I wouldn’t have known what was going on, except that the upstairs neighbor mentioned that she was gravely worried about their baby. It seemed to be anemic and tests gave the pediatrician no clues to diagnosis.
I sat with Bittersweet in my lap, licking his ears and reading the news online for rumors of mysterious illness, or even Midnight Star articles about twenty-first century vampire attacks.
Herschel had landed on Mars by this time. But I hadn’t heard from him. I looked at the ruby ring on my finger. Hematites around the central ruby. That red streak—didn’t hematites have something to do with blood?
Then I thought, maybe Herschel is—I don’t know—infected. The kittens seemed to be addictive. Had he licked one? Even if he hadn’t licked Bittersweet, Cream, or Marmalade, maybe he might go back to the factory and try one there.
But he had licked Bittersweet. I remembered that one bittersweet kiss.
Frantic, I e-mailed him, a long letter with the complete story. I was afraid his employer would read it and he’d get fired or even arrested, but he had to know the danger he was in.
His response was only, Don’t worry, my little earthpussy. The cats are harmless and it’s hard to kill one, starvation or no.
Hard to kill. Why didn’t I like the sound of that?
* * * *
His letters became curt. He didn’t acknowledge my pleas for help with the cats. I asked him for the name of the company that had engineered the MicroMilk™, but he simply rambled on and on in his next missive about a new polymetallic sulfide site his company was prospecting. They’d gone into mining, it seemed. Since Herschel was a biology specialist, he was considering switching employers.
What did this mean for me? What did it mean for my prospects of getting information to save the kittens? Or myself?
They were getting big. The male, Marmalade, showed a healthy interest in jumping the other two. What would happen when Bittersweet and Cream went into heat?
Nonsense, I told myself. Who in the world would engineer a novelty organism, a toy, to reproduce? It would ruin business.
But maybe the box was supposed to keep them prepubescent as well as tiny. Or maybe they were a beta version, organisms that weren’t meant for sale.
For the hundredth time I examined the box in which they had arrived, the vials which had contained their nutrient fluid. There were no clues. Just the contents, and a table showing calorie count (zero), sugar (zero), other nutrients (zero, zero, zero). FORTE DARK CHOCOLATE, MILK CHOCOLATE, and CITRUS FUDGE.
I was almost too sick to go to work. My face was the color of chewing gum on the bottom of a 42nd Street movie seat. My chest rattled as if it were a box full of dried popcorn kernels. I moved through my day as if wading through a saucepan of congealing taffy.
And I was worried about Herschel. He seemed oblivious to the danger he was in. How could I get his attention, so many million miles away? I asked if he were feeling as enervated as I, and he answered finally, saying, well, Mars, you know, the diet, the gravity, the dust in the air, of course he wasn’t what he was on Earth, but he was okay, nothing was wrong, stop worrying, my chocolate mouse, my bird of paradise, my honey goldfish of love.
I wanted to hit him. I wanted to scream. I considered breaking the engagement, just to get his attention so he’d take care of himself, but that would be too cruel, especially if he really were sick.
He sometimes seemed distant, as if his passion for life were gone. If he was affected by the kittens as I had been—but that was silly, he wasn’t sleeping with them nightly. He wasn’t losing blood to nourish them.
Still, the effects might come from mere contact. And I couldn’t be sure he wasn’t going to the factory where they were made, being exposed daily to their rapacious little tongues and teeth.
They were so damn cute!
And the chocolate was good. It was the only thing I really had to look forward to. Even Herschel’s return, the date marked in red on my calendar, didn’t thrill me as it once did. I was too sick. I worried that I would disappoint him as a lover, lying limp and unable to respond to his skilled passion.
I had searched the net for some information about the kittens themselves. I tried the names on the bottom of the box, with and without the word MicroMilk™.
I even broke open one of the empty vials.
The drop of fluid inside was viscous and dark red, and smelled—why was I unsurprised—like old blood.
But it must have something else in it. I took it to a lab, but was met by refusal. They had a policy not to work on Martian organics; the risk was too great.
