The Third Cat Story Megapack - Damien Broderick

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I was certain I could detect a faint heartbeat

      like the final clicks of ticker tape at the end

      of a bad day on Wall Street.

      The intake person at the Humane Society

      said they would check for vital signs to make

      sure, then administer the drug, the Big Sleep, and

      prepare him for cremation. “We cremate twice a week

      and once a month a group takes the ashes

      out to the sea,” I was told.

      I did not want to think of

      Worf in some freezer with a pile of dead cats

      waiting to be fried into dust and chips of feline remains

      like the dead were piled up and burned

      I was asked if I wanted the blanket back.

      No, no I did not want the blanket he died in.

      I paid the $10 handling fee.

      As a cute, black-haired kitten, he cost me $125

      at the pet store twelve years ago.

      His death cost me ten bucks and a blanket.

      THE RUINED QUEEN OF HARVEST WORLD, by Damien Broderick

      “Where are my mausers?” cried Gloriana Avid, dressed in seven layers of floating white and gray muslin. “Ullimus Wong approaches! We must prepare the defenses of the orbital ladder in his honor, or against him. Come, mausers.”

      She peered into the great overgrown garden of her father’s house. Few human people off Harvest knew this word mauser, which was an ancient name for a weapon held in the hand and directed to the killing of other humans. Fewer still recognized, with an irritated sigh, that this name, too, hid one yet older.

      The war cats who stood guard over the rich treasures of Harvest were mausers, true, but mousers as well. Their ancestors, back on fabled Homeland, had been small, fleet creatures with small, fleet minds. Those cats lived and dreamed the hunt for their prey: feathered birds, tracked with furtive slow patient grace until the leap, murderous; and rodents even smaller than themselves, the mouses, for which they, the gray and white and black and tabby and striped mousers, were a mortal terror poised at the wainscoting. So it was with the descendants, the frightful augmented people, the war cats of Harvest.

      “Come, my pretties, my lordly hunters, my avengers,” cried mad Ms. Avid. Her words creaked out into the pungent air of the Harvest world, where, beyond the tangled brambles of the house, a hundred fruits still gleamed under an actinic star, where the cereal crops flourished in wind-flowing oceans of gold and royal purple.

      “It is time to hunt,” called Glory, to her noble cats, and they came. Not to her bidding, for they were proud and walked alone, but in free recognition of her fiefdom. “Come along, Resolution, Triumphant, Defiant. And wait, now, who are you?” This cat was lean, with a head like a blade. Electricity danced and pranced in his pale blue eyes. She had never seen him before. All cats walk alone, as she knew, but this one seemed destined for some singular isolation. “Your name, sir, I say!”

      “My name is Daisy,” said the cat, standing very still in the midst of his brothers. Did they shun him? They did not turn their backs upon him, nor withdraw their heads, and they did not, either, turn in a mass of furious, shrieking repugnance to tear, beat or bite him until his corpse lay bleeding and huddled. That they would have done to a sport, a castback, a cat whose deoxyribonucleic acid was even one codon more seriously warped than Daisy’s. This forbearance, or minimal respect, did not mean they loved him, nor admired his solitude. The mausers put up with him at the margins of their number because he was a son of Courageous and Precious Blue Silk, was sworn, as were they all, to the defense of Harvest and the house.

      Gloriana Avid gave one sniggering bark of laughter, to hear that name, and smothered her mouth in billowing sleeves.

      “And where are your…sisters?” Every mauser heard the absent words, the missing words, the masked words: your brothers’ other sisters. But a word unspoken yields no clear offense. The ears of the wiry cat went back for an instant only, the deep snarl in his throat chopped off at a cough.

      “Come forth, sisters,” he cried in a piercing voice. “The mistress would see you, even though the time is not fitting, her mausers, your brothers, being gathered here together.”

      “Oh, no, no,” cried Glory in her shrill, disappointed, wary tones, “that is not what I—”

      But here came cat females, from the hard shadows of the star’s brilliant daylight, slinky and sinuous. Here was Summery Justice, and Winter Kills, here was Autumn Falls and Spring Healer, lightly springing, falling like shaded leaves.

      The air reeked, abruptly, with lawless pheromones. Everyone except Avid fell into attitudes of alert pugnacity, thrilling with improper desires.

      “Go back at once,” cried Boundless Courage, stepping to the fore. “Ignore this one, this fool,” and he cuffed Daisy across the side of the face, hard, claws scrupulously retracted. “Return to your fastness, sisters. This is not the time. This is not the place.” With exquisite attention, Boundless monitored his brother’s stance. Daisy did nothing. His breathing did not quicken, nor his whiskers draw back. (Each mauser could hear the pulse and breath of every cat in the clearing, and more besides.) His teeth set in a baleful grin. In silence he watched his sisters slink back into the shadows, casting glances over their shoulders. Their long lovely vibrissae gleamed in the sunlight, then were gone.

      “Bad kitty,” said Glory Avid, all a-twitter.

      For a moment, Daisy and Boundless Courage regarded each other. Daisy slipped forward, then, and dropped to his knees, rolled upon his back into supplicant posture, as once, very long ago, his ancestral foe the dog might have rolled in obeisance to an overmastering superior, belly bared. To his own ancestors, as only disdained Daisy knew, this posture held a very different meaning. It blocked an enemy’s approach from behind, while freeing all four muscular limbs and lethal claws to rake and rip.

      Boundless nodded, a civilized being in an almost civilized time and place, and raised one foot to deposit it in ceremonial warning and acknowledgment on the defenseless bowels. And Daisy was no longer there. Snarling, he snapped upward, lunging at the senior brother. He tore with his unleashed claws the fabric from Boundless’ loins, sank his sharp teeth instantly into the mauser’s befurrred groin, twisted, keening a battle cry between his clenched teeth, and ripped away all the gristle and flesh and tight double sac.

      Blood sprayed. Boundless Courage shrieked, clutching at himself. Aghast, confused, mausers flailed, struck at each other, crying, “Unsporting!” and “How vile, sir!” and “You are no gentleman!” Blood and fear and fury reeked, vibrissae quivering beneath their nostrils.

      “No!” sobbed Gloriana Avid. She drew back, seeing droplets of red flung upon her white and gray muslin. “Cats, stop! This must not be!”

      But she was wrong. It had to be. It was the first public declaration of inevitable war between the Worlds and the detestable cat, the abominable cat, the cat who one day would lay waste the Homeland world itself, after the Death-ferried tattered man had come down to Harvest, the Landgrave who would mend Ms. Avid’s heart at such cost.

      * * * *

      While the Lords and Ladies of the World sustained a complacent belief in their own superlative knowledge and power, they had not foreseen Daisy’s destiny. His label name was given him by their unwatched machines, which made slips of this kind only one time in ten billion—and yet, when those errors did occur, a blight roared down, nearly always, like a curse upon their World.

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