MAGICATS!

by Gardner Dozoi

  Harrigan stroked Finnigan reassuringly as the cat gazed around the office with narrowed eyes.

  "If the trouble recurs," the vet was saying, "the cat should be destroyed."

  Harrington returned three days later to pick up Finnigan, who seemed quite chipper, and was obviously glad to see him.

  Lavinia, who shopped for Harrington, bought fresh organ meats three or four times a week and received strict instructions not to feed Finnigan the prohibited foods.

  But the symptoms returned in two weeks' time. Finnigan bled, and his eyes blinked in pain. He chased himself, with frantic, convulsive movements as he tried to bite at the hurt. He ate almost nothing, and all his charm and independence seemed to collapse inward. His strength failed. When he sat in his favorite chair by the fireplace and tried to sharpen his claws, his efforts were a travesty of his former prowess. The nap of the slipcover was hardly roughened.

  Finnigan's eyes grew cloudy and hostile. He tried to hide himself in dark places. Another catheterization produced only temporary relief. Harrington took the cat to another vet, who gave it injections and received a bad scratch under his left eye.

  The injections had no effect. Finnigan continued to decline. Harrington disliked having to leave him alone in the apartment during the days, and disliked having to return at night to find the cat hiding in a closet or under the bed, panting and miserable. Lavinia nearly refused to work in the apartment any longer, so dominated was it by the sick animal.

  Harrington debated having the cat "put away," but the impersonality of that act made him recoil, and there were still occasions when Finnigan would make some shadow of an overture to him, and act as if he might get better. But he didn't, and as he declined, Harrington's nerves went to pieces.

  He took Finnigan to the original vet one Saturday, but the cat was so violent and anguished on being left that Harrington put him back in the box and returned home.

  That night, Finnigan's howling and panting seemed to be more desperate than ever, and Harrington realized that he was going to have to do something about it, all by himself, and right now.

  He thought of chloroform, but he didn't know where he could get it at this hour, or how he'd go about administering it, or how long it took to have its effect. It occurred to him that New York was a hard place to kill an animal.

  As he was running tapwater into his fifth tumbler of whiskey, the idea came to him, the simple, classical, obvious idea: How did you kill a cat? You drowned it. It would be over in seconds, and the emotional strain involved in doing it himself seemed somehow appropriate. Finnigan had been brave for weeks; certainly he himself could be brave for a minute or two. At a delicatessen around the corner he obtained a burlap sack. Returning with it to the apartment, he lifted Finnigan gently from the kitchen floor and carried him down to the basement. He set the cat down on the drainboard and ran a washtub full of cold water, high, up to the taps.

  He held the sack open on the drainboard. Perhaps Finnigan thought it was a game, perhaps he was too sick to care, or perhaps he really knew, and wanted it to happen. At any rate, tail erect, eyes preternaturally bright, Finnigan walked into the mouth of the sack, as if to see whether that dark interior was where his pain and trouble lay.

  Harrington closed the neck of the sack. Squeezing it as hard as he could, he plunged it into the tub. There was a terrible thrashing in the water. Harrington realized his eyes were closed, his teeth clenched, and that he was standing as far away from the tub as he was able to and still hold the dreadful burden under the water. He had no idea how long it was before the struggles subsided and he turned and looked down at the sack eddying limply in the tub. The water sloshed gently back and forth.

  His right hand was stiff with the effort of his grip as he let slip the neck of the sack. The thought occurred to him then that he had made no plans to handle the remains. Perhaps he could get the body cremated. But right now he knew that he could not bear to touch or even look at what he had done. He started up the stairs two at a time, but halfway up the thought of that poor bagged body floating somewhere between the bottom of the tub and the water's surface drove him to turn and go down again.

  Without looking, Harrington reached into the hateful water and pulled the plug. Then he went upstairs to his apartment.

  It happened that I was sailing for Europe on business the next afternoon, and that night I was being dined and bon voyaged by the Levys. About one o'clock in the morning, as I was preparing to leave, their telephone rang, and after a quick, puzzled frown toward his wife, George answered it. It was Harrington, drunk as a lord, and filled with guilt and an overpowering need to tell someone what he'd done. This he did, at some length, to the accompaniment of a sympathetic obligato of reassuring sounds from George, who finally persuaded him to go to bed.

