“No,” Rhiow said. “This contamination is purposeful. The Lone One has been busy here.”
“Very busy, I’d say,” said Urruah. “And the contamination has to have happened a good while ago: not evenehhifcan make changes like this overnight. We’ve got to find out when this alternate timeline was ‘seeded’.”
Rhiow looked around her and lashed her tail in frustration.“We’re going to have a good time finding that out,” she said. “We can’t just ask theehhif.”
“We can ask People,” Arhu said.
“Yes,” said Rhiow, “but which ones? We could waste a lot of time talking to the wrong sources … and I have a feeling time isn’t something we dare waste here.”
They walked down to the edge of the river, looking up and down its length. The water was olive-colored and filthy, and it stank. A few desultory seabirds floated on it, or fished optimistically among the weeds and garbage for something to eat. Above it all, the dirty air billowed, unpleasantly visible.
“For all their technology, they’ve been oddly selective about how they use it,” Urruah said. “They obviously have electricity, but why are they still burning coal in their dens? There’s internal combustion being used out on the water, but why so little in the streets—why all the horses and dirt?”
“It looks like some of theehhif have access to this technology, but not all that many,” Rhiow said. It was a problem that their own world shared, though not quite in this way.
“You were right,” Arhu said suddenly, “about it being late afternoon.”
“Oh?” Rhiow said.
“Yeah. Look, the Moon’s coming up.”
They looked eastward down the river. Through the dirty haze, a dim round source of light had managed to rise above the buildings cluttering that end of the Thames basin. She looked at it, irrationally relieved that at least something was performing as expected around here…
…but then she heard Urruah gulp. Rhiow took another look, as the Moon lifted a little higher above the thickest of the murk.
“That’s not our Moon,” Urruah said softly.
The shape was right. The phase was gibbous. But the face … the face was blotted with darkness, its surface scarred: not with the usual dark maria, but with massive craters and fissures, and great plumes and patches of dark dust.
Urruah sat down. Rhiow was too shocked to move at all.
“What inlaw’sname has happened here?” she whispered.
“It’s sure not the Moon we started with,” Urruah said.
Rhiow couldn’t take her eyes off it. “Well … even our Moon at home isn’t the one we started with. Things happened to it after it was born …”
“But there are stories about that,” Urruah said. “Not the things you mean. It was clean once, they say … pure white, without a mark. Then the story says that the Lone Power in her feline form came, and saw it, and hated it. Sa’Rrahh blotted it with Her paw that was all newly stained withnight—with the death she had invented. She could never bear that anything should remain the way the One made it, if She had anything to say about the matter …”
“I thought the Moon was supposed to be the Old Tom’s eye,” Arhu said.
“Of course it is,” Rhiow said. “And it’s also just a big piece of rock splashed out of the Earth in its formative stages. It’d be a poor kind of world where there was just one explanation for things.”
Urruah looked away from that terrible Moon to give Rhiow a wry look.“Think of it as a conditional hyper-quadratic equation,” he said to Arhu. “Depending on conditions and context, the same equation gives you different answers at different times. But all the answers are correct. Mythology, philosophy and science are just three different modalities used to assess the same data, and they can coexist just fine, if you let them. In fact, they’ll do it just fine whether you let them or not: they have other business than sitting around waiting to see whetheryouapprove.”
Arhu looked up at the smudged Moon and shivered.“I don’t like it,” he said.
“Believe me, you’re not alone there,” Rhiow said softly. Written there dark above them was a blunt nasty restatement of the reason why there were wizards. The world, which should have been perfect, was marred: marred with and by malice long aforethought. The shadow-smudged, crater-scarred Moon of their own world was evidence enough of the Lone Power’s effect in both symbolic and “real” modes. The terrible destructive force which had struck the Earth very young, in what looked like one of the earliest attempts by the Lone One to prevent the rise of life and intelligence there, had not missed. Rhiow still wondered sometimes whether It had slightly miscalculated Its aim, or whether the Powers that Be had Themselves interfered, interposing Their power just enough to help the huge mass of magma splashed out of the planet’s still-molten body to draw itself together and congeal in near orbit. Even when mending the marred, They never overexerted Themselves, all too aware of the energy needed for the long battle lying ahead of them through this universe’s lifetime. No attempt would have been made to fly in the face of natural law and try to get life to arise on the second world. It would have been left to cool at its own pace, its low mass mandating the loss of the sparse store of atmospheric elements which arose from it during the cooling: and all the while the fury of the frustrated Lone One would have been allowed to mark itself on the barren Moon in storm after storm of meteoric impacts, eons of merciless cratering, and the punctured crust flooding the Moon’s surface with the last flows of lifeblood-lava that hardened dark into the great maria, the lighter elements at last all boiled away into the freezing dark of space. A dead world, now, with the mark ofthe Devastatrix’s dark paw pressed on it, livid and chill—a clear message:I missed, this time. But I will never rest until I finish what I began.
The message had plainly been more forcefully stated inthisuniverse, though.I am much closer to finishing,it said: and the technique was a favorite one of the Lone One’s … tricking life into undoing itself—a mockery of the tendency of the Powers to let life, by and large, take care of itself.
“I think going home would be a good idea,” Arhu said.
“Believe me, I’m with you,” Urruah said, “but we have a few things to do first. We need to find out what year this is, if we can—”
“No,” Rhiow said. “No, I think Arhu’s idea is a good one.”
“What?”
“Listen to me,” Rhiow said. “Every minute we stay here makes it worse. Potentially, anyway. No, listen! Urruah, there’s no question that this contamination has happened. Our being here has confirmed it … has made it real for us. And you know whatthatmeans. What’s happened atourend of time?”
She watched Urruah start to look a lot more concerned. There was a variant of what someehhifcalled the Heisenberg“uncertainty” principle which pertained to alternate universes. While you might postulate the existence of an alternate universe, even be faced by evidence of its existence—as Rhiow’s team and the London team had been—that universe did not really “exist” for you until you visited it. Once you did, and its reality had become part of your own, not by consensus, but by direct experience, your own universe also then began to change as a result. This was one of the principles that made wizards so chary of indulging in pleasure trips outside their own universe. For one thing, there was usually plenty of pleasure to be found locally … and for another, once you came back from an alternate-universe jaunt, there might be no “locally” left: or not one you would recognize…