“What possiblegoodcan he be?”
“What do I look like, Hrau’f the Silent? How would I know? Go down there and find out. But go prepared.”
They thought about that for a while. Then Ehef said to Urruah,“Toms. That reminds me. You going to that rehearsal tomorrow morning? I heard tonight’s was canceled.”
“Uh, yes, I’m going.”
“You know Rahiw?”
“Yeah, I saw him earlier.”
“Fine. You see him there, you tell him I have the answer to that problem he left with me. Tell him to get his tail back up here when it’s convenient.”
“All right. You’re not going, though?”
“Aah, that kind of thing,ehhifstuff, I know multicultural is good, but I got no taste for it, my time of life. You youngsters, you get out there, have a good time, listen to the music, maybe make a little of your own, huh?”
Urruah squeezed his eyes shut, a tolerant expression, eloquent of a tom dealing with someone who’d been ffeihfor so long that he couldn’t remember the good things in life. Ehef grinned back and cuffed Urruah in front of one ear, a lazy gesture with the claws out, but not enough force or speed to do any harm. “You just lick that look out of your whiskers, sonny boy,” he said. “Iknew you when you didn’t know where your balls were yet, let alone how many of them to expect. I’ve got other things to do with my spare time lately.” He threw an annoyed glance at the computer.
Rhiow smiled, for this was hardly news, although getting Ehef to talk about this new hobby had been difficult at first She had known what was going on, though, for some years—since the library installed its first computer system and announced that it was calling it CATNYP.
“I wouldn’t have thought you were the techie type,” Saash murmured.
“Yeah, well, it grows on you,” Ehef said. “Horrifying. But we have anehhifcolleague working with the less, shall we say,‘visible’ aspects of the CATNYP system. She’s been busy porting in the software for puttingThe Book of Night with Moononline.”
Rhiow blinked at that.The Book of Night with Moonwas probably the oldest of the human names for what cat-wizards calledThe Gaze of Rhoua’s Eye,the entire assembled body of spells and wizardly reference material, out of which Hrau’f whispered you excerpts when you needed them. Humans had a lot of other regional names for theBook,many of them translating into“the Knowledge” or a similar variant.Ehhifwizards who got their information from the Powers That Be in a concrete written or printed form, rather than as words whispered in their ears or their minds, often carried parts of theBookas small volumes that were usually referred to casually as“the Manual,” and used for daily reference. “Wouldn’t have thought it was possible,” Rhiow said. “The complexity … and the sheer volume of information that would have to be there…”
“It works, though,” Ehef said, jumping up onto one of the nearby desks with a computer terminal on it. “Or at least it’s starting to … the beta-test teams have been working on it for some years now. There was some delay—I think the archetypal ‘hard copy’ of theBookwas missing for a while— but a team out on errantry found it and brought it back. Since then the work’s been going ahead steadily on versions tailored to several different platforms, mostly portable computers and organizers. This is the first mainframe implementation, though. We’re trying to give it a more intuitive interface than previously, a little less structured: more like the input you get from the Whisperer when you ask advice.”
Rhiow jumped up after him, followed a moment later by Urruah and Saash.“I’ve seen theehhifManuals,” Saash said, sitting down and tucking her tail around her as she looked with interest at the computer. “They change in size— the information comes and goes as the wizard needs it How does a computer version of theGazehandle mat?”
“You’re askingme?”Ehef said, looking at the computer’s screen, which at the moment was showing a screen-saver image of flowing stars… but me stars looked unnervingly more real than the ones on Rhiow’sehhif’scomputer screen.“Not my specialty area. Dawn says the software has ‘metaextensions into other continua,’ whateverthatmeans.” He put out a paw, touched the screen: die stars went away, replaced by the white page and lion logo for the library.
’Touch-sensitive,” Rhiow said. “Nice.”
“Gives the Keyboards a little relief. Or they can use these.” He put a paw on the nearby mouse, waggled it around.
Urruah looked at it.“I always wondered why they called these things ‘mice.’ ”
“Has a tail. Makes little clicky squeaky noises. Breaks if you use it hard enough to have any real fun with it. Would have thought that was obvious.”
“But toehhif?”
Ehef shrugged his tail.“Anyway, this is convenient enough for wizards who use a text-based version of theBook’sinformation and need to stop into the research libraries to check some piece of fine detail. Later, when we work the bugs out, we’ll allow access from outside. Maybe let it loose on the Internet, or whatever that turns into next.”
“You mean whateveryouturn it into,” Rhiow said, with a slight smile.
“Come on, Rhi, it doesn’t showthatmuch,” Ehef said mildly. “Anyway,someonehas to help manage something so big. Andehhifare so anarchic…Au,what do I needthisfor right now?” Ehef muttered, and reached out for the mouse, moved it a little on the table.
“What?” Rhiow said. She peered at the screen. A little symbol, a stroke with a dot under it, had appeared down in the right-hand corner: whatehhifcalled an“exclamation point.” Ehef had clicked on it, and another little window had popped up on the screen: this now flickered and filled with words.
“It’s the usual thing,” he growled: “I’m between systems here, and half the time She Whispers, and half the time She sends me E-mail, and sometimes she doesboth,and I never know which to— All right,nowwhat is it?”
Rhiow turned away politely, as the others did, but privately she was wondering about Ehef’s relationship with one of the Powers That Be, and how he could take such a tone with Hrau’f herself. “Huh,” Ehef said finally, finishing his reading. “Well. Not that serious. Rhi, there’s something in the Met you’re supposed to have a look at. They’ve been bringing out some archival material that was in storage in Egyptian. Written stuff, in oldehhif.She says, check the palimpsest cases.”
“For what?” Rhiow flicked her ears forward but could hear nothing from the Whisperer herself.
“She says you’ll know it when you see it”
Rhiow put her whiskers forward good-humoredly at that: it often seemed that Hrau’f was not above making you do a little extra work for your own good. “Strange,” she said, “getting news from her written down like that.”
“Ffff,”Ehef said, a disgusted noise,“you don’t knowhowstrange it looked until we got the Hauhai font designed.Technology.”He pronounced it as a curse word, and spat softly.“If I ever find out which of us suggested to theehhifthat the wheel should be round instead of square, I’m going to dig up her last grave and shred her ears. —Oh,thereyou are, finally. You leave me some?”
Arhu was standing by the desk, looking considerably thicker around the middle than he had just a little while ago. Rhiow was briefly shocked at how thin Arhu was, when a full meal produced a whopping gut-bulge like the one he presently sported.
“Thank you,” Arhu said, and burped.
“Well, may Iau send you good of it, you young slob,” Ehef said, ironic, but still amused.
“Yeah, that reminds me,” Arhu said, and burped again, “whoisthis Iau you’re all yowling about all the time?”
Rhiow opened her mouth, then shut it again and looked away in embarrassment.
To her surprise, though, Ehef merely produced a very crooked smile.“Killing, we got a saying in this business. ‘Stupidity can be accidental. Ignorance is on purpose.’ Ignorance gets your ears shredded The only thing that savedyouis, you asked the question.Alwaysask. You may get your ears shredded anyway, but afterward you’ll still be alive to wear them. Maybe.” He gave Rhiow a dry look. “Maybe you should take him up to the Met with you. He keeps going on like this, he’s likely to run into the Queen in the street one day and get his features rearranged. She’s patient, but I don’t know if She’sthispatient.”