Blind Cat Dance

ALEXANDER JABLOKOV

With only a handful of stories, mostly for Asimov’s, and a few well-received novels, Alexander Jablokov established himself as one of the most highly regarded new writers of the nineties. His first novel, Carve the Sky, was released in 1991, and was followed by other successful novels such as A Deeper Sea, Nimbus, River of Dust, and Deepdrive, as well as a collection of his short fiction, The Breath of Suspension. Jablokov fell silent through the decade of the aughts, but in the last couple of years has been returning to print, releasing Brain Thief in 2010, his first novel in over ten years, and popping up in the magazines again with elegant, coolly pyrotechnic stories such as the one that follows, set in a future society that has developed a novel way of integrating the human and natural worlds, making the animals unable to perceive the human society around them, so that they think they’re in the middle of a forest when actually they’re in the middle of a crowded café. Of course, one immediately has to wonder what it is that the humans themselves are unable to see, although it’s brushing all around them.…

ENCOUNTER #1

CAFE KULFI

The cougar stalks into the cafe, its skin loose, looking relaxed, even a bit bored. Its padded feet are silent on the terrazzo. Conversation at the tables drops for a moment, but then, when the cat doesn’t immediately kill anything, gets noisy again.

Berenika sits near the back, on a banquette, with her friends from before, Mria and Paolo. Mria is small and nervous, with spiky frosted hair. Paolo is tall, with big ears and Adam’s apple.

“You don’t mean you, like, just left.” Mria can’t believe it. “Walked out on Mark.”

“You can’t just walk out of that place, can you?” Paolo says. “That’s miles of desert. You could die. You must have gotten a ride. Who gave you a ride?”

“Oh, sure,” Mria says. “That’s what we need to know. Her means of transportation.”

Paolo looks hurt. “I was just saying she could have called me to come get her. I would have done it. Right, Berenika? Far, but I would have done it for you.”

Berenika is solemn. “Thank you, Paolo.”

“But who—”

“Oh!” Mria turns her head sharply toward Berenika, hoping her hair will exclude Paolo from the conversation. “But what did Mark do? What did he say?”

“Not much, really,” Berenika says. “By that point, I think he realized there wasn’t anything he could do.”

“You must know your husband better than that,” Mria says. “There’s always something he can do. Has he called you? Hired people to kidnap you? Planted himself in your yard and let birds nest in his hair?”

“No.” Berenika clearly doesn’t want to talk about it. “Nothing like that.”

“We were all going to Easter Island.” Paolo is mournful. “To that new jungle. I was already packed.”

“Ah,” Mria says. “Procrastination pays off again. I hadn’t even found my suitcase yet.”

“That’s actually not funny.” Paolo blinks slowly. “I was looking forward to it.”

“Oh, so was I.” Mria waggles her cup over her shoulder at me without looking, an annoying habit. “So was I. I need a break. Easter Island. Giant heads, buried under vines. And you, Berenika. It was your idea in the first place. You wanted some special tour to see how they brought everything back. More than back. I don’t think the jungle was as dense before people came there.”

Berenika isn’t paying much attention to the discussion about the ecological restoration of Easter Island, which, with variations, they’ve already had several times. She’s watching the cougar. No one else is, because it doesn’t really seem to be doing anything.

It’s a male cougar, Puma concolor, medium-sized for its species at 130 pounds, six feet long. It is utterly still, not even the tip of its long, luxurious tail moving. Its fur is red-brown, paler under its muzzle and on its belly. That color matches that of the local population of deer. There are no deer in the cafe. Its hazel eyes are dilated in the dimness. It can’t see color, but can detect the smallest movement.

It has sensed the shadow of something. It is on full alert. And well it should be. It’s out of its territorial range, and on the edge of the range of another male. A bigger male.

It doesn’t really know that yet. Right now, it’s just checking things out.

I refill Mria’s cup, but she just sighs at the delay, not noticing me.

“Weren’t you looking forward to it?” Mria’s voice gets penetrating. “Berenika!”

“What?” Berenika looks at her friends. “Sure. Of course I was.”

“That would have been a great place for you to learn about … restoration methods, whatever it was.” Paolo sighs. “I bought this nice linen jacket.…”

“Return it.” Mria turns to cut him out again. “You’re not seriously still interested in working, like, with animals, Berenika. Are you?”

“I am.” Berenika smiles, just for a split second, a flash of light. “I’m sure they wouldn’t let me start with animals, but that’s still what I want.”

“Oh! That’s ridiculous. Just leave them alone, why don’t you? Let them be themselves. Natural, like they’re supposed to be.”

They all look at the cougar, which is again on the move.

It doesn’t see anything at the tables it moves past. It believes the cafe to be empty, in fact sees the space as a clearing in a larger forest.

“Okay,” Mria says. “Maybe that’s not so natural. I didn’t even really notice when these things started wandering around. Where does the thing take a crap? Not in here, I hope.” She picks up her feet so her pumps don’t touch the floor.

“It’s trained to go in a certain spot, where it gets recycled,” Berenika says. “You might not have noticed it, but there’s a place under the bushes in front of the candle store. And it looked like there was another cougar that usually used it.”

And then she sniffs.

“The service here sucks,” Mria says. “But the place seems clean enough.” She keeps her feet up, though, just in case.

“You checked in the cat toilet?” Paolo says. “And you could tell who’d used it?”

But now Berenika is up. She stalks around, tall and loose, a bit of a cat herself. The combs in her thick, black hair glint in the dimness. The cougar jerks its head, and she freezes. It looks past her. Somewhere, inside, it is deeply frustrated, knowing it’s missing something but having no way of figuring out what it is.

She kneels and sniffs a corner by the counter. Mark had led me to expect someone a bit more … romantic. Not interested in the yucky details of how we actually get these animals to survive among us. She hitches her skirt up a bit to free up her movements and sniffs again. She’s dressed beautifully, with several layers of translucent fabric of contrasting patterns.

People in the cafe are now watching her, not the cougar.

Paolo shreds his napkin in embarrassment, then closes his eyes.

It wouldn’t be natural for me not to react.

“Have you lost something, miss?”

She stands up next to me. “We’re in another cougar’s territory here. Where is it now?”

I’m startled. Did she actually examine the feces in the waste recycler in the plaza? “I’ve seen one, I guess. Another cat, right? But I don’t know. I could ask…”

“That’s all right.” She heads back to her table, having dismissed me as useless.

That’s the point. That’s why I’m wearing this stupid padded white jacket, like a fencer, or something. I’m supposed to be taking care of things in the background.

I still wish she’d have really looked at me.

“Their urine has been modified to smell kind of like turpentine.” Berenika slides neatly back into her seat. “To us. To each other, it still smells jagged and aggressive.”

“That’s charming,” Paolo says.

“It’s a lot of work to get it just right,” Berenika says. “Real skill.” If only she knew. “But we’re definitely on an established territory. I bet that other cougar is out past all those little stands in the plaza. There must be good hunting for small game in the shrubs.”

She’s absolutely right. That other cougar, larger and stronger than this one, isn’t part of the story yet, but there is the potential for drama. Fights over territory and access to sex always sell.

