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Save Point: Cats Walk Between

Aftertime

~*~

-and Cleo finds herself walking along a mountain trail, as though in a moment of distraction she has lost herself. Snow falls slowly down by the drop, as individual luxuriant flakes.

"Terrowne, where are you?" she snarls, with all the considerable depth and force of the lungs of a coughing wildcat, not yet particularly worried, just testing.

Her voice echoes faintly before disappearing into nothingness, which indicates that one, she is in an open space exceeding fifty-two feet in diameter in at least one direction, and two, that no-one else is anywhere in sight. She inhales a snowflake, almost chokes on it, and decides to keep her mouth shut instead. Snow melts on her tongue, cold-tangy.

Since it appears that she is alone, not really an immediately worrying proposition, she decides to sort out what is going on and figure out what is happening by herself. It is time to call upon the all too often ignored power of aggressive observation to make reality comply with her desires.

Looking about establishes that she is in a narrow but not too tall ravine or mountain pass of some sort, approximately level, but one which is not, incongruously, choked by the heavy blanket of snow that is apparent, high above, piled up on top of either of the ravine walls. Her first thought is that the narrowness of the walls has mostly kept out the single, enormous flakes of individual falling snow, in the same way that less rain lands at the base of a steep masonry wall by deflection of the winds around it, but rationality rapidly intercedes to point out that this makes no sense at all. If anything, snow should have accumulated more effectively in this narrow gap. The flakes are collecting on her shoulders, melt-resistant, even now.

She finds the answer in the exposed rock of the walls to either side, almost golden in color, filled with strange gnarled veins and patterns of mineral deposition, and faintly warm to the touch. There is, for lack of a better word, something himalayan about it, a suggestion of ancient folding and change and pressure, of having been upthrust from terrible depth far into the snowy heights. This is rock that is almost alive, heated by some geothermal fire deep inside, one that is held in check by the thinness of the high places and the distances beneath, but is just enough to melt the flakes that drift inside the ravine, and strike the exposed walls. Sure enough, when she looks down, there is a narrow multi-threaded streamlet of meltwater running down the pass between her clawnails, which has graved its own slender branching path about a half an inch down into the surrounding rock.

Thinking about it, she realises that she has yet to feel significantly cold since her arrival, and that the air, although thin, is not too much so, and seems to be slightly humid rather than the frozen dryness one would expect. The high walls must trap the evaporated moisture, creating a local microclimate favorable to the survival of suitably adapted living things, such as herself.

How in hell did she get here anyway? The unexpectedly favorable conditions suggest, regardless of whatever just happened, Sekhmet has smiled on her and she is intended to survive immediate events. Perhaps she has been diverted here somehow from her intended fate.

Choice of direction is limited to slightly up and slightly down, so she picks slightly up, a catty gesture of spitting in the face of face. No-one stops Cleo Ymaris Estar from going where she wants, not even a mountain. She trails her hand along the faintly warm rock of the cliff face and proceeds uphill, hoping that there is somewhere else on this mountain range where she can get laid.

At low points in the ravine walls, the tips of entire mountain ranges and whole cloud layers come intermittently into view. Wherever she is, it is very high up, in the Mount Everest meets upper Shangri-La sort of sense. The weather is clear now, but outside the ravine, conditions must none the less be brutal. She has fur and an inner fire to warm her, and even so, she is forced to breathe somewhat more deeply than normal, to extract enough air to keep climbing the path.

The walls of the pass are interwoven with all sorts of interesting minerals produced by the association of thermal heat and melt water, which is steadily exposing the underlying materials lifted from the ancient depths. At one point she comes across a largish green crystal that is being slowly freed from the surrounding rock, a peridote gem or so she thinks. Normally she'd take the time to hammer such a thing free using her dagger or whatever else came to hand, thinking it suitable for trade or barter, but she is afraid to despoil this strange and serenely exceptional place. She finds herself thinking that it's a shame Terrowne isn't here, because he'd really enjoy looking at all the different rocks and minerals, and she could keep them both warm.

After an uncertain amount of time, the ravine begins to narrow still further, and she expects that it will soon come to an end one way or another, forcing her to venture out onto the exposed face of the mountain. Instead, around a slight corner, she finds that the path continues straight into the solid rock, where a short tunnel has been carved into the end of the ravine. The tunnel, which is only a few paces long, ends at a roughly squared aperture that is beyond any shadow of a doubt a doorway, although any door that may have been in it is long lost to the weather, torn away along with any fastenings or hinges that may have connected it to the corroded rock.

Cleo walks out through the doorway and takes in the view.

The doorway opens onto a sort of half amphitheatre, in which a wide raised platform supported by pylons describes a half circle around a somewhat lower floor, like an arena. She is currently standing on the right side of the platform, which is the more sheltered, whilst the left extremity of the circle protrudes outward into space, the rock backing it having apparently fallen away at some point to leave the platform and its pylons hanging out suspended over nothing. At the middle of the curve, the constant funneling of the mountain storms around the shape of the arena has undermined the pylons at the weakest point, causing several sections of the raised platform to fall inward, retaining their individual integrity but sloping at impossible angles. What remains seems stable enough, but climbing around it may be something of a challenge.

What catches Cleo's attention almost immediately is that there is a bridge, of all things, extending from the far point of the amphitheatre out over emptiness to the next nearest ridge, which is only a short distance away but separated by an impossible chasm, an unimaginable depth. The bridge is obviously not part of the original design but seems to have been added on later, assembled completely from large single segments of some sort of dull silvery metal, although with distance and weathering and the amount of snow accumulated atop it it's impossible to tell. The bridge is oddly thin, and Cleo has a sneaking suspicion that, were she to measure, each piece would just fit through the tunnel door and just barely clear the various bends in the ravine path. There's something sort of familiar about the architecture, although she can't quite place it.

