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Save Point: The Alignment of the Spheres

Cleo comes home and makes a point of ignoring Niphur, who has somehow in defiance of all logic managed to lay the length of his black furry body along the upper edge of the fridge door, where it protrudes just a few inches out from under the cupboard above.

The ledge thus created should be too thin for a housecat, let alone a Niphur, and frankly she has no idea how he even managed to get into that position to begin with without falling off. He's now at approximately the same height as her head and is purring with one front and hind leg dangling over the edge, enjoying the thrumming of the fridge (which is twenty or thirty years old, and has lasted twenty or thirty years because it uses highly efficient coolants that are now illegal and was assembled before the words 'planned' and 'obsolescence' hooked up at a bar in the late eighties).

It goes without saying he has no plan for getting down, other than to perhaps wait until someone opens the door and opportunistically engage the feline parachute that is the 'falling on ones feet' feature set, possibly destroying irreplaceable plastic butter coolers and shelving racks all the way down. Well, she's not going to help him with that.

Let him suffer the consequences of his own poor forward planning when using the appliance as a full-body vibrator gets dull. The coffee is out on the bench and Terrowne has inexplicably left out the milk, probably since just before Niphur got up there, which tends to support her prediction as to the probable consequences of opening the door.

She boils water, watches the steam rise, brews coffee, adds pleasantly but not dangerously warm milk like it used to be in the times before refrigeration. Niphur watches patiently, boldly trying to pretend that everything is fine, then finally mewls when she starts to walk out of the kitchen area, coffee in hand. Well, it's not really a mewl, it's scaled up way too large for that into a sort of softly questioning grunt, but he has at least admitted he needs help.

She puts the coffee on the sideboard, still steaming, and helps him down by assisting him to climb cumbersomely onto her shoulder in a firemans hold. It's an awkward procedure, given that he weighs a considerable amount and has just as many claws as she does, but neither of them fall over and he manages to bound down onto the floor with a thud, then gives her another low grunt she can only characterize as disappointed. How dare she embarrass him like that?

Niphur stalks away proudly with his head held high in standard cat illogic.

To think that it falls to her to be the reasonable one in this particular master-pet relationship. She collects her coffee and tries to recall what it was she was about to do next.

~*~

When the noise starts up again the following evening, Cleo fluffs her hair in frustration, flops her ears down against the pillow, and then pulls the blankets down over her head, accidentally baring her hindquarters in the process, which would be cold if it wasn't summertime down here.

Because of her weight, it's sort of a full-body, bed-shaking motion, but Terrowne is used to her range of little night-time perambulations and only stirs if he thinks she's likely to set the bed on fire. He can't hear it, or at least to him it's no more audible than the occasional passing cosmic ray, but it's keeping her from sleeping, which is a rare thing. She has slept curled up inside barrels, on battlefields, in the packed-dirt dens of wild animals, and the disturbance that can keep her awake when she's not of a mind to be is a rare thing indeed.

Eventually, after some minutes spent in a stunned yet not quite sleeping state with the distressed pillow pulled down forcibly over her head, she gives up, gets up, and pulls on her preferred brand of battered white sneakers to take Niphur out to play at the Reserve.

~*~

Auckland is full of parks, but they're not quite formally recognized or necessarily as public spaces as they would be in a lot of cities. Often they're the convergence of several areas of land which are for one reason or another exempt from use, parts of the necessary drainage or watershed, fields behind schools, areas around libraries and swimming pools. The route they've dubbed the Hidden Waterways is the longest continuous strip, but there are plenty of others, generally within a short walk of most of the suburban areas of the city.

It's the done thing to refer to the one nearest you as 'the Reserve' as in a reserved space, although of course some of them have telling features that grant them a name, such as Rocket Park with its vastly tall playground tower (shortened now, since they took out the original all-steel frame that swayed with motion and the breeze, and that only the bravest children would climb to the top of, replacing it with something far more tediously wholesome and brightly plastikal. She misses it. It was fun to climb up the outside). People know by common consensus which you mean.

This Reserve is a good place to come and play with Niphur at night, because it's quiet and dark and there aren't that many houses nearby for one reason or another (an oddly misplaced wedge of industrial district helps, and the steep street nearby has somehow never come in for overhead lighting despite being, one would think, an obvious candidate for). There are large and baulkishly wooden playground structures scattered around it in odd places, assembled with thick bolts from industrial timbers and cabling wheels, foot-holds cut out to make it possible to scale the hard bits, and sinuous concrete paths wind unexpectedly about.

