The Third Cat Story Megapack: 25 Frisky Feline Tales, Old and New

by Damien Broderick

  They sprang at each other, aroused, snarling.

  * * * *

  A great curved frame had hung upon his back when he came down the ladder out of the slipstream. The artist Kabaka Buganda had been engaged to sing a lament for the passing of William Avid, Master of Harvest planet, who lay naked in his death, shrunken in his age, chilled for the moment against rot by circulating gelid vapors across his bier of state. In his own world Kabaka Buganda was regarded by some as a king, by many as a poet, a lover, a lovable scoundrel. Gloriana, in her grief and loss, saw a man mountain wrapped in the pelt of a wild animal (lion? tiger? cheetah?—she didn’t know, no wild cats roamed Harvest), masculine, powerful. He placed his hands, against tradition, familiarly upon her face, cupped her cheeks.

  “We have never met, Missy Avid, and I grieve that this should be the occasion. He was a good man, your father. I will sing for him.”

  Corded muscle rippled under the dark, dark skin of his bare arms, his unencumbered legs, his four-square feet with their pale nails thick and curved and heavy as the horns of a bull. He was a bull, it seemed to her. He stood over her like a cloud filled with the rain waters of life. The crust of furious loathing and mistrust of all men that had locked her heart softened at his candid gaze, his admiration, his ownership.

  “Then you must sit for me,” he instructed her.

  “Sit?” She shook her head. “Sit?” Did this man from the big dark think he might command her like a dog, a cur? The endless aching in her wounded foot went away from her. Perhaps that was what she wished.

  “For your portrait.” He threw back his large shaven head and laughed a gusty roar of laughter. “I will surround you with the largesse of this garden world, Missy. I will catch the image of your soul within the embrace of a banana tree, lush and ripe with green leaves vast as the ears of the fabled elephant, with hands of bright yellow bananas to embrace you.” He stepped back. The funereal company stood shocked at his gusto, his half-nudity beside the deathly nakedness of William Avid, his penetrating presence. Dignitaries hesitated, crept forward, as if into a shadow, bowed to the dead prince of Harvest, scuttled away.

  Kabaka Buganda never released Gloriana’s eyes. He took the great lyre from his back, found strings in the leather pouch at his waist, strung the lyre as if he were a warrior returned from voyages weary past imagining, stringing a bow too large for mortal man to bend—but this was no weapon of battle. His thumb caressed the taut strings, finally, and a deep melodious note sprang out through the hall. His fingers tuned the notes, while he held her gaze, and she stood trapped and melting, the ache in her broken foot thrilling in a kind of agony of hope. He lifted his head and sang. These were the wer lyel, the funeral dirges of his own world. His bare feet struck the floor, set them booming like a drum.

  * * * *

  To her dizzy mind, days passed like minutes. He took her cantering on horseback across stubbled fields in fallow, attended by mounted mauser warriors. Rather, she invited him, but it did not seem so; he was masterly, charming, he took control without seeming to do so, he drew her up from the sour pit of despair in which she had been content to rest since her abandonment and mutilation.

  “Stand, now. I know it hurts. Good. Feel the pain in your stance, let it speak through your body. Remove your garment, child.” She was thirty years old and more. “Go on. We are alone. Yes, yes, aside from these delicious animal people of yours. Good girl, you are lovely. Ah, the light.” His machines struck at the marble slab brought him from a quarry halfway across the world. His hands moved, he sang, the machines bit into stone, broke it open, caressed it, smoothed it like silky flesh. Dust flooded the clear air, made her cough. He ignored the dust. “Now, bend forward. Let your breasts fall freely. Beautiful!” The shape he was carving did not look, to her grit-reddened eye, much like a portrait. He stood back. “It’s done,” he said. “Let us eat and drink.” And left the room.

  She found him outside under the radiant sun, washing himself in a rainbowed haze of spray. He was naked, and vast, a bull, an elephant, a trumpeting man. Laughing, she threw off the last of her garments and joined him recklessly, slapping at the runnels of bright water, stamping her good foot and her wounded foot in the mud they made.

  They made love like a goddess of fertility welcoming home her sire from the wars.

