Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

“Hunt’s luck, Hwaith,” the newcomer said. “Long time no smell!” They breathed breaths briefly.

“Got some visitors in, Ssh’iivha,” Hwaith said. “They’re hunting news, and I knew just where to bring them.”

“News we’ve got,” Ssh’iivha said. “More of it than I know what to do with. Hunters, you’re welcome! Luck to you all. Come on in, get comfortable. Names or not as you like…”

“Names, of course,” Rhiow said, coming forward to breathe breaths with their hostess. “I’m Rhiow. And thanks for your welcome! We’ve come a long way on our business: we’re on errantry, and we greet you – “

“Oh, I knew that,” Ssh’iivha said; “anyone could see you’re wizards, just by looking at you. You’ve got Hwaith’s look.” Behind her, Rhiow could just hear Urruah’s comment on that: fortunately it was well submerged in the levels of private thoughtspeech to which another nonwizardly Person would not be privy. “Whatever brings you here, you’re welcome.”

“Is it all right for us to be here?” Rhiow said as Urruah went to greet Ssh’iivha. “It won’t make trouble for you with your ehhif?”

“Oh no!” Ssh’iivha said, and laughed. “He likes People: that’s why he’s left all this food around. Everyone comes here to visit the Buffet, and swap news. This is a regular clearing house for Our Kind’s gossip, all up and down these hills. Which is doubtless why you’re here.” She gave Hwaith an affectionate look, and at the sight of it Rhiow felt a strange pang she didn’t know how to classify. But then how many nonwizardly People am I close to at home? she thought. Just Yafv, really. And just to say hello to in the mornings, when I pass him on his stoop, fresh from his latest rat. It must be nice to be part of a mixed community…

“It’s an unusual ehhif you’ve got,” Rhiow said, “who’s willing to make so many of us welcome when they don’t actually live with him.”

“That’s true enough,” Ssh’iivha said. “But he’s something of a loner, and I think we’re company for him without needing to get into emotional involvement. You know how some ehhif are…afraid to get too close. Anyway, if you’re sure you’re not hungry, come on in…”

Ssh’iivha led them in through another People-door, this one built into the normal ehhif back door. “If I may ask,” Urruah said, glancing around him as they came through the big white-tiled kitchen full of huge, stocky, retro-looking appliances, “is ‘Ssh’iivha’ a real name or a nickname?”

Rhiow’s whiskers went forward a little: it was the kind of question a tom might ask of a queen he was getting interested in. “Well, actually it’s both,” Ssh’iivha said. “My ehhif uses it too, or a word that sounds a lot like it. Used it, I should say.”

They came out into the living room. It was handsome, airy, but spare. It was high-ceilinged, wooden-floored, white-walled, and sparse of furniture – suggesting that the ehhif who lived there was either in transit, didn’t consider furniture all that important, or took pleasure in taunting the ehhif around him with his own opinion that their surroundings were too cluttered. Here and there, on one or another of the low white sofas, some Person slept: here a brown tabby, there a white shorthair with his feet in the air. “If you want to take a while to relax,” Ssh’iivha said, “this is the place for you. The neighbors make no trouble: my ehhif makes everything right with them. So we try to keep things right with him. No mating in the back yard, no yelling, no fighting with the neighbors’ People; this is a no-heuwwaff zone.”

“Oh,” Urruah said, sounding slightly disappointed. Rhiow had to fight to keep her whiskers from going too far forward, as mating, yelling and fighting with other toms were probably Urruah’s three favorite things besides wizardry.

Ssh’iivha jumped up on a spare couch and stretched out: Hwaith went up after her, and Rhiow followed, while Urruah stalked around a little examining more of the room, particularly a massive desk over by one of the windows that looked out into the back yard, flanked on both sides with full bookshelves and a couple of occasional tables piled with more books. “You say,” Rhiow said, “that your ehhif ‘used’ your name. But he doesn’t use it now?”

“Oh, yes,” Ssh’iivha said, “just not out loud, these days. It seems silly to think it’s a coincidence: I suspect he can hear us a little, though he probably doesn’t think of it that way. And he talks to us as if he thinks we can hear, which is considerate for an ehhif.”

“But he doesn’t speak out loud….” Urruah said. He was up on the desk now, peering at the complex-looking black-and-gold machine on the top of it.

“No,” Ssh’iivha said. “There’s something the matter with his throat. If he has something to say to other ehhif, he has to write it down on a piece of paper and give it to them. We can just barely hear him whisper, but other ehhif can’t hear him at all.” Ssh’iivha waved her tail, sadly, slowly. “He wasn’t always like this. A while after I came to live with him, his voice started to get hoarse. Finally he went off where ehhif go to be healed, the hhohs’hihal: and he came home seeming well enough, but without his voice. So now all our People call him Eth’ehhif, the Silent Man, when they visit.”

