The Big Meow - Diana Dueyn

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.

Rhiow licked her nose nervously. This was the Silent Man’s body telling her what was happening to it, the destruction of basic infrastructure. But much more was going on. As she kept walking and the street kept darkening, the only light now coming from an ugly bloated red moon setting over the river down at the far end of Thirty-Third, Rhiow started seeing more movement inside the derelict buildings. Inside the dirty windows she could hear things moving. As she went, and that reddish moonlight seemed to get stronger, she started seeing the movements inside them as well. Lumpy shapes in tissue-colors of dark red and spotty dark pink and fat-ivory, rounded, bulbous, glistening a little sometimes – they were getting bolder, pushing themselves right up to the windows, right through the broken places. Eyeless, they nonetheless peered at her, and though faceless, their expressions were mocking as they leered and tittered at her.

Rhiow’s lips wrinkled away from her fangs in distaste. She itched to assemble some minor wizardry that would blast the nasty things away from the windows and put a stop to their snickering. Best wait, though, she thought. No point in wasting energy I might need later… On she went down Thirty-Third, crossing Eighth Avenue and heading for Ninth. Above her, the sky lost the last reflection of city light, went starless. Around her, the structure of the buildings themselves was beginning to shift, and the watching, leering tumor-shapes were no longer just inside them, but starting to appear on the otherwise deserted sidewalks – first just a few, then in groups. By the time she reached the middle of the block between Ninth and Tenth, the edges of the buildings were starting to go unnervingly soft.

By Tenth, the buildings were all built of ehhif tissue – stressed cartilage and bone, perforated organ tissue struggling to repair itself after being attacked again and again by the cancerous cells running wild inside it. But it was not doing well. Everything looked shabby, tattered, inexpressibly weary. And all around her, the tumorous growth inside the Silent Man was running riot. In the tumbledown ruins of the worst-damaged organ-buildings, individual cells rustled and cheeped and burrowed like rats, undermining, consuming, destroying. Outside, larger clumps and clusters of them, wearing blunt rounded eyeless mockeries of ehhif shapes, were gathered on the sidewalks, staring at Rhiow as she went past. Some weird in-body imagery of the Silent Man’s, Rhiow thought. If he sees his body sometimes in dream or imagination as a city, why wouldn’t he see the cancer as a neighborhood in it? And a bad one. Populated by criminals, by bootleggers and bad seeds. Yet in the Silent Man’s stories, Urruah had insisted, the bad guys often had good buried somewhere at their cores, and were sometimes compelled by circumstance or persuasion to remember it. Working in that idiom, could even cells gone mad for multiplying themselves remember what it was like to be normal? It’s worth a try —

Rhiow kept going, and the ehhif-shaped tumor clusters and many of their more mobile single-cell “pets” started coming down off the sidewalks and slowly gathering behind her as she went, the crowd rapidly swelling. They weren’t much bigger than Rhiow was — tiny by comparison with real ehhif. But there are so many of them. And they have me seriously outnumbered. If they should decide to come after me…

That wasn’t a thought to be having right now, here in the heart of what was certainly a candidate to be declared one of the worst “bad neighborhoods” Rhiow had ever been in. Trying to demonstrate a calm she absolutely didn’t feel, Rhiow kept on walking until she came to the middle of the intersection of Thirty-Third and Tenth, pretty much the heart of the worst part of Hell’s Kitchen in that time, all surrounded by crumbling four-story brick apartment buildings and blind-windowed shops that sold nothing. There she sat right down and allowed the crowd that had grown as it followed her down Thirty-Third to gather around her. They had left an uneasy space around her, maybe as long as she was, and Rhiow was glad of it, seeing that the cancer, even in its unthinking way, was uncertain of what she might do or intend.

Rhiow curled her tail around her forepaws and waited for the rustling and the muttering to die down a little. Finally, “I am on errantry,” she said, “and I greet you.”

The silence that followed the Avedictory was deafening, and told Rhiow more than she needed to know about how receptive this audience was going to be to her suggestions. Never mind, just plunge in –”A change is coming to your world,” she said. “It’s going to end.”

“A long, long time from now,” said the multifarous voice of the cancer from all around her. Every one of the ehhif-mimicking clumps and individual cancer cells around her buzzed with it, an unpleasant itchy sound that made Rhiow want to scratch her ears. She restrained herself.

“In terms of your individual lifespans,” Rhiow said, “yes, that’s true. But in terms of your host’s lifespan – a very short time indeed. I’ve come to you on his behalf.”

Rhiow could feel the tumor clumps and cells looking at her as if she was out of her mind, and they were both amused and angry. “Who do you think you are, speaking for the world?” said the voice.

“A friend,” Rhiow said.

Laughter broke out. “Some kind of nut,” said one voice.

“No such thing as a friend in this world,” said another. “Just guys who want something out of you for free.”

“I’m not asking anything of you,” Rhiow said, “except a little forbearance. You remember, perhaps, how it was once, when you were part of a larger whole, and every cell had a place that was made just for it, somewhere that it belonged –”

There was an annoyed buzzing at this. “Listen to that,” said the voice. “Somebody thinks we should know our place.”

“Somebody thinks we should go back to how it used to be,” said another voice. “No chance of that! Now we’re a big deal, now we run things all over the world, now we say what goes!”

“Like it’s our fault how we are or somethin’? We’re how the world made us. How the smoke made us. It made us choose. So we chose!”

Just a flash of bitterness there, but too quickly swallowed up by the wider consensus — the voices of cells who could no longer remember a way of life or an inner metabolism that hadn’t once involved a carcinogen and the irresistible commands it sent. There’s not enough for me to work with there, Rhiow thought, distressed. Better change tack —

“I’m not saying that you personally are at fault for the way things have come to be,” Rhiow said, choosing the words carefully. “And of course anybody can see that you own this place.” That being the problem. Even if a whole team of wizards came in here to try to clean the Silent Man out, all this cancer would need to come back would be one missed cell, and enough time… For she could smell the presence and essential invasiveness of the cancer in the same way that some houiff were able to smell it. This was not the kind of malignancy you could easily talk out of doing what it did, if ever.

“So what’s this stuff about forbearance? You mean we should, like, go away?” More nasty laughter.

“There wouldn’t be much point in me asking that,” Rhiow said, glancing down for a moment to keep her audience from seeing the anger she feared was beginning to show in her eyes. “But for your host’s sake – to lengthen the life of your world, which would surely be a good thing for you – if you could be a little less invasive as regards the nerves – ”