“If you like stuff like that, Mark could have set you up better than anyone,” Mria says. “I think he has connections with the guys who run this stuff. You could have your own, I don’t know, ecosystem, whatever.”

“It’s a messy hobby,” Paolo says. “Not like you, Berenika. I didn’t even think Mark should have gotten those blind fish in your basement. What a lot of work! Is that what got you interested?”

“I didn’t want Mark to set me up with anything.”

Her friends can tell they’ve annoyed Berenika. That’s something they don’t want to do.

Mria shifts in her seat. “Let me get this. My turn, really.”

“Good point,” Paolo says.

The cougar slides behind the counter, being a bit perverse now, as they will be. It angles its body up and puts its forepaws up on the counter, knocking some demitasses to the floor. Its claws are a good inch and a half long. It yawns in flehmen, seeking scent information, and, incidentally, shows its canines, white against its black gumline.

Well, it gets what information it can, but cannot overcome the blockages that allow it to survive in the environment it now lives in. It has no idea it’s in a place that serves good Turkish coffee, black as night, sweet as love, hot as hell, a place that makes you wear a ridiculous jacket to serve it. It can’t smell anything human. It can’t see us or hear us. As far as it is concerned, we no longer exist.

It reaches its head forward … and pushes its nose against the hot side of the espresso machine.

It makes a tiny yelp, like a kitten, then jumps back, crouches down and hisses.

Everyone in the cafe laughs. Despite the fact that they are invisible to it, that there is no possible threat, they are still afraid of it, and welcome such evidence of its impotence.

Berenika, I notice, doesn’t laugh.

ENCOUNTER #2

NO FAUX PHO

A red-tailed hawk soars overhead in an updraft from the parking lot. It’s been up there a while without success. The deer mice in the high grass between the parking places haven’t been active.

The noodle shop is stuck to the side of the old mall like a piece of gum. The tables are on balconies hanging down, with steep stairs that make it easy to spill pho on a customer. Not that anyone worries about the comfort of the waitstaff.

Mria and Berenika have chosen the lowest table, just above where a small herd of elk browse beneath oaks and maples with leaves just touched with russet and purple by approaching fall. An elk cow lowers her head, grabs a bit of grass, looks around. She can’t see us, or the mall, or the cars that make their way over hardened paths through the lot’s ridges and swales to find spots outside the wildlife zones. She also can’t see the cougar, who sits, seemingly not paying attention to her, in some underbrush a few feet away.

That’s two completely different ways of not seeing. I’m sure there are others.

“You know,” Mria says. “I was just remembering how you and Mark got together.”

“It was fated,” Berenika says. “The stars were aligned and it all happened exactly as was ordained.”

“What?”

Berenika laughs. “Oh, come on, Mria. We met at that party. Chance. You had just left. I was helping Margaret clean up.”

“Duty pays off again.”

“He always said he was ‘putting in an appearance’,” Berenika says. “I thought that was pompous, then learned how much of that he actually does.”

“He put in an appearance on Easter Island,” Mria says. “Don’t tell Paolo. He’ll never get over it. Poor Paolo. He kind of got to thinking that he was the one Mark really liked. That they had some kind of relationship.”

“Mark does like Paolo. He said so.”

“Oh! Mark. Like you can believe what he says.”

“You look good,” Berenika says. “Is that a new thing with your hair?”

“Just growing it out a little.” Mria pats her blond curls with a satisfied air. “I’ve got somebody good. I’ll give you her name.”

“Sure. Maybe.”

Berenika’s black hair is thicker and shorter than it was a few months ago, and the clips in it look almost permanent. And she wears an outdoor jacket with a couple of bird shit stains on it that never quite came out.

A second hawk sits on a bough of an oak, just as unsuccessful as the one circling above the parking lot, but not working as hard.

“Really, Berenika. Are you still doing the animal thing?”

Berenika smiles. “I should have done it years ago. Even at a low level, I love it. I have to start at the bottom, of course. Physiology classes, ecology, working support in a clinic. It’s physically hard. I never expected how hard. I fall dead asleep in my bed every night.”

“That desert house of Mark’s had the best beds,” Mria says. “I never dreamed there.”

“Try cleaning up after a sick moose all day. You won’t dream then.”

“No thanks. I prefer a really expensive mattress.”

“Maybe you should have married Mark,” Berenika says.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t stay to help do the dishes. That’ll show me. But he never wanted anyone but you. Why is that?”

“I’m the wrong person to explain. I have no idea.” Berenika watches the cougar. It stalks forward, belly to the ground, astonishingly fluid for something that must have bones in it somewhere.

Mria follows Berenika’s gaze, but I can tell she doesn’t see the cougar either.

“This banh mhi is too dry,” Mria says. “Now, that’s not really a complaint, but you really like that moistness, if you know what I’m saying…”

I replace her banh mhi.

“How is your food, Berenika?” Mria says.

Berenika hasn’t eaten anything. “Fine, I guess.”

“Yeah. Kind of, meh, right? I don’t like the way this one soaks the bread, kind of makes it fall apart.…”

She’s not watching as the cougar charges, but Berenika is.

Three or four bounds, and it is on the elk.

But something gives the cow warning: a rustle in the leaves, a finch that switches branches a few seconds before the cat makes its decision, something, but it is already moving when the cougar tries to drop it.

Claws scratch its flank, but it is bounding off across the parking lot, dodging between the cars it sees as trees, and is gone. Cougars aim, not at the weak or the sick, but at the inattentive. When they’ve judged attention wrong, they can find themselves struggling with something fully as strong as they are.

There is no way the cougar can pursue the fleeing elk. Like all cats, its speed is available only in short bursts. Its heart is small for its body mass. Just that effort alone has sucked up all its stored oxygen. It stands on the spot where the elk had been, breathing deeply, replenishing its stores. At moments like this, it is completely vulnerable.

“What happened?” Mria cranes around.

“Nothing,” Berenika says. “Nothing happened.”

“He can’t have let you go so easily,” Mria says. “That’s just not the Mark I know.”

“Maybe the Mark you know isn’t the Mark I know. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“All right.” Mria manages a smile. “So you’re liking what you’re doing?”

“More than anything I’ve ever done. I feel … I don’t know. It’s like I was always meant to be out there. Not away from people, exactly. But closer to the foundation of things.”

I hate it when people talked like that. We’re never more human than when we’re manipulating the natural world.

I don’t know why she’s annoying me so much all of a sudden. She’s just doing her best, studying, taking her tests like the teacher’s pet I’m sure she’s always been. I was a problem student. It’s only luck, and Mark’s help, that lets me do what I’m so good at.

Mark wants her to feel herself submerged in the totality of nature. But I’m the one creating that totality, setting up each stage on her progress.

There’s no way she’ll ever know I’m back here.

A raccoon emerges on the restaurant balcony. How it got here is my secret.

Of all the wild creatures, it is perhaps the raccoon that misses human beings most. The others didn’t even notice when humans figured out how to edit themselves out of animal perceptions and return the world to the wild.

