Catalyst_ A Tale of the Barque Cats - Anne McCaffrey [87]
CHAPTER 21
Chessie sat up on her haunches, watching the door. It was time for Jared to come, perhaps bearing Kibble’s reassuring scent on his clothing again. But when the door swung open, a strange woman, tall and lean, with short white hair and a stern expression, walked through instead. Chessie craned her neck a little to the side to see if Jared was coming in behind the woman, but he was not.
She kept a sharp eye on the door for a long time after, but Jared never appeared. Only a little discouraged, because even the best and most reliable humans tended to have irregular habits, she spread herself as far as she could across the floor of her cage, laid her head on its side against her outstretched paws and tried to sleep.
She had been very worried indeed before the first time Jared appeared in this place. Since she had come, some of the other cats were carried off by humans who took them through the Other Door, the one no cat in his or her right mind wanted to be on the other side of, and never returned. The caged cats had heard few cries, but the smell of fear and death leaked through that door like the stench of rotting rat flesh.
Overhead lights flickered all the time. This was of no particular consequence to ships’ cats, who cared nothing for dirtside definitions of day and night. The food was of far lower quality than Chessie was used to, and nothing fresh was available, except for the occasional beetle that crawled into a cage. The efforts the laboratory people made to collect and confine the beetles were largely unsuccessful.
The sanitary conditions were appalling. The incarcerated cats were not provided with proper boxes but instead were given paper on which to deposit their excrement and urine. The smell was unappetizing, especially so close to one’s food and water dishes.
Jared had been making it his business to see to it that papers were changed often, so the cages were in a constant rotation of being freshened. It was a comfort. Even those in the lab who seemed to have a liking for her species had difficulty tolerating the stink—which should have told them how much more awful it was to the cats who sat in the middle of it all.
Then there was the cat-cacophony of the hundreds of voices protesting their fate.
“What will become of me?” a young female, as well bred as Chessie herself and heavy with kittens, cried incessantly. “Will they spare my young?”
“Hah! I knew no good would come of helping humans,” an old tom said bitterly. “I thought my shipmates were different but they turned me over quick enough, didn’t they?”
“My girl won’t know what to do without me,” cried a male by the name of Hadley. “What if rats bite her? What if she has bad dreams? Who will knead her middle with his paws to wake her up, and then, when she has forgotten all about her dreams while she feeds him, who will purr her back to sleep?”
“Who will keep the mice out of the wiring?” another fretted, pawing at the wire of his cage until his paws bled.
“Why are they doing this to us?” wailed Git’s kitten, Bat, who had been snatched from his berth before he’d served two months of his contract. “I want ooooowwwwwt!”
Most of the humans had begun wearing devices in their ears that Chessie thought must block out the cries because they ceased responding with either kind words or curses.
Chessie herself said nothing. She was weary and sad, but she had been near death many times already, both as its agent and as one bereft because of it. She had lost children and her