Urruah stared at him. “The conductor? Not that I know.” He cocked his head to one side, briefly listening to the Whisperer, and then said, “No, she says not. —Here he comes!”
On the stage above the musicians, a big burly figure appeared, also in a shortsleeved shirt and dark pants. Rhiow supposed that as ehhif went, he was handsome enough; he had a surprising amount of facial fur. He stepped up to the front of the stage, exchanged a few words with the small round ehhif: there was some subdued shuffling and tapping of bows on strings among the musicians.
The small round ehhif made a suggestion, and the larger ehhif nodded, stepped back to find his right position on the stage. For a few moments there was more howling and crackling of the sound system; then quiet The conductor-ehhif raised his wand.
Music started. It sounded strange to Rhiow, but then most ehhif music did. Urruah, though, had all his attention fixed on the big ehhif, who suddenly began to sing.
The volume was surprising, even without mechanical assistance: Urruah had been right about that, at least. Rhiow listened to about a minute’s worth of it, then said to Urruah, low, “So tell me: what’s he yowling about?”
“The song’s called ‘Nessun dorma.’ It means that no one’s going to sleep.”
“With that noise,” Rhiow said, “I could understand why not…”
“Oh, come on, Rhi,” said Urruah, “give it a chance. Listen to it.”
Rhiow sighed, and did. The harmonies were strange to feline ears and didn’t seem to want to resolve correctly; she suspected no amount of listening was likely to change that perception soon, for her anyway. But at least her knowledge of the Speech made meaning available to her, if nothing else, as the man stood and sang with passion approaching a tom’s of his hope and desire, alone here under the starlight…When the stars’ light faded and the dawn rose up, he sang, then he would conquer… though at the moment, who or what would be conquered wasn’t quite clear: the song itself hadn’t yet provided much context. Perhaps some other tom? There did seem to be a she-ehhif involved, to whom this tom sang—though there was no sign of her at the moment, she being out of sight in the story, or the reality, or both. That at least was tomlike enough: an empty place, the lonely silent night to fill with song, whether or not there was any chance of fulfillment. Or perhaps, Rhiow thought as he sang, it’s the she herself, the one he woos, that he’s intending to conquer. If there was more intended to the conquest than just sex, though, the thought made Rhiow smile a little. Toms who tried domination or other such maneuvers with their mates too soon after the act itself got nothing but ragged ears and aching heads for their trouble.
It was a little odd, actually, to hear such power and passion come from someone standing still on a bare stage, holding, not a she, but only a piece of cloth in one hand, which he kept using to wipe his face. He paused a moment, and behind him the recorded voices of some other ehhif sang sweetly but mournfully that he and they might all very well be dead in the morning if he didn’t conquer… Yet the tom-ehhif sang on with assurance and power, answering them fearlessly; his last note, amplified rather beyond need, made Rhiow put her ears down flat for the loudness of it rather than the tone, which was blindingly true, and went on for longer than seemed possible with even such a big chest’s breath. Rhiow was almost unwillingly held still by the long, cried note at the end of the conquer-word, vinceeeeeeeerrro! as if by teeth in her scruff; alien as the sound was, any cat-tom who had a voice of such power would rightly have had his choice of shes.
The ehhif let the note go. The last chords of accompaniment crashed to an end, and the technical staff responded, some of them, with a chorus of good-natured hoots and applause. After that torrent and slam of sound, the hoots of boms and the city’s rush seemed a little muted.
The ehhif spoke a few words to the short round curly-haired ehhif conducting the musicians, then waved the cloth casually at the technical people and retreated to the back of the stage to have a long drink from a bottle of water. The ehhif conducting the musicians turned to talk to them now, and Rhiow looked a little sidewise at Urruah, a feline gesture of reluctant agreement. “It reminds me a little,” she said, “of the part in the Argument when the Old Tom sings. Innocent, though he’s all scars: and hopeful, though he knows whose teeth will be in his throat shortly.”
Urruah nodded. “That’s one connection I’ve thought of, yes…”
“I can see why they’ll need all these fences,” Rhiow said as they got up and strolled away. “The she-ehhif would be all over him afterward, I’d think. Probably wear him out for any more singing.”
“They don’t, though. It’s not meant personally.”
“That’s the strangest part of it, for me,” Rhiow said. “I don’t understand how he can sing like that and have it not be personal. That was real fighting stuff, that last note. He should have had his claws in someone’s guts, or his teeth in someone else’s scruff, afterward.”
Urruah shook his own head as well. “They’re not us. But later on in the story, there’s a fight.”
“Another tom?”
“No, in the story this tom fights with the queen. She has this problem, see…”
Rhiow half-closed her eyes in good-natured exasperation, for he was off and running again. Like most toms, Urruah had trouble grasping how, for queens, the fascination with song in any of its forms was strictly seasonal. When you were in heat, a tom’s voice was, admittedly, riveting, and the song it sang spoke directly to your most immediate need. Out of heat, though, the tendency was to try to get away from the noise before you burst out laughing at the desperate, impassioned cacophony of it—a reaction not at all appreciated by the toms near a queen in heat, all deep in the throes of competitive artistic and erotic self-expression.
Most of Urruah’s explanation now went over Rhiow’s head, as they walked back uptown, but at least he had something to keep his mind off what the rest of the day’s work was going to involve. He finished with the tale of the tom fighting with the queen—after which the queen apparently surrendered herself to the tom (What a crazy fantasy, Rhiow thought)—and started in on some other story, many times more complicated, that seemed to involve a river, and a piece of some kind of metal. “And when you take this piece of metal and make it into a hring, it makes you master of the universe…”
Rhiow had to laugh at that. “Ehhif? Run the universe? Let alone the world… What a dream! They can’t even run the parts of it they think they do run. Or at least none of them who aren’t wizards seem able to. Look at them! Half of the ehhif on the planet go to bed with empty stomachs: the other half of them die of eating themselves sick…” She gave Urruah a cockeyed look. “And what about your great ehhif-tom there? No way he’s that size naturally. What does he mean by smothering a wonderful voice like that with ten fur coats’ worth of fat? Whichever ehhif-god is in charge of mistreating one’s gifts should have a word with him. Probably will, too, if he doesn’t get off his great tail and do something about it pretty soon.”