Choice of the Cat

by E. E. Knight

  The human psyche has a wonderful capacity to remember pleasant things: the taste of a superlative meal, the feel of a lover's lips, a refrain of inspiring music. It hurries to dispose of the unpleasant-. Valentine was always grateful for that ability later: the three days in that little room were among the worst in his life.

  The first tremors hit within an hour, and by the afternoon, his muscles screamed for action. He wanted to run until he dropped. Sweat poured off his body, his ears pounded, the tiny amount of light coming in through the window hurt his eyes. He felt disoriented. The room seemed to be a tiny cork bobbing on a sea of five-story waves. He did not vomit—he would have loved to do so, but it was one long stretch of nausea absent the relief of vomiting. His stomach alternately cramped and spasmed, leaving him twitching and listening to his own overloud heartbeat. To keep his heart from exploding out of his chest, he curled into a fetal position and locked his arms around his body, at war with his own desire to climb the walls, pound down the door, then run and run until the maddening electricity coursing through his body left him.

  He bit the leather loop to keep from screaming.

  The second day was better. His wooden cell seemed oddly shaded, the red browns of the room became muted and faint, the shadows more sharply defined. The room no longer swooped and plunged around him; it rocked like a cradle moved to and fro by a cooing mother.

  But he wanted out.

  He did push-ups until he collapsed in exhaustion, drank a little water, and passed out into electric nightmares.

  The third day was a hangover to end all hangovers. His empty stomach hurt, his head ached, his hands would not stop trembling. When Duvalier's face appeared in the little window, he threw himself at the glass, clawing at the door and leaving a smear of saliva where he'd tried to bite.

  Then he slept.

  When she came again, he was too drained to react.

  She entered cautiously, a tray holding a shallow bowl with some kind of soup in her hand. "How do you feel, cousin?"

  Valentine eased himself onto the bench, feeling lightheaded. "Weak as ... as a kitten?"

  It turned out that the soup meant the general consensus was that his ordeal was over. While he ate, Duvalier went to get him some clothes, leaving the door open to air out the stuffy room. Forty-eight hours ago, he would have run howling into the hills, but now he was content to just sip at the soup and wait for her to return with something presentable. The blood-and-filth-smeared towel deserved a decent burial; all four corners were gnawed to shreds.

  He finished the meal and got dressed, still trembling a little. When he followed Duvalier into the brighter light of the little honeycomb of rooms that composed the toilet and washing facilities at the rear of the Hall, he put a hand on her shoulder. She, and everything around her, didn't look quite right. There was little color in her skin, and the wooden walls were ashen, like bleached-out driftwood.

  "Just a second," he said. "Why do you look different? The light is all odd."

  "I know what you mean. It's not the light—it's your eyes. A Cat with some medical training explained it to me once. It has to do with the cells in your eyes. I guess there are two kinds; he called them rods and cones. The rods are good at picking up low light levels. You've got a whole lot more rods now. Your color vision will return once your eyes get used to it; right now your brain is just not processing it right. That was his theory. You'll adapt. In any kind of light short of pitch black, you're going to have no trouble seeing from here on out."

  "Did the doctor explain the drunken feeling?"

  "That was even more confusing, and it's got to do with your ears. We have these little bags of liquid in our ears that help us keep our balance. Some animals, cats in particular, have a whole different set of nerve fibers attached to them. You know how a cat always lands on its feet, or at least nearly always? It's from these nerves. Their balance corrects as involuntarily as your leg moving when your knee gets tapped. Right now you're oversensitized again."

  She walked into the kitchen and picked up a sack of flour.

  "Stand on one leg. Raise the other one like a dog marking a tree. Higher. Okay, keep it there," she ordered.

  Valentine obliged, noticing that as he raised his leg he barely moved. Normally he would wobble a bit.

  "Now catch," she said, tossing the ten-pound sack of flour with a shoving motion.

  He caught it a few inches from his chest, causing little puffs of flour to shoot in the air. What's more, his leg was still raised.

  "Interesting," he said, returning his leg to the floor. He shifted the bag of flour in his hands, and quick as a flash hurled it back at her.

