by Diane Duane
Rhiow was upset, too. What came through… ? she thought, gazing at the gate-weft. She thought of the dry chill flowing from the jagged, empty tear in the air they’d found waiting for them that morning. A void place… There were enough of those, away in the outer fringes of being, worlds where life had never “taken.” Other forces moving among the worlds liked such places. They used them to hide while preparing attacks against what they hated: the worlds full of light and life, closer to the Heart of things…
Rhiow shuddered. She needed advice. Specifically, she needed to talk to Carl, and to her local Senior, Ehef, when she had rested and sorted her thoughts out. But rest would have to come first.
Rhiow stood up and once more slipped a paw into the gate-weft, watching the light ripple away from where she felt around for its control structures. You’re all right now, she said to the gate. Don’t worry; we’ll find out what happened.
From the gate came a sense of uncertainty, but also of willingness to be convinced. Rhiow smiled, then looked wistfully at the huge, glossy, taloned paw thrust into the webwork. It would be delightful to stay here longer—to slip down into those ancient forests and hunt real game, something nobler and more satisfying to the soul than mice: to run free in the glades and endless grasslands of a place where the word “concrete” had no meaning, to hold your head up and snuff air that tasted new-made because it was…
Her claw found the string that managed the gate’s custom access routines. The gate’s identification query sizzled down her nerves. Rhiow held still and let it complete the identification, and when it was done, paused. Just for a while… if wouldn’t hurt…
Rhiow sighed, plucked the string toward her, softly recited in the Speech the spatial and temporal coordinates she wanted, and let the string loose.
The whole weft-structure sang and blazed. Before her, the sphere of intersection with her own world snapped into being. A circular-seeming window into gray stone, gray concrete, a long view over jagged pallid towers to a sky smoggy gray below and smoggy blue above, and the sun struggling to shine through it: steam smells, chemical smells, houff-droppings, car exhaust…
Rhiow looked over her shoulder, out of the cave, into the green light with its promise of gold beyond … then leapt into the circle and through, down onto the gravel of the rooftop next to her building. Behind her, with a clap of sound that any ehhif would mistake for a car backfiring, the gate snapped shut. Rhiow came down lightly, so lightly she almost felt herself not to be there at all. She glanced at her forepaw again. It seemed unreal for it to be so small. But this was reality.
Such as it was…
When she got back up to the apartment’s terrace again, the glass terrace doors were open, and Hhuha and Iaehh were having breakfast at the little table near it. The whole place smelled deliciously of bacon. “Well, look who’s here!” Iaehh said. “Just in time for brunch.”
“She’s been out enjoying this pretty day,” Hhuha said, stroking Rhiow as she came past her chair. “It’s so nice and sunny out. Mike, you should feel her, she’s so warm…”
Rhiow smiled wryly. Iaehh chuckled. “No accidents: this cat’s timing is perfect. I know what she wants.”
“Sleep, mostly,” Rhiow said, sitting down wearily and watching him fish around on his plate for something to give her. “And if you’d had the morning I had, you’d want some, too. These four-hour shifts, they’re deadly.”
“All right, all right, be patient,” Iaehh said, and reached Rhiow down a piece of bacon. “Here.”
Rhiow took it gladly enough; she just wished she wasn’t falling asleep on her feet “You spoil that cat,” Hhuha said, getting up and going over to the ffrihh. “I know what she wants. She wants more of that tuna. You should have seen her dive into it this morning! We’ve got to get some more of that.”