I had somehow forgotten what Herschel even looked like. How could that be? The restricted bandwidth of his recent communications had prevented him sending a recent photo, and my attempts earlier had met with disappointment.
I searched his name on the net.
Herschel B. Taylor.
I hadn’t expected to find so many hits. I can’t remember why I hadn’t done this before—or maybe I could. He’d admonished me against it, oh, I’m not very photogenic, and never given a reason, but those grape-candy eyes, that magnetic glance—oh, don’t do that, I hate having my picture taken.
And in fact, there were no good photos of him anywhere on the net. He seemed—invisible.
Oh, yes, there were dozens, maybe almost a hundred hits, mostly pertaining to Mars corporations. But they were always of his back, or of his shadow, or of somebody entirely different who seemed to be sitting opposite him at a conference table, a desk, or a resort restaurant buffet.
To this day, I don’t know how he managed to avoid being imaged, but I know he must have had a reason.
One image struck me with electrifying force. Herschel (that must be him, his long hair, his hand with the hematite ring holding her hand, even his burgundy leather jacket) was kissing a woman whose face was partially visible. The woman was identified as Clarice Etta Armand.
Quickly I searched her name, and a hundred hits came up, the first with a banner over her head.
CHOCOLATE VAMPIRE KITTENS FROM MARS
She was smiling. An unidentified man (in that burgundy leather jacket, wearing that hematite ring) was kneeling in front of her, back to the camera, holding up two tiny kittens.
In another image, she was wearing the burgundy leather jacket loosely around her shoulders, and an unidentified—but oh so recognizable—man had buried his face in the hollow of her neck.
It had been taken at a Martian resort popular with honeymooners.
Clarice and the man dancing. Clarice waving as the man, his face in shadow, held her jacket.
Clarice in a space suit, out in the open on Mars, holding hands with an unidentified man in a space suit. Prospecting a new site.
Herschel’s boss was a man.
Herschel, I wrote. Are you involved with a woman named Clarice?
And he didn’t answer.
* * * *
Which left me with the chocolate vampire kittens from Mars. They were clearly beta products, not meant for export. I wondered how Herschel had gotten entangled in my life. I wondered if Clarice knew about me. Wives on both worlds. Clarice a brilliant entrepreneur, me—what—a test subject?
Maybe she did know about me. Maybe they tested the kittens on me.
Which, as I say, left me with the kittens.
I locked them in my closet and lay down on the bed to think. They screamed and screamed, and I finally dressed and left the apartment. I went to work and didn’t come home. Spent two nights on the floor of my office.
When I returned two days later, they were silent. I cringed, thinking them dead. But perhaps they needed to die. Perhaps it would be the most merciful thing. They had gone after that baby, after all—
But they weren’t deliberate killers. And their predations were programmed into them. How could I think of them as guilty? It was Herschel who was guilty; he knew what they were. Did even Clarice, who had no doubt developed them, know what they were?
I took off my coat and l
istened at the closet door. They were silent, but after a moment, a small black paw slid under from the door, patted, explored, withdrew.
I waited. When it poked out again, I resisted the urge to press my face to the crack in the door and lick that little paw.
Resisting was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
After a while, I put my coat back on and went into the street. At the Tiptops where the butcher had looked at me so oddly when I requested cattle blood, I purchased three pounds of bitter chocolate. Back to my apartment, I broke open the packages, ignoring the bitter perfume of the stuff, and slid square after square under the door.
Kill? Or cure?
The elegant paw did not emerge again. There were purring noises.
I’m afraid to open the door.
CATS CAN COLONIZE MARS, by Mary A. Turzillo [Poem]
First of all,
dust devils to chase.
Second:
water all tied up in polar caps
no wet pawsies for pussycat.
Third:
giant sandbox.
Fourth:
Global storm blocks sun:
if there’s a single beam
cat will find it to sleep in
Fifth:
low oxygen:
cats sleep all day, conserve
precious resource.
Sixth:
heat source for cold humans
to cuddle with at night
Seventh:
cats already know how to fly;
better still in one-third gravity.
