The Big Meow

3. THE BIG MEOW

Chapter One

Four-thirty on a Sunday morning is about the closest the City that Never Sleeps ever gets to dozing off. Midtown Manhattan, in particular, is quieter then than at almost any other time except when it’s snowed. But there was little chance of that happening today. It was the third of June, and though New York’s wizards can do unusual things with their weather when the need arises, right now the busiest group of them had far more important business on their minds.

The light at the corner of Eighth Avenue and West Thirty-first Street changed from red to green, without any other visible result: no cars were waiting to move on either side of the intersection. In fact, nothing at all could be seen between Eighth and the River but various parked cars– not a single pedestrian, not even a stray dog. The only thing moving down that way, down at the far end of Thirty-first, was the Hudson River – seeming to slide slowly with the inward tide from the Great South Bay just now swinging, and the surface of the water gone the color and texture of tarnished beaten pewter in the predawn twilight.

Sitting at the corner of Eighth and Thirty-first, watching the river, watching the paling sky, was a small black cat. To human observers, city cats often look furtive or nervous: but this one sat there like she owned the street. This morning, she did. The most senior worldgating technician on the East Coast of North America let out a long breath and turned her attention away from the placid slow roll of the river, looking uptown along Eighth.

The brash blue-white glare of the spots and the sheets of matte-mirror Mylar up there made Rhiow blink once again. Up at the Thirty-fourth end of the block, the intersection of the two big multi-lane streets was cordoned off with metal parade railings and pre-incident tape. Inside the cordon, and outside, many ehhif (or humans, as they called themselves) ran about doing inexplicable things with cables and props and big chunky pieces of equipment…or seeming to. Outside the cordon, endless more thick black cables ran into the cordoned area from many high-sided plain white trucks parked all around the “shooting” area, up and down Eighth Avenue and into side streets made shadowy by contrast with the fierce lights at the intersection. Off to one side, leaning against one of the corner buildings, was the lone, stay-up-all-night, club-buzzed rep from the Mayor’s-office Film Board people, half asleep…which was all to the best, as it decreased to near-zero the chance that she might possibly recognize for what it was the quite extensive wizardry taking place right under her nose.

They had spent the better part of an hour, now, setting up the“shot.” The poor Film Board lady leaned in her dark blue autumn-season car coat – for the mornings had been cool – against the corner of the office building at the corner of Eighth and Thirty-second, blinking and bleary, without the slightest idea of what the “director” and the “producer” and all the “crew” were agitating about: the thing that was apparently not quite right, not quite ready. Ehhif ran back and forth with clipboards, consulted with one another, or seemed to consult; dragged cables around, repositioned cameras and wheeled carts full of computer equipment…or what looked like cameras and carts and equipment.

Rhiow, watching this performance from down the road, put her whiskers forward in amusement. Well? she said to Urruah. When?

About two minutes. You know how unpredictable these things are when you cut them loose.

We both know. You’re just disappointed there are no oh’ra singers in the area.

An annoyed hiss came down the connection to her. Urruah spent a lot of time hanging around with the backstage toms over at the Met, and had recently been torn between anguish and a sort of perverse delight when a great and seriously overweight Italian tenor had become involved in an incident involving a malfunctioning worldgate and a large number of giant saurians. His protests at having to patch that portion of reality so that an oversized terror lizard had not eaten the tenor in question were specious…but not as much so as they might have been, as from a Person-tom’s point of view, the tenor in question was in himself a whole vast sheaf of wasted opportunities. No tom could really understand how you could do anything to yourself (like get fat) that made you potentially less of a singer, andpotentially less popular with the shes.

Later for that, was all Urruah said: and Rhiow put her whiskers even further forward at his tone, for he was a professional, that one, through and through. When there was a wizardry in hand, nothing could put him off the hunt until what he wanted was in his claws. After that, it would be all food, song and queens: but not a moment sooner.

One minute now. Is he in place? she heard Urruah say to someone else in the connection.

Ready to go, said an excited younger voice. He wants to know, isn’t he supposed to eat something?

Oh, come on, he read the script breakdown with the rest of us! Rhiow said. He knows what he’s supposed to do.

But he says dawn makes him hungry…!

Oh sweet Iau in a trashcan, Rhiow thought. Arhu, she said“aloud”, tell your buddy — excuse me; tell my honored Elder Brother the most excellent World-Senior for the Downside Ophidians — that he should have eaten before he left. And tell him not to get confused! It’s only wizards here, right now, and the cops and the Film Board lady. But if somestreet person or clubber coming home wanders in and he gets into his part too much, he could have to disgorge suddenly.

There was a moment’s silence. Seconded to her through Arhu’s mind came the voice: If that happens, you shall take me to the deli afterwards to compensate, and there shall be a great deal of pastrami bestowed upon me.

And a great deal of hot sauce, Arhu said.

Rhiow let out a long, long breath. If there had been corruption going on among the wizards under her supervision, these last few weeks, it’d have been Urruah’s fault. Ethnic food, popular culture, ffhilm– that strange twenty-four-frames-per-second artform so beloved of human beings – all these things had been dragged into the present project by Rhiow’s senior project engineer; and Rhiow had been torn between disciplining him, which could have been problematic, and letting him get the job done without destroying half of Manhattan.

Discipline later, she thought. Urruah, she thought, tell your prot?g?s to shut up and concentrate. They can both have a whole cow’s worth of pastrami later if this goes according to plan. Time check…

Forty seconds.

Rhiow sat there on the corner, breathed in, breathed out. From behind her, away across the island and across the East River, the light of a clear New York dawn grew slowly; ice-blue and haze-blurred up high, soft as cold water on the eyes, the peach of the eastern side of the sky starting only slowly to show across the Hudson’s sliding sheen. Few other eyes were turned that way. Indeed, humans were almost entirely absent from this scenario…this being why she and her team had chosen it.

“Her team”, of course, being a relative term. The arguments about the logistics alone of the worldgate move had seemed to go on for ages. “Why bother moving the thing at all?” the most senior of the Penn techs had demanded. That was Jath, always contentious, never happy to say “yes” at any moment when he could find an excuse to say “no”. Spending time around him always made Rhiow think that, on the off chance it might improve his mood, maybe there was something to the ehhif drive to get all stray toms neutered. Terrible thought, shame on me… “Rhiow, seriously, why should we bother? The ehhif have just spent umpty billion dollars on improving the miserable poor Penn they’ve got: Amtrak won’t move its stock over there after this. Nobody’s going to be running any significant rail stock over into that building except New Jersey Transit. Why are we being so traditionalist about this? The gates belong in the major railhead on this side of the Island. That means the Penn we’ve got now. Not this Moynihan thing, it’s a nice idea, they mean well, but the gates are rooted on this side, you know how gates are when they get used to the way things have been for a long time…”

It’s not just gates, Rhiow had thought, and then put her ears back just a little: for she’d heard this argument once every three days since the present project had started to become a reality. Jath’s father had been a gate tech, as he would tell you endlessly, and so had his father and his father and his father before him: and when they’d been running things and the old Penn station had been here…. And off he would go, singing the same old song — and Urruah, dear staid Urruah, had finally lost his temper two weeks ago and sat down and actually started washing his sth’uw at Ffrihh during one of these perorations. There had been the inevitable reaction – a lot of hissing and tom-posturing, and very nearly some ears shredded, for Urruah was getting tired of having it thrown into his whiskers that he somehow had been allowed to work with the premier worldgates in New York, thecomplex that had the most senior area primacy, and nonetheless lived in a Dumpster – as if the two states of existence were somehow mutually exclusive.

Rhiow had finally managed to calm the wrangle down, for even Jath had had to admit that there was no point in trying to derail the project at this late date. The Powers that Be had approved it, the most senior wizards working in North America had already put their pawprints on Rhiow’s master timetable, and the concrete parts of the plan now had to be allowed to go forward before the ehhif builders and architects put any more of the new Penn Station in place. There was already too much infrastructure underground that could interfere with the hyperstring structure of the gate-sheaf when it was being moved; that had been the thinking behind Urruah’s solution from the start…

Jath, she said silently, how is it down there? Are you ready?

I don’t know, the answer came back, sounding dubious as always. It looks kind of frayed around the edges: I’m not sure the string structure is going to wind in tightly enough for what we’re planning. I’m thinking we shouldn’t let it up until we have a little more time to assess the power superstructure –

The superstructure is fine, came another voice, younger and sounding extremely impatient. Rhiow let out another breath, as the speaker had good reason. It’s just as fine as it was yesterday when you pronounced it fine, and the day before that. Just get on with it, Jath!

Siff’hah, Rhiow said. She tried not to sound too stern, because she agreed with what the youngster was saying: but at the same time, she needed her to be a little less forthright just now with a wizard who was very much her senior, and whose nerves were in worse shreds than anyone else’s. Hw’aa, she said to Jath’s most senior colleague, how’s it seem to you?

Stable enough, Hw’aa said. Even though he was older than Jath, Hw’aa had for some time now been the counterbalance in the Penn team to Jath’s conservatism; there were few new things that Hw’aa wasn’t willing to try. We’re ready to pull the gate’s roots up. Twenty seconds…

Good. Hunt’s luck to you, cousin –

Luck to you too, Rhiow.

She looked down the street to where the ehhif had mostly stopped running around, and where crowds of people were standing off to the sides of the street now, as if getting ready to see a shot start. Rhiow watched this almost absently, just being glad for the moment that Hw’aa was on site to keep Jath focused and reassured, and that she was herself dealing well enough with the tension not to get caught up in another team’s infighting. My own team’s infighting is bad enough… And there was always the temptation to simply win any given fight by throwing her weight around in her position as the most senior technician working this particular part of the world. But Rhiow knew better. I will meet idiots today, went one version of her after-waking meditation, and one of them will probably be me. Iau Hau’hai, Queen of Life and of Making Things Work, grant me of Your courtesy the courage to shred that idiot’s ears when I meet her, and then get on with work…for being right is nothing next to having things be right…

Fifteen seconds. Want oversight? said Urruah’s more voice in her ear.

“Just a quick look,” Rhiow said. “As long as you’re sure you can spare me the concentration – ”

No problem. Everyone knows what to do. I’m just making sure the timetable goes off by the numbers, now…

And overlaid on the slowly brightening morning around her, she got a glimpse of the darkness under the streets– the track-cavern at the “old Penn” end, the west portal of the old North River tracks, and the bright stringing of the structure of the “ganged” Penn Station worldgate – two gates combined for the moment into one – shining in the darkness where it hung over the steel of the rails. These would be the gate complex’s last few moments in its old position, parked at the end of northern platform of Penn’s Track Twenty. Now the worldgate blazed unnaturally bright in that dark air, an irregularly-shaped, rippling warp and weft of blue and green and golden threads of light, pulled for the moment into full real-world visibility, its diagnostic mode. On one side of it, Jath, and Hw’aa on the other, were reared up with claws and teeth sunk into the gateweave, pulling the gate into the right configuration for the dangerous work that was going to follow. At least there were no trains due down those tracks for another forty minutes: the ehhifs’ Sunday schedule had left the joint worldgating teams some time to troubleshoot anything that might go wrong with the separation of the gate from its power sources, rooted down into the ancient Manhattan of the Downside. But it wasn’t the separation itself that was most of the problem. It was keeping the gate live while it was cut away from its roots, and then moving it without damaging anything else, or itself –

Five. Four. Hw’aa, let it go. Jath, claws out – !

Hw’aa threw his brown tabby-striped self backwards, letting go the strings he’d been holding apart. As he did, gray Jath swept his claws through the near-invisible catenary strings that were all that now remained of the worldgate’s connection to the main power structures in the Downside, severing them. The gate-weft collapsed in on itself in midair, burning in a bright and alarmed-looking jumble of colors – wavering and wobbling in even Urruah’s view as the structure of space bent and twisted slightly around the deranging gate. Off to one side, a small Person-shape began to glow bright where she sat, white patches blazing, even the dark ones seeming to acquire extra depth, a darkness with power moving underneath it: and a shell of the same dark-and-light-patched fire appeared out of the air and clamped itself down around the collapsing, contracting ball of burning hyperstrings –

Busy now, Urruah said, and the imagery vanished. Rhiow looked down the street and saw a tall dark-haired ehhif in a parka and baseball cap and headphones nodding as he picked up the cue. He looked into his“camera” and gestured at another ehhif. “Lights!”

All the film lights surrounding the cordoned-off intersection burst into full ferocious fire, painting the buildings all around with long black equipment-shadows.

“Speed!” the ehhif in the parka shouted.

“Got speed!” the answer came back from somewhere among the crew.

A young ehhif boy held up an electronic clapper-board, snapped it shut for the sync: the red numbers on it started racing, and someone else yelled,“Blue Harvest, take one, scene sixty-five – action!”

A hubbub of thought broke out underground among the members of the amalgamated gate-tech teams. It was difficult for even Rhiow, well used to this chatter from their numerous rehearsals, to make sense of more than a scrap of thought here or there. Is it cohering? Watch out for the secondary root– no, not like that – over here, over here! – okay, there we go, here comes the backlash. Too much expansion? No, wait — !

And up on the street, something unusual began to occur. A fizzle and stutter of a new light, like lightning, painted the buildings further up Eighth Avenue with a sudden multicolored glare. A great rumble, like an incoming subway train, but much, much bigger, shook the whole area.

There were not many people who actually lived in this neighborhood, which was probably as well. Rhiow looked up around her and was clear that any of the residents, if they were even conscious right now, would simply think that the one of the many subway lines under Penn was making an unusual amount of noise this morning…probably something to do with the construction in the new Penn building, which had been going on for months and was famously noisy. It was a mistake that Rhiow would have been happy to encourage. But after the rumble came something that even on quite a bad day could not have been attributed to subway trouble.

Down Eighth Avenue, several storeys above the sidewalk, a huge head peered around the corner of Thirty-fourth Street. Only a very alert observer would have been able to see that the terrible face– fanged, scaled, dramatically striped in blood-crimson and gold, the wicked eye glinting with a burning gold of its own — somehow looked a little uncertain. But then the face recovered its composure. Down in the street, several of the waiting cameras pushed in on it.

The huge jaws opened, revealing fangs like mighty knives. A roar issued forth from that gigantic maw, belling an awful challenge. Windows rattled for blocks up and down Eighth. The cops standing around the“director” goggled, impressed against their will, as the dinosaur – bigger than any Godzilla or Gorgo, impossibly large – came striding out into the intersection of Eighth and Thirty-fourth, its clawed forelegs working, its long tail swept out behind it for balance.

Behind the“dinosaur” came a herd of his people – all smaller far than he: but then the Father of his People could afford the power to manifest himself in a variation of the form that had once destroyed the Lone Power that was gnawing at the roots of the feline world. Now that outrageous and gigantic form, and about fifty smaller “dinosaurs”, came rampaging down Eighth. The ground shook as they came. The cops stood there shaking their heads, impressed: the Film Board lady, in the middle of texting somebody on her mobile, stopped to stare, her mouth hanging open. The greatest dinosaur stopped about halfway down the block, directly between the Felt Forum and Madison Square Garden and the Post Office building, then put his tail briefly down and let out one magnificent roar that once again rattled all the plateglass for hundreds of meters around like a Space Shuttle landing – a histrionic and ferocious ophidian shout of defiance.

And slowly, up through the street, the Sun rose.

Or at least it seemed to. One of the many wizards managing secondary support for this operation had spoken the Mason’s Word to the street, adding one of the Word’s subroutines that affected metals as well as stone and stone derivatives. So, untroubled by the tangle of cable and piping that underlay every New York street, through the concrete and the much-patched asphalt, the sheen and burn of tightly wrappedhyperstrings rode up into the still predawn air. The biggest dinosaur, reacting to the growing light and the new shadow cast from his tremendous bulk, looked over his shoulder at the rising, burning fury, turned, roared his own defiance, and made toward the ball of fire.

He reached out claws to it, sank them in deep, grappled with the great burning shape, and staggered back, striving and wrestling with the burden of it…lurching and stumbling with it backwards, down Eighth, toward Rhiow…and toward exactly the spot where they wanted it to go. Rhiow’s tail began to lash, for this was not a moment for Ith, or Urruah, or Arhu or Siff’hah, to lose their grip on the worldgates. Yet for the moment everything seemed to be working, and things could have gone so much worse if they’d tried to conduct this business underground. The complications of pushing this great deadly ball of energy along an entirely underground route, through meter after meter of ehhif high-tension power conduits and cable guides and pipes and tubes and steam ducts, would have been huge. But it had all become completely unnecessary, one afternoon, when in the midst of yet another too-contentious meeting down underneath Penn, Urruah’s voice spoke up and said, entirely reasonably, “Why should we drive ourselves insane? Why bother hiding the move from the ehhif at all? Hide it in plain sight.”

It had seemed like such an insane concept at first. But even Jath, hard though he’d resisted it, had been won around to the quirky logic of it. And then the other wizards with whom the plan had had to be cleared had accepted it enthusiastically. Is it just that it’s so odd? Rhiow had thought at the time. Whatever the reason, here they all were, ehhif-wizards and People-wizards all together: and here was the whole Penn worldgate complex wrapped into one tightly-wound package. It was trying to unravel itself, but being prevented from doing so by Siff’hah as the spell’s power source, floating along invisibly beside it so as not to have to be distracted by the need towaste concentration on walking. The whole ball of yarn, as it were, was now apparently rolling down toward Rhiow, dominating the street and getting bigger by the moment, bearing down on the dinosaurs clustered around their gigantic chief, who looked to be losing his wrestling match. And right down at the bottom of it all, invisible to all eyes except feline ones, there was a single tiny, tabby-striped figure with his back to Rhiow, pulling the worldgate complex down Eighth Avenue….with his teeth.

The fur stood up all over Rhiow as she watched him, hearing Urruah babbling at her again, late one morning two months ago, as he walked home with her.“I would never have thought of it! I saw it on this ehhif thing on cable late one night, and the image just wouldn’t let me be, and I – ”

“Cable?” Rhiow had shaken her head as if all the fleas apparently living inside Urruah’s head were now trying to roost in her ears. “Your Dumpster has cable, all of a sudden?”

He gave her a look that said most eloquently how he was ignoring her attempts to derail his train of thought.“It was one of those big bull ehhif, all teeth and no brains, and he was pulling along one of those big trucks, they call them semih’s, and he was doing it with his teeth – ”

He was all teeth and no brains? Rhiow wanted to shout. She restrained herself for the moment, and paused in front of a dry-cleaners’ shop to wash an ear that didn’t need it. “Urruah,” Rhiow said, “if you saw an ehhif jump off a bridge, would you do that too? You and your ‘popular culture,’ whatever that is, I swear, because it changes every time you try to define it – ”

“It’s something you don’t get enough of, that’s for sure. Otherwise you would have had this great idea first. Anyway, the cable’s backstage at the Met; the scene guys have to have something to watch while the oh’ra singers are actually singing. So here he is, this ehhif, in one of thesestrong-ehhif contests they have, where they lift rocks and throw trees around and Iau knows what all else, it’s hysterical to watch them.”

