The Big Meow

  Urruah sighed. “Someone’s going to have to go get the gate set up for the slide tomorrow.”

  “That’ll be me,” Hwaith said. He glanced around at the others. “I’d sooner not move it: there are diagnostics to do, and anyway the patching teams wouldn’t thank me – “

  “Hwaith, don’t bother,” Aufwi said. “I’ll handle it. You get some rest.” He glanced around at the others. “No point in wishing anyone the luck of the hunt: we’ve had it! I’ll see you all in the morning. Two hours after Eyerise?

  “That sounds fine,” Rhiow said.

  Aufwi vanished.

  And what about you? the Silent Man said to Helen Walks Softly. What about your film career? What about your agent?

  “I’ve already called him,” Helen said. “I’ve explained an urgent need to go home to see relatives in the Midwest. Which I do really have.” She smiled. “He made up half the story for himself before I could even finish misdirecting him – he’s used to having starlets break without warning under the strain of public attention.” Helen shrugged, and then smiled a little sadly. “I will miss LA, though. This LA. It’s been… a trip down Memory Lane.”

  The Silent Man nodded slowly: then stood up at last. No long goodbyes, he said, and looked around at them all. If I don’t see you in the morning — I’ll see you in the papers.

  “Not the funny ones?” Urruah said.

  The Silent Man smiled. Never my style, he said.

  He went from one to another of the People, petting them goodbye, and finally stopped by Rhiow. Don’t suppose you’d thank me if I picked you up and held you upside down… he said.

  She dropped her jaw at him in the human-smile gesture. “Perhaps not,” she said. “Go very well, cousin; see you around the Worlds.” Who knows, it might be true…

  He stroked her head, then straightened up to take Helen’s hand. You would’ve been great in the movies… he said. Oh well. Be a good cop.

  “That’s the way I roll,” Helen said. “Go well…”

  The Silent Man picked up the sleepy Sheba and headed down the bare little hall, and the bedroom door closed behind him.

  “I don’t know about you,” Rhiow said, “but I’m ready for my nap.” She glanced idly over the others, but not too closely, all too aware of the sorrow or pity they were keeping from showing in their eyes, and unwilling to see it surface to everyone’s embarrassment. “Hwaith?” she said, turning to him. “A last debrief?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  And the two of them walked down the hall to the guest bedroom, tails high, as if everything was fine.

  They were, after all, People.

  Much later, in the guest bedroom, Rhiow was lying on the broad windowsill, looking out into the dark: and Hwaith was beside her, sprawled, snoring gently.

  It was all over; over at last. Yet now there was something that wasn’t over. Or over before it’s fairly begun…

  Rhiow looked out the window into the street, where in other houses lights were ablaze as people picked up after the quake. To think, she thought, that I sat there telling the story of Aifheh and Sehau so casually. How did I never see that this was coming for me?

  Yet now that she did, she felt unable to know how to react, like some Person who’s never seen traffic before and freezes in the middle of the road when she sees the first headlights. I’m caught in something that sounds just like a Middle Lives tale for the Two of them, Rhiow thought. For there were endless variations of the basic story, regional variations, some of them even verging on the comedic – since when the Two began playing sa’Rrahh’s ugly Play back at her, humor was unquestionably part of the strand.

  Then why doesn’t this feel funny, Rhiow thought. After tomorrow morning – this morning! – we won’t see each other again. The Powers don’t permit casual commuting between the past and the future: there’s too much chance of one contaminating the other. So forget about that.

  And as for other possible remedies… Rhiow’s tail lashed. Our times are too far apart. Even if Hwaith wanted to stay for me, tried to stay for me, as Sehau did for Aifheh… The distance in moons is just too far. No one could do it. The winds at the edge of Life would sweep any Person-to-be over the border into Itself eventually. And even if he had more lives to spend, and every one of them should last as long as it possibly could before the body breaks down at last… he still couldn’t do it. The time between us is just too wide.

