Catacombs

by Anne McCaffrey

  Jubal was about to say it still sounded creepy. On the other hand, he thought, it was why he and Chester had become so close, and that was actually wonderful, so instead he asked another question that was on his mind. “From what Chester said, I thought I might see a lot of the beetles—the kefer-ka?”

  “Not here,” Balthazar told him. “Not now. The beetles from the oldest burials have long ago been consumed. Those that remained, the Grand Vizier took with him on his journey to infest the rest of the galaxy—in a good way, of course.”

  “I hope so,” Jubal said. “Pshaw-Ra told Chester eating the beetles is what created the link between new kittens and people, but I don’t think very many links got established before the cats were all quarantined and ended up here. It makes me wonder where the other bugs went.”

  Balthazar had brought water and dried fish cakes, and that served as supper. Pshaw-Ra joined them, and dined first, of course. He washed his face while Jubal and Balthazar sat cross-legged on the sandy stone floor and shared their meal. Pshaw-Ra had already gotten the best part of the dried fish. He lay down afterward as if about to take a nap, but watched them over crossed front paws. Jubal didn’t trust him and felt uneasy dealing with the tricky old feline without having Chester around to interpret.

  Balthazar chewed his fish. He was so thin that every muscle in his jaws and throat gave a visible demonstration of its function as he ate, working within his dry brown face and throat. Despite his age, his teeth were very white and seemed in excellent working order. “The kefer-ka will find hosts,” he said, “though the great affinity is of course only between cats and men. Before the linking power of the beetles is exhausted, the cats must return to the galaxy to play their role.”

  “Masters of the universe?” Jubal asked, joking, because he thought the whole universal domination thing was just some daft plan of Pshaw-Ra’s. Surely nobody else seriously believed it was going to happen.

  “Even so,” Balthazar said with a sober nod. “That and other things. For this reason, we must refuel the Grand Vizier’s ship. That is why we have come.”

  “I don’t understand. There are all those ships all over town. Surely you have some kind of a port, some way of manufacturing fuel?”

  “Indeed we do not. When the great corporation came and removed many of us to what they assured us would be a better place during the Leavetaking, they took with them industrial resources as well. We hid the ships of the cats from the corporate overlords, but they took most of the extra fuel. The vizier used what was readily available for his first journey.”

  “So now what? Is there someplace here to call a taxi or what?”

  “No, but our ancient royal ones were buried with their worldly goods, including their ships—and with all of the fuel that they contained. It is of course sacrilege to disturb their tombs and remove anything within them.”

  “Because of the extraordinary circumstances, you don’t think anyone will mind?” Jubal asked, but he had a sneaking suspicion that was not the case.

  “Oh no, such desecration is punishable by slow and painful death—at least for us. You are an outsider and may be presumed to know no better, if you get caught.”

  “How am I supposed to transport all of this fuel?”

  “The elements are contained in small light packets, not bulky or heavy, but designed so a cat can easily transport them in his mouth and install them. However, many of the elements will be partially spent already, so you will need to take all you can glean from the royal tombs. We will then guide you through the underworld back to the tunnels beneath the desert upon which the vizier’s ship rests.”

  Jubal nodded but said nothing. Why did he get this feeling that the wily old cat was simply using him because he was handy? Maybe because that’s what was going on. It sounded, at least, as though Pshaw-Ra’s plan included getting both cats and humans off Mau and back into space, so he and Chester wouldn’t be separated again—unless Chester wanted it that way.

  “You’ll have to show me what I’m looking for,” Jubal said.

  CHAPTER 14

  Balthazar, holding an electric torch, led Jubal and Pshaw-Ra farther through the tunnels until they reached a door in the side of the wall. Hieroglyphs, most made up of cats, pyramids, lightning bolts, birds, and sun disks, marched down a central panel carved into the door. This room contained only one cat mummy, encased in a box carved to look like a cat with jeweled eyes and gilded fur. The mummy case lay at the top of a pyramid ship that was a smaller replica of Pshaw-Ra’s.

