The Big Meow Read online

  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?…”

  The Big Meow: Chapter Four

  Rhiow looked down the length of the valley where they stood, into a hazy darkness that glittered faintly. Spread out before them like a broad carpet, stretching away to a dimly-seen horizon, were city lights; but the color of the glittering light was strangely white and cool, and not nearly as bright as she would have expected. As Rhiow watched, the light seemed to dim almost to nothing in patches, then brighten again. Rhiow realized she was seeing the city’s light through a haze of what at first glance looked like low cloud.

  Just behind her, Arhu was sniffing. “Smog,” he said under his breath.

  Helen let out a long breath, looking around her. “Even before there were cars and factories,” Helen said, “the People living down there called it ‘the Valley of the Smokes…’. The inversion layer’ll hold anything down that comes up from sea level: even our campfires were enough to do it.” She shook her head, looking down the valley again. “And it’s a long time before the clean-air legislation starts to cut in. But there’s still a lot more in the air than just hydrocarbons and ozone…”

  Rhiow, scenting it, had to agree. It was strange to be right above a city, and yet be standing in air so strongly scented with orange blossom, almond blossom, citrus, the corky, woody scent of walnut…

  “And I see what it is now,” Helen said, sitting down on a nearby fallen trunk of a scrub oak. “About the light. It’s strange not to see the sodium-vapor lights we’ve got in our own time. You get used to city light being a lot brighter, and very orange…”

  “Sodium vapor?” Hwaith, sitting nearby in the shadow of a manzanita, flirted his tail. “No, those are a good ways downtime from us, I’d say. The ehhif here are using incandescent bulbs with little tin reflectors over them.”

  “I’m a little disoriented,” Rhiow said to Hwaith. “I think I smell morning coming, but it’s hard to tell – “

  “You’re right,” Hwaith said. “The Eye will be up in about three hours, but the skyglow’s obscured by the mist this time of year, and the city lights confuse things. Downhill from is us southward. And over to the left is my badly-behaved friend…”

  There, hanging and wavering gently in midair in the shadow of several skeletal gray-needled pines, was this time’s version of the LA gate. Rhiow looked at it for a moment, and got an odd feeling as she did so; there was something almost uneasy about the way it was rippling, not in the usual steady rhythm, but with a kind of shiver interfering intermittently with the ripples. “It doesn’t look right,” she said.

  “No,” Urruah said, “it doesn’t. The chroma of the weft looks way off.” He glanced over at Aufwi. “You know this gate better than any of our group does, though – “

  Aufwi lashed his tail. “Definitely looks sickly,” he said. “Much too blue in the crests of those ripples. It’s a look mine’s been getting lately…”

  “I’ve seen that blueshift before,” Rhiow said, getting up again and going over for a closer look. “You get it when something’s interfering with a gate’s control structures…usually some change in the local matrix it’s sunk into. In this case, it’s sunk into a spot it wasn’t intended to be, and the last group of settings are arguing with the new location.”

  “More than that,” Urruah said. “See the way the waves are canceling each other here and there?” He sat up on his haunches, looking at the gate. “Two, three…four places. Hwaith, your problem child’s trying to put down more roots.”

  “It kept trying to do that before,” Hwaith said, sounding furious. “That’s why I was reluctant to leave it for even such a short time.”

  “We’ll pull them up,” Urruah said, “and then try to get a sense of why it’s doing this. May I?”

  “Please,” Hwaith said, “don’t stand on ceremony! You’ve come a long way to do just that. Just tell me if you need help.”

  Rhiow put her whiskers forward, relieved that Hwaith wasn’t going to get all possessive; all she needed right now was to find herself at the wrong end of time with another version of Jath on her paws. “Now,” she said, “all we have to do is find out why this has been starting to happen to your gate, so that we can keep it from happening to ours…”

  Not ‘all’, said the quiet voice in the back of Rhiow’s head.

  Rhiow flicked an ear. Hwaith gave her an odd look as she turned away
from him. Whisperer, she said silently, if you have any hints for me, now’s the time.

  No hints today, said the Mistress of the Whispering. We’re all in the dark here together. If you turn up anything that seems germane to the Powers, believe me, I’ll mention it. But none of our first guesses or assumptions are likely to be good enough to rely on; and finding out what lies at the root of this gate’s trouble, and yours, is going to make all the difference between life and…something else..

