Urruah had strolled over to where they sat, and now threw a look over his shoulder at the gate. “I really hate to admit it,” he said, “but at first glance, I’m stumped. Rhi, Huff, I’ll want to examine the logs in detail, of course—’ He looked over his shoulder at Fhrio for approvaclass="underline" Fhrio waved his tail in a “don’t-care” way. “Good. I’ll do that later this evening. I need a break.”
Urruah did sound tired, but that was no surprise: even though the gates had their diagnostic procedures built in, there were other more sophisticated ones that Rhiow’s team routinely used to make sure that a given gate’s own diagnostics were “honest”. It had always seemed a wise precaution to Rhiow, since a deranged gate might conceivably lose the ability to diagnose itself correctly.
“You’ll want to sort your schedule out with Fhrio, perhaps,” Huff said.
“Yes,” said Urruah, “I’ll do that.” He headed back over to the gate, where Fhrio and Siffha’h were withdrawing themselves from the gate matrix and letting the strings snap back into place.
Huff sighed. “We’ll leave it shut down for another day,” he said, “and come and tackle it afresh tomorrow. Rhiow, I think we’ve made a good start.”
“I hope so too,” she said. “I have a feeling that this won’t be one of those quickly solved problems, but we won’t be out of your fur until it’s handled.”
“Then we’ll see Urruah later this evening,” said Auhlae: “and you tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow let it be,” Rhiow said, and bumped noses with their hosts … though she threw a look over her shoulder first. Urruah and Fhrio had their heads together again: but Arhu was looking in one direction, and Siffha’h in another, as if they were on opposite sides of the same planet.
Rhiow smiled slightly. “Dai stihó,” she said, the non-species-specific greeting- and parting-words of one wizard to another: go well. “Come on, Arhu, Ruah,” she said, getting up, “let’s call it a day …”
“Very nice People,” Urruah said, as they came out on the Grand Central side of their own gate. “Competent.”
That assessment surprised Rhiow slightly. “You’re satisfied with their inspection routines?” she said.
“They’re much like what I’d be doing if I were stuck with their gate complex,” Urruah said. “I mean, Rhi, look at their transit figures. Three or maybe four times the number of wizards and unaffiliated outworlders use their gates every day as use ours, or the ones at Perm. London is a major on-planet transit center for western Europe, and if you tried to read all the gate logs here once a week, the way Saash did for ours, you’d never have time to do anything else … such as fix the gates when they broke. I’m going to take some time to read those logs in more detail, as I said. But I don’t know what I’m looking for as yet, and I’m hoping the tracers we’ve left in place will pick something up to give me a hint. Without a specific event track to follow, a signature attached to the kind of access we’re looking for, we’re walking in the dark without whiskers.”
Rhiow waved her tail slowly in agreement. “All right,” she said.
“But one thing, Rhi … and this may be more important, even, than the problem with the gate itself. Remember when Huff was telling us about the ‘single’ egresses?”
“Uh, yes—” She paused. “He was telling us that people were going one way, not ‘round trip’.”
“That’s right. Rhi, do you realize how big a problem that is? Times can get imbalanced, just as spaces can: the ‘pressure’ of times against one another has to be kept equal. Those people from other times have to be recovered and put back where they belong, or the gates will become more unstable than they are already. Not just Huff’s gates: all the gates.”
“Ours too,” Rhiow said under her breath.
“Ours would take longest to imbalance,” Urruah said. They’re ‘senior’, and their connection to the Old Downside and the power sources there is direct: that lends them some immunity. But, inevitably, the imbalance will spread. Gating around the planet will start failing without warning and without reason. The rapid-transit system that wizards use so as not to have to waste their powers on minor business like travel spells will go down. The Universe will start dying faster … I just thought I’d mention it.”
“Thank you,” Rhiow said, and her stomach turned over inside her. “What’s your estimate of the time when these imbalances will begin to affect other gates?”
“If there have been only a few imbalanced egresses,” Urruah said, “it would take some weeks. If there have been, say, as many as ten or more, I would expect them within ten to fourteen days. Twenty or so—well, we would already be seeing random failures. So it’s not that bad. But we have to help the London team track down the ehhif from backtime and restore them to their proper periods.”
“And how much diagnosis is that going to take?”
“A fair amount, the longer the ehhif have been loose in a non-native time. There’s a temporal signature you can search for, like a target scent, in someone out of their proper time … but first you need to know exactly which time they’re native to, and the longer they’re in a non-native period, the less detectable it is. A fresh ingress through the malfunctioning gate would be the best thing we could hope for. All ingresses through a given gate would have a similar ‘signature’, like DNA from different members of the same family, and others could be tracked using it.”
Oh gods, Rhiow thought: and I thought things were going fairly well … “All right,” she said: “we’ll take it up with Huff tomorrow.—Arhu? You?”
“Huh?” He was walking along in an unusual state of self-absorption. “Me what?”
“What do you think of the London team,” Rhiow said, “and their gates?” It wasn’t as if he was likely to have a terribly sophisticated assessment at this point, but Rhiow was always careful to make sure everyone had their say after coming back from an “outcall” job.
“Huff and Auhlae are nice,” Arhu said, still looking somewhat distracted. “Fhrio’s a snot: he thinks he knows everything.” And there Arhu fell silent.
Aha, Urruah said privately to Rhiow.
She was inclined to agree. “And Siffha’h?” Rhiow said.
There was a long pause. “I think maybe she doesn’t like me,” Arhu said, “and I don’t know why.”
“Well,” Rhiow said, “it’s early to tell that, yet. You can’t have exchanged more than ten words the whole time we were there.”
“I know,” Arhu said, dejected. That’s the trouble …”
“Give it time,” Urruah said. “It’ll come right in the end. You can’t rush the queens, Arhu, especially the young ones: they have their whole lives ahead of them, maybe as many as nine of them, and they don’t impress easily. Take your time, talk to them …”
“That’s just the problem. She won’t talk to me.”
“So let actions say what words won’t. She probably hears all kinds of bragging these days, if she’s just coming into her day … isn’t she?”
Arhu looked up at Urruah with a kind of heartsick hope that made Rhiow’s heart turn over at the sight of it. “I think so,” Arhu said. “That’s how it smells …”
Rhiow turned her attention away from the conversation and let the toms gain some walking-space in front of her. It was at times like this that she missed Saash most … her slightly sardonic turn of phrase that could make anything, even something as serious as non-round-trip time travel, seem less crucial until you were actually able to get around to handling it. But Saash was out on the One’s errantry now: Rhiow would just have to manage without her, and hold her own against the boys as well as she could. Fortunately, she said to the Whisperer with a pride-queen’s arrogance, it isn’t hard…