Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

“If we go upslope a quarter mile or so,” Helen said, “past the cave, that’ll take us well away from the beaten path. There’s a place where the hillside shelves out flat for a little bit.”

“Arhu?” Rhiow said. “You two go on and get it set up. And ask Aufwi to come up here as soon as he’s finished making the L.A. gate safe and shutting it down.”

Siffha’h and Arhu headed up the hill, but not before Arhu had thrown an odd look over his shoulder at Helen. “Sorry,” Rhiow said. “You’ve got to excuse him: he has trouble with ehhif sometimes. He was abused by them, almost killed, when he was very young.”

“It’s no problem,” Helen said. “We all have our burdens. Believe me, I have problems with some of my fellow ehhif, occasionally.” She smiled a little ruefully as they started up the hill. “All just part of the Game, my ikhareya says…”

“I was going to ask you about that,” Urruah said as they headed upwards through the long grass. “I heard the word you used, and Herself gave me the closest cognate in the Speech at the same time. You have one of the Powers that Be for your own?”

Helen blinked, then laughed. “Uh, no! No one could own one of Them. I’ve just got a close personal connection to one of Them: lots of wizards who’re native Americans do. It’s like yours to– I think you call Her ‘the Whisperer?’”

“That’s right,” Rhiow said. “You hear wizardry through your connection, then–”

Helen’s look was a touch sheepish. “Oh, no, I still use a written Manual a lot of the time. I was born and raised in the Valley, in Encino: I didn’t really start getting to know my tribal life until a few years ago, after I finished college and went into the Force. But I’ve been really busy up here since then, since it turns out the old shaman needed to train a new one before he went West. As usual, there aren’t any coincidences…”

From above and ahead of them came a soft pop!, the sound of someone trying to minimize the air displacement from his appearance “out of nothing”. There stood Aufwi on the flattened space that Helen had described, his head and shoulders silhouetted against the blue. “Do you know Aufwi?” Rhiow said, as they came up on the level. “He handles the L.A. gate.”

“Sure, I see him downtown every now and then. Haku, Aufwi, how’s it going?”

“A lot better than it was earlier, believe me,” he said as they came up and out onto the shelf that lay under the lee of the hill. The shelf was mostly hard dirt strewn with rockfall, and shadowed from the sun by a slope now more nearly a cliff, all studded with outcroppings of brown and golden stone. In a relatively bare spot off to one side, nearly into the sun again, the glow of a complex spell-circle lay spread across the ground, and Arhu and Siffha’h were was pacing around it, looking it over.

No way they could have done that from scratch just now, Urruah said silently to Rhiow, going over to examine the circle. They’ve been practicing for this! For how long, I wonder?

Arhu’s got the Eye, Rhiow said, and I’ve been sure for some time that he doesn’t tell us everything he foresees. Who knows when he might have seen this? It’s handy now…

Aufwi came over to Rhiow. “All’s secure back at the Station now,” he said.

“The gate’s locked down?” Rhiow said.

“Absolutely.”

“You’re sure this time?” Urruah said.

Aufwi looked a little annoyed. “I yanked every power connection but its standby. If it can function in spite of that–”

Rhiow put her tail up against Aufwi’s. “He’s teasing you, Aufwi,” she said. “Ignore him. Once we’ve slid back to where and when we need to be, and had a look at Hwaith’s gate, you can use that to jump forward to ‘now’ again– then wake yours up and lock it on a nearby set of coordinates to do your comparison.”

“Exactly what I had in mind.”

“Good,” Rhiow said, and followed Urruah over to the circle. Helen came behind them, looking over the complex series of nested and interlocking circles and ellipses, either containing long sentences in the Speech or being comprised of them. She nodded at what she saw. “Done without any physical elements at all?” she said. “Very slick.”

“Now why would we use concrete spatial interruptors? Chips and batteries and so on?” Siffha’h put her ears back in disdain. “Inelegant. A brute-force solution.”

“Plugins and carry-ons,” Arhu said, looking smugly around the circle, “are for newbies.”

“Oh, yeah, well, plug this in, oh expert one,” Urruah said, and took a swipe at Arhu in passing as he went to his own. “Must be nice to know everything so young.”

“He just sees everything,” Siffha’h said, resuming her prowl around the circle, and eyeing the spell diagram with care. “Whereas I–”

She ducked just in time for Rhiow’s paw went through the air where her head had been. “You see what I put up with,” Rhiow said to Helen, and started to pace around the circle after Siffha’h. “But I see they’ve been quick and added a circle for you, Helen. Is it big enough?”

“Looks fine.”

“Then you’ll want to add in your personal data. Sif, let’s have a look at the coordinates–”

“Over here,” Siffha’h said. She had laid the spatial and temporal fixes into a small inner circle of their own. Rhiow put a paw down on each of the sets of coordinates in sequence, seeing each group of words and characters in the Speech glow bright in turn. She closed her eyes for a moment to regard her own mental “workspace” and the copy of the coordinates that the Whisperer had left there. “The time’s right,” Rhiow said. “As for the location–”

“The other side of the Hollywood Hills,” Aufwi said, “near Mount Cahuenga. Hwaith’s put us a good ways from where he said the quake activity was occurring.”

“All right,” Rhiow said. She stepped into the spot she could see had been marked out for her, and bent down to check her name and her personality data: it was all as it should have been. “Let’s go, then. Everybody check your info one last time. Then let’s slide.” Rhiow looked at the anchor-end duration data written in the center of the circle. “The slide’s got a five-minute return aperture: short enough so we don’t have to worry about leaving it for this brief period, and plenty wide enough to give us room to come back and forth several times, if we have to, without meeting ourselves unnecessarily.” She looked around.

Siffha’h settled herself in her customary place, the central “powersource” circle that would drive the wizardry as a whole: Arhu was nearby in a separate circle of his own, watching the spell’s progress indicators. Urruah sat in his own circle opposite Rhiow’s, out at the edge, where he could keep an eye on things. Aufwi and Helen settled themselves into their circles on either side of Rhiow.

“Ready?” she said.

Tails were waved, ears put forward, one head nodded. “Let’s go, then,” Rhiow said, and looked down.

The initial words of the spell burned bright in front of her and all the others. All together, they began to read, and the world leaned in to hear. This is a timeslide inauguration. Claudication type unmiq-beth-quaternary-five with reflection, authorization groups–

Instead of the usual growing, listening silence, a sense of inward pressure began to build around them all, as the inbuilt persuasiveness of the language that had made the world now started talking the “now” out of being the present, and into becoming the past.

Rhiow had done timeslides before, and had occasionally been disconcerted by the strange sense of bring frozen in one moment while the fragmented thought processes of thousands of other nearby minds, all caught in the moment she was departing, seemed to come avalanching past her as she was pulled away into the past. But it was different here. Though all the Earth’s surface is old, as the beings living on its surface reckon time, this spot seemed far older than usual because of how long human beings had lived here continuously. While the thoughts of tens of thousands of nearby ehhif preoccupied with work and rent and cars and food and phone conversations poured past them and were swiftly lost, it wasn’t silence that began to replace them, but a long slow sound or rhythm like a chant, like a long memory of all the lives that had ever been here, all heard together. Only some of the minds involved in that rhythm were human: and under the low throb of the sound, counterpoint to it, a long rich unfading gong-note of some near-immortal point of view seemed to run at the roots of everything. The Powers? Rhiow thought. The Earth itself? There was no telling. And then it was too late to try to tell: the pressure grew and grew as they were squeezed out of their own time, into another–