The Big Meow Read online

  Urruah turned away without comment, sat down and started washing, in silent hilarity: composure-washing at one remove, not for himself but for the kit. Arhu had the sense to put his ears back out of the way. I’ll be along in a little while, Urruah said. You go sort him out.

  She flicked her tail in agreement. “Come on,” she said.

  Access for them to the gate’s new lockdown site was the same as it had been for the gate itself, though far less spectacular. As they walked around the corner, Rhiow spoke the numerous syllables of the Mason’s Word, hearing the universe go still around them and leaning in to hear, then feeling the asphalt of Eighth Avenue go summer-soft underneath her. Along with Arhu, who had implemented his own incidence of the Word, Rhiow sank down through the street, into the substrate of the road, past the pipes and conduits, the bricks and stones of earlier layers of the street, the cold clayey earth under the stonework, the i-beamed iron ceilings of the track tunnel.

  The New Jersey Transit North River tunnel was a bleak, plain, filthy place as yet: it would be months before the ehhif construction crews turned their attention to rebuilding it. The rails ran down toward Penn, off to Rhiow’s and Arhu’s right, as they sank down through the ceiling and airwalked toward the platform; to the left, under the occasional naked bulb jutting out of the stanchions of the walls, the tunnels ran off at a downward slope, heading for their dive under the Hudson. Off to their right, ahead of the two of them, the worldgate could be seen hanging over the left-hand set of tracks, shimmering, its colors slowly calming after all the excitement.

  Arhu walked over to the gate, reared up on his hind legs, and sank a single careful claw into the outer edge of the gate, catching one of the control strings and pulling it out. The diagnostic colors and status strings immediately leapt into brilliance, indicating where the gate’s catenary structure – its main power conduit – had been provisionally rerooted into the master catenary that ran under Manhattan, and from there into the more ancient world that was the source of the worldgates’ power. “So the power levels are back up now,” he said. “Ninety percent already, though the last ten won’t come up for a while yet because of the reaction trauma. The unwrap went all right: see, the extra strings have lost their flail and are rewebbing themselves with the main structure – “

  His debrief to Rhiow took surprisingly little time. Arhu appeared to have been actually listening quite closely to Urruah, though Arhu normally would have done anything to avoid having anyone get that idea. But the thing that left Rhiow wondering, as Arhu talked her through the rest of the details surrounding the reattachment of the severed gate, was how like Saash he sounded as he talked string tech. It was strange. Yet maybe not so strange: for it was Saash who had perhaps been kindest to him when he first came into the team, Saash who had overwatched him, made sure he ate well and slept clean and dry, and had a proper place to do his business. Attachments, Rhiow thought. So odd. She never taught him a purr’s worth of theory. Yet, style: style communicates itself. And linkages happen where you expect them the least…

  Finally she interrupted him in the middle of a long string of gate-tech jargon that would have impressed even Saash. “Enough,” she said. “You did good.”

  Arhu flicked an ear at her, looking down toward where Jath and Fh’iss were now sitting together, looking with weary satisfaction at the unwrapped gate, watching its colors die back down from the excited state caused by moving it. “Wouldn’t say that in front of them,” he said.

  “Maybe not,” Rhiow said, quite softly. “But I’m not sure it’s all that important to say it to them. To you, that’s another story.”

  “They don’t respect you, Rhiow,” he said, and there was a touch of growl in his young voice.

  “It’s not about respect, finally,” Rhiow said. “Getting the job done: that’s the issue. Let them be. It’s no fun for them to have someone come tailwaving her way onto their territory and start telling them how things are going to have to be. Soon enough they’ll settle in, when their gate does.”

  “So can I go get my pastrami?”

  She sighed. Urruah was to blame for this deli fixation on both the kits’ side, and for Ith’s as well: but at least they came by it honestly, asking ehhif for it rather than just stealing it from them. And watching Ith go through the wizardly gymnastics necessary to displace enough of his mass to disguise himself as a Person was always worth an evening’s amusement. “Go on,” Rhiow said. “Take a look around before you go: make sure Harl’h’s people didn’t miss anything.”