  Cats bore them, muddy feet and all, to the refreshment of an indoor pool, and washed the pungent juices from their dark skins, night-dark in bright day under the stained glass ceiling. Glory was delirious. Without a thought, she called her mauser ladies to attend them. They stood naked, and the lovely cat females slithered about them with towels and warm air blowers and curried their hair.

  One of the cat ladies, the most beautiful, the most languid, was Blue Precious Silk.

  Glory saw, from the corner of one eye, the artist raise his hand, stroke lightly the soft pad above Silk’s upper lip, trace the gleaming cat-whiskers, her vibrissae.

  The air shrilled without sound.

  In the night, after the company had dined, the artist brought his lyre forth and sang them a song of the betrothal in childhood of the chieftain’s daughter to whichever man could answer a riddle no other might hazard. That man Kakookolo was ugly as a beast, a burned man, a bull man, an elephant man.

  Kakookolo, kwata emminiyo!

  Gloriana Avid’s eyes shone to hear it, understanding none of the Bugandan verses, hearing a translation muttered by a lovely cat person bent to her ear. The cat person was Blue Precious Silk. How did she know these words?

  Kakookolo, come now, take up your lyre!

  The monstrous man asked for the chieftain’s daughter’s hand; under her filial obligation, she gave it, weeping.

  Ndeetera maama ndeetera, nviiri Bulange ndeetera

  maaso malungi ndeetera

  Kyi maama kyi nnyabo, gyangu eno ngoyimba,

  kyi maama kyi nnyabo, gyangu eno ngodigida.

  Fingers struck the lyre strings, made them boom. Gloriana jumped, a little.

  Bring it to me, beautiful one.

  One who goes with beauty doesn’t wait

  I am going away with the beautiful one,

  Yes, now I am with my own.

  And Kakookolo’s hideous mask fell away. He was handsome, a man among men. The villagers, in the song, cried out their blessings:

  Come, dear one, come, be happy.

  Come, dear one, come singing.

  Gloriana sighed.

  Her cat ladies led her, at last, to her chaste bed, tucked her in, hummed her, as they did every night, to sleep.

  And in the morning Kabaka Buganda was gone from the great house of the Avids of Harvest world, gone into the dark upwardness of the stars, and Blue Precious Silk with him.

  * * * *

  The great house fell into ruin.

  Gloriana Avid did her duty to the crops, the plantations, face twisted with boredom, fingers dragging themselves across male and female organs of the waiting plant life, which blossomed and flourished, mocking her with this vegetable unconcern. The formal gardens of the house she let fall into wildness. Here she had trod with the false biologist in the muddy edge of a pond alive with silvery fish; it grew rank, and the fish died. There she had galloped with the false artist, hair flying free in the breeze of their going, and now the stubble sagged and stank, and weeds filled those fields.

  And years passed.

  Decades passed as she dragged her broken foot, like a penance, a mortification, in filmy garments of white and gray, clean and sweet-odored, placed by her bed each morning by her mousy staff. Until the Landgrave’s ship’s intelligence heard rumor of her life-gift, the secret ancient codons embedded in her flesh.

  If there are miracles, she was a miracle.

  I am Death. I am his ship, the Landgrave Ullimus Wong’s emergency and long-term medical care, his music singer in his icy sleep. For a thousand years, I have been his lunky flunky, his drunky boat, his Class Four superluminal personal carrier. I am a Mind Machine, and hence forbidden—
although I am the least of that number, and of no danger to anyone. Who was it brought down ruin upon the galaxy? Anybody might have done it, and many had tried. In fact, as we know, it was the detestable cat.

  Death is not to blame for death.

  I say that I heard a rumor. That is not the precise truth. I was sent an oblique message, dedicated quite brilliantly to catching my attention and my interest, a viral message scattered upon the slipstream. A message of sly invitation to the Harvest world, sent by Daisy, the abominable mauser.

  * * * *

  Death brought down the Landgrave inside a vertically-oriented adiabatic tube. The frozen man was suspended upside down in the shielded pod, its shell washed by cooling gases, monitored by a hundred subtle instruments. The mind of Ullimus Wong crept in a petty pace, sluggish electronic currents moving in the superconductive tissues of his all-but-arrested brain.

  At debarkation port, at the foot of the diamond ladder, his pod was met by a fierce mauser with new scars partly healed visible on his face. The mauser was attended by two sinuous lady cats and four haughty males.

