Catalyst

by Anne McCaffrey

  Leaping from the cat hatch to land heavily on Jubal’s shoulder, Chester licked the fingers that scratched his fur and took a couple of long swipes at his chest fur for good measure.

  Jubal dug into his pocket for the treats. They weren’t Chester’s favorites, but he accepted them after a preliminary sniff, eating them from Jubal’s hand.

  Once the treats restored his strength, he gave greater consideration to Jubal’s question. Could Pshaw-Ra do what all of those cat-less ships full of people had been unable to do?

  Finally he came to the conclusion, which he shared with Jubal, that probably Pshaw-Ra did know something that would help. It would only be fair if he did, in Chester’s opinion, because the skinny cat and something called the kefer-ka—Jubal picked up the image of one of the shiny beetles—had created the basis for the panic to begin with.

  If he flies his own ship and tricks people into bringing him supplies, he must be a pretty smart kitty, Jubal replied. He thought he was being encouraging but realized his mistake when Chester bristled, jealous that the boy he considered his offered praise of the other cat. Not as handsome as you, of course, and nowhere near as nice, definitely less fluffy, and he doesn’t look nearly as soft, but still, really smart. I don’t suppose he ever mentioned what his plan might be?

  Before Chester could respond, footsteps came running down the corridor from the shuttle bay. “Jubal, Beulah says to tell you we’re stuck,” Sosi said. “The docking bay hatch won’t open and the Ranzo has disappeared from the sensors.”

  “It’s okay, Sosi,” Jubal said, not knowing for sure if it was but thinking it was a good idea to help his crewmates see their predicament in a positive light—as he, despite Chester’s reservations, was beginning to do. “Chester’s buddy, the short-haired cat, is a superior sort of alien being named Pshaw-Ra. He, uh—watches over cats, and he’s going to do something to try to help the impounded cats now. I think he may need us and the shuttle to do it.”

  “You are so full of it, Jubal,” Sosi began, then seeing his serious expression, asked, “Really? You’re not kidding?”

  “I’d never kid about something like that and neither would Chester.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he and I talk,” Jubal said. He’d never told Sosi the nature of his bond with Chester, but now seemed like a good time.

  “Hadley talks. He says ‘meow,’ ‘yow,’ ‘rrrowl,’ ‘prrrt,’ and a lot of other stuff.”

  “No, I mean, Chester and I can understand each other’s words and hear and see what’s happening in each other’s lives. We’ve been able to since he was a baby kitten.”

  “No, you haven’t!” she scoffed. “That’s just silly. Sure you can tell what a kitty means by his expression and how he holds his tail and ears and stuff, but even the smartest, best bred ships’ cats don’t talk Standard.”

  “I didn’t say they did. Chester doesn’t actually speak in human words—his vocal cords wouldn’t handle it. But you don’t need language to read thoughts. It’s experience, you know? You can think something in one language or another, but what you mean is always in there in the thought, regardless.”

  “Well, Beulah doesn’t need words right now to say what she means either, but she’s saying a lot of them and they aren’t fit for my delicate childlike ears. So you and the cats had better fill her in before she tries to blast our way out of here.”

  The GHA inspection team took Klinger’s farm by surprise. As the nephew and namesake of GHA head councilman P. B. Klinger, Secretary of Agriculture, Phillip B. Klinger considered himself immune from harassment by what he considered his uncle’s agency.

  And yet, when Phil and his latest bride dismounted following their morning ride, there was the team of white-suited, clipboard-wielding technobureaucrats, claiming they’d come to inspect his stock. They actually called his expensive, beautifully bred horses “stock.”

  “Mr. Klinger,” said the older of the two men, a rugged-looking and, judging from the latest Mrs. Klinger’s reaction to him, handsome fellow. He possessed a deep authoritative voice. “It’s come to our attention that there’s been an oversight in my predecessor’s coverage of this area. While your neighbors have all had their stock and homes inspected for the target pathogen, your property does not seem to have undergone similar scrutiny.”