Hysterical, that’s going to be me in a minute, Rhiow thought, as Urruah went on to describe the strange pulling device which had been built for this ehhif to use – something to sink his teeth into and pull this semih’ the necessary distance. Yet all against her will she’d begun to see how similar his idea was to some of the handling constructions that a gate tech might build to deal with the most recalcitrant gating structures, old ones that were getting likely to shred themselves to bits if you moved them. All right, this was a brute-force kind of solution, completely unlike the more elegant and finicky kind of strategy that her old colleague Saash would have come up with. But Saash was somewhere else at the moment, helping Iau steer the stars in their courses, no doubt; and who knew whether, if you handed her a whole star or a whole gating complex to manhandle around, even she mightn’t havesaid “the hell with the claws” and used her teeth instead? Maybe it’s time I got past my preconceptions about Urruah’s potential as a gate tech, Rhiow thought. All right, it’s just such a tom-sounding way to deal with something, but if it works…

And now here she was watching this terrible rolled-up ball of fire come trundling down Eighth Avenue, while a huge and magnificent dinosaur struggled futilely with it. Rhiow sat there commanding her fur to lie down, and prayed, prayed to Iau the Queen of Everything that Urruah had not misjudged how much energy was required in his own version of the pulling device to keep that terrible thing under control. For that was part of a typical tom’s solution, too: bluff. But you did not bluff a worldgate…or at least you didn’t try bluffing it more than once. And as for a gate that you’d purposely cut loose of its moorings –

The huge glowing ball rolled on. That was not a special effect or an illusion. Urruah’s “puller” was not fastened to the gate sheaf itself, but to the massive shielding construct that had been erected around it and which Siff’hah was powering. And atop the worldgate-bundle proper, the team’s other tom – not to be in any way outdone by his more senior colleague – was riding the top of that ball of force, walking backwards on it as it rolled forwards. That was one piece of popular culture Rhiow had come in contact with one night at her own ehhif’s place: the image of some poor tiger in a forced performance of some kind, walking backwards on a big ball, while a strangely dressed ehhif flicked a whip at it, and music played and crowds cheered. And there was Arhu up there, as nearly invisible against the blaze of energies under him as Urruah was below, at least two paws in contact with that shield all the time, ready to sink his own teeth into it if he neededto. Siff’hah, though, seemed to need very little in the way of help. Power simply streamed off her into the wizardry. That was her business, and she was good at it: sometimes a little too good for Rhiow’s nerves. But as so young a wizard, she was always going to have more power available to herthan the more senior practitioners.

Here we go, said Arhu, as Ith, wrestling with the ball, came up even with the corner of Thirty-first. Down that street, half a block behind the Post Office, was the place where the tracks running under the building and into Penn were exposed to the open air, a great wide pit half a block wide. Sif?

Ready, Siff’hah said.

Ready, said Ith.

Lightning crackled fiercely away from the moving ball of gate-strings, lashing out at the dinosaur who struggled with it. He squealed in rage and staggered back, the earth shaking under him. Then once more he rushed at the globe of strung fire, and once more was repulsed. The dinosaur shrieked renewed fury, attacked one last time: but this time the lightning that burst from the globe of fire was so violent that the king-dinosaur staggered back again, turned, and began an enraged flight down Thirty-first Street, off to Rhiow’s left. The other dinosaurs, which had been milling around their leader, now broke away and began to flee down the side streets, vanishing from the shot and from sight.

Rhiow watched the lightning with admiration. This was probably the only real“special effect” in the whole production: it was the result of purposeful overfeeding of the worldgates’ shield layer on Siff’hah’s part, and was done merely for show, to support the backstory in the script which the New York Film Board had approved. Jath was acting as supervisor for thiseffect, making sure that it didn’t get out of hand. But that was mostly what Jath was good for: at keeping things from happening. It was not anything Rhiow would ever have admitted to him, of course, but it was true. The real master of this whole business was down there at the far end of the street, behind the dinosaurs, with his teeth sunk in the “puller,” still advancing toward her, backwards, steady and slow. Urruah, Rhiow said, what’s the word?

Ready for the turn, Urruah said silently.

Is the socket ready! Rhiow said.

All set, said a new voice: Fh’iss. He was the third of Jath’s team, and had been set completely aside from the “moving” part of the project to concentrate on the business of stopping it from moving at the end of the run. An elaborately constructed socket lay waiting off to one side of the New Jersey Transit tracks, near a freight platform. It was a temporary home for the gate, only shallowly rooted into the subterranean master catenary: there would be time for short-distance repositioning later. Drop it on me, Fh’iss said.

All right, Rhiow said. Here comes the drama. Arhu? Siff’hah? You ready?

Ready to go, Arhu said; but how would it not be, when I’ve been handling things? From the sound of him, you’d think that nothing particularly interesting had been happening. Rhiow put her whiskers forward in amusement. For a kitten barely a year old, who’d been pulled out of a garbage bag floating down the East River, where he and his sibs had been thrown to drown, coolness had become his middle name.

Oh really, said his sister, endlessly unimpressed. But then, Rhiow thought, she had been in that bag too. She had come from a tremendous distance in miles, and had spent the beginning of a new life, in order to hunt her brother down and shred his ears– that being the best way she had of telling him she loved him. Where would you be without me to remind you of what needs doing? And look out, you’re steering it crooked.

I am not.

You are.

Am not– !

I’m going to turn now, Urruah said, so it would be really smart if you two went with me, and didn’t fall off and let this thing blow up and eat half the island! Ith –

Ready.

Slowly, the lightnings crackling around it again, the huge ball of worldgate-fire negotiated the turn into West Thirty-first. Ith,“enraged”, rushed at the worldgate-core one last time, apparently trying to grapple with it, but flailed away again by the crackling violence of the fire. Then the ball of fire seemed to speed up slightly, bumping into Ith, making him stagger, off balance, toward the edge of the great track-pit. Fh’iss?

Ready. Not on top of me, cousin!

Not? Ith said, sounding surprised. But I thought in the script it said– Theatrically he leaned backward over, clawed forelegs flailing, tail lashing for balance, finding it, losing it again. He toppled.

Ith, really, not!

Ith fell backwards, grasping at the ball of fire, sinking his claws into it in one last desperate“attempt” to keep himself from falling. The attempt failed. Giant rear legs kicking, he went over the edge in a tremendous fall. A disastrous roar went up, a bleat of terror and rage, as he clutched the worldgate-ball to him and plunged into the pit. Like a star falling, like the Sun setting, he and the worldgate vanished from view.

There was a huge moment of silence, followed by an almighty crash.

And then the light went out.

The echoes faded. Everybody, Rhiow included, looked intently at the“director”, who was staring at one of the video displays. Then he lifted his hand.

“Cut it!” he yelled. “That’s it, that’s a wrap! Thank you, everybody! Nice work, cousins!”

Applause broke out all around, from the film crew and even from the cops, who until now had probably thought they’d seen just about everything that could happen in the way of a shooting. The special effects would be the talk of the NYPD for days, Rhiow thought: two or three days, anyway. As people started picking things up and carrying them around, Rhiow went padding over to the “director”, who was drinking what was probably his tenth paper cup of a coffee locally famous for its strength and foulness.

“Har’lh,” Rhiow said to Carl Romeo, one of the ehhif Area Seniors, “that stuff will ruin your health.”

“Only if I overdo it,” Carl said. He glanced around him, where the large team of wizards were already beginning to pack up the shot. Equipment was seeming to go into those white high-side trucks, where the cops – having recovered their original bored and jaded attitudes – and the dozy Film Board lady, were completely failing to notice that the equipment, once out of sight behind some genuine boxes and coverings, simply vanished. In the Holland and Midtown tunnels, out of sight of the security cameras – those that had not been spoofed with pre-laid wizardries already – the trucks would soon do the same. “We’ll be out of here in about twenty minutes. Nice work, Rhi.”

She shook her head.“I never touched a string,” she said. “I just coordinate.”

“Not as easy as it sounds,” Carl said, finishing the coffee and then tossing the cup into a nearby recycling bin, which another wizard picked up and carried off a second later. “My people have a saying about herding cats…”

She put her whiskers forward, knowing a compliment when she heard one. From behind the two of them, a huge-toothed head, zebra-striped in vivid red and yellow, but now reduced to its more normal three-foot length, pushed in to peer at the video display.“Did I look good?” Ith said. “I think I looked good.”

Carl chuckled.“Tim,” he said, elbowing the young ehhif wizard standing beside him, “roll the ‘video’, will you, and satisfy our Elder Brother’s vast bloated ego….?”

Rhiow put one ear back, sarcastic, as from behind Har’lh, Urruah came walking up Eighth. “And as for you,” she said to Ith, as the imagery which had just transpired started to repeat itself on the screen while he peered at it, “shouldn’t you be sidled? If enough people here see you for very much longer, we’re going to have a lot more explaining to do.”

“This is New York,” said Ith, turning one of those wise little eyes on Rhiow: it glittered with humor. “If anyone does see a red and yellow Tyrannosaur walk down the street without a film crew, they will either ignore me – being New Yorkers – or assume I am some kind of advertisement.” He shrugged his long tail, looking back at the screen. “What should I advertise, do you think?”

Arhu walked up Ith’s back and sat on his shoulder, looking over it at the video. “Pastrami,” he said.

Rhiow gave Ith a clout in the leg with her claws in; though frankly he was unlikely to have felt every claw she had, through that thick hide.“See now, you’re teaching these kits bad habits,” she said.

“I’d say it’s going both ways,” Carl said, as Siff’hah walked up Ith’s tail to join her twin on Ith’s other shoulder. “Nice work, you two.” He unzipped his parka a little: the air was warming a little as the breeze started to run down Thirty-first from the East River side, the first touch of Sun on the river pushing the air their way. “And you, Urruah: you should be pleased. An elegant solution to a thorny problem. You go ahead, Rhi, ’Ruah: your folks did all the hard work here. Leave the cleanup to us.” He turned his back on her, clapping his hands. “Come on, people, let’s go, pack out the trash…”

Rhiow waved her tail in satisfaction, turning to Urruah.“Is it down and secure? Is it rooted?”

It’s down, Fh’iss said, from down in the track pit. Our overacting cousin delivered it right on target: it fell straight into the socket, and he fell clear. Not that I won’t shred his puny ears later. ‘Not!’

“It’s not rooted in tight yet, though,” Urruah said, sitting down with his tail now weaving slowly from side to side, the thing he always did when he was ticking off items on his internal to-do list. “I want to check out the catenary junctures. If there are any frayed hyperstrings in there left over from moving the sheaf, they’ll play merry hell with the restart synch when we initiate the sequence.”

“Oh, come on,” Arhu said, “you know it’s okay, let’s just blow this thing and go home!”

Urruah turned toward Rhiow, out of Arhu’s view, before rolling his eyes. The look in them, though tired, said plainly to Rhiow, Please shut him down so I don’t have to. I can’t cope with any more right now.

“Something’s making my whiskers twinge a little,” Rhiow said, looking down toward the track-pit where the gate-sheaf was presently resting. The “what” of it, of course, was Arhu, but she didn’t have to tell anyone that. “I’ll wait and have a look myself.”

“Aww, Rhi, come on, you know it’s fine!”

She got up, stretched fore and aft, and gave him a sidewise look. Arhu wasn’t yet nearly well-enough worked in with his team and his team leader to do the smart thing and avert his eyes immediately: he actually spent a second’s worth of staring at Rhiow before having the sense to look away.

“I’m not convinced,” she said. “But for your sins, you get to come down and convince me yourself. Line by line of the spell, and string by string of the gate. No, ‘Ruah, you stay up here and have a wash. A long night’s work you’ve had, and a long month’s work before that: you deserve a moment’s rest. And it’s your team leader’s pleasure, when she’s done with this wet-eared wiseass, to walk you home and see you eat pastrami before day’s Eye comes up. As for you,” she said to Arhu, “come on down here, O endlessly knowledgeable one, and enlighten me as to the statusof my gate.”

Urruah turned away without comment, sat down and started washing, in silent hilarity: composure-washing at one remove, not for himself but for the kit. Arhu had the sense to put his ears back out of the way. I’ll be along in a little while, Urruah said. You go sort him out.

She flicked her tail in agreement.“Come on,” she said.

Access for them to the gate’s new lockdown site was the same as it had been for the gate itself, though far less spectacular. As they walked around the corner, Rhiow spoke the numerous syllables of the Mason’s Word, hearing the universe go still around them and leaning in to hear, then feeling the asphalt of Eighth Avenue go summer-soft underneath her. Along with Arhu, who had implemented his own incidence of the Word, Rhiow sank down through the street, into the substrate ofthe road, past the pipes and conduits, the bricks and stones of earlier layers of the street, the cold clayey earth under the stonework, the i-beamed iron ceilings of the track tunnel.

The New Jersey Transit North River tunnel was a bleak, plain, filthy place as yet: it would be months before the ehhif construction crews turned their attention to rebuilding it. The rails ran down toward Penn, off to Rhiow’s and Arhu’s right, as they sank down through the ceiling and airwalked toward the platform; to the left, under the occasional naked bulb jutting out of the stanchions of the walls, the tunnels ran off at a downward slope, heading for their dive under the Hudson. Off to their right, ahead of the two of them, the worldgate could be seen hanging over the left-hand set of tracks, shimmering, its colors slowly calming after all the excitement.

Arhu walked over to the gate, reared up on his hind legs, and sank a single careful claw into the outer edge of the gate, catching one of the control strings and pulling it out. The diagnostic colors and status strings immediately leapt into brilliance, indicating where the gate’s catenary structure – its main power conduit – had been provisionally rerooted into the master catenary that ran under Manhattan, and from there into the more ancient world that was the source of the worldgates’ power. “So the power levels are back up now,” he said. “Ninety percent already, though the last ten won’t come up for a while yet because of the reaction trauma. The unwrap went all right: see, the extra strings have lost their flail and are rewebbing themselves with the main structure – “

His debrief to Rhiow took surprisingly little time. Arhu appeared to have been actually listening quite closely to Urruah, though Arhu normally would have done anything to avoid having anyone get that idea. But the thing that left Rhiow wondering, as Arhu talked her through the rest of the details surrounding the reattachment of the severed gate, was how like Saash he sounded as he talked string tech. It was strange. Yet maybe not so strange: for it was Saash who had perhaps been kindest to him when he first came into the team, Saash who had overwatched him, made sure he ate well and slept clean and dry, and had a proper place to do his business. Attachments, Rhiow thought. So odd. She never taught him a purr’s worth of theory. Yet, style: style communicates itself. And linkages happen where you expect them the least…

Finally she interrupted him in the middle of a long string of gate-tech jargon that would have impressed even Saash.“Enough,” she said. “You did good.”

Arhu flicked an ear at her, looking down toward where Jath and Fh’iss were now sitting together, looking with weary satisfaction at the unwrapped gate, watching its colors die back down from the excited state caused by moving it. “Wouldn’t say that in front of them,” he said.

“Maybe not,” Rhiow said, quite softly. “But I’m not sure it’s all that important to say it to them. To you, that’s another story.”

“They don’t respect you, Rhiow,” he said, and there was a touch of growl in his young voice.

“It’s not about respect, finally,” Rhiow said. “Getting the job done: that’s the issue. Let them be. It’s no fun for them to have someone come tailwaving her way onto their territory and start telling them how things are going to have to be. Soon enough they’ll settle in, when their gate does.”

“So can I go get my pastrami?”

She sighed. Urruah was to blame for this deli fixation on both the kits’ side, and for Ith’s as well: but at least they came by it honestly, asking ehhif for it rather than just stealing it from them. And watching Ith go through the wizardly gymnastics necessary to displace enough of his mass to disguise himself as a Person was always worth an evening’s amusement. “Go on,” Rhiow said. “Take a look around before you go: make sure Harl’h’s people didn’t miss anything.”

“Did that already,” Arhu said, flirting his tail at Rhiow’s slowness.

“Oh really? How, when you’ve been down here with me?”

“Sif’s doing it right now,” Arhu said, sounding smug, and vanished.

She twitched her whiskers forward in a Person’s smile, gave the settling worldgate one last look, and made her way back up the platform to Jath and Fh’iss. They turned on her a look of weary complaisance. There would probably be some minor recriminations from them tomorrow, during the debrief, but right now they just looked too tired.

That made this the perfect time to praise them: when they wouldn’t be able to summon up the energy to reject it. “Are we done?” Jath said as Rhiow came over. “Fh’iss was wrecked: I sent him off for some sleep.”

“We’re done enough for dawn,” Rhiow said. “The full debrief will keep: the gates need time to steady down, anyway. A long night, we’ve had. Jath, Hw’aa, you did a tremendous job. Please tell Fh’iss that too.” She wasn’t beyond leaving out, for the moment, how long it had taken them to commit themselves to make it a success. None of that mattered, now: they were done.

“Yes, well,” Jath said. “I’m still not sure whether we’ve really needed to do this. But the Powers wanted it done…”

“And you can restructure the gates into a better configuration for all the wizards who use the facility,” Rhiow said. “You’ve got so much more room to work down here now.”

“Yes, there is that…”

She waved her tail.“So we’re done. Keep me posted if anything needs my attention. I’m for my bed. Good morning, my cousins, and the Powers send that you sleep sound. No point in wishing you the luck of the hunt: you’ve had it…”

Jath actually purred. As Rhiow was walking away, behind her the first train of the morning came in, rolling towards Penn. A second before the train would have plowed through the airspace where the gate hung, the warp and weft of the worldgate shimmered away out of physicality, hanging hidden where it would remain until Jath and his team finished tweaking it.

Done, she thought. Finally, really done. What a relief… She made her way back up to street level, the same way she’d come.

When she came out onto Eighth Avenue again, the last of the police cordons were being taken down: the cops were heading off around the corner for coffee and donuts: and all the trucks and people, and the Film Board lady, were gone. There was no one left but a grey tabby, looking up Eighth Avenue to where the lights had changed, and a car or two were crossing the intersection from the side streets.

“Done?” he said.

Rhiow just purred. They sidled themselves, shifting out between the hyperstrings into the commonest kind of feline invisibility, and headed crosstown on Thirty-third.“Did you see those power levels settle?” Urruah said, in the same tone of voice as an ehhif saying, “How about those Mets?”

She put her whiskers forward, realizing she was going to get another half hour’s worth of tech talk. Rhiow just kept purring, letting him have a monosyllable’s worth of agreement here and there, until they were right back on the East Side again. Finally, well uptown and about halfway between Lexington and Park, Urruah just sighed. “A good night’s work,” he said.

“You have no idea,” Rhiow said. “Urruah, I think someone should talk to the Powers about you.”

He gave her a look.“I didn’t think I did that badly – ”

She paused long enough to cuff him upside one ear.“You thick-skulled idiot,” she said. “’Ruah, it’s time you thought about doing your team-leader training. Someone has to handle this job after I move on…”

He gave her a shocked look.“Rhiow,” he said. “What are you planning? Don’t you feel well?”

“I feel fine,” she said.

“Then what’s the matter?”

They paused at the corner of Park and looked down the length of it toward Grand Central, watching the lights change in sequence, to no effect: not a car moved anywhere. The gold of the rising Sun caught the top of the Helmsley-Spears building as Rhiow looked at it.“’Ruah, every now and then we all get tired…”

“Tired? You?” He jerked his tail a couple of times, dismissive, as they started across the street. “Come on. Your problem is that you don’t get out enough.”

“You’re going to tell me I need to be watching more oh’ra,” Rhiow said.

Urruah rolled his eyes at her.“You do. But that’s not the problem. You know what I mean.”

She waved her tail in a gesture of feigned non-understanding.“Maybe,” she said. “Let’s discuss it later. But either way, I think Harl’h needs to look into a change of status for you. An upgrade, anyway: and you need to start doing consulting work of your own.”

His own purr was surprisingly restrained.“Not sure I’m in such a hurry for that,” he said. “I like sleeping in my own Dumpster at night.”

She flirted her tail at him as they came to the corner where her ehhif’s apartment building lay. “Think about it, cousin,” she said. “And go get yourself that pastrami. I don’t think I have to watch you eat it.”

“We’ll save you a bit.”

She butted heads with him.“Don’t fret if you forget to,” she said. “Go on.”

For a moment she watched him walk down First Avenue, then turned to walk down her own block, past the brownstones and the parked cars. At the usual spot in the block, she stepped up into the air and activated the spell she kept ready for easy access to the building. The air, reminded that it had once been stone, or trapped in stone, now went solid under her feet, deconstructing itself as her pads left each“step”. Up to the terrace of her ehhif’s apartment she went, leaping up between the railings –

– and froze, blinking with shock. Her litter box was out on the terrace, under the overhang of the next terrace up. And there was another Person in it. Their eyes met.

Shocked, Rhiow held still, starting to fluff up in outraged reflex at the invasion of her territory. A tom: instantly she could see that. Black, though not as black as she was: you could still see the tabby markings through the darkness. Golden-eyed, a broad face, ears a little beat up, a shocked expression. He opened his mouth to speak–

Rhiow blinked. There was nothing there, no one in her box.

