“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Kit said. “Carl says you took a lot of care last time to fasten the gate down good and tight. We’ll make sure it stays stuck open for you while you’re down there. There shouldn’t be any way a patent gate can be dislocated or interfered with.”
Rhiow had her doubts this week.“That’s what conventional wisdom would say,” she said, “but the gates’ behavior lately hasn’t been conventional.”
Nita shook her head.“We’ll do the best we can for you,” she said. “If we need help, we’ll yell for Carl.”
“Right. Let’s get started,” Saash said, and headed over for the gate.
It was as they had left it the other day: hanging there, the warp and weft of the hyperstrings glowing a slightly duller red than before, token of a lack of extension in the last day. Once more Saash sat up on her haunches, reached in, and plucked at the gate’s diagnostic strings: they followed her claw outward, and light sheened down them, violet in the darkness. “Same as yesterday,” she said to the two young wizards.
“Looks perfectly normal,” Kit said.
“Yes, well, watch.” Saash reached in again for the activation strings, pulled, and again came out with a double pawful of nothing.
Nita whistled softly.“Weird.”
“Yes. I was kind of hoping it might have corrected itself,” Saash said, sounding wry and slightly amused, “but fat chance.”
Rhiow looked at her and was silently impressed, not for the first time, at the way Saash could hold such a casual tone when she was shivering inside. But that was her way, at work. Later, after this was done—assuming everything went all right—she would complain neurotically about her terror for days. But at the moment, she sounded like she was going for a nice sleep in the sun, followed by cream. Iwish I could sound that confident…
Saash let go of the strings, settled back to all fours again, and glanced around.“So here’s what we’ll do,” she said. “I’m going to pull the Lexington Avenue local gate’s locus out of its present location and tether it over here temporarily so that you can keep an eye on both the bum gate and the one we’ve used. Theoretically we should be able to use the broken one to come back after we’ve fixed it; then the Lex gate can have the temporary tethers broken and it’ll just snap back into place.”
“Sounds sensible,” Nita said. “One of us can stay over by Lex and redirect any wizards who turn up there to use it before the change in the gate’s location shows up in then: manuals.”
“Fine,” Saash said, “let’s go, then.” She trotted off, and the young queen-ehhifwent after her, looking carefully down-track as she followed.
Arhu looked after the two of them, while the young tom-ehhifsat down on the edge of the platform, looking at the gate.“It must be an interesting line of work,” Kit said. “I bet you get to travel a lot.”
Rhiow laughed softly.“I wish! No, we’re here mostly. The New York gates get nearly as much use as the ones at Tower Bridge or Alexandria. Not as much usage as the complex at Tokyo, maybe … but those would be the only ones to beat us. As a result, we’re always having to fix something that’s busted.” She puther whiskers forward, slightly amused at a memory. “Last time I was scheduled for a weekend off, I got all the way to the big Crossings worldgating facility on Rirhath B before one oftheirgates broke, and I found myself helping them service it…” She made the extra-large smile that anehhifwould understand.“ ‘Wizard’s holiday.’ ”
The young tom chuckled.“Yeah,” he said, “I’ve had a couple of those myself—”
The darkness in front of them suddenly had another gate hanging in it: more oval than the first one, hanging closer to the cinders and concrete of the floor, almost in contact with the rails. It hyperextended as they watched, the bright lines of its curvature pulling inward and apparently away to vanishing-point eternity before disappearing altogether, replaced by the oval image of the end of the Lexington Avenue local platform, and Nita standing there, looking through the aperture with an interested expression. Saash leaped neatly through, and the image vanished in lines of bright fire as the curvature snapped back flat again behind her. Numerous unnaturally bright“tether” lines could be seen stretching from equidistant points around the edges of the gateweave, up into “empty” air or down into the ground, radiating outward in an array corresponding roughly (as it would have to, in a space with one dimension too few) to the vertices of a tesseract.
“Everything’s set,” Saash said. “Khi-t, I would strongly recommend that you put a general-warding circle around both of these when we’re out of your way and down there working. I don’tknowthat anything from that side might try to come through a patent gate, if it should stumble across one; but there are creatures in that part of Downside that, though they’re just animals by both our standards, could cause a lot of trouble if they got loose in here.”
“I’ll take care of it,” the youngehhif-tom said. He opened the book he was carrying, leafed through it for a moment and ran his finger down one page.“These personal-description parameters look right to you?”
Saash and Rhiow both looked down at the wizard’s manual, which obligingly shifted the color of its printing so that they could more easily read the graceful curves of the printed version of the Speech; and Rhiow cocked her head to one side, hearing at the same time the Whisperer’s translation of the printed material. “That’s fine,” she said. “Just one thing—” She put a paw out to the small block of print containing the symbols that, in wizardly shorthand, described Arhu. There were a lot of blank spaces in the equation that summed him up for spelling purposes. “Thatconfiguration,” she said, “is changing rapidly. And in unexpected ways. Keep an eye on it…”
“Will do,” Kit said.
“Let’s go,” said Saash. She reared up, slipped her paws into the weave of the second gate, and pulled the lines of light outward, wove them together—
The gate hyperextended again, this time the lines of its intraspatial contours seeming to be pulled to a much farther-out infinity than last time—impossible, but so it seemed, regardless. The lines stretched and stretched outward, and there was almost a feeling of the watcher being pulled outward as well, drawn thin, almost to nonexistence.Odd,Rhiow thought.Possibly something to do with this locus being so close to one that’s malfunctioning—
—thensnap,the feeling was gone: and through the gate came the golden light of somewhere else’s summer afternoon…
Urruah leapt through without apparent hesitation, though Rhiow knew he had gone first so that no one should know how nervous he had been.“Just jump through,” Rhiow said to Arhu. “At all costs, stay clear of the edges: even though there are safeties on the locus boundaries, if one of them goes wrong somehow, you could lose a tail, or leg, or something you’d miss more. You’ll feel heavy on the other side. Be prepared for it…”
She purposely hadn’t told him what else he was going to need to be prepared for, as Ffairh hadn’t told her, all that time ago. Better not to create impressions about the desirability of one’s state Downside … there would be enough temptations later. Arhu swallowed, crouched and tensed, and jumped through, almost as neatly as Urruah had.
There was a thump on the other side, and a yowl… but much deeper than a cat’s yowl would have been. Kit craned his neck to see through, looking slightly concerned. “He okay?”
Rhiow laughed softly.“That’s the question of the week. He’s not hurt, anyway.”
More yowling, this time tinged with surprise, was coming through the open gate.“Rhi,” Saash said, “let’s go, shall we, before our wonder child restarts those legends about giant demon cats in the tunnels … ?”