  “How come if this cat was so important his ship is so much smaller than Pshaw-Ra’s?” Jubal asked.

  “The vizier needed a cargo bay for the large and clumsy vessels of your humans to dock within his ship. Our ancestors had no need of such a large space.”

  Pshaw-Ra placed a paw on the ship’s hull and the hatch swung open. He marched inside, tail curled high over his back.

  Below the entrance to the nose cone containing the cat-sized bridge, he pressed a paw to a round symbol split by a lightning symbol. Another hatch opened. Pshaw-Ra inserted half his body, looked up, then pulled himself out and stepped back.

  “The vizier says the packet is intact. You should pluck it free.”

  “I can’t get in there!” Jubal told him.

  “Reach up with your hand,” Balthazar told him. “There is a tab on the outer side where the feline navigator manipulates the packets with his teeth. Your hands are still small. Your fingers should reach it readily enough.”

  Jubal reached inside and up, half afraid something might bite him, but it felt familiar, like pulling an egg out from under a sitting hen, without the hen or the straw. The little tab was just about the right size to grasp with his forefinger and thumb, and when he pulled it into the beam shed by Balthazar’s torch, he saw a tiny clear packet somewhat smaller than the hen’s egg he’d compared it to. “This is enough to fuel a spaceship?” he asked incredulously.

  Balthazar took it from him and held it to the light. Jubal could see that the contents did not fill the packet all the way to the top. “Alas, only for a few months. But there will be more, in other chambers like this, in other ships and—” He looked at where Pshaw-Ra was sitting, atop a metal box engraved with the lightning in a circle symbol Jubal had seen on the bulkhead inside the mummy’s ship. “Aha! In storage containers such as this one.”

  His point made, Pshaw-Ra jumped down, and Balthazar opened the box to find two more full packets and another implement, scalloped and rounded at the bottom of a short rod. Retaining the fuel packets, he handed Jubal the implement.

  Jubal turned it over in his hand and saw that it was shaped like a cat’s paw.

  “This you may use to gain entrance to the ships,” Balthazar told him.

  “Uh—thanks,” he said.

  He followed Balthazar and Pshaw-Ra back through the maze of tunnels to reach the ones that opened almost directly beneath where the ships were docked, so he’d know the way.

  Then all he had to do was continue searching a Galipolis-sized underground city of sepulchers for the distinctive and hard-to-conceal pyramid ships. After he acquired each cache of elements, he’d been instructed to take them back through the subterranean passages to Pshaw-Ra’s ship. There, he had to wait for nightfall, deliver his goods to the old cat, then return to the Valley of the Royal Dead and search for more.

  On his first solo mission, he was spooked by the deadness all around him as he worked. Vague rustlings came from behind the cat mummies and the bones of mummies that had fallen out of their wrappings long ago. He thought the other bones must belong to less noble cats. Nobody had admitted it, but maybe all cats weren’t mummy material? His lantern glinted off eyes smaller than those of cats but too large to be those of the kefer-ka. In one side chamber he thought might belong to another royal navigator cat mummy, he found instead human mummies in a seated position to form lap beds for the cat mummies. He wondered if the ancients had killed royal servants like Chione when a royal cat died, j
ust to keep the nobility from getting lonesome.

  Then came a long trip through the tunnels beneath the desert, and he was scared it wouldn’t lead to the ship as he’d been told, that the whole mission was an excuse to lose him in the tunnels, maybe as bait for the great, though now blind, snake. On the last leg of the trip, though, when he stopped for a rest that turned into a nap, he felt a familiar warm weight settle against him and a familiar purr vibrate against his side. Chester had come to help him.

  Thought I’d lost you, Jubal told him, stroking his back and tail.

  I was just trying to be a good father, Chester said. But Renpet doesn’t want me. Pshaw-Ra says what I have to teach the kittens will come later, so I thought I might as well help you. He rubbed his head against Jubal’s face, tickling his nose with whiskers. Besides, I missed you.

