Catacombs

by Anne McCaffrey

  “We will keep searching the town,” Pshaw-Ra said.

  “I’ll follow the riverbank,” my father said. “If they did manage to leave town, I hope they’ll have sense enough to stay near the water.”

  “Beware of predators,” Pshaw-Ra told him.

  Space Jockey puffed up. “It’s predators who should beware of me,” he said.

  The queen’s voice rang out in a raucous rowwwwl above all of the others.

  “I saw the kittens following the renegade Renpet when she escaped the temple. She has taken them!”

  “No she didn’t!” I said.

  The shine of her eyes narrowed to slits, and everyone else grew silent. “You dare to contradict me?”

  “Uh—no, it’s just, I was following and I didn’t see any kittens.”

  “Obviously she hid them before you caught up with her,” the queen said dismissively, and then broadcast in her piercing voice. “The renegade Renpet has stolen the kittens of our guest! Find her, interrogate her, and recover or avenge the unfortunate young.”

  I saw the mother moving them last night, I told Jubal. Maybe she forgot where she left them.

  No, because they were at the temple.

  He was right, of course, but that didn’t help. I wondered what danger Flekica had feared, to make her move her kittens in the first place. It couldn’t have been Renpet!

  “She didn’t do it,” I told Pshaw-Ra, whose search of the town seemed to involve watching everyone else search. I thought he knew me well enough to believe me without asking too many questions, and he had influence with the queen. He said nothing but looked suspiciously shifty. Even more so than usual.

  As soon as nobody was looking, I exchanged glances with Jubal. They’ve hidden the kittens underground, I said. I can tell by the way Pshaw-Ra acted. Let’s go find them.

  Pshaw-Ra was off someplace else acting important, and the crew had dispersed to search. My mother had taken Flekica to stay with Romina and Ninina, and the woman Beulah stayed with them at Bes’s house.

  The point was, nobody was paying any attention to us at all. We had to return to the temple for me to get my bearings, but when I did, I saw the house with the secret entrance and we made for it. Ha! No one was even on the same street when we slipped in and Jubal lifted the secret door in the floor. He switched on the pocket torch he’d brought from the ship and it showed some stairs we promptly used, pulling the door shut after us.

  I should have brought string or bread crumbs or something, he said as we started into the nearest passage.

  Why?

  So we can find our way back, he said. That’s what they do in all the fairy stories. Explorers use balls of twine.

  I could try to shed my white hairs on the floor, I offered.

  I think you’ve done that already, he said, pointing the beam down at a spray of black and white hairs probably loosened from my previous fall from above.

  It’s okay. I know my way around down here now, I told him. This way.

  I absolutely knew my way, could smell Renpet, Chione, and the dead queen. We walked confidently down the hall and through the twists and turns, all the time expecting to see the kefer-ka streaming toward us and smell the cloying scent of the mummies. Any time now, I reassured Jubal. Won’t be long now. We’re almost there.

  Of course, it was funny down here with no natural light to judge the time of day or night, but it did seem to me it was taking a bit longer to reach the mummies than before. I didn’t remember there being so many places where the tunnel made sharp turns either. Hadn’t it been fairly straight?

  Where are we? Jubal asked at last.

  Here, I replied. But I have no idea where here is.

  Maybe we’d better go back.

  “Mew.”

  “Aw, Chester, don’t cry, boy. It’ll be okay,” Jubal whispered.

  I didn’t cry.

  “Meh-mew?”

  That sounds too small to be you. Do you think it’s one of the lost kittens?

  “Yow,” I said.

  How did it get here?

  I didn’t answer because I wasn’t sure it was here. The sound was coming from slightly above us. I put my paws on a rough place in the wall and tried to jump higher, but it didn’t work and I slid back. Then the mew came again and I realized it wasn’t directly overhead but down the passage by a few tail lengths.

  “Meh-mew. Mew, Mee?”

  More than one kitten voice.