  “I had my own vet look at my horses and other beasts,” Klinger told him. “He found no irregularities. Evidently my precautions—”

  The younger white-suited man cleared his throat. “Sorry, sir, but that is precisely why the GHA has temporarily cross-posted its veterinary practitioners. The fear is that doctors might not deal conservatively enough with their usual clients to adequately address a threat of this magnitude.”

  “We think it highly unlikely, with the pathogen so pervasive in the surrounding properties,” the older man said, “that your animals would have been spared, Mr. Klinger. We’ll need to test all of them—”

  “I just told you, they’ve been tested—”

  “—again,” the older man finished.

  “This is an outrage,” Klinger said. “I’ll have you know my uncle is the head of the GHA council. He’ll have your jobs for this.”

  “On the contrary, sir,” the younger man replied. “Animals with these symptoms have been impounded throughout the galaxy. Your uncle surely would be the last to want favoritism to a relative’s stock that could possibly lead to further contamination. The impound transport will be along momentarily, so if you’ll have your employees stable your horses and round up any other animals living on the farm …”

  “I don’t believe this,” Klinger said. “I’m putting in a call to my uncle now. He’ll straighten you out.”

  “As you say, sir. But in the meantime, we need to begin inspecting the stock,” the older fellow said.

  “I don’t think so, Mister—” Klinger looked at name tags. “—Pointer.”

  The older man looked at the other two in dismay. He gave Klinger a wounded look. “Frankly, Mr. Klinger, I am surprised at your attitude.”

  He didn’t elaborate, but Klinger knew what he meant. Even though his uncle had impounded his neighbor’s horses at his own suggestion that there was something wrong with them, he had not expected that he would be identified as the origin of the information. The matter was supposed to be between his uncle and himself. Actually, it was essential to the credibility of the report and to his uncle’s image as an impartial defender of public health that a family member’s involvement not be revealed. No, his uncle wouldn’t have told even his closest associates about the connection, though all they needed to do was look at the names and do the math.

  “What do you mean by that?” he challenged Pointer finally.

  “Simply that a man with such close ties to the GHA surely must be aware of the vital nature of our mission in protecting the health and welfare of the universe at large, and this farming community in particular. All of your neighbors have submitted to impounds, despite protests that we were ruining them. Economic concerns cannot be allowed to overrule the need to protect the public. Of course, it’s upsetting to lose land that’s been in your family for generations, or have to see valuable beasts taken for possible slaughter, but we need to protect the people.”

  Klinger thought about the offers he’d made his adjacent neighbors for their land at a fraction of its value. They had been resentful, but hadn’t turned him down yet. Had they reported him?

  The younger man spoke again. “We can bring in the Guard to assist us if necessary, Mr. Klinger, but I don’t think you’d want that.”

  Klinger’s lips tightened. His uncle would kill him if he got into trouble with the law over this.

  His new bride clung to his arm but said with a smile, “Of course not. We know you’re just doing your job, but all of our animals are as healthy as can be.”

  “All of the other animals appear to be on the surface too, ma’am, but on further investigation, we’ve found an alien substance in t
heir bodily fluids. The GHA says that we must impound all animals pending our investigation of the long-term effects of the suspected pathogen.”

  She looked back at the beautiful bay mare Klinger had given her as a wedding present. She was a horsewoman first and foremost. Her husband was not as bad as everyone said he was, or so she wanted to believe, but the horses were absolutely splendid, and she couldn’t bear that anything would happen to them. She squeezed Klinger’s arm warningly. She was very beautiful, from a family of powerful lawmakers herself, and furthermore she had—on the advice of and with the support of her relatives—not signed the prenuptial agreement. “Why don’t I show you around the stables while Philly takes care of a little family business?”

