Catacombs (3 page)

Bowing over one extended front paw, he said, “Indeed! Long live you and glorious your reign. Speaking of which, my mission was successful beyond even my expectations. I have returned with a great number of exceptional felines from the outer galaxy, each of them having devoured quantities of the kefer-ka and ready for our accelerated breeding program.”

“Why should I want an accelerated breeding program?” the queen asked. “My own kittenhood would have been idyllic had it not been for the presence of the one other kitten born on Mau during the late queen’s reign—Renpet. Bringing more kittens into our world would only clutter it up. We have plenty of grown cats here now.”

“Grown cats, Your Majesty, who live quite extended lives thanks to my longevity and rejuvenation treatments, but cats who have not been able to procreate with each other for some time. Our gene pool, it seems, has become too shallow and we are now too interrelated. Bast, in her wisdom, has therefore decreed that we can no longer produce kittens within our community. Thus our females are fallow and our males uninterested in the gentler forms of combat. However, with the arrival of these newcomers, and the help of a bit of chemical stimulation, our numbers will once more increase.”

Nefure considered this as she toyed with a golden mouse that lay beside her. “Hmmm, more kittens would eventually mean more subjects under my rule, hence more power. Tell me more about these newcomers.”

“Your Majesty, they tend to be very large, intelligent, and I have
noticed that many possess the coveted papyrus paws with extra toes.”

“How nice for you. But other than increasing our numbers with half-breed kittens, what have their characteristics to do with the greater glory of my reign?”

“Majesty, when these cats have served their purpose, and our offspring—your loyal subjects—have spread throughout the galaxy, they will conquer other peoples and other places in your name, expanding your realm so that in a very short time it will be not merely this sparsely catted planet, but the known universe!”

Humans sleep for long periods at a time. It’s a wonder they ever get anything done. Cats sleep, hunt, eat, groom, sleep, patrol, eat, groom, and sleep again—interspersing other activities between sleep sequences as required. The point is that with nice naps punctuating every other thing we do, we are always able to give our full alert attention to each waking task.

Cultural differences. I’m not judging. Jubal was very tired and so I lay on the pillow beside his head for my first nap, woke to visit with the family and do a bit of mutual grooming, ate some of the crunchies before the others gobbled them up, and took another nap.

There was no porthole in Jubal’s cabin, but somehow, even on this alien planet, I knew that the sun was rising and time was wasting. Jubal’s dreams and my dreams were the same and they both involved rivers and fish.

Of course, Jubal had been alive for ten years and I had been alive only about six months, so he had the opportunity to read a lot more books and watch a great many more informative programs than I did.

His dreams were of the two of us on the bank of a placid body of
water, him in overalls and a straw hat, with a cane pole dangling an intriguing string into the water. Mine were less complicated and featured me and a big fish. When I finished my dream fish, I woke, stretched, and just happened to stick a paw in his face, incidentally waking him too. Funny how that happened.

He did his usual waking up stuff, washing his face, slicking his hair back with water, brushing his teeth, but then he departed from his routine and, still in his pajamas, went on a scavenger hunt among the storage lockers. He stuffed his away bag with a strange collection of items, including a fist full of salt packets from the galley and the sheets he’d stripped from his bunk. Instead of replacing his pajamas with his shipsuit, he reached for a bag that contained the kind of coverings he’d worn back on Sherwood, where I was born, only these were a little nicer than his overalls. Pants, a shirt, socks, and low shoes instead of the slick boots he often wore in the barn. Leaving off the socks, he put on the clothes and added a collapsible cloth hat. Then he left a message on the console that connected each crew member to the bridge.
Gone fishin
’, it said.

Unusually, the entire crew except for the watchman was sleeping at the same time, so the ship was dark. Together we padded down the darkened corridor. Three other cats passed us and one peered out of the ventilation duct, watching curiously as we made for the forward hatch, but I pretended not to see. If I let them know where we were going, they’d all want to come, and while most were trained ship’s cats, they might get lost or otherwise be a bother. This mission was for me and my boy alone, and if I happened to get the first fresh fish, well, someone had to test and make sure they were safe for off world cats, right?

