by Diane Duane
“It very well could,” Auhlae said. “She was a tremendous power in her time, though she had very little direct power—compared to some of the pride-leaders who went before her, anyway. Certainly they would have gone to war had she been assassinated, and if they were able to prove that some other pride they knew of had been involved. There was fierce rivalry between them for a long time: the shadows of it remain, though most of the ehhif powers in Europe are supposed to be working together now …”
“Huff,” Rhiow said, “how much do you know about ehhif history of that time? The eighteen seventies, say?”
“Very little,” he said. “It’s hardly my speciality: like most of us, if I need to know something I go to the Whispering.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “But you know,” he said, “there are People for whom it is a speciality. And they don’t live far from here. In fact, there’s one in particular who’s famous for it. He used to live at Whitehall, but now he’s out in the suburbs. You should go to see him. I’ll show you the coordinates, and you can lay them into one of the other gates.”
“That sounds like a good idea,” Rhiow said. “Would he be available today, do you think?”
“More than likely. Probably your best bet is simply to go out there and meet with him.”
“All right. What’s his name?”
“Humphrey.”
Rhiow blinked. “That’s not a Person’s name …”
“It is now,” Huff said, amused. “Wait till you meet him.”
“Meanwhile, I think the rest of us will be minding the other gates,” Fhrio said, “and watching to see if they start betraying any sign of instability. If they start acting up, we’ll know we have less time to deal with our troubles than we thought.”
Rhiow nodded. “And as for the rest of it,” she said, “we’ll meet again when it’s dark, and see who’s best sharpened their claws on the problem before us.”
The others agreed, then got up and shook themselves, preparatory to heading off in their various directions.
“Now look at this,” Arhu said, crouched down again, and oblivious. “ ‘Princess Christiana of Schleswig-Holstein visited His Majesty and remained to lunch—’ ”
Urruah looked up. “Does it say what they had?” he said, coming to gaze at the paper over Arhu’s shoulder.
Rhiow glanced over at Huff and wandered over to him. “You look tired,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, I’m well enough,” he said. “Rhiow, we’re all too old for this! Except for them—” and he indicated Arhu, and off on the other side of the room, already heading for the back door, Siffha’h. “But no matter … we’ll cope.” He sighed, looked at her, as Auhlae came wandering over and laid her tail gently over his back. “It’s just hard, sometimes, discovering that after a long period of steady and not terribly dangerous work, your reward for getting it right is that you get to save the universe …” His look was dry.
“It’s always dangerous to demonstrate talent,” Auhlae said. “Least of all to Them. But that’s our job: we accepted it when it was offered us .… and what can we do now?”
“Do it the best we can,” Rhiow said. “There’s nothing else.” She rubbed cheeks with Huff, when he offered, and did the same, a little more tentatively, with Auhlae. The two of them headed off toward the front of the pub: and Rhiow made her way out toward the back, and the cat-door, thinking thoughts of quiet desperation … but determined not to give in to them.
Half an hour or so later, Rhiow was padding down a street in one of the northern suburbs of London, looking for a specific house in one small street. She had a description of the house, and a name for a Person: or rather, that peculiar ehhif nickname which Huff had given her. According to the Knowledge, the nickname (bizarrely) came from an ehhif television show, and was a reference to an astute but extremely twisty-minded politician. Rhiow was uncertain whether any Person, no matter how jovial, would really want to be called by such a name.
She found the house, at last. It was actually bumped sideways into another house, in a configuration which the ehhif here called “semidetached.” There was a narrow wall of decorative concrete blocks about four feet high separating the two houses’ front yards and driveways. Rhiow jumped up onto this and made her way back to where it met another wall, taller, one which divided the houses’ two back gardens from one another. This was actually less a wall than a series of screens of interwoven wood, fastened end to end. Rhiow jumped up onto the nearest of them and paced along it and the subsequent screens carefully, looking down on the left-hand side, as she had been instructed.
The right-hand garden was less a garden than a tangle of weeds and rosebushes run amuck. The left-hand one, though, had a lawn with stepping-stones in it, and carefully trimmed shrubs, and small trees making a shady place down at the far end. There was a birdbath standing in the shade, but no bird was fool enough to use it: for lying near the birdbath, upside down in the sun, was a black-and-white Person with long fluffy fur.
Rhiow paused there for a moment looking at him as he dozed, wondering how to proceed. From a tree nearby, a small bird appeared, perched on a nearby branch, and began yelling, “Cat! Cat! Cat!’ at Rhiow.
She rolled her eyes. One of the great annoyances associated with becoming a wizard was, oddly, identical with one of its great joys: learning enough of the Speech to readily understand the creatures around her. It was very hard to eat, with a clean conscience, anything you could talk to and get an intelligible answer back. “In your case, though,” she said to the small bird, “I’m willing to make an exception …”
Except that she wasn’t, really. Rhiow sighed and turned her attention away from the bird, to find that the black-and-white Person’s eyes had opened, at least partially, and he was looking at her, upside down.
“Hunt’s luck to you!’ she said. “I’m on errantry, and I greet you.”
