The Big Meow

by Diane Duane

  “I think the Silent Man’s got the right idea,” Hwaith said. “I’m going to go check my gate…. I’ll be back later. If you hear anything from Arhu – “

  “I’ll let you know,” Rhiow said. “Go well…”

  Hwaith vanished.

  Rhiow stayed as she was, listening to the darkness. In it she could hear an echo, distant, a voice telling itself something it really wanted to believe – and telling it at one remove, so that it was more believable: If I have all the tears that are shed on Broadway by guys in love, I will have enough salt water to start an opposition ocean to the Atlantic and Pacific, with enough left over to run the Great Salt Lake out of business. But I wish to say I never shed any of these tears personally, because I am never in love, and furthermore, barring a bad break, I never expect to be in love, for the way I look at it love is strictly the old phedinkus, and I tell the little guy as much…

  Rhiow crouched there quietly in the darkness, hearing the thought fade away into others as bleak as the Silent Man started what would be a long struggle toward sleep. The muzziness of his pain medication was slowly starting to descend: something he welcomed. I must see what can be done for him, she thought, starting to doze a little herself: if anything. Best to get some rest now, though. Helen will be in touch in the morning, and by then Arhu and Sif will have some answers for us.

  Tomorrow’s going to be busy…

  The Big Meow: Chapter Eight

  Rest came hard to her as well, and didn’t last long. Rhiow’s eyes blinked open seemingly of themselves in the time of uncertain light before the dawn. She was tired enough after the previous evening’s exertions that for a few moments she wasn’t even sure where she was, and lay gazing across the shadowy room in profound disorientation, taking in and trying to make sense of the bulky, ghost-pale furniture, the unfamiliar view out the French doors, the strange empty feel of the place.

  After a few moments memory reasserted itself. From where she lay on her side on the windowsill, she could see the rest of the room to be empty of any People, either her own group or visitors from the neighborhood.

  Why is it that when you most want and need sleep, you can’t get it… she thought, and got up to stretch fore and aft, yawning. The feeling of emptiness around Rhiow didn’t lessen as she gathered her wits; the whole place was devoid of waking minds – Urruah apparently gone elsewhere after his second dinner, Sif and Arhu and Hwaith and Aufwi still off about their various businesses. As for sleeping minds, the Silent Man’s consciousness was still immersed in the sleep his pain medication had finally won him, but the immersion was shallow. Soon enough the pain would break surface again and drag him up into wakefulness with it. Not far from him, Sheba drowsed, heading deeper into sleep after having apparently wakened earlier.

  Worrying, Rhiow thought as she jumped softly down from the windowsill. She had had enough of those awakenings herself lately with Iaehh, as his pain and longing broke through his sleep and made him call the name of someone who couldn’t ever answer him again on this side of life. Her own sorrow was hard enough to bear at such times, and always left her wondering What can be done for him? But there were no easy answers to the question in Iaehh’s case.

  Where the Silent Man was concerned, however, the situation might be different; and Rhiow had been meaning to look into this. And having spent a little while in poor Delores’s physical realm a little while ago, I’m still set for this kind of work. Let’s see what we see…

  She headed over toward the shut bedroom door, purred one of the shorter versions of the Mason’s Word, and passed through the door like a ghost. On the far side she paused to glance around. Here was another very underfurnished room, all done in white. Here another set of French windows stood partway open on the palm-shadowed utility yard at the side of the house; gauzy white curtains stirred slightly in the faintest breeze from outside. In the bed, under the covers, the Silent Man lay very still, curled up nearly in fetal position. It was troubling, almost shocking to see in an ehhif always so erect and rigid, as if only here in this most private place did he dare express in his body any of the stress and pain he felt. Down at the end of the bed, Sheba lay in a tight curl of fur only slightly less white than the coverlet, her tail covering her face.