Going back to work has been hard on the raccoons. Their mood seems permanently bad.

This one has had it, at least for today. It clambers up onto the table, scattering silverware, and, with grim determination, closes its eyes and goes to sleep. As far as it is concerned, this is a place of concealment, invisible to anyone, and, in fact, nothing out in those woods has a chance of seeing it. A buzzard sweeps close overhead, its eyes questing, but sees nothing but dead leaves and a recovered cougar, now loping off, ready for another go at an elk.

“Is it snoring?” Mria says. “Tell me raccoons don’t snore.”

ENCOUNTER #3

GREENSLOPE

The forested slope is really the roof of an indoor gym and mall. Just above the restaurant, the hill crests, and, out of sight, descends in a succession of apartments. At the slope’s base is an open park, its snow trampled by mule deer looking for browse. A small herd of deer stands in a tight group there now, yanking a last bit of grass root out with their teeth.

The big houses on the valley’s other side, beyond the concealed highway, are ugly enough that I wish I had the suppressed perceptions of a wild animal.

I also wish I couldn’t see the Wild West duster they make me wear here. It’s embroidered with lassos and horses.

The spruces and firs overhead hold huge clumps of snow in their needles. A chickadee hangs upside down from a cone and yanks determinedly at a seed. Various other squeaky-voiced small birds jump around the branches, distinguishable as kinglets, nuthatches, and others to those who care to tell them apart. Each has a different diet, and thus different ways of perceiving the world. No one appreciates how hard it is to manage a mixed group like that. Certainly not Paolo, who hasn’t stopped talking since he and Berenika sat down.

But Berenika is looking at the birds. She always looks carefully at animals, as if she actually sees them as meaning something in themselves. She raises a hand, and crooks a finger to summon a waiter. Me.

A kinglet flutters down and perches on it. It’s unexpected, and her green-brown eyes widen. The kinglet, a tiny greenish bird with an orange crown, walks back and forth on her finger. It actually thinks her finger is a twig, and is looking for signs of hibernating insects beneath the bark. Before anything unfortunate happens, it shoots off again.

Berenika watches after it. She has a gift of meaningful stillness. Snow glitters in her dark hair. She is a nature goddess only temporarily among the worlds of men.

The sun is shining but the air is bony and cold. Most animals are in hiding, and those that appear are lean, their intentions focused down to survival. Winter rakes through with sharp teeth, giving the survivors a bigger space to grown in the summer. The pain of survival is most obvious at this season, and the restaurant does a good business when it’s cold.

Giant bluish cubes of ice, fifty feet on a side, thrust out of the trees. Snow clings to flaws in their surfaces. It always seems that you should be able to look all the way through them, but vision disappears into the deep blue interior. These grab the winter’s cold and send it back through heat exchangers in the summer to cool the buildings below, as they melt and cascade down the rocks, disappearing by the time fall brushes the leaves from the trees.

A puff of breeze, and light snow races across the tables. Berenika and Paolo wear folded clothes like elaborate tents, with velvet over their hair. Warm air puffs from their sleeves when they lean forward, melting the snow into droplets. Paolo has his set so high he’s sweating. He’s picked this place to please Berenika. He prefers things to be a little more comfortable.

“So, Berenika,” he says. “How have you been doing?”

Right now, Berenika is doing what she is supposed to be doing. She is looking for the cougar. Her brief hesitation before answering the question creases Paolo’s wide face. He’s laid some kind of plan, but is having trouble putting it into operation.

“Oh, Paolo! Sorry. I’m doing good. I can’t believe I waited so long to do what I wanted to. It’s hard work. But I wouldn’t want to do anything else.”

“But you haven’t heard from.…”

“No. Nothing from Mark. I kind of wish everyone—”

“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. Mria was wondering, and you know how she is. She’d be all over me if I didn’t ask. I’m glad you could find the time to come out here with me. I thought maybe you would like it.”

“I do, Paolo, I do. I’ve always heard of it.”

“It seemed like your kind of place.”

Both of them are uncomfortable. Neither expected to ever be in this situation.

“I’ve been doing well too,” Paolo says.

“Really? What have you been up to?”

“You know, the usual. But well, you know.” Paolo starts again. “Do you have any, like, wider plans? For your life outside of nature?”

“Not really. I’ve been pretty focused.”

Paolo sighs. A gust at the same moment makes it seem that his inability to move her has shaken the snow from the trees.

“Does he still live in the desert?” Paolo asks.

Berenika has sensed movement in the trees along the meadow’s edge. “What?”

“Does Mark still live in that desert place? I liked those parties he had out there.”

Berenika manages to tear her attention from the signs of the cougar’s presence. She leans forward and puts her hand over Paolo’s. Both are gloved, so it’s not as intimate as it might be.

“Give him a call if you want, Paolo. I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.”

“Really?”

“Really. He always said.…” She’s moved too fast, and now has to come up with something Mark always said. “He said you were good company. And he liked it when you mixed the drinks.”

“Yeah, well. I always liked him too. I mean, I understand why it had to end and all, but.…”

Unlike the elk, the mule deer don’t get a reprieve. One is momentarily distracted, trying to yank a particularly sweet grass tuft. There’s a puff of snow as the cougar leaps, and then the lead buck is down. It kicks its legs once, but the cougar’s teeth sink in and crush its windpipe. That may be unnecessary. It looks like its head’s impact with the frozen ground has been enough to take it out.

The cougar breathes hard for a few moments, then lowers its head and starts to feed.

It looks easy. Without a knowledge of what is going on, it all looks easy. The deer weighs as much as the cougar, and carries a multipointed rack that can stab a lung or a gut. Even a small injury can be fatal, if it impairs the ability to hunt. The cougar has to average over a dozen pounds of meat a day to survive a winter. Any interruption in the flow of calories and protein is death. The cougar has been watching for the past two hours, patiently waiting for the exact moment that carried the highest odds.

A waiter has to stand just attentively, but gets relatively less for the effort. And he has to wear a stupid outfit.

The cougar raises its head. Something about the open space of the meadow is bothering it. The mule deer think they have moved off to another high valley, as they do when a predator appears, but there is actually no room for that here. They will circle the dining area and reemerge exactly where they were before. Pika move in their long runs under the snow-covered grass, and, a hundred yards away, a porcupine grunts along a freshly fallen log, tearing bark away to get at the still-fresh living layer beneath. Everything else is silent.

What else does the cougar sense?

It sinks teeth into the carcass, and, with a couple of powerful bounds, hauls it straight up the cliff.

It drops it near the table, right next to Berenika, then resumes its meal. Steam rises from the entrails of the dead elk.

Unlike the others, Berenika does not watch it. Instead, she scans everyone else in the restaurant, a gaze she usually devotes only to the animals. No one is feeding with quite the gusto of the cougar. Berenika has snow in her eyelashes. Sometimes the cougar has that same look. It is a solitary, as private as possible, used to sliding past perception without affecting it. Knowing it is in full view all the time would leave it with the feline equivalent of despair. It could not live that way.

“Is he here?” Paolo hunches forward miserably.

“Who?” Berenika says.

“Mark! He’s got to be here. Somewhere.”

