The Big Meow - Diana Dueyn

“There wouldn’t be much point in me asking that,” Rhiow said, glancing down for a moment to keep her audience from seeing the anger she feared was beginning to show in her eyes. “But for your host’s sake – to lengthen the life of your world, which would surely be a good thing for you – if you could be a little less invasive as regards the nerves – ”

An indignant rustle went through the tumor clumps and cells surrounding her. “Whatchoo talkin’ about?” their voice said, and for just that moment Rhiow had to keep her head down as a spasm of annoyed amusement sparked through her, a memory of Urruah imitating a bad New York gangster-accent he’d picked up from one of his ffihlms. “You’re talkin’ about our communications system, here! You start messing with that, we don’t know where we are any more! If we don’t know where we’ve been, we don’t know where we should be going! Bad enough the world slows down that way over and over, you want to make it worse? Forget about it!”

They don’t like the painkillers, Rhiow thought. Interesting. Is it possible that some ehhif cancers use not just the blood and the lymphatic system for signaling, but the nervous system too? Maybe by some change in the proteins — ? It wouldn’t have surprised her. But there was little time to confer with the Whisperer on the subject at the moment, especially as the crowd around her rustled again, and this time the rustle came with a slight motion toward her.

“We’ve got our own way of doing things here,” said the buzzing voice, more loudly, more angrily. “It’s worked for a long long time. It’s gonna keep working.”

“Of course it will,” Rhiow said. “But it could work even better if you’d consider giving this approach a try.” She glanced around her at the tumor-shapes, putting everything she could into the appeal, even though the appeal was directed at something that wanted nothing more than to reproduce explosively at the cost of the very lifeform that made the explosion possible.

“Don’t need to try anything new,” said one voice. “We’re doin’ what we were built to do.”

“Buzz off, lady,” said a third. “We need those nerves. We’ve got a lot of growing to do here. We need every scrap of this space, everything here.”

“Gotta own it all.”

“You want some turf? Go somewhere else, mess around with somebody else’s. You can’t have ours.”

Rhiow was finding it a lot harder than she’d expected to respond rationally to the tumors and the malignant cells, to do a wizard’s job and retain her equanimity. But that was just the problem here. In this idiom, they were not just clinically malignant, but personally so. They had no intention of listening to her. Though they were Life, to which her final allegiance was sworn, their twisted kind of Life had had all the light sucked out of it. The “bad neighborhood” was intent on swallowing the whole city: it was the final expression of a body angry with the soul that lived in it for a long life of abuse, and now taking its revenge. Yet she had to try. “One last chance,” Rhiow said. “There is always one last chance to make a new choice, to turn away from the old path and make a new one. Remission — ”

The tumor-ehhif and their rat-pets growled, all as one, and shuffled in closer around her. Not good, Rhiow thought, not good at all. Time to go…

Lost, said that fat red moon hanging down over the end of Thirty-Third where it ran into a river of blood. The moon, all blotched with sa’Raahh’s footprints, had swollen to five or six times its normal size; and it was in the Shadowed One’s voice that it spoke now. You’ve lost another one, and through you, so has She. I wonder why you even bother trying any more.

Rhiow refused to listen to that dark Whispering. In the back of her mind was a spell that she’d left ready, a focused jolt of bioelectricity that would recharge quickly from the Silent Man’s own resources. But is it going to be strong enough to handle these things? Rhiow wondered now, for she truly hadn’t thought the cancer would be so aggressive. I might be able to pull more power out of him and into the spell, but can I do it without hurting him?

“Be warned by me,” Rhiow said. “Though your path is ill-chosen, you are yet in some manner my cousins and I must give you fair warning. I will defend –”

They rushed her. Rhiow started to back out but found nowhere to back to: they were behind her, blocking her way out, and the ones coming at her from front and sides reached out to hold her. Well enough, she thought, Rhiow closed her eyes, felt in her mind for the spell, and shouted its last word in the Speech –

In this dimness, it was just as well her eyes were closed, for the flash would have blinded her. Rhiow felt the pressure of the clinging tumor-things fall away. Opening her eyes, she saw that the space around her had opened out a little, and the tumor clusters and mobile cells were shivering and flickering with crackles of afterlight from the discharge. She could feel the spell charging up again in the back of her mind, but Rhiow wasn’t going to wait. She crouched and leaped over the heads of the nearest malignancies –

Something out of the crowd, an oozing loop of tissue, shot up, wrapped around her and yanked her down. A second later Rhiow was down on the ground, half blinded in the sooty fog rising up again from street level. She was quickly weighed down, more and more heavily, as the tumors piled up on top of her. Rhiow struggled, feeling them pushing blobs of tissue at her, probing, poking. The poking got sharper.

