"Six bil— Damned if it isn't Puffpuss. Remember him well. Seen him many a time at dotty Aunt Emma's. Alice, you've never met Puffpuss. This is Puffpuss."
"Of course. Puffpuss. Pwetty kitty, come to Awice. Awice pet you. Itchy kitchy kitchy."
"Futterfutterfutterfutter . . ."
"He's pleased," says Shelby. "He's purring. Exactly the way I remember Puffpuss purring. That's Puffpuss, all right."
"Now," says Tom, "I'm not," as he stands up and shucks off the disguise.
"Right. Now you're Tom. Explain things, Tom."
"Dotty Aunt Emma's having her lawyer in tomorrow. Before he gets there, I do. I simply drop the real cat out the window—to you, Alice; give him a good home, dear—and I take his place. Auntie will accept me unquestioningly."
"But there'll be other people," says Alice. "The lawyer and all."
"Nobody contradicts Aunt Emma. Besides, I'll have substantiation. Shelby, you'll be the vet."
"Check. I'll go now and start practicing my catside manner."
"Do. And you, Alice, practice catching cats."
"Thomas," says Aunt Emma, entering her drawing room just as Tom wheels around from the window. Outside there is a faint noise of "plump" and "oof!" in a girl's voice. "What are you doing up before noon?"
"Couldn't sleep, auntie. I was worried that someone ought to be watching over our future President."
"How touching. Where is he, then?"
"Saw him in the study a moment ago. I'll send him in."
Tom steps into the hall, steps into his disguise, calls out, "Here he comes now, auntie," and saunters back into the drawing room on all fours.
"Yes, there's my puzzums."
Tom fawns against the old lady's legs while she reaches down to scratch his back. Then he stretches out beside her rocking chair, futterfuttering contentedly.
"Jennings, I heard the front bell. Is that Lawyer Kalb-fuss?"
"No, m'lady. It's Sir Sri."
"Yiss." The swami oozes in, now wearing only a rather dirty dhoti. "I came to bespeech you again—" His eyes widen. "Dear Mrs. Madam, what is that?"
Tom lays back his ears and whiskers.
"Do you mean Puffpuss?"
"The cat? That is the cat? The same cat you had yesterday?"
"Of course. Do you suppose I change cats at whim?"
Tom bristles his fur and hisses.
"Puffpuss seems to have taken a slight dislike to you, Swami Ghosh," says Aunt Emma. She adds suspiciously, "You're not by any chance a Democrat?"
"Madam," says the swami, standing smally tall in his sock-less shoes. "I am of the highest Indian caste. A Brahman."
"In Boston it's Brahmin."
"Something about this cat," says the swami, staring at Tom's fluffed-up fur, "is familiar. Yiss."
"If you came here just to addle me," says Aunt Emma, "my mind is made up."
"Surely so," says the swami hastily. "Only, dear Mrs. Mudam, have we assured ourselfs that this cat has the qualities for the Presidentdom?"
"You assured me."
"With the proper guidings in the Ghosh Almighty principles. However, not yet having had that guidings, the cat appears phlegmatic. Has he ever, for instance, catched a mice? One would expect one's President—"
"Puffpuss is six years old. In human terms, that would be forty-two. You can hardly expect him to gambol like a kitten."
"Perhaps not, Mrs. Madam. But regard him. You have been rocking on his tail for five minutes, and he has not so much as—"
"Er—yeowr!" yelps Tom, coming suddenly alert and bounding away from the chair.
"He does sound a bit hoarse," says Aunt Emma worriedly.
Pausing only to glare tigerishly at the swami, Tom begins to gambol like a kitten. He pounces at the fringe of the rug, then bats at the tassels of a drapery.
"And now he seems quite frenetic. I wonder if he could be coming down with something. Thomas!"
Tom gambols out the door, stands up and sticks just his head back in. The swami jumps. "Yes, auntie?"
"Telephone Dr. Udderweiss to come and have a look at Puffpuss."
"Yes, auntie."
In the study, he dials Shelby and says, "Dr. Udderweiss, come at once. Oh, and meantime tell Alice to get me some mice."
"Aren't they feeding you, old boy?"
