[Note from Steve: Consider this story an early holiday gift for you, your children, and grandchildren. A. B. Carolan revisits that wonderful mutant cat Mr. Paws in this story. Some readers met him in The Secret Lab. The Fearsome Four, a group of four teens in the future, who became sleuths to discover how he’d arrived on the International Space Station, end up uncovering a conspiracy instead. I told A. B. about a neighbor’s cat that early this fall started sunning himself and taking catnaps on our backyard picnic table. That might have inspired my Irish collaborator to write this tale (you don’t need to read the novel to enjoy it, although it might motivate you to do so). I told A. B. this tale reminds me a bit of tales written by H. Rider Haggard, who, of course, was English, not Irish.
Due to supply chain issues–out time will be in short supply as A. B. and I dedicate more of it to my writing—I will reduce the number of articles posted to this blog to two in the future. Wednesdays will feature an article about reading, writing, or publishing, and Fridays will be dedicated to free short fiction, continuing the “Friday Fiction” series. Thank you for your understanding.]
Space-Cat
Copyright 2021, A. B. Carolan
It wasn’t easy to find my favorite Human, Shashibala Garcia. Space is big. Maybe too big for a cat? Paws. Mr. Paws. A space-cat who was born on the International Space Station. I’m a unique and dashing feline who might know more mathematics than you probably ever will. Yet too many Humans still just treat me like other cats.
I’d had a few miscues looking for her, that favorite Human of mine. I mistakenly thought I’d stowed away on a big rig heading for the outer planets but ended up on Mars. My visit to that red planet began badly but turned out okay.
Some mice had stowed away earlier on some other big rig and gotten loose in the Mars colony. They’d imported a few cats to control the mouse population, so I ended up with a harem for a while. I guess you could say I did my duty by increasing the cat population so the mouse problem was controlled. None of my kittens could create new mathematical theorems, though.
I soon became bored with Mars. Love’em and leave’em, I say. I reset my sights on Dione, one of Saturn’s moons, where I’d set out originally to find Shashi. I knew she’d be there; we’d corresponded frequently over the years.
Shashi and I had a special relationship that had developed on the ISS when she was just a young kitten. Of course, she’s my favorite Human, so I hoped she’d be as happy to see me as I would be to see her.
She’d married Brian Kelso, another member of her ISS gang, the Fearsome Four, and they headed off to work in Rafael Franchetti’s research team on Dione. Brian and Rafael were okay, but Shashi was special. Together we’d shut down a conspiracy on the space station. That conspiracy had created me, so I’ll always have mixed emotions about ending it.
All cargo bound for Saturn is protected from the space vacuum; there’s so much on the typical big rig that it’s not cost effective to separate things. (I know economics as well as math. You can’t make sense of the former without models from the latter.) I’d still needed to be choosy about where I hid on the way to Mars—air wasn’t necessarily included in a shipping container, but shielding against radiation always was—and that was true for my trip to Dione. Fortunately I had no problem reading the cargo manifests and chose wisely.
I hid in a special cargo container that was filled with living plants; it was temperature and humidity controlled and had little hoses that dripped water on the plants’ roots, all that creating a little jungle for this fearsome tiger. I didn’t know if the plants were for research, future food, or decoration—hard to tell what motivates crazy Humans—but on that long journey I could pretend I was in a real jungle, a Sumatran tiger protecting my territory. Of course, I had to lie on my back from time to time and steal some water from the plants. While there was no catnip, there was some red fruit I could split open and eat. Gave me the runs, but there was enough soil to serve as my bathroom.
Needless to say, I was happy to reach Dione. I’d lost a pound or two—at my young age of twenty-eight (thanks to Shashi’s mother’s telomere extension treatments), losing a bit of extra weight wasn’t such a bad thing—and pretending to be a Sumatran tiger only gets you so far in eliminating the boredom. I’d countered the latter a bit by creating some new number theory theorems. All fun for a while, but I missed Humans in general and Shashi in particular.
So…I was almost purring from happiness when I jumped out of that container. That surprised two Humans who pursued me, screaming “Cat!” I avoided them easily enough and was soon scampering through air and heating ducts in the Dione research station. It reminded me of ISS, only bigger, and that extra space provided a lot more places to hide while I searched for Shashi.
***
I found her in a lab. No surprise there. She was a scientist, after all. She was visualizing something with a graphics terminal. I latter learned that she and Brian worked on modeling the gas giant’s atmosphere. Probably a messy business, I suppose. They’d learned why the upper atmosphere was so hot at least a century ago: the electrical currents in the auroras were much more powerful than Earth’s. Because the faraway sun hardly warmed the planet, that had been a mystery for a while. Now they were modeling how the currents actually accomplished that, so I supposed the atmosphere was a plasma-gas mix that took some scientific finesse to model.
