Just then a cat entered through the rear door of the workroom and rubbed against Mia’s leg. “Bela!” Mia said.
Indeed, the cat looked just like the Empress’s. Al-Ashmar picked the animal up and examined her eyes, removing any doubt. This was certainly Bela, but how was it possible? The cat should have died with the Empress.
Bela bit the meat of Al-Ashmar’s thumb, and he dropped her in surprise. Bela walked from the room as if she’d never intended to be here in the first place.
Al-Ashmar followed her out the rear door. Bela had already slunk beneath the gate of their small yard and out to the alley behind. Al-Ashmar followed and called back to Mia, who was trying to trail him. “Go back, Mia. I’ll return when I can.”
Al-Ashmar trailed Bela through the pale light of pre-dawn. She wound her way through the streets, and it gradually became clear she was leading him toward the palace. But she avoided the main western road. She traveled instead to the rear of the tall hill that housed it. She climbed the rocks, often leaving her human companion behind, but she would stop when Al-Ashmar fell too far back and then continue before he could catch up to her.
The eastern face of the hill held a shallow ravine with plants dotting a trail—most likely from the waste it carried from the palace to the river. Bela found a crook in the hillside, whereupon she stopped. When Al-Ashmar finally caught up, she circled his legs and meowed.
Al-Ashmar parted the wall of vines clinging to the nearby boulder. A low, dark tunnel entrance stood there. Al-Ashmar rushed through, realizing that Bela—or more likely the soul of the Empress—was leading him up to the palace. In utter darkness, he climbed the spiral stairs as quickly as his burning lungs would allow. Occasionally the stairwell would end, forcing him to take a short passage to find another that led him upward once more, but by and large it was strictly a grueling uphill climb.
His legs threatened to give out, forcing him to stop, but dawn would arrive soon, and Al-Ashmar feared that would be when the Empress’s retinue would be killed.
Finally, dim light came from above, and the peal of a bell filtered down to him. Dawn had arrived. Bela meowed somewhere ahead. He felt sure he’d climbed treble the height of the palace, but still he pushed harder. The light intensified, and he came to a wall with a grate embedded into it. Though the brightness hurt his eyes, he surveyed what he realized was the Empress’s garden.
Visible through the three peaked doorways, Djazir paced along the Empress’s throne room. Six of the Empress’s personal guard stood nearby, each wearing ornate leather armor with a sword and dagger hanging from a silver belt. Djazir wore a white silk robe embroidered with crimson thread, and a ceremonial dagger hung from a golden belt at his waist. The Empress was wrapped in folds of white cloth, her face still exposed. Five bolts of white cloth waited on the marble floor to her left.
To her right, on another bolt of cloth, was Rabiah, unconscious or dead.
Please, Rabiah, be alive.
Djazir continued to pace and wring his hands. A young man, wearing clothes similar to but not so grand as Djazir’s, entered the garden and reported to Djazir.
As the two of them conversed, too low to be heard, Bela strolled out from the grate. Al-Ashmar tried to prevent it, but Bela sped up just before his fingers could reach her. She walked up to Djazir as if she were asking for a bit of cream.
“By the spirits, thank you,” Djazir said loudly as he picked Bela up. “Now please,” he said. “Prepare yourselves.” Then he turned to the young man. “Prepare the procession immediately. You will find everything ready by the time you return.”
The young man bowed and walked back through the garden. Al-Ashmar heard a heavy wooden door close. Moments later, the palace’s bell pealed once more.
Al-Ashmar, heart quickening, searched the landscape of the grate, looking for any sign of a catch. He found something hard and irregular about halfway down on the left side, but had no idea how to release it.
As the Empress’s guards positioned themselves on their white cloths, Djazir ladled a thick white liquid from a ceramic bowl using an ornate spoon. He held the spoon to Bela’s lips and waited as she lapped at it. Then he set Bela down on a silk pillow on the Empress’s throne and petted her until her movements slowed.
