by Diane Duane
She licked her nose. "What does it mean?" Rhiow said.
Arhu stared at her, very briefly at a loss. "I don't know," he said. "But it's really important. I couldn't hear much else in my head almost all the time we came back. It was like someone kept shouting it… or like it was a song—"
His tail was lashing. "Later," Rhiow said finally. "They're fighting, down there: they need us. Come on!"
They ran through the door, down the platform for Track 30. The upper track level was hardly recognizable as the familiar, fairly tidy place where Rhiow walked every day. Saurians' bodies were scattered everywhere. Fortunately there seemed to be few casualties among the wizards, or else they had been taken away already for treatment. There seemed to be no station staff around: Rhiow guessed they were staying locked safely in the towers and workrooms, probably having called the cops… though what they would have told the cops they wanted them for, Rhiow would have given a great deal to hear. At least they seemed to have stopped any further trains from coming in.
Tom and a group of other wizards were gathered nearest the track Thirty worldgate, which seemed to be spewing out saurians like a firehose; as fast as they came out, they died of the neural-inhibitor spell being repeatedly used so that the bodies lay heaped high before the gate, and the new saurians had to clamber over the bodies of their dead or push them aside to leap, screaming, at the wizards. On Tracks 25 and 18, trains were stopped halfway down into the platforms, with saurians caught under their bogies or draped over the fronts of the locomotives; Track 32 had the derailed train, its sideways-skewed front splashed with lizard blood, a heap of dead saurians trapped underneath it, and the faint cries of ehhif coming from inside.
"What kept you?" Tom said as Rhiow arrived, with Arhu in tow.
"A pretty serious reanimation," Rhiow said. "Some kind of congruency to what's been trying to push up through here, I suspect. We may find that it resists being patched afterward."
"We'll worry about that later. Some of us are busy pulling people out of that wreck, but we've got other problems. You're the gate specialists— what can we do about this? There seem to be thousands more of these creatures waiting to come through, and if we just hang around here doing this all night, people's memory tracks are going to engrave themselves too deeply to be successfully patched."
Saash, Rhiow said, can you get some relief? We need you up here.
I've got some help already. On my way up.
Urruah—
Heard it. Be right with you.
Saash appeared a few seconds later. "Any ideas how to stop this?" Rhiow said.
Saash shook herself all over and had only the briefest scratch before standing up again, staring at the gate, through which still more saurians were clambering. "How chaotic," she said to Tom, "are you willing to get?"
"Things are pretty chaotic already at the moment," he said. "But anything that would put an end to this would be welcome. We've got to start patching very soon. If you need to get a little destructive—"
"Not physically." Saash was getting that same gleam in her eye that Rhiow had seen the other night when she had turned the catenary loose, and Rhiow started to feel wary. "Just think of it this way. The gate might be more like a plant than a tree, though we tend out of habit to refer to a gate's 'tree structure.' A gate has a 'root'— the anchor-structure of its catenary, way down in the bottom of the Mountain, which fuels itself from whatever power supply Aaurh originally hooked it to: pulsar, white hole, whatever; theoretical distinctions don't matter just now. A gate has a 'stalk'— the catenary itself. And then it has a 'flower' at the top— the portal locus, where the energy is manipulated through the hyperstring structure, and actual transport takes place."
"I hadn't thought of you as having such a horticultural turn of mind," Tom said, watching with a tight, unhappy look as yet more shrieking saurians climbed through the gate and were snuffed out.
"Yes. Well… what happens if you pull the portal locus off the gate?"
Tom stared at her. "Like pulling the head off a daisy.— What does happen?"
"It should shut the gate right down, no matter who or what reactivated the other end."
"Should—!" Rhiow said.
"Until a new portal locus can be woven and installed, nothing can use it for transport."
Tom was silent for a moment. Then he said, "These gates are very old… and were put in place by, well…"
"Gods," Saash said, twitching her tail in agreement. "Fortunately, they are gods who left us, in the Whispering, and The Book of Night with Moon, very complete instructions on how these gates were constructed in the first place… on the grounds that someday they might need serious repair or reconstruction."
