by Diane Duane
“That could be nice,” Arhu said, briefly distracted; he glanced around and licked his chops.
“ ‘Nice’? It could be fatal. There are more kinds of birds in this city than pigeons and sparrows and starlings. If one of the Princes of the Air hits you at eighty miles an hour, you’d better pray you’re high enough up for a long-enough fall to reconstruct the wizardry.”
“The Princes—”
“And a couple of ‘princesses,’ ” Rhiow said. “There’s a falcon-breeding program based on top of a building down near Central Park South. One of the hatchlings, about ten clutches ago, was a wizard: he’s been promoted since, to Lord of the Birds of the East—a Senior for his kind. The rest of them are stuck-up as anything, think they’re royalty, and kill more pigeons in a given day than they need to. They’re a menace. Especially if they hit you with one of those little claw-fists of theirs, at high velocity, while you’re invisible. The impact alone might kill you, for all I know. It sure kills the pigeons.”
She sighed then as the two ehhif fell together, exhausted, at the end of their bout. “Come on,” she said. “Enough looking for one day…”
Arhu’s tail lashed. “If I stop looking at this,” he said, almost absently, “I’ll just see something else…”
Yes, Rhiow thought, that’s the problem, isn’t it… “Come on,” she said, “and we’ll go down to the concourse and see about that pastrami. You can’t see things while you’re eating, I don’t think. The chewing is supposed to interfere.”
He looked at her with a glitter of hope in his eyes. “AD right,” he said.
They walked down the air together, Arhu still doing it very slowly and carefully, as if it were a normal stairway; went right down to ground level, nearest the wall, and slipped inside the brass doors. Arhu looked around them as they walked together past the main waiting room toward the concourse.
Suddenly Arhu stopped and stared. “What are those?” he whispered.
Rhiow looked over into the waiting room. It had been one of the first areas to have its refurbishment completed, and was now routinely used for art exhibitions and receptions, and sometimes even parties. At the moment, though, the big airy space looked oddly empty, even though there were things in it… rather large things. In the center of the room, on a large black pedestal with velvet crowd-control ropes around it, caught in midstride—almost up on its toes, its tail stretched out horizontally and whipping out gracefully behind it—a dinosaur skeleton was mounted. Its huge head, empty-eyed, jaws open, seemed to glare down at the few casual observers who were strolling around it or pausing to read the informational plaque mounted nearby.
Rhiow gazed up at it and smiled sardonically. “Yes,” she said, “I guess it doesn’t look much like what we were dealing with last night. A lot bigger. These are part of the Museum of Natural History’s new exhibition … and the ehhif are all excited about it because now they think they know, from these new models, how the saurians really held themselves and moved.”
Arhu took a few steps toward the biggest of the mounted skeletons … cocked his head to one side, and listened. After a moment, he said, “And those are real bones?”
“They dig them up and wire them together,” Rhiow said. “It always struck me as a little perverse. But then, they have no way of seeing what we saw last night.”
They walked on. “This place looked a lot different, the other night,” Arhu said.
“If it’s any help, it never looks the same way twice to me,” Rhiow said. “I mean, the physical structures are always the same, obviously—well, not always, not with all this renovation and with exhibitions coming and going out in front But night and day pass, the light changes, the ehhif here are never the same ones at any given moment… Though the city still isn’t as big as you might think: you’ll glimpse the occasional familiar face…”
“That’s not what I meant,” Arhu said, more slowly, with a puzzled expression. “It was bigger, somehow. It echoed.”
“It does that more at night than in the daytime,” Rhiow said. “Emptier.”
“No,” Arhu said. “It was full; I saw it full. Or I think I do now.” He stopped and stared at the concourse before him: a late lunchtime crowd, the crush easing somewhat. “I heard something … a lot of noise. I walked in to find out what it was. Then—” He shook his ears as if they hurt him. “I don’t want to think about that,” he said.
“You’re going to have to, sooner or later. But come on,” Rhiow said. “Pastrami first.”
Rhiow came unsidled long enough to do her “trick” again for the man in the Italian deli, and he gave her not only pastrami but cheese as well. She shared the pastrami happily enough with Arhu but never got a chance to do so with the cheese: as soon as he smelled it, he immediately snatched the whole thing and gobbled it, almost choking himself—a topologically interesting sight, like watching a shark eat a mattress. “Oh, this is wonderful,” Arhu attempted to say around the mouthful, “what is this?”
“Solid milk,” Rhiow said, just a little wistfully, watching it vanish. “They have a lot of kinds. This one’s called ‘mozzarella.’ ”
“What a terrific invention!”
“So ehhif are good for something after all?”
He glanced sidewise at her, and his face shut down again. “Not much besides this.”
Rhiow held her peace until he finished the cheese. “Come on, get sidled,” she said, “and we’ll come back and see him again later: he’s a soft-hearted type.”
They strolled a little way out into the concourse, sat down by the east wall, out of the way of people’s feet, and well to one side of the cash machines. Arhu craned his neck back in the bright noon light and looked up at the ceiling again. “It is backward.”
“Yes … and you saw that before. Seeing is going to be a problem for you now … and a gift.”
