“But which of them isreal?”Arhu muttered.
Rhiow swished her tail slowly from side to side.“All of them… until you make the choice, perform the act. You’re only seeing possibilities.”
“But it’s not just things behind things,” Arhu said. “There are other images, things thatstay.”
“The past,” Rhiow said softly. “That at least holds still… some ways, anyway. Are you seeing your past lives?”
“No,” Arhu said, and then added, very surprised, “I think this is my first one.”
“We all have to start somewhere,” Rhiow said.
“How many haveyouhad?”
She gave him a look.“That’s a question you don’t usually ask. If the Person you’re talking to volunteers the information—”
He scowled, turned away.“That’s what Saash said when I asked her what her Ordeal was like.”
“And she was right to say so,” Rhiow said. “That’s personal business, too, as personal among wizards as the issue of lives is among People. Go around asking People questions like that and you’re going to get your ears boxed.”
Arhu looked scornful.“You guys are sure sensitive. Won’t talk aboutthis.Can’t dothat,somebody’s feelings might get hurt. How do you ever get anything done?”
“If there weremorePeople in the world concerned about being sensitive,” Rhiow said, rather shortly, “we’d have a lot less work to do… Look, Arhu, you’ve had a bad time of it so far, I’d say. But we’re trying to teach you the rules so that you’ll have a better tune later. All I can do is warn you how People are going to take the things you say. If you still say them…” She shrugged her tail.
They were quiet for a moment.“As to lives,” Rhiow said then, “I don’t think all that much about my last ones. Most of us don’t, I suspect, after the first few, when the novelty of the change wears off. The really persistent memories—big mistakes, great sorrows or joys—they intrude sometimes. I don’t go digging.What you stumble across, from day to day, you’re usually meant to find for some reason. But caching memories is as sick as caching food, for one of our People. Better to live now, and use the memories, when they come to mind, as a way to keep from making the same mistakes all over again. Use the past as a guide, not a fence.”
“The past…” He looked out into the golden light of the concourse, toward the sunlight spilling through the south windows. “I don’t remember much of mine.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“I do,” Arhu said, somewhat painfully. “You don’t trust me.”
There was no answer to that, not right now: and no question but that he was seeing at least some things with surprising clarity.“Arhu,” Rhiow said, “it’s just that if your gift is seeing … and it looks that way … you have to try to manage it,useit… and especially, you have to try to accept what there is to see about yourself, when it comes up for viewing. Youarethe eye through which you see. If the eye is clouded, all the other visions will be, too … and at this dangerous time in your life, if you don’t do your best to see clearly, you won’t survive.”
He would not look at her.
He sees something,Rhiow thought.Something in his own future, I bet. And he thinks that if he doesn’t talk about it, it won’t happen…
“For the time being, you just do the best you can,” Rhiow said at last. “Though I admit I’d be happier if I knew you were coming to some kind of terms with your Oath.”
“I said the words,” Arhu said after a little while.
“Yes. But will you hold by them?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” The voice was completely flat.
Rhiow swung her tail gently from side to side.“Arhu, do you know what entropy is?”
He paused a moment, listening.“Things run down,” he said finally. “Stuff dies.Everythingdies.”
“Yes.”
“But it wasn’t meant to … not at first.”
“No,” Rhiow said. “Things got complicated. That’s the story of the worlds in one bowl. All the rest of the history of all the worlds there are, has been about the issue of resolving that complication. It will take until the end of the worlds to do it. Our People have their part to play in that resolution. There will be a lot of fighting … so if you like that kind of thing, you’re in the right place.”
“I wasn’t yesterday,” he said bitterly. “I couldn’t have fought anything. I was fooling myself.”
So that much self-vision is in play, whether he thinks so or not,Rhiow thought.“In the strictly physical sense, maybe,” Rhiow said. “But nonetheless, you said what you saw. You tried to warn us. You may have given Saash that little impetus she needed to hurry and finish what she had to do before the saurians came in. That’s worthwhile, even that little help. You struck your first blow.”
“I don’t know if I even did it on purpose,” Arhu said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Rhiow said. “The result matters. We got out alive… and for a while, there was no way to tell whether we would or not. So, by and large, your presence yesterday made a difference.”
She stood up, stretched, let out a big yawn.“Let’s get a little more concrete,” Rhiow said. “Anyway, I want to have a look at that track.”
Together they walked through the concourse, slipping to one side or another to avoid theehhif,and made their way down to the platform for Track 30. A repetitive clanking noise was coming from a little ways down in the darkness, and Rhiow and Arhu paused at the platform’s end to watch the workmen, in their fluorescent reflective vests and hard hats, working on something on the ground, which at the moment was completely obscured by all of them standing around it, watching.
Rhiow threw a glance over at the gate, which was visible enough to her and Arhu if not to the workmen; the patterns of color sheening down it said that it was back to normal again.“Good,” she said. “And it looks like that track’s almost ready to go back into service. Come on,” she said, and hopped down off the platform, onto the track bed.
Arhu was slightly uneasy about following her, but after a moment he came along. She led him carefully around the workmen, past the end of Tower A, and then back down in the direction from which they had first come, but this time at an angle, down toward the East Yard, where trains were pulled in for short-term storage during the morning and evening rush hours. She was not headed for the yard itself, but for a fire exit near the north side of Tower C. Its heavy steel door was shut; she glanced over at Arhu.“Down here,” she said, and put a paw into the metal.
Arhu hesitated for a moment.“Come on, you did it just fine the other night,” Rhiow said.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t thinking about it.”
“Just remember, it’s mostly empty space.You’remostly empty space. Just work the solid parts around each other…”
Rhiow walked through the door. After a moment Arhu followed, with surprising smoothness.“Nice,” Rhiow said, as they went down the stairs together. The light here was dun even by cat standards, and Rhiow didn’t hurry —there was always the chance you might run into someone or something you hadn’t heard on the way down.
At the bottom of the fire exit, they walked through the door there and came out on the lower track level, on another platform, the longest one to be seen on this level. More fluorescent lights ran right down its length toward a low dark mass of machinery at the platform’s end; electric carts and manually powered ones stood waiting here and there. “The tracks on this side are primarily for moving packages and light freight to and from the trains,” Rhiow said; “bringing in supplies and equipment for the station, that kind of thing. But mostly that kind of traffic takes place during the evening or late at night. In the daytime, this area doesn’t get quite so much official use … and so others move in.”
Arhu looked alarmed.“What kind of ‘others’?”
“You’ll see.”
They walked northward along the platform to the point where it stopped, across from a sort of concrete-lined bay in the eastern wall. Rhiow jumped down from the platform and crossed the track to the right of it.“This track runs in a big loop,” she said, “around the terminal ends of the main tracks and out the other side. Not a place to linger: it’s busy night and day. But things are a little quieter up this way.”