It's just too big and cold and wide and open for the usual teenagers to feel at home, and the few houses facing away and the lack of anything worthwhile to steal from the nearby manufactories makes it a hard sell even for the usual low-level shifty types. There are warmer and more friendly places closer to home for a little casual graffiti and vandalism, where one can light up with a few mates. But the place is perfect after dark for Niphur, who likes to run and leap across the cotton-reels and into and out of the trees, and seems to find the colder breezes bracing, especially in the unnaturally hot weather they've been having lately. His fur seems to be made to protect against a much colder environment, and he appears less in the summer months, sometimes with traces of rime and snow about his muzzle.

He also knows that if they see anyone out on their walk, he should disappear back to wherever he comes from. Cleo has handling licenses which can be used to excuse quite a lot, and false papers suitable to justify temporary possession of a big cat, but they're a little out-dated and some brief deniable glimpses are preferable to having to withstand close scrutiny.

Having something to do, and running and walking and breathing cool air that isn't as stultifyingly hot as their surroundings have been lately, helps her to clear her head and ignore the maddening hum that resonates insistently at the back of her head. Niphur is always crazy-cat fun and likes to have his mouth-folds scruffled and ears played about with, but she could swear that he hears the sound a little bit too, and he keeps looking away into the distance in that manner cats do, intently looking at something that isn't there, off in another universe, perhaps.

Suddenly the sound re-doubles, and for a moment she clutches her ears as though at a physical noise, which it doesn't seem to be. But then suddenly it comes into focus, as though someone had tuned a crystal radio and finally got the harmonics exactly right, and instead of a long-wavelength interference with itself, suddenly there is a pure clear pitch that is not exactly pleasant, but quite tolerable to listen to. It's the difference between out-of-tune versus may endanger wineglasses.

Niphur is looking again, from atop one of the play-structures, and she follows his gaze up into the night sky beyond the nearest ridge. It's still full moon night, so there's that silvery quality and a certain lightness to the air, the reflected fraction illuminating in turn banks of a fine skiff of white clouds against a perfectly clear sky.

"...what the fuck?"

~*~

As she runs along the right-hand side of Dominion Road, with Niphur bounding joyfully along at her heels and hopefully being mistaken for a black dog by passing cars, she thinks she can identify in the distance the source of what she thinks she's seeing, which could just be some sort of odd inversion effect produced by the current hot weather, perhaps a downburst of cold air from some high-altitude layer caused by the heat suddenly rising, like a bubbles roiling in a pot.

She's lived long enough to see all sorts of really strange and rare weather, things that have names but no photographs, or pictures but no name. But what this looks most like is something which belongs over a crop-circle in the south of England, not here in New Zealand in a suburban area far from any sort of cereal produce of any kind.

A slender, almost invisible, thread-like pillar of pale, faintly blue-white light rises from an unseen point somewhere on the ground below, and continues upward until it is lost, even to her sight, up high above in the distance. Where it passes through the cloud layer, which was quite fine and very dispersed anyway, the clouds have been pushed back, shunted outward to form a circle like small ripples directed outward from a pond. It's not that readily noticeable unless you're looking at it, and the odds are it will go mostly unnoticed, possibly a call or two to the local observatory or the met service being mostly dismissed as cranks because it would be quite a challenge to take a good picture of something so faint.

But really, right at this moment, with something like this happening right on her doorstep?

No way is she going to miss out on this. She once tracked a rainbow to its end in an old quarry on a misty day, splitting the angle with the sun to prove that you could, and stood glorying in the new colors that were all around her. Tracing some faint pillar of light to its base is really no big deal in comparison, because she thinks she knows where it is.

~*~

The standing stone at the Three Kings is an oddity, a monument to local history that has collided with a student prank to memorable results. The original civic plan called for 'a rough-hewn chunk of stone from the mouth of the volcano' to be placed with a commemorative plaque alongside the edge of Dominion Road. She's seen the original stone, old black-and-white pictures, and it was an ugly thing that oddly resembled a tooth, as if some vastly brutal act of dentistry had drawn from the 'mouth of the volcano' a stray molar gone bad with geologic age.