She stared: she shook herself. Slowly, her fur still halfway fluffed, she stalked toward the litterbox. She stared into it. No footprints. She sniffed. There was no scent there but the slight odor of the last time she’d made siss: no matter how her ehhif, Iaehh, tried to clean the box perfectly, and no matter what the clumping-litter people claimed about their product’s deodorizing powers, that scent was where she’d left it.

No, she thought, and shook her head until her ears rattled. Just a tired mind playing tricks. Very quietly Rhiow went into the apartment through the cat-door her ehhif had installed for her in the glass of the sliding door. Meditation can wait, she thought, her tail wreathing in bemusement. How much good would I get out of it when I’m so tired, I’m hallucinating?

She wandered through the darkened apartment, back into the bedroom. Quietly Rhiow jumped up onto the bottom corner of the king-sized bed, careful not to wake Iaehh up. He slept lightly, too lightly sometimes, since Rhiow’s own ehhif, his mate Hhuha, had died in an accident.

She stood there in the dark for a moment, missing Hhuha one more time, and once again feeling sorry for Iaehh. It’s not good for you to be alone, she thought. How does one do matchmaking for ehhif, I wonder? How do you engineer it so they get out a little more, and meet somebody nice? It wasn’t a question of replacing Hhuha, of course: no one could do that. But at the same time, it seemed important to ehhif life to be paired. Almost as important as it was for People: though ehhif always seemed to keep their emotional lives so compartmentalized…

She sighed, and then yawned. The long night’s work had caught up with her. Let’s get some sleep, she thought. Time enough in the morning to reorganize Iaehh’s social life.

She sat down and had a perfunctory wash; then her head jerked up as she started dozing right in the middle of it. Enough, she thought, and curled up nose to tail. A moment later she was dozing.

And out of the dream, golden eyes looked at her, thoughtful…

The Big Meow: Chapter Two

Afternoon seemed to come only a breath or two later. Rhiow rolled over and stretched out long, blinking at the bronzy light coming in through the bedroom’s Venetian blinds. From outside, she could hear faint clinking sounds; Iaehh was moving around out there. She heard one of the drawers in the little kitchen open, and then the clatter of ehhif eating utensils being taken out.

Rhiow sat up, gazing around the bedroom. As always, it was hard to avoid a pang of sadness; there was still a faint scent of Hhuha hanging about all the furnishings in the place. She was sure that Iaehh was oblivious to this— the ehhif sense of smell was hardly capable of such delicate detection — but every morning, before she was fully awake, Rhiow had to disentangle that faint scent of her own ehhif from the reality of the present physical world, in which her Hhuha was no longer present.

She let out a long breath, wishing that even once more she might hear that small, strange purr-like sound that Hhuha had used to make when she picked Rhiow up and held her, upside down, in the crook of one arm. But there were some things that not even wizardry could do. Hhuha was in her own place now, the right place for an ehhif to be after physical life was done, wherever that might be. And Rhiow, for her own part, knew that the sorrowful moments were the price she paid for keeping the memory of that relationship green. If she tried to reject them, soon she would have no true memory of Hhuha left, but merely a simulacrum, colored by wishful thinking and the desire to avoid pain, not by truth or life. As a wizard, it was with truth and life that her loyalties lay; so she suffered the pain gladly enough, the way you suffered the pain of biting a thorn out of your paw, though in this case the thorn grew back every day. All you can hope, she thought, is that each day the thorn grows back a little shorter…

Rhiow stood up, stretched fore and aft, and jumped down from the bed. She padded across the carpet, paused by the bedroom door to pull it a little further open with her paw, and wandered out into the living room-dining room area. Iaehh was standing in the tiny kitchen, bending over the stove and stirring something in a small pot. Rhiow stood there under the dining room table, sniffing. Noodles again, she thought. Iaehh, my kit, there’s more to life than ramen! Or there should be. But there had not been much heart in him for cooking since Hhuha died. That had become another of life’s little sorrows for Rhiow. The good smells that had once been part of life in this little den now hardly ever happened anymore; Iaehh’s life had become an endless round of takeout food in sad cardboard cartons. Rhiow found herself worrying about Iaehh’s heart in more than the strictly emotional sense, for half the time the dreadful stuff the delivery men brought smelled more of chemicals and fat that of any honest meat. Here’s an intervention it’s time I started working on in earnest, Rhiow thought. A poor sort of thing it is if you can save the city, save the world, but can’t even save your own ehhif.

She came up behind him to where her water dish sat in front of the oven next to the refrigerator. The name-charm on her collar tinkled against it as Rhiow put her head down into it for a good, long drink. Iaehh turned, looked down at her.“So there you are,” he said. “I thought you were going to sleep all day. Where were you all last night, huh?”

For the moment, she merely waved her tail and kept on drinking. Iaehh had slowly come to terms with the concept that Rhiow was able to jump down onto the roof of the building next door. He’d gradually become less troubled by that, as he couldn’t see how she could possibly get anywhere else from there. Had she been a cat like any of the other cats in the neighborhood, of course he would’ve been right. But that was a misconception of which Rhiow was not going to be able to disabuse him, as the protocols of wizardry forbade her to speak to ehhif in any way that could be understood unless she was actually on errantry concerning them at the time. There had been times, and would probably be again, when she would desperately wish that she had even ten seconds of time to make herself understood; only enough time to say, I have to be out for a few days on an intervention, don’t worry about me, I won’t miss any more meals than I have to… But there was no way. She simply had to try to keep her interventions as short as possible: yet another inconvenience in a life that was already busy enough. And now she had to wear the name-charm he’d bought her as well, in case she got lost somehow…and the jingling of the thing drove her crazy.

Rhiow sighed, and finished her drink, and went over to give Iaehh a friendly rub around the ankles.“Oh,” he said. “And now you’re my friend, because I’ve got food, huh?” He reached up toward the cupboard where the People food was kept.

“I’m always your friend,” she said. It did no harm to answer him in Ailurin, as he couldn’t hear it — very few ehhif could; the subvocalized purrs and trills of the language were usually out of their hearing range — and it kept her from feeling as if she was stuck in a monologue. “Catfood has nothing to do with it.” Then she caught the scent of what he was opening. “Except sometimes. Is that salmon? Oh, you really are observant sometimes! You saw I liked that brand last week — “

“Haven’t heard you shout like that for awhile,” he said. “Come on, let’s see you do your little dance, like you used to do for Sue — “

Rhiow reared up against his bare leg, patting it above the knee, with her claws barely in.“I’ll pull your kneecap right off,” she said, “if you don’t stop waving that dish around over my head. Like I can’t reach it if I really want to! Oh, put that down —”

She took a couple more swipes at the dish with her free paw, letting him play the you-can’t-have-it-game for a little longer. Finally he put the dish down, and Rhiow buried her face in it. After last night’s work, she was starving; and she was relieved to see the way Iaehh was dressed, in his shorts and singlet and running shoes, for it meant that he would be out for at least an hour or two — plenty of time for her to head over to Penn and check with Jath and Fh’iss to see how the gate had bedded in. Probably, she thought, I’m worrying for nothing. Probably the gate’s fine. Otherwise I would’ve heard from them by now.

All the same… if there was anything she’d learned in the years since she had ascended to the rank of senior technician for the North American worldgates, it was that it was rarely wise to assume that things were going to go correctly. Gates were one of the most finicky and complex kind of spell structures that a wizard dealt with on a regular basis. Anything that could be imagined going wrong with them usually did, on a regular if not daily basis. This meant that Rhiow and her teams were some of the busiest wizards in the Metropolitan area. But it was interesting work, mentally stimulating — especially since a worldgate rarely failed in the same way twice — and due to its very nature, a wizard involved in it routinely met some of the most interesting people on the planet, or off it.

“Now where did I put those keys,” Iaehh was muttering under his breath as he rummaged around among the paperwork piled up all over the kitchen table. It was routinely a clutter up there, these days; Iaehh rarely sat down to eat there, as if afraid to be reminded of who in the old days had always sat opposite him at the table, poking him with her chopsticks over the take away cartons.

“They’re up on the counter,” Rhiow said, straightening up from polishing the cat food dish clean. “You remember. You were going to try to make a new place for them, where you would always remember where you left them. Except you can never remember. Oh, come on, Iaehh, strain your brain a little!”

“I’ve really got to get this table cleaned up,” Iaehh said. He kept on turning over papers, stacking them up, shoving them around.

Rhiow sat down in the middle of the kitchen floor and started to wash her face.“Yes, you should,” she said softly,” but you say that every day. And it never gets done. Iaehh, do hurry up, I have things to do, and I’d rather not leave while you’re here watching…”

But he kept right on hunting for the keys in the same place, again and again, even while Rhiow finished washing both paws, and under her chin, and started in again on the left ear, even though it didn’t need it. Finally she lost her patience. She glanced over her shoulder, up on the counter, where the coffee machine sat. There were the keys, right on top of it. And of course, Rhiow thought, he could have left them a little too close to the edge of the coffee machine. He could have… and that’s all he needs to think.

Would you do me a favor? she said to the apartment keys in the wizardly Speech, and to gravity in that very small area. It was only a minuscule change of position that was needed, and as a result Rhiow had to pause for a moment to consult in her mind with the Whisperer to get the exact coordinates.

They came through. In her mind, using the Speech, Rhiow described a little circle around the coffeemaker to limit the locus of gravitational change, and indicated the spot where she wanted the keys to go. Right there, if you would—

Everything in a gravitational field likes to fall, and even more so if you ask it nicely. The keys dropped down onto the counter with an obligingly noisy clash of metal. Iaehh jumped, looked over his shoulder, and then laughed at himself.“I keep forgetting,” he said. “I have a brain like a sieve, these days…”

That was a thought that had occurred to Rhiow, as well. Probably stress, she thought. Iaehh had unexpectedly been promoted at his job, and was now managing a whole department. This had made it easier to keep the apartment he had shared with Hhuha, but he was now twice as busy as he had been before his loss. One more thing to worry about… Rhiow thought.

Rhi?

Rhiow changed position slightly and pushed out a hind leg to wash it. Iaehh had pocketed his keys, and was unlocking the apartment door. You’re up earlier than I expected, she said to Urruah.

I couldn’t stay asleep, Urruah said. Wanted to go over to Penn and check things out.

See, isn’t that what I said? What a professional you are. Especially since I’m the one who should be doing that.

“Okay,” Iaehh said, coming back over the Rhiow and bending down to stroke her head. “You have a nice day, plumptious puss. I’ll be back around dinnertime.”

“Yes, but your dinnertime or mine?” Rhiow said, resigned but affectionate, as Iaehh went out the door, shut it behind him, and started locking all the locks. Sorry, ‘Ruah. He’s running behind today, and so am I.

There’s no big rush, Urruah said. I haven’t been there either, yet. But I didn’t want to call you to make you feel guilty. Jath was asking for you.

Oh, sweet Iau, said Rhiow, standing up in a hurry, what can it be now? Tell me nothing’s gone wrong with the gate –

If it has, he didn’t mention it, Urruah said. It was something about L.A.

L.A? Rhiow said. The Los Angeles gate? Now what on earth— Immediately her mind began to fill with all kinds of terrible visions of something they had done wrong with the Penn gate that had affected the Downside connections of the L.A. microcomplex.

It’s nothing to do with our intervention last night, Urruah said, or at least not as far as I can tell. Anyway, Aufwi is on his way over. He and Jath are going to come up here; Jath wanted to sit tight and watch Aufwi’s transfer, to make sure the Penn gate is behaving itself.

All right, Rhiow said.‘Up here’ where? Are you at home? She had to pause for a moment to think where that was this week: Urruah intended to change dumpsters without warning, but normally he could be found somewhere in the west Seventies, near the better uptown food markets.

No, he said. The Met.

Fine, Rhiow said. Give me half an hour to make a swing through Grand Central— I’ll check our own gates to make sure there are no untoward side effects, and be right along. How did Jath seem you this morning?

Pleased, Urruah said. You’d swear this whole thing had been his idea.

Rhiow stood up and shook herself, putting her whiskers right forward in an expression of rueful amusement. That was how things usually went with Jath. He would protest and obstruct and dig in his claws, and in every way make getting a job done as hard as it could be— and then one sleep and one meal later, it was his own personal success, and could never happened without him. Well, the latter may be true, Rhiow thought. But, Powers that Be, I pray You, don’t make me have to admit to it out loud. I suppose I could bear it, but he’d swiftly become unbearable, and both our teams would suffer.

On the other side of the apartment door, the last locks snicked closed, and Rhiow could hear Iaehh’s footsteps heading off down the hall. ‘Ruah, Rhiow said as she went over to the door, give Jath my best, and let him know that I’ll be along shortly.

By the door, Rhiow sat up on her haunches, putting her front paws against the painted metal. There had been a rash of burglaries in this building a couple of years ago, and she had seen how, no matter how many locks and bolts other ehhif in the building put on their doors, the burglars were in no wise deterred. She had therefore become a bit proactive. The wizardry she had laced into the structure of the front of her ehhif’s den was a variant of that old favorite, the Mason’s Word; it took the very minimal stone content of the plaster on the outside of the wall, and the metallic content of the door, and convinced them both that, as they once had been in the ancient day, they now weighed about a ton and were still part of the insides of a mountain. The burglars whom the police had caught trying to break into the apartment most recently — a few months ago — had been found practically weeping with frustration, their sledgehammers shattered, and the wall and door looking innocently unconcerned by the wholeoperation. There had been no breakins since; the word seemed to have been going around among the local criminal fraternity that the building was haunted. But there was no telling how long this salutary state of affairs would last.

Now, pads against the door, Rhiow spoke the necessary words in the Speech and gave up the necessary energy to refuel the spell. Her workload of late had left her no time to consider how she might expand the spell to the other apartments on this floor. Something else that needs to be handled, she thought, watching the way the subtle fire of the recharged wizardry fled away from her paws and sank deep into the structure of the wall and door. She eyed the underlying structure of the wizardry critically, looking for any weak spots or places where the spell was fraying. But there were none: Rhiow prided herself on doing thorough work that was meant to last. It was a habit you got into when you worked routinely with worldgates. The Grand Central gates had been there for hundreds of years, a wizardry rooted in the depths of time, and placed there, so the Whispering said, by one of the daughters of Queen Iau herself. No wizard in his or her right mind would want to hang substandard workmanship on such a construction.

She looked the wizardry over one last time, then turned and made her way back to the sliding door that let out onto the terrace. Out the little clear plastic flap she slipped, onto the painted concrete of the terrace, and stood there for a moment looking around at the golden afternoon. The terrace was near the corner of the building, on the 70th Street side; off to Rhiow’s left, it was an easy jump down to the concrete parapet and flat, graveled roof of the building diagonally behind theirs. Maybe I’ll go down 69th today, she thought.

And then the litter box caught her eye.

Rhiow stared at it. There were still no footprints in it but hers. So weird, she thought. I really need to get some more rest… And then she laughed a cat’s silent laughter at herself. Like that’s going to happen.

She used the litter box, scratching perhaps a little more enthusiastically than usual to kick away the memory of those strange eyes looking at her. It would’ve been a rather challenging look in reality; people meeting for the first time didn’t stare so. There were proprieties of gaze to be observed, degrees of intrusiveness that were permitted later in a relationship but forbidden early on, and emphatically discouraged at a first meeting. Stress, she thought, externalizing itself at the end of a long day…. Rhiow hopped out of the box, shook the inevitable sticking kitty litter off her feet, slipped between the bars of the terrace, and jumped down onto the roof of the building to the left.

The concrete was warm under her pads; it had been sunny all afternoon, to judge by the residual heat. Did Iaehh bring his water bottle with him? Rhiow wondered, as she walked down the parapet, making for the garden-courtyard tree that grew near the far corner of that building. He’s going to need it, running on a day like this… At the far corner of the building, she paused at the edge of the parapet and looked down into the branches of the tree, a tall, handsome maple. The branches up here were very thin, much too much so to bear her weight. She could always have airwalked it, but she’d had little enough exercise in the last few days, and her muscles were itching for a good stretch. Rhiow crouched, her tail lashing, and then leaped down into the branches.

She saw the branch she was heading for, flung her forelegs around it and sank her claws in. Rhiow merely hung on there for a moment, breathing hard, digging her hind claws in as well and getting her bearings. She glanced over her shoulder, then down along the big branch toward the tree trunk. Some of the people in this building had houiff, mostly little dogs that were all yap and no guts; but there was no kindness in making some poor houff crazy by letting it see her when it couldn’t get at her. Like they’d be able to do that either… she thought, putting her whiskers forward.

As Rhiow shinnied down the trunk, she sidled, insinuating herself between the hyperspatial strings whose effect on matter determined whether it was visible or not. By the time she paused a few feet above the ground, reversed head for tail, and jumped down, only a wizard or another cat could have seen her. There, at the shade-starved corner of the little scrap of lawn behind the building, she stopped once more to glance around and see if there were any People around. Her block had about fifty, most of them held captive inside buildings by ehhif too afraid of the city’s dangers to let them out; the rest were more fortunate “pets”, or People unaligned with ehhif…some of them even nonaligned with other People, “out of pride”. But on a day like this, probably most of them are holed up somewhere cool. In the evening, some of them may come out for a boutof hauissh… when things cool down. But not right now.

She strolled away from the tree, around the corner of the building, and down the narrow little alley that led to a locked and barred wire covered gate giving onto 69th Street. Garbage cans were lined up there against the blind brick wall of the building. They were not as tightly closed as they could have been. Rhiow’s nose wrinkled as she went past; there had been rats here — she could smell their siss trail running up and down the wall and near the base of it, a nasty, thin, acrid reek. Something else to deal with when there’s time, Rhiow thought. Her work in errantry had not taken her so far from her feline roots that she would forget that most basic of enmities between her kind and the things that had gnawed at the roots of the world since time began. But who wants to get all messed up with rat-smell on a pretty day like this? And indeed it was a nice day, despite the heat; there was a steady, soft breeze coming in off the river, taking away the worst of the city stink.

Rhiow crouched at the bottom of the wired-up gate, leapt up onto it, pulled herself up claw over claw to the top of it, teetered for a moment on the topmost iron bar, and jumped down onto the sidewalk. There Rhiow stood for a moment, staying close to the gate so that no ehhif, unable to see her, would come wandering into her before she saw them. But the street was quiet enough for the moment. Down toward Third Avenue, she could see a couple of ehhif dams pushing their kits in strollers; nearer to her, a tall dark tom-ehhif with that strange twisted head-fur they seemed to be going in for these days came wandering down toward her with his arm around a shorter ehhif, a queen. Rhiow let them go by before she headed down the sidewalk herself, and put her whiskers forward a little at the look on their faces. She was sure she was reading it right; she had seen it often enough on Iaehh and Hhuha before, usually a few minutes before they went into the bedroom, closed the door, and began to do what Hhuha had routinely referred to as“the cat-scaring thing.” A nice sort of day for it, Rhiow thought, as she ambled down the north side of 69th Street, past the stairs of the mid-street brownstones; assuming you’re interested, of course. It had been quite awhile since she had been — her ehhif had had her spayed before she was old enough to understand what was happening. But she had never particularly regretted it. Freedom from that particular physical imperative had left her with that much more time to concentrate on the business of being a wizard. Possibly a good thing, Rhiow thought, sidestepping into the stairwell of the basement apartment to let a couple more ehhif-dams with strollers go by. Since, over the last couple of years, if I hadn’t had that spare time to concentrate, for all I know, I’d’ve been dead a couple times over…

Rhiow came to the corner of Third Avenue and 69th and tucked herself as flat as she could against the corner wall of the apartment building there. Ehhif walked to and fro before her while she sat there waiting for the light to change, and wondering what in the world could be wrong with the L.A. gate. It wasn’t a heavily used portal; no interplanetary traffic went through there at all, and mostly short jump traffic off the North American continent toward Asia. As the light changed, she wondered once again why the L.A. gate had never budded off any associated microgates in response to the city’s population’s growth over the last century. Normally, worldgates were a direct response of the fabric of local space time to the fraying pressure of millions of sentient minds concentrated into a small space. Rather than rip right open under the desires of all the beings living crammed together there,spacetime usually tried to conserve itself by producing a sort of semipermeable membrane through which beings who knew the portal’s location could pass. And normally, Rhiow thought as the light changed and she got up and trotted across Third Avenue in company with all of the other pedestrians, but well to one side, a given gate complex isn’t shy about budding if the local population’s large enough. Look at Tokyo: how many gates are there in that complex now? Fourteen? Fifteen? I lose track; this last decade, it’s like the thing’s in heat all the time. It no sooner has one gate that it hauls off and has another…

Rhiow patted the problem around with the paw of the mind for a while as she made her way down 69th toward Park Avenue. But the air was too soft and pleasant, and for once, nice-smelling, for her to find it easy to concentrate. Rhiow crossed Park Avenue, pausing once another crowd of ehhif had gone by to take a moment to smell the flowers there, yellow delphiniums and yellow and purple pansies. The lights went red and green together, and Rhiow scampered across again, heading for Lexington Avenue.

