Диана Дуэйн - To Visit the Queen

"Wait a minute," Arhu said, sitting back again, but with a slightly suspicious look this time. "Are you trying to tell me that the whole species of People was built the way we are just so that we could be gate technicians – ?"
"Maybe not just for that purpose, no. But don't you find it a little strange that we're perfectly set up to handle strings physically, and that we can see them naturally, when no other species can?"
"The saurians can."
"That's a recent development," Rhiow said wearily. It was one of many "recent developments" which they were all slowly digesting. "Never mind that for now. No other species could. Meantime, do something before the thing defaults again … "
"All right," Arhu said. "Group one is for phase relationships." He plucked that control string out as he named it, held it hooked behind one claw, and a series of strings in the matrix ran bright golden as he activated them. Two is for the main hyperstring "junction weave" to four-dimensional space, and the "emphatic" forces: three is for the fifth-dimensional interweave, four is for dimensions six through ten and the lower electromagnetic spectrum, five is for the upper electromagnetic and the strong– and weak-force plena. And then – " He paused, licked his nose.
"Then comes motion," Urruah said, " – field nutation, sideslip, tesseral, cistemporal, cishyperspatial." He paused as Arhu leaned in to bite the strings that he was having trouble managing with his paws, " – and then the five strictly physical fields of motion. The planet rotates, it's inclined on its axis and precesses, it's also describing a large ellipse around the Sun, and the Sun is moving on the inward leg of a hyperbola with the galactic core at one focus, and the Galaxy – "
" – is rotating, yes, I think we would have heard if it had stopped ii
Urruah made a face. "Just be glad that's all the kinetics you have to worry about at the moment. Once we get up into second-order stuff, your head will hurt a lot worse than if I'd hit you for your rude mouth, which may come later. And don't think I can't hear you thinking, with your teeth and claws full of hyperstrings: you think the laws of science are broken, or I'm deaf? Thought runs down those things like water: that's partly what they're built for … All you have to worry about now is the path this piece of Earth is describing through space at the moment, and the path that the piece you're trying to gate to is describing. You keep them in synch while the gate's open, and that'll be more than a lot of wizards can do. It's a complex helical locus in motion, but no more complex than a trained Person can handle. Let's see how you do."
Rhiow sat and wondered how Urruah could sound so casual about the management of forces which, if Arhu let them slip, could peel the whole mass of Grand Central Terminal off its track-tunneled lower layers and toss it up into the stratosphere the way you would toss a new-killed rat. That was Urruah's teaching style, though, and it seemed to work with Arhu. Tom stuff, Rhiow thought, and kept her whiskers still: unwise to let the amusement show. For toms, it all comes down to blows and ragged ears in the end. Never mind: whatever works for them …
The weave of the gate before them suddenly shimmered and misted away to invisibility. They got a glimpse of light streaming golden through rustling green leaves, a bustle and rush of ehhif along a checkered black-and-white pavement before them: and suddenly, with a huge clangor of bells, a huge boxy blue-and-white shape turned a corner in front of them and came rushing directly at the gate.
Arhu's eyes went wide: he yowled and threw himself backwards, dropping the mouthful and double pawful of strings. The view through the gate vanished, leaving nothing but the snapped-back rainbow weave of the hyperstrings, buzzing slightly like strummed guitar strings in the dark air as they resonated off the energy that had built up in them while the gate was open.
Arhu lay on the cinders and panted. "What did I – I didn't – "
Rhiow yawned. "It was a tram."
"What?"
"A kind of bus," Rhiow said. "It runs on electricity: some ehhif cities use them. Don't ask me where that was, though."
"Blue-and-white tram," Urruah said. "Combined with that smell? That was Zurich."
"Urruah – "
"No, seriously. There's a butcher just down the road from there, on the Bahnhofstrasse, and they have this sausage that – "
"Urruah." "What? What's the matter?"
Rhiow sighed. Urruah had four ruling passions: wizardry, food, sex, and oh'ra. They jostled one another for precedence, but you could guarantee in any discussion with Urruah that at least one of them would come up, usually repeatedly. "We don't need to hear about the sausage," Rhiow said. "Was that the location you had set into the gate?"
"I didn't set a specific location. Just told it to hunt for population centers in the three hundred to five hundred thousand range with gating affinities."
"Then you did good," Rhiow said to Arhu, "even if you did panic. You had 'here' and 'there' perfectly synchronized."
"Until I panicked." Arhu was washing now, with the quick sullen movements of someone both embarrassed and angry.
"It didn't do any harm. You should always brace yourself, though, when opening a gate into a new location, even on visual-only. It's another good reason to make sure the gate defaults to invisible/intangible until you've got your coordinates solidified."
"Take a break," Urruah said: but Arhu turned back to the gateweave and began hooking his claws into it again, in careful sequence.
Stubborn, Rhiow said silently to Urruah.
This isn't a bad thing, Urruah said. Stubborn can keep you alive, in our line of work, at times when smart may not be enough.
