The Big Meow

by Diane Duane

  Urruah laughed at that. “We’ll take care of it.”

  So what happened?

  “That’s going to take a night’s worth of telling,” Rhiow said. “We didn’t exactly get out without a scratch… but our problems are small compared to what we stopped from happening.” She flopped down on the floor, glad to take the weight off her hind legs: they were still bothering her. “And we’ve brought you another house guest, though only temporarily. After her injury has a little time to stabilize, we’ll need to install some false memories in her to match what the authorities will find once they start cleaning up the site at Dagenham’s.”

  “It’ll make sensational reading,” Urruah said, “we can tell you that much. The scandal rags will have a field day with it… at least, the parts they can figure out…”

  A sudden chorus of shocked yowling went up from outside, from some guest-People who were visiting the buffet. The Silent Man rolled his eyes. They’ve been doing that ever since the excitement started, he said. Everybody’s nerves are on edge. I’ll go see what the problem is now…

  He went out the French doors. Rhiow, now that she had a moment to do so, gave Helen an amused look. “You might have mentioned that Helen Walks Softly wasn’t just a tribal name…!”

  Helen smiled. “No name without a reason…”

  “But this is why mass isn’t an issue for you,” Urruah said, “at least not in the wizardly sense. You’re a shapewalker; it’s a whole different level of matter management, and it comes to you naturally…”

  Helen nodded. “There’s a question among the elders in my band,” she said. “Am I a were-puma, or a puma-woman?” She shrugged. “I’ll take it up with the Powers some day. Right now there’s too much going on…”

  The Silent Man came back inside and stood by his desk for a moment, looking rattled: the first time Rhiow could remember seeing him wearing such an expression. I’m sorry, he said, rubbing his face. But there appears to be a dinosaur in the back yard. I assume he’s something to do with you?

  Urruah and Hwaith and Aufwi and Helen and Rhiow all looked at each other. A moment later, a huge saurian face was looking in one of the French doors, and Arhu jumped down off his head and slipped inside, shouldering the door open so that Ith could get at least his head in.

  “I found him on Hollywood Boulevard, asking directions,” Arhu said, “and got him out of there before too much damage was done.” He shrugged his tail. “He was right over by the Chinese. They’ll probably think he was some kind of promotion.”

  Rhiow got up again and went over to the door, gazing up at Ith. “What on Earth brought you all the way back here?” she said.

  “It was the tablets,” Ith said, sounding very somber.

  “What about them? You could just have mind-spoken me, Ith, told me what you’ve found, you didn’t have to come all the way back here – “

  “I did,” he said. “I did not dare even whisper what I’ve found: I didn’t dare take the chance that a word or two might leak out into the space between times and worlds. But whatever has been done tonight, Rhiow, it has not been enough. You are not finished. There is one thing yet to be done.”

  “What??”

  He pushed his head in the door and put it right down by Rhiow’s.

  “Join forces with the Lone Power,” he whispered. “And end the world.”

  The Big Meow: Chapter Twelve

  Everyone looked at Ith in profound concern, not least the Silent Man.

  You’re going to have to forgive me, he said, glancing over at Rhiow, but I thought things were pretty much handled.

  “Well,” Rhiow said, unnerved. “We were about to start dealing with that issue. What we saw tonight suggests that there’s still considerable unfinished business. We stopped the initial incursion… or rather, it was stopped.” She looked over at Ith. “I think you may have had more to do with that than any of us expected. But the timings laid out in the tablets we saw suggested that the worst is yet to come. And what happened tonight – “

  “Wasn’t quite bad enough?” Arhu said as he clambered up onto Ith’s back and walked up to sit on top of his head.

  The Silent Man watched this performance with a slightly cockeyed look. You’ve got to forgive me, but I had the idea that cats and lizards didn’t usually like each other much.

  “They’re twins,” Urruah said. “Separated at birth.”

  The Silent Man blinked.

