On Her Majesty's Wizardly Service fw-2

by Diane Duane

  They walked a little further down the riverbank to find a place where there was less mud, just under the shadow of the Tower’s walls. There was an old disused dock there, leading a little way out into the water. Gratefully enough they stepped up onto it, and Arhu headed down toward the end of it, where recent weather or wavewash had mostly scoured the rotting planks clean. Here he started to walk the circle they would need, leaving the pale tracery of graphics in the Speech behind him as he walked and muttered.

  Urruah watched him with an expert’s eye. “He’s been practicing that one for a while,” he said.

  Rattled as she was, Rhiow couldn’t help but smile. “The way you’ve been practicing that timeslide?”

  “Uh, well.” Urruah sat down and started to wash his face, then made a face at the taste of his paw, and stopped. “Rhi, you know I wouldn’t step out of bounds. Not on this kind of stuff. It scares me.”

  “It’s sure scaring me,” Rhiow said. “I can’t wait to get back … it’s like fleas under the skin, the fear. But it can’t be helped … we need to do this first.”

  Arhu had finished the first layer of his circle and had tied the wizard’s knot: now he was laying in the coordinates for the Moon and the “pockets” which would trap and hold adequate air inside the spell for the three of them. “It was a nice piece of work, regardless,” Rhiow said. “That slide.”

  “Thanks,” Urruah said. “It didn’t get much approval in some quarters, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “Fhrio.”

  “Just what the Snake is his problem?” Rhiow muttered.

  “I don’t know. Just generalized jealousy, I think. Or else he just really is territorial about anything to do with ‘his’ gates. I never thought I’d see a Person so territorial. I swear, he’s like an ehhif that way.”

  “Maybe he was one in his last life,” Rhiow said, putting her whiskers forward. There were numerous jokes among People about how such an accident might happen, mostly suggesting that it was a step up in the scale of things for the ehhif.

  “Please,” Urruah said. “It makes my head hurt just thinking about it.”

  Arhu stopped, looked up at them. “You want to come check your names?”

  They walked over to the circle and jumped into it. Rhiow examined her name and found everything represented as it should be … but there was something odd about one of the symbols that was normally a constant. It was a personality factor, something to do with relationships: it was suggesting a change in the future, though whether near or far, Rhiow couldn’t tell.

  “Where did you get this?” she said, prodding the symbol with one paw.

  Arhu shrugged. “It came out of the Knowledge: ask the Whisperer.”

  Rhiow waved her tail gently at that. Sometimes such things happened to a wizard who routinely did a lot of spelling: you saw a change in the symbology before it had reflected itself in your own person, or before it seemed to have so reflected itself. Then you were faced with the question of changing it back to a more familiar form—and wondering whether you were thereby keeping yourself stuck in some situation which was meant to change gradually—or leaving it the way it was, and wondering what in the worlds it might mean. Rhiow took a long breath, looking at it, and left it alone.

  Urruah straightened up, apparently having found nothing untoward in his own name, and said, “It looks fine. Is everything else ready?”

  Arhu stared at him. “You’re not going to check it?”

  “Why should I?” Urruah said. “You passed your Ordeal: you’re a wizard. You’re not going to get us killed.” He sat down and started washing again, making faces again, but this time persisting.

  Rhiow sat down too, there being no reason to stand. “Go on,” she said to Arhu: “Let’s see what we see.”

  Arhu looked around him a little nervously, then stepped to the center of the spell and half-closed his eyes, a concentrating look. Rhiow watched with some interest. Spelling styles varied widely among wizards of whatever species: there were some who simply “read” the words of a spell out of the Whispering, and others who liked to memorize large chunks: some who preferred the sound of the words of the Speech spoken aloud, and some who felt embarrassed to be talking out loud to the universe and preferred to keep their contracts with it silent. Arhu was apparently one of these, for without a word spoken—though Rhiow could feel, as if through her fur, that words in the Speech were being thought—she felt the spell starting to take: checking for her presence and Urruah’s, sealing the air in around them, and then the transit—

  —abrupt, quicker than she was used to: but that was very much in Arhu’s style. One moment they were looking at the dirty river flowing between its sludgy banks, and the foul air snuggling down against it: then everything went black and white.