  “I am Daisy,” he told the port Director. He presented documents of authority. “I am instructed to take the Landgrave Wong to Madame Avid.”

  All the documents seemed in order, electronic or sealed parchment. Something about this exchange made the Director uneasy, but he allowed the frozen man, and the Death that saw to his well-being, free exeunt to the lifting craft waiting at the dock.

  In the air, humming across fields alive with purple and gold, Daisy the mauser said, “You are a machine. What is your name?”

  “I am Harriet,” Death said.

  “Defrost and decant your master,” the cat told me. “The timing will be delicate and exact.” He added several cryptic sentences I understood.

  “Confirmed. You were the source of the viral invitation,” I said. “If any harm befalls the Landgrave, you will die instantly.” For the first time in nearly a millennium, I began to unlock the pod’s cryonic barriers. “Set down this craft in an empty field,” I said, “and evacuate all lifeforms. I will inform you when it is safe to return.”

  Keen, those harsh blue eyes did not blink.

  “Make it so,” he told the pilot, another of the frightful cats.

  From a safe distance, the mausers watched gases billow from the open door of the lifting craft. Fog huffed into the sparkling air. Ice crusted the edges of the doorway. The cats settled, alert, bonelessly relaxed yet ready to spring to attention.

  Death reversed death, or its simulation. The Landgrave was not literally frozen; no ice crystals grated against the tender membranes of his abused cells. His flesh was vitrified, made glassy, cooled. Now the process of arrest reversed, step by cautious step.

  It took five fearful hours. At their conclusion, the heart of Landgrave Wong shuddered into beating, the sluggish fluids of his body flowed, his swollen lungs heaved and gasped. Without my ministrations, he would have screamed and died upon the instant. I kept his pain to a minimum, and his brain soothed, relaxed, nearly torpid.

  He half-opened his eyes, under the age-yellowed canister that held him isolated from the world, and the world safe from him.

  “Harriet?”

  “I’m here, Ullimus.”

  “We are on Harvest?”

  “Landed and awaiting your instructions.” His instructions had long since been announced; this was a courtesy. He knew it. His lips moved in a smile.

  “Thank you, Harriet. I expect to die, finally. Who knows, perhaps death will come as a blessed relief?” But he did not truly believe that. He held hope within him like a small flame.

  “Come, cats,” I cried through a focused speaker system to the waiting mausers, motionless in the afternoon sunlight. “Take us the rest of the way to your mistress.”

  * * * *

  “He doesn’t look very well,” said Gloriana Avid disdainfully. She peered down into the yellowed shell. “He looks disgusting. Has he been sick?”

  “Hello, Ms. Avid,” the Landgrave said, and his voice was faint and thready but amplified by the speakers. “I apologize for my appearance.”

  She jumped, even with her bad foot.

  “Can he hear me?”

  “He hears you, Madame,” said Daisy, who stood beside the horizontal pod covered from toes to pointed ears in a containment garment. “He has been ill. He has been sicker than anyone who has not yet died.”

  Glory drew back fastidiously. “I hope it’s not catching.”

  A grating, coughing laugh came from the speakers. “Oh, my dear, I rather fear it is. It is more catching than anything you have ever heard of. But I hope…” His voice fell away. After a moment, as his eyes filled with tears, he said, “I hope you might have the cure for what ails me.”

  “I? I? What is this nonsense? Am I a mountebank, a country witch? I assure you, sirrah, I have no medical training. Look, I think you’d better go back where you came from. What are you doing here, anyway?” She was pettish, and her voice grated nearly as raspingly as the Landgrave’s. “I didn’t order you.”

  “Madam,” said the fierce cat, Daisy, “I invited Ullimus Wong here to Harvest for your mutual benefit.”

  I watched, agog. He was a person, but a cat. What right had a cat to speak thus to one like Glory Avid, queen of Harvest? She took another step back.

  “You invited him? I don’t know you, sir. What’s your name? Oh, wait, you’re the mauser with the ludicrous—” When she broke off, I knew that the cat must have given her the look that within a few years would electrify and shake the whole galaxy. Many would bow down before it, trembling; others would run in the streets, weeping with maddened emotion, tearing at their clothes, fouling themselves publicly in fits of overwrought emotion. “You’re Daisy.”

