by Diane Duane
“No, I couldn’t. You can’t take anything but yourself with you when you sidle. If you steal, you do it visibly… and that’s just as it should be.”
“Then you might as well have just taken it anyway. You could have gotten in and out of that glass thing before he knew what had happened.”
“No,” Rhiow said. “For one thing, you’d never be able to come back here and get more: they’d chase you on sight. But more importantly, it’s rude to them.”
“Who cares? They don’t care about us. Why should we care about them?”
The pastrami was gone. “Come on,” Urruah said, glancing around: “let’s get ourselves sidled before the transit cops show up and get on our case.”
They slipped around a corner from the deli and sidled, then started to walk back out toward the concourse. “They do care, some of them,” Saash said.
Arhu hissed softly in scorn. “Yeah? What about all the others? They’ll kick you or kill you for fun. And you can’t tell which kind they are until it’s too late.”
Rhiow and the others exchanged glances over Arhu’s head as they walked. “It’s not their fault,” Urruah said. “They generally don’t know any better. Most ehhif aren’t very well equipped for moral behavior as we understand it.”
“Then they’re just dumb animals,” Arhu said, “and we should take what they’ve got whenever we like.”
“Oh, stop it,” said Rhiow. “Just because we were made before they were doesn’t mean we get to act superior to them.”
“Even if we are?”
She gave him a sidelong look. “Queen Iau made them,” Rhiow said, “even if we’re not sure for what. Ten lives on, maybe we’ll all be told. Meanwhile, we work with them as we find them…” Arhu opened his mouth, and Rhiow said, “No. Later. We have to get moving if we’re going to catch Ehef during his business hours.”
“Who’s Ehef?” Arhu said.
“Our local Senior wizard,” Urruah said. “He’s five lives on, now. This Me alone, he must be, oh, how old, Rhi?”
“A hundred and sixty-odd moons-round,” Rhiow said, “thirteen or so if you do it by suns-round, ehhif-style. Oldish for this life.”
“A hundred and sixty moons?” Arhu goggled. “He’s ancient! Can he walk?’
Urruah burst out laughing. “Oh, please, gods,” he said between laughs, “let him ask Ehef that. Oh please.”
“Come on,” Rhiow said.
Chapter Five
The walk down to Fifth and Forty-second is never an easy one, even on weekends: too many windowshoppers in from out of town, too many tourists, and even a sidled cat has to watch where it walks on Fifth Avenue on Sunday. But by nine-thirty on a Sunday night, almost everything is closed, even the electronics shops that litter the middle reaches of Fifth, festooned with signs declaring closing-out sale! everything must go! and attracting the unsuspecting passersby who haven’t yet worked out that, come next week, nothing will be gone but their money. As a result, a pedestrian, whether on two feet or four, can stand for a moment and gaze across at the splendid Beaux-Arts facade of the New York Public Library’s Forty-second Street building—especially in the evening, when it glows golden with its landmark lighting—and enjoy the look of the place without being trampled by man, machine, or beast.
The four of them crossed with care in the lull between red lights, and Arhu stood looking up the big flight of steps, and from one side to the other, at the massive shapes of the two lions carved out of the pale pink Tennessee marble. Feral Arhu might have been, but no cat with brains enough to think could have failed to recognize the two huge, silent figures as images of relatives.
“Who are they?” Arhu said.
“Gods,” Urruah said pointedly. “Some of ours.”
Rhiow smiled. “They’re Sef and Hhu’au,” she said, “the lion-Powers of Yesterday and Today.”
Arhu stared. “Are they real?”
Saash smiled slightly. “If you mean, do they exist? Yes. If you mean, do they walk around looking like that? No,” Saash said. “But they’re like that. Big, and powerful… and predatory, each in his or her own way. They stand for the barriers between what was, which we can’t affect, and what will be—which we can, but only by what we do in the present moment.”
