How long they'd be that way, as tomorrow progressed, was a good question. For once it had become plain that they would all have to go Downside, she had felt Urruah's and Saash's fear at once. There was no hiding it from team members, not when the three of them had worked together so closely, for as long as they had….
Iaehh sighed and put the book down. "Oh, come on," Rhiow said under her breath, "couldn't you have made it a record? Thirty seconds or so?" But no: he lifted her, got up, and carefully put her down on the seat where he had been.
"I'm bushed," he said. "This way when I get in bed and your mom says, 'Did she come in?' I can say, 'Yes,' and be allowed to go to sleep. 'Night, plumptious cat."
She breathed out in resignation and watched him make the rounds of the apartment, checking the locks, turning out the lights, finally slipping through the bedroom door and closing it softly behind him.
Rhiow lay there, looking around the room in the faint yellow light that came up in stripes through the narrow venetian blinds: reflection from the streetlights down the alley outside.
"Plumptious," she thought. Is that a real ehhif word? I must look that up.
Oh, well… I have other things to do first.
Rhiow started washing, beginning as she did so to make a mental list of the spells she thought they would need for their journey. She felt like stuffing her head full of everything she could coax out of the Whisperer, and all the other spells she routinely carried with her, useful-seeming or not, from the air hardener right down to the "research" spell that had come with her Ordeal. But normally, the Whisperer would let you carry only so much; Her preference, apparently, was for you to call on Her as you needed new material. She would then provide it for you, whole, in your mind. There was a certain extra security, though, in having the spell ready to go, all spoken in your mind except for the final syllable….
But still.
Downside…
In the darkness, now that there was no one to see, Rhiow shuddered. Bad enough that time had done nothing whatever to mellow her memories of the team's last trip. But now there was an added problem: Arhu's voice, dry and strange, crying: It doesn't matter. It's coming anyway.
And what had the rest of that meant? It came before. Once to see. Once to taste. Once to devour—
She tried washing a little to get her composure back, but it didn't help. Finally she stopped and, instead of flinching away from the issue, "turned" in mind to face it.
Their intervention Downside had been bad the last time: bad. She had not been able to eat for days afterward: the mere feeling of food in her mouth made her retch and choke, so that her ehhif took her to the vet, where she endured indignities she couldn't prevent for the sake of explanations she couldn't make. Finally they had brought her home again, defeated by finding nothing physically wrong, and Rhiow had eventually found her appetite once more. But it had taken her a good while to gain back the lost weight, and all that time her food had tasted like dust, no matter what choice delicacies Iaehh and Hhuha had tempted her with.
She had seen the Ones Below, the Old Ones, the Wise Ones, the Children of the Serpent… and what they were doing to each other.
* * *
They were intelligent: that had been the worst of it. They had been the lords of the world, once. But something had gone very wrong.
…Like any wizard of every species from here to the galaxy's rim, Rhiow knew the generalities. The Powers That Be had made the worlds, under the One's instruction. Each Power had gone Its way, making the things that seemed to It most likely to forward the business of Creation as a whole. Abruptly, then, matters changed as one of the Powers, without warning, brought forth something that none of the others had expected or desired. It invented entropy: it created death.
War broke out in heaven. When the conflict died down, that one Power, furious with the others for the rejection of Its gift, was cast out into the darkness. But there was no getting rid of It so simply: the Lone Power (as various species called it) had been part of creation from the first, and It was part of it still.
There was relative quiet for a while after the battle as worlds formed, seas cooled, atmospheres condensed. Slowly life awakened in the worlds, ascended through each environment's necessary stages of physical complexity, and became intelligent. The Powers relaxed, at first: it now seemed as if Creation was going well.
But each species that became intelligent found itself being offered a chance, a Choice, by an often beautiful form that appeared to its first members early in its history. The Choice, after other issues were stripped away, was usually fairly simple. Take the path that the Powers seemed to have put before it— or turn aside into a path destined to make the species that trod it wiser, more powerful and blessed… more like gods.
The Choice took countless forms, each cunningly tailored to the species to which it was offered. But under its many guises, no matter how fair, it always spelled Death. The Lone Power went from sentient race to race, intent on tricking them into it: offering, again and again, the poisoned apple, the casket that must not be opened. Many species believed the fair promises and accepted the gift, condemning themselves to entropy and death forever after. Some species accepted it only partially, came to understand their error, and rejected it with greater or lesser levels of success, often involving terrible sacrifices that resonated back to earlier battles and sacrifices deep in time. Some species, by wisdom, or luck, or the unwinding of complex circumstance, never accepted the poisoned Gift at all… with results that various other creatures find hard to accept: but even on Earth, there are species that are never seen to die.