In order to cross that bridge, however, she'll have to come to it. It would once have been easy to get to, she imagines, by simply walking around the raised platform, but where sections have collapsed, things are considerably more complicated. Carefully repressing an instinctive impulse to show off by running around the inside curve of the wall to bridge the gaps (which she probably could do, but which would be insanely dangerous under the conditions) she looks around for a better alternative and sees a pair of metal ladders which descend vertically to the arena floor from either side of the half-circle.

Because the weather is cold and clear, and the air is even more still inside the sheltered lower level of the arena, several inches height of fluffy snow has accumulated on each of the rungs of the ladder. The metal is insanely cold, and as she climbs down the snow has a nasty tendency to fall down her collar and between her breasts, where it's all shivery. What worries her more is that she is now leaving an obvious trail to follow, where the snow has been brushed from the rungs. Should the weather break, it will disguise her tracks, but then she'll have to cope with whatever else the mountain might have in store. Until then she will be easy to find.

The snow cover on the arena floor is only about half a foot deep. Presumably when enough accumulates it blows out through the open space where the far wall has fallen away, although it's deeper around the edges. There are mysterious hummocks and ridges on the arena floor, where the snow may or may not cover things, but she avoids them because, given the many things they could be, she'd rather not know. (Some of the outlines very much resemble the outlines of the ribcage of a dead donkey as eaten by predators, plus snow. Of course, that could just be her over active imagination.) More importantly, she doesn't have time to dig things out of the snow, not at the cost of the considerable thermal energy she'd have to expend.

Nailclaws extended, she carefully steps her way across the arena floor, grabs the opposite ladder as soon as it is in range, and climbs slowly up the outer frames rather than the rungs, trusting in their superior strength to far better distribute her weight. But the ladder is solid as stone and shows no signs of wear and tear, and the precaution seems unwarranted. Most of the snow stays in place this time, helping to obscure her path.

The other side of the raised platform does not exactly match the part nearest the tunnel, which may in part account for its structural strength despite overhanging the edge of the slope. The snow is very thin on the most exposed portion, which is wider than the rest and seems to contain some sort of additional structure. Cleo brushes aside the thin tracings of snow with her foot to reveal a larger separate block set into a rectangular opening in the platform floor, the material of which it is made matching a design that is familiar to her from the inverted pyramid temple of the Stellar Way cult near Exmoor. It features the same curious cutouts, almost organic black-carbon composition, and cryptic white non-symbols that resemble printers marks.

Touching it, she experiences a brief intense vision that if she lay down bodily on it, it would sink down into the floor and two panels would slide out to cover it, just like an Exmoor cat trap. And then for some indeterminate period of time, she would exist in an altered state of consciousness, until at last she attained some form of vision or enlightenment, or until her body failed the test.

She snaps back to reality and finds herself standing next to the plinth.

The one the Order of the Stellar Way had in Exmoor was obviously looted, she concludes, and not to be expected to function properly. The mere fact that it was being held together by expensive titanium chains at the corners suggested a degree of improvisation without any real grasp of how the device was actually supposed to work. And the uncanny similarity of the Exmoor cat trap to the complete mechanism seen here was, perhaps, more than a coincidence. A device designed to pry open the mind might be capable of influencing many things.

And, of course, she tells herself, let us not forget about the strange dreams I had when I was floating quietly half-dead in a tank of green goop, with a black fractal shunt shoved firmly up my big tigers' pink pussycat. The ones I never mentioned because they made no rational sense, even by my standards. (She slinks her hips a bit uneasily, remembering what it felt like up there).

Quickly, before she can stop herself or has time to hesitate, she makes up her mind. The last traces of snow are cold on her back, but the carbon plinth is warm. Well, I did say I wanted to get laid somewhere on this mountain, is the last thought that crosses her mind before the slab sinks down, and the covers slide together above her muzzle and bring shadow.

~*~

Seasons pass, or perhaps they are only seconds, or the passage of days, or something in between.

Clouds sweep past, torn by the mountain winds, and the sharp point of the sun shatters on the horizon in a blade of starlight. The snows melt and are gone and return again. The stars spin overhead with colors the night would normally suppress. The moon is a sickle blade, reaching for blood. In the empty places, they are those who are there still.

The covers open, and when Cleo arises, she is something else.

New patterns have graved themselves onto her body, onto her skin, onto her soul. Spiraling, almost glowing tattoos like the fire of sunset wind around her arms, her legs, starting at the wrists and heels and winding upwards to coalesce on her back, throwing spurs outward under her breasts and around her ribcage but not quite meeting at the front. On her upper thighs and arms, and just above the brow of her muzzle, she has developed curious rosette dapples, like the skin of a cheetah if it was patterned with the fragments of still glowing ash that rise into the air of their own accord, weightless, defying gravity. The furthest traces of the fire tattoos extend out just enough to brush her cheekbones, and her skin has become even more golden, the streak running down from her throat to her midriff even more pale. Accordingly, the ancient Azatlani rank marking on her outer haunch is gone; she has assumed her own, unique rank. The shadings of her multicoloured mane have separated out, grouping themselves into the more firey and the more grey, but still intertwined intimately, having stretched and braided themselves all the way down to the backs of her knees, where her queue is held by a clasp of copper. The darkest markings of all shadow around the front of her muzzle, like the brushings on the face of a cougar.

She has kept the small heart-shaped pendant and the silver bracers, but that is all. Like the dragon her lover, she is dressed in her skin and needs no other armour.

And none of this is the remarkable thing. As she moves she slipstreams and blurs, multiphasic, the timeline of the past few seconds failing to reconcile itself around her. The effect is only mild about her breasts and body, where her movements are more consistent, but at the extremities of her arms and legs, it is almost beyond imagining that the eyes should be able to track. Her tail is the worst of all, flickering all over the place in a swarm, as though there were at least two of it, and possibly many more.

She tries to get her eyes to focus, realises that they are in focus, and then falls over.

