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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 backward, 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 Zürich."
    "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 o'hra. 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 gate-weave 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 pawfuls 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 to open physically. "Look at them all," Arhu