The original plan, however, had been put on hold after an unlikely collaboration between bored university students and soon to be laid-off quarry workers resulted in the placement of a proper menhir instead, a large single standing stone impeccably chosen, and dressed square from a huge piece of perfect basalt. It looks uncannily like its authentic forebears from the opposite side of the world, despite being entirely modern and owing more to a certain science-fiction film of the time than to any working knowledge of archaeology.

It would have seemed that, given its position smack-dab in the middle of a recreational sports field, the stone was doomed. But there was a surprising outcry from people who liked it exactly where it was, parallel to where the far end of the pitch would be in a regulation cricket match. It somehow looked exactly right, sitting precisely where it was, in the middle of a perfectly flat wide open space, like something out of an English village green. Why, it was almost like those rascally students had planned it (which of course they had).

A few adjustments were quietly made to the position of the pitch, and blocks of heavy padding provided that could be wrapped around the stone in the same manner as a fixed goalpost during a match. It proved possible to shift the field for rugby and soccer a little toward the nearer side, as a result of which the stone stood at the center line for ball sports, looking on like an overeager coach forbidden to quite set foot in the field itself. The stone also made a hell of a centerpiece for the occasional medieval revivalist fairs and Scottish Games that got held on the field sometimes, usually ending up surrounded by tents and pennants, or becoming the marker for the edge of a combat where two big guys in reproduction armour with blunted swords essayed careful swings at each others shield. During Polynesian music festivals and Matariki mid-winter celebrations, it developed chalked inscriptions that would linger through the next few rainstorms until someone finally bothered to scrub them away, showing stylized Taniwha, or the position of the Pleiades, or whatever else seemed inspiringly mysterious.

Tonight the stone doesn't have its safety padding on, but what it is doing is glowing very palely and shining a faint luminescence to the heavens. It looks as though it might be some sort of weird piezoelectric effect, the stone drawn into resonance with whatever is making that strange pitched note and emitting a tiny amount of light as a side-effect, like a weakly-pumped laser. Which would be a really great scientific explanation if it any way addressed the whole pushing-aside-the-clouds thing that it is undeniably doing right now.

Taking the shortest path out onto the field, down past the side of the council building and out on to the flat, once she's gotten close enough past the gnarled hanging roots of the trees to confirm for sure what she is seeing, she stares at the stone. Niphur is indisputably very excited, constantly pouncing and prowling on nothing, and the effect is sufficiently small that it could be written of as the glimmer of moonlight on humid-damped stone were it not for the fact that she saw the clouds move, moments after the pitch stabilized, when she went to follow Niphurs glance.

She wonders if it is safe to touch. Or indeed to stand next to. It's definitely a thing, but is it a thing that matters, or just something that happens every few centuries or millennia under the right sort of conditions? It's always important to distinguish the merely uncommon from the significant, on her sort of timescale. Everything's inevitable over a sufficient length of years.

Then she notices what else Niphur is looking at.

Down below the high ridge where they were before, her line of sight on the central Skytower was blocked. The epic-looking, fantasy-castle tower-resembling, just ridiculously tall highest building in the southern hemisphere is visible from most parts of the city, unless of course you happen to be on the far side of one of the volcanic ridges that criss-cross between the twin harbours to block your line of sight. This could be considered a good thing or a bad one, depending on whether you want to watch the fireworks and light-shows launched from the tower on New Years, or you are in fact just plain tired of seeing the thing perpetually in the corner of your vision.

Tonight, however, the Skytower is putting on another sort of light-show, one that puts out exactly the same sort of laser-like beam as the standing stone, only at a much greater level of intensity. A colourful show is nothing new, but this is nothing like the usual illumination, which is provided by banks of high-powered searchlights that shine upward and downward onto the body of the tower itself, the exact shading adjustable by how many are turned on and off.

That has to be where the sound is coming from! She mentally cross-references the locations and positions she heard the noise coming from before and yes, it would fit. And there are a couple of other details it might explain too, such as a series of small power failures across the city over the past few days (attributed to excessive use of air-conditioning and fans in the face of the heat) and a brief outage of the major internet providers (calling home over the holidays, or just at home and bored looking for porn). No-one would notice weirdness or bright light beams from the tower, it's normally doing that anyway, right in the heart of the light-polluted central business district. Plus the tower is just plain tempting, an epic location to get up to no good.

