The Book of Night With Moon (11 page)

Disturbed. So was Rhiow when the gate was finished with her, and she unhooked her claw from the blazing, softly humming weft. Panting and blinking, she stood there a moment with streaked and blurring afterimages burning in her eyes: the all-pervasive tangle of strings and energies that was the way the gate perceived the world all the time. To the gate, proper visual images of concrete physical structures were alien. Therefore there was no image or picture of whoever had come and— interfered with it—

Rhiow started to get normal vision back again. Still troubled by both her contact with the gate and by what it had perceived, she sat down and began to wash her face, trying to sort out the gate's perceptions and make sense of them.

Something had interfered. Some
one.
The gate did not deal in names and had no pictures: there was merely a sense of some presence, a personality, interposing itself between one group of words of control and another, breaking a pattern. Associated with that impression was a sense that the interposition was no accident: it was
meant.
But for what purpose, by whom, there was no indication.

And when that break in the pattern was made, something else had thrust through. The gate held no record of what that thing or force might have been: the energy-strands holding the gate's logs had been unraveled and restrung. They now lay bright and straight in the weave, completely devoid of data. The initial break was sealed over by the intervention Rhiow and the team had done this morning. But the gate, in its way, was as distraught as anyone might be to wake up and find himself missing a day of his life.

Rhiow was upset, too.
What came through…?
she thought, gazing at the gate-weft. She thought of the dry chill flowing from the jagged, empty tear in the air they'd found waiting for them that morning.
A void place…
There were enough of those, away in the outer fringes of being, worlds where life had never "taken." Other forces moving among the worlds liked such places. They used them to hide while preparing attacks against what they hated: the worlds full of light and life, closer to the Heart of things…

Rhiow shuddered. She needed advice. Specifically, she needed to talk to Carl, and to her local Senior, Ehef, when she had rested and sorted her thoughts out. But rest would have to come first.

Rhiow stood up and once more slipped a paw into the gate-weft, watching the light ripple away from where she felt around for its control structures.
You're all right now,
she said to the gate.
Don't worry; we'll find out what happened.

From the gate came a sense of uncertainty, but also of willingness to be convinced. Rhiow smiled, then looked wistfully at the huge, glossy, taloned paw thrust into the webwork. It would be delightful to stay here longer— to slip down into those ancient forests and hunt real game, something nobler and more satisfying to the soul than mice: to run free in the glades and endless grasslands of a place where the word "concrete" had no meaning, to hold your head up and snuff air that tasted new-made because it
was…

Her claw found the string that managed the gate's custom access routines. The gate's identification query sizzled down her nerves. Rhiow held still and let it complete the identification, and when it was done, paused.
Just for a while… it wouldn't hurt…

Rhiow sighed, plucked the string toward her, softly recited in the Speech the spatial and temporal coordinates she wanted, and let the string loose.

The whole weft-structure sang and blazed. Before her, the sphere of intersection with her own world snapped into being. A circular-seeming window into gray stone, gray concrete, a long view over jagged pallid towers to a sky smoggy gray below and smoggy blue above, and the sun struggling to shine through it: steam smells, chemical smells,
houff
-droppings, car exhaust…

Rhiow looked over her shoulder, out of the cave, into the green light with its promise of gold beyond… then leapt into the circle and through, down onto the gravel of the rooftop next to her building. Behind her, with a clap of sound that any
ehhif
would mistake for a car backfiring, the gate snapped shut. Rhiow came down lightly, so lightly she almost felt herself not to be there at all. She glanced at her forepaw again. It seemed unreal for it to be so small. But
this
was reality.

Such as it was…

When she got back up to the apartment's terrace again, the glass terrace doors were open, and Hhuha and Iaehh were having breakfast at the little table near it. The whole place smelled deliciously of bacon. "Well, look who's here!" Iaehh said. "Just in time for brunch."

"She's been out enjoying this pretty day," Hhuha said, stroking Rhiow as she came past her chair. "It's so nice and sunny out. Mike, you should feel her, she's so warm…."

Rhiow smiled wryly. Iaehh chuckled. "No accidents: this cat's timing is perfect. I know what
she
wants."

"Sleep, mostly," Rhiow said, sitting down wearily and watching him fish around on his plate for something to give her. "And if you'd had the morning I had, you'd want some, too. These four-hour shifts, they're deadly."

"All right, all right, be patient," Iaehh said, and reached Rhiow down a piece of bacon. "Here."

Rhiow took it gladly enough; she just wished she wasn't falling asleep on her feet. "You spoil that cat," Hhuha said, getting up and going over to the
ffrihh.
"
I
know what she wants. She wants more of that tuna. You should have seen her dive into it this morning! We've got to get some more of that."