She had a standard covert entrance to the Grand Central complex down at 50th and Lex, but there was no particular need to go straight underground and quickly blot out the scent of that summer air. For a change, Rhiow simply trotted down the west side of Lexington Avenue like any other sightseer or Sunday shopper, until she came to the brass-and-glass doors of Grand Central Market. Urruah’s beginning to contaminate me too, Rhiow thought, amused, as she walked invisibly down between the stalls of beautiful meat and hot breads and shining fruit, sniffing appreciatively, and then out into the food hall full of coffee smells and frying smells. On the far side of the food hall, she paused long enough to gaze over toward the glass-paned arch of the Oyster Bar restaurants, closed this early on a Sunday. But to a cat’s nose, such closure was a relative thing. Behind those doors, Rhiow could smell oysters being shucked, and her mouth began to water. I’m going to get him for getting me hooked on those things, she thought, and ran up the stairs to the Main Concourse.

Sunday in Grand Central merely meant that there were fewer commuters among the crowds walking that wide shining floor, and many more people out for a pleasant day in the city— ehhif parents towing along kits who in turn towed along bunches of bright balloons; shoppers with fat carrybags full of tasty-smelling loot; tourists gawking at the beautiful, newly cleaned sky-ceiling and the great downhanging striped flag. There was no escaping the scent of food here, either;the station’s recent renovation had placed a restaurant at each end of the great Concourse, and from one of them the smell of grilling meat floated most appetizingly. But for the moment, Rhiow had other business. She headed across the floor toward the north-side archway labeled Track 32.

There were a couple of ehhif walking down the long, fluorescent-lit platform ahead of her. Rhiow put her whiskers forward at the sight of them, for though there was no train at the platform, and there wasn’t scheduled to be one there for at least another twenty minutes, they didn’t move like ehhif who were waiting for something that wasn’t there. Rhiow wandered along behind them, saw the two ehhif stop at the end of the platform and look into the dark, down where the overhead lighting stopped and the great broad spread of tracks began to draw together. One of them, a tall young tom with long blond hair and a shockingly loud Hawaiian shirt, pulled out a book and began to page through it. His companion, a she-ehhif even taller than he, though much darker and much more quietly dressed, looked over his shoulder at what he was reading.

They must have had their access spell pre-prepared, for barely a tail-flick later, the gate manifested itself. In the darkness, hanging in midair about a foot from the left edge of the platform, the portal matrix that Rhiow kept anchored by Track 32 shivered into visibility— at least for Rhiow and the wizards. Theoretically, a nonwizardly ehhif could have seen it. But the gate was edge-on to any other ehhif who might have approached up the platform; and it would have been unlikely that a nonwizardly ehhif could have seen a wizardry even if they were looking straight at it. Nonetheless, these two were being careful. The tom-ehhif glanced back down the platform, saw Rhiow, and hesitated— then said, “Cousin, we’re on errantry, and we greet you —”

“I can see you’re in a hurry,” Rhiow said in the Speech. “Don’t let me keep you, cousins.” She strolled over to them, peering through the gate. Past the rainbow shimmer of its edges, Rhiow caught a glimpse of a reddish landscape, rocky and stark, under an indigo sky. “Mars?” she said.

“Morocco,” the queen-ehhif said. “That earthquake.”

“That attempted earthquake,” her companion said. “We’re going to go talk it out of it.”

“Go well, cousins,” Rhiow said. “And Iau on your side!” – for the many variables associated with quakes made working with them a chancy business at best. The young woman waved at her; they stepped through.

A second later they were gone, and the worldgate snapped back into its normal configuration, the familiar interwoven structure of tightly laced hyperstrings, glowing and rippling in the darkness of the tunnel like a silken tapestry of light. This gate, at least, was behaving correctly— serving its proper purpose of helping wizards get around without having to waste the universe’s precious energy on individually-constructed transport spells. Rhiow sat up on her haunches and beckoned the gate a little closer. Obediently it drifted right to the edge of the platform, and Rhiow reached out, hooked her claws into the control-weave at the edge of the gate, and pulled it out taut.

The gate-strands caught in her claws glittered with light and symbology in the Speech, the worldgate’s realtime diagnostics. It was working fine; the relocation of the Penn gates seemed to have had no effect on it all. …At the moment, Rhiow thought. Worldgates were full of little surprises… but then, when you were dealing with a wizardry so complex, and one that got so much use by wizards other than the ones who maintained it, this was only to be expected.

She took a moment to query the other two Grand Central gates via this one’s control structure, but found nothing to concern her: all three were behaving as well as they ever did. All right, Rhiow thought. She let most of the hyperstrings snap back into the body of the gate structure, but kept a claw in one of them. This one she pulled toward her, twisting it to bring up one of the configurations she had long since laid into the gate for casual use.

The surface of the gate shivered again, paling away except at the bright-burning edges. The view was uninspiring— a pocked, pale-beige travertine wall, shadowy even on such a bright day. Rhiow let that last string snap back into the gateweave, gathered herself, and leapt through in the second and a half before the gate would revert to its standby state.

She came down at the foot of that wall and huddled against it for a moment, looking quickly to right and left. Distracted ehhif sometimes came tearing along here in a desperate hurry, running up from the nearest of Lincoln Center’s many ticket windows and plunging around the corner ahead and to her left, making singlemindedly for the front doors of that high-arched and beautiful building where ehhif gathered to hear and sing astonishingly long and involved songs that were usually mostly about sex. And then after five or six hours of it, they sit there and applaud even though there hasn’t actually been any, Rhiow thought, heading up around the corner herself. Ehhif are so odd sometimes…

At the moment, though, there was little traffic in the area. Rhiow got up and made her way down toward that corner herself, standing there for a few moments to enjoy both the breeze that came down through the ticket-window overpass, and the view. Before her the big circular fountain in front of the Metropolitan Opera danced in the westering sun in an ever-changing liquid-gold glitter, and many ehhif of both sexes sat on the broad rim of the fountain’s basin, trying to get themselves as wet as possible. Rhiow looked right and left again, and couldn’t see Urruah in any of his favorite places – at the top of the steps in front of the Met’s doors, out in the fountain plaza, or over by the plaza-side caf? on the ground floor of Avery Fisher Hall, where he liked to cadge goodies from the more cat-friendly tourists at the outdoor tables. He’s inside, then.

Rhiow retraced her steps past the ticket window and under the overpass connecting the Met to the New York Public Library’s music annex. Once out on the Amsterdam Avenue side she hung a left. There she found the big steel backstage doors predictably open, in this weather, regardless of security precautions, and the usual crowd of stagehands hanging around outside it with lit smokesticks in their hands, working hardto breathe in more foul fumes than the City already thoughtfully provided. She flirted her tail in annoyance at one more example of human peculiarity as she stalked past them into the cool airy shadows of the backstage area. If they had more than one life to waste, I could understand it, I suppose.But they don’t. Ehhif…!

The big backstage“fly” area, nearly four storeys high, was as usual full of scenery containers being pulled out of huge trucks and pushed back into them. Even an unsidled Person could have found it easy enough to hide back here – and indeed, there were a number of People wandering here and there, either beingchased or studiously ignored by the workers — but Rhiow had neither need nor desire to unsidle in this stir and bustle of ehhif pulling the contents out of huge crates and stuffing them back into others. She glanced around.

“Up here, Rhi,” Urruah shouted. Rhiow looked around and up, as did numerous of the ehhif, who then shrugged when they couldn’t see anything where the meowing noise seemed to be coming from, about thirty feet up against one of the backstage area’s sheer concrete-block walls. But Rhiow could see where Urruah and Jath were waiting for her up on an outward-jutting structural I-beam. Rhiow spoke her “skywalking” variant of the Mason’s Word spell and went up a stair of air to where they waited, meanwhile ignoring the shocked or annoyed glances of some of the other People in the area. It had taken her a while, early in her career, to get used to the idea that some People didn’t approve of wizardry, or see the point in it, and some didn’t even believe in it. She’d learned eventually not to allow this to affect her work, but sometimes she still found the weight of other People’s regard on her fur an unwelcome addition to the day’s burdens. Even now there were eyes looking at Rhiow from the shadows, behind crates or under tarpaulins, thoughtful, or angry, or filled with other more complex, more unwelcome emotions…

She flirted her tail carelessly and jumped up onto the beam, dismissing the wizardry. Jath was crouched down into a compact bundle of silvery gray, looking relaxed, and as self-satisfied as Urruah had warned her. She bent down to bump noses with him.“Are you rested, cousin? That was some work you did…”

“Rested enough,” he said. “Thanks, Rhiow. But business takes precedence, as usual…” He glanced behind him.

Aufwi was sitting there in front of Urruah, his tail curled up neatly around his toes, and maintaining a posture probably more formal than he strictly needed to use with a wizard who was simply acting in a supervisory capacity in his specialty, and not as an actual Advisory or Senior. It was a courtesy in someone his age, only one life on and a few years into that, but there was really no need for it. To defuse it she went straight over and breathed breaths with him.“Aufwi,” she said, “long time no smell, cousin!” Her lips wrinkled back at the agreeable scent of fresh tuna. “Can that be sushi?”

“I had time for a snack before I came,” Aufwi said.

“Some snack,” Rhiow said. “The Eye can’t have been up more than an hour or two in LA, cousin! I wish more of my breakfasts were like that – “

“I moved into a hHaha’hnese restaurant,” Aufwi said. “They had a vermin problem…I solved it.” He looked smug. “And apparently my coloring’s lucky for them.”

That interested Rhiow. Aufwi was shorthaired and mostly white-furred, but also sported the occasional patch of red-brown or gray.“You need to tell me more about that when you have time,” Rhiow said. “But first tell me what brings you out all this way.”

“Well,” Aufwi said, “at first sniff, anyway, I’d say that the L.A. gate is finally trying to spawn.”

Rhiow blinked at that.“Iau’s name, I thought Great Rhoua would wink before that happened! Though I can’t say I mind being wrong. When did this start?”

“A few weeks ago,” Aufwi said. “At first I thought it was another ‘false labor:’ you know how many of those we’ve had over the years. All these little shudders and discontinuities in the main gate’s function, they build up, they build up some more, and then…nothing!” His tail thumped in mild frustration, and some embarrassment: he’d reported quite a number of these “fleabites” to Rhiow over the past year and a half.

“But this has been different, I take it,” Rhiow said.

“A lot,” said Aufwi. “There hasn’t been anything small about these discontinuities. The gate’s connection to its power sources in the Downside starts wavering, as if something’s pulling power off it – “

“Which is impossible,” Urruah said, “under normal circumstances.” He gave Rhiow a look over Aufwi’s shoulder. Together they had lately been through some very non-normal circumstances involving their own gates, and power-loss or diversion had routinely been a symptom.

“But it always comes right back again,” Aufwi said, tilting one ear back at Urruah. “Then, right after that, you get a spacetime tremor somewhere in the neighborhood, never outside a thousand-meter radius. And never very big, a little shallow gravitational dimple — exactly the kind of thingyou get when a new gate’s about to manifest. It even displays the right kind of offset.” That was a peculiarity of new gates when they opened: they often pushed themselves a little off to one side of the largest local population concentration, rather than appearing right in the middle of it. “And then – “ His tail started to thrash.

“Nothing?” Rhiow said.

“Repeatedly,” said Aufwi. His green eyes narrowed with his annoyance: it was as if he thought this was all his fault somehow. “I can’t get rid of the idea that I’ve been doing something wrong at the management end.”

Over Aufwi’s shoulder, Urruah gave Rhiow a look that was half irony, half sympathy: once upon a time, he’d been full of such complaints himself, before Saash whacked him into some kind of confidence in his own abilities. “So far,” Urruah said, “it all sounds like it came right from the Whisperer toyour ear. You can’t hurry a gate; especially not this one. We all know it’s had a peculiar developmental history. I can’t see any way you’ve misstepped.”

“You’re kind to say that,” Aufwi said. “But this last time – the day before yesterday – the pattern changed a little, and I started to get concerned. It took the main gate something like an hour to get back to normal – in terms of the power conduit to the Downside re-establishing itself – and that could have been big trouble, if I hadn’t been able to shut it down before anyone started a transit through it. Also, the gate jumped out of its normal position.”

“But it’s always doing that,” Urruah said.

Rhiow waved her tail in agreement: the LA gate was famously peripatetic for any worldgate associated with such a large population center.“It’s just that Los Angeles has never had enough people concentrated tightly enough together to convince the gate to put down a permanent spatial root,” she said. “The city’s so spread out…”

“Believe me, I know,” Aufwi said. “It’s the story of my life. Is the gate in Union Station today, or has it rolled over to Olvera Street again, or jumped over to Wilshire? I get a lot of exercise.” This time Aufwi at least looked amused as well as annoyed. “But this time it jumped a lotfurther than usual, right into Chavez Ravine. And it was active when it jumped.”

Jath abruptly glanced up, looking interested.“Were they playing?” he said.

Urruah blinked.“Playing what?”

“Vh’aisss’vhall,” Jath said.

Rhiow knew about the game, but only vaguely: it was something Iaehh often watched on the imagebox in the apartment. For the moment, though, her eyes widened as she thought of a live worldgate falling into a stadium full of unsuspecting ehhif.“You caught it and brought it back, of course….”

“Sure. The gate’d gone quiescent again by then. But they could never find out what happened to the ball that the ehhif at bat hit into it–”

“How did they score that?” Jath said, actually sitting up as if the proceedings were now of some interest to him.

“A strike,” Aufwi said. “Foul tip.”

“Oh, now that doesn’t make any sense,” Jath said. “Was the gate in the ss’hahium when he hit the ball into it? Then it’s an ihhn-hhark hhome-rrhun – “

Rhiow closed her eyes briefly. I will meet the seriously obsessed today, she thought, belatedly starting the meditation she really should have done as soon as she got up. I will meet toms intent on strange interspecies crosscultural activities, an intention mostly meant to distract them from the fact that they’re not having sex right this minute. They will sink the teeth of distraction into my scruff and seek to drag me places I have absolutely no desire to go, being fond of my sanity. Nonetheless I will keep my mind on my business and avoid slicing their ears to ribbons…at least until they’ve forgotten about my scruff and my potential butt, and started discussing oh’ra singers and pastrami and vh’aisss’vhal scoring again.

Down on the main floor, there came a small bang! of displaced air off to one side. Rhiow’s head snapped around, and so did many others of the ehhif down there; but after a moment all the ehhif who’d noticed went back to what they were doing, since what they’d heard had simply sounded like something being dropped on that hard concrete floor. When the second bang! happened, no onebut the People in the room even bothered to look. A moment later Arhu came wandering around the back of one of the huge scenery-crates, and Siff’hah from behind another. Rhiow let out an amused breath. But this was inevitable. I thought about pastrami…

“Sorry,” Rhiow said, turning back to Aufwi. “Aufwi, forgive me; so strange a day we’ve had, my brains are still rattling inside my head as if the Queen had boxed my ears. You got the gate back into place – “

“Yes,” Aufwi said. “Fortunately it’s not hard to move, being so mobile by nature. But, Rhiow, these energy surges and displacements are starting to come closer together. If this gate’s going into real labor rather than these little contractions, we ought to shut it down for through transits until it gets on with its business. But I don’t have the authority for that.”

“I have,” Rhiow said. “But I should go have a look first: so you did right to bring the problem to me.” She glanced over at Urruah. “If we do need to shut it down,” she said, “San Francisco’s complex could take the extra load for the time being, I’d think.”

“They’re not that busy up there,” Urruah. “It should be no problem: and if it started to become one, Vancouver or Yucatan could assist.”

Rhiow waved her tail in assent.“Let’s go, then,” she said. “’Ruah?”

“Sure,” he said, and got up, slipping past her and starting to walk down the air. “I’ve got a place over there in the back where I keep a little transit circle set up – “

“Not where any of these poor creatures can stumble onto it, I trust?” Rhiow called after him, trying not to sound too desperately concerned.

“Not more than one at a time,” Urruah said. “Follow me, please…”

He went on down the air, with Jath after him.“Aufwi,” Jath said over his shoulder, “when you’re done there, come on back, I want to talk to you about this scoring thing…”

“I’m so sorry to have bothered you when you should have been resting,” Aufwi said from behind Rhiow, sounding unnecessarily apologetic. “The Whisperer gave me a precis of what you were up to: I can’t believe you’re up and walking around after a piece of work like that…”

“Cousin, please, no more of it,” Rhiow said, putting her whiskers forward. “You did exactly what you should have. And we don’t see enough of you over here! Jath’s right too – you should come and spend some non-business time with us…get to know our own gates a little, and work with thelocal teams. You haven’t met Arhu and Siff’hah yet: come greet them. Urruah, where are we going, exactly?”

She got no immediate answer, for once down on the floor there followed a few moments of mixing and mingling, breaths being breathed and noses being bumped. Rhiow stepped away after a few seconds and let her team get on with it, thinking that she really must make sure that Aufwi came out to do a brief internship with one or another of the New York teams, preferably her own. His previous senior, Fefssuh, had been easygoing and knowledgeable, but so very senior and set in his ways– Aufwi had come to work with him when Fefssuh was almost twelve – that Aufwi had had too little time or opportunity to develop much in the way of initiative or self-confidence. And those were qualities vital in a gate technician. A week or two with Arhu will sort that out, Rhiow thought. Maybewhen summer’s done and we’ve settled his gate down –

“You slept in today,” Arhu said, falling in beside Rhiow as she went after Urruah, toward the back of the fly area.

“You could have done the same,” Rhiow said. “For a change.”

“I hate to miss anything,” Arhu said, glancing around.

“Nothing much to miss,” said Siff’hah, slipping around to bracket Rhiow on the other side. It was a game of theirs, Rhiow had been noticing: each of them would get up close to one of your ears, and then they would start passing their opinions back and forth through your head. “Look at this crowd,” Siff’hah said, glancing scornfully around at the various People watching them from hiding. “They all think we’re fflah.”

It was one of many words Rhiow had never heard until she started listening to Arhu and Siff’hah trying to verbally or physically shred one another’s ears. Ailurin, like any other language, had slang, but these days it seemed to be changing faster than Rhiow could keep track of. This word, at least, she could tell wasn’t complimentary.

“Not all of them,” Arhu said. “Rhi, you have fans.”

His tone, on the surface, was teasing: but there was something a little uneasy about it as well. Rhiow flirted an unconcerned tail at him.“Around here I wouldn’t be too concerned about that,” she said. “I daresay they’ve got more than enough shes to keep them busy in this neighborhood, and not sth’heih ones, either.” It was the Ailurin word that best translated the ehhif concept “spayed.”

“Not all of them care,” Arhu said. “Looks like some People don’t care whether a queen smells shaih or not – “

She turned around in mid-step and cuffed Arhu hard, then instantly regretted it. I might have slept in, but not enough, perhaps… “Mend your language, kit,” she said, turning back to continue following in Urruah’s wake: but as she turned she caught the glance that Arhu had caught, from the darkness deep inside one of the unloaded scenery crates. Pale eyes, wide, looking at her with an expression she could make nothing of: as if she was some kind of bizarre alien creature, dangerous but nonetheless peculiarly desirable –

She looked away, walked a little faster.“Like I said,” Arhu said under his breath.