She looks almost frightened. “Why do you say that?”

“Because he can’t just let you go. I can’t stand it that he let you go.”

The cougar curves around a couple of times, then lays down on the mule deer carcass and goes to sleep. There’s plenty of meat left on it, and its own body heat is the only way it’s going to keep it from freezing solid overnight. The deer’s head gazes blankly at us, its bloody tongue hanging out of its mouth.

ENCOUNTER #4

PLAZA ECONTORO

The plaza outside the Cafe Kulfi is a piece of marsh most of the way to becoming a meadow, with a thick patch of oaks at the edge. The squirrels and birds in the branches sense deeper forest behind them, not a brick wall. There’s still some open water, so there are muskrats, never the most popular animal to watch, but an important part of the system. They serve as food for the mink pair that nest under the cheese shop.

It’s a nice spring day, and quite a few people are out.

My hot dog cart’s umbrella conceals a rainforest canopy microenvironment. Bromeliads and orchids dangle from its ribs. Mist drifts down over the relish tray.

Berenika walks slowly through the plaza. She’s graceful, every part of her long body involved, and her feet seem to barely touch the ground. She’s cut her thick hair even shorter and now wears it unclipped. Her jacket ends at her waist. Her trousers are made of some flowy material.

She’s hunting for something. She doesn’t peer around, but it’s clear from the way she looks off into some invisible distance that she’s letting all of her senses open all the way, so that even the slightest hint will make itself known. I thought she was waiting for Paolo or Mria before going up into the Cafe Kulfi, where I worked on her world for the first time, but neither have shown and it’s starting to look like she’s on her own today.

Despite my mini rainforest, she doesn’t pay any attention to my stand. She’s been in training for months, so surely she recognizes the virtuoso technique involved. It’s a clear signal, directly to her. She’s not usually so obtuse.

The riot of rainforest life under my umbrella is hard to put together and even harder to maintain, right above a great selection of bratwurst and all-beef hotdogs. You could spend an hour looking at moths get nectar from orchids, ants crawling up stems, counting the tree frogs. I’m doing good business, good enough that I can’t pay as much attention to her as I want. It’s a point of pride that I get the orders right.

Even though it’s right in their face, everyone misses the three-toed sloth at first. It hangs amid the leaves, its fur green with algae, its yellow claws hooked around an umbrella rib, and chews on the same leaf it’s been working on for the past half an hour.

Berenika kneels and peers into the animal waste recycler just past a set of stairs. But it’s clean. She can’t tell how recently the cougar who owns this territory has been here.

She turns, and for a moment, I think she’s going to walk over and get a hot dog. I do have to wear this ridiculous purple and orange jacket that clashes with the orchids. I’ve sweated through the pits. Still, I want her to.

Finally, our cougar slinks into the plaza. It glances toward the Cafe Kulfi. It still remembers the unexpected nose burn and won’t go up there unless it has a good reason.

It has other things to worry about. It is well into the other male’s range, and this time is completely aware of it. Its ears flick back and forth. A cougar has thirty separate muscles in its ear and it’s using every one to swivel them, trying to extract all the information the environment has to offer.

Each step forward is a serious consideration. Since it’s here, it believes that it is here to challenge the other cougar. Like anything above a certain level of consciousness, it believes it acts because of decisions it has made. And, like anything above a certain level of consciousness, it is wrong.

As soon as it appears, Berenika is aware of it. She doesn’t turn toward it, but I can see the way her back stretches out, fine shoulder blades against the fabric of her jacket. She stands very still: irrelevant, since the cougar can’t see her. It’s almost a courtesy. Her hands float without weight.

I didn’t understand her before, and now I’m kind of sorry about that raccoon. She’s not just fooling around. She’s as serious about life as I am. She could be the rare Trainer that could be seen, and still do her job.

The cougar whose territory we’re in comes out of the Cafe Kulfi and stands at the top of the stairs. It is significantly larger and stronger than our cougar, full-sized at 170 pounds, eight feet long. Everyone in the plaza falls silent and watches as it swishes its tail impatiently. Since this is its territory, it is the local favorite. They wait to see what it will do to the interloper.

Somewhere around here, Mark appears and comes back into her life. That’s the story. And the cougar, no longer needed, goes. Sure, there’s always a chance it will defeat its larger and stronger opponent. Nothing is certain.

But the smart money’s on the muscle.

The territory owner crouches down to charge. It is ready. Our cougar is going to find out that it is no longer the center of attention.

Berenika strolls toward the cafe, not giving any sign that she sees the other cougar. I should be watching the cougars, but, instead, I watch her. She looks like she’s just window-shopping, but I know she’s not seeing anything in the vitrines. Her consciousness is focused forward.

She steps right into the other cougar’s path. It is ready to leap … and suddenly its opponent has vanished. All it can really sense is the absence that is Berenika, because it can’t detect a human being. A shadow has dropped over its world, and it is confounded.

Suddenly coming to itself, realizing the perilous situation it is in, our cougar turns and bounds out of the plaza.

There is a stir among everyone else in the plaza. They resume whatever they were doing. But they feel vaguely cheated, unfulfilled. A crucial plot point was muffed.

That’s because they’re paying attention to the wrong story.

“Excuse me.”

Berenika came up silently, as I watched the cougar vanish. She catches me off guard.

Our eyes meet through the mist that comes from my umbrella. As a gesture, the sloth even turns its head, jaws still working on its leaf, to look at her.

She realizes the complexity of what I have achieved here. And, seeing that, she’s scoped out who is responsible for the events around her. She has an instinctive feel for the behavior of living creatures. Seeing the effects, she’s tracked down the cause: me.

“I’d like two hot dogs, please.”

Two? She really doesn’t need to get one for me. It’s my stand, after all. “Um, sure. That’s what I’m here for.”

“One with mustard and relish.”

“Okay.”

“And one with lots of hot peppers, sauerkraut, and epizote, if you have any.”

It’s not something I’d usually know about an employer, but Mark had me make him his favorite dog when we were setting this scene up, the day before. Peppers, sauerkraut, and—

“No epizote.” I still have some, but he’s not getting it. “Out today.”

“Well.” She sighs. “We can’t always get what we want, can we?”

“No,” I say. “I guess not.”

I watch her, graceful and slim, as she crosses the plaza and heads right for the copse of trees where Mark stands, seemingly invisible from the world, waiting to emerge into the midst of a battle to the death between cougars for a single territory.

LAST ENCOUNTER

ANHINGA

The water just beyond the table is still and black. The cypress trees in the hammock stretch above, forming a thick canopy, screening the bright sun. The air is hot, heavy, motionless. Spanish moss, vines, flowers dangle down, dripping water. The only detectable motion is that of an occasional insect flying slowly, almost walking on the thick air. Tiny beams with motion detectors pick them out and highlight their lacy wings against the dimness, subtly enough that the patrons take it for granted that they can see things here, despite having evolved on the sunny, dry veldt.

There’s no reason why nature shouldn’t always look her best.

