The Big Meow - Diana Dueyn

“I bet you have to do that a lot back up at our end of things,” Arhu said. “Human wizards have to hide what they’re doing all the time…”

“Most of them do,” Helen said, looking down at herself and brushing at the skirt. “But for me it’s not as much of a problem as it is for most. I keep what I’m doing out of view, sure. But if I need some time off to do an intervention, I just tell my colleagues I’m going off to do some wizardry.” Then she laughed at Rhiow’s expression, and Arhu’s. “No, seriously! They know I’m Native American, and a shaman for my band. So anybody I mention it to thinks I’m just going off to do some New Age thing, with drumming or something.”

Rhiow waved her tail, impressed. “I bet a lot of your fellow ehhif wizards wish they had such a good excuse…”

“I’d take that bet,” Helen said, and grinned. “As for the clothes, though – they’re just me being lazy. I got into the habit when I was working Vice a few years ago. Couldn’t be bothered changing them again and again – especially with the clothes they were giving me: who knew where they’d been? — Anyway, Hwaith, will I fit in? How’s the style look?”

“Good,” Hwaith said. “Very modern.”

“That’s fine: I was shooting for just postwar,” Helen said. “So, as I said, I’ll go have some breakfast, wait for the library to open…see what I can pick up. If we’re going to split up, where should we meet up again afterwards?”

“Back up here, I’d say,” Rhiow said. “Aufwi, if anything gets out of hand up here, call and we’ll come running.”

She turned again to look at the gate, hanging there shimmering innocently in the predawn twilight, for all the world as if there had been nothing wrong with it at all. Yet… “I was told to root here,” Rhiow said under her breath, “’and here I will stay.’”

“Yes,” Hwaith said. He had come up beside her and was looking at the gate with an annoyed expression. “I heard something like that too.”

Which reminds me that there was one more thing I wanted to check. “Cousin,” Rhiow said then, “walk with me a little way?” And she headed uphill, under the shadow of more of the evergreen oaks, toward a lesser crest of the hill they stood on.

Hwaith looked at her oddly for a moment, then followed. Rhiow paused under the last of the trees before the upper hillcrest, and as Hwaith caught up with her, she said, Please, Hwaith, forgive me the familiarity –

It’s not a problem, he said silently. You have to ask: how are my relations with my gate?

She put her whiskers forward. You really do have the Ear, she said. And yes, I do have to ask. For gate management was not just a matter of mechanics, of knowing which string to pull, and when, and how hard. Gates were tremendously complex constructions incorporating the hyperstrings that were the Universe’s building-blocks with hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of words in the Speech which had made the Universe out of those building-blocks. Where such complexities had been sustained for prolonged periods, there was always a question of whether or not the construction incorporating them had acquired some level of sentience…and many gates acted as if they had. Where there was sentience, or the appearance of it, there was relationship: and sometimes relationships went bad.

Rhiow, I’ve been working with this gate for nearly seventy moons, Hwaith said. It’s never given me more than a moment’s trouble, from the first weeks I spent with it until a few weeks ago when it began to misbehave. And there was no sudden withdrawal of cooperation, no falling-out. He sat down, looked eastward: out there, slowly making itself apparent through the haze over the furthest line of hills, was the Great Tom’s Eye, what ehhif called the Moon, rising now, and half-closed. Just, at the end of the last moon, as the Eye started to go dark, a feeling that the gate’s attention was turning elsewhere. Or being turned. As if it was being increasingly distracted by something besides me and this world…something just out of the field of vision, the thing you feel with your whiskers and can’t see…

She looked at Hwaith, troubled by the trouble in those bronzy eyes. He glanced back, and lashed his tail once or twice, a frustrated gesture. Maybe if I’d called for help sooner, he said, none of this would be happening. Or it would have happened, and have been fixed by now. Have I been acting too much like a tom…?

The question caught Rhiow completely off guard…especially as it was one she couldn’t recall ever having been asked by a tom before: they didn’t tend toward self-analysis nearly as much as queens did. I don’t think so, she said at last. Which leaves us looking at the same problem, I suppose. ‘I was told to stay here.’ Told by whom?

“It’s the question I don’t seem to be able to find an answer to,” Hwaith said, aloud now. “And as you’ve heard, the Whisperer didn’t have one either. I suspect that’s what we’ve got to find out.”

She flicked one ear in unnerved agreement. “It’s when we most want concrete answers from Them that we don’t get any,” Rhiow said. “Annoying. But it’s the world we’ve got, until we fix it…so let’s get busy.”

She got up and shook herself, and saw Urruah coming up the hillside toward them. “’Ruah,” Rhiow said, “let’s take one last – “ Then she stopped: for Urruah had stopped too, and was staring at her. “What?” Rhiow said.

He started cursing under his breath, though in a good-natured way. “I can’t believe I’ve been here for an hour without seeing that!” Urruah said.

She waved her tail, confused. “Seeing what?”

“Look up there!”

Rhiow looked over her shoulder, confused. Dimly to be seen above and beyond her and Hwaith, silhouetted against the slow-growing twilight, a great flat pale oblong shape reared up and caught a very little of the cityglow from beneath them. Urruah seemed quite taken with it, though, and Rhiow had to stare at it for a moment before she recognized it as a squared-off version of the ehhif-English letter “D”. It looked to be in bad shape: the wood of which the letter had been built was streaked with bird droppings and pocked here and there with what looked like bullet holes; its white paint was peeling, and the whole letter leaned backwards against its supporting struts as if considering the virtues of falling down. There were light bulbs all round the letter, outlining it, but most of them were broken, and in any case the power to them seemed to have been switched off.

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, which 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 – “