Tom gambols into the drawing room again, as Jennings and another gentleman arrive.
"Counselor Kalbfuss is here, m'lady."
The lawyer edges into the room, looking apprehensively at Tom gamboling behind him.
"Good morning, Kalbfuss. That's Puffpuss."
"That is the—er—heir? I thought, Emma, you said it was to be a cat."
"What does that look like? A canary?"
"Well, no."
"Meow."
"Bless my soul, it is a cat."
"Kalbfuss, it was you who gave me Puffpuss. To console me when my husband passed away."
"It was just a kitten then. I had no idea . . ."
Tom bounds into Aunt Emma's lap and begins playfully to undo her knitting.
"Puffpuss has been a great consolation to me. Now, in gratitude, I intend to provide for his future. Prepare the necessary papers, Kalbfuss. Jennings, you will witness my signature. Thomas, see who that is at the door. Get off my lap, Puffpuss, you're shedding. Thomas!"
"Just going, auntie," Tom calls back, as soon as he has gamboled out of the drawing room.
"From Miss Alice Aforethought," says a palsied, ancient messenger boy at the door. He hands Tom a gorgeously gift-wrapped Tiffany box.
"Why is this box squeaking?"
"Tiffany's finest first-water, flawless, blue-white mice, sir."
"Confound it, I wanted plain old gray house mice."
Haughty sniff. "Try Carder's, sir."
Tom is fussing with various household fluids in the butler's pantry when the doorbell rings again.
"Emil Udderweiss, D.V.M.," says Shelby, wearing a monocle, a Van Dyke and a small round mirror perched on his forehead. "Why are you dyeing those mice?"
"Give me a minute to get upstairs, Shelby, and then you come."
Tom is again gamboling about the drawing room when Shelby sweeps grandly in and demands, "Is there a patient in the house?"
"Ah, Udderweiss," says Aunt Emma. "I called you to give a checkup—"
"How right you were. My superb medical intuition perceives that instantly. The poor dumb creature. Lost all its pelt, I see." Shelby strides to Swami Ghosh and lifts one of his eyelids. "Moribund. Terminal. Tragic." He picks up a telephone, dials swiftly and barks, "The wagon!"
"No, no, no," says Aunt Emma, as the swami backs terrified into a corner. "It was Puffpuss I wanted you to look at."
"To admire, you mean. Never saw a finer specimen of Felis felis. Just see how he gambols. Living all nine lives to the hilt."
"Do you really think so, doctor?"
"All cat, that cat. Observe, he's caught a mouse."
Tom drops it in the middle of the rug and looks proud.
"Odd," says the swami, still somewhat shaken but still unbowed. "This mice is wet. Something seems fishy here. Yiss."
"Fishy indeed!" scoffs Shelby. "Mus domesticus. All mouse, that mouse."
"Thank you, Udderweiss," says Aunt Emma. "I'm so relieved about Puffpuss. Kalbfuss, let's get on with the paperwork."
"A moment, doctor," says the swami spitefully, peering into Shelby's little black bag. "I see no shots record for this cat. Are all his immunities up to date?"
"Hm. You have a point. One can always do with a shot."
"Yiss."
"Fitzrowr!"
"Hold his head, please, counselor." Shelby strides to the sideboard and dollops brandy into a snifter. "Force his jaws, Jennings."
"Fitzr—ulp."
"Not those kind of shot!" rages the swami.
"Good for man or beast," says Shelby, taking one himself.
"Merciful heavens," says Lawyer Kalbfuss.
A siren sounds suddenly outside, and four
burly men in white elbow into the room. "Isolation ward," says Shelby with a jerk of his head, and the four men bear the swami away kicking and screaming.
"Merciful heavens," says Aunt Emma.
"A shock, no doubt, madam. But thank Hippocrates you called me in time. A Himalayan form of hydrophobia, the abominable snowmania. You saw how he was foaming at the cat."
"Merciful heavens."
"Futterfutterfutterfutter . . . hic."
"You think it went well, then?" says Shelby some days later, at a secret meeting in the butler's pantry.
"Perfectly," says Tom. "The will is all signed, sealed and I am irrefutably recognized as Puffpuss. Kalbfuss had me put my pawprints on some of the papers."
