Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

“You caught that scent too,” Hwaith said, “did you?”

Urruah’s nose wrinkled. “Something rank,” he said. “Yes. Never got that from a gate before, no matter how badly it was malfunctioning. You notice it, Rhi?”

“I did,” she said. “And it seems to me that it had something to do with what I felt while we were in transit, in the timeslide. That cold feeling…”

“And different from the Lone Power,” Hwaith said, sounding almost upset by this. “You know how it is – how you can almost always hear her laughing, that angry, nasty edge – “

Rhiow had to agree with him. She’d sensed that before, too, and it had been completely missing in whatever had been lurking just beyond the walls of the timespace corridor through which they’d been traveling. As they came to a spot further down the hill where their path met a broader one, graveled, and coming from the right, Rhiow looked over her shoulder and said, “Helen, did you – “

Then her eyes went wide. Helen was not there.

Urruah and Hwaith looked behind them, too, and were surprised. “Where’d she go?” Urruah said. “Did she sidle?”

“We’d have felt it,” Hwaith said. He was right: you usually could feel someone else sidling in the immediate vicinity. But none of them had felt anything – nor, as they looked around, did it seem that she’d used any of the other methods for invisibility available to wizards.

“Boy,” Urruah said, “she really does walk softly. One of those tribal talents, I guess.”

“Well, she knows where to meet us,” Rhiow said. “Come on, let’s get where we’re going…”

The track below them abruptly ceased to be gravel and pine needles and bark chippings, and turned into the place where, on both sides of the sudden, capped-off road, the sidewalk began. To a city Person, this was a strange contrast, eloquent of the difference between city and country. But overhead the live oaks and the peppertrees leaned in over the path, along with the occasional ragged escapee palm up the hillside; and from their quiet predawn murmurings, Rhiow could tell that the road that started where the sidewalk did meant nothing in particular to them. As far as the trees were concerned, these were the hills eternal, as they had been since the Ice retreated, and a little concrete more or less on the ground hardly mattered at all. The Ice had broken it before, and would again: and afterwards, in the fullness of time, the Trees would still be there.

Once the road began, no wider than a Manhattan side street, the houses started too. They were relatively small at first, widely separated bungalows and two-storey houses mostly done in white stucco and tiled roofs. Some of their gardens looked a little ragged, overgrown with wiry-looking ground cover, pachysandra and pinched-looking ice plant. Here and there the ground under the hundred-foot royal palms was untidy with spiky, frayed heaps of their long shed olive-green frond; and scattered palm-fruits, like fat fluorescent-orange marbles, lay squashed on the sidewalks and in the road. Rhiow paused by one palm tree, sniffing. “Rats?” she said. “Up in the trees?”

“Palm rats.” Hwaith cocked an eye up toward the crown of one of the king palms. From up there Rhiow could hear a strange scratchy noise, like her ehhif’s old mechanical alarm clock trying to ring when it wasn’t properly wound up.

“Any sport in those?” Urruah said.

“When they come down, sure,” Hwaith said. “Unless you feel like going up after them. They have a little bit of an advantage up there…”

“But if you skywalked…”

“Yeah, but is that sport?”

Rhiow smiled to herself as they headed further down the canyon, and the sidewalk became wider and cleaner, and the houses bigger, and the driveways broader. It was as if the further down you got from the clear air and the hills’ height, the more important it became to let other ehhif know how important you were – mostly by the size of what you “owned”. This was a behavior Rhiow knew all too well from Manhattan – knowing also how the Earth itself laughed at the concept of ownership, as hilarious to the semi-sentience indwelling in the ancient bedrock as the idea of ehhif selling each other virtual artifacts and “unreal estate” in computer games. In New York, anyway, the Earth had not for many centuries done what it might so easily do – just shrug, and then bear the brief glass-splinter itch as things fell down and smashed. Here, though, that’s just what it’s been doing. And indeed she could see, as they walked downhill through wisps of morning mist, the occasional upthrust slabs in the sidewalk and cracks in the stucco and plaster of the houses they passed: the shed tiles that no one had noticed or picked up, the slow rilling trickle from someone’s ultramodern lawn-watering system where a pipe had cracked, and the trickling leak was spinning palm pollen and pine needles down into the gutter. Worse could happen. Worse will happen. Iau, Whisperer, be with us, let us know what we need to know to keep it from happening: in the here and now, and our now and then…

They turned a switchback curve in the road. “What in the Tom’s Name,” Urruah shouted as they came around and saw a huge mist-glamoured vehicle crouching by the curb outside one oversized bungalow, “is that what I think it is? It’s a Hhhu’ssenherh!”

He ran off across the street toward one of the big heavy vehicles, walking around it and staring up at it in a good imitation of awe. “Is this one of your passions too?” Rhiow said to Hwaith.

They both stopped dead as Arhu galloped unheeding past them down the middle of the road at top speed, shortly followed by Siff’hah, who was fluffed up from nose to tail and cursing her brother loudly. “Uh, not particularly,” Hwaith said, after the ruckus had gone by and vanished around the downhill curve. “I guess it’s one of those situations where you don’t really notice something until the tourists come through.” He put his whiskers forward.

