The Book of Night With Moon

  "If we survive to find them," Saash said, dry-voiced.

  "Yeah, well. I didn't hold out much hope for you when we first met," Ehef said. "You'd jump at the sight of your own shadow." Saash glanced away. "And look at you now. Nice work, that, yesterday: you kept cool. So keep cool now. That might be what this youngster's been sent to you for. But there's no way to tell which of you will make the difference for him." He glanced at Urruah, somewhat ironically.

  Urruah closed his eyes, a you-must-be-joking expression, and turned his head away.

  Rhiow opened her mouth, then closed it again, seeing Ehef's expression— annoyed, but also very concerned. "Rhiow," he said, "you know the Powers don't waste energy: that's what all this is about. If you found the problem, you're meant to solve it. You're going to have to go down there, and I'm glad it's not me, that's all I can say."

  Rhiow made a face not much different from Arhu's earlier one. "I was hoping you could suggest something else."

  "Of course you were. If I were in your place, I would too! But it's my job to advise you correctly, and you know as well as I do that that's the correct advice. Prepare an intervention, and get your tails down there. Look around. See what's the matter… then come home and report."

  Down below, the soft sound of squeaking began again. Ehef wrinkled his nose. "I wish they could do that more quietly," he muttered.

  "Oh?" Rhiow said, breathing out in annoyance. "Like toms do?"

  "Heh. Rhi, I'll help every way I can. But my going along wouldn't be useful in an intervention like this. Adding someone else on wouldn't help… might hurt."

  "And him?" Urruah flicked an ear at the stacks above them. "He sure got added on."

  "Not by me. By Them. You gonna argue with the hard-to-see type standing out there between those two big guys out front? Or with the Queen? I don't think so. She has Her reasons."

  "What possible good can he be?"

  "What do I look like, Hrau'f the Silent? How would I know? Go down there and find out. But go prepared."

  They thought about that for a while. Then Ehef said to Urruah, "Toms. That reminds me. You going to that rehearsal tomorrow morning? I heard tonight's was canceled."

  "Uh, yes, I'm going."

  "You know Rahiw?"

  "Yeah, I saw him earlier."

  "Fine. You see him there, you tell him I have the answer to that problem he left with me. Tell him to get his tail back up here when it's convenient."

  "All right. You're not going, though?"

  "Aah, that kind of thing, ehhif stuff, I know multicultural is good, but I got no taste for it, my time of life. You youngsters, you get out there, have a good time, listen to the music, maybe make a little of your own, huh?"

  Urruah squeezed his eyes shut, a tolerant expression, eloquent of a tom dealing with someone who'd been ffeih for so long that he couldn't remember the good things in life. Ehef grinned back and cuffed Urruah in front of one ear, a lazy gesture with the claws out, but not enough force or speed to do any harm. "You just lick that look out of your whiskers, sonny boy," he said. "I knew you when you didn't know where your balls were yet, let alone how many of them to expect. I've got other things to do with my spare time lately." He threw an annoyed glance at the computer.

  Rhiow smiled, for this was hardly news, although getting Ehef to talk about this new hobby had been difficult at first. She had known what was going on, though, for some years— since the library installed its first computer system and announced that it was calling it CATNYP.

  "I wouldn't have thought you were the techie type," Saash murmured.

  "Yeah, well, it grows on you," Ehef said. "Horrifying. But we have an ehhif colleague working with the less, shall we say, 'visible' aspects of the CATNYP system. She's been busy porting in the software for putting The Book of Night with Moon online."

