The Big Meow

Rhiow gave him a look. “Don’t get any ideas,” she said, for Urruah was getting one of those wicked looks in his eye. “We’ve got questions to answer right now. Particularly, just who called the police? Besides someone who wasn’t in the bathroom or anywhere near Dolores, as far as we can tell – but was also sure there was a body upstairs.”

“If ‘lady’ is the word we’re looking for,” Urruah said, sounding very dry. “I think I know who you suspect.”

“Suspicion is all we’ve got at the moment,” Rhiow said. “I’m not going to do the Lone One’s work for It by accusing someone without evidence.”

Hwaith stood there waving his tail for a moment. “Well, there are ways around this problem,” he said. “I’ll go have a word with the phone.”

Urruah looked at him in confusion. “What?” he said. “It’s 1946, you don’t have caller ID yet – “

“What’s caller ID?” said Hwaith. “The phone’ll tell me what we want to know if I ask it. In a house this size, there’ll be three or four phones to ask, sure, but….”

Rhiow put her whiskers forward again, flirted her tail at Hwaith in agreement: he wandered off to head down toward the front hall. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think we get a little too reliant on our time’s tech to help us out.”

“You might have something there…”

After a few minutes Hwaith came trotting out the doors again with a satisfied look in his eye, and joined them under the table again. “The phone in the upstairs library remembers who used it last,” Hwaith said. “A woman. And it remembers her voice. Little and tinkly like a bell…”

Rhiow’s eyes narrowed. “Did it remember what she said?”

Hwaith switched his tail in negation. “Our phones don’t know words,” he said. “Just sound. This phone system isn’t sophisticated enough to handle meaning. It’s – “ He glanced at Rhiow, as if looking for words.

“Analog,” she said, “not digital. And not computer-managed, like the phone system in our time.” Rhiow knew from her old hhau’hif associate Ehef, who worked with other wizards on the CATNYP system at the New York Public Library, that a digital system was structurally much more liable to sentience than an analog one: the advent of the transistor and the densely-packed circuitry that made digital signaling possible had left the vast matter substrate of the phone system itself able to become half-alive even very early on. What state it had now reached in her home time, with quadrillions of synapses stretching across continents and under the seas and now even into space, Rhiow couldn’t say. But Ehef always talks about the Net and the Web as if they’re alive in more than the normal “inanimate-object” way…

“Well,” she said after a moment, “that’s more than we had to go on with. You’re pretty sure it meant Anya Harte…”

“I don’t think there’s any other possible reading.”

“One thing though, Rhiow,” Hwaith said. “She didn’t make just one call. She made two.”

Rhiow blinked at that. “Who was the other one to?”

“Another woman. Beyond that, the phone wasn’t sure. All it said was that the phone at the other end was tired, said it never had any rest, just kept getting a lot of calls at all hours of the day and night…”

Rhiow’s tail was lashing as she wondered what to make of that. But her thoughts were interrupted by a tall silhouette paused between the open French doors. Helen stood there, gazing out into the darkness.

Urruah let out a small but unmistakeable “meow” from under the table. Helen’s head turned that way: a second later she casually made her way over, put her drink down onto the table, and gazed out across the pool toward the darkness of the hillside.

“Well,” Urruah said, “you had a nice crowd of suitors back there…”

“Please,” Helen said softly, “that’s an image I’ve been trying to avoid.” She sat down for a moment on one of the deck chairs by the table, pausing to rub one foot, then the other. She sighed. “Heels,” she said. “I don’t mind them every now and then, but I’m really more of a flats person…”

“So what was the outcome of that little meeting?” Urruah said.

“Well, among other things, I hired an agent,” Helen said.

Rhiow stared. “You mean – “

“There were at least five of them downstairs in the main room,” Helen said, dry. “They were already fighting over me by the time I got downstairs.” She chuckled. “I have a feeling our Mr. Dagenham gets some kind of commission on his ‘finds’.”

“So which one did you pick?” Rhiow said.

Helen smiled. “The one who was least interested in my secondary sexual characteristics,” she said. “Sometimes my fellow ehhif can be unusually easy to read, and the only figure this one saw when he was looking at me had a lot of zeroes attached.” Her smile acquired that feral quality again, and Rhiow, seeing it, wondered at how unusually feline the expression was for an ehhif. Contagion, she thought, amused. “Once I had representation sorted out, I went to talk to the studio people. I think it went fairly well.” The smile got broader, and if possible, more smug.