To Visit the Queen by Diane Duane

ears forward. "I used to wonder how a wizard managed when she was in heat," she said. "I never had the chance, myself: my ehhif took me and had me unqueened before I started."
    "Oh, how terrible for you!" Auhlae said.
    "Oh, no, it wasn't that bad. Afterwards I tended to see it as an advantage. No interruptions... no toms fighting over me. It looked like a release."
    Auhlae was silent for a moment, and started to wash one ear. "Well," she said, "I suppose I can see your point of view. But truly, I haven't found it to be all that much of a problem. You can always use wizardry to adjust your own hormones a little, and delay the onset. But of course it's not too good to do much of that kind of thing. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be necessary very often. Only very rarely have I had to be on call while I was in heat, and never while I was kittening. The Whisperer seems to keep track of such things." Auhlae put her whiskers forward, a demure smile with a slightly wicked edge to it. "I suppose we should be grateful that it's the Queen running the Universe and not the Tom: who knows if we'd ever get any rest?"
    Rhiow chuckled. "I think you're right there... in all possible senses of the word."
    "But anyway," Auhlae said, "Huff and I usually come down in the early evenings and troubleshoot the gates. There's always trouble," she said, sounding very resigned. "You know how even inanimate objects can start betraying evidence of personalities, over time— "
    " Oh, yes," Rhiow said.
    "Well, the gates have been here a lot longer than we have, and believe me, they have personalities. Mostly annoyed and suspicious ones. I think it may have had to do with their 'upbringing,' their history. Populations would rise here and then be swept away without warning... and to a certain extent, the gate 'learns' to adapt to the pressure of the population around it. Take that population away suddenly, and it must be like suddenly being thrown off something that you've always slept on safely before. The shock makes you stop trusting... you don't know whether things will be the same from one day to the next. So the gates act fairly 'calmly' for a period of time— a week, a month— and then— pff! " Auhlae made a soft spitting hiss of the kind that an annoyed Person would use to warn another away. "It can take endless time to calm them down. Do you have the same problem?"
    Rhiow flicked her tail no. "Oh, they're alive enough, all right," she said. "Aaurh Herself made them, after all: I'm not sure anything with that level of wizardry incorporated into it could avoid being alive, to some degree. But, fortunately, New York grew very steadily, and our gates behave themselves... except when they don't," she added, wryly. "Often enough..."
    Auhlae purred in amusement. "You must run into the personality problem with other things, though. You sounded pretty definite."
    "Well, it crops up from time to time." And glancing over at Arhu again (who was still gazing thoughtfully at Siffha'h, apparently without effect) and at Urruah and Fhrio (now leaning right into the gate's matrix structure again, with their heads bent close together and almost invisible among the tangle of strings), Rhiow began to tell Auhlae about the diesel locomotives that ran the trains in and out of Grand Central. Theoretically, they should have been just great complex hunks of metal and wiring. But they were not, as the ehhif who drove them and took care of them loudly attested. The engines had noticeable personalities, which manifested in the ways they worked (or didn't): some good-natured and easygoing, some spiteful and annoying, some lazy, some overtly hostile. Rhiow had wondered whether she and the engineers and mechanics were all projecting the traits of life onto dead things for which, admittedly, they all felt affection. But finally she had realized that that wasn't it. She started wondering whether this acquisition of personality might be caused by something specific about the way