They ran through the door, down the platform for Track 30. The upper track level was hardly recognizable as the familiar, fairly tidy place where Rhiow walked every day. Saurians’ bodies were scattered everywhere. Fortunately there seemed to be few casualties among the wizards, or else they had been taken away already for treatment. There seemed to be no station staff around: Rhiow guessed they were staying locked safely in the towers and workrooms, probably having called the cops … though what they would have told the cops theywantedthem for, Rhiow would have given a great deal to hear. At least they seemed to have stopped any further trains from coming in.
Tom and a group of other wizards were gathered nearest the track Thirty worldgate, which seemed to be spewing out saurians like a firehose; as fast as they came out, they died of the neural-inhibitor spell being repeatedly used so that the bodies lay heaped high before the gate, and the new saurians had to clamber over the bodies of their dead or push them aside to leap, screaming, at the wizards. On Tracks 25 and 18, trains were stopped halfway down into the platforms, with saurians caught under their bogies or draped over the fronts of the locomotives; Track 32 had the derailed train, its sideways-skewed front splashed with lizard blood, a heap of dead saurians trapped underneath it, and the faint cries ofehhifcoming from inside.
“What kept you?” Tom said as Rhiow arrived, with Arhu in tow.
“A pretty serious reanimation,” Rhiow said. “Some kind of congruency to what’s been trying to push up through here, I suspect. We may find that it resists being patched afterward.”
“We’ll worry about that later. Some of us are busy pulling people out of that wreck, but we’ve got other problems. You’re the gate specialists—what can we do aboutthis?There seem to be thousands more of these creatures waiting to come through, and if we just hang around here doing this all night, people’s memory tracks are going to engrave themselves too deeply to be successfully patched.”
Saash,Rhiow said,can you get some relief? We need you up here.
I’ve got some help already. On my way up.
Urruah—
Heard it. Be right with you.
Saash appeared a few seconds later.“Any ideas how to stop this?” Rhiow said.
Saash shook herself all over and had only the briefest scratch before standing up again, staring at the gate, through which still more saurians were clambering.“How chaotic,” she said to Tom, “are you willing to get?”
“Things are pretty chaotic already at the moment,” he said. “Butanythingthat would put an end to this would be welcome. We’ve got to start patching very soon. If you need to get a little destructive—”
“Not physically.” Saash was getting that same gleam in her eye that Rhiow had seen the other night when she had turned the catenary loose, and Rhiow started to feel wary. “Just think of it this way. The gate might be more like a plant than a tree, though we tend out of habit to refer to a gate’s ‘tree structure.’ A gate has a ‘root’—the anchor-structure of its catenary, way down in the bottom of the Mountain, which fuels itself from whatever power supply Aaurh originally hooked it to: pulsar, white hole, whatever; theoretical distinctions don’t matter just now. A gate has a ‘stalk’—the catenary itself. And then it has a ‘flower’ at the top—the portal locus, where the energy is manipulated through the hyperstring structure, and actual transport takes place.”
“I hadn’t thought of you as having such a horticultural turn of mind,” Tom said, watching with a tight, unhappy look as yet more shrieking saurians climbed through the gate and were snuffed out.
“Yes. Well… what happens if you pull the portal locusoff the gate?”
Tom stared at her.“Like pulling the head off a daisy. — Whatdoeshappen?”
“It should shut the gate right down, no matter who or what reactivated the other end.”
“Should—!”Rhiow said.
“Until a new portal locus can be woven and installed, nothing can use it for transport.”
Tom was silent for a moment. Then he said,“These gates are very old… and were put in place by, well…”
“Gods,” Saash said, twitching her tail in agreement. “Fortunately, they are gods who left us, in the Whispering, andThe Book of Night with Moon,very complete instructions on how these gates were constructed in the first place… on the grounds that someday they might need serious repair or reconstruction.”
“Which they will,” Rhiow said, “if you go pulling the portal loci off them! Do you know what kind ofenergyyou’re talking about releasing here? And if you don’t do it in exact synchronization, every one of them at just the same time, one or more of the gates could pull free of its anchors to this universe and just go rolling off across the landscape wherever it liked, and only Iau knows where it would wind up, and in what condition! For all you know it would invert function and start eating anything that the portal locus came in contact with—”
“So we’ll be careful about the synchronization,” Saash said.
Rhiow just stared at her.
“How long would it take to get the gates going again after this?” Tom said.
“With all the available gating experts working together to do the reweave? A day or so.”
“If it’s so easy, why hasn’t it ever been done before?” Rhiow said.
“Because no one ever needed to, since nothing has ever made the gates malfunction this way before,” Saash said, sweetly, “and because there’s never been a problem quite likethis!”She gestured with her tail at the fresh wave of dinosaurs clambering over the heap of already-dead ones.
Tom looked at this, and also at the image of the plan that Saash held in her mind. Rhiow was examining that same image with great disquiet. Theoretically it was sound. Practically, it could be done. But—
“All right,” Tom said. “I’ll sanction it. I know you have misgivings, Rhi—so do I—but we’ve tried every other way to shut these gates down again, and nothing has worked. And the clock is ticking—we’ve got to start patching right away.”
He looked at her expectantly. Rhiow sat down, trying to put her composure in place for whatever spell was going to be required of her. The thought, though, of simply—well, not destroying the gates—butmaimingthem: it rattled her. They were not entirely just spells. They were not sentient beings, either… but there was still something akin to life about them…
Rhi,Saash said. Ihear you. But there’s a lot of lifehere,too. And our fellow wizards can’t just stand around down here, killing lizards forever: aside from the cost to them in energy,ehhiflife is going to be seriously disrupted by the reality of what’s happening if it’s allowed to persist and set in too permanently to be erased. Worse: while this is going on, we can’t go find Har’lh or get any closer to the bottom of what’s been going on…
You’re right,Rhiow said finally.“So what do we need to do?”
“Four gates,” Saash said. “Four of us. We don’t need physical contact; what we’re going to do is brutal enough. Rhi, you know Thirty best. Here’s the portal locus’s pattern.” Rhiow’s mind filled with it, not merely a spell-circle but a filigree sphere of light with several more dimensions implied in the diagram, all made of interwoven words in the Speech, intricate and delicate. “Just hang on to that. See that loose thread there?”
Rhiow did, and she swallowed. She had never noticed any of the gate loci as having loose threads before.“Yes—”
“Hang on to it. Don’t let go until I tell you. Urruah?”
“Ready. Got it.”
“There’s the thread. Bite it in your mind, don’t let go. Arhu?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“See that?”
“Sure.”
“Bite it.”
He held very still, his eyes shifting back and forth, but in his mind he did as he was told.
Saash was quiet for a moment.I’ve got the fourth one,she said at last.I’m going to count backward from four in my head. When I say zero—pull those threads. Not a second before or after.