The Big Meow - Diana Dueyn

Ith, really, not!

Ith fell backwards, grasping at the ball of fire, sinking his claws into it in one last desperate “attempt” to keep himself from falling. The attempt failed. Giant rear legs kicking, he went over the edge in a tremendous fall. A disastrous roar went up, a bleat of terror and rage, as he clutched the worldgate-ball to him and plunged into the pit. Like a star falling, like the Sun setting, he and the worldgate vanished from view.

There was a huge moment of silence, followed by an almighty crash.

And then the light went out.

The echoes faded. Everybody, Rhiow included, looked intently at the “director”, who was staring at one of the video displays. Then he lifted his hand.

“Cut it!” he yelled. “That’s it, that’s a wrap! Thank you, everybody! Nice work, cousins!”

Applause broke out all around, from the film crew and even from the cops, who until now had probably thought they’d seen just about everything that could happen in the way of a shooting. The special effects would be the talk of the NYPD for days, Rhiow thought: two or three days, anyway. As people started picking things up and carrying them around, Rhiow went padding over to the “director”, who was drinking what was probably his tenth paper cup of a coffee locally famous for its strength and foulness.

“Har’lh,” Rhiow said to Carl Romeo, one of the ehhif Area Seniors, “that stuff will ruin your health.”

“Only if I overdo it,” Carl said. He glanced around him, where the large team of wizards were already beginning to pack up the shot. Equipment was seeming to go into those white high-side trucks, where the cops – having recovered their original bored and jaded attitudes – and the dozy Film Board lady, were completely failing to notice that the equipment, once out of sight behind some genuine boxes and coverings, simply vanished. In the Holland and Midtown tunnels, out of sight of the security cameras – those that had not been spoofed with pre-laid wizardries already – the trucks would soon do the same. “We’ll be out of here in about twenty minutes. Nice work, Rhi.”

She shook her head. “I never touched a string,” she said. “I just coordinate.”

“Not as easy as it sounds,” Carl said, finishing the coffee and then tossing the cup into a nearby recycling bin, which another wizard picked up and carried off a second later. “My people have a saying about herding cats…”

She put her whiskers forward, knowing a compliment when she heard one. From behind the two of them, a huge-toothed head, zebra-striped in vivid red and yellow, but now reduced to its more normal three-foot length, pushed in to peer at the video display. “Did I look good?” Ith said. “I think I looked good.”

Carl chuckled. “Tim,” he said, elbowing the young ehhif wizard standing beside him, “roll the ‘video’, will you, and satisfy our Elder Brother’s vast bloated ego….?”

Rhiow put one ear back, sarcastic, as from behind Har’lh, Urruah came walking up Eighth. “And as for you,” she said to Ith, as the imagery which had just transpired started to repeat itself on the screen while he peered at it, “shouldn’t you be sidled? If enough people here see you for very much longer, we’re going to have a lot more explaining to do.”

“This is New York,” said Ith, turning one of those wise little eyes on Rhiow: it glittered with humor. “If anyone does see a red and yellow Tyrannosaur walk down the street without a film crew, they will either ignore me – being New Yorkers – or assume I am some kind of advertisement.” He shrugged his long tail, looking back at the screen. “What should I advertise, do you think?”

Arhu walked up Ith’s back and sat on his shoulder, looking over it at the video. “Pastrami,” he said.

Rhiow gave Ith a clout in the leg with her claws in; though frankly he was unlikely to have felt every claw she had, through that thick hide. “See now, you’re teaching these kits bad habits,” she said.

“I’d say it’s going both ways,” Carl said, as Siff’hah walked up Ith’s tail to join her twin on Ith’s other shoulder. “Nice work, you two.” He unzipped his parka a little: the air was warming a little as the breeze started to run down Thirty-first from the East River side, the first touch of Sun on the river pushing the air their way. “And you, Urruah: you should be pleased. An elegant solution to a thorny problem. You go ahead, Rhi, ’Ruah: your folks did all the hard work here. Leave the cleanup to us.” He turned his back on her, clapping his hands. “Come on, people, let’s go, pack out the trash…”

Rhiow waved her tail in satisfaction, turning to Urruah. “Is it down and secure? Is it rooted?”

It’s down, Fh’iss said, from down in the track pit. Our overacting cousin delivered it right on target: it fell straight into the socket, and he fell clear. Not that I won’t shred his puny ears later. ‘Not!’

