Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (39 page)

But Gummitch could easily forgive all this massed inadequacy and downright
brutishness in his felino-human household, because he was aware that he
alone knew the real truth about himself and about other kittens and babies
as well, the truth which was hidden from weaker minds, the truth that was
as intrinsically incredible as the germ theory of disease or the origin of
the whole great universe in the explosion of a single atom.

As a baby kitten Gummitch has believed that Old Horsemeat's two hands were
hairless kittens permanently attached to the ends of Old Horsemeat's arms
but having an independent life of their own. How he had hated and loved
those two five-legged sallow monsters, his first playmates, comforters and
battle-opponents!

Well, even that fantastic discarded notion was but a trifling fancy
compared to the real truth about himself!

The forehead of Zeus split open to give birth to Minerva. Gummitch had
been born from the waist-fold of a dirty old terry-cloth bathrobe, Old
Horsemeat's basic garment. The kitten was intuitively certain of it and
had proved it to himself as well as any Descartes or Aristotle. In a
kitten-size tuck of that ancient bathrobe the atoms of his body had
gathered and quickened into life. His earliest memories were of snoozing
wrapped in terrycloth, warmed by Old Horsemeat's heat. Old Horsemeat and
Kitty-Come-Here were his true parents. The other theory of his origin, the
one he heard Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here recount from time to time—that
he had been the only surviving kitten of a litter abandoned next door,
that he had had the shakes from vitamin deficiency and lost the tip of his
tail and the hair on his paws and had to be nursed back to life and health
with warm yellowish milk-and-vitamins fed from an eyedropper—that
other theory was just one of those rationalizations with which mysterious
nature cloaks the birth of heroes, perhaps wisely veiling the truth from
minds unable to bear it, a rationalization as false as Kitty-Come-Here and
Old Horsemeat's touching belief that Sissy and Baby were their children
rather than the cubs of Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra.

The day that Gummitch had discovered by pure intuition the secret of his
birth he had been filled with a wild instant excitement. He had only kept
it from tearing him to pieces by rushing out to the kitchen and striking
and devouring a fried scallop, torturing it fiendishly first for twenty
minutes.

And the secret of his birth was only the beginning. His intellectual
faculties aroused, Gummitch had two days later intuited a further and
greater secret: since he was the child of humans he would upon reaching
this maturation date of which Old Horsemeat had spoken, turn not into a
sullen tom but into a godlike human youth with reddish golden hair the
color of his present fur. He would be poured coffee; and he would
instantly be able to talk, probably in all languages. While Sissy (how
clear it was now!) would at approximately the same time shrink and fur out
into a sharp-clawed and vicious she-cat dark as her hair, sex and
self-love her only concern, fit harem-mate for Cleopatra, concubine to
Ashurbanipal.

Exactly the same was true, Gummitch realized at once, for all kittens and
babies, all humans and cats, wherever they might dwell. Metamorphosis was
as much a part of the fabric of their lives as it was of the insects'. It
was also the basic fact underlying all legends of werewolves, vampires,
and witches' familiars.

If you just rid your mind of preconceived notions, Gummitch told himself,
it was all very logical. Babies were stupid, fumbling, vindictive
creatures without reason or speech. What could be more natural than that
they should grow up into mute, sullen, selfish beasts bent only on rapine
and reproduction? While kittens were quick, sensitive, subtle, supremely
alive. What other destiny were they possibly fitted for except to become
the deft, word-speaking, book-writing, music-making,
meat-getting-and-dispensing masters of the world? To dwell on the physical
differences, to point out that kittens and men, babies and cats, are
rather unlike in appearance and size, would be to miss the forest for the
trees—very much as if an entomologist should proclaim metamorphosis
a myth because his microscope failed to discover the wings of a butterfly
in a caterpillar's slime or a golden beetle in a grub.

