Rhiow could feel the tumor clumps and cells looking at her as if she was out of her mind, and they were both amused and angry.“Who do you think you are, speaking for the world?” said the voice.
“A friend,” Rhiow said.
Laughter broke out.“Some kind of nut,” said one voice.
“No such thing as a friend in this world,” said another. “Just guys who want something out of you for free.”
“I’m not asking anything of you,” Rhiow said, “except a little forbearance. You remember, perhaps, how it was once, when you were part of a larger whole, and every cell had a place that was made just for it, somewhere that it belonged –”
There was an annoyed buzzing at this.“Listen to that,” said the voice. “Somebody thinks we should know our place.”
“Somebody thinks we should go back to how it used to be,” said another voice. “No chance of that! Now we’re a big deal, now we run things all over the world, now we say what goes!”
“Like it’s our fault how we are or somethin’? We’re how the world made us. How the smoke made us. It made us choose. So we chose!”
Just a flash of bitterness there, but too quickly swallowed up by the wider consensus— the voices of cells who could no longer remember a way of life or an inner metabolism that hadn’t once involved a carcinogen and the irresistible commands it sent. There’s not enough for me to work with there, Rhiow thought, distressed. Better change tack —
“I’m not saying that you personally are at fault for the way things have come to be,” Rhiow said, choosing the words carefully. “And of course anybody can see that you own this place.” That being the problem. Even if a whole team of wizards came in here to try to clean the Silent Man out,all this cancer would need to come back would be one missed cell, and enough time… For she could smell the presence and essential invasiveness of the cancer in the same way that some houiff were able to smell it. This was not the kind of malignancy you could easily talk out of doing what it did, if ever.
“So what’s this stuff about forbearance? You mean we should, like, go away?” More nasty laughter.
“There wouldn’t be much point in me asking that,” Rhiow said, glancing down for a moment to keep her audience from seeing the anger she feared was beginning to show in her eyes. “But for your host’s sake – to lengthen the life of your world, which would surely be a good thing for you – if you could be a little less invasive as regards the nerves – ”
An indignant rustle went through the tumor clumps and cells surrounding her.“Whatchoo talkin’ about?” their voice said, and for just that moment Rhiow had to keep her head down as a spasm of annoyed amusement sparked through her, a memory of Urruah imitating a bad New York gangster-accent he’d picked up from one of his ffihlms. “You’re talkin’ about our communications system, here! You start messing with that, we don’t know where we are any more! If we don’t know where we’ve been, we don’t know where we should be going! Bad enough the world slows down that way over and over, you want to make it worse? Forget about it!”
They don’t like the painkillers, Rhiow thought. Interesting. Is it possible that some ehhif cancers use not just the blood and the lymphatic system for signaling, but the nervous system too? Maybe by some change in the proteins — ? It wouldn’t have surprised her. But there was little time to confer with the Whisperer on the subject at the moment, especially as the crowd around her rustled again, and this time the rustle came with a slight motion toward her.
“We’ve got our own way of doing things here,” said the buzzing voice, more loudly, more angrily. “It’s worked for a long long time. It’s gonna keep working.”
“Of course it will,” Rhiow said. “But it could work even better if you’d consider giving this approach a try.” She glanced around her at the tumor-shapes, putting everything she could into the appeal, even though the appeal was directed at something that wanted nothing more than to reproduce explosively at the cost of the very lifeform that made the explosion possible.
“Don’t need to try anything new,” said one voice. “We’re doin’ what we were built to do.”
“Buzz off, lady,” said a third. “We need those nerves. We’ve got a lot of growing to do here. We need every scrap of this space, everything here.”
“Gotta own it all.”
“You want some turf? Go somewhere else, mess around with somebody else’s. You can’t have ours.”
Rhiow was finding it a lot harder than she’d expected to respond rationally to the tumors and the malignant cells, to do a wizard’s job and retain her equanimity. But that was just the problem here. In this idiom, they were not just clinically malignant, but personally so. They had no intention of listening to her. Though they were Life, to which her final allegiance was sworn, their twisted kind of Life had had all the light sucked out of it. The “bad neighborhood” was intent on swallowing the whole city: it was the final expression of a body angry with the soul that lived in it for a long life of abuse, and now taking its revenge. Yet she had to try. “One last chance,” Rhiow said. “There is always one last chance to make a new choice, to turn away from the old path and make a new one. Remission — ”
The tumor-ehhif and their rat-pets growled, all as one, and shuffled in closer around her. Not good, Rhiow thought, not good at all. Time to go…
Lost, said that fat red moon hanging down over the end of Thirty-Third where it ran into a river of blood. The moon, all blotched with sa’Raahh’s footprints, had swollen to five or six times its normal size; and it was in the Shadowed One’s voice that it spoke now. You’ve lost another one, and through you, so has She. I wonder why you even bother trying any more.
Rhiow refused to listen to that dark Whispering. In the back of her mind was a spell that she’d left ready, a focused jolt of bioelectricity that would recharge quickly from the Silent Man’s own resources. But is it going to be strong enough to handle these things? Rhiow wondered now, for she truly hadn’t thought the cancer would be so aggressive. I might be able to pull more power out of him and into the spell, but can I do it without hurting him?
“Be warned by me,” Rhiow said. “Though your path is ill-chosen, you are yet in some manner my cousins and I must give you fair warning. I will defend –”
They rushed her. Rhiow started to back out but found nowhere to back to: they were behind her, blocking her way out, and the ones coming at her from front and sides reached out to hold her. Well enough, she thought, Rhiow closed her eyes, felt in her mind for the spell, and shouted its last word in the Speech–
In this dimness, it was just as well her eyes were closed, for the flash would have blinded her. Rhiow felt the pressure of the clinging tumor-things fall away. Opening her eyes, she saw that the space around her had opened out a little, and the tumor clusters and mobile cells were shivering and flickering with crackles of afterlight from the discharge. She could feel the spell charging up again in the back of her mind, but Rhiow wasn’t going to wait. She crouched and leaped over the heads of the nearest malignancies –
Something out of the crowd, an oozing loop of tissue, shot up, wrapped around her and yanked her down. A second later Rhiow was down on the ground, half blinded in the sooty fog rising up again from street level. She was quickly weighed down, more and more heavily, as the tumors piled up on top of her. Rhiow struggled, feeling them pushing blobs of tissue at her, probing, poking. The poking got sharper.
Rhiow’s mind flared up in terror, for if she was physically present enough in this scenario to affect these things, they could affect her in turn – and they were looking for a way to implant something of themselves in her –
Not today you don’t!! Instead of resisting the weight of them, she gave in to it – then, in the moment of surprise that followed, Rhiow rolled and lashed out with her claws, slicing, kicking. A high thin shrieking came from somewhere in the pile of wet slobbery tissue that lay atop her: the tumor-creatures closest tried to ooze away. As the pressure lessened, Rhiow managed to roll again, got her feet under her. The spell was ready, recharged. She cried its last word again –