MAGICATS II

by Gardner Dozoi

  Hours later, bathed in sweat, the horse shambling, the hollows bowing into shadow and the glimpsed sky throwing hot bars against the trees, I began to be dully afraid. It seemed I had now lost my clue to anywhere. The jungle had me, bound me in its veils and towering stems. There was no way back, no way out. I stopped then, and tried not to lose my nerve too. It was difficult.

  The red flame died and the grayness came in a rush, and in another rush the black of night. I sat the horse, as the sounds of day receded and the choruses of the frogs grew loud, mocking me, for this black fearful interior was home to them. And to others.

  The Ramayana, which speaks of the roaring of wild animals, the tangled walks, the fatigue and privation of this landscape of trees, says the forest is the realm of the wind, darkness, hunger and great terrors.

  There was nothing now to be done till morning. I had water and some crumbs to make my magnificent evening khana. I possessed no weapon, save the means of starting fire, which I would arrange at once. My sleep I had had. I would watch tonight.

  ###

  I kept my vigil well. Maybe tiredness came to assist me, for I passed swiftly into that Benzedrine state where sleep seems superficial anyway, an invention of time-wasters. Slight fear was here, too, a constant. Slight fear like a condiment sprinkled on the enormous lulling beauty of the night. Not that I could see very much, beyond the sharp gold splashings of my fire. The beauty was in the blackness, and only the blackness lay out there, fold on fold of it, vision coming solely through the ears. Everywhere was the steady burring of frogs and nocturnal insects, which frequently fell death-still, as it does, not for any sinister reason, at least no reason that might be sinister for me. A couple of times, too, came the pandemonic uproar of monkeys disturbed, bursting adrenaline through my bloodstream, after each of which alarums I relapsed, smiling a little. The forests, “realm of terrors,” are essentially and potentially dangerous, but there will seldom be actual violence. The venomous serpent, dropping on the necklike coiled rope from the ceiling of boughs, the big cat, famished and rearing from the bushes, these are the stuff of the book and film industry.

  Periodically, I looked at my watch, pleased at the timelessness I had achieved, where minutes passed like hours, and where two hours could go in what seemed only minutes. That sacerdotalism I’ve mentioned perhaps lay behind the sense I had of the peace of contemplation the sadhu pursues to such spots. For yes, here you might feel the depth and shallowness of created things, their oneness, the bottomless, endless, blissful nothing that is everything, and which contains the vibrating root of the soul. I was delighted also that I had avoided the cliché of supposing I had been brought there by fate. The idea of silly accident sustained me. At length, I could say it would be dawn in scarcely more than an hour, and with the new day I should find my way wherever I wished.

  I had no thought of Pettersun, who inadvertently had caused me to be where now I was. He seemed far off from my contemplations. As if I were forgetting him.

  The light came when the dawn remained most of an hour away. This was not sunrise.

  It was separated light, like that of my own fire. I formed the opinion at once, with mingled hope and distrust, that mankind had arrived with torches, and whether friend or foe I had no means of telling. I sat on with my spine to the tree, my hearth before me, trying to make out figures round the alien glare.

  Presently my uneasiness increased. I had realized whoever carried the torches was playing some sort of puzzling game. First of all, they did not approach, but seemed to be circling me to the left, the flame flashing on and off as stands of fern or trunks interposed. Secondly, unless small children or midgets were concerned, whoever flourished the brands must be crawling on their knees.

  My blood was undiluted adrenaline by now, and rising I moved away from my fire as quietly as I could, taking up a position against a neighboring tree. My anticipation was of robbers, even some revival of the stranglers of Kali Ma. My horse, tethered nearby, was snorting and prancing in the undergrowth. Perhaps the answer would be to slash the tether with the knife I had picked up and now defensively cradled, leap on the horse’s back and make a wild dash through the pitch-black jungle. But such a headlong course was precarious and I was not sure I preferred it. Bluff, lies, and a gift of rupees might be handier.

