Rhiow waved her tail, impressed. “I bet a lot of your fellow ehhif wizards wish they had such a good excuse…”
“I’d take that bet,” Helen said, and grinned. “As for the clothes, though – they’re just me being lazy. I got into the habit when I was working Vice a few years ago. Couldn’t be bothered changing them again and again – especially with the clothes they were giving me: who knew where they’d been? — Anyway, Hwaith, will I fit in? How’s the style look?”
“Good,” Hwaith said. “Very modern.”
“That’s fine: I was shooting for just postwar,” Helen said. “So, as I said, I’ll go have some breakfast, wait for the library to open…see what I can pick up. If we’re going to split up, where should we meet up again afterwards?”
“Back up here, I’d say,” Rhiow said. “Aufwi, if anything gets out of hand up here, call and we’ll come running.”
She turned again to look at the gate, hanging there shimmering innocently in the predawn twilight, for all the world as if there had been nothing wrong with it at all. Yet… “I was told to root here,” Rhiow said under her breath, “’and here I will stay.’”
“Yes,” Hwaith said. He had come up beside her and was looking at the gate with an annoyed expression. “I heard something like that too.”
Which reminds me that there was one more thing I wanted to check. “Cousin,” Rhiow said then, “walk with me a little way?” And she headed uphill, under the shadow of more of the evergreen oaks, toward a lesser crest of the hill they stood on.
Hwaith looked at her oddly for a moment, then followed. Rhiow paused under the last of the trees before the upper hillcrest, and as Hwaith caught up with her, she said, Please, Hwaith, forgive me the familiarity –
It’s not a problem, he said silently. You have to ask: how are my relations with my gate?
She put her whiskers forward. You really do have the Ear, she said. And yes, I do have to ask. For gate management was not just a matter of mechanics, of knowing which string to pull, and when, and how hard. Gates were tremendously complex constructions incorporating the hyperstrings that were the Universe’s building-blocks with hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of words in the Speech which had made the Universe out of those building-blocks. Where such complexities had been sustained for prolonged periods, there was always a question of whether or not the construction incorporating them had acquired some level of sentience…and many gates acted as if they had. Where there was sentience, or the appearance of it, there was relationship: and sometimes relationships went bad.
Rhiow, I’ve been working with this gate for nearly seventy moons, Hwaith said. It’s never given me more than a moment’s trouble, from the first weeks I spent with it until a few weeks ago when it began to misbehave. And there was no sudden withdrawal of cooperation, no falling-out. He sat down, looked eastward: out there, slowly making itself apparent through the haze over the furthest line of hills, was the Great Tom’s Eye, what ehhif called the Moon, rising now, and half-closed. Just, at the end of the last moon, as the Eye started to go dark, a feeling that the gate’s attention was turning elsewhere. Or being turned. As if it was being increasingly distracted by something besides me and this world…something just out of the field of vision, the thing you feel with your whiskers and can’t see…
She looked at Hwaith, troubled by the trouble in those bronzy eyes. He glanced back, and lashed his tail once or twice, a frustrated gesture. Maybe if I’d called for help sooner, he said, none of this would be happening. Or it would have happened, and have been fixed by now. Have I been acting too much like a tom…?
The question caught Rhiow completely off guard…especially as it was one she couldn’t recall ever having been asked by a tom before: they didn’t tend toward self-analysis nearly as much as queens did. I don’t think so, she said at last. Which leaves us looking at the same problem, I suppose. ‘I was told to stay here.’ Told by whom?
“It’s the question I don’t seem to be able to find an answer to,” Hwaith said, aloud now. “And as you’ve heard, the Whisperer didn’t have one either. I suspect that’s what we’ve got to find out.”
She flicked one ear in unnerved agreement. “It’s when we most want concrete answers from Them that we don’t get any,” Rhiow said. “Annoying. But it’s the world we’ve got, until we fix it…so let’s get busy.”
She got up and shook herself, and saw Urruah coming up the hillside toward them. “’Ruah,” Rhiow said, “let’s take one last – “ Then she stopped: for Urruah had stopped too, and was staring at her. “What?” Rhiow said.
He started cursing under his breath, though in a good-natured way. “I can’t believe I’ve been here for an hour without seeing that!” Urruah said.
She waved her tail, confused. “Seeing what?”
“Look up there!”