  CHAPTER 21

  Chessie sat up on her haunches, watching the door. It was time for Jared to come, perhaps bearing Kibble’s reassuring scent on his clothing again. But when the door swung open, a strange woman, tall and lean, with short white hair and a stern expression, walked through instead. Chessie craned her neck a little to the side to see if Jared was coming in behind the woman, but he was not.

  She kept a sharp eye on the door for a long time after, but Jared never appeared. Only a little discouraged, because even the best and most reliable humans tended to have irregular habits, she spread herself as far as she could across the floor of her cage, laid her head on its side against her outstretched paws and tried to sleep.

  She had been very worried indeed before the first time Jared appeared in this place. Since she had come, some of the other cats were carried off by humans who took them through the Other Door, the one no cat in his or her right mind wanted to be on the other side of, and never returned. The caged cats had heard few cries, but the smell of fear and death leaked through that door like the stench of rotting rat flesh.

  Overhead lights flickered all the time. This was of no particular consequence to ships’ cats, who cared nothing for dirtside definitions of day and night. The food was of far lower quality than Chessie was used to, and nothing fresh was available, except for the occasional beetle that crawled into a cage. The efforts the laboratory people made to collect and confine the beetles were largely unsuccessful.

  The sanitary conditions were appalling. The incarcerated cats were not provided with proper boxes but instead were given paper on which to deposit their excrement and urine. The smell was unappetizing, especially so close to one’s food and water dishes.

  Jared had been making it his business to see to it that papers were changed often, so the cages were in a constant rotation of being freshened. It was a comfort. Even those in the lab who seemed to have a liking for her species had difficulty tolerating the stink—which should have told them how much more awful it was to the cats who sat in the middle of it all.

  Then there was the cat-cacophony of the hundreds of voices protesting their fate.

  “What will become of me?” a young female, as well bred as Chessie herself and heavy with kittens, cried incessantly. “Will they spare my young?”

  “Hah! I knew no good would come of helping humans,” an old tom said bitterly. “I thought my shipmates were different but they turned me over quick enough, didn’t they?”

  “My girl won’t know what to do without me,” cried a male by the name of Hadley. “What if rats bite her? What if she has bad dreams? Who will knead her middle with his paws to wake her up, and then, when she has forgotten all about her dreams while she feeds him, who will purr her back to sleep?”

  “Who will keep the mice out of the wiring?” another fretted, pawing at the wire of his cage until his paws bled.

  “Why are they doing this to us?” wailed Git’s kitten, Bat, who had been snatched from his berth before he’d served two months of his contract. “I want ooooowwwwwt!”

  Most of the humans had begun wearing devices in their ears that Chessie thought must block out the cries because they ceased responding with either kind words or curses.

  Chessie herself said nothing. She was weary and sad, but she had been near death many times already, both as its agent and as one bereft because of it. She had lost children and her friend Git to it. A practical cat as well as an ornamental one, she knew she could not avoid her doom if it chose to take her, so she chose to ignore the situation as much as possible. When she slept, she dreamed of her old life with Janina, between litters, and of the good times when she was a new mother, washing the kittens and watching them play and hearing them being praised for their beauty and liveliness. She was sorry for them because it looked as if they would not grow up to have families of their own or form the kind of friendships she had formed. She certainly did not blame her Kibble for this situation.

  When Jared came to the laboratory that first day, although other cats who had been his patients snarled that he had betrayed them and joined the enemy, she welcomed his caresses. Lately she had smelled her Kibble’s scent on him, and that comforted her. Kibble had not abandoned her. She believed Jared truly meant it when he said he would get her out of there and back to Kibble, no matter what. But she didn’t think he could. She knew too much about humans after all of her years among them.

  “Don’t worry, old girl,” he’d told her that first day while scratching her head. “We’ll find some way to get you out of here.” The key word in this reassurance was “out,” and that made her a little hopeful, a little less resigned, and when she felt panic rising in her, she resisted. She was a very patient cat, as a good hunter had to be. She would wait and watch, wait and watch.