  I tried mewing back. They stopped crying. They were frightened. “It’s okay, it’s just me, Chester. The boy and I are here to take you back to your mother,” I told them.

  I didn’t get an answer, or even any sense of a kitten brain at work anywhere nearby. All my life I’ve been able to thought-talk with other cats as well as with Jubal, as well as using the usual vocabulary of variations on me and ow and extensive body ballet to express myself. But I was getting zip from the kittens.

  We stood still, linked and listening. The air was cool and not stale, although this portion of the tunnel did not seem to be used a lot. I got no clear scents of any humans other than Jubal. Nor did I detect the recent presence of any of the Mau cats. The walls were rough, and the height just cleared Jubal’s head. I didn’t know where I was but I knew that I was not anywhere I had been before. I hunkered down and watched the floor, hoping to see a kefer-ka or several hundred come crawling up to be my breakfast but was disappointed.

  “Mew,” the kitten cried from the darkness beyond the beam of Jubal’s pocket torch. We advanced.

  This time I heard something different, a scraping noise, stone on stone. I looked back over my shoulder in time to see the passage closing behind us.

  Jubal turned, shining his light on the stone disk rolling between us and retreat.

  “Crud,” he said.

  We didn’t really want to go back there anyway, did we? I asked.

  I don’t like having our options limited, and besides, you know, this explains a lot. I think we’re lost because somebody wants us to be lost.

  That would explain a lot, I agreed. For instance, it would explain why my nose and memory had seemingly failed to put us on the right track. There are secrets down here we’re not supposed to find out.

  Or maybe, Jubal said, maybe we’re being herded toward the kittens. Maybe someone knows where they are and wants us to find them.

  It seems like an extremely roundabout way of doing it, I argued.

  That “mew” business started up again, and I listened and meowed back and tried thought-talk too, all to no avail. I heard no sounds I hadn’t heard before. More and more I felt we were deliberately being led astray.

  “There’s only one direction we can go,” Jubal said aloud. And it was true, at the time.

  The repetitive mewing continued and we walked forward until a circle of light from the ceiling illuminated the floor of the cave. The ceiling was higher in this passage, about two cat lengths taller than my boy.

  “Skylight?” Jubal wondered.

  I scrabbled up the wall, but Jubal had a better idea. He lifted me over his head so I could see into the light above us. I expected to see the city street or the desert, but instead I saw the all too familiar interior of a vessel somewhat smaller but otherwise identical, as far as I could tell, to Pshaw-Ra’s. High atop it, the nose cone had been removed, and the hatches were open so the light from the sky beyond shone through onto the floor of the tunnel.

  Pretty elaborate, using a recycled spaceship as a skylight, Jubal said, picking up my impressions.

  As we continued onward, we ran into these skylights at regular intervals for a long while, and Jubal said, Looks to me like this network runs right underneath the city streets.

  Other things were in this section too. Disused machinery and storage containers, some empty, others tightly sealed. They had no signs, not even the picture writing, to say what they were for.

  Then the tunnel curved and we had to make a sharp right down a steep incline into another level.

&nb
sp; What neither of us saw was any sign of the kittens.

  CHAPTER 11

  Chester, deprived of one of his favorite pastimes, eating, grew quickly bored with their search and fell back on his other favorite thing to do, sleeping. At least in the caves it was cool enough for Jubal to carry the cat slung around his neck. That left his hands free for feeling walls and holding the torch. Then he stopped and searched his pockets again. Pulling out a packet, he unfastened it and extracted a headlamp, which he put on. Not only was this more convenient, but it would save what remained of the charge in the pocket torch for later. Jubal had a feeling there might be quite a lot of “later.”

  He came to a place where the passage narrowed, but on either side of it there were openings. Entering the first of these, he saw that he was in a good-sized room, with arches and columns connecting the central room to others. This whole place might look like a collection of intertwangled root cellars but seemed to have been underground houses or maybe offices.

