The Big Meow

by Diane Duane

  “Are you sure you know the passwords by heart?” Rhiow said to Sif as she collapsed the claudication down to a glowing spheroid about the size of a pea and levitated it into an invisible otherspace pocket.

  Siffha’h rolled her eyes at Rhiow. “Yes, mother…”

  This reaction at least was normal. Rhiow went to watch Urruah gather up the master gating circle and collapse it in turn, vanishing it into the workspace in the back of his mind as he glanced out into the back yard, where Arhu and Ith were getting ready to transit. “The kits are taking all this pretty calmly,” she said in his ear.

  “Youth has its advantages,” Urruah said. “One of them being the belief that you can never die. Or the refusal to take the belief seriously.”

  Aufwi came up behind Urruah. “I have my copy of the circle,” he said.

  “Got mine too,” Hwaith said from the other side.

  “Everybody’s checked all their personal data in all the copies?” Urruah said. “Long-version names and terminology only? Good. Don’t want any handling routines failing to execute because someone’s using abbreviations – “

  “This is possibly a caution that we’ve heard before,” Aufwi said.

  “About a thousand times…” said Hwaith.

  “A thousand and one is good,” Urruah said. “Let’s shoot for a thousand and two.”

  From down the hallway that led to the bedrooms came Helen Walks Softly, and the Silent Man’s eyes opened wide. Instead of that beat-up LAPD sweatshirt or anything by Elie Saab, Helen was wearing a two-piece midcalf dress of beautifully tanned deerskin, the sleeveless top of which was embroidered with bead designs of whale and orca and salmon. The skirt was ornamented with geometric lightningbolt designs in white and brown shell, as were the deerskin boots below. Helen’s hair was tied back into a long, long ponytail, her cheeks were streaked with red and white clay, and her arms ringed in white clay paint bands; her milkweed-linen and flicker-feather headband had a fan of black condor feathers angling up from the back of it, and in one hand she carried a pair of condor-feather reed wands.

  The Silent Man looked her up and down and pursed his lips to whistle soundlessly. I didn’t know the end of the world was formal, he said. I’ll go get my tux.

  Helen smiled at him and waved the wands at him in amused blessing.

  Rhiow walked over to him and reared up to lean on his knee. “You’ve been very kind to us,” she said, “and so very flexible through all this….” She stopped then, for there was no point in saying much more. “Go well, cousin.”

  He put down a hand to scratch her behind the ears. If this is it, Blackie, he said, all I can say is, it’s a better end than I’d been anticipating. The last couple of days have been a hell of a ride… and I’d sooner go out knowing what I do, than not knowing at all.

  “If we’re lucky…” Arhu said, and then stopped.

  Don’t say it, Patches. Just come back, and we’ll laugh about it later. He looked around at the People and Helen. All of you.

  “From your mouth to the Spirit’s ear,” Helen said. “Rhiow?”

  She flirted her tail “yes”.

  They vanished as twilight fell.

  The spot that Hwaith had chosen for them was at the end of a long drive that came up the top of Mount Hollywood on the north side. In the middle of the drive stood a high white granite obelisk with a base like a seven-pointed star, in the angles of which stood statues of six ehhif astronomers. On a white pedestal just south of that, a bronze sundial with a steel-strip gnomon pointed at the North Star. At the other end of the drive, facing the mountain’s south slope and set in the middle of a broad green lawn, was the Observatory itself, with its great central dome all sheathed in rectangular greened-copper plates, and the two smaller ones each down at the end of the east-and west-oriented wings. It was a gracious and handsome space, and Rhiow looked around it and wished she’d had time to see it before the events that were about to unfold.

  All around them, the brightening lights of Los Angeles lapped upwards toward the surrounding ridges, fading out into the faint speckling of the sparsely built-up hillside streets and then into complete darkness, with here and there a dark spot lacking any lights at all – virgin slopes not yet seen as useful for anything but the occasional theater or golf course. In the fading light of evening, the view across the ridges and canyons toward Cahuenga Peak with the sunset behind it was particularly lovely. The white of the sign that said HOLLYWOODLAND was clearly visible, in this lighting, despite all the dust kicked up in the air by the previous evening’s quakes.