"That's just what they made Swami Ghosh do."
"Who did?"
"The Bide-a-Wee Home & Clinic. He's up for adoption."
"We can't go on meeting like this, Tommy," says Alice, still later. "This fence hurts my—hurts me."
"I've told you, dear, auntie is a light sleeper. Whenever she wakes up she likes to look out and see me here serenading the moon. There she is at the window now. Meowrrrooo, moon."
"It's been months now, and we're no better off than before. It still looks like that old lady will outlive us all. We'll soon be too old to have kittens. I mean kids."
"We'll adopt Sir Sri."
"Be serious, Tommy!"
"Okay, we'll buy us a whole orphanage. We'll be rich, Alice!"
"When? I don't intend to spend the best years of my life straddling a back fence."
"There's auntie again. Meowrrrooo, moon."
Another window rattles up somewhere. "Shut up, you infernal feline!"
Whiz.
Thunk.
"Ow!"
"Sorry, Alice, I think that shoe was meant for me."
"This is too much! I can't endure any more!"
"Alice!"
"Farewell forever, you—you—infernal feline!"
"Hell hath no fury," sighs Shelby, still later, at Tom's fence, "like a woman."
"You don't mean—?"
"Yes. Alice has blown your cover. She's in there now, returning Puffpuss to the bosom of your aunt. You can't go home again."
Lights begin going on in every window of the house. "Your Aunt Emma is so indignant that she's even disowning the real Puffpuss. She's leaving everything to Jennings."
"Ya-hoooo!" comes an exuberant cry from indoors.
"That was Jennings."
"Oh, well," says Tom. "Can't win 'em all."
"You don't seem adequately dashed. Six billion dollars done and gone. Sweet Alice been and bolted."
"The fact is, there's someone else."
"Come now, old boy. In that getup how could you even have met someone else?"
"Here. On this very fence."
"You can't mean—?" Shelby is speechless.
"She's Siamese. They do say that Orientals make the best wives. Her name is Ah Sin."
"I say, old boy, this is letting down the side."
"Here she comes now. Isn't she smashing?"
Shelby goggles, speechless.
"Futterfutterfutterfutter . . ."
"Futterfutterfutterfutter . . ."
"But—but—old boy, how will you live? How will you support a family?"
"I'll become a cat burglar," Tom murmurs carelessly, as he and Ah Sin move off along the fence top, together into the moonset.
"Old boy!" calls Shelby, in one last appeal. "These mixed marriages never work!"
And back come Tom's last words, dim from the dark far distance. "Don't knock it till you try it . . ."
Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee
By Gene Wolfe
Cats have been providing love and companionship for people for thousands of years now, but in the future, when we have sophisticated genetic-engineering techniques at our disposal, might we not be tempted to . . . improve a bit on the classic formula?
The story that follows is about the desperation and isolation of ordinary people. It's about love, and loneliness . . . and a very special breed of cat.
Gene Wolfe is perceived by many critics to be one of the host—perhaps the best—SF and fantasy writers working today. His tetralogy The Book of the New Sun—consisting of The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, and The Citadel of the Autauch—has been hailed as a masterpiece, a seminal work, and is quite probably the standard against which subsequent science-fantasy books of the 1980's will be judged. The Shadow of the Torturer won the World Fantasy Award. The Claw of the Conciliator won the Nebula Award. Wolfe has also won a Nebula Award for his story "The Death of Doctor Island." His other books include Peace, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and The Devil in a Forest. His short fiction has been collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories and Gene Wolfe's Book of Days.
The relation between Sonya and Crane Wessleman was an odd one, and might perhaps have been best described as a sort of suspended courtship, the courtship of a poor girl by a wealthy boy, if they had not both been quite old. I do not mean to say that they are old now. Now Sonya is about your age and Crane Wessleman is only a few years older, but they do not know one another. If they had, or so Sonya often thought, things might have been much different.
