Cat Karina (2 page)

Karina concentrated on the Little Friends, and felt nothing.

The woman drew the stone down Karina’s leg like a cold caress, and said, “You can move it, now.”

“That’s it?” Karina flexed her leg and was astonished to find the break appeared to be mended. Cautiously she withdrew the Little Friends and they retreated into the recesses of her body, their work done. There was no pain. It was as though the wound had never been. Now, with her new strength and the handmaiden’s help, she was able to twist her foot free of the crutch. The skin was broken and it bled slightly. “Can you use the stone again?” she asked.

“No. Your foot must bleed for a while to remind you not to do a stupid thing like this again. You’re precious to the world, Karina.”

Karina asked, “What’s the Purpose you talked about?”

“You can’t know the details. If you did, you could destroy it. You are that important, Karina. But as for the overall Purpose, it is directed towards ending the imprisonment of the greatest person the Earth has ever known: Starquin, the Almighty Five-in-One.”

“Oh, just another religion.” Karina was disappointed.

They swung to the ground. Karina took a deep breath and looked around. Everything looked fresh and new. For a moment something the woman had said touched her mind, and she wondered if she had stepped into a brand-new happentrack, leaving her old self dying on the sailway.…

“I feel so
good
,” she said happily.

“How do you like your world, Karina?”

“I like it fine. I like the sun and the ocean, and the cars’ sails against the trees, and the mountains.… And the felino camp, and,” her face glowed suddenly with anticipation, “the Tortuga Festival, and all the fun.”

“Have you ever thought there was anything else? Haven’t you ever wondered what might be
outside
all that?”

“Well, the fishermen tell of queer folk who live on rafts of weed out in the sea.… And the mountain people talk about monsters in the jungle.…”

“No, I mean
really
outside. Outside this little space and time. Imagine this, Karina. Imagine a million worlds spinning in space, some with people just like us, some with people who don’t know what evil means, some with people so evil that folk are scared even to give their planet a name — and all of those people human. And imagine other creatures too, not human, with different customs.…”

“Like the kikihuahuas, you mean?”

“Yes, and more besides.”

“It’s all in the Examples.” Karina was suddenly impatient. A whole world was waiting for her. Maybe a narrow world by this queer woman’s standards, but a world full of fun and excitement all the same.

“All right, I won’t keep you. Just remember, Karina. Every so often, I want you to look up at the stars and to think of the Greataway, which is all the dimensions of Time and Space — which Mankind used to travel through, thirty thousand years ago before he lost the will and the ability. The Greataway will be rediscovered, and you may play your part. Always remember Starquin, and your promise.”

And the warmth faded from the woman’s voice, and her expression faded too; her face became hard and the Mark of Agni showed again in mottled, livid scars.

“What’s your name?” asked Karina. “You didn’t tell me.”

The handmaiden didn’t reply.

“Who is the Dedo?”

“She is the flesh of Starquin — a part of his body in human form.”

“Wait! You haven’t —”

But the Dedo’s handmaiden was gone, gliding away into the night. For a moment Karina stood there, shaken by the transformation; it was as though she’d been talking to two different women. Her mood of exaltation faded and she shivered, and suddenly the night was cold and the stars hard and threatening, bright terrible little eyes. The Greataway.…

So Karina summoned the Little Friends without quite realizing it; and this time they entered her mind and soothed her. She began to walk north towards the distant black mound of Camelback, the wooded hill where the ambush was to take place. Above her, the sailway track was silent. The approaching car had stopped.

The Pegman — Enriques de Jaia’a, called Enri — was indulging in a curious private ritual. Balanced precariously on the guiderail some six meters from the ground, he was flapping his single arm like a bird and uttering screeches. There was no logical reason for him to do this. The idea had occurred to him a few moments ago, so he had stopped the sailcar, climbed onto the rail, and surrendered himself to irrationality.

“Har! Har! Har!” he shouted, and the cry was borne by the winds across the coastal plain and into the foothills and the forest where the howler monkeys, hearing a faint strange sound, paused and looked up.

But the world didn’t change.

