“In other words,” Urruah said, “if given the excuse, he’ll bomb the rebellious prides right back into the Stone Age.”
“And his own pride as well,” Arhu said. “Just what the Lone One wants.”
“The warning is written on the Moon,” Rhiow said, “as we saw. That’s what It intends the Earth to look like after It’s done.”
“And the situation might get still worse,” Urruah said. “It seems that these ehhif lose their positions, or change them, without warning and at short notice. What if someone comes in as Prime Minister who’s less tolerant than the ehhif holding the position now?”
“Please,” Rhiow said. It was an uncomfortable enough situation as it was. “Our problem is that, whoever rules that world, the period is not one that likes to refrain from technology, once it gets its hands on it. The Victorians like technology, the more aggressive the better. They like mastering and dominating their world … and each other. They have done some great works that have lasted into our own time, it’s true … but they also did a great deal of evil. They routinely acted without due consideration of the effects.”
“I Saw a lot of things that looked like that,” Arhu said, “with Odin. The ehhif took what they got from the book and mostly kept it for themselves. There are a lot of ehhif on this planet, in that time, but the ones with the technology weren’t in a sharing mood. They wanted to keep themselves the top of the ‘prides-of-prides’. Every now and then they would give a little of the information to some of the other prides, the ‘countries’, as a present. A way to prove how powerful they were. But the best of it, the parts that really mattered, or were really dangerous, they kept to themselves.” His ears were flat back. “It’s like caching food. I don’t understand how they can do that.”
“It would probably be pretty foolish of us to expect them not to treat nuclear technology the way they treated all the others …” Urruah said. “So … does that answer your question?”
Rhiow sighed. “I just hope Ith can get that spell working,” she said.
They walked to the Forty-Second Street entrance and looked out through the brass doors. Forty-Second was in full flower, streams of traffic flowing by in both directions, and ehhif walking past, running, chatting, shouting, taking their time in the soft evening air. Rhiow glanced up leftward, a little over her shoulder, to see the light-accented, graceful curves of the Chrysler Building rearing up shinning into the evening sky, the city-light gilding it from underneath. Even at the best of times, she thought, even when life seems normal, who among us can say with certainty that we’ll see this world again tomorrow? Entropy stalks the world in all its usual shapes, and some less usual than others. I’ll meet them, the strange and the deadly, but I don’t need to crouch in fear or bristle at them in show of defiance. I know my job. My commission comes from Those Who Are. We stand together, They and I, in protection of the world They made and I keep. We may lose: there is always that chance. But meanwhile We keep watch at the borders, and contest the Lone One’s passage. We will not let it be easy. We will not fall without selling ourselves dearly. And when in the worlds’ evening we fall at last, and finally come home, We will find that we have brought with us what we love, bound to us forever by blood and intention: and the Lone One will stand with Its claws empty, and howl Her anger at the night. Then we will say, That was a good fight that we won: and come the dawn, We will make another world, and play the play again…
She swallowed, and glanced around her. Urruah was looking at her thoughtfully. He leaned over, bumped noses with her, and said, “See you tomorrow evening …”
Urruah walked off down Forty-Second to the corner of Vanderbilt, and dodged around it and out of sight. Rhiow looked away from him, over to Arhu, and said, “And what about you?”
“I think I have an appointment,” he said, and bumped noses with her too, laying his tail briefly over his back. “See you later …”
He walked off toward the corner of Lexington, slipped around it, and was gone.
Rhiow stood there by the doors and watched her city go by: then, sidled, she lifted her head high, stepped up into the air, and skywalked home.
Iaehh was there, and in quiet mood, when she got in. He fed her, and afterwards sat in the reading chair, and Rhiow made herself comfortable in his lap and tried to doze.
She couldn’t manage it for a while. He wasn’t reading for a change tonight, and he didn’t even turn on the TV: he just sat in the dimness and stroked her, and Rhiow just sat and let him. It was strangely like the days when Hhuha had been here, and she would simply sit with Rhiow in her lap, not doing anything but being there.
Slowly Iaehh began to fall asleep that way. She looked up at him and saw how tired he looked: his face was more drawn than it had used to be, and he was losing weight. What are we going to do about you, Rhiow thought. Hhuha would not like to see you this way. You are so unhappy.
We’ve got to find you somebody.
Then she felt like laughing at herself. The world may start to stop existing next week, or the week after that, if we fail, Rhiow thought, and here I am thinking about matchmaking for my ehhif. Yet there was no question that he did need somebody, and she was going to have to do something about it.
And what about me? she thought. There would be no mates for her, and no kittens. Huff might be a good acquaintance now, might be a friend later. Yet Rhiow was feeling the need for something more. I must go looking, she thought, and see what’s available for a wizard who’s been spending too much time in work, and not enough in having a social life.
Assuming the universe doesn’t end later this month…
She sighed and lay back in Iaehh’s lap. The end of the universe would have to take care of itself. Right now she was home with her ehhif, and had had a good dinner. Just this once, she would lie still, and let it all pass her by: and tomorrow evening, no matter what happened, she would be able to look the Powers in the face and say, I have been a Person: and after that, what matters?
Much later, in the darkness, Rhiow realized that she was having a vision. It shouldn’t have surprised her, in retrospect, she thought: the ravens had already shown her that vision was transferable. It hadn’t immediately occurred to her that others might learn that trick: but it seemed that at least one had.
You made me do it, he said. So you had to see what happened. It was your act … even though I enacted it.
In the vision he was walking down the bike path next to the East River. There had been a time when he had been unable to go anywhere near that body of water: the mere sound of it had been a horror to him. Now, though, he walked down the path and listened to the water chuckling underneath the walkway, listened to it slapping against the concrete piers, and didn’t mind a bit. The voices in it were friendly now.