  Rhiow stood there for a while just looking at it, and watching the lights twinkle to life on the hillsides to westward. “Some days,” Hwaith said, “you can’t see that from here at all. A last glimpse…”

  “You were right about the view from here, anyway,” Rhiow said. Reluctantly she turned away from it, looked at Urruah. “By my preference, I’d set up the gate right here on this entry lawn. I take it we’re past closing time now – “

  “The last visitor-ehhif have just gone home. There are a few observatory staff, but Sif is going to make them feel like they want to leave. Maybe a little tremor to suggest there’s about to be an aftershock from last night.”

  Urruah was paying this discussion no mind. He was looking behind them at the noble domed building with its white Deco columns, and his expression was distressed. “This is all wrong,” he said, “it’s just not fair – “

  Rhiow looked at him in great bemusement. “What? What’s the matter?”

  “Do you know,” Urruah said, sounding unusually mournful, “how many times this building’s been destroyed in ffihlm?”

  “A lot,” Aufwi said.

  “Yes. Aliens and monsters and Iau knows what else… It never occurred to me that I might be involved in doing something similar!”

  “I know. Life,” Aufwi said, “it’s full of little surprises.”

  Toms! Rhiow thought in near-desperation. “Cousins…” she said.

  Urruah sighed. “The gate,” he said, and turned to get busy.

  From around the corner of the building came Ith, with Arhu still riding on his head. “Everything’s clear up here,” Arhu said.

  “Good,” Rhiow said. “’Ruah – “

  From where Urruah stood, the spell circle that would contain the rerooted LA worldgate was flooding outward across the observatory’s lawn and walks to its full size, several hundred feet wide. As it manifested, Siffhah went over to the empty space prepared for her – now nearly twenty feet wide – and spoke the brief sentences in the Speech that activated the small dome-shield that would keep her and the claudication safe from whatever energies might assault them until they were needed.

  Hwaith looked over at Aufwi. “Let’s go get the gate,” he said.

  The two of them vanished. Ith came stalking over to Rhiow, who had been joined by Helen, and the three of them spent a few moments looking out over the hills, and the many little sparkling lights that spoke of human habitation. “They are going to see some terrible things tonight,” Ith said. “And leaving the strictly physical destruction aside, considering the fragility of human minds in the face of multidimensional phenomena, many of them may die of what they see…”

  “I’ve done what I can about that,” Helen said. “I’ve spoken to my ikheya, and the powers of the Earth know what’s coming, especially after last night. The Elder Spirits of the Earth, the ikhareya, are awakening and putting forth their strength. A lot of people will feel the urge to go to bed early tonight. Many others who have to be awake will find their senses dulled and their interest in the sky or the hills minimal. It’s all that can be done for the people, at least before the fact. Afterwards, what we have to patch, we’ll patch. And as for the Earth itself… it’ll stay where it is the best it can: and we’ll help it.”

  A few moments later Hwaith and Aufwi returned, transiting directly into one of the non-active parts of the spell circle. Between them hung the nonpatent gate, just a tall,
narrow, shadowy veil of rippling force in this growing dusk.

  “Right there – “ Hwaith said, indicating a container-circle near the center of the diagram. The two of them busied themselves tethering the gate into the language-recepticle prepared for it. A few moments later the borders of the gate sprang out clear and sharp as Hwaith touched one of the activator strands in the spell-circle with one paw and brought it online.

  He stood studying its conformation for a few moments, watching the faint polychromatic light of a gate’s normal standby state run up and down the warp and weft of the hyperstrings woven into it. “Looks steady,” he said.

  Aufwi walked around the gate and looked it up and down. “Agreed. Let’s do it.” He stepped into the circle and touched another of the control lines.

