Catfantastic: Nine Lives and Fifteen Tales Part 1

Catfantastic: Nine Lives and Fifteen Tales.

Edited By Martin H Greenberg & Andre Norton.

Introduction.

Speaking of Cats.

A Very Weighty Subject.

There is an affinity between writers and cats and perhaps there always has been. Doctor Johnson's concern (expressed in his will) about that well-developed household despot Hodge (who greatly favored oysters for tea) is quoted to this day in most of the biographical material dealing with that sage, critic and author of the eighteenth century.

Having been declared divine in Egypt and in the legends of the north (as witness that the chariot of the G.o.ddess Freya was drawn by cats), fortune favored and then abruptly failed the feline species. Still they survived both the worship in temples and the obscene tortures they were later subjected to as the familiars of witches.

The tales and legends dealing with cats always present them as being not only mysterious but also superior in good sense and understanding to our own species. There was d.i.c.k Whittington's cat who made his master's fortune as surely as Puss-In-Boots wrought favorably for the somewhat stupid and f.e.c.kless young man who inherited his services.

Perhaps it is because cats do not live by human patterns, do not fit themselves into prescribed behavior, that they are so united to creative people. Always the cat remains a little beyond the limits we try to set for him in our blind folly. A cat does not live with one; rather, one lives with a cat.

Each season in the publishing world brings a crop of feline studies both in pictures and words. There are Garfield and Heathcliff to hammer home independence and the pitying att.i.tude of cat for person, as well as such heartwarming stories as those written by such authors as James Herriot.

Herein are neither Heathcliff nor Garfield but some others who have as definite personalities to make forceful impressions within their territories. The matter of magic familiars (much more practical then the wizards they company with) is competently dealt with. For cats have been linked to magic; the more intricate the better, from time immemorial.

These fifteen histories deal not only with spells but also with diplomatic relations on other planets, with forbidden research, engineering on a grand scale, and with guardians who know their duty and expertly do it.

Cats are presented in all shapes, colors, sizes, alike in self-confidence and general ingenuity. There seems never to have been a cat who was not entirely equal to the situation which confronts him or her. In other words, there are no extraordinary cats, merely ones to whom unusual opportunities present themselves.

The Gate of the Kittens.

by Wilanne Schneider Belden.

Feathers was the only kitten of Silk's last litter who did not yet have a permanent home when the man came to obtain a mouser.

"Isn't she small?" he inquired: "She's a fearsome huntress," Anja informed him. "We don't think she'll ever be large. But are you interested in size or in effectiveness?"

The man smiled. "I need a mouser and a ratter."

"Rats don't come full-grown," Anja responded. The man nodded.

"You couldn't want a better," Anja said. She padded a carrying cage with another blanket. "Just don't make her an outdoor cat, the foxes'll get her. A safe way indoors, her rug by the fireside in winter, a cool place in summer, water, and care if she needs it."

"Well, I'll take her if she'll come."

Time I had a home of my own, Feathers thought. But she was far too small to become a cat who lived alone. She'd refused other homes where they wanted a baby-sitter, lap cat, and dependent animal. But this man wanted a working cat, and Feathers accepted.

"Think to me every morning," Silk advised her daughter. "Or I shall worry." Feathers knew her small size concerned her mother. She agreed.

Feathers set about eliminating the small rodent population of the long-untenanted holding her humans were putting back into some sort of order. The man who had come for her saw that she was well cared fora"although she understood clearly that she was not his cat. All in and on the property belonged (human term) to a man called the Master. Feathers was not entirely sure he knew of her existence. She would have taught him the Proper Order of Things with her teeth and clawsa"had he not been one who made her ears lie back when he entered a room. Cats know about Power, its creatures and its uses. Even young and inexperienced cats are instinctively aware of Good and Evil. Feathers knew that what went on in the part of the establishment set aside for his exclusive use was Bad, Wrong, Evil. She felt things that made her long fur stand on end and her mouth open in a silent hiss. Her solution was to avoid all contact with him.

When her first breeding season occurred, she should have been closed indoors, to take no chances that she would conceive so young. But no one thought another cat was within miles, and few paid sufficent attention even to know of her condition.

Stranger and stranger were the behaviors of the Master. Lights of distorted colors accompanied even more disgusting odors and quite indescribably hideous sounds. The servants became silent, frightened of their own shadows, and drank more than too much. They went on long journeys carrying peculiar bundles. People of dubious aspect and, Feathers suspected, even more doubtful character came to the holding in the darkest hours and left well before dawn. The Master would be gone for days, even weeks, then return, usually furious, and cause upset and perturbation. Awaiting kittens, Feathers welcomed his presence even less than usual.

