"At least three or four," Huff said. "We've got to discover whether this assassination is one of the attempts that, in our world, failed: or if it's a new one, never recorded."
"Perhaps never recorded," Urruah said, "because in the past someone else has already stopped it.... Us, perhaps?"
"That would be reassuring," Auhlae said. "But somehow I don't think we can count on it."
There was quiet for a moment. Huff sat gazing thoughtfully at the floor, a weary reddish carpet that over much time had become an amalgam of stomped-in chewing gum, spilled beer, and other substances that Rhiow's nose flatly refused to identify, this far along in their evolution. "Well," Huff said finally, "I concur. It only remains to decide exactly who makes the first incursion into the past."
"Assuming that none of you are particularly eager," Urruah said, "I think it should be us."
The London team looked at him with expressions varying from Huff's thoughtful interest to Auhlae's surprise to Siffha'h's faint confusion: Fhrio put his whiskers forward, positively (and, to Rhiow's mind, oddly) amused.
"Why?" Huff said. "Though I think probably none of us are all that eager..."
"I am!" Siffha'h said.
"Hush," Auhlae said. "You're young for this kind of work yet, Siffha'h."
"I am not! I've got all my teeth— "
"No."
"Why not?"
"Not now."
"As for the 'why'..." Urruah said.
"We're more expendable than you are," Arhu said dryly.
"Arhu!" Rhiow said.
"I wouldn't have put it quite that way," Urruah said, putting his whiskers forward, "but in a way he's right. When it comes down to the feet and the tail of it, Huff, these are your gates, and you know them better than we do. If something goes wrong with a timeslide anchored to one of your gates' power sources, you have a better chance to successfully troubleshoot the situation than we would. And another matter: The Powers sent us to intervene. Implicit in that, to my mind, is the suggestion that we may be best equipped, one way or another, to deal with whatever problems we uncover while working with you."
"Or it might just be ego," Fhrio said, one ear forward and one ear back. It was a joke, Rhiow thought, just.
"Urruah? Ego?" Rhiow said, and then stopped herself from saying "Perish the thought," since that could have implied that it wasn't ego. "Well, Fhrio, if you want to relieve him of the glory, I'm sure you're welcome to change places with him, and he'll stay here and mind your gates for you."
Huff threw Rhiow a very covert and very amused look as Fhrio put his other ear forward. "Oh, no indeed," he said, "I wouldn't want to deprive him...."
"All right, then," Rhiow said to Huff. "I think we'll need some hours to put together what spells we want to carry with us, and to make sure things back at home are all right before we set out. If you can keep the gate in inactive mode until we get back, that'll probably be best."
"No problem with that," Fhrio said. "I'll just disconnect it from the power source entirely until you get back— when? tomorrow?—to set up the parasitic timeslide."
"Tomorrow let it be," Rhiow said, "about this time, if that suits you all."
They all got up. "And meanwhile, thanks for the work you've done," Huff said. "We're farther along than we were, though the problem looks worse than it did: at least there's been a change in status, which you were begging for, Fhrio, as I remember. So you may owe Arhu one after all."
"Though, Fhrio, I must admit that he overstepped the bounds," Rhiow said. "And my apologies to you for that."
Fhrio took a not entirely ceremonial swipe at Arhu's ear. "Let him behave himself after this, then."
"I will do so," Arhu said with abrupt and brittle clarity, "insofar as you so do as well, when we come into the dark and you cannot find the way..."
Rhiow blinked. It was not anything like Arhu's usual turn of phrase; she heard foretelling in it, and her fur stood up on her. She hoped Fhrio's was doing the same, for there was no mistaking the Whisperer's Dam when She chose to speak out loud... as she sometimes did, using Arhu as Her throat.
The resonances trembling around his words faded themselves out on the air, leaving the London team looking at one another. "I'm sorry," Rhiow said, "but it's another recent development. Arhu is a visionary, though the talent is still training. When it comes out so forcefully, though, we've learned to listen."
