The Big Meow: Chapter Three
“I know it sounds insane,” Hwaith said a few minutes later. The plaza at Olvera Street had already begun to fill up with more and more ehhif, so everyone had taken the simplest available option and climbed the biggest of the peppertrees, perching or couching themselves on one or another of the big thick outthrust branches twenty feet or so above the ground.
“Worse than the Lone Power…!” Arhu was muttering under his breath. He had to mutter louder than usual, as from maybe twenty feet above his head, and everyone else’s, various muted screeching and grinding-gear noises were coming from the many annoyed, glossy-black grackles in the tree, all now perched well out of reach and emitting avian curses.
“I know how it sounds. But think about it,” said Hwaith, glancing over at Rhiow as if hoping for support. “It’s evil, yes, and does evil, often enough, from our point of view: it’s entropy embodied, no arguing that. But at least it’s a force native to our sheaf of universes, something interior.”
“I’ll grant you,” Rhiow said, “things exterior to the sheaf wouldn’t be something I’d spend a lot of time thinking about on a daily basis.”
“Who would?” Hwaith said. “We have enough troubles inside.” He sat up and scratched emphatically behind one foreleg.
“I take it you’ve done all the usual diagnostics,” Urruah said. “And the problem’s not with the gate.”
“Let’s put it this way,” Hwaith said; “the problems we’ve been having aren’t the L.A. gate’s usual problems.” He glanced over at Aufwi: Aufwi put his ears back and looked away, a gesture of shared annoyance. “You know the way the thing jumps around. That was my first hint that something was going wrong: it started to stay put.”
Aufwi looked back, going rather wide-eyed with incredulity.“Where?” he said.
“Beechwood Canyon,” Hwaith said, “up by Mount Lee — just south of Mulholland Boulevard. It rolled up there one morning in the middle of an earthquake, and started putting a root down into the hillside.”
Aufwi looked dubious.“Normally I’d have gone right out and caught a rat for Queen Iau as a thank-offering,” he said. “Not like we haven’t been praying for a hundred years that the gate would eventually see fit to settle in someplace! But Mount Lee…?” His tail lashed. “Why on Earth? That’s too much offset for even this crazy gate. There’s no transport center there, and the population’s fairly sparse up that way even now! It’d just have been a couple of hillsides’ worth of brush, back in your time.”
“I don’t have answers for you,” Hwaith said, and his tail was lashing harder than Aufwi’s. “There hasn’t been time to find them. Right when the gate started trying to root, we started having earthquakes, cluster after cluster of them. At least five or six a day, some of them big kicks, some of them just little…but they had that ‘precursor’ feel to them, like they might be the heralds of something big. Half the wizards in L.A. dropped what they were doing and tried to deal with them, but they weren’t having much luck. The only thing that seemed to make a difference was about a week later, when I managed to pry the gate loose from where it was digging itself into the canyon and drag it back down here where it belonged. Then the quakes died down….”
“A coincidence, perhaps?” Rhiow said. “New Moon, or full? That would explain the week’s worth of increased activity–”
Hwaith gave her an exasperated look, and Rhiow glanced away, a touch embarrassed to see a newly-met wizard so openly fraught.“The Moon had nothing to do with it,” Hwaith said, “or at least the Whisperer didn’t think it did. I got suspicious and did a deep diagnostic on the gate, pushing the analysis all the way into the main catenary connection to the Old Downside. I thought that, since that dimension’s so muchmore central than ours, I’d be able to get a better idea of what was making the gate act so oddly.”
Hwaith licked his nose four or five times in rapid succession.“What I got back was a sense that all that part of spacetime was being leaned against. Something pushing, pressing, from outside, wanting in. And at the same time, it was sucking and pulling at the gate, trying to get it stable and rooted deep, so it could be used for…something.” The fur was standing up on Hwaith’s back now, a long dusty ridge running right down to his tail, which was going fluffy with alarm. “And when I finished the spell, I could tell that Hrau’f Herself had been looking over my shoulder all the time, and the fur on Her back was up too. She said, ‘You will need help to understand this, and to stop it: for it isn’t pointed just at you. Here’s where to go.” And Hwaith looked around him at the tree and the dappled sunlight on the plaza, as if he didn’t quite believe in them: and then at Rhiow.
The fur started to stand up on her too. Rhiow had to look away and wash an ear, and she tried not to have it look more like composure-grooming than it had to: but the ragged look of intensity and fear in Hwaith’s eyes was unnerving her as much as the implications of what he’d said. Anything that can frighten Hrau’f the Silent… she thought. “You’re implying,” Rhiow said, “that whatever has been trying to happen in your time, is also going to try to happen in ours, if it’s not dealt with first in backtime.”
“That’s what She gave me to understand,” Hwaith said, “yes.”
“Why?” Urruah said. “What did She say it was?”
“She didn’t,” said Hwaith. “She said, We won’t know until you do. And you won’t know until they do–”
Urruah swore under his breath, a not-very-restrained yowl. Rhiow gave him a look, and then glanced over at Arhu and Siffha’h, whose expressions were jointly very neutral– meaning that they weren’t sure what was going on, but weren’t going to be caught admitting as much. “This is one of those annoying little courtesies the Powers that Be like to do us,” Rhiow said. “The dignity of joint creation. The Powers aren’t the only ones making our worlds happen: we are, too. But They can be as uncertain about the way events unfold as we are. Oh, living outside time in the full flow of Eternity may seem very nice to us….but beings who permanently reside on the far side of Time tend to have trouble affecting timeflow by themselves. They need someone who lives inside to–”
“Do Their dirty work!” Arhu and Siffha’h said in annoyed unison.
“Somehow,” Jath said, “I doubt the One sees it that way.”
“Jath’s right,” Urruah said. “And though the Powers are creators and caretakers, they’re not omnipotent or omniscient. Sure, They intervene here directly, sometimes, when things get bad — but not more often than They have to. We, on the other hand, live here. We know better how time works than They do: we experience it physically. They can’t do that without help from us….”
“And sometimes they can’t be sure what’s going to happen inside sequential time until we make it happen,” said Rhiow. “This sounds like one of those cases.”
“But we’re already inside a time paradox!” Arhu said. “He’s here because we went to him! But if we go to his time, it’ll be because we–”
“Don’t say ‘if’!” Hwaith said, putting his ears back. Then he caught sight of Urruah’s annoyed look, and his tail slowly twitching. Hwaith put his ears forward again. “Please,” he said: but he said it to Rhiow.
For an uncomfortable moment or so there was no noise but the grackles overhead, still making their rusty-gear screech. It was louder now: since none of the People in the tree were doing anything about the grackles, the birds had been hopping stealthily lower, twig by twig, to see if they could somehow make People’s lives more difficult. Rhiow looked up through the leaves and saw one round golden grackly eye bent thoughtfully on her. “Hwaith,” Rhiow said then, glancing back toward him, “you put me in a difficult position, for the situation’s far from clear as yet.”