The Big Meow

by Diane Duane

  We found the water, Arhu said. There’s a waterfall up higher. But that’s not important. We found a cave, up the hillside about forty leaps, in between two big stones. And somebody’s been doing wizardry in here!

  “Oh really,” Rhiow said. “How recently?”

  A week or so ago, Siffha’h said. Maybe a little longer, but not much.

  “What kind of wizardry?” Rhiow said.

  “Uh oh,” Urruah said then, looking behind them.

  Someone had come out of the low round hut, and was standing there looking around: a queen-ehhif in dark pants and a short-sleeved blue shirt. “Doesn’t matter,” Rhiow said, looking uphill again as the ehhif walked off around the hut, “we’re sidled. Sif?”

  Rhiow heard her hesitating. Not sure I like the look of this, Siffha’h said.

  “Why? What’s the matter?”

  I can feel what’s left of the spell in the stone, Siffha’h said. It’s full of geological constants– local ones, with really fine adjustments on them. And there were three or four power conduits leading out of the spell and sunk into the rock underneath the mountain.

  “A diagnostic?” Rhiow said.

  I don’t think so, Siffha’h said, and she was beginning to sound angry. This doesn’t look like someone trying to find out what the earth’s been doing. This looks like someone trying to make it do something–

  Rhiow went chilly inside. It wasn’t as if wizards never made mistakes, or did stupid things: but messing around with the earth’s structure in a place where it was already unstable enough struck her as foolhardy. “That’s really odd,” Rhiow said. “Let’s see what you’ve got. ‘Ruah–” She started up the hill.

  “Rhi,” Urruah said from behind her, “while we’re on the subject of ‘odd’, you might want to have a look–”

  Rhiow turned around. The she-ehhif who’d come out of the hut was heading straight toward them through the grass.

  Rhiow glanced over her shoulder to see what the ehhif might be looking at instead of her — but there was nothing there but more of the long grass. Rhiow looked back at the queen-ehhif, ready to run or vanish if necessary, but it was hard to imagine why it would be necessary. The ehhif didn’t look particularly dangerous: she was very small as humans went, with long dark hair tied back, a low belt hanging down over her trousers to one side–

  And, hanging holstered from that belt, a gun. Rhiow opened her mouth, prepared to say a single word in the Speech, the trigger for the run-and-hide spell that lay, as usual, ready at the back of her brain. As she did, the ehhif stopped and gazed up the hill, as if seeing something there that she hadn’t expected. Then she looked down at Rhiow.

  “Excuse me,” the ehhif said, “but are you People looking for something, or are you lost?” And she said it in the Speech.

  Rhiow and Urruah stared at each other. Then Rhiow put her whiskers forward. “Lost!” she said. “Hardly! But looking for something, yes: though until a few moments ago, we weren’t expecting to find another wizard here. Is that your spell up there?”

  “Yes,” the ehhif said. “Sorry if it looks alarming at first glance: it’s specialized stuff. Anyway, I’m on errantry: haku, cousins!” She sat down in the grass. “In fact, I suspect you’re why I was sent here. I’m called Helen: Helen Walks Softly.”

  Urruah sat down, his whiskers forward too. “You could have fooled me,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t have been polite to sneak up on you,” Helen said. “You might’ve gotten the wrong idea. May I ask names?”

  “My colleague here is Urruah,” Rhiow said. “The youngsters up the hill are Arhu and Siffha’h. : I’m Rhiow– I lead the New York worldgating teams.”

  Helen blinked at that. “Worldgating?” she said. “Were you sent here by assignment?”

  “We were in L.A. on a consult,” Rhiow said, “but when was a wizard’s casual business ever completely casual? The Powers find ways not to waste our efforts.”

  Helen gave Rhiow a wry look. “I hear you there, sister,” she said. “I was going to come by to check the parking lot before I turned in. There’s been a wave of burglaries the past couple of weeks: people breaking into parked cars, or trying to vandalize the interpretive center or the ap.” She nodded back toward the hut. “Nothing going on today, fortunately. But then the Earth moved. What a relief! I checked the center and the ap to make sure they were all right in the aftermath…and then I smelled power passing through. Thought I’d better take a look.”