Paolo, Mria, Berenika, and Mark have fallen silent as they wait for their food. Mark is never chatty, and Paolo and Mria have been trying to fill in the spaces, showing, by their eagerness to entertain, their gratitude that things are back the way they should be, but they’ve run out of things to talk about.

Mark paid their way out here. That’s their notion of the way things should be.

Berenika hasn’t been talking much. Is she already regretting her decision to get back with him?

“Look, there’s one.” Paolo points as an alligator slides by, careful not to thrust his finger over the railing.

No one else looks.

“What’s wrong?” Mark finally says. “I knew this was a mistake. Too wet, right? We should get back to the house. The desert. That’s best.”

“No,” Berenika says. “That’s not it. This is extremely impressive. I might like to work here, actually.”

Our wetland, lush with water coming from the north, is sandwiched between an office building, all pink stucco and plate glass, and a housing development. Carefully generated mist makes the office building look like a mistake of vision, and the houses hide behind a vine-covered wall. Water is pumped into this patch of jungle, runs through, and then gets recovered on the other side of the restaurant.

Water once sheeted down from the lakes to the north, covered the sawgrass prairies less than an inch deep, all the way down to the south. Development and overuse of water had threatened these environments.

Not much of the sawgrass prairie was left, but the wetland is something people want to see. Water flows have been reestablished, exactly to the necessary degree. Nothing that lives here, in the deep waters or any of the other environments around, senses that it all came via subtle paths completely different than the original ones.

But there’s still a lot of work to do. Berenika could make a real contribution.

“But something’s bothering you about it.”

“Yeah: Paolo,” Mria says. “Stop pointing out that stupid alligator every time it swims by. We see it.”

Paolo’s mouth droops.

“No,” Berenika says “It’s the cat.”

Our cougar rests on a bough above the black water, barely awake.

“Wrong species of panther?” Paolo flicks through the restaurant’s environmental information., eager to make good. “The Florida one’s extinct, this one is pretty close, they say.…”

“Not the species. The environment. The place. Cougars live in the slash pine woods. In decent-sized limestone uplands. They need some dry land. Not down in the water here. They don’t fish.”

“Maybe they eat birds.” Paolo, on a roll, is pleased to spot the anhinga, the restaurant’s signature bird, as it pops out of the water, a dead fish speared on its beak. He starts to point, thinks better of it, and changes his gesture to a wave at the waiter.

He’s just going to have to wait. I’m no longer on duty.

The anhinga climbs out on a cypress knee and spends a moment getting the fish off its beak. It’s dark, with a long white neck. It swallows the fish, then spreads its wings. Unlike most water birds, anhingas have no oils on their feathers. This permits them to dive deeply, but means they have to dry their wings before attempting flight.

This catches the cougar’s attention. There’s really no way it can get that anhinga, but, still, it’s kind of an interesting intellectual problem, with the tricky approach, the bird’s speed, and all. For a sated cat, thinking about ways to catch unpromising prey is like doing crossword puzzles.

“You’re right.” Mark frowns. “It shouldn’t be here.”

Neither should I. My job is done. I should be back to my regular work. There’s some oak stands to redo in Illinois, and ponds for migratory birds. Those things are hard. The birds have to maintain their ability to navigate thousands of miles, yet not realize they are landing amid observation platforms whenever they come down.

Aside from some species of parrot, birds are never easy to train.

Berenika has slipped away, probably to the bathroom. I didn’t notice her go.

In her absence, Mark is checking and sending messages. He’s probably finding out where I am, what I’m up to, figuring out that someone who owed me a favor let me set up here in the Everglades, checking water pH and drainage.

Mark isn’t the only one with deep resources.

A couple of heavy drops fall on the raft, and it tilts, just slightly, with added weight.

“Do you really think no one can see you?” Berenika says, almost in my ear.

I jerk, but don’t knock anything over, and look up. She stands over me, water sheeting down her body, her hair gleaming black.

“How much was real?” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.” She moves around the raft, barefoot and silent, and examines the equipment. “Is this what a nature god is? A little man squatting in the underbrush with some display screens?”

“I’ve never claimed divine status—”

She’s in my face. She’s disturbing close up, eyes too big, cheekbones too high, skin too velvet. She’s meant to be observed from a safe distance.

“How much, Mr.… you do have a name, don’t you? Mark must allow you a name.”

“Tyrell Fredrickson.”

“Come on.” She glances back at the restaurant. Mria is complaining that there is too much saffron in the flan. There isn’t supposed to be any saffron in the flan. No one has missed Berenika yet. “You’ve been on me, you and your kitty. What did Mark hire you to do?”

“Just to keep you safe. What appears to be the natural world is more dangerous than you—”

She knocks me down and pins me to the raft. The cougar stands up on its bough and looks over at us, exactly as if it can see us both.

I enjoy feeling her weight on me.

“It wasn’t all my doing, was it?” she says. “Everything around me. You have the power to control it. Tell me!”

So I do. It’s not that I think she’s going to kill me, though she’s mad enough to try. It’s because she sees that which she would like least to see. My assignment was to make her feel like … Mark said, “like a nature goddess.”

It had been a dream ever since she was a little girl, to have the natural world perceive and respond to her. She’d always had pets, found wounded birds and animals and nursed them back to health, had the ability to sit still for hours and let things come to her. She was perfect for the career I had.

Mark’s analysis had shown him that she had left because she felt like she didn’t have equal standing with him. She didn’t have a valid role. So he decided to give her one.

That’s my job, really. To make things seem like they just happen. Of course, if you left the natural world to “just happen,” most of it would be dead and decaying in a couple of seasons. Too much of it is gone for the rest of it to live on its own.

“That’s pretty much what I thought,” she says, and sits back on her heels.

I look at her. I never expected her to go back with Mark, no matter what power she felt. I expected … I don’t know what I expected. None of it makes sense. Mark wanted her to come back to him, so he made her feel more powerful, more in control. And now she questions the one illusion that makes her feel best about herself.

“I’m going away,” I say. “I’m taking a rough job. A weed patch in an old city. No one really likes those mundane restoration jobs. It takes forever, and even when you’re done, it doesn’t look like much.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“In case … if you wonder where I am. What I’m doing.”

She shakes her head, smiles at me. “You really don’t understand anything, do you?”

“Look—no matter what, you’re good at this. Better, probably, than I am. You can—”

“I know what I can do. But what can you do? Are you just going to hide in the leaves and fake it all up for people?”

“It’s what I do. I’m a Trainer.”

“So am I, now. You think Mark wanted to give me the illusion of power over nature to get me to come back to him. But it’s not an illusion, is it? I’m not some kind of nature goddess. That’s just dumb. But I do have power over nature. And I love it all. Every bit of it. Do you love it, Tyrell?”

“I do.” The answer comes before I think about it.

This time she really looks at me. I’m pale, a little soft, but I think I have some shape to me. A good jaw, and people say my eyes are thoughtful.

Well, my mother said it. She was otherwise pretty honest. She never told me I was strikingly handsome or anything.

“You might still make something of yourself, Tyrell. Then we’ll see.” Her dive into the water is totally silent.

Berenika. I write these reports for Mark, but he never reads them. Maybe someday you will.

