“What happened? Can we do this at home?”
“No,” Urruah said. “Cats’ bodies are the same size as their souls, here. Your soul remembers our ancient history, even if your body doesn’t…”
“Look at all this! Where are we?”
“IAh’hah.” Saash used the Ailurin slang that was as close as the average cat could come to pronouncing “New York.”
He stared at Saash. “You’re crazy!”
“This is New York, all right,” Urruah said. “Five hundred thousand years ago, maybe… and ten or twenty worlds over.”
“But this isn’t our world,” Arhu said, not entirely as a question.
“No,” Rhiow said, looking up and around through the golden air. “Ours is related to it… but this one is older… or it’s simply still the way ours was, long ago. Hard to telclass="underline" time differs, from world to world.”
“And things that happen here… happen at home too?”
“Yes. Often in different shapes, ones you might not expect at first. Know how when you look in a puddle, you see yourself? But the image is twisted: the wind touches it, it wrinkles…”
“Yeah.”
“Like that. Except this world would be the real you… and our world would be the image in the puddle, the mirror.”
Arhu opened his mouth, shut it again. “You mean … this is the real world? This is the way we’re supposed to look?”
“I didn’t say that.” Now it was getting tricky. It had taken Rhiow a good couple of years’ study to fully understand the implications of interdimensional relations between worlds. “This world is… in some ways… realer than ours. Closer to the center of things. But, Arhu, there are other worlds a lot more central than this one … and you can go sshai-sau trying to define reality merely in terms of centrality. I wouldn’t suggest you start working on a definition at this early stage. Let’s just say that this is a place where you can be different… but you take care not to do it for too long.”
“Why not? I like this! It would be great to be this way all the time!”
The paw came down on him, heavy, from behind, and pushed Arhu down flat. Arhu twisted his head around to gaze up into the huge, silver-gray face that loomed over him, narrow-eyed, fangs showing just a little. Though Urruah’s markings always went tigerish when he was Downside, he always looked, to Rhiow, more leopardlike. But in this form he was also still the biggest of them: and for all the lions’ fearful reputation, leopards are known even by ehhif to be the more dangerous and terrible hunters, wily and fearfully powerful.
“You wouldn’t like it,” Urruah said, “if you didn’t have a mind.”
Arhu just lay there and looked at him.
“Oh, sure,” Urruah said, “hunt big game, conquer a territory miles long, be big, be strong, eat anything you like, have trees fall over at the sound of your roar: sounds great, doesn’t it? But there’s a price, because none of us are supposed to stay out of our proper worlds for very long. Little by little you start to forget who you are. You forget your other lives if you’ve had any. You lose your wizardry, assuming you’ve achieved it. You lose your history. Finally you lose your name. And then it’s as if you never existed at all, since when you die and Iau calls your name to issue you with your next life, no one answers…” Urruah shrugged.
Arhu lay there looking rather stunned. “Okay, okay,” he said, “I guess I see your point. I like being me.”
Urruah stood back and let him up. Arhu shook himself off, sat down, and took a moment’s he’ihh to correct his slightly rumpled head fur. “But that stuff only happens if you stay here a long time?” he said.
“As far as we know, yes,” Rhiow said.
He looked rather sharply at her. “So what happens if you die Downside before you forget?”
It was the crucial question, the one that had made it harder than usual for Rhiow to get to sleep last night. “I don’t know,” she said.
“You mean … even if you have more lives … you still might not come back.” He was wide-eyed. “You mean you just die dead… like a bug or an ehhif?”
“Maybe,” Rhiow said. The Whisperer was silent about this possibility … and the concept that Hrau’f the Silent herself had no information on this subject was not one that filled Rhiow with joy. Moreover, she had absolutely no desire to be one of those who would supply the information.…
Arhu shook his head until his ears rattled, then craned his neck to look up, gazing at the rank above rank of gigantic trees, vanishing above them into the mist of a passing cloud. “It’s a mountain…” he said.
“It’s the Mountain,” Saash said. “This is the center of everything.”
“What’s that tall thing up at the top…” His voice trailed off, his ears twitching, as the Whisperer had a word with him.
“Oh,” he said then, and sat down with a thump.
“Yes,” Rhiow said. “And down among the Tree’s roots, into the caverns, is where we’re going.”
“What, in the dark? I don’t want to go down there! I want to go over there!” He was staring at the narrow flicker of sunny veldtland showing westward, past the forests. A faint plume of dust hung above it, golden in the late sun: distant herds of game on the move. But then he threw a look over his shoulder at Urruah, who had resolutely turned his back on the vista.
“I just bet you do. Later,” Rhiow said. “Business first.” She looked around them, caught Urruah’s eye, and nodded toward the cave entrance, in which hung the main control matrices for all the Grand Central and Penn gates, all shimmering and alive with the fiery patterns of normal function. Rhiow glanced back at the still-open gate through which they had come, and flirted her tail at Kit, who was standing there watching on the other side. He sketched her a small salute in return.
Can you hear me all right? she said inwardly.
No problems, Kit said, the same way. It was a little odd: his thought to her sounded like one of her own—the way inward speech between her teammates did. But this was Speech-based telepathy rather than thought grounded in Ailurin, and Kit’s thought had a pronounced ehhif accent. Am I clear?
Just fine. “I feel a lot better with them there,” Rhiow said, turning away and making her way sideways along the “threshold” stone, to where Saash already had her claws into the weave of the malfunctioning gate.
“Those were ehhif wizards?” Arhu said, padding along beside her.
“Yes.”
“Very nice people,” Urruah said. “Very professional.”
“Hmf,” Arhu said. “They don’t look like much to me.”
“That they were here to meet us,” Rhiow said, “indicates that Carl thinks they’re two of the most powerful wizards available in this area. The younger the wizard, the more powerful…” She carefully did not say why, in case the Whisperer had not yet mentioned it to Arhu: because the young don’t know what’s impossible yet, and do it anyway. “The only wizards better at being powerful for a long time while young are the ones who’re whales. They stay children longest. Our latency period isn’t that long, relatively … so we have to make up in extreme cleverness and adaptability what we lose early on in sheer power.”