  I had reached this partial decision when something else struck me about the circling, low-down blaze of torchlight. And now I was rather stunned, completely disinclined to attempt or plan escape because everything seemed inappropriate, faced by the fact that, though the light stayed all together—some thirteen or fourteen feet of it—it reflected on nothing, lit up nothing, could not therefore be light at all.

  Just then the vegetable strands of the darkness parted, and the lightless light flamed through.

  I remember I said, “Oh God,” quietly, as if I were expected to. That was all. It was pointless to say or do anything.

  There is a kind of terror that is no longer truly terror, but some type of refined and developed emotion that terror has bred—a sort of ecstasy in which fear, actually, has no part, nor the will to resist that fear usually supplies. I had heard it once or twice described. Now I felt it.

  I could make excuses at this juncture, or alternately could pile the expletives up to mountain height and let off fireworks from the top—both methods resorted to out of nervousness. Because what I must put down now will, of course, not be believed. I didn’t imagine it, or dream it, I do believe in it myself, but only because I saw it.

  What had appeared in front of me was a tiger; it was Pettersun’s tiger, and I choose that possessive with care. It had a tiger’s shape, and a tiger’s aura, from the canine swagger of the hindquarters found always in the greater felines, to the sculpted almost toylike modeling of the head. The blazon of the tiger it had too, it was the color of apricots laced with zebra stripes, as if the scars of a beating had been inlaid with jet. It stood longer and higher than any tiger I had seen or heard of; if it came closer, as undoubtedly it would, its head might nearly level with my own. But freaks occur in nature, men or beasts mightier, larger, than their fellows. The light was inexplicable. For the tiger, Pettersun’s tiger, burned bright, bright as the fire I had mistaken it for, and on this conflagration which shed no gleam to either side, or anywhere, the black stripes seemed like the bars of a furnace, holding the power of it barely contained.

  The eyes were also fire, or apertures into the fire which composed it, not green as the lenses of cats become by night, but golden like the rest. The eyes saw me, perhaps not my flesh, but piercing like an X ray through to my bones. In my ecstasy of terror I understood this much: I was no prey to it. To kill me would be incidental—how it had killed Pettersun—death a by-product of the thing it was. And yet, this was not so, not the truth—even in that extremity I knew I had made a mistake and if I died, would die without the extreme unction of an answer. And then the tiger moved. It moved like a forest fire, plunging in a straight igniting line, right at me. My heart stopped. Started again as the gush of gold veered and crossed my path. At the last, its eyes avoided mine, uninterested. Its dog’s ears were pricked, listening, but not to me, the trembling of my body and my mind. The unstrung bow of its tail brushed through the grasses that should have exploded into arson, that only dipped aside, falling over to lave my hands with coolest dew not sparks.

  Having seen everything, I then covered my eyes with my hands.

  When I looked again, the forests were stirring; a subtle penciling in of forms hinted at the dawn; all other fires were out.

  I put down the beginning of Blake’s poem, though so well known, to facilitate this final act, as one sets out each stage meticulously, when solving a mathematical problem. It runs:

  Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright,

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

  When the scald of morning lifted the black rind off the jungle, I started to walk,
leading the horse, due east. If I had needed proof, which I did not, that something out of the ordinary had touched the vicinity, the horse would have furnished it. Sweating, shivering, and skittish, trying to kick at me, frothing, rolling its eyes—this was what my docile mount of yesterday had become. I led it with the utmost difficulty. It was clearly not afraid of anything that lay ahead, only unhinged; my own state, relegated to the primal.

  After about fifteen minutes, I came into the clearing where a hint of dirty whiteness—a veranda rail and posts—announced the bungalow. This was how near I had been to it all night. I don’t think the knowledge would have enhanced my pleasure. To find it now merely added a suitable footnote to what had gone before.

  I skirted the building with pedantic caution. I wanted no part of it, and once it was behind me, the urge to bolt was almost irresistible. Somehow I controlled it, just as, somehow, I controlled the horse. When we reached the village, we were welcomed with courtesy and without comment. No doubt, the wound of the supernatural was raw for all to see, but I was not theirs, and they did not try to pry or comfort me.

