Catalyst_ A Tale of the Barque Cats - Anne McCaffrey [11]
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