The Big Meow Read online

  “I’m so sorry to have bothered you when you should have been resting,” Aufwi said from behind Rhiow, sounding unnecessarily apologetic. “The Whisperer gave me a precis of what you were up to: I can’t believe you’re up and walking around after a piece of work like that…”

  “Cousin, please, no more of it,” Rhiow said, putting her whiskers forward. “You did exactly what you should have. And we don’t see enough of you over here! Jath’s right too – you should come and spend some non-business time with us…get to know our own gates a little, and work with the local teams. You haven’t met Arhu and Siff’hah yet: come greet them. Urruah, where are we going, exactly?”

  She got no immediate answer, for once down on the floor there followed a few moments of mixing and mingling, breaths being breathed and noses being bumped. Rhiow stepped away after a few seconds and let her team get on with it, thinking that she really must make sure that Aufwi came out to do a brief internship with one or another of the New York teams, preferably her own. His previous senior, Fefssuh, had been easygoing and knowledgeable, but so very senior and set in his ways – Aufwi had come to work with him when Fefssuh was almost twelve – that Aufwi had had too little time or opportunity to develop much in the way of initiative or self-confidence. And those were qualities vital in a gate technician. A week or two with Arhu will sort that out, Rhiow thought. Maybe when summer’s done and we’ve settled his gate down –

  “You slept in today,” Arhu said, falling in beside Rhiow as she went after Urruah, toward the back of the fly area.

  “You could have done the same,” Rhiow said. “For a change.”

  “I hate to miss anything,” Arhu said, glancing around.

  “Nothing much to miss,” said Siff’hah, slipping around to bracket Rhiow on the other side. It was a game of theirs, Rhiow had been noticing: each of them would get up close to one of your ears, and then they would start passing their opinions back and forth through your head. “Look at this crowd,” Siff’hah said, glancing scornfully around at the various People watching them from hiding. “They all think we’re fflah.”

  It was one of many words Rhiow had never heard until she started listening to Arhu and Siff’hah trying to verbally or physically shred one another’s ears. Ailurin, like any other language, had slang, but these days it seemed to be changing faster than Rhiow could keep track of. This word, at least, she could tell wasn’t complimentary.

  “Not all of them,” Arhu said. “Rhi, you have fans.”

  His tone, on the surface, was teasing: but there was something a little uneasy about it as well. Rhiow flirted an unconcerned tail at him. “Around here I wouldn’t be too concerned about that,” she said. “I daresay they’ve got more than enough shes to keep them busy in this neighborhood, and not sth’heih ones, either.” It was the Ailurin word that best translated the ehhif concept “spayed.”

  “Not all of them care,” Arhu said. “Looks like some People don’t care whether a queen smells shaih or not – “

  She turned around in mid-step and cuffed Arhu hard, then instantly regretted it. I might have slept in, but not enough, perhaps… “Mend your language, kit,” she said, turning back to continue following in Urruah’s wake: but as she turned she caught the glance that Arhu had caught, from the darkness deep inside one of the unloaded scenery crates. Pale eyes, wide, looking at her with an expression she could make nothing of: as if she was some kind of bizarre alien creature, dangerous but nonetheless peculiarly desirable –

  She looked away, walked a little faster. “Like I said,” Arhu said under his breath.

  “Don’t judge,” Rhiow said under her breath. “We have comfortable enough lives, and we know what we’re for, and have work to do that we enjoy. Who knows if that Person does? Who knows what he suffers, or enjoys, without talking to him? There’s more to a life than the way it looks. Don’t make decisions about him because he stares.”

  Arhu flirted his tail at her in that I-don’t-care way he had when he did care, but didn’t feel like pressing his case with her. She rolled her eyes and went on along behind Jath, following him and Urruah over to the far back corner of the fly area, down a little low-ceilinged concrete-walled hallway, and through a small open door.

  Rhiow stopped there, looking in shock at the furnishings of the room, which consisted of two ceramic receptacles, one on the floor and one on the wall. “Urruah,” she said. “In their toilet?”

