Chapter Twenty

Paul Hagbolt had grown very tired of his bondage and peculiarly bored with his spread-eagled reflection, and the invisible sun had dried his front completely, when he spotted two cryptic cat faces peering at him from a stretch of flowerbank by the control panel beyond his feet. The one was Miaow’s, the other was large as his own. They came floating forward from the gloom, and their bodies after their faces with a sinuous grace that hardly quivered a single pink petal or green spear, until they were barely emerged from the flowers — whereupon without further glance, at him they settled themselves in the air facing each other, so that he saw them in profile.

The tiger-being held out Miaow facing her, cradling the little gray cat on one spread paw and slim green secondary forearm — Paul realized that the second elbow which had terrified him was simply the normal feline wrist above the elongated palm bones that make a secondary forearm above the paw.

Miaow’s fur was now fluffy dry, and she lolled on her back, fantastically at ease, gray tail draped over violet-barred wrist, staring gravely into the great, violet-petalled eyes of her captor — or rather, her new friend, to judge from appearances.

They looked remarkably like mother and tiny child.

Paul’s feelings about the tiger-being, his very picture of her, underwent rapid changes as he watched her in repose — this time he thought of her from the first as “she,” an assumption bastioned by the apparent absence of external sex organs, except for two modest, indigo-ruddy nipples high in the green fur of her chest.

For a feline, she was short-bodied, long-legged, long-armed — in build more like a cheetah than any other terrestrial cat, though considerably larger: human size. The general proportions, too, were more human than feline — he guessed that in gravity she would be at least as much biped as quadruped.

The fur of her throat, chest, underbelly, and the insides of her arms and legs was green, the rest, green barred with violet.

Her head was prick-eared as any cat’s, but with a higher and broader forehead, seeming to increase the triangularity of the whole face, which was nevertheless completely feline, even to indigo button-nose and pale whisker hairs. Here the fur was violet except for a green mask across the eyes.

Despite the secondary forearms above them, the slim paws looked quite like hands now — three-fingered hands with an opposed thumb. The claws were invisible, presumably retracted and sheathed.

The violet-barred green tail swung gracefully over a half-bent hind leg.

The total effect, he realized suddenly — even the tail! — was now very close to that of a slim, tall woman dressed in a skintight fur costume for some fantastic cat-ballet. He felt a disturbing pang as he had that thought.

And just at that moment the tiger-being began to speak in English — clipped and exotically slurred, yet English nevertheless — not directing her speech toward him but to Miaow.

It was all so “impossible” that Paul listened as if in a dream.

“Come, little one,” the tiger-being said, poutingly parting only the two central inches of her mulberry lips. “We friends now. No need be shy.”

Miaow continued to stare at her gravely, contentedly.

“You me same folk,” the tiger-being continued winningly. “You easeful now, I feel. So speak. Ask question.”

A pause, with Paul feeling on the verge of understanding the fantastic cross-purposes that had begun to operate. Then the tiger-being said: “You shy one! You want front names? I know yours. Mine? — Tigerishka! Name I invent especially for you. You think me terrible tiger, also beautiful toes dancer. Toes dancers call selves, ‘-enska, -skaya, -ishka.’ Tigerishka!”

Then Paul understood. It was the super-error of a super-being. Tigerishka had been reading his thoughts to the point of learning his language in seconds, but all the while attributing those thoughts to her fellow-feline Miaow.

At the same time he realized what the disturbing pang had been: plain male desire for a thrillingly attractive she-being.

Tigerishka must have caught that thought, too, for she waved an indigo-padded finger at Miaow in playful reproof and said: “You have naughty feelings about me, little one. Really, you not big enough — and we both girls! Come now, speak…Paul…”

At that moment the presumably horrible truth must have occurred to her, for she slowly turned her head to stare at the real Paul, simultaneously toeing the edge of the floor below her. The next second she had sprung across the cabin and was poised above him, dagger-claws spread, mulberry lips writhed back from inch-and-a-half needle canines in her upper jaw. She still held Miaow, who seemed not greatly startled by the sudden activity.

Beyond her green slope-shoulder were stacked reflections of her back and of Paul’s own face grimacing madly.

“You — ape!” Tigerishka snarled. She thrust her great-jawed head down so that he winced his eyes three-quarters shut. Then, spacing out the words as one might to a barely literate peasant, she said: “You treat — little one — like beast — like pet?” The horrified contempt in the last word was glacial-volcanic.

All Paul could do in his frantic terror was snatch at something Margo was always saying, and gibber: “No! No! Cats are people!”

Don Merriam had stood on the rim of Earth’s Grand Canyon. He had also looked over the edge of the Leibnitz Cleft near the south pole of the moon. But never — except when he had driven the Baba Yaga through Luna — certainly never from a solid footing, had he peered into anything remotely as deep as the open, mile-wide circular pit that yawned only two dozen paces across the silver pavement from where the Baba Yaga stood with its ladder thrust down between its three legs.

How far did the pit go down? Five miles? Twenty-five? Five hundred? It seemed to maintain its one-mile width indefinitely. The equivalent in emptiness of what the plunging pillar of moon rock was in solidity, it narrowed somewhere far below to a tiny, hazy round that was little more than a point — and that narrowing was only the consequence of the laws of perspective and the limitations of his visual powers.

He toyed with the notion that the shaft went straight through the center of the planet to the other side, so that if he leaped off the edge now he would never hit bottom, but only fall four thousand miles or so — a weary fall, that, taking twenty hours at least, if terminal velocities in this planet’s atmosphere were like those on Earth, almost time enough to die of thirst — and then, finally, perhaps after a few reverberations of reversed and re-reversed fall, come to rest in the air at the planet’s center and slowly swim to the side of the shaft, just as he’d swum through the air of the Baba Yaga’s cabin in free fall.

Of course the air pressure down there, four thousand miles down, would be more than enough to crush him — perhaps enough to drive oxygen monatomic! — but they would surely have ways of dealing with that, ways of making the air exactly as thin or as thick as they wanted it at every depth.

Already he was doing a great deal of thinking in terms of their powers — powers which increased each time he turned his eyes, each time he thought, though he had yet to see a single one of them.

The false memory of his childhood came again, of the pit he’d found that went through the earth behind his family’s farm. So now he stared down the shaft hunting for a star, or rather for a hint of the captive antipodean day under its section of vaulted sky-film eight thousand miles down there. But even as he hunted he knew it was a visual impossibility, and in any case it was made quite infeasible by the multitude of lights glowing, flashing, and twinkling from the sides of the shaft at every floor.