Purposely, therefore, Rhiow spun the lesson out. An hour and a half later, they were standing on the air directly above the roof of Grand Central, maybe thirty stories up, sidled, and fairly close to the windows of the Grand Hyatt. Rhiow had to smile, for many of those windows did not have their curtains pulled, and inside them, one could see (as one almost always could) the occasional pair ofehhifdoing what Hhuha sometimes facetiously called“the cat-scaring thing.” Rhiow could not remember when she had last been scared by it, even by some of the noises Hhuha and Iaehh made in their throes. Arhu, however, had been betrayed by his prurient curiosity, and was watching one pair ofehhif with complete and disgusted fascination.
“Don’t skywalk where you can easily be seen,” Rhiow was saying, while wondering how much of what she told him was sinking in. “If you do it between buildings, make sure the walls are blind … or that you’re sidled. Which has its dangers, too. Birds won’t see you…”
“That could be nice,” Arhu said, briefly distracted; he glanced around and licked his chops.
“ ‘Nice’? It could be fatal. There are more kinds of birds in this city than pigeons and sparrows and starlings. If one of the Princes of the Air hits you at eighty miles an hour, you’d better pray you’re high enough up for a long-enough fall to reconstruct the wizardry.”
“The Princes—”
“And a couple of ‘princesses,’ ” Rhiow said. “There’s a falcon-breeding program based on top of a building down near Central Park South. One of the hatchlings, about ten clutches ago, was a wizard: he’s been promoted since, to Lord of the Birds of the East—a Senior for his kind. The rest of them are stuck-up as anything, think they’re royalty, and kill more pigeons in a given day than they need to. They’re a menace. Especially if they hit you with one of those little claw-fists of theirs, at high velocity, while you’re invisible. The impact alone might kill you, for allI know. It sure kills the pigeons.”
She sighed then as the twoehhiffell together, exhausted, at the end of their bout.“Come on,” she said. “Enough looking for one day…”
Arhu’s tail lashed. “If I stop looking at this,” he said, almost absently, “I’ll just see something else…”
Yes,Rhiow thought,that’s the problem, isn’t it… “Come on,” she said, “and we’ll go down to the concourse and see about that pastrami. You can’t see things while you’re eating, I don’t think. The chewing is supposed to interfere.”
He looked at her with a glitter of hope in his eyes.“AD right,” he said.
They walked down the air together, Arhu still doing it very slowly and carefully, as if it were a normal stairway; went right down to ground level, nearest the wall, and slipped inside the brass doors. Arhu looked around them as they walked together past the main waiting room toward the concourse.
Suddenly Arhu stopped and stared.“What arethose?”he whispered.
Rhiow looked over into the waiting room. It had been one of the first areas to have its refurbishment completed, and was now routinely used for art exhibitions and receptions, and sometimes even parties. At the moment, though, the big airy space looked oddly empty, even though there were things in it… rather large things. In the center of the room, on a large black pedestal with velvet crowd-control ropes around it, caught in midstride—almost up on its toes, its tail stretched out horizontally and whipping out gracefully behind it—a dinosaur skeleton was mounted. Its huge head, empty-eyed, jaws open, seemed to glare down at the few casual observers who were strolling around it or pausing to read the informational plaque mounted nearby.
Rhiow gazed up at it and smiled sardonically.“Yes,” she said, “I guess it doesn’t look much like what we were dealing with last night. A lot bigger. These are part of the Museum of Natural History’s new exhibition … and theehhifare all excited about it because now they think they know, from these new models, how the saurians really held themselves and moved.”
Arhu took a few steps toward the biggest of the mounted skeletons … cocked his head to one side, and listened. After a moment, he said, “And those are real bones?”
“They dig them up and wire them together,” Rhiow said. “It always struck me as a little perverse. But then, they have no way of seeing what we saw last night.”
They walked on.“This place looked a lot different, the other night,” Arhu said.
“If it’s any help, it never looks the same way twice to me,” Rhiow said. “I mean, the physical structures are always the same, obviously—well, not always, not with all this renovation and with exhibitions coming and going out in front But night and day pass, the light changes, theehhif hereare never the same ones at any given moment… Though the city still isn’t as big as you might think: you’ll glimpse the occasional familiar face…”
“That’s not what I meant,” Arhu said, more slowly, with a puzzled expression. “It was bigger, somehow. It echoed.”
“It does that more at night than in the daytime,” Rhiow said. “Emptier.”
“No,” Arhu said. “It was full; I saw it full. Or I think I do now.” He stopped and stared at the concourse before him: a late lunchtime crowd, the crush easing somewhat. “I heard something … a lot of noise. I walked in to find out what it was. Then—” He shook his ears as if they hurt him. “I don’t want to think about that,” he said.
“You’re going to have to, sooner or later. But come on,” Rhiow said. “Pastrami first.”
Rhiow came unsidled long enough to do her“trick” again for the man in the Italian deli, and he gave her not only pastrami but cheese as well. She shared the pastrami happily enough with Arhu but never got a chance to do so with the cheese: as soon as he smelled it, he immediately snatched the whole thing and gobbled it, almost chokinghimself—a topologically interesting sight, like watching a shark eat a mattress. “Oh, this is wonderful,” Arhu attempted to say around the mouthful, “what is this?”
“Solid milk,” Rhiow said, just a little wistfully, watching it vanish. “They have a lot of kinds. This one’s called ‘mozzarella.’ ”
“What a terrific invention!”
“Soehhifare good for something after all?”
He glanced sidewise at her, and his face shut down again.“Not much besides this.”
Rhiow held her peace until he finished the cheese.“Come on, get sidled,” she said, “and we’ll come back and see him again later: he’s a soft-hearted type.”
They strolled a little way out into the concourse, sat down by the east wall, out of the way of people’s feet, and well to one side of the cash machines. Arhu craned his neck back in the bright noon light and looked up at the ceiling again. “It is backward.”
“Yes … and you saw that before. Seeing is going to be a problem for you now … and a gift.”
“If it’s a gift, they can take it back,” he said bitterly. “I can’tstopseeing things now. Though you were right about the chewing.”
“What kinds of things?”
“I don’t know what most of them are,” Arhu said. “It’s like when the Whisperer… when she tells you stuff… but there’s always more than just what she tells you. I see pictures of things behind things behind things, and it all keeps changing. I don’t know where to put my feet.”
“Images of alternate futures,” Rhiow said, wondering if she now was beginning to understand Arhu’s clumsiness. Arhu looked at her strangely.
“Anything can change a future,” Rhiow said. “Say one thing, do one thing, and it goes one way. Do something else, and it goes another. What would have happened if the Whisperer had offered you the Oath, and you’d said no? What if you’d slipped off the brickwork, the other night? What if the police-ehhifhad come and caught you trying to steal the pastrami, and they had taken you away to an animal shelter? Each of your futures would have been different. And there are thousands more.”