  A week later, when I had got back to Chadhur, I hung about in the hotel, waiting for myself to go off the boil like a kettle removed from the scene of the heat. My nerves were jarred in such a way that I could not put my finger on what the disorder was, or how it should be cured. I had accepted that I had brushed with things occult, but they had done me no physical harm. Reasonably elastic and rational as it generally was, my intellect would surely learn to cope with this; already I had perspective. Time would resolve the rest. Yet so far time had only made me worse. It was nothing so mundane as loss of appetite or sleep. I slept perhaps rather more readily than was my wont. And if my dreams were hectic, they were not about tigers, rather about a multitude of unimportant stupid items, that awake one would dismiss—a fly in the room, a dull, unidentified noise, trying to recall the name of someone never met. Awake, I ate and took healthy exercise, was no longer jittery; sudden sounds did not bring me to my feet with a wail. No, it was nothing I could lay my hand on, pick up and examine and so be done with. And yet it was as if my balance on the tightrope of life were gone. I could do all I should, could even be relaxed about it. Yet I knew I had fallen and somehow was suspended in midair.

  After two days, I walked across to the hospital and located Doctor Hari’s office and good coffee. He knew, without being informed, where I had been, and said nothing of it, only remarking as he poured the second cup, “You look a little not yourself. Can I do anything for you?”

  “Only if you have a prescription for psychic whiplash.”

  “Ah ha! The phantom tiger of the forests.”

  I was not amazed he’d heard of it. I had come to believe that gaudy beast of golden fire was often sighted, and word passed on to credible and skeptic alike.

  “Yes,” I said. “And there really is one.”

  “Well,” he said. “And why not?”

  “You haven’t said: Did you see it? Does that mean you’ve seen it yourself?” He only smiled. I thought perhaps he had not. I said, “What you can do for me, if you would, is ask your resident scholar if he’d consider letting me have a translation of this.”

  Hari accepted the sheet of paper mildly. The “resident scholar,” his pet patient, was convalescing in an unusual condition of hermitage.

  “I realize I’m being a damn nuisance,” I said. “But I would be very grateful, and naturally I’d compensate him for his time in whatever way he felt was suitable.”

  “I am not hesitating for that. Your Hindi is fine, and I know from what you have written that you can read the language perfectly well.”

  “In this case, though, shall I say I need a second opinion?”

  Hari glanced at the brief array of words. He may have recognized my own script, or some essence of text. He raised one long curved eyebrow, a dramatic gesture I respected, grinned and told me he would do what he could. Next evening, as the flying-foxes stormed the moon, he found me on the hotel roof and gave me the translation, its price an iced coconut juice. The scholar, it seemed, refused all payment.

  I didn’t read the translation then. I waited until I was alone, and then I waited until the hotel was noiseless, and the streets noiseless, and then until the streets and the hotel began to sound again with dawn. Then I chided myself, and opened the paper and read it through and put it away, and took it out again and read it again, and sat a long while as the window flooded with light, hearing goats and coughing cars, and bicycles and bullock carts, and the relentless drumming of my own heart, as my balance came back to me.

