The Big Meow

She used the litter box, scratching perhaps a little more enthusiastically than usual to kick away the memory of those strange eyes looking at her. It would’ve been a rather challenging look in reality; people meeting for the first time didn’t stare so. There were proprieties of gaze to be observed, degrees of intrusiveness that were permitted later in a relationship but forbidden early on, and emphatically discouraged at a first meeting. Stress, she thought, externalizing itself at the end of a long day…. Rhiow hopped out of the box, shook the inevitable sticking kitty litter off her feet, slipped between the bars of the terrace, and jumped down onto the roof of the building to the left.

The concrete was warm under her pads; it had been sunny all afternoon, to judge by the residual heat. Did Iaehh bring his water bottle with him? Rhiow wondered, as she walked down the parapet, making for the garden-courtyard tree that grew near the far corner of that building. He’s going to need it, running on a day like this… At the far corner of the building, she paused at the edge of the parapet and looked down into the branches of the tree, a tall, handsome maple. The branches up here were very thin, much too much so to bear her weight. She could always have airwalked it, but she’d had little enough exercise in the last few days, and her muscles were itching for a good stretch. Rhiow crouched, her tail lashing, and then leaped down into the branches.

She saw the branch she was heading for, flung her forelegs around it and sank her claws in. Rhiow merely hung on there for a moment, breathing hard, digging her hind claws in as well and getting her bearings. She glanced over her shoulder, then down along the big branch toward the tree trunk. Some of the people in this building had houiff, mostly little dogs that were all yap and no guts; but there was no kindness in making some poor houff crazy by letting it see her when it couldn’t get at her. Like they’d be able to do that either… she thought, putting her whiskers forward.

As Rhiow shinnied down the trunk, she sidled, insinuating herself between the hyperspatial strings whose effect on matter determined whether it was visible or not. By the time she paused a few feet above the ground, reversed head for tail, and jumped down, only a wizard or another cat could have seen her. There, at the shade-starved corner of the little scrap of lawn behind the building, she stopped once more to glance around and see if there were any People around. Her block had about fifty, most of them held captive inside buildings by ehhif too afraid of the city’s dangers to let them out; the rest were more fortunate “pets”, or People unaligned with ehhif…some of them even nonaligned with other People, “out of pride”. But on a day like this, probably most of them are holed up somewhere cool. In the evening, some of them may come out for a bout of hauissh… when things cool down. But not right now.

She strolled away from the tree, around the corner of the building, and down the narrow little alley that led to a locked and barred wire covered gate giving onto 69th Street. Garbage cans were lined up there against the blind brick wall of the building. They were not as tightly closed as they could have been. Rhiow’s nose wrinkled as she went past; there had been rats here — she could smell their siss trail running up and down the wall and near the base of it, a nasty, thin, acrid reek. Something else to deal with when there’s time, Rhiow thought. Her work in errantry had not taken her so far from her feline roots that she would forget that most basic of enmities between her kind and the things that had gnawed at the roots of the world since time began. But who wants to get all messed up with rat-smell on a pretty day like this? And indeed it was a nice day, despite the heat; there was a steady, soft breeze coming in off the river, taking away the worst of the city stink.