BIG CAT: And Other Stories

by Gwyneth Jones

“You are widely learned, Johnforrest”. She touched the fragment of patterned textile, wrapped around three small flat sticks: “What was.”

  A shiny feather or fish-scale set in silver wire: what might have been. Or, better, “the conditional, the always possible.”

  A shrivelled coil of brown, veiny material, probably a root-fragment: what is.

  And a black stone, glossy as obsidian, was The Truth.

  The headset was nowhere in this exchange. He asked and she answered in gesture, the timeless, universal language of this other trade of hers—

  Does what you read come true?

  If you know so much, you know that’s a fool’s question.

  Then she smiled. The black stone in one fist, she laid her free hand on his breast, where his heart was beating. But when I know I’m right, however unbelievable, I’m always right…

  Forrest felt suddenly very confused.

  Sekῥool returned her tokens to the pouch, and slipped the cord over her head. She returned to their couch and was soon deeply asleep, but he lay awake. Sekῥool- Sekool, Woodsong the Sorceress.

  Had he really understood her? It didn’t seem possible.

  ♀

  Their arrival at Tessera Station was as dramatic as darkfall, in its way. Her city, a cloud-raft the size of Manhattan Island, had come to meet them. Moored by mighty hawsers, it stood at the sheer edge of the Tessera Plateau, beside the cable car buildings. Forrest watched the underbelly as they came in: a mass of swollen, membranous dirigibles layered and roped together in a gargantuan netted frame.

  “Unlike the sky habitats in the upper atmosphere,” Sekῥool remarked, “our cities were developed from life. The natural bladder-raft colonies that provide our germ material still flourish: small as tables, big as mountain-tops. We harvest and datamine them for improvements.”

  “Fascinating,” said Forrest: making her laugh.

  “About Gemin, how he comes to me… You will be discreet?”

  “Of course.”

  She had told him that her city, Lacertan, lead an alliance of liberal and independent cloud-cities known as The Band. The other major bloc was an empire, run on military lines, centred on a vast cloud-raft called Rapton. Empire and Band were currently, technically, at peace, but the covert manoeuvring was vicious: this was the situation that had cost Gemin his life. The dirty story had not been released, it was too inflammatory. The official line was that he’d been killed in a caving accident, on a daredevil expedition to one of the old ocean beds, and tragically it had been impossible to recover his body.

  Partly true, but it was a prospecting expedition, said Sekῥool. In disputed territory, where there are rich pickings, and they ran into trouble. He shouldn’t have been there at all, of course.

  They disembarked, smiling for the welcoming committee, in their desert robes and battered wilderness clothes. The Man From The Sky was instantly surrounded by officials and Venusian-style mediafolk. He didn’t speak to Sekῥool again for a while.

  ♀

  Forrest didn’t get to watch the return of the bright: Lacertan was riding strong winds and everyone was indoors; sleeping or not. But after that change the city – which had been quiet as a night in arctic wilderness – bustled. Washed, brushed and dressed in Venusian formal style; provided with fine accommodation and service, Forrest was swept from reception to reception. He ate haute cuisine delicacies, no better or worse than the same absurd fancywork in New York or London. He talked (in like-for-like translation) with interesting Venusians, and had no trouble passing for a denizen of the upper atmosphere. Contact between the realms was minimal. He was Lacteran’s first actual visitor in the flesh: a Marco Polo at the court of Kublai Khan.

  Perhaps the most interesting fact he picked up was that Lizard Men, like the ghost boy, had no tails. Which explained a few things. He met Sekῥool again at his private audience with the Master of the City.

  The simulacrum he’d seen had been a flattering portrait. In life, the Master was a wraith in a medicalised cocoon; though his eyes, appraising Forrest with great interest, were still sharp. Sekῥool was at the bedside, in a dark blue, formal gown: the first time he’d been close to her since the cable-car. Raised on pillows, the Master offered greetings that were translated by an aide wearing a headset. Forrest had arranged for the orrery watch to be boxed and wrapped, in suitable style. He offered it with misgiving, hoping the gift at least looked impressive: but the old man fizzed and crackled with a connoisseur’s delight.

