Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

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…”

Arhu moved on to the next case. “Here,” he said. “Here’s one that we have a copy of.” He paused in front of a fired clay tablet that had been broken into a number of pieces and carefully mended. Some of the gaps in the rubbing were not merely places where the characters were missing, but where they’d been actively obliterated by some ehhif with a sharp object. In other spots two or three of them were missing because the tablet itself had been broken there, and the material between either pulverized or otherwise lost.

“Okay,” Arhu said, and reared up on his hind legs to pat the glass with one paw. It went misty and indistinct, responding to yet another variant of the Mason’s Word that he’d apparently had ready. Arhu reared back on his hindquarters a little, then jumped up straight through the glass and into the case. He put a paw on the tablet and started talking quietly to it in the Speech. “It must have been awful to be hurt like that, after somebody went to all that trouble to make you. And then getting all busted up! Remember how it was when you were brand new and all in one piece? I’ll help you remember – “

Every wizard has a working style, and once more Rhiow found herself appreciating Arhu’s. What he might lack in structural sophistication when constructing a spell, he more than made up for in youthful enthusiasm and a kind of raw empathy that came across as very touching. It was no wonder that the tablet responded almost immediately. The resin binder that the museum’s restorers had used to replace the worst gaps in the tablet started fading out of sight, replaced by a clay-colored light that started settling gently into the gaps like water with silt in it. The memory of clay fired a thousand years past began rebuilding itself in the actual material: the tablet’s edges sharpened, the shapes of the carvings crisped all across the surface. Finally the effect began trembling in the pits and depressions where characters had been obliterated –

There was resistance. Arhu had stopped speaking out loud, now, and was using the Speech silently, impressing his desire on the tablet. It took more time than the general restoration had, but at last those final characters started filling themselves in. Arhu was breathing hard by the time the work was finished and the tablet sat whole and new-looking in the case.

As she and the others moved in for a closer look, though, Rhiow noticed that the reconstituted symbols seemed to be jittering a little in their places, as if they were having trouble staying restored. “Arhu,” she said —

“Yeah, I see it,” Arhu said, his voice sounding a little strained. “Whoever dug them out really wanted them gone. But I’ve copied this image to the paperwork in case the restitution gives way.”

“Nice technique there,” Hwaith said to Arhu. “Do you know which of these is next? I’ll get it ready for you.”

“Sure,” Arhu said. “It’s that one.” He indicated the first tablet, a round one, on a shelf in the next case. “And that one underneath it, next shelf down.”

“Right.”

Arhu looked back to the tablet he’d just restored. “Rhi, I really think this this is going to need a little of the Eye– “

“Do as much as you can without it,” Rhiow said.

He flicked an ear in agreement, and narrowed his eyes to see the tablet better. For some moments, though, he didn’t say anything, and Rhiow started to worry. “They’re not in some kind of code, are they?” she said, concerned. Normally for codes to be made intelligible to a wizard, at least the cultural context for them had to still be available in some living mind, or recorded in the general knowledge base of some living culture. But if it isn’t –

“No, nothing like that,” Arhu said after a moment. “It’s complicated. But the Whisperer’s helping me. These people’s calendars were really accurate, but so weird in terms of how they divided the months and stuff! They had everything from those thirteen-day cycles Helen mentioned to ones that went on for two hundred sixty days… and then much longer ones based on Venus’s orbit and Iau knows what else.” His tail twitched idly as he worked out what he was looking at. “But there’s one really long sequence called the Long Count… and this stuff has to do with that. There were shorter cycles buried in it: hundreds of years instead of hundreds of days or months. And the dates make sense now that the missing stuff’s in place.”

Arhu paused, studying the tablet. “So what we’ve got here are three sets of dates. There are these three long recurring cycles – one that’s three hundred ninety-four years, that’s a b’ak’tun, and one that’s fifty-four, and one that’s eleven. And there are three short cycles of days or months, and three that are very short, just hours or minutes. At very long intervals, all nine cycles coincide. Looks like someone way back when made a list of when the cycles were scheduled to intersect next…”