Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

“Some other time I’ll guess for her if she wants,” he said. “Not right now. I don’t think that’s what you really want right now anyway, is it, Cat?” His tone was mild, friendly. There was no flirtation in it.

Frustrated, she thought, I want you to take off those barriers over your eyes. I want to see into them and make you follow me. I want to know you carnally, and I want to know what you are.

No, his thought replied directly to her thought. No, sorry, I can’t do any of that. Not even for you, milady Cat.

Back at the girl show tent, an hour later, she found herself still quivering in reaction. This man had made her feel naked, unshielded, exposed in a way that no lack of clothing could ever make her feel exposed. Whoever or whatever he was, he could touch her mind. Perhaps he could even tell what she was—or had been.

Partly, she felt outrage, humiliation, vexation. As much as she had ever wanted any man she wanted him, and he had not responded as he should have. It is no small matter when a fertility goddess is thwarted in lust.

And partly she felt great fear. The deities of the old religions are always the demons of the new. Once in her thrice-three lives Cat had been found out and put to death, while still in her feline form, by burning. She still remembered not so much the horrible pain as the helplessness of her clever cat body enslaved by rawhide bindings, the leaping, ravenous flames of the bonfire, the stench of her own consumed skin and fur. It was not a death she ever wanted to experience again.

Strutting and posing through her next kootch show, she picked out a broad-shouldered, handsome young mark and summoned him with her eyes. As she had wordlessly commanded, he was waiting for her in back of the tent afterward, not quite able to believe what was happening, his mouth moving uncertainly, soft as a baby’s. She led him away into the darkness beyond the edge of the carnival, and he did what she wanted, everything she wanted, and he was good, very good. Afterward, she drove him away with her clawed hands. More punishment was not necessary. She knew he would go mad with thinking of her before many days had passed.

She should have been satisfied. Always before she had been satisfied by the simple, sacred act of lust. Yet she found that she was not.

She should have gone away on four speedy unbound paws from that dangerous place where someone had apprehended her truly. Yet she found that she would not.

Confusion take this Ollie person. He has shamed me and he has made me afraid, but he has not yet bested me utterly. We shall see whether he scorns me in the end.

Scorn was perhaps too strong a word, for when she came back to the carnival, walking alone, she found him waiting for her outside Hinkleman’s trailer. “I just want to say I’m sorry if I offended you, Cat,” he told her aloud. “I didn’t mean to.”

The words meant nothing to her. But the thought underlying them was clear as tears. I didn’t mean to stir up anger, and I don’t want enemies. I just want to be let alone with my son and my sorrow.

Sentiment annoyed her. She bared her teeth at him, nearly hissing, then passed him and went inside to sleep in the bunk Hinkleman’s girls had cleared for her. When Hinkleman came, a few minutes later, to see if he could share it with her as was the kootch show owner’s tacit right, she struck at him, leaving four long red scratches across his face. Then she listened in disgust as he comforted himself with the Indian instead. He was aging, potbellied, foul of breath, altogether repulsive. How could he be so goatishly eager while this man who attracted her, this Ollie, was so indifferent?

Men. Hell take them all. So Ollie wishes to be let alone? That will be no heartbreak for me.

Yet the next day when the carnival lights came on at sunset, she went first to the flower stand, and took a blossom—smiling, the old Italian woman gave it to her. Carnies give other carnies what they can. This was a flower like a woman’s petticoat, frilled and fringed and fluted, white once but dipped in a stain that had spread from its petal tips along its veins and into its penetralia, blood red. It was very beautiful. Cat placed it in her golden hair. Then she walked the midway in her red dress again, and came to a certain booth, his booth, and stood there staring at him. It was her curiosity, she told herself, that drew her back to him this way. And she knew that partly this was true.

Hello, Cat, he greeted her without speaking and without looking at her.

Hello.

You are the only one I can talk to this way.

You are the only one I can talk to at all.

There was a pause. Then he thought to her very softly, Yes. Yes, I see. It had not occurred to me, but there is such a thing as being too much alone.

No, not really. I like being alone.

Still… if you wish to talk sometimes, it is no trouble for me to talk with you.

It would be a way, perhaps, of finding out how much he knew of her. As for the other thing she wanted of him… she still desired it badly, and still felt no response in him. And there was no way in cold frosty hell she was going to ask it of him again. The flower in her hair should have been invitation enough. That and the summons in her eyes.

She made mental conversation as casually as if she were hostessing a court function, chatting with the lesser vassals. So you comprehend thoughts. When people come to you and ask you questions, then you can find the answers in their minds?

Yes. And also many things they would not want me to know. Very beautiful things sometimes, and sometimes very ugly. She heard a poet’s yearning in his tone of mind. He wanted to take what was in people and make a song, a saga great enough to hold all of it, everything he had heard and learned. But she did not wish to be in his song.

She could not ask him how much he knew of her. Why would he tell her the truth, anyway? He lied constantly.

So whatever questions the marks ask you, you could answer correctly every time.

Yes.

They why do you so often give the wrong answer?

To please them. People like to win. So I let them win sometimes, and then they come back, you see, and try again.

She turned and walked away. Behind her she could hear him as he started ballying: “I can guess your age, your weight, your occupation! Challenge my skill, ladies and gentlemen! Ask me any question. See if I can answer.”

Cat made sure she was well down the midway before she allowed herself to think it: He keeps them coming back. He keeps me coming back.

And then she thought, If I win, will it be because he has let me?

And she thought, Who is he? What is he?

But her sense of fear felt eased somewhat. If she did not know those things of him by touching his mind, there was little reason to think he knew more of her.

That night she lay with a mark again, and found that she despised him and what she did with him. “You should charge,” Melons told her crossly after the man left. “It’s stupid not to charge. You’re making it bad for the rest of us.” She glared at the kootcher, but she could not have loathed herself much more if she did indeed perform the holy act for pay. Even the thought of how insanity would punish the man for his daring did not comfort her.

The next morning she went to find Ollie in his trailer with his young son. For hours she sat in their kitchen, and conversed in her silent way with Ollie, and had fried trout, fresh caught, for breakfast with both of them. The boy tended to the breakfast, mostly, just as he tended the booth in the evenings, making change for his father, and for the same reason. The Guess Anything man could not do it for himself.