The Big Meow - Diana Dueyn

“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.”

Jath looked annoyed. “The Lone Power,” he said.

“Again,” Arhu and Siff’hah said in cranky and slightly bored-sounding unison.

“No!” Hwaith said.

They all stared at him. “No,” Hwaith said again. “Something else. Something worse.”

“Worse than the Lone One?” Rhiow said, astounded.

Hwaith let out a long breath and sat down, his tail thumping on the ground. “Much worse,” he said. “Something from outside.”

Rhiow sat down too, the world rocking under her in a way that had nothing to do with the San Andreas Fault, but was nonetheless not much of an improvement. “Tell us,” she said…

The Big Meow: Chapter Three

“I know it sounds insane,” Hwaith said a few minutes later. The plaza at Olvera Street had already begun to fill up with more and more ehhif, so everyone had taken the simplest available option and climbed the biggest of the peppertrees, perching or couching themselves on one or another of the big thick outthrust branches twenty feet or so above the ground.

“Worse than the Lone Power…!” Arhu was muttering under his breath. He had to mutter louder than usual, as from maybe twenty feet above his head, and everyone else’s, various muted screeching and grinding-gear noises were coming from the many annoyed, glossy-black grackles in the tree, all now perched well out of reach and emitting avian curses.

“I know how it sounds. But think about it,” said Hwaith, glancing over at Rhiow as if hoping for support. “It’s evil, yes, and does evil, often enough, from our point of view: it’s entropy embodied, no arguing that. But at least it’s a force native to our sheaf of universes, something interior.”

“I’ll grant you,” Rhiow said, “things exterior to the sheaf wouldn’t be something I’d spend a lot of time thinking about on a daily basis.”

“Who would?” Hwaith said. “We have enough troubles inside.” He sat up and scratched emphatically behind one foreleg.

“I take it you’ve done all the usual diagnostics,” Urruah said. “And the problem’s not with the gate.”

“Let’s put it this way,” Hwaith said; “the problems we’ve been having aren’t the L.A. gate’s usual problems.” He glanced over at Aufwi: Aufwi put his ears back and looked away, a gesture of shared annoyance. “You know the way the thing jumps around. That was my first hint that something was going wrong: it started to stay put.”

Aufwi looked back, going rather wide-eyed with incredulity. “Where?” he said.

“Beechwood Canyon,” Hwaith said, “up by Mount Lee — just south of Mulholland Boulevard. It rolled up there one morning in the middle of an earthquake, and started putting a root down into the hillside.”

Aufwi looked dubious. “Normally I’d have gone right out and caught a rat for Queen Iau as a thank-offering,” he said. “Not like we haven’t been praying for a hundred years that the gate would eventually see fit to settle in someplace! But Mount Lee…?” His tail lashed. “Why on Earth? That’s too much offset for even this crazy gate. There’s no transport center there, and the population’s fairly sparse up that way even now! It’d just have been a couple of hillsides’ worth of brush, back in your time.”

“I don’t have answers for you,” Hwaith said, and his tail was lashing harder than Aufwi’s. “There hasn’t been time to find them. Right when the gate started trying to root, we started having earthquakes, cluster after cluster of them. At least five or six a day, some of them big kicks, some of them just little…but they had that ‘precursor’ feel to them, like they might be the heralds of something big. Half the wizards in L.A. dropped what they were doing and tried to deal with them, but they weren’t having much luck. The only thing that seemed to make a difference was about a week later, when I managed to pry the gate loose from where it was digging itself into the canyon and drag it back down here where it belonged. Then the quakes died down….”

“A coincidence, perhaps?” Rhiow said. “New Moon, or full? That would explain the week’s worth of increased activity–”

Hwaith gave her an exasperated look, and Rhiow glanced away, a touch embarrassed to see a newly-met wizard so openly fraught. “The Moon had nothing to do with it,” Hwaith said, “or at least the Whisperer didn’t think it did. I got suspicious and did a deep diagnostic on the gate, pushing the analysis all the way into the main catenary connection to the Old Downside. I thought that, since that dimension’s so much more central than ours, I’d be able to get a better idea of what was making the gate act so oddly.”

Hwaith licked his nose four or five times in rapid succession. “What I got back was a sense that all that part of spacetime was being leaned against. Something pushing, pressing, from outside, wanting in. And at the same time, it was sucking and pulling at the gate, trying to get it stable and rooted deep, so it could be used for…something.” The fur was standing up on Hwaith’s back now, a long dusty ridge running right down to his tail, which was going fluffy with alarm. “And when I finished the spell, I could tell that Hrau’f Herself had been looking over my shoulder all the time, and the fur on Her back was up too. She said, ‘You will need help to understand this, and to stop it: for it isn’t pointed just at you. Here’s where to go.” And Hwaith looked around him at the tree and the dappled sunlight on the plaza, as if he didn’t quite believe in them: and then at Rhiow.

