To Visit the Queen Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 farther forward. "Anyway, this complex handles a lot of offplanet 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."
    "Should I try somewhere else?" Arhu said, now bored with looking at the traffic.
    "Sure, go ahead," Rhiow said, waving her tail in casual assent, and Arhu sat up on his haunches again and hooked his claws into the control matrix, while Rhiow looked thoughtfully for a moment more at that old tower. There were a lot of physical places associated with ehhif that acquired personality artifact over many years, probably as a result of the ehhif tendency to stay in one place for generations. People didn't do that, as a rule, and found the prospect slightly pathological: but there was no use judging one species by another's standards— the One doubtless had Her reasons for designing them differently. Ten lives on, maybe we'll all be told.
    "It's stuck," Arhu said suddenly.
    "What? Stuck how?"
    "I don't know. It's just stuck."
    Urruah got up and stalked over to look the gate-web up and down. To a Person's eyes, its underweave, the warp and woof of interwoven hyperstrings that produced the gating effect, was still plainly visible through the image of sunshine on that other landscape, the tangle of buildings and traffic beyond. Arhu was sitting up with the brilliant strings of the "control weave" now stretched again between his paws, pulled taut and in the correct configuration for viewing. "Look," Arhu said, and twisted his paws so that the weave changed configuration, went much more "open," a maneuver that should have shut down the gate to the bare matrix again.
    The gate just hung there, untroubled and unmoved, and showed the bridge and the traffic, and the ehhif hurrying by.
    Rhiow came up beside Urruah. "Do it again."
    "I can't, not from this configuration, anyway."
    "I mean take that last move back, then reexecute."
    Arhu did.
    Nothing changed. The morning was bright, and shone on the bridge and the river.
    "Let me try," Urruah said.
    "Why?" Rhiow said. "He did it right."
    Urruah looked at her in astonishment. "Well, he..."
    "He did it right. Let's not rush to judgment: let's have a look at this."
    They all did. The strings looked all right, but something else was the matter: nothing that they could see. As she peered at the view, and the gate, Rhiow started to get the feeling that someone was looking over her shoulder...
    ... and then realized that Someone was. She did not have to look to see: she knew Who it was.
    There's a problem, the voice whispered in her ear.
    Urruah's ears flicked: nothing to do with the ambient noise. Arhu's eyes went wide. He was still adjusting to hearing the Whisperer. It took some getting used to, for the voice in your mind sounded like your own thought, except that it was not. It plainly came from somewhere else, and at first the feeling could be as bizarre as feeling someone else switch your tail.
    Rhiow's was switching now, without help. Well, madam, she thought, do You know what this problem is?
    The gate with which yours is presently in affinity is malfunctioning, said