Arhu was looking from Rhiow to Urruah and back again with some confusion.“What’s the matter? Is something wrong back home?”
“She’s saying there mightbeno more home,” Urruah said, glancing around him, “the longer we stay here … Fortunately, timelines don’t wipe themselves out in a matter of seconds, the way people think, when there’s a change. Causality is robust, and it tries hard to stay the way it is to begin with: the variables in the equation will slosh around for a good while before an alternate universe settles fully into place. As a rule,” Urruah said. “Unless the change is so big that causality just can’t resist it at all …”
They all looked up at the scarred Moon again. Rhiow shuddered: then she said,“Remember when we were talking about gating offplanet?”
Arhu looked at Rhiow.
“I think this would be a good time for you to go ahead and do it,” she said to Arhu. “Mind the radiation: there’s a fair amount of it, once you’re out of the atmosphere’s protection. All you need is a standard forcefield spell, the one we were working with last month. You can build the defense against the ionizing radiation into the forcefield at the same time you’re loading in enough air to last you for the visit.”
Arhu looked at her and licked his nose.“You have to wonder,” Urruah said, looking away from the Moon with difficulty, “what could cause that kind of effect. I think we need to find out.”
There was a long silence.“Would you come with me?” Arhu said.
Urruah glanced at Rhiow.“I’m sure he could handle it himself,” he said. “But just this once …” And he glanced up at the Moon again. “That is so bizarre …”
They walked a little further down the riverbank to find a place where there was less mud, just under the shadow of the Tower’s walls. There was an old disused dock there, leading a little way out into the water. Gratefully enough they stepped up onto it, and Arhu headed down toward the end of it, where recent weather or wavewash had mostly scoured the rotting planks clean. Here he started to walk the circle they wouldneed, leaving the pale tracery of graphics in the Speech behind him as he walked and muttered.
Urruah watched him with an expert’s eye. “He’s been practicing that one for a while,” he said.
Rattled as she was, Rhiow couldn’t help but smile. “The way you’ve been practicing that timeslide?”
“Uh, well.” Urruah sat down and started to wash his face, then made a face at the taste of his paw, and stopped. “Rhi, you know I wouldn’t step out of bounds. Not on this kind of stuff. It scares me.”
“It’s sure scaringme,”Rhiow said.“I can’t wait to get back … it’s like fleas under the skin, the fear. But it can’t be helped … we need to do this first.”
Arhu had finished the first layer of his circle and had tied the wizard’s knot: now he was laying in the coordinates for the Moon and the “pockets” which would trap and hold adequate air inside the spell for the three of them. “It was a nice piece of work, regardless,” Rhiow said. “That slide.”
“Thanks,” Urruah said. “It didn’t get much approval in some quarters, though.”
“Oh?”
“Fhrio.”
“Just what the Snakeishis problem?” Rhiow muttered.
“I don’t know. Just generalized jealousy, I think. Or else he just really is territorial about anything to do with ‘his’ gates. I never thought I’d see a Person so territorial. I swear, he’s like anehhifthat way.”
“Maybe he was one in his last life,” Rhiow said, putting her whiskers forward. There were numerous jokes among People about how such an accident might happen, mostly suggesting that it was a step up in the scale of things for theehhif.
“Please,” Urruah said. “It makes my head hurt just thinking about it.”
Arhu stopped, looked up at them.“You want to come check your names?”
They walked over to the circle and jumped into it. Rhiow examined her name and found everything represented as it should be … but there was something odd about one of the symbols that was normally a constant. It was a personality factor, something to do with relationships: it was suggesting a change in the future, though whether near or far, Rhiow couldn’t tell.
“Where did you get this?” she said, prodding the symbol with one paw.
Arhu shrugged.“It came out of the Knowledge: ask the Whisperer.”
Rhiow waved her tail gently at that. Sometimes such things happened to a wizard who routinely did a lot of spelling: you saw a change in the symbology before it had reflected itself in your own person, or before it seemed to have so reflected itself. Then you were faced with the question of changing it back to a more familiar form—and wondering whether you were thereby keeping yourself stuck in some situation which was meant to change gradually—or leaving it the way it was, and wondering what in the worlds it might mean. Rhiow took a long breath, looking at it, and left it alone.
Urruah straightened up, apparently having found nothing untoward in his own name, and said,“It looks fine. Is everything else ready?”
Arhu stared at him.“You’re not going to check it?”
“Why should I?” Urruah said. “You passed your Ordeaclass="underline" you’re a wizard. You’re not going to get us killed.” He sat down and started washing again, making faces again, but this time persisting.
Rhiow sat down too, there being no reason to stand.“Go on,” she said to Arhu: “Let’s see what we see.”
Arhu looked around him a little nervously, then stepped to the center of the spell and half-closed his eyes, a concentrating look. Rhiow watched with some interest. Spelling styles varied widely among wizards of whatever species: there were some who simply“read” the words of a spell out of the Whispering, and others who liked to memorize large chunks: some who preferred the sound of the words of the Speech spoken aloud, and some who felt embarrassed to be talking out loud to the universe and preferred to keep their contracts with it silent. Arhuwas apparently one of these, for without a word spoken—though Rhiow could feel, as if through her fur, that words in the Speech were being thought—she felt the spell starting to take: checking for her presence and Urruah’s, sealing the air in around them, and then the transit—
—abrupt, quicker than she was used to: but that was very much in Arhu’s style. One moment they were looking at the dirty river flowing between its sludgy banks, and the foul air snuggling down against it: then everything went black and white.
And brown. She had not been prepared for the brown: it was a strange note. They were standing on a high place, one of the Lunar Carpathians, she thought, a fairly level spot scattered with small grainy rocks and the powdery pumice dust typical of even this area, which had suffered its share of meteoric impacts, exclusive of impacts of other types. The sphere of air held around them by the spell shed frozen oxygen and nitrogen snow around them at the interface between it and vacuum: the snow sifted out and down a little harder, sliding down the outside of the invisible sphere invoked by the spell, when any of them moved slightly and changed the way the wizardry compensated for their presence.
The brown lay streaked over the white and gray-black of the craters around them. It was ejecta from another impact, a much larger one, some miles away if Rhiow was any judge. She looked all around them for its source, but the crater was well over the short lunar horizon.
More than six miles away, anyway,she thought, glancing over at Arhu. He was licking his nose repeatedly.“Are you all right?” Rhiow said.
“Yeah,” he said, “but the spell’s not. Radiation.”