She wouldn't have even noticed it herself at all, were it not for the unexpected illumination of the Three Kings stone, which must be just picking up a faint secondary signal. Whoever cut and then placed it the way they did must have unconsciously imitated whatever standing stones are meant to do, perhaps with even greater success than the real thing, the stone taken from deeper, dressed far more cleanly than what it was originally meant to imitate.

Still... an adventure right on her own back doorstep! Yes!

After a self-congratulatory fist-pump she runs all the way home, chased by Niphur, baffling all the passing motorists and making them wonder if they just saw what they thought they did.

~*~

Back at home again a little later, she is forced to wrestle with a tricky question. Should she wake up Terrowne and invite him along? Or is this a one-kitten sort of adventure?

Niphur gets put to bed, or at least as much as one can put a giant black-furred Exmoor Beast to bed, meaning led to his cat-basket and snuggled down amid claw-ripped blankets with much ruff-scrabbling and affections, until he gets bored and decides to vanish off to somewhere else or visit his friends in whatever snowy place they call home. He seems to have enjoyed his night out full of excitements, but it is just too damned hot, so he makes a show of stretching his paws and flicking his ears expressively, yawning and baring needle-teeth. The temptation of free food in the form of a huge meat-bone out back offsets the impulse to wander off, at least until he has had a nap.

She watches Terrowne sleeping for a bit before she audaciously decides that she wants to do this one solo. As soon as he wakes up, general Dragonishness will set in again and he'll have an idea of what's going to happen next, so he'll probably come and rescue her if she accidentally blunders into something really disastrous, but for now she likes to imagine that she doesn't really need him and that for this one she'll be completely on her own.

Besides, it's modern times. She can take her phone with her. He's just one loud ringtone away.

She packs a standard concealed weapons loadout, handily already compiled in a small back-pack in the hidden wall-space where they keep the guns, and then pads quietly out onto the white tiles of the garage, tail swaying with excitement. Raising the garage door might wake him up with the loud clattering of the metal rollers, but it should in theory be possible, with a certain dexterity, to drive the jump-bike out through the back garage door, a narrow path that will then take her past the garden plots of cinnamon dark hidden inside the back fence. She'll have to keep the two swan-wings folded in, but that should be easy enough.

She starts the engine of the jump-bike and it spins up almost silently with nothing but a low hum that's nothing compared to the noise she's been hearing all day (and which is still faintly present in the back of her jaws and sinus as a pure frequency instead of the susurration it was before).

It takes only a moment or two to line it up and drive through the door at a crawl, walking it with her feet to stay balanced although the stabilizers do most of the work, turning the tight corner by revving it slightly and pulling the front wheel up into the air to reduce the turning circle, dropping it gently down onto dirt again when she's done to minimize the volume.

She drives a few feet and parks just inside the shadow of the house, then sneaks back to close the door. As an afterthought she ducks back inside and grabs her custom Nitrinos motorcycle helmet, which comes with fully reinforced cat-ears, added as an act of whimsy by the Russian motorcycle supply company of the same name.

They found her to be so-oddly insistent on the placement and size of the ears, unaware that she intended to cut through their premium product from the inside and hollow it out to make actual use of them. The jaw of the helmet has the protruding shape seen on some motorcross designs of the same type, intended to lock down flat against a chest-plate at a survivable angle and prevent neck injury, but in this case the helmet and her gear are effectively free armour that comes with a built-in excuse to wear it anywhere there's a road.

The helmet is probably out in the bank and casino, admittedly, but that leaves a whole big heap of hotels, restaurants and convention centers where she can probably push the issue and get away with it like some sort of long-haired female Galantis. She can always carry it by the straps for a bit to get past security. Why not bring it along?

Discreetly she shuts the door, feeling not so much sneaky as affectionate, not wanting to wake her lover or her pet with any loud noises, and rolls quietly down the path until she is out on the road before opening it up and accelerating away.

Mere minutes later sees her crossing back over Dominion Road and shooting down Mount Eden past Three Kings, the stone still shining palely on her left. Traffic is quite minimal this late and she is able to drive dynamically to the actual speed limits instead of the usual crawl, passing all sorts of familiar landmarks as she heads in.