The Big Meow

by Diane Duane

  “And the rest of that pair is June seventh and June ninth – “

  “Of this year,” Urruah said almost inaudibly. “Our this year, uptime.”

  “Yeah,” Arhu said… and only then realized what he’d said, and licked his nose several times in rapid succession.

  The terror took Rhiow by the throat and squeezed. We’re too late, she thought. Whatever’s going to happen has already started happening! Yet she forced herself to calm down, for there was no proof that they were too late. In fact, the Powers prefer to intervene at the last minute. It gives the Lone One less warning of what They’re about to do, and less chance to find a defense…

  “All right,” Rhiow said, working to keep her voice under control. “The question now becomes one of what exactly is supposed to happen.”

  “These are ready for you,” Hwaith said from inside the next case.

  Arhu paced past the tablets in the case where he’d been working and jumped across into the next one as Hwaith stepped back to make room for him. “Thanks,” he said, looking at the next tablet, which though square had a circular design in the middle and various other pictographs and signs in the corners. “Yeah, this is about the Coincidence too. ‘In this time and only this time may the Dark One become the Shadow of the great and deadly Silence that comes from outside all that is, the Devourer of Worlds: and the greater makes the lesser Its own for that time.” Arhu turned his head to follow the symbols around the curve of the circle. “Yet only by beings within the world may this identity come to be so forged, when they shed blood in rivers, denying their kinship with their own kind, willingly driving out life for death’s and power’s sake.” Now he was standing with his head practically upside down. “Then at such a time if such beings so seek their freedom as to bring about the fulfillment of their desires at the utmost price, they shall have their will, and pay that price; for even the God of gods, in wisdom or folly, has not denied them this freedom, either to preserve their worlds or destroy them…”

  Arhu straightened up, and spent a moment wiggling his head around to try to get a kink out of it. “Anything more on that one?” Urruah said.

  “No,” Arhu said, jumping down to the second tablet that Hwaith had reconstructed. “Those are just decorations.”

  “Good,” Urruah said. He sounded terribly calm, but Rhiow could feel him managing himself as rigorously as she was doing. The last thing either of them dared to do right now was upset Arhu and possibly interfere with his ability to read clearly what he was seeing. “Got that copied too?”

  “Did that first thing,” Arhu said. He now sat down in front of the third tablet, which was densely packed with the squarish pictographs, written very small.

  “Wow,” he said after a moment.

  Hwaith gave him a look. “Wow?”

  Arhu’s tail twitched back and forth as he tried to work out what he was looking at. “Whoever wrote this didn’t believe in putting things in order,” he said. And his face wrinkled a little in distaste, like that of a Person smelling something bad. “It’s all scrambled up. The first part is something about ‘The Dark Rift’. And something comes out of it, and it’s really angry. ‘For long has it been confined in the dark, and kept from its home.’And then there’s stuff about blood, too much blood being shed…”

  “I hear a theme starting to develop,” Rhiow said, not at all happy about it, and still working to keep her reaction from interfering with Arhu’s work.

  Arhu was silent for a moment, his tail stil twitching. “After that it mentions the stars a few times,” he said, sounding confused. “The stars coming out. But ‘after the devouring, the stars are dark…’ Then there are some more date references: to our own time – that last set of dates. And something about the Jaguar again. ‘In the Black Jaguar’s mouth’ – that’s the dark rift again — ‘the Serpent shall be seen, and again they shall struggle. But the struggle shall not go again as it has.’”

  The Serpent again, Urruah said privately to Rhiow. Are you starting to think that someone who’s not here really ought to be along on this party?

  I was thinking that this morning, Rhiow said. Wait a little –

  “Then,” Arhu said, “it says – “ And he stopped. “Rhi, I’ve been really good so far… but this thing’s resisting me. I have to use the Eye.”

  “You’ve done brilliantly to get so much out of these as you have without it,” Rhiow said. “Go ahead.”