  What are you talking to down there? Arhu’s thought came, sounding a little spooked.

  She’s a wizard, Rhiow said silently. Get yourselves down here and greet her properly. “Probably you felt Siffha’h,” she said. “She’s been doing powersource work with us lately, and she’s still running at post-Ordeal levels. So is Arhu, for that matter…so I suppose it could have been either of them.”

  Urruah was looking a little dubiously at Helen’s gun. “You wouldn’t have needed that to deal with burglars, though–”

  Helen nodded. “On my own time, of course not. But I came straight here from work, as I said.” She reached into her pocket and brought out a wallet, flipped it open. The bright sun glinted on the badge there.

  “L.A.P.D.?” Urruah said.

  “That’s right.” Helen put the wallet away, glancing up the hill at the waving of the grass as Arhu and Siffha’h came bounding down. “Not that an armed officer would be allowed here without permission. But I have dispensation, since this is my tribal ground.”

  Rhiow’s eyes widened at that. “You’re one of the ffih-ehhif,” she said, “the First Humans–”

  “That’s right,” Helen said, as Arhu and Siffha’h came out of the grass nearby. “My people are the Chumash: this is all our land, here along the shoreline, from Santa Barbara down to the City.”

  “I guess other ehhif would say it ‘was’ your land,” Urruah said.

  Helen threw an amused glance at him. “It still is,” she said, “in all the ways that matter. Not that most of them would notice.” She grinned. “We’re still here: and we take care of things the best we can. Haku, young cousins–”

  There was a pause while introductions were made and names exchanged: but even afterwards, Siffha’h was still wearing a suspicious look. “That spell up there–” she said. “Just what exactly were you doing?”

  “’Letting the earthquake off the leash,’” Helen said. “Triggering a controlled tremor. Or trying to.”

  “’Trying’?” Arhu said, looking at her oddly. “I thought ‘a spell always works.’”

  “It does if a force equaling or surpassing the power of the wizardry isn’t being purposefully leveled against it,” Helen said. “Which seems to have been the case lately, and I haven’t been able to understand what that force was. Finally I asked my ikhareya about it, and He said He didn’t know either. He said, ‘Go have a look, and some of your cousins will come along and help you find out what the answer was…’” Helen looked a little bemused. “He was using a temporal-conditional tense, though. There’s going to be an answer…but it’s in the past?”

  “That’s what we were told,” Rhiow said. “We’re on our way there after this.”

  “Do you mind if I go with you, then?” Helen said. “Seems like that’s what’s required…”

  “You’re more than welcome on the journey,” Urruah said, “believe me. It’s a relief to know we’re not going to have to do this all by ourselves, anyway…whatever ‘this’ is.”

  “We’re going to set up a separate portal for the timeslide,” Rhiow said. “We don’t want to take the chance of deranging the L.A. gate: it’s already acting badly enough. Would there be a problem if we gated from here? Or might it interfere with your spell up in the cave?”

  Helen shook her head. “It’s built to stay completely quiescent until someone it recognizes activates it,” she said. “I’ll kill its sensor components to make sure it doesn’t get confused.”

  “Is that going to be enough to keep such a
complex spell out of trouble?” Siffha’h said. “And one so old? You don’t sink power conduits like those overnight.”

  “Of course not,” Helen said. “The basic wizardry’s a fixture: a team of our shamans sang it into place hundreds of years ago. But, yes, just pulling the sensor web out of contact will work fine– that’s how we keep it quiet when we’re not actually using it. Wizards who know this terrain well, or have a connection to it, come up and at least once a week to bleed off some of the excess force, the way you start small controlled brushfires every now and then to keep a really big forest fire from destroying everything wholesale. I’ve taken over this job, the last couple of years, because my connection to this terrain’s much better than that of any other wizard around here. This is my native space, after all: the Chumash have lived here since before the Ice.”

  Helen sighed and stretched out her legs in front of her. “But I might as well come from Dubuque, for all the good that spell’s done me lately. Over the last two weeks, I must have run it seven or eight times, trying to provoke any old kind of local discharge, especially from the big fault right under the mountain. But it just wasn’t working.” She looked up at the mountain as if she could see straight into it. “It was driving me nuts. I could feel the power building up, but I just couldn’t bleed it off. It was almost like something was leaning against the fault, holding the force in…” Helen shrugged. “But then this morning, around when I went off duty, it seemed like something blinked, and the fault let loose. Good thing, too.”

