Catalyst (4 page)

When they reached the tracker, the monitor showed Chessie had shifted position slightly, and though her tail tip twitched now and then, she was otherwise sleeping soundly. Chessie was fine, Janina thought.
She
was the one with the problem.

Locksley was a typical frontier settlement—a single circular main street with businesses around the outer diameter and along the spokes branching out into the residential district beyond, where the roads became fewer, leading off into the countryside where horse farms such as Varley’s occupied square miles of fields. The businesses along each spoke were separated into malls according to the sort of wares they sold. There was a food mall; a hardware and repair mall; a clothing, shoes, and fripperies mall; a children’s mall; a housewares mall; and a livestock mall containing feed, horse tack, and home veterinary supplies. She’d heard new settlers express wonderment at the strange arrangement of their town, but the prefab wedges that formed around towns had been the shape carried most easily in the early round-hulled ships. Some of the houses had been delivered that way too, but other, humbler and more primitive dwellings were made of native organic plant life and stone. She liked the look of them, as each was different from anything she had seen before.

While Jared went into a café in the food mall to order their picnic, she ducked into the adjacent clothing spoke to shop for the gifts Captain Vesey had requested she purchase for his family. It was nice that he made an effort to show them he was thinking of them no matter where he was.

Bypassing the sections containing uncomfortable-looking shoes and colorful clothing, she headed for the jewelry and accessories. Captain Vesey’s oldest daughter was horse-crazy, so Janina selected a bracelet beaded with running horses for her. For Mrs. Vesey, she found a hood and collar of soft loden green mohair, locally grown. The hood and collar were a nod to the hero of Terra’s original Sherwood Forest. The colony’s marketing team had decided on that theme for their souvenir industry, but this was a new product,
something Janina hadn’t seen before. That was why Captain Vesey liked the dirtside malls. The space station’s shopping center held a far more cosmopolitan array of goods and services, but each planet had certain lines of items that could be found only on the surface. They made fine collectibles, and the captain said Mrs. Vesey was an original who liked unusual things. Janina had seen pictures of the captain’s family and thought the hood would suit Mrs. Vesey’s green-gold eyes and rather dramatic bone structure very nicely. For the youngest girl, she found a little lavender drawstring bag decorated with a bow and arrow motif outlined in shiny purple crystals. Her shopping complete, she returned to the tracker. Chessie had switched positions so that her face was now to the wall. Janina held her breath for a moment, thinking Chessie seemed too still, then a delicate ear tuft quivered and the long tips of her upturned whiskers twitched. Janina relaxed. Poor Chessie had needed this rest badly.

C
arlton Pontius—Ponty to his shipmates, Carl Poindexter more familiarly to his local Sherwood associates—had not forgotten his son Jubal’s birthday cat at all. Or rather, he had momentarily forgotten his promise but remembered it immediately when he saw the
Molly Daise’s
Cat Person and her prize queen.

Ponty was a man whose capacity for inspiration had often come to the assistance of his aspirations. Like the cat in the little lady’s arms, he usually landed on his feet and got the cream while he was at it.

He had been a soldier until he saw the light and started working as an arms dealer and a sales rep for pharmaceuticals of both legal and illegal status. He had served in every conceivable rank and capacity aboard ships, chiefly those that smuggled prohibited technology from world to world for a price. His sales experience had made him a valuable asset to such crews. His was a competent medic and a mostly self-taught geneticist, having reared several clones from test tube to maturity en route to their most lucrative destinations. Among his other less legitimate talents, he was a consummate con man.

But even he had never in his wildest dreams imagined that he would someday include cat rustling in his résumé.

Oddly enough, it was his child’s innocent wish for a pet that
alerted him to the opportunities awaiting the imaginative man in the feline relocation industry.

Raising the groceries for his family’s sustenance had put his knowledge of the shadier branches of selective breeding to good use. Since horses were big money business on Sherwood, when he first arrived he’d experimented with equine embryos and tended them faithfully. Then he’d been called away before he could return to care for the resulting foals. The best he could do was to borrow a couple of maternal mares from a neighboring herd to look after the little shavers near the line shack where he’d stashed them. Due to the financial demands of his household and the shaky state of his marriage, he’d only been back for brief intervals in the meantime and had no idea what became of the foals. If they survived, they should be full grown by now, with a couple of generations of descendants unless they were sterile, and he had no reason to think they would be.

Cats were smaller, easier to smuggle, and according to the cat girl, some of them were even more valuable than horses. Every ship he served on had a ship’s cat, of course, though none were of the hoity-toity lineage of the furball the girl had been toting. If one of those ships had gone down, the cat would have perished with the crew. The last thing his ships’ masters wanted was to draw attention to their vessels with a big fancy sign, whether or not they were derelict. Cargo could always be retrieved later, but not if some interfering busybody boarded a dead ship to save a cat.

He had known about the Barque Cats and seen them occasionally when he did business with ships whose missions were less shady than his own. They were pretty enough beasts and good hunters and all that, but in spite of what the cat girl said, he didn’t see any difference between them and the standard Maine coon moggie that patrolled the barns, yards, and houses of his feline-inclined neighbors. No matted fur on the pampered highborn beauties, of course. No fleas, ticks, ear mites, or parasites either.

When Ponty saw the girl toting the pregnant cat, it hadn’t taken much mental arithmetic to figure she was on her way to Vlast so he could tend the furball. He had promised his boy a kitten, and that was, he told himself, the reason he had approached the girl. A man could ask about a kitten for his kid, couldn’t he?