  And why would he want to do it? He met me three days ago, as his time goes! He can’t possibly know what he wants in so short a time.

  Though he says he does…

  Impossible as that seemed, perhaps he did. If so, it just made the story worse, especially as she was herself trapped right in the middle of the tragedy of it, and was understanding its issues better than she ever had. So very unconcerned she’d been about the tale in past years: one more legend, one more part of an educated Person’s knowledge – and nothing to do with her, since she was long ago safely spayed. But now the reality had her by the scruff indeed, and though she might kick and yowl as she liked, there was no escaping it.

  And possibly the worst aspect of the whole situation was that even with this sudden unseasonable longing rearing up inside her, there was nothing Rhiow could do about it. No kittens for you, she thought. Not even wizardry could grow back a womb for them to kindle in now: your body’s become too used to the way things have been for all these years. It would quickly reject any attempt to clone new material from neighboring tissue. And the ovaries were gone too: so no chance ever again to experience the ecstasies of heat, the mad hormone-driven flirtations, the chase and the always-intended capture, the hot flush of satisfaction after fulfillment. And to think how I teased Siffha’h about this. Well, that’s come back to bite me hard now.

  Rhiow squeezed her eyes shut and crouched there in the dark for a long time.

  Dear Queen about us, what do I do?!

  No answer. But that was the problem with serving a deity who was also a Person. Independence, the right to make one’s own choice no matter how far down the scale of power you were, was always a given. In the legend, everything had rested on sa’Rraah’s freedom to come and go, and Her casual choice an aeon ago to wander back to the much-missed Hearth and taunt Queen Iau one more time. Without that freedom, there would be no tenth life, no chance for immortality.

  And we have no way to be sure of that chance, Rhiow thought, miserable in the darkness, shivering with anguish. There’s no way to tell if it that last Life will ever be offered, or even achieved, no matter how hard you strive for it. Like wizardry itself, it comes or it doesn’t… and that’s just the way things are.

  Rhiow lay there, feeling the claw in her heart, and knew whose it was. Even after everything that’s happened, she said to sa’Rraah, you’re not off my case, are you?

  After what you and I have just been through, said the Lone Power, what would you expect? How should I allow a mortal to put me through such indignity without suffering for it?And anyway… this was all about putting things back to the way they usually are. Now you will have your wish. Make the best of it.

  She fell silent.

  “Rhiow…”

  He stretched, looking at her, the bronzy eyes pale in the reflected glow from the streetlights outside.

  “For the Queen’s sake don’t apologize,” she said.

  “I wasn’t planning to. I’m done with that. The way things are… is the way things are.”

  She bent down and rubbed his face against his: but then she had to stop.

  “Will you stay a little while longer?” he said. “Just another day or two – “

  “I can’t,” Rhiow said. “You know I can’t. It’s not just the issue of the timeslide, and the buildup of the effects of being out of my right time – though that’s part of it. If I stay longer, it’s just going to be harder for both of us. We should take pity on each other and end it now.”

  He sighed. “She does love her little vengeances,” Hwaith said, ?
??doesn’t she.”

  “Yes she does,” Rhiow said, and looked away from Hwaith, finding it difficult to bear the pain in his eyes, which he was trying to manage for her sake.

  “Well then,” Hwaith said. “It’ll just have to be another life, then.”

  “So it seems,” Rhiow said, doing her best to sound cheerful.

  “All right,” Hwaith said. “Then let’s cuddle.”

  She fell asleep on the windowsill as she had never fallen asleep with another Person: with one of Hwaith’s forelegs thrown over her, protective, something she’d seen Arhu and Sif do. At first she found it hard to bear. Then Rhiow put her own foreleg over his and hugged it to her. This is going to have to last, she said. There’s always memory, at least.

  It was cold comfort. But sometimes, after saving the world, that was all you had left.

  Dawn came too soon. Two hours later came too soon.

