The Big Meow

  Rhiow had to stand still for a moment: it was bad for a team leader to be visibly incapacitated by laughter, at least for longer than a breath or three. “City guy,” Hwaith said under his breath. “We get them here. But there are cities, and there are cities.”

  “I begin to get that sense,” Rhiow said. They walked another block or so downhill, the equivalent of a Manhattan long block – if the road wound rather more while it made its way down the hillside — while Urruah lost his pursuer, or talked it out of the pursuit, and emerged from a low flat bank of ornamental yew, looking ruffled but (to do him credit) amused.

  “Didn’t look like it was much interested in the Formic Word,” Rhiow said, as Urruah joined them in sauntering down the middle of the street again. From behind them and off to the left, where there was more high ground, mist had begun rolling gently down the hillside. It started to slip across the road as they walked, so that shortly they and the big ehhif vehicles by the curbs were hock-or half-wheel-deep in it.

  “No,” Urruah said. “My mistake. Can we bring about five million of those things home with us? Think what they’d do to the pigeons!”

  Hwaith chuckled. “I wish,” he said. “Our pigeons don’t seem all that impressed. But if you think it’d make a difference…”

  They headed downhill, and the yards around the increasingly magnificent houses started to resemble significant portions of Central Park. “It’s not like they use any of this space…” Urruah said.

  “But they could.” Hwaith said. “I think that’s the message.”

  “Typical ehhif,” Rhiow said. “Prove how important you are by having lots of ground and keeping other ehhif from having it.”

  “It’s true,” Hwaith said. He sounded regretful, as they stopped at another intersection. The country around them had flattened out now; above their heads, looking southward, a little spiky-headed forest of palms reared itself against a sky slowly growing violet-blue with the light of the dawn at its back and the reflected light from the unseen sea beneath it. “At least some of them are that way. Not all. The one whose house we’re going to: he’s one of the ones who don’t seem to care. He’s all about ehhif, and not about where they are, if I understand it. And his house is friendly to People.” Hwaith looked up the cross street and down it, like any New Yorker, but with (from Rhiow’s point of view) far less need, for there still wasn’t a car in sight.

  “Does one of our People live with him?” Rhiow said as they crossed the wide street.

  “Absolutely. She’s such a gossipmonger: there’s nothing happening in these hills, and the businesses around them, that Ssh’iivha doesn’t know. That’s why she’s our first stop.” He paused once more, glancing around him. “Come on; we’ll go in the back way.”

  He headed off to the right. As they went, Rhiow saw that each block of the broad clean street had a kind of shadow block behind it; a little blank bare alley with a gutter down the middle of it, to carry runoff water when it rained, and – behind each house – a gate behind which the ribbed metal bins where ehhif put their castoff stuff stood ranked. Here and there such bins stood with their lids askew, but (rather to Rhiow’s surprise) no People were patronizing them. As they walked by the first few gates and bins, Urruah sniffed appreciatively. “High-end stuff in there,” he said. “Smells like Zabar’s.”

  You would know better than I would, Rhiow thought, but didn’t say. Hwaith led them past one pair of garbage cans to one high gate in a property’s back wall. It had a hinged People-door cut into it. “Right through here,” Hwaith said, and led the way through.

  Rhiow slipped through behind him, followed a second later by Urriah. They found themselves standing at the rear of a back yard as beautifully groomed as the front yards they’d been seeing, but much smaller. Here and there a few lawn chairs stood around on the grass, and a round table with an umbrella and a couple of seats set beside it. Past them was a patio area with potted palms set out at its ends, and on the far side of the patio, a large pink-stuccoed bungalow with high glass doors looking out on the back yard. Between those doors and the smaller back door, under the windows, a row of bowls was set out – about twelve of them, it seemed.

  Hwaith led them up to the house. “If it’s been a while since you’ve had a snack,” Hwaith said, “feel free to tuck in. That’s what they’re out here for.”

  Urruah walked among them, inhaling appreciatively. “Can you smell this stuff?” he said under his breath. “No coloring agents! No preservatives! No weird chemical agents with numbers instead of names! No vegetable additives snuck in by confused animal activists! No vhai’d rice or ‘roughage’ — nothing but meat! All kinds of meat!” He looked briefly confused. “And now that I think of it…what kind of meat is that I’m smelling in this stuff?”