“Except if you get access to a timeslide,” Urruah said, “when you can go back in time and—”
“Urruah,” Rhiow said, glaring at him, “go eat something, or do something useful with that mouth, all right?” To Arhu she said, “We do not tamper with time without authorization from Them, from the Powers That Be. And even They don’t do it lightly. You can destroy a whole world if you’re not careful or else you can wipe yourself out of existence, which tends to have the same effect at the personal level even if you’re lucky enough not to have caused everyone else not to have existed as well. So don’t even think about it. And you’ll find,” she added, as the smug we’ll-see-about-that expression settled itself over Arhu’s face, “when you ask the One Who Whispers for details on time travel anyway, that you won’t be given that information, no matter how you wheedle. If you press Her on the subject, your ears will ring for days. But don’t take my word for it. Go ahead and ask.”
Arhu’s face went a little less smug as he looked from Saash to Urruah and saw their knowing grins: especially Urruah’s, which had a little too much anticipation in it. Rhiow looked sidewise at Saash. This “heavy-pawed dam” role isn’t one I ever imagined myself in, Rhiow said silently. And I’m not sure I like it…
Saash glanced at her, a little amused. You’re betraying a natural talent, though…
Thanks loads.
“If they’re Yesterday and Today,” Arhu said, “then where’s Tomorrow?”
“Invisible,” Urruah said. “Hard to make an image of something that hasn’t happened yet. But he’s there, Reh-t is, whether you see him or not. Like all the best predators, you never see him till it’s much too late. Walk right through him, feel the chill: he’s there.”
Arhu stared at the empty space between the two statues, and shivered. It was a little odd. Rhiow looked at him in mild concern for a moment.
They went in, trotting up the stairs and weaving to avoid the ehhif. Arhu kept well over to the right side, skirting the pedestal of Sef’s statue. You scared the child, Rhiow said to Urruah.
It’s good for him, Urruah said, untroubled. He can use some scaring, if you ask me.
They came up to the top of the steps, and Rhiow took a moment to coach Arhu in how to handle the revolving door. Inside the polished brass doors, they stood for a moment, looking up at the great entrance hall, all resplendent in its white marble staircases. Then Rhiow said, “Come on, this way…” and led them off to the left, under the staircase and the second-floor gallery, and past the green travertine marble doorway that opened into the writers’ room; then right, around the corner to a door adorned with a sign reading staff only, and an arrow pointing down with the word
CAFETERIA.
Arhu sniffed the air appreciatively. “Don’t get any ideas,” Urruah growled, “that’s today’s lunch you’re smelling, and it’s long eaten.”
Rhiow heard his stomach growl, and carefully didn’t chuckle out loud. She reared up and pushed the door open: outside of opening hours, it wasn’t locked. It leaned inward with the usual squeak, and they trotted in and up the stairs to the central level of the stacks.
When they were out of the stairwell, Arhu loped over to the edge of the inner stack corridor and looked down through the railings. “Wow,” he said, “what is all this stuff?”
“Knowledge,” Rhiow said, stepping up beside him and looking up at the skylights and four stories of books, and down at three stories more: four and a half miles of shelving, here and in the tunneled-out space under Bryant Park, pierced here and there by the several staircases that allowed access between levels, and the selective retrieval system that moved between levels, its vertical conveyor arms picking up books that had been called for and dropping off books to
be returned. It was the genius of this building, its arrangement in such a way as to hide this great mass of shelf space—so that even when you knew it was here, it was always a shock to see it, as much cubic space as would be in a good-sized apartment building, and not an inch of it wasted.
In the center of it all, on the level at which they had entered, was a large pitlike area filled with desks and carrels, with a wide wooden-arched opening off to one side. Right now this opening, where ehhif would come from the main reading room on the side to pick up books, was shuttered and locked, in case thieves should somehow get in through the great reading room windows by night and try to steal books for collectors. The rarest books were all now up in little wood-paneled, iron-grilled jails in the Special Collections, second-floor front, isolated from the main reference stacks by thick concrete walls and alarm systems. Ehef had told Rhiow once that you could hear the books whispering to each other in the dark through the trefoil-pierced gratings, in a tiny rustling of page chafing against page, prisoners waiting for release. Rhiow had come away wondering whether he had been teasing her. Wizards do not lie: words are their tool and currency, which they dare not devalue. But even wizardry, in which a word can shape a world, has room for humor, and there had been a whimsical glint in Ehef’s eyes that night…
She smiled slightly. “This way,” Rhiow said, and led the way over to the central core of carrels, where the computers sat two to a desk, or sometimes three. Several of the monitors were turned on, casting a soft blue-white glow over the desks; and on one desk, sprawled comfortably with one paw on the keyboard, and looking thoughtfully at the screen in front of him, lay Ehef.
