But it wasn't my Choice. It's theirs… they're stuck with it.
It's a shame you can't trade in a Choice after a test run, though, and say to the Powers That Be, "Sorry, the Lone One fooled us, this Choice is defective, we want another chance."
The silence that fell in Rhiow's mind in the wake of the idle thought was so profound that it practically rang. It was familiar, that silence: the Whisperer suggesting that you might just have stumbled onto something….
Rhiow's eyes widened as she reexamined the thought.
The Choice offered to the forefathers and foremothers of the Wise Ones… could it be that it was defective? Flawed, somehow? Incomplete?
Ridiculous. Whoever heard of an incomplete Choice before? There's a pattern. The Lone One turns up… says, "Would you like to live as the Powers have told you you must, or take a gamble on another way that might work out better?" And you gamble, and fall: or refuse…
And then Rhiow stopped.
But the saurian Choice had to be incomplete. There had been no wizards there. And there had to be wizards: the whole spectrum of a species' life, both natural and supranatural, had to be represented for the Choice to be valid.
Or… She stared at the stone between her paws. No. A species' Choice is its own.
Or was it? If the species was linked to another…
…did the other have to be there, taking part, as well? Taken together with Ith's Oath, with the Ailurin words in it…
…the thought shook Rhiow. The People were their own. They were utterly independent. That some other species would have been involved in their Choice was unthinkable… a challenge to their sovereignty over themselves. That they should be ancillary to some other species' Choice…
That was simply intolerable.
But Rhiow got the cold, no-nonsense feeling in her gut, when she turned to the Whisperer, which suggested that this might indeed be the case.
If this Choice was incomplete… it can be completed now. By a saurian wizard… and those intended to help him complete it, to judge by the language in it. His assistants: his people's supplanters…
Us!
She writhed a little, then cursed, and went over the Whisperer's head.
Iau, why are you dumping this on me?
You were there, came the answer, definite and instantaneous, its Source unmistakable. Or rather: You were not there. You are there now.
Choose.
And the choice was plain. Choose one way, refuse your species' help, and drive the serpents out into the cold and the dark, and damn them all. Let life be as it is, unchanged and stable, to be relied upon.
Choose another way and lose your species' autonomy forever, or whatever illusion of it you have had until now. The People's whole proud history becomes merely a footnote, a preliminary to the advent of these newborns, unable to make their own way without help; midwives to a race that had its chance and lost it, a million years ago. Nature killed them. Let nature be the arbiter: their time is over for good.
Yet nature is not innocent when the Lone One drives it. Or, rather: it remains innocent, not knowing who holds the wheel and uses it as a weapon. Is the storm to blame, or the Lone Power, when the lightning strikes and kills some noble soul about the business of saving life? Do you blame nature or sa'Rráhh when a cab comes too fast around the corner and—
Rhiow's tail lashed. Devastatrix, Rhiow said inside her, I know your work. You will not fool me twice.
Yet it was not a question of anyone being fooled, anymore. Here was a Choice that had not been completed at the beginning of things. The Lone One— illegally?? Rhiow thought, shuddering at the concept— had convinced another species that its Choice had been made. They had suffered, had died in their millions (billions?) for the Lone Power's amusement, for the sake of a technicality, an injustice done that the victim-species was incapable of perceiving.
Now someone had come along and perceived the injustice, the incomplete Choice. What do you do?
Pass by on the other side? Rhiow was a New Yorker; she had seen her share of this. Make a stink? Get yourself killed as a result? She had seen this too.
And getting yourself killed would be the least of it. You were interfering in the business of gods and demigods, here. What happens, in the human idiom, when you take the Lone Power to court and try to convict It of malfeasance? A slippery business, at best. But the destruction of much more than your body would be fair to expect if you failed.
Oh well, Rhiow thought, what do I need all these lives for, anyway? The thought was bitter. Memories of Hhuha, unbidden, definitely unwanted at the moment, kept shocking through her like static on a rug in winter every minute or so, and the pain they caused Rhiow was beginning to tell. Anything that would stop that pain was beginning to look welcome.
Your hands on the wheel, though, she said inwardly to sa'Rráhh, fluffing up slightly. Not an accident. There are no such things.
Unfair, that at the time when I would most like to die, I must now fight hardest to live longest. And for the sake of these miserable, bad-smelling, cold-skinned snakes. She hissed in fury, causing Urruah to open his eyes a little wider and stare at her. Iau, you rag-eared kitten-eater, I hate this, I hate You, why me?
No answer, but then, when someone was yowling abuse at you, a dignified silence was the preferred response. Rhiow thought of the two Himalayans down the block and growled at herself, at her own bad manners, at life in general. Unfair…
You found it. You fix it.
The universe's eternal principle. Repair yourself if you can. Spend the least possible energy doing it. If you can't manage it… tough. And Ehef's succinct comment on Rhiow's observation long ago that this seemed mean-spirited of the Powers, and hard on Their creation: What do you think this is, a charity?