HOW I BECAME A TRAINER

TYRELL FREDRICKSON

You don’t really want the whole story, but perhaps this part will help you make sense of it.

Before I became a Trainer, I worked on a farm, at Sty #14, on the thirtieth floor. Sometimes, when my work was done, I’d go out to the plant areas to watch the sun set. The circulating breeze kept condensation off the glass and made the leaves whisper behind me. From that height I didn’t really see people, just buildings copper to the horizon. After a few minutes, something would start beeping. I wasn’t really supposed to be in that area. My job was the pork.

I’d go back to the dark. The glow strip across the vat room’s arched ceiling was about as bright as a full moon. After all, the pork tubes—pigs, if you insist—couldn’t see.

The sterilizing lights came on once a day. Then it was my job to put on goggles and turn the tubes in their vats of liquid, making sure the UV hit all their surfaces. The fluid was full of antibiotics and all that, but there were fungi, there were molds … anywhere there was that much cell shedding and organic material something would find a way to live.

The main problem was the skin. The bones were vestigial, floating free from each other like an exploded skeletal diagram, but the things still had skin. They floated in the blue-green support fluid, but they were so huge that there were always folds, or points of pressure against the tank sides, where infection could collect. My job was detecting these areas and taking care of them.

It might seem that you should just get rid of the skin and just have meat, but that would cause more problems than it solved. Skin is a sophisticated interface, keeping in the things that should be in, and keeping almost all of the universe out. Creating some new interface would have been more trouble than it was worth. It might not have seemed that way, but they’d changed only those things that needed changing. For example, collagen had been added, to make the skin easier to remove, when that time came.

The back of pork still looked like a pig. The spine had separated like the boosters of a rocket heading for space, but I could still see a trace of the original shoat, with its bristly hair. If I left them in some other orientation, they would slowly turn to have their backs up.

No one ever visited me there. The meat side of the farm just wasn’t that popular. There was an occasional maintenance team, in to adjust the recirculators that turned pork waste into usable fertilizer for the plants on the south side. Otherwise, I was alone with my pigs.

Once a month was slaughtering time.

I’d pull each tube out of the liquid in a support harness. The sterilizing fluid would cascade off its sides. I’d dry the skin, first with a roller and then with an infrared light, and then I would open it up. There was supposed to be a seam, kind of a biological zipper, along where the edge of the belly had once been, but it often got jammed up with squamous cells and other undifferentiated growth.

So I would have to cut it open. I had a vibratory cutter that I would run along the pig’s side. Then, being extremely careful, I would roll up the hide. As I mentioned, there was additional collagen that added some tension, so that the skin curled up to expose the meat.

Most of each pig was smooth flesh, suitable for processed food. Without connective tissue or grain, this was easy to work with. I’d run the cutter along the pig’s length, and then cut off slabs. There was always a little blood seepage, but not much. The cutter was smart, and the blood supply was spaced rationally. Large vessels would be avoided, and tucked in, to dangle like electrical conduit. I’d hit them with vascularization hormones later, stimulate arborization, and link them up with the new flesh that bubbled up around them.

Then I would supervise the movement of the chops to the cooler, in the blank north side of the building. They’d rumble down one of the conveyors and disappear to the next step in the process of making food. The area was forgotten, with hexagonal ice crystals growing on the housings of seldom-used support pumps, and fluid spills that eventually turned into sheets of brown-red ice. My least favorite part of the job was defrosting and cleaning that.

Things did go wrong. Cancers could spread through the flesh when cell reproduction was disrupted. This could happen surprisingly fast. Sometimes an entire tube would have to be terminated and discarded. I had no idea where that flesh went.

Once I heard a rattle as the cutter went by. When I looked at the resulting slab, I found a pig’s lower jaw, complete with teeth, all perfectly formed. They looked tiny against that huge bulk, even though they would have been able to support the feeding of a creature that weighed several hundred pounds. I cleaned them off and kept them. There is nothing more diagnostic of a mammal than the elaborate pattern on the surface of the teeth. Someone with more experience than I could have identified what breed of Sus domestica had led to this gargantuan meat factory.

I got into my routine. I don’t think I was even fully conscious, following out my rounds in the semidarkness, with only the backs of pigs for company.

But that jaw should have made me more attentive. Something had gone wrong with the gene expression in that tube. All the developmental genes were still there, after all, just suppressed. It was only after the cutters hesitated a bit on that same pig that I finally hauled it up out of the fluid to investigate more thoroughly.

It had grown a leg, complete with trotter. It looked ridiculous, down there all by itself, supporting nothing, contacting nothing, but it had the full complement of bones and muscles.

I poked it and it jerked away.

So it had some basic innervation as well. I was going to have to do something about this.

Sometimes a consumer gets a hankering for a real differentiated piece of meat, something with connective tissue, muscle strands, bone: a ham, a rib, a chop. These tubes had not been designed to produce those. Even in those that had been, what looked like ancestral cuts of meat were sculpted creations, not actual muscles attached to limbs.

The hoof looked tiny and precise. Something about it appealed to me. I decided to keep it for a while. I had the idea that I was liberating some essential nature hidden in the huge tube of meat. I reprogrammed the slab cutters to avoid it. That dropped my overall productivity a bit, but still well within the quotas I had for this sty.

Sentimentality has no place in farming. I really should have known that.

Next harvest, that leg threw the slab cutter off so much it pulled back, forcing me to slice meat manually. I wasn’t used to the auxiliary blade, and the flesh shuddered so much when I lowered myself to it that I almost sliced through a finger.

Maintaining a sentimental piece of real pig quickly proved to be tiresome. And a health and safety inspection would show poor practice. My real career was elsewhere, but losing points here could really set me back.

At the next skin maintenance time, I rotated that tube so that the leg stuck out toward me. I pulled myself up to it. The leg’s joint was right at the skin surface. That was good. There would be no telltale stump left afterward, and the cutters would be able to do their job. I got right up to the thing, pushing my head against its side, and slid the auxiliary blade into the leg.

It kicked me. I lost my grip and almost fell into the tank myself. I did drop the saw, and lost it somewhere in those translucent depths. The leg flailed several more times, then was still. But it was pulled back against the tube’s bulk, as if ready to attack again.

A shudder went through the entire thing, sending waves splashing back and forth against the tank sides. Blood seeped from the cut and dripped down.

Muscle and bone were one thing, but the thing had nerves, and had recruited a blood supply.

What had given the command to kick me? The nerves led somewhere.

Maybe I was mad at it, but I had given up on careful surgery. I had to get this thing fixed and back on the production line. I recovered my blade from the tank bottom and slashed deeply, checking for any variations in the meat’s otherwise smooth structure.

I found and removed a couple of ribs and a big fold of tissue that I later figured out was a bladder, one that had never managed to grow in on itself to hold fluid. A bit of ureter led off from it, but it had never regrown a kidney, so the tube just ended.

Beneath that, along the spine, I found a lump. This was the creature’s real secret.

It had never grown a dura mater, much less cranial bones, and most of the brain had never grown either, but here was a bit of the pig’s brain, barely protected by a flexible arachnoid and pia mater, material like stiff rubber.

