“Well enough, then: I will go.”
“I want to go too!” Artie said suddenly, jumping up. “I haven’t seen any magic practically since I got here. I want to see some more!”
Rhiow glanced at Ith, about to object: then she stopped herself.Cousin, if you can take charge of him for a while, it would take a worry off our minds. He’s at the wrong end of time, and it’s not good for anehhifto know too much about its own future without preparation … for which we’ve had no time. The Museum will be a controllable environment, one not too strange to him…
Consider it done.
“Well, Ith,” Rhiow said out loud, “if you take Artie with you, he can help you look for the spell, while you keep him invisible. You should have fun with that,” Rhiow said to Artie.
“You’re going to keep walking into things, though … so be warned.”
“I will bring him gladly,” said Ith. “Artie, are you willing?”
“I should say so!”
“All right, Artie,” Rhiow said, “who are you staying with in London?”
“My uncle and aunt,” he said, suddenly looking rather concerned. “They were expecting me back for teatime …”
“Well,” Urruah said, “if we can get the timeslide to work properly, there’ll be no problem returning him to just a few seconds before or after we found him, or he found us.”And if we can’t get the slide to work properly … then shortly it won’t matter one way or the other…
Rhiow made a face at the thought.And what happens to us then?she thought.We become refugees to some other timeline that hasn’t been ruined. If we can find any such. And Artie will share the same fate…
No,she thought. Noneed to give up just yet. There’s a lot more work to be done…
“Very well,” Ith said, and stood up. “Artie, prepare yourself: we will go to the British Museum, and walk invisible among the displays. Or perhaps—” and that little golden eye glinted—“late tonight, when none but the night watchmen are about, perhaps one of them will look into the Prehistoric Saloon and wonder if he saw one of the displays move, and wink its eye …”
He winked, and Artie burst out laughing as he dusted himself off, which was about all the preparation he could do.“Ith, you wouldn’t,” Rhiow said, trying to sound severe. Ith seemed to have picked up some of Arhu’s taste for mischief along with the taste for deli food. Unfortunately it was difficult to scold someone who was so old and grave, and at the same time so young, and whose wickednesses were ofsuch a small and genteel sort.
“Perhaps I would not,” Ith said, bowing to Rhiow. She put her whiskers forward at the phrasing. “In any case, I will take care of him,” Ith said. “If nothing else, when he needs to rest, I can take him to the Old Downside, where he will see all the ‘thunder lizards’ his heart desires.”
“How are your people doing?” Urruah said. “Settling in nicely?”
“They love the life under the sky,” Ith said. “For some of them, it is as if the old life in the caves never happened. And truly, for some of them, it is better that way. For others … they remember, and they look up at the Sun and rejoice.”
“Have there been any problems with our own People?” Rhiow said. The only other intelligent species populating that ancient ancestor-dimension of Earth were the Great Cats of whomFelis domesticusand its many cousins were the descendants: sabertooths and dire-lions, who had taken refuge in that paradisial otherworld many ages before.
“Oh, no,” Ith said mildly, and flexed his claws. “None that have been serious. They were unsure whether we were predators or prey, at first. They are sure now.” He grinned, showing all those very sharp teeth.
Rhiow chuckled.“Get out of here,” she said. “And go well. Artie, be nice to him. He bites.”
“He wouldn’t biteme,”said Artie.
“No, I would not,” Ith said. “Artie, come stand by me. Now watch, and take care; when the air tears, it does so raggedly, and the boundaries between here and there are sharp—”
They stepped into the air together and were gone: the tear in it healed up behind them.
Huff stared after them.“How does hedothat?” he said. “There wasn’t even any noise from the displacement of the air.”
Rhiow shook her head.“In some ways, he’s become a gate himself,” she said. “Otherwise … I don’t understand it. Ask Her. Meanwhile—what about that timeslide?”
It took several more hours to get it working to both Urruah’s and Fhrio’s liking. Rhiow tried to catch a nap while this was going on, but her anxiety kept waking her up, so that when Urruah finally came to rouse her, she was awake anyway.
“Is the slide ready?” Rhiow said, stretching fore and aft.
“As far as I can tell. For all Fhrio’s rotten temper,” he added very softly, “he’s a good gating tech, and there’s nothing wrong with his understanding of timeslide spells. He rearranged some subroutines I’d thought looked pretty good, and I have to admit that now they look better.”
“Annoyed?” Rhiow said.
“Me? Nothing wrong with me that a pizza won’t cure,” Urruah said. ” … And the end of this job. We can jump again in fifteen or twenty minutes. Fhrio is doing the last fine-tuning: Siffha’h says she’s ready to go again, and Auhlae concurs.”
“Good.” She glanced around. “Where are they?”
“They’ve gone off to relieve themselves first. Huff went off too, just for a snack of something.”
“Right.”
They went over together to look at the timeslide. Rhiow walked around it thoughtfully, trying to see what Fhrio had done. He was sitting, gazing at the whole structure with his eyes half-shut, a little unfocused: a technique Rhiow used herself, sometimes, to see the one bit of a spell or a routine that was out of place.
She stopped at one point and looked to see where a whole group of subroutines had been added, a thick tangle of interwoven branchings in the“hedge”. There were numerous calls on spatial locations which were not far from this one, as far as Rhiow could tell, and all of which were in this time. “What are these?” Rhiow said curiously.
Fhrio glanced up.“I found myself wondering,” he said, “whether we were sending a lion to kill a mouse … I mean, by looking for our pastlings one at a time by tracing specific accesses one at a time. I thought, since theehhif here have support systems that are supposed to be picking up their lost and sick people from the City area, at least … why don’t we let it work for us? So this set of routines visits everyehhif-hospital in the Greater London area, and scans it for a few seconds for anyone in that facility who wasn’t born within the last hundred years. If it finds anyone like that, it picks them up and brings them along with us, in stasis. Then we get back here and analyze their temporal tendenciesin situ,with the gate to help, if we can get the online gate logs to cooperate.”
Rhiow looked the construction over. It was elegant, compact, and looked like it ought to work … but many constructs of this kind looked like they should, and the only way you could find out was by testing them live. “Fhrio,” she said, “It is handsome-looking, and beautifully made. Let’s run it and see what it does.” She paced around to the other side of the timeslide, checked her name in passing, then leapt into the circle and looked thoughtfully at the other sets of coordinates stacked up in the routines to be examined: mostly derived from microtransits of the malfunctioning gate. “If Siffha’h can push us through to all of these,” Rhiow said, “we’re going to be in great shape.”
“I hoped you’d think so,” Fhrio said. And he looked over at Urruah, and bared his teeth in amusement. “Pity you weren’t smart enough to manage something like this, ‘oh expert one’. Even your own team leader admits it.”
Urruah blinked and opened his mouth.
“Urruah,” Rhiow said softly, “would you excuse us?”