Catacombs (11 page)

Chester rose, his fur back down to normal again, and padded forward as if he were out for a stroll in a park. Jubal thought he must have run the equivalent of the length of Galipolis at least.

I smell water
, Chester said, speeding to a trot.

Jubal wondered if it would be fit to drink. He hadn’t brought a purification kit—well, he couldn’t think of everything, and when he picked items from the ship to bring with him, he hadn’t counted on a prolonged spelunking trip through the city’s innards.

Then he too smelled the water and heard the rush and slap of it.

A wall opened on the left and the girl Chione stepped out. “Unless you want to go swimming again, come with me,” she said.

“Is the underground river the same one that runs through the desert?” Jubal asked her later, in her hiding place, when he and Chester had enjoyed a long drink and what seemed to be dried fruit.

“Mmmm, this is good,” Jubal said, biting into the fruit, which had a bit of a crunch to it. “What is it?”

Chester answered.
Keka bugs all squashed together. Smells yummy!

Jubal dropped the morsel on the floor, and Chester and Renpet shared it with surprising daintiness for a pair who had been feuding less than a week before.

“No,” Chione said to Jubal. “Not the same. But from the same source, I think.”

“And where are we exactly?” He looked around the cavernous room, its stone walls painted with picture writing, furnishings carved from the same stone.

“On the west bank,” she said. “We won’t be followed here.”

“Why? Can’t they swim?”

“This is the official place of death. The royal catacombs are here.”

“I thought those were on the other side, where we found Chester?”

“No, those were for the common cats, those who died before the Leavetaking, when there were many, and the ones who have died since. Here all of the royals are wrapped and waiting for their next lives.”

“How long do they have to wait, generally speaking?” Jubal asked. He knew it probably wasn’t a very bright question, but he wanted to keep the conversation going.

“It depends,” she said. “They live longer these days—much longer than ever before—but there are so few kittens. Renpet and Nefure were the last born here, and as you see, they are nearly grown. But soon perhaps their mother the queen will return with the kittens of Renpet and your master.”

“My what?”

She indicated Chester.

“He’s not my master. He’s my friend.”

She shrugged. It made no difference to her. She had accepted, the shrug said, the human’s place compared to the divine feline in the scheme of life.

“And what kittens? Chester’s just a kitten himself.”

She nodded to the two cats now curled together for a nap. “In your heart, perhaps. But Renpet is in estrus and soon there will be kittens.”

Chester, a dad?

Chester looked up at him with slitted eyes, his head still resting on Renpet’s golden belly, and yawned.
Why not? We’ll make beautiful kittens, and you like kittens
.

Jubal felt an unreasonable pang of jealousy. Chester was
his
friend. He had always felt that Chester was his own age. And now he was talking about having kids of his own?

Chione was prattling on. When she wasn’t on the run, she was quite a chatterbox. “They will be wonderful kittens, the kittens of Renpet and Chester the Fisher.”

“Well, she shouldn’t get too attached to him. I don’t think we’re going to stay. This place isn’t real healthy for kittens.”

“Yes,” she said sadly. “As I said, Renpet and Nefure were the last to be born.”

“Our two pregnant cats lost their litters—all of them born too early—and the half-grown kittens of one of the other cats have disappeared. The queen claimed you had them, but Chester and I both knew that was hogwash.”

“She probably took them herself,” Chione said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know! She is not quite sane, that cat.” She added quickly, “Of course, she is to be loved and respected, being of the superior species, but how she came to have the nature she has is a mystery. The late queen was wonderful, kind and wise, and—well, you know Pshaw-Ra. Perhaps he is not, as everyone thinks, Nefure’s sire. Perhaps some lesser, common tom caught the queen before she had those final two kittens and his unscrupulous opportunism
accounts for Nefure’s behavior. Certainly Renpet is much more like the queen.”

