by Diane Duane
“Arhu—”
He paid no attention to her; just stood there, trembling violently, his eyes wide and dark, his throat rough with the purr of fear.
“Something’s coming,” he said.
They all listened for the telltale tick of rails, for the sound of an unscheduled loco down in the main tunnel past Tower U, where forty tracks narrowed to four. But no such sound could be heard. Neither could what Rhiow half-expected— the squeak of rats—though just the thought made her bristle.
Flashback, Urruah said silently. We’ve brought him down too soon.
“Arhu,” Rhiow said, “maybe you and Urruah should go back out to the concourse.”
“It won’t make any difference,” Arhu said, his voice oddly dry and drained-sounding. “It’s coming all the same. It came before. Once, to see. Once, to taste. Once, to devour—”
“Get him back out there,” Rhiow said to Urruah.
Urruah reached over past her, grabbed Arhu by the scruff of the neck as if he were a much smaller kitten than he was, leapt up onto the platform with him, and hurried off down it, half-dragging Arhu like a lion with a gazelle. Fortunately the youngster was still sidled: allowing any watching station staff to view the spectacle of him being dragged down the platform by something that wasn’t there, Rhiow thought, would have produced some choice remarks from Har’lh later.
Rhiow turned her attention back to Saash, who was hissing softly with consternation and anger. “What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know. I interrogated it not five minutes ago and it was fine! Here—” She pulled her paws out of the gate-weave, then carefully put out a single claw and hooked it behind the three-string bundle that led into the interrogation routines. Saash pulled, and the lines of light stretched outward and away from the weft structure, came alive with flickers of dark red fire that ran down the threads like water.
“See? That’s fine. But the gate won’t hyperextend, Rhi! The control functions aren’t answering. It’s simply refusing to open.”
“That can’t happen. It can’t.”
“I’d have thought a gate couldn’t have its logs erased, either,” Saash hissed, “but this seems to be our week for surprises. Now what do we do? There is simply no way I can do this”— she pushed her forepaws through the strings again, leaned back, and pulled, and her paws simply came out again, without a pause—“without getting a response. It’s like dropping something and having it not fall down. In fact, gravity would be easier to repeal than hyperstring function! What in Iau’s name is going on?”
“I wish I knew,” Rhiow said, and heartily she did, for life was now much more complicated than she wanted it to be. “We need advice, and a lot of it, and fast.” She looked over at the gate. “If it’s not functional, you’d better shut it down. FU notify Har’lh.”
“Rhi,” Saash said with exaggerated patience, “what I’m trying to tell you is that I cannot shut it down. Though the gate diagnoses correctly, none of the command structures are palpable. It’s going to have to hang here just like this until it starts answering properly, and we’d better pray to the Queen that the thing doesn’t come alive again without warning, with some train full of coffee-swigging commuters halfway through it.”
Rhiow swallowed. “Go check the others,” she said. “I want to make sure they’re not doing the same thing. Then get yourself right out of here.”
Saash loped off into the darkness. Rhiow sat and looked at the recalcitrant gate. I really need this right now, she thought.
The gate hung there and did nothing but glow and ripple subtly, splendid to look at, and about as useful for interspatial transit as that silk rug back in her ehhif’s den.
Miserable vhai’d thing, Rhiow thought, and looked out into the darkness, trying to calm herself down: there was no tune to indulge her annoyance. No trains were coming as yet, but something needed to be done so that the commuters would not meet this gate before it was functioning correctly again.
Rhiow trotted hurriedly westward down the track, toward Tower A. Directly opposite the tower was a portion of switched track, used to shunt trains into Tracks 23, 24, and 25, and crossing more shunting track for Tracks 30 through 34. She found the spot where the two “joints” of track interleaved in a shape like an ehhif letter X, or like an N or V, depending in which direction the interleave was set.
