To Visit the Queen

by Diane Duane

  Except that she wasn't, really. Rhiow sighed and turned her attention away from the bird, to find that the black-and-white Person's eyes had opened, at least partially, and he was looking at her, upside down.

  "Hunt's luck to you!" she said. "I'm on errantry, and I greet you."

  He looked at her curiously, and rolled over so that he was right side up again. "You're a long way from home, by your accent," he said. "Come on down, make yourself comfortable."

  Rhiow jumped down from the wall and walked over to the respectable-looking Person, breathed breaths with him, and then said, "Please forgive me: I don't know quite what to call you."

  "Which means you know the nickname," he said, and put his whiskers forward. "Go ahead and use it: everyone else does, at this point, and there's no real point in me trying to avoid it."

  "Hhuhm'hri, then. I'm Rhiow."

  "Hunt's luck to you, Rhiow, and welcome to London. What brings you all this way?"

  She sat down and explained, trying to keep the explanation brief and nontechnical. But Hhuhm'hri was nodding a long time before she finished, and Rhiow realized that this was one of the more acute People she had met in a while, with a quick and deep grasp of issues for all his slightly ditzy, wide-eyed looks.

  "Well, that's certainly a different sort of problem," Hhuhm'hri said. "At first I'd thought perhaps you were one of the People who's just been added to the standing committee on rat control."

  Rhiow restrained herself from laughing. "No, the problem's a little different from that."

  "Certainly a little more interesting. I must say I wouldn't want our timeline to be wiped out, either, so I'm at your disposal. Though I must admit that the temptation to alter just one piece here or there, with an eye to improving things, must be very strong."

  "By and large it doesn't work," Rhiow said. "There are conservation laws for history as well as for energy. Remove one pivotal event without due consideration, and another is likely to slip in to take its place— often one that's worse than the one you were trying to prevent."

  "Conservation of history..." Hhuhm'hri mused for a moment. "That's the only odd thing about this, to me: if such a principle exists, why isn't it protecting you in this case?"

  "Because of the nature of the Power that has intervened to cause the change," Rhiow said. "Mostly time heals itself over without a scar if the change is small, or made by a mortal. But when the Powers That Be become directly involved— and in this case, one of the oldest and greatest of Them— the fabric of time is entirely too amenable to Their will. It's unavoidable: They built time, after all...."

  Hhuhm'hri blinked. "Yes," he said. And then he added, "You'll forgive me a second's skepticism, I hope. One doesn't often expect to run into one of Them, or Their direct deeds, in the normal course of the business day."

  "Of course," Rhiow said, at the same time thinking that, from the wizard's point of view, that was all anyone ever ran into, but this was not the moment for abstract philosophy.

  "Sa'Rráhh, eh," Hhuhm'hri said after a moment. "So the bad-tempered old queen's at it again. Well, I'll help you any way I can: we'll play the Old Tom to her Great Serpent, and put a knife or two into her coils before we're done. I may not be walking the corridors of power anymore, but all my contacts are still live... in fact, I have rather more of them since I came out to the green leafy confines of suburbia."

  Rhiow cocked her head. "I'd heard something about your retirement," she said, "from the Knowledge: but even the ehhif in New York noticed it. A lot of talk about you being thrown out of Downing Street— and then maybe murdered."

  Hhuhm'hri put his whiskers right forward and sprawled out, blinking at Rhiow like a politician after a three-mouse lunch followed by unlimited cream: and he smiled like someone who could say a lot more on the subject than he was willing to. "It wasn't that bad," he said. "At least, as far as political scandals go." Though a lot of ehhif had thought it was. The new prime minister's wife, a suspected ailurophobe, had dropped a few remarks on moving into Number Ten that indicated that she thought cats were, of all things, "unsanitary." The remarks had provoked so massive an outbreak of ehhif public concern for "Humphrey" that an official statement from the government had been required to put matters right, making it plain that Humphrey's normal "beat" was the Cabinet Office and Number Eleven, and his position was not threatened. Shortly after that had come the photo opportunity. Rhiow had been looking over Iaehh's shoulder at the television one night and had chanced to catch some of those images: the lady in question looking conciliatory, but also rather as if she very much wished she was elsewhere, or holding something besides a cat, while "Humphrey" gazed out at the cameras, as big-eyed in the storm of strobe-flashes as a kitten seeing a ball of yarn for the first time. "Glad it wasn't me," Rhiow said. "I wouldn't have known what to do in a situation like that."

