The Big Meow

by Diane Duane

  Rhiow started walking down Thirty-Third. Down that way, in this time as in her own, was Hell’s Kitchen. But in this time the place was much closer to deserving the name: a neighborhood – if that was the right name for a place so un-neighborly – home to gangs and crooks of all kinds, whorehouses and sweatshops, mob-run factories and unsavory bars, gambling dens and dives. It was a place that Rhiow gathered from Urruah that the Silent Man had come in a strange way to love as he devoted so much of his working life to chronicling its ways. But ‘Ruah also said the stories the Silent Man told about the place, for all their dry humor, were dark at the heart. A lot of pain, a lot of death… with always the Shadowed One’s laugh at the end – a co-opted ehhif version of it. And the pain acknowledged… but always, the ehhif trying to make it bearable. So of course what she was looking for would be down there. All that remained was to discover the shape it had taken this time.

  As Rhiow headed down Thirty-Third, the sense that someone was watching her got stronger and stronger. Not just one someone: many of them. The fur stood up all down her spine, but she refused to stop and shake it down into place again. She would not give what watched her the satisfaction. Soon enough I’m going to have more to worry about than my fur, Rhiow thought as she made her way down the street, glancing from side to side at the dark buildings, all stained brick and cracked concrete, the unlighted windows. Dirty glass from them lay shattered on the sidewalks. The street, what she could see of it under the layer of pooled smog, was a patchwork of potholes, dug-up places that hadn’t been mended, open manholes from which the covers had been stolen. Here and there a building was missing from the street entirely, reduced to rubble piled up in the lots where they’d stood. On either side of these their neighboring buildings tottered, their adjoining walls pulled away to reveal empty fireplaces, ancient cast-iron radiators hanging in space, wallpaper peeling away and flapping in the cold night’s wind, staircases all open on one side with the stair-treads hanging down into the void. In the rubble that was all that was left between them, dark things shifted and rustled.

  Rhiow licked her nose nervously. This was the Silent Man’s body telling her what was happening to it, the destruction of basic infrastructure. But much more was going on. As she kept walking and the street kept darkening, the only light now coming from an ugly bloated red moon setting over the river down at the far end of Thirty-Third, Rhiow started seeing more movement inside the derelict buildings. Inside the dirty windows she could hear things moving. As she went, and that reddish moonlight seemed to get stronger, she started seeing the movements inside them as well. Lumpy shapes in tissue-colors of dark red and spotty dark pink and fat-ivory, rounded, bulbous, glistening a little sometimes – they were getting bolder, pushing themselves right up to the windows, right through the broken places. Eyeless, they nonetheless peered at her, and though faceless, their expressions were mocking as they leered and tittered at her.

  Rhiow’s lips wrinkled away from her fangs in distaste. She itched to assemble some minor wizardry that would blast the nasty things away from the windows and put a stop to their snickering. Best wait, though, she thought. No point in wasting energy I might need later… On she went down Thirty-Third, crossing Eighth Avenue and heading for Ninth. Above her, the sky lost the last reflection of city light, went starless. Around her, the structure of the buildings themselves was beginning to shift, and the watching, leering tumor-shapes were no longer just inside them, but starting to appear on the otherwise deserted sidewalks – first just a few, then in groups. By the time she reached the middle of the block between Ninth and Tenth, the edges of the buildings were starting to go unnervingly soft.

  By Tenth, the buildings were all built of ehhif tissue – stressed cartilage and bone, perforated organ tissue struggling to repair itself after being attacked again and again by the cancerous cells running wild inside it. But it was not doing well. Everything looked shabby, tattered, inexpressibly weary. And all around her, the tumorous growth inside the Silent Man was running riot. In the tumbledown ruins of the worst-damaged organ-buildings, individual cells rustled and cheeped and burrowed like rats, undermining, consuming, destroying. Outside, larger clumps and clusters of them, wearing blunt rounded eyeless mockeries of ehhif shapes, were gathered on the sidewalks, staring at Rhiow as she went past. Some weird in-body imagery of the Silent Man’s, Rhiow thought. If he sees his body sometimes in dream or imagination as a city, why wouldn’t he see the cancer as a neighborhood in it? And a bad one. Populated by criminals, by bootleggers and bad seeds. Yet in the Silent Man’s stories, Urruah had insisted, the bad guys often had good buried somewhere at their cores, and were sometimes compelled by circumstance or persuasion to remember it. Working in that idiom, could even cells gone mad for multiplying themselves remember what it was like to be normal? It’s worth a try —