He looked over at them with only mild interest as they came, though when his eyes came to rest on Arhu, the expression became more awake. Ehef’s coloration was what People called vefessh, and ehhif called “blue”; his eyes, wide and round in a big round platter of a face, were a vivid green that set off the plush blue fur splendidly. Those eyes reflected the shifting images on the screen, pages scrolling by. “Useless,” he said softly. “Not even wizardry can do anything about the overcrowding on these lines. Phone company’s gotta do something. —Good evening, Rhiow, and hunt’s luck to you.”
“Hunt’s luck, Senior,” she said, sitting down.
“Wondered when you were going to get down to see me. Urruah? How they squealin’?”
“Loudly,” Urruah said, and grinned.
“That’s what I like to hear. Saash? Life treating you well?”
She sat down, threw a look at Arhu, and immediately began to scratch. “No complaints, Ehef,” she said.
“So I see.” He looked at Arhu again, got up, stretched fore and aft, and jumped down off the desk, crossing to them. “And I smell new wizardry. What’s your name, youngster?”
“Arhu.”
Ehef leaned close to breathe breaths with him: Arhu held still for it, just. “Huh. Pastrami,” said Ehef. “Well, hunt’s luck to you too, Arhu. You still hungry? Care for a mouse?”
“There are mice here?”
“Are there mice here, he asks.” Ehef looked at the others as if asking for patience in the face of idiocy. “As if there’s any building in this city that doesn’t have either mice, rats, or cockroaches. Mice! There are hundreds of mice! Thousands! … Well, all right, some.”
“I want to catch some! Where are they?”
Ehef gave Rhiow a look. “He’s new at this, I take it.”
Arhu was about to shoot off past Rhiow when he suddenly found Urruah standing in front of him, with an attentive and entirely too interested expression. “When you’re on someone else’s hunting ground,” Urruah said, “it’s manners to ask permission first.”
“If there are thousands, why should I? I wanna—”
“You should ask permission, young fastmouth,” said Ehef, his voice scaling up into a hiss as he leaned in past Urruah’s shoulder with a paw raised, “because if you don’t, I personally will rip the fur off your tail and stuff it all right down your greedy face, are we clear about that? Young people these days, I ask you.”
Arhu crouched down a little, wide-eyed, and Rhiow kept her face scrupulously straight. Ehef might look superficially well-fed and well-to-do, but to anyone who had spent much time in this city, the glint in his eyes and the muscles under his pelt spoke of a kittenhood spent on the West Side docks among the smugglers and the drug dealers, with rats the size of dogs, dogs the size of ponies, and ehhif who (unlike the tunnel-ehhif) counted one of the People good eating if they could catch one.
“Please don’t rip him up, Ehef,” Rhiow said mildly. “He’s a little short on the social graces. We’re working on it.”
“Huh,” Ehef said. “He better work fast, otherwise somebody with less patience is going to tear his ears off for him. Right, Mr. Wisemouth?” He moved so fast that even Rhiow, who was half-expecting it, only caught sight of Ehef’s paw as it was just missing Arhu’s right ear; the ear went flat, which was just as well, for Ehef’s claws were out, and Arhu crouched farther down.
“Right,” said Ehef. “Well, because Rhiow suggests it, I’ll cut you a little slack. You can’t help it if you were raised in a sewer, a lot of us were. So what you say is, ‘Of your courtesy, may I hunt on your ground?’ And then I say, ‘Hunt, but not to the last life, for even prey have Gods.’ So come on, let’s hear it.”
Only a little sullenly—for there was a faint, tantalizing rustling and squeaking to be heard down at the bottom of the stacks—Arhu said, “Of your courtesy, may I hunt on your ground.”
“Was that a question? Who were you asking, the floor? One more time.”
Arhu started to make a face, then controlled it as one of Ehef’s paws twitched. “Of your courtesy, may I hunt on your ground?”
