Duane,Diane - Wizards - Young Wizards 08 - The Book Of Night With Moon

THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON

by DIANE DUANE

A Note on Feline Linguistics

Ailurin is not a spoken language, or not simply spoken. Like all the human languages, it

has a physical component, the cat version of "body language," and a surprising amount of

information is passed through the physical component before a need for vocalized words

arises.

Even people who haven't studied cats closely will recognize certain "words" in Ailurin:

the rub against a friendly leg, the arched back and fluffed fur of a frightened cat, the

crouch and stare of the hunter. All of these have strictly physical antecedents and uses,

but they are also used by cats for straight forward communication of mood or intent.

Many subtler signs can be seen by even a human student: the sideways flirt of the tail that

says "I don't care" or "I wonder if I can get away with this..." the elaborate yawn in

another cat's face, the stiff-legged, arch-backed bounce, which is the cat equivalent of

making a face and jumping out at someone, shouting "Boo!" But where gestures run out,

words are used—more involved than the growl of threat of purr of contentment, which are

all most humans hear of intercat communication.

"Meowing" is not counted here, since cats rarely seem to meow at each other. That type

of vocalization is usually a "pidgin" language used for getting humans' attention: the cat

equivalent of "Just talk to them clearly and loudly and they'll get what you mean sooner

or later." Between each other, cats sub-vocalize using the same mechanism that operates

what some authorities call "the purr box," a physiological mechanism that is not well

understood but seems to have something to do with the combined vibration of air in the

feline larynx and blood in the veins and arteries of the throat. To someone with a

powerful microphone, a cat speaking Ailurin seems to be making very soft meowing and

purring sounds ranging up and down several octaves, all at a volume normally inaudible

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THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON

to humans.

This vocalized part of Ailurin is a "pitched" language, like Mandarin Chinese, more sung

than spoken. It is mostly vowel-based—no surprise in a species that cannot pronounce

most human-style consonants. Very few noncats have ever mastered it: not only does any

human trying to speak it sound to a cat as if he were shouting every word, but the delicate

intonations are filled with traps for the unwary or unpracticed. Auo hwaai hhioehhu

uaeiiiaou, for example, may look straightforward: "I would like a drink of milk" is the

Cat-Human Phrasebook definition. But the people writing the phrasebook for the human

ear are laboring under a terrible handicap, trying to transliterate from a thirty-seven-vowel

system to an alphabet with only five. A human misplacing or mispronouncing only one of

the vowels in this phrase will find cats smiling gently at him and asking him why he

wants to feed the litter-box to the taxicab? ... this being only one of numerous nonsenses

that can be made of the above example.

So communication from our side of things tends to fall back on body language (stroking,

or throwing things, both of which cats understand perfectly well) and a certain amount of

monologue—which human-partnered cats, with some resignation, accept as part of the

deal. For their communications with most human beings, the cats, like so many of us, tend

to fall back on shouting. For this book's purposes, though, all cat-to-human speech,

whether physical or vocal, is rendered as normal dialogue: that's the way it seems to the

cats, after all.*

One other note: two human-language terms, "queen" and "tom," are routinely used to

translate the Ailurin words sh'heih and sth'heih. "Female" and "male" don't properly

translate these words, being much too sexually neutral—which cats, in their dealings with

one another, emphatically are not. The Ailurin word ffeih is used for both neutered males

and spayed females.

—DD

*Cat thoughts and silent communications are rendered in italics.

I am the Cat who took up His stance

by the Persea Tree, on the night we

destroyed the enemies of God....

Pert em hru, c. 2800 b.c., tr. Budge

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THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON

Bite: bite hard, and find the tenth life.

