“What’s the matter?” Auhlae said. “Didn’t it work?”
“Perfect!’ Urruah said. “Right to the tenth of a second.” The rest of his pleasure in the accuracy of his spelling got lost for Rhiow in a rush of astonishment and delight that the world seemed, by and large, to be the way they had left it. But the delight didn’t last. She couldn’t get rid of the image of that other world’s Moon, and of the certainty that, unless they could work out what had gone wrong and what to do about it, their own Moon would look that way before long. Urruah was right: reality resisted being changed. But it could not resist such change indefinitely: and the rumbling dark of the Underground tunnels almost immediately looked a lot less welcome, and started to look rather like a trap.
“We should get everyone together,” she said to Auhlae. “If you thought you had trouble with random temporal accesses … when we show you what we’ve found, you’ll wish a few stray pastlings wereallyou had …”
FOUR
“They havenuclear weapons??”Huff said.
“Whether they’re exactly weapons the way we would define them, I don’t know,” Rhiow said. “We were hardly there long enough to guess anything about their delivery systems. Do they have missiles? I haven’t a clue. But do they know how to produce large nuclear explosions? You’d best believe it.”
Relative silence fell in the corner of the pub where the London and New York gating teams sat that evening: the only other sound was the occasional dinging and idiot music played by what the London team referred to as the“fruit machines”. Rhiow much wished the machines, ranged around the back wall of this room of the pub, would emit something as innocent as fruit, instead of the deafening shower and clatter of one-pound coins that came out of them every now and then whenehhifplayed with them. As evening drew on and The Mint started to fill up, the hope of a pile of those coins was starting to keep the machines busy withehhif who drifted in, fed the machines money, and then shook and banged them when they didn’t give it back again, with dividends. It was, in its way, a charming illustration of someehhiffaith in the truism that what you gave the universe, it would give back: but they were plainly a little confused about the timing of such returns, or the percentages involved.
“But just the idea of them blowing up the Moon,” Siffha’h said. “It’s awful. It’ll be themselves, next …”
Rhiow, tucked down in the“meatloaf configuration”, twitched her tail in agreement. “It was always a favorite tactic of the Lone One’s,” she said. “Tricking life into undoing itself. And so doing, mocking the Powers, which tend to let life take care of itself, by and large.”
“They were lucky not to bring the whole thing down on top of them,” Fhrio said. “Imagine if they had hit one of those deep lunar ‘mantle faults’ and blown it apart. Just think of the tidal effects on the Earth … and then the fragment impacts later.”
“I’m sure sa’Rrahh would have been delighted,” Huff said. He was lying on his side, finishing one more wash after acting as courier for yet another round of snacks for the assembled group. “I wouldn’t say that was her main intent in this case, as Lone Power, but it would have been entirely acceptable. As it is, it looks like the poorehhif back then have been given the quickest way for an unprepared or immature species to kill itself off … tried and tested in other parts of this Galaxy and others. And if that universe settles fully into place before we can dislodge it, we’ll find ourselves living on the Earth that’s a direct historical successor to that one. If ‘living’ is the word I’m looking for … because we’llbe in the middle of the nuclear winter.”
“Well, all we have to do now,” Siffha’h said, “is figure out what to do about this.”
“Oh, yes,that’sall,” Fhrio said.
Rhiow paid no more attention to this remark than the others seemed to be doing, instead glancing over toward the corner. Half-hidden by the arrangement of a couple of the fruit machines, Arhu’s newspaper was spread out on the floor, and he was bent over it, carefully puzzling out the words. Rhiow had always found it useful that understanding of the Speech let a wizard understand other written languages as well as all spoken ones. Normally she didn’t get too carried away by this advantage: but Arhu had been turning into a voracious reader ofehhifprinted material of all kinds, everything from the big advertisements posted up here and there in Grand Central to scraps of newspaper and magazines that people dropped on the platforms, or the complete papers that Urruah fished out of the garbage bins at regular intervals. Urruah had claimed, with some pride, that Arhu was taking after him in his erudition. Rhiow agreed, but was clearer about the reasons for it. Arhu was nosy … nearly as nosy as Urruah, and with a taste for gossip and scandal nearly as profound. She couldn’t really complain: that insatiable curiosity was part of what made them good at being wizards. At the same time, sometimes the habit drove Rhiow nearly crazy. Urruah’s endlessly relayed tales about the sexual peculiarities and mishaps ofehhifmade her wish very much that Urruah would read more of the kind of newspapers which did not feature headlines like HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR.
What had become immediately plain was that, in 1875 at least,The Timesof London was not that kind of newspaper. There was hardly anything to it. A front page which was almost entirely classified ads, both commercial and private: then interior pages which reported what seemed to the publishers to be important news—most of it having to do withehhif from the pride-of-prides“Britain”, or other prides closely associated with it—and then long reports about what was going on in the place where the pride-rulers sat, the “Houses of Parliament”.
“This is mostly a lot of small stuff,” Arhu said, glancing up at the others in the momentary quiet. “Ehhifbuying and selling dens to live in, and renting them out: or asking otherehhifto come and work with them: or buying and selling little things, or asking otherehhif to help them find things they’ve lost. Some other news about shows and plays they wantehhif to go to: and then news about the pride-ruler and what he does all day. That’s the interesting part: it’s not a Queen. It’s a King.”
Huff breathed out heavily.“Then the old Queen is dead in that eighteen seventy-five,” he said. “There’s a major change. In our world she lived on almost into the next century.”
“But the world’s different, that’s for sure,” Arhu said. “They have all kinds of things that the Whispering says weren’t there in our world’s eighteen seventy-five. A lot of machines like our time’sehhifhave: even computers, though I don’t think they’re as smart as the ones in our time. And they’ve definitely got space travel, though it’s as it is in our world: only the pride-rulers use it. I think it’s for weapons too, mostly.”
“Orbital?” Fhrio said.
“I don’t know,” Arhu said. “They don’t seem eager to talk about it in here. They talk a lot about war, though …” He ran one paw down the page. “See. Here’s the bombing that the Illingworthehhifwas talking about.
“ ‘The Continental powers have once again defied the King-Emperor’s edict by using mechanical flying bombs based at Calais and Dieppe to strike at civilian targets in the south of Sussex and Essex. The Royal Air Force, led by units of His Majesty’s 8th Flying Hussars, succeeded in destroying nearly all elements of the attack, but several flying bombs were knocked off course by the defending forces and exploded in suburban areas of Brighton and Hove, causing civilian casualties and destruction to a large area. The Ministry of War has announced that these attacks will be the cause of the most severe reprisal at a time of the Government’s choosing—’ ”
Arhu stopped, his tail twitching slowly. Fhrio was growling under his breath.“This island has not been bombed since the second of the greatehhifwars in this century,” Huff said. “That they should have been doing such things then … Does it say what they mean by ‘the Continental powers’?”