  Shortly after my return from Europe, George called on me and asked if I'd like to accompany him on a visit to Harrington's apartment. I said I would.

  Harrington turned out to be a rather shy, contained man of perhaps forty-five. His apartment was neat and pleasant, and I could detect the dedicated hand of Lavinia on the gleaming brass andirons of the fireplace and the rich lustre of the wide pine plank floors. I recognized the two comfortable-looking wing chairs on either side of the fireplace from the descriptions I'd gleaned from George and Lavinia. As I made a move toward the one on the left, Harrington raised a hand.

  "Not that one, please. It's—Finnigan's."

  I nodded in embarrassed sympathy, and sat down on the edge of a couch. My feeling was one of deference to an understandable idiosyncrasy: if a man wants to maintain a particular piece of furniture as a memorial to a dead pet, I feel its his own business.

  "I just had it re-covered a month ago." Harrington seemed to speak with a kind of admiration as he rubbed a fussy hand over the slipcovered arm of the chair. "And it's fraying already. That animal's strength is amazing." He shook his head and disappeared into the kitchen to make drinks.

  As Harrington left the room, George and I looked at each other rather oddly. Then he rose to examine the cat's chair. His eyebrows went up as he bent over the arm, and he turned to beckon me. I went over and looked at the chair arm. It was scratched and worn, a sharp contrast to the crisp newness of the rest of the slipcover, which was marred only by the presence of a thin matting of fine reddish cat hairs on the seat.

  "What the hell?" I said. "I thought he'd drowned it." And Lavinia wouldn't allow all this hair, I thought.

  "Maybe he's got another one," George said. "But he mentioned Finnigan by name just then. Shh, here he comes."

  "I gather you've heard about my cat," Harrington said to me as he entered the room and set the drinks down on a coffee table.

  I told him I had, and that I sympathized.

  "I thought I'd lost him there for a while," he said.

  It was not an easy remark to respond to. I looked at George.

  "Nick's been away in Europe," George explained. "As a matter of fact, the night before he sailed he was at my house. It was the night you phoned, after you'd—done it."

  Harrington shook his head reminiscently.

  "You did drown him, didn't you?" I'm sure I sounded rather dubious.

  A small, mirthless grin showed itself on Harrington's face. "I did and I didn't. You see, it didn't work."

  I looked at George; his face was curiously watchful.

  "You mean he recovered?"

  "Oh yes. Hasn't our Lavinia told you? Physically he's in fine health."

  I shook my head and explained I'd only just returned and hadn't gotten around to calling Lavinia yet.

  "Oh, well, then you don't know the most dramatic part of the story. After I'd let the water out of the tub and telephoned the Levys, I went to bed. The next morning was Saturday. Usually I sleep late on Saturday, but I realized one of the other tenants might go down to the basement ahead of me, so I set my alarm for seven and drank myself to sleep. My God, the dreams! Guilt, pursuit, fear—a psychoanalyst's field day. Well, I got s
ome sleep, and was up half an hour before the alarm rang. Still drunk and depressed, I went directly down to the basement.

  "The sack lay, wet and flat, on the bottom of the tub. Shapeless. Empty . . ." (As he warmed to his story, I realized it had the practiced, professional tone of being an oft-told tale.) "I stood very still," he went on. "My first impulse was that I must have blacked out somehow, that I had already disposed of the body. But while I stood there, the whole scene of the night before came sharply to my mind.

  "And right then I heard a sound, a thin, hideous sound that made me think of a snake. I looked down. There was a damp spot at my feet. I stepped back. Finnigan was there, underneath the tubs, his pink hair gnarled and tufted where it had dried unlicked." Harrington passed a hand over his eyes. "It was terrible, dreadful. He lay without moving, his eyes slitted, his head raised a fraction of an inch from the cold concrete floor. As I looked at him, he made that awful sound again, a sort of hiss. I was horrified. The end of that ratty tail flicked infinitesimally against the floor, and his haunches tightened almost imperceptibly. I didn't know if he was gathering for a spring, or what.

