The Book of Night With Moon

  She was on her back, snoring gently. Rhiow put her head down by Hhuha's ear and purred.

  No response.

  It would have been nice to do this the easy way, Rhiow thought reluctantly, but… She bumped Hhu's head with her own, purring harder.

  "Rrrrgh," said Hhuha, and rolled over, and squinted her eyes tighter shut, and after a moment looked at Rhiow out of them with some disbelief.

  She sat up groggily in the bed and looked at the door. "Now how the heck did you get in here? I know he shut that last night."

  "Yes, I know, I opened it, never mind," Rhiow said, "come on, will you? I have to get an early start. Business, unfortunately." She rubbed against Hhuha's side and purred some more.

  "Wow, you're noisy this morning, aren't you? What on earth do you want? Not breakfast already, you pig! You had two whole slices of pizza just a few hours ago."

  Don't remind me, Rhiow thought, for her stomach was growling so hard, she was amazed Hhuha couldn't hear it. "Look, it would really help if you would just get up and give me my morning feed so I can get on with things—"

  "Mike? Mike, get up. I think maybe your kitty wants her breakfast."

  "Nnnggghhhh," said Iaehh, and didn't move.

  "Oh, will you come on already?" Rhiow said, desperately hoping Hhuha didn't notice that her purr was becoming a little forced. "And as for pigs, who ate half a salami last night? And never gave me any? Even when I asked. Now please get up before it gets so late that I have to leave!"

  "Gosh, you really must be hungry. I guess cats digest faster than people or something," Hhuha said, her voice going soft, and she reached out to scratch Rhiow's eyebrows. The tone of voice was one Rhiow had heard before: she got a sense that her ehhif liked being "talked to," even when they couldn't hear half of what was being said, and, even if they could, would have no idea what the words meant anyway. This tendency made them either great idiots or very fond of her indeed, and either conjecture only made Rhiow twitchier under the present circumstances. She stomped her forefeet alternately on the coverlet, as much from impatience as from pleasure at having her head scratched.

  "Come on, then," said Hhuha. She got out of bed, threw a house-pelt around her, and headed toward the kitchen. Rhiow went after her, not in a hurry: this was no time to trip Hhuha halfway there and have to deal with an ehhif temper tantrum that might take half an hour to resolve. By the time Rhiow got to the kitchen, Hhuha was cranking a can open.

  "Mmm," Hhuha said, "nice tuna. You'll like this."

  "I hate the tuna," Rhiow said, sitting down and curling her tail around her forefeet. "It's not made from any part of the fish that you'd ever eat. You should read more of the label than just the part about the dolphins."

  "Yum, yum," Hhuha said, putting the plate down on the floor. "Here you go, puss. Lovely tuna."

  Rhiow looked at the gelid stuff with resignation. Oh, well, she thought, it's food, and I need something before I go out. And anyway— manners… She reared up and gave Hhuha a good rub around the shins before starting to eat.

  "You're a good kitty," Hhuha said, and turned, yawning, to take something out of the refrigerator.

  Rhiow purred with amusement and satisfaction as she ate. The compliment was true enough, but also true was that, while she had been rearing up to rub against Hhuha's leg, she had seen where the container of salmon paté had been pushed back behind some drinking containers on the counter beside the ffrihh.

  "God, I'm glad it's Sunday," Hhuha said, and shut the refrigerator again, heading for the bedroom. "I couldn't bear the thought of work after last night."

  Rhiow sighed as she finished one last bite and turned away from the dish, reluctant: eating too much now would make her want a nap, and she had no time for that. "Must be nice to have weekends off," Rhiow muttered, sitting down to wash. "I wish I did."

  The rest of her personal hygiene took only a few minutes more: her ehhif had put a hiouh-box out on their small terrace for her, where it was under cover from rain. While using it, Rhiow went off into unfocused mode briefly and could hear them talking as Hhuha opened the window-coverings and the window.

  "Mmngnggh…" Iaehh's voice. "Did she eat?"

  "Uh huh." A pause. "She's out now…. I don't know… I'm still not sure it's a great idea to have her box out there."