“It’s not rooted in tight yet, though,” Urruah said, sitting down with his tail now weaving slowly from side to side, the thing he always did when he was ticking off items on his internal to-do list. “I want to check out the catenary junctures. If there are any frayed hyperstrings in there left over from moving the sheaf, they’ll play merry hell with the restart synch when we initiate the sequence.”

“Oh, come on,” Arhu said, “you know it’s okay, let’s just blow this thing and go home!”

Urruah turned toward Rhiow, out of Arhu’s view, before rolling his eyes. The look in them, though tired, said plainly to Rhiow, Please shut him down so I don’t have to. I can’t cope with any more right now.

“Something’s making my whiskers twinge a little,” Rhiow said, looking down toward the track-pit where the gate-sheaf was presently resting. The “what” of it, of course, was Arhu, but she didn’t have to tell anyone that. “I’ll wait and have a look myself.”

“Aww, Rhi, come on, you know it’s fine!”

She got up, stretched fore and aft, and gave him a sidewise look. Arhu wasn’t yet nearly well-enough worked in with his team and his team leader to do the smart thing and avert his eyes immediately: he actually spent a second’s worth of staring at Rhiow before having the sense to look away.

“I’m not convinced,” she said. “But for your sins, you get to come down and convince me yourself. Line by line of the spell, and string by string of the gate. No, ‘Ruah, you stay up here and have a wash. A long night’s work you’ve had, and a long month’s work before that: you deserve a moment’s rest. And it’s your team leader’s pleasure, when she’s done with this wet-eared wiseass, to walk you home and see you eat pastrami before day’s Eye comes up. As for you,” she said to Arhu, “come on down here, O endlessly knowledgeable one, and enlighten me as to the status of my gate.”

Urruah turned away without comment, sat down and started washing, in silent hilarity: composure-washing at one remove, not for himself but for the kit. Arhu had the sense to put his ears back out of the way. I’ll be along in a little while, Urruah said. You go sort him out.

She flicked her tail in agreement. “Come on,” she said.

Access for them to the gate’s new lockdown site was the same as it had been for the gate itself, though far less spectacular. As they walked around the corner, Rhiow spoke the numerous syllables of the Mason’s Word, hearing the universe go still around them and leaning in to hear, then feeling the asphalt of Eighth Avenue go summer-soft underneath her. Along with Arhu, who had implemented his own incidence of the Word, Rhiow sank down through the street, into the substrate of the road, past the pipes and conduits, the bricks and stones of earlier layers of the street, the cold clayey earth under the stonework, the i-beamed iron ceilings of the track tunnel.

The New Jersey Transit North River tunnel was a bleak, plain, filthy place as yet: it would be months before the ehhif construction crews turned their attention to rebuilding it. The rails ran down toward Penn, off to Rhiow’s and Arhu’s right, as they sank down through the ceiling and airwalked toward the platform; to the left, under the occasional naked bulb jutting out of the stanchions of the walls, the tunnels ran off at a downward slope, heading for their dive under the Hudson. Off to their right, ahead of the two of them, the worldgate could be seen hanging over the left-hand set of tracks, shimmering, its colors slowly calming after all the excitement.

Arhu walked over to the gate, reared up on his hind legs, and sank a single careful claw into the outer edge of the gate, catching one of the control strings and pulling it out. The diagnostic colors and status strings immediately leapt into brilliance, indicating where the gate’s catenary structure – its main power conduit – had been provisionally rerooted into the master catenary that ran under Manhattan, and from there into the more ancient world that was the source of the worldgates’ power. “So the power levels are back up now,” he said. “Ninety percent already, though the last ten won’t come up for a while yet because of the reaction trauma. The unwrap went all right: see, the extra strings have lost their flail and are rewebbing themselves with the main structure – “

His debrief to Rhiow took surprisingly little time. Arhu appeared to have been actually listening quite closely to Urruah, though Arhu normally would have done anything to avoid having anyone get that idea. But the thing that left Rhiow wondering, as Arhu talked her through the rest of the details surrounding the reattachment of the severed gate, was how like Saash he sounded as he talked string tech. It was strange. Yet maybe not so strange: for it was Saash who had perhaps been kindest to him when he first came into the team, Saash who had overwatched him, made sure he ate well and slept clean and dry, and had a proper place to do his business. Attachments, Rhiow thought. So odd. She never taught him a purr’s worth of theory. Yet, style: style communicates itself. And linkages happen where you expect them the least…

Finally she interrupted him in the middle of a long string of gate-tech jargon that would have impressed even Saash. “Enough,” she said. “You did good.”

