Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

Rhiow came to the corner of Third Avenue and 69th and tucked herself as flat as she could against the corner wall of the apartment building there. Ehhif walked to and fro before her while she sat there waiting for the light to change, and wondering what in the world could be wrong with the L.A. gate. It wasn’t a heavily used portal; no interplanetary traffic went through there at all, and mostly short jump traffic off the North American continent toward Asia. As the light changed, she wondered once again why the L.A. gate had never budded off any associated microgates in response to the city’s population’s growth over the last century. Normally, worldgates were a direct response of the fabric of local space time to the fraying pressure of millions of sentient minds concentrated into a small space. Rather than rip right open under the desires of all the beings living crammed together there, spacetime usually tried to conserve itself by producing a sort of semipermeable membrane through which beings who knew the portal’s location could pass. And normally, Rhiow thought as the light changed and she got up and trotted across Third Avenue in company with all of the other pedestrians, but well to one side, a given gate complex isn’t shy about budding if the local population’s large enough. Look at Tokyo: how many gates are there in that complex now? Fourteen? Fifteen? I lose track; this last decade, it’s like the thing’s in heat all the time. It no sooner has one gate that it hauls off and has another…

Rhiow patted the problem around with the paw of the mind for a while as she made her way down 69th toward Park Avenue. But the air was too soft and pleasant, and for once, nice-smelling, for her to find it easy to concentrate. Rhiow crossed Park Avenue, pausing once another crowd of ehhif had gone by to take a moment to smell the flowers there, yellow delphiniums and yellow and purple pansies. The lights went red and green together, and Rhiow scampered across again, heading for Lexington Avenue.

She had a standard covert entrance to the Grand Central complex down at 50th and Lex, but there was no particular need to go straight underground and quickly blot out the scent of that summer air. For a change, Rhiow simply trotted down the west side of Lexington Avenue like any other sightseer or Sunday shopper, until she came to the brass-and-glass doors of Grand Central Market. Urruah’s beginning to contaminate me too, Rhiow thought, amused, as she walked invisibly down between the stalls of beautiful meat and hot breads and shining fruit, sniffing appreciatively, and then out into the food hall full of coffee smells and frying smells. On the far side of the food hall, she paused long enough to gaze over toward the glass-paned arch of the Oyster Bar restaurants, closed this early on a Sunday. But to a cat’s nose, such closure was a relative thing. Behind those doors, Rhiow could smell oysters being shucked, and her mouth began to water. I’m going to get him for getting me hooked on those things, she thought, and ran up the stairs to the Main Concourse.

Sunday in Grand Central merely meant that there were fewer commuters among the crowds walking that wide shining floor, and many more people out for a pleasant day in the city — ehhif parents towing along kits who in turn towed along bunches of bright balloons; shoppers with fat carrybags full of tasty-smelling loot; tourists gawking at the beautiful, newly cleaned sky-ceiling and the great downhanging striped flag. There was no escaping the scent of food here, either; the station’s recent renovation had placed a restaurant at each end of the great Concourse, and from one of them the smell of grilling meat floated most appetizingly. But for the moment, Rhiow had other business. She headed across the floor toward the north-side archway labeled Track 32.

There were a couple of ehhif walking down the long, fluorescent-lit platform ahead of her. Rhiow put her whiskers forward at the sight of them, for though there was no train at the platform, and there wasn’t scheduled to be one there for at least another twenty minutes, they didn’t move like ehhif who were waiting for something that wasn’t there. Rhiow wandered along behind them, saw the two ehhif stop at the end of the platform and look into the dark, down where the overhead lighting stopped and the great broad spread of tracks began to draw together. One of them, a tall young tom with long blond hair and a shockingly loud Hawaiian shirt, pulled out a book and began to page through it. His companion, a she-ehhif even taller than he, though much darker and much more quietly dressed, looked over his shoulder at what he was reading.

They must have had their access spell pre-prepared, for barely a tail-flick later, the gate manifested itself. In the darkness, hanging in midair about a foot from the left edge of the platform, the portal matrix that Rhiow kept anchored by Track 32 shivered into visibility — at least for Rhiow and the wizards. Theoretically, a nonwizardly ehhif could have seen it. But the gate was edge-on to any other ehhif who might have approached up the platform; and it would have been unlikely that a nonwizardly ehhif could have seen a wizardry even if they were looking straight at it. Nonetheless, these two were being careful. The tom-ehhif glanced back down the platform, saw Rhiow, and hesitated — then said, “Cousin, we’re on errantry, and we greet you —”

“I can see you’re in a hurry,” Rhiow said in the Speech. “Don’t let me keep you, cousins.” She strolled over to them, peering through the gate. Past the rainbow shimmer of its edges, Rhiow caught a glimpse of a reddish landscape, rocky and stark, under an indigo sky. “Mars?” she said.

“Morocco,” the queen-ehhif said. “That earthquake.”

“That attempted earthquake,” her companion said. “We’re going to go talk it out of it.”