“If it’s a gift, they can take it back,” he said bitterly. “I can’t stop seeing things now. Though you were right about the chewing.”
“What kinds of things?”
“I don’t know what most of them are,” Arhu said. “It’s like when the Whisperer… when she tells you stuff… but there’s always more than just what she tells you. I see pictures of things behind things behind things, and it all keeps changing. I don’t know where to put my feet.”
“Images of alternate futures,” Rhiow said, wondering if she now was beginning to understand Arhu’s clumsiness. Arhu looked at her strangely.
“Anything can change a future,” Rhiow said. “Say one thing, do one thing, and it goes one way. Do something else, and it goes another. What would have happened if the Whisperer had offered you the Oath, and you’d said no? What if you’d slipped off the brickwork, the other night? What if the police-ehhif had come and caught you trying to steal the pastrami, and they had taken you away to an animal shelter? Each of your futures would have been different. And there are thousands more.”
“But which of them is real?” Arhu muttered.
Rhiow swished her tail slowly from side to side. “All of them… until you make the choice, perform the act. You’re only seeing possibilities.”
“But it’s not just things behind things,” Arhu said. “There are other images, things that stay.”
“The past,” Rhiow said softly. “That at least holds still. . . some ways, anyway. Are you seeing your past lives?”
“No,” Arhu said, and then added, very surprised, “I think this is my first one.”
“We all have to start somewhere,” Rhiow said.
“How many have you had?”
She gave him a look. “That’s a question you don’t usually ask. If the Person you’re talking to volunteers the information—”
He scowled, turned away. “That’s what Saash said when I asked her what her Ordeal was like.”
“And she was right to say so,” Rhiow said. “That’s personal business, too, as personal among wizards as the issue of lives is among People. Go around asking People questions like
that and you’re going to get your ears boxed.”
Arhu looked scornful. “You guys are sure sensitive. Won’t talk about this. Can’t do that, somebody’s feelings might get hurt. How do you ever get anything done?”
“If there were more People in the world concerned about being sensitive,” Rhiow said, rather shortly, “we’d have a lot less work to do… Look, Arhu, you’ve had a bad time of it so far, I’d say. But we’re trying to teach you the rules so that you’ll have a better tune later. All I can do is warn you how People are going to take the things you say. If you still say them…” She shrugged her tail.
They were quiet for a moment. “As to lives,” Rhiow said then, “I don’t think all that much about my last ones. Most of us don’t, I suspect, after the first few, when the novelty of the change wears off. The really persistent memories—big mistakes, great sorrows or joys—they intrude sometimes. I don’t go digging. What you stumble across, from day to day, you’re usually meant to find for some reason. But caching memories is as sick as caching food, for one of our People. Better to live now, and use the memories, when they come to mind, as a way to keep from making the same mistakes all over again. Use the past as a guide, not a fence.”
“The past…” He looked out into the golden light of the concourse, toward the sunlight spilling through the south windows. “I don’t remember much of mine.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“I do,” Arhu said, somewhat painfully. “You don’t trust me.”
There was no answer to that, not right now: and no question but that he was seeing at least some things with surprising clarity. “Arhu,” Rhiow said, “it’s just that if your gift is seeing … and it looks that way … you have to try to manage it, use it… and especially, you have to try to accept what there is to see about yourself, when it comes up for viewing. You are the eye through which you see. If the eye is clouded, all the other visions will be, too … and at this dangerous time in your life, if you don’t do your best to see clearly, you won’t survive.”
He would not look at her.
He sees something, Rhiow thought. Something in his own future, I bet. And he thinks that if he doesn’t talk about it, it won’t happen…
“For the time being, you just do the best you can,” Rhiow said at last. “Though I admit I’d be happier if I knew you were coming to some kind of terms with your Oath.”
“I said the words,” Arhu said after a little while.
“Yes. But will you hold by them?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” The voice was completely flat.
Rhiow swung her tail gently from side to side. “Arhu, do you know what entropy is?”
He paused a moment, listening. “Things run down,” he said finally. “Stuff dies. Everything dies.”
“Yes.”
“But it wasn’t meant to … not at first.”
“No,” Rhiow said. “Things got complicated. That’s the story of the worlds in one bowl. All the rest of the history of all the worlds there are, has been about the issue of resolving that complication. It will take until the end of the worlds to do it. Our People have their part to play in that resolution. There will be a lot of fighting … so if you like that kind of thing, you’re in the right place.”
“I wasn’t yesterday,” he said bitterly. “I couldn’t have fought anything. I was fooling myself.”
So that much self-vision is in play, whether he thinks so or not, Rhiow thought. “In the strictly physical sense, maybe,” Rhiow said. “But nonetheless, you said what you saw. You tried to warn us. You may have given Saash that little impetus she needed to hurry and finish what she had to do before the saurians came in. That’s worthwhile, even that little help. You struck your first blow.”
“I don’t know if I even did it on purpose,” Arhu said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Rhiow said. “The result matters. We got out alive… and for a while, there was no way to tell whether we would or not. So, by and large, your presence yesterday made a difference.”
She stood up, stretched, let out a big yawn. “Let’s get a little more concrete,” Rhiow said. “Anyway, I want to have a look at that track.”
