Catacombs (10 page)

The man stared at his hand and I think he wanted to claw the captain, but the locals were supposed to be nice to us.

The queen’s attendant answered in heavily accented but understandable Standard. “We regret that there are no flitters of a size to fit you,” she said. “Such devices were designed only for the sacred ones, and even so, are now devoid of fuel.”

I left them standing talking and began my own search. “Sol? Bat?” I cried. My brothers and I were still considered kittens, however mistakenly, and I figured if I could find them first, they could help me look for the others—or maybe I’d find them all together.

I poked around doorways and under awnings. Jubal followed calling, “Kittykittykitty” and “Fishfishfishfishfish” until the word sounded like “fush.” This city was so tidy there were very few hiding places apart from the houses.

Maybe that was because these people kept everything important belowground? Belowground (except for the part that had all the cat mummies) had felt right, smelled right, more lived in. Like the barn on the farm where I was born had smelled right, full of the scents of life; plants, cats, people, other animals. Up here it felt kind of—well, like on shipboard. Something people had made up, that had nothing to do with anything natural. Which was strange since the houses seemed to be made of stone and mud.

My brothers came running, trailing my sire, Space Jockey. “We were searching too but couldn’t find them anywhere,” Bat told me.

“They’re not very big. They can’t have gone far,” Flekica cried, struggling away from Beulah.

“We will keep searching the town,” Pshaw-Ra said.

“I’ll follow the riverbank,” my father said. “If they did manage to leave town, I hope they’ll have sense enough to stay near the water.”

“Beware of predators,” Pshaw-Ra told him.

Space Jockey puffed up. “It’s predators who should beware of
me,
” he said.

The queen’s voice rang out in a raucous
rowwwwl
above all of the others.

“I saw the kittens following the renegade Renpet when she escaped the temple. She has taken them!”

“No she didn’t!” I said.

The shine of her eyes narrowed to slits, and everyone else grew silent. “You dare to contradict me?”

“Uh—no, it’s just, I was following and I didn’t see any kittens.”

“Obviously she hid them before you caught up with her,” the queen said dismissively, and then broadcast in her piercing voice. “The renegade Renpet has stolen the kittens of our guest! Find her, interrogate her, and recover or avenge the unfortunate young.”

I saw the mother moving them last night
, I told Jubal.
Maybe she forgot where she left them
.

No, because they were at the temple
.

He was right, of course, but that didn’t help. I wondered what danger Flekica had feared, to make her move her kittens in the first place. It couldn’t have been Renpet!

“She didn’t do it,” I told Pshaw-Ra, whose search of the town seemed to involve watching everyone else search. I thought he knew me well enough to believe me without asking too many questions, and he had influence with the queen. He said nothing but looked suspiciously shifty. Even more so than usual.

As soon as nobody was looking, I exchanged glances with Jubal.
They’ve hidden the kittens underground
, I said.
I can tell by the way Pshaw-Ra acted. Let’s go find them
.

Pshaw-Ra was off someplace else acting important, and the crew had dispersed to search. My mother had taken Flekica to stay with
Romina and Ninina, and the woman Beulah stayed with them at Bes’s house.

The point was, nobody was paying any attention to us at all. We had to return to the temple for me to get my bearings, but when I did, I saw the house with the secret entrance and we made for it. Ha! No one was even on the same street when we slipped in and Jubal lifted the secret door in the floor. He switched on the pocket torch he’d brought from the ship and it showed some stairs we promptly used, pulling the door shut after us.

I should have brought string or bread crumbs or something
, he said as we started into the nearest passage.

Why?

So we can find our way back
, he said.
That’s what they do in all the fairy stories. Explorers use balls of twine
.

I could try to shed my white hairs on the floor
, I offered.

I think you’ve done that already
, he said, pointing the beam down at a spray of black and white hairs probably loosened from my previous fall from above.

It’s okay. I know my way around down here now
, I told him.
This way
.

