Everyone was washing now but Fhrio: he had finished first and was hunkered down with his eyes half-closed, perhaps consulting with the Whisperer about the status of his gates … or perhaps, Rhiow thought, wondering how much face he’s lost, and how to get it back … She sighed, and scrubbed her face harder.
Urruah was in comfort: after a chunk of burger, two fish sticks from someone’s finicky child, and a big piece of gravy-soaked crust from someone’s steak and kidney pie, he was lying on one side and putting his stomach fur in order. “So, Huff,” he said, pausing and looking up, “let’s consider options.”
“I don’t know that we have many,” Huff said. He was taking his time about putting his broad snow-white bib in order: it had somehow gotten some ketchup on it after that last piece of hamburger, and Rhiow suspected that he would be pinkish there for a day or two. “We’ve got to try to trace back along the same path that Mr… Illingworth came by. But the modality is going to be difficult, considering how our problem gate is behaving …” He sounded meditative.
“I think we’re going to have to construct a timeslide,” Urruah said. “To access what the ehhif wizards call a ‘piece of time’.”
“You started to tell me about that once,” Arhu said suddenly to Urruah. “And then you yelled at him,” he said, turning to Rhiow. “And me.”
“With reason,” Rhiow said. “It wasn’t germane to the problem at hand: and messing around with time without a specific goal, and approval from the Powers, is like playing in traffic. Worse, actually. But temporal claudication theory’s been a hobby of Urruah’s for a long time.”
Urruah shook himself, then sat up and licked a paw as meditatively as Huff started rubbing behind one ear, even though he had already washed there. “I started getting interested in it when I was still freelance,” he said to Arhu. “Sometimes the Whisperer will talk about it, for whatever reasons. Can’t be boredom, I wouldn’t think: maybe it’s her sneaky way of encouraging research … or just curiosity. She’s sneaky that way.”
“Temporal claudication …” Arhu said. “I thought it was supposed to be ‘temporospatial’.”
“It is,” Urruah said. “Oh, there’s no way you can ever completely lose the spatial coordinate-set on any temporospatial transit spell, no matter how still you try to hold it: not a planet-based one, anyway. But a timeslide’s emphasis is always mainly on temporal change. You can either mount it “freestanding”, by bending space locally and temporarily with spells and equipment tailored to that specific spot: or you can start a timeslide in ‘parasitic’ relationship to an existing worldgate, using the gate’s power source to run the slide. There are more involved ‘half and half’ implementations for use when you want some of the gate’s own functions to augment those of the timeslide: but that kind of implementation is kind of fiddly.”
“A claudication is a squeezing, a constriction,” Huff said to Arhu. “Squeeze space, and you enable things to pop from one side of the ‘squeezed’ area to another: that’s worldgating at its simplest. Squeeze time as well—or squeeze the temporal component of the time/space pair harder than the spatial one—and you pop from one time to another. Present to past … and back again. That’s a timeslide.”
“You still have to control the spatial component very exactly,” Urruah said, “or else you pop out at the right time, all right, but somewhere very different in the planet’s orbit … not forgetting that the planet’s primary has moved too, and taken its whole solar system with it, since the time you’re aiming for. Hanging out there in the cold dark vacuum and feeling very silly … assuming you remembered to bring some air with you.” Urruah put his whiskers forward, amused by the image. Arhu licked his nose, twice, very fast. “You must choose a spot at one ‘end’ of the timeslide,” Urruah said, “ideally your ‘present’ end, as de facto anchor, and the other as the spot to which the anchor chain is fastened … and not lose control of either of them, despite their individual movements through space which continue through the duration of the slide. There has to be enough ‘flex’ in the connection to cope with unpredictable movements of the body … or ‘bodies’, since the temporal element means you have to treat this as a two-body problem. Then when you’re done, you have to unhook both ends of the timeslide without causing temporal backlash at either insertion point. It’s delicate work, my kit: you’ll break a few claws on this one, if it’s what we go for.”
Arhu gave Urruah a look which suggested the usage of claws might be more imminent. “I can handle it,” he said.
“We’ll see,” said Rhiow. “You’re good with static worldgates, for a beginner. Whether you’ll do as well with a timeslide is another question.”
“In any case,” Urruah said, “I think options one and three are closed to us.”
Fhrio looked up from his ruminations at that. “Why?”
“Well,” said Urruah, flicking his tail, “for one thing, how often are we going to have to do this? Does anyone want to give me odds that we’ll find out what’s causing the trouble—from solving the original gate malfunction, to finding out what in Iau’s name Mr… Illingworth was talking about—and fix it all, with just one trip?”
Everyone looked at each other. No one looked willing to suggest they were witless enough to believe that this might happen.
“Right.” Urruah said. “So there’s no sense in running around trying to acquire three or four or five sets of the specialized equipment we’d need to execute a freestanding timeslide repeatedly from the same spot. We’d only waste huge amounts of energy, which the Powers hate, and drive ourselves crazy, which we would hate. Type three, the ‘half and half’ timeslide implementations, are a nuisance to maintain, they get out of kilter at the drop of a whisker, and they fail without warning, which we do not need in these circumstances. This leaves us with type two … which has certain advantages in our case.”
“A parasitic linkage has advantages?” Auhlae said, sounding dubious. “With a malfunctioning gate?”
“It does if you’re trying to fix the malfunction,” Urruah said. “It’ll function as a diagnostic, for the power source, anyway. A clumsy one, but rugged. Nor will it be liable to the same kinds of failures that the malfunctioning gate is having.”
“No … just different ones,” Fhrio said.
Urruah shrugged his tail. “Who wants all mice to taste the same? Variety keeps you young. We parasitize the gate’s power source and use it to power the slide. That at least we’ll be able to control precisely. It’s a simple structure to build and troubleshoot: anything goes wrong with it, we’ll know about it in seconds, and be able to fix it in minutes. You try doing that with one of these gates. They’re complex.”
“Tell me about it,” Huff said wearily. “The others have been failing sporadically because of the extra strain due to this troublesome one being taken offline. They’re just not built for larger access numbers than they’re carrying at the moment.”
“We can get you some help for that,” Rhiow said. “We have authorizations to get assistance from the other congener gates in this bundle. The teams at Chur and its daughter-complex at Samnaun will take some of the strain until we’ve resolved this: we can install a couple of direct access portals in the near neighborhood of the functioning gates.”
“They may have to stay there a while,” Huff said. “We have all these incursions to resolve as well …”