“Don’t judge,” Rhiow said under her breath. “We have comfortable enough lives, and we know what we’re for, and have work to do that we enjoy. Who knows if that Person does? Who knows what he suffers, or enjoys, without talking to him? There’s more to a life than the way it looks. Don’t make decisions about him because he stares.”

Arhu flirted his tail at her in that I-don’t-care way he had when he did care, but didn’t feel like pressing his case with her. She rolled her eyes and went on along behind Jath, following him and Urruah over to the far back corner of the fly area, down a little low-ceilinged concrete-walled hallway, and through a small open door.

Rhiow stopped there, looking in shock at the furnishings of the room, which consisted of two ceramic receptacles, one on the floor and one on the wall.“Urruah,” she said. “In their toilet?”

“No fear of a crowd of them walking into this transit circle, is there?” Urruah said, cheerful. The wizardry blazed up through the white square-tiled floor as they watched.

“Your ingenuity knows no bounds,” Rhiow said, and this was true, though the Speech itself didn’t necessarily have to convey her sarcasm as well. “Aufwi?”

Aufwi stepped on the circle and spoke to it briefly in the Speech, laying in the required coordinates.“Let’s go…”

All it took was a step, and then everything was changed: from the harsh white glare of a single downhanging bulb, and the strange decayed-violet smell of old ehhif siss, to the glare of bright direct sun under a peculiarly open-seeming sky, and a wind laden with the sharp bimetallic taste of city-by-the-sea, as well as a brown hint of smog. Rhiow glanced around her to see if someone was about to trip over her, but no ehhif were anywhere near: the plaza in which they all stood was a near-empty desert of blazing white paving.

Without warning, Aufwi began to curse. Rhiow looked at him in surprise, and Arhu and Siff’hah stared, for his vocabulary was starting to resemble theirs in both filthiness and vehemence. He caught Rhiow’s look, though, and tried to restrain himself. “It’s not fair,” Aufwi said, his tail lashing furiously and his ears down near-flat. “Where’s the vhai’d thing gone now??”

“What?” Rhiow said. “The gate? You didn’t leave it out here, did you?”

“Of course not! But I can feel that it’s not where I did leave it!” Aufwi stared all around him, as if expecting the gate to pop up through the ground. “It was inside the station, down by the Red Line tracks. I’ve been trying to train it by putting it back in the same spot every time it jumps…”

Urruah laughed, that ironic sound of his again.“Might work with a gate that’s part of a complex and has some rootedness associated with it,” he said, “but not with one that hasn’t spawned yet. Nice try, though. Take a breath and see if you can feel where it’s gone.”

Aufwi glanced over at Urruah and then relaxed, his ears gradually coming up and his whiskers going forward. Rhiow found herself wondering how easygoing Fefssuh had actually been with his prot?g? when his supervisors, of whom Rhiow was merely the latest, were not around. How many times has this kit had his ears boxed for something that wasn’t his fault, I wonder? I really must see about that internship…

Aufwi had gone a little unfocused for the moment, hunting in mind for his gate. Rhiow left him to it, turning to look around the plaza. Here, too, the ehhif weekend meant that few human commuters were around, and there was leisure to admire the broad handsome vista of new buildings spreading back from the central, old one, a massive white stucco structure with its peaked roof done in red tile, accompanied by a massive white campanile clock-tower. This place had become nearly moribund once, years before Rhiow’s time: it had actually seen a time when only two trains a day came through it. Then the city’s ehhif saw sense and started to rebuild their local rail system, routing it through here and awakening Union Station from its long slumber.

“It’s all right,” Aufwi said then. “I’ve got it. It’s as I thought: it’s slipped over to Olvera Street again. It likes it there,” he said, turning to Rhiow. “That’s the oldest part of the city, and it seems kind of torn as to where it wants to be – over there, or over here in the oldest transport center.”

Rhiow put her whiskers forward, for here once again was fuel for that oldest debate: were gates alive? Wizardries so complex often started to display some of the characteristics of life– they required energy, they reacted to stimuli, they reproduced – and, especially in the case of worldgates, they seemed to start to acquire some sense of what they were for. “Is it far?” she said.

“Across the street,” Aufwi said. “Come on.”

He led the way across the plaza to where it ended in a drop-off space for cars and buses, and a set of traffic lights. The distance was what for Rhiow would have been more like four or five short city blocks: but out here, ehhif built their roads on a larger scale than Manhattan would ever have allowed. They waited for the traffic roaring by to cease, and then trotted hurriedly across the six lanes to the long line of handsome white buildings on the far side.

There were far more ehhif over here, even at this time of the morning; Aufwi led Rhiow and the group in the wake of some of them, under a high wide white-stucco arch and through into a long pedestrianized space, itself like a small street sheltered on both sides by a double line of stucco buildings, mostly low and red-tiled, though much older-looking than Union Station had been.

“This looks like it’s been here for a while,” Urruah said, glancing up and down the pedestrian precinct, and sniffing. Down to their left, a long line of little stalls in the middle of the precinct stretched down toward its far end: and some of them, to judge by the scent of grills firing up,were getting ready to open for business.

“A few hundred years,” Aufwi said. He was sniffing too, but for something else. “A long time, as ehhif here reckon it – they don’t seem to have been able to keep much else from that period around. Torn down, or buried, or worn out and forgotten… Aha! There we are. Same as last time – “

He led them down toward the center of the pedestrian precinct, past shops hung with bright-colored ornaments, past splashing fountains and old adobe houses festooned with lush green grapevines. In a mostly-paved circle at the heart of it all stood pedestals bearing statues of formal-looking ehhif of ancient days: these alternated with tall handsome trees whose downsweeping branches and leaves gave off a spicy fragrance. There, under one of the biggest trees, on the south side of the circle, Rhiow caught the daylight-subdued shimmer of a sheet of interwoven hyperstrings. The worldgate hung there apparently from a branch of the tree that was outthrust about eight feet from the ground, looking for all the world like some ehhif’s laundry hung out to dry.

“Now there you are,” Aufwi said to the gate, stalking over to it, and then walking slowly around it and looking it over carefully. “How am I supposed to take proper care of you when you misbehave like this? Huh?”

Rhiow turned her head away so that Aufwi wouldn’t see her put her whiskers so far forward that they were in danger of falling right off. “Aufwi,” Urruah said, and Rhiow could hear him struggling to keep his own laughter under control, “maybe you could take a moment off from scolding your problem child to pull out the diagnostic structures and take it offline. Then we can have a look and see what seems to be biting it.”

It was Aufwi’s turn to laugh, then. “Sure,” he said, and reared up on his haunches, reaching up to the downhanging gateweave –

Something kicked the world, hard.

At least that was Rhiow’s first sense of what was happening. It was like being in a building that had been hit by a truck. But they were not in a building, and there were no trucks, and the shock nevertheless went right up through her legs and jolted her so that she nearly fell over where she stood. Half in panic, she staggered and tried to get back her balance, staring around at the others. Arhu and Siff’hah were crowded together, half supporting each other, their ears back and all their fur standing on end: Urruah’s tail was fluffed out to easily five times its normal size: Jath’s eyes were so wide that Rhiow thought they were going to pop out of his head. “What in the Queen’s Name was that?” Rhiow said, shaking all over as she managed to stand upright again.

“Only a little one,” Aufwi said. Not only had he not fallen over, he was still up on his haunches with his claws in the gate’s strings: as she watched, he pulled out the “master function” hyperstring and twisted it until the weave of the gate faded to nearly nothing in the bright air, signaling its deactivated mode. “No problem.”

Rhiow’s eyes went wide. “That was an earthquake? A little earthquake? Powers that Be preserve us from a big one!”

“That’s what we’re working on,” Aufwi said. The sheerly unruffled quality of his demeanor astonished her. He gets nervous about being yowled at a little, but the world moves under him and he shrugs his tail? Rhiow thought. “Seriously, Rhiow, that one wasn’t bad. I’d make it no more than, oh, a four point five.” His face was as casual as that of a Person asked to rate a given brand of People food. “These little short-sharp-shock ones are no big deal: one bang and it’s all over. You want a quake, you want one of the ones where the ground sort of rolls underneath you, the ones with the big transverse waves–”

“I do not want them,” Rhiow said, “any of them, thank you very much!” She looked all around her. “I thought I heard some things falling–”

“Oh, sometimes a piece of stucco’ll fall off down here,” Aufwi said. “But not much more. The ehhif who built these houses, they were smart – they knew what they were dealing with. Nothing more than a storey or two high, small windows, long low buildings that hug the ground so there’s not so far to fall–”

“They’ll have felt this where the buildings are a lot taller,” Urruah said, glancing westward to where the towers and spires of “downtown” Los Angeles rose.

Aufwi put his head to one side, listening to the Whisperer.“No serious damage,” he said after a moment. “Some cracks in walls, some minor injuries from things falling on People or ehhif. And things look all right around here.” He looked up at the bright sky, waved his tail. “’Just another day in Paradise…’”

Rhiow had her doubts that this was anything like Timeheart, either the ehhif version or her own, if such occurrences were commonplace. And without warning, the hair stood up all over her again. Oh, stop that, what’s the matter with me today –

Something kicked the world again: and this time, the kick felt much harder. Rhiow’s heart felt like it was seizing inside her. Knowing what was happening wasn’t making the experience any easier to deal with: it was making it worse. Rhiow wanted to yowl in terror, and barely managed to restrain herself as she staggered for balance. Iau Queen of Everything, help me hang on —

“Aftershock – !” Aufwi said, as Rhiow and the others tried to keep from falling over. “Don’t worry, only four point one or so that time – “

In front of them, the near-invisible gate shivered all over like the back of a Person who’d been bitten by a flea. The gate’s weft writhed, puckered, writhed again –

Someone came through and fell to the ground.

They all stared.

It was a Person. He was black all over, nearly as black as Rhiow, but exposure to much sun or the natural cast of his coat was letting all the usually-concealed tabby markings show through the darkness of the fur. He was dusty and rather thin, a long-faced, long-legged tom with tilted brass-yellow eyes.“Oh, thank Iau,” he said, gasping as if with exertion as he picked himself up, “I got it right. I didn’t want to keep you waiting. I didn’t, did I? There’s no time to lose – “

He had the air of a Person hanging on with every claw to keep himself from going frantic. His tongue went in and out over his nose three or four times in a row as he tried to get his composure, staring around him.“But it’s really going to be all right now,” the tom said then, looking from one to another of them, and last of all his eyes came to rest on Rhiow. “I made it. I’m here. I’m on errantry, and in need and haste I greet you – “

It was a form of the Avedictory that Rhiow had only rarely heard used— the one meant to convey utmost urgency. “Cousin,” she said, “tell us your name, and tell us how we can help you.”

“Hwaith,” he said. “I’m Hwaith. Our gate is malfunctioning, the LA gate – “

“But it’s fine,” Aufwi said, glancing up at it.

“The kind of fine that means People can come through it after you’ve shut it down?” Urruah said. “I’d say that is the wrong kind of fine.”

But Hwaith was already lashing his tail“no”. “Not that one,” he said, and licked his nose again, nervous. “My Los Angeles gate.”

Rhiow’s eyes went wide. “Hwaith, you’ve timeslid, haven’t you? When are you from?”

“2432022.873981,” Hwaith said.

At the sound of the middle three digits before the decimal point, Rhiow blinked, then said silently to the Whisperer, Would you check me on this?

A twenty-digit conversion of the Julian date was slipped into her mind, including cognates in ehhif and cetacean eras. Rhiow blinked again. Are you sure? she said silently.

Inside her head, the Mistress of the Whispering made a small demure coughing sound like someone giving polite warning that she was getting ready to dispose of a hairball, or a ridiculous question. Sorry, Rhiow said, for one did not casually query the soundness of the advice of Hrau’f the Silent when on errantry. Sorry, reflex…

“That would be nineteen forty-six, as the ehhif make it,” Rhiow said. “Cousin, you know the rules about front-timing – “

“And you know it’s impossible in the first place if someone from the front-time hasn’t given you the necessary coordinates and conditionals,” he said. “You did that. Will do it.”

“Not without a fair amount of explaining,” Urruah said.

“And the Powers have sanctioned it,” Hwaith said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. Please, cousins, you’re needed to put right what’s gone wrong! You’re the answer.”

This response left Rhiow, as usual, very unnerved as to the possible nature of the question. But at least this was a nervousness she knew what to do about– unlike having the Earth move under her. “What’s needed, Hwaith?” she said. “What’s the problem?”

He looked at her for a moment as if wondering where to begin.“Something’s trying to subvert our gate,” he said. “Something that wants to use it for its own purposes.”

Jath looked annoyed.“The Lone Power,” he said.

“Again,” Arhu and Siff’hah said in cranky and slightly bored-sounding unison.

“No!” Hwaith said.

They all stared at him.“No,” Hwaith said again. “Something else. Something worse.”

“Worse than the Lone One?” Rhiow said, astounded.

Hwaith let out a long breath and sat down, his tail thumping on the ground.“Much worse,” he said. “Something from outside.”

Rhiow sat down too, the world rocking under her in a way that had nothing to do with the San Andreas Fault, but was nonetheless not much of an improvement.“Tell us,” she said…

The Big Meow: Chapter Three

“I know it sounds insane,” Hwaith said a few minutes later. The plaza at Olvera Street had already begun to fill up with more and more ehhif, so everyone had taken the simplest available option and climbed the biggest of the peppertrees, perching or couching themselves on one or another of the big thick outthrust branches twenty feet or so above the ground.

“Worse than the Lone Power…!” Arhu was muttering under his breath. He had to mutter louder than usual, as from maybe twenty feet above his head, and everyone else’s, various muted screeching and grinding-gear noises were coming from the many annoyed, glossy-black grackles in the tree, all now perched well out of reach and emitting avian curses.

“I know how it sounds. But think about it,” said Hwaith, glancing over at Rhiow as if hoping for support. “It’s evil, yes, and does evil, often enough, from our point of view: it’s entropy embodied, no arguing that. But at least it’s a force native to our sheaf of universes, something interior.”

“I’ll grant you,” Rhiow said, “things exterior to the sheaf wouldn’t be something I’d spend a lot of time thinking about on a daily basis.”

“Who would?” Hwaith said. “We have enough troubles inside.” He sat up and scratched emphatically behind one foreleg.

“I take it you’ve done all the usual diagnostics,” Urruah said. “And the problem’s not with the gate.”

“Let’s put it this way,” Hwaith said; “the problems we’ve been having aren’t the L.A. gate’s usual problems.” He glanced over at Aufwi: Aufwi put his ears back and looked away, a gesture of shared annoyance. “You know the way the thing jumps around. That was my first hint that something was going wrong: it started to stay put.”

Aufwi looked back, going rather wide-eyed with incredulity.“Where?” he said.

“Beechwood Canyon,” Hwaith said, “up by Mount Lee — just south of Mulholland Boulevard. It rolled up there one morning in the middle of an earthquake, and started putting a root down into the hillside.”

Aufwi looked dubious.“Normally I’d have gone right out and caught a rat for Queen Iau as a thank-offering,” he said. “Not like we haven’t been praying for a hundred years that the gate would eventually see fit to settle in someplace! But Mount Lee…?” His tail lashed. “Why on Earth? That’s too much offset for even this crazy gate. There’s no transport center there, and the population’s fairly sparse up that way even now! It’d just have been a couple of hillsides’ worth of brush, back in your time.”

“I don’t have answers for you,” Hwaith said, and his tail was lashing harder than Aufwi’s. “There hasn’t been time to find them. Right when the gate started trying to root, we started having earthquakes, cluster after cluster of them. At least five or six a day, some of them big kicks, some of them just little…but they had that ‘precursor’ feel to them, like they might be the heralds of something big. Half the wizards in L.A. dropped what they were doing and tried to deal with them, but they weren’t having much luck. The only thing that seemed to make a difference was about a week later, when I managed to pry the gate loose from where it was digging itself into the canyon and drag it back down here where it belonged. Then the quakes died down….”

“A coincidence, perhaps?” Rhiow said. “New Moon, or full? That would explain the week’s worth of increased activity–”

Hwaith gave her an exasperated look, and Rhiow glanced away, a touch embarrassed to see a newly-met wizard so openly fraught.“The Moon had nothing to do with it,” Hwaith said, “or at least the Whisperer didn’t think it did. I got suspicious and did a deep diagnostic on the gate, pushing the analysis all the way into the main catenary connection to the Old Downside. I thought that, since that dimension’s so muchmore central than ours, I’d be able to get a better idea of what was making the gate act so oddly.”

Hwaith licked his nose four or five times in rapid succession.“What I got back was a sense that all that part of spacetime was being leaned against. Something pushing, pressing, from outside, wanting in. And at the same time, it was sucking and pulling at the gate, trying to get it stable and rooted deep, so it could be used for…something.” The fur was standing up on Hwaith’s back now, a long dusty ridge running right down to his tail, which was going fluffy with alarm. “And when I finished the spell, I could tell that Hrau’f Herself had been looking over my shoulder all the time, and the fur on Her back was up too. She said, ‘You will need help to understand this, and to stop it: for it isn’t pointed just at you. Here’s where to go.” And Hwaith looked around him at the tree and the dappled sunlight on the plaza, as if he didn’t quite believe in them: and then at Rhiow.

The fur started to stand up on her too. Rhiow had to look away and wash an ear, and she tried not to have it look more like composure-grooming than it had to: but the ragged look of intensity and fear in Hwaith’s eyes was unnerving her as much as the implications of what he’d said. Anything that can frighten Hrau’f the Silent… she thought. “You’re implying,” Rhiow said, “that whatever has been trying to happen in your time, is also going to try to happen in ours, if it’s not dealt with first in backtime.”

“That’s what She gave me to understand,” Hwaith said, “yes.”

“Why?” Urruah said. “What did She say it was?”

“She didn’t,” said Hwaith. “She said, We won’t know until you do. And you won’t know until they do–”

Urruah swore under his breath, a not-very-restrained yowl. Rhiow gave him a look, and then glanced over at Arhu and Siffha’h, whose expressions were jointly very neutral– meaning that they weren’t sure what was going on, but weren’t going to be caught admitting as much. “This is one of those annoying little courtesies the Powers that Be like to do us,” Rhiow said. “The dignity of joint creation. The Powers aren’t the only ones making our worlds happen: we are, too. But They can be as uncertain about the way events unfold as we are. Oh, living outside time in the full flow of Eternity may seem very nice to us….but beings who permanently reside on the far side of Time tend to have trouble affecting timeflow by themselves. They need someone who lives inside to–”

“Do Their dirty work!” Arhu and Siffha’h said in annoyed unison.

“Somehow,” Jath said, “I doubt the One sees it that way.”

“Jath’s right,” Urruah said. “And though the Powers are creators and caretakers, they’re not omnipotent or omniscient. Sure, They intervene here directly, sometimes, when things get bad — but not more often than They have to. We, on the other hand, live here. We know better how time works than They do: we experience it physically. They can’t do that without help from us….”

“And sometimes they can’t be sure what’s going to happen inside sequential time until we make it happen,” said Rhiow. “This sounds like one of those cases.”

“But we’re already inside a time paradox!” Arhu said. “He’s here because we went to him! But if we go to his time, it’ll be because we–”

“Don’t say ‘if’!” Hwaith said, putting his ears back. Then he caught sight of Urruah’s annoyed look, and his tail slowly twitching. Hwaith put his ears forward again. “Please,” he said: but he said it to Rhiow.

For an uncomfortable moment or so there was no noise but the grackles overhead, still making their rusty-gear screech. It was louder now: since none of the People in the tree were doing anything about the grackles, the birds had been hopping stealthily lower, twig by twig, to see if they could somehow make People’s lives more difficult. Rhiow looked up through the leaves and saw one round golden grackly eye bent thoughtfully on her. “Hwaith,” Rhiow said then, glancing back toward him, “you put me in a difficult position, for the situation’s far from clear as yet.”

