Cat Karina

by Coney, Michael

  “Want some help with the vampiro?”

  “Wouldn’t mind.”

  Teressa stood by sullenly as Karina examined the creature who lay, trussed as though ready for the sun-oven, on the floor of the cart. Karina placed her palms on either side of the vampiro’s head. “Be quiet,” she said to the others. The vampiro lay still.

  The sounds of the evening seemed to fade away, leaving Karina and the vampiro in a private world, small and walled with silence. Karina waited, concentrating. Little Friends.… she thought.

  She felt the strange force flow down her arms.

  And later, a minute or a microsecond later, she felt it return.

  And she knew.

  “Well?”

  “It’s.… It’s time for this vampiro to mate. He needs to be set free. We’ll.… You’ll have to get another.”

  “Yes, and what about tonight? What about that, huh?”

  “He’ll shelter you tonight, if you’re kind to him.”

  “Thank you so much, Karina,” said Saba. “You’re so clever. Isn’t she, Teressa?”

  “Huh. Just a trick. She isn’t getting round me. She deserted the grupo when we needed her most, remember?”

  Suddenly, this ingratitude merged with her recent unhappiness, and Karina felt a flash of temper. “Oh, so I’m not getting round you, Tess? Want to bet?”

  “None of that stuff,” said Teressa nervously, backing away.

  But Karina pinned her arms. “Want to bet?” She thrust her face close to the other, forcing her sister to meet her eyes. “Watch me, Tess. Watch me!”

  “Let me go!”

  “Look at my eyes.… That’s right. Now. You don’t really hate me, do you? Of course you don’t. Keep looking at me, or I’ll break your goddamned spine.… I could, you know. You love me, Tess. You don’t believe I ran out on you. You love me. You always have. You’d do anything for me. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you?”

  “I’d do anything for you,” repeated Teressa woodenly.

  “Okay. Now, let’s get this vampiro untied and set up.” Karina let Teressa go and she blinked, then smiled.

  “I’ve been a fool,” she said.

  “Wait a moment,” said Runa. “Just wait a goddamned moment. You don’t convince me as easily as that. Why the hell did you run out on us, anyway?”

  “I didn’t. It was important to the felinos that I found out what was happening at the delta. And if you don’t believe me, then by Mordecai I’ll convince you!”

  “No, that’s all right,” said Runa hastily, edging away.

  “Convince me,” purred Saba, moving up against Karina and gazing at her round-eyed.

  The tension broke, they laughed and hugged, and the El Tigre grupo was united again.

  “Now,” said Karina after a while. “Let me tell you how we can get back at that lousy Iolande grupo.…”

  The hemitrex and the victory.

  “We are nothing,” said Haleka into the afternoon air. “We are less than the mountain, less than the sea. We are ants, without understanding, without effect. We move through a brief instant of Time like a puff of wind, and are gone, leaving nothing.”

  “Aren’t you glad I’m back, Haleka?”

  “Gladness does not enter into it. You were sent here as a punishment, and since you have performed adequately I saw fit to allow you a brief respite. So now you’re back. When do you leave us permanently?”

  “Father says I can’t go back until after the Festival. I really wanted to see the Festival, Haleka.”

  “Another example of your desire for corruption. El Tigre has more sense than I’d have given a felino credit for. The Festival is a disgusting bacchanal; a drunken, brawling exhibition of gluttony, lust and other pleasures of the flesh.”

  “What others are there?” asked Karina innocently; then, seeing Haleka’s frown deepening, she said hastily, “I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten all day. Can we stop, now?”

  He looked down at her and found himself saying, “All right. But hurry. The tump must receive his full daily intake.” He reached into a large sack and took out a portable sun-oven, banding it down to her.

  “That’s all right. I can eat it raw.”

  “Certainly not! I shall not encourage you to eat raw flesh except in an emergency. I took the trouble to have this oven made for you, and so long as you are in the tumpfields you will use it.”

