THREE
“I know it sounds insane,” Hwaith said a few minutes later. The plaza at Olvera Street had already begun to fill up with more and more ehhif, so everyone had taken the simplest available option and climbed the biggest of the peppertrees, perching or couching themselves on one or another of the big thick outthrust branches twenty feet or so above the ground.
“Worse than the Lone Power…!” Arhu was muttering under his breath. He had to mutter louder than usual, as from maybe twenty feet above his head, and everyone else’s, various muted screeching and grinding-gear noises were coming from the many annoyed, glossy-black grackles in the tree, all now perched well out of reach and emitting avian curses.
“I know how it sounds. But think about it,” said Hwaith, glancing over at Rhiow as if hoping for support. “It’s evil, yes, and does evil, often enough, from our point of view: it’s entropy embodied, no arguing that. But at least it’s a force native to our sheaf of universes, something interior.”
“I’ll grant you,” Rhiow said, “things exterior to the sheaf wouldn’t be something I’d spend a lot of time thinking about on a daily basis.”
“Who would?” Hwaith said. “We have enough troubles inside.” He sat up and scratched emphatically behind one foreleg.
“I take it you’ve done all the usual diagnostics,” Urruah said. “And the problem’s not with the gate.”
“Let’s put it this way,” Hwaith said; “the problems we’ve been having aren’t the L.A. gate’s usual problems.” He glanced over at Aufwi: Aufwi put his ears back and looked away, a gesture of shared annoyance. “You know the way the thing jumps around. That was my first hint that something was going wrong: it started to stay put.”
Aufwi looked back, going rather wide-eyed with incredulity. “Where?” he said.
“Beechwood Canyon,” Hwaith said, “up by Mount Lee -- just south of Mulholland Boulevard. It rolled up there one morning in the middle of an earthquake, and started putting a root down into the hillside.”
Aufwi looked dubious. “Normally I’d have gone right out and caught a rat for Queen Iau as a thank-offering,” he said. “Not like we haven’t been praying for a hundred years that the gate would eventually see fit to settle in someplace! But Mount Lee…?” His tail lashed. “Why on Earth? That’s too much offset for even this crazy gate. There’s no transport center there, and the population’s fairly sparse up that way even now! It’d just have been a couple of hillsides’ worth of brush, back in your time.”
“I don’t have answers for you,” Hwaith said, and his tail was lashing harder than Aufwi’s. “There hasn’t been time to find them. Right when the gate started trying to root, we started having earthquakes, cluster after cluster of them. At least five or six a day, some of them big kicks, some of them just little…but they had that ‘precursor’ feel to them, like they might be the heralds of something big. Half the wizards in L.A. dropped what they were doing and tried to deal with them, but they weren’t having much luck. The only thing that seemed to make a difference was about a week later, when I managed to pry the gate loose from where it was digging itself into the canyon and drag it back down here where it belonged. Then the quakes died down….”
“A coincidence, perhaps?” Rhiow said. “New Moon, or full? That would explain the week’s worth of increased activity–”
Hwaith gave her an exasperated look, and Rhiow glanced away, a touch embarrassed to see a newly-met wizard so openly fraught. “The Moon had nothing to do with it,” Hwaith said, “or at least the Whisperer didn’t think it did. I got suspicious and did a deep diagnostic on the gate, pushing the analysis all the way into the main catenary connection to the Old Downside. I thought that, since that dimension’s so much more central than ours, I’d be able to get a better idea of what was making the gate act so oddly.”
Hwaith licked his nose four or five times in rapid succession. “What I got back was a sense that all that part of spacetime was being leaned against. Something pushing, pressing, from outside, wanting in. And at the same time, it was sucking and pulling at the gate, trying to get it stable and rooted deep, so it could be used for…something.” The fur was standing up on Hwaith’s back now, a long dusty ridge running right down to his tail, which was going fluffy with alarm. “And when I finished the spell, I could tell that Hrau’f Herself had been looking over my shoulder all the time, and the fur on Her back was up too. She said, ‘You will need help to understand this, and to stop it: for it isn’t pointed just at you. Here’s where to go.” And Hwaith looked around him at the tree and the dappled sunlight on the plaza, as if he didn’t quite believe in them: and then at Rhiow.
The fur started to stand up on her too. Rhiow had to look away and wash an ear, and she tried not to have it look more like composure-grooming than it had to: but the ragged look of intensity and fear in Hwaith’s eyes was unnerving her as much as the implications of what he’d said. Anything that can frighten Hrau’f the Silent… she thought. “You’re implying,” Rhiow said, “that whatever has been trying to happen in your time, is also going to try to happen in ours, if it’s not dealt with first in backtime.”
“That’s what She gave me to understand,” Hwaith said, “yes.”
“Why?” Urruah said. “What did She say it was?”
“She didn’t,” said Hwaith. “She said, We won’t know until you do. And you won’t know until they do–”
Urruah swore under his breath, a not-very-restrained yowl. Rhiow gave him a look, and then glanced over at Arhu and Siffha’h, whose expressions were jointly very neutral– meaning that they weren’t sure what was going on, but weren’t going to be caught admitting as much. “This is one of those annoying little courtesies the Powers that Be like to do us,” Rhiow said. “The dignity of joint creation. The Powers aren’t the only ones making our worlds happen: we are, too. But They can be as uncertain about the way events unfold as we are. Oh, living outside time in the full flow of Eternity may seem very nice to us….but beings who permanently reside on the far side of Time tend to have trouble affecting timeflow by themselves. They need someone who lives inside to–”
“Do Their dirty work!” Arhu and Siffha’h said in annoyed unison.
“Somehow,” Jath said, “I doubt the One sees it that way.”
“Jath’s right,” Urruah said. “And though the Powers are creators and caretakers, they’re not omnipotent or omniscient. Sure, They intervene here directly, sometimes, when things get bad -- but not more often than They have to. We, on the other hand, live here. We know better how time works than They do: we experience it physically. They can’t do that without help from us....”
“And sometimes they can’t be sure what’s going to happen inside sequential time until we make it happen,” said Rhiow. “This sounds like one of those cases.”
“But we’re already inside a time paradox!” Arhu said. “He’s here because we went to him! But if we go to his time, it’ll be because we–”
“Don’t say ‘if’!” Hwaith said, putting his ears back. Then he caught sight of Urruah’s annoyed look, and his tail slowly twitching. Hwaith put his ears forward again. “Please,” he said: but he said it to Rhiow.
