The Big Meow - Diana Dueyn

A long, long silence then.

“So I’ll take that as a yes,” Rhiow said, and went back to washing.

The quiet all around her was most ominous. But Rhiow kept washing. She was not the most passionate player of hauissh, but she had the wit to know when she was sitting in the best position she’d ever held in such a game, and she intended to enjoy it.

She put her leg down and paused for a moment as if considering where to wash next. “In any case,” Rhiow said, “I wouldn’t want you to be overly concerned. I think Urruah and the boys have our solution sorted out now.”

Their little plan? Amusing. Even satisfactory, on the merely physical level. But it won’t work without Me.

Rhiow was instantly intent on not revealing the effect this declaration was having on her, particularly the word “satisfactory”. “You would say that, of course,” Rhiow said, “to save face, if nothing else.” She regarded one forepaw and started licking it idly.

The Outside One has managed minor breaches into our realities before, sa’Rraah said. But these have always been merely local: one universe or another. And always it has been driven out, and the breaches sealed. Eventually the Outside One came to know that only with the active assistance of one of the resident Powers could It break through right across the sheaf of sheaves of worlds, and make the breakthrough permanent. Even so It would have to put forth all Its strength. For if It failed, It would never be able to make such an attempt again, and must remain confined to the Outermost Darkness forever.

Rhiow started washing the side of one paw, then scrubbed behind her ear with it. So?

So even as junior a wizard as you should understand that there’s a spiritual component to this problem, said the Lone Power. It can’t be omitted from any potential solution. The One Outside, insofar as such a vast unliving negation can be said to want anything, wants to be a god. As part of our agreement… I suggested that It could be shown how. Therefore, as It attempts Its incursion, it expects me to confer upon It…

“Godhead?” Rhiow said. “Oh, come on!”

I had some training for the position, sa’Rraah said. Our worlds’ cosmogony had a different prospective direction once, before our Royal Dam overreacted to something I invented.

Rhiow rolled her eyes.

But I was being trained as a possible replacement for Her, the Lone One said, in case the rigors of running a universe should require such. Didn’t you know?

Rhiow thought this sounded very like a lie, and remembered who’d also come up with that invention. “I didn’t,” she said. “But what you’re suggesting is that the One Outside expects this gift from you… and you have in mind to give It something else entirely. The opposite of what it’s expecting.”

Whatever. I’ve certainly convinced It that It needs to become physical before It can be a god. The Lone One shrugged her tail. That’s such a popular trope, after all.

“And It swallowed that?”

We’ll soon find out.

“That’s a pretty glib answer for such a tall order,” Rhiow said. “Maybe the tallest order anyone’s ever seen. And what proof can you offer me that what you say is true?”

None that your tiny mortal brain could hold, the Lone One said. But even you have to admit that what faces us now is worse by far than anything I might inflict on the worlds by Myself. Yes, My agenda remains. Yet if this course of events goes forward, there’s an end to agendas for all of us, and for all time. If I play hauissh with the Queen and the worlds to their detriment, well, that’s My business. But what’s trying to happen now would end all games in the same darkness. There’s no profit in that for Me.

It all sounded very smooth and too-plausible until the last word. And there some claw of certainty snagged Rhiow’s ear and held her still a moment That selfishness, that certainty that the world could be drowned in darkness unless it suited Her plan, rang absolutely true – regardless of how much sa’Rraah mostly disliked truth, her divine Dam’s invention.

The realization made Rhiow lick her nose again, several times. “Well enough,” she said. “But why should you come to me with such a proposal. We have quite a lot of history together – “

History is the very point, sa’Rraah said. You have borne the Queen Herself inside you, in the flesh and in Her strength, for however brief a time — and lived to tell the tale. Such a passage, the cosmic irony of the merely mortal kitling bearing her Queen and Mother inside her, will have strengthened you in ways you wouldn’t understand – but gods would. And whether it’s by chance or some cursed plan of Hers, no one else would have the strength to bear Me in the same wise. And once again the absolute insufferable pride rang true, and nearly made Rhiow laugh.

“And what gift are you offering me if I fall in with your plans and actually do this insane thing?” Rhiow said. “Normally there’d be an temptation suitable to the size of the work.”

None, said the Lone One. Except that the worlds, and the Queen, will survive, and the normal state of play can be resumed after this interloper has been seen off.

