Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

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 slid 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…

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.