For an uncomfortable moment or so there was no noise but the grackles overhead, still making their rusty-gear screech. It was louder now: since none of the People in the tree were doing anything about the grackles, the birds had been hopping stealthily lower, twig by twig, to see if they could somehow make People’s lives more difficult. Rhiow looked up through the leaves and saw one round golden grackly eye bent thoughtfully on her. “Hwaith,” Rhiow said then, glancing back toward him, “you put me in a difficult position, for the situation’s far from clear as yet.”
“Clarifying it’s going to take time,” Hwaith said, “and it’s what we don’t have much of, where I am. But here, you have all the time in the world…for the time being.” He had slipped into the Speech for the moment, and the conditional tenses he was using were a lot more conditional than Rhiow would have liked. “All I know for sure, all the Whisperer told me, is that my problem is your problem. Or, shortly, it will be. Solve mine, you’ll solve yours. But if my problem isn’t solved, you’re going to find yourself dealing with it– and it’ll be a much tougher fix, She said. If not nearly impossible.”
Rhiow and her team, and Jath and Aufwi, looked at one another. “Cousins, please,” Hwaith said, getting up and shaking himself all over, “I shouldn’t be here any longer: I have to get back and make sure my gate’s all right -- I don’t trust it out of my sight for more than a few minutes at a time, the way it’s been acting. There’s so much more to tell, but this is the wrong end of time to be telling it in! You have the coordinates where I’ll meet you–”
Rhiow could feel them lying at the back of her mind, ready to be used. There was the indicator that the proposed intervention had been sanctioned, and at a very high level: when the Whisperer was so direct with you, it didn’t do to start arguing the fine points of an intervention until you’d begun it and had a better idea of exactly what was involved. Yet the choice to go or not lay with her -- the “dignity” of co-creation lay once again dumped in front of Rhiow for her attention, bloody and twitching, like a half-dead rat. And speaking of twitching, there was poor Hwaith, watching her with those narrowed brassy eyes, waiting for her choice. She found herself wondering whether this kind of nervous tic was part of his normal mode of operation -- the way Saash had never been able to stop scratching while she was still inside her ninth life’s skin– or simply transient discomfort at being in the middle of a forward timeslide, an enterprise naturally fraught with all kinds of danger. He caught her look, held it for a second, then looked away again, as if embarrassed --
“…We’ll come,” Rhiow said at last. “We have to make some preparations of our own, you’ll understand. But we’ll be with you shortly.”
“Thank you!” Hwaith said. “Well met on the Journey–”
And he was gone.
The brief inrush of air to the place where he’d been caused a gust of wind in the peppertree’s branches. From above them all, the grackles screeched again, more loudly now, reading the breeze– unusually rationally, for birds so far down the food chain -- as something that was somehow the cats’ fault. Everyone rolled their eyes.
Everyone but Urruah, at least. He was looking at Rhiow with an expression that normally meant (when he was going to agree with her) that he was going to find a way to improve on what she’d already decided, or (when he wasn’t in agreement) that he was trying to find a better plan without being overtly offensive.
“Is anyone really buying this?” he said.
Oh, well, Rhiow thought, tucking herself down on the branch in a neutral pose that kept the paws folded in, so as not to show what might be in their claws, so much for not being offensive! Did he have enough breakfast, I wonder? He always starts growling when his stomach does…
“You can buy what you like,” Arhu said, “but if the Whisperer’s selling, I’m in.”
“What he said,” said Siffha’h, hunching herself down beside her brother.
Rhiow closed her eyes, hearing the challenge: “I’ll see your offensiveness, and raise you ten claws and a jawful.” So much for Urruah’s seniority! But the two kits were young and still in the first flush of their power, and when they closed ranks and started reinforcing each other’s sometimes wildly uninformed but emphatic opinions, there was often trouble.
Jath’s ears were already flat at such disrespect to a more senior wizard, and he had an eye on Rhiow, waiting to see what she was going to do. Rhiow removed her sidelong glance from him very slowly, as if not officially noticing his expression -- the way you “took back” a move in hauissh. The look she turned on Arhu and Siffha’h was a dam’s look, patient for the moment, but meant to communicate that the big hard clout behind the ear was waiting. “You two want to relocate your manners,” she said, “before I slice some holes in your hides and install new sets.” Not waiting for any reaction, she then glanced over at Urruah. “Meanwhile, perhaps you want to take the time to explain your concerns to these two experts. Though if you’d rather just knock them out of the tree, I’m sure I’ll understand.”
Arhu and Siffha’h had the grace to look a little chastened. Strangely, though, so did Urruah. “I don’t know,” Urruah said. “It just all sounded a little dubious to me, somehow. And sketchy.”
“A hunch? Well, we don’t always have a lot of data under our paws when we start an intervention,” Rhiow said. “Granted, that can make decisions harder. But I don’t doubt Hwaith’s sincerity. And he dropped into the Speech for the part of the conversation that mattered…so there’s no question of this being any kind of fabrication on his part.”
“Misapprehension, though,” Urruah said, “is always a possibility–”
And then something very, very large kicked the tree, and the world heaved upwards and then sank away again...
The grackles burst up out of the tree and into the milky blue, screeching. Below, from the ehhif in the plaza, there were some muffled exclamations at the shake, and some not at all muffled. Over on the main road they’d crossed, tires screeched and some horns blew. In the parking lot on the northern side of Olvera Street, behind the oldest part of the pueblo, car alarms started to go off in a sporadically augmented cacophony of hoots, honks, and warbles. Rhiow closed her eyes and hung onto her branch of the tree, as the vibrations from the kick started to fade away. Then there was another one.
What vhai’d kind of bark do these things have! Rhiow thought in fury as the shaking went on, and on… She dug in her claws as hard as she could, but the bark was too smooth, she was starting to slip–
The shaking gradually faded away. Arhu and Siffha’h and Urruah and Aufwi and Jath were all still hanging on and looking around them as if waiting for one more punchline to the cosmic joke: but nothing came.
“Five point one or so,” said Aufwi, as Rhiow pushed herself upright from the branch, more by force of will than anything else. What she really wanted to do was get down out of this tree and put herself flat against the ground, where there would be no further she could fall. Except it wouldn’t help! The ground could still start bouncing around --
Urruah looked up through the branches at the cloudless sky. “All right, all right, I get it!” he shouted at the Silent One. “Have you ever heard of subtlety??”
