BIG CAT: And Other Stories

by Gwyneth Jones

  He heard nothing, but simply became aware of a rush of small, purposeful movement, closing in on him. The creatures were highly camouflaged, about the size of ground squirrels; long, flexible snouts; shaggy apparently limbless bodies. Their swift appearance seemed uncanny, the dream turned to nightmare, but of course they had smelt his blood. He fled, grabbing at appropriate defence, spun around and pepper-sprayed them. Which did the trick. Hell, they weren’t armour-plated, and they liked the taste of their own kind, a useful trait in aggressive vermin. Inevitably the drop-zone was now out of sight, but before he could think about that a new player arrived. Shaggy four-legged things: bigger than the first guys and smart, organised pack-hunters. He ran, but they outflanked him. Forced to climb, he shot up the first three or four metres of his chosen refuge in seconds, and went on climbing, easy work, to a knot of boughs high above the ground. There he perched, assembling his pellet gun: thrumming with adrenalin and almost laughing out loud.

  An exhilarating place, this planet called Desire!

  No pack, and no effective firearms, a lack he might come to regret. He was equipped for the wilderness, but not for slaughter. How do you say ‘I come in peace’ to a pack of Venusian hyenas? He saw formidable teeth, and hoped his armoury was sufficient. But apparently Venusian hyenas couldn’t climb. The brutes circled, panting in frustration, then retreated, vanishing into the dim ranks of the trees.

  Not worth it, muttered Forrest. Or I smell wrong, unappetising.

  He took stock of his situation: treed in a trackless forest full of hungry predators, some several billion years and around thirty eight million kilometres from home – and noticed that his secret burden of depression, the Black Dog mood that had haunted him for years, had vanished.

  Savouring PoTolo’s crowning moment, he wondered if he might be here for days. He’d need food, water; shelter; some way to defeat beasts that could tear him apart! The challenges he might face: possibly fatal, possibly insurmountable, delighted him. He was debating whether to take the gun apart or carry it down assembled, when a severe, numbing pain alerted him to the tree’s behaviour.

  He bared his right leg and saw grey noduled strands, tightly wrapped around his calf. The knot of boughs had produced suckers and sent them to feed, stealthily creeping inside his pants leg. Forrest grabbed his knife and slashed. The pain was unmistakeably deep and compelling: there was venom involved, and no time to lose. The suckers fell away. He slashed again at a row of puckered wounds, like scribbled smiley faces: opening a long gash in the hope of bleeding the poison out. Too late. In the act of securing a tourniquet below the knee he stopped being able to breathe, lost consciousness; lost his balance and fell.

  ♀

  He woke on his back, lying on some kind of bed, a very warm coverlet confining him. He smelled foul meat and remembered being dragged through darkness, maybe in the teeth of those hyenas, in a red mist of pain… The pain was still intense, and there were other discomforts, possibly broken bones, but hyenas hadn’t brought him here: wherever here was. The flickering light showed a hollow, interior space; crudely furnished. There was someone with him, a figure squatting by a fire-bowl, poring over small objects on a slab. Silvery fingers rearranged the items, a sleek bent head pondered the pattern. He was sure he’d seen the same thing before, far away, in another world—

  She’s telling my fortune, he thought, though how he knew the figure was female, he had no idea. The items were swept away, and vanished. The figure sat back, murmuring, looking down into upturned palms; seeming to engage in a dialogue with the Unseen.

  He slept again. The pain burned low, like a smothered fire.

  When he next woke she was by his couch, in a very unhuman posture.

  “Good,” she said. “You’re awake. Your head is clear?”

  He nodded, staring. He had been rescued by a glistening, greenish woman with a muscular sheeny tail, which she was using as a third lower limb; a hairless head, and bird or snake-like features (green eyes that filled the width of her face, a long mouth with an eerie curl; a glint of needle teeth). But she spoke and he understood her. He must be dreaming, after all.

