Cat Karina (3 page)

The struggling mass rolled across the deck and brought up with a crash against the after rail. He stole a glance and saw that Karina, freed from the tunic and naked, was fighting back. She’d thrown an arm around Teressa’s neck from behind and was throttling her, meanwhile getting a devastating kick into Runa’s stomach. Saba, smaller than her sisters and weaker, left the battle and joined him on the foredeck. She was panting and her colour was not good. Enri put an arm around her.

“Too rough for you, sweetheart?”

“I just get tired so quickly, that’s all. I wish I was like Teressa, I really do.”

It had been a multiple birth, a normal occurence among felinos. More unusually, the babies had all been girls. Although male felino children generally leave the grupos at puberty, either to squire an unrelated grupo or to join the bachelors at the other end of the camp, their presence in the childhood grupo provides a steadying influence in the formative years. The death of the mother had not helped and, with the formidable El Tigre too involved with his revolutionary plotting to guide the four wild daughters of one of his five wives, the girls had gone their own way.

Now Runa was vomiting over the side, Teressa was leaning against the mast, mauve-faced and gagging, and Karina was getting dressed.

“Teressa doesn’t look very happy,” said the Pegman.

Saba looked round, smiled and said, “I’d change places with her even now. She’s strong.”

Karina joined them. The wind had freshened and her hair streamed like flames. “Aren’t you glad we’re here, Pegman? What would you do without us? That last gust would have taken the mast right out of this old tub, if we hadn’t reefed for you.” She made no mention of the fight. It was an everyday occurrence in the grupo, a part of growing up.

But Enri asked, curious, “Why do you always win, Karina?”

“Because nothing hurts her,” said Saba.

“No, I’m just better than them, that’s all,” said Karina. She had never told anyone about the Little Friends. That was her secret, and instinctively she knew she’d better keep it. Felinos with real peculiarities — as distinct from Saba who was simply not strong — had a habit of being found dead.

The sailcar reached the downgrade and roared through Camelback Funnel with the speed of a galloping horse, and the girls shouted and laughed with excitement as the craft bucked from side to side and the guiderails screamed a warning. Teressa stood guard over the brake lever, daring Enri to approach, knowing that this strange True Human friend of theirs would never get involved in a physical struggle with them.

“Karina — just go and put that brake on, will you?” Enri pleaded, hanging onto a stanchion with his one hand.

But Karina was yelling with the fun of it, standing on the prow of the
Estrella del Oeste
like a beautiful figurehead, braced against the handrails. “No way!” she shouted back against the bedlam screeching of tortured wood. Enri sniffed, smelling hot bearings.

Then he thought:
what the hell.
Just for a few moments he’d forgotten his need to rearrange the world’s history.

Too soon they reached Rangua South Stage, the shanty-town of vampiro tents at the foot of the hill on which stood Rangua Town. Teressa surrendered the brake, laughing at him with slanting eyes as he hauled on the handle and managed to bring the runaway car to a halt. The girls climbed down, calling to the felinos and showing their legs. The felinos, mostly bachelors but with a few fathers among them, muttered disapprovingly at the association between the girls and a True Human.

“He’ll kiss you while he stabs you in the back, Teressa!” one of them shouted, repeating the traditional saying about True Humans, although in expurgated form out of deference to her age.

Then they hitched up the shrugleggers for the two-kilometer climb to the town. The running rail descended to ground level for this purpose; the gradient was too steep for any sailcar to climb unassisted in anything but gale-force winds. Ten shrugleggers sufficed for the job, and with oaths and yells from the felinos the
Estrella del Oeste
was soon moving again.

Enri slackened off the halliard and furled the sail. Now that the girls were gone and the exhilarating ride over, he felt let down. A surly felino sat on deck, another led the shrugleggers. The wheels creaked, the car felt heavy and dead. The felino on deck had his back to him, sitting on the prow where the lovely Karina had stood, his legs dangling and his head bowed, half asleep, his neck vulnerable to an ax blow.…

Now
that
would change history.

That would be just the kind of open clash between True Human and felino which was needed to spark off the present tinder-box of relations.