--The Gaze of Rhoua's Eye

(feline recension of The Book of Night with Moon): Ixiii, 18

Chapter One

They never turn the lights off in Grand Central; and they may lock the doors between 1

and 5:30 a.m., but the place never quite becomes still. If you stand outside those brass-and-

glass doors on Forty-second Street and peer in, down the ramp leading into the Grand

Concourse, you can see the station's quiet nightlife—a couple of transit police officers

strolling past, easygoing but alert; someone from the night cleaning crew heading toward

the information island in the center of the floor with a bucket and a lot of polishing cloths

for all that century-old brass. Faintly, the sound of rumblings under the ground will come

to you—the Metro-North trains being moved through the upper- and lower-level loops,

repositioned for their starts in the morning, or tucked over by the far-side tracks to be

checked by the night maintenance crews. On the hour, the massive deep gong of the giant

Accurist clock facing Forty-second strikes, and the echoes chase themselves around under

the great blue sky-vault and slowly fade.

By five o'clock the previous day's dust will have been laid, the locks checked, the glass on

the stores in the Graybar and Hyatt passageways all cleaned: everything done, until it's

time to open again. The transit policemen, still in a pair because after all this is New York

and you just can't tell, will stroll past, heading up the stairs on the Vanderbilt Avenue side

to sit down in the ticketed passenger waiting area and have their lunch break before the

day officially starts. Anyone looking in through the still-locked Forty-second Street doors

will see nothing but stillness, the shine of slick stone and bright brass.

But there are those for whom locked doors are no barrier. Were you one of them, this

morning, you would slip sideways and through, padding gently down the incline toward

the terrazzo flooring of the concourse. The place would smell green, the peculiar too-

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THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON

strong wintergreen smell of a commercial sweeping compound. Your nose would wrinkle

as you passed a spot on the left, against the cream-colored wall, where blood was spilled

yesterday—a disagreement, a knife and a gun pulled, everything finished in a matter of

seconds: one life wounded, one life fled, the bodies taken away. But the disinfectants and

the sweeping compound can't hide the truth from you and the stone.

You would walk on, pause in the center of the room, and look upward, as many tunes

before, at the starry, painted vault of the heavens—its dusk-blue rather faded, and half the

bulbs in the Zodiac's constellations burnt out. The Zodiac is backward. They'll be

renovating the ceiling this spring, but you doubt they'll fix that problem. It doesn't matter,

anyway: after all, "backward" depends on which direction you're looking from....

You would walk on again then, guided by senses other than the purely physical ones, and

stroll silently over to the right of the motionless up-escalators, toward the gate to Track

25. Once through its archway, everything changes. The ambiance of the terminal—light,

air, openness— abruptly shifts: the ceiling lowers, the darkness closes in. Lighting comes

in the form of long lines of fluorescent fixtures, only one out of every three of them lit,

this time of day. They shine down in bright dashed lines on the seven platforms to your

right, the nine to your left, and straight ahead, on the gray concrete of the platform that

serves Tracks 25 and 26. Behind you, a pool of warm light lies under the windows of the

glass-walled room that is the Trainmaster's Office. Little light, though, makes it past the

platform's edge to the tracks themselves. They are long trenches of shadow between pale

gray plateaus of concrete that stretch, tapering, into the middle distance, vanishing into

more darkness. The rails themselves gleam faintly only close to where you stand: they too

reach off into the dark, converging, and swiftly disappear. Red and green track guidelights

shine dully there. A few shine brighter: the track crew members are down there, walking

the rails to check for obstructions and wiping the lights off as they come.

You walk quietly down the center platform, letting your eyes get used to the reduced

light, until you come to where the platform ends, almost a quarter-mile from the arches of

the gates.

You jump down from the tapered end of the platform, into shadow, and walk out of reach

of the last fluorescent lights. The red and green lights marking the track switches are your

only illumination now, and all you need. Seventy-five feet ahead of you, Tracks 25 and 26

converge. Just off to your right is the walkway to a low concrete building, Tower A, the

master signaling center for the terminal. You are careful not to look directly at it: the

bright lights inside it, the blinking of switch indicators and computer telltales, would ruin

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your night-sight. You pad softly on past, under its windows, past the little phone-

exchange box at the tower's end, on into the darkness. The still, close air smells of iron,

rust, garbage, mildew, cinders, electricity—and something else.

Here you pause, warned by the senses that drew you here, and you wait. Trembling on

your skin, and against your eyes, is a feeling like the tremor of air in the subway when,

well down (he tunnel, a train is coming. But what's coming isn't a train. Everything

around is silent, even the subway tunnel three levels below you. Two levels above you

now is the block between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets: from there, no sound conies,

either. Watching, you wait.

