The Book of Night with Moon fw-1

by Diane Duane

  “You mean,” Rhiow said, “that something is changing the way the Downside gating structures behave?”

  Ehef shrugged his tail. “Possible.”

  “Or else something’s changing the locks on the gates,” Saash said suddenly, with a peculiar and disturbed look on her face.

  “That would probably be the lesser of the two evils,” Ehef said, “but neither one’s any good. Worldgating’s one of the things that keeps this planet running … not that the world at large notices, or ought to. If wizards in high-population areas like this have to start diverting energy from specialized wizardries just to handle ‘rapid transit,’ they’re not going to be able to do their jobs at peak effectiveness … and the results are going to start to show in a hurry. Someone’s going to have to find out what’s going wrong, and fast.” Ehef looked up at Rhiow. “And you found the problem … so you know what that means. You get to fix it.”

  Rhiow hissed very softly. “Which means a trip Downside. Hiouh. Well, you can tell the Powers from me that they’re going to have to find someone else to mind the baby while we do what we’re doing. He’s on Ordeal, but he doesn’t understand the ramifications of the Oath as yet, and we’re not going to have time to teach him and do this at the same time. Nor can we take the chance that he might sabotage something we’re doing in a moment of high spirits—”

  “Sony, Rhi,” Ehef said. “You’re stuck with him. The ‘you found the problem, you fix it’ rule applies to Arhu as well. Your team must have something to offer him that no other wizards now working have; otherwise he wouldn’t be here with you.”

  “Maybe they do,” Rhiow said, starting to get angry, “but what about my team, then? How’re they supposed to cope, having to do their jobs—and particularly nasty ones, now— while playing milk-dam to a half-feral kitten? He’s an unknown quantity, Ehef: he sounds odd sometimes. And I have no idea what he’s going to do from one moment to the next, even when he’s not sounding odd. Why should my team be endangered, having to look out for him? They’re past their own Ordeals, trained, experienced, and necessary—who’s looking out for their needs?”

  “The same Ones who look after them usually,” Ehef said. “No wizard is sent a problem that is inappropriate to him or to his needs. Problems sent to a team are always appropriate to the whole team … whether it looks that way, at this end of causality, or not. Right now, you can question that appropriateness … what wizard doesn’t, occasionally? But afterward, things always look different.”

  “They’ll look a lot more different if we’re dead,” Urruah said softly.

  “Yeah, well, we all take that chance, don’t we? But even crossing the street’s not safe around here, you know that. At least if you die on errantry, you know it was for a purpose. More assurance than most People get. Or most other sentient beings of whatever kind.” He glanced up at the stairway to the next level of the stacks, where scampering sounds could be heard again. “As for him, he’s almost certainly part of the solution to this problem. Look at him: almost too young to be doing this kind of thing … and all the more powerful for it. You know how it is with the youngest wizards: they don’t know what’s impossible, so they have less trouble doing it. And just as well. We learn our limits too soon as it is…”

  “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 mink 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 informatio
n 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 mat?”

  “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 me 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: die 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, check 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. “Killing, 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 mink,” 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 Perm 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. Til 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.