To Visit the Queen (9 page)

Rhiow stood at the corner of Seventieth and Second, by the corner of the dry cleaner's there, waiting for the traffic to finish passing so that she could cross.
They're scared,
she thought:
they feel they need protection from the Universe. Nor does it help that though they may know the Powers exist,
ehhif
aren't sure what
their
role is. They're not even sure what happens to them when they die.
There was an unsettling sense of permanence about
ehhif
death, in which Rhiow was no expert despite her recent brush with it. The
ehhif
themselves seemed to have been told a great many mutually exclusive stories about what happened After. Her own
ehhif
was somewhere benevolent, Rhiow knew. But where? And would Hhuha ever come back, the way you might expect a Person to, during the first nine lives at least? Not that, certainties aside, it wasn't always a slight shock when you looked into the eyes of some new acquaintance and suddenly saw an old one there, and saw the glint of recognition as they knew you, too. Rhiow's fur had stood up all over her the first time it had happened, a couple of lives back. You got used to it, though. Some People tended to seek out friends they had known, finishing unfinished business or starting over again when everyone had moved on a life or so, in new and uncontaminated circumstances.

She came to Second and turned south, trotting down the avenue at a good rate, while above her, against the brightening sky, the last yellow streetlights stuttered out. Rhiow crossed Second diagonally at Sixty-seventh and kept heading south and west, using the sidewalk openly for as long as the pedestrian traffic stayed light. It was unwise to attract too much attention, even this early: There were always
ehhif
out walking their
houiff
before they went to work.
But you can't really feel things as clearly when you're sidled,
Rhiow thought,
and anyway, there's no
houff
I couldn't handle.
If the sidewalk got too crowded, Rhiow knew five or six easy ways to do her commute out of sight. But she liked taking the "surface streets": more of the variety of the life of the city showed there. There were doubtless People who would feel that Rhiow should be paying more attention to her own kind, but by taking care of the
ehhif,
she took care of People, too.

Southward and westward: Park Avenue and Fifty-seventh. Here there was considerable pedestrian traffic even at this time of morning, people heading home from night shifts or going to breakfast before work, and the two greenery-separated lanes of Park were becoming a steady stream of cabs and trucks and cars. Though she was fifteen blocks north of Grand Central proper, Rhiow was now right on top of the terminal's track array: at least the part of it where it spread from the four "ingress" tracks into the main two-level array, forty-two tracks above and twenty-three below. As she stood on the southwest corner of Fifty-seventh and Park, beside one of the handsome old apartment buildings of the area, Tower U was some fifteen or twenty feet directly below her. From below came the expected echoing rumble, the tremor in the sidewalk easily felt through her paw-pads— one of the first trains of the morning being moved into position.

Five twenty-three,
Rhiow thought, knowing the train in question. She looked up one last time at the paling sky, then headed for the grate in the sidewalk just west of the corner by the curb.

She slipped in between the bars, stepped down the slope of the grainy, eroded concrete under the grating, and paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust. Ahead of her the slope dropped away suddenly.

It was a moderately long drop, ten feet: she took a breath, jumped, came down on top of a tall cement-block wiring box, and jumped from there another eight feet or so to the gravel in the access tunnel. Rhiow trotted down the cast-cement tunnel, all streaked with old iron stains, to where it joined the main train tunnel underneath Park. There in front of her was the little concrete bunker of Tower U, its lights dark at the moment. To her left were the four tracks, which almost immediately flowered into ten— seven active tracks, three sidings— by the time they reached Fifty-fifth.

Rhiow looked both ways, listened, then bounded over to the left-paw side of the tracks and began following them southward, along the line of the eastward sidings. Ahead, the fluorescents were still on nighttime configuration, one-quarter of them on and three-quarters off, striping the platforms in horizontal bands of light against the rusty dimness. She trotted toward them, seeing something small move down by the bottom of Track 24: and she caught a glimpse of something that didn't belong down here, a glitter of white or hazy blue light concentrated in one spot.