At the time I am speaking of every citizen of the United States received a certain guaranteed income, supplemented if there were children, and augmented somewhat if he or she worked in certain underpaid but necessary professions. It was a very large income indeed in the mouths of conservative politicians and insufficient to maintain life according to liberal politicians, but Sonya gave them both the lie. Sonya without children or augmentation lived upon this income, cleanly but not well. She was able to do this because she did not smoke, or attend any public entertainment that was not free, or use drugs, or drink except when Crane Wessleman poured her a small glass of one of his liqueurs. Then she would hold it up to the light to see if it were yellow or red or brown, and sniff it in a delicate and ladylike way, and roll a half teaspoon on her tongue until it was well mixed with her saliva, and then swallow it. She would go on exactly like this, over and over, until she had finished the glass, and when she had swallowed it all it would make her feel somewhat younger; not a great deal younger, say about two years, but somewhat younger; she enjoyed that. She had been a very attractive girl, and a very attractive woman. If you can imagine how Debbie Reynolds will look when she attends the inauguration of John-John Kennedy, you will about have her. With her income she rented two rooms in a converted garage and kept them very clean.
Crane Wessleman met Sonya during that time when he still used, occasionally, to leave his house. His former partner had asked him to play bridge, and when he accepted had called a friend, or (to be truthful) had his wife call the friend's wife, to beg the name of an unattached woman of the correct age who might make a fourth. A name had been given, a mistake made, Sonya had been called instead, and by the time the partner's wife realized what had occurred Sonya had been nibbling her petits fours and asking for sherry instead of tea. The partner did not learn of his wife's error until both Crane Wessleman and Sonya were gone, and Crane Wessleman never learned of it. If he had, he would not have believed it. The next time the former partner called, Crane Wessleman asked rather pointedly if Sonya would be present.
She played well with him, perhaps because she was what Harlan Ellison would call an empath—Harlan meaning she gut-dug whether or not Crane Wessleman was going to make the trick—or perhaps only because she had what is known as card sense and the ability to make entertaining inconsequential talk. The partner's wife said she was cute, and she was quite skillful at flattery.
Then the partner's wife died of a brain malignancy; and the partner, who had only remained where he was because of her, retired to Bermuda; and Crane Wessleman stopped going out at all and after a very short time seldom changed from his pajamas and dressing gown. Sonya thought that she had lost him altogether.
So
nya had never formed the habit of protesting the decisions of fate, although once when she was much, much younger she had assisted a male friend to distribute mimeographed handbills complaining of the indignity of death and the excretory functions—a short girl with blond braids and chino pants, you saw her—but that had been only a favor. Whatever the handbills said, she accepted those things. She accepted losing Crane Wessleman too, but at night when she was trying to go to sleep, she would sometimes think of Crane Wessleman among The Things That Might Have Been. She did not know that the partner's wife was dead or that the partner had moved to Bermuda. Nor did she know how they had first gotten her name. She thought that she was not called again because of something—a perfectly innocent thing which everyone had forgotten in five minutes—she had said to the partner 's wife. She regretted it, and tried to devise ways, in the event that she was ever asked again, of making up for it.
It was not merely that Crane Wessleman was rich and widowed, although it was a great deal that. She liked him, knowing happily and secretly as she did that he was hard to like; and, deeper, there was the thought of something else: of opening a new chapter, a wedding, flowers, a new last name, a not dying as she was. And then four months after the last game Crane Wessleman himself called her.
He asked her to have dinner with him, at his home; but he asked in a way that made it clear he assumed she possessed means of transportation of her own. It was to be in a week.
She borrowed, reluctantly and with difficulty, certain small items of wearing apparel from distant friends, and when the evening came she took a bus. You and I would have called it a helicopter, you understand, but Sonya called it a bus, and the company that operated it called it a bus, and most important, the driver called it a bus and had the bus driver mentality, which is not a helicopter pilot mentality at all. It was the ascendant heir of those cheap wagons Boswell patronized in Germany. Sonya rode for half because she had a Golden Age card, and the driver resented that.
When she got off the bus she walked a considerable distance to get to the house. She had never been there before, having always met Crane Wessleman at the former partner's, and so she did not know exactly where it was although she had looked it up on a map. She checked the map from time to time as she went along, stopping under the infrequent streetlights and waving to the television cameras mounted on them so that if the policeman happened to be looking at the time and saw her he would know that she was all right.
MAGICATS! Page 18