  "Oh, come on, Sue. Better there than in the bathroom. You're the one who was always muttering about walking in the kitty litter in the morning. Anyway, she's not going to fall or anything."

  "I don't mean that. It's encouraging her to get down on that lower roof that worries me."

  "Why? It's not like she can get to anywhere else from there. She can roam around and get some fresh air… and she's been doing it for months now without any trouble. She would have gone missing a long time back if she could have."

  "Well, I still worry."

  "Susannnnn… She's not stupid. It's not like she's going to try to go twenty stories straight down."

  Rhiow put her whiskers forward in a slight smile as she finished tidying the box, then got out and shook her feet fastidiously. Bits of litter scattered in various directions, skittering off the terrace. They can make water run uphill and fly off to the Moon when they like, she thought, resigned, but they can't make hiouh-litter that won't stick to your paws. A serious misplacement of priorities…

  Rhiow went to the edge of the railed terrace, looked down. Her ehhif 's apartment was near the corner of the building. Its wall fell sheer to the next terrace, thirty feet down, but she had no interest in that. Off to the left was an easy jump, about three feet, to the concrete parapet of a lower roof of a building diagonally behind theirs, but Rhiow wasn't going that way either. Her intended path lay sideways, along the brick wall itself. Some fanciful builder had built into it a pattern of slightly protruding bricks, a stairstep pattern repeating above and below. The part of it Rhiow used led rightward down the wall to the building's other near corner, about fifty feet away; and six feet below that, in the direction of the street, was the raised parapet of yet another roof, the top of the next building along.

  Rhiow slipped through the railings, stepped carefully up onto the first brick, and made her way downward along the wall, foot before foot, no hurry. This segment of her road, the first used each day setting out and the last to manage before getting home, was also the trickiest: no more than two inches' width of brick to put her feet on as she went, nothing to catch her should she fall. Once she almost had, and afterward had spent nearly half an hour washing and regaining her composure, horrified at what might have happened, or worse, who might have seen her. Wasted time, she thought now, amused at her younger self. But we all learn….

  At the corner of the building Rhiow paused, looked around. Soft city-noise drifted up to her: the hoot of horns over on Third, someone's car alarm wailing disconsolately to itself four or five blocks north, the rattle of trays being unloaded at the bakery eastward and around the corner. All around her, the sheer walls of other apartment and office buildings turned blind walls and windows to the sight of a small black cat perched on a two-inch-wide brick, ninety feet above the sidewalk of Seventieth Street. No one saw her. But that was life in iAh'hah, after all: no one looked up or paid attention to any but their own affairs.

  Except for a small group of public servants, of whom she was one. But Rhiow spent no more time thinking about that than was necessary, especially not here, where she stuck out like an eye on a week-old fish head. Her business was not to be noticed, and by now, she was good at it.

  She measured the jump down to the parapet. No matter that she had done it a thousand times before: it was the thousandth jump and one, misjudged, that would cheat you out of a spare life you had been saving for later. Rhiow crouched, tensed, jumped; then came down on the cracked foot-wide concrete top of the parapet, exactly where she liked to. She made the smaller jump down onto the surface of the roof, looked around again, her tail twitching.

  No one there. Rhiow stepped across the coarse cracked gravel as q
uickly as she could: she disliked the stuff, which hurt her feet. She passed wire vent grilles and fan housings making a low moaning roar, blasting hot air up and out of the air-conditioning systems below; summer was coming on, and the unseasonably hot weather this last week had turned the city-roar abruptly louder. The smells had changed, too, as a result. The air up here reeked of the disinfectant that the biggest ehhif-houses put in their ventilating systems these days and also stank of lubricating oil, dust settled since last winter, sucked-out food scents, mouth-smoke, garbage stored in the cellars until pickup day…

  After that, the fumes and steams coming up from the city street seemed fresh by comparison. Rhiow jumped up on the streetside parapet, looking down. Seventieth reached east to the river, west to where her view was blocked past Third by scaffolding for a new building and digging in the street itself, something to do with the utility tunnels. The street was an asphalt-stitched pattern of paved and repaved blacktop, pierced by the occasional gently steaming tunnel-cover, lined with the inevitable two long lines of parked cars, punctuated by the ehhif walking calmly here and there. Some of them had houiff on the leash: Rhiow's nose wrinkled, for even up here she could smell what the houiff left in the street, no matter how their ehhif cleaned up after them.