  Yeah, me too.

  They lost track of time in the tunnels, finding tombs and ships, extracting fuel modules, hauling them back to Pshaw-Ra’s ship and waiting for the old cat to install them, then starting all over again.

  Sometimes Balthazar showed up, and he would tell Jubal what more of the symbols meant and some more of the history of the Mau. More often Pshaw-Ra himself would pop in, using some mysterious route known only to him, and use the old ships as show-and-tell to explain to Chester how cleverly he had modified their functions in his own ship. Chester followed him as intently as if he were a fish, watching his paws as they pretended to work the controls.

  “I wondered how he made it work, but he never showed me before!” Chester told Jubal when the old cat had gone.

  Once, they came upon a stretch of tunnel where the wall went on and on for what seemed miles without an opening into a side chamber or ossuary. Chester was uneasy the whole time, sniffing along the bottom of the wall. It was unusually dirty and seemed to have been scraped, but Jubal began to make out a few drawings on it too—they seemed to be astrological or even astronomical in nature, the sun, moons, and stars growing larger as he walked down the length of the wall. The artist had begun a second line of drawings below the ones higher on the wall. These showed a long wavy line that he took to be a river, a cat, an eye, a dagger, and a wavy line chopped into little pieces. The symbol Balthazar had told him stood for wind appeared next, and the wavy lines ascended to the upper drawing, heading toward a sun disk, then appeared to encircle it.

  In the next panel, the boat symbol appeared with a cat symbol beside it and a sword symbol beside that. There, the swirl resolved itself into a snake biting its own tail, surrounding an unoccluded sun. Then, below it, a long serpentine shape plummeted back into the long wavy line that stood for the river.

  When he looked down, Chester was sitting at his feet looking up at him quizzically. What do you suppose it means? he asked the cat, but other than a brief hiss, Chester had nothing to add.

  From time to time they returned to the river for fresh provisions and to visit Chester’s kittens, who were sleek young cats now. The fluff in their fur frilled around their faces, draped their tails, and softened the mittens on their feet, but they were not quite as heavily coated as Flekica’s kittens, which seemed huge compared to the younger litter but were still playful enough to enjoy games of chase with the smaller ones. The faces of Renpet’s kittens were somewhat sharper and more triangular, and their tufted ears larger and more pointed. They ran all over the cave, as well as Chione and Renpet, greeted Chester with extravagant purrs and rubbings, and treated Jubal as if he was Chester’s extra paw. But although Chester sometimes interpreted the kittens’ thoughts for him, Jubal had no more special knowledge of them than he did of any other cat. He had hoped that his connection with Chester might extend to his family, but that wasn’t happening.

  On his last visit, Renpet had seemed more nervous than before. Chione told him, “She has smelled the great snake again, and felt his body thudding through the passages.”

  “But he’s blind now,” Jubal said. “He won’t be able to find any of us if we hide.”

  “He smells with his long forked tongue,” Chione answered. “And nothing down here would smell as sweet to the eater of souls and killer of light as the new lives we nurture.”

  If Pshaw-Ra had paid any attention to the nature of others rather than what use he could make of them, he would have realized that Nefure was not exactly the maternal type. She had in fact inherited his lack of interest in others, but was sadly lacking his intelligence or curiosity.

  Being the queen, she had not nursed her own kittens. She had not seen them for more than a few moments before the nurse took them away to clean them, let them pull nourishment from her body, and presumably teach them something about being cats. Nefure would wait until they developed manners before she herself undertook to instruct them, however perfunctorily, in being royalty.

  She rested for a time after the onerous task of giving birth, and though she missed the ministrations of her usual servants, who were caring for new kittens, she got a great deal of extra attention from the toms among her courtiers, including the new tom from the star cats, the one she supposed had sired her latest litter.