Bela rested her head on her crossed paws and stared directly at Al-Ashmar. Her eyes blinked, twice, before slowly closing for the last time. Her lungs ceased to draw breath mere moments later.
The bell pealed again, long and slow.
Djazir moved to each of the guards in turn and administered a spoonful of the liquid. Their bodies were already lying down, but each fell slack less than three breaths after imbibing the poison.
Al-Ashmar worked frantically at the catch. Open, damn it! Open!
Djazir moved next to Rabiah’s motionless form.
“Stop it, Djazir!”
Djazir turned. He moved toward the grate, squinting.
The catch released.
Al-Ashmar stepped out into the light, ready to charge for Djazir should he make a move toward Rabiah. Instead Djazir dropped the spoon and pulled his dagger free of its sheath.
“I was willing to let your children live, Al-Ashmar, but an affront such as this demands their deaths.”
Al-Ashmar, heart beating wildly, patted his vest for anything he might use as a weapon and found only the leftover phials of Bela’s tonic. He swallowed hard and pulled one of them from his vest pocket.
Djazir chuckled. “Are you going to heal me, physic?”
Al-Ashmar unstoppered the phial and waited for Djazir to come close, but Djazir lunged much faster than Al-Ashmar had anticipated. Al-Ashmar dodged, but still the steel bit deep into his shoulder. He flung the phial’s contents at Djazir’s face, aiming for the eyes. Enough of the acerbic liquid struck home, and Djazir screamed and fell backward.
Al-Ashmar fell on top of Djazir, driving his good shoulder into Djazir’s gut. A long, deep, noisy exhalation was forced from Djazir’s lungs, giving Al-Ashmar time to scramble on top of him. Holding the knife to one side, Al-Ashmar seized Djazir’s neck and applied all the leverage he could as the older man writhed beneath him, sputtering and choking, eyes pinched tight. Finally, as the palace bell pealed over the city, Djazir’s body lost all tension.
Al-Ashmar breathed heavily, wincing from the pain in his screaming shoulder. He cleaned Djazir as best he could and tugged him into position on the remaining bolt of white cloth. Then he rushed to Rabiah’s side and tried to wake her. He thought surely she was dead, thought surely this had all been for naught, but no, she still had a faint heartbeat. She still drew breath, however slowly. He slapped her, but she would not wake.
The bell pealed. They would return soon.
Al-Ashmar took a bit of the tonic still left in the phial and spread it under and inside Rabiah’s nostrils. She jerked and her eyes opened. She was slow in focusing, but eventually she seemed to recognize Al-Ashmar.
“Where am I?” she asked, rubbing the tonic from her nose.
“Not now. I will explain all later.”
Al-Ashmar helped Rabiah through the grate, but before he could take the first of the steps down, she turned him around and wrapped her arms around him.
“Thank you for my life,” she said.
He freed himself from her embrace and pulled her toward the stairs. “Thank me when you have your new one.”
Al-Ashmar knew they would have to leave for foreign lands, but it couldn’t be helped. He hadn’t expected this change in fortune, but neither had he expected his wife to die or to raise seven children on his own. He would take what fate gave him and deal with it as best he could.
With Rabiah.
Yes, with Rabiah it would all be just a little bit easier.
Afterword by Bradley P. Beaulieu
I heard an analogy years ago: that you draw yourself toward a goal similar to the way a rubber band pulls a weight across a table. If the pull is too slack, you end up moving toward your goal too slowly (or not at all);
too fast and the rubber band breaks. It’s at those in-between times where the pull is not too strong and not too slack that you work at peak efficiency. I believe this is what happened to me with this story.
“In the Eyes of the Empress’s Cat” was written during Uncle Orson’s Literary Bootcamp in the summer of 2005. In Bootcamp, the campers are asked to write one story—in twenty-four hours. Well, that’s not exactly true. You take one day to brainstorm and develop the story idea; the story idea is critiqued by the group the following day; and then you’re expected to write the story in twenty-four hours.