Rhiow’s mind flared up in terror, for if she was physically present enough in this scenario to affect these things, they could affect her in turn – and they were looking for a way to implant something of themselves in her –

Not today you don’t!! Instead of resisting the weight of them, she gave in to it – then, in the moment of surprise that followed, Rhiow rolled and lashed out with her claws, slicing, kicking. A high thin shrieking came from somewhere in the pile of wet slobbery tissue that lay atop her: the tumor-creatures closest tried to ooze away. As the pressure lessened, Rhiow managed to roll again, got her feet under her. The spell was ready, recharged. She cried its last word again –

More shrieking as she struggled to her feet and looked for clear space to jump into: but there was none except right around her, and even that space wasn’t as big as it had been before. Either they’ve gotten used to it, or it’s just not strong enough. Rhiow’s whole pelt was shivering with revulsion at the touch of the tumor-things as they came at her again. If I jump another time, the same thing’s going to happen, Rhiow thought as she crouched. No other way out of this. I’ve got to turn up the juice in this spell. I’ll try not to harm him, but —

A sudden new burst of shrieking came from the far edge of the crowd that was around her. The attention of the tumor-creatures turned that way. Rhiow reared up on her hind legs and began slashing at them again, batting at them as if they were unusually large rats, but also peering desperately past them to see what was happening.

Off at the edge of the ugly crowd, she caught side of a shadow, a Person, fighting toward her, small malignancies and large crowding away as it came. For a moment Rhiow thought she was looking at someone’s restatement of legend, for where the Person’s claws should have been there were ferocious cracklings of light like the aftereffect of her own spell. Urrau Lighning-claw?! Rhiow thought, confused by the apparition, yet entirely welcome to have a demigod mix in. But the lightning was understated, as if whoever was coming had understood that any wizardry used had to be carefully tempered in this scenario. Whoever was coming was doing most of the work with his paws, and plainly had a gift for it. The tumor-things were flying from his blows, and though they tried to rush and smother him down as they had Rhiow, they weren’t getting close enough to get a chance.

Rhiow started fighting her way toward the newcomer, and though she might not have been physically as strong as the other, her attackers’ attention was divided now. Shortly there were only three or four layers of the ehhif-like tumor creatures between the two of them, and then just two. Rhiow bashed in the heads of the remaining few that were right before her, and could now see the other Person’s face. Two eyes, not one, she thought a little irrationally. Not Urrua, then. And not Urruah either, for this Person was slenderer, and nearly as black as she was.

Hwaith?!

In the unnatural light he was somehow burning dark, and every claw was out, all glinting far brighter than they should in that ugly red light. He spun where he stood, and all the malignancies around them backed away a little as he slashed at them. Time to go, wouldn’t you say? Hwaith said.

Rhiow glanced around at the crowd pressing in and couldn’t see any other course of action that made sense. Both of us or nothing, she said, making one small vital change to the spell lying in the back of her head.

That would be my plan too. Ready?

Ready!

Hwaith inflated himself to what seemed three times any Person’s right size, and let out a hiss that sounded like an understreet steam-main breaking. The malignancies tumbled over one another to get away. As they did, Rhiow licked her nose nervously – though there was no way around what she had to do — and then cried out the last word of the spell one last time. Light flashed and sizzled blindingly all around them, far brighter than the last two times. The malignancies fell to the ground, twitching.

Rhiow and Hwaith exchanged one quick triumphant glance over the bodies of their enemies. And then Rhiow, looking past Hwaith, realized in shock that not only the malignancies were twitching. So were the buildings all around them. “Uh – ” she said.

Even as she spoke, the nearest one started coming down in an ugly wet slumping-into-the-street that she had no desire to be anywhere near. “Come on!” Rhiow cried, and the two of them leapt over the fallen malignancies, came down again on some of them, jumped again, hissing and spitting in disgust, and fled down the street among the still-twitching bodies of many more.

