The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (89 page)

“It’s called . . .” The Cat paused and then wiggled her eyebrows. “
Ek-die-ssshone
.” She paused. “That-ssh a word. I don’t know what it mean-sh either. It’s just in my head.”

That Cat knew her toothless voice was funny. She was playing up to it. I saw then how clever she was, how clever she had been. She knew just what to say to get Leveza on her side.

“Bee-sh make honey, and bee-sh make Horshes.”

“So you give the seed something from bees, and we give birth to full-bloods?” Everything about Grama stood up alert and turned toward the Cat.

“Not you too,” I moaned.

Finally I made Leveza laugh. “Oh Akwa, you old chestnut!”

“No,” said the Cat. “What gets born is much, much closer to Horses. It’s a mix of you and a full-blooded Horse, but then we can . . .”

“Breed back!” said Grama. “Just pair off the right ones.”

“Yup,” said the Cat. “I’ve alsway-sssh thought I could do it. I jussht needed lotsh of Horshes. My pridemates had sschtrong tendenshee to eat them.”

There was something deadly in Leveza’s calm. “We could bring back the Ancestors. Imagine what they could tell us! Maybe they have all the Memory Sticks, all together.”

The Cat leaned back, her work done. “They knew nothing. They had no memory. Everything they knew, they had to learn. How to walk. How to talk. All over again each time. So they could forget. But they could learn.”

Overhead the stars looked like a giant spider’s web, all glistening with dew.

“They wanted to travel to the stars. So they thought they would carry the animals and plants inside them. And they were worried that all their knowledge would be lost. ‘How,’ they asked, ‘can we make the information safe?’ So they made it like the knowledge every spider has: how to weave a web.”

“Kaway,” said Leveza, in a mourning voice.

I felt as thought I had gone to sleep on the ground all alone instead of sleeping on my feet to watch. This was madness, just the kind of madness to capture Leveza. I will keep watch now, I promised myself.

“Maybe one day the Ancestors will sail back.” Leveza arched her neck and looked up at the stars.

All the next day, as we headed east, they talked their nonsense. Nowadays, I wish that I had listened and could remember it, but all I heard then was that the Cat was subverting my Leveza. I knew it was no good pleading with her to let all of this madness alone, to come home, to be as we were. How I wanted that Cat to die. I’ve never felt so alone and useless.

“Don’t worry, love,” said Grama. “It’s Leveza’s way.”

I was too angry to answer.

The stream dipped down through green hills which suddenly fell away. We stopped at the top of a slope, looking out over a turquoise and grey plain. We had made it to the eastern slopes facing the sea. The grass was long and soft and rich, so we grazed as we walked, and I hoped my milk would come back. The foals, Choova included, began to run up and down through the meadows as if already home. We’d made it; we would be fine.

Fortchee kept pushing us, getting us well out of the Cats’ range. Still, it was strange; this was flatlands, full of tall grass. Why were there no other Cats? I kept sniffing the wind, we all did, but all we smelled was the pure fresh smell of grazing.

It was not until near sunset that Fortchee brayed for camp. Grama and I went back, and I kicked the grass as I walked. Grama chewed my mane and called me poor love. “She’s always loved ideas. The Cat is full of them.”

“Yes, she wants us to make new children to feed to her!” I pulled Choova closer to me and nuzzled her.

We camped, grazed, and watered, but I couldn’t settle. I paced round and round. I went back to our wagon, slumped down, and tried to feed Choova again. I couldn’t. I wept. I was dry like old grass, and I had no one to help me and felt alone, abandoned. I heard Leveza start to sing! Sing, while sleeping with a Cat. She was blank, unfeeling, something restraining had been left out of her. She didn’t love me, she didn’t love anything. Just her fabrications. And she’d pulled me and used me up and left me alone.

Choova was restless too. For a while, getting her to sleep occupied me. Finally her breathing fell regular, soft and smelling of hay, sweet and young and trusting, her long slim face resting on my haunches.

I lay there and heard Leveza sing the songs about sunrise, pasture, running through fields, the kinds of songs you sing when you are excited, young.

In love.

Sleep wouldn’t come, peace wouldn’t come. I turned over and Choova stirred, Grama groaned. I was keeping them awake. Suddenly I was determined to bring all of this to a stop. I was going to go out there and get my groom-mate back. So I rolled quietly out from under the wagon. Everything was still; even birds and insects – no stars, no moon. Yet I thought I heard . . . something.