  "You hold still and pray you won't walk into anything when she finally puts you down," Hhuhm'hri said, amused. "Sweet Queen above us, ten minutes straight of flash photography! I was half blind at the end of it. But other than that, I did what I had to. I shed on her." He put his whiskers forward in a good-natured way. "What else could I do? What kind of PR advice was she getting, to take a photo call with a black-and-white cat in a black suit? Did they expect me to stop shedding in one color? She should have worn a print, or tweed. Well, she was only new to the job. She's learned better since. While I stayed there, I steered clear of the children, by and large, which is mostly what she was worried about. No point in tormenting the poor woman. Then my kidneys began to kick up, and I thought, why should I hang about and distract these poor ehhif? They've got enough problems, and my replacement's trained. So I took early retirement— and there was a press scandal about that, too, unavoidable I suppose— but I was happy enough to let 'Harold' move in at Number Ten, and go off to get the kidneys sorted out and settle into domestic life. I still have more than enough to do."

  "Not just the rats, in other words."

  "Oh, dear me, no. As I said, now that I'm quartered out here, People who might otherwise attract notice if they came to see me in Downing Street don't feel shy about it anymore. No more cameramen hanging about all hours of the day and night..." He yawned. "Sorry, I was up late this morning. Tell me what kind of help you need from me, specifically."

  "Advice on personalities," Rhiow said. "I need to know what People can best help us in that time, in the eighteen seventies... ideally, in the target year itself, where their intervention will do most good. We think it's eighteen seventy-five. The possible error, my colleague thinks, is a couple of years on either side."

  "Eighteen seventy-five," Hhuhm'hri said. "Or between eighteen seventy-three and eighteen seventy-six. Not a quiet time..."

  He mostly closed his eyes, thinking, and for a few minutes he lay there in the warm, dappled shade and said nothing. Rhiow waited, while above a growing chorus of small birds scolded at them, and her mouth began to water slightly at the thought of foreign food, whether she could talk to it or not.

  "Well," Hhuhm'hri said suddenly as Rhiow was beginning to concentrate on one small bird in particular, a greenish yellow creature with banded dark wings and a bright blue cap who was hanging temptingly close on a branch of a dwarf willow. "There are certainly a fair number of resources: though the Old Cats' Network was really only getting started then. One in particular should be of best use to you, though. 'Wilberforce' told me about something that had come down to him from 'George,' or maybe it was 'Tiddles,' the one who owned Nelson... something concerning the British Museum's cat at that point. 'Black Jack,' the ehhif called him. An outstanding character— he worked at the museum for something like twenty years, and what he didn't know about the place, or about things going on in the capital in general, wasn't worth knowing. He passed everything he knew down to his replacement, 'young Jack'—and it's through that youngster that a lot of information about that time comes down to us. Either one of them would be the one you'd want to talk to, but I can give you a fair amount of t
he information that has come down from them, so that you'll start to get a sense of what questions you need to ask. How much background do you need?"

  "All you can give me."

  "Is your memory that good?" Hhuhm'hri said, looking thoughtful.

  "It can be when it has to be," Rhiow said. "I can emplace everything you say to me in the Whispering as I hear it. I won't be much good for conversation while you're at it, but it'll be accessible to me and the rest of my team afterwards, and any other wizards who need the information."

  "That's very convenient."

  "It is," Rhiow said, though privately she thought that what would not be convenient was the headache she would have afterward. "If you'll give me a moment to set up the spell, we can get started."