  And brown. She had not been prepared for the brown: it was a strange note. They were standing on a high place, one of the Lunar Carpathians, she thought, a fairly level spot scattered with small grainy rocks and the powdery pumice dust typical of even this area, which had suffered its share of meteoric impacts, exclusive of impacts of other types. The sphere of air held around them by the spell shed frozen oxygen and nitrogen snow around them at the interface between it and vacuum: the snow sifted out and down a little harder, sliding down the outside of the invisible sphere invoked by the spell, when any of them moved slightly and changed the way the wizardry compensated for their presence.

  The brown lay streaked over the white and gray-black of the craters around them. It was ejecta from another impact, a much larger one, some miles away if Rhiow was any judge. She looked all around them for its source, but the crater was well over the short lunar horizon.

  More than six miles away, anyway, she thought, glancing over at Arhu. He was licking his nose repeatedly. “Are you all right?” Rhiow said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “but the spell’s not. Radiation.”

  “The problem won’t be the Van Allen belts,” Rhiow said. “We’re well away from them. Solar flare, possibly—”

  Urruah gave Rhiow a look. You are an optimist, he said silently.

  “I don’t think so,” Arhu said. “I need a better look. Come on—”

  He started to walk upwards as if on a stairway: a good trick, Rhiow thought, if he was using the air trapped with them to do it. She got up and carefully went up after him, none too concerned about the actual instrumentality at the moment—and much more concerned that the bubble of air should follow them all up, as Urruah came stepping carefully up behind her. She also took some care with how she went in the low gravity. Falling off Arhu’s invisible stairway, and down and out of the spell, would be unfortunate.

  The spell followed them with no problems: its diameter was at least ten meters, and Arhu had apparently designated himself as its center. They walked upward for perhaps a quarter mile before Arhu stopped, standing there in the middle of nothing and looking down on the desolate landscape. Rhiow looked down too, and drew in a long painful breath. The crater off to the northward, the one which had produced the brown ejecta, lay plain before them. It was at least five miles in diameter, and ran all the way to the far horizon northward. Great fissures ran from it, in all directions but mostly toward the north. The bottom of the crater was glazed as if with ice, but it was not ice: it shone with a bitter, brittle gleam under the slanting light of the sun.

  “So what would you make it?” Urruah said after a moment’s silence. “A megaton or so? And there are a lot more of these. Some particularly big impacts up in the northern hemisphere …”

  Rhiow’s tail lashed furiously. “The only good thing about this,” she said, “is that they did this up here and not on Earth. But still—what a message.”

  “Yes indeed,” Urruah said. “For every other pride of ehhif in the world to see, every time the Moon comes up. “Look what we could do to you, if we wanted to.” The question is—which ehhif down there are doing it?” He glanced at the gibbous-waning Earth hanging above the horizon.


  “When we come back,” Rhiow said, “we’re going to have to find out. The Lone One has seen to it somehow that these people have been given the most dangerous technology that they could possibly get their hands on. With the assumption, I’m sure, that they’ll certainly destroy themselves. What we’re going to have to do is fly in the face of that certainty and stop it.”

  “If we can,” Urruah said. He sounded rather muted: even his supreme self-confidence was having trouble dealing with this.

  “Space travel as well,” Arhu said. “They can come up here and see what’s here … and then they do this.” He was bristling.

  “If we’re very lucky, we may be able to keep them from doing worse,” Rhiow said. “But even here, I don’t want to linger. The longer we stay in this universe … the more we endanger our own.”

  “Let’s get back down then,” Urruah said. The timeslide won’t have self-activated yet, but that doesn’t matter. It functioned: that part of our test is a success. We can come back when we need to. And as for this—” He too was fluffed up as he looked down around him.

  “Arhu,” he said after a moment, “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have seen it this way, you first time out.”

  “No, it’s all right,” Arhu said. “We needed to do it: you were right. But let’s go home.”

  He paused, standing there on nothing, and narrowed his eyes. A second later they were standing on the old dock by the Thames again, and Rhiow’s ears were ringing with the bang! of displaced air which accompanied their appearance. There were ehhif walking by the river, further eastward, but they paid no attention to the sound at all.