  “The Master is pleased,” reported the aide. “He says the orbits of our planet and our near neighbour present a pretty problem. He has never seen the puzzle worked in craft with such elegance and charm. He suggests you must twin your soul with my lady’s brother, our Chief Scientist, who is also fascinated by the third world.”

  Then the Master was tired, and they were both dismissed. She donned a headset as soon as they were clear of the leader’s private apartment. “I think you have no engagements just now, sir. Let me show you a view over the city.”

  The view from the terrace she chose was not dazzling; they were hemmed in by blank walls, and the redoubt that protected the Residence. But there was a glimpse of bright cloud above, and more rosy-greenery than he’d seen elsewhere.

  “So that’s my marriage,” Sekῥool said, pacing. “He was a good leader, now he’s old, and deathly sick. But he’s not senile and he doesn’t want to let go, so that’s that. He’s forgotten how he’s paralysing me: paralysing the whole city—”

  Her hair, grown out, ran in natural, feathery corn-rows to her nape. She wore classy make-up, there were jewels at her throat. The gown was daringly décolleté in the back, at the swell of her tail’s root. But he missed her jungle pants.

  “You think I’m speaking very freely? Don’t worry, everyone knows how I feel. Including the Master… Nobody’s going to blab indiscretions in your company, Johnforrest. These things.” She tapped her headset. “Are notoriously easy to hack.”

  “What does the Master think about what happened to your son?”

  “That the accident was in disputed territory, and anything’s better than war. That I can marry again when he dies, or take a lover now, and have other children. That he’ll negotiate when he’s stronger (it won’t happen, he’s dying). I can’t bear to tell him how real my son’s suffering still is to me. So I just have to wait.”

  The people of Lacertan, Forrest had learned, were a godless lot of sophisticated animists, like Sekῥool herself. They were liberal, they were easy, but the idea of their prince lying untended, “trapped in his death”, at the bottom of some hole, gave them the horrors. And they weren’t visited by that crawling corpse. He knew he was talking at a desperate woman, and forgave her many things.

  “What about my twin soul? Your brother, the Chief Scientist?”

  “Esbwe? Who knows? He’s an eccentric genius, he lives in a world of his own.”

  The smile he loved fought with the pain. “Enjoy the rest of your visit. You may not have been following the reckoning, we’ve come a long way since you boarded. We’ll soon pass over the spot where you and I met, and then I suppose you’ll leave us.”

  So that’s it, thought Forrest. He’d been wondering when he was due to disappear. Or to be kinsnipped…

  So be it.

  ♀

  Forrest decided it was time he made an acquaintance with his lady’s brother; to whom he somehow hadn’t been formally introduced. The Chief Scientist didn’t do official receptions, but it was surprisingly easy to set up an appointment, once he made his interest known. Esbwe’s place of business turned out to be a large but shabby old building, in a heritage area; which, unlike the Residence, didn’t seem overburdened with staff, or any other signs of significant office. Perhaps “Chief Scientist” was a courtesy title? The Minister for Science, who escorted the foreign dignitary, only to be left twisting her tail in an anteroom – had been reticent on the subject of Esbwe’s responsibilities.

  Forrest was u
shered into a laboratory both like and unlike the same kind of space he’d often visited. Enigmatic machinery; fizzing screens, sleek apparatus that rode tracks on the ceiling, cylinders that rose from the floor. A Lizard Man, in a black smock and white pants (Venusian professional clothing) stood peering into a tank, in the middle of all this.

  “Come and look at this, sir Forrest. Look into the visor and keep your hands to yourself.”

  They were alone, and Esbwe was definitely the guy Forrest had glimpsed in the mirror-screen. He went over, and peered through the fixed visor. The tank seemed empty at first, then moving dots appeared, and took on form: twisting strands that divided and recombined—

  “What do you make of that?”

  “Er, the living material of cell-signatures?”

  “Life, sir! On our world all life is doomed, that is beyond doubt. But I have calculated that the third world has a biosphere, and my great project is to infect it. When I’ve perfected my delivery system, my animaculae will be injected through the clouds into the airless deeps beyond. They will make the crossing, and something of us may survive.”

  “A noble dream,” said Forrest.

