The Big Meow Read online

  Rhiow reared up against his bare leg, patting it above the knee, with her claws barely in. “I’ll pull your kneecap right off,” she said, “if you don’t stop waving that dish around over my head. Like I can’t reach it if I really want to! Oh, put that down —”

  She took a couple more swipes at the dish with her free paw, letting him play the you-can’t-have-it-game for a little longer. Finally he put the dish down, and Rhiow buried her face in it. After last night’s work, she was starving; and she was relieved to see the way Iaehh was dressed, in his shorts and singlet and running shoes, for it meant that he would be out for at least an hour or two — plenty of time for her to head over to Penn and check with Jath and Fh’iss to see how the gate had bedded in. Probably, she thought, I’m worrying for nothing. Probably the gate’s fine. Otherwise I would’ve heard from them by now.

  All the same… if there was anything she’d learned in the years since she had ascended to the rank of senior technician for the North American worldgates, it was that it was rarely wise to assume that things were going to go correctly. Gates were one of the most finicky and complex kind of spell structures that a wizard dealt with on a regular basis. Anything that could be imagined going wrong with them usually did, on a regular if not daily basis. This meant that Rhiow and her teams were some of the busiest wizards in the Metropolitan area. But it was interesting work, mentally stimulating — especially since a worldgate rarely failed in the same way twice — and due to its very nature, a wizard involved in it routinely met some of the most interesting people on the planet, or off it.

  “Now where did I put those keys,” Iaehh was muttering under his breath as he rummaged around among the paperwork piled up all over the kitchen table. It was routinely a clutter up there, these days; Iaehh rarely sat down to eat there, as if afraid to be reminded of who in the old days had always sat opposite him at the table, poking him with her chopsticks over the take away cartons.

  “They’re up on the counter,” Rhiow said, straightening up from polishing the cat food dish clean. “You remember. You were going to try to make a new place for them, where you would always remember where you left them. Except you can never remember. Oh, come on, Iaehh, strain your brain a little!”

  “I’ve really got to get this table cleaned up,” Iaehh said. He kept on turning over papers, stacking them up, shoving them around.

  Rhiow sat down in the middle of the kitchen floor and started to wash her face. “Yes, you should,” she said softly,” but you say that every day. And it never gets done. Iaehh, do hurry up, I have things to do, and I’d rather not leave while you’re here watching…”

  But he kept right on hunting for the keys in the same place, again and again, even while Rhiow finished washing both paws, and under her chin, and started in again on the left ear, even though it didn’t need it. Finally she lost her patience. She glanced over her shoulder, up on the counter, where the coffee machine sat. There were the keys, right on top of it. And of course, Rhiow thought, he could have left them a little too close to the edge of the coffee machine. He could have… and that’s all he needs to think.

  Would you do me a favor? she said to the apartment keys in the wizardly Speech, and to gravity in that very small area. It was only a minuscule change of position that was needed, and as a result Rhiow had to pause for a moment to consult in her mind with the Whisperer to get the exact coordinates.

  They came through. In her mind, using the Speech, Rhiow described a little circle around the coffeemaker to limit the locus of gravitational change, and indicated the spot where she wanted the keys to go. Right there, if you would —

  Everything in a gravitational field likes to fall, and even more so if you ask it nicely. The keys dropped down onto the counter with an obligingly noisy clash of metal. Iaehh jumped, looked over his shoulder, and then laughed at himself. “I keep forgetting,” he said. “I have a brain like a sieve, these days…”

  That was a thought that had occurred to Rhiow, as well. Probably stress, she thought. Iaehh had unexpectedly been promoted at his job, and was now managing a whole department. This had made it easier to keep the apartment he had shared with Hhuha, but he was now twice as busy as he had been before his loss. One more thing to worry about… Rhiow thought.

  Rhi?

  Rhiow changed position slightly and pushed out a hind leg to wash it. Iaehh had pocketed his keys, and was unlocking the apartment door. You’re up earlier than I expected, she said to Urruah.

  I couldn’t stay asleep, Urruah said. Wanted to go over to Penn and check things out.