Nevertheless it was such a mind-staggering truth, Gummitch realized at the
same time, that it was easy to understand why humans, cats, babies, and
perhaps most kittens were quite unaware of it. How to safely explain to a
butterfly that he was once a hairy crawler, or to a dull larva that he
will one day be a walking jewel? No, in such situations the delicate minds
of man- and feline-kind are guarded by a merciful mass amnesia, such as
Velikovsky has explained prevents us from recalling that in historical
times the Earth was catastrophically bumped by the planet Venus operating
in the manner of a comet before settling down (with a cosmic sigh of
relief, surely!) into its present orbit.

This conclusion was confirmed when Gummitch in the first fever of
illumination tried to communicate his great insight to others. He told it
in cat patois, as well as that limited jargon permitted, to Ashurbanipal
and Cleopatra and even, on the off chance, to Sissy and Baby. They showed
no interest whatever, except that Sissy took advantage of his unguarded
preoccupation to stab him with a fork.

Later, alone with Old Horsemeat, he projected the great new thoughts,
staring with solemn yellow eyes at the old god, but the latter grew
markedly nervous and even showed signs of real fear, so Gummitch desisted.
("You'd have sworn he was trying to put across something as deep as the
Einstein theory or the doctrine of original sin," Old Horsemeat later told
Kitty-Come-Here.)

But Gummitch was a man now in all but form, the kitten reminded himself
after these failures, and it was part of his destiny to shoulder secrets
alone when necessary. He wondered if the general amnesia would affect him
when he metamorphosed. There was no sure answer to this question, but he
hoped not—and sometimes felt that there was reason for his hopes.
Perhaps he would be the first true kitten-man, speaking from a wisdom that
had no locked doors in it.

Once he was tempted to speed up the process by the use of drugs. Left
alone in the kitchen, he sprang onto the table and started to lap up the
black puddle in the bottom of Old Horsemeat's coffee cup. It tasted foul
and poisonous and he withdrew with a little snarl, frightened as well as
revolted. The dark beverage would not work its tongue-loosening magic, he
realized, except at the proper time and with the proper ceremonies.
Incantations might be necessary as well. Certainly unlawful tasting was
highly dangerous.

The futility of expecting coffee to work any wonders by itself was further
demonstrated to Gummitch when Kitty-Come-Here, wordlessly badgered by
Sissy, gave a few spoonfuls to the little girl, liberally lacing it first
with milk and sugar. Of course Gummitch knew by now that Sissy was
destined shortly to turn into a cat and that no amount of coffee would
ever make her talk, but it was nevertheless instructive to see how she
spat out the first mouthful, drooling a lot of saliva after it, and dashed
the cup and its contents at the chest of Kitty-Come-Here.

Gummitch continued to feel a great deal of sympathy for his parents in
their worries about Sissy and he longed for the day when he would
metamorphose and be able as an acknowledged man-child truly to console
them. It was heartbreaking to see how they each tried to coax the little
girl to talk, always attempting it while the other was absent, how they
seized on each accidentally wordlike note in the few sounds she uttered
and repeated it back to her hopefully, how they were more and more
possessed by fears not so much of her retarded (they thought) development
as of her increasingly obvious maliciousness, which was directed chiefly
at Baby … though the two cats and Gummitch bore their share. Once
she had caught Baby alone in his crib and used the sharp corner of a block
to dot Baby's large-domed lightly downed head with triangular red marks.
Kitty-Come-Here had discovered her doing it, but the woman's first action
had been to rub Baby's head to obliterate the marks so that Old Horsemeat
wouldn't see them. That was the night Kitty-Come-Here hid the abnormal
psychology books.

Gummitch understood very well that Kitty-Come-Here and Old Horsemeat,
honestly believing themselves to be Sissy's parents, felt just as deeply
about her as if they actually were, and he did what little he could under
the present circumstances to help them. He had recently come to feel a
quite independent affection for Baby—the miserable little proto-cat
was so completely stupid and defenseless—and so he unofficially
constituted himself the creature's guardian, taking his naps behind the
door of the nursery and dashing about noisily whenever Sissy showed up. In
any case, he realized that as a potentially adult member of a felino-human
household he had his natural responsibilities.

Accepting responsibilities was as much a part of a kitten's life, Gummitch
told himself, as shouldering unsharable intuitions and secrets, the number
of which continued to grow from day to day.