  Rhiow blinked at that. The Book of Night with Moon was probably the oldest of the human names for what cat-wizards called The Gaze of Rhoua's Eye, the entire assembled body of spells and wizardly reference material, out of which Hrau'f whispered you excerpts when you needed them. Humans had a lot of other regional names for the Book, many of them translating into "the Knowledge" or a similar variant. Ehhif wizards who got their information from the Powers That Be in a concrete written or printed form, rather than as words whispered in their ears or their minds, often carried parts of the Book as small volumes that were usually referred to casually as "the Manual," and used for daily reference. "Wouldn't have thought it was possible," Rhiow said. "The complexity… and the sheer volume of information that would have to be there…"

  "It works, though," Ehef said, jumping up onto one of the nearby desks with a computer terminal on it. "Or at least it's starting to… the beta-test teams have been working on it for some years now. There was some delay— I think the archetypal 'hard copy' of the Book was missing for a while— but a team out on errantry found it and brought it back. Since then the work's been going ahead steadily on versions tailored to several different platforms, mostly portable computers and organizers. This is the first mainframe implementation, though. We're trying to give it a more intuitive interface than previously, a little less structured: more like the input you get from the Whisperer when you ask advice."

  Rhiow jumped up after him, followed a moment later by Urruah and Saash. "I've seen the ehhif Manuals," Saash said, sitting down and tucking her tail around her as she looked with interest at the computer. "They change in size— the information comes and goes as the wizard needs it. How does a computer version of the Gaze handle that?"

  "You're asking me?" Ehef said, looking at the computer's screen, which at the moment was showing a screen-saver image of flowing stars… but the stars looked unnervingly more real than the ones on Rhiow's ehhif's computer screen. "Not my specialty area. Dawn says the software has 'metaextensions into other continua,' whatever that means." He put out a paw, touched the screen: the stars went away, replaced by the white page and lion logo for the library.

  "Touch-sensitive," Rhiow said. "Nice."

  "Gives the Keyboards a little relief. Or they can use these." He put a paw on the nearby mouse, waggled it around.

  Urruah looked at it. "I always wondered why they called these things 'mice.' "

  "Has a tail. Makes little clicky squeaky noises. Breaks if you use it hard enough to have any real fun with it. Would have thought that was obvious."

  "But to ehhif?"

  Ehef shrugged his tail. "Anyway, this is convenient enough for wizards who use a text-based version of the Book's information and need to stop into the research libraries to check some piece of fine detail. Later, when we work the bugs out, we'll allow access from outside. Maybe let it loose on the Internet, or whatever that turns into next."

  "You mean whatever you turn it into," Rhiow said, with a slight smile.

  "Come on, Rhi, it doesn't show that much," Ehef said mildly. "Anyway, someone has to help manage something so big. And ehhif are so anarchic…. Au, what do I need this for right now?" Ehef muttered, and reached out for the mouse, moved it a little on the table.

  "What?" Rhiow said. She peered at the screen. A little symbol, a stroke with a dot under it, had appeared down in the right-hand corner: what ehhif called an "exclamation point." Ehef had clicked on it, and another little window had popped up on the screen: this now flickered and filled with words.

  "It's the usual thing," he growled: "I'm between systems here, and half the time She Whispers, and half the time She sends me E-mail, and sometimes she does both, and I never know which to— All right, now what is it?"

  Rhiow turned away politely, as the others did, but privately she was wondering about Ehef's relationship with one of the Powers That Be, and how he could take such a tone with Hrau'f herself. "Huh," Ehef said finally, finishing his reading. "Well. Not that serious. Rhi, there's something in the Met you're supposed to have a look at. They've been bringing out some archival material that was in storage in Egyptian. Written stuff, in old ehhif. She says, c
heck the palimpsest cases."

  "For what?" Rhiow flicked her ears forward but could hear nothing from the Whisperer herself.

  "She says you'll know it when you see it."

  Rhiow put her whiskers forward good-humoredly at that: it often seemed that Hrau'f was not above making you do a little extra work for your own good. "Strange," she said, "getting news from her written down like that."

  "Ffff," Ehef said, a disgusted noise, "you don't know how strange it looked until we got the Hauhai font designed. Technology." He pronounced it as a curse word, and spat softly. "If I ever find out which of us suggested to the ehhif that the wheel should be round instead of square, I'm going to dig up her last grave and shred her ears.— Oh, there you are, finally. You leave me some?"