“Go well, cousins,” Rhiow said. “And Iau on your side!” – for the many variables associated with quakes made working with them a chancy business at best. The young woman waved at her; they stepped through.

A second later they were gone, and the worldgate snapped back into its normal configuration, the familiar interwoven structure of tightly laced hyperstrings, glowing and rippling in the darkness of the tunnel like a silken tapestry of light. This gate, at least, was behaving correctly — serving its proper purpose of helping wizards get around without having to waste the universe’s precious energy on individually-constructed transport spells. Rhiow sat up on her haunches and beckoned the gate a little closer. Obediently it drifted right to the edge of the platform, and Rhiow reached out, hooked her claws into the control-weave at the edge of the gate, and pulled it out taut.

The gate-strands caught in her claws glittered with light and symbology in the Speech, the worldgate’s realtime diagnostics. It was working fine; the relocation of the Penn gates seemed to have had no effect on it all. …At the moment, Rhiow thought. Worldgates were full of little surprises… but then, when you were dealing with a wizardry so complex, and one that got so much use by wizards other than the ones who maintained it, this was only to be expected.

She took a moment to query the other two Grand Central gates via this one’s control structure, but found nothing to concern her: all three were behaving as well as they ever did. All right, Rhiow thought. She let most of the hyperstrings snap back into the body of the gate structure, but kept a claw in one of them. This one she pulled toward her, twisting it to bring up one of the configurations she had long since laid into the gate for casual use.

The surface of the gate shivered again, paling away except at the bright-burning edges. The view was uninspiring — a pocked, pale-beige travertine wall, shadowy even on such a bright day. Rhiow let that last string snap back into the gateweave, gathered herself, and leapt through in the second and a half before the gate would revert to its standby state.

She came down at the foot of that wall and huddled against it for a moment, looking quickly to right and left. Distracted ehhif sometimes came tearing along here in a desperate hurry, running up from the nearest of Lincoln Center’s many ticket windows and plunging around the corner ahead and to her left, making singlemindedly for the front doors of that high-arched and beautiful building where ehhif gathered to hear and sing astonishingly long and involved songs that were usually mostly about sex. And then after five or six hours of it, they sit there and applaud even though there hasn’t actually been any, Rhiow thought, heading up around the corner herself. Ehhif are so odd sometimes…

At the moment, though, there was little traffic in the area. Rhiow got up and made her way down toward that corner herself, standing there for a few moments to enjoy both the breeze that came down through the ticket-window overpass, and the view. Before her the big circular fountain in front of the Metropolitan Opera danced in the westering sun in an ever-changing liquid-gold glitter, and many ehhif of both sexes sat on the broad rim of the fountain’s basin, trying to get themselves as wet as possible. Rhiow looked right and left again, and couldn’t see Urruah in any of his favorite places – at the top of the steps in front of the Met’s doors, out in the fountain plaza, or over by the plaza-side café on the ground floor of Avery Fisher Hall, where he liked to cadge goodies from the more cat-friendly tourists at the outdoor tables. He’s inside, then.

Rhiow retraced her steps past the ticket window and under the overpass connecting the Met to the New York Public Library’s music annex. Once out on the Amsterdam Avenue side she hung a left. There she found the big steel backstage doors predictably open, in this weather, regardless of security precautions, and the usual crowd of stagehands hanging around outside it with lit smokesticks in their hands, working hard to breathe in more foul fumes than the City already thoughtfully provided. She flirted her tail in annoyance at one more example of human peculiarity as she stalked past them into the cool airy shadows of the backstage area. If they had more than one life to waste, I could understand it, I suppose. But they don’t. Ehhif…!

The big backstage “fly” area, nearly four storeys high, was as usual full of scenery containers being pulled out of huge trucks and pushed back into them. Even an unsidled Person could have found it easy enough to hide back here – and indeed, there were a number of People wandering here and there, either being chased or studiously ignored by the workers — but Rhiow had neither need nor desire to unsidle in this stir and bustle of ehhif pulling the contents out of huge crates and stuffing them back into others. She glanced around.

“Up here, Rhi,” Urruah shouted. Rhiow looked around and up, as did numerous of the ehhif, who then shrugged when they couldn’t see anything where the meowing noise seemed to be coming from, about thirty feet up against one of the backstage area’s sheer concrete-block walls. But Rhiow could see where Urruah and Jath were waiting for her up on an outward-jutting structural I-beam. Rhiow spoke her “skywalking” variant of the Mason’s Word spell and went up a stair of air to where they waited, meanwhile ignoring the shocked or annoyed glances of some of the other People in the area. It had taken her a while, early in her career, to get used to the idea that some People didn’t approve of wizardry, or see the point in it, and some didn’t even believe in it. She’d learned eventually not to allow this to affect her work, but sometimes she still found the weight of other People’s regard on her fur an unwelcome addition to the day’s burdens. Even now there were eyes looking at Rhiow from the shadows, behind crates or under tarpaulins, thoughtful, or angry, or filled with other more complex, more unwelcome emotions…