  Rhiow kept going, and the ehhif-shaped tumor clusters and many of their more mobile single-cell “pets” started coming down off the sidewalks and slowly gathering behind her as she went, the crowd rapidly swelling. They weren’t much bigger than Rhiow was — tiny by comparison with real ehhif. But there are so many of them. And they have me seriously outnumbered. If they should decide to come after me…

  That wasn’t a thought to be having right now, here in the heart of what was certainly a candidate to be declared one of the worst “bad neighborhoods” Rhiow had ever been in. Trying to demonstrate a calm she absolutely didn’t feel, Rhiow kept on walking until she came to the middle of the intersection of Thirty-Third and Tenth, pretty much the heart of the worst part of Hell’s Kitchen in that time, all surrounded by crumbling four-story brick apartment buildings and blind-windowed shops that sold nothing. There she sat right down and allowed the crowd that had grown as it followed her down Thirty-Third to gather around her. They had left an uneasy space around her, maybe as long as she was, and Rhiow was glad of it, seeing that the cancer, even in its unthinking way, was uncertain of what she might do or intend.

  Rhiow curled her tail around her forepaws and waited for the rustling and the muttering to die down a little. Finally, “I am on errantry,” she said, “and I greet you.”

  The silence that followed the Avedictory was deafening, and told Rhiow more than she needed to know about how receptive this audience was going to be to her suggestions. Never mind, just plunge in –”A change is coming to your world,” she said. “It’s going to end.”

  “A long, long time from now,” said the multifarous voice of the cancer from all around her. Every one of the ehhif-mimicking clumps and individual cancer cells around her buzzed with it, an unpleasant itchy sound that made Rhiow want to scratch her ears. She restrained herself.

  “In terms of your individual lifespans,” Rhiow said, “yes, that’s true. But in terms of your host’s lifespan – a very short time indeed. I’ve come to you on his behalf.”

  Rhiow could feel the tumor clumps and cells looking at her as if she was out of her mind, and they were both amused and angry. “Who do you think you are, speaking for the world?” said the voice.

  “A friend,” Rhiow said.

  Laughter broke out. “Some kind of nut,” said one voice.

  “No such thing as a friend in this world,” said another. “Just guys who want something out of you for free.”

  “I’m not asking anything of you,” Rhiow said, “except a little forbearance. You remember, perhaps, how it was once, when you were part of a larger whole, and every cell had a place that was made just for it, somewhere that it belonged –”

  There was an annoyed buzzing at this. “Listen to that,” said the voice. “Somebody thinks we should know our place.”

  “Somebody thinks we should go back to how it used to be,” said another voice. “No chance of that! Now we’re a big deal, now we run things all over the world, now we say what goes!”

  “Like it’s our fault how we are or somethin’? We’re how the world made us. How the smoke made us. It made us choose. So we chose!”

  J
ust a flash of bitterness there, but too quickly swallowed up by the wider consensus — the voices of cells who could no longer remember a way of life or an inner metabolism that hadn’t once involved a carcinogen and the irresistible commands it sent. There’s not enough for me to work with there, Rhiow thought, distressed. Better change tack —

  “I’m not saying that you personally are at fault for the way things have come to be,” Rhiow said, choosing the words carefully. “And of course anybody can see that you own this place.” That being the problem. Even if a whole team of wizards came in here to try to clean the Silent Man out, all this cancer would need to come back would be one missed cell, and enough time… For she could smell the presence and essential invasiveness of the cancer in the same way that some houiff were able to smell it. This was not the kind of malignancy you could easily talk out of doing what it did, if ever.