“Clarifying it’s going to take time,” Hwaith said, “and it’s what we don’t have much of, where I am. But here, you have all the time in the world…for the time being.” He had slipped into the Speech for the moment, and the conditional tenses he was using were a lot more conditional than Rhiow would have liked. “All I know for sure, all the Whisperer told me, is that my problem is your problem. Or, shortly, it will be. Solve mine, you’ll solve yours. But if my problem isn’t solved, you’re going to find yourself dealing with it– and it’ll be a much tougher fix, She said. If not nearly impossible.”

Rhiow and her team, and Jath and Aufwi, looked at one another.“Cousins, please,” Hwaith said, getting up and shaking himself all over, “I shouldn’t be here any longer: I have to get back and make sure my gate’s all right — I don’t trust it out of my sight for more than a few minutes at a time, the way it’s been acting. There’s so much more to tell, but this is the wrong end of time to be telling it in! You have the coordinates where I’ll meet you–”

Rhiow could feel them lying at the back of her mind, ready to be used. There was the indicator that the proposed intervention had been sanctioned, and at a very high level: when the Whisperer was so direct with you, it didn’t do to start arguing the fine points of an intervention until you’d begun it and had a better idea of exactly what was involved. Yet the choice to go or not lay with her — the “dignity” of co-creation lay once again dumped in front of Rhiow for her attention, bloody and twitching, like a half-dead rat. And speaking of twitching, there was poor Hwaith, watching her with those narrowed brassy eyes, waiting for her choice. She found herself wondering whether this kind of nervous tic was part of his normal mode of operation — the way Saash had never been able to stop scratching while she was still inside her ninth life’s skin– or simply transient discomfort at being in the middle of a forward timeslide, an enterprise naturally fraught with all kinds of danger. He caught her look, held it for a second, then looked away again, as if embarrassed —

“…We’ll come,” Rhiow said at last. “We have to make some preparations of our own, you’ll understand. But we’ll be with you shortly.”

“Thank you!” Hwaith said. “Well met on the Journey–”

And he was gone.

The brief inrush of air to the place where he’d been caused a gust of wind in the peppertree’s branches. From above them all, the grackles screeched again, more loudly now, reading the breeze– unusually rationally, for birds so far down the food chain — as something that was somehow the cats’ fault. Everyone rolled their eyes.

Everyone but Urruah, at least. He was looking at Rhiow with an expression that normally meant (when he was going to agree with her) that he was going to find a way to improve on what she’d already decided, or (when he wasn’t in agreement) that he was trying to find a better plan without being overtly offensive.

“Is anyone really buying this?” he said.

Oh, well, Rhiow thought, tucking herself down on the branch in a neutral pose that kept the paws folded in, so as not to show what might be in their claws, so much for not being offensive! Did he have enough breakfast, I wonder? He always starts growling when his stomach does…

“You can buy what you like,” Arhu said, “but if the Whisperer’s selling, I’m in.”

“What he said,” said Siffha’h, hunching herself down beside her brother.

Rhiow closed her eyes, hearing the challenge:“I’ll see your offensiveness, and raise you ten claws and a jawful.” So much for Urruah’s seniority! But the two kits were young and still in the first flush of their power, and when they closed ranks and started reinforcing each other’s sometimes wildly uninformed but emphatic opinions, there was often trouble.

Jath’s ears were already flat at such disrespect to a more senior wizard, and he had an eye on Rhiow, waiting to see what she was going to do. Rhiow removed her sidelong glance from him very slowly, as if not officially noticing his expression — the way you “took back” a move in hauissh. The look she turned on Arhu and Siffha’h was a dam’s look, patient for the moment, but meant to communicate that the big hard clout behind the ear was waiting. “You two want to relocate your manners,” she said, “before I slice some holes in your hides and install new sets.” Not waiting for anyreaction, she then glanced over at Urruah. “Meanwhile, perhaps you want to take the time to explain your concerns to these two experts. Though if you’d rather just knock them out of the tree, I’m sure I’ll understand.”

Arhu and Siffha’h had the grace to look a little chastened. Strangely, though, so did Urruah. “I don’t know,” Urruah said. “It just all sounded a little dubious to me, somehow. And sketchy.”

“A hunch? Well, we don’t always have a lot of data under our paws when we start an intervention,” Rhiow said. “Granted, that can make decisions harder. But I don’t doubt Hwaith’s sincerity. And he dropped into the Speech for the part of the conversation that mattered…so there’s no question of this being any kind of fabrication on his part.”

“Misapprehension, though,” Urruah said, “is always a possibility–”

And then something very, very large kicked the tree, and the world heaved upwards and then sank away again…

The grackles burst up out of the tree and into the milky blue, screeching. Below, from the ehhif in the plaza, there were some muffled exclamations at the shake, and some not at all muffled. Over on the main road they’d crossed, tires screeched and some horns blew. In the parking lot on the northern side of Olvera Street, behind the oldest part of the pueblo, car alarms started to go off in a sporadically augmented cacophony of hoots, honks, and warbles. Rhiow closed her eyes and hung onto her branch of the tree, as the vibrations from the kick started to fade away. Then there was another one.

What vhai’d kind of bark do these things have! Rhiow thought in fury as the shaking went on, and on… She dug in her claws as hard as she could, but the bark was too smooth, she was starting to slip–

The shaking gradually faded away. Arhu and Siffha’h and Urruah and Aufwi and Jath were all still hanging on and looking around them as if waiting for one more punchline to the cosmic joke: but nothing came.

“Five point one or so,” said Aufwi, as Rhiow pushed herself upright from the branch, more by force of will than anything else. What she really wanted to do was get down out of this tree and put herself flat against the ground, where there would be no further she could fall. Except it wouldn’thelp! The ground could still start bouncing around —

Urruah looked up through the branches at the cloudless sky.“All right, all right, I get it!” he shouted at the Silent One. “Have you ever heard of subtlety??”

Aufwi cocked his head to one side.“Different epicenter on that one,” he said after a moment.

“Oh?” Urruah said. “Where was it?”

How can you possibly sound so casual after something like that? Rhiow said silently to him, once again forcing herself to sit still and keep from indulging in a fit of composure-grooming.

When I’m covering for you, Urruah said. So for Iau’s good sake just shut up and put yourself right!

“Rancho Sierra Vista,” said Aufwi. “It’s thirty miles or so up the coast, at the top of one of the big coastal canyons– five miles or so inland from Malibu. The first one’s epicenter was up in the Hollywood hills–”

“Near Beachwood Canyon, by any chance?” Arhu said.

Aufwi looked thoughtful.“Now than you mention it, about halfway up–”

“Uh huh,” Urruah said. He looked over at Rhiow. “This last one was worse, though. We’d better have a look at Sierra Vista first. Then when we go back, we can compare this quake to one or more of Hwaith’s, and see if they’re somehow similar. And if it is–”

Don’t say if! said a desperate voice in her mind.

Rhiow stood up and made a great show of stretching, fore and aft, as she thought.“Then the case is proven, at least enough for a start. All right,” she said. She looked over at Jath. “Cousin, we’re going to be busy a while, it seems. You’re going to have to mind the gates at Grand Central while we’re sorting this out. Are you willing?”

The question was more ceremonial than anything else.“I accept with good cheer,” Jath said.

I bet you do, especially since you’ve been wanting to get your paws on my gates for– how long now? Since Ffairh went out-of-skin, anyway. It was one of those minor irritations that had been nibbling at the end of Rhiow’s tail for a long time. Jath had always seen himself as heir-apparent to the master supervisory position forthe New York gating facilities…especially since it brought with it supervision of all the other North American gates. He’d taken it badly when, on Ffairh’s nomination of her, Rhiow had succeeded to the position: but there had been nothing he could say or do, as the Powers that Be had “confirmed in silence” by raising no objection, and Harl’h, as the involved Supervisory wizard, had done the same. Rhiow had found dealing with the situation difficult, early in her career. But over time her ears had become more resistant to the claws Jath had tried to hook into them, and finally he’d given up bothering her and gone back to watching his own mousehole.

“I thank you,” Rhiow said, “and the Powers lay Their tails over your back as They walk this path with you.” Because They’ll need to!– for the Grand Central gates were not only more central and more senior than the Penn group, but famously cranky and difficult to manage. But then again, Rhiow thought, putting her whiskers forward somewhat belatedly, and possibly for the wrong reasons, maybe this small adventure will give you a sense of why I’m running Grand Central, and you’re not.

That was an unworthy thought, though. Rhiow turned away from it…but with just a few whiskers still forward. “Aufwi,” she said, “you know the here-and-now Los Angeles gate better than any of us: we’ll need you to act as anchor for us here, and consultant, so that we can talk to you when we’ve looked at Hwaith’s gate and have a realtime baseline tojudge it by.”

“No problem with that,” Aufwi said, glancing down at where the dislocated gate still hung, gently stirring, from its branch. “When I get it back in place, I’ll run another diagnostic before I take it offline, and compare the recent logs against the ones from Hwaith’s time. That way we cansee if the gate’s showing any signs of acting the way it was back then.”

“Just what’s needed,” Rhiow said. “Thanks, cousin. Do you know the area where this last quake was?”

Aufwi got that stricken look again.“No,” he said, “not really–”

Rhiow laughed as she got up, even though she staggered a bit– it was as if her legs had become suddenly unwilling to trust the solidity of the branch underneath her. “Calm down,” she said, “it’s not as if we expect you to know everything — !”

Arhu had sat up too, and still had his head tilted a little to one side.“I can see it,” he said. “There’s a gateway, and a hill. And I hear water coming down nearby…”

Rhiow put her ears forward, pleased that he’d so quickly found where they needed to be. Though he’d possessed the Eye, the visionary gift, from his first hours as a wizard, controlling it was another story. “We’ll do a short-jump transit, then,” Rhiow said, “and see what’s going on up there.” She glanced down and around to make sure there were no ehhif nearby, but they were mostly in other parts of the plaza– for all she knew, they’d been concerned that the tree might fall on them during the earthquake. “Probably that parking lot behind these buildings will be a good place,” Rhiow said: “it won’t be too full yet. Siffha’h, will you go lay out a transit circle for us? Arhu will pass you the coordinates.”

“Right,” Siffha’h said, and vanished with a small inrush of air. A second later, Arhu did the same.

Aufwi jumped down to the next branch, over which the gate was hanging, and sank his claws into the weft of it.“Call me when you need me,” he said to Rhiow; then he pulled the gate up from the branch and dove through it, taking it with him as he vanished.

Jath got up and stretched, a long casual gesture meant to suggest that earthquakes were nothing in particular to him. I saw your eyes, though, Rhiow thought. Why are you bothering with this petty point-scoring…? Or am I overly sensitive at the moment because the Earth just tried to kick me off like a flea?

“You’ve got your claws full with those two,” Jath said.

Under any other circumstances Rhiow would have immediately agreed: but with her nerves in their present state, she was unwilling to give Jath the satisfaction.“They’re both extremely talented,” Rhiow said, “and living proof of the old saying that sometimes the Powers mean the trainers to be the trained as well.” She put her whiskers way forward. “Meanwhile, the Track Thirty-Two gate at Grand Central will be running its pre-peak diagnostic shortly. I wouldn’t like to make you miss that…”

Jath’s expression went concerned…and acquisitive. “No,” he said, “of course not — Hunt’s luck to you, Rhiow, Urruah–”

He too vanished. Urruah gave Rhiow a look.“You sent him off to watch an automated log dump?” Urruah said. “Half an hour of figures as dry as a roadkill squirrel? You’re cruel.”

“Powers forbid I should deny him any of the joys of managing Grand Central,” Rhiow said, as they walked down the air together, glancing around at the plaza, where the upset ehhif were slowly regaining their composure. “If he’s going to covet something of mine, let it be an informed covet.”

At ground level they glanced around, then made their way toward the archway that led back to the parking lot.“Sounding a little possessive today…” Urruah said.

Rhiow hissed under her breath as they made their way under the arch, past a group of ehhif in broad hats, tuning up stringed instruments.“Aaah. ‘Ruah, it’s just that he’s so obvious about it sometimes… and so willful about ignoring the facts: as if Ffairh and I were in some kind of cosmic plot with the Powers that Be to deny him his Iau-given rights. As if any of us would have time for such a thing, let alone inclination–”

They strolled over to where Arhu was sitting by the glowing lines of a completed transit circle, all neatly done inside a single parking space well off to one side of the parking lot. Siffha’h was sitting in the middle of the circle and glowing slightly around the edges herself, an indicator that she had the wizardry powered up and ready to go, with herself as power source. As Rhiow and Urruah paced up to the circle, Siffha’h said, “Did you see the way he was staring at you?”

Rhiow glanced over at her.“’He?’” she said. “You little eavesdropper, haven’t I told you before this to stay out of my head?” She took a not-very-serious swipe at Siffha’h’s head. “Powerful you may be, but be responsible about it: leave your teammates their privacy. And ‘he’ who? Jath? As if I care.”

“Jath!” Siffha’h let out a hiss of derision. “That dried-up old hairball? I meant Hwaith.”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t notice it,” Arhu said, as Rhiow stepped into the circle and sat down on the small sub-circle marked out for her. “He just sat there twitching and staring, like he couldn’t take his eyes off you.”

Rhiow jerked her tail in dismissal, then wrapped it around her feet where she sat.“Oh please! I’ve spent half the day, already, feeling as if everyone’s staring at me. I’m starting to think I put my ears on backwards when I got up. And as for Hwaith, he was watching me because I was the one who’d be making the decision. Yes, he was twitchy, but why wouldn’t he be? Nobody dares stay out of their proper time for very long: things get damaged.”

“And usually,” Urruah said, walking around the circle and checking the structure of the spell, “the first damage is to you. That’d be enough by itself to put his fur up. But also–” He looked at Arhu. “Think about it. Who likes going years out of his way to admit something’s going onthat he can’t handle, and then having to ask for help?” Hearing the gender-specific pronouns, Rhiow glanced down at the bark as if wondering where her clawmarks should have been, and very much avoided putting her whiskers forward in amusement. “I get the sense he doesn’t like time travel much, either.”

“None too fond of it myself,” Siffha’h muttered.

“Well, you’d best get that way,” Rhiow said, “since the Whisperer seems to feel it’s what we need to be doing right now.” She sighed, then, for as she looked down at the spell-symbols surrounding her personalized part of the transit circle, she realized she was going to need to brush upon the conditional tenses and plug-in syntaxes that the Speech used to deal with travel back and forth through time. Arhu had all the pertinent symbology laid out here, probably having saved it from their last paratemporal work, but it didn’t do to rely too completely on someone else’s transcription of your personality data. They might transpose a character, somewhere along the line, and inadvertently change your nature. Not the best way to start a job…

“Is it all right?” Arhu said.

He didn’t exactly sound uncertain– that wasn’t in his style– but Rhiow knew he was being careful, which was a development worth reinforcing. She put her whiskers forward. “Mine seems to be in order,” she said, “and nicely done. ’Ruah?”

Urruah was standing in the middle of his circle, carefully checking the strung-out Speech-characters that defined his subsidiary branch of the spell.“Looks fine,” he said. “You’re getting the hang of this, youngster. A lot less clutter in the design than there used to be.”

Arhu looked smug, sitting down in his own section.“Told you so,” he muttered to Siffha’h.

“Yeah, well, the way I wanted to do it was better. If you’d taken that last set of conditionals and combined them with–”

“Can we please just pop?” Urruah said. “You two can go back to shredding each other’s egos after we get where we’re going.”

Rhiow flicked an ear at him in amusement and reached over the border of her own circle to put a paw down on the nearest control structure. The words of the wizardry flared up around them into fierce contrast with the cracked and oil-stained blacktop underfoot.“Ready?” she said.

The other three looked down at the spell diagram, began to recite along with her. All around them, the sounds of L.A. traffic, the sound of the mariachi band starting to play in the Olvera Street plaza, the distant scream of a jet overhead, began to thin and fade to nothing in the silence that always accompanied the universe starting to listen to a spell. Their words in the Speech filled that silence to overflowing, spilled out of it, drowned it in colorless fire–

And then both fire and silence were gone, with the circle, and both light and air around them were utterly changed. Rhiow put her nose up into a wind that had nothing to do with their transit, and breathed deep. It was blowing toward them from the westward, and it smelled of the Sea.

They were standing to one side of the entrance to yet another parking lot. This one, though, was very unlike the Olvera Street parking lot, which had been hemmed in by buildings, old and new, on all sides. This space was broad, bare, and bright in the sun, under the hazy blue sky. Pale concrete painted with parking stripes stretched away from them on all sides. Directly in front of them, as they looked westward, was a broad arch– two fifteen-foot pitch-pine poles spanned by a long carved signboard that said:

SANTA MONICA MOUNTAINS NATIONAL RECREATION AREA— SATWIWA

Rhiow glanced around. Under her feet she could feel a strange trembling sensation, almost a buzzing. It was like a stronger version of the peculiar uncertainty she’d felt in her limbs in the plaza tree.

“What’s a Satwiwa?” Siffha’h said, looking up at the sign.

“Some ehhif placename,” Urruah said. “Never mind that. Feel it, Rhi?”

How could I not? Rhiow thought. That sense of terrible uncertainty coming up out of the ground felt like it was shouting right down her bones.“Is it the last earthquake we’re feeling,” she said, “or the next one?”

“I don’t think it’s either,” Arhu said.

Siffha’h’s ears flicked back, then forward. “Ahead of us,” she said. “That’s where the power is…”

“Come on,” Urruah said.

Inside the arch, there were only a few cars parked here and there, and no sign of the ehhif who’d left them. Urruah in the lead, the four wizards trotted past the cars to a sidewalk that surrounded the parking lot. This led to a beaten-down dirt trail winding off through an upsloping grassy meadow dotted here and there with stands of taller grasses and brush.

“A long way up…” Arhu said under his breath. Several miles further along the way the path ran, foothills clad in dark-green chaparral and sagebrush rose toward a mountain studded with outcroppings of red stone. The peak was bare; high above it, small winged dots circled in the haze-blue sky, working an early updraft.

“We don’t have to go up there,” Siffha’h said. She shot off across the meadow northwestward, a small black and white shape bounding through the grass. With a racketing clap and clatter of wings, a covey of small plump brown and white birds burst up out of the waving green-gold of the longest grass. Ignoring them, Arhu ran hot on Siffha’h’s track, and Rhiow and Urruah after him; and as they plunged past underneath the fleeing quail, Rhiow had to laugh at herself, because for all her unease, her mouth still watered to see them go.

“Haven’t I been telling you there was more to life than canned cat food,” Urruah said as she galloped along beside him.

“Don’t tempt me,” Rhiow said. “They had those in the Market this other morning, roasted and ready to go–”

“Did they now! Must stop by there on the way home. I know the roast-poultry lady.”

“Of course you do,” Rhiow said, resigned.

“And by the way, why are we running?”

“Because she is?” Rhiow said, as ahead of them Siffha’h started to slow, and Arhu caught up with her. “Because it’s a nice day for it?”

Siffha’h, though, had now paused, and was sniffing around in the grass. Rhiow could see her briefly paw at the ground, then look up again, and her expression wasn’t that of someone who’d been running for enjoyment. As Arhu caught up with her, and then Urruah and Rhiow, she glanced around at them. “The power was here,” Siffha’h said. “But it’s moved…”

“The earthquake?” Rhiow said. Standing here, she could feel it burning in the ground through the pads of her paws. But as Siffha’h had said, she couldn’t tell whether it was the quake just past, or some tremor in the future.