  “He means that mostly in the spiritual sense,” Rhiow said. “Someone will explain it to you eventually, as far as we understand it, anyway. But what Arhu’s saying is that, despite everything we went through, we got off rather easily… which confirms that the worst is still to be dealt with. Ith, I take it after Aufwi told us where to look, you did find the remaining tablets – “

  “I did,” Ith said. He had hunkered down, now, with his head and just the tops of his shoulders pushed into the room through the open French doors, and was more or less wearing the sprawled-out Arhu like a hat. “Some of them were in very bad state and had to be reconstructed, but they were willing enough to be reminded of what they had been once. Indeed, they were eager to become what they had been, even if only temporarily. They were full of urgency to be read. But when I read them…” He trailed off. “I did not know what to make of what I was seeing.” Even as Ith leaned on his elbows, those long slender claws of his were scissoring together, clenching, flexing, clenching again in great nervousness.

  “Elder brother,” Rhiow said, “what is it? What did you find?”

  Ith’s voice dropped again to a whisper, and despite the awful tension of the moment, Rhiow couldn’t help but be tempted toward laughter by a whisper that nonetheless filled the whole room. “The tablets said that darkness must fight darkness, that only the dark can save us: that wizards must turn to their oldest enemy, and only so will the worlds be saved…”

  Rhiow’s tail lashed. “Turn to her how?” she said, horrified. It was completely counterintuitive, utterly impossible, almost certainly a lie. At least that’s the conclusion that reasonable thought would lead you to… “It’s some trap,” she said to the others, unable to believe anything else. “Some stratagem of Hers, to get us to fall in with Her plans and do exactly the opposite of whatever will stop Her.”

  Urruah was sitting with eyes slitted, very still. “It’s always been a favorite tactic of the Lone One,” he said, “to get wizards to do Her dirty work for Her.”

  “But She knows we’d know that,” Arhu said. “She might think we’re annoying, but when has She ever thought we were stupid?”

  “You’re sure about the translation?” Siffha’h said, looking at Ith a little suspiciously.

  “There was no mistaking it. Look for yourself.”

  A moment later, replicas of the uptime tablets and annotations of their carvings had appeared in the middle of the living room floor. Everyone gathered around to study them. But Ith was right about the words, insofar as the Speech sufficed to read them, and right about the absolute flatness of the language in the inscriptions, and the inability to construe it in any other way. The carvings that ornamented the texts even looked a little hasty, as if the ancient artisan was unnerved by what he or she had been carving. With reason… Rhiow thought. If the artist was a wizard, this message can’t have made any more sense to him or her than to us…

  Helen Walks Softly was sitting on the floor in jeans and an LAPD sweatshirt with her legs curled under her, and now she leaned over the glowing simulacra of the carvings on the tablets, gazing at them thoughtfully. “Isn’t this interesting,” she said, and tapped a finger on one of the reconstructed tablets. “See this?”

  Rhiow paced over to look at the carven character Helen was indicating. There seemed to be two heads embedded in it, one a cat’s and one a serpent’s, each with some ornamental scrollwork surrounding it. But then she looked more closely, and saw that the Feathered Serpent was wearing a collar adorned with cat’s heads, and the Great Cat had a collar that looked like
a snake…

  “An ocelocoatl,” Helen said, “and a Chan-Bahlum. When they turn up at all, theyturn uptogether a lot.”

  Rhiow glanced at Arhu and Ith. “Maybe now we know why,” Rhiow said. “It’s been becoming plain that the two of them go a long way back. Or about six months, depending on how you look at it…”

  “But that’s not the whole point, Rhiow. Look at the two of them. They’re right next to this – “

  Rhiow peered at the carved character Helen was indicating. At first glance it looked like the the Black Leopard’s head, with a constellation of little leopard heads around it. “Now what?” Rhiow muttered. “Is that the Devourer in the Darkness having kittens or something? Isn’t He a tom?”

  “Look closer, Rhi. It’s not Tepeyollotl: He’s on the far side of this carving. This is sa’Rraah, with her little friends all around her – right next to the Ocelocoatl, our feline-saurian fusion. And they’re looking at Tepeyollotl together.”