  But two hours later they were all standing outside the Observatory as the sun looked over the low mountains to the east, and struck fire from the sundial by the white obelisk. It was still too early for ehhif tourists — not that there were likely to be any here this morning, considering what the night before had been like – and the worldgate lay out on the terrace again, just by itself now and not enclosed in any unnecessary spell-structure.

  “I set it up for Grand Central in our time,” Aufwi said: “easier to drop everyone in the same place when there’s a timeslide hooked into the weave. The track 33 off-hours access area, an hour after you left the original uptime coordinates be all right for everybody?”

  “Fine,” Rhiow heard Urruah say. It was not fine with her: nothing seemed fine at the moment. She stood off to one side with Hwaith, looking at the gate, even though there was nothing she wanted to look at less – except perhaps Hwaith’s eyes.

  He put his head up against hers. You should go, he said silently.

  No I shouldn’t! Rhiow cried. …Except I must.

  Aufwi glanced at them, no more; then away again. Quietly the air went prickly with the feel of a gate going active when it had a timeslide augmentation.

  Hwaith pushed his face in front of hers so that she couldn’t avoid seeing it. Cousin and love, he said, …go well.

  Cousin, Rhiow said. And love. Always go well.

  With you wishing it so, Hwaith said, it has to be.

  And he turned his face away.

  Rhiow walked over to the gate more unwillingly than she had ever gone anywhere in her life. Helen, in LAPD uniform again, was stepping through as she came up: Arhu and Ith went through after her, and then Siffha’h. Urruah glanced over his shoulder and went through, followed by Aufwi. By the gate, knowing it would close after her, Rhiow paused as Hwaith came along behind her.

  “Don’t forget to disengage the slide conduit before you close it down,” she said.

  “Rhiow,” Hwaith said. “Am I a complete idiot? …Just go.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  She took one last long glance, one that was going to have to last her a lifetime: then turned and stepped through.

  A second later she was surrounded by the sooty, metal-smelling dark of the track 33 platform-end, all full of locked empty postal parcel cages and little pallet-moving trucks. Rhiow had seen this spot a thousand times, and it now all looked inexpressibly alien to her — dirty and unfriendly and miserable. Around her, her team and Ith and Helen were looking up and down the platform, making sure of their own personal invisibility routines before stepping out into the public areas.

  Helen Walks Softly smiled at them all. “My cousins, we’ll meet again on the journey, I know,” she said. “But I shouldn’t linger: I have a shift this evening.”

  Urruah glanced across at the ehhif clock up against the wall to which the postal cages were chained. “If you pop over to 25,” he said, “the local to Croton will be out of there in about two minutes. The gate comes unshielded as soon as it pulls out.”

  “Perfect. All of you – go well!”

  “Wait for me,” Aufwi said. “I’ll come with you. Rhiow – Urruah – “

  “You’re entirely welcome, cousin,” Rhiow said. “Soon again…”

  He headed off after Helen; the two of them vanished into the dark at the end of the platform.

  “So much for that,” Siffha’h said, and headed out into the Main Concourse. But Arhu and Ith lingered a moment longer, and Arhu – on top of Ith’s head as usual — went unfocused for a moment before looking down at his counterpart suddenly. “Pastrami?” he said.

  “Indubitably,” said Ith.

  They vanished.

  Rhiow and Urruah were left looking at each other in the noisy dark. “Do you want me to walk home with you?” Urruah said.

  “No,” Rhiow said, “it’s all right. I know, ‘Ruah. I’ll be ready to talk about it soon enough. But not just now.”

  She sidled herself and headed out into the Concourse. Sif had already taken herself somewhere else, and for all she knew, Arhu and Ith were probably on the upper West Side by now. Out into the busy bustle and stir of ehhifkind Rhiow took herself, and it all sounded just like so much noise to her as she made her way out the station’s side entry and onto Lexington.

  She made herself do the walk the long way to the upper East Side, hoping that it would ground her a little. But it was a long way, a hard way, harder than she ever remembered it having been, even right after Hhuha died. Everything seemed as colorless as when the One Outside had been sucking the life out of the landscape. But, This is temporary, Rhiow told herself. You have been through an extraordinary thing. The reaction is normal. This will pass.

