Cats in Space and Other Places

by Bill Fawcett

  Below the transparency, Spar saw a horrible tableau. Suzy was strapped to a bright metal rack guyed by shrouds. She was very pale and her eyes were closed. From the side of her neck went a red sipping-tube which forked into five branches. Four of the branches went into the red mouths of Crown, Rixende, Phanette, and Doucette. The fifth was shut by a small metal clip, and beyond it Almodie floated cowering, hands over her eyes.

  Crown said softly, "We want it all. Strip her, Rixie."

  Rixende clipped shut the end of her tube and swam to Suzy. Spar expected her to remove the blue culottes and bra, but instead she simply began to massage one of Suzy's legs, pressing always from ankle toward waist, driving her remaining blood nearer her neck.

  Crown removed his sipping tube from his lips long enough to say, "Ahh, good to the last drop." Then he had mouthed the blood that had spurted out in the interval and had the tube in place again.

  Phanette and Doucette convulsed with soundless giggles.

  Almodie peered between her parted fingers, out of her mass of platinum hair, then scissored them shut again.

  After a while Crown said, "That's all we'll get, Phan and Doucie, feed her to the big chewer. If you meet anyone in the passageway, pretend she's drunk. Afterward we'll get Doc to dose us high, and give him a little brew if he behaves, then we'll drink Spar."

  Spar had his wrist knot more than halfway to his teeth. Hellhound kept watching eagerly for movement, unable to see movement that slow. Slaver made tiny gray globes beside his fangs.

  Phanette and Doucette opened the hatch and steered Suzy's dead body through it.

  Embracing Rixende, Crown said expansively toward Doc, "Well, isn't it the right thing, old man? Nature bloody in tooth and claw, a wise one said. They've poisoned everything there." He pointed toward the smoky orange round sliding out of sight. "They're still fighting, but they'll soon all be dead. So death should be the rule too for this gimcrack, so-called survival ship. Remember they are aboard her. When we've drunk the blood of everyone aboard Windrush, including their blood, we'll drink our own, if our own isn't theirs."

  Spar thought, Crown thinks too much in they's. The knot was close to his teeth. He heard the big chewer start to grind.

  In the empty next cabin, Spar saw Drake and Fenner, clad once more as brewos, swimming toward the open hatch.

  But Crown saw them too. "Get 'em, Hellhound," he directed, pointing. "It's our command."

  The big black dog bulleted from his shroud through the open hatch. Drake pointed something at him. The dog went limp.

  Chuckling softly, Crown took by one tip a swastika with curved, gleaming, razor-sharp blades and sent it spinning off. It curved past Spar and Doc, went through the open hatch, missed Drake and Fenner—and Hellhound—and struck the wall of stars.

  There was a rush of wind, then the emergency hatch smacked shut, Spar saw Drake, Kenner, and Hellhound, wavery through the transparent pliofilm, spew blood, bloat, burst bloodily open. The empty cabin they had been in disappeared. Windrush had a new wall and Crown's Hole was distorted.

  Far beyond, growing ever tinier, the swastika spun toward the stars.

  Phanette and Doucette came back. "We fed in Suzy. Someone was coming, so we beat it." The big chewer stopped grinding.

  Spar bit cleanly through his wrist lashings and immediately doubled over to bite his ankles loose.

  Crown dove at him. Pausing to draw knives, the four girls did the same.

  Phanette, Doucette, and Rixende went limp. Spar had the impression that small black balls had glanced from their skulls.

  There wasn't time to bite his feet loose, so he straightened. Crown hit his chest as Almodie bit his feet.

  Crown and Spar giant-swung around the shroud. Then Almodie had cut Spar's ankles loose. As they spun off along the tangent, Spar tried to knee Crown in the groin, but Crown twisted and evaded the blow as they moved toward the inboard wall.

  There was the snick of Crown's knife unfolding. Spar saw the dark wrist and grabbed it. He butted at Crown's jaw. Crown evaded. Spar set his teeth in Crown's neck and bit.

  Blood covered Spar's face, spurted over it. He spat out a hunk of flesh. Crown convulsed. Spar fought off the knife. Crown went limp. That the pressure in a man should work against him.