  “No fear of a crowd of them walking into this transit circle, is there?” Urruah said, cheerful. The wizardry blazed up through the white square-tiled floor as they watched.

  “Your ingenuity knows no bounds,” Rhiow said, and this was true, though the Speech itself didn’t necessarily have to convey her sarcasm as well. “Aufwi?”

  Aufwi stepped on the circle and spoke to it briefly in the Speech, laying in the required coordinates. “Let’s go…”

  All it took was a step, and then everything was changed: from the harsh white glare of a single downhanging bulb, and the strange decayed-violet smell of old ehhif siss, to the glare of bright direct sun under a peculiarly open-seeming sky, and a wind laden with the sharp bimetallic taste of city-by-the-sea, as well as a brown hint of smog. Rhiow glanced around her to see if someone was about to trip over her, but no ehhif were anywhere near: the plaza in which they all stood was a near-empty desert of blazing white paving.

  Without warning, Aufwi began to curse. Rhiow looked at him in surprise, and Arhu and Siff’hah stared, for his vocabulary was starting to resemble theirs in both filthiness and vehemence. He caught Rhiow’s look, though, and tried to restrain himself. “It’s not fair,” Aufwi said, his tail lashing furiously and his ears down near-flat. “Where’s the vhai’d thing gone now??”

  “What?” Rhiow said. “The gate? You didn’t leave it out here, did you?”

  “Of course not! But I can feel that it’s not where I did leave it!” Aufwi stared all around him, as if expecting the gate to pop up through the ground. “It was inside the station, down by the Red Line tracks. I’ve been trying to train it by putting it back in the same spot every time it jumps…”

  Urruah laughed, that ironic sound of his again. “Might work with a gate that’s part of a complex and has some rootedness associated with it,” he said, “but not with one that hasn’t spawned yet. Nice try, though. Take a breath and see if you can feel where it’s gone.”

  Aufwi glanced over at Urruah and then relaxed, his ears gradually coming up and his whiskers going forward. Rhiow found herself wondering how easygoing Fefssuh had actually been with his protégé when his supervisors, of whom Rhiow was merely the latest, were not around. How many times has this kit had his ears boxed for something that wasn’t his fault, I wonder? I really must see about that internship…

  Aufwi had gone a little unfocused for the moment, hunting in mind for his gate. Rhiow left him to it, turning to look around the plaza. Here, too, the ehhif weekend meant that few human commuters were around, and there was leisure to admire the broad handsome vista of new buildings spreading back from the central, old one, a massive white stucco structure with its peaked roof done in red tile, accompanied by a massive white campanile clock-tower. This place had become nearly moribund once, years before Rhiow’s time: it had actually seen a time when only two trains a day came through it. Then the city’s ehhif saw sense and started to rebuild their local rail system, routing it through here and awakening Union Station from its long slumber.

  “It’s all right,” Aufwi said then. “I’ve got it. It’s as I thought: it’s slipped over to Olvera Street again. It likes it there,” he said, turning to Rhiow. “That’s the oldest part of the city, and it seems kind of torn as to where it wants to be – over there, or over here in the oldest transport center.”

  Rhiow put her whiskers forward, for here once again was fuel for that oldest debate: were gates alive? Wizardries so complex often started to display some of the characteristics of life – they required energy, they reacted to stimuli, they r
eproduced – and, especially in the case of worldgates, they seemed to start to acquire some sense of what they were for. “Is it far?” she said.

  “Across the street,” Aufwi said. “Come on.”

  He led the way across the plaza to where it ended in a drop-off space for cars and buses, and a set of traffic lights. The distance was what for Rhiow would have been more like four or five short city blocks: but out here, ehhif built their roads on a larger scale than Manhattan would ever have allowed. They waited for the traffic roaring by to cease, and then trotted hurriedly across the six lanes to the long line of handsome white buildings on the far side.

  There were far more ehhif over here, even at this time of the morning; Aufwi led Rhiow and the group in the wake of some of them, under a high wide white-stucco arch and through into a long pedestrianized space, itself like a small street sheltered on both sides by a double line of stucco buildings, mostly low and red-tiled, though much older-looking than Union Station had been.

