“Oh, yes,” Rhiow said.
“Well, the gates have been here a lot longer than we have … and believe me, they have personalities. Mostly annoyed and suspicious ones. I think it may have had to do with their ‘upbringing’, their history. Populations would rise here and then be swept away without warning … and to a certain extent, the gate “learns” to adapt to the pressure of the population around it. Take that population away suddenly, and it must be like suddenly being thrown off something that you’ve always slept on safely before. The shock makes you stop trusting … you don’t know whether things will be the same from one day to the next. So the gates act fairly “calmly” for a period of time—a week, a month—and then—pfft! Auhlae made a soft spitting hiss of the kind that an annoyed Person would use to warn another away. “It can take endless time to calm them down. Do you have the same problem?”
Rhiow flicked her tail “no”. “Oh, they’re alive enough, all right,” she said. “Aaurh Herself made them, after alclass="underline" I’m not sure anything with that level of wizardry incorporated into it could avoid being alive, to some degree. But fortunately New York grew very steadily, and our gates behave themselves … Except when they don’t,” she added, wry. “Often enough …”
Auhlae purred in amusement. “You must run into the personality problem with other things, though. You sounded pretty definite
“Well, it crops up from time to time …” And glancing over at Arhu again (who was still gazing thoughtfully at Siffha’h, apparently without effect) and at Urruah and Fhrio (now leaning right into the gate’s matrix structure again, with their heads bent close together and almost invisible among the tangle of strings), Rhiow began to tell Auhlae about the diesel locomotives that ran the trains in and out of Grand Central. Theoretically they should have been just great complex hunks of metal and wiring. But they were not, as the ehhif who drove them and took care of them loudly attested. The engines had noticeable personalities which manifested in the ways they worked (or didn’t): some good-natured and easy-going, some spiteful and annoying, some lazy, some overtly hostile. Rhiow had wondered whether she and the engineers and mechanics were all projecting the traits of life onto dead things for which, admittedly, they all felt affection. But finally she had realized that that wasn’t it. She started wondering whether this acquisition of personality might be caused by something specific about the way the locomotives’ complicated shapes and structures affected the local shape of spacetime—the way the atomic and molecular structure of water, for example, manifested itself as wetness. The Whisperer had no answers for her, or none that made sense: and when Rhiow had taken the problem casually to the ehhif Advisory wizards for New York, Tom and Carl, they had shaken their heads and confessed an ignorance on which even their wizards’ Manuals could not shed light. Finally Rhiow had simply given up and started talking to the locomotives in the course of her rounds, despite being unable to tell whether it was making any difference. But certainly something with a personality, no matter how undeveloped, deserves to be talked to as if it exists…
Auhlae looked bemused at that, for a moment. “Now there’s something I hadn’t given much thought to,” she said. “The Underground trains … you get a faint sense of personality off them, but nothing like that. Or is it just because I haven’t been looking … ?”
“Hard to say,” Rhiow said. “But beware. Do you really need another area of interest? The one we share is trouble enough …”
Auhlae laughed softly. “Tell me about it,” she said, as Huff came back down the stairs again.
He came padding toward them. “Problems, hrr’t?” she said.
“Oh, I wanted a look at number three,” Huff said, “since this one’s being worked on.” He sat down beside Auhlae and leaned against her slightly. “You know how they tend to interfere with each other—their catenary links are close together in the power-feed “bundle” from their linkage to your gates—” he waved his tail at Rhiow—“and to the Downside.” He paused a moment, then said, “Is it true that you were there? Down deep, right at the roots of things?”
“We were there,” Rhiow said, “but it’s not a memory I’d call up willingly just now. For one thing, we lost a partner of my age there: if we had her here now, I’d bet we’d have solved your problem already. As it is, we’re all learning new jobs, and everything is so confused …”
“I’m sorry for your trouble,” said Huff: and Auhlae blinked somber agreement, stirring her tail slowly.
“Oh, it wasn’t all sad,” Rhiow said: “not at all. A great many things changed for the better; and the Downside has new guardians …”
“The great cats live there,” Auhlae said, “don’t they? … our ancestors, our ancient selves. The Old People …”
“Yes,” Rhiow said, “and nothing will remove them from where they have been since the Beginning. But there are two Peoples there now.” Maybe this was not the time to start that particular story: but the facts still made Rhiow wake up in the middle of the night, wondering. For all the years there had been dry-land creatures in this world, cat and serpent had expressed in a specific symbolism the two sides of an ancient enmity: creatures of the sun and light against creatures of earth and the dark beneath the earth, warm blood against cold blood, the Powers that Be against the Lone Power that went rogue, both sides battling for the world. But suddenly Rhiow found herself running across new concepts, in which at least some of the great saurians were warm-blooded, and images in which serpent was born of cat (despite the older mythologies which suggested that cat had been born of serpent)—all too predictable a development, since Arhu had become “father” to the Father of the new serpent-kind, the great saurians who had become the new guardians of the Old Downside.
Of course the Universe was full of these jokes and ironies, mostly born of the misapprehension, native to beings living serially in time, that time itself was serial. Naturally, it was not. Time was at least Riemannian, and tended to run both in circles and cycles: outward—reaching spirals which repeated previous tendencies and archetypes reminiscent of earlier ones, but the repetitions came in “bigger’ forms, and with unexpected ramifications. Now time bit its own tail one more time, and in the process of that biting pulled off the old skin, revealing the new shiny skin and the bigger body underneath: more beautifully scaled and intricately patterned, more muscular, and, as usual, harder to understand. Rhiow had seen these hints before the last months’ troubles began, but hadn’t been able to make much of them at the time. Now, with the events and the history behind her, the myth was easier to understand. But it still made her blink, sometimes, and wonder what happened to the good old days, when things were simpler: when cats were cats, and snakes were snakes, and never the twain would meet…
Of course, for most cats, they never would. But as a wizard, Rhiow came of a bigger worldview, one which held that cats were equal, under the One, to any other sentient species—say, whales, or humans, or some dogs or birds of prey, or various other creatures intelligent enough to have emotional lives and to understand the existence of a world outside their own selves. Most People would have trouble with the idea that ehhif were equal to them. And dogs? Birds? They would hiss with indignation at the very idea. Rhiow knew better … but was glad she did not often have to indulge in explanations to her less tolerant kindred.
“It’s been a very strange time,” Rhiow said at last, “and I look forward to telling you about it in detaiclass="underline" for, truly, there are parts of it I don’t understand myself. Ruah … any news?”