On Her Majesty's Wizardly Service fw-2

by Diane Duane

  “—is rotating, yes, I think we would have heard if it had stopped—”

  Urruah made a face. “Just be glad that’s all the kinetics you have to worry about at the moment. Once we get up into second-order stuff, your head will hurt a lot worse than if I’d hit you for your rude mouth, which may come later. And don’t think I can’t hear you thinking, with your teeth and claws full of hyperstrings: you think the laws of science are broken, or I’m deaf? Thought runs down those things like water: that’s partly what they’re built for … All you have to worry about now is the path this piece of Earth is describing through space at the moment, and the path that the piece you’re trying to gate to is describing. You keep them in synch while the gate’s open, and that’ll be more than a lot of wizards can do. It’s a complex helical locus in motion, but no more complex than a trained Person can handle. Let’s see how you do.”

  Rhiow sat and wondered how Urruah could sound so casual about the management of forces which, if Arhu let them slip, could peel the whole mass of Grand Central Terminal off its track-tunneled lower layers and toss it up into the stratosphere the way you would toss a new-killed rat. That was Urruah’s teaching style, though, and it seemed to work with Arhu. Tom stuff, Rhiow thought, and kept her whiskers still: unwise to let the amusement show. For toms, it all comes down to blows and ragged ears in the end. Never mind: whatever works for them…

  The weave of the gate before them suddenly shimmered and misted away to invisibility. They got a glimpse of light streaming golden through rustling green leaves, a bustle and rush of ehhif along a checkered black-and-white pavement before them: and suddenly, with a huge clangor of bells, a huge boxy blue-and-white shape turned a corner in front of them and came rushing directly at the gate.

  Arhu’s eyes went wide: he yowled and threw himself backwards, dropping the mouthful and double pawful of strings. The view through the gate vanished, leaving nothing but the snapped-back rainbow weave of the hyperstrings, buzzing slightly like strummed guitar strings in the dark air as they resonated off the energy that had built up in them while the gate was open.

  Arhu lay on the cinders and panted. “What did I—I didn’t—”

  Rhiow yawned. “It was a tram.”

  “What?”

  “A kind of bus,” Rhiow said. “It runs on electricity: some ehhif cities use them. Don’t ask me where that was, though.”

  “Blue-and-white tram,” Urruah said. “Combined with that smell? That was Zurich.”

  “Urruah—”

  “No, seriously. There’s a butcher just down the road from there, on the Bahnhofstrasse, and they have this sausage that—”

  “Urruah.”

  “What? What’s the matter?”

  Rhiow sighed. Urruah had four ruling passions: wizardry, food, sex, and oh’ra. They jostled one another for precedence, but you could guarantee in any discussion with Urruah that at least one of them would come up, usually repeatedly. “We don’t need to hear about the sausage,” Rhiow said. “Was that the location you had set into the gate?”

  “I didn’t set a specific location. Just told it to hunt for population centers in the three hundred to five hundred thousand range with gating affinities.”

  “Then you did good,” Rhiow said to Arhu, “even if you did panic. You had ‘here’ and ‘there’ perfectly synchronized.”

  “Until I panicked.” Arhu was washing now, with the quick sullen movements of someone both embarrassed and angry.

  “It didn’t do any harm. You should always brace yourself, though, when opening a gate into a new location, even on visual-only. It’s another good reason to make sure the gate defaults to invisible/intangible until you’ve got your coordinates solidified.”

  “Take a break,” Urruah said: but Arhu turned back to the gateweave and began hooking his claws into it again, in careful sequence.

  Stubborn, Rhiow said silently to Urruah.

  This isn’t a bad thing, Urruah said. Stubborn can keep you alive, in our line of work, at times when smart may not be enough.