Fhrio shrugged his tail. "We'll see what happens," he said, sounding skeptical, but cheerfully so. "Are we all done? Then I've got a gate to see to, and a pride to go home to. See you all tomorrow."
He stalked out, leaving them all looking after him. Auhlae looked after him with some concern and said, "He goes my way home, for a little distance: I'll go with him. Siffha'h, come with me?"
"Sure," said the youngster. Auhlae rubbed faces quickly with Huff, saluted the others with a flirt of her tail, and headed off after Fhrio. Siffha'h trotted off after Auhlae, leaving Arhu gazing after her.
Rhiow lashed her tail once or twice, then said to Huff, "Truly, I am sorry if we've caused any trouble."
"If the way he acts makes you think so," Huff said, giving her an amused look out of those big green eyes, "don't. Fhrio's always like the flea down in your ear that you can't get at. But for all that, he's good at his job. Come on."
They all made their way out, slipping behind the bar and down a corridor behind it to a heavy metal door with a small cat door installed in the bottom of it: then out into a small, untidy yard stacked high with steel beer barrels and plastic soft-drink crates. At the back of the yard, a corrugated steel gateway in a high wall had a small improvised cat door cut into the steel and hinged. "Convenient," Urruah said.
"It is, isn't it?" said Huff. "But one thing. Urruah, thank you for volunteering."
Urruah looked at him in surprise. "Well, as I said, it seems appropriate. Doesn't it, Rhi?"
"It does. Accusations of ego aside."
Huff laughed at that. "Don't take him seriously, cousins: please don't. He's got ego enough of his own and to spare. But I do thank you."
"You're worried about Auhlae," Arhu said suddenly.
Rhiow sighed, thinking that vision was not Arhu's only problem: he was perceptive as well, but not about how to use the perception. He needs a tact transplant, she thought, but she suspected that this was something not even wizardry could handle. She and Urruah were just going to have to beat it into him over time, hopefully before he got so big that the corrective administration of educational whackings was no longer a viable option.
Huff looked for a long moment at Arhu before saying, "Yes, I am. I don't think you're too young to understand the situation. We've been together awhile, and she's dear to me: the thought of her in danger upsets me. If we needed to do something dangerous in the Powers' service, of course we would... and doubtless will. But I don't like to think of her anywhere near trouble."
Rhiow understood completely, though at the same time it seemed to her that for partners who were wizards, and who might be in trouble at the drop of a whisker, such an attitude was likely to cause one or both of them pain sooner or later.
"I know what you mean," Arhu said, and suddenly looked very young, and painfully dignified, and profoundly troubled, all at once. Oh, dear, Rhiow said privately to Urruah, he has been bitten badly, hasn't he.
The claw in the ear is the claw through the heart, Urruah said, quoting the old proverb. I just hope she doesn't rip him ragged before she's through.
"Yes," Huff said. "I thought you might. Thank you, anyway: thank you all for volunteering." And he leaned over and rubbed cheeks with Rhiow.
She was oddly moved. "Cousin, you're more than welcome. It's our job, after all. Meanwhile, we'd better get going to prepare what we need. We'll see you down by the gate, about this time tomorrow."
They made their way out the little steel door, into the alley behind the pub, and headed for the gate, and home. And all the way home, Rhiow's fur felt strange to her where Huff's cheek had brush
ed it.
Three
They parted at Grand Central— Urruah to make his way off to his Dumpster, Arhu to the garage. Rhiow went home by one of the "high road" routes, over roofs and 'tween-building walls, rather than by the surface streets. She was already thinking about the spells she would want to bring with her the next day, the preparations she would have to make, and she was in no mood to deal with the traffic at street level. Yet at the same time Huff's touch was on her mind: nor could she stop thinking about poor Arhu's adolescent suffering over Siffha'h. I wonder why she dislikes him, Rhiow thought as she jumped up on a high dividing wall at the end of Seventieth Street and looked down through the maze of tiny cramped alleys that would finally lead to her own alleyway and the road up her own apartment's wall. I hope they can sort something out. It would be nice if Arhu had another wizard more or less of his own age to be around, instead of just us old fossils.