  It was nearly five hours later that she made her way out of Hhuhm'hri's back garden: The Sun was going down, and even the dimming sunset light made Rhiow's eyes hurt. Her whole head was clanging inside as if someone were banging a cat-food can with a spoon. And I'm ravenous, too, she thought, heading back to the vacant lot into which she had originally gated. Parts or no parts, if I go straight home after this, I'm eating whatever Iaehh gives me.

  It had been worth it, though. Her brains felt so crammed full of ehhif political and nonpolitical history of the 1870s that she could barely think: and after a sleep, she would be able to access it through the Knowledge, as if taking counsel with the Whisperer, and sort it for the specific threads and personalities they needed. It helped, too, that Hhuhm'hri's point of view was such a lucid one, carefully kept clear of uninformed opinion or personal agendas. It had apparently been an article of honor for the long line of Downing Street cats to make sure that the information they passed down the line was reliable and as free from bias as it could be, while still having an essentially feline point of view. They counted themselves as chroniclers, both of public information and of the words spoken in silence behind the closed doors of power, in Downing Street and elsewhere: and they suffered the amused way ehhif treated them, put up with the cute names and the often condescending attention, for the sake of making sure someone knew the truth about what was going on, and preserved it. Not that there hadn't been affection involved, as well: Hhuhm'hri had been quite close to the prime minister before the present one, and Churchill's affection for the People he lived with had been famous— Rhiow could not get rid of the image of the great ehhif sitting up in bed with a brandy and a cigar, dictating his memoirs and pausing occasionally to growl "Isn't that right, Cat Darling?" to the redoubtable orange-striped "Cat," veteran of the Blitz, who had worked so hard to keep his ehhif's emotions stable through that terrible time.

  They were an unusual group, the Downing Street cats: genuine civil servants, and talented ones. Over the many, many years they had been in residence, they had learned to understand clearly ehhif speech of various kinds— the first "cabinet" cats, dating back to the pride-ruler Henry VI, had been ehhif-bilingual in English and French— and they were assiduous about training their replacements to make sure the talent wasn't lost in this most special of the branches of the Civil Service. Not quite wizards, Rhiow thought, though there may be wizardly blood in their line somewhere, or occasional infusions of it from outside. For not all the Downing Street group were related. They were a rrai'theh, a working pride without blood affinities, part of the much larger pride that referred to itself as the Old Cats' Network. Rhiow wondered if, as in other nonwizardly cats, another talent to "spill over" from wizardly stock had been the one for passing through closed doors unnoticed. She suspected it had; in their line of work, such an ability would have been invaluable.

  She made her way down to the Tower Hill Underground station with her head still buzzing with Hhuhm'hri's briefing. It was unnerving, the way thinking about ehhif affairs for four or five hours straight could make you start looking at the world the way they did. Rhiow wasn't sure she liked it. Oh well, an occupational hazard. But the one word that seemed to have come up most frequently in Hhuhm'hri's reminiscences was "war." Try as she might, Rhiow could not understand why ehhif could kill each other in such large numbers for what seemed to her completely useless purposes. Fighting for land to live on, for a territory that would provide food to eat, that she could understand. All People who ran in prides, from the microfelids to the great cats of this world, did the same. But they usually didn't kill each other; a fight that resulted in the other pride running away was more than sufficient. If they tried to come back, you just drove them away again.

  Ehhif, though, seemed not to find this kind of fighting sufficient. What troubled Rhiow most severely was tales of ehhif killing one another in large numbers for the sake of land that was nearly worthless— going to war simply because they had said that a given piece of land was theirs and some other ehhif had disputed the claim. Or when they went to war for the sake of prestige or injured pride: that was strangest to her of all. And it seemed to her, from what Hhuhm'hri had told her, that the pride-of-prides, which its ehhif called Britain, had gone to war for all these reasons, and for numerous other ones, over the past couple of centuries. Granted, they had done so genuinely to preserve their own people from being killed as well: the second of the great conflicts of this century had been one of that kind, and the British had defended themselves with courage and cleverness at least equal to their enemies'. Nevertheless, Rhiow was beginning to think she knew who most likely would have blown up atomic weapons on the Moon in 1875, if they'd had access to them.