  “This looks like it’s been here for a while,” Urruah said, glancing up and down the pedestrian precinct, and sniffing. Down to their left, a long line of little stalls in the middle of the precinct stretched down toward its far end: and some of them, to judge by the scent of grills firing up, were getting ready to open for business.

  “A few hundred years,” Aufwi said. He was sniffing too, but for something else. “A long time, as ehhif here reckon it – they don’t seem to have been able to keep much else from that period around. Torn down, or buried, or worn out and forgotten… Aha! There we are. Same as last time – “

  He led them down toward the center of the pedestrian precinct, past shops hung with bright-colored ornaments, past splashing fountains and old adobe houses festooned with lush green grapevines. In a mostly-paved circle at the heart of it all stood pedestals bearing statues of formal-looking ehhif of ancient days: these alternated with tall handsome trees whose downsweeping branches and leaves gave off a spicy fragrance. There, under one of the biggest trees, on the south side of the circle, Rhiow caught the daylight-subdued shimmer of a sheet of interwoven hyperstrings. The worldgate hung there apparently from a branch of the tree that was outthrust about eight feet from the ground, looking for all the world like some ehhif’s laundry hung out to dry.

  “Now there you are,” Aufwi said to the gate, stalking over to it, and then walking slowly around it and looking it over carefully. “How am I supposed to take proper care of you when you misbehave like this? Huh?”

  Rhiow turned her head away so that Aufwi wouldn’t see her put her whiskers so far forward that they were in danger of falling right off. “Aufwi,” Urruah said, and Rhiow could hear him struggling to keep his own laughter under control, “maybe you could take a moment off from scolding your problem child to pull out the diagnostic structures and take it offline. Then we can have a look and see what seems to be biting it.”

  It was Aufwi’s turn to laugh, then. “Sure,” he said, and reared up on his haunches, reaching up to the downhanging gateweave –

  Something kicked the world, hard.

  At least that was Rhiow’s first sense of what was happening. It was like being in a building that had been hit by a truck. But they were not in a building, and there were no trucks, and the shock nevertheless went right up through her legs and jolted her so that she nearly fell over where she stood. Half in panic, she staggered and tried to get back her balance, staring around at the others. Arhu and Siff’hah were crowded together, half supporting each other, their ears back and all their fur standing on end: Urruah’s tail was fluffed out to easily five times its normal size: Jath’s eyes were so wide that Rhiow thought they were going to pop out of his head. “What in the Queen’s Name was that?” Rhiow said, shaking all over as she managed to stand upright again.

  “Only a little one,” Aufwi said. Not only had he not fallen over, he was still up on his haunches with his claws in the gate’s strings: as she watched, he pulled out the “master function” hyperstring and twisted it until the weave of the gate faded to nearly nothing in the bright air, signaling its deactivated mode. “No problem.”

  Rhiow’s eyes went wide. “That was an earthquake? A little earthquake? Powers that Be preserve us from a big one!”

  “That’s what we’re working on,” Aufwi said. The sheerly unruffled quality of his demeanor astonished her. He gets nervous about being yowled at a little, but the world moves under him and he shrugs his tail? Rhiow thought. “Seriously, Rhiow, that one wasn’t bad. I’d make it no more than, oh, a four point five.” His face was as casual as that of a Person asked to rate a given brand of People food. “These little short-sharp-shock ones are no big deal: one bang and it’s all over. You want a quake, you want one of the ones where the ground sort of rolls underneath you, the ones with the big transverse waves–”

  “I do not want them,” Rhiow said, “any of them, thank you very much!” She looked all around her. “I thought I heard some things falling–”

  “Oh, sometimes a piece of stucco’ll fall off down here,” Aufwi said. “But not much more. The ehhif who built these houses, they were smart – they knew what they were dealing with. Nothing more than a storey or two high, small windows, long low buildings that hug the ground so there’s not so far to fall–”

  “They’ll have felt this where the buildings are a lot taller,” Urruah said, glancing westward to where the towers and spires of “downtown” Los Angeles rose.