“Oh Queen Iau,” Rhiow muttered around the mouthful, “give me strength.” She cocked an eye up at Iaehh. “And some more of that before I go have a nap…”
Chapter Four
The hour’s main news stories, from National Public Radio: I’m Bob Edwards… The South Kamchatka oil spill has begun to disperse after Tropical Storm Bertram shifted course northeastward in the early morning hours, Pacific time, causing near-record swells between the Bay of Kronockji and Shumshu Island at the southern end of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. The spill from the crippled Japanese tanker Amaterasu Maru threatened the economically important fishing grounds off the disputed Kurile Islands, and had significantly increased tensions between Russia and Japan at a time when the disposition of the Kuriles, claimed by Japan but occupied by the Soviet Union since the end of World War Two, had been thought by diplomatic sources to be nearing resolution. —President Yeltsin’s special envoy Anatoly Krischov has returned to Moscow from Teheran after talks aimed at resolving the escalating border crisis in the Atrek valley between Iran and Turkmenistan, where rebel tribesmen have clashed with both Iranian and Russian government forces for the fourth day in…”
Rhiow rolled over on her back, stretched all her legs in the air, and yawned, blinking in the late afternoon light. The sound of the ra’hio being turned on had awakened her. A long day, she thought. I don’t usually oversleep like this…
She twisted her head around so that she was looking at the living room upside down. A soft rustling of papers had told Rhiow even before her eyes were open that Hhuha had just sat back down at the other end of the couch. Iaehh was nowhere to be seen; Rhiow’s ears told her that he was not in the sleeping room, or the room where he and Hhuha bathed and did their hiouh. So he was out running, and could be gone for as little as a few minutes or as long as several hours.
Rhiow knew in a general way that Iaehh was doing this to stay healthy, but sometimes she thought he overdid it, and Hhuha thought so, too; depending on her mood, she either teased or scolded him about it. “You’re really increasing your chances of getting hit by a truck one of these days,” she would say, either laughing or frowning, and Iaehh would retort, “Better that than increasing my chances of getting hit by a massive cardiac, like Dad, and Uncle Robbie, and…” Then they would box each other’s ears verbally for a while, and end up stroking each other for a while after that. Really, they were very much like People sometimes.
Rhiow yawned again, looking upside down at Hhuha. Hhuha glanced over at her and said, “You slept a long time, puss.” She reached over and stroked her.
Rhiow grabbed Hhuha’s hand, gave it a quick lick, then let it go and started washing before going for her breakfast. So, Rhiow thought while the news headlines finished, there’s still an oil spill. This by itself didn’t surprise her. Timeslides, like any wizardry meant to alter the natural flow and unfolding of time, were rarely sanctioned when other options were available. Probably the Area Advisory for the Pacific Region had noticed the availability of a handy alternative instrumentality: natural, “transparent” in terms of being unlikely to arouse ehhif suspicions, and fairly easily influenced—of all the languages that humans use, only the wizardly Speech has no equivalent idiom for “everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.”
Oh well, Rhiow thought. One less thing to worry about. She spent a couple more minutes putting her back fur and tail in order, then got down off the couch, stretched fore and aft, and strolled over to the food dish. Halfway across the room, her nose told her it was that tuna stuff again, but she was too hungry to argue the point.
Wouldn’t I just love to walk over to you, she thought about halfway down the bowl, looking over her shoulder at Hhuha, and say to you, loud and clear, “I’d think that last raise would let you spend at least sixty cents a can.” But rules are rules…
Rhiow had a long drink, then strolled back to jump up on the couch and have a proper wash this time. She had finished with her head and ears when Hhuha got up, went to the dining room, and came back with still more papers. Rhiow looked at them with distaste.
As Hhuha sighed and put the new load down on the couch, Rhiow got up, s
tretched again, and carefully sat herself down on the papers; then she put her left rear leg up past her left ear and began to wash her back end. It was body language that even humans seemed sometimes to understand.
Rhiow was pretty sure that Hhuha understood it, but right now she just breathed out wearily. She picked Rhiow up off the pile and put her on the couch next to it, saying, “Oh, come on, you, why do you always have to sit on my paperwork?”
“I’m sitting on it because you hate it,” Rhiow said. She sat down on it again, then hunkered down and began kneading her claws into the paperwork, punching holes in the top sheet and wrinkling it and all the others under it.
“Hey, don’t do that, I need those!”
“No, you don’t. They make you crazy. You shouldn’t do this stuff on the weekend: it’s bad enough that they make you do it all day during the week.” Rhiow rolled over off the paper-pile, grabbing some of the papers as she went, and throwing them in the air.
“Oh, kitty, don’t!” Hhuha began picking the papers up. “Not that I wouldn’t like to myself,” she added under her breath.