Arhu flicked an ear at her, looking down toward where Jath and Fh’iss were now sitting together, looking with weary satisfaction at the unwrapped gate, watching its colors die back down from the excited state caused by moving it. “Wouldn’t say that in front of them,” he said.

“Maybe not,” Rhiow said, quite softly. “But I’m not sure it’s all that important to say it to them. To you, that’s another story.”

“They don’t respect you, Rhiow,” he said, and there was a touch of growl in his young voice.

“It’s not about respect, finally,” Rhiow said. “Getting the job done: that’s the issue. Let them be. It’s no fun for them to have someone come tailwaving her way onto their territory and start telling them how things are going to have to be. Soon enough they’ll settle in, when their gate does.”

“So can I go get my pastrami?”

She sighed. Urruah was to blame for this deli fixation on both the kits’ side, and for Ith’s as well: but at least they came by it honestly, asking ehhif for it rather than just stealing it from them. And watching Ith go through the wizardly gymnastics necessary to displace enough of his mass to disguise himself as a Person was always worth an evening’s amusement. “Go on,” Rhiow said. “Take a look around before you go: make sure Harl’h’s people didn’t miss anything.”

“Did that already,” Arhu said, flirting his tail at Rhiow’s slowness.

“Oh really? How, when you’ve been down here with me?”

“Sif’s doing it right now,” Arhu said, sounding smug, and vanished.

She twitched her whiskers forward in a Person’s smile, gave the settling worldgate one last look, and made her way back up the platform to Jath and Fh’iss. They turned on her a look of weary complaisance. There would probably be some minor recriminations from them tomorrow, during the debrief, but right now they just looked too tired.

That made this the perfect time to praise them: when they wouldn’t be able to summon up the energy to reject it. “Are we done?” Jath said as Rhiow came over. “Fh’iss was wrecked: I sent him off for some sleep.”

“We’re done enough for dawn,” Rhiow said. “The full debrief will keep: the gates need time to steady down, anyway. A long night, we’ve had. Jath, Hw’aa, you did a tremendous job. Please tell Fh’iss that too.” She wasn’t beyond leaving out, for the moment, how long it had taken them to commit themselves to make it a success. None of that mattered, now: they were done.

“Yes, well,” Jath said. “I’m still not sure whether we’ve really needed to do this. But the Powers wanted it done…”

“And you can restructure the gates into a better configuration for all the wizards who use the facility,” Rhiow said. “You’ve got so much more room to work down here now.”

“Yes, there is that…”

She waved her tail. “So we’re done. Keep me posted if anything needs my attention. I’m for my bed. Good morning, my cousins, and the Powers send that you sleep sound. No point in wishing you the luck of the hunt: you’ve had it…”

Jath actually purred. As Rhiow was walking away, behind her the first train of the morning came in, rolling towards Penn. A second before the train would have plowed through the airspace where the gate hung, the warp and weft of the worldgate shimmered away out of physicality, hanging hidden where it would remain until Jath and his team finished tweaking it.

Done, she thought. Finally, really done. What a relief… She made her way back up to street level, the same way she’d come.

When she came out onto Eighth Avenue again, the last of the police cordons were being taken down: the cops were heading off around the corner for coffee and donuts: and all the trucks and people, and the Film Board lady, were gone. There was no one left but a grey tabby, looking up Eighth Avenue to where the lights had changed, and a car or two were crossing the intersection from the side streets.

“Done?” he said.

Rhiow just purred. They sidled themselves, shifting out between the hyperstrings into the commonest kind of feline invisibility, and headed crosstown on Thirty-third. “Did you see those power levels settle?” Urruah said, in the same tone of voice as an ehhif saying, “How about those Mets?”

She put her whiskers forward, realizing she was going to get another half hour’s worth of tech talk. Rhiow just kept purring, letting him have a monosyllable’s worth of agreement here and there, until they were right back on the East Side again. Finally, well uptown and about halfway between Lexington and Park, Urruah just sighed. “A good night’s work,” he said.

“You have no idea,” Rhiow said. “Urruah, I think someone should talk to the Powers about you.”

He gave her a look. “I didn’t think I did that badly – ”

She paused long enough to cuff him upside one ear. “You thick-skulled idiot,” she said. “’Ruah, it’s time you thought about doing your team-leader training. Someone has to handle this job after I move on…”

He gave her a shocked look. “Rhiow,” he said. “What are you planning? Don’t you feel well?”