  No matter, she thought. It's just the way the city is. And better get on with it, if you want it to stay that way.

  Rhiow sat down, curled her tail around her forefeet, and composed herself. Amusing, to be making the world safe for houiff to foul the sidewalks in, but that was part of what she did.

  Her eyes drooped shut, almost closed, so that she could more clearly see, and be seen by, the less physical side of things. I will meet the cruel and the cowardly today, she thought, liars and the envious, the uncaring and unknowing: they will be all around. But their numbers and their carelessness do not mean I have to be like them. For my own part, I know my job; my commission comes from Those Who Are. My paw raised is Their paw on the neck of the Serpent, now and always….

  There was more to the formal version of the meditation, but Rhiow was far enough along in her work now, after these six years, to (as one of her ehhif associates put it) depart from the Catechism a little. The idea was to put yourself in order for the day's work, reminding yourself of the priorities— not your own species-bound concerns, but the welfare of all life on the planet: not your personal grudges and doubts, but the fears, however idiotic they seemed, of all the others you met. There was always the danger that the words would become routine, just something you rattled off at the start of the workday and then forgot in the field. Rhiow did her best to be conscientious about the meditation and her other setup work, giving it more than just speech-service… but at the same time, the urge to get going and do the work itself drove her hard. She presumed They understood.

  Rhiow got up again, stretched, and trotted off down the roof's parapet to its back corner, which looked inward toward the center of the block between Seventieth and Sixty-ninth. She had egress routes all around the top of the building, but this was the least exposed; this time of day, when even an ehhif could see clearly, there was no point in being careless.

  At the back corner Rhiow paused, glanced downward into the dusty warm darkness of the alley between the two buildings. Nothing was there but a rat, stirring far down among the garbage bags behind the locked steel door that led to the street. The far windows in the nearest building were all blinded with shades or curtains, no ehhif face showing. Well enough, she thought, and said under her breath the word that reminds the ephemeral of how it once was solid.

  Rhiow stepped out, felt the step under her feet, there as always, and went on down: another step, another, through the apparently empty air, Rhiow trotting down it like a stairway. This imagery struck Rhiow as easier (and more dignified) than the tree-climbing paradigm often used by cats who lived out, and the air seemed amenable enough to the image made real: an empty stairway reaching twenty stories down into the alley's dimness, the stairsteps outlined and defined only by the faintest radiance of woven string structure. The strings held the wizardry in. Inside it, air was briefly stone again, as solid to walk on as it would have been a billion years back, before ancient eruption and the warming sun on Earth's crust let the atmosphere's future components out. Shortly, when Rhiow was down, it would be free as air again. But like all the other elements— in fact, like all matter, when you came down to it, sentient or not— air was nostalgic, and enjoyed being lured into being as it had been once before, long ago, when things were simpler.

  Eight feet above the ground, where the surrounding walls were all blind, Rhiow paused. I could jump on that rat, she thought. Once again she saw the rustle and flicker of motion, heard the nasty yummy squeak-squeal from inside one of the black plastic garbage bags. Involuntarily, Rhiow's jaw spasmed, chattering slightly— the spasm that would break the neck of the prey clenched in it. Her mouth watered. Not that she would eat a rat, indeed not: filthy flea-ridden things, Rhiow thought, and besides, who knows what they've been eating. Poison, half the time. But cornering one, hitting it, feeling the body bruise under your paw and hearing the squeal of pain: that was sweet. Daring the rat's jump at your face, and the yellowed teeth snapping at you— and then, when it was over, playing with the corpse, tossing it in the air, celebrating again in your own person the old victory against the thing that gnaws at the root of the Tree—

  No time this morning, she thought, and you're wasting energy standing here. Let the air get on with doing what it has to. Carrying smog around, mostly…

  She went down the last few almost-invisible steps, jumping over the final ones to the dusty brick-paved surface of the alley. The noise inside the garbage bag abruptly stopped.