  “They probably think it’s a car backfiring or something,” Urruah muttered.

  “Maybe so,” Rhiow said, “and I’ll be glad to get back where that kind of perception is normal for its time. Come on!”

  They made their way as quickly as they dared, sidled, back to Old Jewry, the street where the other end of the timeslide was sited. It was hard to avoid the ehhif, sometimes, they were so crowded together, and Rhiow was bruised or kicked more than once as the team made its way toward the timeslide.

  They were about to break into a run across the noise and muck of George Street again, making for Old Jewry, when to Rhiow’s complete astonishment, Arhu, ahead of her, suddenly darted through a thicket of walking legs and westward down George Street. “Arhu!’ she cried. “What are you—”

  “Just two blinks—!’ he said, and dodged around a corner. Rhiow and Urruah crowded against a nearby building, staring after him. Not quite two blinks later—more like two blinks and a quick scrub—he reappeared, dodging among the ehhif. He was unsidled, and had something large and white in his mouth: it flapped as he came. Ehhif pointed and laughed at Arhu as he ran.

  He ran straight past Urruah and Rhiow, and straight across George Street, weaving expertly to avoid the traffic. Rhiow and Urruah threw each other a look and went after him at speed. All three made it to the far side together, as more horse carriages and a few more of the antique cars came splashing and rattling down through the mud at them.

  Arhu was spattered but triumphant. “I saw an ehhif drop it,” he said, and dropped it himself, going sidled again.

  “How could you see him around the corner?” Urruah said, while Rhiow peered curiously at the thing. It said, THE TIMES, AUGUST 18, 1875, and everywhere else it was covered with small fine print in ehhif English. It would hardly have passed for a newspaper in New York: it seemed to have only three pages, no pictures, and no ads.

  Arhu wrinkled his nose up. “I mean, I see him,” he said. “I still see him now, even though he did it already. Au, Rhiow, the way we talk about time doesn’t work right for talking about vision. I need new words or something …”

  “One last check,” Urruah said, and held his head up as if sniffing for something. Rhiow looked at him, bemused.

  “What?” she said.

  “I’ve been feeling around me with a detector spell ever since we got here,” Urruah said. “But to no effect. You remember Mr… Illingworth? Well, there’s no sign of him.”

  “You mean, after all this, he’s not from here?”

  “I don’t know what it means,” Urruah said, “and at the moment, I’m not going to hang around to find out. Come on!”

  Arhu picked up the paper again, coming unsidled as he did so, and they headed down the little street together, keeping to one side, for there were some ehhif passing up and down it together. Urruah stopped at one point and felt around with his paw in the mud. “All right,” he said, “there’s the “tripwire”. Now if these vhai’d ehhif will just go away—”

  It took some minutes: there were several false starts in which the street would look like it was going to be clear, and then another ehhif or two or three would come along from one end or the other. This left Rhiow with nothing to do but watch her own tension increase, and try to reduce it. Oh, please let the world still be there when we get back, our own world, please—! Meanwhile, Arhu had to keep dropping the paper and picking it up, to avoid being seen by the ehhif. “It’s all right, isn’t it?” he said suddenly. “Bringing things back?”

  “Or forward in this case?” Rhiow said. “Yes. Things are all right. Anything alive, that’s where the complications start …”

  “Quick,” said Urruah. The street was empty, and he had pulled the “tripwire’. The circle of the timeslide spell sprang into being around them. “Ready? Brace yourselves—”

  Rhiow tried, but against that awful pressure there was no way you could brace, nothing you could do but endure as everything, light and breath and almost life, was squeezed out of you. Hang on, she thought, it can’t last much longer, hang on—

  —and suddenly things were dark again, and Auhlae and Fhrio were looking at them, bemused, from outside the circle.

  “What’s the matter?” Auhlae said. “Didn’t it work?”

