Arhu turned away from Rhiow. "It's sick to be so worried about everybody else," he said, refusing to look at her. "People should care about themselves first. That's the way we're built."
"You've bought into the myth too, have you," Rhiow said, rather dryly. "Sometimes I wonder if the houiff started that one, but I'm not sure they're that subtle. I suspect the concept's older, and goes back further, to our own people's version of the Choice." She looked at him, though, saw the set, angry look of his face, and flirted her tail sideways, a why-am-I-bothering? gesture. "I think your stomach is making you cranky," she said. "Let's go down and see about a bite more of that cheese— Oh. Wait a moment—"
An ehhif in a suit, and carrying a briefcase, was coming along the colonnade. Arhu stared at him with alarm, for the ehhif plainly saw them and was making directly for them. He got ready to jump—
"Not that way!" Rhiow said three hurried words in the Speech, and hardened the air behind Arhu just before he launched himself straight out into the main concourse. "It's all right, sit still!"
Arhu sat back down, shocked, digging his claws into the marble. The approaching ehhif paused, glanced around him casually, put the briefcase down, then turned around and leaned on his elbows on the railing, and stared out across the concourse himself.
"Nice to see you, Har'lh," Rhiow said. "Thanks for the backup yesterday."
"Don't mention it. I would have come myself, but I was otherwise occupied." He glanced sideways, only very briefly. "Good to meet you, Arhu," he said. "Go well. An excellent job you folks did. Nice going with that, Rhiow."
"Thanks, Har'lh. I could have done without the last part of it, but at least we brought our skins home whole. Going down to inspect the catenary?"
"I doubt I'll need to go down that far… I just want a look at the main matrices up top."
"All right. But Saash thinks the whole thing needs to be rewoven."
"So she said. When she makes her full report, I'll look into it in more detail and have a word with the Supervisory Wizard for the North American region," Har'lh said. "It's not a job I'd care for, though. Logistically it would be something of a nightmare. Not to mention unsafe for Saash if the job started to get more complicated than she thought."
"Don't things usually?" Rhiow said. Then, a little mischievously, she added, "I'm curious, though, Har'lh. You don't seem much bothered by these inspection runs. What happens to your physicality, Downside?"
"Well now, I would think some people might consider that a personal question," Har'lh said, giving her an amused look. "But let's just say I won't be able to stop going to the gym any time soon. My looks don't change down there the way People's do. Pity."
Rhiow put her whiskers forward at him. "Is Tom back from Geneva yet?"
"Later tonight. I'm glad he'll be getting back…. Between work and Work, I've been getting short of sleep."
Rhiow had figured that out already: Har'lh's rugged good looks had acquired a rather brittle edge over the past few days. "The way you keep pouring cappucino down yourself, are you surprised?" she said, and whisked her tail back and forth in a tsk, tsk gesture. "Your body isn't going to thank you, Har'lh."
"All right, now, you wait just a minute, Miss Cream Junkie," Har'lh said, smiling slightly. "You're lecturing me about my body?"
Rhiow put one ear back in the mildest annoyance. Hhuha had discovered that Rhiow was very partial to whipping cream… and Rhiow had not exactly talked her out of it. It was a couple of weeks after that time that Rhiow had first heard the bizarre adjective "plumptious." Shortly thereafter Hhuha had stopped bringing cream home and had subjected Rhiow to a very annoying withdrawal ("Is it smart to just do this 'cold turkey'?" Iaehh had asked, and Rhiow had practically shouted, "Cold turkey would be very nice in these circumstances, yes, give me some!"— to no avail). There had followed a course of what purported to be diet cat food, but which Rhiow firmly believed to be textured, compressed sawdust in a shiny gravy consisting mostly of lacquer. Next to it, the foul disgusting tuna of recent days could actually have been considered an improvement, though that was not something that Rhiow was ever going to let Hhuha know. "Life around ehhif can be a little too fat-free sometimes," she said. "I'm just grateful she didn't try to turn me vegetarian." She shuddered, knowing cats whose well-meaning but very confused ehhif had tried this tack. Mostly the People involved had found themselves short a life very quickly, unless they managed to get away and start over elsewhere.