  He leaned close to the tablet and held quite still for a few moments. Rhiow held her breath. Around them all the feel of the room altered subtly as Arhu’s vision of the tablet briefly superseded theirs. Everything else went shadowy compared to the ancient carved designs, which grew deep with uncomfortable meaning. “Now comes the Roar that bursts the earth and lets in the bitter seas, that breaks the dark and frees its dwellers to do battle with the light…”

  They could see it as Arhu did – the vast shattering crash of inimical power that waited to wash across the planet, to set the crust cracking and the outraged oceans rushing into new beds as magma broke up through the old ones. The Earth tore itself apart in growing darkness, the sun vanishing in an atmosphere full of the dust and ash thrown up from the broken surface and the thousands of volcanic eruptions along the fragmenting continental plates. Soon there was no light anywhere but the smothering fire breaking up from the planet’s outraged mantle. Then even that faded.The reek of death filled heaven and earth as all life that had not already died in fire or water now began to do so in ice and darkness…

  And it would not stop there, of course. The destruction would spread unimaginably far, the outflooding darkness killing every living world and smothering the stars. “Yet if the Roar is not heard,” Arhu said, as everything went dark, “then shall life be spared until the day, and the hour of the day, shall come again, and life shall again be offered the choice to live or to die forever…”

  …and the Earth turned bright again under the sun, unharmed, placid.

  The vision faded. Arhu took his paws away from the tablet, shaking his head, and paused to catch his breath. The others looked at each other, unnerved. “Boy,” Urruah said, “you’d really rather be somewhere else when Tepeyollotl lets out with that big meow.”

  “But the runup to these events has happened at least once,” Rhiow said. “And the world’s still here. Why?”

  “Something must have averted the worst of it,” Hwaith said.

  “But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t still serious effects. Remember when Helen said the Mayans abandoned their cities?”

  “The tenth century…” Urruah said, and licked his nose. The suggestion fit the dates too well.

  Rhiow shivered all over. “We’re going to have to make sense of this as quickly as we can,” she said. In the case, Arhu was making his way down two cases to one of the remaining objects from which rubbings had been made. It was neither clay nor ceramic, but a plain smooth slab, maybe an ehhif foot wide and two feet long, of carved white jade. Temporarily restored to its pristine condition by Hwaith’s wizardry, it was extremely beautiful, even in its mended state. But it had been most comprehensively broken – shattered into six large pieces and numerous smaller fragments.

  “Somebody,” Hwaith said, looking up at it, “meant for any reader to understand that this was important. In that culture, gold was all over the place… but jade was precious.”

  Urruah was looking at it with great interest. “Yeah,” he said. “This isn’t just someone’s ‘keep off the grass’ sign. What I’d like to know, though, is why someone tried to hard to destroy it. Anyway — Arhu?”

  “Yeah,” Arhu said, and sat down in front of the slab, once again bracing himself against it with his forepaws as he Looked at it.

  If the last tablet had immediately been eloquent of utmost disaster when viewed with the Eye, this one was less instantly forthcoming – yet it also had a disquieting feel to it, as if it held hidden some secret that might be even more difficult to deal with than a universe�
�s destruction. “It says the Rift is the key,” Arhu said. “Xibalba Be, the Black Rift, the Dark Mouth…” Rhiow’s vision, like Arhu’s, filled with the image of a huge irregular band of darkness stretching across the otherwise bright streak of the Galaxy.

  The Rift grew, or grew closer: it was hard to tell which. But it’s not frightening, Rhiow thought, bemused. Why isn’t this as upsetting as what we just saw? “But then,” Arhu said, “it skips. It says, ‘The old suns will be eaten. The dark and the light will merge and both be destroyed.’ And a little further on, ‘Call upon the Destroyer, do not forget Its name. It will betray – ‘”

  He stopped. “Betray what?” Urruah said.

  “I don’t know,” Arhu said. “Don’t you see it? I’m losing it. I can’t See – “

  Rhiow shivered. For that short time they had all been able to feel with Arhu the equivocal meaning that trembled in the very structure of the stone. But now it was fading, the hidden message of the carving and draining away even while they watched, untl the piece of white jade was just a stone again, carved with strange signs, beautiful but mute.