  “Perfect!’ Urruah said. “Right to the tenth of a second.” The rest of his pleasure in the accuracy of his spelling got lost for Rhiow in a rush of astonishment and delight that the world seemed, by and large, to be the way they had left it. But the delight didn’t last. She couldn’t get rid of the image of that other world’s Moon, and of the certainty that, unless they could work out what had gone wrong and what to do about it, their own Moon would look that way before long. Urruah was right: reality resisted being changed. But it could not resist such change indefinitely: and the rumbling dark of the Underground tunnels almost immediately looked a lot less welcome, and started to look rather like a trap.

  “We should get everyone together,” she said to Auhlae. “If you thought you had trouble with random temporal accesses … when we show you what we’ve found, you’ll wish a few stray pastlings were all you had …”

  FOUR

  “They have nuclear weapons??” Huff said.

  “Whether they’re exactly weapons the way we would define them, I don’t know,” Rhiow said. “We were hardly there long enough to guess anything about their delivery systems. Do they have missiles? I haven’t a clue. But do they know how to produce large nuclear explosions? You’d best believe it.”

  Relative silence fell in the corner of the pub where the London and New York gating teams sat that evening: the only other sound was the occasional dinging and idiot music played by what the London team referred to as the “fruit machines”. Rhiow much wished the machines, ranged around the back wall of this room of the pub, would emit something as innocent as fruit, instead of the deafening shower and clatter of one-pound coins that came out of them every now and then when ehhif played with them. As evening drew on and The Mint started to fill up, the hope of a pile of those coins was starting to keep the machines busy with ehhif who drifted in, fed the machines money, and then shook and banged them when they didn’t give it back again, with dividends. It was, in its way, a charming illustration of some ehhif faith in the truism that what you gave the universe, it would give back: but they were plainly a little confused about the timing of s
uch returns, or the percentages involved.

  “But just the idea of them blowing up the Moon,” Siffha’h said. “It’s awful. It’ll be themselves, next …”

  Rhiow, tucked down in the “meatloaf configuration”, twitched her tail in agreement. “It was always a favorite tactic of the Lone One’s,” she said. “Tricking life into undoing itself. And so doing, mocking the Powers, which tend to let life take care of itself, by and large.”

  “They were lucky not to bring the whole thing down on top of them,” Fhrio said. “Imagine if they had hit one of those deep lunar ‘mantle faults’ and blown it apart. Just think of the tidal effects on the Earth … and then the fragment impacts later.”

  “I’m sure sa’Rrahh would have been delighted,” Huff said. He was lying on his side, finishing one more wash after acting as courier for yet another round of snacks for the assembled group. “I wouldn’t say that was her main intent in this case, as Lone Power, but it would have been entirely acceptable. As it is, it looks like the poor ehhif back then have been given the quickest way for an unprepared or immature species to kill itself off … tried and tested in other parts of this Galaxy and others. And if that universe settles fully into place before we can dislodge it, we’ll find ourselves living on the Earth that’s a direct historical successor to that one. If ‘living’ is the word I’m looking for … because we’ll be in the middle of the nuclear winter.”

  “Well, all we have to do now,” Siffha’h said, “is figure out what to do about this.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s all,” Fhrio said.

  Rhiow paid no more attention to this remark than the others seemed to be doing, instead glancing over toward the corner. Half-hidden by the arrangement of a couple of the fruit machines, Arhu’s newspaper was spread out on the floor, and he was bent over it, carefully puzzling out the words. Rhiow had always found it useful that understanding of the Speech let a wizard understand other written languages as well as all spoken ones. Normally she didn’t get too carried away by this advantage: but Arhu had been turning into a voracious reader of ehhif printed material of all kinds, everything from the big advertisements posted up here and there in Grand Central to scraps of newspaper and magazines that people dropped on the platforms, or the complete papers that Urruah fished out of the garbage bins at regular intervals. Urruah had claimed, with some pride, that Arhu was taking after him in his erudition. Rhiow agreed, but was clearer about the reasons for it. Arhu was nosy … nearly as nosy as Urruah, and with a taste for gossip and scandal nearly as profound. She couldn’t really complain: that insatiable curiosity was part of what made them good at being wizards. At the same time, sometimes the habit drove Rhiow nearly crazy. Urruah’s endlessly relayed tales about the sexual peculiarities and mishaps of ehhif made her wish very much that Urruah would read more of the kind of newspapers which did not feature headlines like HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR.