The Big Meow Read online

  Rhiow craned her neck a bit to catch a glimpse of more letters like this one, reaching eastward along the ridge of the hill from where they all stood. L A N D, said the ones she could see. “Some kind of advertisement?” she said after a moment. If there was one thing she’d learned about ehhif over time, it was that they would put up an ad anywhere that gravity would allow.

  Hwaith made a little trilling noise down in his throat, a feline chuckle. “That’s right. Some ehhif started building a housing development up here a couple of decades ago, and they put these letters up here to show where the houses would go.” He glanced up at the D, waved his tail in amusement. “They were supposed to take it down quite some while back, but they’ve seemed to become too fond of it to get rid of it…or too lazy to bother. I take it they still haven’t done anything about it, uptime?”

  Urruah chuckled too. “Oh, they’ve done something,” he said, “but not in terms of getting rid of it.”

  Rhiow quirked her tail at him to forestall the inevitable explanation. “’Ruah,” she said, “later for this. Are the others ready to go?”

  “Just about.”

  “All right,” Rhiow said. “Come on…”

  With the two toms following after, Rhiow walked back down to where the gate hovered, now inside the nearly-unseen spherical shell of a boundary wizardry that Aufwi had erected around it. Arhu and Siff’hah and Helen had just finished checking it over with him. “If any ehhif come up here,” Aufwi said to Rhiow as she came up, “they won’t even get close enough to the boundary to bump into it: they’ll just get an urge to steer away.”

  “That’s fine,” Rhiow said. “So let’s all get out there and see what we can discover. Take a close look at the other ends of the gate’s roots, see what they’re sunk into, and try to get a sense of why they chose that particular spot. The answer may not be obvious: it might be some transitory phenomenon, or some person or being that’s been in that spot, rather than something inherent in the spot itself. Once you think you’ve worked it out, don’t do anything about the root: we’re all going to have to act together in that regard. But take the time to check the surrounding area carefully. Time’s the issue here, after all. We can’t stay backtime all that long on any one trip: besides the danger of producing nested time paradoxes, it’s just plain bad for the soul, and none of us needs to add temporal wasting to the problems we’ve got already. So make your observations count, and don’t be afraid to bring a little more data back than you strictly think you need.”

  Everyone swung their tails or nodded that they understood. “Let’s go, then,” Rhiow said. “Hwaith, is our own goal close enough to walk to?”

  “It’s a long walk,” he said, “unless you’re used to that kind of thing.”

  She flirted her tail as they all started downhill, making for a path that could be seen down below, among the trees. “I’m a New Yorker,” she said. “I do my forty blocks a day…it shouldn’t be a problem.” As Arhu galloped past her down the hill, she reached out a claw and just managed to snag his tail.

  He skidded to a halt before the claw had time to dig in. “You be careful!” Rhiow said.

  “Oh, come on, Rhi! We’ve been backtime before!”

  “Not this close to our hometime,” Rhiow said. “Little distances between times are more dangerous than big ones. A mistake made way back leaves you lots of successor instants to correct it, and the piled-up error is big and easy to patch. Close in, the effects are a lot more subtle, and fixing them is sa’Rraah’s own business. So watch what you do – “

  “Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on her! Don’t get your tail in a kink!” Arhu said, and galloped on down toward the path.

  In his wake came Siff’hah, who threw Rhiow a look of profound annoyance. “And watch your manners when you meet People here,” Rhiow said, though. “None of the edgy stuff like a few minutes ago.” She put her whiskers forward, for it had still been funny. “So disrespectful to a more senior wizard! Jath would be shocked.”

  “Please,” Siff’hah said, and laid her whiskers back. “Don’t ‘Jath’ me! Yet another tom. Has it occurred to you how many of them seem to be around at the moment?”

  Hwaith glanced around him as if this news came as a surprise, and Rhiow’s whiskers went even further forward. “Oh, you’re okay, Hwaith. But Rhi, did you hear him? ‘I’ll keep an eye on her?’” Siff’hah snorted. “No doubt using the one brain cell he keeps tucked away up his thath and only sticks in his head occasionally for fear he’ll wear it out. And as for Urruah – “

  “Now now,” Rhiow said.