There was an ax hanging from the shrouds for use in an emergency. Enri took it down and hefted it in his hand. It was heavy but well-balanced, and the blade was the keenest flaked stone. Enri often did illogical, crazy things.…

But the felino would bleed, and maybe
hurt.

Enri put the ax back and stared at the eastern sky which was brightening with dawn.

“Haaaar!” he cried. “Har! Har! Har!” And he slapped his hand against the mast, again and again.

The felino looked round; a quick askance look.

Then Enri heard a noise below, a clatter and thump against the squeaking and rumbling of
Estrella.
Somebody was down there. An intruder, in his private domain. Somebody fooling with his things, robbing him, most likely — maybe even a
bandido
.

He took up the ax again and, yelling, descended the ladder into the cabin.

“I’m going to kill you!” he shouted, staring around the dark interior. “I can see you.” But he couldn’t. He was shouting to cover his own nervousness. A felini, however — with those catlike eyes — could see
him
.

“You wouldn’t kill me, would you, Pegman?” said a soft voice.

He dropped the ax. “Where are you, Karina?”

“Sitting on your bed.”

“Why?” He forced his mind away from the mental image of warm limbs, a slim body dressed in alpaca, and said, “I don’t need to kill you. Your father will do it for me, when he finds out where you’ve been. Now — what do you want?”

The car moved out of the trees and a pale glimmer of early daylight came through the porthole. Karina was a dark silhouette. She said, “Tonight I met a queer woman. She said she was the handmaiden of a
bruja
called the Dedo. You’re a wise man, Enri. You know more about the world than I do — and you’re a True Human too. You know the legends, and you sing songs of the past. Why would that woman have said I would become famous? And she did heal my leg; she really did.”

The Dedo
.…

The word struck a chord in Enri’s memory.

.… There was a dense jungle and the harsh screaming of birds, and he’d left the other trackmen and gone exploring.…

And a monster had charged him, bursting out of a thicket.

Huge it was, and terrible, carrying an aura of unspeakable evil. Not jaguar, nor bear nor cai-man, yet possessing the most fearful characteristics of all three, and bigger than any of them, bigger even than the mythical thylacosmilus, about which he’d sometimes sung songs. But he never sang songs of this monster, in the years which followed.

So he ran until he collapsed sobbing with fear and exhaustion beside a stream, and while he lay there a girl came to him — a girl beautiful beyond measure, more beautiful even than Corriente, his love; but cold.

In a voice without expression she had said, “Don’t be alarmed. Bantus will not harm you now. You are outside the valley, you see.…” And they had talked for a while, of Time and happentracks.

I
am the Dedo
, the beautiful girl had said.
You will never forget me
.

“What else did she say? Can you remember the exact words?”

Surprised at the tenseness in his voice, Karina said, “I didn’t understand a lot of it. She used strange words. The Greataway — that was her word for the sky, I think. Ifalong.… Other words. That’s it — she said, ‘In certain tracks of the Ifalong you will be famous.’ Me, famous? What do you make of that, Enri?”

“If the Dedo’s handmaiden said you will be famous,” said Enri carefully, “then I think you will. I met the Dedo myself once, and I believe her.” He tried to smile. “People will write songs about you. Maybe I should write one, to be first.”

“But what are tracks of the Ifalong?”

“The Dedo says that Time consists of happentracks, all branching out from the present. So that at any moment your future might go one way or the other, depending on what you do. The Ifalong is the total of all these happentracks in the future, when there are a billion different ways things might have happened. One thing the Dedo can do, is to
see
all these happentracks in the Ifalong, and work out the course people ought to take.”

Karina caught a glimpse of immensity. “Ought to take, why? What’s the purpose? Why not just live?”

“I think she thinks there’s more to life than that. But she didn’t tell me what.”

Karina was thinking deeply. “I wonder.… Do you think it might be possible to
change
things, by jumping onto another happentrack which had branched off some time before? Suddenly find yourself in a different world, where.…” Her voice trailed away. She was going to say: where my mother is still alive.… “No,” she said. “You’d have to do something so strange that it was completely out of place in your happentrack, something which simply didn’t fit in with the way things are, something —”

“Yes, you would,” said the man who thought coolly of murder, and was given to meaningless bursts of shouting, and who perched on rails flapping like a bird.