  See, isn’t that what I said? What a professional you are. Especially since I’m the one who should be doing that.

  “Okay,” Iaehh said, coming back over the Rhiow and bending down to stroke her head. “You have a nice day, plumptious puss. I’ll be back around dinnertime.”

  “Yes, but your dinnertime or mine?” Rhiow said, resigned but affectionate, as Iaehh went out the door, shut it behind him, and started locking all the locks. Sorry, ‘Ruah. He’s running behind today, and so am I.

  There’s no big rush, Urruah said. I haven’t been there either, yet. But I didn’t want to call you to make you feel guilty. Jath was asking for you.

  Oh, sweet Iau, said Rhiow, standing up in a hurry, what can it be now? Tell me nothing’s gone wrong with the gate –

  If it has, he didn’t mention it, Urruah said. It was something about L.A.

  L.A? Rhiow said. The Los Angeles gate? Now what on earth — Immediately her mind began to fill with all kinds of terrible visions of something they had done wrong with the Penn gate that had affected the Downside connections of the L.A. microcomplex.

  It’s nothing to do with our intervention last night, Urruah said, or at least not as far as I can tell. Anyway, Aufwi is on his way over. He and Jath are going to come up here; Jath wanted to sit tight and watch Aufwi’s transfer, to make sure the Penn gate is behaving itself.

  All right, Rhiow said. ‘Up here’ where? Are you at home? She had to pause for a moment to think where that was this week: Urruah intended to change dumpsters without warning, but normally he could be found somewhere in the west Seventies, near the better uptown food markets.

  No, he said. The Met.

  Fine, Rhiow said. Give me half an hour to make a swing through Grand Central — I’ll check our own gates to make sure there are no untoward side effects, and be right along. How did Jath seem you this morning?

  Pleased, Urruah said. You’d swear this whole thing had been his idea.

  Rhiow stood up and shook herself, putting her whiskers right forward in an expression of rueful amusement. That was how things usually went with Jath. He would protest and obstruct and dig in his claws, and in every way make getting a job done as hard as it could be — and then one sleep and one meal later, it was his own personal success, and could never happened without him. Well, the latter may be true, Rhiow thought. But, Powers that Be, I pray You, don’t make me have to admit to it out loud. I suppose I could bear it, but he’d swiftly become unbearable, and both our teams would suffer.

  On the other side of the apartment door, the last locks snicked closed, and Rhiow could hear Iaehh’s footsteps heading off down the hall. ‘Ruah, Rhiow said as she went over to the door, give Jath my best, and let him know that I’ll be along shortly.

  By the door, Rhiow sat up on her haunches, putting her front paws against the painted metal. There had been a rash of burglaries in this building a couple of years ago, and she had seen how, no matter how many locks and bolts other ehhif in the building put on their doors, the burglars were in no wise deterred. She had therefore become a bit proactive. The wizardry she had laced into the structure of the front of her ehhif’s den was a variant of that old favorite, the Mason’s Word; it took the very minimal stone content of the plaster on the outside of the wall, and the metallic content of the door, and convinced them both that, as they once had been in the ancient day, they now weighed about a ton and were still part of the i
nsides of a mountain. The burglars whom the police had caught trying to break into the apartment most recently — a few months ago — had been found practically weeping with frustration, their sledgehammers shattered, and the wall and door looking innocently unconcerned by the whole operation. There had been no breakins since; the word seemed to have been going around among the local criminal fraternity that the building was haunted. But there was no telling how long this salutary state of affairs would last.

  Now, pads against the door, Rhiow spoke the necessary words in the Speech and gave up the necessary energy to refuel the spell. Her workload of late had left her no time to consider how she might expand the spell to the other apartments on this floor. Something else that needs to be handled, she thought, watching the way the subtle fire of the recharged wizardry fled away from her paws and sank deep into the structure of the wall and door. She eyed the underlying structure of the wizardry critically, looking for any weak spots or places where the spell was fraying. But there were none: Rhiow prided herself on doing thorough work that was meant to last. It was a habit you got into when you worked routinely with worldgates. The Grand Central gates had been there for hundreds of years, a wizardry rooted in the depths of time, and placed there, so the Whispering said, by one of the daughters of Queen Iau herself. No wizard in his or her right mind would want to hang substandard workmanship on such a construction.