  “Oh, he’s all right,” Siff’hah said. “But he’s such a – he’s such a boy!”

  “Boys have their uses,” Rhiow said, with a humorous glance at Hwaith. “As we will doubtless hear you saying over and over to anyone who’ll bother listening when you’re next in heat. Meanwhile, the single-brain-celled one is getting ahead of you.” She peered past Siff’hah. “Probably going to fall down that next ravine if someone doesn’t hurry up and keep him out of trouble…”

  Siff’hah plunged downhill after her brother. “They’re good kits,” Rhiow said when Siff’hah was safely out of earshot, to judge by the sudden sounds of crunching and thrashing in the toyon and manzanita brush at the bottom of the hill. “A little rambunctious.”

  “But extremely powerful,” Hwaith said. “The Whisperer told me their power ratings. You’ve got your hands full.”

  Rhiow laughed under her breath. “It’s not just a question of power,” she said. “You should have seen Arhu when he first arrived: all claws and ego – he’d have shredded sa’Rraah’s own ears if he thought she was looking at him the wrong way. And Sif was apparently much the same. They’ve both had a busy time of it, this life: and a hard one. But they’re settling in.”

  “It must be interesting working with a team,” Hwaith said, looking over his shoulder to where Urruah and Helen were walking together and chatting.

  “It must be interesting working unaffiliated,” Rhiow said. “Aufwi’s been doing it for a long time. And – seventy moons, you said? That’s a good while. But this isn’t a busy gate.”

  “No,” Hwaith said. “Historically, San Francisco’s always taken most of the strain – especially bearing in mind the willful way this gate’s always behaved. No one’s relied on it for much.” He glanced back upslope to where Aufwi was minding it. “To tell you the truth, I’d hoped, when I timeslid ahead, that I’d find it’d finally been clouted into some kind of stability.” The look he gave Rhiow as they came down onto the path was rueful. “And that you folks’d be able to tell me how to come back and straighten things out.”

  “More likely,” Rhiow said, “what we do back here will enable us to go back ahead and get it straightened out. It’s we who’ll be thanking you.” She peered over the edge of the ground past the path, where the crashing noises of the twins heading downhill were continuing. “Looks like they’re taking a short cut,” Rhiow said, and glanced over her shoulder at Helen, who with Urruah had just come down onto the path behind them

  Helen, too, was looking down that way with amusement. “It’s a good thing we weren’t trying to be sneaky or anything,” she said.

  Rhiow laughed. “They’ve got the sense to sidle,” she said. “So should we, I suppose: no point in confusing any ehhif we might meet out early walking their dogs.”

  “You won’t see much of that up here,” Hwaith said, as they both paused to go invisible, and Urruah came up with them. “Up here in the canyons, most of the dogs are kept in the ehhifs’ houses, or in their yards: they’d be nervous about taking them out, for fear of running into coyotes.”

  Urruah chuckled, sidling himself. “Well, neither dogs or coyotes are likely to be a problem for us,” he said, pausing for just a moment to sidle. “But it’s as well to preserve a low profile. What can’t see you, can’t have its eyes looked through by…other interested parties.” He sounded a little disturbed as they made their way along down the path, wh
ich began to curve as the hillside did, under the outreaching branches of the gray ghost pines.

  “You caught that scent too,” Hwaith said, “did you?”

  Urruah’s nose wrinkled. “Something rank,” he said. “Yes. Never got that from a gate before, no matter how badly it was malfunctioning. You notice it, Rhi?”

  “I did,” she said. “And it seems to me that it had something to do with what I felt while we were in transit, in the timeslide. That cold feeling…”

  “And different from the Lone Power,” Hwaith said, sounding almost upset by this. “You know how it is – how you can almost always hear her laughing, that angry, nasty edge – “

  Rhiow had to agree with him. She’d sensed that before, too, and it had been completely missing in whatever had been lurking just beyond the walls of the timespace corridor through which they’d been traveling. As they came to a spot further down the hill where their path met a broader one, graveled, and coming from the right, Rhiow looked over her shoulder and said, “Helen, did you – “

  Then her eyes went wide. Helen was not there.

