Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

Suddenly the pressure itself started to become too much to bear. There in the debatable territory between times, Rhiow found herself unable to breathe, almost unable to think, for the sense of something pushing in on her — not the spell but something outside it, not time but something outside it: something bearing down on her, hard, and intending to bear down in such wise on everything else if only it could. It was as terrible in its sheer crushing weight as a mountain’s weight of stone would have been— and impersonal in ways not even stone could manage. She could sense consciousness, yes, but also a vast chilly uncaring that was in its way far worse than any sense of active evil. Worse than the Lone One, Rhiow heard Hwaith saying in her mind, as she gasped for breath and couldn’t find any. Far worse — Oh, Iau help me, he was right, what do we do now — ?!

And then she was flung down hard on stony ground, on a slope, and rolled a few feet before she came to a stop, bruised and almost embarrassed enough not to care that she could breathe again. No cat likes falling without even having had a chance to try to get her feet under her. Rhiow got up angry, shaking herself, her tail lashing.

“Welcome to L.A.,” Hwaith said out of the darkness.

Growling under their breaths, or muttering, she could hear the others getting up. Rhiow stared around her hurriedly, still blinded by contrast with the day from which they’d come. And then she heard Helen say:

“Holy Coyote, what’s happened to the light?…”

The Big Meow: Chapter Four

Rhiow looked down the length of the valley where they stood, into a hazy darkness that glittered faintly. Spread out before them like a broad carpet, stretching away to a dimly-seen horizon, were city lights; but the color of the glittering light was strangely white and cool, and not nearly as bright as she would have expected. As Rhiow watched, the light seemed to dim almost to nothing in patches, then brighten again. Rhiow realized she was seeing the city’s light through a haze of what at first glance looked like low cloud.

Just behind her, Arhu was sniffing. “Smog,” he said under his breath.

Helen let out a long breath, looking around her. “Even before there were cars and factories,” Helen said, “the People living down there called it ‘the Valley of the Smokes…’. The inversion layer’ll hold anything down that comes up from sea level: even our campfires were enough to do it.” She shook her head, looking down the valley again. “And it’s a long time before the clean-air legislation starts to cut in. But there’s still a lot more in the air than just hydrocarbons and ozone…”

Rhiow, scenting it, had to agree. It was strange to be right above a city, and yet be standing in air so strongly scented with orange blossom, almond blossom, citrus, the corky, woody scent of walnut…

“And I see what it is now,” Helen said, sitting down on a nearby fallen trunk of a scrub oak. “About the light. It’s strange not to see the sodium-vapor lights we’ve got in our own time. You get used to city light being a lot brighter, and very orange…”

“Sodium vapor?” Hwaith, sitting nearby in the shadow of a manzanita, flirted his tail. “No, those are a good ways downtime from us, I’d say. The ehhif here are using incandescent bulbs with little tin reflectors over them.”

“I’m a little disoriented,” Rhiow said to Hwaith. “I think I smell morning coming, but it’s hard to tell – “

“You’re right,” Hwaith said. “The Eye will be up in about three hours, but the skyglow’s obscured by the mist this time of year, and the city lights confuse things. Downhill from is us southward. And over to the left is my badly-behaved friend…”

There, hanging and wavering gently in midair in the shadow of several skeletal gray-needled pines, was this time’s version of the LA gate. Rhiow looked at it for a moment, and got an odd feeling as she did so; there was something almost uneasy about the way it was rippling, not in the usual steady rhythm, but with a kind of shiver interfering intermittently with the ripples. “It doesn’t look right,” she said.

“No,” Urruah said, “it doesn’t. The chroma of the weft looks way off.” He glanced over at Aufwi. “You know this gate better than any of our group does, though – “

Aufwi lashed his tail. “Definitely looks sickly,” he said. “Much too blue in the crests of those ripples. It’s a look mine’s been getting lately…”

“I’ve seen that blueshift before,” Rhiow said, getting up again and going over for a closer look. “You get it when something’s interfering with a gate’s control structures…usually some change in the local matrix it’s sunk into. In this case, it’s sunk into a spot it wasn’t intended to be, and the last group of settings are arguing with the new location.”

“More than that,” Urruah said. “See the way the waves are canceling each other here and there?” He sat up on his haunches, looking at the gate. “Two, three…four places. Hwaith, your problem child’s trying to put down more roots.”

“It kept trying to do that before,” Hwaith said, sounding furious. “That’s why I was reluctant to leave it for even such a short time.”

“We’ll pull them up,” Urruah said, “and then try to get a sense of why it’s doing this. May I?”

“Please,” Hwaith said, “don’t stand on ceremony! You’ve come a long way to do just that. Just tell me if you need help.”

Rhiow put her whiskers forward, relieved that Hwaith wasn’t going to get all possessive; all she needed right now was to find herself at the wrong end of time with another version of Jath on her paws. “Now,” she said, “all we have to do is find out why this has been starting to happen to your gate, so that we can keep it from happening to ours…”

Not ‘all’, said the quiet voice in the back of Rhiow’s head.

Rhiow flicked an ear. Hwaith gave her an odd look as she turned away from him. Whisperer, she said silently, if you have any hints for me, now’s the time.

No hints today, said the Mistress of the Whispering. We’re all in the dark here together. If you turn up anything that seems germane to the Powers, believe me, I’ll mention it. But none of our first guesses or assumptions are likely to be good enough to rely on; and finding out what lies at the root of this gate’s trouble, and yours, is going to make all the difference between life and…something else..

Rhiow licked her nose several times, very fast, as the Silent One fell silent again. “Sorry — ” she said to Hwaith, turning back to him.

“She doesn’t sound very encouraging, does She,” he said.

“You caught that?”

He flicked his tail in a gesture of mild annoyance, looked away. “I do hear things, unfortunately,” Hwaith said. “It was my first specialty after Ordeal: not the Eye, but the Ear. I could never really control it, though, which is why I went into gate work as soon as there was an opening.” He looked at Rhiow again, apologetic. “Please excuse me: it’s not intentional…and when She speaks in that tone of voice, it’s hard to avoid hearing Her.”

“I wouldn’t argue that point,” Rhiow said, looking away to watch Urruah reach out and sink his claws into the edges of the gate’s weft, hooking them into its control webs. He pulled, and the predictable tangled lines of light stretched out and away from the gate proper. “Is it just me,” Rhiow said, “or do those threads look…I don’t know…thinner than usual?”

“It’s not just you,” Hwaith said. He licked his nose once or twice, nervous: and Aufwi looked over at Rhiow and Hwaith and said, “This is something my gate’s been doing too. It’s been sporadic, though, and I haven’t been able to get it to repeat so that I can do a diagnostic…”