She knew him and his behaviors to be Evil, but she could not contain her raging curiosity. When she thought to Silk, her mother was horrified. Disturbed both by this reaction and her own uncharacteristic mania, Feathers agreed that she would seek to discover what the Master did only if she could locate a way to see without being seen, to find out without being found out. Conscientious searching located no way into his private workroom. Every mousehole and ratway was blocked with material that made her ill when she smelled it. Still, she watched.

While she observed the only door one night, her dark fur with its shadow stripes and spots making her utterly unnoticeable, a man who came and went (always at night, always surrept.i.tiously, always on a horse with m.u.f.fled hooves) brought three other men with him to the steading. He led them to the door of the workroom. When they entered, so did Feathers., They did not notice.

"You have no doubts that you have located the Gate," the tallest man said.

The Master nodded. "And established the requirements to bring to it that we seek. It has but to be tested."

The three men stared at one another.

"Tested? How can you test thata"somethinga"will come through it?"

"By sending something the other way."

The men moved uneasily. The tall one rested his hand on his sword hilt.

"When?" the fattest one asked: "Tomorrow is the night of the Cat," the master replied.

"Why the cat?"

"What do we seek to have enter through the Gate?" the Master askeda"as if only the abysmally stupid would have to be reminded.

"The Puma," the little man said. Softly. The men nodded.

"And the fee to pa.s.s the Gate?"

"The Puma will bring with him one we do not need."

"You're sure it will be he who a pays?"

The Master's brows almost met. "You doubt me?"

The men a.s.sured him they did not doubt.

Feathers wanted to yowl, to hiss and scratch. She sat glued to the floor instead, filled with a combination of terror and disgust. She had never heard of Gates, knew nothing of what the men spoke, and had no idea what a Puma was. But paying the fee she understood. They planned to kill.

Why should it matter? She cared little for people.

Because to kill to eat or to protect was in the natural order of life. To kill to do a wrong was not.

A hand came down, grabbed her by the back of the neck, and dropped her into a lidded basket. A voice chuckled. "A good choice, I think, to test the Gate. A small cat in exchange for a Puma."

"Mother!" Feathers screamed. She was, after all, not quite nine months old, and she was terribly frightened.

They all laughed, and if Feathers had not been a cat, she would have fainted from dread.

The next night she saw nothing, heard things that, had she not been a cat, would have driven her mad, and, at the last, was grabbed by those bloodless, bony, cruel fingers and pushed through something. She fell into an icy rain puddle. Inside her, one of her babies died.

Librarians, in general, are pretty nice people. What faults and failings they have as individuals rarely cause them to run down old ladies in crosswalks or kick puppies. Consequently, when Judith Justin, MLS, in charge of the Bookmobile, made out the form of a cat half-crawling across the rainy road, she applied the brakes with cautiona"and prayer. As she had been driving twenty miles an hour for over twenty miles, crouching forward on the seat and peering anxiously through the rain-drenched windows, the opportunity to rest was sufficient inducement to overcome her dread of attempting to bring the heavy vehicle to a safe stop.

Several members of the staff accused her of minor witchcraft if sorcery could have any effect on machinery or other examples of cold iron. They insisted that the Bookmobile liked her. It did what she asked it to, started when she turned the key, rocked out of sandtraps with alacrity, and steered between obstacles , without even scratching the top coat of paint. It invariably had its flat tires, broken fuel lines, and burned out light bulbs for other Bookmobile drivers. Never for Judith. So the brakes, wet as they were, took hold smoothly and effectively, the rear half of the bus followed the front half instead of skidding into the middle of the street, and the Bookmobile sat waiting patiently for the cat to cross.

Judith turned on the interior lights and opened the front door. An oblong of light wavered into the rainy afternoona"dark, almost, as night.

"Here, kitty, kitty, kitty," Judith called. She never insulted her own cats with the phrase, but cats somehow knew that people who called, "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty," offered food and shelter.

The most woebegone wail ever to issue from feline throat responded. Judith's heart turned over. She shielded her face against the cold windshield and squinted out. Yes, the cat had turned and scrunched under the bus.

Judith stood at the top of the steps and called again. The cat answered, but it did not enter.

