BIG CAT: And Other Stories

by Gwyneth Jones

  “Do you know what’s causing the effect?” asked Boaaz.

  “It’s not weathering, we’re inside the Enclosure. Must be bugs in the ceramic, we’ll have to get it reconfigured. Can’t understand it. It’s supposed to last forever, that stuff.”

  “But the station is very old, isn’t it? Older than Butterscotch itself. You don’t think the pretty rocks in here had anything to do with the damage?” Boaaz tried a rumble of laughter. “You know, child, sometimes I think they move around at night!”

  The rock group was nowhere near the walls. It never was, by daylight.

  “I am twenty years old,” said the Martian, with an odd look. “Old enough to know when to stay away from bad luck, messir. Excuse me.”

  He hurried away, leaving Boaaz very puzzled and uneasy.

  Ω

  He had come here to collect minerals, therefore he would collect minerals. What he needed was not mollycoddling but an adventure, to clear his head. It would be foolhardy to brave the Empty Quarter of Mars in the company of a frightened child: perhaps equally foolhardy to set out alone. He would offer to go exploring with the Aleutian: who took a well-equipped station buggy out into the wild red yonder almost every day.

  Conrad would surely welcome this suggestion!

  But Conrad was reluctant. He spoke so warmly of the dangers, and with such concern for the Shet’s age and metabolism, that Boaaz’s pride was touched. He was old, but he was strong. The nerve of this stripling, suggesting there were phenomena that an adult male Shet couldn’t handle! Even if the stripling was a highly experienced young immortal—

  “If you prefer to ‘go solo’ I would hate to disturb your privacy. We must compare routes, so that our paths do not cross.”

  “The virtual tour is very, very good,” said the Aleutian, persuasively. “You can easily and safely explore ancient ‘Arabia Terra’ with a fully customised avatar, from the comfort of your hotel room.”

  “Stop talking like a guidebook,” rumbled Boaaz. “I’ve thrived in tougher spots than this. I shall make my arrangements today.”

  “You won’t mind me mentioning that the sentient biped peoples of Shet are basically aquatic in origin—”

  “Origin be blowed. We have lived on land since our oceans shrank, about two million standard years ago. I am not an Aleutian, I have no memories of that era. And if I were ‘basically aquatic’, that would mean I am already an expert at living outside my natural element. Wouldn’t it?”

  “Oh well,” said Conrad at last, ungraciously. “Then you can come along. I suppose it’s safer if I keep you where I can see you.”

  Ω

  The notable features of the ancient uplands were to the north: luckily the opposite direction from Isabel’s dour location. The two buggies set out at sunrise, locked in tandem; Conrad in the lead. As they passed through the particulate barrier of the Enclosure, Boaaz felt a welcome stirring of excitement. His outside cams showed quiet mining fields, and the ever-present stromatolites, but already the landscape was becoming more rugged. He felt released from bondage. A few refreshing trips like this, and he would be quite recovered. He would no longer be compelled to turn, feeling those ornate chairs lined up behind him, knowing that the repulsive creature of his dream was taking shape—

  “It’s a dusty one,” remarked Conrad, over the intercom. “Often is, around here, in the northern ‘summer’. And there’s a storm warning. We’ll just loop around the first buttes, a short EVA and home again…”

  Boaaz recovered himself with a chuckle. His cams showed a calm sky, healthily tinged with blue; his exterior monitors were recording the friendliest conditions known to Mars. “I’m getting ‘hazardous storm probability’ at near zero,” he rumbled in reply. “Uncouple and return if you wish. I shall make a day of it.”

  Silence. Boaaz felt that he’d won the battle.

  Conrad had let slip a few too many knowledgeable comments about Martian mineralogy, in their friendly chats. Of course he wasn’t ‘purely a tourist’. He was a rock hound himself. He’d been out every day, scouring the wilds for sites the Guidebook and the Colonial Government Mineral Survey had missed, or undervalued. Obviously he’d found a good spot, and he didn’t want to share. Boaaz sympathised wholeheartedly. But a little teasing wouldn’t come amiss, to reward the Aleutian for being so sneaky!

