“Not too far, but Perm’s a mess right now, and I’m on deadline,” the woman said. “Vancouver, and then Kamchatka.”
“Oh, the oil spill.”
“If we can get authorization from the Powers That Be for the timeslide,” the woman said, and smiled slyly, “it’ll be, ‘Whatoil spill?’ But we won’t know until we check with the A.A. in Vancouver.”
“Well,dai,”Rhiow said, as the woman turned toward the gate,“and good luck with the Advisory. And with Them…”
“Thanks. You go well, too,” the woman said, stepping forward as the center of the gate’s string structure puckered fully inward into metaextension. A human wizard couldn’t see the strings without help, but she certainly could see the metaextension’s sudden result. Hanging in the air before them was a round (or actually, spherical) window into deep gray shadow with the beginnings of dawn outside it, a sky paling above close-planted pine trees. A park, perhaps, or someone’s backyard, there was no telling—a given wizard set the coordinates to suit his mission’s needs. Had Rhiow been curious about the location, she could check the gate’s log later. For the moment, she watched the young woman step into the predawn dimness, and heard her speak the word that completed the wizardry, releasing the hyperextended strings to pop back out of phase.
The gate-weft persisted in metaextension just a second or so—a safety feature—and then the curvature snapped back flat as if woven of rubber bands, light rippling up and down the resonating strings as the structure collapsed into a configuration with lower energy levels. The spherical intersection with otherwhere vanished: the tapestry of light lay flatagainst the air again, waiting.
That’s working all right, at least,Rhiow thought. Last week, as the wizard had mentioned,thishad been the gate that had needed adjustment. Three mornings out of five, its web had refused to extend properly, making it impossible to use without constant monitoring.
Saash had had to stand here sidled all during rush hour, running the gate on manual and being jostled by insensible commuters. Her comments later had left Rhiow’s ears burning: that soft breathy little voice sounded unusually shocking when it swore.
Rhiow smiled at the memory, and said silently,Saash?
A pause, and then,Here.
I’m over by your favorite gate. I’m going Downside to make sure none of the others is fouling it.
A slight shudder at the other end.Better you than me,Saash said.
How’s our foundling?
Sleeping still. Go ahead, Rhi; Urruah’s around if anything’s needed.
Dai,then.
You too. And be careful…
Rhiow let the link between them lapse, and watched the gate, letting its weft steady and the colors pale from their use-excited state. Then she reached into the weave with a paw and plucked at one specific string, a control structure. The whole weave of the gate resonated with light and power as it ran a brief diagnostic on its own fabric. Then it displayed a smaller glowing pattern, a“tree” structure—many-branched at the top, narrowing to a single “trunk” at the bottom.
With a single claw, Rhiow snagged the trunk line. The string blazed, querying her identity: the access for which Rhiow was asking was restricted.
Rhiow hung on to the string. The power blazing in it ran up through claw and paw and sizzled along her nerves, hunt-big for her access“authorization” from the Powers That Be. It found that, along with Rhiow’s memory of her own acceptance of the Oath, woven together into the tapestry of life-fire and thought-fire that was how the wizardry perceived her brain. Satisfied, the wizardry rebounded, ran burning out of her body anddown the weft of the gate. The tapestry rippled with light; the string structure puckered inward. The sphere in the air snapped open.
Warm green shadow shading down to a rich brown, slanting golden light leaning through the dimness in shafts… And that smell. Rhiow did not linger but leapt through, and waved the gate closed behind her with a flirt of her tail.
She landed in loam, silent, springy, deep. Rhiow came down soundlessly but hard, as always forgetting the change until it actually came upon her—and then, within a breath’s time, she was wondering how she’d ever borne the way she’d been until a second ago, bound into the body of one of the People, not even a very big body as the People reckoned such things. Rhiow lifted the paw that had plucked the gate-string out, found it ten times bigger, the claw an inch-long talon; looked down at the print that paw had left in the soft loam, and found it as wide across as anehhif’shand was long. The usual unbelieving look over her shoulder reassured her about her color: she was still glossy black. She would have found it difficult to handle if that had changed as well.
Rhiow stood surrounded by many brown pillar-trunks of shaggy-barked trees, limbless this far down: their first branches began far above her head, holding out thin-needled bunches of fronds like anehhif’shands with fingers spread. No sky could be seen through the overlapping ceiling of them, though here and there, ahead and to the sides, some gap of growth let the sun come slanting through to pool, tawny-golden, on the needle-carpeted floor. Rhiow padded along toward where more light came slipping among trunks more sparsely set, a bluer, cooler radiance.
A few minutes later she stepped out from among the trees onto a mossy stone ledge lifted up above the world; she looked downward and outward, breathing deep. The breeze stirring among those trees and rustling their tops behind her had nothing to do with New York air: it was a wind from the morning of the world, bearing nothing but the faint clean smell of salt. In a sky of cloudless, burning blue, the sun swung low to her right, passing toward evening from afternoon; westward, low over the endless green hills, its light burnished everything gold.
It was summer here. It was always summer here. The sun lay warm on her pelt, a lovely basking heat. The wind was warm and always bore that salt tang from the glimmering golden-bronze expanse of ocean just to the east. The whole view, excepting the occasional cliff-face or ledge like the one on which Rhiow stood, was covered with the lush green of subtropical forest. Here was the world as it had been before magnetic fields and poles and climates had shifted. Whether it was actually the same world, the direct ancestor-in-timeline of Rhiow’s own, or an alternate universe more centrally placed in the scheme of things, Rhiow wasn’t sure—and she didn’t think anyone else was, either. It didn’t seem to make much difference. What mattered was that her own world was grounded in this one, based on it. This was a world more single and simple, the lands not yet fragmented: everything one warm, green blanket of mingled forest and grassland, from sea to sea. The wind breathed softly in the trees, and there was no other sound until from a great distance came a low coughing roar: one of her Kindred, the great cats of the ancient world, speaking his name or the name of his prey, to the wind.
At the sound, Rhiow shivered briefly, and then smiled at herself. The People were descended from the dire-cats and sabertooths who roamed these forests—orhaddescended from them, willingly, giving up size and power for other gifts. Either way, when one of the People returned to this place, the size of the cat’s body once again matched the size of its soul, reflecting the stature and power both had held in the ancient days. Reflex might make Rhiow worry at the thought of meeting one of those great ones, but for the moment, she was at least as great.
Rhiow gazed down from that high place. Perhaps half a mile below and a mile eastward, the River plunged down in a torrent that she thought must haunt the dreams of the lesser streams of her day, trickles like the Mississippi and the Yangtze. In her own time and world, this would become the Hudson, old, wide, and tame. But now it leapt in a roaring half-mile-wide wall of water from the deep-cut edge of what would someday be the Continental Shelf, falling a mile and a half sheer to smash deafening into its first shattered cauldron-pools, and then tumbled, a lakeful every second, on down the crags and shelves of its growing canyon, into the clouded sea. The spray of the water’s impact at such velocity, spread so wide, made a permanent rainbow as wide as Manhattan Island would be someday.