The ledge was about two feet wide. To its edge Madame Phloi moved warily, nose down and tail high. Ten stories below there were moving objects but nothing of interest, she decided. Walking daintily along the extreme edge to avoid the broken glass, she ventured in the direction of the fat man’s apartment, impelled by some half-forgotten curiosity.
His window stood open and unscreened, and Madame Phloi peered in politely. There, sprawled on the floor, lay the fat man himself, snorting and heaving his immense paunch in a kind of rhythm. It always alarmed her to see a human on the floor, which she considered feline domain. She licked her nose apprehensively and stared at him with enormous eyes, one iris hypnotically off-center. In a dark corner of the room something fluttered and squawked, and the fat man waked.
“Sherrff! Get out of here!” he shouted, struggling to his feet.
In three leaps Madame Phloi crossed the ledge back to her own window and pushed through the screen to safety. Looking back to see if the fat man might be chasing her and being reassured that he wasn’t, she washed Thapthim’s ears and her own paws and sat down to wait for pigeons.
Like any normal cat, Madame Phloi lived by the Rule of Three. She resisted every innovation three times before accepting it, tackled an obstacle three times before giving up, and tried each new activity three times before tiring of it. Consequently, she made two more sallies to the pigeon promenade and eventually convinced Thapthim to join her.
Together they peered over the edge at the world below. The sense of freedom was intoxicating. Recklessly, Thapthim made a leap at a low-flying pigeon and landed on his mother’s back. She cuffed his ear in retaliation. He poked her nose. They grappled and rolled over and over on the ledge, oblivious of the long drop below them, taking playful nips of each other’s hide and snarling guttural expressions of glee.
Suddenly and instinctively Madame Phloi scrambled to her feet and crouched in a defensive position. The fat man was leaning from his window.
“Here, kitty, kitty,” he was saying in one of those despised falsetto voices, offering some tidbit in a saucer. The Madame froze, but Thapthim turned his beautiful trusting eyes on the stranger and advanced along the ledge. Purring and waving his tail cordially, he walked into the trap. It all happened in a matter of seconds: the saucer with withdrawn, and a long black box was swung at Thapthim like a ball bat, sweeping him off the ledge and into space. He was silent as he fell.
When the family came home, laughing and chattering, with their arms full of packages, they knew at once something was amiss. No one greeted them at the door. Madame Phloi hunched moodily on the windowsill staring at a hole in the screen, and Thapthim was not to be found.
“Look at the screen!” cried the gentle voice.
“I’ll bet he got out on the ledge.”
“Can you lean out and look? Be careful.”
“You hold Phloi.”
“Do you see him?”
“Not a sign of him! There’s a lot of glass scattered around, and the window’s broken next door.”
“Do you suppose that man . . .? I feel sick.”
“Don’t worry, dear. We’ll find him . . . There’s the doorbell! Maybe someone’s bringing him home.”
It was Charlie standing at the door. He fidgeted uncomfortably. “ ’Scuse me, folks,” he said. “You missin’ one of your kitties?”
“Yes! Have you found him?”
“Poor little guy,” said Charlie. “Found him lyin’ right under your windows—where the bushes is thick.”
“He’s dead!” the gentle voice moaned.
“Yes, ma’am. That’s a long way down.”
“Where is he now?”
“I got him down in the basement, ma’am. I’ll take care of him real nice. I don’t think you’d want to see the poor guy.”
Still Madame Phloi stared at the hole in the screen and waited for Thapthim. From time to time she checked the other windows, just to be sure. As time passed and he did not return, she looked behind the radiators and under the bed. She pried open the cupboard door where the pots and pans were stored. She tried to burrow her way into the closet. She sniffed all around the front door. Finally she stood in the middle of the living room and called loudly in a high-pitched, wailing voice.
Later that evening Charlie paid another visit to the apartment.