  Karina set the complex of hemitrexes on the ground and focussed the sunlight on a strip of tumpmeat, which soon began to crackle and emit a delicious aroma. Haleka slid down the tump’s flank and joined her, squatting on his skinny haunches. He watched her eat while he chewed thoughtfully on herbs and reflected on the unseemly coarseness of her nature. Feeling himself in the mood for lecturing, and judging Karina to be a worthy victim, he cast around in his mind for some parable fitting to the occasion.

  “I am going to tell you a story, Karina.”

  “But won’t the tump lose out on its daily intake?”

  “Sit down.” He directed a skeletal forefinger at her, and she resumed her seat with every sign of reluctance.

  Haleka then told her the story known as The Dead People of Arbos — which, millennia later, passed into the Song of Earth as the Second Kikihuahua Allegory.…

  The Isle of Arbos lies thirty kilometers off the coast, and people say it floated out to sea on the waters of the Rio Plata. It is quite barren, and uninhabited — although it was not always that way.

  Once it was peopled by a tribe of Wild Humans some forty strong. They arrived by raft, having been driven from the mainland by a hostile tribe. When they arrived, the Isle of Arbos was covered with forest, much of which they cut down to build huts. The fishing was good, so although the trees did not bear fruit there was no shortage of food. In the mornings the men would depart in dugout canoes, and in the evenings they would return with fish. They would kindle the Wrath of Agni, and the fires burned into the night as the fish were cooked and eaten. The tribe grew fat.

  But the trees became sparse. In a hundred years every tree had been cut, and since none were planted the island became a dusty waste. The islanders were reduced to eating their fish raw; and they became like animals as their art and culture declined.

  A hundred and fifteen years after they arrived, the waters around Arbos turned red. A tiny organism, carried by the waters of the Rio Plata, had found salt water to its liking and had multiplied prodigiously. The fish ate the organism, and the shellfish ate it too, and they thrived.

  But any humans who ate the fish, died.

  They died slowly, over a period of months, but they died nonetheless — and in some agony at the end, as the organism ate into their flesh.

  One day a kikihuahua came by.

  He saw the people lying sick on the beach, and he guessed the cause.

  “Our God has deserted us,” said the chief. “He has left us on this barren island to die.”

  “No,” said the kikihuahua. “That is not God’s way. He is displeased with the kind of creatures you have become, and he has sent hardship your way so that you may improve. It is God’s way of weeding out the people who do not use the wits he gave them.”

  “But there is nothing we can do! We have no fire and no food!”

  “The time for burning and destroying is past,” said the kikihuahua. “You must adapt — that is what God is telling you.” He bent down, and from the beach he picked a small dish-shaped object. “You see this hemitrex? Millennia ago, the hemitrex was a different creature altogether. It was soft. It had no hard shiny shell. It was just a fragile mass of jelly floating in the ocean — in fact people called it the jellyfish. It was at the mercy of tide and current, and since it floated near the surface, it was at the mercy of the sun, too.

  “And one day, the sun became terrible.

  “Giant balls of fire exploded from its surface and sent evil rays shafting towards the Earth like poison arrows. Men and animals and plants died in the heat and sickness of its light. For ten thousand years t
his went on, until the fires died down and the sun was normal again. But the men and animals and plants were no longer normal. Except for those humans protected by the Sisters of the Moon, they were changed, because only by changing could they have survived the furious sun.

  “The jellyfish adapted too. In order to protect itself against the rays, it grew a hard thin shell of a shiny substance which had the power of reflecting almost all the sunlight which struck it. The jellyfish adapted, and it lived. As did many other creatures. As you must.”

  The chief pointed out, “We don’t have ten thousand years. We’re dying now.”

  “Then eat something other than fish.”

  “There is nothing else. The land is barren.”

  The kikihuahua put its hand into a rock pool and drew out a handful of seaweed. “Eat this. It is not affected by the red tide.”

  “We’ve tried. It’s too coarse. We cannot digest it.”

  “Then cook it.”

  “We have no firewood, remember?”