Several falls later, trying to get the disorienting multiphasic effect under control, she manages to get up and stagger several metres sideways to collide palm first with a section of freestanding wall that is all that lies between her and the vast abyss off to the side. Once she has managed to stay almost still for a minute of two, the effect is minimised and she starts to get used to it. Like you could, she chides herself, for reckless endangerment and abandonment of self.

There are no metaphors for this, is all she can think. It feels like waking up from total loss of circulation almost dead, and getting up and falling over when the blood rushes agonizingly to your starved extremities. It feels like enlightenment by electric shock. It feels like being hit most beneficently in the head by a elderly sword saint. Of course, none of these in fact describe the whole thing accurately in any way whatsoever.

She tries to take a couple of steps, fails as abysmally as the vast open space she nearly falls into, and is forced to clutch at the wall again and take several deep breaths. In the process, she makes a point of checking out her own tits, which are fortunately still the same colour. Well that's a great relief, she thinks manically, because I am fond of that shade of terracotta pink.

The next time, she makes a point of staggering the other way, as she attempts to restore her temporal circulation. Which is the best weakest simile she's been able to come up with so far. It's like circulation, which is part of your body only you don't really know how it works, and tend not to think about it until it suddenly goes badly wrong and you fall out of bed twitching. Yes, that's exactly it, she concludes. And of course nothing to do with it at all.

After spending a certain amount of time on her knees, and then swaying crazily around in a circle several times around the plinth, like a new age stoner Navajo or possibly Sioux attempting some kind of peyote fuelled rain dance and getting snow instead, she starts to vaguely get the hang of it. It occurs to her that, in fact, once she has learned how to use this curious new ability, she will actually be able to move even faster and strike even harder than she could before, but it's anything but instinctive, and she feels weak and clumsy as a newborn kitten. Bitch kitty queen of swords, she mutters to herself, thinking of the insult she's been struck with more than once, most usually as a compliment. Who knew enlightenment was so tricky.

By her still temporally disoriented estimate, it's got to have been at least an hour before she feels confident that she can walk in a convincingly straight line and sit down neatly if it goes wrong, rather than go spalling off sideways. She thinks that the simple practice of just actually going somewhere and doing things might help her learn faster than anything else, and her impatience to master any new thing will not let her just wander about in circles, flailing and falling down.

She eyes the bridge and contemplates the fall, which, she thinks, is wonderful motivation and is definitely likely to keep her focused on her objective.

The bridge is not that narrow, she notices when she looks at it more closely. The upper surface has been ruggedized, graved with cross-hatchings to improve traction and reduce the risk. It looks terminally stable, like it's not going anywhere any century soon. Snow has collected on the surfaces, but not ice, as one would expect. Figuring out how that works is somewhat beyond her, in her currently altered state of body. The ravine made sense, because the snow melted and ran off, but the bridge is covered in fine powder which is not melting, nor could it given that it's a long expanse of thin metal suspended in a freezing breeze. She wonders if it might be something like the dry valleys in Antarctica, so cold that no moisture is present.

Half an hour later, she realises that she has been sitting on her knees in the snow staring at the bridge for half an hour, and that a fine layer of snow is starting to cover her thighs and shoulders and build up around the furry cleft of her ass, except where the end of her tail is still twitching multiphasically and flicking it away like a broom. Which is good, because she seems to have managed to stay still at long last, but which is bad, because she could still theoretically freeze out here in the open, fabulously weird new powers or not. She snorts loudly and blows away some of the snow that has accumulated around her butt, sending flakes skittering lightly across the paving stones.

Stiffly, she forces herself to her feet and, with a growl, very carefully and slowly makes her way out onto the span.

Actually staggering across the bridge gives her a much better appreciation of its architecture, the view down onto the span being far preferable to the vertiginous drop below. She's afraid she'll catch herself staring into spinning nothing again, and so she hunkers up with claws out and shuffles slowly across, concentrating on the design. Which is, she concludes, quite simply mad. Oh for a nice white snow rabbit to chase, or even a hare.

For one thing, supports seem to have been slapped in wherever they might work, which is not across at least the middle half of the span. That bit has a sort of deranged suspension thing that's been thrown in to make it stay together. The components all seem to be from the same original set of stock pieces, all of the same size, accommodated by creative distribution of the underlying supports to make the whole thing work. The fact that it describes a curve both sideways and upwards into the air as it crosses the gap seems to be an unavoidable design feature, necessitated by the fixed lengths. The unknown architect seems to have been not without some basic design nous, however, since each length is in fact two adjacent overlapping beams alongside one another. Which, Cleo realises, would neatly deal with any thermal expansion as the structure expands and contracts in the biting conditions. Plus, snow can fall down through the diagonal gaps and so it won't build up in the treads.

In fact, more than anything else, she concludes, it's just like an Azatlani highway overpass. The pieces even look kind of similar. Although the planning commission was either out to a long lunch or had already been bribed when the design proposal for this one came through.

She makes a conscious decision to rest for a few minutes at the high point of the structure and take in the impossibly vast view. There is no sign of anything, even out in the deepest distance, just more snow and empty air and mountains. The light is numinous. Once she feels she's gotten all she can out of the blurred vista, she starts walking against the downward curve, across to the far side, trying not to gain speed, not to tumble over her own nailclaws and fall.

She's not sure just how long it has been when she finally finds herself on the downward straight-way, looking at what the bridge leads to, but the light has dimmed and it growing late.

Here is a flat plateau of substantial size, extending from the flanks of the mountain, not resistant to but covered with a thickness of snow. Here too is a building, constructed of flat stones stacked together and chinked with some unknown dark thickness, like tar mixed with coarse sand and animal hair, backed up against the wall of the cliff and presumably extending back into some sort of cave or beneath overhang. Here are windows made of thickened glass, backed up against the stones from the inside, held in their place by the same substance, glowing brightly with the ever too brilliant yellows and oranges of reflected firelight, seen from the outside at the beginning of the night.