  The gate blazed up bright as a spotlight, throwing long sharp shadows away from Rhiow and her team and from Ith and Helen. The interwoven hyperstrings of the gate’s pseudosurface throbbed with the power pouring through them, brighter with every passing second. It was an alarming sight. If any gate Rhiow was managing had started to behave this way, she would either have locked it to some location and activated it or would have taken it offline instantly, terrified that it would burn out while being held in the nonpatent state. But this one’s been reinforced against that, she thought. And even if it did burn out, we could build another. Assuming there’s a planet left to attach it to –

  Then something made Rhiow shiver. “Ith,” she said, looking over toward where Ith and Helen had been standing near the edge of the terrace, where the mountain slope dropped away southward. “Ready?”

  Helen was standing with the condor feather wands in each hand, looking south with a listening expression. As for Ith, without warning he was now about ten times his everyday size, a towering fanged apparition from which any sensible tyrannosaurus would have fled; and his stripes were burning paler, fading to match the hot underlying gold. It was one of the ways Ith appeared when roaming the plains of the Old Downside with the saurians he had redeemed and brought out of the darkness with him. But the other, more ancient form he wore at need, Rhiow suspected he was holding in abeyance. Trust him, he’ll know the moment —

  She turned her attention back to the gate. It kept throbbing brighter and brighter, and Rhiow looked over at the control characters written underneath the spot where it hovered in the spell-circle.

  “It’ll hold,” Aufwi said.

  Urruah was stalking around the inside of the circle, carefully stepping in the empty access and maintenance patches and keeping an eye on the gate’s power draw. “Yes it will,” he said, “but we’re going to need a new one when this is done…”

  “Which will be a good thing,” Hwaith said heading over to the management circle inside the diagram that held his own link to the power draw controls. “Especially considering how much trouble this thing’s been giving me lately. Wouldn’t you love the chance to do initial emplacement on a gate? And see the installation done right for a change?”

  “Please,” Urruah said, “don’t get me started. That one gate over at Penn, even at the best of times – “

  He started in on his favorite rant about the worst-built gate of the Penn complex, and Rhiow threw Hwaith a grateful glance as the gate throbbed brighter and brighter, coming up to the peak of its energy feed. ‘Ruah gets nervous in the runup to any intervention, she said silently. This is how he copes, but when things break loose –

  It’s how I cope too, Hwaith said silently. What do you think I’m doing now? But he’ll be fine, Rhi –

  This was almost certainly true, but it was somehow a great relief to have someone else saying it to her. Rhiow headed over to where Sif was babysitting the claudication package, which sat like a tiny fiery pearl in front of her at the center of the domed-in circle. “It’s stable?”

  “No problems so far,” Siffha’h said, not taking her eyes off it.

  Rhiow went on past her to the spot where Arhu was sitting by himself, eyes closed as if ignoring everything around him… but she knew nothing was further from the truth. “Arhu…?”

  He didn’t look up or around: he didn’t need to. “It’s coming,” he said very quietly. “Get ready.”

  Once more Rhiow turned her attention to the sky. No stars were showing, initially because of the dust still hanging in the air. But then it became plain that there were not going to be any stars tonight; and Rhiow started going cold from the inside out.

  The initial effect hardly looked apocalyptic enough, at first. It began getting dark. Well, it was doing that already, Rhiow thought. But the unnatural quality of the descending darkness, something relentless and strangely cruel, became plainer moment by moment as the gate came up to its maximum power output and held there. Outside the circle of the gate’s radiance, the ugly new nightfall seemed to be fading down not merely the light of the sky and the sunset, but the outlines and colors in things – not the way normal night did, but in a way that suggested that light and color and even solidity were being sucked out of everything. For the time being, the ferocious light of the gate resisted the sucking. But even its normally multicolored light was turning pale and unhealthy-looking, a livid sheen setting in.