  Her reflexes were no less than his. She snatched the bag out of the air, but while she was strong enough to halt the ten pounds of flour aimed like a missile at her head, the bag wasn't quite up to the task. Its weakened fibers opened, and a white bomb detonated full in her face.

  "Mother—!" she screamed, emerging from the cloud in kabuki makeup and fury.

  Valentine let out the first squawk of a laugh and then read her expression. Their eyes locked for a second, like a gazelle and cheetah staring at each other on the veldt. He ran for his life.

  "Dead meat, Valentine!" she shrieked, after him in a flash. Valentine went to the stairs up to his little flat, and jumped. To his astonishment, he made it up to the top of the flight in a single bound. With only one foot down, he changed direction and leapt onto the next platform over, a jump he normally would have needed a sprint to cover.

  He slipped on the landing and sprawled. Duvalier was on his back in a moment—she must have equaled or exceeded the speed and power of his bounds. He tried to wriggle out, but as he turned over, she pinned him with legs that felt like a steel trap. She nailed his arms down in a full pin. He found the situation arousing: Duvalier in the classical position astride him, the flour liberally coating her from the waist up adding its own strange zest to the moment. But her eyes were lit only in triumph.

  "Okay, gotcha," she said. "Let's have it."

  "Sorry," he panted. "Didn't mean to make you the monkey's uncle."

  "What's that?

  "A monkey's uncle!"

  "Can't hear you, Valentine, speak up."

  "Uncle!"

  "That's better," she said, rolling off him.

  He took a deep breath, still goosey with the half-drunken, half-hungover sensation.

  "Ghost, how do they do it?"

  "Do what?"

  "Change us like that."

  He shrugged. "I've wondered about that myself. Some of the Wolves used to say they were just awakening something already inside us. I was talking to a cabin mate named Pankow one time, and I remember he took a gas lamp that was barely on, just a flicker, and turned it all the way up. It hissed and roared and lit up the whole room. He said that's what the wizards do, they just 'turn up the heat.'"

  Valentine wondered if he could share his fears with her, as well. He looked at the healing wound on his hand. "But the bigger the flame, the sooner the gas runs out. You swap heat and light for longevity. It worries me. I haven't met many elderly Hunters."

  She shook her head, flour cascading off her face. "Gimme a break, Val. You know how long the average Cat lasts in the KZ? Two or three years. Ask Welles—she'll confirm it. Me, I'm already well past my 'lifespan.' I'd like to switch subjects.

  "Now that you've been tuned up, it's time to start training. We'll be cutting a lot of corners. I'll try to fill in the holes on the road."

  "Okay, Sarge, what's next on the agenda?"

  She began to dust herself off. "Sarge? David, as a courtesy, Cats are treated as captains by the other ranks in Southern Command. So you got promoted after all. But rank doesn't mean much to us. As far as the agenda goes, you're going to get some food and sleep in you. Then we're going to run your ass ragged. When I drop, Welles will take over. So you take it easy while you can."

  Over the next weeks, Valentine decide that Duvalier held an epic grudge against him
for the flour bomb and wanted to see him lose life or limb if at all possible. When she was unavailable to personally torment him, Dix Welles made sure he sweated.

  He had to carry the sword everywhere, to ridiculous extremes like the shower and the toilet. If Duvalier caught him exiting the head with a dog-eared copy of Reader's Digest instead of his sword, he got to spend the rest of the day running up and down the mountain. He learned a few basic stances, cuts, and thrusts from Duvalier the first day, then practiced them endlessly, first with a wooden replica until he got the motion right, and then with the naked blade. One day Welles took him outside and had him climb up the sharply slanted lodge roof, and draw, swing, and move with the sword back and forth across the narrow peak, carefully straddling the top as he fought wind and momentum.

  He took bundles of twigs, wrapped them in old rags, soaked them, and then attached them to poles. The target was then placed on a gimbal-mounted teeter-totter. He tried to hit it while Duvalier, at the other end of the ten-foot plank, made it dodge his blows. She succeeded in knocking him over with it more than once. When she wasn't bashing him with straw men, she was doing it herself, in fencing duels with wooden swords. She struck like lightning, and more than once laid him out with stars in his eyes.

