by Диана Дуэйн
"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 such 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.
What had become immediately plain was that, in 1875 at least, The Times of London was not that kind of newspaper. There was hardly anything to it. A front page which was almost entirely classified ads, both commercial and private: then interior pages which reported what seemed to the publishers to be important news – most of it having to do with ehhif from the pride-of-prides "Britain", or other prides closely associated with it – and then long reports about what was going on in the place where the pride-rulers sat, the "Houses of Parliament".
"This is mostly a lot of small stuff," Arhu said, glancing up at the others in the momentary quiet. "Ehhif buying and selling dens to live in, and renting them out: or asking other ehhif to come and work with them: or buying and selling little things, or asking other ehhif to help them find things they've lost. Some other news about shows and plays they want ehhif to go to: and then news about the pride-ruler and what he does all day. That's the interesting part: it's not a
Queen. It's a King."
Huff breathed out heavily. "Then the old Queen is dead in that eighteen seventy-five," he said. "There's a major change. In our world she lived on almost into the next century."
"But the world's different, that's for sure," Arhu said. "They have all kinds of things that the Whispering says weren't there in our world's eighteen seventy-five. A lot of machines like our time's ehhif have: even computers, though I don't think they're as smart as the ones in our time. And they've definitely got space travel, though it's as it is in our world: only the pride-rulers use it. I think it's for weapons too, mostly."
"Orbital?" Fhrio said.
"I don't know," Arhu said. "They don't seem eager to talk about it in here. They talk a lot about war, though … " He ran one paw down the page. "See. Here's the bombing that the Illingworth ehhif was talking about.
" 'The Continental powers have once again defied the King-Emperor's edict by using mechanical flying bombs based at Calais and Dieppe to strike at civilian targets in the south of Sussex and Essex. The Royal Air Force, led by units of His Majesty's 8th Flying Hussars, succeeded in destroying nearly all elements of the attack, but several flying bombs were knocked off course by the defending forces and exploded in suburban areas of Brighton and Hove, causing civilian casualties and destruction to a large area. The Ministry of War has announced that these attacks will be the cause of the most severe reprisal at a time of the Government's choosing – ""
Arhu stopped, his tail twitching slowly. Fhrio was growling under his breath. "This island has not been bombed since the second of the great ehhif wars in this century," Huff said. "That they should have been doing such things then … Does it say what they mean by "the Continental powers"?"
Arhu looked at the paper, reached out and carefully turned the middle leaf of it over with his paw. "I don't see any specific pride names," he said. "Maybe they expect everybody to know what they're talking about."
Huff sighed. "There's no question that this is useful," he said, "but it's not nearly enough to base an intervention on. How I wish the Whispering could throw some light on this … "
Rhiow shook her head. "She seems unable to discuss what's happening in an alternate universe," she said. "Is it possibly outside the Whisperer's brief? Would it be speculation, even for her? – which as we know is something she won't indulge in. Or is this simply something we're supposed to have to find out for ourselves … ?"
"Whichever," Urruah said, stretching, "the result is the same. But I wouldn't take too long about it. That other universe has 'become real' … and now it and ours are going to be starting to fight it out for primacy between them, though we can't feel the effects at the moment."
"We will soon enough," Fhrio growled. "The gates will be the first symptom. When something starts going wrong with them – "
"You mean, besides what's going wrong already," Arhu said.
Fhrio sat up, glaring at Arhu, and lifted one paw. Urruah looked over at Fhrio.
"I wouldn't," he said. "Anybody gets to shred his ears for tactlessness, it's me. Arhu, don't you think your tone was a little snide?"
"Sorry," Arhu said, not sounding very much so. Rhiow sighed.
Arhu had gone back to reading the back page of his paper. Rhiow watched this process with amusement that she hoped was well concealed. Besides being useful, the paper had given him an excuse not to try to speak or even to look at Siffha'h for the whole early evening so far. "Hey, listen to this," he said, and began reading aloud with some difficulty: not so much because of the words themselves, as because of how odd some of them seemed in context. "If its what Mr.. Illingworth was talking about."
"What?" Rhiow said. Even Siffha'h sat up at that.
"I think it is, anyway.
" 'Maskelyne and Cook – Dark Seance. The latest novelty and most
startling performance ever presented to the public … the seance includes the floating of Luminous Instruments, distribution of flowers with dew, appearance of materialized spirit forms, spirit hands, spirit arms, strange and apparently unearthly voices, music extraordinary, the inexplicable Coat Feat, all accomplished by Messrs. Maskelyne and Cook while bound hand and foot, the ropes secured with knots executed by the most perfect adepts in the art of rope-tying, elected by the audience.' "
He paused and looked up. "But that doesn't sound like such a big deal."
"It does if you're an ehhif and not a wizard," Urruah said. "We have ehhif like that at home: they do shows where they pretend to be wizards. Without the ethical element, anyway. It's 'magic' rather than wizardry: mostly they pretend to do things that would normally kill them, and make things disappear."
Fhrio muttered something under his breath. Rhiow, having occasionally shared what she suspected was Fhrio's sentiment, had to put her whiskers forward just a little. " 'In addition to the great sensation the Dark Seance and exposes of so-called spiritualism,' " Arhu said, " 'the following leading features amuse the audience at the present program: Mr.. Maskelyne's extraordinary comical illusions, extraordinary Chinese plate-spinning, lady floating in air, the animated walking-stick, the Tell Tale Hat, etc. The original and inexplicable Corded Box Feat is performed at every representation. Every afternoon at three, every evening at eight.' "
Arhu looked up again. " 'Spiritualism?' "
Rhiow shook her head and started to tilt her head sideways to listen to what the Whisperer might have to say: but Siffha'h said suddenly, "It's where ehhif used to think that their dead still stayed around to speak to them after they were gone. The live ehhif would try to get advice from their dead ones, and ask them what was going to happen in the world … things like that."
