The burning, twisting column of the catenary pushed against the circle, bowing it inward in one spot Saash’s eyes were fixed on it, rainbowed with its fires as she guided the catenary in by force of will toward the spell that would catch it and hold it still for operation. “It’s going to pop through in a second,” she said to Urruah, her voice calm enough, but strained a little higher than usual. “Got the pocket ready for it?”
“Ready.” He slid his left paw over to another part of the circle, sank his claws into the fire.
The catenary pushed farther into the circle, the stream and sheen of light down its length getting brighter and fiercer, the smell getting stronger. The circle bent inward to accommodate its passage, a curve-bud of light pushing inward around the contour of the column of fire. Abruptly, with a jerk, the catenary broke free of the circle, broke through—
A smaller circle, the completed“bud,” now surrounded the base of the column, where it erupted from the stone: another one encircled it higher up. Rhiow saw Arhu’s nervous glance upward. “The spell’s spherical,” she said. “You need to extend at least one extra dimension along when you’re working with these things.”
Arhu backed away from the catenary as it drifted into the center of the circle, stopped there.“All right,” Saash said, pacing around it once and looking it over. “See that bundle there? The one that looks mostly blue. That’s the one for the gate that’s giving us trouble.”
“How do you want to handle this?”
Saash sat down and had another scratch, looking oddly meditative and calm for someone who was nose to nose with a concentration of power in which a small nuclear explosion might be drowned out, if not entirely missed.“I’m going to shut down everything but Penn, and the one Grand Central gate that Khi-t’s holding patent,” she said. “The Penn power linkages are right over on the other side of the bundle … no need to involve them, and it’ll give anyone who needs to do a transit somewhere to divert to for a little while.”
“Right.”Kit,Rhiow said inwardly,we’re taking all the Grand Central gates down but yours.
Right—we’II divert anyone who shows up. Let us know when you’re done.
Saash got up, finished with her scratch, then paced once more around the catenary, looking it up and down. One spot she leaned in to look at with great care, a braided cord of blue and blue-white fires as thick as the wrist of her forepaw. With great care and delicacy, she leaned closer, then shut her eyes—and bit it.
Sparks flew, the light grew blinding; the singeing smell got stronger. Arhu stared.
More than half the catenary went dark, or nearly so.
Saash straightened, looked the pillar of fire up and down.“All right,” she said. “That’s better.” The “dark” bundles and strands weren’t completely dead, but now shone only as brightly as the weft of one of the gate matrices up at the surface. She sat up on her haunches in her preferred operating position and reached into the dark bundles,pulling out a hefty double clawful of them.
“Here,” she said suddenly to Arhu, “come on over here.” He did, looking dubious. “Right. Now hold these for me. Don’t be scared, they won’t hurt you. Much,” she added, her whiskers going forward just a little as she shoved the pulled-out strings at him, and Arhu, more from reflex than anything else, grabbed them and hung on. His eyes went wide with shock as he felt the sizzle of the catenary’s power in his paws—the ravening fire of it just barely leashed, and as anxious to get at him as a guard dog on a chain.
“Good,” Saash said, not even looking at him as she pulled out another of the bundles of hyperstrings and handed them off to Rhiow. Rhiow settled herself on her haunches as well, hanging onto the strings, and Saash looked over the bundle, slipped a careful claw behind three or four of the strings, and slashed them. They leapt free, glowing and hissing softly, and lashing like angry tails. “Don’t let those hit you,” she said conversationally to Arhu, “they’ll sting. Rhi, remember last time, when that whole bundle came loose at once?”
“Please,” Rhiow muttered. “I’d rather be attacked by bees. At least they can sting you only once.”
Saash was elbow-deep in the catenary now, slowing down a little in her work.“Hmm,” she said. “I wonder…” She leaned in again, pulled forward one particular minor bundle of strings, glowing a pale gold, and took it behind her front fangs, closed her mouth; then looked unfocused for a moment, an expression like the “tasting” look she made when breathing breathswith someone. After a few seconds, Saash’s eyes flicked sideways toward Rhiow. “Aha,” she said.
“ ‘Aha,’ ” said Rhiow, slightly edgy. Her mind was on those openings all around them, but more on Arhu. “Care to give us an explanation of what that means in the technical sense?”
“String fatigue,” Saash said.
Rhiow blinked. You came across it, occasionally, but more usually in the gate matrices, higher up. Usually a hyperstring had to be most unusually stressed by some repetitive local phenomenon to degrade to the point where it stopped holding matter and energy together correctly.
“There’s a bad strand here,” Saash said. “It’s not conducting correctly. Tastes ‘sick.’ ”
“What would have caused that?” Urruah said.
Saash shrugged her tail.“Sunspots?”
“Oh please.”
“No, seriously. You get more neutrinos at a maximum. Add that to the flare weather we’ve been having recently— get a good dose of high-energy stuff through a weak area in a hyperstring, it’s likely enough to unravel. In any case, it’s not passing power up the line to the gate.”
“I thought the power conduits were all redundant, though,” Urruah said.
“They are. That’s the cause of the problem here. The ‘sick’ strand’s energy states have contaminated the redundant backup as well because they’re identical and right against each other in the bundle.” Saash looked rather critically at the catenary. “Someone may have to come down here and rebraid the whole thing to prevent it happening again.”
“Pleasedon’t say that,” Rhiow said. “Can you fix it now?”
“Oh, I can cut out the sick part and patch it with material from another string,” said Saash. “They’re pretty flexible. I’d just like to know a little more about the conditions that produced this effect.”
“Well,” Rhiow said, “better get patching. Are the other strings all right?”
“I’m going to finish the diagnostic,” Saash said. “Two minutes.”
They seemed long to Rhiow, although nothing bad was happening. Her forearms were aching a little with the strain of holding the hyperstrings at just the angle Saash had given them to her; and meanwhile her eyes kept dropping to that symbol, almost lost in the fire of the circle but not quite. It was simple: two curves, a slanted straight line bisecting them—in its way, rather like the symbol that even theehhifhad known to carve on the Queen’s breast.
The Eye—
She looked up suddenly and found Arhu sitting there with his claws clenched full of hyperstrings and gazing down at it, too, while Saash, oblivious, pulled out several bright strings in her claws and began to knit them together. Arhu’s expression was peculiar, in its way as meditative as Saash’s look had been earlier.
“They have a word for it, don’t they?” he said.
“For what?” Rhiow said. “And who?”
“For this,” Arhu said, glancing up again at his paws full of dulled fire. “Ehhif.”
“Cat’s-cradle,” she said. “For them it’s just play they do with normal string, a kitten’s game.”