“See? And why you should pay attention to that stuff when I’m here, I can’t understand,” Rhiow muttered, as Hhuha picked her up and put her in her lap. “See, isn’t that better? You don’t need this junk. You need a cat.”
“Talk talk, chatter chatter,” Hhuha said under her breath, straightening the paperwork out. “Probably you’re trying to tell me I shouldn’t bring my work home. Or more likely it’s something about cat food.”
“Yes, now that you mention—” Rhiow made a last swipe at one piece of the paperwork as it went past her nose in Hhuha’s hand. “Hey, watch those claws,” Hhuha said.
“I would never scratch you, you know that,” Rhiow said, settling. “Unless you got slow. Put that stuff down…”
Hhuha started rubbing behind Rhiow’s ears, and Rhiow went unfocused for a little while, purring. There were People, she knew, who saw the whole business of “having” an ehhif as being, at best, old-fashioned—at worst, very politically incorrect. The two species really had no common ground, some People said. They claimed that there could be no real relationships between carnivores and omnivores, predators and hunter-gatherers: only cohabitation of a crude and finally unsatisfactory kind. Cats who held this opinion usually would go on at great length about the imprisonment of People against their will, and the necessity to free them from their captivity if at all possible—or, at the very least, to raise their consciousness about it so that, no matter how pleasant the environment, no matter how tasty the food and how “kind” the treatment, they would never forget that they were prisoners, and never forget their own identity as a People presently oppressed, but who someday would be free.
When all ehhif civilization falls, maybe, Rhiow thought, with a dry look. Make every ehhif in the city vanish, right this second, and turn every cat in Manhattan loose: how many of them will be alive in three weeks? Cry “freedom!”—and then try to find something to eat when all you know about is Friskies Buffet.
She made a small face, then, at her own irony. Maybe it would be better if all cats lived free in the wild, out of buildings, out of ehhif influence; maybe it would be better if that influence had never come about in the first place. But the world was the way that it was, and such things weren’t going to be happening any time soon. The truth remained that ehhif kept People and that a lot of People liked it… and she was one.
That’s the problem, of course, she thought. We’re embarrassed to admit enjoying interdependence. Too many of us have bought into the idea that we’re somehow “independent” in our environment to start with. As if we can stop eating or breathing any time we want…
She sighed and stretched again while Hhuha paused in her scratching and started going through her papers once more. Anyway, what’s the point, Rhiow thought, in making sure People are so very aware that they’re oppressed, when for most of them there’s nothing they can do about it? And in many cases, when they truly don’t want to do anything, the awareness does nothing but make them feel guilty… thus making them more like ehhif than anything else that could have been done to them. That outwardly imposed awareness satisfies no one but the “activist” People who impose it. “I suffer, therefore you should too…”
Granted, Rhiow’s own position was a privileged one and made holding such a viewpoint easy. All languages are subsets of the Speech, and a wizard, by definition at least conversant with the Speech if not fluent in it, is able to understand anything that can speak (and many things that can’t). Rhiow’s life with her ehhif was certainly made simpler by the fact that she could clearly understand what they were saying. Unfortunately, most cats couldn’t do the same, which tended to create a fair amount of friction.
Not that matters were perfect for her either. Rhiow found, to her annoyance, that she had slowly started becoming bilingual in Human and Ailurin. She kept finding herself thinking in slang-ehhif terms like ra’hio and o’hra: poor usage at best. Her dam, who had always been so carefully spoken, would have been shocked.
Rhi? said Saash inside her.
I’m awake, Rhiow said silently.
Took you long enough, Saash said. Believe me, when this is over, I’ve got a lot of sleep to make up.
Oh? Rhiow said.
Our youngster, Saash said dryly, has been awake and lively for a good while now. It’s been exciting trying to keep him in here, and I don’t think I’ll be able to do it much longer. I had to teach him to sidle to distract him even this long—
You mean you had to try to teach him to sidle, Rhiow said.
I mean he’s been sidling for the last two hours, said Saash.