No eyes but yours, acclimated and looking in the right place, would see what slowly

becomes visible. The air itself, somehow more dark than the air in front of it, is bending,

showing contour, like a plate-glass window bowing outward in a hurricane wind—or

inward, toward you. Yet the contour that you half-see, half-sense, is wrong. It bulges like

a blown bubble—but a bubble blown backward, drawn in rather than pushed out. You

half-expect to hear breath sucked inward to match what you almost-see.

The bubble gets bigger and bigger, spanning the tracks. The darkness in the air streaks,

pulled past its tolerances. Not-light shows through the thin places; wincing, you glance

away. The faintest possible shrilling sound fills your twitching ears, the sound of

spacetime yielding to intolerable pressure, under protest: it scales up and up, piercing you

like pins—

—and stops, as the bubble breaks, letting through whatever has been leaning on it from

the other side. You look at it, blinking. Silence again: darkness. A false alarm—

Until, as you shake your head again at the shrilling, you realize that you shouldn't still be

hearing it. And out of the blackness in front of you, pattering, rustling, they come. First,

just a few. Then ten of them, a hundred of them, more. Hurrying, scattering, humpily

running, their little wicked eyes gleaming dull red in the light from far behind you, they

flow at you like darkness come alive, darkness with teeth, darkness shrilling with hunger:

the rats.

There is more than hunger in those voices, though, more than just malice in those eyes.

Their screams have terror in them. They will destroy anything that gets between them and

their flight from what comes behind them, driving them; they'll strip the flesh from your

bones and never even stop to enjoy it. Backing away, hissing, you see the huge dark shape

that comes behind them—walking two-legged, claws like knives lashing out in

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amusement at the shrieking tats, the long lashing tail balancing out behind: high above,

the blunt and massive head, jaws working compulsively, huge razory fangs gleaming even

in this dim light: and gazing down at you through the darkness, the eyes—the small,

gemlike, cruelly smiling eyes, with your death in them: everything's death.

Seeing this, you do the only thing you can. You run.

But it's not enough....

-=O=-***-=O=-

She was sound asleep when the voice breathed in her ear. There was nothing unusual

about that: They always took the method of least resistance.

Oh, fwau, why right this minute?

Rhiow refused to hurry about opening her eyes, but rolled over and stretched first, a good

long stretch, and yawned hard. Opening her eyes at last, she saw the main room still dark:

her ehhif hadn't come out to open the window-coverings yet. No surprise there, for the

noisemaker by the bed hadn't gone off yet, either. Rhiow rolled over and stretched one

more time, for the call hadn't been desperately urgent, though urgent enough. Please don't

let it be the north-side gate again. Not after all the hours we spent on the miserable thing

yesterday. Au, it's going to take forever to get things going this morning....

She stood up, stretched fore and aft, then sat down on the patterned carpet in the middle

of the room and started washing, making a face as she began; her fur still tasted a little

like the room smelled, of cheese and mouth-smoke and other people from the eating party

last night. Rhiow's mouth watered a little at the memory of the cheese, to which she was

most partial. She had managed to wheedle a fair amount of it out of the guests. Normally

this would have left her with a somewhat abated appetite in the morning, but getting a call

always sharpened her stomach, and more so if she was asleep when the call came: it was

as if the urgency transmitted straight to her gut and there turned into hunger.

Probably some kind of sublimation, Rhiow thought, scrubbing her ears. And a vhai'd

nuisance, in any case. She leaned back, bracing herself on one paw, and started washing

the inside right rear leg.

Well, at least the timing isn't too abysmal. The others will be up shortly, or else they won't

have gone to bed at all: just fine either way.

Rhiow finished up, putting her tail in order, and then stood and trotted through the

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landscape of disordered furniture, noting drinking-vessels left under chairs, a couple of

them knocked over and spilled, and she paused to pick up half a dropped cracker with

some of that pink fish stuff on it. Salmon paid, she thought as she munched. Not bad, even

a night old. She gulped the last bit down, licked a couple of errant specks of it off her

whiskers, and looked around. I wonder if they left the container out on the counter, like

those others?