  Aufwi put his head to one side, listening to the Whisperer. “No serious damage,” he said after a moment. “Some cracks in walls, some minor injuries from things falling on People or ehhif. And things look all right around here.” He looked up at the bright sky, waved his tail. “’Just another day in Paradise…’”

  Rhiow had her doubts that this was anything like Timeheart, either the ehhif version or her own, if such occurrences were commonplace. And without warning, the hair stood up all over her again. Oh, stop that, what’s the matter with me today –

  Something kicked the world again: and this time, the kick felt much harder. Rhiow’s heart felt like it was seizing inside her. Knowing what was happening wasn’t making the experience any easier to deal with: it was making it worse. Rhiow wanted to yowl in terror, and barely managed to restrain herself as she staggered for balance. Iau Queen of Everything, help me hang on —

  “Aftershock – !” Aufwi said, as Rhiow and the others tried to keep from falling over. “Don’t worry, only four point one or so that time – “

  In front of them, the near-invisible gate shivered all over like the back of a Person who’d been bitten by a flea. The gate’s weft writhed, puckered, writhed again –

  Someone came through and fell to the ground.

  They all stared.

  It was a Person. He was black all over, nearly as black as Rhiow, but exposure to much sun or the natural cast of his coat was letting all the usually-concealed tabby markings show through the darkness of the fur. He was dusty and rather thin, a long-faced, long-legged tom with tilted brass-yellow eyes. “Oh, thank Iau,” he said, gasping as if with exertion as he picked himself up, “I got it right. I didn’t want to keep you waiting. I didn’t, did I? There’s no time to lose – “

  He had the air of a Person hanging on with every claw to keep himself from going frantic. His tongue went in and out over his nose three or four times in a row as he tried to get his composure, staring around him. “But it’s really going to be all right now,” the tom said then, looking from one to another of them, and last of all his eyes came to rest on Rhiow. “I made it. I’m here. I’m on errantry, and in need and haste I greet you – “

  It was a form of the Avedictory that Rhiow had only rarely heard used — the one meant to convey utmost urgency. “Cousin,” she said, “tell us your name, and tell us how we can help you.”

  “Hwaith,” he said. “I’m Hwaith. Our gate is malfunctioning, the LA gate – “

  “But it’s fine,” Aufwi said, glancing up at it.


  “The kind of fine that means People can come through it after you’ve shut it down?” Urruah said. “I’d say that is the wrong kind of fine.”

  But Hwaith was already lashing his tail “no”. “Not that one,” he said, and licked his nose again, nervous. “My Los Angeles gate.”

  Rhiow’s eyes went wide. “Hwaith, you’ve timeslid, haven’t you? When are you from?”

  “2432022.873981,” Hwaith said.

  At the sound of the middle three digits before the decimal point, Rhiow blinked, then said silently to the Whisperer, Would you check me on this?

  A twenty-digit conversion of the Julian date was slipped into her mind, including cognates in ehhif and cetacean eras. Rhiow blinked again. Are you sure? she said silently.

  Inside her head, the Mistress of the Whispering made a small demure coughing sound like someone giving polite warning that she was getting ready to dispose of a hairball, or a ridiculous question. Sorry, Rhiow said, for one did not casually query the soundness of the advice of Hrau’f the Silent when on errantry. Sorry, reflex…

  “That would be nineteen forty-six, as the ehhif make it,” Rhiow said. “Cousin, you know the rules about front-timing – “

  “And you know it’s impossible in the first place if someone from the front-time hasn’t given you the necessary coordinates and conditionals,” he said. “You did that. Will do it.”

  “Not without a fair amount of explaining,” Urruah said.

  “And the Powers have sanctioned it,” Hwaith said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. Please, cousins, you’re needed to put right what’s gone wrong! You’re the answer.”

  This response left Rhiow, as usual, very unnerved as to the possible nature of the question. But at least this was a nervousness she knew what to do about – unlike having the Earth move under her. “What’s needed, Hwaith?” she said. “What’s the problem?”

  He looked at her for a moment as if wondering where to begin. “Something’s trying to subvert our gate,” he said. “Something that wants to use it for its own purposes.”