Rhiow glanced up hurriedly at the windows of the tower. There were a couple of the station ehhif sitting there, watching the board behind them, its colored lights indicating the presence of trains farther up the line. She could read those lights well enough, after some years of practice, to know that no moving train was anywhere near her, and the ehhif weren’t likely to turn and see her before she did what needed doing.
She stood on the little black box set down in the gravel beside the switch and looked at it with her eyes half-shut, seeing into it, watching how the current flowed. Not a complicated mechanism, fortunately: it simply moved the track one way or the other, depending on what the tower told it.
Rhiow closed her eyes all the way, put herself down into the flow of electricity in the switch, and told the switch that she was the tower, and it should move the track this way.
It did. Clunk, clunk, went the track, and it locked in position: the position that would shunt an incoming train away from Tracks 23, 24, and 25.
Rhiow glanced up at the tower. One of the men inside at the desk was looking over his shoulder at a control board, having heard something: an alarm, or maybe just a confirming click inside the tower that the switch was moving. Right, Rhiow thought, and leapt over to the switched track itself. The switch had been the hard part. This would be easier.
She put her paws on the cool metal of the track and spoke to it in the Speech. Why do you want to lie there with your atoms moving so slowly? Why so sluggish? Let them speed up a bit: here’s some energy to do it with.… A bit more. Go on, keep it up. Don’t stop till I tell you.
Then she got her paws off it in a hurry because the metal was taking her seriously. The segment of track went from cool to a neutral temperature she couldn’t feel, to warm, to hot, to really hot, in a matter of seconds. She loped away quickly while it was still shading up from a dull apple-red to cherry-red, to a beautiful glowing canary-yellow. A few seconds more to the buttercup-yellow stage, and the steel of the two pieces of track had fused together. All right, that’s fine, you can stop now, thank you! she yowled silently to the metal, jumped up onto the platform, and skittered back toward the concourse.
A few moments later the Terminal annunciator came alive and started asking the trainmaster to report to Tower A immediately. Rhiow, panting a little but pleased with herself, came out into the concourse and found Saash, Urruah, and Arhu waiting for her: Saash looking flustered and annoyed, Urruah looking very put-upon, and Arhu deep in composure-grooming again, with one ear momentarily inside out from the scrubbing he was giving it.
“I welded the switching track by Tower A,” she said to Saash. “Nothing’s going onto Tracks Twenty-three through Twenty-five that isn’t picked up and carried there, at least not until they replace that track. Might take them a couple of days.”
“Well, don’t expect me to know what’s wrong with that gate by then,” Saash said. “I haven’t got a clue. We need advice.”
“I agree. What about you?” Rhiow said to Arhu. “Are you all right?”
He glanced at her, then went back to washing. Urruah looked over his head and said to Rhiow, “He was a little rocky for a few moments when I brought him out. Then he just blinked and looked dozy.”
“Arhu?”
He looked up this time. “I’m all right,” he said. “I just remembered … you know.”
I wish I did know, Rhiow thought, for she still had no satisfactory explanation for what this killing had been doing down there the other day, or for exactly what had caused what happened.
“Come on,” she said, “let’s walk. This place is going to be crawling with station people in a fe
w minutes.”
They headed for the Graybar passage again. Rhiow spared herself a few seconds more to revel, just briefly, in the relative quiet of the terminal this time of day, this time of week. The soft rush of sound, echoing from the ceiling 120 feet above, was soothing rather than frantic: an easygoing bustle. People down for a Sunday in the city, heading home again; people who lived here, returning after a day out of town; or subway riders emerging to pick up a sandwich or a late newspaper, or a coffee. That bizarre, dark smell… Rhiow wondered what Arhu thought of it, for it bad taken so long for her to get used to it as anything but a stink. Now she was so accustomed to the scent of coffee in the Terminal that she couldn’t imagine the place without it, any more than without the faint aromas of cinders and steel and ozone. “Arhu,” she said—
But he wasn’t mere. And Rhiow smelled something in the air besides coffee, and suddenly everything became plain.
