“Wow!” Arhu said.
“Wow,” said Urruah, rather sourly.
Rhiow was inclined to agree with him. Who needs this now?? she thought. Life had just begun to be getting a little settled again, after the craziness of the late summer, after the desperate intervention in which they had all been involved in the Old Downside, in which Arhu gained his wizardry and Saash lost hers, or rather took it up in a more profound version after her ninth death—though either way she was lost to the team now. Arhu had filled her spot, though not precisely. Saash had been a gate technician of great skill, and Arhu was primarily a visionary, gifted at seeing beyond present realities into those past or yet to come. That talent was still steadying down, as it might take some years yet to do: and it would take a lot of training yet before Arhu was anything like the gating technician that Saash had been. Since they got back, Rhiow and Urruah had been spending almost all their free time coaching him and wondering when life would get back to anything like “normal”. So much for that! Rhiow thought.
“What are we going to do about our regular maintenance rounds?” Urruah said.
Rhiow flirted her tail. “The Perm Station team will have to handle them.”
“Oh, they’re going to just love that.”
“We can’t help it, and they’ll know that perfectly well. All of us wind up subbing for People on other teams every now and then. Sometimes it’s fun.”
“They won’t think so,” Urruah said. “How long is this going to go on?”
Rhiow sighed. The human school year was just starting, and ehhif businesses were swinging back into full operation after the last of their people came back from vacation … The City was sliding back into fully operative mode, which meant increased pressure on the normal rapid transit. That in turn meant more stress on the gates, for the increased numbers of ehhif moving in and out of the City meant more stress on the fabric of reality, especially in the areas where large numbers of people flowed in and out in the vicinity of the gate matrices themselves. String structure got finicky, matrices got warped and gates went down without warning at such times: hardly a day went by without a malfunction. The Pennsylvania Station gating team had their paws full just with their normal work. Having the Grand Central gates added to their workload, at their busiest time…
“Ruah, it can’t be helped,” Rhiow said. “They can take it up with the Powers themselves, if they like, but the Whisperer will send them off with fleas in their ears and nothing more. These things happen.”
“Yeah, well, what about you?”
“Me?”
“You know. Your ehhif.”
Rhiow sighed at that. Urruah was “nonaligned”—without a permanent den and not part of a pride-by-blood, but most specifically uncompanioned by ehhif, and therefore what they would call a “stray”: mostly at the moment he lived in a dumpster outside a construction site in the East Sixties. Arhu had inherited Saash’s position as mouser-in-chief at the underground parking garage where she had lived, and had nothing to do to keep in good odor with his “employers” except, at regular intervals, to drop something impressively dead in front of the garage office, and to appear fairly regularly at mealtimes. Rhiow, however, was denned with an ehhif in an twentieth-story apartment between First and Second in the Seventies. Her comings and goings during his workday were nothing which bothered Iaehh, since he didn’t see them: but in the evenings, if he didn’t know where she was, he got concerned. Rhiow had no taste for upsetting him—between the two of them, since the sudden loss of her “own’ ehhif, Hhuha, there had been more than enough upset to go around.
“I’ll have to work around him the best I can,” she said. “He’s been doing a lot of overtime lately: that’ll probably help me.” Though as she said it, once again Rhiow found herself wondering about all that overtime. Was it happening because the loss of the household’s second income had been making the apartment harder to afford, or because the less time Iaehh spent there, being reminded of Hhuha in the too-quiet evenings, the happier he was … ? “And besides,” she said, ready enough to change the subject, “it can’t be any better for you …”
Urruah made a hmf sound. “Well, it’s annoying,” he said. “They’re starting H’la Houheme at the end of the week.”
“I don’t mean that. I had in mind your ongoing business with the ‘Somali’ lady you’ve been seeing over at the Met. The diva-ehhifs ‘pet’.”
Urruah shook his head hard enough that his ears rattled slightly. It was a gesture Rhiow had been seeing more often than usual from him, lately, and he had picked up a couple more scars about the head. “Yes, well,” he said.
Rhiow looked away and began innocently to wash. Urruah’s interest in the artform known to ehhif as “opera” continued to strike her as a little kinky, despite Rhiow’s recognition that this was simply a slightly idiosyncratic personal manifestation of all toms’ fascination with song in its many forms. However, lately Urruah had been discoursing less in the abstract mode as regarded oh’ra, and more about the star dressing room and the goings-on therein. Urruah’s interest in Hwith was apparently less than abstract, and appeared mutual, though most of what Rhiow heard of Hwith’s discourse had to do with the juicier gossip about her “mistress’s” steadily intensifying encounters with the oh’ra’s present guest conductor.
“Well, what the hiouh,” Urruah said after a moment, “this is what we became wizards for, anyway, isn’t it? Travel. Adventure. Going to strange and wonderful places …”
And getting into trouble in them, Rhiow thought. “Absolutely,” she said. “Come on … let’s start getting the logistics sorted out.”
She turned and walked back up the platform, jumped down onto the tracks and started to make her way over the iron-stained gravel to the platform for Track Twenty-Four. Urruah followed at his own pace: Arhu leapt and ran to catch up with her. “Why’re you so down about it?” he said. “This is gonna be great!”
“It will if you don’t act up,” Rhiow said, and almost immediately regretted it.
“Whaddaya mean, ‘act up’? I’m very well behaved.”
Rhiow gave Urruah a sidewise look as he came up from behind them. “Compared to the Old Tom on a rampage,” she said, “or the Devastatrix in heat, doubtless you are. As People go, though, we have some work to do on you yet.”
“Listen to me, Arhu,” Urruah said, as they jumped up onto Track Twenty-Four and started weaving their way down it toward the entrance to the Main Concourse. “We’re going into other People’s territory. That’s always ticklish business. Not only that: we’re going there because there’s something going on that they couldn’t handle by themselves. They have to have feelings about that … and that we’re now going to come strolling in there with our tails up to fix things, supposedly, can’t make them overjoyed either. It makes them look bad to themselves. You get it?”
“Well, if they are bad—”