  “You don’t believe me. How could one of the menial cloud-dwellers be an Interplanetarian? You gave the Master that orbit-tracking toy for a joke, I’m sure. You forget that before your habitats were ever launched the skies above our levels were often clear. You overlook the fact that our records hold a wealth of astronomical knowledge; some of it thousands of years old—”

  “I find Lacertan science very impressive.”

  The scientist curled his lip, in a bitter shadow of her smile.

  “How generous. But I’m not one of the idiots who’ve been fawning over you, Mr From-The-Sky. To me the sky-habitats are the enemy. The Rapt are our natural allies. The sooner we join the empire the better I’ll be pleased, and I am happy for you to take that warning home.”

  “My headset is malfunctioning,” said Forrest, mugging puzzlement. “I can’t understand a word. I must come back another time. So sorry.”

  ♀

  He had decided, with great regret, that he’d be safer if Sekῥool didn’t know he was a willing victim of her plans, but after this disconcerting meeting with her brother, he changed his mind. They had to have a frank discussion, and luckily or unluckily, he knew the safest venue for the meeting – in this city where she’d warned him everything he said and heard was monitored. He placed a personal call to Esbwe, and left a message confirming he would return to the lab with a functioning translation device; naming a time after Lacertan office hours.

  ‘Falling asleep in the daytime’ was discouraged by incessant bursts of public music. A loud and melodious call to quiet relaxation was fading, as Forrest approached the shabby old building again, and entered it without fanfare. There was nobody about. He stationed himself around the corner from the lab, and waited. Sekῥool arrived soon after him. He was right behind her as she unlocked the doors.

  “I thought that would smoke you out.”

  “Excuse me? I was expecting to meet my brother.”

  “I don’t think he’s coming,” said Forrest, following her inside. “I sent an automated cancellation, immediately after my first message, which he will have seen, and you did not.” He tapped the web of his headset. “I can hack things like this myself, it isn’t very complex.”

  Not that Forrest cared if Esbwe turned up; except for her sake.

  “Sekῥool, I’m afraid I tricked you, but we need to talk, and I believe this room is safe. I don’t think even your crazy brother would have risked the open sedition I heard from him earlier today if your Homeland Security was listening in. But I knew this lab was firewalled, anyway,” he added, deliberately. “You’ll remember making a video call, from the great heart refuge? That’s when I saw him in here, and heard the two of you planning how to use me in a hostage exchange—”

  Her big green eyes got bigger, but she kept her head. No panic, no fluster. “So you know. All right… I was desperate. I went hunting down below for a suitable damned Rapt to capture, and exchange for my son’s body. I ran into you instead, and it seemed like—”

  “A stroke of good luck. I was to be kinsnipped from the great heart after you left: but then you had a better idea. I understand, and I don’t blame you, I just don’t know why the hell Esbwe’s involved. That arrogant idiot is going to destroy you, Sekῥool. Did you know he’s planning to sell this city to the Rapt? How do you think the Master; how d’you think your people would like the sound of that?”

  “Esbwe talks nonsense, nobody listens. I needed his expertise.”

  “Take mine, instead. I know how to do this thing—

  They were two people who had been intensely intimate, but not very talkative, and then silenced by the city. Here they were, alone again, and suddenly it was very bewildering—

  “He has a right,” said Sekῥool, her big eyes shamed and defiant. “An inalienable right, to help me recover our son’s body.”

  “My God… Are you saying your brother is, is your boy’s father?”

  She recoiled. “I know. I know how it sounds, but Johnforrest, I couldn’t marry him. He was erratic even then. He had no reputation, he’s no leader, he was totally unsuitable. I let myself get pregnant, but I married the Master. It made sense to me. My husband would die. I could never marry Esbwe. But he’d be beside me, and our son would inherit—”

  Like Pharaonic Egypt, thought Forrest, fascinated. So, talent gets courted and rewarded, dynastic power stays with the blood royal—

  “Maybe not such good sense to Esbwe.”