CAT ANECDOTES, edited by Adam White
Another fertile subject for anecdote. Who has not some faithful black Topsy, Tortoise-shell, or Tabby, or rather succession of them, whose biographies would afford many a curious story? Professor Bell (British Quadrupeds; the professor has long retired to his favorite Selborne. He occupies the house of Gilbert White; and a new illustrated edition of the Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne has been long looked for from him) has well defended the general character of poor pussy from the oft-repeated calumnies spread about it. Cats certainly get much attached to individuals, as well as to houses and articles in them. They want the lovableness and demonstrativeness of dogs; but their habits are very different, and they are strictly organized to adapt them to watch and to pounce on their prey.
As we have elsewhere remarked, and the remark was founded on observation of our eldest daughter when a very young child, “Your little baby loves the pussy, and pussy sheathes her claws most carefully, but should baby draw back her arm suddenly, and pussy accidentally scratch that tender skin, how the little girl cries! It is, perhaps, her first lesson that sweets and bitters, pleasures and pains, meekness and ferocity, are mingled in this world” (The Instructive Picture Book; or, A Few Attractive Lessons from the Natural History of Animals, by Adam White, p. 15 [Fifth Edition, 1862].)
Jeremy Bentham and His Pet Cat, “Sir John Langborn”
Dr., afterwards Sir John Bowring, in the life of that diligent eccentric “codificator,” Jeremy Bentham (The Works of Jeremy Bentham, now first collected under the superintendence of his executor, John Bowring, Vol. XI, pp. 80, 81), thus alludes to some of his pets: “Bentham was very fond of animals, particularly ‘pussies,’ as he called them, ‘when they had domestic virtues;’ but he had no particular affection for the common race of cats. He had one, however, of which he used to boast that he had ‘made a man of him,’ and whom he was wont to invite to eat macaroni at his own table. This puss got knighted, and rejoiced in the name of Sir John Langborn. In his early days, he was a frisky, inconsiderate, and, to say the truth, somewhat profligate gentleman; and had, according to the report of his patron, the habit of seducing light and giddy young ladies of his own race into the garden of Queen’s Square Place; but tired at last, like Solomon, of pleasures and vanities, he became sedate and thoughtful—took to the church, laid down his knightly title, and was installed as the Reverend John Langborn. He gradually obtained a great reputation for sanctity and learning, and a doctor’s degree was conferred upon him. When I knew him, in his declining days, he bore no other name than the Reverend Doctor John Langborn; and he was alike conspicuous for his gravity and philosophy. Great respect was invariably shown his reverence; and it was supposed he was not far off from a miter, when old age interfered with his hopes and honors. He departed amidst the regrets of his many friends, and was gathered to his fathers, and to eternal rest, in a cemetery in Milton’s Garden (Jeremy Bentham’s house in Queen’s Square was that which had been occupied by the great poet).
“‘I had a cat,’ he said, ‘at Hendon, which used to follow me about even in the street. George Wilson was very fond of animals too. I remember a cat following him as far as Staines. There was a beautiful pig at Hendon, which I used to rub with my stick. He loved to come and lie down to be rubbed, and took to following me like a dog. I had a remarkably intellectual cat, who never failed to attend one of us when we went round the garden. He grew quite a tyrant, insisting on being fed and on being noticed. He interrupted my labors. Once he came with a most hideous yell, insisting on the door being opened. He tormented Jack (Colls) so much, that Jack threw him out of the window. He was so clamorous that it could not be borne, and means were found to send him to another world. His moral qualities were most despotic—his intellectual extraordinary; but he was a universal nuisance.”
“‘From my youth I was fond of cats, as I am still. I was once playing with one in my grandmother’s room. I had heard the story of cats having nine lives, and being sure of falling on their legs; and I threw the cat out of the window on the grass-plot. When it fell it turned towards me, looked in my face and mewed. “Poor thing!” I said, “thou art reproaching me with my unkindness.” I have a distinct recollection of all these things. Cowper’s story of his hares had the highest interest for me when young; for I always enjoyed the society of tame animals. Wilson had the same taste—so had Romilly, who kept a noble puss, before he came into great business. I never failed to pay it my respects. I remember accusing Romilly of violating the commandment in the matter of cats. My fondness for animals exposed me to many jokes.’”
