Rhiow blinked. There was nothing there, no one in her box.
She stared: she shook herself. Slowly, her fur still halfway fluffed, she stalked toward the litterbox. She stared into it. No footprints. She sniffed. There was no scent there but the slight odor of the last time she’d made siss: no matter how her ehhif, Iaehh, tried to clean the box perfectly, and no matter what the clumping-litter people claimed about their product’s deodorizing powers, that scent was where she’d left it.
No, she thought, and shook her head until her ears rattled. Just a tired mind playing tricks. Very quietly Rhiow went into the apartment through the cat-door her ehhif had installed for her in the glass of the sliding door. Meditation can wait, she thought, her tail wreathing in bemusement. How much good would I get out of it when I’m so tired, I’m hallucinating?
She wandered through the darkened apartment, back into the bedroom. Quietly Rhiow jumped up onto the bottom corner of the king-sized bed, careful not to wake Iaehh up. He slept lightly, too lightly sometimes, since Rhiow’s own ehhif, his mate Hhuha, had died in an accident.
She stood there in the dark for a moment, missing Hhuha one more time, and once again feeling sorry for Iaehh. It’s not good for you to be alone, she thought. How does one do matchmaking for ehhif, I wonder? How do you engineer it so they get out a little more, and meet somebody nice? It wasn’t a question of replacing Hhuha, of course: no one could do that. But at the same time, it seemed important to ehhif life to be paired. Almost as important as it was for People: though ehhif always seemed to keep their emotional lives so compartmentalized…
She sighed, and then yawned. The long night’s work had caught up with her. Let’s get some sleep, she thought. Time enough in the morning to reorganize Iaehh’s social life.
She sat down and had a perfunctory wash; then her head jerked up as she started dozing right in the middle of it. Enough, she thought, and curled up nose to tail. A moment later she was dozing.
And out of the dream, golden eyes looked at her, thoughtful…
The Big Meow: Chapter Two
Afternoon seemed to come only a breath or two later. Rhiow rolled over and stretched out long, blinking at the bronzy light coming in through the bedroom’s Venetian blinds. From outside, she could hear faint clinking sounds; Iaehh was moving around out there. She heard one of the drawers in the little kitchen open, and then the clatter of ehhif eating utensils being taken out.
Rhiow sat up, gazing around the bedroom. As always, it was hard to avoid a pang of sadness; there was still a faint scent of Hhuha hanging about all the furnishings in the place. She was sure that Iaehh was oblivious to this— the ehhif sense of smell was hardly capable of such delicate detection — but every morning, before she was fully awake, Rhiow had to disentangle that faint scent of her own ehhif from the reality of the present physical world, in which her Hhuha was no longer present.
She let out a long breath, wishing that even once more she might hear that small, strange purr-like sound that Hhuha had used to make when she picked Rhiow up and held her, upside down, in the crook of one arm. But there were some things that not even wizardry could do. Hhuha was in her own place now, the right place for an ehhif to be after physical life was done, wherever that might be. And Rhiow, for her own part, knew that the sorrowful moments were the price she paid for keeping the memory of that relationship green. If she tried to reject them, soon she would have no true memory of Hhuha left, but merely a simulacrum, colored by wishful thinking and the desire to avoid pain, not by truth or life. As a wizard, it was with truth and life that her loyalties lay; so she suffered the pain gladly enough, the way you suffered the pain of biting a thorn out of your paw, though in this case the thorn grew back every day. All you can hope, she thought, is that each day the thorn grows back a little shorter…
Rhiow stood up, stretched fore and aft, and jumped down from the bed. She padded across the carpet, paused by the bedroom door to pull it a little further open with her paw, and wandered out into the living room-dining room area. Iaehh was standing in the tiny kitchen, bending over the stove and stirring something in a small pot. Rhiow stood there under the dining room table, sniffing. Noodles again, she thought. Iaehh, my kit, there’s more to life than ramen! Or there should be. But there had not been much heart in him for cooking since Hhuha died. That had become another of life’s little sorrows for Rhiow. The good smells that had once been part of life in this little den now hardly ever happened anymore; Iaehh’s life had become an endless round of takeout food in sad cardboard cartons. Rhiow found herself worrying about Iaehh’s heart in more than the strictly emotional sense, for half the time the dreadful stuff the delivery men brought smelled more of chemicals and fat that of any honest meat. Here’s an intervention it’s time I started working on in earnest, Rhiow thought. A poor sort of thing it is if you can save the city, save the world, but can’t even save your own ehhif.
She came up behind him to where her water dish sat in front of the oven next to the refrigerator. The name-charm on her collar tinkled against it as Rhiow put her head down into it for a good, long drink. Iaehh turned, looked down at her.“So there you are,” he said. “I thought you were going to sleep all day. Where were you all last night, huh?”
For the moment, she merely waved her tail and kept on drinking. Iaehh had slowly come to terms with the concept that Rhiow was able to jump down onto the roof of the building next door. He’d gradually become less troubled by that, as he couldn’t see how she could possibly get anywhere else from there. Had she been a cat like any of the other cats in the neighborhood, of course he would’ve been right. But that was a misconception of which Rhiow was not going to be able to disabuse him, as the protocols of wizardry forbade her to speak to ehhif in any way that could be understood unless she was actually on errantry concerning them at the time. There had been times, and would probably be again, when she would desperately wish that she had even ten seconds of time to make herself understood; only enough time to say, I have to be out for a few days on an intervention, don’t worry about me, I won’t miss any more meals than I have to… But there was no way. She simply had to try to keep her interventions as short as possible: yet another inconvenience in a life that was already busy enough. And now she had to wear the name-charm he’d bought her as well, in case she got lost somehow…and the jingling of the thing drove her crazy.
Rhiow sighed, and finished her drink, and went over to give Iaehh a friendly rub around the ankles.“Oh,” he said. “And now you’re my friend, because I’ve got food, huh?” He reached up toward the cupboard where the People food was kept.
“I’m always your friend,” she said. It did no harm to answer him in Ailurin, as he couldn’t hear it — very few ehhif could; the subvocalized purrs and trills of the language were usually out of their hearing range — and it kept her from feeling as if she was stuck in a monologue. “Catfood has nothing to do with it.” Then she caught the scent of what he was opening. “Except sometimes. Is that salmon? Oh, you really are observant sometimes! You saw I liked that brand last week — “
“Haven’t heard you shout like that for awhile,” he said. “Come on, let’s see you do your little dance, like you used to do for Sue — “
Rhiow reared up against his bare leg, patting it above the knee, with her claws barely in.“I’ll pull your kneecap right off,” she said, “if you don’t stop waving that dish around over my head. Like I can’t reach it if I really want to! Oh, put that down —”
She took a couple more swipes at the dish with her free paw, letting him play the you-can’t-have-it-game for a little longer. Finally he put the dish down, and Rhiow buried her face in it. After last night’s work, she was starving; and she was relieved to see the way Iaehh was dressed, in his shorts and singlet and running shoes, for it meant that he would be out for at least an hour or two — plenty of time for her to head over to Penn and check with Jath and Fh’iss to see how the gate had bedded in. Probably, she thought, I’m worrying for nothing. Probably the gate’s fine. Otherwise I would’ve heard from them by now.