The Third Cat Story Megapack. Damien Broderick

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СКАЧАТЬ against their enemy, sucking away its energy, binding its arms, muting its poisons and smashing its manipulators, gelding its frightful powers of reproduction.

      “Enough,” I said, finally, to the cat person who held her there. Perhaps half a minute had elapsed, or perhaps it was over sooner.

      He stood back, released her.

      Glory gazed upon the hot, healing face of my master. Already, at darting molecular speeds, the defanged poisons swept away into his blood stream for disposal. The lumps and weals of his face and forehead visibly subsided, paling. It would be days, perhaps longer, before his flesh recovered its beauty, but the lineaments were already written against the dark mud streaking his cheeks. He struggled to raise himself against the weight of the loam of Harvest, and I adjusted the surface, lifting him.

      Out of some access of hysterical memory, Glory sighed, watched the ugly mask fall away, and murmured in a daze:

      “Kyi maama kyi nnyabo, gyangu eno ngoyimba, kyi maama kyi nnyabo, gyangu eno ngodigida.”

      Without a glance over her shoulder at the taut, watching cats, she raised her floating white and gray skirts and clambered up onto the opened pod. She placed first her gnawed foot, with its absent heel and toes, into the thick mud, and then the other, whole foot, sliding forward on her behind to trap the Landgrave’s lower body between her strong thighs, and fell upon his breast.

      The mad thing began to laugh, a joyous, open laugh, and she lifted herself, slathered with mud, and kissed him this time for real, slathering his healing mouth with sweet kisses.

      I saw, then, that she was not mad. No longer mad.

      The Landgrave oofed.

      “Pardon me, madam, but I’m having a little trouble breathing.”

      She giggled, drew back, helped him sit up. “That better?”

      “Yes, thank you. We haven’t been introduced. I am Ullimus Wong, and I am delighted to make your acquaintance.”

      He smiled as he said it, and his smile, despite his remaining welts, was dazzling.

      “Oh yes, oh yes,” she said to him. She reached under the mud, scratched at her hidden limb. “That stings.” She frowned. “I am Gloriana Avid, and my mother is Grace Desdemona Merribelle Avid. You’ve probably heard of her.”

      Ullimus shook his head, and drying mud flew about the room.

      “I haven’t been keeping up with court affairs,” he said. “Sorry. As you see—”

      “We’ve got to get you out of this horrid mess and into a bath,” she said, thinking sensibly at last, for the first time in decades. She was unspeakably lovely, radiant with her vegetable life. “Here, somebody, give me a hand.”

      Daisy the mauser stepped forward, loaned her his wiry strong arm as she clambered down from the mud. She took a step on her whole right foot, and another on her nearly-whole left foot.

      “Oh dear god,” she cried, or whimpered. “Look what I’ve done now.”

      Probably she fainted. I was not watching her or the commotion in the room. I was attending to my healed master, the Landgrave.

      * * * *

      Everyone knows what happened next. Was Death to blame? I accept no culpability.

      “That cat of yours is making waves,” the Landgrave said one fine morning to the Landgravine. They sat outdoors under tall leafy shade, careful of Ullimus Wong’s pale, tender, vulnerable skin. He was plugged into a news circuit bearing word through the slipstream from far and wide in delayed time and extended space.

      “The mauser Daisy?” Glory ate a triangle of marmalade on crisp mango, and the pouring light split into rays of reddy yellow and sharp orange. “Bof!” Fingers free, mouth full, she let her hands part in dismissal, her slender shoulders shrugging. “We owe him for your life, dear heart, and for bringing us together, and that is a very great deal. But I cannot forgive his delinquency.”

      The detestable cat had abandoned Harvest more than a year earlier, taking with him all of his kind save three weary and elderly house mausers and those feline garden patrollers so hardened into their roles that they could not, would not take a chance on what Daisy called, perhaps with some irony, the glory road. Glory saw no glory in it, merely ingratitude and faithlessness.

      “Wherever he goes, wars die down,” said astonished Ullimus Wong, monitoring the news. “Conflicts fade into amicable, tough-minded negotiations. Old enemies embrace, however reluctantly. I have to tell you, I still don’t know who all these people are or their names—”

      “Use your Know,” she told him. “You really are an old fuddy-duddy, Ullie, at times.”

      If he winced, I was the only one acute enough to perceive it.

      “My people have a word for what’s happening,” he told her. And murmured the old, old words:

      When there is no desire,

      all things are at peace.

      If the peace has been shattered,

      how can one be content?

      One’s foes are not demons,

      but beings like oneself.

      One does not wish them personal harm.

      Nor does one rejoice in victory.

      How rejoice in victory

      and delight in the slaughter of men?

      “Or the slaughter of mausers, neither, I suppose,” Glory said slowly, as thoughtfully as she ever managed. “But my warrior cats lived for strife and contest. That creature Daisy—what a name, what a name!”

      “He does not go by that name any longer. Indeed, no.”

      “—he came to attention with some barbarity. What was it?” Her eyes lost focus, her hand reached for a pastry. It must be admitted that Gloriana Wong was growing stout, however beautifully. In part it was due to her pregnancy. She was old by the traditions of men and women, but the soil and special codons of her world and herself kept her fresh as a newly picked melon, glowing like dark plum jam. “My god, yes, that was it. He gelded his brother!”

      “The monster has turned over a new leaf, then,” the Landgrave informed her, smiling. I heard his heart’s pulse quicken. How he loved her! I understood in the abstract why that might be, but I retained my suspicions.

      “There is talk of an uprising on the Homeland world,” he said. “Peace and love. The old temptation, the old intoxication and illusion. Oh, the Lords and Ladies don’t remember how it was, as I do.” For a moment his face fell into a sort of memorious sorrow. I knew what he recalled, for I had been there also—the blood, the fire, the horror, the molecular viral machines of which he was the last living victim and vector.

      I made a throat-clearing sound. It startled them both. People tended to forget that I was there.

      “May I suggest something for your consideration?”

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