I started purring from the ventilation duct just above her desk. She looked up, maybe wondering if she were dreaming, because that had been the way we’d met on ISS. She jumped on top of the desk, an easy thing to do in Dione’s low gravity, and stared into the duct at me.
“Well, well, a cat. You look just like Mr. Paws.”
I couldn’t respond. I’d lost my wi-fi implant on the way to Mars, and the research station’s AI wouldn’t have the code that allowed me to communicate with Humans anyway. But she’d see the port when she took me down, so I purred more loudly.
After I was comfortable on her lap, she called Brian via her own wi-fi implant. Although there was no need, she vocalized, not subvocalized, the call.
“We have a visitor. Guess who it is.”
“No idea. Someone hitched a ride on that big rig that just sent a shuttle down, interrupting my data collection?”
“Maybe. He got here some way.”
“So who is it?”
“Mr. Paws.”
That must have shocked Shashi’s mate because there was a period of silence.
“How do you know?”
“What other cat has a wi-fi port?”
He laughed. “Where is he now?”
“On my lap.”
“Um. I’ll be right there. I can’t get back online until after that shuttle goes up for another load.”
I had no idea where Brian had to come from, but he showed up twenty minutes later, breathless. He picked me up and cradled me in his arms.
“Are you really Mr. Paws?”
I purred a “yes,” but he didn’t understand cat language.
“My mother can transmit the code so our AI can link with him,” Shashi said. “She’ll be as surprised as we are.”
“In the meantime, we need to get him some food. He looks a bit malnourished.”
Now we’re talking! I was liking this new Brian. He was a lot more serious, mature, and caring. More like Shashi, in fact. I decided she’d been good for him.
***
After wi-fi communication was reestablished, we had some good times together, Shashi, Brian, and I. Rafael okayed my presence as long as I kept out of the way, but only three Humans knew I was there on Dione. I suspected those two on the loading docks hadn’t wanted to admit that I’d escaped their clutches.
It wasn’t all fun…or a different kind of fun. I contributed to the trio’s research effort. With my AI connection, I could contribute as well as any Human when it came to data analysis—all based on cat-language commands, of course.
If Rafael hadn’t known I was there, he would have suspected something was amiss. We got our work done thirty to forty percent faster than Shashi and Brian had alone. That gave us some extra time for us to get caught up and for me to explore the Dione station. On one of those trips, I saw something that puzzled me.
“What’s Project Home Run?” I said to them after my jaunt and relaxing after dinner.
Shashi looked at Brian; he shook his head. “We don’t know,” she said.
I knew enough about Earth to figure out the usual meaning of “home run,” a term used in an Earth game that could only be watched and not played out in space. I also knew enough that Human names for projects often obscured what they were about instead of explained.
“Where’d you hear about it, Mr. Paws?” Brian said.
“Not heard but seen,” I said. “The director has a special terminal to communicate with Earth. He was reviewing something sent to him, but he’d only received the title page of the document.”
“Could you see where it was from?” Shashi said.
“GenCorp. Remember them?”
“Vaguely,” Shashi said. “I think my mother’s research funds come from a GenCorp subsidiary.”
“So do some research funds for this station,” Brian said. “Maybe that’s why the director received the message. Might not mean anything.”
“You know the saying,” I said.
“About curious cats?” Shashi said. “Trying to find out what Project Home Run might get you killed, Mr. Paws. The director might not like the idea that a cat’s here either.”
“No mice around, I take it?” I’d already told them about my Martian experiences, not that they could compare with Edgar Rice Burrough’s adventures featuring Jedi warriors, helped by John Carter. “I am helping to get the work done, aren’t I?”
“That might not set well with the director either,” Brian said. “Fortunately, Rafael insulates us from him a lot.”
“So…maybe Rafael could find out about Project Home Run?”
“Um. I suppose he might agree to do that, just to satisfy your curiosity.”
***
Rafael and the director had agreed to disagree on many things, but the latter knew he wouldn’t last long if he got in the way of research. Scientists wouldn’t tolerate that for long, even if their funding was channeled through the director. UNSA would step in and make adjustments if there were any hedges on the agreement between Earth’s mega-corporations and UNSA about future space exploration and research.
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Let me start with the blurb for the new Esther Brookstone novel, Defanging the Red Dragon :