She sighed. I was right, Rhiow thought, we are certainly all going to die. For during Choice, some of the participants always die: no Choice is valid without that most final commitment. And if even one of the team died, all would be trapped below: all would die together.
The only thing we can do, I suppose, is make sure we make it work… make it all worthwhile.
Yet the other side of the paradox was that, for the Choice to take, some must also survive; otherwise there will be no one to implement it.
That'll be Ith, I suppose.
But who even knows if Ith will cooperate? For everything would turn on him, at last. It was all very well to think about him taking the part of the saurian wizard who should have been present at his People's choice, and remaking it, or rather making it for the first time— becoming, as it were, his People's Father. But his ambivalences were likely enough to destroy any such chance: he was as angry and uncertain in his own way as Arhu had been.
But if we don't get him to cooperate somehow… Those empty doorways in the upper corridors… they would not be empty for long. Rhiow thought of places like the great Crossroads worldgating facility on the sixth planet of Rirhath B: many permanently emplaced gates, leading into thousands of otherwheres, and used freely for travel by species accustomed to such technologies, part science and part wizardry. The Old Downside would become such a place if the Lone One had its way with the saurians. Those doors would be filled with vistas of other worlds, forced open in places previously innocent of such travel— and out through them would pour armies of warrior lizards, intent on killing whatever they found. "Misused territories": that had been the line from the catechism taught to Ith by the Great One. Ith fortunately seemed to have renounced it, but millions of others of his kind, it seemed, would not. They would take other worlds gladly: the lost race would become masters of an interstellar empire— even an intercontinual one.
Still… Arhu had said it when asked who Ith was: The father. My son. You've got to bring him along….
She glanced up at them and found them nearly nose to nose now, against the wall and glaring at each other again.
You can't just sit around when this is what happened to your people, Arhu was saying loudly
to Ith. You have to do something. You saw. You were tricked! His tone was just a touch uncertain; he was new to this kind of advocacy… but he was doing his best.
Then Rhiow blinked. "Why, you little monster," she muttered, "you were in my head again!! Urruah, did you know that he—"
"Rhi, you're loud sometimes when you muse," Urruah said, with slightly malicious amusement. "Sorry, I know it's probably to do with— Sorry," he said abruptly, and sat down and started to wash.
Rhiow felt the pain bite her again. She swallowed, licked her nose a couple of times, tried to put it out of her mind.
The Great One would have His reasons, Ith said, very slowly.
Yeah! Killing the whole bunch of you, and everything else It can get Its hands on! Can't you see?
I see too much. You see too much. There is blood everywhere; it runs across the world's face, and nothing we do will stop it.
Arhu licked his nose. That's not right. It's to stop that kind of thing that we've come.
You cannot stop it or even change it. Much less can I change it. Ith bowed his head down to Arhu again, locked eyes with him. This is typical mammal-thought: quick questions, quick answers, the hope that everything will be all right with action taken now and done in a moment. Perhaps matters would improve for a year, or two, or ten. But in fifty? Two hundred? Five hundred? All will be again as it was. More will have died. The pain will go on, the blood will run.
You're wrong, Arhu said. You have to help us with what we've come to do. It's not just for us. It's for everything!
Everything, Ith said, is foul.
Arhu couldn't find anything much to say for a second.
All there is here is death, Ith said. Those who will kill eat those who must die so that others can kill. When we come up into the sun, we will kill again. How many lives must pass before it all ends? Here, under this so-warm sun, and on other worlds, and in places where there are not even stars to shine, places completely strange to us: how many more of every kind will die? Each of those places has its own life: we will come into each one and destroy it. The image, which had run vaguely through Rhiow's mind, ran clear through his own— his gift, or Arhu's Eye, could see it all: endless planes and planets, devastated. The immense distances between galaxies, between continua, would not be enough to stop a race of saurians made immortal by combined technology and wizardry. And finally, That Which has used us to destroy everything will destroy us as well… laughing that we were fools enough to be Its instruments. I hear Its laughter even now, for the process is well begun.
…And you know all this to be true, Ith said, leaning down more closely to Arhu; and suddenly the air itched with wizardry, spelling done without diagrams, but in the mind… if it was spelling, and not some saurian congener to the Whispering. I see it in you, as you have seen it, though you have denied the sight. I see you too have heard the laughter. Forward in time: and back.
Arhu looked up into Ith's eyes, an expression of horror growing on his face, his eyes going wide, slowly going almost totally to dark. He crouched down, still gazing up into Ith's eyes, his claws starting to dig into the stone, scrabbling at it. Arhu seemed unaware of what he was doing.
"They were crying, first," he said softly. "Not laughing. Ehhif have such weird sounds, you can't tell them apart half the time… But it was warm. Our dam was there, so we weren't afraid of the noises they made. The little ones, the ehhif-kits, they were crying, but they did that a lot if you scratched them, or when they scratched each other. I didn't know the words then. Now I know them. 'Daddy, please, Daddy, let us keep them, let us keep just one, just one, Daddy…' "
Rhiow rolled quietly upright, glanced over at Urruah. He was still sitting leaning against the wall, his eyes closed down to slits, but he was awake, watching and listening. Saash had her back to Rhiow, but Rhiow saw an ear flick, just once.
