The Unwinding House and Other Stories

by Jared Millet

  Dr. Noel had kept Mercury in his clinic for observation. Everyone wanted to be there when he was put to sleep, so we asked a tug crew to mind the ship while all of us shuttled to the surface. We missed our chance to beat Stradivarius, but if anyone cared no one said so. As we passed through the planet-side terminal, an unusually large crowd was watching the newsfeed. We were so wrapped up in our sorrows that we didn’t bother to find out why.

  We hired a tunnel taxi rather than ride the public train. The boys kept stiff upper lips, but Chris did a better job than Pagan. Judy cried softly, huddled between Jack and Helen, and every time Pagan looked up at her he hid a sniffle. Jennifer put her arm around his shoulders. I ruffled Chris’s hair.

  When we arrived, a man in a dark suit was waiting.

  “Captain Leahy?” he said. “Bruce Perry, Planetary Manager’s Office.” He offered his hand. Caught off guard, Helen didn’t take it at first.

  “I understand this wasn’t going to be a pleasant day for you,” he went on, “but of course with what’s happened on Luna… Well, I want to assure you that Titan is here to help and we’re ready to offer any assistance you need.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Helen. “What’s happened on Luna?”

  “You haven’t heard?” I could see Perry working out how to phrase what he said next. “There was an incident at Copernicus. Part of the city was exposed to vacuum and there have been about a hundred deaths. They haven’t released many details, but Lunar Administration sent a Priority One emergency call. You see, one of the areas damaged was Species Preservation.”

  “My god,” said Jennifer, “are they gone?”

  Perry shook his head. “Most of the animals are fine. The SPC has its own emergency lockdowns, but several of their colonies were lost. Frogs, turtles… and cats.”

  For a moment even the air recyclers seemed to stop.

  “How many are left?” I asked.

  “System-wide, less than fifty. Half are in private residences on Luna, another handful on Ganymede, a couple are on Titan, a few in the asteroids, and the rest are on ships like yours. The majority of the ones left, however, have been illegally neutered.”

  My eyes twitched when he said that. I wondered if he knew we’d had Rosie and Gilly fixed after giving away their first litters. In the old days on Earth, they could have used artificial insemination and cloning to restore the breeding stock, but almost none of that tech had made it into space.

  “So what happens now?” asked Jack.

  “Emergency preservation measures are in effect,” said Perry. “All felines capable of breeding are to be sent to Copernicus post haste. Euthanasia of any member of the species is temporarily out of the question.”

  The relief that swept through us was palpable. Still, there were practical issues to consider.

  “Merc’s in a bad way,” said Helen. “The cost—”

  “As I said, will be taken care of.”

  “Are you certain they want him? He’s got a heart defect.”

  “I assure you they do. The breeding population is too small to be picky. Don’t worry, Captain. We’ll help you any way we can.”

  ~

  “Any way we can” was well and good, but our trip to the Inner System wouldn’t be smooth. Titan had two other cats to send with us: a pair of old toms who we’d have to keep separate from our own little tribe to prevent all-out war. For Mercury, Perry gave us five chem packs and a spanking new biomonitor for our sickbay. For pill delivery, though, there was nothing anyone could do to make it easier. And guess whose job it was to get the meds down the little monster’s throat?

  It wasn’t so bad at first. As Ayers Rock slid down the ecliptic, we started Merc on a regimen of atenolol and benazepril with a taurine chaser. At first we buried the pills in a faux-tuna paste from our foodmat. He was so excited about getting his very own “wet food” every night that he didn’t even notice the medicine.

  Helen gave him a checkup every day, and when his heart showed little improvement Dr. Noel prescribed a tiny dose of digoxin, as well as an antacid to ease the resulting indigestion. Finishing up the chemical smorgasbord was a calcium supplement, a dose of furosemide, and a tiny bit of aspirin to act as a diuretic.