The guidelines we were given were interesting and may give some insight into how easy it can be to generate story ideas. First, we were told to interview random people. We were allowed to say why we were interviewing them, but beyond that it was simply a conversation with a person I didn’t know that would eventually (inevitably) reveal something insightful or enigmatic or thought-provoking—in other words: something I could use in my story. The thing to note here is that this was not only true of the person I ended up interviewing, but of anyone I might have interviewed.
The young woman I met was a college student, still trying to find her way in life but interested in medicine. She spoke of a family friend who had had a stroke. During her recovery this woman would try to say one word, but a completely different yet perfectly intelligible word would come out of her mouth, as if the wires to the one word had been rerouted to the other. Out of this conversation, as you may have guessed, came the Empress.
Another brainstorming technique was to visit a library or bookstore and simply browse. Just like a conversation with a stranger, this will eventually produce something that can complicate or enhance a story. I found a book on iridology, the discipline of assessing one’s health through examination of the iris and white of the eye. I’ll leave you to determine how this affected the story.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t complete the story in the allotted time frame. I took an extra day, but I’m still very proud of the result. That’s not to say that I did this alone. I have all my fellow ’05 Bootcampers to thank and, of course, Card himself. As I recall, Card was critical of my initial story idea, and rightly so. It was with his insights and all the excellent advice I received during Bootcamp that “Cat” was conceived, created, and refined. My heartfelt thanks to all those involved.
Mazer in Prison
BY ORSON SCOTT CARD
Being the last best hope of humanity was a lousy job.
Sure, the pay was great, but it had to pile up in a bank back on Earth, because there was no place out here to shop.
There was no place to walk. When your official exercise program consisted of having your muscles electrically stimulated while you slept, then getting spun around in a centrifuge so your bones wouldn’t dissolve, there wasn’t much to look forward to in an average day.
To Mazer Rackham, it felt as though he was being punished for having won the last war.
After the defeat of the invading Formics—or “Buggers,” as they were commonly called—the International Fleet learned everything they could from the alien technology. Then, as fast as they could build the newly designed starships, the IF launched them toward the Formic home world, and the other planets that had been identified as Formic colonies.
But they hadn’t sent Mazer out with any of those ships. If they had, then he wouldn’t be completely alone. There’d be other people to talk to—fighter pilots, crew. Primates with faces and hands and voices and smells, was that asking so much?
No, he had a much more important mission. He was supposed to command all the fleets in their attacks on all the Formic worlds. That meant he would need to be back in the solar system, communicating with all the fleets by ansible.
Great. A cushy desk job. He was old enough to relish that.
Except for one hitch.
Since space travel could only approach but never quite reach three hundred million meters per second, it would take many years for the fleets to reach their target worlds. During those years of waiting back at International Fleet headquarters—IF-COM—Mazer would grow old and frail, physically and mentally.
So to keep him young enough to be useful, they shut him up in a near-lightspeed courier ship and launched him on a completely meaningless outbound journey. At some arbitrary point in space, they decreed, he would decelerate, turn around, and then return to Earth at the same speed, arriving home only a few years before the fleets arrived and all hell broke loose. He would have aged no more than five years during the voyage, even though decades would have passed on Earth.
A lot of good he’d do them as a commander, if he lost his mind during the voyage.
Sure, he had plenty of books in the onboard database. Millions of them. And announcements of new books were sent to him by ansible; any he wanted, he could ask for and have them in moments.
What he couldn’t have was a conversation.
He had tried. After all, how different was the ansible from regular email over the nets? The problem was the time differential. To him, it seemed he sent out a message and it was answered immediately. But to the person on the other end, Mazer’s message was spread out over days, coming in a bit at a time. Once his whole message had been received and assembled, the person could write an answer immediately. But to be received by the ansible on Mazer’s little boat, the answer would be spaced out a bit at a time, as well.