I absolutely knew my way, could smell Renpet, Chione, and the dead queen. We walked confidently down the hall and through the twists and turns, all the time expecting to see the kefer-ka streaming toward us and smell the cloying scent of the mummies.
Any time now
, I reassured Jubal.
Won’t be long now. We’re almost there
.

Of course, it was funny down here with no natural light to judge the time of day or night, but it did seem to me it was taking a bit longer to reach the mummies than before. I didn’t remember there being so many places where the tunnel made sharp turns either. Hadn’t it been fairly straight?

Where are we?
Jubal asked at last.

Here
, I replied.
But I have no idea where here is
.

Maybe we’d better go back
.

“Mew.”

“Aw, Chester, don’t cry, boy. It’ll be okay,” Jubal whispered.

I didn’t cry
.

“Meh-mew?”

That sounds too small to be you. Do you think it’s one of the lost kittens?

“Yow,” I said.

How did it get here?

I didn’t answer because I wasn’t sure it was here. The sound was coming from slightly above us. I put my paws on a rough place in the wall and tried to jump higher, but it didn’t work and I slid back. Then the
mew
came again and I realized it wasn’t directly overhead but down the passage by a few tail lengths.

“Meh-mew. Mew, Mee?”

More than one kitten voice.

I tried mewing back. They stopped crying. They were frightened. “It’s okay, it’s just me, Chester. The boy and I are here to take you back to your mother,” I told them.

I didn’t get an answer, or even any sense of a kitten brain at work anywhere nearby. All my life I’ve been able to thought-talk with other cats as well as with Jubal, as well as using the usual vocabulary of variations on
me
and
ow
and extensive body ballet to express myself. But I was getting zip from the kittens.

We stood still, linked and listening. The air was cool and not stale, although this portion of the tunnel did not seem to be used a lot. I got no clear scents of any humans other than Jubal. Nor did I detect the recent presence of any of the Mau cats. The walls were rough, and the height just cleared Jubal’s head. I didn’t know where I was but I knew that I was not anywhere I had been before. I hunkered down and watched the floor, hoping to see a kefer-ka or several hundred come crawling up to be my breakfast but was disappointed.

“Mew,” the kitten cried from the darkness beyond the beam of Jubal’s pocket torch. We advanced.

This time I heard something different, a scraping noise, stone on stone. I looked back over my shoulder in time to see the passage closing behind us.

Jubal turned, shining his light on the stone disk rolling between us and retreat.

“Crud,” he said.

We didn’t really want to go back there anyway, did we?
I asked.

I don’t like having our options limited, and besides, you know, this explains a lot. I think we’re lost because somebody wants us to be lost
.

That would explain a lot
, I agreed. For instance, it would explain why my nose and memory had seemingly failed to put us on the right track.
There are secrets down here we’re not supposed to find out
.

Or maybe
, Jubal said,
maybe we’re being herded toward the kittens. Maybe someone knows where they are and wants us to find them
.

It seems like an extremely roundabout way of doing it
, I argued.

That “mew” business started up again, and I listened and meowed back and tried thought-talk too, all to no avail. I heard no sounds I hadn’t heard before. More and more I felt we were deliberately being led astray.

“There’s only one direction we can go,” Jubal said aloud. And it was true, at the time.

The repetitive mewing continued and we walked forward until a circle of light from the ceiling illuminated the floor of the cave. The ceiling was higher in this passage, about two cat lengths taller than my boy.

“Skylight?” Jubal wondered.

I scrabbled up the wall, but Jubal had a better idea. He lifted me over his head so I could see into the light above us. I expected to see the city street or the desert, but instead I saw the all too familiar interior of a vessel somewhat smaller but otherwise identical, as far as I could tell, to Pshaw-Ra’s. High atop it, the nose cone had
been removed, and the hatches were open so the light from the sky beyond shone through onto the floor of the tunnel.