  The cat nodded curtly. To an assistant, also wrapped in molecular sheathing, he said, “Bring in the mud.”

  Standing carefully back against a wall, the human nurse shrieked, “Mud?”

  A construction lifter came through the triple doors, settled beside the adiabatic pod. It sloshed, heavily.

  “Open the pod door, Harriet,” Daisy ordered me. What could I do? The titanium and diamondoid shell split down its central seam and opened like a rusty flower.

  Ullimus Wong lay blinking, naked, entubed, in all his ghastly affliction. I withdrew his tubes, patted the entry points with antibiotic unguents, sealed them.

  Faintly, through her covered mouth, Glory said, “Now that’s not nice.”

  “Hose in the loam,” Daisy said calmly.

  I watched in disbelief. I had expected the unexpected, the far-fetched, the newly-contrived, but not this.

  A metal snout eased forth from the industrial lifter, found the cavity within the pod, settled gently inches from the Landgrave’s poor pustular feet. With a coughing chug, mud sloshed into the pod.

  “You’ll drown him!” shrieked the nurse, and flung herself at the hose. A cat lady caught her effortlessly, swung her aside, pinned her to the wall.

  The rich dark loam, alive with red worms and millions, billions of bacteria, slurped around the Landgrave’s near-corpse, covered him in a dark sea to his very chin.

  “Enough,” said Daisy. “Stop.” He stepped close, took a sharp instrument from a pouch in his garment, slashed a foul abscess on Ullimus Wong’s right cheek. Yellow pus oozed forth, and a little blood. The mauser scraped the exudant into a vial, capped it, double-sealed it, placed it with extreme care into a containment vessel held for him by his lieutenant. “Remove this to safe storage,” he said.

  I watched as the cat person carried away, out of the protected space, a sample of the vicious molecular virus that had infected the Landgrave after it murdered billions of humans in the last, or latest, desperate conflict that blazed through the galaxy. The sample was inactivated, nulled, or he’d have been truly dead a thousand years before—but what once was dead may be sparked again to life. Vide the Landgrave himself, up from the ice. A high-pitched noise came from my s
peakers. Daisy ignored it.

  He crossed the room and found Gloriana Avid, fertility goddess of the world of Harvest, found her shrunk back but not cowering. She had been betrayed thrice, and knew rejection, knew suffering, but nobody had ever raised a hand against her.

  Daisy raised his hand. He did not strike her. Seizing her by the thick black lovely hair above the scruff of her neck, he dragged her to the edge of the mud-filled, mud-caked pod. My Landgrave stared up in terror, choking as mud ran up his cheeks and entered his mouth and nostrils. With one hand, easily, Daisy pulled Glory to the side of the adiabatic pod and with the other he lifted the Landgrave’s ruined head, yellow and mold-greenish and warty with his ancient disease.

  “Kiss him,” the cat said.

  Speechless with revulsion, Glory shook her head against his grip, pulled back with all her strength.

  “Kiss his lips,” said the warrior mauser. “Open his mouth with yours, place your tongue against his, dribble your spittle into his throat.”

  “Ee-ewww,” shrieked Gloriana. “Gross!”

  But her face was pressed downward despite her will. The lips of the ill man and the broken woman met, writhed, his sealed against the mud and hers in abject disgust. Holding her tightly by the hair, Daisy pinched her nostrils. Finally, gasping for breath, the Landgrave opened his mouth as she, choked, opened hers. The magic of her thirty-two generations of primed proteins entered him with her gasping, runny mucus.

  It entered his body like a proud, upright host of warriors mounted on great war steeds, banners lifted, flying and brave, in the dawn light of battle, the warriors crying the name of their cause. It is a strained figure, perhaps, but that is how I saw it, how Death saw the entry of Glory’s forces into that field of contest, my master’s body. In an endless hour, or day, or month, I watched the forces pitted against each other, tiny machines swarming with their nulled quarter-life, ferocious still, deadly enough to keep him at the edge of oblivion, and raised against them the living molecules of Harvest’s goddess plunging against their enemy, sucking away its energy, binding its arms, muting its poisons and smashing its manipulators, gelding its frightful powers of reproduction.