To either side of the building, to either side of the door, huge creatures prowl with sleek black fur, seemingly impervious to the cold, or just sit and watch her with enormous glowing yellow eyes, breathing steam hotly and seeming to find the whole thing enormously entertaining, like a joke she's only just about to get. She does not fear them because she has met them before. This is exactly how it was in her dream. She trails one hand absently across the forehead of one of the beasts she walks past, and it licks her hand with an impossibly hot tongue. She finds herself in front of the door, wrought wood, like it's grown into place, somehow part of the building, all one with the rafters and the floorboards and the roofbeams that protrude out beyond the edges of the stones. She finds herself on the doorstep.

The nearest beast draws itself up onto its haunches, front legs straight and paws together, back legs and tail folded neatly under its rear end, so it can sit comfortably in the snow. Then it raises its head and bays at the moon. The sound is distinctly cat-like, an ululating scream that should strike fear into the heart but is obviously so full of meaning, so complex that it cannot be in any way a threat. The other beasts take up the song, but she is not afraid.

Suddenly the door bursts open, and she stumbles at last, and begins to fall. And then, much to her surprise, is caught by waiting arms and held.

"Dâyâ?" is all she has the chance to say, the word inadvertant in old Azatlani, before the world whirls away, and she spins down into blackness in a dizzying aphasic blur.

~*~

This is the story that Cleo's father tells her, before it all gets mazed.

"I'm afraid I was never really very truthful with you, my dear. You see, you were never really very human to begin with, because neither was your mother. They called her witch and nine-tailed fox and other worser things, before they beat the hell out of her.

"What your mother actually was, now that's a little more tricky to explain. Across the place called the wide, in the higher spatial expanse that accompanies all valid yet separate versions of how it might have been, in one of those places, the evolution of higher mammals was a little different, perhaps because the reality there was also a little bit different, a bit more flexible. Confused yet? And that's only a guess, it could be something else entirely. Whatever. In that always was, the mammals at least picked up a fascinating little quirk of neurological alchemy, an entire complex of unique neurotransmitters and nervous system modifications that affected the entire physiological system and body by association. Certainly the effect is only visible in higher mammals, those with enough neurological processing power, so to speak.

"I am going on a bit, aren't I? Well, the upshot of all this was a somewhat modified perception of reality, ultimately resulting in the ability to manipulate reality. In the version of the world where your mother lived, cats walk between to other possible worlds, because it's easier to hunt stupid prey than the highly agile local species, which can't escape the local universe but have an inconvenient habit of darting away into other places when startled. Some of them hide themselves by going translucid, which makes mere chameloflage look simplistic. Evolutionary competition was weirder and more intense, the more complex the species became. Ironically, sentience was the final stroke of the hammer for the whole mess, because the ability to comprehend that you yourself are observing events as they occur throws a spanner in the works.

"Damn. A dual engineering metaphor. I've been out here too long by myself. To continue - for a different and stranger evolution, giving rise to a different and stranger civilization. They had a beautiful and world spanning empire or culture, or something like it, near the end. I don't know exactly what happened to them - it seems they met another civilization who could also travel across the wide, but who utilized a vastly different method, involving the intense heat and pressure deep in the veins of molten rock that run down into the core of the world, where there is no gravity because you are already at the heart. There was a clash of cultures, each side condemning the 'aggressive perceptions' of the other, but each meaning something entirely different with the same two words, both of which I'm translating anyway. As someone once wrote - think scavenger hunt. Then take the words literally and separately. That gives you an idea of the fundamental failure to understand that neither of them realized until it was far too late. The other side, obsessed by engineering, engineered themselves a final solution, which was all the more clever because it broke nothing, destroyed nothing, changed nothing. It was only later, when they looked out on the splendid cleanliness they had created, that guilt ate their hearts and they realized that they had rid themselves of a terrifying beauty. They had done something they could not forgive themselves for; they had slain the thing they never knew they always wanted. They traveled onward, knowing that the journey would finish them in the end.

"Of course, it is difficult to truly destroy a culture who can step outside of the world at will. They had always been travelers and explorers, because they never ran out of new territories to wander. Their books of maps were exponential, each page to a vaster scale than the one before, until you were looking down on spaces vaster than the surface of the world, sketched in roughly and with lots of blanks. Here be dragons, in some cases quite literally.

"So, there were plenty of travelers in other places at the instant when it finally went down - and some few with unusually enhanced reflexes, who slowed time and punched out when they felt the realistic wake slide past them, the same way some people can feel an electromagnetic pulse. I don't need to tell you about the aftermath of an entire civilization collapsing - you've seen that already, for yourself. You're twice unholmed, and you never even knew it. That's what this story is all about, in the end, because all civilizations eventually collapse and it's the survivors who end up being the remarkable creatures, the myths and legends of the aftermath. The witches and nine-tailed foxes.

"The survivors kept on traveling, because it was what they did. In some cases they got together, formed small clannish groups, traded goods between widely spaced places to ensure that none of the gaijin ever realized that the locations providing their little luxuries weren't actually there. They even called themselves travelers, a secret name for a hidden race, until at last they had interbred so extensively with everyone else that their talents were lost, and their hand-me-down mythology became exactly that - nothing but a legend.

"So, to your mother. I was chasing a legend myself when I found her, a legend about huge black cats that make intermittent appearances everywhere around the world, which mesmerize their prey with huge golden eyes and snap it up without even a struggle, but which can never be caught because they disappear into thin air - except when it amuses them to stay a while and play games by hunting the men hunting them. Sound familiar? You are one, at least partly.

