There would be no way to be sure of that with the data we have. But Iamsuggesting that Siffha’h’s right. This was not a malfunction … or not a very likely one. There was someone at the other end managing it … or someone who programmed it and walked away.”
“But how do you open a gateforwardin time?” Siffha’h said, her eyes big.
Huff looked at her somberly.“Unless you’ve mastered contemporal existence,” Huff said, “you don’t. But the only ones who have done so, who simultaneously live in all times and none, are the Powers that Be.”
“Including that one other Power,” said Auhlae, “who gives us so much trouble …”
Glances were exchanged all around.
“Well, the circle’s served its purpose,” Rhiow said. She flirted her tail at the “wizard’s knot”: it unraveled, and the rest of the circle vanished with it. “Thanks, Siffha’h. That was nicely done.”
She looked smug.“Any time.”
Fhrio went over to the gate and put one paw into the control weave, hooking out first one string, then another. He hissed softly.“There’s no telling what happened now,” he said. “Those ‘settings’ wiped themselves from the logs when the gate collapsed … that doubtless being the ‘operator’s’ intention. We’re no further along than we were before.”
Urruah, who had stepped away to sit down and have a brief wash while Fhrio was looking the gate over, now glanced up.“Well,” he said, “it’s not that bad. I wove them into the gate’s ‘hard’ memory, stacked underneath your standard default routines, while I was locking the gate open. Just a precaution: I was afraid I might drop something vital when things got busy. But at least that way we could be sure of finding the settings again if something went wrong.”
Fhrio blinked.“Howdid you get into my hard routines that fast …?”
Urruah smiled one of those smug-tom smiles, and Rhiow said hurriedly,“Huff, I wouldn’t mind taking a break for a little while, if it suits you.”
“Certainly. Let’s go up and get some fresh air … see if we can find some lunch. After that,” and Huff looked grim, “we must plan. If the Lone Power is behind what we just saw … and I can’t think what else could be … then we’ve a nasty job ahead of us. Food first: but then the council of war …”
The food took less time than Rhiow had thought, most of it provided byehhifwhom she found astonishingly willing. Huff had simply led them around to The Mint, the pub where he lived with hisehhif,the pub’s manager. Rhiow was not sure what to expect from a pub, except for thinking that perhaps, like many other things she had glimpsed so far in London, it might be fairly old: but this one was as much like a New York uptown bar as anything else, all plate glass and polished brass and hanging plants. Huff made his way through the pub’s “lounge” area, graciously accepting bits of sausage and burger and sandwich and other treats from the patrons and bringing this food back to the others, who stayed discreetly sidled in one out-of-the-way corner of the pub otherwise populated only by a group of mindlessly dinging and hooting small-stakes gambling machines.
“You’re very popular here,” Urruah said, after Huff came back with a rather large piece of fried fish.
“Oh yes,” Huff said, watching with amusement as Arhu fell on the piece of fish and devoured it almost without stopping to breathe. “They’re a nice enough bunch, by and large: and myehhifdoesn’t mind. He describes it as “good will” … says it helps business. It’s my pleasure, I’m sure.” Huff looked around the place with a satisfied air. “Always nice to be part of a successful undertaking. I just have to watch myself, sometimes: it would be too easy to get fat …”
Rhiow, busy washing her face after finishing a greasy but delectable half of a sausage, was glad of the excuse not to be looking at Huff when he said that. He had already achieved at least“portly” status, but he was not genuinely overweight … yet.
And who am I to stare athimin this regard? If I had unlimited access to food like this, who knows what I’d look like in a few months …All the same, she wished she had the opportunity to find out.
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 … orperhaps,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 traceback 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 theehhifwizards 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 righttime,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, asde factoanchor, 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.”