  This is what we saw last night, Rhiow said. Here it comes –

  Not far from the obelisk halfway down the drive, something started to trouble the air – a curdling, a growing obscurity. Very faintly, a suggestion of a dingy weave could be seen forming in it, growing more solid, darkening. But as it darkened the weave grew somehow more distinct. Rhiow’s fur rose at the sight of it, as it began to shimmer around the edges with that same disturbing light that the gate in the cavern had radiated.

  Blacker and blacker it went, and all around the second gate things were quickly losing their color and their solidity. The white obelisk faded away like the Moon behind cloud as the outflowing gloom washed up against and around it, flowed past it. Rhiow watched with concern as that ink-in-water obscurity in the air deepened, advanced toward the boundaries of the spell containing the LA gate.

  “Rhi,” Urruah said. “Better get in here – “

  She licked her nose several times, very quickly. “No,” she said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “But Rhi – “

  She reached back into her mind to erect around her the small but robust personal shield that she’d constructed earlier with this situation in mind. “’Ruah, if I have to climb out of there to do something in company with our silent partner, the gate could be overwhelmed when you crack the shield to let me out. The gate’s both the bait and the trap, and the rat hasn’t stuck its nose in yet. So seal it up.”

  Inside the gating circle, Sif’s expression was unsurprised: she spared Rhiow only a glance and went back to concentrating on the tiny blazing claudication-pearl she was guarding. But Aufwi and Hwaith looked at Rhiow in alarm.

  Rhiow ignored them and looked over at Arhu, who was trying to climb up on top of Ith again. “Not this time,” she said, sorry to do so, but it was necessary. “He may have to go where you can’t, Arhu, and do what you can’t, and you don’t dare slow him down. Get in there with the others.”

  “Rhi – “

  There was no energy to waste arguing with him. She simply held his eyes. After a moment Arhu looked away and up at Ith, who reached him down a claw. “You must,” Ith said.

  Arhu cursed, then bumped his head hard against the claw and ran back to the spell-circle, leaping through the interface into one of the maintenance roundels. Urruah glanced back at Aufwi. The circle domed over with light, leaving Rhiow standing just outside.

  She turned away and licked her nose again. I really need to stop doing that, she thought, it’s going to get sore… And then Rhiow laughed out loud. Am I insane?? She sat down on the paved walkway and tried to calm herself down while she watched the dark gate finish forming and flare into a ragged patch of shadowy, eye-hurting fire.

  It could not be looked at for long – there was something increasingly of
fensive about that livid light — so Rhiow turned her attention to Ith and Helen. Ith was a fanged and taloned statue of burning gold, now, even taller than he had been before, and looking wesward to where the last embers of sunset were fading away to cinders. Helen stood still over by the edge of the terrace where the ground dropped away, watching the unnatural darkening of the night around them. Alone of all unprotected things around them, as the shadows in the air spread away from the new dark gate, Helen seemed not to be losing the dim warm color of her deerskin dress; the shell-designs on it glowed faintly, and her hair was a dark river down her back, a far more wholesome darkness than what was gathering ever more intensely around the black gate.

  Rhiow glanced back at it through air gone murky with shadows, and saw that it was elongating upward. No, she thought then. It’s being pulled up. Things were about to start happening, she was sure of it. Keep them congruent… Rhiow said silently to Urruah. Don’t let that one drag yours up with it and get out of control.

  No fear of that, Arhu said. I’m borrowing some rooting from him. His eyes went to Ith’s ever more brightly-glowing form. We’re not going anywhere.

  The dark gate rose, and the shadows in the air flowed down from it as Rhiow had seen thick mist come flowing down the hillslope behind the Silent Man’s house in the morning. Away from the ground, it started shedding its spreading gloom more quickly, more thickly. Soon the white obelisk was completely gone and the Observatory was reduced to a hard-to-see ghost through the dimness, visible only because of Ith’s fierce glow against its north-facing walls. He was watching the gate rise high over the terrace, his claws knitting together as always: but there was something far more studied about that movement now, and Rhiow thought she could see the glow of manipulated hyperstrings between the claws, wound down small and tight… for the moment.