“Is the tripwire here?” Arhu said.
“Of course it’s here,” Urruah said, a little crossly. “I can feel it even through this stuff. Everything’s going according to plan … so far.” He looked around at the mud. “Though I have to admit my plans did not includethis.”
“It’s going to take a while for our noses to get used to this,” Rhiow said, looking around her with some concern. “Meanwhile, there’s no point in standing around waiting for it to happen.”
“You mentioned playing in traffic,” Arhu said, looking across the street as horse carriages plunged by, big drays pulled by huge horses, smaller gigs with neat-looking ponies between the shafts, or tall slender beasts apparently bred for the hackney trade. “I’d give a lot for a nice taxi torun underneath at the moment.”
“I wish you had one too,” Urruah growled, glancing up the road and unwilling to put a paw in the loathsome mud. “I will never complain about New York being dirty again.Never!”
“Yes you will,” Arhu said, more in a tone of resignation than foresight: but he knew Urruah well enough by now to be able to make the statement without resource to prophecy.
Urruah was so disgusted that he didn’t even bother taking a swipe at Arhu. “For someone who lives in a dumpster,” Rhiow said, unable to resist the chance to tease him, “you’re awfully fastidious.”
“My dumpster is cleaner than this,” Urruah said. “Asewage-treatmentfacility is cleaner than this! If—”
“I get the message,” Rhiow said. “Come on, Ruah, we don’t have a choice. Let’s do it.”
They ran across the street together…
…and Arhu was completely unprepared for the motor roar that came from down the side street. In a cloud of smoke, a four-wheeled vehicle on thin-tired, spindly wheels came charging around the corner and straight at them.
There was no time to jump. Arhu’s eyes rolled in terror, but it was informed terror. He threw himself flat under the vehicle’s chassis: it passed over him and roared on down the street, theehhifsitting in the contraption either completely unaware that they’d almost run over a cat, or completely unconcerned about it.
Urruah, who had been further into the middle of the road, now ran over to Arhu as he picked himself up and shook himself to get the worst of the muck off.“You have to start being more careful about what you ask for,” Urruah growled. “Clearly someone’s listening … Are you all right?”
“As long as I don’t have to wash and find out what I taste like,” Arhu muttered, “yes.” He trotted hurriedly for the sidewalk, or what passed for it: in this neighborhood, this meant “where the mud was only an inch thick instead of three or four”.
They crouched against the brick building there and looked up and down the road. It was plainly George Street, running into Great Tower Hill as usuaclass="underline" but the traffic was mostly pulled by horses—not that that made it any slower than modern London traffic: if anything, it looked to be moving a little faster.
People walked past them, some well dressed, some seemingly poor but clean though somewhat threadbare, some practically in rags: and no one seemed to notice the mud. A few heads turned when one of the motor vehicles passed, though. Rhiow couldn’t tell whether it was because they were unusual, or simply because of the noise they made. Apparently the muffler had not yet been invented.
“Now what arethosedoing here?” Urruah said. “Internal combustion engines aren’t until the turn of the century.”
“Neither is the word for smog,” Rhiow said, looking up at the dingy, near-opaque sky, “but that doesn’t seem to have stopped these people: they’ve got that, too.”
“What time would you say this is?” Rhiow said. “The light is so peculiar …”
Urruah shook his head.“Late afternoon? Not even smog could make it this dim.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” Rhiow said.
“Everything here feels wrong,” Arhu said. “All of it.” His face had lost the disgusted expression it had worn a moment before: his eyes looked slightly unfocused.
“You’re not kidding,” Urruah said. “Something’s happened to history … and I don’t like the look of it. Or the smell of it.”
Rhiow curled her lip at the smell from the street.“This would have been here anyway,” she said, picking one forefoot up out of the mud. “The kind of sanitation we take for granted in our own time was something theseehhifwere only beginning to see the need for. And their technology’s not up to it, even if theydidsee the need. There are more people in this city than in almost any other in the world, and all they’ve got are brooms and dustpans … and four millionehhif and a quarter million horses inside the City limits.” She smiled grimly. “Work it out for yourself. How many cubic miles of—”
“Please,” Urruah said, and sneezed.
They started to walk, looking for somewhere clean. They found no such place, at least in the public roads. Only the moat surrounding the Tower led up to patches of green grass beneath the old stone walls. Their structure was unchanged from what Rhiow had seen in modern London: but they were stained black by who knew how many years of air pollution. Slowly the three of them made their way around toward the river, looking down it from a spot which would have been close to where Rhiow and Arhu had stood only a few hours before.
“This is all wrong,” Arhu whispered. Across the river was a great palisade of buildings, all of which were taller than architecture of theehhifQueen Victoria’s time could possibly have been.
This stuff shouldn’t be here,” Arhu said. “And look at that—”
They looked at the great bridge, crowned with its pyramidal towers and boasting its high cross-walkway, which appeared on so many of the postcards and Tshirts which theehhifsold near Tower Hill Underground station.“That’s wrong too,” Arhu said.
Rhiow looked at him.“Are you sure? Even in our world, it’s pretty old—”
Urruah stared off into the distance for a moment as he cocked an ear to listen to the Whisperer.“He’s right, though,” he said presently. “She says that in our world, this wasn’t built until 1886. No matter what year this is in the ‘spread’ we’re heading for, that’s still too soon.”
“Interesting,” Rhiow said, and shook herself to abort a beginning shiver … “Something to do with the technology, maybe … ?”
“They’ve got a whole lot too much of it, if you ask me,” Urruah said.
“Of technology?” Rhiow said, and looked around her. Overhead, something very like a helicopter went by in a loud chatter of rotors. What she couldn’t understand was why a helicopter needed wings as well…
“Of the wrongkindof technology,” Urruah said. “Rhi, this timeline has been contaminated …seriouslycontaminated.”
“And you don’t think it’s an accident.”
“Do you? Really?”
She looked around her at the vista down the river, of cranes standing up and erecting new buildings of steel and plate glass, but still somehow in a style that was essentially Victorian, complicated and (to her eye) over-decorated. She looked down the face of the river, which was full of shipping—not sail, as at least some of that shipping still should have been, but metal ships, running on internal combustion or (in just a very few cases, as in a technology that was rapidly being left behind) steam. She saw thedesignof many of those ships which were making their way to and from the Pool of London: lean, low, forward-thrust, angular shapes such as she had seen often enough in New York Harbor—battleships and cruisers in the modern mold, all fanged with guns and other weapons she couldn’t recognize. There were a lot of those warships: they came and went as regularly, it seemed, as the tour ships that ran up and down the Thames in Rhiow’s own native time. For all its bustle of business and its aura ofehhifsuccess and power, this London also had a grim air about it.