Arhu’s tail was lashing now. “No,” he said. “Something to do with it, though. Something involved with the earthquake was here. Something that wants to be here again…” He straightened up, looking around him with the same kind of questing expression. “The water,” he said. “It’s here somewhere nearby. Once we find the water, we’ll be close–”

He and Siffha’h ran off northwestward again through the long pale golden grass. Rhiow and Urruah watched them go for a moment, then started after them. After the rather unnerving morning, this interlude was a relief: and as she and Urruah followed the younger wizards, Rhiow found herself less troubled by the feeling of quake-trying-to-happen in the ground beneath her, and increasingly fascinated by the sense of old overlays, the remnant energy from wizardries done in this area over centuries, even millennia. Any place where wizards worked repeatedly over time acquired such: but the ones Rhiow felt underher now as she and Urruah trotted off in the youngsters’ wake seemed to lie very light in the ground, for ehhif work– at least in contrast with the concrete-and-steel wizardly environment where Rhiow normally worked. In Manhattan, the remnants of the vigorous and aggressive ehhif wizardries of the last few centuries were more likely to have embedded themselves in concrete than in the underlying bedrock…and henceforth were susceptible over time to having been simply jackhammered up or knocked down, and carted away. Here, though, beneath the insistent buzzing of recent or soon-to-be earthquake in the ground, Rhiow was getting a sense of old earth layered deep in wizardries faded down faint, buried stratum on stratum in ground which had been continuously inhabited by the same people since the Ice withdrew, or earlier. She was reminded of the feel of the ground near the little worldgate in Chur, in the Alps, which had been there since ehhif Bronze-Age days: but those overlays had been noisy and assertive compared to these.

“It’s pretty up here,” Urruah said as he trotted along beside her, glancing off to one side, where a lone queen-ehhif in hiking boots and shorts and T-shirt could be seen wandering along the bark-chipped path to one side. “Pity we don’t have places like this in New York.”

“Oh, come on, of course we do!” Rhiow said. “Go out on the Island, into the winery country. Or out by Montauk Point. Or up to the Poconos..”

Urruah wrinkled his nose, pausing a moment to sniff at a tall leggy bush with long yellow flowers.“Those aren’t New York New York, though,” he said.

Rhiow swung her tail broadly from one side to the other, conceding the point, as they paused to look at a low slant-roofed wooden building off to one side. Arhu and Siffha’h had already run past it, unconcerned: Rhiow stopped to glance at the ehhif characters on a carved sign to one side, then shrugged her tail and went after them. “Since when are you so concerned about ehhif boundaries? And even if you are, what about Coney Island? Or the bottom of the big runway at Kennedy, where it goes into the marsh in Jamaica Bay.” She stopped a moment by a flower bed to rub her face against a downhanging stalk of some spiny, sharp-scented plant, greeting it, and got a sap-slow acknowledgement from the life inside. “But if it’s this kind of quiet you’re looking for,” Rhiow said, flirting her tail and walking on in the direction the youngsters had gone, “you know you’re still not going to find it there. Too much mental background noise from all the lives pushed so tightly together for so long. You want the Poles, or the Moon, where you can hear theplanet think…”

They went past the little building along a curved, paved path and suddenly found themselves looking at something odd. In the shadow of a very small hill, out in the middle of some parched looking grass, stood a hut perhaps thirty Person’s-paces wide, built of rushes or reeds, its outer layers shingled down over one another in a series of graceful curves. In front of the hut’s single low door was a wide circle of stumps of age-silvered wood and blocks of stone of varying heights and shapes. In the center of it was another smaller circle of stones, and a further scatter of rocks in the center of it all, some fire-blackened. “At least you’re sounding a little calmer,” he said.

“Not sure I feel that way yet,” Rhiow said. She stretched her neck up a little to try to see where Arhu and Siffha’h had gone: they’d vanished into the tall grass past the hut, apparently on their way up the hillside. “I guess it’s just wizards’ syndrome. You get so used to being ableto reason with everything, or at least persuade it. But this is one of the situations where sheer scale gets in the way…”

They trotted past the ring and toward the hillside.“I suppose I can see the Earth’s point,” Urruah said. “We think we’re so important. But what’re we to the world? A minor skin condition. Why should it care about us? It has its own priorities. Tides, gravity, plates sliding… And if a flea starts shouting at you to stop scratching, do you listen?”

Rhiow put her whiskers forward.“It wouldn’t be high on my list.”

“But still,” Urruah said, “we’re wizards. It’s our job to listen, isn’t it?”

“The next time I see you scratching, I’ll remind you,” Rhiow said, “and we’ll see what you do.” She paused where the slope before them started to get steeper, and the grass longer. “Where’ve those two gotten to now?”

We found the water, Arhu said. There’s a waterfall up higher. But that’s not important. We found a cave, up the hillside about forty leaps, in between two big stones. And somebody’s been doing wizardry in here!

“Oh really,” Rhiow said. “How recently?”

A week or so ago, Siffha’h said. Maybe a little longer, but not much.

“What kind of wizardry?” Rhiow said.

“Uh oh,” Urruah said then, looking behind them.

Someone had come out of the low round hut, and was standing there looking around: a queen-ehhif in dark pants and a short-sleeved blue shirt.“Doesn’t matter,” Rhiow said, looking uphill again as the ehhif walked off around the hut, “we’re sidled. Sif?”

Rhiow heard her hesitating. Not sure I like the look of this, Siffha’h said.

“Why? What’s the matter?”

I can feel what’s left of the spell in the stone, Siffha’h said. It’s full of geological constants– local ones, with really fine adjustments on them. And there were three or four power conduits leading out of the spell and sunk into the rock underneath the mountain.

“A diagnostic?” Rhiow said.

I don’t think so, Siffha’h said, and she was beginning to sound angry. This doesn’t look like someone trying to find out what the earth’s been doing. This looks like someone trying to make it do something–

Rhiow went chilly inside. It wasn’t as if wizards never made mistakes, or did stupid things: but messing around with the earth’s structure in a place where it was already unstable enough struck her as foolhardy. “That’s really odd,” Rhiow said. “Let’s see what you’ve got. ‘Ruah–” She started up the hill.

“Rhi,” Urruah said from behind her, “while we’re on the subject of ‘odd’, you might want to have a look–”

Rhiow turned around. The she-ehhif who’d come out of the hut was heading straight toward them through the grass.

Rhiow glanced over her shoulder to see what the ehhif might be looking at instead of her— but there was nothing there but more of the long grass. Rhiow looked back at the queen-ehhif, ready to run or vanish if necessary, but it was hard to imagine why it would be necessary. The ehhif didn’t look particularly dangerous: she was very small as humans went, with long dark hair tied back, a low belt hanging down over her trousers to one side–

And, hanging holstered from that belt, a gun. Rhiow opened her mouth, prepared to say a single word in the Speech, the trigger for the run-and-hide spell that lay, as usual, ready at the back of her brain. As she did, the ehhif stopped and gazed up the hill, as if seeing something there that she hadn’t expected. Then she looked down at Rhiow.

“Excuse me,” the ehhif said, “but are you People looking for something, or are you lost?” And she said it in the Speech.

Rhiow and Urruah stared at each other. Then Rhiow put her whiskers forward.“Lost!” she said. “Hardly! But looking for something, yes: though until a few moments ago, we weren’t expecting to find another wizard here. Is that your spell up there?”

“Yes,” the ehhif said. “Sorry if it looks alarming at first glance: it’s specialized stuff. Anyway, I’m on errantry: haku, cousins!” She sat down in the grass. “In fact, I suspect you’re why I was sent here. I’m called Helen: Helen Walks Softly.”

Urruah sat down, his whiskers forward too.“You could have fooled me,” he said.

“Wouldn’t have been polite to sneak up on you,” Helen said. “You might’ve gotten the wrong idea. May I ask names?”

“My colleague here is Urruah,” Rhiow said. “The youngsters up the hill are Arhu and Siffha’h. : I’m Rhiow– I lead the New York worldgating teams.”

Helen blinked at that.“Worldgating?” she said. “Were you sent here by assignment?”

“We were in L.A. on a consult,” Rhiow said, “but when was a wizard’s casual business ever completely casual? The Powers find ways not to waste our efforts.”

Helen gave Rhiow a wry look.“I hear you there, sister,” she said. “I was going to come by to check the parking lot before I turned in. There’s been a wave of burglaries the past couple of weeks: people breaking into parked cars, or trying to vandalize the interpretive center or the ap.” She nodded back toward the hut. “Nothing going on today, fortunately. But then the Earth moved. What a relief! I checked the center and the ap to make sure they were all right in the aftermath…and then I smelled power passing through. Thought I’d better take a look.”

What are you talking to down there? Arhu’s thought came, sounding a little spooked.

She’s a wizard, Rhiow said silently. Get yourselves down here and greet her properly. “Probably you felt Siffha’h,” she said. “She’s been doing powersource work with us lately, and she’s still running at post-Ordeal levels. So is Arhu, for that matter…so I suppose it could have been either of them.”

Urruah was looking a little dubiously at Helen’s gun. “You wouldn’t have needed that to deal with burglars, though–”

Helen nodded.“On my own time, of course not. But I came straight here from work, as I said.” She reached into her pocket and brought out a wallet, flipped it open. The bright sun glinted on the badge there.

“L.A.P.D.?” Urruah said.

“That’s right.” Helen put the wallet away, glancing up the hill at the waving of the grass as Arhu and Siffha’h came bounding down. “Not that an armed officer would be allowed here without permission. But I have dispensation, since this is my tribal ground.”

Rhiow’s eyes widened at that. “You’re one of the ffih-ehhif,” she said, “the First Humans–”

“That’s right,” Helen said, as Arhu and Siffha’h came out of the grass nearby. “My people are the Chumash: this is all our land, here along the shoreline, from Santa Barbara down to the City.”

“I guess other ehhif would say it ‘was’ your land,” Urruah said.

Helen threw an amused glance at him.“It still is,” she said, “in all the ways that matter. Not that most of them would notice.” She grinned. “We’re still here: and we take care of things the best we can. Haku, young cousins–”

There was a pause while introductions were made and names exchanged: but even afterwards, Siffha’h was still wearing a suspicious look. “That spell up there–” she said. “Just what exactly were you doing?”

“’Letting the earthquake off the leash,’” Helen said. “Triggering a controlled tremor. Or trying to.”

“’Trying’?” Arhu said, looking at her oddly. “I thought ‘a spell always works.’”

“It does if a force equaling or surpassing the power of the wizardry isn’t being purposefully leveled against it,” Helen said. “Which seems to have been the case lately, and I haven’t been able to understand what that force was. Finally I asked my ikhareya about it, and He said He didn’t know either. He said, ‘Go have a look, and some of your cousins will come along and help you find out what the answer was…’” Helen looked a little bemused. “He was using a temporal-conditional tense, though. There’s going to be an answer…but it’s in the past?”

“That’s what we were told,” Rhiow said. “We’re on our way there after this.”

“Do you mind if I go with you, then?” Helen said. “Seems like that’s what’s required…”

“You’re more than welcome on the journey,” Urruah said, “believe me. It’s a relief to know we’re not going to have to do this all by ourselves, anyway…whatever ‘this’ is.”

“We’re going to set up a separate portal for the timeslide,” Rhiow said. “We don’t want to take the chance of deranging the L.A. gate: it’s already acting badly enough. Would there be a problem if we gated from here? Or might it interfere with your spell up in the cave?”

Helen shook her head.“It’s built to stay completely quiescent until someone it recognizes activates it,” she said. “I’ll kill its sensor components to make sure it doesn’t get confused.”

“Is that going to be enough to keep such a complex spell out of trouble?” Siffha’h said. “And one so old? You don’t sink power conduits like those overnight.”

“Of course not,” Helen said. “The basic wizardry’s a fixture: a team of our shamans sang it into place hundreds of years ago. But, yes, just pulling the sensor web out of contact will work fine– that’s how we keep it quiet when we’re not actually using it. Wizards who know this terrain well, or have a connection to it, come up and at least once a week to bleed off some of the excess force, the way you start small controlled brushfires every now and then to keep a really big forest fire from destroying everything wholesale. I’ve taken over this job, the last couple of years, because my connection to this terrain’s much better than that of any other wizard around here. This is my native space, after all: the Chumash have lived here since before the Ice.”

Helen sighed and stretched out her legs in front of her.“But I might as well come from Dubuque, for all the good that spell’s done me lately. Over the last two weeks, I must have run it seven or eight times, trying to provoke any old kind of local discharge, especially from the big fault right under the mountain. But it just wasn’t working.” Shelooked up at the mountain as if she could see straight into it. “It was driving me nuts. I could feel the power building up, but I just couldn’t bleed it off. It was almost like something was leaning against the fault, holding the force in…” Helen shrugged. “But then this morning, around when I went off duty, it seemed like something blinked, and the fault let loose. Good thing, too.”

Rhiow thought of Hwaith’s description of something leaning against the world, and the fur started to rise on her back. “Yes, you said you were relieved,” Rhiow said. “Forgive me, but after what I’ve been through this morning, the word seems a little unusual…” She shook herself all over, trying to get the fur to lie down again.

Helen nodded.“Your first time? I understand you. But maybe you’ve had enough time here to feel the ground a little–” She put her hand down on the grassy ground beside her. “This whole area’s coming down with faults, and microquakes are an everyday occurrence. Just in these ten square miles or so, we’ve got the Chatsworth fault to the north, and the Bailey Fault west of us, and the Malibu Fault running south of us along the coastline, and two big ones running right under Boney Mountain–” she waved at the bare peak looming above them westward–”so it’s not so much ‘have you had an earthquake today?’ as ‘how did you miss having one’.” She shook her head. “Mostly they’re so tiny you don’t feel them. But it’s still really strange for us to go so long here without even a minor tremor. It was giving me the jitters…and the ikhareya wasn’t happy either. At least nowI can relax a little. At least until we find out what’s causing this problem, anyway.”

“You didn’t feel anything from the quakes down in L.A., then?” Rhiow said.

Helen shook her head.“I had to hear about them on the news, in the car, on my way home from work.” Then she chuckled at Urrauh’s expression. “Urruah, I’m all for connectedness to the land, and taking care of the environment, but if I did my grocery shopping via gating circle, that people would notice.”

Urruah’s tail wreathed gently. “Aha,” he said. “Is that where you were? I thought I smelled chicken–”

I am going to give you such a whack when we’re in private, Rhiow said silently. “Well,” Rhiow said, “maybe we should get our slide set up. Our backtime contact, Hwaith, gave us the coordinates we need, and we’ve got all the necessary authorizations.”

“I see that,” Helen said, standing up and dusting her hands off on her pants: she was looking upslope, into the wind. “From fairly deep in, too. Whatever’s going on, this is fairly serious…” She looked down at Rhiow. “And it doesn’t seem to be our usual enemy involved with this, does it? The Kemish, the Old Bad One… Or at least that’s not the feeling I’m getting.”

“I’d say you’d be right,” Rhiow said, “and I wish I knew what to make of that. Meanwhile, do you want to nominate a spot where we can anchor the slide?”

“If we go upslope a quarter mile or so,” Helen said, “past the cave, that’ll take us well away from the beaten path. There’s a place where the hillside shelves out flat for a little bit.”

“Arhu?” Rhiow said. “You two go on and get it set up. And ask Aufwi to come up here as soon as he’s finished making the L.A. gate safe and shutting it down.”

Siffha’h and Arhu headed up the hill, but not before Arhu had thrown an odd look over his shoulder at Helen. “Sorry,” Rhiow said. “You’ve got to excuse him: he has trouble with ehhif sometimes. He was abused by them, almost killed, when he was very young.”

“It’s no problem,” Helen said. “We all have our burdens. Believe me, I have problems with some of my fellow ehhif, occasionally.” She smiled a little ruefully as they started up the hill. “All just part of the Game, my ikhareya says…”

“I was going to ask you about that,” Urruah said as they headed upwards through the long grass. “I heard the word you used, and Herself gave me the closest cognate in the Speech at the same time. You have one of the Powers that Be for your own?”

Helen blinked, then laughed.“Uh, no! No one could own one of Them. I’ve just got a close personal connection to one of Them: lots of wizards who’re native Americans do. It’s like yours to– I think you call Her ‘the Whisperer?’”

“That’s right,” Rhiow said. “You hear wizardry through your connection, then–”

Helen’s look was a touch sheepish. “Oh, no, I still use a written Manual a lot of the time. I was born and raised in the Valley, in Encino: I didn’t really start getting to know my tribal life until a few years ago, after I finished college and went into the Force. But I’ve been really busy up here since then, since it turns out the old shaman needed to train a new one before he went West. As usual, there aren’t any coincidences…”

From above and ahead of them came a soft pop!, the sound of someone trying to minimize the air displacement from his appearance“out of nothing”. There stood Aufwi on the flattened space that Helen had described, his head and shoulders silhouetted against the blue. “Do you know Aufwi?” Rhiow said, as they came up on the level. “He handles the L.A. gate.”

“Sure, I see him downtown every now and then. Haku, Aufwi, how’s it going?”

“A lot better than it was earlier, believe me,” he said as they came up and out onto the shelf that lay under the lee of the hill. The shelf was mostly hard dirt strewn with rockfall, and shadowed from the sun by a slope now more nearly a cliff, all studded with outcroppings of brown and goldenstone. In a relatively bare spot off to one side, nearly into the sun again, the glow of a complex spell-circle lay spread across the ground, and Arhu and Siffha’h were was pacing around it, looking it over.

No way they could have done that from scratch just now, Urruah said silently to Rhiow, going over to examine the circle. They’ve been practicing for this! For how long, I wonder?

Arhu’s got the Eye, Rhiow said, and I’ve been sure for some time that he doesn’t tell us everything he foresees. Who knows when he might have seen this? It’s handy now…

Aufwi came over to Rhiow.“All’s secure back at the Station now,” he said.

“The gate’s locked down?” Rhiow said.

“Absolutely.”

“You’re sure this time?” Urruah said.

Aufwi looked a little annoyed.“I yanked every power connection but its standby. If it can function in spite of that–”

Rhiow put her tail up against Aufwi’s. “He’s teasing you, Aufwi,” she said. “Ignore him. Once we’ve slid back to where and when we need to be, and had a look at Hwaith’s gate, you can use that to jump forward to ‘now’ again– then wake yours up and lock it on a nearby set of coordinates to do your comparison.”

“Exactly what I had in mind.”

“Good,” Rhiow said, and followed Urruah over to the circle. Helen came behind them, looking over the complex series of nested and interlocking circles and ellipses, either containing long sentences in the Speech or being comprised of them. She nodded at what she saw. “Done without any physical elements at all?” she said. “Very slick.”

“Now why would we use concrete spatial interruptors? Chips and batteries and so on?” Siffha’h put her ears back in disdain. “Inelegant. A brute-force solution.”

“Plugins and carry-ons,” Arhu said, looking smugly around the circle, “are for newbies.”

“Oh, yeah, well, plug this in, oh expert one,” Urruah said, and took a swipe at Arhu in passing as he went to his own. “Must be nice to know everything so young.”

“He just sees everything,” Siffha’h said, resuming her prowl around the circle, and eyeing the spell diagram with care. “Whereas I–”

She ducked just in time for Rhiow’s paw went through the air where her head had been. “You see what I put up with,” Rhiow said to Helen, and started to pace around the circle after Siffha’h. “But I see they’ve been quick and added a circle for you, Helen. Is it big enough?”

“Looks fine.”

“Then you’ll want to add in your personal data. Sif, let’s have a look at the coordinates–”

“Over here,” Siffha’h said. She had laid the spatial and temporal fixes into a small inner circle of their own. Rhiow put a paw down on each of the sets of coordinates in sequence, seeing each group of words and characters in the Speech glow bright in turn. She closed her eyes for a moment toregard her own mental “workspace” and the copy of the coordinates that the Whisperer had left there. “The time’s right,” Rhiow said. “As for the location–”

“The other side of the Hollywood Hills,” Aufwi said, “near Mount Cahuenga. Hwaith’s put us a good ways from where he said the quake activity was occurring.”

“All right,” Rhiow said. She stepped into the spot she could see had been marked out for her, and bent down to check her name and her personality data: it was all as it should have been. “Let’s go, then. Everybody check your info one last time. Then let’s slide.” Rhiow looked at the anchor-end duration data written in the center of the circle. “The slide’s got a five-minute return aperture: short enough so we don’t have to worry about leaving it for this brief period, and plenty wide enough to give us room to come back and forth several times, if we have to, without meeting ourselves unnecessarily.” She looked around.

