The Big Meow - Diana Dueyn

“Some of them have died of their meddling down there,” Urruah said. “Other ehhif have thought they’d fallen foul of the trains. It would’ve been lovely if it’d been that simple. Or that clean.” His tail was lashing. “But I’m thinking about something else. ‘The Great Old One’ – “

“Yes,” Rhiow said. “The Dark Lady’s friend?”

“I suppose,” Hwaith said, “the lesser hatreds wouldn’t mind latching onto a greater one, if they thought it meant a better feed…”

Rhiow growled a little in her throat at that. It had never occurred to her to think of sa’Rraah as the lesser of two evils. Queen Iau’s dark daughter was Entropy’s mistress and inventor, mother of the love of pain and death, heart of all the things wrong with this universe. But now, she thought, there are more universes than ours to think of. A whole different sheaf, perhaps. Where other gods work and move…

The Whisperer was silent in the back of her mind: unusually so. It’s strange, she thought: we tend to think of the Queen as the ruler of everything. But it seems there are boundaries even to Her power, for the Dark Lady’s friend seems to come from beyond them. And then…what’s beyond that?

Silence still from the Whisperer as they threaded through the corridors that led back to the parts of the house where the party was still going on. Rhiow’s tail was twitching with unease. Arhu, she said silently, what news?

They’re on the way home, he said. We’re in the back seat of their car.

Any useful conversation as yet?

Nothing new, Arhu said. She’s arguing with him a little. Doesn’t really want to do what he’s suggesting – it’s making her uneasy.

He’s not letting it lie, though, Siffha’h said. Keeps telling her that the Strong Ones are the answer to all her problems. Rhiow could feel the fur lifting along Sif’s back in revulsion. He’ll wear her down again, especially in the shape she’s in at the moment.

Rhiow flicked an ear in unhappy agreement as they came out into the front hall, all still sidled, and crowded off to one side of the doorway to eye the crowd gathered there. Get that date and time! she said. And especially the place. If we can get there and check the spot where they’re meeting beforehand, it may be useful.

Leave it to us, Arhu said.

The front hall was full of ehhif gossiping away at high speed. One of the cops was actually still standing there with a drink in his hand, surrounded by people talking at him, and apparently much flattered by the attention. Urruah looked at this in surprise. “Oh well,” he said, “a different time, after all – “ He waved his tail in bemusement as they headed through into the room where the band was still playing.

This room too was still full, though not many people were dancing now: most of them were gathered into knots of gossip and increasingly raucous drinking, and the band was playing with the resigned air of men trying to pretend that there was actually still someone listening to what they did. The Silent Man was where they had left him, listening to something Walter Winchell was saying: but his eyes were on Helen Walks Softly, who was off to one side of the room by the French doors, surrounded by a group of four men variously dressed in tuxedos or dark suits. One of them, younger than all the rest, slim and dark with a narrow, thoughtful face, was standing by Helen in a pose that to Rhiow somehow looked strangely proprietary. Behind them, trying not to hover too closely, Elwin Dagenham was nonetheless in a position to hear and see everything that was going on. Helen overtopped all the men around her by at least a head, and as the sidled People headed toward her, she threw them a swift glance of acknowledgement over her audience’s heads.

As they got within hearing range over the blare of the dance band, one of the ehhif, a little round man with little round glasses, was saying to Helen. “And, uh, Miss Walker… as for your other skills… can you perhaps act?”

Helen merely bowed her head a little – he was considerably shorter than she – drooped her eyelids slightly, and looked at him from under her brows, allowing a curve of smile to show and slowly grow. “Who knows,” she said, “I might be doing it right now.”

All three of the older men sucked their breaths in at the range of sultry and tempting implications that were suddenly lurking under the surface of Helen’s voice. Reading their reactions, the slim young man acquired a lopsided and somewhat mercenary smile that vanished a second later.

Rhiow glanced over at Urruah and Hwaith. “I suspect this might take a few minutes yet,” she said, putting her whiskers forward. “Let’s go on outside.”