  “Did that already,” Arhu said, flirting his tail at Rhiow’s slowness.

  “Oh really? How, when you’ve been down here with me?”

  “Sif’s doing it right now,” Arhu said, sounding smug, and vanished.

  She twitched her whiskers forward in a Person’s smile, gave the settling worldgate one last look, and made her way back up the platform to Jath and Fh’iss. They turned on her a look of weary complaisance. There would probably be some minor recriminations from them tomorrow, during the debrief, but right now they just looked too tired.

  That made this the perfect time to praise them: when they wouldn’t be able to summon up the energy to reject it. “Are we done?” Jath said as Rhiow came over. “Fh’iss was wrecked: I sent him off for some sleep.”

  “We’re done enough for dawn,” Rhiow said. “The full debrief will keep: the gates need time to steady down, anyway. A long night, we’ve had. Jath, Hw’aa, you did a tremendous job. Please tell Fh’iss that too.” She wasn’t beyond leaving out, for the moment, how long it had taken them to commit themselves to make it a success. None of that mattered, now: they were done.

  “Yes, well,” Jath said. “I’m still not sure whether we’ve really needed to do this. But the Powers wanted it done…”

  “And you can restructure the gates into a better configuration for all the wizards who use the facility,” Rhiow said. “You’ve got so much more room to work down here now.”

  “Yes, there is that…”

  She waved her tail. “So we’re done. Keep me posted if anything needs my attention. I’m for my bed. Good morning, my cousins, and the Powers send that you sleep sound. No point in wishing you the luck of the hunt: you’ve had it…”

  Jath actually purred. As Rhiow was walking away, behind her the first train of the morning came in, rolling towards Penn. A second before the train would have plowed through the airspace where the gate hung, the warp and weft of the worldgate shimmered away out of physicality, hanging hidden where it would remain until Jath and his team finished tweaking it.

  Done, she thought. Finally, really done. What a relief… She made her way back up to street level, the same way she’d come.

  When she came out onto Eighth Avenue again, the last of the police cordons were being taken down: the cops were heading off around the corner for coffee and donuts: and all the trucks and people, and the Film Board lady, were gone. There was no one left but a grey tabby, looking up Eighth Avenue to where the lights had changed, and a car or two were crossing the intersection from the side streets.

  “Done?” he said.

  Rhiow just purred. They sidled themselves, shifting out between the hyperstrings into the commonest kind of feline invisibility, and headed crosstown on Thirty-third. “Did you see those power levels settle?” Urruah said, in the same tone of voice as an ehhif saying, “How about those Mets?”

  She put her whiskers forward, realizing she was going to get another half hour’s worth of tech talk. Rhiow just kept purring, letting him have a monosyllable’s worth of agreement here and there, until they were right back on the East Side again. Finally, well uptown and about halfway between Lexington and Park, Urruah just sighed. “A good night’s work,” he said.

  “You have no idea,” Rhiow said. “Urruah, I think someone should talk to the Powers about you.”

  He gave her a look. “I didn’t think I did that badly – ”

  She paused long enough to cuff him upside one ear.
“You thick-skulled idiot,” she said. “’Ruah, it’s time you thought about doing your team-leader training. Someone has to handle this job after I move on…”

  He gave her a shocked look. “Rhiow,” he said. “What are you planning? Don’t you feel well?”

  “I feel fine,” she said.

  “Then what’s the matter?”

  They paused at the corner of Park and looked down the length of it toward Grand Central, watching the lights change in sequence, to no effect: not a car moved anywhere. The gold of the rising Sun caught the top of the Helmsley-Spears building as Rhiow looked at it. “’Ruah, every now and then we all get tired…”

  “Tired? You?” He jerked his tail a couple of times, dismissive, as they started across the street. “Come on. Your problem is that you don’t get out enough.”

  “You’re going to tell me I need to be watching more oh’ra,” Rhiow said.

  Urruah rolled his eyes at her. “You do. But that’s not the problem. You know what I mean.”