The result was that for the person Mazer was conversing with, many days intervened between the parts of the conversation. It had to be like talking with somebody with such an incredible stammer that you could walk away, live your life for a week, and then come back before he had finally spit out whatever it was he had to say.
A few people had tried, but by now, with Mazer nearing the point where he would decelerate to turn the ship around, his communications with IF-COM on the asteroid Eros were mostly limited to book and holo and movie requests, plus his daily blip—the message he sent just to assure the IF that he wasn’t dead.
He could even have automated the daily blip—it’s not as if Mazer didn’t know how to get around their firewalls and reprogram the shipboard computer. But he dutifully composed a new and unique message every day that he knew would barely be glanced at back at IF-COM. As far as anyone there cared, he might as well be dead; they would all have retired or even died before he got back.
The problem of loneliness wasn’t a surprise, of course. They had even suggested sending someone with him. Mazer himself had vetoed the idea, because it seemed to him to be stupid and cruel to tell a person that he was so completely useless to the fleet, to the whole war effort, that he could be sent out on Mazer’s aimless voyage just to hold his hand. “What will your recruiting poster be next year?” Mazer had asked. “‘Join the International Fleet and spend a couple of years as a paid companion to an aging space captain!’?”
To Mazer it was only going to be a few years. He was a private person who didn’t mind being alone. He was sure he could handle it.
What he hadn’t taken into account was how long two years of solitary confinement would be. They do this, he realized, to prisoners who’ve misbehaved, as the worst punishment they could give. Think of that—to be completely alone for long periods of time is worse than having to keep company with the vilest, stupidest felons known to man.
We evolved to be social creatures; the Formics, by their hivemind nature, are never alone. They can travel this way with impunity. To a lone human, it’s torture.
And of course there was the tiny matter of leaving his family behind. But he wouldn’t think about that. He was making no greater sacrifice than any of the other warriors who took off in the fleets sent to destroy the enemy. Win or lose, none of them would see their families again. In this, at least, he was one with the men he would be commanding.
The real problem was one that only he recognized: He didn’t have a clue how to save the human race, once he got back.
That was the part that nobody
seemed to understand. He explained it to them, that he was not a particularly good commander, that he had won that crucial battle on a fluke, that there was no reason to think he could do such a thing again. His superior officers agreed that he might be right. They promised to recruit and train new officers while Mazer was gone, trying to find a better commander. But in case they didn’t find one, Mazer was the guy who fired the single missile that ended the previous war. People believed in him. Even if he didn’t believe in himself.
Of course, knowing the military mind, Mazer knew that they would completely screw up the search for a new commander. The only way they would take the search seriously was if they did not believe they had Mazer Rackham as their ace in the hole.
Mazer sat in the confined space behind the pilot seat and extended his left leg, stretching it up, then bringing it behind his head. Not every man his age could do this. Definitely not every Maori, not those with the traditional bulk of the fully adult male. Of course, he was only half Maori, but it wasn’t as if people of European blood were known for their extraordinary physical flexibility.
The console speaker said, “Incoming message.”
“I’m listening,” said Mazer. “Make it voice and read it now.”
“Male or female?” asked the computer.
“Who cares?” said Mazer.
“Male or female?” the computer repeated.
“Random,” said Mazer.
So the message was read out to him in a female voice.
“Admiral Rackham, my name is Hyrum Graff. I’ve been assigned to head recruitment for Battle School, the first step in our training program for gifted young officers. My job is to scour the Earth looking for someone to head our forces during the coming conflict—instead of you. I was told by everyone who bothered to answer me at all that the criterion was simple: Find someone just like Mazer Rackham.”
Mazer found himself interested in what this guy was saying. They were actually looking for his replacement. This man was in charge of the search. To listen to him in a voice of a different gender seemed mocking and disrespectful.
Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show Page 4