  She looked the wizardry over one last time, then turned and made her way back to the sliding door that let out onto the terrace. Out the little clear plastic flap she slipped, onto the painted concrete of the terrace, and stood there for a moment looking around at the golden afternoon. The terrace was near the corner of the building, on the 70th Street side; off to Rhiow’s left, it was an easy jump down to the concrete parapet and flat, graveled roof of the building diagonally behind theirs. Maybe I’ll go down 69th today, she thought.

  And then the litter box caught her eye.

  Rhiow stared at it. There were still no footprints in it but hers. So weird, she thought. I really need to get some more rest… And then she laughed a cat’s silent laughter at herself. Like that’s going to happen.

  She used the litter box, scratching perhaps a little more enthusiastically than usual to kick away the memory of those strange eyes looking at her. It would’ve been a rather challenging look in reality; people meeting for the first time didn’t stare so. There were proprieties of gaze to be observed, degrees of intrusiveness that were permitted later in a relationship but forbidden early on, and emphatically discouraged at a first meeting. Stress, she thought, externalizing itself at the end of a long day…. Rhiow hopped out of the box, shook the inevitable sticking kitty litter off her feet, slipped between the bars of the terrace, and jumped down onto the roof of the building to the left.

  The concrete was warm under her pads; it had been sunny all afternoon, to judge by the residual heat. Did Iaehh bring his water bottle with him? Rhiow wondered, as she walked down the parapet, making for the garden-courtyard tree that grew near the far corner of that building. He’s going to need it, running on a day like this… At the far corner of the building, she paused at the edge of the parapet and looked down into the branches of the tree, a tall, handsome maple. The branches up here were very thin, much too much so to bear her weight. She could always have airwalked it, but she’d had little enough exercise in the last few days, and her muscles were itching for a good stretch. Rhiow crouched, her tail lashing, and then leaped down into the branches.

  She saw the branch she was heading for, flung her forelegs around it and sank her claws in. Rhiow merely hung on there for a moment, breathing hard, digging her hind claws in as well and getting her bearings. She glanced over her shoulder, then down along the big branch toward the tree trunk. Some of the people in this building had houiff, mostly little dogs that were all yap and no guts; but there was no kindness in making some poor houff crazy by letting it see her when it couldn’t get at her. Like they’d be able to do that either… she thought, putting her whiskers forward.

  As Rhiow shinnied down the trunk, she sidled, insinuating herself between the hyperspatial strings whose effect on matter determined whether it was visible or not. By the time she paused a few feet above the ground, reversed head for tail, and jumped down, only a wizard or another cat could have seen her. There, at the shade-starved corner of the little scrap of lawn behind the building, she stopped once more to glance around and see if there were any People around. Her block had about fifty, most of them held captive inside buildings by ehhif too afraid of the city’s dangers to let them out; the rest were more fortunate “pets”, or People unaligned with ehhif…some of them even nonaligned with other People, “out of pride”. But on a day like this, probably most of them are holed up somewhere cool. In the evening, some of them may come out for a bout of hauissh… when things cool down. But not right now.

  She strolled away from the tree, around the corner of the building, and down the narrow little alley that led to a locked and barred wire covered gate giving onto 69th Street. Garbage cans were lined up there against the blind brick wall of the building. They were not as tightly closed as they could have been. Rhiow’s nose wrinkled as she went past; there had been rats here — she could smell their siss trail running up and down the wall and near the base of it, a nasty, thin, acrid reek. Something else to deal with when there’s time, Rhiow thought. Her work in errantry had not taken her so far from her feline roots that she would forget that most basic of enmities between her kind and the things that had gnawed at the roots of the world since time began. But who wants to get all messed up with rat-smell on a pretty day like this? And indeed it was a nice day, despite the heat; there was a steady, soft breeze coming in off the river, taking away the worst of the city stink.