“Sure, go on, you, catch yourself some mice, there’s a steady supply, I make sure of that. But don’t eat them all or I’ll skin you before anybody’s gods get a chance. Go on, what are you waiting for, don’t you hear them messing around down there? Screwing each other, that’s what that noise is, mouse sex, disgusting.”
Hurriedly, Arhu got up and scurried off. Rhiow and the others looked after him, then sat down with Ehef.
“Thanks, Ehef,” Rhiow said. “I’m sorry he’s so rude.”
“Aah, don’t worry about it, we all need a little knocking around in this life before we’re fit to wash each other’s ears. I was like that once. He’ll learn better; or get dead trying.”
“That’s what we’re hoping to avoid…”
Saash blinked, one ear swiveling backward to follow the rustling going on above. “ ‘I make sure there’s a steady supply’? I wouldn’t think that’s a very professional attitude for a mouser.”
“I got more than one profession, you know that. But the day I eat every mouse in the place, that’s the day they decide they don’t need a cat anymore.”
“And, besides,” Saash said dryly, “ ‘even prey have gods.’ ”
“Sure they do.” Ehef settled himself, stretched out a paw. “But ethics aside, look, it’s not like the old times anymore, no more ‘jobs for life.’ With the budget cuts, if these people want to give me cat food, they have to pay for it themselves. Bad situation, nothing I can do about it. So I make sure they think I’m useful, and I make sure I don’t have to go out of my way to do it. Why should I go hunting out when I can eat in? I bring the librarians dead mice every day, they bring me cat food, everybody’s happy. Leaves me free for other work. Such as consultation, which reminds me, why didn’t you call to make sure I was available first?”
Rhiow smiled. “You’re always available.”
“The disrespect of youth.”
“When have I ever been disrespectful to you? But it’s true, you know it is. And I usually do call first, but I had a problem.”
Ehef’s ears swiveled as he heard the scampering downstairs. “So I see. Not the one I thought, though.” His whiskers went forward in a dry smile. “Thought you finally figured out what to do with that spell.
”
“What? Oh, that.” Rhiow laughed. “No, I’m still doing analysis on it, when I have the time. Not much, lately. The gates seem to take up most of it… and that’s the problem now.”
“All right.” He blinked and looked vague for a moment, then said, “I keep a sound-damper spell emplaced around the desks: it’s active now, he won’t hear. Tell me your troubles.”
She told him about their earlier failure with the gate. Ehef settled down into a pose that Rhiow had become very familiar with over the years: paws tucked in and folded together at the wrists, eyes half-closed as he listened. Only once or twice did he speak, to ask a technical question about the structure of the gate. Finally he opened one eye, then the second, and looked up.
So did Rhiow. It was very quiet downstairs.
“He couldn’t get out of here, could he?” she said.
“Not without help. Or not without turning himself into a mouse,” said Ehef, “which fortunately he can’t do yet, though I bet that won’t last long. But never mind. Pretty unsettling, Rhi, but you have to see where this line of reasoning is going to take you.”
“I wasn’t sure,” she said. “I thought a second opinion—”
“You hoped I would get you off the hook somehow,” Ehef said with that slightly cockeyed grin that showed off the broken upper canine. “You’ve already talked this through with Saash, I know—otherwise you wouldn’t waste my time—and she couldn’t suggest anything at our level of reality that could cause such a malfunction.” He glanced up at Saash: she lashed her tail “no.” “So the problem has to be farther in, at a more central, more senior level. Somewhere in the Old Downside.”
This agreed with Rhiow’s opinion, and it was not at all reassuring. Wizards most frequently tend to rank universes in terms of their distance to or from the most central reality known—the one that all universes mirror, to greater degree or lesser, and about which all worlds and dimensions are arranged. That most senior reality had many names, across existence. Wizards of the People called it Auhw-t, the Hearth: ehhif wizards called it Timeheart. It was the core-reality of the universes: some said it was the seed-reality, parent of all others. Whether this was the case or not, worlds situated closer to the Hearth had an increased power to affect worlds farther out in life’s structure. The Old Downside was certainly much more central than the universe in which Earth moved, so that what happened there was bound to happen here, sooner or later. And a failure in the effect of the laws of wizardry in a universe so central to the scheme of things had bad implications for the effectiveness of wizardry here and now, on Earth, in the long term.