Arhu looked accusingly at Rhiow. “I thought you told me everything came in fives.”
“Not everything,” Rhiow said, in slight desperation. “Things to do with gates.”
Ith looked at her with a cockeyed expression, a sidewise look that had reminded Rhiow more than once of a robin looking at a worm. “Possibly we have a paired underlying symmetry here,” he said. “Dual symmetries of sixes and fives, conjoined at the functional level as elevens? The even and the odd …”
“Or the like and the unlike,” Urruah said, interested. “But together, they make a prime …”
Rhiow rolled her eyes. Since coming into his own, Ith sometimes went off into mathematical conjectures which completely lost her—a side-effect, she thought, of coming of a species which was only now discovering abstract reasoning for its own sake, after having spent so many millennia in the darkness, thinking about nothing but survival and food. It was perhaps some side-gift of his wizardry: or, like Urruah’s never-ending fondness for food and oh’ra, it might just be a hobby. Either way, it tended to make her head hurt.
“Ith, you’re going to have to take it up with the Powers that Be,” Rhiow said, “because I haven’t the faintest idea. Right now we need someone to help us look for that spell, for the other parts of it, and to get them welded together. We may need it very badly in a very short time.”
“Then I will come and do that for you,” Ith said. “I will search everywhere I can think of. The Museum here first, as you say: and then the Museum in New York as well, and elsewhere, if I must.”
Arhu glanced up, looking a little uneasy. “I don’t know if I like the idea of taking the Father of his People away from them just now,” he said. “This could be a dangerous time …”
Ith looked at him with mild surprise. “Do fathers not go out to find food and protect their young, sometimes? The important thing is to come back afterwards … Besides, events in one universe spread to others, sooner or later. By acting now, perhaps I save myself the need to act more desperately later …”
“That may or may not be,” Huff said, “but in any case, it’s still very good of you to come and help us. I mean …” He sounded slightly flustered. “We are, after all, People … and you are, after all …”
“A snake?” Ith dropped his jaw amiably. “Well, People have in the past taken a certain amount of interest in the welfare of another people’s universe: mine. We could have been left to die in the dark, or to live out our lives as slaves, under the Lone Power’s influence. But others risked themselves for us. Perhaps there is no ‘payback’: but paying forward is certainly an option open to us … So let us not speak of it any more.”
He rocked a little on his haunches, reaching back in mind again to the interview with Wallis which Arhu had shown him, and looking down at the fragmentary spell again. “ ‘A person of Power’,” said Ith, “must enact the spell. Does that mean, perhaps, a Person? One of your People? Or could it be just any wizard?”
“It depends if they call themselves persons or not, I suppose,” Rhiow said. “Ith, your guess is as good as mine … But I think we’re going to need the rest of the spell before we can draw any conclusions about that.”
“Well enough, then: I will go.”
“I want to go too!” Artie said suddenly, jumping up. “I haven’t seen any magic practically since I got here. I want to see some more!”
Rhiow glanced at Ith, about to object: then she stopped herself. Cousin, if you can take charge of him for a while, it would take a worry off our minds. He’s at the wrong end of time, and it’s not good for an ehhif to know too much about its own future without preparation … for which we’ve had no time. The Museum will be a controllable environment, one not too strange to him…
Consider it done.
“Well, Ith,” Rhiow said out loud, “if you take Artie with you, he can help you look for the spell, while you keep him invisible. You should have fun with that,” Rhiow said to Artie.
“You’re going to keep walking into things, though … so be warned.”
“I will bring him gladly,” said Ith. “Artie, are you willing?”
“I should say so!”
“All right, Artie,” Rhiow said, “who are you staying with in London?”
“My uncle and aunt,” he said, suddenly looking rather concerned. “They were expecting me back for teatime …”
“Well,” Urruah said, “if we can get the timeslide to work properly, there’ll be no problem returning him to just a few seconds before or after we found him, or he found us.” And if we can’t get the slide to work properly … then shortly it won’t matter one way or the other…
Rhiow made a face at the thought. And what happens to us then? she thought. We become refugees to some other timeline that hasn’t been ruined. If we can find any such. And Artie will share the same fate…
No, she thought. No need to give up just yet. There’s a lot more work to be done…
“Very well,” Ith said, and stood up. “Artie, prepare yourself: we will go to the British Museum, and walk invisible among the displays. Or perhaps—” and that little golden eye glinted—“late tonight, when none but the night watchmen are about, perhaps one of them will look into the Prehistoric Saloon and wonder if he saw one of the displays move, and wink its eye …”
He winked, and Artie burst out laughing as he dusted himself off, which was about all the preparation he could do. “Ith, you wouldn’t,” Rhiow said, trying to sound severe. Ith seemed to have picked up some of Arhu’s taste for mischief along with the taste for deli food. Unfortunately it was difficult to scold someone who was so old and grave, and at the same time so young, and whose wickednesses were of such a small and genteel sort.
“Perhaps I would not,” Ith said, bowing to Rhiow. She put her whiskers forward at the phrasing. “In any case, I will take care of him,” Ith said. “If nothing else, when he needs to rest, I can take him to the Old Downside, where he will see all the ‘thunder lizards’ his heart desires.”
“How are your people doing?” Urruah said. “Settling in nicely?”
“They love the life under the sky,” Ith said. “For some of them, it is as if the old life in the caves never happened. And truly, for some of them, it is better that way. For others … they remember, and they look up at the Sun and rejoice.”
“Have there been any problems with our own People?” Rhiow said. The only other intelligent species populating that ancient ancestor-dimension of Earth were the Great Cats of whom Felis domesticus and its many cousins were the descendants: sabertooths and dire-lions, who had taken refuge in that paradisial otherworld many ages before.
“Oh, no,” Ith said mildly, and flexed his claws. “None that have been serious. They were unsure whether we were predators or prey, at first. They are sure now.” He grinned, showing all those very sharp teeth.
Rhiow chuckled. “Get out of here,” she said. “And go well. Artie, be nice to him. He bites.”
“He wouldn’t bite me,” said Artie.
“No, I would not,” Ith said. “Artie, come stand by me. Now watch, and take care; when the air tears, it does so raggedly, and the boundaries between here and there are sharp—”