Now Rhiow did laugh, and though she felt the Lone Power bristle at the sound, she couldn’t bring herself to care. “Fairest and Fallen, this still sounds entirely like a plot to make sure that the darkness does fall, by housing Yourself in me and then rendering me unable to lead my team against you and the greater darkness. Indeed, maybe that’s why you whispered Laurel’s name to me earlier – as part of the wider plot, to make me trust you when you broached this mad idea to me. Allow us a small victory – but knowing that was all it would be, the way one of us would lift a paw to let the mouse run and think it’s free before the final blow. A fine fool the Queen would think me if I fell for such a ploy after everything we’ve been through with you in the past…!”

Pulling sa’Rraah’s whiskers in such a way was reckless business, and Rhiow waited for the scorned fury and the lightnings to break loose, revealing the true intention underneath. But it didn’t happen. There was merely a long pause, and then the darkness said, with an outwardly affronted air, Whether you’re a fool or no, that’s between you and the Queen. But I tell you that She Herself has no better plan. Ask, and see.

And everything went quiet as that unseen presence withdrew.

Rhiow sat there in the dark of dream for some time, waiting for an afterword, some rebuttal from other levels of reality. But nothing came. At last she said to the Whisperer, Well, your sister’s voluble today. And you have nothing to say on this subject? No advice?

The silence was deafening. Rhiow couldn’t recall having heard anything like it before. It was not the waiting quiet the Whisperer allowed you to hear when She expected you to figure something out for yourself. It was straightforward uncertainty. Whatever words the Lone One might have for Rhiow in this pass, the Queen had none. And as for sa’Rraah, there had been more than mere indignation behind her riposte. The Lone Power was afraid, and – again, absolutely in character for her – unwilling to show it: for among a People for whom pride was normally no sin, sa’Rraah carried enough of it around inside Her skin for an entire species. Not even now, not even with worlds at stake, would She admit either Her own impotence or Her fear of what was to come.

So, Rhiow thought. So it’s true.

And after this sank in, Rhiow laid her ears right back at the unfairness of it all. So once more I’m expected to carry a whole world out of trouble by the scruff, she said to both the Queen and the Lone One. More than just a world! – or so it seems, if I’m not actually being tricked into the worlds’ destruction.

The unbroken silence did not help her composure. She was fuming. If we survive this, she shouted into the Void, I want a sabbatical! Do you hear me??

Silence still; but Rhiow thought she was heard.

She curled up and lay down again. “Now if I can just get some sleep out of this sleep,” she said to the darkness, “I’ll see what can be done…”

Nerves woke her up early, as she’d half expected. It was early afternoon, and outside the sun was shining on the palm trees and the bougainvillea flowers as if the world wasn’t about to end.

Stop thinking like that… she thought. She got up, stretched fore and aft, and sat on the window for a moment, watching a hummingbird visit the flowers one after another with methodical and singleminded thoroughness.

Her mind went back to the last things under discussion before she’d slept. Urruah and his solutions…. Yet she hadn’t thought that his solution to moving the Penn gate would work, either: and it had. That seemed ‘so tommish’, too… Now she had even more evidence that Urruah was on the right track: sa’Rraah’s somewhat grudging description of the plan as “satisfactory.”

Assuming that I too am not being played…

But the Whisperer had been silent… and there came a point where you had to set paranoia aside and act. Rhiow jumped down from the windowsill, pulled the door open with one paw, and strolled down the hall.

The living room was a hive of wizardly activity, with spell circles laid out on the floor and Siffha’h, Urruah, Hwaith, and Aufwi working on various tasks: while Helen Walks Softly still sat on the floor looking the work over, and the Silent Man sat at his desk making hurried notes on something. At the edge of the circle Rhiow stood for a moment, looking at it unfocused to get a general idea of what was going on: then sat down and washed her face, acutely aware of the others watching her.

She let them wait, hunting for the right words. Then she lifted her head.

“All right,” Rhiow said at last. “Where’s a good place to make a last-ditch attempt to save the known and unknown universes?”

Her team looked at one another with satisfaction: and Hwaith caught her eye.

“Griffith Park?” he said. “There’s a great view from Mount Hollywood…”

“Fine,” Rhiow said. “We have a lot to do in a hurry besides our own setup. There are all the planet’s Regional-level and higher wizards to speak to; they’ll already know from the Powers and their manuals, in a general way, what the threat is and what’s being done about it. But we’ll need to let them know the specifics, now, and help them start preparing to preserve and protect their own pieces of the world.” She looked over at Hwaith. “And I need to talk to the Planetary,” she said. “If things on Earth get too damaged, the kindest thing may be for him or her to pull the plug.”