There was, for instance, the Affair of the Squirrel Mirror.

Gummitch had early solved the mystery of ordinary mirrors and of the
creatures that appeared in them. A little observation and sniffing and one
attempt to get behind the heavy wall-job in the living room had convinced
him that mirror beings were insubstantial or at least hermetically sealed
into their other world, probably creatures of pure spirit, harmless
imitative ghosts—including the silent Gummitch Double who touched
paws with him so softly yet so coldly.

Just the same, Gummitch had let his imagination play with what would
happen if one day, while looking into the mirror world, he should let
loose his grip on his spirit and let it slip into the Gummitch Double
while the other's spirit slipped into his body—if, in short, he
should change places with the scentless ghost kitten. Being doomed to a
life consisting wholly of imitation and completely lacking in
opportunities to show initiative—except for behind-the-scenes
judgment and speed needed in rushing from one mirror to another to keep up
with the real Gummitch—would be sickeningly dull, Gummitch decided,
and he resolved to keep a tight hold on his spirit at all times in the
vicinity of mirrors.

But that isn't telling about the Squirrel Mirror. One morning Gummitch was
peering out the front bedroom window that overlooked the roof of the
porch. Gummitch had already classified windows as semi-mirrors having two
kinds of space on the other side: the mirror world and that harsh region
filled with mysterious and dangerously organized-sounding noises called
the outer world, into which grown-up humans reluctantly ventured at
intervals, donning special garments for the purpose and shouting loud
farewells that were meant to be reassuring but achieved just the opposite
effect. The coexistence of two kinds of space presented no paradox to the
kitten who carried in his mind the twenty-seven-chapter outline of
Space-Time
for Springers
—indeed, it constituted one of the minor themes of
the book.

This morning the bedroom was dark and the outer world was dull and
sunless, so the mirror world was unusually difficult to see. Gummitch was
just lifting his face toward it, nose twitching, his front paws on the
sill, when what should rear up on the other side, exactly in the space
that the Gummitch Double normally occupied, but a dirty brown,
narrow-visaged image with savagely low forehead, dark evil walleyes, and a
huge jaw filled with shovel-like teeth.

Gummitch was enormously startled and hideously frightened. He felt his
grip on his spirit go limp, and without volition he teleported himself
three yards to the rear, making use of that faculty for cutting corners in
space-time, traveling by space-warp in fact, which was one of his powers
that Kitty-Come-Here refused to believe in and that even Old Horsemeat
accepted only on faith.

Then, not losing a moment, he picked himself up by his furry seat, swung
himself around, dashed downstairs at top speed, sprang to the top of the
sofa, and stared for several seconds at the Gummitch Double in the
wall-mirror—not relaxing a muscle strand until he was completely
convinced that he was still himself and had not been transformed into the
nasty brown apparition that had confronted him in the bedroom window.

"Now what do you suppose brought that on?" Old Horsemeat asked
Kitty-Come-Here.

Later Gummitch learned that what he had seen had been a squirrel, a
savage, nut-hunting being belonging wholly to the outer world (except for
forays into attics) and not at all to the mirror one. Nevertheless he kept
a vivid memory of his profound momentary conviction that the squirrel had
taken the Gummitch Double's place and been about to take his own. He
shuddered to think what would have happened if the squirrel had been
actively interested in trading spirits with him. Apparently mirrors and
mirror-situations, just as he had always feared, were highly conducive to
spirit transfers. He filed the information away in the memory cabinet
reserved for dangerous, exciting and possibly useful information, such as
plans for climbing straight up glass (diamond-tipped claws!) and flying
higher than the trees.

These days his thought cabinets were beginning to feel filled to bursting
and he could hardly wait for the moment when the true rich taste of
coffee, lawfully drunk, would permit him to speak.

He pictured the scene in detail: the family gathered in conclave at the
kitchen table, Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra respectfully watching from floor
level, himself sitting erect on a chair with paws (or would they be
hands?) lightly touching his cup of thin china, while Old Horsemeat poured
the thin black steaming stream. He knew the Great Transformation must be
close at hand.