Pretty elaborate, using a recycled spaceship as a skylight
, Jubal said, picking up my impressions.

As we continued onward, we ran into these skylights at regular intervals for a long while, and Jubal said,
Looks to me like this network runs right underneath the city streets
.

Other things were in this section too. Disused machinery and storage containers, some empty, others tightly sealed. They had no signs, not even the picture writing, to say what they were for.

Then the tunnel curved and we had to make a sharp right down a steep incline into another level.

What neither of us saw was any sign of the kittens.

C
hester, deprived of one of his favorite pastimes, eating, grew quickly bored with their search and fell back on his other favorite thing to do, sleeping. At least in the caves it was cool enough for Jubal to carry the cat slung around his neck. That left his hands free for feeling walls and holding the torch. Then he stopped and searched his pockets again. Pulling out a packet, he unfastened it and extracted a headlamp, which he put on. Not only was this more convenient, but it would save what remained of the charge in the pocket torch for later. Jubal had a feeling there might be quite a lot of “later.”

He came to a place where the passage narrowed, but on either side of it there were openings. Entering the first of these, he saw that he was in a good-sized room, with arches and columns connecting the central room to others. This whole place might look like a collection of intertwangled root cellars but seemed to have been underground houses or maybe offices.

They were pretty thoroughly stripped of any hint of occupation, human or feline, and he wondered who had lived there. Maybe the people and cats who eventually were removed to updated worlds, leaving behind only the hardcore cat worshippers now living on Mau?

It wasn’t surprising to him that they might have lived down here
to escape the heat on the surface, but why had anyone ever built the houses exposed to the elements? Maybe because cats were so fond of the sun. The Mauan cats, being short-furred, wouldn’t mind it the way the Barque Cats did. And from what he’d read, this whole culture was not only catcentric but solarcentric, so some of their time would be spent on the surface, even if the real work took place down below. He had to admit, they’d made the houses pretty cool considering the outside temperatures.

What he found odder was that the farther he went, the better constructed the tunnels seemed to be, as if the rustic ones on the upper levels had been practice for making the more sophisticated ones lower down. The people who first came here, according to what Pshaw-Ra told Chester, had advanced technology for the time. Maybe the root cellar houses had been a kind of base camp for their community while they made everything else, like the fancy hall beneath the cat idol in the temple?

After taking a wide ramp down and finding it led to a broad hall with lights that came on when he entered, he thought,
This is more like it
.

Just when Jubal began wondering where everybody worked, because so far he hadn’t seen another soul, a loud
blaaat
filled the air. Claws dug into him and Chester levitated to the ceiling, then hit the ground running ten feet in front of Jubal, who was hard on his furry heels.

A voice said something in a calm even tone, with words so garbled Jubal couldn’t tell if it was in a foreign language or only heavily accented. He got the gist of it, though. It doubtlessly meant “intruder alert.” He pounded after Chester, hoping they were stampeding in the right direction.

Down they ran through corridors and caverns, each passage taking them lower. Jubal’s breath rasped so loudly and his heart pounded in his ears so hard that he didn’t realize that the alarm had stopped until Chester halted abruptly in front of him and sat down in his path.

Keep going!
Jubal told him.
We should find cover, at least, before we stop
.

We’re covered
, Chester said, though his ears were still flat and the black fur of his back, ruff, and tail spiked to make him look twice his size.
Listen
.

A hail of footsteps and rumble of indistinct voices seemed to seep through the walls to their right.

At any time those footsteps could come through another doorway, another arch, and straight toward them. Jubal edged to the left-hand wall, thinking that if they were found, he could just tell the truth, that they’d been hunting for the kittens and become lost.

The voices ebbed, the footsteps pattered away, and he gulped to pull some moisture into his dry mouth and throat. He had never been so thirsty, and after the long sprint down first one corridor then another, he was no longer cool either. All of the water in his body was pouring out of it, soaking his skin and clothing.