The Big Meow

There, hanging and wavering gently in midair in the shadow of several skeletal gray-needled pines, was this time’s version of the LA gate. Rhiow looked at it for a moment, and got an odd feeling as she did so; there was something almost uneasy about the way it was rippling, not in the usual steady rhythm, but with a kind of shiver interfering intermittently with the ripples. “It doesn’t look right,” she said.

“No,” Urruah said, “it doesn’t. The chroma of the weft looks way off.” He glanced over at Aufwi. “You know this gate better than any of our group does, though – “

Aufwi lashed his tail. “Definitely looks sickly,” he said. “Much too blue in the crests of those ripples. It’s a look mine’s been getting lately…”

“I’ve seen that blueshift before,” Rhiow said, getting up again and going over for a closer look. “You get it when something’s interfering with a gate’s control structures…usually some change in the local matrix it’s sunk into. In this case, it’s sunk into a spot it wasn’t intended to be, and the last group of settings are arguing with the new location.”

“More than that,” Urruah said. “See the way the waves are canceling each other here and there?” He sat up on his haunches, looking at the gate. “Two, three…four places. Hwaith, your problem child’s trying to put down more roots.”

“It kept trying to do that before,” Hwaith said, sounding furious. “That’s why I was reluctant to leave it for even such a short time.”

“We’ll pull them up,” Urruah said, “and then try to get a sense of why it’s doing this. May I?”

“Please,” Hwaith said, “don’t stand on ceremony! You’ve come a long way to do just that. Just tell me if you need help.”

Rhiow put her whiskers forward, relieved that Hwaith wasn’t going to get all possessive; all she needed right now was to find herself at the wrong end of time with another version of Jath on her paws. “Now,” she said, “all we have to do is find out why this has been starting to happen to your gate, so that we can keep it from happening to ours…”

Not ‘all’, said the quiet voice in the back of Rhiow’s head.

Rhiow flicked an ear. Hwaith gave her an odd look as she turned away from him. Whisperer, she said silently, if you have any hints for me, now’s the time.

No hints today, said the Mistress of the Whispering. We’re all in the dark here together. If you turn up anything that seems germane to the Powers, believe me, I’ll mention it. But none of our first guesses or assumptions are likely to be good enough to rely on; and finding out what lies at the root of this gate’s trouble, and yours, is going to make all the difference between life and…something else..

Rhiow licked her nose several times, very fast, as the Silent One fell silent again. “Sorry — ” she said to Hwaith, turning back to him.

“She doesn’t sound very encouraging, does She,” he said.

“You caught that?”

He flicked his tail in a gesture of mild annoyance, looked away. “I do hear things, unfortunately,” Hwaith said. “It was my first specialty after Ordeal: not the Eye, but the Ear. I could never really control it, though, which is why I went into gate work as soon as there was an opening.” He looked at Rhiow again, apologetic. “Please excuse me: it’s not intentional…and when She speaks in that tone of voice, it’s hard to avoid hearing Her.”

“I wouldn’t argue that point,” Rhiow said, looking away to watch Urruah reach out and sink his claws into the edges of the gate’s weft, hooking them into its control webs. He pulled, and the predictable tangled lines of light stretched out and away from the gate proper. “Is it just me,” Rhiow said, “or do those threads look…I don’t know…thinner than usual?”

“It’s not just you,” Hwaith said. He licked his nose once or twice, nervous: and Aufwi looked over at Rhiow and Hwaith and said, “This is something my gate’s been doing too. It’s been sporadic, though, and I haven’t been able to get it to repeat so that I can do a diagnostic…”

“Got some trouble here,” Urruah said then, and the steady way he said it brought the fur up all over Rhiow.

“What?” she said, getting up and trotting over.

“No,” Urruah said, “nothing you need to do anything about right this second. We’re going to need a few extra paws in a little bit, though.” He bent in close, seized a bundle of the glowing gate-strings in his teeth, and reached in with the freed-up paw to hook another tangle of them with his claws. “This thing hasn’t just put down one root. It’s got five now.”

Hwaith hissed, swearing in helpless anger. “It’s not going to do any good pulling them up one at a time,” he said. “It’ll just re-root one of them while we’re working on the next.”

“We can each take one,” Rhiow said. “’Ruah, are the roots sinking themselves nearby?”

It looked as if the knotted mass of hyperstrings was resisting him, trying to snap back into the gate. He lashed his tail “no”. “They’re spread out,” he said. “South, east, southeast, southwest of here. Take a look – “