"Completely the wrong lifestyle for you guys," Har'lh said, and glanced down. "I wish my kind wouldn't keep trying that crap.— Hey, Urruah, how they shakin'?"
"In all directions, as usual," Urruah said, and jumped up on the railing next to Rhiow. " 'Luck, you two." He leaned over toward Arhu, breathed breaths with him. "Is that mozzarella I taste? Rhi, you spoil this kit."
Arhu looked at Urruah, and said, "Half a quarter pounder with cheese and bacon. You ate the lettuce?" He grimaced. "What a big bunny!"
"Oh yeah? So how do you know what lettuce tastes like?"
"I'm going Downside," Har'lh said, "before something gets out of hand here. Give Saash my best, Rhiow. I'll talk to her as soon as I get topside again."
" 'Luck," Rhiow said, and Har'lh strode away toward the stairway, swinging his briefcase idly.
Urruah was looking at Arhu a little oddly. "Half a quarter pounder?" he said. "How do you know?"
"I see you eating it," Arhu said.
"Saw," Urruah said pointedly.
"No. I see you eating it now," Arhu said. He was looking at the blank marble wall as if there was far more there to see. "The MhHonalh's down in the subway, at Madison and Fifty-first. A tom-ehhif and a queen-ehhif are eating outside it, and talking. Then talking louder. Real loud. All of a sudden they start fighting—" Arhu's look was blank but bewildered. "He hits her, and tries to hit her again but she ducks back, and then he comes at her again, now he's feeling around in his jacket for something, but all of a sudden he trips over something he can't see and falls down, and he's getting up and feels in his jacket again— and then the transit cops come around the corner: he gets up and runs away, and the queen is standing there—'crying'—"
Urruah's eyes were very round as he looked over at Rhiow. "It really is the Eye, isn't it?" Urruah said softly.
"The ehhif's dropped his quarter pounder on the floor there," Arhu said, as if he hadn't heard. "I see you pick it up and take it away behind the garbage can. No one else sees, they're all looking at the ehhif-queen and the cops—"
Rhiow looked at Urruah, her tail twitching thoughtfully. "That was a nice move," she said.
"I might have done it only for the burger," Urruah said, looking elsewhere.
Rhiow put her whiskers right forward at the phrasing, for the one thing wizards dare not do with words is lie. "Of course it's the Eye," she said. "The symbol for it was in the spell. We worked the spell… and spells always work. I think he may have had this talent in latent form, before… but the presence of the symbol in the spell reaffirmed it, and now it's really starting to focus."
Arhu was looking at Rhiow again. "I see you now," he said, a little desperately. "But I see that, too. And other things. A lot of them at once…"
"It's the 'eternal present,' " Rhiow said. "I heard about it once from Ffairh: if you ever get stuck in a gate, in an artificially prolonged transit, you can start seeing things that way. Not a good sign, normally…"
"But I'm not normal," Arhu said, suddenly sounding very weary.
"No," Rhiow said wearily. "And neither are we. We are all weirdoes together… but the 'together' is the important part."
She sighed then. " 'Look, I could use a small dose of normalcy myself. Let's all go back to my neighborhood; they're starting the day's bout of hauissh, and we can sit and just kibitz for a while. You two skywalk over: Arhu can use the practice. No birds," she said to Arhu, at the sight of that gleam starting to creep back into his eye. "I have a little something to take care of here; I'll meet you there in half an
hour or so. Yafh's stoop, maybe?"
"Sounds like a plan. Come on, youngster, let's you and the Big Bunny show them how we do it uptown."
And Urruah turned and strolled straight out onto the air over the main concourse, forty feet up, heading for the front doors.