  Spar shook the blood from his face. Through its beads, he saw Keeper and Kim side by side. Almodie was clutching his ankles. Phanette, Doucette, Rixende floated.

  Keeper said proudly. "I shot them with my gun for drunks. I knocked them out. Now I'll cut their throats, if you wish."

  Spar said, "No more throat-cutting. No more blood." Shaking off Almodie s hands, he took off for Doc, picking up Doucette's floating knife by the way,

  He slashed Doc's lashings and cut the gag from his face.

  Meanwhile Kim hissed, "Sstole and ssecreted Keeper's sscrip from the boxx. Ashshured him you sstole it, Sspar. You and Ssuzzy. Sso he came. Keeper izz a shshlemiel."

  Keeper said, "I saw Suzy's foot going into the big chewer. I knew it by its anklet of hearts. After that I had the courage to kill Crown or anyone. I loved Suzy."

  Doc cleared his throat and croaked, "Moonmist." Spar found a triple pouch and Doc sucked it all. Doc said, "Crown spoke the truth. Windrush is a plastic survival ship from Earth. Earth"—he motioned toward the dull orange round disappearing aft in the window—"poisoned herself with smog pollution and nuclear war. She spent gold for war, plastic for survival. Best forgotten. Windrush went mad. Understandably. Even with the Lethean rickettsia, or Styx ricks, as you call it. Thought Windrush was the cosmos. Crown kidnapped me to get my drugs, kept me alive to know the doses."

  Spar looked at Keeper. "Clean up here," he ordered. "Feed Crown to the big chewer."

  Almodie pulled herself from Spar's ankles to his waist. "There was a second survival ship. Circumluna. When Windrush went mad, my father and mother—and you— were sent here to investigate and cure. But my father died and you got Styx ricks. My mother died just before I was given to Crown. She sent you Kim."

  Kim hissed, "My fforebear ccame from Ccircumluna to Windrushsh, too. Great-grandmother. Taught me the fliguress for Windrushsh . . . Radiuss from moon-ccenter, two thoussand five hundred miless. Period, ssixx hourss—sso, the sshort dayss. A terranth izz the time it takess Earth to move through a coonsstellatinn, and sso on."

  Doc said, "So, Spar, you're the only one who remembers without cynicism. You'll have to take over. It's all yours, Spar."

  Spar had to agree.

  Schrödinger's Cat

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  As things appear to be coming to some sort of climax, I have withdrawn to this place. It is cooler here, and nothing moves fast.

  On the way here I met a married couple who were coming apart. She had pretty well gone to pieces, but he seemed, at first glance, quite hearty. While he was telling me that he had no hormones of any kind, she pulled herself together, and by supporting her head in the crook of her right knee and hopping on the toes of the right foot, approached us shouting, "Well, what's wrong with a person trying to express themselves?" The left leg, the arms and the trunk, which had remained lying in the heap, twitched and jerked in sympathy.

  "Great legs," the husband pointed out, looking at the slim ankle. My wife has great legs."

  A cat has arrived, interrupting my narrative. It is a striped yellow tom with white chest and paws. He has long whiskers and yellow eyes, I never noticed before that cats had whiskers above their eyes; is that normal? There is no way to tell. As he had gone to sleep on my knee, I shall proceed.

  Where?

  Nowhere, evidently. Yet the impulse to narrate remains. Many things are not worth doing, but almost anything is worth telling. In any case, I have a severe congenital case of Ethica laboris puritanica, or Adam's Disease. It is incurable except by total decephalization. I even like to dream when asleep, and to try and recall my dreams: it assures me that I haven't wasted seven or eight hours just lying there. Now here I am, lying, here. Hard at it.

&
nbsp; Well, the couple I was telling you about finally broke up. The pieces of him trotted around bouncing and cheeping, like little chicks, but she was finally reduced to nothing but a mass of nerves; rather like fine chicken- wire, in fact, but hopelessly tangled.

  So I came on, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, and grieving. This grief is with me still. I fear it is part of me, like foot or loin or eye, or may even be myself: for I seem to have no other self, nothing further, nothing that lies outside the borders of grief.

  Yet I don't know what I grieve for: my wife? my husband? my children, or myself? I can't remember. Most dreams are forgotten, try as one will to remember. Yet later music strikes the note and the harmonic rings along the mandolin-strings of the mind, and we find tears in our eyes. Some note keeps playing that makes me want to cry; but what for? I am not certain.

  The yellow cat, who may have belonged to the couple that broke up, is dreaming. His paws twitch now and then, and once he makes a small, suppressed remark with his mouth shut. I wonder what a cat dreams of, and to whom he was speaking just then. Cats seldom waste words. They are quiet beasts. They keep their counsel, they reflect. They reflect all day, and at night their eyes reflect. Overbred Siamese cats may be as noisy as little dogs, and then people say, "They're talking," but the noise is further from speech than is the deep silence of the hound or the tabby. All this cat can say is meow, but maybe in his silences he will suggest to me what it is that I have lost, what I am grieving for, I have a feeling that he knows. That's why he came here. Cats look out for Number One.

  It was getting awfully hot. I mean, you could touch less and less. The stove-burners, for instance; now, I know that stove-burners always used to get hot, that was their final cause, they existed in order to get hot. But they began to get hot without having been turned on. Electric units or gas rings, there they'd be when you came into the kitchen for breakfast, all four of them glaring away, the air above them shaking like clear jelly with the heat waves. It did no good to turn them off, because they weren't on in the first place. Besides, the knobs and dials were also hot, uncomfortable to the touch.

  Some people tried hard to cool them off. The favorite technique was to turn them on. It worked sometimes, but you could not count on it. Others investigated the phenomenon, tried to get at the root of it, the cause. They were probably the most frightened ones, but man is most human at his most frightened. In the face of the hot stove-burners they acted with exemplary coolness. They studied, they observed. They were like the fellow in Michelangelo's "Last Judgment" who has clapped his hands over his face in horror as the devils drag him down to Hell—but only over one eye. The other eye is busy looking. It's all he can do, but he does it. He observes. Indeed, one wonders if Hell would exist if he did not look at it. However, neither he nor the people I am talking about had enough time left to do much about it. And then finally of course there were the people who did not try to do or think anything about it at all.

  When hot water came out of the cold-water taps one morning, however, even people who had blamed it all on the Democrats began to feel a more profound unease. Before long, forks and pencils and wrenches were too hot to handle without gloves; and cars were really terrible. It was like opening the floor of an oven going full blast, to open the door of your car. And by then, other people almost scorched your fingers off. A kiss was like a branding iron. Your child's hair flowed along your hand like fire.

  Here, as I said, it is cooler; and, as a matter of fact, this animal is cool. A real cool cat. No wonder it's pleasant to pet his fur. Also he moves slowly, at least for the most part, which is all the slowness one can reasonably expect of a cat. He hasn't that frenetic quality most creatures acquired—all they did was ZAP and gone. They lacked presence. I suppose birds always tended to be that way, but even the hummingbird used to halt for a second in the very center of his metabolic frenzy, and hang, still as a hub, present, above the fuchsias—then gone again, but you knew something was there besides the blurring brightness. But it got so that even robins and pigeons, the heavy impudent birds, were a blur; and as for swallows, they cracked the sound barrier. You knew of swallows only by the small, curved sonic booms that looped about the eaves of old houses in the evening.

  Worms shot like subway trains through the dirt of gardens, among the writhing roots of roses.

  You could scarcely lay a hand on children, by then: too fast to catch, too hot to hold. They grew up before your eyes.

  But then, maybe that's always been true.

  I was interrupted by the cat, who woke and said meow once, then jumped down from my lap and leaned against my legs diligently. This is a cat who knows how to get fed. He also knows how to jump. There was a lazy fluidity to his leap, as if gravity affected him less than it does other creatures. As a matter of fact there were some localized cases, just before I left, of the failure of gravity; but this quality in the cat's leap was something quite else. I am not yet in such a state of confusion that I can be alarmed by grace, Indeed, I found it reassuring. While I was opening a can of sardines, a person arrived.

