Catalyst_ A Tale of the Barque Cats - Anne McCaffrey [42]
Janina half expected a reluctant Jared to prevent the Molly Daise from disembarking, but that did not happen. Five days after the ship returned for her and the cats, it departed the space station, two cats and one Cat Person richer.
By the time they were a day out, Chester’s behavior changed again. From a ’fraidy cat and a happy hunter, he morphed once more, this time into a listless, indifferent little lump with a vacant and vaguely resentful stare. He did not want to eat, he would not hunt, and he followed his mother and Janina around only, she suspected, because he did not wish to be left alone.
Janina began to fear she had reassured Jared as to the cats’ health too soon. What if he made a disastrous decision based on her support? She lay awake when she should have been catnapping with her charges, imagining a terrible plague—the first symptom of which was the shiny spit and mucosa—wiping out the animals that ate the shiny bug, infecting each other with whatever vile disease it might carry, and finally contaminating the entire universe. The animals would die. The disease might even spread to people. And again the blame would be hers; Jared, who had only tried to do the right thing, would be destroyed professionally when the origins of the disease became known.
She whimpered and tossed in her berth until she finally did sleep, exhausted by her dreams and then comforted by purring cats, Chessie having crawled on top of her chest, while the kitten—more animated than he had been since they left the station—curled up between her head and shoulder and sang into her ear.
All of which made his lackluster performance when they next patrolled more puzzling than ever.
Ponty found the ship he was looking for. The captain and crew of the Reuben Ranzo were respectable enough that he didn’t mind taking the boy there, but not so respectable that they could afford to be too inquisitive about Ponty’s own schemes. The captain was a divorced man whose ex-wife—a memorable woman Ponty recalled with painful clarity—made him look like a saint. He had a little girl about Jubal’s age. Ponty’s other criteria for a ship was that it not be one to which he had delivered a contraband kitten.
Not that Jubal was going to secure a berth simply to be a playmate for the captain’s daughter. Fortunately, the boy was a hard worker and handy at a number of practical pursuits of the kind that had never interested Ponty. His mother’s influence. He was good at building things and taking them apart, good with machinery, and even seemed comfortable fixing plumbing.
And Jubal liked it that the Ranzo had a ship’s cat; not a fancy Barque Cat, just a jumped-up mangy old alley cat. In spite of what the kid had said about not wanting another cat, he immediately befriended it, though the captain said his daughter, the self-appointed Cat Person, considered Hadley to be her own. Hadley was black and fluffy, like Chester without the tuxedo and spats. He seemed to be a laid-back animal and graciously spread himself around enough to include Jubal, a possible new source of food and pets.
Once the kid was installed and helping load and stow the equipment and cargo, Ponty went about his business. He needed to acquire a few things to furnish the homegrown lab he intended to establish shipboard, an enterprise he was sure would interest Captain Loloma—nonviolent, low risk, and potentially quite profitable. He already had the DNA of Chessie and her litter. Cloning her and her kittens was only illegal if he got caught, and there was little chance of that. To most people, one cat looked a lot like another.
The equipment and supplies he couldn’t filch or acquire by calling in favors, he had to buy at the station commissary, a huge megamall encompassing one entire deck of the station. He was looking for a particular reagent when he felt an ominous poke in his back.
“If it isn’t my old friend Ponty,” a familiar but entirely unwelcome voice growled in his ear. “You weren’t planning on leaving without coming to