  Arhu was standing by the desk, looking considerably thicker around the middle than he had just a little while ago. Rhiow was briefly shocked at how thin Arhu was, when a full meal produced a whopping gut-bulge like the one he presently sported.

  "Thank you," Arhu said, and burped.

  "Well, may Iau send you good of it, you young slob," Ehef said, ironic, but still amused.

  "Yeah, that reminds me," Arhu said, and burped again, "who is this Iau you're all yowling about all the time?"

  Rhiow opened her mouth, then shut it again and looked away in embarrassment.

  To her surprise, though, Ehef merely produced a very crooked smile. "Kitling, we got a saying in this business. 'Stupidity can be accidental. Ignorance is on purpose.' Ignorance gets your ears shredded. The only thing that saved you is, you asked the question. Always ask. You may get your ears shredded anyway, but afterward you'll still be alive to wear them. Maybe." He gave Rhiow a dry look. "Maybe you should take him up to the Met with you. He keeps going on like this, he's likely to run into the Queen in the street one day and get his features rearranged. She's patient, but I don't know if She's this patient."

  "It won't be tonight, I don't think," Rhiow said.

  He looked at her narrow-eyed for a moment. "You think it's wise to put this off?"

  "I'm only feline, Ehef," Rhiow said, and yawned; there was no point in hiding it. "Give me a break. It's been a lively couple of days, and it's going to get worse. We'll get it taken care of… but my team and I need some sleep first, and I need a good long talk with the Whisperer tonight before we go Downside. I want to make sure I have the right spells ready to protect us. You know why."

  "Yes," Ehef said. "Look, I'll ask the Penn team to keep an eye on your open gate. But that's going to have to be your main concern when you've had a little rest. You did a nice interim solution, but you know it won't last. They'll be cutting that piece of bad track out even as we speak. Tomorrow night— morning after next, tops— they'll replace it, and if that gate's not behaving right, then where are we? Go home, get your sleep. Meanwhile, we'll get some help to watch the top side of the gate for you, act as liaison if you need anything from Above when you're ready to get working down there."

  "Thanks, Ehef," Rhiow said. "I'll appreciate that."

  Arhu yawned, too, and looked somewhat surprised as he did so. "I'm tired," he said. "Can we go back to that little den now?"

  "Not a bad idea," Saash said. "Rhi, when should we meet tomorrow?"

  "A little after noon, I guess," she said. "Sound all right? Urruah?"

  "I'll be up earlier," he said. "That rehearsal. I'll walk you three home first, though."

  "The Tom's own chivalry. Senior… thanks again for the help."

  "We're all in this together," Ehef said, settling down on the desk again. "Go well on the errand, wizards."

  They purred their thanks, all but Arhu, and headed out. As they made their way toward the door to the main front hall, Arhu whispered, none too quietly, "What do you want more spells for? Are we going to have a fight? Is something going to happen?"

  "You'll find out soon enough," Saash said, "when your Ordeal really gets started."

  "This looks pretty much like an ordeal already," Arhu muttered, glancing from Rhiow to Saash. He did not look at Urruah.

  Urruah smiled, and they went out.

  * * *

  As it turned out, they got slightly sidetracked on the way home. Rhiow wanted Arhu to know the way to her own neighborhood, so they went there first. There was no rush to get anywhere, so Rhiow and the others strolled down Seventy-first at their ease: Rhiow, in particular, with the intense pleasure of someone who is off shift for the moment and has the luxury of enough time to stop and smell the roses. Or, more accurately, time to smell and appreciate, each in its proper way, the trees, air, cars, gutters, weeds, flowers, garbage cans, and other endemic wildlife of the city: the squirrels, sparrows, starlings, passing ehhif and houiff, the rustlings above and below ground, the echoes and the whispers; steam hissing, tires and footsteps on concrete, voices indoors and outdoors: and above and around it all, the soft rush of water, the breeze pouring past the buildings— now that there was enough temperature differential for there to be a breeze— and very occasionally, from high up, the cry of one of the Princes of the Air about his business, which in this part of the world mostly amounted to killing and eating pigeons. Her Oath aside, Rhiow's personal opinion was that the city was oversupplied with pigeons, and as part of their position in the natural order of things, the Princes were welcome to as many of them as they could eat. They reminded her too much of rats, with the unwelcome and unnecessary addition of wings.