“That’s nice,” Jubal said, “but it doesn’t seem to be doing her a lot of good.” He shook his head and looked around at the painted and carved stone room, deep underground, in a place where a cat was queen and her sister a princess, in something like a catty version of a Dumas swashbuckler, though without the sword fighting, and people just helped the cats!

Chione caught his look, although the light from the wall sconces was not bright. “What troubles you, Chester’s boy?”

“I don’t get this place. I don’t understand why the humans are ruled by a cat queen or why the cats are considered divine or why everything is underground and some of it is really modern and some looks ancient. I don’t get how the walls slid around as we passed through it, and I don’t get why you could send a cat into space and have all of these other cat spaceships laying around your yards and serving as skylights for the next layer of tunnels. This is a weird place. I love cats a lot but I just don’t get it.”

Chione shrugged. “I don’t understand how you can live among the stars either, or what the cats did there. I wish I did. Renpet’s distant ancestors traveled through space long before they settled among our earthly ancestors and taught them so much that is part of our culture even today, though many of their ancient teachings have been lost. When first we came to this planet, we brought with us the mummies of the original divine cats. Our society is a remnant of one that once revered them above all other deities. Many of the mummies of sacred cats were stolen and destroyed by foreigners, but many of those were the mummies of less nobly born cats, sacrificed by unscrupulous priests in the long ago. We have preserved the original remains lo these many millennia and brought them with us when we migrated. Our royalty claim descent from these starfarers and teachers.”

“Is Pshaw-Ra royalty?”

“He is of the royal line, yes, though the power passes from
mother to daughter. But my father, who was once the servant of Pshaw-Ra, said that he bore the closest resemblance of any cat he knew to those described in the sacred texts.”

“Did the cats write those?”

“They dictated them to the ancestors. They had great powers of thought transference through which they imparted their advanced ideas.”

“Like what happens between Chester and me or you and Renpet?”

“Yes, only much more potent.”

Jubal chewed the corner of his lower lip thoughtfully. “One other thing I don’t get, then—from what I’ve read, back in the early days when the new worlds were being settled, there wasn’t much of a luggage allowance—how did your people get to bring a bunch of cat mummies?”

“We would not leave them behind! We had to leave many of the sacred implements as it was …”

“The sacred scratching post, that kind of thing?” he asked. He was a little put off by all the “sacred” this, that, and the other thing. He loved Chester and thought he was very smart, but he didn’t revere his cat particularly.

She smiled at him as if he’d said something very bright, and he felt bad for being sarcastic. “Yes, all of those things. The sarcophagi of the mummies were small, and I suppose were easily disguised as other things those in charge might have considered more useful. The sacred cats were thought to be mere pets, rather than our leaders.”

“So the whole thought transference thing continued up until the time your people left Earth?”

“Only occasionally, among certain individuals with a special affinity, an important ingredient in a bond even now. But those cats who coupled their minds with the minds of human interpreters directed us.”

Jubal wondered how much it was the word of the cat passing
through the interpreter that did the directing, and how much it would have been the interpreter making up edicts that would suit his own purposes and saying they were from the divine kitty.

Chester looked up at him through slitted eyes.
You don’t think a mere cat could come up with that on his own? Is that it?

No, no, that’s not what I mean. I know you’re smart and everything, but wouldn’t inventing space travel interfere with your napping, hunting, eating, and the other stuff you seem to need to do every day to be happy?

Inventing feline space travel would be a lot like hunting … and we are natural-born explorers with a lot of what you humans call scientific curiosity
.

Jubal was stung to suddenly be lumped with “you humans.”
Of course you are, buddy. You’re brilliant. I didn’t mean you
.

Or Renpet?
Chester asked, having evidently forgiven the little female for stealing his fish.

Jubal reached down and petted both of them between their ears.
Sure. Renpet too
.

Both of them purred up at him. He was evidently forgiven.

Chione gave him a startled look. “She tolerated your touch!”