  The locked buggies dropped into layered craters, climbed gritty steppes. Boaaz buried himself in the strange-sounding English-language wish-lists he’d compiled long ago, when dreaming of this trip. Hematite nodules, volcanic olivines, exotic basalts, Mössbauer patterns, tektites, barite roses. He longed for rarities, but anything he carried back from the Red Planet, across such a staggering distance, would be treasure. Bound to fill his fellow-hounds at home with delight and envy.

  Behind him the empty chairs were ranged in judgement. That which waits at the gates was taking form. Boaaz had to look over his shoulder but he did not turn. He knew he couldn’t move quickly enough, and only the sleek desert-survival fittings of the buggy would mock him—

  Escaping from ugly reverie, Boaaz noticed that Conrad was deviating freely from their pre-logged route. Maybe he should have protested, but he didn’t. There was no real need for concern. They had life support, and Desert Rescue Service beacons that couldn’t be disabled. He examined his CGMS maps instead, and found nothing marked that would explain Conrad’s diversion. How interesting! What if the Aleutian’s find was ‘significantly anomalous’, or commercially valuable? If so, they were legally bound to leave it untouched, beacon it and report it—

  I shan’t pry, thought Boaaz. He maintained intercom silence, as did Conrad, until at last the locked buggies halted. The drivers disembarked. The Aleutian, with typical bravado, was dressed as if he’d been optimised before birth for life on Mars: the most lightweight air supply and a minimal squeeze-suit, under his Aleutian-style desert thermals. Boaaz removed his helmet.

  “I hope you enjoyed the scenic route,” said Conrad, with a strange glint in his eye. “I hate to be nannied, don’t you? We are not children.”

  “Hmm. I found your navigation, ahaam, enlightening.”

  The Aleutian seemed to be thinking hard about his next move.

  “So you want to stop here, my friend?” asked Boaaz. “Very well. I suggest we go our separate ways, and rendezvous later for the return?”

  “Good idea,” said Conrad. “I’ll call you.”

  Ω

  Boaaz rode his buggy around an exquisite tholeiitic basalt group – a little too big to pack. He disembarked, took a chipping and analysed it. The spectrometer results were unremarkable: the sum greater than the parts. Often the elemental make-up, the age and even the conditions of its creation, however extreme, give no hint as to why a rock is beautiful.

  His customised suit was supple. He felt easier in it than in his own unaugmented hide: and youthfully weightless – without the discomfiting loss of control of weightlessness itself. Not far away there was a glittering pool, like a mirage of surface water, that might mark a field of broken geodes. Or a surface deposit of rare spherulites. But he wanted to know what the Aleutian had found. He wanted to know so badly that in the end he succumbed to temptation, got back in the buggy and returned to the rendezvous: feeling like a naughty child.

  Conrad’s buggy stood alone. Conrad was nowhere in sight, and no footprints led away from a nondescript gritstone outcrop right in front of their halting place. For a moment Boaaz feared something uncanny, then he accepted the obvious. Consumed by naughty curiosity he pulled the emergency release on Conrad’s outer hatch. The buggy’s life-support generator shifted into higher gear with a whine, but the Aleutian was too occupied to notice. He sat in the body-clasping driver’s seat, eyes closed, head immobilised, his skull in the quivering grip of a cognitive scanner field. A compact flatbed scanner nestled in the passenger seat. Under its shimmering virtual dome lay some gritstone fragments. They didn’t look anything special, but something about them roused memories. Ancient image
s, a historical controversy, from before Mars was first settled—

  Boaaz quietly eased his bulk over to Conrad’s impromptu virtual-lab, and studied the fragments carefully, under magnification.

  He was profoundly shocked.

  “What are you doing, Conrad?”

  The Aleutian opened his eyes, and took in the situation.

  Wise immortals stay on the planet they call, simply, Home. Aleutians who mix with lesser beings are dangerous characters, because they have no boundaries: they just don’t care. Conrad was completely brazen.

  “What does it look like? I’m digitising some pretty Martians for my scrapbook.”

  “You aren’t digitising anything. You have taken biotic traces from an unmapped site. You are translating them into data code, with the intent of removing them from Mars, hidden within your consciousness. That is illegal!”

