The Book of Night With Moon (12 page)

When all
ehhif
civilization falls, maybe,
Rhiow thought, with a dry look.
Make every
ehhif
in the city vanish, right this second, and turn every cat in Manhattan loose: how many of them will be alive in three weeks? Cry "freedom!"— and then try to find something to eat when all you know about is Friskies Buffet.

She made a small face, then, at her own irony. Maybe it would be better if all cats lived free in the wild, out of buildings, out of
ehhif
influence; maybe it would be better if that influence had never come about in the first place. But the world was the way that it was, and such things weren't going to be happening any time soon. The truth remained that
ehhif
kept People and that a lot of People liked it… and she was one.

That's the problem, of course,
she thought.
We're embarrassed to admit enjoying interdependence. Too many of us have bought into the idea that we're somehow "independent" in our environment to start with. As if we can stop eating or breathing any time we want…

She sighed and stretched again while Hhuha paused in her scratching and started going through her papers once more.
Anyway, what's the point,
Rhiow thought,
in making sure People are so very aware that they're oppressed, when for most of them there's nothing they can
do
about it? And in many cases, when they truly don't want to do anything, the awareness does nothing but make them feel guilty… thus making them more like
ehhif
than anything else that could have been done to them. That outwardly imposed awareness satisfies no one but the "activist" People who impose it. "I suffer, therefore you should too…"

Granted, Rhiow's own position was a privileged one and made holding such a viewpoint easy. All languages are subsets of the Speech, and a wizard, by definition at least conversant with the Speech if not fluent in it, is able to understand anything that can speak (and many things that can't). Rhiow's life with her
ehhif
was certainly made simpler by the fact that she could clearly understand what they were saying. Unfortunately, most cats couldn't do the same, which tended to create a fair amount of friction.

Not that matters were perfect for her either. Rhiow found, to her annoyance, that she had slowly started becoming bilingual in Human and Ailurin. She kept finding herself thinking in slang-
ehhif
terms like
ra'hio
and
o'hra:
poor usage at best. Her dam, who had always been so carefully spoken, would have been shocked.

Rhi?
said Saash inside her.

I'm awake,
Rhiow said silently.

Took you long enough,
Saash said.
Believe me, when this is over, I've got a lot of sleep to make up.

Oh?
Rhiow said.

Our youngster,
Saash said dryly,
has been awake and lively for a good while now. It's been exciting trying to keep him in here, and I don't think I'll be able to do it much longer. I had to teach him to sidle to distract him even this long—

You mean you had to
try
to teach him to sidle,
Rhiow said.

I mean he's been sidling for the last two hours,
said Saash.

Rhiow blinked at that. Nearly all wizardly cats had an aptitude for sidling, but most took at least a week to learn it; many took months.
Sweet Queen about us,
Rhiow thought,
what
have
the Powers sent us? Besides trouble…

All right,
Rhiow said to Saash.
I'll be along in half an hour or so. Where's Urruah?

He's having a break,
Saash said.
I sent him off early…. I thought maybe there was going to be a murder.

Oh joy,
Rhiow thought. To Saash, she said,
Did he go off to the park? He mentioned the other day that some big tom thing would be going on over there.

He mentioned it to me too,
Saash said.
Not that I understood one word in five of what he was saying: it got technical. He left in a hurry, anyway, and I didn't want to try to keep him.

I just bet,
Rhiow thought. When Urruah was in one of those moods, it was more than your ears were worth to try to slow him down.
All right. Hold the den; I'll be along.

Somewhat regretfully— for quiet times like this seemed to be getting rarer and rarer these days— Rhiow got down out of Hhuha's lap, sat down on the floor and finished her wash, then went out to the terrace to use the
hiouh
-box.

Afterward, she made her way down from the terrace to the top of the nearby building and did her meditation— not facing east for once, but westward. The smog had been bad today; Rhiow was glad she had been inside with the air-conditioning. But now that the day was cooling, a slight offshore breeze had sprung up, and the ozone level was dropping, so that you could at least breathe without your chest feeling tight. And— probably the only positive aspect to such a day— the Sun was going down in a blaze of unaccustomed splendor, its disk bloated to half again its proper size and blunted to a beaten-copper radiance by the thick warm air. Down the westward-reaching street, windows flashed the orange-gold light back in fragments; to either side of Rhiow, and behind her, skyscraper-glass glowed and in the heat-haze almost seemed to run, glazed red or gold or molten smoky amber by the westering light.

Rhiow tucked herself down and considered the disk of fire as it sank toward the Palisades, gilding the waters of the Hudson. As a wizard, she knew quite well that what she saw was Earth's nearest star, a glimpse of the fusion that was stepchild to the power that started this universe running.
Rhoua
was what People called it. The word was a metonymy: Rhoua was a name of Queen Iau, of the One, in Her aspect as beginner and ender of physical life. Once cats had understood the Sun only in the abstract, as life's kindler. It had taken a while for them to grasp the concept of the Sun as just one more star among many, but when they did, they still kept the old nickname.

The older name for the Sun had been
Rhoua'i'th,
Rhoua's Eye: the only one of Her eyes that the world saw, or would see, at least for a good while yet. That one open Eye saw thoughts, saw hearts, knew the realities beneath external seemings. The other Eye saw those and everything else as well; but no one saw
it.
It would not open until matter was needed no more, and in its opening, all solid things would fade like sleep from an opening eye. A blink or two, and everything that still existed would be revealed in true form, perhaps final form— though that was uncertain, for the gathered knowledge of matters wizardly, which cat-wizards called
The Gaze of Rhoua's Eye,
said little about time after the Last Time or about how existence would go after Existence, in terms of matter, past its sell-by date. But there was little need to worry about it just yet while Rhoua still winked. The day the wink turned to a two-eyed gaze…
then
would be the time to be concerned.

