The Big Meow

Rhiow looked over her shoulder, confused. Dimly to be seen above and beyond her and Hwaith, silhouetted against the slow-growing twilight, a great flat pale oblong shape reared up and caught a very little of the cityglow from beneath them. Urruah seemed quite taken with it, though, and Rhiow had to stare at it for a moment before she recognized it as a squared-off version of the ehhif-English letter “D”. It looked to be in bad shape: the wood of which the letter had been built was streaked with bird droppings and pocked here and there with what looked like bullet holes; its white paint was peeling, and the whole letter leaned backwards against its supporting struts as if considering the virtues of falling down. There were light bulbs all round the letter, outlining it, but most of them were broken, and in any case the power to them seemed to have been switched off.

Rhiow craned her neck a bit to catch a glimpse of more letters like this one, reaching eastward along the ridge of the hill from where they all stood. L A N D, said the ones she could see. “Some kind of advertisement?” she said after a moment. If there was one thing she’d learned about ehhif over time, it was that they would put up an ad anywhere that gravity would allow.

Hwaith made a little trilling noise down in his throat, a feline chuckle. “That’s right. Some ehhif started building a housing development up here a couple of decades ago, and they put these letters up here to show where the houses would go.” He glanced up at the D, waved his tail in amusement. “They were supposed to take it down quite some while back, but they’ve seemed to become too fond of it to get rid of it…or too lazy to bother. I take it they still haven’t done anything about it, uptime?”

Urruah chuckled too. “Oh, they’ve done something,” he said, “but not in terms of getting rid of it.”

Rhiow quirked her tail at him to forestall the inevitable explanation. “’Ruah,” she said, “later for this. Are the others ready to go?”

“Just about.”

“All right,” Rhiow said. “Come on…”

With the two toms following after, Rhiow walked back down to where the gate hovered, now inside the nearly-unseen spherical shell of a boundary wizardry that Aufwi had erected around it. Arhu and Siff’hah and Helen had just finished checking it over with him. “If any ehhif come up here,” Aufwi said to Rhiow as she came up, “they won’t even get close enough to the boundary to bump into it: they’ll just get an urge to steer away.”

“That’s fine,” Rhiow said. “So let’s all get out there and see what we can discover. Take a close look at the other ends of the gate’s roots, see what they’re sunk into, and try to get a sense of why they chose that particular spot. The answer may not be obvious: it might be some transitory phenomenon, or some person or being that’s been in that spot, rather than something inherent in the spot itself. Once you think you’ve worked it out, don’t do anything about the root: we’re all going to have to act together in that regard. But take the time to check the surrounding area carefully. Time’s the issue here, after all. We can’t stay backtime all that long on any one trip: besides the danger of producing nested time paradoxes, it’s just plain bad for the soul, and none of us needs to add temporal wasting to the problems we’ve got already. So make your observations count, and don’t be afraid to bring a little more data back than you strictly think you need.”

Everyone swung their tails or nodded that they understood. “Let’s go, then,” Rhiow said. “Hwaith, is our own goal close enough to walk to?”

“It’s a long walk,” he said, “unless you’re used to that kind of thing.”

She flirted her tail as they all started downhill, making for a path that could be seen down below, among the trees. “I’m a New Yorker,” she said. “I do my forty blocks a day…it shouldn’t be a problem.” As Arhu galloped past her down the hill, she reached out a claw and just managed to snag his tail.

He skidded to a halt before the claw had time to dig in. “You be careful!” Rhiow said.

“Oh, come on, Rhi! We’ve been backtime before!”

“Not this close to our hometime,” Rhiow said. “Little distances between times are more dangerous than big ones. A mistake made way back leaves you lots of successor instants to correct it, and the piled-up error is big and easy to patch. Close in, the effects are a lot more subtle, and fixing them is sa’Rraah’s own business. So watch what you do – “

“Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on her! Don’t get your tail in a kink!” Arhu said, and galloped on down toward the path.

In his wake came Siff’hah, who threw Rhiow a look of profound annoyance. “And watch your manners when you meet People here,” Rhiow said, though. “None of the edgy stuff like a few minutes ago.” She put her whiskers forward, for it had still been funny. “So disrespectful to a more senior wizard! Jath would be shocked.”