  “Probably mink,” said an amused voice from off to one side. “After they make coats out of them, what’s left over winds up in the canned People-food….”

  From around the corner of the house, along a walkway that probably ran to the front yard, came a Person. She was, as People reckoned such things, extremely beautiful in an exotic way: white-furred, fluffy, and a bit plump, with small, well-set ears and vividly green eyes. Nor was she one of those flat-faced, inbred People whom ehhif have inflicted on the worlds over time, but a long-nosed, gracious-looking Person, with a look of courtesy and intelligence about her to go with the beauty. Rhiow didn’t bother glancing back at Urruah to see his reaction: she could already hear him doting on this pretty new apparition.

  “Hunt’s luck, Hwaith,” the newcomer said. “Long time no smell!” They breathed breaths briefly.

  “Got some visitors in, Ssh’iivha,” Hwaith said. “They’re hunting news, and I knew just where to bring them.”

  “News we’ve got,” Ssh’iivha said. “More of it than I know what to do with. Hunters, you’re welcome! Luck to you all. Come on in, get comfortable. Names or not as you like…”

  “Names, of course,” Rhiow said, coming forward to breathe breaths with their hostess. “I’m Rhiow. And thanks for your welcome! We’ve come a long way on our business: we’re on errantry, and we greet you – “

  “Oh, I knew that,” Ssh’iivha said; “anyone could see you’re wizards, just by looking at you. You’ve got Hwaith’s look.” Behind her, Rhiow could just hear Urruah’s comment on that: fortunately it was well submerged in the levels of private thoughtspeech to which another nonwizardly Person would not be privy. “Whatever brings you here, you’re welcome.”

  “Is it all right for us to be here?” Rhiow said as Urruah went to greet Ssh’iivha. “It won’t make trouble for you with your ehhif?”

  “Oh no!” Ssh’iivha said, and laughed. “He likes People: that’s why he’s left all this food around. Everyone comes here to visit the Buffet, and swap news. This is a regular clearing house for Our Kind’s gossip, all up and down these hills. Which is doubtless why you’re here.” She gave Hwaith an affectionate look, and at the sight of it Rhiow felt a strange pang she didn’t know how to classify. But then how many nonwizardly People am I close to at home? she thought. Just Yafv, really. And just to say hello to in the mornings, when I pass him on his stoop, fresh from his latest rat. It must be nice to be part of a mixed community…

  “It’s an unusual ehhif you’ve got,” Rhiow said, “who’s willing to make so many of us welcome when they don’t actually live with him.”

  “That’s true enough,” Ssh’iivha said. “But he’s something of a loner, and I think we’re company for him without needing to get into emotional involvement. You know how some ehhif are…afraid to get too close. Anyway, if you’re sure you’re not hungry, come on in…”

  Ssh’iivha led them in through another People-door, this one built into the normal ehhif back door. “If I may ask,” Urruah said, glancing around him as they came through the big white-tiled kitchen full of huge, stocky, retro-looking appliances, “is ‘Ssh’iivha’ a real name or a nickname?”

  Rhiow’s whiskers went forward a
little: it was the kind of question a tom might ask of a queen he was getting interested in. “Well, actually it’s both,” Ssh’iivha said. “My ehhif uses it too, or a word that sounds a lot like it. Used it, I should say.”

  They came out into the living room. It was handsome, airy, but spare. It was high-ceilinged, wooden-floored, white-walled, and sparse of furniture – suggesting that the ehhif who lived there was either in transit, didn’t consider furniture all that important, or took pleasure in taunting the ehhif around him with his own opinion that their surroundings were too cluttered. Here and there, on one or another of the low white sofas, some Person slept: here a brown tabby, there a white shorthair with his feet in the air. “If you want to take a while to relax,” Ssh’iivha said, “this is the place for you. The neighbors make no trouble: my ehhif makes everything right with them. So we try to keep things right with him. No mating in the back yard, no yelling, no fighting with the neighbors’ People; this is a no-heuwwaff zone.”

  “Oh,” Urruah said, sounding slightly disappointed. Rhiow had to fight to keep her whiskers from going too far forward, as mating, yelling and fighting with other toms were probably Urruah’s three favorite things besides wizardry.