  “I don’t understand it,” Rhiow said, looking up at the tablets. “Why is the context so troublesome all of a sudden — ?”

  It’s being interfered with, the Whisperer said.

  Rhiow blinked. The thought of the kind of power that could interfere with the functioning of wizardry itself, the very basic use of the Speech to make the normally unintelligible intelligible– But this is the problem. We’re dealing with powers and forces from outside.

  “It’s a good thing you did as much as you did without the Eye,” Urruah said. “If you’d used it to start with, we wouldn’t have anything like as much to work with as we have now.”

  “Yeah,” Arhu said. But he sounded dispirited as he sat down again, and Rhiow knew what he was thinking without having to overhear it. This was the most important piece, the key to stopping what’s trying to happen — What can be done?? Rhiow said to the Whisperer.

  Here and now, that voice said, nothing.

  Rhiow held still and considered. Then perhaps we need to look elsewhere for answers than here or now.

  The Whisperer paused… and Rhiow felt the other’s whiskers go forward.

  “I think we need to do an end run,” she said. “And I’m not going to let myself get too desperate about the Devourer of Worlds until I have a talk with the Devourer of Darkness.”

  The others stared at her.

  Or Pastrami, said the large calm voice inside all their heads.

  *

  “Ith!” Arhu shouted, and sat up straight.

  Rhiow’s tail waved in satisfaction and relief that Ith had been able to follow the proceedings after she had alerted him earlier. And the connection was surprisingly strong for one reaching so far uptime, and without a specific wizardry having been built to conduct it. “Cousin,” Rhiow said, “we have business in hand here, but it’s being hindered.”

  I know, he said.

  Hwaith’s ears twitched. “How?”

  What my brother sees, I also see. They could all feel through the connection the scratching and rubbing together of saurian claws, Ith’s typical gesture when he was concerned about something. And today I see that I can be of help.

  “Indeed you can,” Rhiow said. “Having seen what your brother was looking at – “

  I will go to that place in our time and complete what has been begun. And I hear your concern, he said privately to Rhiow; indeed I share it. Forgive my brevity. I will go about this business now, and call you before you depart for your errand tonight.

  “Ith,” Rhiow said, “you’re a star.”

  She could feel that distant jaw drop in one of the gestures that felines and saurian shared. So it would seem, Ith said, and dropped out of the link.

  Arhu came down out of the case and stood looking around him for a moment. “Rhi,” he said, “I’m sorry…”

  “You have nothing to be sorry for!” she said. “You did brilliantly. Come on… let’s head out. We need to get back to the Silent Man’s and get some rest before this evening.”

  “Though we might,” Hwaith said, “if you liked, stop and smell the roses…”

  She chuckled, glanced at the others. “Please,” Urruah said. “I have to confess, the smog has been getting to me a little.”

  They headed down the marble stairs and out through that high arched portico once more, wandering down the gravel walks and inhaling air strongly scented with something besides internal combustion. White roses, red ones, gold ones and pink ones, fat rosebushes and thin plants with showy single blossoms, heavy scents and sharp light ones, they were all there.

  But there was all too little time to enjoy them. Rhiow was sitting by a white rosebush with huge lemony-smelling flowers when Ith spoke in her ear again: and the sound of alarm in his voice brought her up on her feet in a second. Rhiow, we have a problem.

  What?

  I have gone to the museum: to the very place I saw with the rest of you. And then to all other parts of it.

  Oh, Ith, don’t tell me –

  The tablets have not been here for many years. They’re gone…

  The Big Meow: Chapter Ten

  “Is there any trace – “ Rhiow said.

  I can certainly feel their shadows here, Ith said. But after so much time, those are so faint as to be almost impossible to read. I can feel the tablets being wrapped and crated up, and then taken away. But to where…. Rhiow could feel his claws clicking together. Discovering that will take longer.