"Oh Queen Iau," Rhiow muttered around the mouthful, "give me strength." She cocked an eye up at Iaehh. "And some more of that before I go have a nap…"

T
he hour's main news stories, from National Public Radio: I'm Bob Edwards…. The South Kamchatka oil spill has begun to disperse after Tropical Storm Bertram shifted course northeastward in the early morning hours, Pacific time, causing near-record swells between the Bay of Kronockji and Shumshu Island at the southern end of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. The spill from the crippled Japanese tanker
Amaterasu Maru
threatened the economically important fishing grounds off the disputed Kurile Islands, and had significantly increased tensions between Russia and Japan at a time when the disposition of the Kuriles, claimed by Japan but occupied by the Soviet Union since the end of World War Two, had been thought by diplomatic sources to be nearing resolution.— President Yeltsin's special envoy Anatoly Krischov has returned to Moscow from Teheran after talks aimed at resolving the escalating border crisis in the Atrek valley between Iran and Turkmenistan, where rebel tribesmen have clashed with both Iranian and Russian government forces for the fourth day in…"

Rhiow rolled over on her back, stretched all her legs in the air, and yawned, blinking in the late afternoon light. The sound of the
ra'hio
being turned on had awakened her.
A long day,
she thought.
I don't usually oversleep like this…

She twisted her head around so that she was looking at the living room upside down. A soft rustling of papers had told Rhiow even before her eyes were open that Hhuha had just sat back down at the other end of the couch. Iaehh was nowhere to be seen; Rhiow's ears told her that he was not in the sleeping room, or the room where he and Hhuha bathed and did their
hiouh.
So he was out running, and could be gone for as little as a few minutes or as long as several hours.

Rhiow knew in a general way that Iaehh was doing this to stay healthy, but sometimes she thought he overdid it, and Hhuha thought so, too; depending on her mood, she either teased or scolded him about it. "You're really increasing your chances of getting hit by a truck one of these days," she would say, either laughing or frowning, and Iaehh would retort, "Better that than increasing my chances of getting hit by a massive cardiac, like Dad, and Uncle Robbie, and…" Then they would box each other's ears verbally for a while, and end up stroking each other for a while after that. Really, they were very much like People sometimes.

Rhiow yawned again, looking upside down at Hhuha. Hhuha glanced over at her and said, "You slept a long time, puss." She reached over and stroked her.

Rhiow grabbed Hhuha's hand, gave it a quick lick, then let it go and started washing before going for her breakfast.
So,
Rhiow thought while the news headlines finished,
there's still an oil spill.
This by itself didn't surprise her. Timeslides, like any wizardry meant to alter the natural flow and unfolding of time, were rarely sanctioned when other options were available. Probably the Area Advisory for the Pacific Region had noticed the availability of a handy alternative instrumentality: natural, "transparent" in terms of being unlikely to arouse
ehhif
suspicions, and fairly easily influenced— of all the languages that humans use, only the wizardly Speech has no equivalent idiom for "everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it."

Oh well,
Rhiow thought.
One less thing to worry about.
She spent a couple more minutes putting her back fur and tail in order, then got down off the couch, stretched fore and aft, and strolled over to the food dish. Halfway across the room, her nose told her it was that tuna stuff again, but she was too hungry to argue the point.

Wouldn't I just love to walk over to you,
she thought about halfway down the bowl, looking over her shoulder at Hhuha,
and say to you, loud and clear, "I'd think that last raise would let you spend at
least
sixty cents a can." But rules are rules…

Rhiow had a long drink, then strolled back to jump up on the couch and have a proper wash this time. She had finished with her head and ears when Hhuha got up, went to the dining room, and came back with still more papers. Rhiow looked at them with distaste.

As Hhuha sighed and put the new load down on the couch, Rhiow got up, stretched again, and carefully sat herself down on the papers; then she put her left rear leg up past her left ear and began to wash her back end. It was body language that even humans seemed sometimes to understand.

Rhiow was pretty sure that Hhuha understood it, but right now she just breathed out wearily. She picked Rhiow up off the pile and put her on the couch next to it, saying, "Oh, come on, you, why do you always have to sit on my paperwork?"

"I'm sitting on it because you hate it," Rhiow said. She sat down on it again, then hunkered down and began kneading her claws into the paperwork, punching holes in the top sheet and wrinkling it and all the others under it.

"Hey, don't do that, I need those!"

"No, you don't. They make you crazy. You shouldn't do this stuff on the weekend: it's bad enough that they make you do it all day during the week." Rhiow rolled over off the paper-pile, grabbing some of the papers as she went, and throwing them in the air.

"Oh, kitty, don't!" Hhuha began picking the papers up. "Not that I wouldn't like to myself," she added under her breath.

"See? And why you should pay attention to that stuff when
I'm
here, I can't understand," Rhiow muttered, as Hhuha picked her up and put her in her lap. "See, isn't that better? You don't need this junk. You need a cat."

"Talk talk, chatter chatter," Hhuha said under her breath, straightening the paperwork out. "Probably you're trying to tell me I shouldn't bring my work home. Or more likely it's something about cat food."

"Yes, now that you mention—" Rhiow made a last swipe at one piece of the paperwork as it went past her nose in Hhuha's hand. "Hey, watch those claws," Hhuha said.

"I would never scratch you, you know that," Rhiow said, settling. "Unless you got slow. Put that stuff
down….
"

Hhuha started rubbing behind Rhiow's ears, and Rhiow went unfocused for a little while, purring. There were People, she knew, who saw the whole business of "having" an
ehhif
as being, at best, old-fashioned— at worst, very politically incorrect. The two species really had no common ground, some People said. They claimed that there could be no real relationships between carnivores and omnivores, predators and hunter-gatherers: only cohabitation of a crude and finally unsatisfactory kind. Cats who held this opinion usually would go on at great length about the imprisonment of People against their will, and the necessity to free them from their captivity if at all possible— or, at the very least, to raise their consciousness about it so that, no matter how pleasant the environment, no matter how tasty the food and how "kind" the treatment, they would never forget that they were prisoners, and never forget their own identity as a People presently oppressed, but who someday would be free.