All our worries about his education, she thought. Did any of us think about getting him something to eat??
The smell of roasting meat, and cold meat, and meat as yet uncooked, was extremely noticeable, and it was coming from right in front of them—from the Italian deli that had a branch here, one of a big chain. Also in front of them, and now much closer to the meat, was Arhu. “Oh, wow,” he shouted as he tore toward the open glass-fronted deli counter, mercifully inaudible over yet another noisy announcement-request, for the stationmaster this time, “what is that, I want some!”
They ran after him. Rhiow’s fur stood right up all over her in fear. Oh, Gods, look at him, he’s come visible—
Arhu had already dodged around the side of the deli counter and was now behind it, standing on his hind legs, reaching and pawing for the meat that the white-aproned ehhif there was slicing. Pastrami, Rhiow thought, her mouth starting to water as she ran, oh, -what I wouldn’t give for some pastrami at the moment… ! But Arhu couldn’t reach, and succeeded only in snagging the ehhif’s apron. Arhu crouched down, ready to jump up onto the deli counter—
He fell over backward in an utterly comical manner… or so it looked to the big swarthy ehhif, who glanced down to see what had caught in his apron. But the cause was Urruah, who (still sidled) had simply reared up on his hind legs again, grabbed Arhu once more by the scruff of the neck, and thrown himself over backward, so that the two of them fell down in a heap.
The ehhif stared. Arhu struggled, his legs waving around wildly, until he realized that he wasn’t going anywhere and that (to judge by the soft but very heartfelt growling noises coming from just behind him) he would be truncating his present life by trying to. The ehhif laughed out loud … as well he might have at the sight of a young and apparently very uncoordinated cat, lying on his back and kicking like a crab.
“Arhu!” Rhiow hissed at him. “Get out of there!”
Urruah let Arhu go, looking blackest murder at him. Arhu righted himself, shook himself all over, looked with desperate longing at the meat, and then at Urruah, and slunk back around the deli counter.
Urruah came close behind him. Rhiow thought for a moment, then came unsidled, and sat down against the wall as Urruah shouldered Arhu out into the concourse again, out of the ehhif’s direct view. He craned his neck to try to see where Arhu had gone, and couldn’t; then went back to his work, chuckling.
Urruah sat down between Arhu and the deli counter, and glanced over at Rhiow. I’m going to kill him. You know that.
I think you won’t Besides, you’d have to wait your turn, at the moment. “So,” Rhiow said to Arhu, who was on the point of turning around and trying to find another way around the counter. “What was that supposed to be?”
“I’m hungry! Look at all that stuff up there! They’re caching!”
He tried to get around Urruah again. Urruah hunched up his shoulders and narrowed his eyes in a way that suggested Arhu could do this only if he was willing to leave his skin behind.
“Ehhif save food,” Rhiow said. “It’s weird, I know, but they do it. Let it pass for the moment. You’re starting to look like one of those people who has to be taken everywhere twice: the second time, it’s always to apologize. Arhu, stop it and sit down for a moment!!”
“But I want it.”
“So do I, and we’ll have some shortly, but anybody with more than used hiouh-litter between their ears would know not to dance around the way you did! Like a houff, I swear. Anybody would think you’re a stray.” She used auuh, the worst of the numerous words for the concept.
“lama stray,” Arhu said sullenly.
“Not anymore, you’re not. You can be a ragged-eared, scarred-up, shameless, unwashed, thieving, bullying reprobate later in life if you want, or else you can be respectably nonaligned. Just as you please. But right now you’re in-pride, and you’ll behave yourself respectably, or I’ll know why.”
“Oh, yeah?” he spat. “Why?”
Rhiow hit him upside the head, hard, with her claws just barely in, and knocked Arhu flat. The thump was audible some feet away: one or two ehhif passing by glanced over at it.
