“Think of the sea as being hyperspace, its surface as the universe we know, its ships as planets, we, a submarine.
“We surface near some solitary sun not yet built up with artificial orbs. Then they appear, and we must dive again. Sometimes we stay too long, must fight a battle before we vanish in the void’s cruel dark. We’ve blown up three suns just for diversions! Those novas are in distant galaxies. We may have killed a planet; can’t be sure.
“Sometimes our cold pursuers make a truce and plead with us a while, and make us offers before they aim their killing bombs and rays — hoping we’ll see the arc light of their reason that glares always above the cosmic prison yard.
“Twice we risked all to find another cosmos — cut loose in hyperspace and sailed off blind. But by some twist of hyperspatial gusts we were brought back to this same universe — enchanted thorn-forest around a castle, or tunnel ending by some trick of space inside the same jailyard that it was dug from.
“We are the Vanderdecken Planet of the Cosmos, making our knight’s tour ’round the universe — but always comes the untiring pursuit along the crooked curves of hyperspace.
“We try to keep our standards, but we slacken. We didn’t need to hurt your planet, Paul! — or so I think, I really can’t be sure — I’m but a servant on the Wanderer. But though I can’t be sure, I’ll say this now: I hope before we harm one creature more, we plunge forever into the dark storm. They say the third time you drown — May that be so!”
Her voice changed and she cried out sharply: “Oh, Paul, we’re charging around with all these beautiful dreams and yet all we can do is hurt people. Should you wonder that we’re falling in love with death?”
Tigerishka broke off. After a bit, her voice neutral yet tight, as if she had drawn into herself, she said: “There, I’ve told the monkey everything now. The monkey may feel superior to the cat, if he wishes.”
Very quietly, Paul drew and let out a deep breath. His heart was thudding. At another time he might question Tigerishka’s story and his understanding of it, but now it simply stood there as she had told it, as if the stars beneath him were an emblazoning of it — a diamond script spelling only what she had said.
This fantastic eyrie was so like the viewpoint of dream, so like what is lightly called “the mind’s eye,” that Paul could hardly say whether he were living only in his fancy or in the whole great starry cosmos; for once, imagination and reality were seamlessly mated.
Pushing his shoulders from the great warm window with less effort than a sigh, he looked sideways and down at the fantastic figure beside him, seeming in silhouette more than ever like a slim woman costumed for a cat ballet. Her hind legs were sprawled out, her forepaws folded together-to cushion her chin, so that her head was up and he saw in black outline the snub nose, the height of her forehead and the spearpoints of her ears. Her tail arched off beyond her, where its tip twitched in a slow rhythm against the stars. She looked like a slim black sphinx.
’Tigerishka,” he said softly, “there was once a long-haired monkey who lived hungry and died young. His name was Franz Schubert. He wrote hundreds of monkey songs — pongo ballads and ape laments. One of them was to words written by an altogether forgotten monkey called Schmidt von Lьbeck. That monkey song strikes me now as if it had been written for you and your people. At least, it’s named for your planet — Der Wanderer…The Wanderer. I’ll sing it for you…”
He began, “Ich komme von Gebirge her…
“No,” he said, breaking off, “let me put it in my own language and change some of the pictures just a little, to fit better, without changing any of the key lines or the feeling.”
The words and phrases he wanted came effortlessly.
He heard a soft rustling wail, all exactly pitched, in more voices than one, and he realized that Tigerisbka was lifting the piano accompaniment from his mind and reproducing it with a lonelier beat than even the piano gets.
After the sixth bar, he came in:
I come here from the stars alone, The way is twisted, the deeps moan. I wander on, am seldom gay, And keep on asking, “What’s the way?” All space is dark, the suns are cold, The flowers are pale and life is old. Talk that’s not noise is getting rare — I am a stranger everywhere. Where are you, world that’s all my own? — Longed for and sought, but never known; The cosmos that’s as green as hope, One fiercely flowered, starward slope; The world where all my friends can walk, My dead stand up, nor white as chalk, The universe that talks my talk — Where are you? I wander on, am seldom gay, And keep on asking, “What’s the way?” A ghostly answer comes from space: “There where you are not — there’s your place.”
When the last line was sung, and Tigerishka had hummed the accompaniment out to its end, she sighed and said softly: “That’s us, all right. He must have had a little cat in him, that Schubert monkey — and that Schmidt monkey, too. You’ve got a little cat in you, Paul…”
He looked for a moment at the slim, star-edged figure beside him and then he reached out a hand that was star-edged, too, and laid it on her shoulder. He sensed no tightening, no anger, under the faintly warm, dry, short soft fur. After a moment, although it was nothing he’d consciously planned — perhaps the fur was giving cues to his fingers — he began to scratch gently the curving margin between shoulder and neck, exactly as he might have done to Miaow.
For a while she did not move, although he thought he felt muscles relaxing under the fur. Then there was the faint murmur of a barely-breathed purr — just a flutter of sound — and she leaned her head against his hand so that her ear brushed his wrist He shifted his kneading toward the back of her neck and she raised her head, rolling it from side to side with a deeper fluttering purr. Then she rolled her body away from him a quarter turn, and for a moment he thought it was to tell him to stop, but quickly discovered it was only that she wanted to be scratched under the chin. And then he felt a silky finger press against the back of his neck and draw smoothly down his body and he realized it was the tip of her tail caressing him.
“Tigerishka?” he murmured.
“Yes, Paul…” she answered faintly. With a tiny dragging of elbow and knee against the warm transparency he drifted against her, and his arms met around her slim, brushy back and, while the tail-tip continued to caress, he felt her velvet pads resting lightly against his spine with only the ghosts of claws at their tips. He heard Miaow mewing plaintively. “She jealous…” Tigerishka breathed with the faintest chuckle as her cheek brushed against his, and he felt her harsh narrow tongue lightly touch his ear and begin to scrub against the back of his neck.
Up to this moment he had done everything quite gravely, as if his every gesture were part of a ritual that he must get just right and never be excited, but now safely welded to this fantastic feline Venus in Furs the excitement did come, and the images began to flood up into his mind, and he let go altogether, though strangely without losing control. For the images came with a queer orderliness, as when his mind had first been riffled through by Tigerishka, but now they came slowly enough so that he could see them all clearly, through and through. They were pictures of men, women, and beasts. They were pictures of erotic love, rape, torture, and death — but he realized that even the deaths and the tortures were only to underline the intensity of the contacts, the exquisite violation of all bodily taboos, the completeness of the togetherness; they were the inward decor for the actions of two bodies. These pictures alternated regularly with mind-filling symbols like elaborate jewels and patterned enamelings, or meaningful shapes in a richly bright kaleidoscope. After a long while the symbols began to dominate the pictures; they began to throb like great drums, to shiver and resound like great cymbals; there was a feeling of the universe around, of darting out toward it in all directions, of outspreading to totality in one great series of building and diminishing surges that went plunging through the stars to velvet darkness.