Rhiow yawned again, looking upside down at Hhuha. Hhuha glanced over at her and said, “You slept a long time, puss.” She reached over and stroked her.
Rhiow grabbed Hhuha’s hand, gave it a quick lick, then let it go and started washing before going for her breakfast. So, Rhiow thought while the news headlines finished, there’s still an oil spill. This by itself didn’t surprise her. Timeslides, like any wizardry meant to alter the natural flow and unfolding of time, were rarely sanctioned when other options were available. Probably the Area Advisory for the Pacific Region had noticed the availability of a handy alternative instrumentality: natural, “transparent” in terms of being unlikely to arouse ehhif suspicions, and fairly easily influenced—of all the languages that humans use, only the wizardly Speech has no equivalent idiom for “everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.”
Oh well, Rhiow thought. One less thing to worry about. She spent a couple more minutes putting her back fur and tail in order, then got down off the couch, stretched fore and aft, and strolled over to the food dish. Halfway across the room, her nose told her it was that tuna stuff again, but she was too hungry to argue the point.
Wouldn’t I just love to walk over to you, she thought about halfway down the bowl, looking over her shoulder at Hhuha, and say to you, loud and clear, “I’d think that last raise would let you spend at least sixty cents a can.” But rules are rules…
Rhiow had a long drink, then strolled back to jump up on the couch and have a proper wash this time. She had finished with her head and ears when Hhuha got up, went to the dining room, and came back with still more papers. Rhiow looked at them with distaste.
As Hhuha sighed and put the new load down on the couch, Rhiow got up, stretched again, and carefully sat herself down on the papers; then she put her left rear leg up past her left ear and began to wash her back end. It was body language that even humans seemed sometimes to understand.
Rhiow was pretty sure that Hhuha understood it, but right now she just breathed out wearily. She picked Rhiow up off the pile and put her on the couch next to it, saying, “Oh, come on, you, why do you always have to sit on my paperwork?”
“I’m sitting on it because you hate it,” Rhiow said. She sat down on it again, then hunkered down and began kneading her claws into the paperwork, punching holes in the top sheet and wrinkling it and all the others under it.
“Hey, don’t do that, I need those!”
“No, you don’t. They make you crazy. You shouldn’t do this stuff on the weekend: it’s bad enough that they make you do it all day during the week.” Rhiow rolled over off the paper-pile, grabbing some of the papers as she went, and throwing them in the air.
“Oh, kitty, don’t!” Hhuha began picking the papers up. “Not that I wouldn’t like to myself,” she added under her breath.
“See? And why you should pay attention to that stuff when I’m here, I can’t understand,” Rhiow muttered, as Hhuha picked her up and put her in her lap. “See, isn’t that better? You don’t need this junk. You need a cat.”
“Talk talk, chatter chatter,” Hhuha said under her breath, straightening the paperwork out. “Probably you’re trying to tell me I shouldn’t bring my work home. Or more likely it’s something about cat food.”
“Yes, now that you mention—” Rhiow made a last swipe at one piece of the paperwork as it went past her nose in Hhuha’s hand. “Hey, watch those claws,” Hhuha said.
“I would never scratch you, you know that,” Rhiow said, settling. “Unless you got slow. Put that stuff down…”
Hhuha started rubbing behind Rhiow’s ears, and Rhiow went unfocused for a little while, purring. There were People, she knew, who saw the whole business of “having” an ehhif as being, at best, old-fashioned—at worst, very politically incorrect. The two species really had no common ground, some People said. They claimed that there could be no real relationships between carnivores and omnivores, predators and hunter-gatherers: only cohabitation of a crude and finally unsatisfactory kind. Cats who held this opinion usually would go on at great length about the imprisonment of People against their will, and the necessity to free them from their captivity if at all possible—or, at the very least, to raise their consciousness about it so that, no matter how pleasant the environment, no matter how tasty the food and how “kind” the treatment, they would never forget that they were prisoners, and never forget their own identity as a People presently oppressed, but who someday would be free.
When all ehhif civilization falls, maybe, Rhiow thought, with a dry look. Make every ehhif in the city vanish, right this second, and turn every cat in Manhattan loose: how many of them will be alive in three weeks? Cry “freedom!”—and then try to find something to eat when all you know about is Friskies Buffet.
She made a small face, then, at her own irony. Maybe it would be better if all cats lived free in the wild, out of buildings, out of ehhif influence; maybe it would be better if that influence had never come about in the first place. But the world was the way that it was, and such things weren’t going to be happening any time soon. The truth remained that ehhif kept People and that a lot of People liked it… and she was one.
That’s the problem, of course, she thought. We’re embarrassed to admit enjoying interdependence. Too many of us have bought into the idea that we’re somehow “independent” in our environment to start with. As if we can stop eating or breathing any time we want…
She sighed and stretched again while Hhuha paused in her scratching and started going through her papers once more. Anyway, what’s the point, Rhiow thought, in making sure People are so very aware that they’re oppressed, when for most of them there’s nothing they can do about it? And in many cases, when they truly don’t want to do anything, the awareness does nothing but make them feel guilty… thus making them more like ehhif than anything else that could have been done to them. That outwardly imposed awareness satisfies no one but the “activist” People who impose it. “I suffer, therefore you should too…”
Granted, Rhiow’s own position was a privileged one and made holding such a viewpoint easy. All languages are subsets of the Speech, and a wizard, by definition at least conversant with the Speech if not fluent in it, is able to understand anything that can speak (and many things that can’t). Rhiow’s life with her ehhif was certainly made simpler by the fact that she could clearly understand what they were saying. Unfortunately, most cats couldn’t do the same, which tended to create a fair amount of friction.
Not that matters were perfect for her either. Rhiow found, to her annoyance, that she had slowly started becoming bilingual in Human and Ailurin. She kept finding herself thinking in slang-ehhif terms like ra’hio and o’hra: poor usage at best. Her dam, who had always been so carefully spoken, would have been shocked.
Rhi? said Saash inside her.
I’m awake, Rhiow said silently.
Took you long enough, Saash said. Believe me, when this is over, I’ve got a lot of sleep to make up.