CHAPTER 11

CHESTER’S LOG: DR. VLAST’S OFFICE

Imagine the vet making such a fuss about the shiny stuff in our poop! I was surprised the doctor hadn’t deduced that the glittery bits only showed up in our leavings when we ate the keka bugs. They didn’t make us sick. They were delicious, and I for one always felt better after eating one. It was fun to hunt them too. They made a tiny sound when they scuttled, their crunchy shells clicking, that sounded like keka keka keka, the sound we cats make when watching prey. I could say that’s how I knew to call them keka bugs but the truth is that it just came to me, the same way the boy’s thoughts and activities came to me in dreams and sometimes even while I was awake, if the need was great.

Sometimes they didn’t want to be eaten, that was true, and that led to a lot of hacking up, but nothing serious or prolonged. The shiny bits that didn’t digest were certainly nothing to panic over.

I was very anxious to please the girl and the vet that day, because I hoped another visit meant the boy would be there. He had been in my dreams every time I closed my eyes, and I knew he was thinking of me. I thought we’d be together again soon. The girl was kind enough, but her friends talked of selling me—they didn’t think I could understand them, but I could, of course. I may not share dreams with everyone, and require a lot of cat antics to make myself understood to people who are not my boy, but having been connected with him from my birth, I understood his language perfectly well. Naturally, my vocabulary was limited to words he knew, and I had only a sketchy notion of many human concepts, but I considered those to be the humans’ concern and of no interest to me or my species. However, I understood perfectly well what the vet meant when he said all animals might be “destroyed.” That was not good, and I was glad to be able to straighten him out about the connection between our “symptoms” and our prey.

I was somewhat deflated when Mother asked, “Why did you catch a keka bug for the doctor, dear? Humans don’t eat those, you know.” I had to explain my act of selfless heroism to her—after all, keka bugs are delicious and I gave that one away without knowing if I’d ever catch another one.

Although I was disappointed that the boy had not appeared in person at the clinic by the time we left, as I’d hoped, I continued to feel his presence with me, as I had since we were parted.

I danced back to the ship, running circles around Mother, pleased with my accomplishment and certain that there never was a young cat cleverer than I. I was sure I had been chosen to spend my life doing Great Things.

But shortly after we returned to the ship, it departed the space station. We floated in what Mother called “free-fall,” and although I was frightened at first, I soon started to enjoy it. Then someone turned on the gravity again, gradually, so that we were lowered to the deck.

The separation happened then, and it wasn’t gradual. It was as if someone had snipped the harness that bound the boy and I together, the way the harness on the ship bound Mother and I together.

Without warning, the boy’s warm bright presence vanished, leaving only a cold hollow void. I could not hear his thoughts or see what he was doing. I curled up for a nap, thinking to find him while I slept, but he was not in my dreams, which were instead of wild canines breaking into the barn, hunting tender kittens, then stalking the space station while they somehow brandished laser rifles while standing on their hind legs. They clamored at the ship’s hatches and my mother cried. My boy had been with me almost since birth and now he wasn’t! It was as if I was suddenly blinded, or had lost my paws.

“Get up, you lazy kitten,” Mother chided me, unaware of my loss. “You’ve missed one patrol. Kibble let you slide since you did that showy bit of killing at the doctor’s office, but it’s time you earned your keep again.”

“Let me sleep,” I whimpered in return. “I’m trying to find the boy.”

“You can’t find him, you silly child, because he’s back at home. I tried to warn you not to get too attached but you never listened to me. The boy and his father were our abductors. They are not our people.”

“The boy is my person,” I cried. “And I want him back.”

“That is foolishness. We are back where we belong, with Kibble and the crew, doing the job we were born and bred to do. And it’s about time you got off your tail and did it. I thought you were over this nonsense.”

“Mother, without the boy, the canines will get us,” I told her, remembering my dream. “Like they got Git and Buttercup.”

“Don’t be daft. There are no canines here, and if there were, the entire crew would protect us. We’re quite valuable, you know. At least, I am, and you will be if you start performing your duties.”

I didn’t care. The boy was not to be found during dreams or waking, so what did it matter? I wanted him, and until someone produced him, they could expect whatever they wanted from me but I wasn’t interested in cooperating.

Mother was quite stubborn, and soon used her feline wiles to convince Kibble to load me into the kitten harness and attach us to each other. I lay down and wouldn’t move, but Mother dragged me along.

We paused outside the service opening in the bulkhead, while Mother sniffed and scratched, searching for the source of the telltale scrabbling from within.

“This close to the station, there is always more hunting to do,” she instructed me. “As we get farther from port, there are fewer and then no creatures left for me to hunt. By then it is time to visit with the crew. There are so many of them, and they all want me to spend time with them. Sometimes it is quite draining, but I do my best not to disappoint my public.”

Kibble opened the service door for us and unhitched my harness, scratching my ears. “Be a good boy, Chester, and follow Chessie’s lead,” she told me, shoving me inside and closing the door behind me. The passage was only one cat wide, with no extra room even for a kitten as small as I was.

But I confess it smelled intriguingly of rodent and keka bugs. The floor lacked claw holds, and one could feel the ship’s movement far more clearly than from within the corridors. With no one but Mother there to notice if I failed to live up to her standards as a hunter, there was little point in further demonstration of my lack of worth as a ship’s cat. I suppose I thought they would send me back to the boy if I was not what they expected, but I underestimated how much they hoped to profit from acquiring me.

So that day I hunted and made my mother proud. With each kill, she would pick up our adversary in her mouth and carry it back to the service door and scratch for Kibble to open it. When one passage had been cleaned, we were let into the next.

