LITMIR.BIZ

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they came, borne to the great house in cunning vegetable carriages shaped by the witchy DNA of the growers of Harvest, drawn by prancing giant mousers and attended by their gray augmented cousins.

      You know all this.

      How, tender, she came down the high, broad staircase in a soft glow fixed upon her, sharp-boned in her youth, midnight hair piled about her aubergine features, eyes alive with hope and expectation.

      How the great, vile biologist Bander Zonin met her at the foot of the staircase, bent over her hand, knelt, gestured once to a mouseman bearing a deep salver. He lifted her small right foot from the flagged floor, to the amazed gasps of the company, and as music swelled from the orchestra removed her pretty shoe, took a beautiful fur boot from the salver, and slipped it up her toes, beyond the sweetly curved sole of her foot, pulled it past her ankles, let it fasten itself at her calf. Gloriana drew in her breath, and pressed her hands to her cheeks. The living booty was white as snow, and splashed in an eye-teasing pattern of blood-red markings.

      It was a fabulously expensive gift. She settled her weight into its ineffable comfort.

      Bander Zonin slipped away her left shoe, drew up the second Ioconian wolf-fur boot past her achingly lovely ankle. It closed upon her lower leg.

      Applause and cries of admiration. The orchestra burst up with the first waltz of the evening.

      The biologist bowed again to his betrothed, and took her hand.

      “May I have the honor?”

      They floated to the center of the ballroom. There they spun, weightless, she a bird with the borrowed feet of a hunting beast, he a beast, a male hunting, a wolf, a fox, a thief.

      The floor filled with men and women smiling, taking their measures. Music swooped, cantered.

      Nobody heard her shriek, her scream, her pitiful cry—not for a moment. And then everyone heard it.

      Nobody who heard her scream would ever forget it.

      She tumbled slowly, it seemed. He released her waist, her hand. Gloriana fell with a crash, clutching her left foot.

      The blood-splashed ivory fur burst scarlet with real blood.

      She screamed and screamed.

      And Bander Zonin tore off the boot, tearing away, it seemed to the aghast onlookers, the whole of her perfect heel, half the toes of her foot. He stared, apparently in horror, at his gift. He sagged. Mouse persons rushed to the aid of their mistress. Mausers roared in confusion. People rushed to Gloriana’s aid. In the crush, the rush, Zonin vanished.

      “Stop that foul son of a bitch!” roared anguished, incredulous, broken-hearted William Avid, Master of Harvest, taking up his traumatized daughter in his arms. “To the orbital ladder, mausers!”

      Within hours, as Glory Avid lay mute in a hospital shell, everyone knew that the brute had escaped. He had done the unthinkable, twice. First he had pillaged and raped the witchy flesh of the first daughter of Harvest planet. Then he had flung himself, and his grisly, fabulously lucrative prize up and out and into the black, strapped down against gravity inside a spacecraft from the old imperium. Nobody knew such things existed still. Their ignorance was his salvation, his escape.

      Within a year, certain other worlds began to bear unwontedly lavish fruit and crops, under suns not quite as hard and hot as Harvest’s but fecundated by the old hidden secret of the flesh of the women who had ruled and enriched Harvest for thirty-two generations.

      When she recovered her senses, pain quenched, Gloriana Avid remained mute for fifteen bitter years, limping on her ruined foot, refusing regrowth and reshaping.

      Then she spoke. “I will die a virgin,” she said, finally. Her voice creaked with disuse. “I will never look at another man.”

      Nor did she—until the artist Kabaka Buganda came to the cheated world, the fated world, the place from whence one day would rise Daisy, the detestable cat, to spread that spoiled world’s fear and terror across the galaxy.

      * * * *

      Daisy went to the fastness of the four season ladies, his sisters, rapped upon the oak door. A mouse maid answered, looked at him with disapproval, tutted barely audibly, led him into a cool wood-paneled parlor. At her leisure, wearing a belled anklet that tinkled musically, Summery Justice strolled down the stairs, flirting her tail, flick, flick.

      He stood straight, slender, fierce-eyed. His vibrissae shone pale in the muted illumination of the parlor, testing and tasting the slightest vibration in the air.

      “And what can I do for you, Mr. Daisy?”

      “Our brother Boundless Courage is dead,” he said shortly. “Dead of his wound. I present myself as senior sibling.”

      She sank onto a narrow, straight-backed, armless, striped gold-cushioned chair, gestured him to do likewise. Once, a claim so bold, so absurd, would have earned a snigger. No longer. Was Summery Justice afraid of this outsider, this near-pariah, this overlooked rival for leadership of her clan? Would you be? Her voice, though, held no quaver as she asked:

      “Do you mean us harm, your sisters?”

      He tightened his lips. “I mean harm only to those who obstruct the path.”

      Now she did shiver, a little. “What path is that, Mr. Daisy?”

      “The path to the destiny of mausers. The glory road.”

      “I see. May I call my sisters together? I believe we should discuss this prospect.”

      A deep growl rose up within his breast. “Call them, yes. The hour is near. A Class Four superluminal personal carrier approaches our world, a man who might advance my plans or thwart me, if he can. Thwart us all, we mausers.”

      Bewildered, Summery cried, “A man? Oh, not another man! Is there to be no end to this?”

      Daisy, the detestable cat, moved his gloved hand through a short, dismissive arc.

      “He is frozen. He lives, attended by Death.”

      “Wonderful,” said Summery Justice, with asperity. “Just the kind of news we were hoping for, this season.” She rose and made to leave the room, her back turned rudely. Even fear can be trumped by indignation.

      “Come back here,” he commanded in a frightful tone.

      She paused. “Go to hell, monstrous girl-named cat.” In a fit of mad bravado, she thrust up one finger, two clenched up on either side, wiggled it, and gnawed on it with her sharp teeth.

      He pounced in one fast leap, seized her at the root of her tail, a most obscene hold, and spun her around. Summery Justice lost her cat balance, fell bruisingly to the floor, yowling.

      “You will respect me,” said the detestable cat. “Oh yes, I think you will.”

      They sprang at each other, aroused, snarling.

      * * * *

      A great curved frame had hung upon his back when he came down the ladder out of the slipstream. The artist Kabaka Buganda had been engaged to sing a lament for the passing of William Avid, Master of Harvest planet, who lay naked in his death, shrunken in his age, chilled for the moment against rot by circulating gelid vapors across his bier of state. In his own world Kabaka Buganda was regarded by some as a king, by many as a poet, a lover, a lovable scoundrel. Gloriana, in her grief and loss, saw a man mountain wrapped in the pelt of a wild animal (lion? tiger? cheetah?—she didn’t know, no wild cats roamed Harvest), masculine, powerful. He placed his hands, against tradition, familiarly upon her face, cupped her cheeks.

      “We have never met, Missy Avid, and I grieve that this should be the occasion. He was a good man, your father. I will sing for him.”

      Corded muscle rippled under the dark, dark skin of his bare arms, his unencumbered legs, his four-square feet with their pale nails thick and curved and heavy as the horns of a bull. He was a bull, it seemed to her. He stood over her like a cloud filled

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