“But that,” she said softly to Arhu, turning to look at him just before she slipped ahead of him through the metal of the door, “was entropy.”
Out in the concourse again, the air seemed much fresher than it had a right to in an enclosed space where diesel fumes so often came drifting out of the track areas; and the sunlight pouring through the windows was doubly welcome. Rhiow paced along up the staircase to the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance; sidled again, she and Arhu jumped up on the cream marble colonnade railing and walked along it to where they could perch directly over the big escalators going up into the MetLife building. There Rhiow started a brief wash, a real one this time.
“That was completely disgusting,” Arhu said, staring out and down at the shining brass of the information kiosk in the middle of the concourse floor.
“What? The lice? I guess so. But I always do that when I see him. It’s a little thing. Can’t you imagine how he must have felt?”
“I can imagine it right now,” Arhu said with revulsion, sat down, and started scratching as if he too had had Saash’s pelt wished on him.
“He’s a sad case,” Rhiow said. “One of many. The ehhif would say that he fell through the safety net.” She stopped washing, sighed again: Rosie’s sadness was sometimes contagious. “When we’re not minding the gates … we try to spread our own net to cushion the fall for a few of those who fall through. People … ehhif… whoever. We take care of this place, and since they’re part of it for a while … we take care of them too.”
“Why bother?” Arhu burst out. “It won’t make a difference! It won’t stop the way things are!”
“It will,” Rhiow said. “Someday … though no one knows when. This is the Fight, the battle under the Tree: don’t you see that? The Old Tom fought it once, and died fighting, and came back with the Queen’s help and won it after he’d already lost. All these fights are the Fight. Stand back, do nothing, and you are the Old Serpent. And it’s easy to do that here.” She looked around at the place full of hurrying people, most of them studiously ignoring one another. “Here especially. Ehhif kill each other in the street every day for money, or food, or just for fun, and others of them don’t lift a paw to help, just keep walking when it happens. People do it, too. Hauissh goes deadly, toms murder kittens for fun rather than just because their bodies tell them to… The habit of doing nothing or of cruelty, believing the worst about ourselves, gets hard to break. You meet People like that every day. It’s in the Meditation: ask the Whisperer. But you don’t have to be the way they are. Wizards are for the purpose of breaking the habit… or not having it in the first place. It’s disgusting, sometimes, yes. You should have tasted yourself when we found you.”
Arhu turned away from Rhiow. “It’s sick to be so worried about everybody else,” he said, refusing to look at her. “Peopie should care about themselves first. That’s the way we’re built.”
“You’ve bought into the myth too, have you,” Rhiow said, rather dryly. “Sometimes I wonder if the houiff started that one, but I’m not sure they’re that subtle. I suspect the concept’s older, and goes back further, to our own people’s version of the Choice.” She looked at him, though, saw the set, angry look of his face, and fluted her tail sideways, a why-am-I-bothering? gesture. “I think your stomach is making you cranky,” she said. “Let’s go down and see about a bite more of that cheese— Oh. Wait a moment—”
An ehhif in a suit, and carrying a briefcase, was coming along the colonnade. Arhu stared at him with alarm, for the ehhif plainly saw them and was making directly for them. He got ready to jump—
“Not that way!” Rhiow said three hurried words in the Speech, and hardened the air behind Arhu just before he launched himself straight out into the main concourse. “It’s all right, sit still!”
Arhu sat back down, shocked, digging his claws into the marble. The approaching ehhif paused, glanced around him casually, put the briefcase down, then turned around and leaned on his elbows on the railing, and stared out across the concourse himself.
“Nice to see you, Har’lh,” Rhiow said. “Thanks for the backup yesterday.”
“Don’t mention it. I would have come myself, but I was otherwise occupied.” He glanced sideways, only very briefly. “Good to meet you, Arhu,” he said. “Go well. An excellent job you folks did. Nice going with that, Rhiow.”
“Thanks, Har’lh. I could have done without the last part of it, but at least we brought our skins home whole. Going down to inspect the catenary?”
“I doubt I’ll need to go down that far… I just want a look at the main matrices up top.”
“All right. But Saash thinks the whole thing needs to be rewoven.”
“So she said. When she makes her full report, I’ll look into it in more detail and have a word with the Supervisory Wizard for the North American region,” Har’lh said. “It’s not a job I’d care for, though. Logistically it would be something of a nightmare. Not to mention unsafe for Saash if the job started to get more complicated than she thought.”
“Don’t things usually?” Rhiow said. Then, a little mischievously, she added, “I’m curious, though, Har’lh. You don’t seem much bothered by these inspection runs. What happens to your physicality, Downside?”
“Well now, I would think some people might consider that a personal question,” Har’lh said, giving her an amused look. “But let’s just say I won’t be able to stop going to the gym any time soon. My looks don’t change down there the way People’s do. Pity.”
Rhiow put her whiskers forward at him. “Is Tom back from Geneva yet?”
“Later tonight. I’m glad he’ll be getting back… Between work and Work, I’ve been getting short of sleep.”
Rhiow had figured that out already: Har’lh’s rugged good looks had acquired a rather brittle edge over the past few days. “The way you keep pouring cappuccino down yourself, are you surprised?” she said, and whisked her tail back and forth in a tsk, tsk gesture. “Your body isn’t going to thank you, Har’lh.”
“All right, now, you wait just a minute, Miss Cream Junkie,” Har’lh said, smiling slightly. “You’re lecturing me about my body?”
Rhiow put one ear back in the mildest annoyance. Hhuha had discovered that Rhiow was very partial to whipping cream… and Rhiow had not exactly talked her out of it It was a couple of weeks after that time that Rhiow had first heard the bizarre adjective “plumptious.” Shortly thereafter Hhuha had stopped bringing cream home and had subjected Rhiow to a very annoying withdrawal (“Is it smart to just do this ‘cold turkey’?” Iaehh had asked, and Rhiow had practically shouted, “Cold turkey would be very nice in these circumstances, yes, give me some!”—to no avail). There had followed a course of what purported to be diet cat food, but which Rhiow firmly believed to be textured, compressed sawdust in a shiny gravy consisting mostly of lacquer. Next to it, the foul disgusting tuna of recent days could actually have been considered an improvement, though that was not something that Rhiow was ever going to let Hhuha know. “Life around ehhif can be a little too fat-free sometimes,” she said. “I’m just grateful she didn’t try to turn me vegetarian.” She shuddered, knowing cats whose well-meaning but very confused ehhif had tried this tack. Mostly the People involved had found themselves short a life very quickly, unless they managed to get away and start over elsewhere.