He looked at her curiously, and rolled over so that he was right side up again. “You’re a long way from home, by your accent,” he said. “Come on down, make yourself comfortable.”
Rhiow jumped down form the wall and walked over to the respectable-looking Person, breathed breaths with him, and then said, “Please forgive me: I don’t know quite what to call you …”
“Which means you know the nickname,” he said, and put his whiskers forward. “Go ahead and use it: everyone else does, at this point, and there’s no real point in me trying to avoid it.”
“Hhuhm’hri, then. I’m Rhiow.”
“Hunt’s luck to you, Rhiow, and welcome to London. What brings you all this way?”
She sat down and explained, trying to keep the explanation brief and non-technical. But Hhuhm’hri was nodding a long time before she finished, and Rhiow realized that this was one of the more acute People she had met in a while, with a quick and deep grasp of issues for all his slightly ditzy, wide-eyed looks.
“Well, that’s certainly a different sort of problem,” Hhuhm’hri said. “At first I’d thought perhaps you were one of the People who’s just been added to the standing committee on rat control.”
Rhiow restrained herself from laughing. “No, the problem’s a little different from that …”
“Certainly a little more interesting. I must say I wouldn’t want our timeline to be wiped out, either, so I’m at your disposal. Though I must admit that the temptation to alter just one piece here or there, with an eye to improving things, must be very strong …”
“By and large it doesn’t work,” Rhiow said. “There are conservation laws for history as well as for energy. Remove one pivotal event without due consideration, and another is likely to slip in to take its place—often one that’s worse than the one you were trying to prevent.”
“Conservation of history …” Hhuhm’hri mused for a moment. “That’s the only odd thing about this, to me: if such a principle exists, why isn’t it protecting you in this case?”
“Because of the nature of the Power which has intervened to cause the chang
e,” Rhiow said. “Mostly time heals itself over without a scar if the change is small, or made by a mortal. But when the Powers that Be become directly involved … and in this case, one of the oldest and greatest of them—the fabric of time is entirely too amenable to Their will. It’s unavoidable: They built time, after all …”
Hhuhm’hri blinked. “Yes,” he said. And then he added, “You’ll forgive me a second’s skepticism, I hope. One doesn’t often expect to run into one of Them, or Their direct deeds, in the normal course of the business day.”
“Of course,” Rhiow said, at the same time thinking that, from the wizard’s point of view, that was all anyone ever ran into: but this was not the moment for abstract philosophy.
“Sa’Rrahh, eh,” Hhuhm’hri said after a moment. “So the bad-tempered old queen’s at it again. Well, I’ll help you any way I can: we’ll play the Old Tom to her Great Serpent, and put a knife or two into her coils before we’re done. I may not be walking the corridors of power any more, but all my contacts are still live … in fact, I have rather more of them since I came out to the green leafy confines of suburbia.”
Rhiow cocked her head. “I’d heard something about your retirement,” she said, “from the Knowledge: but even the ehhif in New York noticed it. A lot of talk about you being thrown out of Downing Street—and then maybe murdered—”
Hhuhm’hri put his whiskers right forward and sprawled out, blinking at Rhiow like a politician after a three-mouse lunch followed by unlimited cream: and he smiled like someone who could say a lot more on the subject than he was willing to. “It wasn’t that bad,” he said. “At least, as far as political scandals go …”
Though a lot of ehhif had thought it was. The new Prime Minister’s wife, a suspected ailurophobe, had dropped a few remarks on moving into Number Ten which indicated that she thought cats were, of all things, “unsanitary”. The remarks had provoked so massive an outbreak of ehhif public concern for “Humphrey” that an official statement from the government had been required to put matters right—making it plain that Humphrey’s normal “beat” was the Cabinet Office and Number Eleven, and his position was not threatened. Shortly after that had come the photo opportunity. Rhiow had been looking over Iaehh’s shoulder at the television one night and had chanced to catch some of those images: the lady in question looking conciliatory, but also rather as if she very much wished she was elsewhere, or holding something besides a cat: while “Humphrey” gazed out at the cameras, as big-eyed in the storm of strobe-flashes as a kitten seeing a ball of yarn for the first time. “Glad it wasn’t me,” Rhiow said. “I wouldn’t have known what to do in a situation like that.”
“You hold still and pray you won’t walk into anything when she finally puts you down,” Hhuhm’hri said, amused. “Sweet Queen above us, ten minutes straight of flash photography … ! I was half-blind at the end of it. But other than that, I did what I had to. I shed on her.” He put his whiskers forward in a good-natured way. “What else could I do? What kind of PR advice was she getting, to take a photo call with a black and white cat in a black suit? Did they expect me to stop shedding in one color? She should have worn a print, or tweed … Well, she was only new to the job. She’s learned better since. While I stayed there, I steered clear of the children, by and large, which is mostly what she was worried about. No point in tormenting the poor woman. Then my kidneys began to kick up, and I thought, why should I hang about and distract these poor ehhif? They’ve got enough problems, and my replacement’s trained. So I took early retirement—and there was a press scandal about that too, unavoidable I suppose—but I was happy enough to let “Harold” move in at Number Ten, and go off to get the kidneys sorted out and settle into domestic life. I still have more than enough to do.”