“I’ll get started on that,” Aufwi said, and vanished.

“You, naturally,” Rhiow said to Urruah, “won’t have been wasting time while I was off side…”

Urruah waved his tail at the spell structure he’d been working on since Rhiow had gone to sleep.

“You’ve been busy…” she said. The circle contained all the worldgate variables sourced from the attempted manifestation in the cavern, which the Whisperer’s more automated functions had thoughtfully stored for them.

He shrugged his tail in agreement. “I’ve got four redundant power containment structures built in here,” he said. “If one blows out, we’ve got room to fail.”

“Don’t say that word tonight,” Rhiow said, looking over the diagram. “Robust,” she agreed. “It’ll need to be. But why four? Three’s the normal arrangement.”

“’Three’s the charm,’” Helen said from one side, “that’s what they say in the West. But it’s my land, my cultural substrate, we’re anchoring this to. And in my people’s linguistic and cosmogonic traditions, the ‘fulfillment number’ is four. Four directions. Four winds.” She grinned. “Four feet.”

Rhiow flicked an ear in amusement, turned her attention back to the diagram. “There’s Sif’s spot,” Urruah said, indicating one sub-circle. “She’s already laid a lot of power into the basic structures, just in case something knocks her back and leaves her needing time to take a breath. Other than that – “ He waved a paw at the tightly inwritten analysis circles, completely full of a compact spiral of tiny Speech-characters. “Those have all the data about the structure of the black gating last night, both what the Whisperer got and what Aufwi and Hwaith derived from direct contact. We can match it up and scale it up to a thousand times more than last night’s power.” He turned a concerned look on her. “Which is the only thing that bothers me. Even Sif can only do so much. Power…”

“You leave that with me,” Rhiow said. “I have an alternate source. …And this – ” She indicated one circle that was dark and empty while everything else was glowing in test mode.

“That’s where the claudication will go,” he said. “Sif’s packing it now. ”

“With what?”

“A direct tap into the heart of a quasar,” said Siffha’h, who was off to one side, sitting in a small, densely interwritten circle of her own and gazing down at it thoughtfully as a power gauge display slowly crept toward half full. “The Whisperer said she had a spare one that she wasn’t using for anything.”

Rhiow gave Urruah a sideways look. “She’s being cooperative…”

“The safeties are off, Rhi,” Urruah said. “We’re being given whatever we ask for. It feels a little weird…”

“If not now,” Rhiow said, “then when? Since if the Powers aren’t nice to us right now, there might not be a universe tomorrow… Good work, anyway. With that much power and that much mass packed into the portable claudication, when we shove it into the gate to start the eversion, it should be like nothing even Iau’s ever imagined.”

“Let’s hope so…” Urruah said.

Rhiow wandered out into the back yard. There were People eating the buffet on the concrete by the house, and Rhiow greeted them casually in passing: but most of them were fluffed up, and looking repeatedly over their shoulders between bites. This was due to the presence of Ith, who was reclining in the middle of the back lawn amid a scatter of white cold-cut wrappers. Beside him, Arhu lay on his back with his paws in the air and his gut visibly bulging.

“How much pastrami?” Rhiow said, looking with some dismay at all the garbage lying around.

“Not too much,” Ith said. “Only four or five pounds. It would not have been polite to deprive everyone else of their sandwiches…”

“You should clean this up,” Rhiow said. “You’ll attract rats.”

Ith gave her a droll look that wordlessly suggested rats were the very least of their problems.

“And you,” Rhiow said to Arhu. “Isn’t there something you should be doing? Something Sight-related?”

“Nothing to See right now, Rhi,” Arhu said. “It’s either all light, or all dark… So I’m taking the afternoon off.”

Rhiow snorted. “Greed and sloth,” she said. “No doubt the other ehhif sins will be along shortly…”

She strolled over to sit down by Ith’s head. “You’re likely to be the key to all this,” she said.

“I thought it more likely you would be,” he said.

Rhiow suddenly got the feeling that Ith knew about her conversation in the darkness with the Lone One. “We’ll have to see about that,” she said. “But your presence back here definitely changes things in our favor. Not even sa’Rraah anticipated the way you were going to come out of the Old Downside, or that you’d turn her Old Serpent avatar against her and drag it up with you into the Light. Now you’re not only the White Serpent, but also a living connection between the Old Downside and the other complex-state worlds ‘beneath’ the world, the foundations of Earth’s physical reality.”