There was more to the Meditation, of course; it was more a set of guidelines than a ritual in any case … a reminder of priorities, a “mission statement’. It was perhaps also, just slightly, whatehhifmight term“a call to arms”: there was always a feeling after you finished it that Someone was listening, alert to your problems, ready to make helpful suggestions.
Rhiow got up, shook herself and headed over to the side of the building to make her stairway down.The joke is,she thought, getting sidled and heading down the briefly hardened air,that knowing the Powers are there, and listening, doesn’t really solve that many problems.It seemed to her thatehhif had the same problem, though differing in degree. They were either absolutely sure their Gods existed, or not very sure at alclass="underline" and those who were most certain seemed to be no more at peace with the fact than those who doubted. The City was full of numerous grand buildings, some of them admittedly gloriously made, in whichehhifgathered at regular intervals, apparently to remind their versions of the Powers that Be that They existed (which struck Rhiow as rather unnecessary) and to tell Them how wonderful they thought They were (which struck her as hilarious—as if the Powers Who created this and all other universes, under the One, would be either terribly concerned about being acknowledged or praised, or particularly susceptible to flattery).
She thanked the air and released it as she came down to the alley level and made for the gate onto the sidewalk, thinking of how Urruah had accidentally confirmed her analysis some months back. He had some interest in the vocal music made in the bigger versions of these buildings, some of it being of more ancient provenance than mostehhifworks he heard live in concert in town. He’d gone to one service in the great “cathedral’ in midtown to do some translation of the music’s verbal content, and had come back bemused. Half the verses addressed by theehhifthere to the Powers that Be had involved the kind of self-abasement and abject flattery which even a queen in heat would have found embarrassing from her suitors—but this material had alternated with some expressing a surprisingly bleak worldview, one filled with a terror of the loss of the Powers’ countenance—even, amazingly, the One’s—and a tale of the approaching end of the Worlds in which any beings which did not come up to standard would be discarded like so much waste, or tortured for an eternity out of time. Rhiow wondered how the Lone Power had managed to give them such ideas about the One without being stopped somehow. Such ideas would explain a lot of the things someehhif did…
Rhiow stood at the corner of Seventieth and Second, by the corner of the dry-cleaners’ there, waiting for the traffic to finish passing so that she could cross.They’re scared,she thought:they feel they need protection from the Universe. Nor does it help that though they may know the Powers exist,ehhifaren’t even sure what happens to them when they die.There was an unsettling sense of permanence aboutehhifdeath, in which Rhiow was no expert despite her recent brush with it. Theehhifthemselves seemed to have been told a great many mutually exclusive stories about what happened After. Her ownehhifwas somewhere benevolent, Rhiow knew. But where? And would Hhuha ever come back, the way you might expect a Person to, during the first nine lives at least … ? Not that—certainties aside—it wasn’t always a slight shock when you looked into the eyes of some new acquaintance and suddenly saw an old one there, and saw the glint of recognition as they knew you too. Rhiow’s fur had stood up all over her, the first time it had happened, a coupleof lives back. You got used to it, though. Some People tended to seek out friends they had known, finishing unfinished business or starting over again when everyone had moved a life or so on, in new and uncontaminated circumstances…
She crossed Second and turned south, trotting down the avenue at a good rate, while above her, the last against the brightening sky, yellow streetlights stuttered out. Rhiow crossed Second diagonally at Sixty-Seventh and kept heading south and west, using the sidewalk openly for as long as the pedestrian traffic stayed light. It was unwise to attract too much attention, even this early: there were alwaysehhifout walking their houiff before they went to work.But you can’t really feel things as clearly when you’re sidled, Rhiow thought, and anyway, there’s nohouff I couldn’t handle …If the sidewalk got too crowded, Rhiow knew five or six easy ways to do her commute out of sight. But she liked taking the“surface streets”: more of the variety of the life of the city showed there. There were doubtless People who would feel that Rhiow should be paying more attention to her own kind … but by taking care of theehhif,she took care of People too.
Southward and westward: Park Avenue and Fifty-Seventh … Here there was considerable pedestrian traffic even at this time of morning, people heading home from night shifts or going to breakfast before work, and the two greenery-separated lanes of Park were becoming a steady stream of cabs and trucks and cars. Though she was fifteen blocks north of Grand Central proper, Rhiow was now right on top of the Terminal’s track array: at least the part of it where it spread from the four “ingress” tracks into the main two-level array, forty-two tracks above and twenty-three below. As she stood on the southwest corner of Fifty-Seventh and Park, beside one of the handsome old apartment buildings of the area, Tower U was some fifteen or twenty feet directly below her: from below came the expected echoing rumble, the tremor in the sidewalk easily felt through her paw-pads—one of the first trains of the morning being moved into position.
Five twenty-three,Rhiow thought, knowing the train in question. She looked up one last time at the paling sky, then headed for the grate in the sidewalk just west of the corner by the curb.
She slipped in between the bars, stepped down the slope of the grainy, eroded concrete under the grating, and paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust. Ahead of her the slope dropped away suddenly.
It was a moderately long drop, ten feet: she took a breath, jumped, came down on top of a tall cement-block wiring box, and jumped from there another eight feet or so to the gravel in the access tunnel. Rhiow trotted down the cast-cement tunnel, all streaked with old iron-stains, to where it joined the main train tunnel underneath Park. There in front of her was the little concrete bunker of Tower U, its lights dark at the moment. To her left were the four tracks which almost immediately flowered into ten—seven active tracks, three sidings—by the time they reached Fifty-Fifth.
Rhiow looked both ways, listened, then bounded over to the left-hand side of the tracks and began following them southward, along the line of the eastward sidings. Ahead, the fluorescents were still on night-time configuration, one-quarter of them on and three-quarters off, striping the platforms in horizontal bands of light against the rusty dimness. She trotted toward them, seeing something small move down by the bottom of Track Twenty-Four: and she caught a glimpse of something that didn’t belong down here, a glitter of white or hazy blue light concentrated in one spot…
Bong,said the ghost-voice of the clock in the Main Concourse, as Rhiow cut across a few intervening tracks and jumped up onto the platform for Twenty-Four. There was Urruah, sitting and looking at the dimly-seen warp and weft of the worldgate, the oval of its access matrix a little larger than usual.
“Luck, Ruah,” Rhiow said, and stood by him a moment with her tail laid over his back in greeting. “Where’s the wonder child?”