To Visit the Queen by Diane Duane Page A

the locomotives' complicated shapes and structures affected the local shape of spacetime— the way the atomic and molecular structure of water, for example, manifested itself as wetness. The Whisperer had no answers for her, or none that made sense: and when Rhiow had taken the problem casually to the ehhif advisory wizards for New York, Tom and Carl, they had shaken their heads and confessed an ignorance on which even their wizard's manuals could not shed light. Finally Rhiow had simply given up and started talking to the locomotives in the course of her rounds, despite being unable to tell whether it was making any difference. But certainly something with a personality, no matter how undeveloped, deserves to be talked to as if it exists.
    Auhlae looked bemused at that, for a moment. "Now there's something I hadn't given much thought to," she said. "The Underground trains... you get a faint sense of personality off them, but nothing like that. Or is it just because I haven't been looking?"
    "Hard to say," Rhiow said. "But beware. Do you really need another area of interest? The one we share is trouble enough."
    Auhlae laughed softly. "Tell me about it," she said as Huff came back down the stairs again and padded toward them.
    "Problems, hrr't?" Auhlae said.
    "Oh, I wanted a look at number three," Huff said, "since this one's being worked on." He sat down beside Auhlae and leaned against her slightly. "You know how they tend to interfere with each other— their catenary links are close together." He paused a moment, then said, "Is it true that you were there? Down deep, right where the catenaries meet, at the roots of things?"
    "We were there," Rhiow said, "but it's not a memory I'd call up willingly just now. For one thing, we lost a partner of my age there: if we had her here now, I'd bet we'd have solved your problem already. As it is, we're all learning new jobs, and everything is so confused."
    "I'm sorry for your trouble," said Huff, and Auhlae blinked somber agreement, stirring her tail slowly.
    "Oh, it wasn't all sad," Rhiow said, "not at all. A great many things changed for the better; and the Downside has new guardians."
    "The great cats live there," Auhlae said, "don't they? Our ancestors, our ancient selves. The Old People..."
    "Yes," Rhiow said, "and nothing will remove them from where they have been since the Beginning. But there are two peoples there now." Maybe this was not the time to start that particular story, but the facts still made Rhiow wake up in the middle of the night, wondering. For all the years there had been dry-land creatures in this world, cat and serpent had expressed in a specific symbolism the two sides of an ancient enmity: creatures of the Sun and light against creatures of Earth and the dark beneath the Earth, warm blood against cold blood, the Powers That Be against the Lone Power that went rogue, both sides battling for the world. But suddenly Rhiow found herself running across new concepts, in which at least some of the great saurians were warmblooded, and images in which serpent was born of cat (despite the older mythologies, which suggested that cat had been born of serpent)—all too predictable a development, since Arhu had become "father" to the new serpent-kind, the great saurians who had become the new guardians of the Old Downside.
    Of course the Universe was full of these jokes and ironies, mostly born of the misapprehension, native to beings living serially in time, that time itself was serial. Naturally, it was not. Time was at least Riemannian, and tended to run both in circles and cycles: outward-reaching spirals that repeated previous tendencies and archetypes reminiscent of earlier ones, but the repetitions came in "bigger" forms, and with unexpected ramifications. Now time bit its own tail one more time, and in the process of that biting pulled off the old skin, revealing the new shiny skin and the bigger body underneath: more beautifully scaled and intricately