  Ssh’iivha jumped up on a spare couch and stretched out: Hwaith went up after her, and Rhiow followed, while Urruah stalked around a little examining more of the room, particularly a massive desk over by one of the windows that looked out into the back yard, flanked on both sides with full bookshelves and a couple of occasional tables piled with more books. “You say,” Rhiow said, “that your ehhif ‘used’ your name. But he doesn’t use it now?”

  “Oh, yes,” Ssh’iivha said, “just not out loud, these days. It seems silly to think it’s a coincidence: I suspect he can hear us a little, though he probably doesn’t think of it that way. And he talks to us as if he thinks we can hear, which is considerate for an ehhif.”

  “But he doesn’t speak out loud….” Urruah said. He was up on the desk now, peering at the complex-looking black-and-gold machine on the top of it.

  “No,” Ssh’iivha said. “There’s something the matter with his throat. If he has something to say to other ehhif, he has to write it down on a piece of paper and give it to them. We can just barely hear him whisper, but other ehhif can’t hear him at all.” Ssh’iivha waved her tail, sadly, slowly. “He wasn’t always like this. A while after I came to live with him, his voice started to get hoarse. Finally he went off where ehhif go to be healed, the hhohs’hihal: and he came home seeming well enough, but without his voice. So now all our People call him Eth’ehhif, the Silent Man, when they visit.”

  “I tried to have a look at him to see what was going on with his throat,” Hwaith said, sounding a little embarrassed, “but I couldn’t get far. I’m not really much good at healing: I specialize in spatial constructs, mostly. And he’s spiky, Rhiow: a real tom. You try to get friendly with him, and if he didn’t start the process himself, he wonders what you’re up to, he holds you away….”

  Rhiow waved her own tail, trying to maintain her composure. The words “the hhohs’hihal” had brought the fur up on her against her will. She could still see her poor Hhu’ha’s discarded body lying there on a steel slab, not inconsiderately treated, but nonetheless terribly empty of the soul that had so often used that flesh to pick her up and cuddle her and make rude-for-ehhif noises against her belly — an entirely undignified process for a Person, and one without which the world was now all too dry and empty a place. “We’ll look into it while we’re here, if you like,” Rhiow said, commanding herself to some kind of calm. “We’ve got some other things to look into as well, but if we cross his path we’ll certainly try to see if he needs some kind of assistance that we can offer him. Are you expecting him soon?”

  “It’s hard to say,” Ssh’iivha said. “He works our hours, truly: he’s almost more one of us than one of them. Out from sunset to a bit past dawn, usually: then he comes home, makes notes of what he’s seen and where he’s been, and after a drink of something, falls over. He’s in the Business, you see. He sleeps the day away…then, a while before sunset, he gets up and dresses himself and goes out again.”

  “’The Business?’” Rhiow said. “Which one?”

  “He makes dreams,” Ssh’iivha said. Hheivvhwei was the Ailurin word she used, a common one for fiction, as opposed to fwaiwei, “news”, a story that was known or supposed to have really happened.

  Urruah jumped down from the desk and wandered back over to them. “He’s working with one of the ss’huhios?” he said.

  “That’s right,” Ssh’iivha said. She looked over at Hwaith. “It’s the place that has the lion as its symbol: don’t ask me the name of it – they’ve changed that about three times in the last few years. He’s just finished work on a ffhilm for them. It’s based on one of the stories he told for one of the hviih-sh’ethh, the papers-that-speak-silently.”

  “A magazine,” Urruah said. “Interesting.”

  “But I heard from one of the other People who come through here, Hhaiivuh his name is, he’s a mouser at one of the other ss’huhios, that the eth’Ehhif was lucky to finish work on that ffhilm when he did.” Ssh’iivha’s eyes went wide with the expression of a Person plunging happily into the latest gossip. “Apparently that big earthquake the other day did a lot of damage at the ss’huhio: some gas connection or something went wrong in the fake-street where they’d been making the ffhilm, and half the backlot burned down. There were even a couple of ehhif killed. The police and the ehhif who put out fires were all over the place for days. And even now that they’ve gone, everyone’s schedules over there are in shreds, it seems…”

  “The earthquakes,” Hwaith said, “they’re part of what’s brought us here. But I hadn’t heard that anyone had been killed!”