“I’ve only seen these in ffhilms,” Urruah said, turning around to spray one of the vehicle’s snow-white tires with great care. “Isn’t it fabulous?”

Rhiow flirted her tail. “If you say so. ‘Ruah, you’re not by any chance doing something that would annoy the ehhif who owns it, are you?”

“Oh, not so anyone would care…” He waltzed back over to Rhiow and Hwaith. “It’ll wash off in the next rain…”

“Hah,” Hwaith said, amused, as he led them on down the hill. “You really are a New Yorker. ‘The next rain’ won’t be until October.”

They ambled further on down the road, and Rhiow noted as they went that the houses seemed to be getting much bigger, the front yards most seriously wider and deeper and more manicured, if occasionally a bit brown; and some of the houses even had two of the big autos in front of them. “You must have good police here,” Rhiow said, glancing into one driveway at the two massive cars there. “You’d think just anybody could steal them, or key them, out here…”

“Steal them?” Hwaith said, sounding shocked. “They wouldn’t get far. The police here are pretty good, for ehhif. And I don’t think there are as many cars now as you folks have uptime…”

Rhiow cocked an ear: the Whisperer slipped a number into it. She blinked. “Three million?” she said. “In the whole state?”

“You’ll believe they’re all right here in the Basin, under your nose,” Hwaith said, sounding rueful, “the first time the inversion layer gets bad.”

“Leaded gas…” Urruah said, waving his tail, looking back at the big cars as they headed on downhill.

Hwaith looked at him with big bronzy eyes, their polite expression nonetheless managing to suggest that Urruah was one whisker short of a full set. “What else would there be?”

“Wait a while,” Urruah said. “Believe me, it gets better. And you just wait till the sushi bars open.”

“What’s sushi?”

Urruah took a deep breath, then let it go as they all paused in the middle of the street where it was crossed by another. The four-way STOP sign might as well have been in the middle of the Mojave for all the traffic there was at this hour of the morning. “Let it be,” Rhiow said. “Hwaith, Herself is very quiet. Have you noticed that?”

“Unusually so,” Hwaith said. “I hate it when She waits for us to tell Her what to do.”

“You and me both, littermate,” Rhiow said.

They wandered across the intersection, and Rhiow caught a sidewise glance from Urruah as he headed across the road to sniff at the base of a peppertree. ‘Littermate?’

She gave Urruah his look back with a dead rat on top. Goodness me, ‘Ruah, do I detect a note of jealousy?

Of what? Of him? Urruah busied himself spraying the bottom of the royal palm at the corner with an expression of utter abstraction. He’s too skinny for you, Rhi. Plus, you met him, what? Two hours ago?

Fifty years ago, some ways, Rhiow said, angling gently rightward: away down the road, she could see another of those huge blunt round cars coming up the road. He’s a nice young wizard who can use some emotional support, the way things are going around here. Got a problem with that, Dumpster boy? Go pee on another tree.

Urruah gave her an amused look as she and Hwaith stepped up onto the curb. He trotted away from them, across yet another perfectly coiffed emerald-and-jade-striped lawn, to examine a big scraggly bush with bright red flowers that looked like bottlebrushes. Urruah stared up into the tree as they walked past the large pink-stuccoed house it leaned on. “You People have really large bees here!” he said.

“Uh…it’s a hummingbird,” Hwaith said softly, but not in time for Urruah to get out of the way of the furious little bundle of scarlet feathers that came diving at him from higher up in the bottlebrush tree, making a sound like an infuriated cellphone stuck in texting mode.

Urruah went galloping off in a gray-tabby streak into the next yard downhill: the hummingbird, a subdued blood-ruby glint in the early light, went after him at humm factor five, closing fast. Urruah dove head-first into a bed of ivy and vanished.

Rhiow had to stand still for a moment: it was bad for a team leader to be visibly incapacitated by laughter, at least for longer than a breath or three. “City guy,” Hwaith said under his breath. “We get them here. But there are cities, and there are cities.”

“I begin to get that sense,” Rhiow said. They walked another block or so downhill, the equivalent of a Manhattan long block – if the road wound rather more while it made its way down the hillside — while Urruah lost his pursuer, or talked it out of the pursuit, and emerged from a low flat bank of ornamental yew, looking ruffled but (to do him credit) amused.

“Didn’t look like it was much interested in the Formic Word,” Rhiow said, as Urruah joined them in sauntering down the middle of the street again. From behind them and off to the left, where there was more high ground, mist had begun rolling gently down the hillside. It started to slip across the road as they walked, so that shortly they and the big ehhif vehicles by the curbs were hock-or half-wheel-deep in it.

“No,” Urruah said. “My mistake. Can we bring about five million of those things home with us? Think what they’d do to the pigeons!”

Hwaith chuckled. “I wish,” he said. “Our pigeons don’t seem all that impressed. But if you think it’d make a difference…”

They headed downhill, and the yards around the increasingly magnificent houses started to resemble significant portions of Central Park. “It’s not like they use any of this space…” Urruah said.