The Big Meow - Diana Dueyn

Urruah’s tail too was twitching now. “You’re thinking we might find ourselves up against some other sheaf’s version of a wizard,” he said. “Or worse: some other sheaf’s version of a Power.”

Rhiow flicked an ear in agreement. “Not a prospect I’m excited about, I assure you! But being prepared is half the battle. If someone contaminated by another continuum’s version of wizardry, or some Power from outside, is working here – then just knowing that’s what’s going on gives us an advantage of sorts. If they expect us to have been taken completely by surprise, then that’s an advantage they’ve lost. It’s hauissh all right, my kit! And we’re caught in the game of our lives.”

“Of everyone’s lives,” Urruah said softly. “Everywhere.”

“So we’d best play hard,” Rhiow said. “Here more than usual, knowledge will be power. We need to know everything that the other players here know – and more than they know. And in a hurry!” Her tail lashed. “Arhu is going to get more of a workout than he’s going to like. And we’re going to catch grief from Siffha’h because of it. Can’t be helped…”

Urruah sighed. “So here we are having to break new ground one more time,” he said. “You’d think that maybe by now some ehhif wizards somewhere might have run up against something similar, and taken a little of the edge off the problem…”

Rhiow had to laugh at him. “’Ruah, as if we’re not perfectly capable of handling what errands the Powers send us without having ehhif help us out! That’s not a sentiment I’d expect to hear from you.”

Urruah gave her a dry look. “But Rhi,” he said, “it still brings up the question. Why us? Why now? Why haven’t other wizards in our worlds had this problem before?”

“I’m not sure they haven’t,” Rhiow said. “We have to find out if they have, and fast. If this has ever come up before, we have to find out what was done to stop it. I imagine that the other side, whoever they were, believe the data to have been lost. Perhaps it has. Time…” She sighed. “It’s such a solvent. Even wizardly knowledge isn’t proof against it. News gets forgotten, the Speech itself loses recensions, worlds are lost and words get worn down…” She paused to wash a paw and try to calm herself a little. “But regardless, for the moment we have to assume that we’re where we are, and when we are, for the usual reasons: because we’re the best tools the Powers have for the job.”

“Oh,” Urruah said. “No pressure, then…”

Rhiow got up enough to take a swipe at his ear, missing on purpose. “Go on back in there and eat some more breakfast,” she said. “I have to make a call.”

*

Arhu was back in less than half an hour. When Rhiow came back inside after all too brief a time spent meditating and handling necessary physical matters, she found Arhu sitting by himself in the middle of the living room floor, using some of the Silent Man’s spare typing paper to make hard copies of the images he’d Seen earlier. “Well?” she said.

Arhu didn’t answer for a moment. On the piece of paper in front of him, a set of the squarish Mayan characters were forming to cover the paper, with the exception of some of those troublesome gaps. When the figures had darkened down fully, he opened his eyes and started panting a little. A few seconds later he looked up at Rhiow. “There were a couple more pages in the folder when I went this time,” Arhu said.

“Interesting,” Rhiow said. “Someone in that house was looking at them last night, or this morning – perhaps in some other room?”

“I think in another room,” Arhu said, glancing around him at the various pieces of paper. “But the originals don’t like where they are very much; it’s like they’re trying not to notice what they’re used for or who’s looking at them. The house makes them nervous. They really prefer thinking about the past than dealing at all with the present…”

Rhiow’s tail twitched as she thought about that. Inanimate objects couldn’t always be depended on to give one data in much depth, but when they were afraid, it was worth noticing. “Did they know where they came from?”

“Absolutely,” Arhu said. “A museum. I could see their pictures of it.”

“You didn’t use – “

“No I did not use the Eye!” Arhu hissed. And then he quieted down and looked a little concerned. “Not that I would have felt real happy about using it, or staying there very much longer, even if you hadn’t said anything. I was starting to wonder if something was watching me. After just a little while I wanted to get out.” He paused to scratch behind one ear, then looked over at the empty desk. “Where’s our ehhif gone?”

“He’s having a shower,” Hwaith said, wandering in from the kitchen. “So where was this museum?”

“Here,” Arhu said, and put a paw down on a piece of paper that was still blank. It quickly filled with a map of central Los Angeles, and a spot where, within a square of roads, various smaller streets curved toward a meeting-place at the square’s heart. The curves were in marked contrast to the severity of the angles and smaller squares made by the streets all around.