Aufwi cocked his head to one side. “Different epicenter on that one,” he said after a moment.
“Oh?” Urruah said. “Where was it?”
How can you possibly sound so casual after something like that? Rhiow said silently to him, once again forcing herself to sit still and keep from indulging in a fit of composure-grooming.
When I’m covering for you, Urruah said. So for Iau’s good sake just shut up and put yourself right!
“Rancho Sierra Vista,” said Aufwi. “It’s thirty miles or so up the coast, at the top of one of the big coastal canyons– five miles or so inland from Malibu. The first one’s epicenter was up in the Hollywood hills–”
“Near Beachwood Canyon, by any chance?” Arhu said.
Aufwi looked thoughtful. “Now than you mention it, about halfway up–”
“Uh huh,” Urruah said. He looked over at Rhiow. “This last one was worse, though. We’d better have a look at Sierra Vista first. Then when we go back, we can compare this quake to one or more of Hwaith’s, and see if they’re somehow similar. And if it is–”
Don’t say if! said a desperate voice in her mind.
Rhiow stood up and made a great show of stretching, fore and aft, as she thought. “Then the case is proven, at least enough for a start. All right,” she said. She looked over at Jath. “Cousin, we’re going to be busy a while, it seems. You’re going to have to mind the gates at Grand Central while we’re sorting this out. Are you willing?”
The question was more ceremonial than anything else. “I accept with good cheer,” Jath said.
I bet you do, especially since you’ve been wanting to get your paws on my gates for– how long now? Since Ffairh went out-of-skin, anyway. It was one of those minor irritations that had been nibbling at the end of Rhiow’s tail for a long time. Jath had always seen himself as heir-apparent to the master supervisory position for the New York gating facilities…especially since it brought with it supervision of all the other North American gates. He’d taken it badly when, on Ffairh’s nomination of her, Rhiow had succeeded to the position: but there had been nothing he could say or do, as the Powers that Be had “confirmed in silence” by raising no objection, and Harl’h, as the involved Supervisory wizard, had done the same. Rhiow had found dealing with the situation difficult, early in her career. But over time her ears had become more resistant to the claws Jath had tried to hook into them, and finally he’d given up bothering her and gone back to watching his own mousehole.
“I thank you,” Rhiow said, “and the Powers lay Their tails over your back as They walk this path with you.” Because They’ll need to!– for the Grand Central gates were not only more central and more senior than the Penn group, but famously cranky and difficult to manage. But then again, Rhiow thought, putting her whiskers forward somewhat belatedly, and possibly for the wrong reasons, maybe this small adventure will give you a sense of why I’m running Grand Central, and you’re not.
That was an unworthy thought, though. Rhiow turned away from it…but with just a few whiskers still forward. “Aufwi,” she said, “you know the here-and-now Los Angeles gate better than any of us: we’ll need you to act as anchor for us here, and consultant, so that we can talk to you when we’ve looked at Hwaith’s gate and have a realtime baseline to judge it by.”
“No problem with that,” Aufwi said, glancing down at where the dislocated gate still hung, gently stirring, from its branch. “When I get it back in place, I’ll run another diagnostic before I take it offline, and compare the recent logs against the ones from Hwaith’s time. That way we can see if the gate’s showing any signs of acting the way it was back then.”
“Just what’s needed,” Rhiow said. “Thanks, cousin. Do you know the area where this last quake was?”
Aufwi got that stricken look again. “No,” he said, “not really–”
Rhiow laughed as she got up, even though she staggered a bit– it was as if her legs had become suddenly unwilling to trust the solidity of the branch underneath her. “Calm down,” she said, “it’s not as if we expect you to know everything -- !”
Arhu had sat up too, and still had his head tilted a little to one side. “I can see it,” he said. “There’s a gateway, and a hill. And I hear water coming down nearby…”
Rhiow put her ears forward, pleased that he’d so quickly found where they needed to be. Though he’d possessed the Eye, the visionary gift, from his first hours as a wizard, controlling it was another story. “We’ll do a short-jump transit, then,” Rhiow said, “and see what’s going on up there.” She glanced down and around to make sure there were no ehhif nearby, but they were mostly in other parts of the plaza– for all she knew, they’d been concerned that the tree might fall on them during the earthquake. “Probably that parking lot behind these buildings will be a good place,” Rhiow said: “it won’t be too full yet. Siffha’h, will you go lay out a transit circle for us? Arhu will pass you the coordinates.”
“Right,” Siffha’h said, and vanished with a small inrush of air. A second later, Arhu did the same.
Aufwi jumped down to the next branch, over which the gate was hanging, and sank his claws into the weft of it. “Call me when you need me,” he said to Rhiow; then he pulled the gate up from the branch and dove through it, taking it with him as he vanished.
Jath got up and stretched, a long casual gesture meant to suggest that earthquakes were nothing in particular to him. I saw your eyes, though, Rhiow thought. Why are you bothering with this petty point-scoring…? Or am I overly sensitive at the moment because the Earth just tried to kick me off like a flea?
“You’ve got your claws full with those two,” Jath said.
Under any other circumstances Rhiow would have immediately agreed: but with her nerves in their present state, she was unwilling to give Jath the satisfaction. “They’re both extremely talented,” Rhiow said, “and living proof of the old saying that sometimes the Powers mean the trainers to be the trained as well.” She put her whiskers way forward. “Meanwhile, the Track Thirty-Two gate at Grand Central will be running its pre-peak diagnostic shortly. I wouldn’t like to make you miss that…”
Jath’s expression went concerned…and acquisitive. “No,” he said, “of course not -- Hunt’s luck to you, Rhiow, Urruah–”
He too vanished. Urruah gave Rhiow a look. “You sent him off to watch an automated log dump?” Urruah said. “Half an hour of figures as dry as a roadkill squirrel? You’re cruel.”
“Powers forbid I should deny him any of the joys of managing Grand Central,” Rhiow said, as they walked down the air together, glancing around at the plaza, where the upset ehhif were slowly regaining their composure. “If he’s going to covet something of mine, let it be an informed covet.”
At ground level they glanced around, then made their way toward the archway that led back to the parking lot. “Sounding a little possessive today…” Urruah said.
