Rhiow stood at the corner of Seventieth and Second, by the corner of the dry-cleaners’ 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 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 a life or so on, in new and uncontaminated circumstances…
She crossed Second and turned south, trotting down the avenue at a good rate, while above her, the last against the brightening sky, 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-hand side of the tracks and began following them southward, along the line of the eastward sidings. Ahead, the fluorescents were still on night-time 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 Twenty-Four: 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 Twenty-Four. 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. Someone 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 which 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?”