Siffha’h settled herself in her customary place, the central “powersource” circle that would drive the wizardry as a whole: Arhu was nearby in a separate circle of his own, watching the spell’s progress indicators. Urruah sat in his own circle opposite Rhiow’s, out at the edge, where he could keep an eye on things. Aufwi and Helen settled themselves into their circles on either side of Rhiow.

“Ready?” she said.

Tails were waved, ears put forward, one head nodded.“Let’s go, then,” Rhiow said, and looked down.

The initial words of the spell burned bright in front of her and all the others. All together, they began to read, and the world leaned in to hear. This is a timeslide inauguration. Claudication type unmiq-beth-quaternary-five with reflection, authorization groups–

Instead of the usual growing, listening silence, a sense of inward pressure began to build around them all, as the inbuilt persuasiveness of the language that had made the world now started talking the“now” out of being the present, and into becoming the past.

Rhiow had done timeslides before, and had occasionally been disconcerted by the strange sense of bring frozen in one moment while the fragmented thought processes of thousands of other nearby minds, all caught in the moment she was departing, seemed to come avalanching past her as she was pulled away into the past. But it was different here. Though all the Earth’s surface is old, as the beings living on its surface reckon time, this spot seemed far older than usual because of how long human beings had lived here continuously. While the thoughts of tens of thousands of nearby ehhif preoccupied with work and rent and cars and food and phone conversations poured past them and were swiftly lost, it wasn’t silence that began to replace them, but a long slow sound or rhythm like a chant, like a long memory of all the lives that had ever been here, all heard together. Only some of the minds involved in that rhythm were human: and under the low throb ofthe sound, counterpoint to it, a long rich unfading gong-note of some near-immortal point of view seemed to run at the roots of everything. The Powers? Rhiow thought. The Earth itself? There was no telling. And then it was too late to try to tell: the pressure grew and grew as they were squeezed out of their own time, into another–

Suddenly the pressure itself started to become too much to bear. There in the debatable territory between times, Rhiow found herself unable to breathe, almost unable to think, for the sense of something pushing in on her— not the spell but something outside it, not time but something outside it: something bearing down on her, hard, and intending to bear down in such wise on everything else if only it could. It was as terrible in its sheer crushing weight as a mountain’s weight of stone would have been— and impersonal in ways not even stone could manage. She could sense consciousness, yes, but also a vast chilly uncaring that was in its way far worse than any sense of active evil. Worse than the Lone One, Rhiow heard Hwaith saying in her mind, as she gasped for breath and couldn’t find any. Far worse — Oh, Iau help me, he was right, what do we do now — ?!

And then she was flung down hard on stony ground, on a slope, and rolled a few feet before she came to a stop, bruised and almost embarrassed enough not to care that she could breathe again. No cat likes falling without even having had a chance to try to get her feet under her. Rhiow got up angry, shaking herself, her tail lashing.

“Welcome to L.A.,” Hwaith said out of the darkness.

Growling under their breaths, or muttering, she could hear the others getting up. Rhiow stared around her hurriedly, still blinded by contrast with the day from which they’d come. And then she heard Helen say:

“Holy Coyote, what’s happened to the light?…”

The Big Meow: Chapter Four

Rhiow looked down the length of the valley where they stood, into a hazy darkness that glittered faintly. Spread out before them like a broad carpet, stretching away to a dimly-seen horizon, were city lights; but the color of the glittering light was strangely white and cool, and not nearly as bright as she would have expected. As Rhiow watched, the light seemed to dim almost to nothing in patches, then brighten again. Rhiow realized she was seeing the city’s light through a haze of what at first glance looked like low cloud.

Just behind her, Arhu was sniffing.“Smog,” he said under his breath.

Helen let out a long breath, looking around her.“Even before there were cars and factories,” Helen said, “the People living down there called it ‘the Valley of the Smokes…’. The inversion layer’ll hold anything down that comes up from sea level: even our campfires were enough to do it.” She shook her head, looking down the valleyagain. “And it’s a long time before the clean-air legislation starts to cut in. But there’s still a lot more in the air than just hydrocarbons and ozone…”

Rhiow, scenting it, had to agree. It was strange to be right above a city, and yet be standing in air so strongly scented with orange blossom, almond blossom, citrus, the corky, woody scent of walnut…

“And I see what it is now,” Helen said, sitting down on a nearby fallen trunk of a scrub oak. “About the light. It’s strange not to see the sodium-vapor lights we’ve got in our own time. You get used to city light being a lot brighter, and very orange…”

“Sodium vapor?” Hwaith, sitting nearby in the shadow of a manzanita, flirted his tail. “No, those are a good ways downtime from us, I’d say. The ehhif here are using incandescent bulbs with little tin reflectors over them.”

“I’m a little disoriented,” Rhiow said to Hwaith. “I think I smell morning coming, but it’s hard to tell – “

“You’re right,” Hwaith said. “The Eye will be up in about three hours, but the skyglow’s obscured by the mist this time of year, and the city lights confuse things. Downhill from is us southward. And over to the left is my badly-behaved friend…”

There, hanging and wavering gently in midair in the shadow of several skeletal gray-needled pines, was this time’s version of the LA gate. Rhiow looked at it for a moment, and got an odd feeling as she did so; there was something almost uneasy about the way it was rippling, not in the usual steady rhythm, but with a kind of shiver interfering intermittently with the ripples. “It doesn’t look right,” she said.

“No,” Urruah said, “it doesn’t. The chroma of the weft looks way off.” He glanced over at Aufwi. “You know this gate better than any of our group does, though – “

Aufwi lashed his tail.“Definitely looks sickly,” he said. “Much too blue in the crests of those ripples. It’s a look mine’s been getting lately…”

“I’ve seen that blueshift before,” Rhiow said, getting up again and going over for a closer look. “You get it when something’s interfering with a gate’s control structures…usually some change in the local matrix it’s sunk into. In this case, it’s sunk into a spot it wasn’t intended to be, and the last group of settings are arguing with the new location.”

“More than that,” Urruah said. “See the way the waves are canceling each other here and there?” He sat up on his haunches, looking at the gate. “Two, three…four places. Hwaith, your problem child’s trying to put down more roots.”

“It kept trying to do that before,” Hwaith said, sounding furious. “That’s why I was reluctant to leave it for even such a short time.”

“We’ll pull them up,” Urruah said, “and then try to get a sense of why it’s doing this. May I?”

“Please,” Hwaith said, “don’t stand on ceremony! You’ve come a long way to do just that. Just tell me if you need help.”

Rhiow put her whiskers forward, relieved that Hwaith wasn’t going to get all possessive; all she needed right now was to find herself at the wrong end of time with another version of Jath on her paws. “Now,” she said, “all we have to do is find out why this has been starting to happen to your gate, so that we can keep it from happening to ours…”

Not‘all’, said the quiet voice in the back of Rhiow’s head.

Rhiow flicked an ear. Hwaith gave her an odd look as she turned away from him. Whisperer, she said silently, if you have any hints for me, now’s the time.

No hints today, said the Mistress of the Whispering. We’re all in the dark here together. If you turn up anything that seems germane to the Powers, believe me, I’ll mention it. But none of our first guesses or assumptions are likely to be good enough to rely on; and finding out what lies at the root of this gate’s trouble, and yours, is going to make all the difference between life and…something else..

Rhiow licked her nose several times, very fast, as the Silent One fell silent again.“Sorry — ” she said to Hwaith, turning back to him.

“She doesn’t sound very encouraging, does She,” he said.

“You caught that?”

He flicked his tail in a gesture of mild annoyance, looked away.“I do hear things, unfortunately,” Hwaith said. “It was my first specialty after Ordeal: not the Eye, but the Ear. I could never really control it, though, which is why I went into gate work as soon as there was an opening.” He looked at Rhiow again, apologetic. “Please excuse me: it’s not intentional…and when She speaks in that tone of voice, it’s hard to avoid hearing Her.”

“I wouldn’t argue that point,” Rhiow said, looking away to watch Urruah reach out and sink his claws into the edges of the gate’s weft, hooking them into its control webs. He pulled, and the predictable tangled lines of light stretched out and away from the gate proper. “Is it just me,”Rhiow said, “or do those threads look…I don’t know…thinner than usual?”

“It’s not just you,” Hwaith said. He licked his nose once or twice, nervous: and Aufwi looked over at Rhiow and Hwaith and said, “This is something my gate’s been doing too. It’s been sporadic, though, and I haven’t been able to get it to repeat so that I can do a diagnostic…”

“Got some trouble here,” Urruah said then, and the steady way he said it brought the fur up all over Rhiow.

“What?” she said, getting up and trotting over.

“No,” Urruah said, “nothing you need to do anything about right this second. We’re going to need a few extra paws in a little bit, though.” He bent in close, seized a bundle of the glowing gate-strings in his teeth, and reached in with the freed-up paw to hook another tangle of them with his claws. “This thing hasn’t just put down one root. It’s got five now.”

Hwaith hissed, swearing in helpless anger.“It’s not going to do any good pulling them up one at a time,” he said. “It’ll just re-root one of them while we’re working on the next.”

“We can each take one,” Rhiow said. “’Ruah, are the roots sinking themselves nearby?”

It looked as if the knotted mass of hyperstrings was resisting him, trying to snap back into the gate. He lashed his tail“no”. “They’re spread out,” he said. “South, east, southeast, southwest of here. Take a look – “

Urruah bit deeper into the hyperstring bundle he was holding in his teeth. Sudden bright strings of light shot out from the base and edges of the gateweave, seeming to lance down into the dimly glittering cityscape like laser light, the only difference being that physical objects didn’t stop them. They resumed on the other side, in one case going straight through a hillcrest and down into the landscape below.

“One’s a little stronger than the others,” he said. “That one going through the hill. Maybe it’s been there a touch longer – hard to tell. But they’re all going to have to come up at once.”

Rhiow flicked her tail.“How are you for power at the moment?” she said to Hwaith. “Did we catch you at the end of your work day, or the beginning?”

He let out a breath.“I’m tired enough,” he said, “but I won’t drop what I grab hold of a moment before anyone else does. Let’s go.”

“’Ruah, I’ll take that older root,” Rhiow said, heading over toward it. “Hwaith, the one next to mine, running down the canyon. Aufwi, the one past that. Arhu, the last one. Sif, you stand by and lend power if you sense anyone slipping.”

Everyone headed to the string Rhiow had indicated for each of them, and bit down on it or hooked their claws around it.“Can I do anything to help?” Helen said.

“Lend Sif a paw if there’s need,” Rhiow said. She bit down on her own string, pulling back a little and testing it. With the pull she got a clearer sense of the structures into which it was trying to root – the stone of some other hillside, cracked, unstable-feeling – and something else that concerned her more: an odd sour stink or flavor, unpleasant. It reminded Rhiow of something, but she couldn’t think what. And now it’s going to make me crazy for days until I remember. Where’s that coming from, though? You don’t usually get taste associations on hyperstrings — “Let us know when you’re set,” she said.

“Just a moment more,” Urruah said. All along and across the web of the gate, hyperstrings flickered and vibrated as if someone was plucking them; beads and streaks of multicolored fire chased up and down the threads as Urruah made final adjustments in the master web of the gate, securing its structure before starting to pull any roots loose. “All right,” he said then. “Everybody – pull!”

Rhiow set her teeth hard, ignoring the sudden increase in that odd stink, and started backing away from the gate. The string she was biting resisted her more aggressively, but she kept on backing away– this being only the physical component of the actual stress Rhiow was bringing to bear on the hyperstring, the pressure of the mind and of the necessary words in the Speech, all bent toward persuading it to give up, let go, stop being so attached… But the resistance increased. This attachmentsuits me, the string told her, in the stubborn, silent manner of a construct refusing to answer to the desires of a wizard who hadn’t put it there. I was told to root here, and here I will stay.

I have rightful authority over you, Rhiow thought in the Speech: I am sent to you on errantry by the Powers that Be, and it’s proper that you obey my intent! But the root-string was having none of it. It sought to anchor itself deeper in that down-canyon ground, even as Rhiow pulled at it. The strange muddy stink in her nostrils got stronger as it did, and Rhiow could also feel something else through the far end of the string – a shiver, a tremor, rumbling, growing: the memory of a recent earthquake. And one trying not to be just a memory –

She shivered all over, but she kept her grip. Around her she could sense the others having a similar problem: Urruah’s temper wanting to flare, but being suppressed; Arhu annoyed at anything being able to resist his intention, still unusually powerful in a wizard so near his Ordeal; Aufwi alarmed at the string’s refusal to respond: Hwaith surprisingly cool and certain as he stepped back and back with his ownstring. Well, it’s his own gate, after all. But he doesn’t seem to be having any better luck than the rest of us. This doesn’t look good —

From outside the group, Siff’hah said, “Rhiow – “

She was tempted to tell Siff’hah to throw all the power she had at one or another of the roots – for dividing her effort among them seemed unlikely to do much good at this point. But what if doing that unbalances the whole gateweave? It might tear loose and run out of control, like Aufwi’s did – Or else the gate mightjust tear apart, possibly even shred under the strain altogether. That didn’t bear thinking about, for worldgates, even a singleton gate like this one, had a tremendous amount of power wrapped up in them. Release all that energy at once, and local space and subspace were both at risk of becoming deranged – as was the matter they contained.

Either way, the tack they were taking at the moment apparently wasn’t getting them anywhere, and they were going to have to consider other possibilities. Sif, Rhiow said silently, start a mapping routine. We need to see in which exact spots those roots are sinking themselves, so we can go down there afterwards and understand the whys as well as the wheres. She was careful not to say After this doesn’t work: there was always the possibility something might yet give in their favor, that the gate would see sense and do as it was told —

Doing it now, Siff’hah said. Think we’re going to need it, too —

Rhiow said nothing. Her whole business at the moment was to hang onto her string and watch what Urruah did as he manipulated the strings held in teeth and claws. Her own words came back to her suddenly: I’m not going to do this job forever… She sank her teeth more tightly into her string, pulled harder. Now what made me say that to him right then? Maybe I was just tired. Yet one way or another, there was some truth to it. She might be a wizard until the day she kicked this life’s skin away behind her and moved on to the next one: but she wasn’t required to do the same kind of work all that while. Even specialties don’t have to be forever. And the Powers understand that sometimes you need a break from the routine —

That strange mind-stink from the hyperstring was beginning to bother her. Rhiow wanted mightily to sneeze, but that was the last thing she was going to allow herself to do at the moment, when it could upset someone else’s concentration. She wrinkled her nose, then her whole muzzle, in an attempt to disrupt the coming sneeze. It worked for a moment, but then the stink started to itch in her nostrils again. I will not, she thought, I will not, as Iau’s my witness, I will not –

“Anybody making any progress?” Urruah said, though from his tone of voice Rhiow thought he already knew the answer.

“Not moving!” Arhu said.

“The thing’s locked down,” Aufwi said. “Some kind of compulsion – “

Urruah glanced over at Hwaith. Hwaith, hanging on, simply lashed his tail angrily, tried to take one more step back, failed–

“Then ease up, all,” Urruah said. “Let’s stop and think – “

Everyone slowly started to give way to the backward pull of the gate-root he or she was holding. Rhiow could feel something peculiar down the string as she stopped exerting pressure against it: an odd sense of– not satisfaction, but relief. And not from the root, but from the gate itself: as if it knew perfectly well it was the object of contention between two different forces, and was glad to see the contention stop, because it was – frightened? Frightened, not of the other – but of us?

When Rhiow was close enough to the gate, she opened her jaws, and the root-string snapped back hard the instant she let it go. Urruah let go of the bundles of strings he was holding and dropped to his forefeet again, his ears back flat.

“Well,” Arhu said, “that was a whole lot of nothing! What’s the matter with the thing? Doesn’t it know we’re on its side, and it’s supposed to do what we ask it?”

“Good question,” Urruah said. He sat down, his tail lashing. “Something else for us to look into. Hwaith, has the gate been openly uncooperative this way with you before?”

“Never,” Hwaith said. He sounded mortified.

“Well, it doesn’t matter. I don’t think we should waste any more time trying to disengage those roots from here,” Urruah said. “Our effort’s being attenuated by our distance from the actual spaces they’re affecting.”

Rhiow flicked an ear in agreement.“We’re going to have to go to the separate locations where they’ve sunk themselves in,” she said, “and pull them up from there, one at a time. And while we do that, someone’s going to have to stay up here and keep the gate from putting down new roots in response. And if it does, try to get a sense of what’s making it behave that way.”

“I know its structures pretty well,” Aufwi said. “Probably that’s me.” He looked over at Hwaith. “If you don’t mind – “

Hwaith swung his tail“no”. “I think I’m more likely to be needed as a ‘native guide,’” he said.

Siff’hah came strolling over then, with Helen Walks Softly close behind. “I have your root locations for you,” she said to Rhiow, and put one white paw out a little ahead of her, resting it on a bare patch on the dusty reddish ground. From her paw, delicate lines of light fled away in all directions, describing in miniature a duplicate of the faintly glittering street-structure below them. They all gazed down at it, and Helen hunkered down by it and gazed down at the four small pulsing golden lights that burned on the little map. A larger white one pulsed up in the darkest part of the wizardly map, amid the hills.

“All right,” Helen said, pointing at the nearest of the golden lights south of them. “That one I know. That’s Hollywood Boulevard and – yeah, Highland Avenue, see the way it doglegs north of Franklin? There’s a lot of new building there now, but – “ and she waved a little further down the street-line to where that golden light burned – “that’s still where it belongs. Mann’s Chinese Theater.”

“You mean Grauman’s,” said Hwaith. “Who’s ‘Mann’?”

“Uh, long story,” Helen said.

“Au,” Urruah said, “Grauman’s — !” He went from wearing the ears-back expression of an annoyed gate technician to the whiskers-forward of some kind of excited arts fan, an expression Rhiow had seen a thousand times before. “You’re going to tell me that that they do opera there, I suppose,” she said.

Urruah turned one of those stricken, don’t-tell-me-you-have-no-idea-what-I’m-talking-about looks on her. “You’re kidding me,” he said, “surely! Even you have to have heard about the place – “

“Somehow the Whisperer neglected to bring me up to date,” Rhiow said, trying to sound severe.

“It’s a place where ffilhm was shown,” he said. “Maybe the greatest ffilhm showplace of this time. The ehhif stars would come here when their ffilhms were premiered, and walk down a red carpet, and put their handprints in cement – “

“And after all the trouble we went through to get them up off all fours,” Rhiow said, torn between annoyance and bemusement, “tell me why in Iau’s name they’re so eager to get down on them again? But, no, please, don’t tell me now, because I know it’s going to happen later no matter how I try to avoid it – “

“Hey, I had no idea you were a fan,” Hwaith said to Urruah, looking surprised. “When we get this gate settled, I’ll take you down there. I know some of the backstage toms. They keep asking me why don’t I– “

O Queen Iau, Rhiow thought, help me keep my claws sheathed and my temper in one piece! Is this why most of the really good gate techs are queens? Toms just can not focus for more than the time it takes to eat something or kill something– She opened her mouth.

Then Rhiow closed it again, as startled as everyone else by the sudden sound of Siff’hah hissing softly. Urruah and Hwaith both turned to stare at her. “I am not holding this imaging spell here for my health, you two!” Siff’hah said. “Hhel’hen, do you know what those other lights are, or are we going to have to stimulate these sheihss’s thought processes a little?”

Claws were now very visible jutting out from the paw that held the wizardry in place, and Sif’s eyes were pits of solid, furiously dilated darkness in the dim light. Helen leaned over the map, wearing what for an ehhif would have been only the smallest of smiles, as Urruah and Hwaith fell quite abruptly silent, and Arhu looked up into the darkness with an expression of complete innocenceand uninvolvement. Rhiow kept her whiskers back for the moment, though she was amused.