“That’s the Museum of History, Science and Art,” Hwaith said. “It’s down in Exposition Park, where the big rose garden is.”

“You know your way around there?” Rhiow said.

“Fairly well,” Hwaith said. “Errantry occasionally takes me down that way. Getting in won’t be a problem.”

“Let’s go, then,” Rhiow said. It was as if the Whisperer was leaning over her shoulder, looking intently at the map, and bristling with a barely-managed fear that something might not happen in time.

“I’ll do a transit circle out in the back,” Hwaith said. “Give me a moment.” He went out to take care of it.

Rhiow glanced back at Arhu, who was once more looking over the images on the paper. His ears were laid back. “What’s the matter?” she said.

His eyes met hers, and the look in them was genuinely distressed: a reaction he hadn’t been willing to display while Hwaith was there. “Rhi,” he said. “There really was something looking… watching. It felt like what was leaning against the timeslide when we gated in.”

Rhiow hissed softly. “Sa’Rraah….”

“No!” Arhu said. “Not Her. I know what She feels like by now!” His fur didn’t rouse, but Rhiow thought that was only because he was absolutely commanding it to lie still, as a tom not of his pride was in the area and he didn’t want his reaction to show. “She always wants to make you look stupid,” Arhu said. “I mean, She wants you dead too — but the Lone One mostly wants you to think that you were an idiot to even try to fight Her: that She was always going to win. It’s personal, with Her. This, though – “ He turned away from Rhiow as he got up and with a small wizardry swept the papers into a neat pile. “This just wants you dead.”

Rhiow wasn’t sure what to say.

“But we’re the answer, aren’t we?” Arhu said, vanishing the papers into an otherspace pocket. “Iau and the Powers wouldn’t have sent us back here if we weren’t supposed to fix this. If we didn’t have at least a chance.”

Rhiow waved her tail in quiet agreement. “That’s how Urruah and I are seeing it at the moment,” she said.

Arhu hissed as Rhiow had: a small personal sound of frustration and nervousness. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “But I hate this.” His eyes met hers again. “Is it wrong to hate this?”

Rhiow sighed. “Not at all, my kit,” she said. “As long as while we hate it, we just keep on doing what we have to.”

She headed for the doors, trying to look calm for him, and Arhu followed.

*

The museum was surprisingly beautiful for something buried so deep in the heart of a busy ehhif city, and both the building and its surroundings had a spaciousness and grace about them that Rhiow found it possibly to enjoy even in these unnerving circumstances. Down in this part of the city, well away from the hills, there was still some mist clinging in the wake of dawn — though it seemed unlikely to Rhiow that this would last long. From the mist rose a building that featured a big central dome between two smaller ones, and an arched and pillared porch that looked down into the aisles and graveled paths of the huge surrounding rose gardens. The mist softened the traffic noises drifting in from all sides as the surrounding city surged to life in the brightening morning.

They all sidled before they made their way through the mist and up the steps of the front entrance. “The place doesn’t open for a few hours yet,” Hwaith said. “It should be nice and quiet for us.”

They spoke the Mason’s Word and passed through the bronze-bound doors under the porch, into the huge airy space under the rotunda of the central dome. Had there been any sound, it would have echoed: but the silence here was total, the outside traffic sounds sealed completely away.

Rhiow and Urruah and Arhu paused there on the shining marble floor while Hwaith got his bearings. “Right,” he said. “The last time I was here, all the Mesoamerican stuff was one floor up. The stairs are over here –“

He led them over to the right, where a stairway came down between the lesser right-hand dome and the main one and switched back to follow the circle of the building up and around to the level over the front entrance. There they passed through an arch in the outer wall into a long hall that ran along the front of the building.

Inside it was an unbroken stretch of glass cases on the dome side, and more cases between the windows that looked down on the main entrance. To Rhiow, the sense of profound age that suddenly descended on her as she glanced around was astonishing. It’s strange, she thought, that I don’t get this feeling when we have reason to go to the museums in the City in our hometime. But possibly I’m just getting jaded about those, having seen them so often.