"Which they will," Rhiow said, "if you go pulling the portal loci off them! Do you know what kind of energy you're talking about releasing here? And if you don't do it in exact synchronization, every one of them at just the same time, one or more of the gates could pull free of its anchors to this universe and just go rolling off across the landscape wherever it liked, and only Iau knows where it would wind up, and in what condition! For all you know it would invert function and start eating anything that the portal locus came in contact with—"
"So we'll be careful about the synchronization," Saash said.
Rhiow just stared at her.
"How long would it take to get the gates going again after this?" Tom said.
"With all the available gating experts working together to do the reweave? A day or so."
"If it's so easy, why hasn't it ever been done before?" Rhiow said.
"Because no one ever needed to, since nothing has ever made the gates malfunction this way before," Saash said, sweetly, "and because there's never been a problem quite like this!" She gestured with her tail at the fresh wave of dinosaurs clambering over the heap of already-dead ones.
Tom looked at this, and also at the image of the plan that Saash held in her mind. Rhiow was examining that same image with great disquiet. Theoretically it was sound. Practically, it could be done. But—
"All right," Tom said. "I'll sanction it. I know you have misgivings, Rhi— so do I— but we've tried every other way to shut these gates down again, and nothing has worked. And the clock is ticking— we've got to start patching right away."
He looked at her expectantly. Rhiow sat down, trying to put her composure in place for whatever spell was going to be required of her. The thought, though, of simply— well, not destroying the gates— but maiming them: it rattled her. They were not entirely just spells. They were not sentient beings, either… but there was still something akin to life about them….
Rhi, Saash said. I hear you. But there's a lot of life here, too. And our fellow wizards can't just stand around down here, killing lizards forever: aside from the cost to them in energy, ehhif life is going to be seriously disrupted by the reality of what's happening if it's allowed to persist and set in too permanently to be erased. Worse: while this is going on, we can't go find Har'lh or get any closer to the bottom of what's been going on….
You're right, Rhiow said finally. "So what do we need to do?"
"Four gates," Saash said. "Four of us. We don't need physical contact; what we're going to do is brutal enough. Rhi, you know Thirty best. Here's the portal locus's pattern." Rhiow's mind filled with it, not merely a spell-circle but a filigree sphere of light with several more dimensions implied in the diagram, all made of interwoven words in the Speech, intricate and delicate. "Just hang on to that. See that loose thread there?"
Rhiow did, and she swallowed. She had never noticed any of the gate loci as having loose threads before. "Yes—"
"Hang on to it. Don't let go until I tell you. Urruah?"
"Ready. Got it."
"There's the thread. Bite it in your mind, don't let go. Arhu?"
"Uh, yeah."
"See that?"
"Sure."
"Bite it."
He held very still, his eyes shifting back and forth, but in his
mind he did as he was told.
Saash was quiet for a moment. I've got the fourth one, she said at last. I'm going to count backward from four in my head. When I say zero— pull those threads. Not a second before or after.
Right, they all said.
The wizards around them got quiet, watching, except for those still occupied with killing whatever saurians came through the gate.
Four, Saash said.
Three.
Two.
One.
Z—
There was a tremendous rumble that seemed to come from the bowels of the building, working its way upward toward them, shaking. Dust sifted down from the ceiling, light fixtures swung, and fluorescent light tubes snapped and went dark—
And sudden silence fell: the shaking stopped as if a switch had been thrown.
The gate by Track 30 vanished— simply went away like a blown bubble that pops when a breeze touches it.
Everyone held very still, waiting. But no more saurians came out of the air.
There was a restrained cheer from the wizards standing around, and Tom came over to look at the space where the gate had been. "I don't feel the catenary," he said, sounding concerned.
