The Big Meow

By Tenth, the buildings were all built of ehhif tissue – stressed cartilage and bone, perforated organ tissue struggling to repair itself after being attacked again and again by the cancerous cells running wild inside it. But it was not doing well. Everything looked shabby, tattered, inexpressibly weary. And all around her, the tumorous growth inside the Silent Man was running riot. In the tumbledown ruins of the worst-damaged organ-buildings, individual cells rustled and cheeped and burrowed like rats, undermining, consuming, destroying. Outside, larger clumps and clusters of them, wearing blunt rounded eyeless mockeries of ehhif shapes, were gathered on the sidewalks, staring at Rhiow as she went past. Some weird in-body imagery of the Silent Man’s, Rhiow thought. If he sees his body sometimes in dream or imagination as a city, why wouldn’t he see the cancer as a neighborhood in it? And a bad one. Populated by criminals, by bootleggers and bad seeds. Yet in the Silent Man’s stories, Urruah had insisted, the bad guys often had good buried somewhere at their cores, and were sometimes compelled by circumstance or persuasion to remember it. Working in that idiom, could even cells gone mad for multiplying themselves remember what it was like to be normal? It’s worth a try —

Rhiow kept going, and the ehhif-shaped tumor clusters and many of their more mobile single-cell “pets” started coming down off the sidewalks and slowly gathering behind her as she went, the crowd rapidly swelling. They weren’t much bigger than Rhiow was — tiny by comparison with real ehhif. But there are so many of them. And they have me seriously outnumbered. If they should decide to come after me…

That wasn’t a thought to be having right now, here in the heart of what was certainly a candidate to be declared one of the worst “bad neighborhoods” Rhiow had ever been in. Trying to demonstrate a calm she absolutely didn’t feel, Rhiow kept on walking until she came to the middle of the intersection of Thirty-Third and Tenth, pretty much the heart of the worst part of Hell’s Kitchen in that time, all surrounded by crumbling four-story brick apartment buildings and blind-windowed shops that sold nothing. There she sat right down and allowed the crowd that had grown as it followed her down Thirty-Third to gather around her. They had left an uneasy space around her, maybe as long as she was, and Rhiow was glad of it, seeing that the cancer, even in its unthinking way, was uncertain of what she might do or intend.

Rhiow curled her tail around her forepaws and waited for the rustling and the muttering to die down a little. Finally, “I am on errantry,” she said, “and I greet you.”

The silence that followed the Avedictory was deafening, and told Rhiow more than she needed to know about how receptive this audience was going to be to her suggestions. Never mind, just plunge in –”A change is coming to your world,” she said. “It’s going to end.”

“A long, long time from now,” said the multifarous voice of the cancer from all around her. Every one of the ehhif-mimicking clumps and individual cancer cells around her buzzed with it, an unpleasant itchy sound that made Rhiow want to scratch her ears. She restrained herself.

“In terms of your individual lifespans,” Rhiow said, “yes, that’s true. But in terms of your host’s lifespan – a very short time indeed. I’ve come to you on his behalf.”

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 —