But there wasn't time for that: she was on call. The bedroom door was shut. Rhiow started

to rear up and scratch on it, then sat back down, having second thoughts: if she wanted

both breakfast and an early start, it was smarter not to annoy them. She looked

thoughtfully at the doorknob, squinting slightly.

It took only a second or so to clearly perceive the mechanism: friction-dependent, as she

knew from previous experience, but not engaged. The door was merely pushed shut and

was sticking a little tighter at the top than the bottom, that being all that held it in place.

Rhiow gazed at that spot for a moment, closed her eyes a bit further, and presently came

to see the two patches of dim sparkle that represented the material forces at work in the

two adjoining surfaces of the stuck spot. Under her breath she said the word that

temporarily reduced the coefficient of friction in that spot, then stood on her hind legs and

leaned against the door.

It fell open. Rhiow trotted in, feeling the normal forces reassert themselves behind her.

One jump took her onto the bed, which sloshed up and down as she padded up the length

of it, to a spot beside Iaehh's head. He was facedown in the pillow, a position she had

come to recognize over time as meaning he didn't want to get up any time soon. Rhiow

blinked, sympathetic if nothing else, and walked over his back to get to Hhuha.

She was on her back, snoring gently. Rhiow put her head down by Hhuha's ear and

purred.

No response.

It would have been nice to do this the easy way, Rhiow thought reluctantly, but... She

bumped Hhu's head with her own, purring harder.

"Rrrrgh," said Hhuha, and rolled over, and squinted her eyes tighter shut, and after a

moment looked at Rhiow out of them with some disbelief.

She sat up groggily in the bed and looked at the door. "Now how the heck did you get in

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THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON

here? I know he shut that last night."

"Yes, I know, 7 opened it, never mind," Rhiow said, "come on, will you? I have to get an

early start. Business, unfortunately." She rubbed against Hhuha's side and purred some

more.

"Wow, you're noisy this morning, aren't you? What on earth do you want? Not breakfast

already, you pig! You had two whole slices of pizza just a few hours ago."

Don't remind me, Rhiow thought, for her stomach was growling so hard, she was amazed

Hhuha couldn't hear it. "Look, it would really help if you would just get up and give me

my morning feed so I can get on with things—"

"Mike? Mike, get up. I think maybe your kitty wants her breakfast."

"Nnnggghhhh," said Iaehh, and didn't move.

"Oh, will you come on already?" Rhiow said, desperately hoping Hhuha didn't notice that

her purr was becoming a little forced. "And as for pigs, who ate half a salami last night?

And never gave me any? Even when I asked. Now please get up before it gets so late that

I have to leave!"

"Gosh, you really must be hungry. I guess cats digest faster than people or something,"

Hhuha said, her voice going soft, and she reached out to scratch Rhiow's eyebrows. The

tone of voice was one Rhiow had heard before: she got a sense that her ehhif liked being

"talked to," even when they couldn't hear half of what was being said, and, even if they

could, would have no idea what the words meant anyway. This tendency made them

either great idiots or very fond of her indeed, and either conjecture only made Rhiow

twitchier under the present circumstances. She stomped her forefeet alternately on the

coverlet, as much from impatience as from pleasure at having her head scratched.

"Come on, then," said Hhuha. She got out of bed, threw a house-pelt around her, and

headed toward the kitchen. Rhiow went after her, not in a hurry: this was no time to trip

Hhuha halfway there and have to deal with an ehhif temper tantrum that might take half

an hour to resolve. By the time Rhiow got to the kitchen, Hhuha was cranking a can open.

"Mmm," Hhuha said, "nice tuna. You'll like this."

"I hate the tuna," Rhiow said, sitting down and curling her tail around her forefeet. "It's

not made from any part of the fish that you 'd ever eat. You should read more of the label

than just the part about the dolphins."

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"Yum, yum," Hhuha said, putting the plate down on the floor. "Here you go, puss. Lovely

tuna."