"You wouldn't be able to," Saash said, coming over to stand by him. "But I can see it; the hyperstrings leave a traceable pattern in the space they occupy, even without energy flowing. It's just that the sensory component usually expresses itself through—" She stopped.
"Through what? What's the matter?"
Saash stood there, gazing into the dark with an expression of increasing horror… then began a low, horribly expressive yowling. To Rhiow it sounded like her tail was caught in a door… except there was no door, and she could feel her friend's sudden fear and anger.
"What?" Rhiow said. "What—"
Then she felt it, too.
Oh, Iau, no—
Arhu crouched down, looking scared— a more emphatic response than he had revealed even in the face of a ten-ton tyrannosaurus. Urruah stared at him, then at Saash.
"Oh, no," Rhiow said. "Saash— where's the Number Three gate?"
Arhu was sinking straight into the concrete.
"It's come loose before its locus was pulled off," Saash hissed. "It's popped out of the matrix—"
There was nothing showing of Arhu now except the tips of his ears, which were rapidly submerging into the floor.
"It's not your fault," Saash yowled, "come out of there, you little idiot! Somebody boobytrapped it!"
Saash glared at Tom as Arhu clambered up out of the floor again. "Somebody knew we were going to do that intervention," Saash said. "One of the gates was left with a minuscule timing inbalance, hard-wired in and left waiting to go off as soon as the portal locus was tampered with. It hasn't been deactivated… and now everything that was coming out of all the gates before is going to come out of just that one…!"
"My God," Tom whispered. "Where's the other gate gone?"
Rhiow looked at him in shock. "A loose transit gate," she said, "normally inheres to the area of the greatest density of thought and anchors there. The place where the most minds are packed the most closely together—"
"Dear Iau up a tree," Urruah whispered. They all stared at him.
He looked at them, open-eyed with horror.
"Tonight? The biggest concentration of minds?" Urruah said. "It's in the Sheep Meadow…!"
Urruah ran out. "Hurry up and start patching," Tom said to several of the wizards who had been working with him; and he, and Rhiow, and Saash, and Arhu, and half the rest of the wizards in the place ran after him.
* * *
Urruah was making for the sidewalk, which was well enough away from any of the gates inside to prevent adverse effects. Maybe he didn't really need to, under the circumstances, but Rhiow, at the moment, thought it was probably better to be safe than sorry. There were enough people sorry already.
Sabotage… Rhiow thought again, as she and Arhu raced, along with the others, past the waiting room. As if from inside…
Arhu glanced over at the mess that still lay all about in the waiting room as they passed. "That was it," Arhu said to her, fierce, his panic of a few moments ago now replaced with a rush of angry satisfaction and aliveness the like of which Rhiow had never yet sensed in him. "That was what I saw… the first night. That came out. Even the rats ran away from it. And I—" He winced as they ran out the front doors with the others, and then said, "We're even now. It wasn't going to do that to me twice."
"Arhu," Rhiow said, while Urruah and Tom paced out a large transit circle— it glowed in the sidewalk behind them as they paced, causing interested looks from the passing pedestrians— "when you work with words the way wizards do, precision is important. Something like that was what you saw? Or, that was what you saw? Which is it?"
He looked at her with utter astonishment. "You mean— you think there's another?"
"How would I know? I want to know what you meant."
"Ready," Tom said. "Everybody in here— hurry up!"
They jumped into the circle with Tom and Urruah and the other wizards. "You sure of these coordinates?" Tom was saying to Urruah.
"They're 'backstage,' " Urruah said. "The spot was empty yesterday. No guarantees for tonight— but it's got better odds of being empty than anywhere else in the meadow tonight. You've got a 'bumper' on this, to keep us from accidentally coexisting with anybody—"
"Yeah, but who knows what it's going to do in such a densely populated area? We've got to take the chance. Whatever our spell will do if it malfunctions, it won't be as bad as what's already happening—"
There was no arguing with that. Tom said three words and the circle flamed up into life, then a fourth.
Wham!