  It didn’t take Mercury long to figure out that his evening snack was meant to be good for him. Maybe the medicine just tasted bad, but somehow he learned to nibble around the hard bits and lick the bowl clean while leaving his pills behind. We tried crushing the meds into powder before mixing them into his food, but when we did that he turned up his nose and refused to eat at all. We tried wrapping the pills in synthetic ham, but that didn’t work even once.

  I put out a cry for help on SolNet and someone on a Jupiter relay beacon suggested we stuff the pills in a pocket of fish-flavored gelatin. That worked the first time – Merc swallowed his meds and begged for more. On the second day, though, he got wise.

  It was amazing to watch. For a solid minute, he rolled the gel between his tongue and the roof of his mouth, peeling away every bit of the fish paste and spitting his pills in a pile on the floor. Proud of this feat of oral dexterity, he sat on his haunches, thwacked his tail, and waited to do it again.

  I was so hot I could have microwaved him with my brain. Not caring if I pinched muscle along with scruff, I grabbed him by the neck, jammed him into my armpit, and squeezed his mouth open. He screeched and stabbed his claws into my palm. I screamed before I could stop myself, and turned it into a roar.

  “Take it, damn it! Take your goddamn medicine!”

  Stunned, he went limp for just a second. I used it to my advantage and shoved the slime-coated pills past his teeth, then clamped his mouth shut.

  “Swallow, damn it. Do you want to die, you little moron? Swallow or I’ll break your stupid neck, I swear to God.”

  He clawed me again, but I held on until I felt the pills go down his throat. When I let go, he darted off toward the spin core at something like a tenth the speed of light while I sank against the wall and rubbed my bleeding hand.

  Judy stood in the door to the rec room, her eyes wide with horror.

  “Judy, wait. I didn’t mean…”

  It was too late. She ran up the curve of the centrifuge toward the crew quarters. I groaned. She’d probably add a few horrific details when she told her parents. Knowing I was in for it, I went ahead and buzzed the bridge.

  “Helen, can you spare a minute?”

  ~

  Later that night, I was losing another war game with the computer when Jennifer came onto the bridge to run a check on our communication array. I turned away from my monitor to watch her glide in the glow of the holoscreens. Behind me, the computer beeped.

  “Damn it,” I said. “There goes Germany.”

  “The cat’s messing up your game.”

  “At least I’m off pill detail.” I wouldn’t soon forget the tongue-lashing the captain had given me. “Out of the cathouse, into the doghouse.”

  “Helen will get over it,” said Jennifer, “but I don’t think Judy’s going to like you for a while. What’s this?”

  I craned my neck. On her display flashed the symbol for a ship-to-ship message with a ten minute lightspeed delay. She touched the screen and a voice filled the cabin.

  “Sunset Strip to Ayers Rock. Sunset Strip to Ayers Rock. Personal call for McKenzie Carter. Over.” The message repeated on automatic. I nodded at Jennifer to hit the reply.

  “This is Carter,” I said. “Ayers Rock receives, come back.”

  While we waited, Jennifer looked up the other ship’s registry. Sunset Strip was smaller than ours, one of the new freighters from the shipyard on Ceres.

  “Mackie? That you?” The drawl sounded familiar. “This is Breck Hanson. Used to work at Base Aldrin?”

  “Yeah, I remember. What can we do for you?”

  Twenty minutes later came the response. “You’re the cat fella, right?”

  Something in his voice made me nervous. “I know a thing or two. What’s the problem?”


  Jennifer grimaced. “Come on, get to the point already.”

  I wondered why Hanson hadn’t already done so. Ship-to-ship communication was too slow for hemming and hawing.

  “Well,” Hanson said, “we’re taking these cats back to Copernicus and we think something’s wrong with them. They’re breathing real hard and two aren’t moving.”

  Jennifer and I locked eyes in horror. “Breck, you idiot. What did you do?” This time the delay was interminable.

  “Now hold on,” Hanson finally said. “We didn’t do nothin’. We just stuck ‘em in the aft storage bay while we cleaned all the mess they’ve been making. Damn things piss everywhere.”

  I tried to imagine what could have gone wrong, but my wife got there before I did.