"Hunting a big cat that can never be captured didn't sound like such a bad investment, not at the high point of the transgenesis movement. We had already made great advances by searching out a number of living creatures that had long been held to be entirely mythical, then sequencing them and finding out exactly how their various abilities worked. The human immortality project was derived almost entirely from a single capture, a creature descended from a winged reptile species that remained alive indefinitely as long as it consumed a continuous supply of fresh blood. It was a very strange thing - it claimed to have been alive for impossible lengths of time, but its body was very recent, physiologically speaking. Some of the team thought that it might be assimilative, the one creature mapping itself onto a new host at regular intervals, complete with personality and newly developed physical traits. Which would explain how something could exist for so long and not go completely mad - it was actually a new version of itself, each and every time. Which raised a whole barrel of extra issues, above and beyond the thing itself, but what really mattered was that it worked, once we reverse-engineered it a bit, and it made a fortune for us all.

"There were complications of course. It started out as a pet project, got funding, went corporate, got the attention of the government, got assimilated by defense contract, had bits classified secret, and finally wound up a weapons program. But the first major achievement, the immortality, we got that out and anyone with enough money could buy it. It was so obviously profitable that there was no way they could keep the product under wraps, regardless of the source. And there was no way they could keep us from profiting by it, without revealing what we knew.

"Things started to get increasing weird as time went on, however. It started to get scary. They wanted more, but they didn't seem to know exactly what more might be, and they didn't want it to get outside of their personal grasp, ever. The one unacceptable threat, to people with power, is the possibility of something they cannot control. So rather than have lots of money and absolutely no freedom, and work in a closed laboratory whilst being continuously surveilled every second of every day, I made a point of loudly advocating a return to first principles. I was going hunting, I told them, and I might be gone for some time. If one winged lizard could be this significant, who knew what else might be lurking in the far corners of the world? I appealed to their greed, and more importantly to their desire to keep me out of the way, and then I blended in a few hints about it being an early retirement, an extended holiday, my desire to travel, and so on and so forth. I topped it off by selecting the most uncatchable creature on earth, which might, better yet, not even actually exist, and offering to pay my way entirely with my own money.

"Having been served this enormous dessert of deception with extra topping, the authorities were temporarily diverted by the search for a napkin and I got out while the going was good. But the thing was, at some point I'd convinced myself. I really did want to go to far and dangerous places, hunt the black cats or let them hunt me, and get in as much sightseeing as possible in the process. I'd had to plan the whole thing out in obsessive detail already, to make good on my deception, so I made good on my existing plans and extended them. Then I went out looking.

"The search lasted for years, and I've already told you most of the places I saw and things I did, way back in the day when you were just a little catling. I stumbled over enough interesting things purely by accident to easily justify the ongoing mission. There were ruins from no known culture, strange local myths with telling details, and lots of curious species to be sequenced and then released. My favourite was the leucrotta, which had a ridged palate in place of teeth and could gnaw through large bones in a single sitting. It was a calcivore and needed lots of bones to eat to constantly repair its own palate and external armour. You could never find a dead one because the live ones would eat the remains in their entirety, usually in under fifteen minutes. We used the leucrotta later to design living, self-repairing armour made of bone.

"I visited all manner of remote places on the trail of the myth, until eventually my search led me to the distant island chain of Nihon, where an especially detailed version of the story claimed regular appearances not by black cats, but by foxes with supernatural powers, that gained a multiplicity of tails as they aged, eventually attaining ascension after a thousand years and becoming jinwei hu, celestial nine-tailed foxes, able to change their shape to that of a young man or a beautiful woman. It might seem that the two legends have little in common, but it appeared to me as though they matched up in some way, although I couldn't tell what it was. When I asked around, using a particularly barbarous cover version of Nihonese, the usual sort of crazy old mad bastards who don't care what you sound like were happy to add more details as long as someone was buying them another drink. It seems there was an association, mysterious and unspecified, between such foxes and the occurrence of ball lightning, and the practice of various forms of witchcraft.

"This in its turn seemed strangely relevant, in that I'd once heard a story from a tribe of Lenni Lenape farmers about a way out of the world, located far out in the pine barrens where they rarely went. Supposedly the actual place as described only existed intermittently, in a manner that correlated roughly with the seasons, but you could find it by back-tracking the small, brightly glowing witch-lights it produced, which would float outwards and be bourne away on the wind until they suddenly disappeared, popping out of existence again like a soap bubble. The Lenni Lenape had heard of the black cats, and believed it was best not to mess with them, as their hunting was also seasonal. I hadn't seen any.

"So, I went hunting nine-tail foxes instead of black cats. As is the way with these things, everyone had a friend who had seen one, but no-one had actually seen one themselves. Similarly, such things did not happen here, but it was widely known that they had recently occurred just a few hundred li off to the north. I got local scholars to check ancient anomaly books for me, and it turned out that this was actually true, in a sense, in that the origins of the fox story seemed to come from somewhere to the north. After exhausting the Nihonese islands and running out of island chain, I was convinced by a long-haired Ainu tribal shaman that the story was actually an import, somehow acquired from China, although where it had originated or how it had changed in the telling, or indeed why it had persisted so well in Nihon, he did not know. He seemed proud, however, that he knew the truth whilst the Nihonese, who considered his people to be barbarians, were deceiving themselves.

"Tracking the legend onward into China was an entire tale in and of itself, because China is both vast and incredibly rich in myths, history and tall stories. The country is so large it has a multitude of names just for itself in all of its own languages, let alone everyone else's. But eventually I found myself in an incredibly remote corner of that vast country, where the main feature of the landscape was an assortment of star-shaped stone towers, built in an architectural style that matched nothing else I'd seen anywhere. The towers were the bastions and territorial markers for several not-quite warring but highly competitive familial clans, each of which took one or more animals to be its clan symbol. There was a Cat Clan, a Snake Clan, a Raven Clan, and most significantly, a Fox Clan. The clans liked to make masks to wear on ceremonial occasions, both to proclaim their allegiance and purely for purposes of decoration. However, the Fox Clan were both the most accomplished and the most prolific mask makers, and sold large numbers of the fox masks onward to passing travelers and other persons either just visiting, or without specific clan affiliation. It seemed to me that these exotic people might provide the origin of the legend regarding the celestial nine-tailed fox.