The original pig had a fair amount of cortex. It was an intelligent animal.

This tube of meat was not an intelligent animal. But even then I knew enough of the structure of the mammalian nervous system to have some idea of what had regrown. It was a bit of the motor cortex: what had allowed the thing to kick me. And much of the sensory cortex: what had allowed it to feel me probing it.

There was no comfort I could give. Nothing I could do to help. It couldn’t see, it couldn’t hear, it couldn’t taste. But it could feel pain.

It was just a mistake. Just a malfunction in gene expression, the generation of nerve cells with no consumption value. I thought about how long it had been shuddering under the slices of the cutter. The innervation had gone much farther than I would have thought possible. It sensed everything that was going on, everything that happened to it.

It was silent in that huge room. I sat there, kind of stroking the part of the skin that was left. I had no idea if it could feel that too.

A damage report was called for, so that others could be on the lookout for a similar malfunction.

But I didn’t tell anyone. I excised the brain, the nerves, the other organs.

Then I sautéed those no-longer-functional pain centers in butter. The ultimate discourtesy to a food animal is to kill it but not to eat it.

I think I overcooked them. They were a bit crumbly. But I choked them down.

Okay, this isn’t why I became a Trainer. But it’s why I’ve never quit. We’ve picked something up, and now there’s no way for us to ever put it down again. Now that you bear some of the weight, Berenika, maybe you understand.

NON-ENCOUNTER

MARK AND BERENIKA’S DESERT RESIDENCE

I go through every room of the house, as if someone will be hiding in one of them.

But there’s nowhere to hide. The furniture is gone, and the rooms, floored with native stone, seem to have been vacuumed by forensics teams and retain not a trace of their previous occupants.

The high living room windows show the distant dry ridge, tilting like a sinking ship.

I hear a thunk from the underground garage, then voices. A man and a woman.

I was sure Berenika would leave him again. It just didn’t make sense that she would stay. But instead she was taking advantage of his power. I thought they were far away, restoring some part of the dead ocean, not here to find me scuttling across their floor like a hermit crab that had misplaced its shell, pale and shrivel-assed.

“Who are you?”

It’s Paolo. He stands tall and skinny in the doorway’s exact center, as if demonstrating how unnecessarily wide it is.

“I—”

“Oh, you know him.” The short, blond Mria pushes past him, carrying a bag that seems symbolic of “groceries”: leafy celery and a baguette stick out of the top. “The Trainer. Mark’s guy.”

“Mark’s guy.” Paolo’s eyes are pale blue. I had not noticed how clear and perceptive they were. I hadn’t really been watching him, and he certainly had never looked at me before. “What is he doing here, then?”

“I don’t know.” Mria is already in the kitchen. “Maybe he’s training gophers. Why don’t you ask him?”

“I’m here to put some things away,” I say. This is even almost true. At least it is now.

“Hey, us too,” Paolo says. “We can start a club. ‘People who clean up after Mark and Berenika.’”

“Don’t be bitter, Paolo.” Mria is opening and closing cabinets. “Didn’t they say they’d leave a saucepan in … oh, there it is. She just asked us for a favor, since we were going to be in the neighborhood.”

There was no neighborhood. Mark had, impressively, put his house where there really was nothing, an expanse of dry ridges and valleys in the Great Basin. The most visible life in the region was a herd of pronghorns that tended to keep well south, where there was more water. The only plant visible is an occasional sullen creosote bush. Those black sticks suck all the moisture from the dirt around them, leaving a circle so dry that no seed would ever germinate there. Their kingdoms are tiny and parched, but they are supreme within them.

“You hid your car,” Paolo says.

“Habit.”

“So what were you going to do here?”

“Maybe he’s moving here.” Mria pokes her head in from the kitchen. Behind her, I hear something frying. “You want some lunch, Mr. Animal Trainer? We’re going to have to pack out what we don’t eat.”

I’d never pegged Mria as a cook. But, then, I hadn’t paid that much attention to her either. I’d been watching Berenika.

“Sure,” I say. “I didn’t bring anything to contribute.”

“Didn’t figure that you would.” She vanishes back into the kitchen.

“Berenika’s going to be a Trainer too,” Paolo says. “She’s going to find out what really makes things tick.”

“It’s a long, hard road,” I say. “Much less fun than it looks.”

“She knows all about that,” Paolo says. “You probably explained some of it to her.”

“I tried.”

“You’re not going to ask, are you.” Mria hands me linen-wrapped silverware and has me set the table. “Berenika’s gone back to Mark, and both of them are off on some atoll trying to restore fish stocks, train tuna to protect themselves, whatever, and you’re going to pretend you don’t even care.”

“I don’t have the right to care,” I finally manage.

“The forks go on the other side,” Mria says briskly. “You don’t need some kind of standing to care.”

“Oh, come on.” Paolo slouches above us, unsure of what to do. “He just failed. He wanted to set things up a certain way, train Berenika to move to him, and he didn’t do it.”

I try to do it slowly, but I think they hear me let my breath out.

“Don’t you guys need to protect those fish?” Mria says. “Go ahead. I’ll lay everything else out.”

“The fish,” Paolo says on the way down the stairs to the lower levels. “Did you put them here?”

“My first project for Mark,” I say. “They’re an almost-vanished subspecies—agriculture had dropped the water table and their caves were going dry. They seem to be breeding pretty well here. I hope the new owner takes care of them.”

“It’s in the deed. You have to. If you don’t want to, buy somewhere else.”

Many people think that the way we fool nature now shows our power. But it equally enslaves us to perpetual care.

Or some of us, anyway.

In the cool darkness we could hear the water swirling beneath our feet and in the walls. A still pool filled the floor’s center. We stand on its edge, looking down and seeing the passages receding in all directions into the earth.

The pool has a blue glow now that we’re here. The fish can’t see it, but it lets us see them.

“Did you … make this?” Paolo’s eyes are large in the dimness.

“I worked it out. There were objections. There’s no geology anywhere near here that could remotely have water-filled caverns like this, but Mark offered to finance it, and it really was the best option. You can’t have everything perfect.”

Blind fish have eyes. Or, rather, they develop eyes normally, up to a point. The genes that guide the development of the eyes is still there, still active. An eyecup develops, a lens. Then, another gene, busily beefing up the front of the head, increasing the sense of smell, the barbels, the whole chemical/physical sense structure that the fish needs to survive in the absolute darkness of limestone caverns a thousand feet underground, finally gets its bulldozers and concrete mixers into the area—and builds right over the eye. It sinks under that new flesh, and vanishes.

I wave my hand over the water. This was once Berenika’s great pleasure, Mark had told me. The one thing about the house that had entranced her. I want to see what she saw.

And they come. The fish swim out of their underground grottos and out into the dim blue glow of that room. Their skin is pure white, patterned with blue, like tattoos. Their drooping barbels let them sense what is around them. They swirl up, never touching each other, sensing the pressure of the others, searching for their microscopic food.