Eyes wide, suddenly delighted, Arhu scampered out across the air after him. Rhiow stood there, absolutely transfixed with horror lest they be seen. But no one looked up. No one in the city ever looks up.
She watched them go, unnoticed; then let out a long breath at the lunacy of toms and headed back toward the Italian deli.
* * *
When Rhiow got home, she found that her ehhif had been out as well, to dinner and a movie, and apparently had been back only a little while: Iaehh was going through the freezer, apparently hunting a frozen pizza. Rhiow walked over into the little kitchen and found her food bowl empty. She looked meaningfully at Iaehh, and said loudly, "I wouldn't keep you waiting for your dinner."
Iaehh shut the ffrihh and started going through the cupboards. "Sue?"
No answer. "Sue?"
"Oh, sorry, honey…" came the voice from the bedroom. "My mind was elsewhere."
"I was looking for that tuna stuff."
"Oh, there isn't any… the store was out of it."
"Thank you, Queen of us all," Rhiow said, heartfelt, and put her face down in the bowl. It was a nice hearty mixture, beef and something else: rabbit? Turkey? Who cares? Delightful.
"I'll pick up some of it tomorrow."
"I'll enjoy this while it lasts," Rhiow muttered.
"She seems to like this all right, though."
"Good…" Hhuha said, as she came back into the living room.
"You sound tired."
"I am tired. Another day of fighting with the damn system, and the damn network, and the damn air conditioner…"
He came over to her and held her. "I wish you could find a way to get out of there."
Hhuha sighed. "Yeah, well, I've been thinking about that, too. It's making you as unhappy as it's making me."
"I wouldn't put it that strongly."
"I would. So, listen… I've got an appointment in a couple of days."
"Oh? Who with?"
"A headhunter."
"You didn't tell me about this!"
"I'm telling you now. The guy's been on the phone to me a couple of times over the last year. At first I didn't want to do anything; you know, I thought things at the office might improve."
"Yeah, sure."
"Well, I did. But the other day I thought, 'Okay.' " She snickered. "You should have seen me sneaking out to a pay phone at lunchtime, like some kind of crook."
"Well, it wouldn't be great for you if they heard you talking about it in the early stages of the negotiations, I admit."
"In any stages. Someone else in the company was that dumb, last year. They were pink-slipped within minutes of the word getting out. I don't plan to have that happen, believe me."
"So who's he headhunting for?"
"A couple of different companies, apparently. He's willing to arrange interviews with both if my resumé holds up. We'll be talking about that day after next. Lunchtime appointment."
"Hey, wow. Good luck!"
A brief silence while they nuzzled each other. "It's a little scary," Hhuha said after a little while. "Jumping before I'm pushed…"
"You were always the brave one."
"No. I just hate being taken advantage of… and I've been starting to get that feeling…"
Another small silence. "Want to be taken advantage of now?"
"I thought you'd never ask."
They went into the bedroom, chuckling. Rhiow lifted her head to watch them go, then put her whiskers forward and went out her little door, softly, so that they would not think they had scared the cat.
* * *
On the rooftop, she lay comfortably sprawled in the still warmth. Air conditioners thundered around her, a basso rumble and rattle through the night, the fans of the cooling towers showing as gleaming disks in the light of the nearly full Moon that was sliding, golden, up the eastern sky.
Rhiow looked up at it thoughtfully. Rhoua's Eye, its glory hidden behind the world, glanced past it (as legend had it) into the Great Tom's eye, which reflected its light; growing from slit to eye half-open to eye round and staring, and then shrinking down to slitted eye and full-dark invisibility again, as the month went round. There were People who believed, in the face of ubiquitous evidence to the contrary, that the feline eye mirrored the Moon's phase. Rhiow had been amazed, and very amused, to find that some ehhif had the same story.