Rhiow hissed under her breath as they made their way under the arch, past a group of ehhif in broad hats, tuning up stringed instruments. “Aaah. ‘Ruah, it’s just that he’s so obvious about it sometimes… and so willful about ignoring the facts: as if Ffairh and I were in some kind of cosmic plot with the Powers that Be to deny him his Iau-given rights. As if any of us would have time for such a thing, let alone inclination–”
They strolled over to where Arhu was sitting by the glowing lines of a completed transit circle, all neatly done inside a single parking space well off to one side of the parking lot. Siffha’h was sitting in the middle of the circle and glowing slightly around the edges herself, an indicator that she had the wizardry powered up and ready to go, with herself as power source. As Rhiow and Urruah paced up to the circle, Siffha’h said, “Did you see the way he was staring at you?”
Rhiow glanced over at her. “’He?’” she said. “You little eavesdropper, haven’t I told you before this to stay out of my head?” She took a not-very-serious swipe at Siffha’h’s head. “Powerful you may be, but be responsible about it: leave your teammates their privacy. And ‘he’ who? Jath? As if I care.”
“Jath!” Siffha’h let out a hiss of derision. “That dried-up old hairball? I meant Hwaith.”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t notice it,” Arhu said, as Rhiow stepped into the circle and sat down on the small sub-circle marked out for her. “He just sat there twitching and staring, like he couldn’t take his eyes off you.”
Rhiow jerked her tail in dismissal, then wrapped it around her feet where she sat. “Oh please! I’ve spent half the day, already, feeling as if everyone’s staring at me. I’m starting to think I put my ears on backwards when I got up. And as for Hwaith, he was watching me because I was the one who’d be making the decision. Yes, he was twitchy, but why wouldn’t he be? Nobody dares stay out of their proper time for very long: things get damaged.”
“And usually,” Urruah said, walking around the circle and checking the structure of the spell, “the first damage is to you. That’d be enough by itself to put his fur up. But also–” He looked at Arhu. “Think about it. Who likes going years out of his way to admit something’s going on that he can’t handle, and then having to ask for help?” Hearing the gender-specific pronouns, Rhiow glanced down at the bark as if wondering where her clawmarks should have been, and very much avoided putting her whiskers forward in amusement. “I get the sense he doesn’t like time travel much, either.”
“None too fond of it myself,” Siffha’h muttered.
“Well, you’d best get that way,” Rhiow said, “since the Whisperer seems to feel it’s what we need to be doing right now.” She sighed, then, for as she looked down at the spell-symbols surrounding her personalized part of the transit circle, she realized she was going to need to brush up on the conditional tenses and plug-in syntaxes that the Speech used to deal with travel back and forth through time. Arhu had all the pertinent symbology laid out here, probably having saved it from their last paratemporal work, but it didn’t do to rely too completely on someone else’s transcription of your personality data. They might transpose a character, somewhere along the line, and inadvertently change your nature. Not the best way to start a job…
“Is it all right?” Arhu said.
He didn’t exactly sound uncertain– that wasn’t in his style– but Rhiow knew he was being careful, which was a development worth reinforcing. She put her whiskers forward. “Mine seems to be in order,” she said, “and nicely done. ’Ruah?”
Urruah was standing in the middle of his circle, carefully checking the strung-out Speech-characters that defined his subsidiary branch of the spell. “Looks fine,” he said. “You’re getting the hang of this, youngster. A lot less clutter in the design than there used to be.”
Arhu looked smug, sitting down in his own section. “Told you so,” he muttered to Siffha’h.
“Yeah, well, the way I wanted to do it was better. If you’d taken that last set of conditionals and combined them with–”
“Can we please just pop?” Urruah said. “You two can go back to shredding each other’s egos after we get where we’re going.”
Rhiow flicked an ear at him in amusement and reached over the border of her own circle to put a paw down on the nearest control structure. The words of the wizardry flared up around them into fierce contrast with the cracked and oil-stained blacktop underfoot. “Ready?” she said.
The other three looked down at the spell diagram, began to recite along with her. All around them, the sounds of L.A. traffic, the sound of the mariachi band starting to play in the Olvera Street plaza, the distant scream of a jet overhead, began to thin and fade to nothing in the silence that always accompanied the universe starting to listen to a spell. Their words in the Speech filled that silence to overflowing, spilled out of it, drowned it in colorless fire–
And then both fire and silence were gone, with the circle, and both light and air around them were utterly changed. Rhiow put her nose up into a wind that had nothing to do with their transit, and breathed deep. It was blowing toward them from the westward, and it smelled of the Sea.
They were standing to one side of the entrance to yet another parking lot. This one, though, was very unlike the Olvera Street parking lot, which had been hemmed in by buildings, old and new, on all sides. This space was broad, bare, and bright in the sun, under the hazy blue sky. Pale concrete painted with parking stripes stretched away from them on all sides. Directly in front of them, as they looked westward, was a broad arch– two fifteen-foot pitch-pine poles spanned by a long carved signboard that said:
SANTA MONICA MOUNTAINS NATIONAL RECREATION AREA -- SATWIWA
Rhiow glanced around. Under her feet she could feel a strange trembling sensation, almost a buzzing. It was like a stronger version of the peculiar uncertainty she’d felt in her limbs in the plaza tree.
“What’s a Satwiwa?” Siffha’h said, looking up at the sign.
“Some ehhif placename,” Urruah said. “Never mind that. Feel it, Rhi?”
How could I not? Rhiow thought. That sense of terrible uncertainty coming up out of the ground felt like it was shouting right down her bones. “Is it the last earthquake we’re feeling,” she said, “or the next one?”
“I don’t think it’s either,” Arhu said.
Siffha’h’s ears flicked back, then forward. “Ahead of us,” she said. “That’s where the power is…”
“Come on,” Urruah said.
Inside the arch, there were only a few cars parked here and there, and no sign of the ehhif who’d left them. Urruah in the lead, the four wizards trotted past the cars to a sidewalk that surrounded the parking lot. This led to a beaten-down dirt trail winding off through an up-sloping grassy meadow dotted here and there with stands of taller grasses and brush.
“A long way up…” Arhu said under his breath. Several miles further along the way the path ran, foothills clad in dark-green chaparral and sagebrush rose toward a mountain studded with outcroppings of red stone. The peak was bare; high above it, small winged dots circled in the haze-blue sky, working an early updraft.