  “Oh yes,” said Ssh’iivha. “And here’s a curiosity for you! The ehhif who died in the fire weren’t even ss’huhio people, Hhaiivuh said. They were [insert Ailurin term here] ehhif – “ she used the word for “stray” that many People used to express the human-English term “homeless” – “and no one’s sure how they got into the backlot, or why they didn’t get out when the fire started. Because it didn’t start suddenly: it took a long time to get going, Hhaiivuh said. Maybe too long.” Ssh’iivha flicked on ear back in a bemused gesture. “Hhaiivuh told me that there’s a rumor going around that the fire wasn’t really caused by the earthquake at all, but started on purpose – “

  From out at the front of the house came a sudden noise: a car door slamming. “Oh,” Ssh’iivha said, “he’s home early today. Anyway, Hhaiivuh told me that another of the hunters over there, Fehwau, said he’d been over in that part of the backlot earlier in the day and hadn’t smelled anybody who shouldn’t have been there. He said, Why would homeless ehhif have been there except to sleep? It didn’t make sense that they would have been there so late in the day, because the fire started at about noon, right when that earthquake happened – “

  A key turned in the front door, and it opened. The ehhif who came in was extremely well-dressed: three-piece suit in dove grey, expensive-looking silvery silk tie, fedora just a shade of grey darker, shoes to match. He wasn’t a tall man, and was rather pale and slightly built; but to Rhiow’s way of thinking, that wasn’t something you’d notice much once you’d seen his eyes. They were piercing and cool behind the silvery wire-rimmed glasses: the expression could doubtless be rather intimidating, by ehhif standards, depending on what the rest of his face was doing.

  He paused there as he shut the door, and glanced around at the various other People lounging about the place, and Ssh’iivha and Urruah and Rhiow and Hwaith. Seeing them all, he nodded, his expression seeming to say that all this was fine with him; and he slipped out of his jacket, draping it carefully over one of the white couches. “Half a moment,” Ssh’iivha said, “the gossip’ll keep,” and she jumped down from the couch to run over to him.

  She rubbed against the ehhif’s leg, purring, and he
bent down and stroked her, then picked Ssh’iivha up and cuddled her. Awwww, Urruah said silently as she reached a paw up to touch the ehhif’s cheek.

  The ehhif’s mouth moved. Hey there, Miss Sheba, he said, and to Rhiow’s astonishment, not a whisper, not a murmur, came out of him as he said it. Had a good night out. Looks like you and your buddies’ve been doing the same.

  He put Ssh’iivha down and went to the back door, glancing out at it, apparently to check the state of the food bowls. Then he went to the icebox, got himself a seltzer bottle, spritzed himself a glass full of it, and went over to the typewriter.

  The ehhif sat down, reached down into a drawer of the desk, pulled out a sheet of paper, and rolled it into the machine with such speed and ease that it was plain this was something he’d done so many hundreds of thousands of times that he didn’t even need to think about it any more. And then he was typing, fast, with two fingers.

  “You see how nice he is,” Ssh’iivha said as she wandered back to the couch and jumped up on it again. “I had no idea that there were ehhif so nice until I came to him.”

  “You had another one before?” Rhiow said.

  Ssh’iivha scrubbed briefly at one ear, turning it inside out and then rightside in again. “Sa’Rraah sends us these things to test us,” she said. “Oh, Hahr’rena was very beautiful. And very famous, as ehhif judge things: she’s been in a lot of ffhilmss. And she meant well: she was kind enough, when she thought to be. But she’s not very good with People. Sort of an unconscious type, always full of her own dramas and troubles, but never one to depend on for keeping food in the bowl.” Ssh’iivha opened those green eyes wide in a vexed expression. “I can’t tell you how many times I had to walk two blocks from home in BelAir to get a drink out of someone’s fountain or fishpond because she’d forgotten to fill the water dish. I was mortified. All the other ffhilm-ehhifs’ People looking out the window at me as if I was some kind of stray…! Well, finally she met the Silent One here, and ‘gave’ me to him. And was I glad to go!” Ssh’iivha’s tail lashed a little.