There were wizardly connections as well. Apparently the ehhif version of The Gaze of Rhoua's Eye, the defining document that contained descriptions of all beings and all wizardry in this particular part of the universe, originally took the form of an actual book that could be read only by moonlight: hence its ehhif name, The Book of Night with Moon. Supposedly the Book had to be read from, at intervals, to keep all existence in place, and everything correctly defined. I wouldn't care to be the one who does the reading, Rhiow thought, looking out over the city as the Moon went quietly up the sky. Too much exposure to such power, such knowledge, and you could lose yourself as surely as you might lose yourself Downside if you stayed too long…
But that was the danger all over wizardry: there were so many different kinds of existence, alien and fascinating, to lose your nature in…. Though was this perhaps some kind of obscure hint from the Powers, Rhiow wondered, that you might be expected to lose your nature eventually?… A hint of the way things would be, someday, when the world was finally set right, and all the kinds of existence were united in timelessness, perfected and made whole, as the Oath intimated they would be?
…Maybe. But she wasn't ready.
The question of the danger was always there, though, for a practicing wizard. When you were on the universe's business all the time, with a wizard's multifarious worries on your mind, were you likely to start losing your felinity? I wonder, she thought, if the ehhif wizards have this problem… if they fear losing their "humanity" as a result of having to cope with the larger worldview, the bigger mindset, in which no language or way of life is superior to any other, and each must be valued on its own terms? I can understand why it must look crazy to Arhu that I spend so much time worrying about houiff and ehhif and whatnot….
But then, she thought, I have ehhif of my own to think about, after all. The habit's hard to break….
All the same… the worry niggled at her, occasionally, and was doing so again. It was something she had occasionally felt she should talk to Ehef about. But then she would get busy with some assignment….
Maybe that's not good, Rhiow thought after a while. How many years have I been at this, now? And when did I last have a vacation from the Art? A real one, when I wouldn't be on call, and could stay home, and eat that terrible cat food, and lie in the sun, and purr at Hhuha… and just be People…
The problem was, of course, that she knew perfectly well how much time and energy the Powers That Be had invested in her. Go on vacation… and that invested energy would be lost, even for that little while: as in hauissh, any move which is not an attack means lost ground. The heat death of the universe doesn't speed up… but it doesn't slow down as much as it might have. Lie basking in the sun… and know that the power that runs the sun is running out at its usual speed, trickling away like blood from a wound… and you're not doing anything to make sure the world keeps going that little bit longer to enjoy that warmth and light.
She sighed. I will know doubt, she thought, slipping into the Meditation, and fear: I will suspect myself of folly and impracticality in this seemingly hard-edged world, where things clouded or obscure are so often discounted as unimportant, and mystery is derided, and uncertainty is seen as a sign of an inability to cope. But my commission comes from Those Who move in the shadows, indistinct and unseen for Their own purpose: Those Whom we never see face to face exce
pt in the faces of those we meet from day to day. In Them is my trust, until I am relieved of Their trust in me. I will learn to live with uncertainty, for it is the earnest of Their promise that all things may yet be well; and when, in the shadows, the doubts arise, I will close my eyes and say, This is no shade to Them; for my part, I will bide here and wait for the dawn….
She closed her eyes and dozed.
* * *
Rhi, Saash's voice came suddenly.
Rhiow opened her eyes, surprised. The Moon was much farther across the sky, westering now. "What is it?" she said. "Are you all right?"
I'm fine. But Rhiow, have you heard anything from Har'lh?
"He said he was going to talk to you after he came back from Downside," Rhiow said.
Well, he hasn't.
"Maybe something else came up," Rhiow said. "He's a Senior, for Iau's sake. It's not like he hasn't got ten million people to keep an eye on."
Rhi, you're not listening. He hasn't come back from Downside. The gate logs show his access… but not his egress.
Rhiow sat up, shaking her head. "He could have come back by another gate. And he did say he might take a look at the catenary if he had to—"