  She simply couldn’t believe it.

  At last Rhiow came to the corner of the street where her ehhif’s apartment building lay, and walked down past the little skinny fenced-in trees, the brownstone doorsteps, the vans making deliveries, the queen-ehhif pushing strollers. None of it meant a thing to her. She came at last to the apartment gate where the garbage cans were locked up until collection day, spoke by rote the air-hardening spell she used every day, and walked up the air to where Iaehh’s apartment’s terrace stuck out. Weary to the bone, she headed toward it…

  …and saw that there was someone in her litterbox.

  Rhiow froze.

  The dusty black shape had its back turned to her, and was scratching busily. Rhiow stood there on the air staring at him as inside her began to grow a joy so extreme that it was very like terror. She was unable to believe what she was seeing, unable to believe what had happened —

  Surprise, said sa’Rraah in Rhiow’s ear.

  Rhiow sat right down on the air in shock.

  You did me a favor, sa’Rraah said. It was with your help that I drove out the one who would have destroyed my universe, and my plans… and Me. So I have done a little favor for you, and did not too quickly sweep across the border into Life a soul that, having come to the end of its current life some time back, very much wanted not to be born just yet. Or indeed for some while. Or at all, until somebody else arrived.

  Rhiow held very still, hearing more in the silence that followed the Lone One’s words than she might possibly wish.

  I will grant you, sa’Rraah said, sounding just a touch cranky, he was more than usually persistent about staying on the other side. But without My help, he could not have remained. You may now thank me.

  Rhiow knew better than most what the next move in the dance usually was. Yet today… today everything was different. It was all about chances: the possibility to do something a different way… and not crush out even what might seem like just a tiny spark of light in the darkness. And what do I owe you for this favor? she said at last.

  Nothing… just this once. Did you not help Me and My pride, defend what is ours from the interloper? Be warned: after today, all is as it was. But for today… I remember that you helped me keep what is Mine.

  Rhiow was silent a moment. Litter-sister, she said then, …I do thank you. So now I go. And may you also go well.

&nbs
p; Sa’Rraah made her no answer.

  But now I want to talk to your mother!!

  There was a short pause. Arhu knew, Rhiow thought suddenly. He knew as soon as we got here, that’s where the sudden urge for pastrami came from —

  But daughter, Queen Iau said quietly, surely you too might have known. After the part you played, at so central a level – and that Hwaith then played in order to be with you — surely you might have suspected that however well or ill-disposed She was toward you, sa’Rraah would discover that there would be no keeping you two from one another. For one lifetime – nine – ten – or however many…

  The shock and relief were such that Rhiow could have lain right down and yowled. But this seemed the wrong moment. She pulled herself together and tried for some kind of composure. But what came out was, “After what we’ve just been through, I want a holiday!”

  She was expecting an argument. What she wasn’t expecting was to hear the Queen of the Universe say, Done. How long?

  That brought Rhiow up short. First and foremost, she was a wizard. For as long as the sabbatical lasted, she would be walking away from any chance of active assignment. And though there were times she hated admitting it, active assignment was fun.

  Her tail lashed. “I’ll tell You when I’m ready to come back,” Rhiow said.

  Well enough, said the Queen. Anything else?

  “…I can’t think of anything right now,” Rhiow said. “But I may later.”

  Let me know when you do, said Iau.

  Rhiow’s ears went back and forth in a momentary flicker of suspicion. “Royal Dam and Queen,” she said, “You’re being unusually accommodating.”

  There was a pause before the answer came back from the heart of Creation. Rhiow, she said, you’ve picked up a touch of roughness of manner from My Eldest daughter.

  Rhiow declined to allow any embarrassment to show.

  Yet that said, said the Queen, if I feel accommodating today, or have a notion to indulge an unusually productive member of My pride… then surely that’s My business. So, as I said: for a little while, when you think of something else — within reason… speak My name.