  There were no pigeons in the street at the moment, though, because hauissh was in progress… and any pigeon careless or foolish enough to drop itself into the middle of a bout of hauissh rapidly became an aspect of play, and shortly thereafter an object of digestion. Cars, ehhif, and houiff did pass through, and took part in play, without knowing they did.

  Indeed there was nothing overt that would have led any ehhif to suspect that a game as old as felinity was going on up and down the length of the block of Seventy-first between First and Second; reputations were on the line, and from many windows eyes watched, hindered from gameplay, perhaps, but not from intelligent and passionate interest.

  Rhiow sidled through it all with her tail up, as did the rest of the team. So close to home, it wouldn't have done to be visible on the street: if one of the neighbors should mention her presence there to Iaehh or Hhuha, there would be endless trouble. As it was, she needed to be sidled anyway, to avoid the many ehhif who were on the street this time of the evening.

  "Hey, ffeih-wizard!" came a comment from one of the streetside terraces above. "Had a good roll on your back lately?"

  Rhiow put her whiskers forward and strolled on by, not even bothering to look up, though Arhu did. Urruah and Saash wore expressions suggesting calm tolerance of idiocy. "…If she's so terrific and powerful and all," said the predictable second voice, "why can't she make the kittening part grow back, and do something really useful with herself?"

  Rhiow kept walking, showing no reaction to the others and schooling herself to be slightly amused. There were People in her neighborhood, as in every neighborhood where a feline wizard worked, who knew about her and found her either funny or repugnant; and who found the concept of wizardry laughable or even hateful. These People in particular— the two extremely spoiled and opinionated pedigreed Himalayans six stories up, in one of the penthouse apartments of the new building near the corner— were sure that Rhiow was living evidence of some kind of convoluted plot against their well-being: a parasite, possibly a traitor, and certainly not proper breeding material. Rhiow, for her own part, was sure that they were pitifully bored and ignorant, had nothing to do with their days but culture their spite, and had almost certainly never done a useful thing since their eyes came open. "…can't really be much of a Person," one of them said spitefully, meaning to be heard, "if you haven't even made kittens once…"

  "Not much point in making them if you're not going to be able to tell what they are, my dear."

  "Ooh, meow," Rhiow muttered, and kept walking.

  "They need a nice
little plague of fleas to take their minds off their 'troubles,' " Urruah said under his breath, coming up alongside her.

  "Please. That would be so unethical."

  "But satisfying. Just think of them scratching…"

  "…and give them the satisfaction of thinking the universe really is after them? Please." All the same…

  The team paused about a third of the way down the street; Rhiow ducked into the entranceway of an apartment building and sat for a moment, peering down the sidewalk. There was a row of five brownstones across the street, their front steps still largely identical despite the renovations of the past few decades; they faced across to a large modern apartment building and two other brownstones, one on each side of it. On the first floor, far left windowsill of the left-hand brownstone, a small milk-chocolate-colored cat sat hunched up, round-backed, golden eyes half-shut, as if looking at nothing. Across the street, sitting upright, was a large, dirty white tom; he was looking intently at the top of a wall between the two brownstones directly across from him. Shadows fell across that wall, cast by a thick raggy carpet of some kind of climbing vine that scaled up the nearest wall of the adjoining building.

  Rhiow stood for a moment and waited to see if any other players would reveal themselves to so cursory an analysis, but after a few seconds she gave it up. "Come on," she said, and walked with the others over to where the white cat sat; he glanced at them as they came. It was Yafh, of course, dominating the block's gameplay as usual. It was a good thing he was so genial about it; life with him could have become extremely annoying otherwise.