“Any friend of Chester’s is a friend of mine. Evidently your princess feels the same way about me.”

“Walk with me,” the girl said, rising to her sandaled feet and straightening her skirt. “Our friends wish to commune with each other, I think.”

Chester?
Jubal asked.

See you later, boy. Some things a tom has to do by himself, you know what I mean?

Jubal and Chione left the entire huge cavern room to the two cats, walking along the ledge that formed a bank for the vigorous and noisy underground river.

“What happened to the bridge that was here when we crossed from the other side?” he asked her.

“I retracted it,” she said.

“I didn’t see you do that.”

“You didn’t see a lot of things.”

“You can say that again. You talk a lot about dead ancestors. Is this place haunted or something?”

“What would make you think that?”

“Well, back on the other side, we kept getting lost. Chester was looking for that mummy place you showed him before, and he said the tunnel had been fairly straight, but we couldn’t seem to escape all sorts of twists and turns that led us up and down, just under the surface and to these sort of primitive houses. Just about the time we figured out where to go, the passage that seemed to be there wasn’t anymore, as if someone was changing the layout of the tunnels.”

“Someone was, at least on this end. When we heard the alarm, Renpet had me route you away from your pursuers and toward us.”

She took a small device from inside her skirt and waggled it in one hand.

“You control the tunnel walls?”

“Not really, just a series of doors and sliding walls that block off some passages and open others. Mine only works within a certain radius. There is a control room on the other end where they can monitor activity in the critical passages and control traffic within them. This only has a little light that comes on if someone unauthorized enters the area.”

“We still haven’t located the kittens. I know you didn’t take them, but do you suppose they might have somehow come to this side of the river—maybe someone brought them? Or do you think they’ve been killed?”

She shook her head and the tiny braids into which all of her hair was plaited bounced. “I do not think so. You are honored guests, and it has been so long since we had kittens here, I cannot think that anyone would harm them.”

“We thought we heard them close to the surface on the other side, but Chester said that even though it sounded like kittens, he
wasn’t getting any mental response from them. I’d like to keep looking, even if he is otherwise occupied.”

“I will clear the passages on this side for you, or those within my range. The west is reserved for the dead, and the living rarely visit here. It would be a good place to hide someone. Like me, like Renpet. There are doorways to the world above concealed beneath the sand.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Uh—is there another way back through them without disturbing Their Catships?” It came out a little sarcastic. After all he’d gone through to find Chester, the cat had gone and got his head turned by a kitty face.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “There are many ways. This one will do,” and she led him to another entrance that wasn’t even cavelike. It had a doorway, with lintels and carvings, but until they got right up on it with his headlamp and her torch, the opening hadn’t been evident.

“Thanks,” he said, and stalked off into the tunnel.

He had barely started, however, when he heard the skitter of paws behind him.
Wait! You are my boy. How can you go away without me? Wait for me! I love you. I am lost without you
, Chester’s voice pleaded inside his head. And in another moment claws dug into his shoulders and neck before the familiar furry weight settled against the back of his head. Chester licked his ears and his jaw and his hair, purring like a small machine.

I thought you had better things to do
, Jubal said.

She clawed me!
he said.
I did what she wanted and then she turned around and almost knocked my nose off my face. I’m sorry. Am I getting blood on you?

Jubal sort of wanted to teach Chester a lesson and be a little standoffish, but it was hard to do that under the circumstances. He raised his hand back to pet his friend, and his fingers did come away sticky.
She nailed you a good one, didn’t she?

Yes, and I did exactly as she asked
.

My pop would probably say that’s females for you
.

My mother’s not like that! Git wasn’t either, and I doubt if Silvesta is, even though I haven’t seen her for a long time. Maybe it’s that royal blood thing again
.

Maybe. When we get back, you should ask your mother
.

At some point while they’d been communicating, another set of noises beyond the gurgling of the underground river and the sandy crunch of Jubal’s footsteps began.