  Rhiow smiled. She said the word that released the air from solidity: upward and behind her, the strings faded back into the general fabric of things from which they had briefly been plucked, and the air dispersed with a sigh. Rhiow walked by the garbage bag toward the streetward wall and the gate in it, still smiling. She knew where this one was. Later, she thought. Rats were smart, but not smart enough to leave garbage alone. It was two days yet until collection. The rat would be back, and so would she.

  But right now, she had business. Rhiow put her head out under the bottom of the iron door, looked around. The sidewalk was empty of pedestrians for half a block; most important, there were no houiff in sight. Not that Rhiow was in the slightest afraid of houiff, but they could be a nuisance if you ran into them without warning— the ridiculous barking and the notice they drew to you were both undesirable.

  A quiet morning, thank Iau. She slipped under and out, onto the sidewalk, and trotted along at a good rate. There was no time to idle, and besides, one of the first lessons a city cat learns is that it's always wise to look like you're going somewhere definite, and like you know your surroundings. A cat that idles along staring at the scenery is asking for trouble, from houiff or worse.

  She passed the dry cleaner's, still closed so early, and the bookshop, and the coffee-and-sandwich shop— open and making extremely tantalizing smells of bacon: Rhiow muttered under her breath and kept going. Past the stores were five or six brownstones in a row, and as she passed the third one, a gravelly voice said, "Rhiow!"

  She paused by the lowest step, looking up at the top of the graceful granite baluster. Yafh was sitting there with a bored look, scrubbing his big blunt face: not that scrubbing it ever made much difference to his looks. The spot was a perfect one for beginning the day's bout of hauissh, the position-game that cats everywhere played with each other for territorial power, or pleasure, or both. In hauissh, early placement was everything. Now any cat who might appear on the street and try to settle down in the area that Yafh was temporarily claiming as "territory" would have to deal with Yafh first— by either confronting him head-on, moving completely out of sight, or taking a neutral stance… which would translate as appeasement or surrender, and lose the newcomer points.

  Rhiow, since she was just passin
g through, was not playing. Business certainly gave her an excuse not to pause, but she rarely felt so antisocial. She went up the stairs, jumped onto the baluster, and paced down toward Yafh to breathe breaths with him. "Hunt's luck, Yafh—"

  His mouth a little open, Yafh made an appreciative "tasting" face at the scent of her cat food. "If I had been really hunting, I could have used some luck," he said. "One of those little naked houiff, say… or even a pigeon. Even a squirrel. But there's nothing round here except roaches and rats."

  Rhiow knew: she had smelled them on his breath, and she kept her own taste-face as polite as she could. "Don't they feed you in there, Yafh? If it weren't for you, your ehhif would have those things in their stairwells, if not their beds. You should leave them and go find someone who appreciates your talents."

  Yafh made a most self-deprecating silent laugh and tucked himself down into half-crouch again, folding his paws in. After a moment Rhiow joined in the laugh, without the irony. Of the many cats in these few square blocks, Yafh was the one Rhiow knew and was known by best, and some would have found that an odd choice of friends, for one with Rhiow's advantages. Yafh was a big cat for one who had been untommed very young, but unless you took a close look at his hind end, you would never have suspected his ffeih status from the way his front end looked. Yafh would fight anything that moved, and had done so for years: he had enough scar tissue to make a new cat from, and was as ugly as a houff— broken-nosed, ragged-eared, one eye gone white-blind from some old injury. Where there were no scars, Yafh's coat was white; but his fondness for dust-bathing and for hunting in the piled-up rubbish behind his ehhif's building kept him a more or less constant dingy gray. His manner was generally as blunt and bluff as his looks, but he had few illusions and no pretensions, and his good humor hardly ever failed, whether he was using it on others or on himself.