They strolled out through the French doors. Even out here on the patio there were party guests were drinking and talking like mad, and a few determined dancers holding one another in the shadows and swaying together to the slightly distanced music. “Plainly it takes more than a guest collapsing and the cops showing up looking for a murder to shift this bunch,” Urruah said as they headed over to the edge of the patio and sat down under a table surrounded by some deck chairs near the pool. “You wonder how big an emergency you’d have to set off to get them to take notice for more than a few minutes…”

Rhiow gave him a look. “Don’t get any ideas,” she said, for Urruah was getting one of those wicked looks in his eye. “We’ve got questions to answer right now. Particularly, just who called the police? Besides someone who wasn’t in the bathroom or anywhere near Dolores, as far as we can tell – but was also sure there was a body upstairs.”

“If ‘lady’ is the word we’re looking for,” Urruah said, sounding very dry. “I think I know who you suspect.”

“Suspicion is all we’ve got at the moment,” Rhiow said. “I’m not going to do the Lone One’s work for It by accusing someone without evidence.”

Hwaith stood there waving his tail for a moment. “Well, there are ways around this problem,” he said. “I’ll go have a word with the phone.”

Urruah looked at him in confusion. “What?” he said. “It’s 1946, you don’t have caller ID yet – “

“What’s caller ID?” said Hwaith. “The phone’ll tell me what we want to know if I ask it. In a house this size, there’ll be three or four phones to ask, sure, but….”

Rhiow put her whiskers forward again, flirted her tail at Hwaith in agreement: he wandered off to head down toward the front hall. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think we get a little too reliant on our time’s tech to help us out.”

“You might have something there…”

After a few minutes Hwaith came trotting out the doors again with a satisfied look in his eye, and joined them under the table again. “The phone in the upstairs library remembers who used it last,” Hwaith said. “A woman. And it remembers her voice. Little and tinkly like a bell…”

Rhiow’s eyes narrowed. “Did it remember what she said?”

Hwaith switched his tail in negation. “Our phones don’t know words,” he said. “Just sound. This phone system isn’t sophisticated enough to handle meaning. It’s – “ He glanced at Rhiow, as if looking for words.

“Analog,” she said, “not digital. And not computer-managed, like the phone system in our time.” Rhiow knew from her old hhau’hif associate Ehef, who worked with other wizards on the CATNYP system at the New York Public Library, that a digital system was structurally much more liable to sentience than an analog one: the advent of the transistor and the densely-packed circuitry that made digital signaling possible had left the vast matter substrate of the phone system itself able to become half-alive even very early on. What state it had now reached in her home time, with quadrillions of synapses stretching across continents and under the seas and now even into space, Rhiow couldn’t say. But Ehef always talks about the Net and the Web as if they’re alive in more than the normal “inanimate-object” way…

“Well,” she said after a moment, “that’s more than we had to go on with. You’re pretty sure it meant Anya Harte…”

“I don’t think there’s any other possible reading.”

“One thing though, Rhiow,” Hwaith said. “She didn’t make just one call. She made two.”

Rhiow blinked at that. “Who was the other one to?”

“Another woman. Beyond that, the phone wasn’t sure. All it said was that the phone at the other end was tired, said it never had any rest, just kept getting a lot of calls at all hours of the day and night…”

Rhiow’s tail was lashing as she wondered what to make of that. But her thoughts were interrupted by a tall silhouette paused between the open French doors. Helen stood there, gazing out into the darkness.

Urruah let out a small but unmistakeable “meow” from under the table. Helen’s head turned that way: a second later she casually made her way over, put her drink down onto the table, and gazed out across the pool toward the darkness of the hillside.

“Well,” Urruah said, “you had a nice crowd of suitors back there…”

“Please,” Helen said softly, “that’s an image I’ve been trying to avoid.” She sat down for a moment on one of the deck chairs by the table, pausing to rub one foot, then the other. She sighed. “Heels,” she said. “I don’t mind them every now and then, but I’m really more of a flats person…”

“So what was the outcome of that little meeting?” Urruah said.

“Well, among other things, I hired an agent,” Helen said.

Rhiow stared. “You mean – “

“There were at least five of them downstairs in the main room,” Helen said, dry. “They were already fighting over me by the time I got downstairs.” She chuckled. “I have a feeling our Mr. Dagenham gets some kind of commission on his ‘finds’.”

“So which one did you pick?” Rhiow said.

Helen smiled. “The one who was least interested in my secondary sexual characteristics,” she said. “Sometimes my fellow ehhif can be unusually easy to read, and the only figure this one saw when he was looking at me had a lot of zeroes attached.” Her smile acquired that feral quality again, and Rhiow, seeing it, wondered at how unusually feline the expression was for an ehhif. Contagion, she thought, amused. “Once I had representation sorted out, I went to talk to the studio people. I think it went fairly well.” The smile got broader, and if possible, more smug.