The sun hadn’t made much of an impact on the sand yet, and the air was much cooler than I expected, quite comfortable enough for me to ride on top of Jubal’s pack and watch his back. There was no sign that Pshaw-Ra had returned to the pyramid ship.

The lovely quiet cool period didn’t last, however. The river was
farther than it looked, and the closer we got, the brighter it got, until before we knew it the sun had zipped up into the sky and made the sand shimmer and the water dazzle.

Jubal stopped and I hopped down while he pulled off his pack. The sand was not yet as hot as it had been the day before, and the extra fur between my toes protects my pads. My extra toes make my feet broad too, so I could mostly walk on top of the sand instead of sinking down into it the way the boy did with every step.

He smeared some stuff over his exposed skin and pulled out the sheet and put it over his head. I saw then that he had cut a hole in the middle, so it draped over him. Humans! If he was hotter, why was he putting on an outer coat?

He tried to put some of the cream on my nose, but I jerked out of the way.
Chester, your nose will burn out here
.

I’ll take my chances
, I told him.
That stuff smells so strong I wouldn’t be able to smell danger before it pounced on us
.

You think there’s danger? Did Pshaw-Ra say there were dangerous things here?

No, but he did say there’d be a welcoming committee of friendly cats bearing food and drink for everyone, and that didn’t happen, and if there’s no danger, what happened to him?

Good point
.

We were walking again then, Jubal’s sheet flapping around him as he moved, creating a slight breeze that tickled my fur in a pleasing fashion.

I tried to run ahead but quickly stopped, waiting for my boy to catch up. The heat made me want to pant like a dog, but my mouth was so dry! Jubal picked me up and I crawled under the sheet and back on top of his pack.

A couple of winks later the air cooled and a welcome scent of greenery awakened me. I peered out of the hole in the sheet, to the side of Jubal’s sweaty neck. We stood in the shade of a tall tree looking out over the river. Around us grew tall reeds and trees.

The reeds were strong enough for Jubal to attach a line with a shiny thing weighing down the end so with a flick of the cane it carried the line far out into the water.

I hope these fish are dumb enough they don’t know a lure from live bait
, he said. And he sat. And sat. And the nice shade we had been under when he first sat down moved as the sun scaled the sky, and still we sat.

My belly on the grass, I scooted forward under paw power until I peered down into the brownish flow before us. There were fish in there, but they must not have been stupid enough because all of them were swimming right past us and nobody was stopping to see what was at the end of Jubal’s line. Through the wet wild scent of the water, bearing tidings from every creature that had taken a drink from it, and every place it had been before this one, I smelled the deliciousness of fishes. At least one of them needed to get caught.

No, don’t go
, I commanded them, not that I speak fish.
Lookit the shiny thing! Yummy yummy shiny thing
.

I stuck my paw into the water and waved it toward the lure. The nearest fish didn’t swim to the lure, though, it swam right up to my paw, taking it for the live bait Jubal didn’t have. I let it get within biting distance but I wasn’t about to lose my paw. I didn’t have to think about it. As if the paw remembered something the rest of me hadn’t learned yet, it swiped from the fish’s head to its belly, claws came out, paw scooped up the fish and flipped it wriggling onto the bank.

Jubal grinned. “Good work, Chester!”

I was occupied with watching the fish trying to flop its way back into the river. At the last moment I would pounce it and foil its attempt to avoid becoming my breakfast.

So intent was I on the fish that I didn’t smell trouble until it bounded down from above and snatched my fish from between my front feet, then streaked away with it in a tawny blur.

Two could play at that game. I shot after the streak before Jubal could open his mouth to call me back, his thought hanging between us.

The tawny blur was another cat—one of Pshaw-Ra’s kind but not him, as I clearly smelled.
Hey, you, come back with my fish!
I snarled so ferociously I almost frightened myself. That was my very first fish ever, and I wanted it back. The cats who lived here probably caught their own all the time. Why take mine?