I hold my finger over the water, but don’t touch it. It’s best for them if they never know anyone else is here. It’s too late, anyway. Even if they knew I was here, that I had determined their destinies, they wouldn’t care.

“Come on,” I say to Paolo.

The controls make everything automatic, but it still seems that we need to be there to supervise. I carefully check the sandy floor for any obstructions and find.…

Paolo stands next to me and looks down.

“Was that your cat?” he says.

“Not at all,” I say. “Just a companion. We worked together for a while. And then—”

“And now it works for Mark too?”

The footprint is clear. I’m tempted to say too clear, as if it was rolled there for police identification. But over here, it looks like the cougar slept. A cave might seem a good place of concealment for it.

No way of telling how long ago it had been here.

“Will they … will they be okay under there?” Paolo says.

“The system is sealed and recirculating,” I tell him. “Left for long enough, sure. This cave won’t survive the fall of civilization or anything. But long before they have any trouble, someone will be here to clean it up, keep them fed and alive.”

The cover looks like heavy stone, though I know it’s just a foamed metal alloy with a thin cover of fused rock dust. It slides across the pool, across the cougar footprint, across the vague traces we ourselves have left down there, and the blue glow vanishes. The house’s life is concealed until someone returns to reveal it again.

The cougar never knew I was there, so it can’t miss me, but it must be able to detect a difference in its life now that I have left it.

“Come on up.” Mria calls from upstairs. “Lunch is ready.”

“What are you going to do now?” Paolo says.

“I have another project.”

“Mark must have paid you a bundle. It must be something pretty wild.”

“Not so wild,” I say. “Just something that needs to get done.”

POTENTIAL ENCOUNTER

URBAN STUDY AREA #7

Sometimes a chunk of decorative plaster crashes down from the coffered ceiling high overhead. This usually happens a couple of days after a heavy rain. The water percolates through the various remaining layers of the railway station roof. You’d think there wouldn’t be an acanthus swag or gilded rosette left up there, but the builders had not stinted on unseen decoration.

Sometimes it happens for no reason at all, like this morning. I jerk awake, hearing just the echoes of a distant crash.

Usually I get up and search, trying to figure out which piece it was that had just been added to the rubble on the waiting room floor. I don’t know what the point of that is, but I do feel good when I see fresh edges, as if I’m finally getting a grip on how things work around here.

I don’t feel like doing that today. I just wiggle myself deeper into my bag and watch the pale light of morning grow in the high windows. The pigeons that have left a crust over the glass shift complain on their perches high above.

I’ve been here a few months now, and still find it ridiculous. Had absolutely everyone left this city and headed for better places? It had once been huge. I can walk the old streets for days, clamber carefully across rusting bridges, jump across the pits of collapsed sewers. None of it was set up to interact with nature. It comes from a purely human world, now obsolete.

Most of it collapsed and was swept into sinuous ridges, twenty or thirty feet high. Forests slowly spread across them. There’s a small modern city up the river a bit, but it has its own environment and I never take any animals there.

So now I live among weeds: spiky leaved plants, muck-loving carp, fast-growing trees, pigeons. I hunt among the herds of stunted deer that browse the grass between fallen branches of locusts and silver maples. Sometimes a pack of canids makes its quarrelsome way through the area. A cross between domestic dogs and coyotes, they are unromantic, unphotogenic, and unclean. No Trainer has ever worked to get them to set their carrion-smelling paws on a city street. No passerby has ever been struck at dawn by their wild beauty. When I hear them yelping at night I stuff my head into my pillow.

A crow calls outside, so it really is time to get up. All of the animals can see me, but only that crow seems to care. It has a kind of reptilian affection for me, based on the small prey I scare up on my hunts, and I sometimes find it staring fixedly at me, head sidewise, considering me with an expressionless yellow-rimmed eye. I work at not attributing human emotions to it, but always fail. Maybe I wasn’t meant for my line of work after all.

At least I haven’t given it a name. That’s the most obvious way we pretend animals are more ours than they actually are. I figure it respects me, but is puzzled by me. Our lives are pretty similar just now, so we get along. The bird can predict in general what I am going to do next, but not specifically, and that is the basis of a decent relationship.

There is no natural world. If the term ever had meaning, it hasn’t for years. Jeremiads about how the natural world will unite and turn against humans are a childish fantasy. Nature has no motivations, no desires, no ultimate goal.

Except what we choose to give it. I finally roll out of my bag, wash my face in the basin I always fill before going to sleep, and go outside. It’s overcast, and cold. My breath puffs. I like feeling the weather against me. Having little defense against it, I have to react to it the same way everything else alive has to. I listen to the air, sniff it to see how scents are carrying today, listen to any sounds it brings. I’m here and visible. I can be evaded, I can be resisted, I can be killed. I pay full attention.

Outside, something on the ground catches my eye. I kneel to get a better look. I reach out my hand, but pull it back before my fingertips can disturb anything.

It’s a partial print: a big heel pad, and two toe marks. No claw indentations, and it looks pretty good-sized. Cat. It looks like a large cat.

I bend over the imprint and push my face almost to the ground, looking and smelling, using every channel of information I can. I smell cat too.

Could be a lynx. I’ve seen some other, ambiguous traces. A lynx would be okay.

I don’t think it’s a lynx. A few days ago I found a piece of scat. Like the print, it was big, bigger than your usual coydog turd. And it had a bit of hair in it, as from self-grooming with a rough tongue. I managed to persuade myself that it was just the right shade of reddish brown.

I stand up, ready for my day. If there really is a cougar out here somewhere, I won’t see it. In an even contest, I don’t have a chance. But I’ll keep looking.

Anyone could find me here, if they wanted. Berenika has to know where I am. She could come here and observe me in my natural habitat. If she wanted.

It’s ridiculous. A feral housecat could make it here in this shrunken weed patch, for as long as it evaded the coydogs, but chances were lower for a lynx, and a cougar was impossible. A cougar needed more than ten square miles of territory to support itself, probably significantly more in this impoverished ecology, and there was nothing like that here, not yet. A single kill and the deer would flee elsewhere. These are not trained to forget, circle around, and return. Again, not yet.

So there’s work to be done. The various patches of woods can be knitted together in the minds of the beasts that are here. That’s what we do. We take the far-flung archipelagos of environment and reassemble them into continents in the minds of the animals. We give them a way to live in the world we have made.

So I live, work, and hope.

I imagine Berenika, somewhere in an abandoned room in the city, in a brick row house standing alone amid the trees, like a single book on an empty shelf. Since I’m imagining it, I imagine detail. She’s in an old bedroom where someone changed wallpaper every year. The warmth and moisture she’s brought into the room have loosened its glue, and the soft paper peels off in layers, showing different colors. When she awakes before dawn, it’s to the whisper of falling florals and beribboned hunting horns.

I don’t actually believe she’s there. She’s got more important things to pay attention to.

Mark is the kind of guy who thinks that making his wife stronger is the way to keep her. That makes him hard to compete with. But I’ve worked with him, and know he can be tiresome. A jerk, really. And, pathetic huddled voyeur or not, I know what I’m doing. That can be attractive. There is some room for hope.

Meanwhile, I have work to do.