Bong,
said the ghost-voice of the clock in the main concourse, as Rhiow cut across a few intervening tracks and jumped up onto the platform for 24. There was Urruah, sitting and looking at the dimly seen warp and weft of the worldgate, the oval of its access matrix a little larger than usual.

" 'Luck, 'Ruah," Rhiow said, and stood by him a moment with her tail laid over his back in greeting. "Where's the wonder child?"

"Upstairs begging for pastrami from the deli guy."

Rhiow sighed. "There's one habit of his I wish you wouldn't encourage."

"Oh, indeed? I seem to remember where he got it.
Some
one took him upstairs and— "

"Oh, all right." Rhiow grinned. "We all slip sometimes. Did you open this?"

"No, he did, while he was waiting for us."

"For us? You weren't here?"

"He was early. Got impatient, apparently."

Rhiow put one ear back. "Not sure I like him doing this by himself, as yet..."

"How were you planning to stop him? Come on, Rhi, look at it. The synchronization's exact. He would have stayed here to keep an eye on it," Urruah added, forestalling her as she opened her mouth, "but I told him to go on upstairs and get himself a snack. The guy likes him: he won't get in trouble."

Rhiow put her ear forward again, though she had a definite feeling of being "ganged up on by the toms."
It may be something I'm going to have to get used to.
"All right," she said, studying the gate. It was open on London, set for nonpatency and a nonvisible matrix on the far side: this side would have been invisible to her too, except that she could see where Arhu had carefully laid in the "graphic" Speech-form of her name, and Urruah's and his own, in the portion of the spell matrix that controlled selective visibility and patency configurations. Beyond the matrix, light glittered off the river that ran by the big old stone building on which the view was centered: a huge square building of massive stone walls, with what appeared to be more buildings inside it, like a little walled city.

"The Tower of London," Urruah said.

"Doesn't look like a tower..."

"There's one inside it," Urruah said, "the original. The gating complex proper is a little to the north: this is a quieter place for a meeting, the Whisperer suggested. Local time's four hours or so after sunrise."

"Ten thirty," Rhiow said. "Is this a good time for the gating team there?"

"Don't know how
good
it is," Urruah said, "but it's what She specified. She may have spoken to them already. Ah hah— here he comes."

The small black-and-white form came trotting insouciantly down the platform, not even sidled. "Arhu," Rhiow said as he came up to them, "come on. You know how they are about cats in here— "

"Not about cats they can't find," Arhu said, licking his chops, and sidled. Rhiow sighed, leaned over, and breathed breaths with him: and she blinked. "Sweet Iau in a basket, what's
that?"

"Chili pickle."

Rhiow turned to Urruah. "You have created a
monster,"
she said.

Urruah laughed out loud. "Your fault. You showed him how to do the food-catching trick for the deli guy first."

"Yes, but
you
encourage him all the time, and— "

"Hey, come on, Rhi, it's good," Arhu said. "The guy in there likes hot stuff. He gave me some on a piece of roast beef last week as a joke." Arhu grinned. "Now the joke's on him: I like it. But he's good about it. I ate a whole one of those green Hungarian chilies for him the other day. He thinks it's cool: he makes other people come and see me eat it."

"Not the transit police, I hope," Rhiow said.

"Naah. I wouldn't go if I knew they were up there. I always know when they're down on the tracks," Arhu said.

Rhiow flicked one ear resignedly: there were plainly advantages to being a fledgling visionary. "All right. Are you ready?"

"I was ready an hour before you got here."

"So I hear. Well, the parameters are all set: You did a good job. Turn the gate patent, and let's go."

Arhu sat up in front of the great oval matrix, reached in, and pulled out a pawful of strings. The clarity of the image in the matrix suddenly increased greatly, a side effect of the patency.

"Go ahead," Arhu said. Urruah, already sidled, leaped through into the day on the far side of the gate: Rhiow sidled and followed him.