Rhiow looked at the gelid stuff with resignation. Oh, well, she thought, it's food, and I

need something before I go out. And anyway—manners... She reared up and gave Hhuha a

good rub around the shins before starting to eat.

"You're a good kitty," Hhuha said, and turned, yawning, to take something out of the

refrigerator.

Rhiow purred with amusement and satisfaction as she ate. The compliment was true

enough, but also true was that, while she had been rearing up to rub against Hhuha's leg,

she had seen where the container of salmon pate had been pushed back behind some

drinking containers on the counter beside the ffrihh.

"God, I'm glad it's Sunday," Hhuha said, and shut the refrigerator again, heading for the

bedroom. "I couldn't bear the thought of work after last night."

Rhiow sighed as she finished one last bite and turned away from the dish, reluctant: eating

too much now would make her want a nap, and she had no time for that. "Must be nice to

have weekends off," Rhiow muttered, sitting down to wash. "I wish I did."

The rest of her personal hygiene took only a few minutes more: her ehhif had put a hiouh-

box. out on their small terrace for her, where it was under cover from rain. While using it,

Rhiow went off into unfocused mode briefly and could hear them talking as Hhuha

opened the window-coverings and the window.

"Mmngnggh ..." Iaehh's voice. "Did she eat?"

"Uh huh." A pause. "She's out now.... I don't know... I'm still not sure it's a great idea to

have her box out there."

"Oh, come on, Sue. Better there than in the bathroom. You 're the one who was always

muttering about walking in the kitty Utter in the morning. Anyway, she's not going to fall

or anything."

"I don't mean that It's encouraging her to get down on that lower roof that worries me."

"Why? It's not like she can get to anywhere else from there. She can roam around and get

some fresh air... and she's been doing it for months now without any trouble. She would

have gone missing a long time back if she could have."

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"Well, I still worry."

"Susannnnn ... She's not stupid. It's not like she's going to try to go twenty stories straight

down."

Rhiow put her whiskers forward in a slight smile as she finished tidying the box, then got

out and shook her feet fastidiously. Bits of litter scattered in various directions, skittering

off the terrace. They can make water run uphill and fly off to the Moon when they like, she

thought, resigned, but they can't make hiouh-litter that won't stick to your paws. A serious

misplacement of priorities...

Rhiow went to the edge of the railed terrace, looked down. Her ehhif's apartment was near

the corner of the building. Its wall fell sheer to the next terrace, thirty feet down, but she

had no interest in that. Off to the left was an easy jump, about three feet, to the concrete

parapet of a lower roof of a building diagonally behind theirs, but Rhiow wasn't going

that way either. Her intended path lay sideways, along the brick wall itself. Some fanciful

builder had built into it a pattern of slightly protruding bricks, a stairstep pattern repeating

above and below. The part of it Rhiow used led rightward down the wall to the building's

other near corner, about fifty feet away; and six feet below that, in the direction of the

street, was the raised parapet of yet another roof, the top of the next building along.

Rhiow slipped through the railings, stepped carefully up onto the first brick, and made her

way downward along the wall, foot before foot, no hurry. This segment of her road, the

first used each day setting out and the last to manage before getting home, was also the

trickiest: no more than two inches' width of brick to put her feet on as she went, nothing

to catch her should she fall. Once she almost had, and afterward had spent nearly half an

hour washing and regaining her composure, horrified at what might have happened, or

worse, who might have seen her. Wasted time, she thought now, amused at her younger

self. But we all learn....

At the corner of the building Rhiow paused, looked around. Soft city-noise drifted up to

her the hoot of horns over on Third, someone's car alarm wailing disconsolately to itself

four or five blocks north, the rattle of trays being unloaded at the bakery eastward and

around the corner. All around her, the sheer walls of other apartment and office buildings

turned blind walls and windows to the sight of a small black cat perched on a two-inch-

wide brick, ninety feet above the sidewalk of Seventieth Street. No one saw her. But that

was life in iAh'hah, after all: no one looked up or paid attention to any but their own

affairs.

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Duane, Diane - Wizards - Young Wizards 08 - The Book Of Night With Moon

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