To Visit the Queen by Diane Duane Page B

said to her— an advantage over most People, who had to guess from tone of voice and body language what was going on with their ehhif.
    "You hungry? You didn't eat much of what I left you this morning."
    "You forgot to wash the bowl again," Rhiow said, starting to step down into his lap, then pausing while Iaehh resettled himself. "With all the dried stuff from yesterday and the day before yesterday stuck to it, it wasn't exactly conducive to gourmet dining. I'll get some of the dry food in a while."
    She settled down in his lap and made herself comfortable while he stroked her. "You're a nice kitty," Iaehh said. "Aren't you?"
    "Under the throat," Rhiow said, "yes, right there, that's the spot...." She stretched out her neck and purred, and for a while they just sat there together while bright squares of the late afternoon sun worked their way slowly across the apartment.
    "Now why can't the people at work be as laid back as you," Iaehh said after a while. "You just take everything as it comes.... You never get stressed out."
    She stretched out her forepaws and closed her eyes. "If you only knew," Rhiow said.
    "You don't have any worries. You have a nice bed to sleep on, nice food whenever you want it...."
    "As regards the food, 'nice' is relative," Rhiow said with some amusement, kneading with her paws on Iaehh's knee. "That 'choice parts' thing you gave me the day before yesterday was parts, all right, but as for 'choice'? Please. I'd be tempted to go out and kill my own cows, except that getting them in the cat door would be a nuisance."
    "Ow, ow, don't do that! You go in and out whenever you like, you don't have a job, you don't have to worry about anyone depending on you...."
    Rhiow's tail twitched ironically. "Wouldn't it be nice if it were so," she said softly, and sighed. Any wizard had daily concerns over whether or not she was doing her job well: you pushed past those doubts and fears as best you could, secure in the knowledge that the Powers That Be would not long allow you to go on uncorrected if you were messing up. Yet that routine, negative sort of approval sometimes fell short of one's emotional needs; it left you wondering, Am I giving enough? The Powers that made the Universe have poured Their virtue into me for the purpose of saving that Universe, piece by piece, day by day. Am I giving enough of it back? And— more to the point— is it working?
    "What a life," Iaehh said.
    "You're not kidding," Rhiow said.
    "But I still wonder... is it good enough...."
    She opened an eye and looked up at him.
    "I don't know sometimes," Iaehh said, stroking her steadily, "if it's fair for me to keep you. Just because... you're all that's left of her. I don't know, is that a fair reason to keep a pet?"
    Rhiow sighed again. His tone was reflective, his face was still, but the intensity of Iaehh's grief for Hhuha was no less obvious for lacking tears. For one thing, Rhiow could hear the echoes of his emotions: even nonwizardly People could manage that much with the ehhif with whom they spent most of their time. For another thing, Rhiow was an experienced wizard, fluent in the Speech. Understanding it, you could thereby understand anything that spoke. You could also speak to anything that spoke, and make yourself understood: but this was strictly forbidden to wizards except when engaged in errantry, on wizardly business that required it. Rhiow had sometimes been tempted to break her silence, but she had never done it— not even when Iaehh had clutched her and wept into her fur, moaning the name that Rhiow herself also would have moaned aloud in shared grief, if only it had been allowed: Susan, Susan...
    Iaehh stroked her, and Rhiow could hear and feel his pain, a little blunted from that first terrible night, but no less easy to bear. She knew the way it came to him in sudden stabs, without warning, at the sound of a telephone ringing or a ra'hio commercial that had always made Hhuha laugh. "I worry that you're lonely,"