  And how did they get them? And how can we undo it?

  It was going to take time to work that out. At least they had a little time to work with, but not much.

  She made her way among the ehhif at the Underground ticket machines and past them, under the gates and down to the platform where the malfunctioning gate and its power source were being held. Hhuhm'hri had told Rhiow that thousands of ehhif had hidden in tunnels and basements near here during the bombings of London in that second great war. That had resolved, for Rhiow, the question of something she had been feeling since she came down here first— a faint buzzing in the walls, as if at the edge of hearing: the ghost-memory in the tunnels and the stones of ehhif sleeping nearby in the faintly electric-lit darkness. Their troubled and frightened dreams still saturated the bricks and mortar of the tunnels— and "behind" them, if you were sensitive to such things and you listened very hard, you could just catch the faintest sound of the shudder and rumble of falling bombs. That unsound, intruding at the very edge of a sensitive's consciousness, could easily get lost in or confused with the rumble of present-day trains through the stone.

  At least I know what it is now, Rhiow thought, making her way to the platform and jumping up. A relief. I thought I was going a little strange.

  Only Urruah and Arhu were there just now. " 'Luck," Rhiow said, going over to breathe breaths with Urruah, who was sitting and looking at his timeslide-spell, apparently taking a break after having done an afternoon's worth of troubleshooting. The timeslide was presently lying quiescent on the platform floor, in a tangle of barely seen lines. "How's it going?"

  "Slow," he said. "I wanted to have another look at the disconnected gate's logs before I started changing my own settings around."

  "Find anything useful?" Rhiow asked, glancing over at Arhu. He was tucked down in meat loaf configuration with his eyes half closed, unmoving.

  "No," Urruah said, following her glance and looking thoughtful. "But, Rhi, I think the logs are being tampered with."

  She sat down, surprised. "By whom?"

  "Or what," Urruah said. "I can't say. Normally when a gate's offline, its logs are frozen in the state they were in when the gate was taken off. I hooked the gate up again briefly to the catenary to have a look at the way the source has been feeding it power— and found that some of the logs weren't the way I remembered them. In particular, the logs pertaining to Mr. Illingworth's access were in a different state than they were when I left them. Specifically, temporal coordinates were not the same."

&n
bsp; Rhiow looked around her and then said privately, Fhrio?

  I don't think so. For one of us to tamper with gate's logs would normally leave marks that an expert can see, alterations in the relationships between the hyperstrings of the gate. Now, I'm an expert, and I can't find any marks. Still...

  You're not sure. Rhiow's tail switched.

  No, I'm not. If it's not Fhrio, though, I'd be tempted to look farther inward.

  The Lone Power, Rhiow thought.

  Urruah hissed softly. Rhi, I know It's been meddling in the larger sense. The contamination of the 1875-or-thereabouts timeline is certainly Its doing. But by and large It's not going to do something like this. It's still one of the Powers That Be, and shares Their tendency not to waste effort Itself when It can get someone closer to the problem to do the dirty work. Myself, I'm going to keep an ear on one of us a little closer by.

  She had to agree with him there. "So what are you going to do?" she said aloud.

  He shrugged his tail. "Try the altered coordinates," he said. "Or at least lay them into my timeslide and see what happens when we try to access them."

  "It could very well be a trap of some kind," Rhiow said.

  "Yes, but we don't have to put our foot right into it," Urruah said. "We can look before we jump. A habit of mine."

  Rhiow put her whiskers forward. "All right. Anything else?"

  "Well, one other possibility," Urruah said. "I think our problem in finding Mr. Illingworth's home universe, or not finding it, may have to do with the timeslide still being powered out of the malfunctioning gate's power source. We noted from what few logs were left from the microtransits earlier that the far end of the gate-timeslide was lashing around in backtime, like the end of some ehhif's garden hose when they let it go with the water running at full pressure. The end whiplashes around, coming down first here, then there... never the same place twice. I think the fault for that could possibly lie in the power source rather than the gate."