"Details of the clans were these: they had once been traveling traders, but had settled down in this remote place and built a home, using a unique style of architecture that they remembered from their homeland, long ago; the leader of each clan had a sword that was likewise unique, each made of different metals that no-one could recognize, each metal having its own name specific to it in some highly foreign language and applicable to no other substance, each handed down carefully for many generations; they bred amongst themselves only whenever possible, although out-breeding was unavoidable in order to maintain healthy bloodlines; they grew gardens of many strange herbs and other tradeable goods found nowhere else, bought from their homeland; and they liked drinking tea after it had been dried until brown, boiled and then mixed with milk, a disgusting concoction that rated the insulting term 'dead leaf juice' from decent persons who drank their tea green.

"Naturally, all these compelling oddities caught my attention, so I moved in and took up residence in an abandoned wooden structure, usefully near an inn and teahouse. I call it a structure because it shared the same peculiar architectural style of the star towers, but it had sagged dreadfully over untold years and was not viable as part of a farm, a home, or even as storage space. By throwing huge sums of money toward fixing the building, I got to associate closely with members of the clans, who were the only ones who knew how. They appreciated the money and the interest, and I got to tell them loudly and in bad Chinese how I was an enormously wealthy foreign adventurer who had fallen in love with the region and decided to enjoy my profits here and now, rather than take any more risks. Ironically, they did not seem offended by the bad Chinese, as they had their own language that they spoke mostly amongst themselves when they thought no-one was listening.

"It was a wonderful house once it was finished, and I got thoroughly into the spirit of the place. Each clan kept animals that exemplified their clan name, but some were only shown for the public on special occasions. The Raven Clans ravens were the most visible, since they lived atop one of the towers, made loud noises and ate anything that looked like it would stay dead. Unfortunately, they were just ravens.

"Snake Clan had a curious type of snake that was never local to that part of the world, and indeed came from a completely different continent. I managed to obtain a scale or two, and they had a surface micro-structure that diffracted light, producing a pretty display of rainbow colours around the curvature of the snakes body. Which was interesting, but no more so than an optical disc.

"Fox Clan had foxes, but they were the fastest damn foxes you ever saw. They mostly kept to their dens underneath one of the towers, but would occasionally be seen escaping with a chicken, for which purposes a standing order was kept. Note that I say seen escaping; careful questions whilst pretending to be stupidly drunk on rice wine indicated that no-one had ever seen the before of the chicken hunt, only the after, in which the fox strolled back home in full view of everyone. Several times a year, the foxes suffered themselves to be walked on leashes in a parade, during which time they were well-mannered and obedient. At the end of the parade they would be unleashed and, quite literally, disappear off home whilst nobody was watching. But the slyness of foxes is legendary, and I could find no solid proof that they were anything but that.

"It was the Cat Clan that interested me most, of course. They definitely kept cats, of all shapes and sizes. Their heraldry was also of interest, in that it was highly inconsistent compared with that of all the other clans. Where the others had a single primary leitmotif, that was repeated throughout their various banners, wall carvings, storage boxes and of course masks, the Cat Clan embraced a kind of inventive originality in regard to what their emblem should be. The village people I talked to had a theory, that there were so many compelling species both big and small that they could have named themselves after, that they had decided instead to go for some sort of hidden irony or understatement by calling themselves Cat Clan. This particular discussion gave rise to a hilarious drunken miming out in which the villagers made out that they were mighty ch'uan shu masters and loudly declaimed their pretentious titles, each invoking the name of a different type of cat. 'I am mighty crouching tiger, 'cause I have drunk to much to stand up!' 'Ha, I snow panther of the east will freeze your sorry ass!' and so forth.

"When I asked if there was a special type of cat that they kept, for ceremonies and the like, they told me that yes there was, but they did not actually keep them at their tower. Instead, they said, the special cats lived out in the wilderness somewhere on their own, and were summoned once or twice a year for seasonal festivities. Adding to the complications was that the cats were not any common species known to the villagers, but were instead a species of their own with its own foreign name, like the metals in the swords of the clan leaders, coming from their long departed homeland. When the summoning ritual was performed, they would come and be given food. If I waited I could watch the ceremony, but the cats were sacred and should not be interfered with.

"I decided it would be worth waiting, if only to acquire a stray strand or two of hair, of which such a large creature would be certain to discard one or two during its ceremonial meal. So in the interval until the next solstice night, I kept my eyes and ears open and learned all I could about the clans, their towers and the competitive local politics they engaged in. It turned out that the towers were in a specialized sense similar to real world game pieces, and could be acquired at boundaries based on changing profits and political stances in regard to the various industries and endeavors each clan engaged in. The Fox Clan had been the most successful in the long term, thanks to its greater productivity and less aggressive stance, whilst the Raven Clan controlled building and construction, giving it a fixed share of the territory as long as anyone wanted their roof fixed. Meanwhile the Cat Clan and Snake Clan had fallen into an undeclared internecine intrigue, in which they played off one another and both lost share. It was difficult to say which of the two parties, if either, was the less responsible for the situation, but there were undercurrents of all sorts. Snake Clan had a reputation for hidden viciousness, but this could have been it playing up its own reputation with stories of secret schemes and tea laced with venom. Certainly, they both had profoundly martial tendencies, the Snake Clan in stealth and espionage, the Cat Clan in open battle, at which they excelled. The Cat Clan seemed to be taking the worst of the dispute, in that they had the least territory and fewest numbers left, but it seemed that the Cat Clan somehow included additional requirements of training and bloodline that made it harder for them to increase their numbers and less popular to outsiders. The whole thing was profoundly complex, not even considering the number of possible alliances between various groups and individuals, and the many other lesser clans, some of which performed just one very specific job or function, or consisted of only one remaining family, or in some cases even a single individual too proud to join another clan even by marriage. But as long as the whole thing stayed clandestine and never went beyond a simple tavern fight, it didn't really create any problems and no-one would speak of it. You had to pick it up by observation.

"You can see where this is going, of course. I was still waiting to see the ceremony when misplaced jealousy spilled over into hate, and someone poisoned the Cat Clan. It might not have even been the Snake Clan - it could have been almost anyone. The Cat Clan were prideful and arrogant, and because of their extensive training and obsession with bloodlines, they were the only ones who fully retained the neurological adaption, the ability to walk between. They used it in the ceremony to summon the cats, so they had no choice but to go to great lengths to retain it. The other clans knew this, and were full of envy because they had lost their own abilities with time, whilst simultaneously hating the Cat Clan for keeping theirs. And of course, jealousy led to the usual whispers. They are witches, they are nine-tail foxes - a play on words having to do with the fact that what unavoidable out-breeding they had to do, they restricted to systematic affairs with talented members of the Fox Clan until conception was achieved. They kept their bloodline strong at the expense of others.

"The poisoning was extraordinarily thorough. I was never able to identify the substance they used, beyond the fact that it was a complex naturally occurring protein molecule of some kind, poisonous to them specifically in a way that would never affect anyone else. It bound itself to particular cellular receptor like a marker-specific antiviral, and was so similar to the existing neurotransmitters that there was no way I could scrub it from the blood efficiently without making things worse. I think they administered it by lacing a particular stimulant used by everyone in the clan, which they took in their tea or wine once a day to enhance their abilities.

"The consequences of the poisoning, though - that was the most remarkable thing of all. Everyone else had consumed their various drinks, felt unusually strange for several minutes, then suddenly lost consciousness and died. She'd seen her brother collapse in front of her, after he'd taken too long over his tea and it spilled from his hands. She put together what she'd seen and spat out the mouthful of tea she'd just poured herself, but it was too late - it had already touched the inside of her mouth. That just meant it'd take a hell of a lot longer.

"She was the only one left, so she went and got the sword, the Cat Sword, strapped it over her shoulder, walked out the front door and went straight to challenge the leader of the Snake Clan, because she was certain that it was his doing, or at least that he was involved. I can't speak for her ability to reason at that point, because the poison had completely screwed up her nervous system. The feeling unusually strange thing would have been putting it mildly.

"She caught up with him in the midst of the marketplace, where I was out buying some supplies. Walked straight up to him and punched him in the chin even before she drew the sword. Best technical uppercut I ever saw. She was all flushed from the poison and off her head, and everyone's first assumption was that she was drunk. He was taken completely by surprise. If she'd started with the sword, he would've gotten dead, but she had too much honour. Later, I realised that it was the bravest thing I ever saw, given that she'd started dying only minutes before.

"Of course, after that it all went to hell. She drew, he drew, they beat the hell out of each other. Given that he was twice her size, twice her age and twice as dishonest, not to mention not poisoned, he smacked her flat. He'd actually started to buy something when he realised that she'd gotten up again and was still going for him. He hit her again. People were starting to jeer by this point, shouting predictable things. 'Yeah, fuck up that nine-tail fox bitch!' was the most memorable. 'Drunk damn sorceress,' was the only one that seemed vaguely regretful.

"In the end, she got up three times. The last time she was still trying to get up, but it took so long that the crowd lost attention and I was able to get in there and scoop her up, half-carry and half-drag her back to my house before someone could decide to do something creative to teach her a lesson. I had all sorts of Azatlani medical stuff in with my sequencing kit, so I gave her a couple of those autonomic reflex boosters - you know, the injectable ones that glow a worrying shade of luminescent yellow in the dark? I didn't even know she'd been poisoned yet, I just wanted her to be able to move under her own power so she wouldn't be scared by waking up in my bed. They worked, almost accidentally, because they helped keep her nervous system going and blocked some of the relevant receptors. She woke up and I was able to haul her into bed, while she raved on about how he's a poisonous snake, he's killed them, killed them all, well now I'm gonna go kill him. I had to hold her still so she wouldn't try to go after him again, until she fell asleep.

"About two minutes later, they finally noticed that everyone else in Cat Clan was dead and fatally poisoned. Naturally they leaped to the idiotic conclusion that she'd done it and came after her with assorted pointy metal things and agricultural tools. I had to hold them off at the door long enough to point out that she'd obviously been poisoned too, and she seemed to think Snake had done it, else why would she commit the crazy attack in the marketplace? It looked tense for a moment, until I offered to keep her in custody until we could get some sense out of her.

"We'd never actually met before, strangely enough. Her name was Li Chun-Yuen, which by Chinese naming conventions actually made her given name Chun-Yuen, but I called her Li, because it was also a common measure of distance, and we were both from so far away. And she was the last of her family now, the only one left, so she didn't have to share it with anybody. She had been of high rank within her family, not likely to inherit, but still an important person, of significant training and merit. The sword was hers now, because there was no-one else left to claim it. She had been due to call the cats at the next ceremony, but there would be no cats and no ceremony now.

"I couldn't fix the poisoning, but with a judicious mix of assorted stimulants I was able to mostly counteract the effects. She could breathe clearly and talk coherently, although she was still acting a little strange, like someone who's had just enough to drink to reach the unnaturally friendly stage. She kept trying to hug me and in the end I gave in. She was messed-up and looking for consolation and on a tonne of drugs. Sure she'd been hit a bunch of times, but she'd been so weak that it hadn't taken very much to knock her down, and the damage wasn't actually that severe. With enough medication it couldn't keep her down.