“Only wanted to tell you, ma’am, how nice I took care of him,” he said. “I got a box that was just the right size. A white box, it was. And I wrapped him up in a piece of old blue curtain. The color looked real pretty with his fur. And I buried the little guy right under your window behind the bushes.”
And still the Madame searched, returning again and again to watch the ledge from which Thapthim had disappeared. She scorned food. She rebuffed any attempts at consolation. And all night she sat wide-eyed and waiting in the dark.
The living-room window was now tightly closed, but the following day the Madame—after she was left by herself in the lonely apartment—went to work on the bedroom screens. One was new and hopeless, but the second screen was slightly corroded, and she was soon nosing through a slit that lengthened as she struggled out onto the ledge.
Picking her way through the broken glass, she approached the spot where Thapthim had vanished. And then it all happened again. There he was—the fat man—reaching forth with a saucer.
“Here, kitty, kitty.”
Madame Phloi hunched down and backed away.
“Kitty want some milk?” It was that ugly falsetto, but she didn’t run home this time. She crouched there on the ledge, a few inches out of reach.
“Nice kitty. Nice kitty.”
Madame Phloi crept with caution toward the saucer in the outstretched fist, and stealthily the fat man extended another hand, snapping his fingers as one would call a dog.
The Madame retreated diagonally—half-toward home and half-toward the dangerous brink.
“Here, kitty. Here, kitty,” he cooed, leaning farther out. But muttering, he said, “You dirty sneak! I’ll get you if it’s the last thing I ever do. Comin’ after my bird, weren’t you?”
Madame Phloi recognized danger with all her senses. Her ears went back, her whiskers curled, and her white underside hugged the ledge.
A little closer she moved, and the fat man made a grab for her. She jerked back a step, with unblinking eyes fixed on his sweating face. He was furtively laying the saucer aside, she noticed, and edging his fat paunch farther out the window.
Once more she advanced almost into his grasp, and again he lunged at her with both powerful arms.
The Madame leaped lightly aside.
“This time I’ll get you, you stinkin’ cat,” he cried, and raising one knee to the windowsill, he threw himself at Madame Phloi. As she slipped through his fingers, he landed on the ledge with all his weight.
A section of it crumbled beneath him. He bellowed, clutching at the air, and at the same time a streak of creamy brown flashed out of sight. The fat man was not silent as he fell.
As for Madame Phloi, she was found doubled in half in a patch of sunshine on her living-room carpet, innocently washing her fine brown tail.
The Mountain Cage
Pamela Sargent
Pamela Sargent has firmly established herself as one of the foremost writer/editors of her generation. Her well-known anthologies include Women of Wonder, More Women of Wonder, The New Women of Wonder, and, with Ian Watson, Afterlives. Her critically acclaimed novels include Cloned Lives, The Sudden Star, The Golden Space, Watchstar, Earth-seed, The Alien Upstairs, Eye of the Comet, Homeminds, The Shore of Women, and Venus of Dreams. Her short fiction has been collected in Starshadows and The Best of Pamela Sargent. Her most recent book is the novel Venus of Shadows. She lives in Binghamton, New York.
Here she gives us a novel perspective on the human misery of war, and paints a moving portrait of an upheaval so vast and terrible and fundamental that it affects even the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth—among which, of course, we must
most definitely number the cats.
* * *
Mewleen had found a broken mirror along the road. The shards glittered as she swiped at one with her paw, gazing intently at the glass. She meowed and hunched forward.
Hrurr licked one pale paw, wondering if Mewleen would manage to shatter the barrier, though he doubted that she could crawl through even if she did; the mirror fragments were too small. He shook himself, then padded over to her side.
Another cat, thick-furred, stared out at him from a jagged piece of glass. Hrurr tilted his head; the other cat did the same. He meowed; the other cat opened his mouth, but the barrier blocked the sound. A second cat, black and white, appeared near the pale stranger as Mewleen moved closer to Hrurr.
“She looks like you,” Hrurr said to his companion. “She even has a white patch on her head.”
“Of course. She is the Mewleen of that world.”
Hrurr narrowed his eyes. He had seen such cats before, always behind barriers, always out of reach. They remained in their own world, while he was in this one; he wondered if theirs was better.
Mewleen sat on her haunches. “Do you know what I think, Hrurr? There are moments when we are all between worlds, when the sights before us vanish and we stand in the formless void of possibility. Take one path, and a fat mouse might be yours. Take another, and a two-legs gives you milk and a dark place to sleep. Take a third, and you spend a cold and hungry night. At the moment before choosing, all these possibilities have the same reality, but when you take one path—”
“When you take one path, that’s that.” Hrurr stepped to one side, then pounced on his piece of glass, thinking that he might catch his other self-unaware, but the cat behind the barrier leaped up at him at the same instant. “It means that you weren’t going to take the other paths at all, so they weren’t really possibilities.”
“But they were for that moment.” Mewleen’s tail curled. “I see a branching. I see other worlds in which all possibilities exist. I’ll go back home today, but that cat there may make another choice.”
Hrurr put a paw on the shard holding his twin. That cat might still have a home.
“Come with me,” Mewleen said as she rolled in the road, showing her white belly. “My two-legged ones will feed you, and when they see that I want you with me, they’ll honor you and let you stay. They must serve me, after all.”
His tail twitched. He had grown restless even before losing his own two-legged creatures, before that night when others of their kind had come for them, dragging them from his house and throwing them inside the gaping mouth of a large, square metal beast. He had stayed away after that, lingering on the outskirts of town, pondering what might happen in a world where two-legged ones turned on one another and forgot their obligations to cats. He had gone back to his house only once; a banner with a black swastika in its center had been hung from one of the upper windows. He had seen such symbols often, on the upper limbs of people or fluttering over the streets; the wind had twisted the banner on his house, turning the swastika first into a soaring bird, then a malformed claw. A strange two-legs had chased him away.
“I want to roam,” he replied as he gazed up the road, wondering if it might lead him to the top of the mountain. “I want to see far places. It’s no use fighting it when I’m compelled to wander.”
Mewleen bounded toward him. “Don’t you know what this means?” She gestured at the broken mirror with her nose. “When a window to the other world is shattered, it’s a sign. This place is a nexus of possibilities, a place where you might move from one world to the next and never realize that you are lost to your own world.”
“Perhaps I’m meant to perform some task. That might be why I was drawn here.”
“Come with me. I offer you a refuge.”
“I can’t accept, Mewleen.” His ears twitched as he heard a distant purr, which rapidly grew into a roar.
Leaping from the road, Hrurr plunged into the grass; Mewleen bounded to the other side as a line of metal beasts passed them, creating a wind as they rolled by. Tiny flags bearing swastikas fluttered over the eyes of a few beasts; pale faces peered out from the shields covering the creatures’ entrails.
As the herd moved on up the road, he saw that Mewleen had disappeared among the trees.
###
Hrurr followed the road, slinking up the slope until he caught sight of the metal beasts again. They had stopped in the middle of the road; a gate blocked their progress.
Several two-legged ones in gray skins stood by the gate; two of them walked over to the first metal beast and peered inside its openings, then stepped back, raising their right arms as others opened the gate and let the first beast pass. The two moved on to the next beast, looking in at the ones inside, then raised their arms again. The flapping arms reminded Hrurr of birds; he imagined the men lifting from the ground, arms flapping as they drifted up in lopsided flight.
He scurried away from the road. The gray pine needles, dappled by light, cushioned his feet; ahead of him, winding among the trees, he saw a barbed-wire fence. His whiskers twitched in amusement; such a barrier could hardly restrain him. He squeezed under the lowest wire, carefully avoiding the barbs.
The light shifted; patches of white appeared among the black and gray shadows. The trees overhead sighed as the wind sang. “Cat! Cat!” The birds above were calling out their warnings as Hrurr sidled along below. “Watch your nests! Guard your young! Cat! Cat!”
“Oh, be quiet,” he muttered.
A blackbird alighted on a limb, out of reach. Hrurr clawed at the tree trunk, longing to taste blood. “Foolish cat,” the bird cawed, “I’ve seen your kind in the cities, crawling through rubble, scratching for crumbs and cowering as the storms rage and buildings crumble. The two-legged ones gather, and the world grows darker as the shining eagles shriek and the metal turtles crawl over the land. You think you’ll escape, but you won’t. The soil is ready to receive the dead.”
Hrurr clung to the trunk as the bird fluttered up a higher limb. He had heard such chatter from other birds, but had paid it no mind. “That doesn’t concern me,” he snarled. “There’s nothing like that here.” But he was thinking of the shattered mirror, and of what Mewleen had said.
“Foolish cat. Do you know where you are? The two-legged ones have scarred the mountain to build themselves a cage, and you are now inside it.”
“No cage can hold me,” Hrurr cried as the bird flew away. He jumped to the ground, clawing at the earth. I live, he thought, I live. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with piney air.
The light was beginning to fade; it would soon be night. He hunkered down in the shadows; he would have to prowl for some food. Below ground, burrowing creatures mumbled sluggishly to one another as they prepared for sleep.
###
In the morning, a quick, darting movement caught Hrurr’s attention. A small, grayish bird carelessly landed in front of him and began to peck at the ground.
He readied himself, then lunged, trapping the bird under his paws. She stared back at him, eyes wide with terror. He bared his teeth.
“Cruel creature,” the bird said.
“Not cruel. I have to eat, you know.” He had injured her; she fluttered helplessly. He swatted her gently with a paw.
“At least be quick about it. My poor heart will burst with despair. Why must you toy with me?”
“I’m giving you a chance to prepare yourself for death.”
“Alas,” the bird sang mournfully. “My mate will see me no more, and the winds will not sing to me again or lift me to the clouds.”
“You will dwell in the realm of spirits,” Hrurr replied, “where there are no predators or prey. Prepare yourself.” He bit down; as the bird died, he thought he heard the flutter of ghostly wings. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I have no choice in these matters. As I prey upon you, another will prey upon me. The world maintains its balance.” He could not hear her soul’s reply.
When he had eaten, he co
ntinued up the slope until he came to a clearing. Above him, a path wound up the mountainside, leading from a round, stone tower with a pointed roof to a distant chalet. The chalet sprawled; he imagined that the two-legs inside it was either a large creature or one who needed a lot of space. Creeping up to the nearer stone structure, he turned and looked down the slope.
In the valley, the homes of the two-legged ones were now no bigger than his paw; the river running down the mountainside was a ribbon. This, he thought, was how birds saw the world. To them, a two-legs was only a tiny creature rooted to the ground; a town was an anthill, and even the gray, misty mountains before him were only mounds. He suddenly felt as if he were gazing into an abyss, about to be separated from the world that surrounded him.
He crouched, resting his head on his paws. Two-legged ones had built the edifices of this mountain; such creatures were already apart from the world, unable even to hear what animals said to one another, incapable of a last, regretful communion with their prey, eating only what was stone dead. He had always believed that the two-legged ones were simply soulless beings whose instincts drove them into strange, incomprehensible behavior; they built, tore down, and built again, moving through the world as if in a dream. But now, as he gazed at the valley below, he began to wonder if the two-legged ones had deliberately separated themselves from the world by an act of will. Those so apart from others might come to think that they ruled the world, and their constructions, instead of being instinctive, might be a deliberate attempt to mold what was around them. They might view all the world as he viewed the tiny town below.
This thought was so disturbing that he bounded up, racing along the path and glorying in his speed until he drew closer to the chalet. His tail twitched nervously as he stared at the wide, glassy expanse on this side of the house. Above the wide window was a veranda; from there, he would look no bigger than a mouse—if he could be seen at all. Farther up the slope, still other buildings were nestled among the trees.
MAGICATS II Page 14