  She waved her tail in a gesture of feigned non-understanding. “Maybe,” she said. “Let’s discuss it later. But either way, I think Harl’h needs to look into a change of status for you. An upgrade, anyway: and you need to start doing consulting work of your own.”

  His own purr was surprisingly restrained. “Not sure I’m in such a hurry for that,” he said. “I like sleeping in my own Dumpster at night.”

  She flirted her tail at him as they came to the corner where her ehhif’s apartment building lay. “Think about it, cousin,” she said. “And go get yourself that pastrami. I don’t think I have to watch you eat it.”

  “We’ll save you a bit.”

  She butted heads with him. “Don’t fret if you forget to,” she said. “Go on.”

  For a moment she watched him walk down First Avenue, then turned to walk down her own block, past the brownstones and the parked cars. At the usual spot in the block, she stepped up into the air and activated the spell she kept ready for easy access to the building. The air, reminded that it had once been stone, or trapped in stone, now went solid under her feet, deconstructing itself as her pads left each “step”. Up to the terrace of her ehhif’s apartment she went, leaping up between the railings –

  – and froze, blinking with shock. Her litter box was out on the terrace, under the overhang of the next terrace up. And there was another Person in it. Their eyes met.

  Shocked, Rhiow held still, starting to fluff up in outraged reflex at the invasion of her territory. A tom: instantly she could see that. Black, though not as black as she was: you could still see the tabby markings through the darkness. Golden-eyed, a broad face, ears a little beat up, a shocked expression. He opened his mouth to speak –

  Rhiow blinked. There was nothing there, no one in her box.

  She stared: she shook herself. Slowly, her fur still halfway fluffed, she stalked toward the litterbox. She stared into it. No footprints. She sniffed. There was no scent there but the slight odor of the last time she’d made siss: no matter how her ehhif, Iaehh, tried to clean the box perfectly, and no matter what the clumping-litter people claimed about their product’s deodorizing powers, that scent was where she’d left it.

  No, she thought, and shook her head until her ears rattled. Just a tired mind playing tricks. Very quietly Rhiow went into the apartment through the cat-door her ehhif had installed for her in the glass of the sliding door. Meditation can wait, she thought, her tail wreathing in bemusement. How much good would I get out of it when I’m so tired, I’m hallucinating?

  She wandered through the darkened apartment, back into the bedroom. Quietly Rhiow jumped up onto the bottom corner of the king-sized bed, careful not to wake Iaehh up. He slept lightly, too lightly sometimes, since Rhiow’s own ehhif, his mate Hhuha, had died in an accident.

  She stood there in the dark for a moment, missing Hhuha one more time, and once again feeling sorry for Iaehh. It’s not good for you to be alone, she thought. How does one do matchmaking for ehhif, I wonder? How do you engineer it so they get out a little more, and meet somebody nice? It wasn’t a question of replacing Hhuha, of course: no one could do that. But at the same time, it seemed important to ehhif life to be paired. Almost as important as it was for People: though ehhif always seemed to keep their emotional lives so compartmentalized…

  She sighed, and then yawned. The long night’s work had caught up with her. Let’s get some sleep, she thought. Time enough in the morning to reorganize Iaehh’s social life.

  She sat down and had a perfunctory wash; then her head jerked up as she started dozing right in the middle of it. Enough, she thought, and curled up nose to tail. A moment later she was dozing.

  And out of the dream, golden eyes looked at her, thoughtful…

  The Big Meow: Chapter Two

  Afternoon seemed to come only a breath or two later. Rhiow rolled over and stretched out long, blinking at the bronzy light coming in through the bedroom’s Venetian blinds. From outside, she could hear faint clinking sounds; Iaehh was moving around out there. She heard one of the drawers in the little kitchen open, and then the clatter of ehhif eating utensils being taken out.

  Rhiow sat up, gazing around the bedroom. As always, it was hard to avoid a pang of sadness; there was still a faint scent of Hhuha hanging about all the furnishings in the place. She was sure that Iaehh was oblivious to this — the ehhif sense of smell was hardly capable of such delicate detection — but every morning, before she was fully awake, Rhiow had to disentangle that faint scent of her own ehhif from the reality of the present physical world, in which her Hhuha was no longer present.