A huge displacement of air as all their masses were subtracted from the space outside Grand Central; and Slam! an explosion of air outward as they all appeared—
—and heard a blast of sound that staggered them all— partly from the amplification, partly from how close they all were to the stage. The orchestra was playing a massive, deliberate accompaniment to three voices— two lower, one high— that wound forcefully and delicately about one another, scaling continually upward through slow changes of key. Rhiow found herself briefly impinging on the outskirts of Urruah's mind as on those of all the others in the transit circle there— had been no time to install the usual filters— and was drowned in his instant recognition and delight, even in these horrible circumstances, at the perfection of the sound coming from two of the three tehn'hhirs, and a third invited guest, the new young ssoh'pra-oh from the Met, in the great finale of a work called Ffauwst. Two of the voices argued— the Lone One and a wizard, in the throes of a struggle for the wizard's soul— but the third and highest, the voice of a young and invincibly innocent queen, called on the bright Powers for aid: and (said Urruah's memory) the aid came—
Let it be an omen! Rhiow thought desperately as they broke the circle and looked around them. A few security people and police noticed them, started coming toward them—
The human wizards, prepared, all went sidled in a whisker's twitch. Rhiow and her team did, too, and they all hurried past the extremely confused policemen and security people to get around to one side of the stage and get a clearer view—
It was hard, but they managed to clamber up among some sound gear, and from that viewpoint stared out into the night. The Sheep Meadow was full, absolutely full of ehhif, only dimly seen in the light from the stage. They sat on blankets and in portable chairs; the smell of food and drink was everywhere, and Rhiow threw a concerned look at Arhu— but for once he had his mind on other things. His ears were twitching; he stared toward one side of the meadow—
"Where's the gate?" Tom was whispering.
"Not here yet," Saash said. "The locus is still moving—"
A faint sound could be heard now, something different from the susurrus of more than a hundred thousand bodies in one place. It was hard to tell just what it was with this
mighty blast of focused sound, both real and amplified, coming from the orchestra. Rhiow glanced at the little round ehhif whom she had seen leading them earlier; now he was in the kind of black-and-white clothes that ehhif males wore for ceremonial these days, and conducting the orchestra as if he heard nothing whatever but his music. Perhaps he didn't. But there was more sound than music coming from the edges of the meadow. A rustling, a sound like the distant rush of wind—
The three on the stage— a tall, pale, dark-haired tom-ehhif, a shorter tom, more tan but also dark-haired, both in the black-and-white clothes, and a tall, beautiful, dark-skinned queen-ehhif in a dress glittering like starlit night— were no more aware of anything amiss than the conductor. The toms, singing the Lone Power and the doomed wizard, cursed one another melodiously; the queen, ignoring them both, relentlessly declared her own salvation, requiring the aid of the Powers That Be. In a final blast of pure sound, a chord in three perfect notes, all three took up their fates, to the accompaniment of a final, mighty orchestral crash.
The ehhif in the audience roared approval and applauded, a sound like the sea on the shore, rolling from one side of the great space to the other: the tehn'hhirs and the ssoh'pra-oh took their bows and walked off the stage, almost close enough for Rhiow to have reached out with a claw and snagged the ssoh'pra-oh's gown. But out at the edge of that sound, over toward the east side of the park, something was going wrong. The sound leaned up and up in pitch as the queen's voice had. Rhiow, Urruah, Arhu, Tom, all the wizards looked that way, straining to see what was happening—
"It's coming," Arhu said.
"What?" Rhiow hissed, as the third tehn'hhir, the big furry one Urruah had shown her the other day, went up the stairs to the stage past her, and more applause rolled across the meadow at the sight of him. He too was resplendent in the ceremonial black and white now, with a long white scarf around his neck, and he once again held the scrap of cloth he had used to wipe his face in the heat. This he waved at the conductor: once more the music began. There was a further rush of applause just at the sound of it—
He smiled. "Tu pure, o Principessa," he began to sing—