Mine!
The other cat’s thought seemed to echo the end of my own, mocking my anger and fish-hunger.

She—I could clearly smell that she was a she—darted into a thick stand of reeds and I dove in after her. Dimly, as if he was very far away, I heard Jubal’s feet swishing through the grass and clattering through the reeds behind me, not calling, but listening for my thoughts, watching through my eyes, smelling through my nose.

Suddenly the other cat bounded to a halt and crouched over the fish, her fur spiking up all along her back, her tail twice its original size.

Fearlessly, I leaped on top of her, snarling and biting.
It’s mine, you fishy thief!
I growled, and she yowled as my teeth penetrated her short fur and found flesh, surprising me almost as much as it did her.

Then something whipped down across my ears, then whacked the bridge of my nose, driving me off my enemy and my prey.

A female human voice was screaming,
Let her alone, you monster!

I was so surprised I crouched back, spitting and hissing and crying all at the same time. No human had
ever
struck me or spoken to me like that, not even when I peed on the captain’s bed! Who was this crazy girl bending over the still battle-ready tawny cat, who nailed her with bared claws and growled over the fish.

Look what you’ve done!
the human cried, and struck at me again with the reed, but I dodged her and backed against a comforting pair of legs.

“Cut it out!” Jubal hollered at her. “Don’t you dare hit my cat again or I’ll—”

The girl’s mouth fell open and she dropped the reed. I thought she was just surprised to see a strange boy wearing a sheet and waving what had been a fishing rod at her, but she fell to her knees, staring at me horrified from black eyes with whites showing all around them. “Cat? That’s a cat?”

Jubal knelt beside me and patted my bristling back. “Of course he’s a cat—half-grown kitten really.” Jubal was less challenging now. This was the first native human we had encountered, or native cat for that matter, if you didn’t count Pshaw-Ra.

“Kitten? But he’s
huge
!”

“His breed is large. He’s a Barque Cat, a very well-bred one too,” Jubal said proudly.

“And he’s got so much fur!”

“They’re like that,” Jubal agreed, continuing to stroke me. Against my inclination I started purring.

The other cat had turned away from me and was tearing into my fish. I looked up at Jubal and meowed, as if he couldn’t understand very well that it was
my
fish, my
first ever
self-caught fish, that the creature was devouring before my very eyes. I tensed, ready to spring again, but Jubal restrained me by holding onto my ruff in a very pushy fashion.

Hey
! I protested.

“That’s his fish your cat is eating,” Jubal told the girl. “He just caught it and she swiped it before he got a bite.”

“She is a sacred Mau. All things Mau are hers.”

“Then she should have caught it herself,” Jubal said. “I have a vessel full of cats bigger than Chester, hungry and stressed out from their trip.”

“No one said you could take the fish of the Mau.”

“Maybe not, but I’m not real impressed with your hospitality at the moment. One of your Mau, a cat named Pshaw-Ra, brought us here and said that you all loved cats—worshipped, was what he
said, actually—and would help keep ours safe until we could work things out back where we came from. But he disappeared and nobody else has showed up to help us, so Chester and I figured, being near a river and all, we’d catch some fresh fish to supplement the little bit of food we were able to bring with us.”

“Why were you not better prepared?” the girl asked. Like Jubal and Sosi, she was little more than a kitten, with wide dark eyes and a wild curly black coat of head fur, her skin two shades darker than the coat of the thieving cat eating my fish.

“We—uh—we had to leave in a hurry, before we could provision ourselves properly. And the extra cats were what you might say emergency passengers who came with nothing but the fur they were wearing. I used to fish back home but I guess Chester just figured it out because he was hungry.”

I growled to reinforce his argument, but it was futile. My fish was down to skeleton and the other cat was making small growling noises as she gobbled up the last bits.

“Renpet is hungry too. She does not fish. I do not fish. Offerings had always been made to sustain her before our banishment.”

“Banishment? What for? Did she get busted for stealing some other cat’s fish?”