I reared up to look over the windbreaks and saw light over the horizon, and drifting white smoke. I thought it was the last of the fire, then realized it was in the wrong direction. Did I hear shots? And mewling?

I was about to give the danger call when Fortchee stepped up to me. “
Fuhfuhfoom
,” he said, the quiet call. “That’s Cat fighting Cat. The ones chasing us have strayed into another pride’s territory.”

I felt ice on our shoulders. We stood and watched and listened and our focusing ears seemed to pull the sound closer to us.

A battle between Cats.

“We can sleep on a little longer in safety,” he said. “I had to tell Leveza to stop singing.”

I started to walk. “I need to talk sense to that woman.”

“Good luck.” He pulled a cart aside, to make a gap for me. “Be careful anyway.”

As I walked toward the wagon the sound grew, a growling, roaring, crying, a sound like a creeping wildfire. It was as if all the world had gone mad along with me.

I slipped down the track, silently, rehearsing what I would say to her. I would tell her to come back to Choova and the herd and let the Cat do what she could to survive. I would tell her: You choose. Me or that Cat. I would force her to come back, force her to be sensible.

I got halfway down the track, and clouds moved away from the moon, and I saw.

At first I thought Leveza was just grooming her. That would have been enough to make me sick, the thought of grooming something that smelt of death, of blood.

But it wasn’t grooming. The Cat had not eaten for days, was wounded and hungry, and Leveza had leaking tits.

I saw her suckling a Cat.

The Earth spun. I had never known that such perversion existed; I’d never heard of normal groom-mates doing such a thing. But what a fearful confounding was this, of species, of mother, of child? While my Choova starved, that Cat, that monster, was being fed, given horsemilk as if by a loving mother.

I gagged and made a little cry and stumbled and coughed and I think those two in the wagon turned and saw me. I spun around and galloped, hooves pounding, and I was calling over and over, “Foul, foul, foul!”

I wailed and I heard answering shouts from inside the camp. Ventoo and Lindalfa came hobbling out to me.

“Akwa, darling!”

“Akwa, what’s wrong?”

They were mean-eyed. “What’s
she
done now?” They were yearning for bad news about Leveza

I wept and wailed and tried to pull myself away. “She won’t feed Choova but she’s feeding that Cat.”

“What do you mean, feed?”

I couldn’t answer.

“Hunting! Yes we saw! Killing for that thing!”

“Foul, yes, poor Akwa!”

I hauled in a breath that pushed my voice box the wrong way.

“It’s not hunting!” I was frothing at the mouth, the spittle and foam splayed over my lips and chin. “Uhhhhh!”

I wished the grass would slash her like a thousand needles. I wanted hot embers poured down her throat, I wanted her consumed, I wanted the Cats to come and make good all their terrible threats. Yes, yes, eat your Cat lover and then be eaten too. Call for me and I will call back to you:
you deserve this!

Grama was there. “Akwa, calm down. Down, Akwa.” She ronfled the soothing noise. I blew out spittle at her, rejecting the trigger from my belly outward. I shriek-whinnied in a mixture of fear, horror, and something like the sickness call.

“She’s suckling the Cat!”

Silence.

Someone giggled.

I head-butted the person I thought had laughed. “Suckling. An adult. Cat!”

Grama fell silent. I shouted at her. “Heard of that before, Midwife?” My eyes were round; my teeth were shovels for flesh; I was enraged at everything and everyone.

Grama stepped back. Fortchee stepped forward. “What is all this noise?”

I told him. I told him good, I told him long. Ventoo bit my tail to keep me in place; the others rubbed me with their snouts.

“Poor thing! Her groom-mate.”

“Enough,” said Fortchee. He turned and started to walk toward their wagon.

“Too true there!” said Ventoo. Old Pronto grabbed a gun.

We all followed, making a sound like a slow small rockslide, down toward the cart.

Leveza stood up in the wagon, waiting. So did the Cat.

“Give us your guns,” said Fortchee.

“We can’t. . . .”

“I’m not asking, I’m ordering.”

Leveza looked at him, as if moonlight still shone on his face. She sighed, and looked up at the stars, and handed him her gun.

“The Cat’s too.”