  They were pretty thoroughly stripped of any hint of occupation, human or feline, and he wondered who had lived there. Maybe the people and cats who eventually were removed to updated worlds, leaving behind only the hardcore cat worshippers now living on Mau?

  It wasn’t surprising to him that they might have lived down here to escape the heat on the surface, but why had anyone ever built the houses exposed to the elements? Maybe because cats were so fond of the sun. The Mauan cats, being short-furred, wouldn’t mind it the way the Barque Cats did. And from what he’d read, this whole culture was not only catcentric but solarcentric, so some of their time would be spent on the surface, even if the real work took place down below. He had to admit, they’d made the houses pretty cool considering the outside temperatures.

  What he found odder was that the farther he went, the better constructed the tunnels seemed to be, as if the rustic ones on the upper levels had been practice for making the more sophisticated ones lower down. The people who first came here, according to what Pshaw-Ra told Chester, had advanced technology for the time. Maybe the root cellar houses had been a kind of base camp for their community while they made everything else, like the fancy hall beneath the cat idol in the temple?

  After taking a wide ramp down and finding it led to a broad hall with lights that came on when he entered, he thought, This is more like it.

  Just when Jubal began wondering where everybody worked, because so far he hadn’t seen another soul, a loud blaaat filled the air. Claws dug into him and Chester levitated to the ceiling, then hit the ground running ten feet in front of Jubal, who was hard on his furry heels.

  A voice said something in a calm even tone, with words so garbled Jubal couldn’t tell if it was in a foreign language or only heavily accented. He got the gist of it, though. It doubtlessly meant “intruder alert.” He pounded after Chester, hoping they were stampeding in the right direction.

  Down they ran through corridors and caverns, each passage taking them lower. Jubal’s breath rasped so loudly and his heart pounded in his ears so hard that he didn’t realize that the alarm had stopped until Chester halted abruptly in front of him and sat down in his path.

  Keep going! Jubal told him. We should find cover, at least, before we stop.

  We’re covered, Chester said, though his ears were still flat and the black fur of his back, ruff, and tail spiked to make him look twice his size. Listen.

  A hail of footsteps and rumble of indistinct voices seemed to seep through the walls to their right.

  At any time those footsteps could come through another doorway, another arch, and straight toward them. Jubal edged to the left-hand wall, thinking that if they were found, he could just tell the truth, that they’d been hunting for the kittens and become lost.

  The voices ebbed, the footsteps pattered away, and he gulped to pull some moisture into his dry mouth and throat. He had never been so thirsty, and after the long sprint down first one corridor then another, he was no longer cool either. All of the water in his body was pouring out of it, soaking his skin and clothing.

  Chester rose, his fur back down to normal again, and padded forward as if he were out for a stroll in a park. Jubal thought he must have run the equivalent of the length of Galipolis at least.

  I smell water, Chester said, speeding to a trot.

  Jubal wondered if it would be fit to drink. He hadn’t brought a purification kit—well, he couldn’t think of everything, and when he picked items from the ship to bring with him, he hadn’t counted on a prolonged spelunking trip through the city’s innards.

  Then he too smelled the water and heard the rush and slap of it.

  A wall opened on the left and the girl Chione stepped out. “Unless you want to go swimming again, come with me,” she said.

  “Is the underground river the same one that runs through the desert?” Jubal asked her later, in her hiding place, when he and Chester had enjoyed a long drink and what seemed to be dried fruit.

  “Mmmm, this is good,” Jubal said, biting into the fruit, which had a bit of a crunch to it. “What is it?”

  Chester answered. Keka bugs all squashed together. Smells yummy!

  Jubal dropped the morsel on the floor, and Chester and Renpet shared it with surprising daintiness for a pair who had been feuding less than a week before.

  “No,” Chione said to Jubal. “Not the same. But from the same source, I think.”

  “And where are we exactly?” He looked around the cavernous room, its stone walls painted with picture writing, furnishings carved from the same stone.

  “On the west bank,” she said. “We won’t be followed here.”

  “Why? Can’t they swim?”