  “Your fall saved your life, at a cost. I have set your broken bones, the venom is overcome, but the nibbler bite itself is now urgent. Rotten flesh must be excised, regeneration triggers implanted. You should know: I can immobilise you, I can give you analgesics, but I can’t put you out.” She showed him her palm: he saw moving symbols. “I can read your cell signature on this, but not the details of its expression, and anaesthesia is complex. I might kill you.”

  “You are a medicine woman,” said John Forrest slowly.

  “Yes.” Her eerie mouth curled further, until he thought her jaw would split from her face. “I am indeed. The procedure will be very painful.”

  “Go ahead and operate, doctor. Do I need to sign anything?”

  “Not necessary.”

  The operation was a success. When pain was once more a smothered fire, she told him all was well and that he would soon mend. She asked him where he’d come from.

  “From the sky,” said Forrest, “does it matter?”

  “Not to me,” said Lizard Woman, her long mouth curling.

  He noticed, at last, a spidery transparent headset that caught gleams of firelight and a mic by her mouth. He raised an arm, the one that wasn’t still immobilised by the heated coverlet.

  “What’s that?” he muttered, incredulous. “Some kind of babelfish?”

  “Yes, sir, it’s a translation device. It may look old-fashioned and clumsy to you, but it converts my language into yours, and yours into mine, adequately enough. Mr From-the-Sky, I have business that cannot wait. When you can walk I’ll take you to a better equipped refuge, where you may rest and recover in safety.”

  Forrest decided he wasn’t dreaming. He was on Ancient Venus, and his rescuer was a sophisticated Venusian, an unexpected bonus! She was not astonished: she had some rationale to account for his odd anatomy and strange arrival, and that suited him well. He couldn’t gauge how long he’d been in this cave, not even by the growth of his beard, which she had kept close-trimmed, but he felt he could assume that retrieval had failed: probably he was too far from the drop-zone.

  He wasn’t overly concerned. PoTolo would certainly keep trying. All Forrest had to do was get himself back to the zone, before the orbits of the two planets veered too wildly apart. It would be a whole lot easier, however, if he didn’t have to explain himself too much.

  She walked him up and down. She showed him the “wellspring”, a fresh water supply tapped from the root system of the trees, and explained how to operate a fire-bowl (the flames were natural gas, from the same source); how to use her gourd-like ration-packs. Her tone was always frosty, if her gadget was translating emotional nuance correctly; her conversation minimal. Forrest surmised, amused, that she’d identified him as a local bad guy of some kind – temporarily protected by her Venusian Hippocratic Oath.

  ♀

  When he was well enough they left the cave, via a twisting crawl-space passage that woke nightmare memories for Forrest – and emerged out of a hole in a huge dead tree stump. She led the way, Forrest limped behind. He’d tried to convince her to take him back where she’d found him; to no avail, and he was angry. But not such a fool as to strike out on his own, against her will. If Lizard Woman had dragged him down below herself, she was extremely strong. Or had confederates he hadn’t met; or both, of course. She was alone, living on gourds of mush, but implanted and supplied with impressive tech. What was the story? Who was Forrest supposed to be? So many unknowns, and he’d have relished them, except that he was so annoyed.

  But her pace started to tell. She had the pack; he carried nothing, which he found galling. If there were trails, she didn’t use them; if she had transport available, she preferred to hike. What was she? Some kind of Venusian Backwoods Survivalist, humiliating a hated city slicker? He refused to be outdone. When she handed him one of those sappy-gruel gourds,
he emptied it without breaking stride. But it got to be desperate work. She wore a floating grey robe; under it a shirt, and pants that accommodated the tail by having no backside. When the robe lifted, as she crossed some obstacle, he saw the big gleaming root of her tail, and it was sexy in a weird way.

  Before long her tail was the only thing that kept him moving.

  Dizzy with exhaustion, he picked at his itching fingertips: trying to extricate a tiny, wriggling, brown worm or caterpillar from under one of his fingernails. He didn’t know he’d stopped until Lizard Woman was in front of him, taking hold of his wrist.

