Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer

Tigerishka reached out and brushed his right wrist with the back of a green paw, then sat back again. He realized with rather incredulous wonder that his right arm was free. He worked the fingers, bent and unbent the elbow with less pain than he’d anticipated, then started to lift his fingers to his lips, but stopped them midway.

If he simply touched his lips, she might interpret it as meaning he wished to be tube-fed that way.

He brought his fingers to his forehead, then in one smooth movement dropped them to his lips and out toward her pointed ears. Inspiration continuing, he dropped them toward her muzzle, then swept them back to his own ear.

“Yes, want talk,” she interpreted. “Monkey cat have great gossip, eh?” She slowly shook her green-masked face from side to side. “No! Be all chatter-questions — one, ten, five thousands! I know apes.”

His expectations crumbled. At the same time it was occurring to him, with curious certainty, that she could have said that in grammatically perfect English, but deliberately chose not to — very much as a brilliant European quite capable of speaking any language flawlessly will hang onto his accent and his first, makeshift constructions to emphasize his exotic individuality, and also as a subtle criticism of the arbitrary English pronunciations and of its swarms of silly little auxiliary words.

“Still—” Tigerishka temporized — “are things I will tell.” Then, at court-stenographer speed, and a little singsong, as if it were very boring to her: “I come superior galactic culture. Read minds, throw thoughts, sail hyperspace, live forever if want, blow up suns — all that sort stuff. Look like animal — resume ancestral shapes. Make brains small but really huge — (psychophysiosubmicrominiaturization! We stay superior.) You not believe? So listen. Plants eat inorganic: they superior! Animals eat plants: they superior. Cats eat fresh meat: we most superior! Monkeys try eat everything: a mess!”

Then without pause: “Wanderer sail hyperspace. Yes, star photos, I know. Need fuel — much matter for converters. Your moon good woodpile. Smash, pulverize, dredge. We fuel up, then go. No need you monkeys get hot and bothered.”

After she broke off, Paul continued to seethe for all of five seconds, utterly enraged at her heartless oversimplifications. Then it occurred to him that there was nothing whatever he could do about it. He took a deep, slow breath and calmed his features, hoping they were growing less red. Then he held his hand tightly over his mouth and suddenly threw it out, as if to say: “Away with the gag.”

It also occurred to him that there was really no point to this gesture game, since she must know his thoughts, but immediately on the heels of that came the realization that the point simply was that it was a game. Cats like games; they like to play with helpless victims; and here Tigerishka seemed no exception.

She confirmed this by smiling as she slowly shook her head — smiling and wrinkling her upper lips so that her five-bristle mustaches made little circles.

He took another tack. He repeated the “Away with the gag” gesture, but immediately followed it by bringing his hand to his mouth as if holding a glass, and tipping it as if drinking. Finally he laid his forefinger across the center of his lips.

Tigerishka’s star-shaped pupils narrowed to points as she stared at his eyes. “I let you drink mouth, you no talk? No say single word?”

Paul nodded solemnly.

She took from her kit a limp white flask of what looked like half-pint capacity and held it against his lips. “I squeeze gently, you suck,” she said, and brushed the back of her other forepaw across his cheek and chin. Sensation flashed back into them and at the same time a cool seeping was solacing his dry and aching throat. After a bit the taste came: milk. Milk with a faint musky tone. He wondered if it were feline or synthetic, humanly assimilable or not, but decided he must trust Tigerishka’s judgment.

When the first edge of his thirst was quenched, he reached up his hand to take over the job of squeezing. She neither rebuffed this gesture nor immediately relinquished her hold on the flask, so for a few moments he felt, through the edges of his fingers and hand, the velvet of her pads and the resilient silk of her fur and, through the latter, the hard curve of a sheathed claw. Then she withdrew her paw, saying only: “Gently, remember.”

When the flask was crushed flat, he handed it back to her, unintentionally adding: “Thank you” — but before the words could come out, her pads had lightly slapped his lips and the gag was back again.

He wondered dully if the gag was a matter of pure suggestion or some impalpable film, or some instantaneous electrophoretic tissue-impregnation — cafaphoresis, doctors actually called it! — or whatnot else — but a thought-jumbling lethargy was swiftly stealing over his body and mind. Fatigue or drugs? That too was too hard to think about.

Drowsily he realized that the saucer’s invisible indoor sun had faded to twilight. Through sleep-mist he felt the freeing brush of Tigerishka’s fur against his left wrist and ankle, so that only his right ankle still fettered him.

He folded himself into a uterine position and drifted toward deeper sleep.

The last thing he was aware of was Tigerishka’s neutral, “ ’Night, monkey.”

The Wanderer showed Earth its yin-yang face for a fifth time. For a full day now it had hung in Terra’s night sky. For the meteorologists at the South Pole International Observation Station, deep in the unbroken night of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, the Wanderer had made a full circuit of the sunless sky, keeping always the same distance above the icy horizon, and now hung once more where it had first appeared above the Queen Maud Range and Marie Byrd Land. Great green auroras sprang from the snows and glowed around it.

The strange planet mightily restimulated some supernatural beliefs and many sorts of mania.

In India, which had thus far escaped the severer earthquakes and suffered minimal tidal damage, it was worshipped by large congregations in nightlong rites. Some identified it as the invisible planet Ketu, at last disgorged by the serpent. Brahmins quietly contemplated it and hinted it might mark the dawn of a new kalpa.

In South Africa it became the standard of revolt for a bloody and successful uprising against the Boers.

In Protestant countries the Book of Revelation was searched through in thousands of Bibles never before read or even opened.

In Rome the new Pope, who was a Jesuit-trained astronomer, combatted superstitious interpretations of events, while the paparazzi found films and lenses for their cameras which would enable them to snap movie stars and other notorious notables gesturing at the Wanderer or background by it — as Ostia fought flood, and the new Mediterranean tides pushed up the Tiber.

In Egypt a felinoid being landing from a saucer was identified as the benign goddess Bast by an expatriate British theosophist, and the cult of cat-worship got off to a new beginning. According to the theosophist, the Wanderer itself was Bast’s destructive twin: Sekhet, the Eye of Ra.

There was an odd echo of this development in Paris, where two felinoids, repeating Tigerishka’s mistake, loosed from the zoological gardens all the tigers, lions, leopards, and other large felines. Some of the beasts appeared in Left Bank cafes. A similar liberation occurred at the Tiergarten in Berlin, where the animals were threatened by flood waters.

Strange, strange to think that Don Merriam was sleeping snugly now in his little cabin aboard the Wanderer, just as Paul was sleeping as soundly aboard Tigerishka’s saucer.