The Big Meow
Life's already much too
busy for Rhiow and the other cats of the New York City worldgating
maintenance teams. The old, cramped Penn Station is being torn apart and
relocated into its big new building, which means that the Penn
worldgates have had to be moved too. Everyone's nerves are in shreds,
and no one's had enough sleep for a human, let alone a Person. So when
Rhiow goes staggering home to her litterbox the morning after the job's
done and finds it already occupied by another cat -- who then vanishes
-- at first she thinks she's hallucinating.
But she's not. When
her team is called to Los Angeles to do a minor consult after the city's
single worldgate is deranged by a string of earthquakes, Rhiow's
"hallucination" reappears bearing a dire message from the past. The
messenger, a tom called Hwaith, reveals that similar earthquakes are
striking Los Angeles in 1946 -- indicators not only of increasing
instability in the San Andreas Fault, but of something far more
troubling. Something is trying to subvert the Los Angeles gate to its
own purposes. "The Lone Power?" Rhiow asks. "No," Hwaith says.
"Something worse. Something from outside."
Rhiow and her team
find themselves caught up in ever-deepening peril and mystery as they
make the dangerous trip back to post-war Los Angeles. Their intervention
plunges them headfirst into the glitzy, murky world of 1946 Hollywood, a
smoggy film-noir landscape filled with glamourous starlets,
flamboyantly corrupt studio heads, wicked, pampered cats with hidden
agendas, unsolved murders, snoopy screenwriters, scheming PR flacks, and
a shadowy, celebrity-ridden cult dabbling in knowledge better left
alone -- knowledge which could destroy their world's present and doom
its future, if the dreadful promise of the Year of the Black Jaguar is
fulfilled...