To Visit the Queen Read Online Free PDF

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 drier 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 asked, 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 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. This is a younger one; the location it serves started developing gates around the beginning of the last millennium, when the last bunch 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