Enri climbed down, kicked his toe against the side of the sailcar fourteen times, took off the brake, picked up the ropes and pulled in the boom. The
Estrella del Oeste
began to move, jerkily. Enri grimaced, squeezing up his eyes and sucking his teeth, and began to think of the Tigre grupo — the name which people gave the headstrong sisterhood consisting of Karina, Runa, Teressa and, what was the name of the quiet one? Saba.

Charming, vicious, lovely young inhuman girls who, he suspected, would ambush him tonight. Pity they didn’t have a mother to keep them in check, or a brother to lend a little finesse to their outlandish behavior.

But life would be dull without them.…

“I am the captain of the sailcar
Estrella del Oeste!
” Enri shouted suddenly to a group of rheas feeding harmlessly below the track. “I sail for distant cantons with a cargo of ripe tortuga which I will sell for enough money to buy the moon. Or at least, the Sister of the Moon,” he conceded, his mind wandering to a strange, gigantic dome-thing he’d once seen down the coast; a thing almost as big as a mountain, its top lost in the clouds. “One day I will be rich!” he shouted. “I’ll buy my own sailcar! I’ll have a fleet of sailcars!”

But the
Estrella del Oeste
didn’t even belong to him. It was an ancient Canton car, its days of fast passenger work long over, a broken-down hulk with patched sails and frayed ropes eking out its last years as a track maintenance vehicle. In its time it had held twenty passengers in its cylindrical hull, but now the seats were gone, and the drapes and the luxuries, leaving only a bare cavern some ten meters long filled with the tools of Enri’s trade: wooden pegs, mallets, rope, bone needles and thread, a shovel, a flint spokeshave, and several barrels of stinking tumpfat for greasing the rails and bearings. Enri’s living quarters were there too; a tiny cabin with a bed, a table and a few possessions.

Enri rode on deck, behind the car’s single mast, gripping the mainsheet — the rope which controlled the angle of the sail to the wind — like any crewman on one of the prestigious Company craft, controlling the sailcar’s speed by the tension of the rope and by occasional judicious application of the brake. The wind was light tonight, and he didn’t have to use the brake much.

The
Estrella del Oeste
lumbered on while the Pegman dreamed of changing the course of history, and a small part of his mind — the professional part — gauged the state of the track by the feel of the deck’s motion through the seat of his pants. Soon the car slowed. He had reached the long climb past Camelback.

The wind chose that moment to slacken.

“Huff! Huff!” He shouted the traditional crewman’s cry and blew pointlessly into the limp sail. The wind dropped altogether.

The car was rolling to a halt.

He stood, a tall, thin figure in the moonlight, and shook the boom, inviting the wind. His mood of elation had evaporated. Now he saw himself as a broken-down True Human in a broken-down car. “God damn everything to hell!” he yelled. It would be morning before he reached Rangua at this rate.

The car stopped. He swung one-handed to the running rail and jammed a chock under the rear wheel to prevent the car rolling back down the grade and losing him what little ground he’d gained. Walking back to a crutch, he swung his mallet to check the security of the fastenings.

The mallet struck the crutch with a solid thunk. In the distance, the moon reflected pale silver on the sea.

“Sabotage!” he suddenly shouted, driving his fist at the sky. “I’m a saboteur and I’m going to remove a couple of pegs from this crutch, so that it will collapse when the dawn car from Torres hits it. Ten important people will die in the splintered wreckage. The southbound track will be damaged too, and the next car from Rangua will pile into the mess. More people will die!”

Obsessed by his vision of destruction he sat down, his imagination racing. The Canton Lord would be on the Torres car. Enri would be waiting near and would pull the Lord free, the instant before Agni struck the wreck into flames. The Lord would give him land and Specialists, whom he would set to building cars. Monkey-Specialists, with deft fingers and tiny minds.

And then.… And then he would search the whole world for Corriente, his love. And he would find her, and she would cling to him, and they would live happily ever —

The wind was blowing.

He walked slowly back to the
Estrella del Oeste.
There was no hurry, and he was lingering over the dream.

The rail trembled. A dry bearing squeaked like a rat.

Corriente, so warm, so loving.…

The
Estrella del Oeste
was moving!