  The cats in the cages next to her, at first unable to understand why she was not as agitated as they, eyed her warily. But slowly, as their own exertions wore them down, her calm curling, sleeping, waiting and watching, quieted them, so they followed suit. And their calm quieted the cats in the cages next to theirs.

  Chessie knew that dwelling on what you feared but were helpless to change was a waste of time. All that did was make your fur fall out. So when they were more settled, she began telling stories to the other cats, especially the kits. Stories of the bravery and independence of catkind, of the first cat to contact humans, whose tale was told by a human as “The Cat Who Walked By Himself,” of Scarlett who went into a burning building over and over again to bring out her kits, sustaining horrible injuries but saving most of her family. She told them (again) of her illustrious ancestor, Tuxedo Thomas, and how he saved his human’s ship many times by his cleverness and the quickness of his pounce and paws. And she told them the most ancient stories of all, of the origins of Earth cats, those who guarded the temples of ancient Africa, Asia, and Indochina, those who were worshipped as gods, those who were hunted as the accomplices of supposedly evil people and yet still caught and killed the rats that brought plague to the very humans who had killed their own noble protectors. This was another of those terrible times for their species, but she knew that the qualities that made cats great would keep them from becoming extinct. The truth was, humans could not actually do without them, though cats could do without humans.

  Others among the captives had tales too, losing their fear momentarily in the presence of a large appreciative audience. The cats who were in heat and those who were in pursuit sung tales of their ancestors, of their own beauty and prowess as hunters or makers of enchanting offspring. They sang lustily and drove the lab tech humans to take refuge from the caterwauling in headphones and earplugs.

  But that day, when Jared did not come, Chessie slept to escape the fear that she had been abandoned to her fate once more. She wanted to trust, but among the stories of her fellow cats were many ancestral tales of human treachery and betrayal. These cats seemed not to have particularly good positions on their ships. They, like Git, seemed to feel that trust was for dogs.

  Chessie awakened suddenly, though at first their section of the laboratory seemed quiet. The white-haired woman who’d come in Jared’s stead was gone—along with all but one of the attendants. Light, muffled noises, laughter that made her spine quiver, and the scent of ter
ror leaked around the Other Door. And something else. What?

  First she thought it was that something—or someone—was missing again. Who? Who had been taken? She scanned cages as far as she could see, above, below, to the right and left and behind her. She saw no one furry in the corner cage where the cranky old cat had been.

  She wanted to howl a warning, but what good would a warning do? The other cats were sleeping, grooming, or murmuring quietly among themselves. She watched and waited, sensing danger so close that her fur stood on end along her ruff and back.

  Peering at the Other Door again, she saw that the keka beetles were moving more purposefully now. Earlier they had been scuttling. Now they leaked around the door in several not-entirely-silent unbroken lines.

  Under the babble of cat voices, she heard the skittering of the beetles, the whisper of their carapaces against the floor.

  Whispering husky and hoarse, and a sigh like an expulsion of breath. “Kefer-kah!” it sounded like. “Kefer-kah! Kefer-kah!”

  Some of the bugs had apparently mated, for among their ranks were young ones that were very very tiny. Even Chessie’s sharp eyes could barely detect them. Their movement was marked by the thinnest filament of motion as they crawled to the cages and up the legs of the tables and the desk where the human slept with his head thrown back and his mouth wide open. A can of liquid sat within the curl of his hand. One tiny suicidal creature made a leap of catlike proportions directly into the open mouth. Another leaped into the can. And then all of the others retreated into the corners of the room, or entered the cages of the bored cats.

  Chessie could not imagine why the kekas were doing all of this. If it was instinct, it was a very odd instinct indeed, but they were bugs, not sensible cats, and their buggy agendas were beyond her comprehension.

  Later, while the food dishes were being filled, the white-haired woman approached Chessie’s cage. She smelled like death and disinfectant, but Chessie noted with some satisfaction the scratch along one cheek and the red cross-hatching on the woman’s wrists.