  Rhiow licked her nose several times, very fast, as the Silent One fell silent again. “Sorry — ” she said to Hwaith, turning back to him.

  “She doesn’t sound very encouraging, does She,” he said.

  “You caught that?”

  He flicked his tail in a gesture of mild annoyance, looked away. “I do hear things, unfortunately,” Hwaith said. “It was my first specialty after Ordeal: not the Eye, but the Ear. I could never really control it, though, which is why I went into gate work as soon as there was an opening.” He looked at Rhiow again, apologetic. “Please excuse me: it’s not intentional…and when She speaks in that tone of voice, it’s hard to avoid hearing Her.”

  “I wouldn’t argue that point,” Rhiow said, looking away to watch Urruah reach out and sink his claws into the edges of the gate’s weft, hooking them into its control webs. He pulled, and the predictable tangled lines of light stretched out and away from the gate proper. “Is it just me,” Rhiow said, “or do those threads look…I don’t know…thinner than usual?”

  “It’s not just you,” Hwaith said. He licked his nose once or twice, nervous: and Aufwi looked over at Rhiow and Hwaith and said, “This is something my gate’s been doing too. It’s been sporadic, though, and I haven’t been able to get it to repeat so that I can do a diagnostic…”

  “Got some trouble here,” Urruah said then, and the steady way he said it brought the fur up all over Rhiow.

  “What?” she said, getting up and trotting over.

  “No,” Urruah said, “nothing you need to do anything about right this second. We’re going to need a few extra paws in a little bit, though.” He bent in close, seized a bundle of the glowing gate-strings in his teeth, and reached in with the freed-up paw to hook another tangle of them with his claws. “This thing hasn’t just put down one root. It’s got five now.”

  Hwaith hissed, swearing in helpless anger. “It’s not going to do any good pulling them up one at a time,” he said. “It’ll just re-root one of them while we’re working on the next.”

  “We can each take one,” Rhiow said. “’Ruah, are the roots sinking themselves nearby?”

  It looked as if the knotted mass of hyperstrings was resisting him, trying to snap back into the gate. He lashed his tail “no”. “They’re spread out,” he said. “South, east, southeast, southwest of here. Take a look – “

  Urruah bit deeper into the hyperstring bundle he was holding in his teeth. Sudden bright strings of light shot out from the base and edges of the gateweave, seeming to lance down into the dimly glittering cityscape like laser light, the only difference being that physical objects didn’t stop them. They resumed on the other side, in one case going straight through a hillcrest and down into the landscape below.

  “One’s a little stronger than the others,” he said. “That one going through the hill. Maybe it’s been there a touch longer – hard to tell. But they’re all going to have to come up at once.”

  Rhiow flicked her tail. “How are you for power at the moment?” she said to Hwaith. “Did we catch you at the end of your work day, or the beginning?”

  He let out a breath. “I’m tired enough,” he said, “but I won’t drop what I grab hold of a moment before anyone else does. Let’s go.”

  “’Ruah, I’ll take that older root,” Rhiow said, heading over toward it. “Hwaith, the one next to mine, running down the canyon. Aufwi, the one past that. Arhu, the last one. Sif, you stand by and lend power if you sense anyone slipping.”

  Everyone headed to the string Rhiow had indicated for each of them, and bit down on it or hooked their claws around it. “Can I do anything to help?” Helen said.

  “Lend Sif a paw if there’s need,” Rhiow said. She bit down on her own string, pulling back a little and testing it. With the pull she got a clearer sense of the structures into which it was trying to root – the stone of some other hillside, cracked, unstable-feeling – and something else that concerned her more: an odd sour stink or flavor, unpleasant. It reminded Rhiow of something, but she couldn’t think what. And now it’s going to make me crazy for days until I remember. Where’s that coming from, though? You don’t usually get taste associations on hyperstrings — “Let us know when you’re set,” she said.

  “Just a moment more,” Urruah said. All along and across the web of the gate, hyperstrings flickered and vibrated as if someone was plucking them; beads and streaks of multicolored fire chased up and down the threads as Urruah made final adjustments in the master web of the gate, securing its structure before starting to pull any roots loose. “All right,” he said then. “Everybody – pull!”