  Rhiow thought of Hwaith’s description of something leaning against the world, and the fur started to rise on her back. “Yes, you said you were relieved,” Rhiow said. “Forgive me, but after what I’ve been through this morning, the word seems a little unusual…” She shook herself all over, trying to get the fur to lie down again.

  Helen nodded. “Your first time? I understand you. But maybe you’ve had enough time here to feel the ground a little–” She put her hand down on the grassy ground beside her. “This whole area’s coming down with faults, and microquakes are an everyday occurrence. Just in these ten square miles or so, we’ve got the Chatsworth fault to the north, and the Bailey Fault west of us, and the Malibu Fault running south of us along the coastline, and two big ones running right under Boney Mountain–” she waved at the bare peak looming above them westward–”so it’s not so much ‘have you had an earthquake today?’ as ‘how did you miss having one’.” She shook her head. “Mostly they’re so tiny you don’t feel them. But it’s still really strange for us to go so long here without even a minor tremor. It was giving me the jitters…and the ikhareya wasn’t happy either. At least now I can relax a little. At least until we find out what’s causing this problem, anyway.”

  “You didn’t feel anything from the quakes down in L.A., then?” Rhiow said.

  Helen shook her head. “I had to hear about them on the news, in the car, on my way home from work.” Then she chuckled at Urrauh’s expression. “Urruah, I’m all for connectedness to the land, and taking care of the environment, but if I did my grocery shopping via gating circle, that people would notice.”

  Urruah’s tail wreathed gently. “Aha,” he said. “Is that where you were? I thought I smelled chicken–”

  I am going to give you such a whack when we’re in private, Rhiow said silently. “Well,” Rhiow said, “maybe we should get our slide set up. Our backtime contact, Hwaith, gave us the coordinates we need, and we’ve got all the necessary authorizations.”

  “I see that,” Helen said, standing up and dusting her hands off on her pants: she was looking upslope, into the wind. “From fairly deep in, too. Whatever’s going on, this is fairly serious…” She looked down at Rhiow. “And it doesn’t seem to be our usual enemy involved with this, does it? The Kemish, the Old Bad One… Or at least that’s not the feeling I’m getting.”

  “I’d say you’d be right,” Rhiow said, “and I wish I knew what to make of that. Meanwhile, do you want to nominate a spot where we can anchor the slide?”

  “If we go upslope a quarter mile or so,” Helen said, “past the cave, that’ll take us well away from the beaten path. There’s a place where the hillside shelves out flat for a little bit.”

  “Arhu?” Rhiow said. “You two go on and get it set up. And ask Aufwi to come up here as soon as he’s finished making the L.A. gate safe and shutting it down.”

  Siffha’h and Arhu headed up the hill, but not before Arhu had thrown an odd look over his shoulder at Helen. “Sorry,” Rhiow said. “You’ve got to excuse him: he has trouble with ehhif sometimes. He was abused by them, almost killed, when he was very young.”

  “It’s no problem,” Helen said. “We all have our burdens. Believe me, I have problems with some of my fellow ehhif, occasionally.” She smiled a little ruefully as they started up the hill. “All just part of the Game, my ikhareya says…”

  “I was going to ask you about that,” Urruah said as they headed upwards through the long grass. “I heard the word you used, and Herself gave me the closest cognate in the Speech at the same time. You have one of the Powers that Be for your own?”

  Helen blinked, then laughed. “Uh, no! No one could own one of Them. I’ve just got a close personal connection to one of Them: lots of wizards who’re native Americans do. It’s like yours to– I think you call Her ‘the Whisperer?’”