“I tried to have a look at him to see what was going on with his throat,” Hwaith said, sounding a little embarrassed, “but I couldn’t get far. I’m not really much good at healing: I specialize in spatial constructs, mostly. And he’s spiky, Rhiow: a real tom. You try to get friendly with him, and if he didn’t start the process himself, he wonders what you’re up to, he holds you away….”

Rhiow waved her own tail, trying to maintain her composure. The words “the hhohs’hihal” had brought the fur up on her against her will. She could still see her poor Hhu’ha’s discarded body lying there on a steel slab, not inconsiderately treated, but nonetheless terribly empty of the soul that had so often used that flesh to pick her up and cuddle her and make rude-for-ehhif noises against her belly — an entirely undignified process for a Person, and one without which the world was now all too dry and empty a place. “We’ll look into it while we’re here, if you like,” Rhiow said, commanding herself to some kind of calm. “We’ve got some other things to look into as well, but if we cross his path we’ll certainly try to see if he needs some kind of assistance that we can offer him. Are you expecting him soon?”

“It’s hard to say,” Ssh’iivha said. “He works our hours, truly: he’s almost more one of us than one of them. Out from sunset to a bit past dawn, usually: then he comes home, makes notes of what he’s seen and where he’s been, and after a drink of something, falls over. He’s in the Business, you see. He sleeps the day away…then, a while before sunset, he gets up and dresses himself and goes out again.”

“’The Business?’” Rhiow said. “Which one?”

“He makes dreams,” Ssh’iivha said. Hheivvhwei was the Ailurin word she used, a common one for fiction, as opposed to fwaiwei, “news”, a story that was known or supposed to have really happened.

Urruah jumped down from the desk and wandered back over to them. “He’s working with one of the ss’huhios?” he said.

“That’s right,” Ssh’iivha said. She looked over at Hwaith. “It’s the place that has the lion as its symbol: don’t ask me the name of it – they’ve changed that about three times in the last few years. He’s just finished work on a ffhilm for them. It’s based on one of the stories he told for one of the hviih-sh’ethh, the papers-that-speak-silently.”

“A magazine,” Urruah said. “Interesting.”

“But I heard from one of the other People who come through here, Hhaiivuh his name is, he’s a mouser at one of the other ss’huhios, that the eth’Ehhif was lucky to finish work on that ffhilm when he did.” Ssh’iivha’s eyes went wide with the expression of a Person plunging happily into the latest gossip. “Apparently that big earthquake the other day did a lot of damage at the ss’huhio: some gas connection or something went wrong in the fake-street where they’d been making the ffhilm, and half the backlot burned down. There were even a couple of ehhif killed. The police and the ehhif who put out fires were all over the place for days. And even now that they’ve gone, everyone’s schedules over there are in shreds, it seems…”

“The earthquakes,” Hwaith said, “they’re part of what’s brought us here. But I hadn’t heard that anyone had been killed!”

“Oh yes,” said Ssh’iivha. “And here’s a curiosity for you! The ehhif who died in the fire weren’t even ss’huhio people, Hhaiivuh said. They were [insert Ailurin term here] ehhif – “ she used the word for “stray” that many People used to express the human-English term “homeless” – “and no one’s sure how they got into the backlot, or why they didn’t get out when the fire started. Because it didn’t start suddenly: it took a long time to get going, Hhaiivuh said. Maybe too long.” Ssh’iivha flicked on ear back in a bemused gesture. “Hhaiivuh told me that there’s a rumor going around that the fire wasn’t really caused by the earthquake at all, but started on purpose – “

From out at the front of the house came a sudden noise: a car door slamming. “Oh,” Ssh’iivha said, “he’s home early today. Anyway, Hhaiivuh told me that another of the hunters over there, Fehwau, said he’d been over in that part of the backlot earlier in the day and hadn’t smelled anybody who shouldn’t have been there. He said, Why would homeless ehhif have been there except to sleep? It didn’t make sense that they would have been there so late in the day, because the fire started at about noon, right when that earthquake happened – “

A key turned in the front door, and it opened. The ehhif who came in was extremely well-dressed: three-piece suit in dove grey, expensive-looking silvery silk tie, fedora just a shade of grey darker, shoes to match. He wasn’t a tall man, and was rather pale and slightly built; but to Rhiow’s way of thinking, that wasn’t something you’d notice much once you’d seen his eyes. They were piercing and cool behind the silvery wire-rimmed glasses: the expression could doubtless be rather intimidating, by ehhif standards, depending on what the rest of his face was doing.