…For my own part,
Rhiow told the fading day,
I know my job; my commission comes from Those Who
Are.
Some I will meet today who think that day is blind and that night lies with its eyes closed; that the Gaze doesn't see them, or doesn't care. Their certainty of blindness, though, need not mean anything to
me.
My paw raised is Their paw on the neck of the Serpent, now and always…

Rhiow finished her meditation and stood, stretching herself thoroughly and giving one last look to that great burning disk as the apartment buildings of the western Hudson shore began to rear black against it. Having, like many other wizards, done her share of off-planet work, Rhiow found it difficult to think of Rhoua's Eye as anything less than the fiery heart of the solar system. It still amused her, sometimes, that when the People had found out about this, they had had a lot of trouble explaining the concept to the
ehhif.
Some of the earlier paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art were potentially rather embarrassing, or at best amusing, in this regard— images of big eyes and sun-disks teetering precariously on top of cat-headed people, all hilariously eloquent of
ehhif confusion,
even in those days when
ehhif
language was much closer to Hauhai, and understanding should have been at least possible if not easy.

Rhiow made her way down to the street, sidled before she passed the iron door between her and the sidewalk, and then slipped under, heading west for Central Park.

She was surprised to meet Urruah halfway, making his way along East Sixty-eighth Street through the softly falling twilight, with a slightly dejected air. He slipped into the doorway of a brownstone and sat down, looking absently across the street at the open kitchen door of a Chinese restaurant. Clouds of fluorescent-lit steam and good smells were coming out of it, along with the sounds of a lot of shouting and the frantic stirring of woks.

"I would have thought you'd still be in the park," Rhiow said, sitting down beside him.

"The rehearsal's been put off until tomorrow," Urruah said. "One of the toms is off his song."

Rhiow made an oh-really expression. Urruah, like most toms, had a more or less constant fascination with song. She had originally been completely unable to understand why a tom should be interested in the mating noises that another species made: still less when the other species was not making these noises as part of mating, but because it was
thinking
about mating,
in the abstract.
But Urruah had gone on to explain that this particular kind of
ehhif
singing, called
o'hra,
was not simply about sex but was also some kind of storytelling. That had made Rhiow feel somewhat better about it all, for storytelling was another matter. Dams sang stories to their kits, grown People purred them to one another— gossip and myth, history and legend: no one simply
spoke
the past. It was rude. The thought that
ehhif
did the same in song made Rhiow feel oddly closer to them, and made her feel less like Urruah was doing something culturally, if not morally, perverse.

"So," Rhiow said, "what will they do now?"

"They'll keep building that big structure down at the end of the Great Lawn; that wasn't going to be finished until tonight anyway. Tomorrow they'll do the sound tests and the rest of the rehearsal. The other two toms are fine, so there shouldn't be any more delays."

Rhiow washed an ear briefly. "All right," she said. "We're going to have to take Arhu out and show him our beat… not that I particularly care to be doing that so soon, but he already knows how to sidle—"

"Whose good idea was
that?
" Urruah said, narrowing his eyes in annoyance.

"Mine," Rhiow said, "since you ask. Come on, Urruah! He would have had to learn eventually anyway… and it turns out he's a quick study. That may save his life, or, if he dies on Ordeal, who knows, it may make the difference between him getting his job done and not getting it done. Which is what counts, isn't it?"

"Humf," Urruah said, and looked across the street again at the restaurant. "Chicken…"

"Never mind the chicken. I want you on-site with him for this first evening at least, and as many of the next few evenings as possible. He needs a good male role model so that we can start getting him in shape for whatever's going to happen to him." She gave him an approving look. "I just want you to know that I think you're handling all this very well."

"I
am
a professional," Urruah said, "even if he does make my teeth itch…. But something else is on my mind, not just
o'hra,
as you doubtless believe. That oil spill intervention you mentioned? I heard that they got the authorization for the timeslide they wanted."

Rhiow blinked at that. "Really? Then why is the spill still on the news? That whole timeline should have 'healed over'… excised itself. We're well past the 'uncertainty period' for such small change."

"Something went wrong with it."

Rhiow put her whiskers back in concern. Timeslides were expensive wizardries, but also fairly simple and straightforward ones: hearing that something had "gone wrong" with a timeslide was like hearing that something had gone wrong with gravity. "Where did you hear about that?"

"Rahiw told me; he heard it from Ehef— he saw him this morning."

The source was certainly reliable. "Well, the situation's not a total loss anyway," Rhiow said. "That tropical storm sure 'changed course.' You could tell
that
was an intervention with your whiskers cut off."

"Well, of course. But not the intended one. And a failed timeslide…" Urruah's tail lashed. "Pretty weird, if you ask me."

"Probably some local problem," Rhiow said. "Sunspots, for all I know: we're near the eleven-year maximum. If I talk to Har'lh again this week, I'll ask him about it."

"Sunspots," Urruah said, as if not at all convinced. But he got up, stretched, and the two of them headed back down East Sixty-eighth together.

They wove their way along the sidewalk, taking care to avoid the hurrying pedestrians. As they paused at the corner of Sixty-eighth and Lex, Urruah said, "There he is."

"Where?"

"The billboard."

Rhiow tucked herself well in from the corner, right against the wall of the dry cleaner's there, to look at the billboard on the building across the street. There was a
picture
on it— one of those flat representations that
ehhif
used— and some words. Rhiow looked at those first, deciphering them; though the Speech gave her understanding of the words, sometimes the letterings that
ehhif
used could slow you down. " 'The— three—' What's a 'tenor'?"