“We don’t have to go up there,” Siffha’h said. She shot off across the meadow northwestward, a small black and white shape bounding through the grass. With a racketing clap and clatter of wings, a covey of small plump brown and white birds burst up out of the waving green-gold of the longest grass. Ignoring them, Arhu ran hot on Siffha’h’s track, and Rhiow and Urruah after him; and as they plunged past underneath the fleeing quail, Rhiow had to laugh at herself, because for all her unease, her mouth still watered to see them go.
“Haven’t I been telling you there was more to life than canned cat food,” Urruah said as she galloped along beside him.
“Don’t tempt me,” Rhiow said. “They had those in the Market this other morning, roasted and ready to go–”
“Did they now! Must stop by there on the way home. I know the roast-poultry lady.”
“Of course you do,” Rhiow said, resigned.
“And by the way, why are we running?”
“Because she is?” Rhiow said, as ahead of them Siffha’h started to slow, and Arhu caught up with her. “Because it’s a nice day for it?”
Siffha’h, though, had now paused, and was sniffing around in the grass. Rhiow could see her briefly paw at the ground, then look up again, and her expression wasn’t that of someone who’d been running for enjoyment. As Arhu caught up with her, and then Urruah and Rhiow, she glanced around at them. “The power was here,” Siffha’h said. “But it’s moved…”
“The earthquake?” Rhiow said. Standing here, she could feel it burning in the ground through the pads of her paws. But as Siffha’h had said, she couldn’t tell whether it was the quake just past, or some tremor in the future.
Arhu’s tail was lashing now. “No,” he said. “Something to do with it, though. Something involved with the earthquake was here. Something that wants to be here again…” He straightened up, looking around him with the same kind of questing expression. “The water,” he said. “It’s here somewhere nearby. Once we find the water, we’ll be close–”
He and Siffha’h ran off northwestward again through the long pale golden grass. Rhiow and Urruah watched them go for a moment, then started after them. After the rather unnerving morning, this interlude was a relief: and as she and Urruah followed the younger wizards, Rhiow found herself less troubled by the feeling of quake-trying-to-happen in the ground beneath her, and increasingly fascinated by the sense of old overlays, the remnant energy from wizardries done in this area over centuries, even millennia. Any place where wizards worked repeatedly over time acquired such: but the ones Rhiow felt under her now as she and Urruah trotted off in the youngsters’ wake seemed to lie very light in the ground, for ehhif work– at least in contrast with the concrete-and-steel wizardly environment where Rhiow normally worked. In Manhattan, the remnants of the vigorous and aggressive ehhif wizardries of the last few centuries were more likely to have embedded themselves in concrete than in the underlying bedrock…and henceforth were susceptible over time to having been simply jackhammered up or knocked down, and carted away. Here, though, beneath the insistent buzzing of recent or soon-to-be earthquake in the ground, Rhiow was getting a sense of old earth layered deep in wizardries faded down faint, buried stratum on stratum in ground which had been continuously inhabited by the same people since the Ice withdrew, or earlier. She was reminded of the feel of the ground near the little worldgate in Chur, in the Alps, which had been there since ehhif Bronze-Age days: but those overlays had been noisy and assertive compared to these.
“It’s pretty up here,” Urruah said as he trotted along beside her, glancing off to one side, where a lone queen-ehhif in hiking boots and shorts and T-shirt could be seen wandering along the bark-chipped path to one side. “Pity we don’t have places like this in New York.”
“Oh, come on, of course we do!” Rhiow said. “Go out on the Island, into the winery country. Or out by Montauk Point. Or up to the Poconos..”
Urruah wrinkled his nose, pausing a moment to sniff at a tall leggy bush with long yellow flowers. “Those aren’t New York New York, though,” he said.
Rhiow swung her tail broadly from one side to the other, conceding the point, as they paused to look at a low slant-roofed wooden building off to one side. Arhu and Siffha’h had already run past it, unconcerned: Rhiow stopped to glance at the ehhif characters on a carved sign to one side, then shrugged her tail and went after them. “Since when are you so concerned about ehhif boundaries? And even if you are, what about Coney Island? Or the bottom of the big runway at Kennedy, where it goes into the marsh in Jamaica Bay.” She stopped a moment by a flower bed to rub her face against a downhanging stalk of some spiny, sharp-scented plant, greeting it, and got a sap-slow acknowledgement from the life inside. “But if it’s this kind of quiet you’re looking for,” Rhiow said, flirting her tail and walking on in the direction the youngsters had gone, “you know you’re still not going to find it there. Too much mental background noise from all the lives pushed so tightly together for so long. You want the Poles, or the Moon, where you can hear the planet think…”
They went past the little building along a curved, paved path and suddenly found themselves looking at something odd. In the shadow of a very small hill, out in the middle of some parched looking grass, stood a hut perhaps thirty Person’s-paces wide, built of rushes or reeds, its outer layers shingled down over one another in a series of graceful curves. In front of the hut’s single low door was a wide circle of stumps of age-silvered wood and blocks of stone of varying heights and shapes. In the center of it was another smaller circle of stones, and a further scatter of rocks in the center of it all, some fire-blackened. “At least you’re sounding a little calmer,” he said.
“Not sure I feel that way yet,” Rhiow said. She stretched her neck up a little to try to see where Arhu and Siffha’h had gone: they’d vanished into the tall grass past the hut, apparently on their way up the hillside. “I guess it’s just wizards’ syndrome. You get so used to being able to reason with everything, or at least persuade it. But this is one of the situations where sheer scale gets in the way…”
They trotted past the ring and toward the hillside. “I suppose I can see the Earth’s point,” Urruah said. “We think we’re so important. But what’re we to the world? A minor skin condition. Why should it care about us? It has its own priorities. Tides, gravity, plates sliding… And if a flea starts shouting at you to stop scratching, do you listen?”
Rhiow put her whiskers forward. “It wouldn’t be high on my list.”
“But still,” Urruah said, “we’re wizards. It’s our job to listen, isn’t it?”
“The next time I see you scratching, I’ll remind you,” Rhiow said, “and we’ll see what you do.” She paused where the slope before them started to get steeper, and the grass longer. “Where’ve those two gotten to now?”
We found the water, Arhu said. There’s a waterfall up higher. But that’s not important. We found a cave, up the hillside about forty leaps, in between two big stones. And somebody’s been doing wizardry in here!
“Oh really,” Rhiow said. “How recently?”
A week or so ago, Siffha’h said. Maybe a little longer, but not much.
“What kind of wizardry?” Rhiow said.
“Uh oh,” Urruah said then, looking behind them.