  “That’s right,” Rhiow said. “You hear wizardry through your connection, then–”

  Helen’s look was a touch sheepish. “Oh, no, I still use a written Manual a lot of the time. I was born and raised in the Valley, in Encino: I didn’t really start getting to know my tribal life until a few years ago, after I finished college and went into the Force. But I’ve been really busy up here since then, since it turns out the old shaman needed to train a new one before he went West. As usual, there aren’t any coincidences…”

  From above and ahead of them came a soft pop!, the sound of someone trying to minimize the air displacement from his appearance “out of nothing”. There stood Aufwi on the flattened space that Helen had described, his head and shoulders silhouetted against the blue. “Do you know Aufwi?” Rhiow said, as they came up on the level. “He handles the L.A. gate.”

  “Sure, I see him downtown every now and then. Haku, Aufwi, how’s it going?”

  “A lot better than it was earlier, believe me,” he said as they came up and out onto the shelf that lay under the lee of the hill. The shelf was mostly hard dirt strewn with rockfall, and shadowed from the sun by a slope now more nearly a cliff, all studded with outcroppings of brown and golden stone. In a relatively bare spot off to one side, nearly into the sun again, the glow of a complex spell-circle lay spread across the ground, and Arhu and Siffha’h were was pacing around it, looking it over.

  No way they could have done that from scratch just now, Urruah said silently to Rhiow, going over to examine the circle. They’ve been practicing for this! For how long, I wonder?

  Arhu’s got the Eye, Rhiow said, and I’ve been sure for some time that he doesn’t tell us everything he foresees. Who knows when he might have seen this? It’s handy now…

  Aufwi came over to Rhiow. “All’s secure back at the Station now,” he said.

  “The gate’s locked down?” Rhiow said.

  “Absolutely.”

  “You’re sure this time?” Urruah said.

  Aufwi looked a little annoyed. “I yanked every power connection but its standby. If it can function in spite of that–”

  Rhiow put her tail up against Aufwi’s. “He’s teasing you, Aufwi,” she said. “Ignore him. Once we’ve slid back to where and when we need to be, and had a look at Hwaith’s gate, you can use that to jump forward to ‘now’ again– then wake yours up and lock it on a nearby set of coordinates to do your comparison.”

  “Exactly what I had in mind.”

  “Good,” Rhiow said, and followed Urruah over to the circle. Helen came behind them, looking over the complex series of nested and in
terlocking circles and ellipses, either containing long sentences in the Speech or being comprised of them. She nodded at what she saw. “Done without any physical elements at all?” she said. “Very slick.”

  “Now why would we use concrete spatial interruptors? Chips and batteries and so on?” Siffha’h put her ears back in disdain. “Inelegant. A brute-force solution.”

  “Plugins and carry-ons,” Arhu said, looking smugly around the circle, “are for newbies.”

  “Oh, yeah, well, plug this in, oh expert one,” Urruah said, and took a swipe at Arhu in passing as he went to his own. “Must be nice to know everything so young.”

  “He just sees everything,” Siffha’h said, resuming her prowl around the circle, and eyeing the spell diagram with care. “Whereas I–”

  She ducked just in time for Rhiow’s paw went through the air where her head had been. “You see what I put up with,” Rhiow said to Helen, and started to pace around the circle after Siffha’h. “But I see they’ve been quick and added a circle for you, Helen. Is it big enough?”

  “Looks fine.”

  “Then you’ll want to add in your personal data. Sif, let’s have a look at the coordinates–”

  “Over here,” Siffha’h said. She had laid the spatial and temporal fixes into a small inner circle of their own. Rhiow put a paw down on each of the sets of coordinates in sequence, seeing each group of words and characters in the Speech glow bright in turn. She closed her eyes for a moment to regard her own mental “workspace” and the copy of the coordinates that the Whisperer had left there. “The time’s right,” Rhiow said. “As for the location–”

  “The other side of the Hollywood Hills,” Aufwi said, “near Mount Cahuenga. Hwaith’s put us a good ways from where he said the quake activity was occurring.”

  “All right,” Rhiow said. She stepped into the spot she could see had been marked out for her, and bent down to check her name and her personality data: it was all as it should have been. “Let’s go, then. Everybody check your info one last time. Then let’s slide.” Rhiow looked at the anchor-end duration data written in the center of the circle. “The slide’s got a five-minute return aperture: short enough so we don’t have to worry about leaving it for this brief period, and plenty wide enough to give us room to come back and forth several times, if we have to, without meeting ourselves unnecessarily.” She looked around.