Maybe it can't get up the first step, she thought. Not a big step for a healthy cat, but this one looked almost as if a car had hit it.

Judith pulled on her poncho, scrunched it around her legs as she stooped, and squatted on the bottom step.

"Kitty?"

"Mrow." The cat was right below the steps.

"C'mon," Judith said encouragingly. "I'll help you. I promise I don't kick cats."

A scraggly head on a long, scrawny neck, both sapping and dripping, poked out from beneath the step.

"Farther," Judith encouraged. "I don't want to pick you up like a kitten. You're too big a cat for that to be good for you."

The cat peered up, blinking. It inched out until Judith could get her hands around its body behind the front legs. She reached down, "This could hurt," she warned the cat, not knowing whether the drenched animal was really injured or not. "I'm only trying to help. Don't scratch."

She might have been picking up a fur stole that had been soaking in ice water for a week. Judith hissed. "Poor thing," she murmured. As she slid a hand down to support the back half of the cat's body, she realized that, hurt or not, the cat was certainly pregnant. Very pregnant.

"This is no weather to have kittens," Judith protested. "Let's see if I can at least get you warm and dry."

She carried odd things in the librarian's closet: her sleeping bag and knapsack, for example, because on two of her routes she stayed overnight. The county paid twenty dollars toward lodging, but Judith could use that twenty dollars. She didn't remember removing her swimming suit and towels, either. Those, she carried all summer. Camps had pools, and several camps were regular Bookmobile stops. Yup.

Judith was worried about the cat. She didn't seem to be damaged, but the woman was no veterinarian, and she couldn't be sure. By the time the animal was as dry as Judith could rub her and curled up on the beach towel next to the heater vent, she was making a sound Judith interpreted as a rusty purr.

Better, anyway, she thought. She ducked out from under the dash and sat back. Odd. That marvelous, dark feathery fur somehow masked the animalness of the cata"turned it into a blob of nothing in the semidarkness. Pretty fur, really, black and a dozen shades of gray, with no distinct pattern. She petted the cat's head. It purred again.

Caring for the cat had restored the blood supply to several places Judith had tensed it out of, relaxed her amazingly, and made her feel a little less inadequate to the task of getting the Bookmobile down the mountain in the dark. Only eight more winding, precipitous miles to the intersection with the state route, another twenty-five across the flat, then the last long drive on the freeway into town. She'd called to say she was going to try to beat the snow so the Bookmobile wouldn't get stuck on the mountaintop for who knew how long. The dispatcher was appreciative, but she'd insisted that Judith call from the filling station at the intersection, then again from the motel at the freeway. According to the weather report, the valley floor should be clear. But if all did not go well, she wasn't to try to come into town tonight.

All did not go well. The rain became sleet. The temperature outside dropped too rapidlya"the snowline might be as far down the mountain as the motel. The roadway, not the best at any time, became actively dangerous. If she hadn't been more scared to try to stopa"this stretch hadn't a single pullout big enough for the busa""

"than she was to drive, Judith would have given up. But d.a.m.ned fools acted as if they had nine lives and none of them could be lost to the conditions tonight. She was pa.s.sed by three vehiclesa"one coming, two goinga"a four-wheel drive affair, a sports car, and a light truck. The latter two went swishing around the bus at twice the speed Judith considered safe. The driver of the RV seemed to believe himself late for his own wake, but he was also, obviously a professional driver. Moves Judith considered suicidal proved to be only highly dangerous. She shook her head. "Well," she told the cat, "I guess if they can, I can."

The filling station was already closed, and Judith didn't blame the high school kid who pumped gas on weekends for going home a little early. She knew where the attendant hid the restroom keys, thank heavens, but the public phone was almost unprotected. Judith was wet to the waist by the time she could return to the warm Bookmobile. The cat indicated it wanted to go out, so Judith put it under her poncho and took it to the least windy side of the building.

"Hurry up," she said, shivering. The cat hurried.

"Part of my funk is hunger," she told the cat. "I'll bet you're hungry, too." The cat meowed.

"Well, there should be something."

She changed into her camping clothes and dug into the emergency drawer. In addition to flashlights and adhesive bandages and similar other a.s.sistances for the minor emergencies a Bookmobile librarian might be expected to meet, she'd seen, well, she thought she'd seen a Hmm. Yes. Candy bar. Old, but not too old.