“Not just the rats, in other words.”
“Oh, dear me, no. As I said, now that I’m quartered out here, People who might otherwise attract notice if they came to see me in Downing Street don’t feel shy about it any more. No more cameramen hanging about all hours of the day and night …” He yawned. “Sorry, I was up late this morning. Tell me what kind of help you need from me, specifically.”
“Advice on personalities,” Rhiow said. “I need to know what People can best help us in that time, in the eighteen seventies … ideally, in the target year itself, where their intervention will do most good. We think it’s eighteen seventy-five. The possible error, my colleague thinks, is a couple of years on either side.”
“Eighteen seventy-five,” Hhuhm’hri said. “Or between eighteen seventy-three and eighteen seventy-six. Not a quiet time …”
He mostly-closed his eyes, thinking, and for a few minutes he lay there in the warm dappled shade and said nothing. Rhiow waited, while above a growing chorus of small birds scolded at them, and her mouth began to water slightly at the thought of foreign food, whether she could talk to it or not.
“Well,” Hhuhm’hri said suddenly, as Rhiow was beginning to concentrate on one small bird in particular, a greenish-yellow creature with banded dark wings and a bright blue cap which was hanging temptingly close on a branch of a dwarf willow. There are certainly a fair number of resources: though the Old Cats’ Network was really only getting started, then. One in particular should be of best use to you, though. ‘Wilberforce’ told me about something that had come down to him from ‘George’, or maybe it was ‘Tiddles’, the one who owned Nelson … something concerning the British Museum’s cat at that point. ‘Black Jack’, the ehhif called him. An outstanding character: he worked at the Museum for something like twenty years, and what he didn’t know about the place, or about things going on in the Capital in general, wasn’t worth knowing. He passed everything he knew down to his replacement, ‘young Jack’—and it’s through that youngster that a lot of information about that time comes down to us. Either one of them would be the one you’d want to talk to: but I can give you a fair amount of the information which has come down from them, so that you’ll start to get a sense of what questions you need to ask. How much background do you need?”
“All you can give me.”
“Is your memory that good?” Hhuhm’hri said, looking thoughtful.
“It can be when it has to be,” Rhiow said. “I can emplace everything you say to me in the Whispering, as I hear it. I won’t be much good for conversation while you’re at it, but it’ll be accessible to me and the rest of my team afterwards, and any other wizards who need the information.”
“That’s very convenient.”
“It is,” Rhiow said, though privately she thought that what would not be convenient was the headache she would have afterwards. “If you’ll give me a moment to set up the spell, we can get started.”
It was nearly five hours later that she made her way out of Hhuhm’hri’s back garden: the sun was going down, and even the dimming sunset light made Rhiow’s eyes hurt. Her whole head was clanging inside as if someone was banging a cat-food can with a spoon. And I’m ravenous, too, she thought, heading back to the vacant lot into which she had originally gated. Parts or no parts, if I go straight home after this, I’m eating whatever Iaehh gives me.
It had been worth it, though. Her brains felt so crammed full of ehhif political and non-political history of the 1870s that she could barely think: and after a sleep, she would be able to access it through the Knowledge, as if taking counsel with the Whisperer, and sort it for the specific threads and personalities they needed. It helped, too, that Hhuhm’hri’s point of view was such a lucid one, carefully kept clear of uninformed opinion or personal agendas. It had apparently been an article of honor for the long line of Downing Street cats to make sure that the information they passed down the line was reliable and as free from bias as it could be, while still having an essentially feline point of view. They counted themselves as chroniclers, both of public information and of the words spoken in silence behind the closed doors of power, in Downing Street and elsewhere: and they suffered the amused way that ehhif treated them, put up with
the cute names and the often condescending attention, for the sake of making sure someone knew the truth about what was going on, and preserved it. Not that there hadn’t been affection involved, as well: Hhuhm’hri had been quite close to the Prime Minister before the present one, and Churchill’s affection for the People he lived with had been famous—Rhiow could not get rid of the image of the great ehhif sitting up in bed with a brandy and a cigar, dictating his memoirs and pausing occasionally to growl, “Isn’t that right, Cat Darling?” to the redoubtable orange-striped “Cat’, veteran of the Blitz, who had worked so hard to keep his ehhif’s emotions stable through that terrible time.
They were an unusual group, the Downing Street cats: genuine civil servants, and talented ones. Over the many, many years they had been in residence, they had learned to understand clearly ehhif speech of various kinds—the first “cabinet’ cats, dating back to the pride-ruler Henry VI, had been ehhif-bilingual in English and French—and they were assiduous about training their replacements to make sure the talent wasn’t lost in this most special of the branches of the Civil Service. Not quite wizards, Rhiow thought: though there may be wizardly blood in their line somewhere, or occasional infusions of it from outside -for not all the Downing Street group were related. They were a rrai’theh, a working pride without blood affinities, part of the much larger pride which referred to itself as “the Old Cats’ Network”. Rhiow wondered if, as in other non-wizardly cats, another talent to “spill over” from wizardly stock had been the one for passing through closed doors unnoticed. She suspected it had: in their line of work, such an ability would have been invaluable.