  When I had said it aloud, that writing on the wall of Pettersun’s bungalow, the phonetics had stolen in on me, and after gestation, offered themselves. They were basic enough; to replace “eye” with that which resembles it: “I.” And in the vernacular that employs the word “thy” to guess that maybe the word “the” might become the word “thee.” And primed by that, I had written out the back-to-front verse again, with its alterations, thus: Symmetry fearful thy frame could I? Or Hand Immortal—What? Night—thee; of forests. Thee in—Bright burning Tiger! Tiger! And again, a fraction closer, that click of intuitive knowledge—cat’s fur touched blindfolded—yet not enough. And then I hit upon the obvious. I translated the bizarre sentences, as they stood, flatly into Hindi, and gave them to a bilingual scholar for free and profound translation back into our native tongue, Blake’s, mine, and Pettersun’s. And so I received my answer. It wasn’t, I think, an invocation. Although Pettersun knew, he did not know. Although he wanted, he had no notion of wanting. Or at least of what the wanting was and how it might be satisfied. It had to tear him in pieces to get out, that monstrous and fantastical birth—the beast within, the glittering core of what he had tried to possess through pursuing, to become through destroying, the alter image, the bond, the magic circle, hunter and hunted—the place where the margin wears so thin that one may become the other. To the villages perhaps, it is the transmigration principle. He died and returned to pay Karma as a tiger. But no, he is the tiger’s child, as surely as he gave birth to it—to himself. The Id foresaw, if Pettersun did not. The Id always foresees. And that was why, stumbling through the medium of Blake, knowing no other, he wrote on his wall what the kindly Brahman translated for me, this prayer to the infinite Possibility:

  Flawless and fearful One, could I assume thy form?

  Or, Immortal moving Fate, what is my portion?

  Thou art Night, thou art the forests’ night. Thou art within—

  Bright burning Tiger! Tiger!

  I Love Little Pussy

  by Isaac Asimov

  A gentle children’s poem was the inspiration for this tale of an aging spinster’s love for her kitten, and the bizarre and funny consequences that follow upon a misguided attempt to strengthen the ties that bind . . .

  A good case could be made for the proposition that Isaac Asimov is the most famous SF writer alive. He is the author of more than four hundred books, including some of the best-known novels in the genre (The Caves of Steel; I, Robot; and the Foundation trilogy, for example); his last several novels kept him solidly on the nationwide bestseller lists throughout the ’80s; he has won two Nebulas and two Hugos, plus the prestigious Grandmaster Nebula; he has written an enormous number of nonfiction books on a bewilderingly large range of topics, everything from the Bible to Shakespeare, and his many books on scientific matters have made him perhaps the best-known scientific popularizer of our time; his nonfiction articles have appeared everywhere from Omni to TV Guide; he is one of the most sought-after speakers in the country, has appeared on most of the late-night and daytime talk shows, and has even done television commercials—and he is also the only SF writer famous enough to ever have had an SF magazine named after him, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. A mere sampling of Asimov’s other books, even restricting ourselves to fiction alone (we should probably say, to SF alone, since he is almost as well known in the mystery field), would
include The Naked Sun, The Stars Like Dust, The Currents of Space, The Gods Themselves, Foundation’s Edge, The Robots of Dawn. Robots and Empire, and Foundation’s Earth. His most recent fiction titles include the collection Azazel, and two expansions of famous Asimov short stories into novel form, The Ugly Little Boy and Nightfall, written in collaboration with Robert Silverberg.

  * * *

  George and I were sitting on a park bench on a perfect late spring day when a rather ordinary tabby cat wandered into our vicinity. I knew there were feral cats in the park that would be dangerous to approach, but this specimen had the inquisitive look of a tame pussy. Since I am proud of the fact that cats are attracted to me, I held out my hand and sure enough she sniffed at it and allowed me to stroke her head.

  I was rather surprised to hear George mutter, “Wretched little beast.”

  “Don’t you like cats, George?” I asked.

  “Would you expect me to, in the light of my sad history?” he said, sighing heavily.

  “I know your history is sad,” I said. “Inevitably so, considering your character, but I didn’t know that cats had a role in it.”

  “That,” said George, “is because I never told you of my second cousin, Andromache.”

  “Andromache?”

  ###

  Her father [said George] was a classical scholar, hence the name. He also had a little money, which he left to Cousin Andromache on the occasion of his early death and she, by shrewd investment, considerably increased it.

  He did not include me in his bounty. I was a child of five at the time of his death and he could scarcely have left me anything outright, but a more generous soul would have set up a trust fund.

  As I grew older, however, I realized that Cousin Andromache, who was twenty-two years older than I, might well predecease me. It did occur to me—for I was a precocious lad, thoughtful and far-sighted—that, in that case, I might receive a sizable share of the loot.