  “This is the official place of death. The royal catacombs are here.”

  “I thought those were on the other side, where we found Chester?”

  “No, those were for the common cats, those who died before the Leavetaking, when there were many, and the ones who have died since. Here all of the royals are wrapped and waiting for their next lives.”

  “How long do they have to wait, generally speaking?” Jubal asked. He knew it probably wasn’t a very bright question, but he wanted to keep the conversation going.

  “It depends,” she said. “They live longer these days—much longer than ever before—but there are so few kittens. Renpet and Nefure were the last born here, and as you see, they are nearly grown. But soon perhaps their mother the queen will return with the kittens of Renpet and your master.”

  “My what?”

  She indicated Chester.

  “He’s not my master. He’s my friend.”

  She shrugged. It made no difference to her. She had accepted, the shrug said, the human’s place compared to the divine feline in the scheme of life.

  “And what kittens? Chester’s just a kitten himself.”

  She nodded to the two cats now curled together for a nap. “In your heart, perhaps. But Renpet is in estrus and soon there will be kittens.”

  Chester, a dad?

  Chester looked up at him with slitted eyes, his head still resting on Renpet’s golden belly, and yawned. Why not? We’ll make beautiful kittens, and you like kittens.

  Jubal felt an unreasonable pang of jealousy. Chester was his friend. He had always felt that Chester was his own age. And now he was talking about having kids of his own?

  Chione was prattling on. When she wasn’t on the run, she was quite a chatterbox. “They will be wonderful kittens, the kittens of Renpet and Chester the Fisher.”

  “Well, she shouldn’t get too attached to him. I don’t think we’re going to stay. This place isn’t real healthy for kittens.”

  “Yes,” she said sadly. “As I said, Renpet and Nefure were the last to be born.”

  “Our two pregnant cats lost their litters—all of them born too early—and the half-grown kittens of one of the other cats have disappeared. The queen claimed you had them, but Chester and I both knew that was hogwash.”

  “She probably took
them herself,” Chione said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know! She is not quite sane, that cat.” She added quickly, “Of course, she is to be loved and respected, being of the superior species, but how she came to have the nature she has is a mystery. The late queen was wonderful, kind and wise, and—well, you know Pshaw-Ra. Perhaps he is not, as everyone thinks, Nefure’s sire. Perhaps some lesser, common tom caught the queen before she had those final two kittens and his unscrupulous opportunism accounts for Nefure’s behavior. Certainly Renpet is much more like the queen.”

  “That’s nice,” Jubal said, “but it doesn’t seem to be doing her a lot of good.” He shook his head and looked around at the painted and carved stone room, deep underground, in a place where a cat was queen and her sister a princess, in something like a catty version of a Dumas swashbuckler, though without the sword fighting, and people just helped the cats!

  Chione caught his look, although the light from the wall sconces was not bright. “What troubles you, Chester’s boy?”

  “I don’t get this place. I don’t understand why the humans are ruled by a cat queen or why the cats are considered divine or why everything is underground and some of it is really modern and some looks ancient. I don’t get how the walls slid around as we passed through it, and I don’t get why you could send a cat into space and have all of these other cat spaceships laying around your yards and serving as skylights for the next layer of tunnels. This is a weird place. I love cats a lot but I just don’t get it.”

  Chione shrugged. “I don’t understand how you can live among the stars either, or what the cats did there. I wish I did. Renpet’s distant ancestors traveled through space long before they settled among our earthly ancestors and taught them so much that is part of our culture even today, though many of their ancient teachings have been lost. When first we came to this planet, we brought with us the mummies of the original divine cats. Our society is a remnant of one that once revered them above all other deities. Many of the mummies of sacred cats were stolen and destroyed by foreigners, but many of those were the mummies of less nobly born cats, sacrificed by unscrupulous priests in the long ago. We have preserved the original remains lo these many millennia and brought them with us when we migrated. Our royalty claim descent from these starfarers and teachers.”