  She pulled out her headset and donned it. “Your head swims,” she suggested, a cool, contemptuous light in her huge eyes. “Disoriented, can’t think straight? Your skin creeps?”

  “All of that,” mumbled Forrest. “Well done, doctor. You said you would help me.”

  “I don’t believe I did say that, and yet I will.”

  She was lying, things only got worse. Now they really went off-piste. Forrest was dragged through virgin thickets, thrown into ditches, forced over mad sastrugi of upheaved root-mass, until they reached a small clearing where a new kind of tree, reddish and gnarled, grew with no near neighbours. Stumbling and confused, he was ordered to strip, and hustled onto a natural platform among its roots. The lower bole was scarred. She stuck something in his hand, forced him to grip and shouted at him.

  “Stab the tree! Stab it! Over your head. Cover your eyes. Okay?”

  She’d given him a knife. He reached up and stabbed the tree. A huge gush of stinging hot liquid burst out, and pounded on him.

  A hot shower! My God!

  The itching that had been driving him mad, a vile, active sensation over his whole body, leapt to a crescendo. He looked down and saw a nest of little dark worms on his chest. More of them, over his belly, his arms. They were wriggling out of his pores, his anus, they were everywhere, and there were hundreds of them. The hot, scouring liquid diminished. Frantically he stabbed the tree again, and again, oh blessed relief—

  The first time he left the platform she sent him back. The second time she was satisfied, and slapped a new variety of soft-walled gourd into his hands.

  “Hold that. Whatever they gave you, Mr From-The-Sky, it doesn’t last. You’ll have to do as we do, when we’re in here. Depilate and use barrier methods, or the sippers will overwhelm you in hours. Now I’m going to fix you up, before you collapse.”

  She made him sit on the ground, massaged a grainy goop into his hair, his beard, his arms and legs, his chest, his pubes: sent him to rinse off, then helped to apply a cream that left his skin shining like her own. There was also breathable gel, she said, as she sleeked his every crevice, for nostrils, mouth and eyes: but it wasn’t necessary in the short term. The “sippers” wouldn’t block airways, or endanger sight, until their host was actually dying. The erection she provoked along the way didn’t bother her, she ignored it and so did he. But there was something between them, when he was purged, hairless and dressed again, that had not been there before.

  “Since we’re talking, sir. What about a name?”

  “Forrest. My name is John Forrest, and you?”

  “Sekῥool.”

  “Sek. That means the woods, doesn’t it?”

  “You know my humble language?”

  He shook his head. “In the cave, I sometimes heard you talking to someone. Or communing with your gods? I listened. I figured out that sek meant woods, frequency of occurrence.” He gestured around them. “Since here we are.”

  “I have no gods,” she said, and added, “Ool means song. The ῥ is a separating sound, my name is Woodsong. Sekool without the ῥ means something different.”

  The distinction was clearly important: he wasn’t sure how to respond.

  “Woodsong, okay. Er, John means gift of God.”

  She laughed, or at least the sound she made felt like laughter. His eyes burned, he’d forgotten to cover them, but the world was in focus. He was awake, alive: firing on all cylinders again, maybe for the first time since he’d touched down. He looked at the gouged tree bole, and the shower-platform: a natural formation, smoothed by long use.

  “There are people living around here?”

  “There are the indigenes, primitive surface-dwellers: you won’t see them. A few others: you’ll see them even less. Let’s go. It’s not much further.”

  Soon they crossed a really large clearing, and he was able to gauge the height of the frondy canopy at last: impressive but not extraordinary; sixty or seventy metres. Only mosses grew on the open ground, but the springy uncertain feeling stayed the same.

  Sekῥool kept to the margin of the trees. Up ahead a shadow moved, between the canopy and a ceiling of bright cloud; a grey curtain falling under it: defined like a rainstorm seen from afar, on a wide plain. Forrest thought they were really heading into rain until they crossed the shadow’s trajectory, and he stared in amazement at the tangled, mighty underbelly – then flinched and ducked, as vagrant shining strands actually brushed his naked skull.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. She’d kept the headset on since his shower-bath, a concession he appreciated; though often puzzled by the babelfish’s translation. “They’re eating air. It doesn’t know we’re here.”