  Rhiow crouched at the bottom of the wired-up gate, leapt up onto it, pulled herself up claw over claw to the top of it, teetered for a moment on the topmost iron bar, and jumped down onto the sidewalk. There Rhiow stood for a moment, staying close to the gate so that no ehhif, unable to see her, would come wandering into her before she saw them. But the street was quiet enough for the moment. Down toward Third Avenue, she could see a couple of ehhif dams pushing their kits in strollers; nearer to her, a tall dark tom-ehhif with that strange twisted head-fur they seemed to be going in for these days came wandering down toward her with his arm around a shorter ehhif, a queen. Rhiow let them go by before she headed down the sidewalk herself, and put her whiskers forward a little at the look on their faces. She was sure she was reading it right; she had seen it often enough on Iaehh and Hhuha before, usually a few minutes before they went into the bedroom, closed the door, and began to do what Hhuha had routinely referred to as “the cat-scaring thing.” A nice sort of day for it, Rhiow thought, as she ambled down the north side of 69th Street, past the stairs of the mid-street brownstones; assuming you’re interested, of course. It had been quite awhile since she had been — her ehhif had had her spayed before she was old enough to understand what was happening. But she had never particularly regretted it. Freedom from that particular physical imperative had left her with that much more time to concentrate on the business of being a wizard. Possibly a good thing, Rhiow thought, sidestepping into the stairwell of the basement apartment to let a couple more ehhif-dams with strollers go by. Since, over the last couple of years, if I hadn’t had that spare time to concentrate, for all I know, I’d’ve been dead a couple times over…

  Rhiow came to the corner of Third Avenue and 69th and tucked herself as flat as she could against the corner wall of the apartment building there. Ehhif walked to and fro before her while she sat there waiting for the light to change, and wondering what in the world could be wrong with the L.A. gate. It wasn’t a heavily used portal; no interplanetary traffic went through there at all, and mostly short jump traffic off the North American continent toward Asia. As the light changed, she wondered once again why the L.A. gate had never budded off any associated microgates in response to t
he city’s population’s growth over the last century. Normally, worldgates were a direct response of the fabric of local space time to the fraying pressure of millions of sentient minds concentrated into a small space. Rather than rip right open under the desires of all the beings living crammed together there, spacetime usually tried to conserve itself by producing a sort of semipermeable membrane through which beings who knew the portal’s location could pass. And normally, Rhiow thought as the light changed and she got up and trotted across Third Avenue in company with all of the other pedestrians, but well to one side, a given gate complex isn’t shy about budding if the local population’s large enough. Look at Tokyo: how many gates are there in that complex now? Fourteen? Fifteen? I lose track; this last decade, it’s like the thing’s in heat all the time. It no sooner has one gate that it hauls off and has another…

  Rhiow patted the problem around with the paw of the mind for a while as she made her way down 69th toward Park Avenue. But the air was too soft and pleasant, and for once, nice-smelling, for her to find it easy to concentrate. Rhiow crossed Park Avenue, pausing once another crowd of ehhif had gone by to take a moment to smell the flowers there, yellow delphiniums and yellow and purple pansies. The lights went red and green together, and Rhiow scampered across again, heading for Lexington Avenue.

  She had a standard covert entrance to the Grand Central complex down at 50th and Lex, but there was no particular need to go straight underground and quickly blot out the scent of that summer air. For a change, Rhiow simply trotted down the west side of Lexington Avenue like any other sightseer or Sunday shopper, until she came to the brass-and-glass doors of Grand Central Market. Urruah’s beginning to contaminate me too, Rhiow thought, amused, as she walked invisibly down between the stalls of beautiful meat and hot breads and shining fruit, sniffing appreciatively, and then out into the food hall full of coffee smells and frying smells. On the far side of the food hall, she paused long enough to gaze over toward the glass-paned arch of the Oyster Bar restaurants, closed this early on a Sunday. But to a cat’s nose, such closure was a relative thing. Behind those doors, Rhiow could smell oysters being shucked, and her mouth began to water. I’m going to get him for getting me hooked on those things, she thought, and ran up the stairs to the Main Concourse.