“That’s why,” she said, as Arhu started to get up, then crouched down to avoid another blow, and glared up at Rhiow, wincing and flat-eared. She held the paw ready, watching him with eyes narrowed. “And don’t flatter yourself to think you can make so much trouble for me that I’ll let you run away from your beatings, either. The Powers sent you to us, and by Iau we’ll keep you and feed you and teach you to know better until you’re past your Ordeal, or of age, or this-life dead: you won’t get away from us any sooner than that.” She glanced around at the others. “Isn’t that so?”
Saash blinked and looked off vaguely in another direction. Urruah yawned, exhibiting every one of his teeth, long, white, and sharp; then he looked lazily at Arhu, and said, “I like the dead part.”
Oh, thank you so much for your help, Rhiow said silently to them both, growling softly. Saash, didn’t you think to get him something to eat, all today?
I was about to, when he started his little stunt with Abad. And then you showed up, and we went straight out, and I assumed you would stop for something, but no, we had to come straight here, by the High Road, no less, and by the time we got near food he was ravenous, and why do you expect him to have behaved otherwise?
Rhiow bristled … and then took a breath and let it out Well, you know, she said, after a moment, you may have something there. So box my ears and call me a squirrel.
Saash looked at her with annoyed affection. Not today. I’m saving up all your beatings to give them to you all at once. Probably kill you.
“What’s a life or two between friends?” Rhiow muttered. “I’m sorry. Now, Arhu, listen to me because you’ve got to get this through your head. We do not go out of our way to attract attention. A wizard’s business is not to be noticed. And it’s not ehhif attention we’re working to avoid! We’ve been doing strange things around them all through their history, and they still haven’t worked out what’s going on. There are much worse things to worry about. Though we work for the Powers That Be, not all the Powers are friendly … and if you carelessly raise your profile high enough to get noticed by one of them in particular, She’ll squash you flatter than road pizza, eat all your nine lives, spit them up like a hairball, and leave you nothing but a voice to howl in the dark with! She is no friend to wizards, or life, or any of the other things you took your Oath to defend. And even if you don’t take your Oath seriously yet, She does … and will, if She catches you.”
He stared at her, ears down, still wide-eyed: not the usual insolent look. Maybe it got through, she thought. I hope so. “So behave yourself,” Rhiow said, “because I’m personally going to see to it that your ears ring from moonrise to sunset until you do. —Meanwhile, we’re not going to linger here; we’ve been visible too long already. But for the Dam’s sweet sake if you have to come out in public and beg, at least do it with some dignity. Watch this.”
She slipped around the counter and strolled through the door over to the
open space just beside the big glass counter laden with all the meat and cheese: then she sat down demurely and put her tail about her feet. There she waited.
The big man behind the counter had gone back to the business of making a pastrami and Swiss on rye. Rhiow gazed at him steadily, and when he felt the pressure of her look, she opened her mouth and trilled. It was practically a shout for a cat, but Rhiow knew mat ehhif beard this sound as a small conversational half-purr, not grating or intrusive, but inquisitive and polite. When he looked over at her, Rhiow did it again, stretching her mouth a bit out of shape to approximate the human smile, far more pronounced than a cat’s.
The man looked at her thoughtfully for a moment. Then he shrugged. He glanced from side to side to see whether anyone was watching, then reached down to the pile of pastrami he had already cut, and threw a big slice in Rhiow’s direction.
She was ready for this. In an instant she was up on her hind legs and had caught it in her paws. Then she dropped it, picked it up in her teeth, and trotted around the counter and out with it: not hurried, but businesslike, with her tail up and confident.
Off to one side, Rhiow dropped it for the others to share. The sound of the ehhif’s laughter was still loud behind the counter. “The outside’s got pepper on it: it’s an acquired taste,” Rhiow said to Arhu. “Better just eat the middle. — Now did you see how that went? I picked up that technique from my ehhif: don’t ask me why, but they think it’s hilarious. If I go back, that man will give me more to see me do it again.”
“It’s a waste of time,” Arhu muttered around his mouthful. “You could have just sidled and took it.”