Someone had come out of the low round hut, and was standing there looking around: a queen-ehhif in dark pants and a short-sleeved blue shirt. “Doesn’t matter,” Rhiow said, looking uphill again as the ehhif walked off around the hut, “we’re sidled. Sif?”
Rhiow heard her hesitating. Not sure I like the look of this, Siffha’h said.
“Why? What’s the matter?”
I can feel what’s left of the spell in the stone, Siffha’h said. It’s full of geological constants– local ones, with really fine adjustments on them. And there were three or four power conduits leading out of the spell and sunk into the rock underneath the mountain.
“A diagnostic?” Rhiow said.
I don’t think so, Siffha’h said, and she was beginning to sound angry. This doesn’t look like someone trying to find out what the earth’s been doing. This looks like someone trying to make it do something–
Rhiow went chilly inside. It wasn’t as if wizards never made mistakes, or did stupid things: but messing around with the earth’s structure in a place where it was already unstable enough struck her as foolhardy. “That’s really odd,” Rhiow said. “Let’s see what you’ve got. ‘Ruah–” She started up the hill.
“Rhi,” Urruah said from behind her, “while we’re on the subject of ‘odd’, you might want to have a look–”
Rhiow turned around. The she-ehhif who’d come out of the hut was heading straight toward them through the grass.
Rhiow glanced over her shoulder to see what the ehhif might be looking at instead of her -- but there was nothing there but more of the long grass. Rhiow looked back at the queen-ehhif, ready to run or vanish if necessary, but it was hard to imagine why it would be necessary. The ehhif didn’t look particularly dangerous: she was very small as humans went, with long dark hair tied back, a low belt hanging down over her trousers to one side–
And, hanging holstered from that belt, a gun. Rhiow opened her mouth, prepared to say a single word in the Speech, the trigger for the run-and-hide spell that lay, as usual, ready at the back of her brain. As she did, the ehhif stopped and gazed up the hill, as if seeing something there that she hadn’t expected. Then she looked down at Rhiow.
“Excuse me,” the ehhif said, “but are you People looking for something, or are you lost?” And she said it in the Speech.
Rhiow and Urruah stared at each other. Then Rhiow put her whiskers forward. “Lost!” she said. “Hardly! But looking for something, yes: though until a few moments ago, we weren’t expecting to find another wizard here. Is that your spell up there?”
“Yes,” the ehhif said. “Sorry if it looks alarming at first glance: it’s specialized stuff. Anyway, I’m on errantry: haku, cousins!” She sat down in the grass. “In fact, I suspect you’re why I was sent here. I’m called Helen: Helen Walks Softly.”
Urruah sat down, his whiskers forward too. “You could have fooled me,” he said.
“Wouldn’t have been polite to sneak up on you,” Helen said. “You might’ve gotten the wrong idea. May I ask names?”
“My colleague here is Urruah,” Rhiow said. “The youngsters up the hill are Arhu and Siffha’h. : I’m Rhiow– I lead the New York worldgating teams.”
Helen blinked at that. “Worldgating?” she said. “Were you sent here by assignment?”
“We were in L.A. on a consult,” Rhiow said, “but when was a wizard’s casual business ever completely casual? The Powers find ways not to waste our efforts.”
Helen gave Rhiow a wry look. “I hear you there, sister,” she said. “I was going to come by to check the parking lot before I turned in. There’s been a wave of burglaries the past couple of weeks: people breaking into parked cars, or trying to vandalize the interpretive center or the ap.” She nodded back toward the hut. “Nothing going on today, fortunately. But then the Earth moved. What a relief! I checked the center and the ap to make sure they were all right in the aftermath…and then I smelled power passing through. Thought I’d better take a look.”
What are you talking to down there? Arhu’s thought came, sounding a little spooked.
She’s a wizard, Rhiow said silently. Get yourselves down here and greet her properly. “Probably you felt Siffha’h,” she said. “She’s been doing power-source work with us lately, and she’s still running at post-Ordeal levels. So is Arhu, for that matter…so I suppose it could have been either of them.”
Urruah was looking a little dubiously at Helen’s gun. “You wouldn’t have needed that to deal with burglars, though–”
Helen nodded. “On my own time, of course not. But I came straight here from work, as I said.” She reached into her pocket and brought out a wallet, flipped it open. The bright sun glinted on the badge there.
“L.A.P.D.?” Urruah said.
“That’s right.” Helen put the wallet away, glancing up the hill at the waving of the grass as Arhu and Siffha’h came bounding down. “Not that an armed officer would be allowed here without permission. But I have dispensation, since this is my tribal ground.”
Rhiow’s eyes widened at that. “You’re one of the ffih-ehhif,” she said, “the First Humans–”
“That’s right,” Helen said, as Arhu and Siffha’h came out of the grass nearby. “My people are the Chumash: this is all our land, here along the shoreline, from Santa Barbara down to the City.”
“I guess other ehhif would say it ‘was’ your land,” Urruah said.
Helen threw an amused glance at him. “It still is,” she said, “in all the ways that matter. Not that most of them would notice.” She grinned. “We’re still here: and we take care of things the best we can. Haku, young cousins–”
There was a pause while introductions were made and names exchanged: but even afterwards, Siffha’h was still wearing a suspicious look. “That spell up there–” she said. “Just what exactly were you doing?”
“’Letting the earthquake off the leash,’” Helen said. “Triggering a controlled tremor. Or trying to.”
“’Trying’?” Arhu said, looking at her oddly. “I thought ‘a spell always works.’”
“It does if a force equaling or surpassing the power of the wizardry isn’t being purposefully leveled against it,” Helen said. “Which seems to have been the case lately, and I haven’t been able to understand what that force was. Finally I asked my ikhareya about it, and He said He didn’t know either. He said, ‘Go have a look, and some of your cousins will come along and help you find out what the answer was…’” Helen looked a little bemused. “He was using a temporal-conditional tense, though. There’s going to be an answer…but it’s in the past?”
“That’s what we were told,” Rhiow said. “We’re on our way there after this.”
“Do you mind if I go with you, then?” Helen said. “Seems like that’s what’s required…”
“You’re more than welcome on the journey,” Urruah said, “believe me. It’s a relief to know we’re not going to have to do this all by ourselves, anyway…whatever ‘this’ is.”