  Hearing the knock, I thought it might be the mailman. I miss mail very much, so I hurried to the door and said, "Is it the mail?" A voice replied, "Yah!" I opened the door. He came in, almost pushing me aside in his haste. He dumped down an enormous knapsack he had been carrying, straightened up, massaged his shoulders, and said, "Wow!"

  "How did you get here?"

  He stared at me and repeated, "How?"

  At this, my thoughts concerning human and animal speech recurred to me, and I decided that this was probably not a man, but a small dog. (Large dogs seldom go yah, wow, how, unless it is appropriate to do so.)

  "Come on, fella," I coaxed him. "Come, come on, that's a boy, good doggie!" I opened a can of pork and beans for him at once, for he looked half-starved. He ate voraciously, gulping and lapping. When it was gone he said, "Wow!" several times. I was just about to scratch him behind the ears when he stiffened, his hackles bristling, and growled deep in his throat. He had noticed the cat.

  The cat had noticed him some time before, without interest, and was now sitting on a copy of The Well- Tempered Clavichord washing sardine oil off its whiskers.

  "Wow!" the dog, whom I had thought of calling Rover, barked. "Wow! Do you know what that is? That's Schrödinger's cat!"

  "No, it's not; not any more; it's my cat," I said, unreasonably offended.

  "Oh, well, Schrödinger's dead, of course, but it's his cat. I've seen hundreds of pictures of it. Erwin Schrodinger, the great physicist, you know. Oh, wow! To think of finding it here!"

  The cat looked coldly at him for a moment, and began to wash its left shoulder with negligent energy. An almost religious expression had come into Rover's face. "It was meant," he said in a low, impressive tone. "Yah. It was meant. It can't be a mere coincidence. It's too improbable. Me, with the box; you, with the cat, to meet—here— now." He looked up at me, his eyes shining with happy fervor. "Isn't it wonderful?" he said. "I'll get the box set up right away." And he started to tear open his huge knapsack.

  While the cat washed its front paws, Rover unpacked. While the cat washed its tail and belly, regions hard to reach gracefully, Rover put together what he had unpacked, a complex task. When he and the cat finished their operations simultaneously and looked at me, I was impressed. They had come out even, to the very second. Indeed it seemed that something more than chance was involved. I hoped it was not myself.

  "What's that?" I asked, pointing to a protuberance on the outside of the box. I did not ask what the box was, as it was quite clearly a box.

  "The gun," Rover said with excited pride.

  "The gun?"

  "To shoot the cat."

  "To shoot the cat?"

  "Or to not shoot the cat. Depending on the photon." "The photon?"

  "Yah! It's Schrödinger's great Gedankenexperiment. You see, there's a little emitter here. At Zero Time, five seconds after the lid of the box is closed, it will em
it one photon. The photon will strike a half-silvered mirror. The quantum mechanical probability of the photon passes through the mirror is exactly one-half, isn't it? So! If the photon passes through, the trigger will be activated and the gun will fire. If the photon is deflected, the trigger will not be activated and the gun will not fire. Now, you put the cat in. The cat is in the box. You close the lid. You go away! You stay away! What happens?" Rover's eyes were bright.

  "The cat gets hungry?"

  "The cat gets shot—or not shot," he said, seizing my arm, though not, fortunately, in his teeth. "But the gun is silent, perfectly silent. The box is soundproof. There is no way to know whether or not the cat has been shot until you lift the lid of the box. There is NO way! Do you see how central this is to the whole of quantum theory? Before Zero Time the whole system, on the quantum level or on our level, is nice and simple. But after Zero Time the whole system can be represented only by a linear combination of two waves. We cannot predict the behavior of the photon, and thus, once it has behaved, we cannot predict the state of the system it has determined. We cannot predict it! God plays dice with the world! So it is beautifully demonstrated that if you desire certainty, any certainty, you must create it yourself!"

  "How?"

  "By lifting the lid of the box, of course," Rover said, looking at me with sudden disappointment, perhaps a touch of suspicion, like a Baptist who finds he has been talking church matters not to another baptist as he thought, but to a Methodist, or even, God forbid, an Episcopalian. "To find out whether the cat is dead or not."