  Even when he was off his feet, he had to read. Poisons, explosives, powders both natural and chemical that blinded or sickened. Acids and bases. A grizzled old Cat, toothless and bent, lectured him on how to sabotage everything from tank engines to hydraulic brakes to a backyard water pump.

  He learned to climb and fight with his claws. Duvalier taught him to always keep them in the pockets of an old overcoat, so that all he had to do was slip his hands in to become armed. He clawed, climbed, and parried with them until they felt like old friends, but that wasn't good enough. Duvalier had him practice with them until they felt like a natural extension of his body. A couple of the other Cats-in-training shook their heads and privately made fun of Duvalier's fixation with them.

  "Waste of time," one of them said at dinner. "You end up using them one fight out of a hundred, I've been told."

  Welles overheard and stiffly turned on the other Aspirant. "That one time in a hundred he'll be alive. And you won't."

  Ryu appeared now and then and took Valentine in order to work his mind. First Valentine had to reduce his aura at rest, and as the days progressed, he had to do the same while running or climbing, or even practicing with his sword. He'd learned the basics of hiding lifesign from an old Cat named Eveready the summer after he'd been invoked as a Wolf. Now he was learning from the Lifeweaver who had taught Eveready.

  Valentine could satisfy Ryu at rest, but in action, the Lifeweaver upbraided him again and again. One afternoon, as he crossed a rock-strewn creek under the Lifeweaver's eye, Ryu lifted his arms, the signal to stop. "You're still in your own mind, David."

  The obvious joke about "the perfect Cat is always out of his mind" had to be bitten back—again.

  "You're not a Kurian. You don't need it to survive. How can you sense it?"

  "Aura is a lot of things, David. Thought, emotion, sensitivities, fear. I am able to perceive these to an extent. So can you, by the way. There's more to intuition than guesswork. Sometimes I can read you as easily as you read printed words."

  "Sorry. I saw a fish dart away."

  "Forget about your empty stomach for a while."

  Valentine stood in the shin-deep water and tried to reduce himself again, become a part of the stream and the rocks rather than a traveler over them.

  "The energy they feed from, what we call lifesign, is as individual as a fingerprint," Ryu continued, "and you're putting out far too much into the world. You're the wind on the rocks, the water flowing on its natural course, a swarm of gnats over the dead log there."

  Valentine imagined himself part of the stream. The fish he'd alarmed resumed its vigil, waiting for a meal to drop onto the surface of the slow-flowing pool. Just water and rock, trout. ..

  "Quit thinking, David. Just float across."

  Valentine followed the water, ignoring the fish and the gnats until he stood beside Ryu.

  "Better. Look back at the stones. Try to trace your path."

  He squatted and looked for marks of his field boots on the stones. He'd come up and out of the stream without overturning a stone or leaving a telltale track of mud.

  He didn't say anything, just felt the breeze.

  "Now be that wind and let's talk again at the top of that hill," Ryu said, pointing to a limestone-scarred slope.

  He worked inside the lodge, as well, leaping from rafter to rafter with his arms tied behind his back.

  "Everything is balance, Valentine," Duvalier shouted up at him from the floor, a long hard fall below him, as he teetered for a split-second after a jump. "It keeps you from being hit in a fight, lets you hold your rifle steady, and makes you silent when you walk."

  A Cat named Cymbeline — a tattooed woman with a milky eye and hairless even to her eyebrows — taught him unarmed combat. Her philosophy for unarmed combat was to arm yourself as quickly as possible with anything handy, even a piece of chain or a good solid stick. From her, Valentine learned to use everything from his instep to his skull — Cymbeline called it a readily available, ten-pound brick — to disable an opponent.

  His spare locker from the Second Regiment depot found him after five weeks at the Lodge, along with another padlocked case of back-straining weight. A note and a small key came in an envelope forwarded with his other mail. He looked at the unfamiliar handwriting and opened the letter. Written in heavy block printing was

  * * *

  Dear David,

  This better make it intact, or I'll have something to say to the Territorial Post. I've become good friends with Molly and her family. They told me what happened and what you did for them in Wisconsin. We're glad to have people like the Carlsons in Weening.