The southbound dawn sailcar was captained by the infamous Herrero so Karina hung about the station for a while, drawing curious glances from True Humans who wondered why she hadn’t returned to South Stage with the other felinos.

She knew her father would be waiting for her and she couldn’t face his rage, not yet. It was daylight now, and in the distance the sun was coming up over the rim of the sea. Rangua sat on a shoulder of the coastal mountains. Inland, the jungle crawled up the slopes and there were great cleared meadows where slow-moving tumps could be seen: huge mounds of flesh eating their way across the landscape in the care of the tumpiers.

The town was small, bright and neat, and the signs of wealth were everywhere. The stores were full of exotic goods and bright woven fabrics from the great southern plains, and the people, mostly True Humans, were well-fed and clean, busily getting the town ready for the day. West, in the distant foothills, stood the white Palace of the Canton Lord, with his private sailway winding through the tumpfields.

“Hey there, cat girl!” The greeting came from a grimy individual leaning against a wall; even in Rangua Town there were derelicts. Karina grinned at him with some malice, toyed with the idea of teasing, then realized that the slatting noise of the car’s sails had ceased. The crew had hauled them tight and the car was about to depart. She ran along the dusty street pursued by the ribald shouts of the bum, reached the trackside and, timing her moment, seized the guide-arm of the sailcar
Urubu
as it rumbled past. In one fluid movement she hauled herself up onto the arm, laughed into the amazed face of an elderly passenger who stared out of a nearby porthole, and swung herself to the deck above.

The
Urubu
was a two-master and the crew of four were busy. The wind was light and it needed all their skill to keep the car moving; they hauled on the sheets to the instructions barking out of a voicepipe on the foredeck.

Then the car reached the downgrade and began to accelerate, and the men relaxed and turned their attention to the young girl leaning on the after-rail.

“Captain Herrero will kill you,” one of them said. “You know what he thinks of felinos.”

“He’ll never know,” answered Karina. The captain controlled the craft from a tiny cabin in the nose of the car, under the foredeck.

“He will if I tell him.”

“But you won’t.” She stared at him in some contempt.

He grinned, embarrassed by the certainty in her tone, at her knowledge that he couldn’t bring himself to harm her. “You’re one of El Tigre’s grupo, aren’t you?” Although deck crews were True Humans, they had a good knowledge of felinos and their ways and were often used as mediators in disputes.

But Karinas’s attention had been caught by a shiny object, one of six set in a row of holes in a deck-coaming. “What …?” She pulled one out and stared at it. “What are these?”

“Knives, of course.”

“But.…” That smooth, shiny surface, cold to the touch.… “They’re
metal!
They.… Why do you have
metal
knives?” Suddenly the thing seemed to sear her hand and she dropped it to the deck. Touched by Agni. The metal was cursed by the Wrath of Agni. All metal was.

Now a larger man spoke, slow and deep. “We have metal knives to protect ourselves against bandit gangs of felinas.”

“But it’s illegal. It’s heresy!”

“Let’s just say that Captain Herrero’s religion involves keeping his crew safe, and we like it that way.”

“But … there’s only one religion — the Kikihuahua Examples. And the Examples say that metal is cursed by Agni the Fire-God, and that people are happier without it.” She was staring at the knife. “And that thing proves the Examples are right. The knife is for killing.”

Now the first man said, “The knives were found in an old dwelling. They were not wrought by any Ranguan man. They’re used in an emergency if a sheet jams in a gale and the car is in danger.”

And the big man added, “And they’re used in defense.” He moved close to Karina. “How is your father, girl? Is he still plotting rebellion? Does he still think the felinos could run the sailways better themselves? Tell him this.” He reached out and gathered up a handful of her tunic and, his fingers biting into her breast, he pulled her close. “Tell him we’re ready. Tell him about the knives. Tell him we don’t fight any fairer than he does.” His face was a centimeter from hers and she could smell his breath, and feel the mist of saliva which accompanied his speech.