  Rhiow set her teeth hard, ignoring the sudden increase in that odd stink, and started backing away from the gate. The string she was biting resisted her more aggressively, but she kept on backing away – this being only the physical component of the actual stress Rhiow was bringing to bear on the hyperstring, the pressure of the mind and of the necessary words in the Speech, all bent toward persuading it to give up, let go, stop being so attached… But the resistance increased. This attachment suits me, the string told her, in the stubborn, silent manner of a construct refusing to answer to the desires of a wizard who hadn’t put it there. I was told to root here, and here I will stay.

  I have rightful authority over you, Rhiow thought in the Speech: I am sent to you on errantry by the Powers that Be, and it’s proper that you obey my intent! But the root-string was having none of it. It sought to anchor itself deeper in that down-canyon ground, even as Rhiow pulled at it. The strange muddy stink in her nostrils got stronger as it did, and Rhiow could also feel something else through the far end of the string – a shiver, a tremor, rumbling, growing: the memory of a recent earthquake. And one trying not to be just a memory –

  She shivered all over, but she kept her grip. Around her she could sense the others having a similar problem: Urruah’s temper wanting to flare, but being suppressed; Arhu annoyed at anything being able to resist his intention, still unusually powerful in a wizard so near his Ordeal; Aufwi alarmed at the string’s refusal to respond: Hwaith surprisingly cool and certain as he stepped back and back with his own string. Well, it’s his own gate, after all. But he doesn’t seem to be having any better luck than the rest of us. This doesn’t look good —

  From outside the group, Siff’hah said, “Rhiow – “

  She was tempted to tell Siff’hah to throw all the power she had at one or another of the roots – for dividing her effort among them seemed unlikely to do much good at this point. But what if doing that unbalances the whole gateweave? It might tear loose and run out of control, like Aufwi’s did – Or else the gate might just tear apart, possibly even shred under the strain altogether. That didn’t bear thinking about, for worldgates, even a singleton gate like this one, had a tremendous amount of power wrapped up in them. Release all that energy at once, and local space and subspace were both at risk of becoming deranged – as was the matter they contained.

  Either way, the tack they were taking at the moment apparently wasn’t getting them anywhere, and they were going to have to consider other possibilities. Sif, Rhiow said silently, start a mapping routine. We need to see in which exact spots those roots are sinking themselves, so we can go down there afterwards and understand the whys as well as the wheres. She was careful not to say After this doesn’t work: there was always the possibility something might yet give in their favor, that the gate would see sense and do as it was told —

  Doing it now, Siff’hah said. Think we’re going
to need it, too —

  Rhiow said nothing. Her whole business at the moment was to hang onto her string and watch what Urruah did as he manipulated the strings held in teeth and claws. Her own words came back to her suddenly: I’m not going to do this job forever… She sank her teeth more tightly into her string, pulled harder. Now what made me say that to him right then? Maybe I was just tired. Yet one way or another, there was some truth to it. She might be a wizard until the day she kicked this life’s skin away behind her and moved on to the next one: but she wasn’t required to do the same kind of work all that while. Even specialties don’t have to be forever. And the Powers understand that sometimes you need a break from the routine —

  That strange mind-stink from the hyperstring was beginning to bother her. Rhiow wanted mightily to sneeze, but that was the last thing she was going to allow herself to do at the moment, when it could upset someone else’s concentration. She wrinkled her nose, then her whole muzzle, in an attempt to disrupt the coming sneeze. It worked for a moment, but then the stink started to itch in her nostrils again. I will not, she thought, I will not, as Iau’s my witness, I will not –

  “Anybody making any progress?” Urruah said, though from his tone of voice Rhiow thought he already knew the answer.

  “Not moving!” Arhu said.

  “The thing’s locked down,” Aufwi said. “Some kind of compulsion – “

  Urruah glanced over at Hwaith. Hwaith, hanging on, simply lashed his tail angrily, tried to take one more step back, failed –

  “Then ease up, all,” Urruah said. “Let’s stop and think – “

  Everyone slowly started to give way to the backward pull of the gate-root he or she was holding. Rhiow could feel something peculiar down the string as she stopped exerting pressure against it: an odd sense of – not satisfaction, but relief. And not from the root, but from the gate itself: as if it knew perfectly well it was the object of contention between two different forces, and was glad to see the contention stop, because it was – frightened? Frightened, not of the other – but of us?