The darkness stripped away behind her as she leaped through the gate matrix. She came down on cobblestones, found her footing, and looked around her in the morning of a bright day, blinding after the darkness of the Grand Central tunnels. Off to her right, just southward, was the wide river, which she had earlier seen glinting in the distance: in the other direction, up the cobbled slope, was a small street running into a much larger, busier one. Traffic driving on the left charged past on it. She turned, looking behind her at where the smaller street curved away, running parallel to the river. Black taxicabs of a tall, blocky style were stopping in the curve of the street, and
ehhif
were getting out of them and making their way in one of two directions: either toward where she and Urruah stood, looking toward an arched gate that led into the Tower, or toward a lesser gate giving on another expanse of cobblestones, which sloped down toward the river.

As Rhiow looked around, Arhu stepped through the worldgate, with one particular hyperstring still held in his teeth. He pulled it through after him and grounded it on the cobbles. Gate matrix and string vanished together, or seemed to; but Rhiow could see a little parasitic light from the anchor string still dancing around one particular cobble.

"That's our tripwire," Arhu said. "Pull it and it activates the gate to open again."

"And what about the other wizards who might need the gate while we're gone?" Rhiow said.

Arhu put his whiskers forward, pleased with himself. "It won't interfere— the gate proper's back in neutral again. I only coded these timespace coordinates into one string."

"Very good," Rhiow said: and it was. He was already inventing his own management techniques, a good sign that he was beginning genuinely to understand the basics of gating.

They looked around them for a few moments more in the sun. It was a breezy morning: clouds raced by, their shadows patterning the silver river with gray and adding new shades to the gray-brown-silver dazzle-painting of the battleship that was moored on the other side of the river. Arhu had no eyes for that, though, or for the traffic, or for the
ehhif
passing them by. He was looking at the stone walls of the Tower, and his ears were back.

"It's
old
here," Arhu said. His ears went forward, and then back again, and kept doing that, as if he were trying to listen to a lot of things at once... things that made him nervous.

"It's old in New York, too," Urruah said.

"Yeah, but not like this...."

"It's the
ehhif,"
Rhiow said. "They've been here so long— first thousands, then hundreds of thousands of them, then millions, all denning on the two sides of this river. A thousand years now, and more."

"There's more to it than that," Arhu said. He was staring at the Tower. "I smell blood...."

"Yes," said a big deep voice behind them. "So do we."

They turned in some surprise, for he had come up behind them very quietly, even for a Person. Rhiow, taking him in at first glance, decided that she should revise her ideas about bigger cats being needed in the world: They were already here. This was without any question one of the biggest cats she had ever seen, not to mention the fluffiest. His fur, mostly black on his back, shaded to a blended silver-brown and then to white on his underparts, with four white feet and a white bib making the dark colors more striking. He had a broad, slightly tabby-striped face with surprisingly delicate-looking slanted green eyes in it, and a nose with a smudge: the splendid plume of gray-black tail held up confidently behind him looked a third the thickness of his body, which was considerable. If this Person was lacking for anything, it wasn't food.

"We are on errantry," Rhiow said, "and we greet you."

"Well met on the errand," said the Person. "I'm Huff: I lead the London gating team. And you would be Rhiow?"

"So I would. Hunt's luck to you, cousin." They bumped noses in meeting-courtesy. "And here is Urruah, my older teammate: and Arhu, who's just joined us."

Noses were bumped all around: Arhu was a little hesitant about it at first. "I won't bite," Huff said, and indeed it seemed unlikely. Rhiow got an almost immediate impression from him that this was one of those jovial and easygoing souls who regret biting even mice.

"I'm sorry to meet you without the rest of the team," Huff said, "but we had another emergency this morning, and they're in the middle of handling it. I'll bring you down to them, if you'll come with me. Anyway, I thought you might like to see something of the 'outside' of the gating complex before we got down into the heart of the trouble."

"It's good of you," Urruah said, falling into step on one side of him, Rhiow pacing along on the other: Arhu brought up the rear, still looking thoughtfully at the Tower. "Did I see right from the history in the Whispering that the gates actually used to be aboveground here, and were relocated?"