  They re-entered the woods, and almost at once she halted, gesturing for him to step well back. A knotted growth, a tumour on a root, stood knee-high in their path. Sekῥool crouched, her tail balancing her, and cut herself between the fingers of her right hand with the knife he’d borrowed. Was her blood red? He couldn’t tell, in this everlasting rosy-green twilight—

  “Wait. Don’t move from where you stand.”

  Following her with his eyes, he saw the same ceremony performed again, further into the trees on his right. What was she doing? Placating demons? Having met some of the demons, he didn’t move a muscle until she reappeared from the left: she’d circled around something big. They walked on, and stood in the precinct of a truly vast dead giant, a stump tall as a house and broad as a barn. Forrest looked it over with respect.

  “I hope this guy doesn’t feed on flesh.”

  “Actually he does, but the heartwood is inert.”

  The last section of the entrance tunnel was vertical. They descended a ladder into a room rounded and domed like the first cave, but far more spacious, and better furnished. There were covered couches, low tables, domed chests: a fire-bowl at one focus of the ellipse and a wellspring at the other. Screened-off areas seemed to lead to other rooms.

  Forrest’s appetite had returned. He longed for steak, fries and a good malt, but made do with another sappy-gruel gourd (he should stop calling them ‘gourds’, since they were obviously manufactured): fell onto a couch, and plunged into oblivion.

  ♀

  In his dreams the snouted things chased him: limbless bodies covered in worms. The hyenas circled under the venom tree, shaggy with their own freight of bloodsuckers. The tiny worms that filled the sek’s air, and had invaded his pores, had smaller worms to bite them. He woke with a shuddering start. Nibblers, sippers: cute names for unappeasable horrors. Wee folk, good folk, trooping all together… Parasites are everywhere, far too many of the bastards on Earth: but if Sekῥool hadn’t found him, what an appalling fate! But she didn’t find me, he thought. She was watching me. “Your fall saved your life, but at a cost—”

  He opened his eyes. She was beside him, in her tripod pose: wearing the headset. She smiled. He’d come to like that eerie, too-wide smile; very much. But it had an edge to it, on which he feared to cut himself.

  “I must return your gear.”

  She handed over everything: including the pellet gun, which he’d assumed was lost or permanently confiscated. “That is not a lethal weapon,” she remarked. “You carried none. What if you’d run into trouble, Johnforrest?”

  What kind of trouble, he wondered. Friends of yours?

  “What if I did? Thou shalt not kill. I’m on a fact finding mission, I
’m not at war with anyone.”

  “A fact-finding mission,” she repeated. “Indeed. I see.”

  “What about you, Sekῥool? I’m deeply in your debt, of course, but what are you doing in this hellhole? How did you happen to turn up like that?”

  “The surface is a source of raw materials, Johnforrest. Surely even sky-dwellers know that. We come here to make deals with the indigenes, and to squabble with each other over the spoils. I was researching tree venoms that can be weaponised, if you must know.”

  “That’s no work for a doctor.”

  “We live in the dark as well as the bright, Mr From-The-Sky, and though I chose medicine, I was born to something else… I saw you run from the vermin, I saw you climb and then fall, it was pure chance.”

  Now I know too much, thought Forrest. And whatever the hell’s going on, I get the feeling I’m in serious trouble. But you’d spare me if you could, for which I thank you—

  He said nothing, just nodded gravely.

  “I’ll be leaving soon,” she said. “Here you have everything you need, and no sippers or nibblers can reach you: the hollows under the great hearts are our safe houses. I’ll give you a homing beacon, since you have none, to guide you back to the spot where I found you. But you were very ill. Please wait: eat, rest and exercise a while before leaving. I’m not happy about the way you keep falling asleep in the daytime—”

  “Oh, that? We call it jet-lag. It’s nothing; it’s just taking me a while to adjust to a different time zone—”