Unfortunately, cats didn't eat chocolate. What else? Ah-ha! Trust Cal's hollow leg. A tightly-lidded tin box of English biscuits that rattled loudly. Probably canned meat, as Cal was a diabetic and couldn't eat sweets. So it was. The good kind, without too much salt. Judith pulled the top off and let the cat lick its dinner off her fingers.

She didn't want to go on, but she'd waited as long as she dared.

"We're stopping at the motel," she told the cat. Positive thinking, she added to herself. The likelihood that they'd get as far as the motel seemed less and less probable every second. But experience in these mountains warned Judith that the snowline would be well below the elevation of the station. No one manned the place on Sunday night, and the amount of food in Cal's can wouldn't keep them for another couple of days. She probably wouldn't starve before somebody showed up, but she wasn't sure the cat could make it. Only later would someone point out to her the oddity of failing to call the sheriff for help and, even odder, of placing the importance of feeding the stray cat before that of quite possibly losing her own life.

Unwillingness to commit herself and the bus to the dubious mercies of the weather kept her from starting. She wondered if she should get out in the rain again and check to be sure the chains were there, just in case she needed them. But where in the world would they be if they weren't in their stow s.p.a.ce? Putting on chains would be no easy task, but she'd had to master it to get the job, so she could, if she had to.

She examined what she could see of the roadway, peering into the darkness intently. Incredulous, she watched headlights become attached to a bus even larger than hers, rather like a transcontinental Greyhound. It rumbled past at a speed that made her wonder why it was not flying. Certainly it had worked up adequate speed to take off.

Well, if they can, I guess I can, she informed herself. On we go. She shoved her hands into her fur-lined gloves and turned the key.

The bus purred into life. They inched onto the road. This part of the trip really is the easiest, she tried to rea.s.sure herself. Straight, and the wind isn't strong enough to be a problem. Often, high winds whipped across the flatlands, winds so strong that the county office canceled the Bookmobile visits. But the state road was well maintained, most of it was three lanes wide and some of it four, and at this end of the valley one could make out the lights of isolated homes. To Judith's considerable surprise, the radio condescended to work, due, doubtless, to an unusual inversion layer that reflected the signal into the valley. Judith grinned, demanded Bacha"and got it. She snorted. Things seemed to be going better.

Then the snow began.

In five minutes she knew it was chains now or give up. She got them all on in less than an hour, and by that time almost was unable to drive out of the hollow the presence of the bus had made in the swiftly piled s...o...b..nk. But the chains were new and sharp, and they dug in. She drove down a whirling white tunnel beyond which was only darkness, solid, like ebony or granite. She dared not go on. She dared not stop. She shifted into a lower gear and continued. For as long as the bus would move, she'd drive. Every quarter mile brought them closer to the freeway, to the motel and people and safety. Every turn of the wheels made one step she need not take in the cold and snow when the storm was over, and she had to move or die.

The man had a name, and most people knew what it was, but he was never referred or spoken to as anything but General. He deserved it. He made the essential breakthrough in the scientific aspect himself, and he convinced men who could take that information and turn it into a completed system that they could and must do so. Whatever they needed he earned or developed or bought or stolea"ahead of time.

When it was done, he named it the Puma. The name seemed particularly appropriate. The puma was the big cat of the American west, the most deadly carnivore that hunted alone. It moved with stealth, erupted into powerful movement, and destroyed with strength and speed. Yet a sleeping puma was harmless and could rarely be found, so camouflaging was its color, so clever were its habits of concealment. All of these traits were to be found in the Puma. It was deadly, and it was powerful, but it was nowhere near the size of previousa"objectsa"of its kind. It and its transport and launching systems were approximately the size of a large bus which, as a sensible precaution, the exterior was designed to resemble. Just as the puma slept upwind of possible pursuers and could not be located by scent, the Puma disseminated no telltale radiation. And after it had done its work, its target area would be free of animal life, but clean. Troops could go in at once. That was the General's personal contribution.

"Tests start tomorrow," the General said. Someone commented that the weather was not ideal. The General indicated that if a puma was hungry, the weather didn't matter a d.a.m.n. If the Puma couldn't be transported and launched in a hurricane, it had better be redesigned. Did anyone need to do his job over again, and if so, why hadn't he spoken up before this?

n.o.body mentioned blizzard because n.o.body thought of blizzard.

"It pounces on Sunday," the General said. "I've arranged for the test grounds to be empty. Except for us. Any indications that we've been breached?"

There hadn't better be, so there weren't.