  "I turned and simply ran up the stairs. Lavinia was due that afternoon, and by the time she arrived I was so potted I could scarcely babble out what had, uh, happened."

  Harrington shook his head. "It took three days to coax Finnigan out of the basement. Lavinia finally did it. That was three months ago. I called on the vet, and told him what had happened, and a little while later I called him to report that the symptoms of the cystitis had cleared up entirely. The vet can't account for it. Sometimes the deposits in the bladder simply break up and dissolve away. It's possible, I suppose, that Finnigan's—uh, immersion was a factor in clearing up the condition, and that's some comfort for me, I suppose. But I haven't actually managed to touch the poor beast since that night. And I've never seen him really sound asleep, either. He just sits and stares at me . . ." Harrington trailed off miserably.

  "Where's the cat now?" George asked him gently.

  "Oh, probably out in the back yard. He shows no inclination to run away, and I feel it's hardly right to try to find another home for him. He's really quite alienated from the pet status by now. It's as if he were on earth for the sole purpose of hating me. We sit by the fire, and he's very decorative still, with his great tail swishing back and forth. And I can be positive he's dozing, but when I look directly at him, those big yellow eyes are staring right into mine. And if I make an overture toward him, Finnigan hisses or backs away . . ." Harrington sighed and rose. He signalled us to follow him out to the kitchen.

  "He has access to the back yard," he said, indicating a hinged wooden panel in place of one of the panes in the window over the sink. Pushing the panel out, he leaned toward the opening. "Puss, Puss, Puss?" he called. In a moment he let the panel fall back into place. "No use. Of course, I'll never have another cat in here. He's a complete loner by now."

  We returned to the living room. "I'm sorry you couldn't see him. Lovely animal, even if he is poor company. And he's still young. There's no reason to think he won't live a long, long time." Harrington dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, as if to rub out the cat's existence.

  And it was on that note that George and I said our goodbyes.

  A few days later, in my apartment, I was watching Lavinia dust books. I told her I'd met Mr. Harrington, and that he'd told me what happened after he'd tried to drown his cat.

  "What was that?" Lavinia asked me.

  "Why, that the cat recovered, and that he's pretty difficult to live with, pretty bitter."

  "You see that cat?" Lavinia asked me, doggedly polishing backstraps.

  I said I hadn't.

  "Mister B., that cat ain't bitter about nobody no more. That cat ain't there. I found that cat in the tub, and I th'ew the carcass right out into the garbage. If Mr. Harrin'ton want to go aroun' croonin' to that poor dead thing, and puttin' out livers and lights into little dishes . . ."

  "But Lavinia," I interrupted. "I was there. I saw the big wing chair. The slipcover looked new—and Mr. Harrington said it was—" (Lavinia nodded.) "—and yet the arm was almost in tatters. And the seat was covered with—"

  "I don't bother that chair, and it don't bother me." Lavinia seemed quite agitated. "That's the deadest, drownedest cat I ever see. Ain't no cat in that house. You say they's cat hairs, scratch marks, on the new cover for Finnigan's chair. I say my church don' teach nothin' about ghost cats—an' I'm much too old to be fixin' to find out now."

  I myself am not nearly so definite about which reality I believe in; as Harrington said, however, Finnigan does seem destined—one way or another—to live a long, long time.

  Jade Blue

  By Edward Bryant

  Multiple Nebula-winner Edward Bryant became a full-time writer in 1969, and over the past fourteen years has established himself as one of the most popular and respected writers of his generation. Bryant's stories have appeared everywhere from Orbit to National Lampoon to Penthouse, including almost all of the SF magazines and anthologies. His books include the well-known Cinnabar (either a collection of short stories or a "mosaic novel," depending on your own definition), Phoenix Without Ashes, a novelization of a television script by Harlan Ellison, three acclaimed short-story collections, Among the Dead, Wyoming Sun, and Particle Theory, and, as editor, the anthology 2076: The American Tricentennial.

