The Book of Night With Moon by Diane Duane Page A

the papers as she went, and throwing them in the air.
    "Oh, kitty, don't!" Hhuha began picking the papers up. "Not that I wouldn't like to myself," she added under her breath.
    "See? And why you should pay attention to that stuff when I'm here, I can't understand," Rhiow muttered, as Hhuha picked her up and put her in her lap. "See, isn't that better? You don't need this junk. You need a cat."
    "Talk talk, chatter chatter," Hhuha said under her breath, straightening the paperwork out. "Probably you're trying to tell me I shouldn't bring my work home. Or more likely it's something about cat food."
    "Yes, now that you mention—" Rhiow made a last swipe at one piece of the paperwork as it went past her nose in Hhuha's hand. "Hey, watch those claws," Hhuha said.
    "I would never scratch you, you know that," Rhiow said, settling. "Unless you got slow. Put that stuff down…. "
    Hhuha started rubbing behind Rhiow's ears, and Rhiow went unfocused for a little while, purring. There were People, she knew, who saw the whole business of "having" an ehhif as being, at best, old-fashioned— at worst, very politically incorrect. The two species really had no common ground, some People said. They claimed that there could be no real relationships between carnivores and omnivores, predators and hunter-gatherers: only cohabitation of a crude and finally unsatisfactory kind. Cats who held this opinion usually would go on at great length about the imprisonment of People against their will, and the necessity to free them from their captivity if at all possible— or, at the very least, to raise their consciousness about it so that, no matter how pleasant the environment, no matter how tasty the food and how "kind" the treatment, they would never forget that they were prisoners, and never forget their own identity as a People presently oppressed, but who someday would be free.
    When all ehhif civilization falls, maybe, Rhiow thought, with a dry look. Make every ehhif in the city vanish, right this second, and turn every cat in Manhattan loose: how many of them will be alive in three weeks? Cry "freedom!"— and then try to find something to eat when all you know about is Friskies Buffet.
    She made a small face, then, at her own irony. Maybe it would be better if all cats lived free in the wild, out of buildings, out of ehhif influence; maybe it would be better if that influence had never come about in the first place. But the world was the way that it was, and such things weren't going to be happening any time soon. The truth remained that ehhif kept People and that a lot of People liked it… and she was one.
    That's the problem, of course, she thought. We're embarrassed to admit enjoying interdependence. Too many of us have bought into the idea that we're somehow "independent" in our environment to start with. As if we can stop eating or breathing any time we want…
    She sighed and stretched again while Hhuha paused in her scratching and started going through her papers once more. Anyway, what's the point, Rhiow thought, in making sure People are so very aware that they're oppressed, when for most of them there's nothing they can do about it? And in many cases, when they truly don't want to do anything, the awareness does nothing but make them feel guilty… thus making them more like ehhif than anything else that could have been done to them. That outwardly imposed awareness satisfies no one but the "activist" People who impose it. "I suffer, therefore you should too…"
    Granted, Rhiow's own position was a privileged one and made holding such a viewpoint easy. All languages are subsets of the Speech, and a wizard, by definition at least conversant with the Speech if not fluent in it, is able to understand anything that can speak (and many things that can't). Rhiow's life with her ehhif was certainly made simpler by the fact that she could clearly understand what they were saying. Unfortunately, most cats couldn't do the same, which tended to