“We’re going to set up a separate portal for the timeslide,” Rhiow said. “We don’t want to take the chance of deranging the L.A. gate: it’s already acting badly enough. Would there be a problem if we gated from here? Or might it interfere with your spell up in the cave?”
Helen shook her head. “It’s built to stay completely quiescent until someone it recognizes activates it,” she said. “I’ll kill its sensor components to make sure it doesn’t get confused.”
“Is that going to be enough to keep such a complex spell out of trouble?” Siffha’h said. “And one so old? You don’t sink power conduits like those overnight.”
“Of course not,” Helen said. “The basic wizardry’s a fixture: a team of our shamans sang it into place hundreds of years ago. But, yes, just pulling the sensor web out of contact will work fine– that’s how we keep it quiet when we’re not actually using it. Wizards who know this terrain well, or have a connection to it, come up and at least once a week to bleed off some of the excess force, the way you start small controlled brushfires every now and then to keep a really big forest fire from destroying everything wholesale. I’ve taken over this job, the last couple of years, because my connection to this terrain’s much better than that of any other wizard around here. This is my native space, after all: the Chumash have lived here since before the Ice.”
Helen sighed and stretched out her legs in front of her. “But I might as well come from Dubuque, for all the good that spell’s done me lately. Over the last two weeks, I must have run it seven or eight times, trying to provoke any old kind of local discharge, especially from the big fault right under the mountain. But it just wasn’t working.” She looked up at the mountain as if she could see straight into it. “It was driving me nuts. I could feel the power building up, but I just couldn’t bleed it off. It was almost like something was leaning against the fault, holding the force in…” Helen shrugged. “But then this morning, around when I went off duty, it seemed like something blinked, and the fault let loose. Good thing, too.”
Rhiow thought of Hwaith’s description of something leaning against the world, and the fur started to rise on her back. “Yes, you said you were relieved,” Rhiow said. “Forgive me, but after what I’ve been through this morning, the word seems a little unusual…” She shook herself all over, trying to get the fur to lie down again.
Helen nodded. “Your first time? I understand you. But maybe you’ve had enough time here to feel the ground a little–” She put her hand down on the grassy ground beside her. “This whole area’s coming down with faults, and microquakes are an everyday occurrence. Just in these ten square miles or so, we’ve got the Chatsworth fault to the north, and the Bailey Fault west of us, and the Malibu Fault running south of us along the coastline, and two big ones running right under Boney Mountain–” she waved at the bare peak looming above them westward–”so it’s not so much ‘have you had an earthquake today?’ as ‘how did you miss having one’.” She shook her head. “Mostly they’re so tiny you don’t feel them. But it’s still really strange for us to go so long here without even a minor tremor. It was giving me the jitters…and the ikhareya wasn’t happy either. At least now I can relax a little. At least until we find out what’s causing this problem, anyway.”
“You didn’t feel anything from the quakes down in L.A., then?” Rhiow said.
Helen shook her head. “I had to hear about them on the news, in the car, on my way home from work.” Then she chuckled at Urrauh’s expression. “Urruah, I’m all for connectedness to the land, and taking care of the environment, but if I did my grocery shopping via gating circle, that people would notice.”
Urruah’s tail wreathed gently. “Aha,” he said. “Is that where you were? I thought I smelled chicken–”
I am going to give you such a whack when we’re in private, Rhiow said silently. “Well,” Rhiow said, “maybe we should get our slide set up. Our backtime contact, Hwaith, gave us the coordinates we need, and we’ve got all the necessary authorizations.”
“I see that,” Helen said, standing up and dusting her hands off on her pants: she was looking upslope, into the wind. “From fairly deep in, too. Whatever’s going on, this is fairly serious…” She looked down at Rhiow. “And it doesn’t seem to be our usual enemy involved with this, does it? The Kemish, the Old Bad One… Or at least that’s not the feeling I’m getting.”
“I’d say you’d be right,” Rhiow said, “and I wish I knew what to make of that. Meanwhile, do you want to nominate a spot where we can anchor the slide?”
“If we go upslope a quarter mile or so,” Helen said, “past the cave, that’ll take us well away from the beaten path. There’s a place where the hillside shelves out flat for a little bit.”
“Arhu?” Rhiow said. “You two go on and get it set up. And ask Aufwi to come up here as soon as he’s finished making the L.A. gate safe and shutting it down.”
Siffha’h and Arhu headed up the hill, but not before Arhu had thrown an odd look over his shoulder at Helen. “Sorry,” Rhiow said. “You’ve got to excuse him: he has trouble with ehhif sometimes. He was abused by them, almost killed, when he was very young.”
“It’s no problem,” Helen said. “We all have our burdens. Believe me, I have problems with some of my fellow ehhif, occasionally.” She smiled a little ruefully as they started up the hill. “All just part of the Game, my ikhareya says...”
“I was going to ask you about that,” Urruah said as they headed upwards through the long grass. “I heard the word you used, and Herself gave me the closest cognate in the Speech at the same time. You have one of the Powers that Be for your own?”
Helen blinked, then laughed. “Uh, no! No one could own one of Them. I’ve just got a close personal connection to one of Them: lots of wizards who’re native Americans do. It’s like yours to– I think you call Her ‘the Whisperer?’”
“That’s right,” Rhiow said. “You hear wizardry through your connection, then–”
Helen’s look was a touch sheepish. “Oh, no, I still use a written Manual a lot of the time. I was born and raised in the Valley, in Encino: I didn’t really start getting to know my tribal life until a few years ago, after I finished college and went into the Force. But I’ve been really busy up here since then, since it turns out the old shaman needed to train a new one before he went West. As usual, there aren’t any coincidences…”
From above and ahead of them came a soft pop!, the sound of someone trying to minimize the air displacement from his appearance “out of nothing”. There stood Aufwi on the flattened space that Helen had described, his head and shoulders silhouetted against the blue. “Do you know Aufwi?” Rhiow said, as they came up on the level. “He handles the L.A. gate.”
“Sure, I see him downtown every now and then. Haku, Aufwi, how’s it going?”
“A lot better than it was earlier, believe me,” he said as they came up and out onto the shelf that lay under the lee of the hill. The shelf was mostly hard dirt strewn with rockfall, and shadowed from the sun by a slope now more nearly a cliff, all studded with outcroppings of brown and golden stone. In a relatively bare spot off to one side, nearly into the sun again, the glow of a complex spell-circle lay spread across the ground, and Arhu and Siffha’h were was pacing around it, looking it over.