Iaehh hadn't seen Rhiow the night before, so when she came in the cat door now, an hour or so after he would have returned from work, Iaehh swept her up and carried her around the apartment for about ten minutes, alternately scolding her for being missing and hugging her for having come back. Rhiow put up with it, even though she didn't normally much care for being carried around. Finally she patted his face with her paw, which she knew he thought was very "cute": but she left her claws just the tiniest bit out, and he felt them, and laughed.
"You're a good puss," he said, and put her down by the cat-food dish. He had washed it again. "You're learning," she said, and purred approval as he fed her. When he finally sat down in his reading chair (having had his dinner some time ago: pizza, to judge by the smells), she jumped up into his lap and sat there washing for a good while. Iaehh picked up the remote control and turned on the living room TV, and for a good long time he sat quiet and watched the local news channel intone its litany of who had been robbed or shot in the city, what politicians were saying cutting and possibly true things about other politicians, and what the weather was going to be like the next day.
When the weather report came around for the second time, Rhiow looked up at Iaehh and saw that he was dozing. She put her whiskers forward. Why else would he have been sitting still so long? she thought. Even Iaehh sometimes ran out of that nervous energy that kept him running all day and made him sleep poorly at night. At least, sometimes that's why he sleeps badly. Other times, when he wept himself asleep after lying awake a long time, Rhiow knew quite well that there were other reasons. At such times she sometimes wished she could speak to his neurochemistry as she had done with Mr. Illingworth, and spare him the pain: but Rhiow knew that that would not have been within the right use of her powers. To ease pain, the Oath said, indeed: but when pain was what led to the growth that wizardry was also supposed to guard, one did not tamper. Her ehhif's pain was difficult for her to bear, but Rhiow was not such a youngster in the exercise of the Art as to mistake the comforting of her own hurt for the salving of Iaehh's.
Now, though, he sat with his mouth slightly open, snoring very softly, while on the TV the mayor of New York complained about one of the city commissioners: and Rhiow let her eyes half-close and let the sound wash over her like running water or wind or any other noise that might have content, but not any content that she needed to pay attention to at the moment. There were more important things on her mind than city politics.
Time travel bothered her, as it bothered many wizards whose work sometimes necessitated it. For one thing, it was rarely quite so simple or straightforward as "going back in time." Even the phrase "back in time" was deceptive: the directionality of time was a variable, though the relationship of the past to the present was nominally a constant. No matter how careful you were, the possibility of careless action setting up unwelcome paradoxes was all too obvious... and unraveling such tangles was worse, inevitably involving more backtiming and the possibility of making things worse still.
The complications had fascinated Arhu all the way home: he had delightedly plagued Urruah with questions about a subject that until now had been off limits, about everything from what you fastened a timeslide to, to that ancient imponderable, the "grandfather paradox." Urruah had mentioned it, and Arhu had actually had to stop walking while he figured it out, or tried to. "It's weird," he said. "I can't see what would happen. Or, I mean, I can see two ways it would go."
"What? You mean, if you went back in time and killed your grandfather?" Urruah had said. "Well, one way, if you're still there afterwards, it means you're a by-blow. A bastard, as the ehhif would say. But then how else would you describe someone who would go back in time and kill their own grandfather? I ask you. And if you go the other way, and you succeed, then you're not there at all. And serves you right for being a bastard."
At that, Arhu had become so confused that he actually went quiet: and shortly thereafter they were at Grand Central, and Arhu went off to his dinner, ending the day's questioning. Rhiow had smiled somewhat wearily at that as she and Urruah parted, for the "grandfather paradox" served well enough to illuminate how difficult it could be to alter history, especially if you viewed it linearly. But in this line of work you would eventually have to deal with the question of what happened when events in some original timestream had actually been altered. Then you would have alternate universes to deal with. By themselves, they were bad enough. But they also brought with them the possibility that, in dealing with them, you would find yourself going back in place ... which was more complex than merely backtiming, and potentially more dangerous.