  Rhiow switched her tail in agreement. They watched Arhu reconstruct the active matrix, and pull out the strings again, two pawsful of them: then he leaned in and carefully began taking hold of the next groups with his teeth, pulling them down one by one to join the ones already in his claws. The gate shimmered—

  Traffic flowed by in both directions right before them, cars and buses in a steady stream: but there was something odd about the sight, regardless. In the background, beyond some lower buildings, two great square towers with pointed pyramidal tops stuck up: a roadway ran between them, and some kind of catwalk, high up.

  “The cars are on the wrong side,” Arhu said suddenly.

  “Not wrong,” Rhiow said, “just different. There are places on the planet where they don’t drive the way ehhif here do.”

  “No one on the planet drives the way ehhif here do,” Urruah muttered.

  Rhiow put her whiskers forward in a smile. “No argument.”

  People were walking back and forth before what would be the aperture of the gate, were it physically to open. “Look at them all,” Arhu said, somewhat bemused. “It keeps coming up cities.”

  “It would whether Urruah had set the parameters that way or not,” Rhiow said to Arhu. “Worldgates inhere to population centers.”

  Make it a little dryer for him, why don’t you? Urruah said good-humoredly into her mind as he looked out at the ehhif hurrying by. “See, Arhu, if you pack enough people of whatever species into a tight enough space, the fabric of physicality starts fraying from the pressure of all their minds intent on getting what they want. Pack even more of them in, up to the threshold number, and odd things start to happen routinely in that area as the spacetime continuum rubs thinner—places get a reputation for anything being available there, or at least possible. Go over the threshold number, and gates start forming spontaneously.”

  “Much smaller populations can produce gates if they’re there for long enough,” Rhiow said. “The piled-up-population effect can be cumulative over time: there are settlements of ehhif that have been established for many thousands of years, and therefore have gates even though only a small population lives there at any one time.”

  “Catal Huyuk,” Urruah said, “and Chur, places like that. Those old gates can be tricky, though: idiosyncratic … and over thousands of years, they pick up a lot of strange memories, not all of them good. The newer high-population-locus gates can be a lot safer to work with.”

  “What’s the threshold number you were talking about?” Arhu said, studying the gate.

  “A variable, not a constant,” Rhiow said. “It varies by species. For ehhif, it’s around ten million. For People, eight hundred thousand, give or take a tail.”

  Arhu flirted his own tail, a gesture of disbelief. “Where would you get that many People?”

  “Right here in this city, for one place,” Rhiow said. “All those ‘pets’, all those ‘strays’—” The words she used were rhao’ehhih’h and aihlhih, ‘human-denned’ and ‘nonaligned’. “There might be as many as a million of us just in this island. Either way, there’s more than enough of us to sustain a gating complex without ehhif being involved … and they’re here too. With such big joint populations, it’s no surprise that this complex is the most senior one in the planet.”

  “And besides, there’s the ‘master’ gating connection to the old Downside,” Urruah said. “Every worldgate on the planet has ‘affectional’ connections to it: for all we know, its presence made it possible for all the other gates to spawn.”

  Arhu shook his head. “What’s this city, then?”

  “London,” Urruah said.

  “Don’t tell me … you can smell the local butcher.”

  Urruah took a swipe at Rhiow, which she ducked with her whiskers forward, amused to have successfully put a claw into his near-impervious ego. “As it happens,” Urruah said, “I recognize the landscape. That’s Tower Bridge back there.”
<
br />   Rhiow looked at the bridge between the two towers: it was starting to rise in two pieces, to let a ship past. “Isn’t that the one the ehhif have a rhyme about? It fell down …”

  “Wrong bridge. The location it serves started developing gates around the beginning of the last millennium, when the last batch of ehhif with a big empire came through.”

  “The ‘Hrromh’ans’.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Not a very old complex, then?” Rhiow said.

  “Nope. A little finicky, this one. The population pressure built up around it in fits and starts rather than steadily, and it kept losing population abruptly—the city kept getting sacked, having plagues and fires, things like that. The matrices formed under touchy circumstances. But the Tower Bridge complex is good for long-range transits: better than ours, even. No one’s sure why. Convergence of ley lines, gravitic anomalies under that hill close to the bridge, who knows?” Urruah waved his tail. “Leave it to the theorists.”

