She looked away, walked a little faster.“Like I said,” Arhu said under his breath.
“Don’t judge,” Rhiow said under her breath. “We have comfortable enough lives, and we know what we’re for, and have work to do that we enjoy. Who knows if that Person does? Who knows what he suffers, or enjoys, without talking to him? There’s more to a life than the way it looks. Don’t make decisions about him because he stares.”
Arhu flirted his tail at her in that I-don’t-care way he had when he did care, but didn’t feel like pressing his case with her. She rolled her eyes and went on along behind Jath, following him and Urruah over to the far back corner of the fly area, down a little low-ceilinged concrete-walled hallway, and through a small open door.
Rhiow stopped there, looking in shock at the furnishings of the room, which consisted of two ceramic receptacles, one on the floor and one on the wall.“Urruah,” she said. “In their toilet?”
“No fear of a crowd of them walking into this transit circle, is there?” Urruah said, cheerful. The wizardry blazed up through the white square-tiled floor as they watched.
“Your ingenuity knows no bounds,” Rhiow said, and this was true, though the Speech itself didn’t necessarily have to convey her sarcasm as well. “Aufwi?”
Aufwi stepped on the circle and spoke to it briefly in the Speech, laying in the required coordinates.“Let’s go…”
All it took was a step, and then everything was changed: from the harsh white glare of a single downhanging bulb, and the strange decayed-violet smell of old ehhif siss, to the glare of bright direct sun under a peculiarly open-seeming sky, and a wind laden with the sharp bimetallic taste of city-by-the-sea, as well as a brown hint of smog. Rhiow glanced around her to see if someone was about to trip over her, but no ehhif were anywhere near: the plaza in which they all stood was a near-empty desert of blazing white paving.
Without warning, Aufwi began to curse. Rhiow looked at him in surprise, and Arhu and Siff’hah stared, for his vocabulary was starting to resemble theirs in both filthiness and vehemence. He caught Rhiow’s look, though, and tried to restrain himself. “It’s not fair,” Aufwi said, his tail lashing furiously and his ears down near-flat. “Where’s the vhai’d thing gone now??”
“What?” Rhiow said. “The gate? You didn’t leave it out here, did you?”
“Of course not! But I can feel that it’s not where I did leave it!” Aufwi stared all around him, as if expecting the gate to pop up through the ground. “It was inside the station, down by the Red Line tracks. I’ve been trying to train it by putting it back in the same spot every time it jumps…”
Urruah laughed, that ironic sound of his again.“Might work with a gate that’s part of a complex and has some rootedness associated with it,” he said, “but not with one that hasn’t spawned yet. Nice try, though. Take a breath and see if you can feel where it’s gone.”
Aufwi glanced over at Urruah and then relaxed, his ears gradually coming up and his whiskers going forward. Rhiow found herself wondering how easygoing Fefssuh had actually been with his prot?g? when his supervisors, of whom Rhiow was merely the latest, were not around. How many times has this kit had his ears boxed for something that wasn’t his fault, I wonder? I really must see about that internship…
Aufwi had gone a little unfocused for the moment, hunting in mind for his gate. Rhiow left him to it, turning to look around the plaza. Here, too, the ehhif weekend meant that few human commuters were around, and there was leisure to admire the broad handsome vista of new buildings spreading back from the central, old one, a massive white stucco structure with its peaked roof done in red tile, accompanied by a massive white campanile clock-tower. This place had become nearly moribund once, years before Rhiow’s time: it had actually seen a time when only two trains a day came through it. Then the city’s ehhif saw sense and started to rebuild their local rail system, routing it through here and awakening Union Station from its long slumber.
“It’s all right,” Aufwi said then. “I’ve got it. It’s as I thought: it’s slipped over to Olvera Street again. It likes it there,” he said, turning to Rhiow. “That’s the oldest part of the city, and it seems kind of torn as to where it wants to be – over there, or over here in the oldest transport center.”
Rhiow put her whiskers forward, for here once again was fuel for that oldest debate: were gates alive? Wizardries so complex often started to display some of the characteristics of life– they required energy, they reacted to stimuli, they reproduced – and, especially in the case of worldgates, they seemed to start to acquire some sense of what they were for. “Is it far?” she said.
“Across the street,” Aufwi said. “Come on.”
He led the way across the plaza to where it ended in a drop-off space for cars and buses, and a set of traffic lights. The distance was what for Rhiow would have been more like four or five short city blocks: but out here, ehhif built their roads on a larger scale than Manhattan would ever have allowed. They waited for the traffic roaring by to cease, and then trotted hurriedly across the six lanes to the long line of handsome white buildings on the far side.
There were far more ehhif over here, even at this time of the morning; Aufwi led Rhiow and the group in the wake of some of them, under a high wide white-stucco arch and through into a long pedestrianized space, itself like a small street sheltered on both sides by a double line of stucco buildings, mostly low and red-tiled, though much older-looking than Union Station had been.
“This looks like it’s been here for a while,” Urruah said, glancing up and down the pedestrian precinct, and sniffing. Down to their left, a long line of little stalls in the middle of the precinct stretched down toward its far end: and some of them, to judge by the scent of grills firing up,were getting ready to open for business.
“A few hundred years,” Aufwi said. He was sniffing too, but for something else. “A long time, as ehhif here reckon it – they don’t seem to have been able to keep much else from that period around. Torn down, or buried, or worn out and forgotten… Aha! There we are. Same as last time – “
He led them down toward the center of the pedestrian precinct, past shops hung with bright-colored ornaments, past splashing fountains and old adobe houses festooned with lush green grapevines. In a mostly-paved circle at the heart of it all stood pedestals bearing statues of formal-looking ehhif of ancient days: these alternated with tall handsome trees whose downsweeping branches and leaves gave off a spicy fragrance. There, under one of the biggest trees, on the south side of the circle, Rhiow caught the daylight-subdued shimmer of a sheet of interwoven hyperstrings. The worldgate hung there apparently from a branch of the tree that was outthrust about eight feet from the ground, looking for all the world like some ehhif’s laundry hung out to dry.
“Now there you are,” Aufwi said to the gate, stalking over to it, and then walking slowly around it and looking it over carefully. “How am I supposed to take proper care of you when you misbehave like this? Huh?”
Rhiow turned her head away so that Aufwi wouldn’t see her put her whiskers so far forward that they were in danger of falling right off. “Aufwi,” Urruah said, and Rhiow could hear him struggling to keep his own laughter under control, “maybe you could take a moment off from scolding your problem child to pull out the diagnostic structures and take it offline. Then we can have a look and see what seems to be biting it.”