  Rhiow stood quiet in the dimness for a few moments, watching the ehhif’s breathing. It was very shallow. Too shallow. The drugs… But she was sure the Silent Man had listened to the warnings from his doctors about the drugs’ effects… and had taken them no more seriously than absolutely necessary. Most likely he thinks it’d be a happy accident if he simply failed to wake up one morning. Not that he would have arranged such a thing on purpose, of course. For even so short a time as she’d known him, Rhiow thought suicide wouldn’t be his style.

  She paced over past the bed to jump up on the sill of the window that looked out on the other side of the house’s front yard. Outside a pallid mist was rising, colorless as everything else was in that hour balanced between night and morning. By human reckoning it was four in the morning, the time when People and ehhif alike were most likely to slip across the boundaries between life and what lay beyond, and sometimes not to come back.

  Rhiow sat down on the windowsill, a shadow in the surrounding paleness, and gazed down at the man curled up under the covers, his face half-hidden by them. She didn’t need to go any closer to do what she had in mind, but there was something else keeping her at a distance. Even in his sleep the Silent Man had an aura of unapproachability, the same effect that had kept a clear space of sorts all around him at the party when all the other ehhif had been singlemindedly concentrating on breaking down barriers and injecting themselves into one anothers’ space. Maybe it’s no wonder that he had relatively little trouble getting to grips with us when we appeared, she thought. His mindset has something of the feline about it: the reserve, the self-containment of the good hauissh player who watches and waits….

  Rhiow composed herself and concentrated on clarifying to herself what she intended to do here. The one goal she would most have desired was unfortunately not available to her. I can’t save his life… For the Whisperer had told her how this poor ehhif’s story was to end. To save the Silent Man would mean changing history.

  And not for the better. It wasn’t just a matter of how he’d lived his life or what he’d done – the great pleasure he’d brought many millions of other ehhif by the stories he’d told. It was his death itself, in these circumstances, that was going to make the difference. Right up until the Silent Man died, so terrified of cancer were human people in his time that they wouldn’t even speak of it. “Died after a long illness”, was the usual euphemism – if they used it at all. Or if the illness had even been long. It was the Silent Man’s death and his friend Walter’s refusal to be quiet about it, the angry survivor’s stubborn insistence on calling the Silent Man’s death by its right name, that would begin the slow change of how ehhif handled the whole issue of cancer. Thousands would be helped in the near term of time by all the money and publicity that Winchell would bring to bear on the issue, and after that, many millions more would have their lives lengthened or at the very least improved, as the in a culture that had completely changed how it went after this particular human malady.

  So this was not a death that could be averted or avoided. But if I can at least spare him some pain on the way… Rhiow thought. That would do. I’ll have a look around, then speak to the cancer and see if it will hear me.

  Rhiow closed her eyes and assembled the spell in her mind, then silently started to speak the words. The stillness of the room around her faded down into a silence even more profound as the wizardry began to work and the surrounding space leaned into slow compliance with her will. In the dimness, darkness started to fall all around her, only the Silent Man’s form under the covers remaining distinct and growing more so.

  What Rhiow had in mind was something less straightforwardly interventional than what she’d done to Delores’s insides. The wizardry she was work
ing was as much on herself as on the Silent Man, a matter of shifted perceptions. As the room faded around her, the ehhif’s body seemed to grow, but at the same time its structure seemed both to fade and to begin abstracting itself into something more like a schematic than the body’s reality of interconnected tissue, of muscle and bone and lymph. All around Rhiow a scatter of slowly strengthening light was starting to build itself into structures that would express the Silent Man’s internal ecology and all the forces working in it.

  The effect would take a while to refine itself to the point where Rhiow could best interact with it. She jumped down off the windowsill – that being almost all that was left of her previous perception of the room – and stepped cautiously into the growing outlay of lines of light that was the way the wizardry was rendering the Silent Man’s body. It had a way to go yet before she got down to the one-Angstrom level that she needed to deal with: such profound shifts in perception levels couldn’t happen instantaneously.