Bisset and His Musical Cats
S. Bisset, to whom we referred before, was a Scotchman, born at Perth. He went to London as a shoemaker; but afterwards turned a broker. About 1739 he turned his attention to the teaching of animals. He was very successful, and among the subjects of his experiments were three young cats. Wilson, in his Eccentric Mirror (Vol. I, No. 3. p. 27), has recorded that “he taught these domestic tigers to strike their paws in such directions on the dulcimer, as to produce several tunes, having music-books before them, and squalling at the same time in different keys or tones, first, second, and third, by way of concert. In such a city as London these feats could not fail of making some noise. His house was every day crowded, and great interruption given to his business. Among the rest, he was visited by an exhibitor of wonders. Pinchbeck advised him to a public exhibition of his animals at the Haymarket, and even promised, on receiving a moiety, to be concerned in the exhibition. Bisset agreed, but the day before the performance, Pinchbeck declined, and the other was left to act for himself. The well-known Cats’ Opera was advertised in the Haymarket; the horse, the dog, the monkeys, and the cats went through their several parts with uncommon applause, to crowded houses, and in a few days Bisset found himself possessed of nearly a thousand pounds to reward his ingenuity.”
Constant, Chateaubriand, and the Cat
“Benjamin Constant was accustomed to write in a closet on the third story. Beside him sat his estimable wife, and on his knee his favorite cat; this feline affection he entertained in common with Count de Chateaubriand” (Times, 18 Dec. 1830, quoted by Southey, Common-Place Book, IV, p. 489).
Liston the Surgeon and His Cat
Robert Liston, the great surgeon, was, it seems, very fond of a cat. Dr. Forbes Winslow asks, “Who has not seen Liston’s favorite cat Tom? This animal is consi
dered to be a unique specimen of the feline tribe; and so one would think, to see the passionate fondness which he manifests for it. This cat is always perched on Liston’s shoulder, at breakfast, dinner, and tea, in his carriage, and out of his carriage. It is quite ludicrous to witness the devotion which the great operator exhibits towards his favorite” (Physic and Physicians, a medical sketchbook, Vol. II, p. 363 [1839]).
Liston was a curious man. He often called on his friends as early as six o’clock in the morning. In most cases, such calls must have been visits of formality or quiet jokes at the lazy manners of most men of the present age. We know one person whom he called on usually at this early hour. It would be more healthy for the young, if they would imitate this talented surgeon. We may here say that he used to allow one particular nail to grow long. It was a nail he used to guide his knife when operating. When at college in 1833 or 1834, we heard a student, who knew this clever operator well, happily apply the double-entendre, “homo ad unguem factus,” a phrase, Dr. Carson, our noble rector at the High School, taught us to translate “an accomplished man.”
The Banker Mitchell’s Antipathy to Kittens
Mr. J. T. Smith, once Keeper of the Prints in the British Museum, author of The Life and Times of Nollekens, the Royal Academician (A Book for a Rainy Day, p. 103; old Smith was a regular hunter after legacies, and like all such was often disappointed. His Nollekens is a fine example), tells a story of Mr. Matthew Mitchell, a banker, who collected prints.
“Mr. Mitchell had a most serious antipathy to a kitten. He could sit in a room without experiencing the least emotion from a cat; but directly he perceived a kitten, his flesh shook on his bones, like a snail in vinegar. I once relieved him from one of these paroxysms by taking a kitten out of the room; on my return he thanked me, and declared his feelings to be insupportable upon such an occasion. Long subsequently, I asked him whether he could in any way account for this agitation. He said he could not, adding that he experienced no such sensations upon seeing a full-grown cat; but that a kitten, after he had looked at it for a minute or two, in his imagination grew to the size of an overpowering elephant.”
The Third Cat Story Megapack: 25 Frisky Feline Tales, Old and New Page 28