  “Not with the friendliest expressions I’ve ever seen, either,” Urruah said.

  “Not arguing that point,” Rhiow said, “I still don’t know if I’m going to trust the fate of all known universes to some artist who was practicing carving snarls…”

  Siffha’h now came over to look at the carving, especially the part that Helen had identified as sa’Rraah and the shadow-imps. “You know,” Siffha’h said, “Herself’s little jackals were sure down there in strength in that cavern.”

  “True,” Rhiow said, bristling. “Something I was trying to avoid thinking about at the time.”

  “But that’s the problem, Rhi. Why weren’t they doing anything?”

  That gave Rhiow pause. In the cavern, Rhiow had dismissed it the shadow-imps’ nonintervention as a momentary condition, something to be grateful for as long as it lasted: and then everything had gone crazy and she hadn’t had time to spare them further consideration. But now she thought, They should’ve been attacking us. What was holding them back?

  “I don’t have any answer for you on that count,” Rhiow said. “But after reviewing what happened, I don’t see that we have any cause to relax at the moment.” She licked her nose. “That wizardry, black as it was, executed before poor Laurel managed to remake her Oath and withdraw enacture from it. The calcified heart that Dagenham threw into it was the product of the last ceremonial murder they needed – the one that would enable the entry of Tepeyollotl into our spaces. That kicked the spell into execution, though we were able to disrupt its running somewhat, and the weaving of the incursion worldgate.” She looked over at Hwaith and Aufwi. “You two were instrumental in that. And then Ith arrived –“

  “Though not where intended,” Ith said, regretful. “When I had the data I needed, I was trying to transit directly to your location. But the executing spell was spitting out so much energy that no transit could have arrived here without being deranged. And along with the warping of local hyperstring structure by the gate that was attempting to form – and then being shredded –“ He scraped for a moment at a smear of tar on one long wrist that he and Arhu hadn’t managed to spell off on the way back. “My transit was knocked a hundred yards or so off target. Fortunately the built-in offset function cut in so that I did not materialize inside a crowd of upset humans…”

  “I was half hoping that the sudden physical presence here of a being so senior in the middle of that spell, even at a distance, could have so completely changed the local running conditions that the spell would exhaust all the energy pumped into it by the serial murders,” Rhiow said. “But the Whisperer tells me that the disruption just wasn’t sufficient. Unfortunately, my cousins, a spell always works, and this one intends to do just that. It’ll try to complete before the end of the date cycle it was tuned to – the dates that we found in the first tablets.”

  “Meaning tonight,” Helen said.

  “Late tonight, yes. It can’t do it exactly where the spell was started: the local space has been too deranged by the destruction of the cavern. What we have to do now is plot out all the places nearby where the locus seems likely to reroot, stake them out with spell-sensors, and be ready to move when the spell tries to finish executing.”

  “Probably the place where a gate has rooted most strongly in recent times,” Siffha’h said.

  Rhiow sighed. “Working that out is going to take yet more time away from what we really need to be doing. Which is trying to figure out some way to keep this world and all its surrounding space from being torn apart when the spell finishes running…”

  She fell silent for a moment, for the problem was truly rather bigger than that. Everything we had wasn’t enough just now, Rhiow thought. We assumed we were going to be able to stop the spell completely and prevent the Outside’s incursion that way… and failed. So what will we have tonight that we didn’t have a few hours ago? And when is one of these guys going to call me on this? Because I can’t be the only one that this problem has occurred to, and I don’t see how what Ith has brought us is going to make any difference…

  “Rhi,” Hwaith said, “why not be a little more proactive? Why let Tepeyollotl and the Lone One pick the ground that suits them? Force the issue.”

  She looked over at him, bemused. “How, exactly?”

  He was looking at Auwfi with his whiskers forward. “Take advantage of local circumstances. Get our local long-term, allegedly fixed gate to do what it always wants to do anyway.”