  As the wizardry worked, the darkness around Rhiow also began to be lit by flickers of the Silent Man’s own perceptions of the wizardry, filtered through the intervening medium of sleep and caged inside the lines of light. It was an expected side effect of doing such a wizardry while the subject wasn’t fully conscious. The surface of the Silent Man’s mind shivered with the dream, a tremor like that of the dreamer’s closed eyes. But the tremor was a troubled one, and the disruption penetrated down into the slowly building abstract, shaking its fabric and infusing it with alien vistas. It’ll pass, Rhiow thought. Fairly quickly, I hope…

  All around Rhiow spread a view of scrubby desert country. Under other circumstances it would have seemed unfamiliar, but here inside the Silent Man’s sleeping self Rhiow had access to his memories, and recognized it as he would have. The dry dun-colored surroundings all scattered with sand and mesquite were part of the empty country south of the Mexican border, all too familiar to the Silent Man after months spent covering the turn-of-the-century border skirmishes between Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and the outlaw Pancho Villa. There in some nameless, dusty stucco-built village in the depths of Jalisco province, a fair-haired barefoot girl in ragged skirt and blouse stopped in the street to stare at the tall thin stranger, then a handsome enough young man despite being worn down by the long and violent campaign he’d been covering for the sensation-hungry Hearst papers.

  In the dream of long ago, nothing was in the Silent Man’s heart but vague interest in the smart and funny teenager who tried to attach herself to him, dancing and singing in the dusty street to get his attention. Dream-memory quickly flashed forward to the somber nuns he paid to take her into their boarding school and teach her to read and write, and Rhiow caught glimpses through his eyes of earnest and laboriously-written letters from the girl that the Silent Man read when he was back in New York after the war. But then the dream flickered forward in time again, and without warning it wasn’t letters he was looking at. Through the Silent Man’s eyes Rhiow glanced up from a red-ringed sandwich plate in some Broadway eatery and saw the street door open. A fair-haired young woman was standing there, dressed to kill in a dark short dress over long, long dancer’s legs. Her eyes searched the place, finding the Silent Man, locking on him as if there was no one else in the room. Meeting her eyes with his own, the Silent Man’s heart constricted with desire and fear. And around him, the men having lunch with the Silent Man turned and stared, and one let out a long low whistle…

  The sudden stab of unease derailed the dream, which flinched away into darkness and then into some pale and indistinct scenario bringing with it a different array of uncomfortable sensoria – hard chairs, hospital smells, and an unavoidable anticipation of something awful that was going to happen soon. Rhiow backed away into the darkness around the fringes of the dream, her tail twitching with a Person’s innate unease at being submerged unbidden into another’s emotional life. As always there came the initial urge to turn away before something more private and embarrassing rose up to confront her. But Rhiow mastered it. There was always the chance this would happen, she thought. And there’s no better way or time to make this investigation. If there’s a fight coming, we’d best be sure of what condition all the participants are in…

  She sat again and waited as the wizardly visualization constructed itself, the broadcast light solidifying and sheeting filmily upwards now, strengthening as it grew in height against the surrounding darkness. Shapes started to form, and the defining light withdrew itself to their edges as they reared up high and straight against the dark. Skyscrapers, Rhiow thought as the cityscape started to assert itself, a crowd of narrow canyons of hard structure with streams of life running alongside them. Why would this have surprised me? For the Silent Man had spent so much of his time in New York, and had become (she’d gathered from Urruah) inextricably associated with it. The question is, which vision does he see as a microcosm of the other?…

  The city of the Silent Man’s imaginings was towering up all around Rhiow now, solidifying, going dark except for the spatter of light now scattering itself through the vista in mimicry of windows and streets and headlights. Yet out beyond the edges of the vision, Rhiow knew that the arid landscapes through which the Silent Man had passed and from which he’d originally come still surrounded the city. In this visualization it was both island and oasis, a patch of life in the barrenness that was all the rest of living as far as the Silent Man was concerned. The wilderness haunted his and his body’s memory — like calling to like no matter how much he might deny it. And in the middle of it all, amid the noise and rush of all his fellow ehhif, he lives and moves…and hides. Mining their lives, and hiding his…