  At some point she recalled that these kittens were supposed to assist her in dominating the universe, so she thought perhaps she should have a look at them. Only two moon cycles had passed. She expected they would still be as adorable as kittens were supposed to be—as everyone swore she had been—and yet old enough to be presentable.

  Viti-amun, her principal maid and captain of her guard, fetched them and brought them to her.

  They had stripes and spots in gray and black. One had an unruly reddish ruff around her neck and black striped legs and tail, and another was totally white. They scratched their longish fur often with their monstrously huge feet; their grotesquely, monstrously, appallingly huge feet. She’d been told they were “polydactyl,” but Pshaw-Ra had made it sound as if that were a good thing. The extra toes didn’t deform the paws of the male she had taken—what was his name? Jockey? “There must be some mistake, Viti-amun. You have the wrong kittens. These cannot be mine.”

  Viti-amun looked trapped. She knew better than to contradict her queen and yet she didn’t wish to seem derelict in her duty. “I found these kittens where I was told to look for yours, Majesty,” she said.

  The kittens looked confused and rather stupid. They seemed to expect something of her. “Well, they won’t do. That one is hideous.” She indicated the little female with the red ruff and striped legs. “Their feet are much too large. Have the doctors remove some of those toes, or better yet, dispose of them and I’ll start all over when I get in the mood again. And fetch my father, the Grand Vizier. He has some explaining to do. Am I correct in surmising that my city is now filled with this sort of ill-bred offspring?”

  “Most of the kittens look similar to these, Majesty, yes. The Grand Vizier indicated they had turned out as he expected and wished.”

  “That is why I must speak to him. They are not as I expected or wished. The red-maned one is far too ugly to be from my elegant line. And all of their faces and tails are too fat, their body lines stocky, their eyes not set at the proper angle. Oh no, they will not do at all.”

  Nefure’s tail swatted back and forth as she issued her edict, and the kittens, led by the red-ruffed one, decided she was playing and attacked the tail.

  She swirled and swiped, but the kittens rolled under her swings, and the minute she righted herself attacked again. “Get the little monsters off me!” she cried. “And bring me Pshaw-Ra now!”

  ———

  Viti-amun’s brother and first lieutenant, Vala-ra, deployed the guard to find the Grand Vizier while Viti-amun made the kittens scarce. She had hoped her mistress’s pride in herself would spill over into pride in her kittens, that the old vizier’s promises that the kittens were the key to universal domination and absolute power would be enough to endear them, however superficially, to the queen. But she had underestimated the depth of Nefure’s superficiality.

  Viti-amun’s own dar
ling kittens by the handsome Barque tom Bat, with their beautiful big ears and clever many-toed paws, were waiting when she and the young princes and princesses returned to her house. Essentially a security officer, she had selected a home with access to the tunnels of the underworld, though she had not had occasion to use it for anything other than checking on the status of some project or fetching the queen a serving of kefer-ka. Now she wished she had force-fed the kefer-ka from the wisest and oldest of the ancestors to Nefure. Perhaps it would have helped suit her to the throne. Why Renpet had allowed her sister to run her off was a subject of great speculation.

  There was no time now to consider what might have been or should have been. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that, having decided her own kittens were not worthy to be in her presence, Nefure might wish to rid her realm of all of the kittens mothered or sired by the Barque Cats—and right now, there were no other kind of kittens. Viti-amun was quite fond of them, both her own and the little princes and princesses, for all that they might someday take after their mother.

  Opening the trapdoor in her floor, she told the children they were all going to play a hiding game. She shushed their questions and pushed them onto the stairs, closing the trapdoor behind her. Now she knew she must put as much distance between the kittens and her own house as possible, lest the queen send the guard—Viti-amun’s own troops—to ensure that the kittens were dispatched.

  Vala-ra could not understand what the fuss was about or why it was necessary to act as though the vizier needed to be apprehended. All he had to do was put out a call on his com and Pshaw-Ra answered immediately. He explained that the queen wished to see him, but did not say how displeased she was.