  Urruah and Hwaith looked behind them, too, and were surprised. “Where’d she go?” Urruah said. “Did she sidle?”

  “We’d have felt it,” Hwaith said. He was right: you usually could feel someone else sidling in the immediate vicinity. But none of them had felt anything – nor, as they looked around, did it seem that she’d used any of the other methods for invisibility available to wizards.

  “Boy,” Urruah said, “she really does walk softly. One of those tribal talents, I guess.”

  “Well, she knows where to meet us,” Rhiow said. “Come on, let’s get where we’re going…”

  The track below them abruptly ceased to be gravel and pine needles and bark chippings, and turned into the place where, on both sides of the sudden, capped-off road, the sidewalk began. To a city Person, this was a strange contrast, eloquent of the difference between city and country. But overhead the live oaks and the peppertrees leaned in over the path, along with the occasional ragged escapee palm up the hillside; and from their quiet predawn murmurings, Rhiow could tell that the road that started where the sidewalk did meant nothing in particular to them. As far as the trees were concerned, these were the hills eternal, as they had been since the Ice retreated, and a little concrete more or less on the ground hardly mattered at all. The Ice had broken it before, and would again: and afterwards, in the fullness of time, the Trees would still be there.

  Once the road began, no wider than a Manhattan side street, the houses started too. They were relatively small at first, widely separated bungalows and two-storey houses mostly done in white stucco and tiled roofs. Some of their gardens looked a little ragged, overgrown with wiry-looking ground cover, pachysandra and pinched-looking ice plant. Here and there the ground under the hundred-foot royal palms was untidy with spiky, frayed heaps of their long shed olive-green frond; and scattered palm-fruits, like fat fluorescent-orange marbles, lay squashed on the sidewalks and in the road. Rhiow paused by one palm tree, sniffing. “Rats?” she said. “Up in the trees?”

  “Palm rats.” Hwaith cocked an eye up toward the crown of one of the king palms. From up there Rhiow could hear a strange scratchy noise, like her ehhif’s old mechanical alarm clock trying to ring when it wasn’t properly wound up.

  “Any sport in those?” Urruah said.

  “When they come down, sure,” Hwaith said. “Unless you feel like going up after them. They have a little bit of an advantage up there…”

  “But if you skywalked…”

  “Yeah, but is that sport?”

  Rhiow smiled to herself as they headed further down the canyon, and the sidewalk became wider and cleaner, and the houses bigger, and the driveways broader. It was as if the further down you got from the clear air and the hills’ height, the more important it became to let other ehhif know how important you were – mostly by the size of what you “owned”. This was a behavior Rhiow knew all too well from Manhattan – knowing also how the Earth itself laughed at the concept of ownership, as hilarious to the semi-sentience indwelling in the ancient bedrock as the idea of ehhif selling each other virtual artifacts and “unreal estate” in computer games. In New York, anyway, the Earth had not for many centuries done what it might so easily do – just shrug, and then bear the brief glass-splinter itch as things fell down and smashed. Here, though, that’s just what it’s been doing. And indeed she could see, as they walked downhill through wisps of morning mist, the occasional upthrust slabs in the sidewalk and cracks in the stucco and plaster of the houses they passed: the shed tiles that no one had noticed or picked up, the slow rilling trickle from someone’s ultramodern lawn-watering system where a pipe had cracked, and the trickling leak was spinning palm pollen and pine needles down into the gutter. Worse could happen. Worse will happen. Iau, Whisperer, be with us, let us know what we need to know to keep it from happening: in the here and now, and our now and then…

  They turned a switchback curve in the road. “What in the Tom’s Name,” Urruah shouted as they came around and saw a huge mist-glamoured vehicle crouching by the curb outside one oversized bungalow, “is that what I think it is? It’s a Hhhu’ssenherh!”

  He ran off across the street toward one of the big heavy vehicles, walking around it and staring up at it in a good imitation of awe. “Is this one of your passions too?” Rhiow said to Hwaith.