I cooperated. I did what they wanted me to do. But I was not happy about it, and I let Mother take credit for the hunt.

When Kibble tried to pet me and tell me what a fine cat I was—as if I didn’t already know that—I took a swing at her with my lethal right paw and drew blood. She looked as if she were going to cry, not because I had hurt her hand to any great degree, but because she expected me to be as affectionate with her as Mother was. Well, it wasn’t going to happen. The boy was my person, and I had no room for others, especially not those responsible for separating us.

Mother cuffed me again, but though I yowled as if she’d gutted me, I didn’t care. Mother was as much to blame as anyone. Most of my life she had been ill or idle. Git had taught me more than she had. It seemed as if all she did was cuff me or scold me or wake me up from my naps. She wouldn’t let me nurse anymore. In fact, since the doctor had fixed her, she didn’t smell exactly like she should have. I was thoroughly dissatisfied with everyone and intended to let them know about it.

I was still yowling while Kibble washed her scratch and scooped me up, wrapping me in a towel except for one leg. She tucked me under her elbow, and try as I might, I couldn’t wriggle free. I was little more than three months old and no match for a seasoned Cat Person. She pulled out something metal, sharp, and shiny.

“Mother! Help!” I cried. “She is seeking revenge for that little scratch, she is going to chop off my leg! Save me! Save me!”

“Do be still,” Mother said, opening one eye. “I need my beauty sleep.”

“No! No! Mother, help me! Oh no, she’s starting with my toes—she’s going to torment me to death, Mother, just as Git said no well-brought-up cat does to its prey. It was only a little scratch! She took liberties with my fur! I was only defending myself. No-no!”

“Janina, will you shut that brat up?” a gruff male voice demanded.

I looked up, afraid another attacker would join Kibble in my torture. I felt a brief tug, heard a snip, and when I looked back, the sharp pointed useful bit of my middle claw was gone! Amputated! I can scarcely relate the indescribable horror of that moment. And then she pressed another toe and another claw poked out, entirely against my will. I cried, I howled, but to no avail. She was without mercy. I twisted and squirmed and freed my back paws and tail, but her shipsuit lent her impressionable flesh armor as impervious to my claws as a turtle’s shell would have been.

My hind legs churned and I tried to back out of her suffocating embrace, but once more there was the tug and snip and another claw fell away from my poor mutilated paw. Then three more times in quick succession, and suddenly my paw and leg were free! Free! She had weakened at last. Now she would feel my wrath and be forced to release me.

But alas, it was not to be. Her fingers somehow entangled my disfigured paw in the towel and pounced upon the other foreleg.

I wriggled and cried for mercy, humiliated to be bested by a human who was not even mine. But the worst was to come when she flipped me over just as Mother had earlier smacked rodents into submission, imprisoned one of my free hind paws in the folds of the restraint, and grabbed my right rear leg in a grip so tight I knew she would snap it if I continued trying to pull away from her. Although she was not the boy, I had thought, up until then, that she was adequate as far as humans went. Mother was fond of her, but all I could think was that Kibble had concealed her brutish nature until my attack brought it forth. When I felt her grip loosen this time, I kicked hard and connected with her hand again, but she just laughed, grabbed the paw, and tucked it back into the towel before starting on my other leg. I got in one kick, but all that did was cause her aim to miss, and this time there was horrible pain shooting up my leg, causing me to release the contents of my bladder.

“Kitten, you are a trial and a tribulation,” Kibble said to me, and gripped me tighter, her elbow continuing to clutch me to her side while my urine soaked into the towel and my fur. She wiped her hands—one on my towel, one on her trouser leg—and clipped my remaining claws while I continued crying unheeded for mercy.

Then she set me down and went once more to the basin, where she washed her hands. I ran to Mother for comfort, thinking that when she saw what the girl she loved so foolishly had done to me, she would surely relent and groom me lovingly as she had when I was younger. But instead she flattened her ears and hissed at me, and I jumped back.

Cruel hands caught me around the middle and lifted me to the basin. The wicked young woman took a cloth and rubbed it over my soiled fur, then reached for something else—a gun, not as long as the one Jubal’s mother had wielded, but the same general shape. She pointed it at the wet fur and I twisted to see what she was doing. Her finger moved, something clicked, and the gun went off, not barking but growling and blowing warm wind into my fur. I knew it was some sort of death ray, the kind the boy had read about in his comic books. But it didn’t kill me, and in fact I am ashamed to admit it actually felt rather nice.

When she at last set me down and allowed me to rest from her evil ministrations, I found I was exhausted from the abuse and fell straight to sleep. But the horrors of waking were nothing compared to the pain of a restless, searching sleep where no boy joined with me no matter how hard I tried to find him. When I awoke, desolately lonely, I vowed that my attack of that day would be nothing compared to the campaign of terror I intended to wreak on the heartless hapless humans who held me captive. They thwarted my will at their own peril.

I awoke at a different hour than Mother and Kibble, who were attuned to each other’s sleep patterns. First I took my revenge on the girl, turning one of her boots over and crawling inside it to relieve my bowels. It is an acknowledged fact that cats could teach entire invaded civilizations a thing or two about guerrilla warfare. Which does not mean that we usually have anything against apes, simply that we are masters at effectively deploying the weapons that our bodies provide against the sensitivities of our adversaries.

Once I had taken care of Kibble’s boots, I refueled at the water dish, then used Mother’s cat flap to exit our quarters. The captain’s boots were next. He was the one who insisted I be snatched from the bosom of my boy and forced aboard his ship. He would pay dearly for that.