He paused there as he shut the door, and glanced around at the various other People lounging about the place, and Ssh’iivha and Urruah and Rhiow and Hwaith. Seeing them all, he nodded, his expression seeming to say that all this was fine with him; and he slipped out of his jacket, draping it carefully over one of the white couches. “Half a moment,” Ssh’iivha said, “the gossip’ll keep,” and she jumped down from the couch to run over to him.

She rubbed against the ehhif’s leg, purring, and he bent down and stroked her, then picked Ssh’iivha up and cuddled her. Awwww, Urruah said silently as she reached a paw up to touch the ehhif’s cheek.

The ehhif’s mouth moved. Hey there, Miss Sheba, he said, and to Rhiow’s astonishment, not a whisper, not a murmur, came out of him as he said it. Had a good night out. Looks like you and your buddies’ve been doing the same.

He put Ssh’iivha down and went to the back door, glancing out at it, apparently to check the state of the food bowls. Then he went to the icebox, got himself a seltzer bottle, spritzed himself a glass full of it, and went over to the typewriter.

The ehhif sat down, reached down into a drawer of the desk, pulled out a sheet of paper, and rolled it into the machine with such speed and ease that it was plain this was something he’d done so many hundreds of thousands of times that he didn’t even need to think about it any more. And then he was typing, fast, with two fingers.

“You see how nice he is,” Ssh’iivha said as she wandered back to the couch and jumped up on it again. “I had no idea that there were ehhif so nice until I came to him.”

“You had another one before?” Rhiow said.

Ssh’iivha scrubbed briefly at one ear, turning it inside out and then rightside in again. “Sa’Rraah sends us these things to test us,” she said. “Oh, Hahr’rena was very beautiful. And very famous, as ehhif judge things: she’s been in a lot of ffhilmss. And she meant well: she was kind enough, when she thought to be. But she’s not very good with People. Sort of an unconscious type, always full of her own dramas and troubles, but never one to depend on for keeping food in the bowl.” Ssh’iivha opened those green eyes wide in a vexed expression. “I can’t tell you how many times I had to walk two blocks from home in BelAir to get a drink out of someone’s fountain or fishpond because she’d forgotten to fill the water dish. I was mortified. All the other ffhilm-ehhifs’ People looking out the window at me as if I was some kind of stray…! Well, finally she met the Silent One here, and ‘gave’ me to him. And was I glad to go!” Ssh’iivha’s tail lashed a little.

Behind them, the typing was going on at full speed: a piece of paper was pulled out of the typewriter, and another one was pulled out of the drawer and inserted and the typing began again, with hardly a second’s break. “He’s a good provider, then,” Rhiow said.

“Absolutely. The house here, the apartment in New York — Oh yes,” Ssh’iivha said, seeing Rhiow’s whiskers go forward, “I thought I heard the accent. Yes, we do well enough. He has a housekeeper who watches this place while we’re not here: the Buffet is on whether we’re here or not. He and I, we go back and forth between the coasts together. Not as often as we used to since before he lost his voice, but…”

Urruah had been watching the rapid-fire typing with increasing curiosity. “Rhi,” he said, “do you need me right now?”

She flicked one ear “no”. Urruah jumped off the couch and padded over to the desk, glancing up at it. “Don’t go in the drawer!” Ssh’iivha said: “he’s fanatical about that. Very organized. And don’t get too close to the left elbow: the speed it moves when he hits the thing that makes the carriage go back over, he’ll knock you halfway into next week, and then spend an hour apologizing.”

Urruah leaped up carefully onto the desk and balanced there on the edge of it, looking at what the ehhif was typing. The ehhif spared him no more than a glance, just enough to make sure that Urruah wasn’t going to disarrange anything or get in the way. You just stay there, fella, he said, and don’t get in the paper drawer – And then he went back to his typing.

“Ssh’iivha,” Rhiow said softly, “forgive him: he’s such a snoop. And a bit besotted with ehhif culture. He’s far better than the rest of my team at reading their writing, even without the Speech to help him: it’s become a hobby. Back home he’s endlessly translating their posters and ads, whether we want to know what they’re about or not – “

“And menus, I suspect,” Hwaith said, with a sly grin.

Rhiow’s whiskers went forward. “Au, cousin, you have no idea,” she said. “The foods he’s gotten me interested that it was far better I didn’t know about…” She looked back over at Ssh’iivha. “But forgive me: you were telling us about the fire that started when the earthquake hit – “