Rhiow patted the problem around with the paw of the mind for a while as she made her way down 69th toward Park Avenue. But the air was too soft and pleasant, and for once, nice-smelling, for her to find it easy to concentrate. Rhiow crossed Park Avenue, pausing once another crowd of ehhif had gone by to take a moment to smell the flowers there, yellow delphiniums and yellow and purple pansies. The lights went red and green together, and Rhiow scampered across again, heading for Lexington Avenue.
She had a standard covert entrance to the Grand Central complex down at 50th and Lex, but there was no particular need to go straight underground and quickly blot out the scent of that summer air. For a change, Rhiow simply trotted down the west side of Lexington Avenue like any other sightseer or Sunday shopper, until she came to the brass-and-glass doors of Grand Central Market. Urruah’s beginning to contaminate me too, Rhiow thought, amused, as she walked invisibly down between the stalls of beautiful meat and hot breads and shining fruit, sniffing appreciatively, and then out into the food hall full of coffee smells and frying smells. On the far side of the food hall, she paused long enough to gaze over toward the glass-paned arch of the Oyster Bar restaurants, closed this early on a Sunday. But to a cat’s nose, such closure was a relative thing. Behind those doors, Rhiow could smell oysters being shucked, and her mouth began to water. I’m going to get him for getting me hooked on those things, she thought, and ran up the stairs to the Main Concourse.
Sunday in Grand Central merely meant that there were fewer commuters among the crowds walking that wide shining floor, and many more people out for a pleasant day in the city— ehhif parents towing along kits who in turn towed along bunches of bright balloons; shoppers with fat carrybags full of tasty-smelling loot; tourists gawking at the beautiful, newly cleaned sky-ceiling and the great downhanging striped flag. There was no escaping the scent of food here, either;the station’s recent renovation had placed a restaurant at each end of the great Concourse, and from one of them the smell of grilling meat floated most appetizingly. But for the moment, Rhiow had other business. She headed across the floor toward the north-side archway labeled Track 32.
There were a couple of ehhif walking down the long, fluorescent-lit platform ahead of her. Rhiow put her whiskers forward at the sight of them, for though there was no train at the platform, and there wasn’t scheduled to be one there for at least another twenty minutes, they didn’t move like ehhif who were waiting for something that wasn’t there. Rhiow wandered along behind them, saw the two ehhif stop at the end of the platform and look into the dark, down where the overhead lighting stopped and the great broad spread of tracks began to draw together. One of them, a tall young tom with long blond hair and a shockingly loud Hawaiian shirt, pulled out a book and began to page through it. His companion, a she-ehhif even taller than he, though much darker and much more quietly dressed, looked over his shoulder at what he was reading.
They must have had their access spell pre-prepared, for barely a tail-flick later, the gate manifested itself. In the darkness, hanging in midair about a foot from the left edge of the platform, the portal matrix that Rhiow kept anchored by Track 32 shivered into visibility— at least for Rhiow and the wizards. Theoretically, a nonwizardly ehhif could have seen it. But the gate was edge-on to any other ehhif who might have approached up the platform; and it would have been unlikely that a nonwizardly ehhif could have seen a wizardry even if they were looking straight at it. Nonetheless, these two were being careful. The tom-ehhif glanced back down the platform, saw Rhiow, and hesitated— then said, “Cousin, we’re on errantry, and we greet you —”
“I can see you’re in a hurry,” Rhiow said in the Speech. “Don’t let me keep you, cousins.” She strolled over to them, peering through the gate. Past the rainbow shimmer of its edges, Rhiow caught a glimpse of a reddish landscape, rocky and stark, under an indigo sky. “Mars?” she said.
“Morocco,” the queen-ehhif said. “That earthquake.”
“That attempted earthquake,” her companion said. “We’re going to go talk it out of it.”
“Go well, cousins,” Rhiow said. “And Iau on your side!” – for the many variables associated with quakes made working with them a chancy business at best. The young woman waved at her; they stepped through.
A second later they were gone, and the worldgate snapped back into its normal configuration, the familiar interwoven structure of tightly laced hyperstrings, glowing and rippling in the darkness of the tunnel like a silken tapestry of light. This gate, at least, was behaving correctly— serving its proper purpose of helping wizards get around without having to waste the universe’s precious energy on individually-constructed transport spells. Rhiow sat up on her haunches and beckoned the gate a little closer. Obediently it drifted right to the edge of the platform, and Rhiow reached out, hooked her claws into the control-weave at the edge of the gate, and pulled it out taut.
The gate-strands caught in her claws glittered with light and symbology in the Speech, the worldgate’s realtime diagnostics. It was working fine; the relocation of the Penn gates seemed to have had no effect on it all. …At the moment, Rhiow thought. Worldgates were full of little surprises… but then, when you were dealing with a wizardry so complex, and one that got so much use by wizards other than the ones who maintained it, this was only to be expected.
She took a moment to query the other two Grand Central gates via this one’s control structure, but found nothing to concern her: all three were behaving as well as they ever did. All right, Rhiow thought. She let most of the hyperstrings snap back into the body of the gate structure, but kept a claw in one of them. This one she pulled toward her, twisting it to bring up one of the configurations she had long since laid into the gate for casual use.
The surface of the gate shivered again, paling away except at the bright-burning edges. The view was uninspiring— a pocked, pale-beige travertine wall, shadowy even on such a bright day. Rhiow let that last string snap back into the gateweave, gathered herself, and leapt through in the second and a half before the gate would revert to its standby state.
She came down at the foot of that wall and huddled against it for a moment, looking quickly to right and left. Distracted ehhif sometimes came tearing along here in a desperate hurry, running up from the nearest of Lincoln Center’s many ticket windows and plunging around the corner ahead and to her left, making singlemindedly for the front doors of that high-arched and beautiful building where ehhif gathered to hear and sing astonishingly long and involved songs that were usually mostly about sex. And then after five or six hours of it, they sit there and applaud even though there hasn’t actually been any, Rhiow thought, heading up around the corner herself. Ehhif are so odd sometimes…