  I don't have any family worth speaking about. I never served with your father but I know he'd want me to help you along if I could. I'm enclosing a very dear friend of mine, one of my favorite guns from my days in Jorgensen's Bears. It's over a hundred years old now, and been rebuilt a time or two, but it's a damned murderous weapon and I want it in your hands. It's an old Soviet PPD-40. Reliable in any weather and dirt. I've enclosed a thousand rounds I loaded myself, plus tools and casts to make reloads. I've also sent a little manual on it I wrote myself. I suppose it was captured by the Germans when they invaded Russia. The German Army loved this gun and grabbed every one they could. It got captured again by our troops and brought back here. I got it . from a collector in Missouri who was handing out his guns left and right in the Bad Old Days of '22. Later taught me to take care of it.

  Hope it takes care of you as well as it did me. Watch the full auto—you'll empty that big drum in less than eight seconds if you hold the trigger down. You can get shells for it at Red's in Ft. Smith, or the Armory in Pine Bluff, or go see Sharky at Gunworks in Mountain Home. Just tell them you need 7.62 X 25 or .30 Mauser. Better yet, learn to do your own reloads. More reliable that way. READ THE DAMN INSTRUCTIONS, kid.

  Always liked you when you spent that season in Weening. I respected the way you went after them Harpies and took that Hood that got the Helm boy and your Labor Regiment pals. Stop by anytime, there's always a bed and a beer waiting for you at my place.

  Your friend,

  Bob Bourne

  * * *

  Valentine remembered the man named Tank from four years ago and the firelit night when Gabriella Cho, the closest thing Val had had to a childhood sweetheart, died.

  He put the memories away.

  So the gun was the mystery mentioned in Molly's last letter. He took the key from the letter and opened the case. The gun was smaller than a carbine, but solidly built, with a thick wooden stock. The barrel was encased in a larger, vented handle. Amongst the little reloading tools and instructions were three heavy ammunition boxes. He picked up the gun, ruggedly manufactured from heavy steel. C
yrillic characters were printed above the trigger.

  "Thanks, Tank."

  Tank had enclosed three drums and a banana magazine. The fully loaded drums held seventy-one rounds. Valentine hastily referred to the manual, a mixture of weapons jargon and how-to hints, like instructions for replacing a worn spring in the drum and using a piece of leather to cushioning a part in the gun's simple action. He stripped the weapon experimentally, an operation that involved simply opening the hinged receiver to expose the bolt and spring, and found that it broke down as easily as it went back together. Valentine, who had some experience with various guns used by both the Free Territory and their enemies, was all in favor of simplicity, but he had his doubts about using exotic ammunition. The stock was clearly new; perhaps that was what Molly was referring to when she said Tank was working on something for him that winter. Gleaming with rich stain and polish, the stock had been fashioned out of a beautifully grained piece of ash.

  Duvalier joined him on his little platform. "Heard a Logistics wagon was by with some stuff for you. Did your locker arrive?"

  Valentine replaced the gun in the case.

  "Yes. Even better, an old Bear came through."

  * * *

  The next night they ate dinner alone. Dix had led the rest of the Cats to the nearest Southern Command trading post for supplies. Valentine was grateful for the quiet—he'd spent the day running pursuits on Duvalier. If he was unlucky enough not to catch her after an hour, they'd turn around and she'd chase him. He hoped he'd get time for a long shower and then a sweat in the steam room.

  Ryu emerged from his refuge, a beautiful woman accompanying him. In fact, she was so striking, Valentine assumed she had to be another Lifeweaver. Such beauty had to be illusion, the stock-in-trade of all Lifeweaver interactions with humanity.

  The Cats greeted the stranger with short bows.

  "My courageous ones, please greet my sister from the East, Ura," Ryu said, standing aside so she could come forward. Radiant in a simple teal gown with a roped belt of gold, she walked without bending blades of grass beneath delicate feet. Valentine thought she looked like a princess out of a storybook.