Rhiow switched her tail in agreement. They watched Arhu reconstruct the active matrix, and pull out the strings again, two pawsful of them: then he leaned in and carefully began taking hold of the next groups with his teeth, pulling them down one by one to join the ones already in his claws. The gate shimmered –­Traffic flowed by in both directions right before them, cars and buses in a steady stream: but there was something odd about the sight, regardless. In the background, beyond some lower buildings, two great square towers with pointed pyramidal tops stuck up: a roadway ran between them, and some kind of catwalk, high up.
"The cars are on the wrong side," Arhu said suddenly.
"Not wrong," Rhiow said, "just different. There are places on the planet where they don't drive the way ehhif here do."
"No one on the planet drives the way ehhif here do," Urruah muttered.
Rhiow put her whiskers forward in a smile. "No argument."
People were walking back and forth before what would be the aperture of the gate, were it physically to open. "Look at them all," Arhu said, somewhat bemused. "It keeps coming up cities."
"It would whether Urruah had set the parameters that way or not," Rhiow said to Arhu. "Worldgates inhere to population centers."
Make it a little dryer for him, why don't you? Urruah said good– humoredly into her mind as he looked out at the ehhif hurrying by. "See, Arhu, if you pack enough people of whatever species into a
tight enough space, the fabric of physicality starts fraying from the pressure of all their minds intent on getting what they want. Pack even more of them in, up to the threshold number, and odd things start to happen routinely in that area as the spacetime continuum rubs thinner – places get a reputation for anything being available there, or at least possible. Go over the threshold number, and gates start forming spontaneously."
"Much smaller populations can produce gates if they're there for long enough," Rhiow said. "The piled-up-population effect can be cumulative over time: there are settlements of ehhif that have been established for many thousands of years, and therefore have gates even though only a small population lives there at any one time."
"Catal Huyuk," Urruah said, "and Chur, places like that. Those old gates can be tricky, though: idiosyncratic … and over thousands of years, they pick up a lot of strange memories, not all of them good. The newer high-population-locus gates can be a lot safer to work with."
"What's the threshold number you were talking about?" Arhu said, studying the gate.
"A variable, not a constant," Rhiow said. "It varies by species. For ehhif, it's around ten million. For People, eight hundred thousand, give or take a tail."
Arhu flirted his own tail, a gesture of disbelief. "Where would you get that many People?"
"Right here in this city, for one place," Rhiow said. "All those 'pets', all those 'strays' – " The words she used were rhao 'ehhih'h and aihlhih, 'human-denned' and 'nonaligned'. "There might be as many as a million of us just in this island. Either way, there's more than enough of us to sustain a gating complex without ehhif being involved … and they're here too. With such big joint populations, it's no surprise that this complex is the most senior one in the planet."
"And besides, there's the 'master' gating connection to the old Downside," Urruah said. "Every worldgate on the planet has 'affectional' connections to it: for all we know, its presence made it possible for all the other gates to spawn."
Arhu shook his head. "What's this city, then?"
"London," Urruah said.
"Don't tell me … you can smell the local butcher."
Urruah took a swipe at Rhiow, which she ducked with her whiskers forward, amused to have successfully put a claw into his near– impervious ego. "As it happens," Urruah said, "I recognize the landscape. That's Tower Bridge back there."
Rhiow looked at the bridge between the two towers: it was starting to rise in two pieces, to let a ship past. "Isn't that the one the ehhif have a rhyme about? It fell down … "
"Wrong bridge. The location it serves started developing gates around the beginning of the last millennium, when the last batch of ehhif with a big empire came through."
"The 'Hrromh'ans'." "That's right."
"Not a very old complex, then?" Rhiow said.
"Nope. A little finicky, this one. The population pressure built up around it in fits and starts rather than steadily, and it kept losing population abruptly – the city kept getting sacked, having plagues and fires, things like that. The matrices formed under touchy circumstances. But the Tower Bridge complex is good for long-range transits: better than ours, even. No one's sure why. Convergence of ley lines, gravitic anomalies under that hill close to the bridge, who knows?" Urruah waved his tail. "Leave it to the theorists."
"Like you, now."
He put his whiskers forward, but the expression in his eyes was ironic. "Well, we're all diversifying a little at the moment, aren't we? Not that we have much choice."
"You miss her too," Rhiow said softly.
Urruah watched Arhu for a little, and then said, "She used to go on and on about these little details. Now I wonder whether she had a hint of what was going to happen … "
The interesting thing," Rhiow said, "is that you remembered all this."
He looked at her sidewise. "Shouldn't surprise you. 'He lives in a dumpster, he's got a brain like a dumpster', isn't that what you always say?"
"I never say that," Rhiow said, scandalized, having often thought that very thing.
"Huh," Urruah said, and his whiskers went further forward. "Anyway, this complex handles a lot of off-planet work – emergency interventions, and the routine training and cultural exchange transits involving wizards here and elsewhere in the Local Group of galaxies. Bigger scheduled transits than that tend to go to Chur or Alexandria or Beijing, to keep Tower Bridge from getting overloaded, Saash told me. It overloads easily – something to do with the forces tangled around that hill with the old castle on it."
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