Cats in Space and Other Places Bill Fawcett (ebook reader that looks like a book .TXT) 📖

out where I was. Then I caught your scent. You are quite distinct, you know, different even from your mother. Then I heard you again when you tried to sneak up on me. You are as quiet as a herd of imlowwn."

Natanha's balled fist hit her leg in a cute little gesture of frustration. "One of these days I'll catch you. One day you'll be dreaming, and I'll catch you."

He turned his head away from the sunrise and to Natanha for the first time. He studied her face, so much like her mothers, the determination there, and raised an eyebrow. It was the only response such a statement deserved.

She was about to insist, then changed her mind. "Where's the rock? Did you like it? Did you like it?"

Ki raised his left hand which caused a glint on the metal and pointed to the water.

"Where?' she demanded. "I don't see it."

"It's at the base of the waterfall. The water is polishing it. When the time is right, I'll take it out." Ki was suddenly intensely aware of the similarity of Natanha and her cherished bit of earth. She, too, would be ready for public viewing only after she'd been polished. He only hoped the process would not be too painful.

"No one can see it at the bottom of the waterfall," she pouted.

"I know it's there, as do you. Who else needs to?" Natanha subsided, and found herself regarding the sun rising over her fathers capital. In this light, delicate, fragile, none too sharp, the city was wonderful. The tall towers picked up the pinks and yellows of the dawn and threw them back at her. She could not see from here the hovels that had grown up at the edges of the city, filled with squatters who could not pay the land tax. From here it was golden, warm, exciting. She imagined the people beginning to get ready for the day, soon to fill the streets with writhing snakes made of people, patchy snakes with colors from all over the Empire. The low residential districts lost their bone whiteness in this light, becoming fragile pink roses almost lost in the high canes of the skyscrapers. Where the 'scrapers left their shadows, there were dark pools of blue, deep, deep, like the lake that filled Fuji's crater.

After a time, she found her voice and the courage to speak of what had brought her here.

"They tried to kill Daddy yesterday."

"Yes," Ki answered, aware of where this line of questioning was likely to go.

"Will they try to kill Mama, too?"

"Probably."

Natanha paused. This next was the heart of the matter. "Am I going to die?"

Ki was relieved that she had brought this question to him. He did not want another to answer it, to frighten her, or, worse yet, to lie to her. "Eventually. We all do."

She was frustrated. "YOU know! Are the rebels going to kill Mama and me?"

"No."

"How do you know?"

Ki opened his right hand, slowly turned it palm up, and extended it gracefully to Natanha. It was answer enough. He would never permit it. She put her small hand in his, feeling safe now, and returned to watching the sunrise.

"Scarlet and cadmium yellow going into violets contrast nicely with the oranges in the highlights in the blue shadows, right . . . ?" She was showing off for him.

He turned his face toward her, his eyes open wide, and this time raised both eyebrows. Softly, she withdrew her hand from his.

"Yes," she sighed. "Mama says I talk too much, too." And, as if Mama had reminded her, she smoothed her skirt in unconscious imitation. Then she looked at Ki. His back was straight, his hands on his thighs, relaxed, his face to the new morning. She shifted her weight, straightened her back, too, and placed her hands. Then she checked Ki again, to see that she'd done it correctly, and went back to watching her father's city come to life.

Ki smiled indulgently.

The Ballad of Lost C'mell

Cordwainer Smith

She got the which of the what-she-did,

Hid the bell with a blot, she did,

But she fell in love with a hominid.

Where is the which of the what-she-did?

from The Ballad of Lost C'mell

She was a girly girl and they were true men, the lords of creation, but she pitted her wits against them and she won. It had never happened before, and it is sure never to happen again, but she did win. She was not even of human extraction. She was cat-derived, though human in outward shape, which explains the C in front of her name. Her father's name was C'mackintosh and her name C'mell. She won her tricks against the lawful and assembled Lords of the Instrumentality.

It all happened at Earthport, greatest of buildings, smallest of cities, standing twenty-five kilometers high at the western edge of the Smaller Sea of Earth.

Jestocost had an office outside the fourth valve.

1

Jestocost liked the morning sunshine, while most of the other Lords of Instrumentality did not, so that he had no trouble in keeping the office and the apartments which he had selected. His main office was ninety meters deep, twenty meters high, twenty meters broad. Behind it was the "fourth valve," almost a thousand hectares in extent. It was shaped helically, like an enormous snail. Jestocost's apartment, big as it was, was merely one of the pigeonholes in the muffler on the rim of Earthport. Earthport stood like an enormous wineglass, reaching from the magma to the high atmosphere.

Earthport had been built during mankind's biggest mechanical splurge. Though men had had nuclear rockets since the beginning of consecutive history, they had used chemical rockets to load the interplanetary ion-drive and nuclear-drive vehicles or to assemble the photonic sail-ships for interstallar cruises. Impatient with the troubles of taking things bit by bit into the sky, they had worked out a billion-ton rocket, only to find that it ruined whatever countryside it touched in landing. The Daimoni-people of Earth extraction, who came back from somewhere beyond the