Quite a few locations on Earth had a "back in place" as well as "back in time." There were other downsides than the Old Downside, less central in the hierarchy of universes, perhaps, but no less important to the creatures who loved or hated the realities to which those places were related. History, or the reality of which history is a shadow, was in full flower in these less central downsides, fully expressed there no matter how they might be repressed elsewhere— in fact, usually more vigorous in expression in direct proportion to how vigorously they had been repressed in the "real world."
And going back in place involved an entirely different set of dangers. You ran the risk of somehow altering the basic mythological or archetypal structure of a place, which could be immensely important in the minds of thousands or millions of sentient beings. Tampering with the mythological essence of a place— a Rubicon or a Valley Forge, in the ehhif metaphor, a Camelot or a Runnymede— could change not just history, but the perception of it as good, bad, or indifferent, a far more perilous business than changing the mere structure of time. Such shifts could create ripples and harmonics that would be capable of ripping whole worlds apart. The thought of going back in both time and place at once was dangerous enough to make Rhiow shudder.
But they might wind up doing just that, for London was definitely a Place, one of those hinges of ehhif history in this part of the world. Not that the history of place wasn't mostly an ehhif manifestation, anyway. Humans weighed hard on the world, and imprinted it with history and personality. But People stepped more lightly. Feline history tended to take place within individual cats, who, according to their nature, saw place as merely something they moved over or through: it was rare for one of the People to become attached to one field, one tree. Granted, your den for this season— or this week of this season— was something you would defend, for the sake of the kittens or the local hunting. But sooner or later time or loss or boredom seeped into every den like water, and you moved out, perhaps with mild regret, to escape the creeping damp and find yourself somewhere else more warm or dry. Memories of those dens you took with you as the worthwhile part of the transaction, but the dens themselves held little interest unless your kill or your kittens were in them.
What kept People in one place, if anything, was the ehhif they companioned: sometimes much to the Person's embarrassment— and Rhiow glanced up in affectionate amusement at Iaehh, who sat there with his head slightly to one side and his eyes closed, his mouth open, and t
he tiny snore emitting from it at decorous intervals. The whole business of companionment was a tangled one. Some People felt that the only way the ehhif-People relationship could be viewed was as slavery: others, mostly those already in such a relationship, tended to see it otherwise, in a whole spectrum of aspects from pity ("Someone has to try to teach them better") to simple affection ("Mine are well enough behaved, and they're nice to me; what's the problem?") to cheerful mercenary exploitation ("If they want to feed us, why shouldn't we enjoy eating their food? Doesn't cost anything to purr afterwards, either.").
The People who raved most about slavery and freedom found all these views despicable: starving in a gutter, they said, but starving free, was far superior to a full belly in the den of the oppressor. Rhiow, ehhif-companioned for a good while now, found such an attitude simplistic at best. Yet there was no denying the existence of People who had no knowledge of themselves as such: taken from their dams too early, perhaps, too soon even to drink in with the first milk and their mother's tale-purring the truth of what they were or where in the worlds their own kind came from— People who were barely self-aware, merely receptacles for food and excreters of it, dull-brained demanders of strokes and treats, "pets" in the true sense of the word: slaves to their most basic instincts, but in service to nothing any higher at all.
Rhiow shuddered a little. But it's not that simple, she thought. Even among People who are self-aware, People for that matter living wild and "free," you'll find those for whom the gods and the life of the world don't matter at all, or matter far less then their last rat or a warm place to sleep. Which is worse? A cat who doesn't know she's a cat— just eats and sleeps and lives? Or one who does know, and doesn't care?
A tangled issue, and not one that Rhiow would resolve. Meanwhile, there was still the problem of the upcoming intervention. She had spoken to the Whisperer on the way home and received what she was expecting: official "sanction" for time travel, if the teams decided it was necessary. She had also sorted out with Her the spells she felt most likely she would need. In the morning, before they were ready to set out, she would crosscheck with Urruah to make sure they weren't carrying duplicates. And beyond that, there was nothing much she could do, except worry about what the future held for them... or, rather, the past. And what good would that do?