From the depths of reality came the feeling of divine whiskers being put forward, and the sound of tolerant laughter.
The whole team made the commute to London the next morning to check the diagnostics and the logs, and found nothing: and they did so the next morning, and the morning after that … with no sign of any unusual ingresses or egresses at all. On the fourth day of this, Rhiow began to wonder whether the Powers had sent her team on one of those useful but temper-fraying jobs which her old mentor and teacher Ffairh would have described as “trying to herd mice at a crossroads”: a lot of trouble to very little effect for a long, long time … until you lost patience and started eating the mice, which might be what the Powers had in mind in the first place. Urruah was beginning to feel the strain, and was getting short with everybody, especially Arhu. Arhu, for his own part, was getting bored.
“He won’t let me do anything,” he said to Rhiow one morning as they went in to work together.
“That’s possibly because he’s not sure of your level of mastery as such,” Rhiow said, “and possibly because it’s other People’s gates we’re working with, not our own. No, Arhu, listen: don’t look that way. If you want to get a job done—that being the whole reason we have to keep going to London—sometimes you have to do it a little more slowly, a little more cautiously, than you otherwise would. At home, with our own gates, it’s usually no big deal. If one of us makes a mistake, she gets her head smacked, we clean up the mess, and the matter stays in the family. But when you’re dealing with other People’s territory, things slow down. And this is their territory … be sure of that.”
“I thought you told me ‘we are guardians and nothing more’,” Arhu said with some annoyance.
“That’s as true of the London team as it is of us. But it’s Her business to tell them that, not ours.”
They paused in front of the number-three gate, which was anchored over by the Waldorf Yard again because of track maintenance going on near its usual location. “Territory,” Rhiow said, “it’s a problem …”
“Yeah. Oh, Urruah said he might be late this morning. Something about the dumpster.”
“I wish he’d tell me these things,” Rhiow said, and sat down in front of the gate. “How late did he think?”
“He didn’t say.”
She waved her tail, resigned. Toms … “You’d better take care of the gating, then,” she said. “They’re going to be wondering where we are.”
“Probably not,” Arhu said, sitting up and slipping his forepaws into the control weave. “I don’t think Fhrio cares one way or the other.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure,” Rhiow said. “He’s likely enough to care … but not to show it …”
Arhu was busy with the weave, pulling strings out and hooking them under and through one another with his claws. He was getting quick at this work, whatever Urruah might think: after a few days’ practice with the London configuration, the pattern had become second nature to him. Or else the gate itself was beginning to answer his requirements, falling into “heart-configuration” with Arhu—a development very much to be hoped for. It was the kind of sympathy, not quite a symbiosis, which Saash had had with the Grand Central gates: a sort of mutual understanding of what needed to be done, based to be sure on a sound theoretical knowledge, but on something much more in execution. It was as if the gates had liked Saash, and wanted to cooperate with her because she liked them. If Arhu was acquiring that kind of almost-affection, Rhiow thought, there would be little limit to what he could do as a gate technician later in life, or in other lives to come, if the wizardry followed him.
And we could use someone with that kind of basic affinity, she thought. For all my theoretical work, I don’t have it: and for all Urruah’s, he’s more an engineer than a technician. Probably it comes of being a power source: of seeing the gate as something to be done to, rather than someone to be done with…
Arhu stopped. “Does that look right?” he said suddenly, sounding rather confused.
Rhiow looked over the gate-weft. The colors were running correctly, the hyperstrings all seemed to be making the correct “itch” in the air, the resonances of sound and texture were all in place. “It looks fine—”
“It doesn’t feel fine. It feels like something’s come unsnagged.”
Arhu was blinking, looking a little vague. Rhiow had learned to recognize that particular danger sign. “Now,” Rhiow said, “or later?”
“I think—’ Arhu’s eyes narrowed, a look of abrupt and uncomfortable concentration. This was always the most difficult part of the work for a visionary, the matter of learning to “ride” the vision rather than simply being ridden by it: though the question of which was finally master, the seer or the seen, was always one which caused most seers a certain amount of unease over their careers. “I think later. But not much later. Short term …”
Oh wonderful, Rhiow thought. “Today? Tomorrow?”
“What am I, some ehhif weather forecaster?” Arhu said, still squinting, with his paws all tangled up with hyperstrings. “Do you want percentages of probability too?”
“Whatever you can come up with,” Rhiow said. “And whatever idiom works for you. I’m not picky.”
“I can see the sun,” Arhu said after a moment, “but I’m not sure which one it is, which day. Just a sense of things … unraveling. Something unsnags, and then everything sorts itself out. Though it smells really bad at first—”
He blinked again, shook his ears until they rattled, and looked at Rhiow. “Gone. I hate it when it does that!”
“Calm down, Arhu, take it easy, don’t let the strings go—”
“I wasn’t going to, do you think I want the whole place to jump off into space … ?” But his ears were flat back, and he hissed softly. “Rhiow,” Arhu said, sitting up still with that unkittenish perfect balance of his, “I can hear Her. I can see what She sees … just for a second. Everything together: images, thoughts in minds, lots of minds all together, a hundred paws’ worth of places all at once … But all broken, like light in water when the wind blows. My brains won’t hold a whisker’s worth of it … and then it’s gone. What’s the use, this becoming one of the Powers, but not enough of one to be any good to anybody, or for long enough to figure it out, long enough to make a difference—!”
Rhiow sighed and paced over to him, balanced on her hindquarters just long enough to bump her head against his. “You know it’s going to be hard at first,” she said, settling down again. “It’s going to take so much practice, and it’s going to be hard for a long time yet. The seer’s talent is one of the worst ones in its way … tough to manage. But if you can stay with it …”
“Do I have a choice?” Arhu said, and the edge of bitterness and sadness was impossible to miss. “If I don’t learn it, I’ll lose it …”
He sat back on his haunches then and said, “Never mind. At least I can still gate.”
He gave one sidewise glance at Rhiow, and gave the strings a quick pull.
The other side of the gate flickered abruptly into black night over a white land—pale silver-and-white dust and stone with every stone’s shadow laid out long and black and razorlike behind it. Over everything hung a shape that burned at first so blue that the eye refused it: then you saw the white swirls, and the shades of green and haze-brown, but the main color was blue, shining down pale on that white desolation, and Rhiow’s abrupt first thought was of the shade of Auhlae’s eyes.