The Big Meow

Rhiow crouched at the bottom of the wired-up gate, leapt up onto it, pulled herself up claw over claw to the top of it, teetered for a moment on the topmost iron bar, and jumped down onto the sidewalk. There Rhiow stood for a moment, staying close to the gate so that no ehhif, unable to see her, would come wandering into her before she saw them. But the street was quiet enough for the moment. Down toward Third Avenue, she could see a couple of ehhif dams pushing their kits in strollers; nearer to her, a tall dark tom-ehhif with that strange twisted head-fur they seemed to be going in for these days came wandering down toward her with his arm around a shorter ehhif, a queen. Rhiow let them go by before she headed down the sidewalk herself, and put her whiskers forward a little at the look on their faces. She was sure she was reading it right; she had seen it often enough on Iaehh and Hhuha before, usually a few minutes before they went into the bedroom, closed the door, and began to do what Hhuha had routinely referred to as “the cat-scaring thing.” A nice sort of day for it, Rhiow thought, as she ambled down the north side of 69th Street, past the stairs of the mid-street brownstones; assuming you’re interested, of course. It had been quite awhile since she had been — her ehhif had had her spayed before she was old enough to understand what was happening. But she had never particularly regretted it. Freedom from that particular physical imperative had left her with that much more time to concentrate on the business of being a wizard. Possibly a good thing, Rhiow thought, sidestepping into the stairwell of the basement apartment to let a couple more ehhif-dams with strollers go by. Since, over the last couple of years, if I hadn’t had that spare time to concentrate, for all I know, I’d’ve been dead a couple times over…

Rhiow came to the corner of Third Avenue and 69th and tucked herself as flat as she could against the corner wall of the apartment building there. Ehhif walked to and fro before her while she sat there waiting for the light to change, and wondering what in the world could be wrong with the L.A. gate. It wasn’t a heavily used portal; no interplanetary traffic went through there at all, and mostly short jump traffic off the North American continent toward Asia. As the light changed, she wondered once again why the L.A. gate had never budded off any associated microgates in response to the city’s population’s growth over the last century. Normally, worldgates were a direct response of the fabric of local space time to the fraying pressure of millions of sentient minds concentrated into a small space. Rather than rip right open under the desires of all the beings living crammed together there, spacetime usually tried to conserve itself by producing a sort of semipermeable membrane through which beings who knew the portal’s location could pass. And normally, Rhiow thought as the light changed and she got up and trotted across Third Avenue in company with all of the other pedestrians, but well to one side, a given gate complex isn’t shy about budding if the local population’s large enough. Look at Tokyo: how many gates are there in that complex now? Fourteen? Fifteen? I lose track; this last decade, it’s like the thing’s in heat all the time. It no sooner has one gate that it hauls off and has another…

Rhiow patted the problem around with the paw of the mind for a while as she made her way down 69th toward Park Avenue. But the air was too soft and pleasant, and for once, nice-smelling, for her to find it easy to concentrate. Rhiow crossed Park Avenue, pausing once another crowd of ehhif had gone by to take a moment to smell the flowers there, yellow delphiniums and yellow and purple pansies. The lights went red and green together, and Rhiow scampered across again, heading for Lexington Avenue.

She had a standard covert entrance to the Grand Central complex down at 50th and Lex, but there was no particular need to go straight underground and quickly blot out the scent of that summer air. For a change, Rhiow simply trotted down the west side of Lexington Avenue like any other sightseer or Sunday shopper, until she came to the brass-and-glass doors of Grand Central Market. Urruah’s beginning to contaminate me too, Rhiow thought, amused, as she walked invisibly down between the stalls of beautiful meat and hot breads and shining fruit, sniffing appreciatively, and then out into the food hall full of coffee smells and frying smells. On the far side of the food hall, she paused long enough to gaze over toward the glass-paned arch of the Oyster Bar restaurants, closed this early on a Sunday. But to a cat’s nose, such closure was a relative thing. Behind those doors, Rhiow could smell oysters being shucked, and her mouth began to water. I’m going to get him for getting me hooked on those things, she thought, and ran up the stairs to the Main Concourse.