  The kikihuahua sighed. “You haven’t learned anything.” He placed the seaweed on the rock and held the hemitrex over it, tilting it so that the sun’s rays were gathered in the shiny bowl and focussed on the weed. After a while, steam rose. In a few moments the seaweed was cooked, tender and edible.

  The kikihuahua bowed, walked across the island, climbed onto his vehicle-creature and disappeared.

  At this point the Second Kikihuahua Allegory, as told in later years, ends. In Karina’s day, however, people were more ruthlessly literal, and Haleka continued the story to its climax, as he knew it, like this:

  The chief approached the pile of cooked seaweed, sniffed it and made a face of disgust. “We can’t eat this muck. It may be food for a kikihuahua but it’s no food for humans. We’re a tribe offish-eaters, and fish-eaters we will remain, and no alien with hairy buttocks will tell us otherwise.”

  “And anyway,” said his woman, holding up the shell, “This jellyfish may have adapted, but it’s dead all the same.”

  “There’s a lesson in that,” said the chief.

  And from that day on they thought no more of the kikihuahua, but continued to eat raw fish, getting even sicker until they died, one by one.

  Which is why the Isle of Arbos is uninhabited — and there’s a lesson in that, too.

  “So?” said Karina.

  “You will obey the dictates of the Examples and not eat raw meat.”

  “Are you sure that’s what the story means?”

  “You will not question me, Karina!”

  During the rest of the afternoon the tump browsed its way through the foothills and Karina walked beside it; first on the seaward side, then on the side of the mountains — and the tump always tended to shy away from her.

  I’m not cut out to be a tumpier, she thought in some satisfaction.

  Evening came and Haleka slid down, allowing Karina time for a small cooked meal before the sun dropped below the mountains. Then the coolness of night enveloped the fields and Karina climbed onto the tump’s back to watch for jaguars. Looking around, she could see the dim shapes of other tumps, each topped by its attendant. The moon slid from behind a bank of clouds and the scene was suddenly washed with cold light. Karina, alert, stared about her, hearing faint sounds from a nearby grove of trees. A night-hunting owl swooped low overhead, snatching some squealing rodent from the grass and startling her. From somewhere else came the metallic roar of a big cat.

  There was something wild and elemental about the night.

  It’s a time for killing. The words came unbidden into Karina’s mind, planted there countless generations ago by a forgotten technician at the institute of Mordecai N. Whirst.

  A sudden scream cut through the night sounds.

  Karina whirled round. The tump to her left gave a convulsive heave, and the attendant was missing from its back. Then there was a worrying sound; a grunting, and noises of a struggle.

  Karina threw her head back and uttered an unearthly screech.

  “Huh? Huh?” It seemed that all of nature had been shocked into silence — with the exception of Haleka, who was muttering his anger at being roused. “Is that you, Karina? What in the name of Whirst is —”

  “Be quiet.” Karina pulled him unceremoniously to his feet. “Come with me.”

  Karina dragged Haleka at a trot towards the riderless tump. When they got there, they found the apprentice lying unconscious on the ground. Blood seeped darkly from a wound at his temple. His tumpier was crawling from under a blanket, grumbling.

  “What …?”

  “There’s been an attack.” Karina looked around. “Where have they gone?”

  “They? Jaguars hunt alone, Karina.”

  “Felinas don’t.”

  Others arrived; tumpiers and their apprentices, alerted by Karina’s screech. Then, sliding from the backs of nearby tumps, three girls.

  Haleka stared at them in surprise and suspicion. “Who are these felinas?”

  “My sisters. I thought we might need some help tonight, so I replaced three of the apprentices. It was bad luck we picked the wrong tumps, or we might have had them. Did you see anything, Teressa?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “I thought we’d catch them in the act. But it seems they’ve gone. Maybe I frightened them off,” said Karina unhappily.

  The apprentice on the ground groaned, returning to consciousness.

  “Weakling,” observed Teressa disgustedly. She pulled him to his feet, not very gently. “Who attacked you, huh?”

  His eyes focussed and he saw her. Sudden fear showed. “A grupo! What’s a grupo doing here?”