Silently Leveza held it out to him.

“Now get down out of that cart and rejoin the herd.”

“And Mai?” Such regret, such fondness, such concern for blood-breathed Cat.

The spittle curdled; the heart shriveled; I tasted gall, and I said, “She’s taken a Cat for a groom-mate. I don’t want her! I don’t want her back!”

Her head jerked up at me in wonder.

“All her fabricating!”

I felt myself rear up in the air, and I bucked. I bucked to get away from my own heart, from the things I’d seen, for the way I’d been stretched. I was tired, I was frightened, I wanted her to be as we had been. Our girlhoods when we galloped beribboned over the hill.

“She’d feed my child to that bloody Cat!”

Reared up, wrenching, I made a noise I had never heard before, never knew could be made.

It was like giving birth through the throat, some ghastly wriggling thing made of sound that needed to be born, and it came out of me, headless and blind. A relentless, howling pushing-back that flecked everything with foam as if I were the sea.

Triggered.

Even Fortchee.

All.

We all moved together, closing like a gate. Our shoulders touched and our haunches. We lowered our heads. We advanced. I saw Leveza look into my eyes and then crumple. She knew what this was, even if I did not, and she knew it had come from me.

We advanced and butted the cart. We pushed all our heads under it and turned the cart over. Leveza and the Cat had to jump out, clumsy, stumbling to find their feet.

The Cat snarled, toothless. Leveza shook her head. “Friends. . . .”

We were deaf. We were upon them. We head-butted them. Leveza slipped backward, onto her knees. Fortchee reared up and clubbed her on the head with his hooves. She stood up, turned. Fortchee, Ventoo, Raio, Pronto, all bared their teeth and bit her buttocks hard. Feet splaying sideways, she began to run.

The Cat bounded, faster in bursts than Leveza was, and leapt up onto her back. Leveza trotted away, carrying her. Her tail waved, defiant. Then milklight closed over them as if they had sunk. We heard light scattering sounds of stones for a while, then even her hoofbeats faded into the whispering sound of spaces between mountains.

Without a word, Grama sprang after them. I saw her go too. There were no Cats on the plain to seize them as the horizon burned.

The herd swung to the left in absolute unison, wheeling around, and then trotted back to the camp. We felt satisfied, strangely nourished, safe and content. I looked back under the cart. Choova raised her head. “What was that, Mummy?”

“Nothing, love, nothing,” I said.

Fortchee told us quietly that we should get moving now while the Cats were occupied. We dismantled the windbreaks and packed the tools. Some of the men turned Leveza’s cart upright and old Pronto went back to his post in harness. Never did we pack with so little noise, so swiftly, calmly. Nothing was said at all, no mention of it. The horizon burned with someone else’s passion.

Choova ran out to graze, her mane bobbing. She never asked about Leveza or Grama, not once, ever. A soft glowing light spread wide across the pampas.

We followed the stream to the sea and then migrated along the sand. It got between our fingers. We did see the turtles. I would have asked them about acids, especially the acids in batteries, but they were laying eggs, and would have been fearful.

Fortchee led us to a wonderful pasture, far to the south, on a lake next to sea, salt and fresh water so close, beside tall sudden cliffs that kept Cats at bay. Oats grew there year round; the rains never left. By digging we found rust shoals, thick layers of it, enough to make metal for several lifetimes. There was no reason to leave. We waited for the trigger to leave, but year in, year out, none came.

Fortchee had us build a stone wall across the small peninsula of land that connected our islet to the mainland, and we were safe from Cats. When he died, we called him our greatest innovator.

On top of a high hill we found the fallen statue of an Ancestor, his face melted, his arms outstretched. As if to welcome Ancestors back from the stars.

No one came to me in the night to comfort me or bite my neck and call me love. I suppose I’d been touched by something strange and so was strange myself. I would have taken a low-rank drifter, only they did not get past the wall. Still, I had my Choova. She brought me her children to bless, and then her grandchildren, though they never really recognized what I was to them. Their children had no idea that I still lived. My loneliness creaked worse than my joints and I yearned for a migration, to sweep me numbly away.

Not once did anyone speak of Leveza, or even once remember her. Our exiled groom-brothers would drift by, to temporarily gladsome cries, and they told us, before moving on, of new wonders on the prairie. But we blanked that too.