  “So what’s this stuff about forbearance? You mean we should, like, go away?” More nasty laughter.

  “There wouldn’t be much point in me asking that,” Rhiow said, glancing down for a moment to keep her audience from seeing the anger she feared was beginning to show in her eyes. “But for your host’s sake – to lengthen the life of your world, which would surely be a good thing for you – if you could be a little less invasive as regards the nerves – ”

  An indignant rustle went through the tumor clumps and cells surrounding her. “Whatchoo talkin’ about?” their voice said, and for just that moment Rhiow had to keep her head down as a spasm of annoyed amusement sparked through her, a memory of Urruah imitating a bad New York gangster-accent he’d picked up from one of his ffihlms. “You’re talkin’ about our communications system, here! You start messing with that, we don’t know where we are any more! If we don’t know where we’ve been, we don’t know where we should be going! Bad enough the world slows down that way over and over, you want to make it worse? Forget about it!”

  They don’t like the painkillers, Rhiow thought. Interesting. Is it possible that some ehhif cancers use not just the blood and the lymphatic system for signaling, but the nervous system too? Maybe by some change in the proteins — ? It wouldn’t have surprised her. But there was little time to confer with the Whisperer on the subject at the moment, especially as the crowd around her rustled again, and this time the rustle came with a slight motion toward her.

  “We’ve got our own way of doing things here,” said the buzzing voice, more loudly, more angrily. “It’s worked for a long long time. It’s gonna keep working.”

  “Of course it will,” Rhiow said. “But it could work even better if you’d consider giving this approach a try.” She glanced around her at the tumor-shapes, putting everything she could into the appeal, even though the appeal was directed at something that wanted nothing more than to reproduce explosively at the cost of the very lifeform that made the explosion possible.

  “Don’t need to try anything new,” said one voice. “We’re doin’ what we were built to do.”

  “Buzz off, lady,” said a third. “We need those nerves. We’ve got a lot of growing to do here. We need every scrap of this space, everything here.”

  “Gotta own it all.”

  “You want some turf? Go somewhere else, mess around with somebody else’s. You can’t have ours.”

  Rhiow was finding it a lot harder than she’d expected to respond rationally to the tumors and the malignant cells, to do a wizard’s job and retain her equanimity. But that was just the problem here. In this idiom, they were not just clinically malignant, but personally so. They had no intention of listening to her. Though they were Life, to which her final allegiance was sworn, their twisted kind of Life had had all the light sucked out of it. The “bad neighborhood” was intent on swallowing the whole city: it was the final expression of a body angry with the soul that lived in it for a long life of abuse, and now taking its revenge. Yet she had to try. “One last chance,” Rhiow said. “There is always one last chance to make a new choice, to turn away from the old path and make a new one. Remission — ”

  The tumor-ehhif and their rat-pets growled, all as one, and shuffled in closer around her. Not good, Rhiow thought, not good at all. Time to go…

  Lost, said that fat red moon hanging down over the end of Thirty-Third where it ran into a river of blood. The moon, all blotched with sa’Raahh’s footprints, had swollen to five or six times its normal size; and it was in the Shadowed One’s voice that it spoke now. You’ve lost another one, and through you, so has She. I wonder why you even bother trying any more.

  Rhiow refused to listen to that dark Whispering. In the back of her mind was a spell that she’d left ready, a focused jolt of bioelectricity that would recharge quickly from the Silent Man’s own resources. But is it going to be strong enough to handle these things? Rhiow wondered now, for she truly hadn’t thought the cancer would be so aggressive. I might be able to pull more power out of him and into the spell, but can I do it without hurting him?