  “Sunset Strip,” she said, “was there anything poisonous they may have gotten into? What about air filtration? Was the environment cold, hot, or what?”

  “Nothing poisonous. That bay gets pretty warm by the heat exchanger, but we didn’t leave them in there that long.”

  “Hanson.” I was almost yelling. “It’s heatstroke. Cats don’t vent body heat as well as humans. You’ve got to cool them down. Give them a bath, run water over them, anything. Hurry!”

  My advice was too little, too late.

  ~

  Helen called a meeting the next morning. None of us had slept since the back-and-forth with Sunset Strip and eventually the Species Preservation Center itself. The kids were doing their lessons in the rec room, so the rest of us crowded into the kitchen and shut the door.

  “It’s bad,” she began. “Three of their cats died, but the others are okay. Sunset was originally heading for Luna, but now they’ve been rerouted to Mars so someone else can take the remaining animals. There’s another group of cats coming in from the Kuiper Belt, but they won’t reach the SPC for two years.

  “Here’s the real problem. Two of the cats who died last night were males. There’s one male in the Kuiper group, but he’s old and might not survive the trip. There’s another on Mars, but he’s too young. They won’t let him travel for six months. Most of the cats on Luna are females, and all of the males there are neutered.”

  “So basically, we’re it,” said Jack.

  “We’re it. Mercury, Duck, and our two guests from Titan are, as of last night, the only breeding male cats in the universe. Mackie, I don’t care how hard it is to get Merc to take his medicine. It’s got to be done.”

  “Speaking of,” said Jennifer, “has anyone seen him?”

  ~

  We didn’t for several days. We only found (and heard) the signs of his passing: the shrieks of Rosie and Gilly being chased in the night, the thud of Duck losing a bout of sumo wrestling, and an ammonia stench in the spin core, which Merc used as a litter box whenever he was angry. Every now and then, I heard the phantom thump of an over-long tail thwacking the bulkhead.

  As small as the pressurized compartments on Ayers Rock were, there were more places for a cat to hide than one might think. After days of waiting for him to come out on his own, Helen sent the kids on a methodical search while she and Jennifer blocked access to the living quarters and storage compartments. Jack and I watched from the bridge and listened on the ship’s com.

  “Our cabin’s clear,” the captain’s daughter reported. “No one but our tagalongs.”

  “Ten bucks Judy catches him,” said Jack.

  “Twenty on the boys,” I replied.

  “He’s not in ours either,” said Pagan.

  “Duck’s in the kitchen,” Chris added. “Gilly’s under a chair. No sign of Merc.”

  “Check the cabinets,” I said. “He knows how to get them open.” Jack punched me in the arm, but I shrugged him off.

  “Thanks, Mackie,” said Jennifer. “I think we’ve got it.”

  “I’m in the rec room,” said Pagan. “Rosie’s here, but no… wait… Got him! Behind the holoset!”

  There was a scuffle, a bump, and a bang, and I hoped that wasn’t the sound of our entertainment system crashing. Shouts poured through the intercom right on top of each other.

  “He’s heading for the office. Get him, Judy.”

  “I got him, Mom, I… Ow! He bit me!”

  “He’s cutting through the kitchen. Pagan, grab him.”

  “He’s under the… Ow! Shit, shit, shit!”

  “Watch the language,” I said over the com.

  “Dad, this is Chris. He’s circling back around the cabins, but I think he’s found a way into the outer duct.”

  “Damn it,” I whispered. If Mercury escaped into the ventilation system, there’d be no way to catch him. And if his heart gave out, there’d be no easy way to recover his body.

  Jack must have thought the same thing. “He could lead us in circles for days. It’s like chasing comet chunks.”

  That was it. The idea blossomed in my mind like the sun shining straight through the walls.

  “Helen,” I called, “Bay One’s still pressurized, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Open it. Kids, bang on the floor by the ductwork and chase him out to the spin core. Jen, let him through the aft hatch.”

  “What’re you thinking, Mack?” Helen was all for discussion, but she hated when anyone else gave orders.

