Диана Дуэйн - To Visit the Queen

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?"
Rhiow sighed. The human school year was just starting, and ehhif businesses were swinging back into full operation after the last of their people came back from vacation … The City was sliding back into fully operative mode, which meant increased pressure on the normal rapid transit. That in turn meant more stress on the gates, for the increased numbers of ehhif moving in and out of the City meant more stress on the fabric of reality, especially in the areas where large numbers of people flowed in and out in the vicinity of the gate matrices themselves. String structure got finicky, matrices got warped and gates went down without warning at such times: hardly a day went by without a malfunction. The Pennsylvania Station gating team had their paws full just with their normal work. Having the Grand Central gates added to their workload, at their busiest time
"Ruah, it can't be helped," Rhiow said. "They can take it up with the Powers themselves, if they like, but the Whisperer will send them off with fleas in their ears and nothing more. These things happen."
"Yeah, well, what about you?"
"Me?"
"You know. Your ehhif."
Rhiow sighed at that. Urruah was "nonaligned" – without a permanent den and not part of a pride-by-blood, but most specifically uncompanioned by ehhif, and therefore what they would call a "stray": mostly at the moment he lived in a dumpster outside a construction site in the East Sixties. Arhu had inherited Saash's position as mouser-in-chief at the underground parking garage where she had lived, and had nothing to do to keep in good odor with his "employers" except, at regular intervals, to drop something impressively dead in front of the garage office, and to appear fairly regularly at mealtimes. Rhiow, however, was denned with an ehhif in an twentieth-story apartment between First and Second in the
Seventies. Her comings and goings during his workday were nothing which bothered Iaehh, since he didn't see them: but in the evenings, if he didn't know where she was, he got concerned. Rhiow had no taste for upsetting him – between the two of them, since the sudden loss of her "own' ehhif, Hhuha, there had been more than enough upset to go around.
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