  They both stopped dead as Arhu galloped unheeding past them down the middle of the road at top speed, shortly followed by Siff’hah, who was fluffed up from nose to tail and cursing her brother loudly. “Uh, not particularly,” Hwaith said, after the ruckus had gone by and vanished around the downhill curve. “I guess it’s one of those situations where you don’t really notice something until the tourists come through.” He put his whiskers forward.

  “I’ve only seen these in ffhilms,” Urruah said, turning around to spray one of the vehicle’s snow-white tires with great care. “Isn’t it fabulous?”

  Rhiow flirted her tail. “If you say so. ‘Ruah, you’re not by any chance doing something that would annoy the ehhif who owns it, are you?”

  “Oh, not so anyone would care…” He waltzed back over to Rhiow and Hwaith. “It’ll wash off in the next rain…”

  “Hah,” Hwaith said, amused, as he led them on down the hill. “You really are a New Yorker. ‘The next rain’ won’t be until October.”

  They ambled further on down the road, and Rhiow noted as they went that the houses seemed to be getting much bigger, the front yards most seriously wider and deeper and more manicured, if occasionally a bit brown; and some of the houses even had two of the big autos in front of them. “You must have good police here,” Rhiow said, glancing into one driveway at the two massive cars there. “You’d think just anybody could steal them, or key them, out here…”

  “Steal them?” Hwaith said, sounding shocked. “They wouldn’t get far. The police here are pretty good, for ehhif. And I don’t think there are as many cars now as you folks have uptime…”

  Rhiow cocked an ear: the Whisperer slipped a number into it. She blinked. “Three million?” she said. “In the whole state?”

  “You’ll believe they’re all right here in the Basin, under your nose,” Hwaith said, sounding rueful, “the first time the inversion layer gets bad.”

  “Leaded gas…” Urruah said, waving his tail, looking back at the big cars as they headed on downhill.

  Hwaith looked at him with big bronzy eyes, their polite expression nonetheless managing to suggest that Urruah was one whisker short of a full set. “What else would there be?”

  “Wait a while,” Urruah said. “Believe me, it gets better. And you just wait till the sushi bars open.”

  “What’s sushi?”

  Urruah took a deep breath, then let it go as they all paused in the middle of the street where it was crossed by another. The four-way STOP sign might as well have been in the middle of the Mojave for all the traffic there wa
s at this hour of the morning. “Let it be,” Rhiow said. “Hwaith, Herself is very quiet. Have you noticed that?”

  “Unusually so,” Hwaith said. “I hate it when She waits for us to tell Her what to do.”

  “You and me both, littermate,” Rhiow said.

  They wandered across the intersection, and Rhiow caught a sidewise glance from Urruah as he headed across the road to sniff at the base of a peppertree. ‘Littermate?’

  She gave Urruah his look back with a dead rat on top. Goodness me, ‘Ruah, do I detect a note of jealousy?

  Of what? Of him? Urruah busied himself spraying the bottom of the royal palm at the corner with an expression of utter abstraction. He’s too skinny for you, Rhi. Plus, you met him, what? Two hours ago?

  Fifty years ago, some ways, Rhiow said, angling gently rightward: away down the road, she could see another of those huge blunt round cars coming up the road. He’s a nice young wizard who can use some emotional support, the way things are going around here. Got a problem with that, Dumpster boy? Go pee on another tree.

  Urruah gave her an amused look as she and Hwaith stepped up onto the curb. He trotted away from them, across yet another perfectly coiffed emerald-and-jade-striped lawn, to examine a big scraggly bush with bright red flowers that looked like bottlebrushes. Urruah stared up into the tree as they walked past the large pink-stuccoed house it leaned on. “You People have really large bees here!” he said.

  “Uh…it’s a hummingbird,” Hwaith said softly, but not in time for Urruah to get out of the way of the furious little bundle of scarlet feathers that came diving at him from higher up in the bottlebrush tree, making a sound like an infuriated cellphone stuck in texting mode.

  Urruah went galloping off in a gray-tabby streak into the next yard downhill: the hummingbird, a subdued blood-ruby glint in the early light, went after him at humm factor five, closing fast. Urruah dove head-first into a bed of ivy and vanished.