  Aufwi’s eyes opened, and he dropped his jaw in a big grin, and he and Hwaith said in unison, “Get uprooted and move around…”

  “We’ll pull up the fixed gate and put it someplace where the ground suits us,” Hwaith said, “and then pump it so full of energy that the spell won’t have any choice but to execute there.”

  “Ideally,” Arhu said, “somewhere mostly away from ehhif, so that we don’t have to worry about a lot of collateral damage.”

  “Plenty of empty hillsides around here…” Hwaith said.

  Rhiow put her rightside whiskers forward in ironic amusement at the sound of toms contemplating doing what they secretly loved best: destroying things with impunity. But truly it’s not a bad idea… “The concept has merit,” she said.

  “Great. And then what?” Siffha’h said, and yawned.

  Rhiow knew what, or rather knew what she didn’t know, and was about to speak up at last because she had no other option. But then she became aware of Urruah sitting like a statue at the edge of the reconstruction of the uptime tablets — his tail curled around his toes, his head bent down, and staying so still that Rhiow was wondering whether he had dozed off. But after a moment he spoke. “Ith,” he said. “Hheh’len. What do you make of that?”

  They both looked at the spot he had been gazing, a place at the edge of the last clay-tablet fragment in one row. There was another serpent figure there, the front part of it twisted around in several tightly-coiled S shapes, and underneath it a peculiar funnel-shaped figure, with a coiled and back-flexed end. “What does that say?” Urruah said, leaning down further and staring at the characters next to the funnel shape.

  Helen leaned over and studied the characters. “It’s something about how the Nine-Wind God comes to the place of the serpent rope – “

  “But look at the picture,” Urruah said. “Everybody, Rhi, look at it. If you didn’t know what you were drawing – or trying to make a picture of it just from somebody’s description, maybe not a terribly good description either – doesn’t that look like a rough schematic of the throat of a worldgate? Look how it bends back there – that’s almost the Klein-bottle rationalization that we use to represent the schematic in 2D – “

  “And look what’s inside the funnel,” Helen said. “Another one. A little tiny one…”

  Very slowly Urruah lifted his head and looked at Rhiow.

  Her eyes started to widen. And I thought I was seeing typical tommish let’s-destroy-stuff business going on before! “Oh, no,” Rhiow said. “No, Urruah. No chance! If you think that just because of
a little thing like the world possibly ending — ”

  “It doesn’t have to end, Rhi!” Urruah said. “Look at it! A little open-throated claudication stuck into a gate’s patency locus. We know perfectly well from wizardly theory what will happen when we do this — ”

  “We think we do,” Rhiow shouted at him, “because gate theory also tells us perfectly clearly why that this is something we should never ever do! If you put a working claudication through an active worldgate, the eversion reaction will rip spacetime apart on a massive scale –“

  “Or when in the vicinity of an equivalent rip of roughly equal proportions, with careful management,” Urruah said, “mesh with and evert the corresponding eversion so that the two cancel each other out.”

  He was looking over at Hwaith and Aufwi now. Both of them were acquiring the same look of rapidly growing and truly terrifying interest, made far worse because each of them was contemplating how wonderful it would be to have a good reason to do something that was normally a gate technician’s worst nightmare. “Urruah, you are out of your vhai’d mind!” Rhiow said. “’With careful management?’ You’re contemplating constructing a gate adjustment of this complexity and magnitude on the fly? Because there’s no way to judge the actual forces or qualities of the incursion until it happens – “

  “Of course there’s a way. We already have some indicators,” Urruah said. “From the earlier gating that failed! Sure, this time the scalars will be bigger, because Ith won’t be falling into the middle of everything without warning. But we know roughly how the incursion gate will build itself.”

  “So we root the pumped-up LA gate where we want it – “ Aufwi said.

  Hwaith’s tail was lashing. “And we build a pocket claudication with a lot of power wound up inside it, tailored so that when it’s pushed through the LA gate, the eversion is on a close order of force to the incursion event – “

  “And then when the incursion starts right in front of us, which it’ll have no choice to do, we feed the claudication into the live gate, and when the eversion starts, we push it into the incursion locus, and… blooey!”