The Big Meow

Rhiow sat down on the windowsill, a shadow in the surrounding paleness, and gazed down at the man curled up under the covers, his face half-hidden by them. She didn’t need to go any closer to do what she had in mind, but there was something else keeping her at a distance. Even in his sleep the Silent Man had an aura of unapproachability, the same effect that had kept a clear space of sorts all around him at the party when all the other ehhif had been singlemindedly concentrating on breaking down barriers and injecting themselves into one anothers’ space. Maybe it’s no wonder that he had relatively little trouble getting to grips with us when we appeared, she thought. His mindset has something of the feline about it: the reserve, the self-containment of the good hauissh player who watches and waits….

Rhiow composed herself and concentrated on clarifying to herself what she intended to do here. The one goal she would most have desired was unfortunately not available to her. I can’t save his life… For the Whisperer had told her how this poor ehhif’s story was to end. To save the Silent Man would mean changing history.

And not for the better. It wasn’t just a matter of how he’d lived his life or what he’d done – the great pleasure he’d brought many millions of other ehhif by the stories he’d told. It was his death itself, in these circumstances, that was going to make the difference. Right up until the Silent Man died, so terrified of cancer were human people in his time that they wouldn’t even speak of it. “Died after a long illness”, was the usual euphemism – if they used it at all. Or if the illness had even been long. It was the Silent Man’s death and his friend Walter’s refusal to be quiet about it, the angry survivor’s stubborn insistence on calling the Silent Man’s death by its right name, that would begin the slow change of how ehhif handled the whole issue of cancer. Thousands would be helped in the near term of time by all the money and publicity that Winchell would bring to bear on the issue, and after that, many millions more would have their lives lengthened or at the very least improved, as the in a culture that had completely changed how it went after this particular human malady.

So this was not a death that could be averted or avoided. But if I can at least spare him some pain on the way… Rhiow thought. That would do. I’ll have a look around, then speak to the cancer and see if it will hear me.

Rhiow closed her eyes and assembled the spell in her mind, then silently started to speak the words. The stillness of the room around her faded down into a silence even more profound as the wizardry began to work and the surrounding space leaned into slow compliance with her will. In the dimness, darkness started to fall all around her, only the Silent Man’s form under the covers remaining distinct and growing more so.

What Rhiow had in mind was something less straightforwardly interventional than what she’d done to Delores’s insides. The wizardry she was working was as much on herself as on the Silent Man, a matter of shifted perceptions. As the room faded around her, the ehhif’s body seemed to grow, but at the same time its structure seemed both to fade and to begin abstracting itself into something more like a schematic than the body’s reality of interconnected tissue, of muscle and bone and lymph. All around Rhiow a scatter of slowly strengthening light was starting to build itself into structures that would express the Silent Man’s internal ecology and all the forces working in it.

The effect would take a while to refine itself to the point where Rhiow could best interact with it. She jumped down off the windowsill – that being almost all that was left of her previous perception of the room – and stepped cautiously into the growing outlay of lines of light that was the way the wizardry was rendering the Silent Man’s body. It had a way to go yet before she got down to the one-Angstrom level that she needed to deal with: such profound shifts in perception levels couldn’t happen instantaneously.

As the wizardry worked, the darkness around Rhiow also began to be lit by flickers of the Silent Man’s own perceptions of the wizardry, filtered through the intervening medium of sleep and caged inside the lines of light. It was an expected side effect of doing such a wizardry while the subject wasn’t fully conscious. The surface of the Silent Man’s mind shivered with the dream, a tremor like that of the dreamer’s closed eyes. But the tremor was a troubled one, and the disruption penetrated down into the slowly building abstract, shaking its fabric and infusing it with alien vistas. It’ll pass, Rhiow thought. Fairly quickly, I hope…