  “Like you, now.”

  He put his whiskers forward, but the expression in his eyes was ironic. “Well, we’re all diversifying a little at the moment, aren’t we? Not that we have much choice.”

  “You miss her too,” Rhiow said softly.

  Urruah watched Arhu for a little, and then said, “She used to go on and on about these little details. Now I wonder whether she had a hint of what was going to happen …”

  The interesting thing,” Rhiow said, “is that you remembered all this.”

  He looked at her sidewise. “Shouldn’t surprise you. ‘He lives in a dumpster, he’s got a brain like a dumpster’, isn’t that what you always say?”

  “I never say that,” Rhiow said, scandalized, having often thought that very thing.

  “Huh,” Urruah said, and his whiskers went further forward. “Anyway, this complex handles a lot of off-planet work—emergency interventions, and the routine training and cultural exchange transits involving wizards here and elsewhere in the Local Group of galaxies. Bigger scheduled transits than that tend to go to Chur or Alexandria or Beijing, to keep Tower Bridge from getting overloaded, Saash told me. It overloads easily—something to do with the forces tangled around that hill with the old castle on it.”

  “Should I try somewhere else?” Arhu said, now bored with looking at the traffic.

  “Sure, go ahead,” Rhiow said, waving her tail in casual assent, and Arhu sat up on his haunches again and hooked his claws into the control matrix, while Rhiow looked thoughtfully for a moment more at that old tower. There were a lot of physical places associated with ehhif that acquired personality artifact over many years, probably as a result of the ehhif tendency to stay in one place for generations. People didn’t do that, as a rule, and found the prospect slightly pathological: but there was no use judging one species by another’s standards—the One doubtless had Her reasons for designing them differently. Ten lives on, maybe we’ll all be told…

  “It’s stuck,” Arhu said suddenly.

  “What? Stuck how?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just stuck.”

  Urruah got up and stalked over to look the gate-web up and down. To a Person’s eyes, its underweave, the warp and woof of interwoven hyperstrings which produced the gating effect, were still plainly visible through the image of sunshine on that other landscape, the tangle of buildings and traffic beyond. Arhu was sitting up with the brilliant strings of the “control weave” now stretched again between his paws, pulled taut and in the correct configuration for viewing. “Look,” Arhu said, and twisted his paws so that the weave changed configuration, went much more “open”, a maneuver that should have shut down the gate to the bare matrix again.

  The gate just hung there, untroubled and unmoved, and showed the bridge and the traffic, and the ehhif hurrying by.

  Rhiow came up beside Urruah. “Do it again.”

  “I can’t, not from this configuration, anyway.”

  “I mean take that last move back, then re-execute.”

  Arhu did.

  Nothing changed. The morning was bright, and shone on the Bridge and the river…

  “Let me try,” Urruah said.

  “Why?” Rhiow said. “He did it right.”

  Urruah looked at her in astonishment. “Well, he …”

  “He did it right. Let’s not rush to judgment: let’s have a look at this.”

  They all did. The strings looked all right … but something else was the matter: nothing that they could see. As she peered at the view, and the gate, Rhiow started to get the feeling that someone was looking over her shoulder…

  …and then realized that Someone was. She did not have to look to see: she knew Who it was.

  There’s a problem, the voice whispered in her ear.

  Urruah’s ears flicked: nothing to do with the ambient noise. Arhu’s eyes went wide. He was still getting used to hearing the Whisperer. It took some getting used to, for the voice in your mind sounded like your own thought … except that it was not. It plainly came from somewhere else, and at first the feeling could be as bizarre as feeling someone else switch your tail.

  Rhiow’s was switching now, without help. Well, madam, she thought, do You know what this problem is?