  “This is all wrong,” Arhu muttered, sounding stricken. “Why can’t I See where they went?”

  Rhiow licked her nose, intent on not letting her growing exasperation show. “Arhu, take a breath and try to let some of the tension go – “

  “Why should I not be tense? We needed what was on that last tablet, it’s really important, I know it is!”

  “You should try to stay calm because you’re not going to be able to See your own tail otherwise!” Rhiow said. “You should know by now that vision’s at its least effective when the seer is giving in to stress and trying to pressure the view into happening. Even visionaries with years and years of experience have trouble with — ”

  “At this rate I’m not gonna have a chance to acquire years and years of experience,” Arhu hissed, “because we are all going to be dead real soon. In fact we’re going to die before any of us were even born, and I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find that really frustrating!!”

  My brother, Ith said, that estimation seems premature, since both of us still exist: and as I would not be here if not for you –

  “Oh no you don’t,” Arhu said. “Don’t start with the big cheerful take on the time paradox stuff, because I understand it as well as you do, and the principle of temporal linearity means that – “

  Among other things, Ith said, sounding a little dry now, it means I must now become very busy finding the tablets by other means. And from here on in I dare not dip into your timestream too often for the sake of giving you progress reports. Doing so might denature the local timestream enough to make it impossible to reach you when I do discover something useful. Or it might so alert our old enemy to our business that even more attention is brought to bear on you. And there seems to have been enough of that as it is…

  “Ith,” Rhiow said, “your caution’s commendable. But we need something more concrete to work with within a few hours than the hints and riddles we’ve got so far. Otherwise we won’t have time to prepare a response by the time Dagenham’s group meets this evening–“

  I hear you, Ith said. I will contact you as soon as I have something worth breaking silence for. Dai –

  His end of the connection went silent.

  Rhiow was unable to restrain herself from letting out a hiss of frustration. Arhu, meanwhile, had begun swearing under his breath again. “ – don’t care, I’m going to get back in there and stare at that thing for as long as it takes until
I See what we came here for! And if sa’Rraah Herself shows up and tries to give me grief, She can just –”

  Oh, Queen Iau, no more of this right now! Rhiow thought, and stood up to turn around and clout him until he saw a little sense. But to her great surprise Hwaith slipped past her and the increasingly concerned-looking Aufwi, moved gently over to Arhu’s side, whipped one forepaw up and hooked its foreclaw right into the soft middle of Arhu’s ear.

  Arhu broke off, his mouth hanging open as he stared at Hwaith in shock, but he wisely didn’t move otherwise: that claw was well set in place to go deep if he so much as twitched. “Listen, young tom,” Hwaith said. “You have to watch what you ask for in circumstances like this. Right now I’m more than happy to answer you on sa’Rraah’s behalf and tell you that this claw right here is what she’s waiting to stick into every wizard who gets careless or foolish about how they work with others in the Art, especially when everyone’s under pressure. If your team leader is telling you to get a grip and be quiet, then that’s what you need to be doing.”

  Arhu didn’t move a whisker even to narrow his eyes, as that would have meant moving his ears… an experiment he looked unwilling to try. All the same, when he spoke, his voice was just a whisker away from a yowl. “You think you know so much?” Arhu said. “You may think you’re a big deal gate tech in this day and age, but you’re not so hot that you didn’t have to come yelling to us uptime for help. And here or there, you are not the boss of me – “

  “In the normal flow of events, actually I am,” Hwaith said, “since I’ve been a wizard a lot longer than you have, and the Powers expect you to defer to my judgment when there’s good reason, and to treat me with due respect. But since you’re not paying your team leader the respect she’s due either, then let’s move a tail’s width outside the normal management structure, shall we? Let’s see if you’re willing to move that pretty little not-yet-shredded ear of yours far enough to get loose and find out who’s really the boss of who.”

  Arhu’s tail lashed furiously, but he didn’t move otherwise, and kept his mouth shut. “So then,” Hwaith said, and unhooked the claw –