Rhiow shifted uncomfortably on the chair. The People had been offered the Choice just as everyone else had: like so many other species on Earth, they had not done well. They had been lucky, though, compared to the Wise Ones. Once upon a time, that had been a mighty people, coming to their dominance of the planet long before the primates or other mammals. Offered the Choice— and the Lone Power's gift, disguised as the assurance that their dominion would never fail while the sun shone— the reptilian forefathers of the Wise Ones chose what the great dark-scaled shape offered them. For a while, Its words were true: the great lizards strode the world and devoured what they would. But it was little more than an eyeblink in terms of geological time before, without warning, the hammerblow fell from the sky. The skies darkened with the massive amounts of dust thrown up by the initial meteoric impact and the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that followed. The sun no longer shone. The winds rose and stripped the lands bare: the great lizards, almost all of them, starved and died, lamenting the ill-made Choice… and hearing, in the howl of the bitter wind and the endless storms of dust and snow, the cruel laughter of the One who had tricked them.
Not all of them had died, of course. Some had found refuge in other worlds, places more central. One of those worlds was the one where the Old Downside lay. Down under the roots of the Mountain, the descendants of the survivors of the Wise Ones had found their last refuge. There they nursed their slow cold anger at the changes that had come over the world they ruled. They were no friends toward mammals, which they considered upstarts— degenerate inheritors of their own lost greatness. And to a mammal, the alien reptilian mindset that (at the beginning of things) had made the great lizards the exponents of an oblique and unusual wisdom now merely made them almost impossible to understand— treacherous, dangerous. Even some of the older ehhif stories had apparently come to reflect a few shattered fragments of the truth: tales of a tree, of a serpent that spoke, of an ancient enmity between mammals and serpents.
The enmity certainly remained. It hardly seemed to Rhiow as long as a year ago when she and Urruah and Saash had gone down into the caves under the Mountain for the first time, in search of the cause of a recurrent malfunction plaguing the gate that normally resided over by the platform for the Lexington Avenue line. They had inspected the "mirror" gates up at the top of the caves and had found that intervention there would not be suff
icient. Slowly they had made their way down into the caverns— a night and a day it had taken them to reach the place; they had even had to sleep there, uneasy nightmare-ridden sleep that it had been. Finally they had found the secondary, "catenary" gate matrix, the place where the immaterial power "conduits" of the upper gates came up through the living stone.
They had also found the Wise Ones, waiting for them just before the cavern where the catenary matrix lay.
There had been a battle. Its outcome had not been a foregone conclusion, even though the three of them were wizards. Rhiow and her team, driven to it, much regretting it (except possibly for Urruah, Rhiow thought), had killed the lizards who'd attacked them, and then began repairs on the gate. It had been clumsily sabotaged, apparently by the lizards interfering with the hyperstrings that led the catenary's energy conduit up through the stone: nonphysical though those "tethers" were, active tunneling under the right circumstances could displace them… and the Old Ones, by accident or other means, had gotten it right. Fortunately the damage had not been too serious. Rhiow and her team had rooted the gate-conduit more securely, caused new molten stone to flow in and reinforce its pathway through the stone, and had started to make their retreat.
That was when they found more of the lizards, furtive and hasty, devouring the bodies of those Rhiow and the others had killed. Urruah had charged them, scattering them: and the three of them had made their way hurriedly back to the surface and to the gateway to their own world. But Rhiow had not been able to forget the sight of an intelligent being, tearing the flesh of one of its own kind for food. What kind of life is that for any creature? Down there in the dark… with nothing to eat but…
She shivered again, then started breathing strong and slow to calm herself. Whisperer, she said silently, I have work to do. Tell me what I need to hear.
What do you have in mind? the answer came after a moment.
Rhiow told her. Shortly, what she needed to see had begun laying itself out before her mind: spell diagrams, the complex circles and spheres in which the words and signs of the Speech would be inscribed— either on some actual physical surface, or in her mind. From much practice and a natural aptitude, Rhiow had come to prefer the second method: she had discovered that a spell diagram, once "inscribed" in the right part of her memory, would stay there, complete except for the final stroke, or sigil, that would finish it. For the rest of it— words, equations, descriptions, and instructions— she simply memorized the information. Like other peoples with a lively oral tradition, cats have good memories. And Rhiow knew there was always backup, should a detail slip: the Whisperer was always there, ready to supply the needed information, as reliable as a book laid open would be for an ehhif.
You could carry too much, though— burden yourself with useless spells and find yourself without quick access to the one you really needed— so you had to learn to strike a balance, to "pack" cleverly. Rhiow selected several spells that could be used to operate on the "sick" gate— each tailored to a specific symptom it had been showing— and then several others. To the self-defense spells she gave particular thought. One line of reasoning was that the Old Ones, having been so thoroughly routed last time, wouldn't try anything much now. But Rhiow was unwilling to trust that idea— though it would be nice if it turned out that way. She packed several very emphatic destructive spells, designed not to affect a delicate gate halfway through its readjustment: spells designed to work on the molecular structure of tissue rather than with sheer blunt destructive force on any kind of matter, knives rather than sledgehammers. It was like Saash's approach to the rats— nasty but effective.
Finally Rhiow couldn't think of anything else she would need. The knowledge settled itself into her brain, the images and diagrams steadying down where she could get at them quickly. She began to relax a little. There was really nothing more to be done now but sleep. She would make sure she ate well in the morning: going out underfueled on one of these forays was never smart.