Rhiow bunked at that. Nearly all wizardry cats had an aptitude for sidling, but most took at least a week to learn it; many took months. Sweet Queen about us, Rhiow thought, what have the Powers sent us? Besides trouble…
All right, Rhiow said to Saash. I’ll be along in half an hour or so. Where’s Urruah?
He’s having a break, Saash said. I sent him off early… I thought maybe there was going to be a murder.
Oh joy, Rhiow thought. To Saash, she said, Did he go off to the park? He mentioned the other day that some big tom thing would be going on over there.
He mentioned it to me too, Saash said. Not that I understood one word in five of what he was saying: it got technical. He left in a hurry, anyway, and I didn’t want to try to keep him.
I just bet, Rhiow thought. When Urruah was in one of those moods, it was more than your ears were worth to try to slow him down. All right. Hold the den; I’ll be along.
Somewhat regretfully—for quiet times like this seemed to be getting rarer and rarer these days—Rhiow got down out of Hhuha’s lap, sat down on the floor and finished her wash, then went out to the terrace to use the hiouh-box.
Afterward, she made her way down from the terrace to the top of the nearby building and did her meditation—not facing east for once, but westward. The smog had been bad today; Rhiow was glad she had been inside with the air-conditioning. But now that the day was cooling, a slight offshore breeze had sprung up, and the ozone level was dropping, so that you could at least breathe without your chest feeling tight. And—probably the only positive aspect to such a day—the Sun was going down in a blaze of unaccustomed splendor, its disk bloated to half again its proper size and blunted to a beaten-copper radiance by the thick warm air. Down the westward-reaching street, windows flashed the orange-gold light back in fragments; to either side of Rhiow, and behind her, skyscraper-glass glowed and in the heat-haze almost seemed to run, glazed red or gold or molten smoky amber by the westering light.
Rhiow tucked herself down and considered the disk of fire as it sank toward the Palisades, gilding the waters of the Hudson. As a wizard, she knew quite well that what she saw was Earth’s nearest star, a glimpse of the fusion that was stepchild to the power that started this universe running. Rhoua was what People called it. The word was a metonymy: Rhoua was a name of Que
en Iau, of the One, in Her aspect as beginner and ender of physical life. Once cats had understood the Sun only in the abstract, as life’s kindler. It had taken a while for them to grasp the concept of the Sun as just one more star among many, but when they did, they still kept the old nickname.
The older name for the Sun had been Rhoua’i’th, Rhoua’s Eye: the only one of Her eyes that the world saw, or would see, at least for a good while yet. That one open Eye saw thoughts, saw hearts, knew the realities beneath external seemings. The other Eye saw those and everything else as well; but no one saw it. It would not open until matter was needed no more, and in its opening, all solid things would fade like sleep from an opening eye. A blink or two, and everything that still existed would be revealed in true form, perhaps final form—though that was uncertain, for the gathered knowledge of matters wizardly, which cat-wizards called The Gaze of Rhoua’s Eye, said little about time after the Last Time or about how existence would go after Existence, in terms of matter, past its sell-by date. But there was little need to worry about it just yet while Rhoua still winked. The day the wink turned to a two-eyed gaze … then would be the time to be concerned.
…For my own part, Rhiow told the fading day, 7 know my job; my commission comes from Those Who Are. Some I will meet today who think that day is blind and that night lies with its eyes closed; that the Gaze doesn’t see them, or doesn’t care. Their certainty of blindness, though, need not mean anything to me. My paw raised is Their paw on the neck of the Serpent, now and always…
Rhiow finished her meditation and stood, stretching herself thoroughly and giving one last look to that great burning disk as the apartment buildings of the western Hudson shore began to rear black against it. Having, like many other wizards, done her share of off-planet work, Rhiow found it difficult to think of Rhoua’s Eye as anything less than the fiery heart of the solar system. It still amused her, sometimes, that when the People had found out about this, they had had a lot of trouble explaining the concept to the ehhif. Some of the earlier paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art were potentially rather embarrassing, or at best amusing, in this regard—images of big eyes and sun-disks teetering precariously on top of cat-headed people, all hilariously eloquent of ehhif confusion, even in those days when ehhif language was much closer to Hauhai, and understanding should have been at least possible if not easy.