Urruah, surprisingly, looked a little concerned. “You don’t think this business might interfere with your work?” he said.

Helen sat down and pushed her hair back with a thoughtful look. “I’m not sure now that it’s not part of it,” she said. “Normally I’d certainly have seen them off. But you know how it is when the events of the moment suddenly put tools in your hand that you weren’t expecting, but that’ll be useful. The Manual says that when the universe itself is imperiled, it may try to find ways to help you that won’t get it, or you, in trouble.” She looked thoughtful. “I find myself wondering whether some of those offices, especially the ones at the studios, are going to be places it’ll be useful for us to have entrée, and an alibi for being there.” She looked over at Rhiow. “And there’s at least one of those studios that’s of interest to us: the one that had the fire. It’s one of several that’re making me a job offer. I imagine I could tell my agent I’ve got a preference for that one.”

Urruah sat switching his tail, thinking. Rhiow watched this process with interest for a moment, then said to Helen, “But, cousin, when we’re through with all this – “

Helen shrugged. “I can ‘vanish,’” she said. “Starlets did that sometimes. A moment of fame, then suddenly something takes them away: marriage, a change of heart…”

Urruah looked up suddenly. “Murder,” he said.

Helen looked shocked. “I’d never stage such a thing,” she said.

“I wasn’t saying you would,” said Urruah, sounding uneasy. “But it’s occasionally been an occupational hazard. Ehhifs’ reactions to the she-ehhif held up before them in movies as desirable can be… complex. And sometimes deadly.”

Helen breathed out, stretched. “I know,” she said. “Well, I’m not going to be the usual starlet: there can’t be that many who’re also wizards. And killing a wizard isn’t all that easy. So let’s not worry about that right now.” She stood up again. “I should go in and deal with Freddie, he needs contact information for me…”

“Freddie?” Rhiow said.

“My agent,” said Helen. “Freddie Fields. He’s a new young agent with a company called MCA.” Urruah’s eyes went wide: Rhiow made a note to ask him why later on. Helen, though, was now wearing a somewhat considering look. “Shouldn’t take more than a moment to do a wizard-spoof on my own cellphone so that it thinks it’s got a ‘40’s local phone number.” She looked down at Hwaith. “You think the local phone system will talk to mine?”

“If properly introduced,” Hwaith said, “shouldn’t be a problem. Make an excuse to use the queens’-room for a few minutes and we can take care of it.”

“Good,” Helen said. “And we can go touch base with Mr. Runyon and let him know what’s happened.”

“He was interested?” Hwaith said as they headed back toward the French doors.

Helen laughed softly. “Are you kidding? If we’re not careful, this little escapade’s likely to wind up in one of his stories. I want to make sure he conceals the facts sufficiently to avoid any time paradoxes. But to say that he found what was going on funny – I think it’d be an understatement.”

They headed back into the main room. The music had thankfully gone quiet now, the band having taken advantage of the general disinterest in what they were doing to take a break and get themselves some booze and food. Over by the table that Runyon and Winchell were sharing, the studio people were arguing in lowered but intense voices, and Runyon was jotting on his pad – not the normal bold block letters he used for casual communication, but something quick and flowing. Shorthand, Urruah said silently to Rhiow. Look at him go! He put his whiskers right forward. They may be sorry some day that they didn’t go have this conversation somewhere else. Do they think just because he can’t talk that he can’t hear?

It does make you wonder, Rhiow said.

As Helen strolled smiling back over to the group, their conversation got a little more hushed, then changed course and picked up again. “Miss Walker,” said one of the men, “Goldwyn would be most interested in testing you for a new romantic drama – “

“Miss Walker, wouldn’t you be more interested in trying something less predictable, possibly even a musical! You could – “

“Paramount is going to be the forefront this year of a whole new idiom in film, we’re calling it film noir – “

They were all talking at once now, and it was impossible for Rhiow to make much sense of anything that was going on. Helen merely stood there exchanging an amused look with slim young Mr. Fields, who stood with his arms crossed and was taking everything in. Rhiow, for her own part, sat down and watched the Silent Man scribbling away, a faint smile on his face. Cousin, she said to him silently, how are you holding up?