  The gate with which yours is presently in affinity is malfunctioning, said the silent voice inside their heads. The London gating team requires your assistance—they will be expecting you. You should leave as soon as you can make arrangements for covering your own territory during your absence.

  And that was it: the voice was silent, the presence gone, as suddenly as it had come.

  Arhu blinked, though this time he didn’t drop the strings. “What did She mean?” he said. “Where’s London?”

  The place we’ve been looking at,” Rhiow said, glancing at the Bridge again. “About a third of the way around the planet. Look in that fourth group of strings and you’ll see the coordinates.”

  “You mean we have to go away?”

  “That’s what she said,” said Urruah, dismayed. To London, yet.”

  “I would have thought you’d be happy, Ruah,” Rhiow said, slightly amused despite her own surprise and concern. The butchers and all …”

  “When you’re visiting, that’s one thing,” Urruah said, sitting down and licking his nose. “Working … that’s something else. It wasn’t so much fun the last time.”

  “We have to go work on someone else’s gates?” Arhu said, letting the strings go, carefully, one at a time. “And you did this before?”

  “We had to go help a team in Tokyo,” said Rhiow, “halfway around the planet: it was about a sunround and a half ago. We were there for nearly three weeks. It was something of a logistical nightmare … but we got the job done.”

  “ ‘Something’ of a nightmare—!” Urruah muttered, and lay down on the platform, looking across at the commuters as they came and went. “You have a talent for understatement.”

  “There’s no telling how long we’ll be gone on one of these consultational trips,” Rhiow said, “but they’re not normally brief. Usually we’re only called in for consultation when the local team has exhausted all its other options and still hasn’t solved the problem.”

  “Why us, though?” Arhu said.

  “We’re the senior gating team on the planet,” Urruah said, “because we work with Grand Central. It’s not that we’re all that much better at the job than anyone else—” and Rhiow blinked at this sudden access of humility from Urruah—“but the main gating matrices in the Old Downside, ‘under’ the Terminal, are the oldest functioning worldgate complex on the planet. All the other gating complexes which have since come into being have ‘affinity’ links through Grand Central to the Downside matrices.”

  “Think of all those other gating complexes as branches of a tree,” Rhiow said, “and Grand Central as the last of the really big complexes that branched out closest to the trunk. There have been others that were bigger or older, but for one reason or another they’re gone
now … so Grand Central is the last of the ‘firstborn’ gating complexes, the ones that Aaurh the Maker set in place Herself when the world was young. Since we routinely work with Grand Central, and less routinely with the Downside matrices, we’re expected to be competent to troubleshoot gates further up the ‘tree’ as well.”

  “Wow!” Arhu said.

  “Wow,” said Urruah, rather sourly.

  Rhiow was inclined to agree with him. Who needs this now?? she thought. Life had just begun to be getting a little settled again, after the craziness of the late summer, after the desperate intervention in which they had all been involved in the Old Downside, in which Arhu gained his wizardry and Saash lost hers, or rather took it up in a more profound version after her ninth death—though either way she was lost to the team now. Arhu had filled her spot, though not precisely. Saash had been a gate technician of great skill, and Arhu was primarily a visionary, gifted at seeing beyond present realities into those past or yet to come. That talent was still steadying down, as it might take some years yet to do: and it would take a lot of training yet before Arhu was anything like the gating technician that Saash had been. Since they got back, Rhiow and Urruah had been spending almost all their free time coaching him and wondering when life would get back to anything like “normal”. So much for that! Rhiow thought.

  “What are we going to do about our regular maintenance rounds?” Urruah said.

  Rhiow flirted her tail. “The Perm Station team will have to handle them.”

  “Oh, they’re going to just love that.”

  “We can’t help it, and they’ll know that perfectly well. All of us wind up subbing for People on other teams every now and then. Sometimes it’s fun.”

  “They won’t think so,” Urruah said. “How long is this going to go on?”