  She let out a long breath, wishing that even once more she might hear that small, strange purr-like sound that Hhuha had used to make when she picked Rhiow up and held her, upside down, in the crook of one arm. But there were some things that not even wizardry could do. Hhuha was in her own place now, the right place for an ehhif to be after physical life was done, wherever that might be. And Rhiow, for her own part, knew that the sorrowful moments were the price she paid for keeping the memory of that relationship green. If she tried to reject them, soon she would have no true memory of Hhuha left, but merely a simulacrum, colored by wishful thinking and the desire to avoid pain, not by truth or life. As a wizard, it was with truth and life that her loyalties lay; so she suffered the pain gladly enough, the way you suffered the pain of biting a thorn out of your paw, though in this case the thorn grew back every day. All you can hope, she thought, is that each day the thorn grows back a little shorter…

  Rhiow stood up, stretched fore and aft, and jumped down from the bed. She padded across the carpet, paused by the bedroom door to pull it a little further open with her paw, and wandered out into the living room-dining room area. Iaehh was standing in the tiny kitchen, bending over the stove and stirring something in a small pot. Rhiow stood there under the dining room table, sniffing. Noodles again, she thought. Iaehh, my kit, there’s more to life than ramen! Or there should be. But there had not been much heart in him for cooking since Hhuha died. That had become another of life’s little sorrows for Rhiow. The good smells that had once been part of life in this little den now hardly ever happened anymore; Iaehh’s life had become an endless round of takeout food in sad cardboard cartons. Rhiow found herself worrying about Iaehh’s heart in more than the strictly emotional sense, for half the time the dreadful stuff the delivery men brought smelled more of chemicals and fat that of any honest meat. Here’s an intervention it’s time I started working on in earnest, Rhiow thought. A poor sort of thing it is if you can save the city, save the world, but can’t even save your own ehhif.

  She came up behind him to where her water dish sat in front of the oven next to the refrigerator. The name-charm on her collar tinkled against it as Rhiow put her head down into it for a good, long drink. Iaehh turned, looked down at her. “So there you are,” he said. “I thought you were going to sleep all day. Where were you all last night, huh?”

  For the mom
ent, she merely waved her tail and kept on drinking. Iaehh had slowly come to terms with the concept that Rhiow was able to jump down onto the roof of the building next door. He’d gradually become less troubled by that, as he couldn’t see how she could possibly get anywhere else from there. Had she been a cat like any of the other cats in the neighborhood, of course he would’ve been right. But that was a misconception of which Rhiow was not going to be able to disabuse him, as the protocols of wizardry forbade her to speak to ehhif in any way that could be understood unless she was actually on errantry concerning them at the time. There had been times, and would probably be again, when she would desperately wish that she had even ten seconds of time to make herself understood; only enough time to say, I have to be out for a few days on an intervention, don’t worry about me, I won’t miss any more meals than I have to… But there was no way. She simply had to try to keep her interventions as short as possible: yet another inconvenience in a life that was already busy enough. And now she had to wear the name-charm he’d bought her as well, in case she got lost somehow…and the jingling of the thing drove her crazy.

  Rhiow sighed, and finished her drink, and went over to give Iaehh a friendly rub around the ankles. “Oh,” he said. “And now you’re my friend, because I’ve got food, huh?” He reached up toward the cupboard where the People food was kept.

  “I’m always your friend,” she said. It did no harm to answer him in Ailurin, as he couldn’t hear it — very few ehhif could; the subvocalized purrs and trills of the language were usually out of their hearing range — and it kept her from feeling as if she was stuck in a monologue. “Cat food has nothing to do with it.” Then she caught the scent of what he was opening. “Except sometimes. Is that salmon? Oh, you really are observant sometimes! You saw I liked that brand last week — “

  “Haven’t heard you shout like that for awhile,” he said. “Come on, let’s see you do your little dance, like you used to do for Sue — “