Or maybe it was just the difference in the kinds of things that were here, the more intimate scale of the displays — not the massive statuary of ehhif tombs and effigies, and their bulky-graceful take on the way People saw the Powers that Be, but instead a lavish collection of the things ancient ehhif in a very different part of the world had used in their day to day lives in this part of the world. There were incense burners and effigies of ehhif and beasts, and all kinds of pots and ceramic baskets and three-or four-footed drinking and eating vessels, some of them in animal shapes or looking like human heads. There was delicate jewelry of silver and turquoise and carved translucent shell, and massive pieces – necklets and gold-bound collars in carved jade and polished stone. There were rows and rows of small round-featured ehhif figures made of clay or other baked ceramics, some simply dressed and some ornately; some still painted after centuries, some worn down by time to the red-brown of the original clay. And off to one side stood a great wall of glass, behind which, on many shelves, stood row after row of tablets that had once been square or rectangular or round, but were now well worn by time into less regular shapes.

“This is it!” Arhu said, sounding excited. “I can feel it. This is where the original rubbings came from – “ He started down the long wall of glass, pausing to look carefully at each group of tablets.

Urruah strolled along in tandem with him, looking over the artifacts on the other side. “I never get tired of how old all these things feel,” Hwaith said to Rhiow as the two of them brought up the rear, watching watched Arhu work his way down the line of cases. “It’s not as if ehhif have been here that much longer than People have – they haven’t, of course.” He looked around him, waving his tail gently. “Maybe it’s just that slight sense of alienness… that there’s this other species sharing the planet with us, and their lives are so complex in so many ways that we’ll never really have time to understand. You might go out on the High Road and meet other species that are physically so different, so strange. But ehhif just seem stranger far because they’re right here alongside us, and we just don’t know them…”

Then he trailed off. “I’m sorry,” Hwaith said. “That must sound awfully facile. Or shallow. You’re in close company with ehhif, you said. The situation probably looks a lot different to you…”

“Oh, no,” Rhiow said. She might feel distracted right now by her concern and unease, but Hwaith’s thought was one that had occurred to her more than once. “In fact, if you ever get really close to one,” she said, “it feels more true, not less. At least that’s been my experience.”

“I wonder what it would be like, sometimes,” Hwaith said. “To be someone’s ‘pet’, to let them build that relationship around you. It must be strange to try to balance something as vital as a Person’s independence against the emotional needs of someone from another species…”

Rhiow laughed just a little sadly, thinking of Hhuha. — For the first time in, dear Iau, it’s days now. I’ve been far too busy this last little while… “It’s nowhere near so clinical,” she said. “What does seem strange at first is to find yourself becoming friends with someone you can’t even talk to. Though if things go well, after a while it starts to seem like the most natural thing in the world…”

“Rhiow!” Arhu said. “Look down here!”

“What?” She trotted down to him, and Hwaith followed. “Is it one of the carvings with the gaps?”

“No,” Arhu said. Just briefly, his voice sounded as if he’d found something funny. Rhiow came up behind him, and alongside Urruah she peered into the case. On its bottommost shelf was a tall fired-clay tablet with some of its paint intact though it was more than five hundred years old. It featured an image in the Mayan style of something that could have been mistaken for a crocodile standing on its hind legs. But the “crocodile’s” muzzle was unusually heavy and blunt and short, and its hind legs were much heavier than any croc’s, and its front legs far too short and delicate. In addition, no crocodile ever had teeth like the ones drawn in this creature’s jaws: and crocs didn’t normally come patched in yellow and red. They didn’t normally have wings, either, or wear collars ornamented with little cats’ heads.

“That must have given the archaeologists and translators a fun time,” Urruah said, as amused as Arhu. “Let’s see who they think he is —” He peered at the label mounted on the floor of the enclosure. “’Atypical Feathered Serpent motif, Teotihaucan region circa 1500, with ocelocoatl features. Possibly represents the K’iche Maya deity Q’uq’umatz, Creator, Patron of Civilization and Devourer of Darkness.’”

“More like Auto’matz the Devourer of Pastrami,” Arhu muttered, smiling.

“A colleague of ours back uptime,” Rhiow said to Hwaith, who was possibly understandably looking a little bewildered. “A surprisingly senior colleague for someone so new at the job, too. He’s Arhu’s big brother.”

Hwaith gave Rhiow a look that suggested he thought he was having his tail pulled. Rhiow had to chuckle. “It’s a long story…”

“Looks like the locals knew Ith way back when,” Urruah said to Arhu. “Or rather, they know what he’s become since you and Ith started rewriting thte Great Serpent’s story…”