Together they walked through the concourse, slipping to one side or another to avoid the ehhif, and made their way down to the platform for Track 30. A repetitive clanking noise was coming from a little ways down in the darkness, and Rhiow and Arhu paused at the platform’s end to watch the workmen, in their fluorescent reflective vests and hard hats, working on something on the ground, which at the moment was completely obscured by all of them standing around it, watching.
Rhiow threw a glance over at the gate, which was visible enough to her and Arhu if not to the workmen; the patterns of color sheening down it said that it was back to normal again. “Good,” she said. “And it looks like that track’s almost ready to go back into service. Come on,” she said, and hopped down off the platform, onto the track bed.
Arhu was slightly uneasy about following her, but after a moment he came along. She led him carefully around the workmen, past the end of Tower A, and then back down in the direction from which they had first come, but this time at an angle, down toward the East Yard, where trains were pulled in for short-term storage during the morning and evening rush hours. She was not headed for the yard itself, but for a fire exit near the north side of Tower C. Its heavy steel door was shut; she glanced over at Arhu. “Down here,” she said, and put a paw into the metal.
Arhu hesitated for a moment. “Come on, you did it just fine the other night,” Rhiow said.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t thinking about it.”
“Just remember, it’s mostly empty space. You’re mostly empty space. Just work the solid parts around each other…”
Rhiow walked through the door. After a moment Arhu followed, with surprising smoothness. “Nice,” Rhiow said, as they went down the stairs together. The light here was dun even by cat standards, and Rhiow didn’t hurry —there was always the chance you might run into someone or something you hadn’t heard on the way down.
At the bottom of the fire exit, they walked through the door there and came out on the lower track level, on another platform, the longest one to be seen on this level. More fluorescent lights ran right down its length toward a low dark mass of machinery at the platform’s end; electric carts and manually powered ones stood waiting here and there. “The tracks on this side are primarily for moving packages and light freight to and from the trains,” Rhiow said; “bringing in supplies and equipment for the station, that kind of thing. But mostly that kind of traffic takes place during the evening or late at night. In the daytime, this area doesn’t get quite so much official use … and so others move in.”
Arhu looked alarmed. “What kind of ‘others’?”
“You’ll see.”
They walked northward along the platform to the point where it stopped, across from a sort of concrete-lined bay in the eastern wall. Rhiow jumped down from the platform and crossed the track to the right of it. “This track runs in a big loop,” she said, “around the terminal ends of the main tracks and out the other side. Not a place to linger: it’s busy night and day. But things are a little quieter up this way.”
She ducked into the bay and to the left, pausing to let her eyes adjust—it was much darker down here than out in the cavernous underground of the main lower track area, with all its lines of fluorescents and the occasional light shining out the windows of workshops and locker rooms. Behind her, Arhu stared into the long dark passage. Huge wheels wrapped full of fire hose, and mated to more low, blocky-looking machines, were bolted into the walls, from which also protruded big brass nozzles of the kind to which fire equipment would be fastened. A faint smell of steam came drifting from the end of the corridor, where it could be seen to meet another passage, darker still.
“What is this? And what’s that?” Arhu whispered, staring down the dark hallway. For, hunched far down the length of it, against one of the low dark
machines, something moved … shifted, and looked at them out of eyes that eerily caught the light coming from behind them.
“It’s a storage area,” Rhiow said. “We’re under Forty-eighth Street here; this is where they keep the fire pumps. As for what it is—”
She walked down into the darkness. Very slowly, she could hear Arhu coming up behind, his pads making little noise on the damp concrete. The steam smell got stronger. Finally she paused by the spot from which those strange eyes had looked down the hallway at them. It seemed at first to be a heap of crazily folded cardboard, and under that a pile of old, stained clothing. But then you saw, under another piece of folded cardboard from a liquor store box, the grimy, hairy face, and the eyes, bizarrely blue. From under the cardboard, a hand reached out and stroked Rhiow’s head.
“Hunt’s luck, Rosie,” Rhiow said, and sat down beside him.
“Luck Reeoow you, got no luck today,” Rosie said. Except that he didn’t say it in ehhif. He said, “Aihhah ueeur Rieeeow hanh ur-t hah hah’iih eeiaie.…”
Arhu, who had slowly come up beside her, stared in complete astonishment. “He speaks our language!”
“Yes,” Rhiow said, taking a moment to scrub a bit of fallen soot out of her eye: solid particulates from the train exhausts tended to cling to the ceiling over here because of the steam. “And his accent’s pretty fair, if you give him a little credit for the mangled vowels, the way he shortens the aspirants, and the ‘shouting.’ The syntax needs work, though. Rosie, excuse me for talking about you to your face. This is Arhu.”
“Hunt’s luck, Arhu,” Rosie said, and reached out a grubby hand.
Arhu sat down just out of range, looking even more shocked than he had when the Children of the Serpent burst through into the catenary cavern the night before.
“I don’t know if Arhu is much for being petted, Rosie,” Rhiow said, and tucked herself down into a comfortable meatloaf shape. “He’s new around here. Say hello, Arhu.”