Arhu lay still gazing up into Ith's eyes, his claws working, working on the stone. "He said, 'We can't keep them, the landlord won't let us have more than one, I told your mother not to let her out until we got her spayed, well, it's her fault, you take it up with her….' He picked us up. He wasn't bad about it, he was always careful when he picked us up. He put us in a dark place. It rustled. He closed it up. We couldn't smell our mother anymore. We heard her crying then, we tried to get to her, but we couldn't see, it was dark, we were all jammed together in the dark, and then the noise started."
Rhiow swallowed, watching the convulsive, obsessive movement of Arhu's claws on the stone. "It was loud. We didn't know what it was. A bus, I think now. We couldn't smell anything but each other, and some of us got scared and made hiouh or siss in the bag, it got all over us and smelled terrible, we could hardly smell each other anymore. The noise stopped; we were crying, but no one would let us out, we didn't know where our dam was— Then something pushed us hard against one side of the bag. It felt strange, we were falling, we tried to come down on our feet. Then there was another big noise, we came down hard, it hurt…."
Arhu swallowed. The fear in his voice was growing. "It was cold. We were crying and trying to get out, but the black stuff wouldn't give no matter how we clawed at it, our claws weren't any good. And then we hit something, and after that it started to get wet inside, not just from our siss. Wetter and wetter. A lot of water. The bag was getting full. There wasn't air. We kept falling in the water, and it got in our faces, we couldn't breathe. We tried to stay up… but the only way we could stay up was by climbing on each, climbing on each other…"
Saash had slowly come to her feet now and was slipping close to Arhu, but he paid her no attention, only gazing up at Ith. It was as if he saw, in those reptilian eyes, the one vision he had been steadfastly denying himself, or saw it mirrored, as the other saw…
"They bubbled," Arhu said, his voice dropping to a whisper. "They bubbled when they breathed the water. They stopped moving. Their smells went away. They died. And the rest of us had to climb on them, on their bodies, and put our heads up and try to breathe, and there was less and less room, less and less air, and it was so cold."
Barely even a whisper, now; even that faded. "So cold. Nowhere to breathe. Sif died last. She was my twin almost, she had my same spots. She bubbled underneath me. I felt the breath go out, I smelled her scent go away…." I was the last one. I was the strongest. I climbed best. Then the last air went away. I started to bubble. It was cold inside me. It got black. I said, Good, I want to be with my littermates. But I couldn't. Something grabbed the thing, the bag we were in, and pulled us out, and broke the bag open. It was an ehhif. It saved me, it dumped me out on the ground. Incredible bitterness at that. It dried me off, it took me to a bright place, they fed me, they put me in a warm room. Later another ehhif came and took me away. She fed me, she kept me in her den. She gave me a hiouh box, but every time I made siss or hiouh in it, it would smell of them, and I would remember my brothers and sisters, how they smelled finally, and how they started to bubble, and I couldn't go back to the box. I had to make the hiouh somewhere else in the ehhif's den. And then she took me out of her den and put me in a shoulderbag and took me in another loud thing, a bus, and she put me down in the street, and she went away fast, in another bus. I couldn't find her den again. I went to live behind the Gristede's.
His claws were starting to splinter. Saash, behind him, began slowly to wash his ear. Arhu was still looking up at Ith, into the saurian's eyes.
I heard the laughing, Arhu said, over the soft grating of his claws on the stone. When the ehhif threw us in the water. And while we were drowning: that laughing. It knows nothing can stop It, or what It does. It can do it whenever It wants. It was the Lone One at the bottom of the ehhif's heart that made it do that. It's always at the bottom. I see It now. And It's at the bottom here. I see…
You also see, Ith said, how there is nothing but the pain, no matter what we do against It.
There was a long, long pause: almost one of Ith's own.
I don't know, Arhu said.
He said nothin
g more. Saash washed him, her purr of pain and compassion rumbling and echoing loud in the long dark hallway. The flexing of Arhu's claws was slowly stopping; his head dropped so that he was no longer staring at Ith. Arhu lay there gazing down at the barren black stone of the floor, and did not move or think, at least for any of them to hear.
Rhiow slowly got up and paced over to where Urruah leaned against the wall. What now? Urruah said to her.
Let him alone for a while, Rhiow said. He needs time to recover, after that. And frankly, after hearing it, so do I. Arhu's pain had shaken Rhiow, in some ways, worse than her own had been doing.
They went away and sat down together, leaving Saash with Arhu, while Ith leaned down over them both as Saash washed, a peculiar kind of company.
So, Urruah said. The Lone One tried with you, and failed… I think. Now It's tried with him… and there's no way to tell how It's done. Who's next?