  The story that follows takes place in Cinnabar, Bryant's fabulous Victorian city of the far future, a glittering fin de siècle world peopled by immortals and simulacra and rococo statues that nod as you pass, a paradoxical, perfumed world of manners and refinement and sudden brutality, a place where machines bend time, and dreams—and nightmares-can come true.

  There, in Cinnabar, you will meet one of Bryant's most engaging and memorable characters, the catmother Jade Blue, the only one who might be able to save a small boy from the vampiric shadow-creatures of his dreams. . . .

  What? You don't know what a catmother is?

  Read on. . . .

  "And this," said Timnath Obregon, "is the device I have invented to edit time."

  The quartet of blurred and faded ladies from the Craterside Park Circle of Aesthetes made appreciative sounds; the whisper of a dry wind riffling the plates of a long-out-of-print art folio.

  "Time itself."

  "Fascinating, yes."

  "Quite."

  The fourth lady said nothing, but pursed wrinkled lips. She fixed the inventor in a coquettish gaze. Obregon averted his eyes. How, he wondered, did he deserve to be appreciated in this fashion? He had begun to wish the ladies would leave him to his laboratory.

  "Dear Mr. Obregon," said the hitherto silent one. "You have no idea how much we appreciate the opportunity to visit your laboratory. This district of Cinnabar was growing tedious. It is so refreshing to encounter an eminent personality such as yourself."

  Obregon's smile was strained. "I thank you, but my fame may be highly transitory."

  Four faces were enraptured.

  "My APE—" The inventor took a cue from the concert of rising eyebrows. "Ah, that's my none-too-clever acronym for the artificial probability enhancer. My device seems on the brink of being invented simultaneously—or worse, first—by a competitor at the Tancarae Institute. One Dr. Sebastian Le Goff."

  "Then this machine is not yet, um, fully invented?"

  "Not fully developed. No, I'm afraid not." Obregon thought he heard one of the ladies tsking, an action he had previously believed only a literary invention. "But it's very, very close to completion," he hastened to say. "Here, let me show you. I can't offer a full demonstration, of course, but—" He smiled winningly.

  Obregon seated himself before the floor-to-ceiling crystal pillar which was the APE. He placed his hands on a brushed-metal console. "These are the controls. The keyboard is for the programming of probability changes." He stabbed the panel with an index finger; the crystal pillar glowed fluorescent orange. "The device is powered inductiv
ely by the vortical time streams which converge in the center of Cinnabar." His finger darted again and the pillar resumed its transparency. "For now I'm afraid that's all I can show you."

  "Very pretty, though."

  "I think blue would be so much more attractive."

  "I found the most cunning sapphire curtain material yesterday."

  "Tea would be marvelous, Mr. Obregon."

  "Please, ladies. Call me Timnath." The inventor walked to a tangle of plastic tubing on an antiseptic counter. "I'm an habitual tea drinker, so I installed this instant brewing apparatus." He slid a white panel aside and removed five delicate double-handled cups. "The blend for today is black dragon pekoe. Satisfactory with everyone?"

  Nodding of heads; brittle rustle of dying leaves.

  "Cream and sugar?"

  The tall one: "Goat cream, please."

  The short one: "Two sugars, please."

  The most indistinct one: "Nothing, thank you."

  The flirtatious one: "Mother's milk, if you would."

  Obregon punched out the correct combinations on the tea-maker's panel and rotated the cups under the spigot.

  From behind him one of the ladies said, "Timnath, what will you do with your machine?"

  Obregon hesitated. "I'm not sure, really. I've always rather liked the way things are. But I've invented a way of changing them. Maybe it's a matter of curiosity."

  Then he turned and distributed the tea. They sat and sipped and talked of science and the arts.

  "I firmly believe," said the inventor, "that science is an art."

  "Yes," said the flirtatious lady. "I gather that you pay little attention to either the practical or commercial applications of technology." She smiled at him from behind steepled fingers.

  "Quite so. Many at the Institute call me a dilettante."

  The tall lady said, "I believe it's time to go. Timnath, we thank you for allowing us to impose. It has been a pleasure." She dashed her teacup to the tile floor. Her companions followed suit.