No way they could have done that from scratch just now, Urruah said silently to Rhiow, going over to examine the circle. They’ve been practicing for this! For how long, I wonder?
Arhu’s got the Eye, Rhiow said, and I’ve been sure for some time that he doesn’t tell us everything he foresees. Who knows when he might have seen this? It’s handy now…
Aufwi came over to Rhiow. “All’s secure back at the Station now,” he said.
“The gate’s locked down?” Rhiow said.
“Absolutely.”
“You’re sure this time?” Urruah said.
Aufwi looked a little annoyed. “I yanked every power connection but its standby. If it can function in spite of that–”
Rhiow put her tail up against Aufwi’s. “He’s teasing you, Aufwi,” she said. “Ignore him. Once we’ve slid back to where and when we need to be, and had a look at Hwaith’s gate, you can use that to jump forward to ‘now’ again– then wake yours up and lock it on a nearby set of coordinates to do your comparison.”
“Exactly what I had in mind.”
“Good,” Rhiow said, and followed Urruah over to the circle. Helen came behind them, looking over the complex series of nested and interlocking circles and ellipses, either containing long sentences in the Speech or being comprised of them. She nodded at what she saw. “Done without any physical elements at all?” she said. “Very slick.”
“Now why would we use concrete spatial interruptors? Chips and batteries and so on?” Siffha’h put her ears back in disdain. “Inelegant. A brute-force solution.”
“Plugins and carry-ons,” Arhu said, looking smugly around the circle, “are for newbies.”
“Oh, yeah, well, plug this in, oh expert one,” Urruah said, and took a swipe at Arhu in passing as he went to his own. “Must be nice to know everything so young.”
“He just sees everything,” Siffha’h said, resuming her prowl around the circle, and eyeing the spell diagram with care. “Whereas I–”
She ducked just in time for Rhiow’s paw went through the air where her head had been. “You see what I put up with,” Rhiow said to Helen, and started to pace around the circle after Siffha’h. “But I see they’ve been quick and added a circle for you, Helen. Is it big enough?”
“Looks fine.”
“Then you’ll want to add in your personal data. Sif, let’s have a look at the coordinates–”
“Over here,” Siffha’h said. She had laid the spatial and temporal fixes into a small inner circle of their own. Rhiow put a paw down on each of the sets of coordinates in sequence, seeing each group of words and characters in the Speech glow bright in turn. She closed her eyes for a moment to regard her own mental “workspace” and the copy of the coordinates that the Whisperer had left there. “The time’s right,” Rhiow said. “As for the location–”
“The other side of the Hollywood Hills,” Aufwi said, “near Mount Cahuenga. Hwaith’s put us a good ways from where he said the quake activity was occurring.”
“All right,” Rhiow said. She stepped into the spot she could see had been marked out for her, and bent down to check her name and her personality data: it was all as it should have been. “Let’s go, then. Everybody check your info one last time. Then let’s slide.” Rhiow looked at the anchor-end duration data written in the center of the circle. “The slide’s got a five-minute return aperture: short enough so we don’t have to worry about leaving it for this brief period, and plenty wide enough to give us room to come back and forth several times, if we have to, without meeting ourselves unnecessarily.” She looked around.
Siffha’h settled herself in her customary place, the central “powersource” circle that would drive the wizardry as a whole: Arhu was nearby in a separate circle of his own, watching the spell’s progress indicators. Urruah sat in his own circle opposite Rhiow’s, out at the edge, where he could keep an eye on things. Aufwi and Helen settled themselves into their circles on either side of Rhiow.
“Ready?” she said.
Tails were waved, ears put forward, one head nodded. “Let’s go, then,” Rhiow said, and looked down.
The initial words of the spell burned bright in front of her and all the others. All together, they began to read, and the world leaned in to hear. This is a timeslide inauguration. Claudication type unmiq-beth-quaternary-five with reflection, authorization groups–
Instead of the usual growing, listening silence, a sense of inward pressure began to build around them all, as the inbuilt persuasiveness of the language that had made the world now started talking the “now” out of being the present, and into becoming the past.
Rhiow had done timeslides before, and had occasionally been disconcerted by the strange sense of bring frozen in one moment while the fragmented thought processes of thousands of other nearby minds, all caught in the moment she was departing, seemed to come avalanching past her as she was pulled away into the past. But it was different here. Though all the Earth’s surface is old, as the beings living on its surface reckon time, this spot seemed far older than usual because of how long human beings had lived here continuously. While the thoughts of tens of thousands of nearby ehhif preoccupied with work and rent and cars and food and phone conversations poured past them and were swiftly lost, it wasn’t silence that began to replace them, but a long slow sound or rhythm like a chant, like a long memory of all the lives that had ever been here, all heard together. Only some of the minds involved in that rhythm were human: and under the low throb of the sound, counterpoint to it, a long rich unfading gong-note of some near-immortal point of view seemed to run at the roots of everything. The Powers? Rhiow thought. The Earth itself? There was no telling. And then it was too late to try to tell: the pressure grew and grew as they were squeezed out of their own time, into another–
Suddenly the pressure itself started to become too much to bear. There in the debatable territory between times, Rhiow found herself unable to breathe, almost unable to think, for the sense of something pushing in on her -- not the spell but something outside it, not time but something outside it: something bearing down on her, hard, and intending to bear down in such wise on everything else if only it could. It was as terrible in its sheer crushing weight as a mountain’s weight of stone would have been-- and impersonal in ways not even stone could manage. She could sense consciousness, yes, but also a vast chilly uncaring that was in its way far worse than any sense of active evil. Worse than the Lone One, Rhiow heard Hwaith saying in her mind, as she gasped for breath and couldn’t find any. Far worse -- Oh, Iau help me, he was right, what do we do now -- ?!
And then she was flung down hard on stony ground, on a slope, and rolled a few feet before she came to a stop, bruised and almost embarrassed enough not to care that she could breathe again. No cat likes falling without even having had a chance to try to get her feet under her. Rhiow got up angry, shaking herself, her tail lashing.
“Welcome to L.A.,” Hwaith said out of the darkness.
Growling under their breaths, or muttering, she could hear the others getting up. Rhiow stared around her hurriedly, still blinded by contrast with the day from which they’d come. And then she heard Helen say:
“Holy Coyote, what’s happened to the light?...”
Chapter 4 of The Big Meow is scheduled to be published here for its subscribers on May 12, 2006.