Rhiow closed her eyes, "looking" at the spell diagrams littering the workspace in her mind, a glowing word-scattered landscape. Other spells, recently used, lay farther out on the bright plain, less distinct, as if seen through mist: the last few months' worth of work, a foggy, dimly radiant tapestry. Even the spell that Ehef had mentioned was visible way off there, right at the edge of things, the "hobby" spell that she had picked up on her own Ordeal so long ago. Well, at least that's behind me.
It's not behind Arhu, though. Poor baby. I hope he makes it.
But so many of us don't….
She sighed, feeling sleep coming, and passed gratefully into dream.
* * *
The warmth was all around her but slightly stronger from one side, like the fire her ehhif would light in the apartment's old fireplace once in a while, in the winter, when they thought they could get away with it. The Whispering had died away some time ago; now there was only the comforting presence of the Silent One, and the hint of a rumbling, reassuring purr that ran through everything.
Madam, Rhiow said, I'm frightened.
So are we all, in the face of That, the answer came. Or almost all of us are. My sister the Firstborn wasn't. But that was always her style, to go into battle laughing, as if there were no possibility of defeat. Maybe she knows something the rest of us don't. Or that may simply be in her nature as our Dam made it. For the mortal and the semimortal, at least change, the learning of courage, is an option. But for those of us whose natures were set at the beginning of things, we must, I fear, simply be afraid while we keep on doing our jobs. A god that forgets the virtues of specialization, trying to do things It was never designed for, soon becomes no god, but a tyrant.
Like your other sister, madam…
I don't speak of her, the answer came. We see enough of her as it is. You will shortly see more.
I really don't want to, Rhiow said.
Little enough attention the worlds pay to what any of us want, the answer came. As always, there was a slight edge of humor in the Whisperer's voice, but it was more muted than usual. Desire, though… and intention… those are other powers to which even the Powers must answer. Go do your job, daughter. I'll do mine. Perhaps both of them may yet come to something….
The silence became complete, though, still reassuring, the warmth remained. The dim glow of the spells faded, and Rhiow slept.
Six
Morning came up clear but not at all cool, and Rhiow was awakened early by Hhuha complaining as she got dressed. "Must be eighty out there already," she was saying to Iaehh. "And the damn air conditioner at the office is on the blink again. I swear, a company that makes profits every year that could be mistaken for the GNP of a small country, but they'll let the staff sit there and swelter for two weeks in a row before they get someone in to fix the thing so it doesn't produce heat in August…."
"Sue, you should quit," Iaehh said.
Rhiow got up and stretched and went over to where Hhuha leaned against one of the counters in the kitchen. "Here he goes again," she said under her breath, rubbing against Hhuha's legs, and then went to the food bowl. This argument was one that happened about once a month, these days. Hhuha was a salaried consultant for one of the larger computer companies with offices in the city; but before this job, she had been "freelance"— nonaligned, Rhiow thought this meant— and had worked for whom she pleased. Iaehh— who was presently still wrapped in only his bathrobe and was leaning against the other counter, facing Hhuha— thought Hhuha should be freelance again, even though it meant less certainty about how much they would have to eat each week or (sometimes) whether they would eat at all.
"I wish. Damn contract," Hhuha said, pouring milk in her coffee.
"Some of that down here, please?" Rhiow said loudly.
"So don't sign it the next time."
"Don't tempt me…."
"I am tempting you. Don't commit yourself to them again. Go independent and let them pay twice what they're paying now if they want your services. Otherwi
se, let someone else pay twice what they're paying."
Hhuha put the milk away, sighing. "I don't know… I've gotten kind of used to the steady paycheck…."
"I know you have."
"Excuse me? Milk?" Rhiow said, standing up on her hind legs and patting the bottom of Hhuha's skirt. "Oh, sweet Iau, but I wish just once I could say it so you would understand. Hello? Hhuha?!"
Hhuha looked at Rhiow, bent down and stroked her. "More cat food, honey? Sure. I don't know, though, Mike… There's so much competition out there… and so much uncertainty. In your job, too. You and I can starve. But someone else wouldn't understand if the food ran out…."
She straightened up and started to open another can of cat food. "Don't blame it on me," Rhiow said. "You should do what makes you happy…. Oh, gods, not the tuna again!— Look, Hhuha! Saucer! Empty! Milk!!"
"Wow, she really likes that stuff," Iaehh said. "Better get some more."
"I'll stop by the store on the way home."
"But, hon, you really should think about it. The hours there are wearing you out. You keep having to bring work home. They're not giving you the support they promised. They can't even keep the air conditioners working, as you say. You're not happy there…."
Rhiow sighed, hating to look ungrateful, and went over to the ffrihh, stood up on her hind legs against it, and patted the handle, looking mournfully at Hhuha.
"What?" Hhuha said.
"You put the milk away without offering her any," Iaehh said.
"Why can't more toms have brains like yours?" Rhiow said, and went straight to him and rubbed his legs, too, while Hhuha opened the ffrihh and got the milk out again. "What a clever ehhif you are."