  “Trust me. You’re going to love it.”

  The first part of my plan worked. The kids chased Mercury out of the vents, Helen narrowed his escape route, and Jennifer let him into the cargo bay. She tried to grab him, but he rocketed past her and vanished into the zero-gee jungle of smelly containers from Titan. With an old sailor’s curse, she shut the door and locked him in.

  I addressed the A.I. “Command: new assignment. Activate all internal balance detectors and intercom pickups in Cargo Bay One. Increase gain to full. Acknowledge.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  “Tie into the biomonitor in sickbay. Appropriate the software into your memory. Acknowledge.”

  “Biomonitor software is copyright SolNet Systems, Inc. and may not be copied…”

  “Override. Acknowledge.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  “Use appropriated software and cargo bay monitoring equipment to locate feline designate Mercury.”

  “Feline designate Mercury is on the aft cargo bay bulkhead one meter from the starboard hull.”

  “Good. Now engage navigational algorithms, active simulation setting. Compute flight plan intercept for feline designate Mercury. Treat Mercury as an out-of-control vessel with a malfunctioning guidance system. I will act as the intercepting craft. Once I’ve entered the cargo bay, compute Mercury’s most probable trajectory and update me with real time course corrections. Make this work and I’ll buy you a new war game simulator. Acknowledge.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  “Execute.”

  ~

  We squared off like gunslingers as soon as I entered the bay, Merc at one end, me at the other. I held an open cage. Mercury thwacked his tail.

  I lunged and he flew sideways. The computer called out his course and I twisted in mid-air to kick against one of the crates. In the centrifuge this wouldn’t have worked, but in free fall Mercury was trapped by Newton’s laws of motion.

  It took me a few passes to get the hang of following the computer’s instructions. The A.I. figured out that I couldn’t interpret directional headings and told me which crates to bounce off instead. It took a few more minutes for the computer to work out Mercury’s evasion patterns. Once it did, the A.I. told me to stay put on the aft bulkhead. I didn’t understand, but I didn’t question it either. For the A.I. this was a game, and it had beaten me too many times for me to not trust that it knew what it was doing.

  It directed me to the aft port-side corner and told me to point the open end of the cage toward the bow. I did, then took position by the aft hatch. Merc had planted himself on the forward hatch and laced his claws between the buttons of the control pad. The A.I. told me to jump.

  I knew I woul
dn’t catch him. As the computer must have predicted, he made for the port bulkhead and bounded toward the rear, unknowingly toward the waiting container. Seconds later came a howl of outrage as the A.I.’s trap slammed shut.

  I carried him to the spin core to the sound of my family’s applause and took a bow as best I could. Mercury squirmed like a broken gyroscope in his cage. I passed him to Judy, who passed him to Helen, who carried him down to the sickbay. Jack informed me that our computer had already taken the liberty of entering our credit information into SolNet’s wargame server.

  I headed for the rec room. I wanted to relax, but I’d barely sat down when Helen’s voice came over the com.

  “Maaaackie.”

  I entered sickbay to find Mercury bundled up on the table, all four legs tucked, his mouth shut, his pills spat out before him. Helen and Judy stood to each side to make sure he didn’t escape.

  “Come on, cat,” I said. “Let’s do this.”

  ~

  After that, it got easier. Whatever point of honor Mercury had needed to prove must have been satisfied. Don’t get me wrong, he still made me chase him, but never again was he so hard to catch. Every now and then he would head for the cargo bay and pit himself against the A.I.

  In all that time, he never acted as sick as he really was. The medicine didn’t cure him, but it kept him from getting worse. He continued to be a menace, especially after he broke into Helen’s quarters and terrorized our other feline guests.

  It took us seven months to chase the Moon around the Sun. To tighten our flight path we cut as close as we could to the orbit of Mercury’s namesake, but Ayers Rock was an outer planets hauler and doing so taxed our heat shield to the limit. We climbed out of Sol’s gravity well on momentum alone, and for the first time in years we saw the dust-gray speck that was Luna and the ash-gray cinder that was Earth.