  “Be warned by me,” Rhiow said. “Though your path is ill-chosen, you are yet in some manner my cousins and I must give you fair warning. I will defend –”

  They rushed her. Rhiow started to back out but found nowhere to back to: they were behind her, blocking her way out, and the ones coming at her from front and sides reached out to hold her. Well enough, she thought, Rhiow closed her eyes, felt in her mind for the spell, and shouted its last word in the Speech –

  In this dimness, it was just as well her eyes were closed, for the flash would have blinded her. Rhiow felt the pressure of the clinging tumor-things fall away. Opening her eyes, she saw that the space around her had opened out a little, and the tumor clusters and mobile cells were shivering and flickering with crackles of afterlight from the discharge. She could feel the spell charging up again in the back of her mind, but Rhiow wasn’t going to wait. She crouched and leaped over the heads of the nearest malignancies –

  Something out of the crowd, an oozing loop of tissue, shot up, wrapped around her and yanked her down. A second later Rhiow was down on the ground, half blinded in the sooty fog rising up again from street level. She was quickly weighed down, more and more heavily, as the tumors piled up on top of her. Rhiow struggled, feeling them pushing blobs of tissue at her, probing, poking. The poking got sharper.

  Rhiow’s mind flared up in terror, for if she was physically present enough in this scenario to affect these things, they could affect her in turn – and they were looking for a way to implant something of themselves in her –

  Not today you don’t!! Instead of resisting the weight of them, she gave in to it – then, in the moment of surprise that followed, Rhiow rolled and lashed out with her claws, slicing, kicking. A high thin shrieking came from somewhere in the pile of wet slobbery tissue that lay atop her: the tumor-creatures closest tried to ooze away. As the pressure lessened, Rhiow managed to roll again, got her feet under her. The spell was ready, recharged. She cried its last word again –

  More shrieking as she struggled to her feet and looked for clear space to jump into: but there was none except right around her, and even that space wasn’t as big as it had been before. Either they’ve gotten used to it, or it’s just not strong enough. Rhiow’s whole pelt was shivering with revulsion at the touch of the tumor-things as they came at her again. If I jump another time, the same thing’s going to happen, Rhiow thought as she crouched. No other way out of this. I’ve got to turn up the juice in this spell. I’ll try not to harm him, but —

  A sudden new burst of shrieking came from the far edge of the crowd that was around her. The attention of the tumor-creatures turned that way. Rhiow reared up on her hind legs and began slashing at them again, batting at them as if they were unusually large rats, but also peering desperately past them to see what was happening.

  Off at the edge of the ugly crowd, she caught side of a shadow, a Person, fighting toward her, small malignancies and large crowding away as it came. For a moment Rhiow thought she was looking at someone’s r
estatement of legend, for where the Person’s claws should have been there were ferocious cracklings of light like the aftereffect of her own spell. Urrau Lighning-claw?! Rhiow thought, confused by the apparition, yet entirely welcome to have a demigod mix in. But the lightning was understated, as if whoever was coming had understood that any wizardry used had to be carefully tempered in this scenario. Whoever was coming was doing most of the work with his paws, and plainly had a gift for it. The tumor-things were flying from his blows, and though they tried to rush and smother him down as they had Rhiow, they weren’t getting close enough to get a chance.

  Rhiow started fighting her way toward the newcomer, and though she might not have been physically as strong as the other, her attackers’ attention was divided now. Shortly there were only three or four layers of the ehhif-like tumor creatures between the two of them, and then just two. Rhiow bashed in the heads of the remaining few that were right before her, and could now see the other Person’s face. Two eyes, not one, she thought a little irrationally. Not Urrua, then. And not Urruah either, for this Person was slenderer, and nearly as black as she was.

  Hwaith?!

  In the unnatural light he was somehow burning dark, and every claw was out, all glinting far brighter than they should in that ugly red light. He spun where he stood, and all the malignancies around them backed away a little as he slashed at them. Time to go, wouldn’t you say? Hwaith said.

  Rhiow glanced around at the crowd pressing in and couldn’t see any other course of action that made sense. Both of us or nothing, she said, making one small vital change to the spell lying in the back of her head.