She turned away and started to wash, waiting for Rosie to master himself. When the sobbing stopped, Rhiow turned back to him and said,“Did you see them come through here? Did they hurt you? I can’t tell by smell, Rosie: it’s your clothes.”
The cardboard moved from side to side: underneath it, eyes gleamed.“They went by,” he said, very softly, after a little while.
“Did you see where they came from?” Rhiow said.
The head shook again.
“Which ‘cold things,’ Rosie?” Rhiow said.
“They roar … in the dark…”
Rhiow sighed. This was a familiar theme with Rosie: though hewouldkeep coming down here to hide, trains frightened him badly, and he seemed to have a delusion that if they could, they would get off the tracks and come after him. When life occasionally seemed to ratify this belief—as when a train derailed near enough for him to see, on Track 110—Rosie vanished for weeks at a time, and Rhiow worried about him even more than she did usually.
“All right, Rosie,” she said. “You stay here a little while. I’ll come back with something for you, and I’ll have a word with the rats … they won’t come while you eat. Will you go back to the shelter after the convention’s done?”
Rosie muttered a little under his breath, and then said,“Airaha nuzusesei lazeira.”
“Once more, please?”
’Try to. No purr not long tired lie down not get up.”
Rhiow licked her nose; she caught all too clearly theehhif’ssense of weariness and fear.“We have got to get you some more verbs,” she said, “or adjectives, or something. Never mind. I’ll be back soon, Rosie.”
She turned and hurried away, thinking hard about Rosie’s clothes, and putting together a familiar short description of them in her head, in the Speech, and of what she wanted to happen to them, and what was inside them. “Come on, Arhu. You don’t want to be too close to him in the next few seconds.”
“Why? What’s the matter? What’s he going to—”
Well down the hallway, Rhiow paused and looked back. In this lighting, it would have taken a cat’s eyes to see what she and Arhu could: the revolting little multiple-branched river of body lice making their way in haste out of Rosie’s clothes, and pouring themselves very hurriedly out every available opening, out from under the cardboard and out across the floor, where they pitched themselves down a drain and went looking for other prey.
“I wonder if they like rat?” Rhiow said, and smiled, showing her teeth.
She loped back out of the corridor, with Arhu coming close behind her, and together they made their way back to the fire exit.
“Butthat,”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. Theehhifwould 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. Thisisthe 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.Allthese fights are the Fight. Stand back, do nothing, and youarethe 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.Ehhifkill 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.Hauisshgoes 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 waytheyare. 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 tastedyourself whenwe 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 thehouiffstarted 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, awhy-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—”
Anehhifin a suit, and carrying a briefcase, was coming along the colonnade. Arhu stared at him with alarm, for theehhifplainly 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 approachingehhif 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 toyourphysicality, Downside?”