It was impossible — yet the dark bulk of the old car was receding from him, wheels rumbling on the running rail, rigging straining to the fresh breeze. He began to run, awkwardly, one-armed and unbalanced on the narrow rail slippery with tumpfat.

“Yaah!” he shouted, like a felino trying to halt a shruglegger.

A burst of clear, feminine laughter answered him. Now he shouted at himself, calling himself a fool. The Tigre grupo had outwitted him again. He could see them now — four girls, leaning on the after-rail, waving. They had sheeted the sail in tight and now, for all he knew, were going to take the
Estrella
all the way to Rangua South Stage. “Stop!” he yelled.

“Not for a man who dreams of sabotage!” came the cry. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself — and you a pegman, too!”

Damned felinas! He ran on, muttering. Teressa was at the bottom of this. She’d put them up to it, the little bitch. Saba was too timid and Runa would see the consequences, and Karina … Karina was too nice. But Teressa could sway them all. She would grow up to be a
bandida
, that girl.

Somebody must have touched the brake — Karina probably — because he heard a scraping sound and the sailcar slowed. He reached the door and swung himself inside, blundered through the tools and stink and climbed the short ladder to the deck.

“Hello, Pegman!”

The four girls lay about the deck in attitudes of innocence, and Teressa was even mending a frayed rope. Helplessly he regarded them: cat-girls, descendants of some ancient genetic experiment, come back to haunt Man in the person of him, Enriques de Jai’a, pegman for the Rangua Canton. “I am human!” he suddenly shouted. “I am Mankind!”

“Of course you are, Enri,” said Karina. “So are we.” There was a slight reproach in her tone.

He’d meant no harm; he’d hardly been aware of his own outburst. “You’re goddamned jaguar girls,” he muttered.

“But you love us,” said Teressa, not even looking up from her work.

“Aah, what the hell!” To his intense embarrassment he found tears in his eyes and he turned away, facing north. The wind was strengthening with every moment and he must pull himself together. There was some difficult sailing between here and Rangua; the sailway turned inland for a short distance and cars had been known to jib in the sudden shift of wind. Last year, the
Reine de la Plata
had had her mast carried away and a crewman killed. Felinos and shrugleggers had towed the disgraced craft into Rangua, laughing derisively.

No, the Camelback Funnel, as it was called, was a difficult stretch for a man with one arm.

“And you couldn’t do without us,” said Runa seriously. “Not in this wind.” She handled the sheets, slackening them off while Saba eased the halliard and Karina, climbing to the lookout post, jerked the sail downwards. Teressa threaded a line through the cringles and in no time the sail was neatly reefed — a manoeuver he was totally unable to carry out himself. The car rode more steadily as the pressure on the lee guiderail eased.

“They shouldn’t expect you to do it all yourself,” said Karina.

“It’s this or no job at all.”

“Then don’t work. Plenty of people in South Stage don’t work. Other people look after them.”

“Listen!” he was suddenly bellowing, placing his hands at the side of his head like mules’ ears. “You’re talking about a felino camp! You people are different! You go around in grupos! True humans aren’t like that. We’re more.… solitary. The weak ones die. It’s good for the species.”

Karina said quietly, “Tonight a True Human helped me.”

“Huh?”

“I broke my leg. I was lying trapped on the rail. She came and mended my leg, and set me free.”

“If you broke your leg you wouldn’t be able to stand on it now.”

“She healed it right away, with a stone.”

“Ah, what the hell.” He wasn’t going to argue.

But her sisters had already descended on Karina and the four girls had become a struggling, fighting mass on the deck; half-play, half-serious. “Broken leg, eh?” Teressa was shouting, twisting viciously at Karina’s ankle. Meanwhile Runa was dragging Karina’s alpaca tunic over her head and Saba, safe now Karina was effectively trussed and blinded, was pounding away at her body with her fists. The
Estrella del Oeste
rolled on through the night. Enriques de Jai’a turned away, checking the set of the sail. Felinas had no sense of decency, and Karina wore no pants, and how much was a man supposed to take?

“Har! Har! Haaaar!” he roared into the wind, acutely embarrassed by his own emotions.