  “Oh, grow up. It’s a scam. I’m not kidnapping Martian babies. I’m not even ‘kidnapping’ fossilised bacteria, just scraps of plain old rock. But fools will pay wonderfully high prices for them. Where’s the harm?”

  “You have no shame, but this time you’ve gone too far. You are not a collector, you’re a common thief, and I shall turn you in.”

  “I don’t think so, Reverend. We logged out as partners today, didn’t we? And you’re known as an avid collector. Give me credit, I tried to get you to leave me alone, but you wouldn’t. Now it’s just too bad.”

  Boaaz’s nostril slits flared wide, his gullet opened in a blueish gape of rage. He struggled to maintain dignity, and resumed his helmet.

  “I’ll make my own way back.”

  Ω

  Before long his anger had cooled. He acknowledged his own ignoble impulse to spy on a fellow-collector, and recognised that Conrad’s crime was not wicked, just very, very naughty. But ancient ‘biotic traces’, though purely legendary, were a sacred tenet, their putative existence enshrined in the Martian Constitution. The nerve of that young Aleutian! Assuming that Boaaz would be so afraid of being implicated in an unholy scandal, he would make no report—!

  But when this got out… What would the Archbishop think!

  What if he did keep quiet? Conrad had come to Butterscotch with a plan. He’d have ways of fooling the neurological scanners. If Conrad wasn’t going to get caught, and nobody was going to be injured—

  What should he do?

  That which waits at the gates was taking shape in an empty chair. It waits for those who deny good and evil, and separates them from the Void, forever—

  He could not think clearly. Conrad’s shameless behaviour had become confused with the oxygen-starvation nightmares, disturbed sleep and uneasy wakenings. The marks on the wall of the inner courtyard… He must have room, he could not bear this crowded confinement. He stopped the buggy, checked his EVA gear and disembarked.

  The sky of Mars arced above him, the slightly fish-eyed horizon giving it a bulging look, like the whiteish cornea of a great, blind eye. Dust suffused the view through his visor as if with streaks of blood. He was in an eroded crater, which could be dangerous. But no warnings had flashed up on his helmet screen, and the floor seemed safe, the buggy wasn’t settling. When he stepped down, his boots soon found solid crust. Gastropods crept about; in the distance he could see a convocation of trucks: he was back in the mining fields. He watched a small machine as it climbed a stromatolite spire, and “defecated” on the summit.

  Inside that spoil-tower, in the moisture and chemical warmth of the chewed waste, the real precursors were at work. All over the mining regions, the “stromatolites” were spilling out oxygen. Some day there would be complex life here, in unknown forms. The settlers were bringing a biosphere to birth, using the native organic chemistry alone… Absurd superstition, absurd patience. It made one wonder if the Martians really wanted to change their cold, unforgiving desert world—

  A shadow flicked across his view. Alarmed, he checked the sky: fast-moving cloud meant a storm. But the sky was cloudless; the declining sun cast a rosy, tourist-brochure glow over the landscape. Movement again, in the corner of his eye. Boaaz spun around, a clumsy manoeuvre that almost felled him, and saw a naked, biped figure with a smooth head and spindly limbs, standing a few metres away: almost invisible against the tawny ground. It seemed to look straight at him, but the ‘face’ was featureless—

  The eyeless gaze was not hostile. The impossible creature seemed like a shadow cast by the future. A folk-monster, waiting for the babies who would run around the Martian countryside; believe in it a little, and be happily frightened. Perhaps I’ve been afraid of nothing myself, thought Boaaz. After all, what did it do, the horrid thing I almost saw in that chair? It reached out to me, perhaps quite harmlessly… But there was something wrong. The figure trembled, folded down and vanished like spilled water. Now the whole crater was stirring. The spindly shadow creatures were fleeing, limbs flashing in the dust that was their habitat. Something had terrified them. Not Boaaz, the thing behind him. It had hunted him down and found him here, far from all help.

  Slowly, dreadfully slowly, he turned. He saw what was there.