  “Maybe not… I asked his help, I owed him that. It’s illegal, of course, for a simulacrum to have a lifespan, but the deal is acceptable. It’s been accepted. What I did, to get what we needed, was theft, and I’m sorry—”

  “A simulacrum,” repeated Forrest, stunned. “A flish atatonaton—”

  “Yes? A short-lived fleshly automaton, for a dead boy. A fair trade, I thought: and we have a good chance of getting away with it. The Rapt refuse to admit they’re holding Gemin. But they’d love to know more about the sky habitat people, and they can learn a lot from a flesh puppet. Forgive me for using you. It’s a shady deal but it’s going to work, for long enough, and then they won’t want to admit it even happened—”

  So much for my heroics, thought Forrest. And she was bold, she was reckless, but maybe Forrest was the one who needed forgiving—

  “Sekῥool, it’s not going to work. I’m not, er, what you think I am.”

  “I know.”

  “You know—?”

  “Of course! Esbwe’s convinced you’re a sky-dweller, but he makes puppets: I’m a doctor. In my world, boy babies’ tails are excised, at birth or soon after: the non-existent gods only know why. Yours has never been excised, it’s vestigial and internal. That’s what I first noticed, but then: your entire skeleton is different. Not deformed, different; organs too. Your cell signature is legible, and obviously functional, but I’ve never seen anything like it. Maybe I took a mad risk, but I did you no harm and I thought you’d be far away, and never know.” Her long smile broke out, uncertainly. “I’m sure you have resources I can’t imagine, hidden somewhere in the sek where I found you—”

  “No I don’t, ma’am,” said Forrest. “I’m a shipwrecked sailor.”

  Her hand went to the pouch at her throat, she stared at him in amazement – and then a man screamed.

  It was a hideous sound: high-pitched, jagged and agonized. Forrest looked wildly around the empty lab. Sekῥool leapt across the room, and slapped her palm on a touch-pad. The wall in front of her opened. Within the space revealed a naked man sat strapped to a chair: flushed and dripping sweat, a headset clasping his skull, tools of torture attached to his body. The Chief Scientist, oblivious, was adjusting his instruments.

  The naked man was Forrest.

  “The Rapt would have been kinder,” said Sekῥool. “Esbwe, it’s conscious, and you are disgus
ting. This was not in the bargain.”

  “What’s he doing here?” snapped Esbwe, glaring at Forrest. “Now we’ll have to eliminate the bastard, and that wasn’t in the bargain.”

  “I’ve been living under a madman’s heel,” said Sekῥool, in dawning wonder, taking out her knife. “I did you a cruel injustice, Esbwe, and I can’t undo it. But enough is enough.”

  Esbwe howled in fury. “Don’t you dare touch it! It’s mine!”

  A lash of her tail sent him skidding. The knife plunged, violent and precise, into the hollow of the doll’s collarbone, and it collapsed. “I don’t know why I never realised,” she murmured, standing over the wet ruin. “I don’t have to wait for him to die. I can seize power, I can make my own rules. I can give myself in place of Gemin if I must.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” shouted Forrest. “Sekῥool, when I thought you were going to hand me over in person, I was willing. I’m still willing. I’m not suicidal: I know how to handle hostage bargaining, I’ve done the work before. I’ll be safe, and I’ll bring your son’s body home—”

  “Why would you do that, man from somewhere else?”

  Forrest, smiling with his eyes, drew her close, and kissed her brow—

  But something was happening. Were the palace guards rushing in? No, it was his hands, they were breaking up, vanishing. He felt a strangely familiar shock; this had happened to him before. It was PoTolo’s probe, it was being retrieved. The cloud-raft must be over the drop-zone.

  “Sekῥool! Wait for me! I can’t stop this, but I’ll come back!”

  She laid her hand against his heart. “I know.”

  The Black Stone

  When the orbits were aligned once more, John Forrest returned to West Africa. He was to repeat his stunt for a select group of scientists. He arrived before the guests, and joined Dr PoTolo, alone in the lab. Nothing much had changed, in the room with the big windows that looked out on the sunset horizon. John Forrest, dressed as before in his wilderness kit, also seemed unchanged; except that he was in a better temper.

  “That thing,’ he said, nodding at the oily black globe in its chamber. “Your time-and-space-travel gizmo. Does it have to be in the container?”