Диана Дуэйн - To Visit the Queen

"How busy can gods get?" Arhu muttered, turning his attention back to the gate.
"You'd be surprised," Urruah said. "Queen Iau's daughters have their own lives to lead. You think the Silent One has all day to sit around waiting to see if you need help? Get off those little thaith of yours and do something."
"They're not little," Arhu said, and then fell silent for a moment. " … All right, should I just collapse this and start over?"
"Sure, go ahead," Rhiow said.
Arhu reached out a paw and hooked one claw into one of the glowing control strings of the gate. The visible gate-locus vanished, leaving nothing behind it but the intricate, faint traces of hyperstring structure in the air.
And he's right about them not being little, Rhiow said privately, from her mind to Urruah's.
When even you notice that, oh spayed one, Urruah said, it suggests that we may shortly have a problem on our hands.
Rhiow stifled a laugh, keeping her eye on Arhu as he studied the gate matrix, then sat up again and started slowly hooking strings out of the air to "reweave' the visible matrix. It surprises me that you
would describe the concept of approaching sexual maturity as a problem.
Oh, it's not, not as his affects me anyway, Urruah said. We're in– pride now: he's safe with me – it helps that the relationship between you and me isn't physical. Though I do feel sorry for you, Urruah said, magnanimously.
Rhiow simply put her whiskers forward and accepted the implied compliment without comment. But for him, Urruah said, there's likely to be trouble coming. Hormonal surges don't sort well with the normal flow of wizardly practice.
I'm not sure there's going to be anything normal about his practice for a while, Rhiow said, dry, as they watched the structure of the gate reassert itself in the air, rippling and flowing, wrinkling as if someone was pulling it out of shape from the edges. Arhu had not actually started his task on the gate yet, but he was thinking about it, and the gates were susceptible to the thoughts of the technicians who worked with them.
"Uh," Arhu said.
"Don't just pull it in all directions like a dead rat, for Iau's sake," Rhiow said, trying not to sound as impatient as she felt. "Take time to get your visualization sorted out first."
"Remember what I told you about visualizing the entire interweave of the gate's string structure as organized into five-stranded structures and groups of five," Urruah said. "Simplest that way: there are five major groupings of forces involved in worldgates, and besides, we have five claws on each paw, and these things are never accidental – "
"Wait a minute," Arhu said, sitting back again, but with a slightly suspicious look this time. "Are you trying to tell me that the whole species of People was built the way we are just so that we could be gate technicians – ?"
"Maybe not just for that purpose, no. But don't you find it a little strange that we're perfectly set up to handle strings physically, and that we can see them naturally, when no other species can?"
"The saurians can."
"That's a recent development," Rhiow said wearily. It was one of many "recent developments" which they were all slowly digesting. "Never mind that for now. No other species could. Meantime, do something before the thing defaults again … "
"All right," Arhu said. "Group one is for phase relationships." He plucked that control string out as he named it, held it hooked behind one claw, and a series of strings in the matrix ran bright golden as he activated them. Two is for the main hyperstring "junction weave" to four-dimensional space, and the "emphatic" forces: three is for the fifth-dimensional interweave, four is for dimensions six through ten and the lower electromagnetic spectrum, five is for the upper electromagnetic and the strong– and weak-force plena. And then – " He paused, licked his nose.
"Then comes motion," Urruah said, " – field nutation, sideslip, tesseral, cistemporal, cishyperspatial." He paused as Arhu leaned in to bite the strings that he was having trouble managing with his paws, " – and then the five strictly physical fields of motion. The planet rotates, it's inclined on its axis and precesses, it's also describing a large ellipse around the Sun, and the Sun is moving on the inward leg of a hyperbola with the galactic core at one focus, and the Galaxy – "
" – is rotating, yes, I think we would have heard if it had stopped ii
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."
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