“Why wouldn’t I?” The voice was completely flat.
Rhiow swung her tail gently from side to side. “Arhu, do you know what entropy is?”
He paused a moment, listening. “Things run down,” he said finally. “Stuff dies. Everything dies.”
“Yes.”
“But it wasn’t meant to … not at first.”
“No,” Rhiow said. “Things got complicated. That’s the story of the worlds in one bowl. All the rest of the history of all the worlds there are, has been about the issue of resolving that complication. It will take until the end of the worlds to do it. Our People have their part to play in that resolution. There will be a lot of fighting … so if you like that kind of thing, you’re in the right place.”
“I wasn’t yesterday,” he said bitterly. “I couldn’t have fought anything. I was fooling myself.”
So that much self-vision is in play, whether he thinks so or not, Rhiow thought. “In the strictly physical sense, maybe,” Rhiow said. “But nonetheless, you said what you saw. You tried to warn us. You may have given Saash that little impetus she needed to hurry and finish what she had to do before the saurians came in. That’s worthwhile, even that little help. You struck your first blow.”
“I don’t know if I even did it on purpose,” Arhu said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Rhiow said. “The result matters. We got out alive… and for a while, there was no way to tell whether we would or not. So, by and large, your presence yesterday made a difference.”
She stood up, stretched, let out a big yawn. “Let’s get a little more concrete,” Rhiow said. “Anyway, I want to have a look at that track.”
Together they walked through the concourse, slipping to one side or another to avoid the ehhif, and made their way down to the platform for Track 30. A repetitive clanking noise was coming from a little ways down in the darkness, and Rhiow and Arhu paused at the platform’s end to watch the workmen, in their fluorescent reflective vests and hard hats, working on something on the ground, which at the moment was completely obscured by all of them standing around it, watching.
Rhiow threw a glance over at the gate, which was visible enough to her and Arhu if not to the workmen; the patterns of color sheening down it said that it was back to normal again. “Good,” she said. “And it looks like that track’s almost ready to go back into service. Come on,” she said, and hopped down off the platform, onto the track bed.
Arhu was slightly uneasy about following her, but after a moment he came along. She led him carefully around the workmen, past the end of Tower A, and then back down in the direction from which they had first come, but this time at an angle, down toward the East Yard, where trains were pulled in for short-term storage during the morning and evening rush hours. She was not headed for the yard itself, but for a fire exit near the north side of Tower C. Its heavy steel door was shut; she glanced over at Arhu. “Down here,” she said, and put a paw into the metal.
Arhu hesitated for a moment. “Come on, you did it just fine the other night,” Rhiow said.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t thinking about it.”
“Just remember, it’s mostly empty space. You’re mostly empty space. Just work the solid parts around each other…”
Rhiow walked through the door. After a moment Arhu followed, with surprising smoothness. “Nice,” Rhiow said, as they went down the stairs together. The light here was dun even by cat standards, and Rhiow didn’t hurry —there was always the chance you might run into someone or something you hadn’t heard on the way down.
At the bottom of the fire exit, they walked through the door there and came out on the lower track level, on another platform, the longest one to be seen on this level. More fluorescent lights ran right down its length toward a low dark mass of machinery at the platform’s end; electric carts and manually powered ones stood waiting here and there. “The tracks on this side are primarily for moving packages and light freight to and from the trains,” Rhiow said; “bringing in supplies and equipment for the station, that kind of thing. But mostly that kind of traffic takes place during the evening or late at night. In the daytime, this area doesn’t get quite so much official use … and so others move in.”
Arhu looked alarmed. “What kind of ‘others’?”
“You’ll see.”
They walked northward along the platform to the point where it stopped, across from a sort of concrete-lined bay in the eastern wall. Rhiow jumped down from the platform and crossed the track to the right of it. “This track runs in a big loop,” she said, “around the terminal ends of the main tracks and out the other side. Not a place to linger: it’s busy night and day. But things are a little quieter up this way.”
She ducked into the bay and to the left, pausing to let her eyes adjust—it was much darker down here than out in the cavernous underground of the main lower track area, with all its lines of fluorescents and the occasional light shining out the windows of workshops and locker rooms. Behind her, Arhu stared into the long dark passage. Huge wheels wrapped full of fire hose, and mated to more low, blocky-looking machines, were bolted into the walls, from which also protruded big brass nozzles of the kind to which fire equipment would be fastened. A faint smell of steam came drifting from the end of the corridor, where it could be seen to meet another passage, darker still.
“What is this? And what’s that?” Arhu whispered, staring down the dark hallway. For, hunched far down the length of it, against one of the low dark machines, something moved … shifted, and looked at them out of eyes that eerily caught the light coming from behind them.
“It’s a storage area,” Rhiow said. “We’re under Forty-eighth Street here; this is where they keep the fire pumps. As for what it is—”
She walked down into the darkness. Very slowly, she could hear Arhu coming up behind, his pads making little noise on the damp concrete. The steam smell got stronger. Finally she paused by the spot from which those strange eyes had looked down the hallway at them. It seemed at first to be a heap of crazily folded cardboard, and under that a pile of old, stained clothing. But then you saw, under another piece of folded cardboard from a liquor store box, the grimy, hairy face, and the eyes, bizarrely blue. From under the cardboard, a hand reached out and stroked Rhiow’s head.
“Hunt’s luck, Rosie,” Rhiow said, and sat down beside him.
“Luck Reeoow you, got no luck today,” Rosie said. Except that he didn’t say it in ehhif. He said, “Aihhah ueeur Rieeeow hanh ur-t hah hah’iih eeiaie.…”
Arhu, who had slowly come up beside her, stared in complete astonishment. “He speaks our language!”
“Yes,” Rhiow said, taking a moment to scrub a bit of fallen soot out of her eye: solid particulates from the train exhausts tended to cling to the ceiling over here because of the steam. “And his accent’s pretty fair, if you give him a little credit for the mangled vowels, the way he shortens the aspirants, and the ‘shouting.’ The syntax needs work, though. Rosie, excuse me for talking about you to your face. This is Arhu.”
“Hunt’s luck, Arhu,” Rosie said, and reached out a grubby hand.
Arhu sat down just out of range, looking even more shocked than he had when the Children of the Serpent burst through into the catenary cavern the night before.
“I don’t know if Arhu is much for being petted, Rosie,” Rhiow said, and tucked herself down into a comfortable meatloaf shape. “He’s new around here. Say hello, Arhu.”
“Uh, hunt’s luck, Rosie,” Arhu said, still staring.
“Luck food not great stomach noise scary,” Rosie said sadly, settling back into his nest of cardboard and old clothes. All around him, under the cardboard, were piled plastic shopping bags stuffed full of more clothes, and rags, and empty fast food containers; he nestled among them, arms wrapped around his knees, sitting content, if a little mournful-looking, against the purring warmth of the compressor-pump that would service the fire hose coiled above him.