  “Trying to help you, idiot. Who attacked you?”

  “I was pulled off the tump from behind. I didn’t see.”

  “Jaguars often attack from behind,” said a tumpier wisely. “They run up the back of the tump and pick the apprentice off, clean as a mango.”

  “They don’t club him across the head,” said Runa. “This is human work.”

  “A goddamned felina grupo!” somebody shouted, staring in deep suspicion at Teressa.

  “Shut up, all of you!” Runa shouted, as a babble of accusations arose. “Shut up! This may be a diversion! While we’re all arguing here, they could be stripping a tump to the bone somewhere else!”

  Karina raised her head, sniffed the air, and cried, “I smell blood! Over there! Towards the mountains!”

  “But —”

  “Be quiet, Saba.” Karina allowed the main body of the hunt to move off westwards, then took Haleka by the arm and called to her sisters. “Come on — this way. The noise from that crowd is enough to scare a herd of crocodiles. We go east, and we have Haleka as our witness.”

  The five of them walked quietly downhill, and before long they heard the sounds of feeding.

  “They don’t know you’re here,” whispered Karina to her sisters. “They won’t be expecting a full-scale attack. If it’s Iolande’s grupo, there’ll be four of them. That’s one each. Haleka — you help Saba.”

  But the tumpier was accelerating down the slope, skinny legs pumping. “That’s my tump! For the love of Mordecai — it’s my tump they’re eating!” His voice was shrill with outrage, and the sounds in front of them ceased suddenly.

  There was a low chuckle.

  “Poor old tumpier. What a shame.”

  Dark figures moved against the moonlit bulk of the tump. A jagged gash wept black blood. No knives had been used; the felinas had simply slashed at the tump with their tough fingernails and chewed their way in.

  “Now,” said Karina.

  She’d already picked out Iolande, the tallest of the grupo — the mother, skilled in battle. Iolande stood a little apart from the others, frozen in the act of cramming a chunk of meat into her mouth, her fingers dripping while she watched the oncoming grupo with narrowed eyes.

  “So.… It’s El Tigre’s little girls. Go home, kids. Find someone your own age to play with.”

  “Take th
e others!” shouted Karina. “I’ll look after this old cow!”

  “You’ll regret your choice,” said Iolande calmly, and jammed the wad of flesh into Karina’s eyes as she came in, blinding her for one vital moment.

  Karina felt a knee crash into her groin and she doubled up, pawing at her eyes. Instinctively she swayed aside as she fell, and felt the wind of Iolande’s other knee as it swept past her head. This was for real. Iolande was fighting, if not to kill, at least to maim. On the ground, Karina grabbed for the other woman’s knees. She caught one of them. The other foot slashed into her flank, cutting flesh. She let go and rolled away. The wind had been knocked out of her.

  Little Friends.…

  Her vision cleared and she looked up. Iolande was standing nearby, breathing normally, unmarked, a faint smile on her face. Behind Karina, a little way off, the baffle rolled on.

  “Had enough, pretty Karina?”

  Karina hurled herself forward, the Little Friends driven from her consciousness by the sheer violence of her rage. Iolande jumped as she came in, pulling herself up by the trappings and hanging from the tump’s back, and slashed at Karina with her feet — but she didn’t quite allow for the strength and speed of the girl. Karina turned in mid-leap, caught Iolande’s foot and, still turning, dragged the woman to the ground.

  Iolande yelled as the ligaments other knee tore, sending hot needles of pain through her leg.

  Karina maintained her grip, twisting the foot back until Iolande screamed again. Then Iolande’s other foot caught her in the stomach with devastating force, hurling her against the tump. She fell aside in the nick of time, barely avoiding Iolande’s rush.

  For a moment they stood face to face, recovering their breath. They hardly noticed the shouts and thump of flesh on flesh from nearby. They watched each other, and then they heard a male voice shout with pain.

  And Iolande smiled.

  There was a perfect confidence in her smile, a knowledge that her grupo was mother-taught in fighting, a certainty that they would win.