  He tried to speak, he tried to pray. But the holy words were meaningless, and a horror seized his mind. His buggy had vanished, the beacon on his chest refused to respond to his hammering. He ran in circles, tawny devils rising in coils from around his feet. He was lost, he would die, and then it would devour him—

  Ω

  Hours later, Conrad (struck by an uncharacteristic fit of responsibility) came searching for the old fellow, tracking his suit beacon.

  Night had fallen, deathly cold. The High Priest crouched in a shallow gully, close to the crater where Conrad had spotted his deserted buggy; his suit scratched and scarred as if something had been trying to tear it off him, his parched, gaping screams locked inside his helmet—

  Ω

  Boaaz struggled free from troubling dreams, and was bewildered to find his friend the Aleutian curled informally on the floor beside his bed. “Hello,” said Conrad, sitting up. “I detect the light of reason. Are you with us again, Reverend?”

  “What are you doing in my room—?”

  “Do you remember anything? How we brought you in?”

  “Ahm, haham. Overdid it a little, didn’t I? Oxygen starvation panic attack, thanks for that, Conrad, most grateful. Must get some breakfast. Excuse me.”

  “We need to talk.”

  Boaaz drew his massive head down into his neck-folds, the Shet gesture that stood for refusal, but also submission.

  “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

  “I knew you’d see sense. No, this is about something serious. We’ll talk this evening. You must be starving, and you need to rest.”

  Boaaz checked his eyeball screen, and found that he had lost a day and a night. He ate, rehydrated his hide and retired to bed again: to reflect. The Mighty Void had a place for certain psychic phenomena, but his faith had no explanation for a “ghost” with teeth and claws; a bodiless thing that could rend carbon fibre… In a state between dream and waking, he trudged again the chance avenue of stromatolites. Vapour hung in the thin air, the spindly towers bent their heads in menace. Isabel Jewel’s module waited for him, so charged with fear and dread it was like a ripe fruit, about to burst.

  Ω

  The miners and their families were subdued that night. The sound of their merrymaking was just a dull murmur in the private lounge, where Boaaz and the Aleutian met. The bar steward arranged a nested ‘trolley’ of drinks and snacks, and left them alone. Boaaz offered his snifter case, but the Aleutian declined.

  “We need to talk,” he reminded the old priest. “About Isabel Jewel.”

  “I thought we were going to discuss my scare in the desert.”

  “We are.”

  Strengthened by his reflections, Boaaz summoned up an indignant growl. “I can’t discuss a parishioner with you. Absolutely not!”

  “Before we managed to drug you to sleep,” said Conrad, firmly, “y
ou were babbling, telling us a horrible, uncanny story. You went into detail. You weren’t speaking English, but I’m afraid Yarol understood you pretty well. Don’t worry, he’ll be discreet. The locals here don’t meddle with Isabel Jewel.”

  “Yarol?”

  “The station manager. Sensible type for a human. You met him the other day in your courtyard, I believe. Looking at some nasty marks on the wall?”

  The Shet’s mighty head sank between his shoulders. “Ahaam, in my delirium, what sort of thing did I say?”

  “Plenty.”

  Conrad leaned close, and spoke in ‘Silence’ – a form of telepathy the immortals officially only practiced among themselves; or with the rare mortals who could defend themselves against its power.

  The old priest shuddered, and surrendered.

  “You underestimate me, and my calling. I am not in danger!”

  “We’ll see about that… Tell me, Boaaz, what is a ‘bear’?”

  “I have no idea,” said the old priest, mystified.

  “I thought not. A bear is a wild creature native to Earth, big, shaggy, fierce. Rather frightening. Here, catch—”

  Inexplicably, the Aleutian tossed a drinking beaker straight at Boaaz: who had to react swiftly, to avoid being smacked in the face—

  “Tentacles,” said Conrad. “I don’t think you find them disgusting, do you? It’s an evolutionary quirk. Your people absorbed some wiggly-armed ocean creatures into your body-plan, aeons ago, and they became your ‘delicates’. Yet what you saw in Isabel Jewel’s module was ‘a bear with tentacles’, and it filled you with horror. Just as if you were a human, with an innate terror of big animals and snakey-looking things.”

  Boaaz set the beaker down. “I don’t know what you’re getting at. That vision, however I came by it, was merely a nightmare. In the material world I have visited her once, and saw nothing at all strange.”