The fur started to stand up on her too. Rhiow had to look away and wash an ear, and she tried not to have it look more like composure-grooming than it had to: but the ragged look of intensity and fear in Hwaith’s eyes was unnerving her as much as the implications of what he’d said. Anything that can frighten Hrau’f the Silent… she thought. “You’re implying,” Rhiow said, “that whatever has been trying to happen in your time, is also going to try to happen in ours, if it’s not dealt with first in backtime.”

“That’s what She gave me to understand,” Hwaith said, “yes.”

“Why?” Urruah said. “What did She say it was?”

“She didn’t,” said Hwaith. “She said, We won’t know until you do. And you won’t know until they do–”

Urruah swore under his breath, a not-very-restrained yowl. Rhiow gave him a look, and then glanced over at Arhu and Siffha’h, whose expressions were jointly very neutral– meaning that they weren’t sure what was going on, but weren’t going to be caught admitting as much. “This is one of those annoying little courtesies the Powers that Be like to do us,” Rhiow said. “The dignity of joint creation. The Powers aren’t the only ones making our worlds happen: we are, too. But They can be as uncertain about the way events unfold as we are. Oh, living outside time in the full flow of Eternity may seem very nice to us….but beings who permanently reside on the far side of Time tend to have trouble affecting timeflow by themselves. They need someone who lives inside to–”

“Do Their dirty work!” Arhu and Siffha’h said in annoyed unison.

“Somehow,” Jath said, “I doubt the One sees it that way.”

“Jath’s right,” Urruah said. “And though the Powers are creators and caretakers, they’re not omnipotent or omniscient. Sure, They intervene here directly, sometimes, when things get bad — but not more often than They have to. We, on the other hand, live here. We know better how time works than They do: we experience it physically. They can’t do that without help from us….”

“And sometimes they can’t be sure what’s going to happen inside sequential time until we make it happen,” said Rhiow. “This sounds like one of those cases.”

“But we’re already inside a time paradox!” Arhu said. “He’s here because we went to him! But if we go to his time, it’ll be because we–”

“Don’t say ‘if’!” Hwaith said, putting his ears back. Then he caught sight of Urruah’s annoyed look, and his tail slowly twitching. Hwaith put his ears forward again. “Please,” he said: but he said it to Rhiow.

For an uncomfortable moment or so there was no noise but the grackles overhead, still making their rusty-gear screech. It was louder now: since none of the People in the tree were doing anything about the grackles, the birds had been hopping stealthily lower, twig by twig, to see if they could somehow make People’s lives more difficult. Rhiow looked up through the leaves and saw one round golden grackly eye bent thoughtfully on her. “Hwaith,” Rhiow said then, glancing back toward him, “you put me in a difficult position, for the situation’s far from clear as yet.”

“Clarifying it’s going to take time,” Hwaith said, “and it’s what we don’t have much of, where I am. But here, you have all the time in the world…for the time being.” He had slipped into the Speech for the moment, and the conditional tenses he was using were a lot more conditional than Rhiow would have liked. “All I know for sure, all the Whisperer told me, is that my problem is your problem. Or, shortly, it will be. Solve mine, you’ll solve yours. But if my problem isn’t solved, you’re going to find yourself dealing with it– and it’ll be a much tougher fix, She said. If not nearly impossible.”

Rhiow and her team, and Jath and Aufwi, looked at one another. “Cousins, please,” Hwaith said, getting up and shaking himself all over, “I shouldn’t be here any longer: I have to get back and make sure my gate’s all right — I don’t trust it out of my sight for more than a few minutes at a time, the way it’s been acting. There’s so much more to tell, but this is the wrong end of time to be telling it in! You have the coordinates where I’ll meet you–”

Rhiow could feel them lying at the back of her mind, ready to be used. There was the indicator that the proposed intervention had been sanctioned, and at a very high level: when the Whisperer was so direct with you, it didn’t do to start arguing the fine points of an intervention until you’d begun it and had a better idea of exactly what was involved. Yet the choice to go or not lay with her — the “dignity” of co-creation lay once again dumped in front of Rhiow for her attention, bloody and twitching, like a half-dead rat. And speaking of twitching, there was poor Hwaith, watching her with those narrowed brassy eyes, waiting for her choice. She found herself wondering whether this kind of nervous tic was part of his normal mode of operation — the way Saash had never been able to stop scratching while she was still inside her ninth life’s skin– or simply transient discomfort at being in the middle of a forward timeslide, an enterprise naturally fraught with all kinds of danger. He caught her look, held it for a second, then looked away again, as if embarrassed —