They were an unusual group, the Downing Street cats: genuine civil servants, and talented ones. Over the many, many years they had been in residence, they had learned to understand clearlyehhifspeech of various kinds—the first “cabinet’ cats, dating back to the pride-ruler Henry VI, had beenehhif-bilingual in English and French—and they were assiduous about training their replacements to make sure the talent wasn’t lost in this most special of the branches of the Civil Service.Not quite wizards,Rhiow thought:though there may be wizardly blood in their line somewhere, or occasional infusions of it from outside -for not all the Downing Street group were related. They were arrai’theh,a working pride without blood affinities, part of the much larger pride which referred to itself as“the Old Cats’ Network”. Rhiow wondered if, as in other nonwizardly cats, another talent to “spill over” from wizardly stock had been the one for passing through closed doors unnoticed. She suspected it had: in their line of work, such an ability would have been invaluable.
She made her way down to the Tower Hill Underground station with her head still buzzing with Hhuhm’hri’s briefing. It was unnerving, the way thinking aboutehhifaffairs for four or five hours straight could make you start looking at the world the way they did. Rhiow wasn’t sure she liked it.Oh well … an occupational hazard.But the one word which seemed to have come up most frequently in Hhuhm’hri’s reminiscences was “war”. Try as she might, Rhiow could not understand whyehhifcould kill each other in such large numbers for what seemed to her completely useless purposes. Fighting for land to live on, for a territory that would provide food to eat,thatshe could understand. All People who ran in prides, from the microfelids to the great cats of this world, did the same. But they usually didn’t kill each other: a fight that resulted in the other pride running away was more than sufficient. If they tried to come back, you just drove them away again.
Ehhif,though, seemed not to find this kind of fighting sufficient. What troubled Rhiow most severely was tales ofehhif killing one another in large numbers for the sake of land that was nearly worthless—going to war simply because they had said that a given piece of land was theirs, and some otherehhifhad disputed the claim. Or when they went to war for the sake of prestige or injured pride: that was strangest to her of all. And it seemed to her, from what Hhuhm’hri had told her, that the pride-of-prides, which its ehhif called Britain, had gone to war for all these reasons, and for numerous other ones, over the past couple of centuries. Granted, they had done so genuinely to preserve their own people from being killed as welclass="underline" the second of the great conflicts of this century had been one of that kind, and the British had defended themselves with courage and cleverness at least equal to their enemies’. Nevertheless, Rhiow was beginning to think she knew who most likely would have blown up atomic weapons on the Moon in 1875, if they’d had access to them.
And howdidthey get them? And how can we undo it?
It was going to take time to work that out. At least they had a little time to work with … but not much.
She made her way among theehhif atthe Underground ticket machines and past them, under the gates and down to the platform where the malfunctioning gate and its power source were being held. Hhuhm’hri had told Rhiow that thousands ofehhifhad hidden in tunnels and basements near here during the bombings of London in that second great war. That had resolved, for Rhiow, the question of something she had been feeling since she came down here first—a faint buzzing in the walls, as if at the edge of hearing: the ghost-memory in the tunnels and the stones ofehhifnot just passing through here, but staying, and sleeping near here in the faintly electric-lit darkness. Their troubled and frightened dreams still saturated the bricks and mortar and tile of the tunnels—and “behind” them, if you were sensitive to such things and you listened very hard, you could just catch the faintest sound of the shudder and rumble of falling bombs. That unsound, intruding at the very edge of a sensitive’s consciousness, could easily get lost in or confused with the rumble of present-day trains through the stone.
At least I know what it is now,Rhiow thought, making her way to the platform, and jumping up.A relief. I thought I was going a little strange…
Only Urruah and Arhu were there just now.“Luck,” Rhiow said, going over to breathe breaths with Urruah, who was sitting and looking at his timeslide-spell, apparently taking a break after having doing an afternoon’s worth of troubleshooting. The timeslide was presently lying quiescent on the platform floor, in a tangle of barely-seen lines. “How’s it going?”
“Slow,” he said. “I wanted to have another look at the disconnected gate’s logs before I started changing my own settings around.”
“Find anything useful?” Rhiow said, glancing over at Arhu. He was tucked down in “meatloaf” configuration with his eyes half-closed, unmoving.
“No,” Urruah said, following her glance and looking thoughtful. “But, Rhi, I think the logs are being tampered with.”
She sat down, surprised.“By whom?”
“Or what,” Urruah said. “I can’t say. Normally when a gate’s offline, its logs are ‘frozen’ in the state they were in when the gate was taken off. I hooked the gate up again briefly to the catenary to have a look at the way the source has been feeding it power—and found that some ofthe logs weren’t the way I remembered them. In particular, the logs pertaining to Mr. Illingworth’s access were in a different state than they were when I left them. Specifically, temporal coordinates were not the same.”
Rhiow looked around her and then said privately,Fhrio?
I don’t think so. For one of us to tamper with a gate’s logs would normally leave “marks” that an expert cansee …alterations in the relationships between the hyperstrings of the gate. Now, I’m an expert … and I can’t find any “marks”.
The Lone Power …Rhiow thought.
Urruah hissed softly.Rhi, I know It’s been meddling in the larger sense. The contamination of the 1875-or-thereabouts timeline is certainly Its doing. But by and large It’s not going to do something likethis.It’s still one of the Powers that Be, and has Their tendency not to waste effort Itself when It can get someone closer to the problem to do the dirty work.
She had to agree with him there.“So what are you going to do?”
He shrugged his tail.“Try the altered coordinates,” he said. “Or at least lay them into my timeslide and see what happens when we try to access them.”
“It could very well be a trap of some kind …” Rhiow said.
“Yes, but we don’t have to put our foot right into it,” Urruah said. “We can look before we jump. A habit of mine.”
Rhiow put her whiskers forward.“All right. Anything else?”
“Well, one other possibility,” Urruah said. “I think our problem in finding Mr. Illingworth’s home universe, or not finding it, may have to do with the timeslide still being powered out of the malfunctioning gate’s power source. We noted from what few logs were left from the “microtransits” earlier that the far end of the gate-timeslide was lashing around in backtime, like the end of someehhif’sgarden hose when they let it go with the water running at full pressure. The end whiplashes around, coming down first here, then there … never the same place twice. I think the fault for that could possibly lie in the power source rather than the gate.”
Rhiow blinked at that.“I can’t see how. The power source isn’t supposed to have any coordinate information in it, or anything like that …”