It had been a revelation to him that ships would actually pay so much to have a kitten with the right pedigree on board. Crews apparently gave more for a fancy-bred Barque Cat than he had ever been paid for a year on any of his voyages. Well, they might be too good for him, but nothing was too good for his boy. Jubal wanted a kitten, and his son was going to get the best kitten his old man could get for him. If he happened to make enough money off the sale of the cat and all of the other kittens to support his family and future enterprises for some time to come, it was no more than his reward for being such a great father. He could have always settled for one of those poor little Sherwood kittens that were lucky to find a berth as a barn cat, luckier still to be a pampered pet, but if that cat girl said her cat was better, and worth more money, he figured she ought to know.

Personally, he didn’t see—unless these cats had their kittens through their noses or in some other special way—how anyone would ever be able to tell the difference between a kitten born to Thomas’s Duchess and sired by Space Jockey from a kitten born to Haystack Puss and sired by Back Fence Tom. There was ID hardware, of course, with the DNA code on it, but that could be counterfeited easily enough.

So, in his natural fatherly solicitude for his boy, he formulated a lapse into not-so-latent larceny. Using the Duchess as his seed cat, so to speak, he could use her DNA samples to maybe elevate some otherwise undervalued kittens to her lofty and lucrative status, sort of like placebo cats, or a control group. As expensive as the real thing, of course, but all misrepresented in a spirit of scientific inquiry. If they didn’t know the difference, would his clients adopt the barn kittens and believe them to be as good as Chessie’s real
kittens? It was a far far better thing he planned to do, a redemocra-tization of that most independent feline species. He would be undermining a silly human value system that falsely overinflated some animals while leaving others homeless and forsaken—when they could be going to good homes for a healthy profit to him. He was nothing, he liked to think, if not softhearted.

His own kid would get a bona fide Barque kitten, of course. His kid deserved nothing but the best.

Jared returned to the tracker swinging a large woven basket, and he and Janina took off over the ridge to the field Varley had indicated, where six more broken-colored horses watched curiously as the humans unpacked their lunch. Included in the picnic provisions was a healthy supply of apples and carrots.

A café lunch might have been more private, as it turned out. These horses were no more frightened than the others had been, and were also so nosy as to be intrusive. Janina and Jared sat together on a blanket, close enough to pass food and close enough that she could feel his body’s warmth radiating through the chill of the afternoon breeze.

“Janina, you’ve been a tremendous help,” he said, handing her a plate with some cheese and apple on it. “Did your Cat Person training include being a vet tech?”

“Not really,” she said. “Just certain things. Like birthings, treating wounds, emergency cat medicine, recognition of the usual cat maladies.”

“Not all of the cat handlers I’ve met seem nearly as well-versed in all of those areas as you are,” he said.

“What they gave us at the academy was a bit sketchy. I was lucky to be assigned such a wonderful cat to work with as soon as I’d finished the Cat Person elective in my schooling. And not all of the cabin boys and girls who care for a ship’s cat have even had the academy training I did. Some ships acquire a cat without having a
properly trained Cat Person in the crew, just a youngster to feed the cat and change the commode. They don’t all know how to monitor the cat’s hunt and search activities properly, to do the most good for the ship. When I meet some of the untrained ones, I try to answer questions and make suggestions. Most of them at least do love their cat.”

“You’ve done remarkably well with the knowledge you have,” he told her.

She felt her skin growing warm from more than the sun’s heat. He had the most beautiful eyes, and they were totally focused on her.

“I study everything I can from the courses in the data banks, and take classes at our ports of call when we dock for more than a couple of days.”

“Excellent. Have you thought about later?”

“Later?”

“When Chessie—retires. She’s not a young cat, and all of these litters are taking a toll on her.”

Janina studied the grass intently for a moment or two while her eyes stopped swimming. She knew he didn’t mean actually retire. Chessie wouldn’t leave the
Molly Daise
until she died. Then, if the ship hadn’t retained one of her kittens for an understudy, they’d have to buy a kitten and assign a new Cat Person, someone young and small enough to follow the kitten into places where an adult couldn’t go. “I—I’d probably train my replacement,” she said. But the thought of trying to do that after Chessie passed—she didn’t know how she’d face it. She couldn’t bear the thought of being without Chessie. They’d been together since she was eight years old and Chessie fit into the palm of her hand.

“Will you return to your family on your home world?” he asked, pretending he hadn’t noticed her discomfort.

“I don’t have a family, not that I know of. My mother was killed in an accident when I was small. My father was away—no one ever told me exactly where—and has never returned. I haven’t been
able to learn anything about him. I’m not really sure what I’ll do when Chessie—”

He cleared his throat, and this time he seemed a little nervous. “I actually had something I wanted to ask you about that,” he said.

She didn’t catch the rest of it. A brown and white muzzle intruded between them and lipped the apple off the plate, leaving a smear of sparkly slobber on the cheese.

Both of them bent over the plate. “Look,” she said, pointing, “that looks like what Chessie’s been coughing up.”

Jared was already fishing a specimen bag out of his inside pocket. Lifting the cheese slice with the edge of the disposable fork, he deposited it in the bag. He frowned. “This is very irregular, since a ship’s cat and a wild horse are hardly on the same diet and don’t even breathe the same air. I can’t think what they’d have in common that would produce this”—he waggled the bag at her before tucking it into his pocket—“in both species.”

Janina felt suddenly sick with apprehension. “You don’t suppose it’s some sort of alien plague, do you? Like those diseases that used to kill so many Terran animals before they developed vaccines?”