  Rhiow moved into the vision and let it finish growing up around her. Cabs as yellow as her those of her own time, but a lot heavier and rounder, drove around and past her as she walked down the double yellow line, ghostlike and impervious. The traffic was two-way, and the street was Broadway: what she and the Silent Man would have agreed in thinking of as the better end of Broadway, up in the high Fifties, south of the Park but well north of the rougher parts of town further south on the island. On either side as she went, Rhiow was flanked by bright lights and the neon gleam from restaurants and bars of the past. Away down the road in the direction of what would someday be Times Square, the fierce electric glare of the Great White Way reflected upward between the buildings like a confused and actinic sunrise. There it all lay spread out before Rhiow as she went — the main drag of the Silent Man’s heart, with his lifeblood running up and down it: the seemings of the city’s men and women and children, guys and dolls, mugs and molls, cops and robbers, all hemmed in by the dark facades of the city, the penthouses and the basement tenements.

  She passed by the front of Lindy’s, all aglow with light, the inside alive with waiters bustling around, every banquette and counter-stool full. Outside on the corner, surrounded by a menacing crowd of bodyguards, stood what some drift of inner Silent Man-memory told her was a local mobster, doing “business as usual” with any passersby who dared come close. If all this is body-symbolic for him, Rhiow thought as she padded by, and all these buildings and people have inner meaning – then maybe the restaurant is his stomach, and the mobster… what? An ulcer? If she went over and engaged with them, doubtless she’d find out. But right now she had other business, and Rhiow knew where she would find it.

  She followed Broadway down through the urbane Fifties, into the more rough-and-ready Forties, and through the bright-lit incandescent canyon that would be Times Square some day. Though the tallest buildings hadn’t been built yet, the core building at One Times Square was there as it had been for the last two decades of the Silent Man’s life, though the famous wraparound news ticker showed nothing but a long string of periods as she passed it by. Though nothing like the multicolored day-in-night lightblast that Rhiow was used to in her own time, the glare was still harsh enough to make a Person squint. The shadows of the ehhif crowding the Square and crossing her path all sli
d and flickered hard-edged past her. As they pressed in around Rhiow, she looked sidelong at them, for many of those shadows had more in them than just darkness. An old regard was bent on her through them — curious and hostile, but for the moment, passive.

  Rhiow flirted her tail in overtly nonchalant acknowledgement of sa’Rraah’s presence and kept on walking through the southern part of the Theatre District, where the glare behind her faded and the shadows in the streets and between the buildings deepened. Passersby grew fewer, and the feel of the streets, for which any Person or ehhif living in the City necessarily acquired some sense, started to grow chilly and uncomfortable. No surprise, Rhiow thought, as Broadway narrowed on either side and the traffic grew sparse. This wasn’t exactly a healthy neighborhood in his day… Where people or groups stood on streetcorners, they looked like they were skulking: dressed in dark coats, hats pulled down, eyes glinting sullenly or narrowed in threat as they turned away from her regard. And down the streets, well away from the streetlights – which started to look pitifully few and feeble – the darkness was pooling above the tarred road surfaces like a thick black smog.

  Rhiow stopped in the middle of the intersection she’d just come to and looked around her. Thirty-Third, she thought, glancing westward along the side street. The traffic down here was almost nonexistent. She turned to look up the way she had come, and saw only the dull double sheen of a set of headlights or two as they turned into uptown side streets. Any foot traffic up there was invisible through the darkness piling up between her and the areas where light still dwelt.

  It’s how he sees it, Rhiow thought. His body as an island in the dark… and the dark encroaching. She flicked an ear at something she heard in the darkness down Thirty-Third: something scrabbling, a moment’s metallic banging, then silence again.

  She knew what would make that kind of noise in her own world, but what it meant to an ehhif she couldn’t be sure. Rats… It was a signal. To go down there… or stay away? She couldn’t discount the possibility that the Silent Man’s unconscious mind might be aware of her intrusion on some level. It’s just a question of whether he’d see it as benign. But having come this far, I don’t think I can allow that to affect what I have in mind…