A few seconds later, that part of Thirty-Third Street was all one puddle of shivering, blood-dark ooze. Behind them as they ran in the direction of Broadway, more of the buildings fell, and still more, in a series of slurping, liquid collapses. The nearer buildings, with more solid material in them, still shook unnervingly but eventually settled. By the time they hit Broadway, and areas representative of parts of the Silent Man that were still undamaged, everything had solidified and stood still and quiet. But that unsettling red moon still stared down Thirty-Third at them, glaring and sullen, like the eye of a Person who has been argued into silence for the moment but intends to come back to the subject later.

Rhiow stood there a moment, looking down the street, and then shook herself all over. “That was completely disgusting, and I need a bath,” she said, aware that she probably sounded pitiful, and for the moment not caring.

“Yes it was,” Hwaith said. “And so do I. So let’s get out of here.”

Rhiow sighed. “But one thing first. We have to stop in Times Square.”

“All right.”

They walked it, not hurrying, seeing the dark city start coming back to life around them, at least in the Silent Man’s dream-image of his inner self: real ehhif walking the streets again, real traffic rolling, traffic lights changing, the brilliance of the glare of the intersection of Broadway and Eighth Avenue reasserting itself. Hwaith just walked by Rhiow, not demanding explanations or doing much of anything but look around at the surroundings and their fellow pedestrians as they went: men in fedoras and pretty women on their arms, others wearing long dark coats and furtive looks, ducking into the stairwells of below-ground apartments or meeting to whisper on streetcorners. The stores began to have lights again, the shadows crept aside out of the street to huddle in their proper places in doorways and side alleys, and finally Rhiow and Hwaith came out into the brilliance of Times Square.

There Rhiow made her way over to the front of One Time Square, still in this time the home of the newspaper. Around it the news ticker showing nothing but periods kept making its placid way. Here, as she reached out with a string-manager’s energy detection senses into the heart of the Silent Man’s city-as-self-image, Rhiow knew she would find the conduits for the strictly pain-sensing aspects of his nervous system. Like much else in the City, they were buried under the road: she could see them there, long bundled lines, glowing with the messages they carried.

“Bear with me a for a second,” Rhiow said to Hwaith, sat down, and closed her eyes. Once settled, she ran her consciousness down into the conduits and tried to make some choices about which ones to affect and which to leave alone. The problem was that the Silent Man’s sensorium as a whole was extraordinarily interwoven as far as pain was concerned. But then all his life’s been about sensing what’s going on with those around him – rooting out their pain and nailing it down on paper. It’s all wound up with who he is and what he does: channeling that pain…

Nonetheless, for the sake of what he would be doing in company with them over the days to come, Rhiow did what she had to. She spoke the words in the Speech that would reset the Silent Man’s afferent nerves’ sensitivity to pain stimuli to a somewhat lower level. Finishing, she opened her eyes and saw, all around her, the glare of Times Square dimming down. Only the periods on the “zipper” sign kept their brilliance: but the rest of the place gently dulled itself down to something that resembled a brownout. The shadows that had been chased to the edges of things started to creep back.

Rhiow was aware of Hwaith looking at her: but he didn’t say anything. She sighed. “It won’t last,” Rhiow said after a few moments. “He’ll get some relief initially, and he’ll have some more energy to call on as a result. But he’s too much about being a raw nerve, aware of everything all the time, to let it stay this way.”

“He’ll dissolve it himself before you even go, maybe,” Hwaith said, sounding a little sad.

Rhiow flicked one ear “yes”. “In the meantime, we’ve done what we need to,” she said. “Let’s go.” She closed her eyes again.

*

When she reopened them, Rhiow was shocked by how bright everything seemed. But after a few moments’ blinking she realized that the room was in almost exactly the same shade of morning twilight as she’d left it. She had been inside the Silent Man’s other self for no more than twenty minutes.

Over by the door she spied a dark shadow against the room’s light colors: Hwaith. Listen, she said silently, so as not to awaken either the Silent Man or Sheba, how long have you been there?

Since a little after you started, I think.

On guard…

Yes. Until it was obvious I was could make myself more useful elsewhere.

Thank you.

Rhiow jumped down off the windowsill, but came down harder than she’d intended, feeling a little faint. The noise of her landing’s thump made the Silent Man stir a little.

She could have hissed at her own clumsiness, but that would have disturbed the Silent Man and Sheba too. Rhiow staggered a little, found her footing, headed toward the door.