“Oh—yes, I suppose so,” he said, sounding a little distracted. “It’s just that … I don’t know … I’m not used to coping with these stress levels, and everyone around me seems to be losing their temper half the time. My team’s unhappy and I don’t know why, and there doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it …”
Rhiow put one ear back: it was a feeling she’d had occasionally. “Oh, Huff, it’ll sort itself out … you’ll see. It is the stress, truly: this problem isn’t the kind of thing any of us would normally have to handle in the course of work. And to be suddenly thrown together with strangers, no matter how well-intentioned they are, and then try to deal with something like this … it isn’t going to be easy for anyone.” She put her whiskers forward a little. “You’re such an easygoing type anyway,” Rhiow said, “that it must be difficult for you to deal with the frictions: they must seem kind of foolish to you.”
He gave her a rueful look.“Sometimes,” he said, “yes. Yes, you’re right …” He sighed. “Stranger or not,” he said, “it’s nice to have someone around who understands. But then you’re not exactly a stranger any more.”
“No, of course not. When we get all this solved, Huff, you should come visit us in New York. We’ll show you and your team around the gates at Grand Central … ‘do the town’ a little. Urruah knows some extremely good places to eat.”
“I know,” Huff said, sounding a little more amused. “I keep hearing about them.” His whiskers were right forward now.
“I bet,” Rhiow said, resigned. “Look … we’ve got a long day ahead of us tomorrow. I should get home. You try to get some rest, Huff, and we’ll see you later on.”
He waved his tail in agreement.“Go well,” he said. They touched cheeks: and Rhiow went out the back, through the cat door, and down the alley, heading for the Tower Hill Underground station … thinking, a little absently, how nice it was that it no longer felt strange to rub cheeks with Huff at all…
She got home very late, by New York time, and found Iaehh in bed and snoring. As quietly as she could, Rhiow curled up with him, too tired even to care whether he would roll over on top of her in the middle of the night, as he often did while feeling for someone else who should have been in the bed, but wasn’t. She sighed at the thought of what now seemed about a hundred years ago: a time when both herehhifwere here and happy, and her life managing a gating team had been relatively simple and uncomplicated … or had seemed so.
About a second later, she woke up.Oh, unfair,she thought. It was typical that, on a night when you most needed the sense of being asleep for a long time, you instead got that“cheated” feeling of having been asleep almost no time at all.
It was, however, nearly six in the evening. Iaehh wasn’t back from work yet, but he would be soon, and if she didn’t get out fairly quickly, he would turn up and delay her. Rhiow sighed and got right up, stretching hard fore and aft: ate (finding the bowls washed and filled again), then washed and used the box, and headed out for Grand Central. Half an hour later Rhiow was in London, on the platform in the Underground station, watching Urruah reconstructing his timeslide. Auhlae was there, and Siffha’h: Arhu was sitting off to one side, ostensibly watching Urruah fine-tuning his spell, but (to Rhiow’s eye) actually staying rather pointedly out of Siffha’h’s way.
“Perfect timing,” Urruah said, looking up. “I’m just about set here.”
“You have all those extra coordinate-sets that you wanted to test laid in as well?” Rhiow said, strolling over to the “hedge” of burning lines which was the spell diagram. It looked taller than it had been before.
“Yes indeed,” Urruah said. “We’ll take them in order after we check out the main one, the ‘scarred’ timeline. Everybody, come and check your names. We’re ready to rock and roll …”
Rhiow jumped into the circle to reexamine her name. Auhlae jumped in after her, remarking,“I would have thought you were more interested in the classical line of things, Urruah …”
His whiskers went forward.“Always. But I believe one’s interest in music should be balanced.”
“If it’sehhifmusic you’re talking about,” Siffha’h said as she jumped into the circle as well, “you’re too balanced by half. All that screeching.”
Urruah chuckled.“Wait till you’re older and you have more leisure to develop your tastes.”
“ ‘Older’!’ Siffha’h said. “I’m sick of hearing about it. And I’m getting older right now waiting for you People to get your acts together!” She glared at Arhu.
Arhu, taking no apparent notice, made a small elegant jump which landed him precisely on the spot which Urruah had laid out for him inside the circle. He bent down, checked his name, and then turned his back to Siffha’h, yawning, and sat down with his tail wrapped around his toes.
“Huh,” said Siffha’h, glancing at Arhu and planting her forepaws in the power-feed area of the spell. She looked over at Urruah.
“Everybody sidled?” he said. “Good. First set of coordinates are ready,” he said. “The spell’s on standby. Feed it!”
“Consider it fed,” Siffha’h said.
The world vanished in a blast of light and power so vehement that Rhiow was glad she had been sitting down: otherwise she would have fallen over. This was not anything like Urruah’s style of power-feed, decorous and smooth like a limo starting and stopping. This was a crash of power and pressure, happening all at once from all around, like being at the center of a lightning strike. In the middle of it all she thought she heard something like a yowl of frustration, but shecouldn’t be sure. When the light cleared away again, Rhiow half-expected to smell ozone: she had to sit there for a moment or so and shake her head, waiting for her eyes to work again. After a few moments they did, but she still saw a residual blur of green light at the edges of vision for a little while, the remnant of the image of the first flash of the spell-circle as it came up to power.
She looked around and saw that they were all once more sitting in a muddy street: and Rhiow sighed at the thought of what getting clean again was likely to taste like. The sky above them was that of early morning, clear and blue: a surprising contrast to the last time.“All right,” Urruah said, “there’s the tripwire. I’ve closed the gate.” Then Urruah looked up and around, and said suddenly, “And we’ve got a problem.”
“What?” said Rhiow.
He was looking up at the Moon, which stood high in the southern sky at third quarter. They all looked too.
The Moon was white, with only the faintest blue shadows.
“Oh,vhai,”Auhlae said,“this isn’t the contaminated timeline!” She turned to Urruah. “This is the predecessor toourLondon! Our world! For pity’s sake, Urruah, how did that happen?”
Urruah was dumbfounded.“Auhlae, you saw the settings, we worked on them together—you tellme!”
“I’ll tell you how it happened,” Siffha’h said, staggering to her feet. “We were being blocked. Couldn’t you feel it? Urruah?”
“I’m not sure—”
“Nice excuse,” Arhu muttered.
“Oh, go swallow your tail!’ Siffha’h spat. “Who asked you for anything like an opinion? As if you could produce one out your front end instead of your rear for a change.We were being blocked!Something knocked us sideways. Somethingvhai’dwell doesn’t want us in the alternate timeline! Like the Lone One!”
She was bristling with fury, as much from winding up in the wrong place, Rhiow thought, as for having her competence called into question. But there was another possibility which had occurred to Rhiow: that the other timeline was becoming stronger, strong enough now to begin interfering withanytemporal gating.But there’s no evidence of that … yet.
“It could happen,” Rhiow said. “For the meantime, we shouldn’t stand here arguing.” She glanced over at Urruah. “It’s not a wasted trip, Ruah. We still have some things to check on, and some sources who would be helpful to talk to here. Among other things, would you say this is at least the right year?”