The Book of Night With Moon

THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON. Copyright © 1997 by Diane Duane. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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A
ilurin 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 straightforward 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 or 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 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.

*Cat thoughts and silent communications are rendered in italics.

T
hey 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.