The Big Meow

“But look at the picture,” Urruah said. “Everybody, Rhi, look at it. If you didn’t know what you were drawing – or trying to make a picture of it just from somebody’s description, maybe not a terribly good description either – doesn’t that look like a rough schematic of the throat of a worldgate? Look how it bends back there – that’s almost the Klein-bottle rationalization that we use to represent the schematic in 2D – “

“And look what’s inside the funnel,” Helen said. “Another one. A little tiny one…”

Very slowly Urruah lifted his head and looked at Rhiow.

Her eyes started to widen. And I thought I was seeing typical tommish let’s-destroy-stuff business going on before! “Oh, no,” Rhiow said. “No, Urruah. No chance! If you think that just because of a little thing like the world possibly ending — ”

“It doesn’t have to end, Rhi!” Urruah said. “Look at it! A little open-throated claudication stuck into a gate’s patency locus. We know perfectly well from wizardly theory what will happen when we do this — ”

“We think we do,” Rhiow shouted at him, “because gate theory also tells us perfectly clearly why that this is something we should never ever do! If you put a working claudication through an active worldgate, the eversion reaction will rip spacetime apart on a massive scale –“

“Or when in the vicinity of an equivalent rip of roughly equal proportions, with careful management,” Urruah said, “mesh with and evert the corresponding eversion so that the two cancel each other out.”

He was looking over at Hwaith and Aufwi now. Both of them were acquiring the same look of rapidly growing and truly terrifying interest, made far worse because each of them was contemplating how wonderful it would be to have a good reason to do something that was normally a gate technician’s worst nightmare. “Urruah, you are out of your vhai’d mind!” Rhiow said. “’With careful management?’ You’re contemplating constructing a gate adjustment of this complexity and magnitude on the fly? Because there’s no way to judge the actual forces or qualities of the incursion until it happens – “

“Of course there’s a way. We already have some indicators,” Urruah said. “From the earlier gating that failed! Sure, this time the scalars will be bigger, because Ith won’t be falling into the middle of everything without warning. But we know roughly how the incursion gate will build itself.”

“So we root the pumped-up LA gate where we want it – “ Aufwi said.

Hwaith’s tail was lashing. “And we build a pocket claudication with a lot of power wound up inside it, tailored so that when it’s pushed through the LA gate, the eversion is on a close order of force to the incursion event – “

“And then when the incursion starts right in front of us, which it’ll have no choice to do, we feed the claudication into the live gate, and when the eversion starts, we push it into the incursion locus, and… blooey!”

Rhiow was trying to keep her tail from revealing her inmost thoughts. ‘Blooey.’ Sweet Iau, what am I going to do with these three?

“But Rhi, you haven’t heard the best thing about this!”

“I haven’t?”

He ignored her irony. “The other effect associated with an eversion, the other reason this is such a bad thing to do! It inflicts dimensional quantum outrage on all of hyperstring structure throughout a given physical reality, sensitizing it to such eversions so that they can never happen again. If this was just a regular gate eversion, it would make worldgating impossible right across all the universes affected. But in this case, it’s not regular gatings that would become impossible, but the kind of unnatural fusion gating that tried to happen in the cavern. Our sheaf of universes would be immunized against this kind of thing forever more!”

At first hearing the concept sounded attractive, but Rhiow was feeling more ragged by the moment and was beginning to doubt her analytical abilities. “Ruah, there’s no way the San Andreas fault could fail to trigger with the forces that would be discharged here. The earlier earthquake would be nothing to this. And I’m leaving aside the effects on the ocean and the atmosphere clear up to space – “

“Rhi, it’s true, the Earth may be seriously damaged. Even if we can minimize the worst effects, we may at the very least we may destroy the state of California, which I would regret – “

“I bet the Californians would too,” Arhu said under his breath.

“But for that price, if things go right we’ll shut down the invader’s access to our whole khiliocosm so It can never get in here again. And worst case, even if it doesn’t work, by Iau we’ll give the Great Old One Outside something to remember us by, a multidimensional abscess in its very guts that’ll never heal — and stuff a hairball into sa’Rraah’s gullet like she’s never had since Aaurh the Mighty shoved the Big Bang down her throat and made her cough it up!”