"It only took me a couple of minutes of thinking before I decided to make her the offer. I told her I could take her somewhere where it might be possible to heal her, or at least greatly extend her life. The poison substance had an unpronounceable name, but it was supposed to be universally fatal. The mere fact that she was still alive proved I might be telling the truth. I warned her that she wouldn't be able to take anything with her, just what she was carrying - her sword, her clothes. We'd both have to disappear, like one of those foxes after it caught the chicken. A new and possibly very scary life, but she needn't be afraid of anything for however much time she had left. She said, 'yes I'll marry you,' I said, 'but I never asked,' and she said, 'what difference does it make at this point?'

"I called in a military White Crow fighter, one of those little dual-blade Oriole class helicopters that has room for three people tops, or one person and a whole lot of guns. I knew enough people who knew enough people to call in such a favour, and many hours later in the dead of night it landed on a particular hilltop I knew about beyond the town, with the blades counter-rotating and noise suppression running at full. We didn't even wake up any birds or mice. She must have thought me a sorceror, but she was a witch herself by any definition, so it worked out well. It turned out that those hand-me-down legends of her people included descriptions of flying machines and other assorted technologies they'd had long ago at their peak, so she wasn't afraid. In fact there were some things she remembered that we didn't have, which became possible because we knew they were. The pilot of the White Crow had bought ample medical supplies to let me stabilise her for the moment.

"That was the start of the strangest married life ever. It took me three days to work out a complete system of substances to keep the poison in check. Even then I knew it wouldn't actually stop it, only counter the effects. Once she felt better, she was bound and determined to carry out her wifely duties, even though I made it clear she owed me no obligation. I suppose she thought of it as going out and finding a fox to mate with her, or something like that. She kept greeting me naked on top of my bed, with a variety of poses and her sword lying handily on the bedside table. Sooner or later I was always going to give in. It was wonderful.

"A sudden reality check kicked in when it became apparent that I'd got her pregnant with you. All of a sudden, the complexity was up by an order of magnitude. She was absolutely delighted; she wouldn't be the last one in her family after all. But, I pointed out to her, what if the poison affected you, even before you were born? I ran scans and tests, concluded that you were safe for a while, at least until you started to develop the higher order neurological functions that the poison targeted. But it was already in your system, as it was in hers.

"The first thing we did was remove you entirely to prevent any further exposure, place you in one of the developmental tanks that were part of the equipment for the transgenesis project. We'd grown all sorts of smaller creatures in them in the past; I had to hope that they could sustain you as well. You were so tiny, so little. And your mom was so brave.

"I told her my idea, that we could still save you, by changing you enough that you could not be poisoned anymore. I told her the story about how cats are poisoned by neurofennol, even though it's just a mild painkiller for humans. I said, maybe the reverse can be true, if I make it like that.

"It rapidly became apparent that we were going to need more samples. The parts of you that were only human I could shuffle about as I saw fit, using the entire sequencing database, and replace with material from as many other species as necessary. But for the special bits, the unique combination of neurotransmitters and nervous system that you inherited from your mother, I needed samples from the same evolutionary sequence that had created it in the first place. If I could get just the smallest piece of fur or claw from one of the legendary black cats, I could use it to fill in the blanks. I could match it with samples from a lioness, to make it fit with the parts of you that were human. The result would be a single transgenic whole, uniquely resistant to the effects of the poison. And if it then took another year, or another decade, or even another century for your system to completely remove the substance, it wouldn't matter.

"Your mother performed the summoning ceremony late one night under a full moon in a building site in the inner city. It was the wrong season of the year, she said, and the wrong place, and she was attempting it from memory without ever having done it before. But she said that it did not matter, that if you were the right one, you could call then from anywhere and they would come to your call, and lay their heads on your lap, and lick your skin to taste you so that they could find you, wherever you were.

"I think it took a year off her life, or more. But every day we had was borrowed, and she was doing it to save her child, and show me the miracle I had spent years seeking. Not at midnight, but in the true depths of the night, every light went out for several miles around, and they came. There were several of them, a small pack complete with kittens, and they licked our palms and nuzzled us, then dispersed like a shadowy flood into the city around, to hunt for food and scare seven kinds of hell out of anyone who saw them. Later we heard them singing together in a sort of yowling chorus, each from a different part of the city. I was left with a tuft of dark fur in my hand, from where I had stroked one and it had shed a few excess fibers. By morning there was no other sign of them.

"I went to work immediately, because there was no time, and the later I left it, the fewer changes I could make. I admit some of my decisions were arbitrary, and I left out a few minor details. Body fur yellow like the lioness, pale on the muzzle, beneath the brows, and on the lower belly and inner thighs. Dark black hair the colour of the black cats fur, although I see you turned it self-dyeing to match the rest. Deep green eyes full of hidden shades of blue. Keep the tail because it'll look nice. Muscular body shape, because it will suit a lionesses build.

"Your mother was enthralled and horrified to watch you grow. Especially after the time you opened your eyes while you were still in the tank and looked at us, and although they were green rather than golden, and out of focus, still we were mesmerised and could not look away until you closed them again. You had the powers that early. You flexed little underdeveloped claws and breathed liquid, but you were still so damned cute we couldn't help but love you. Neotenous, like a kitten.

"With a week or two to spare I ensured your resistance to the poison, but I kept making additional little changes to your supplements and body chemistry as you developed, like a work of art, until it was too late to add further refinements. You were so changed, so different from anything else before, I could see no reason to stop before it was done. I'd had to go back to working for the transgenesis project to get all the equipment and supplies I needed, but it was a small price to pay.

"A few weeks before you had finished growing, once the tank was too small to hold you anymore and we woke you up, one of my colleagues came to me. He was a physicist and a computer scientist, not in my field at all, but the one who provided the technical support for all of our other projects. He remembered me having privately spoken out, back in the day, about my concerns regarding the ongoing weaponisation of what had started out as an open project, before I'd talked my way out. The conditions of my reinstatement were to hand over anything I might discover in the course of making you; the conditions of his employment were that he was not allowed to leave at all. Which he hadn't minded at all, until he accidentally discovered the something more that his superiors had been looking for all along. He was playing with the standardized nanotech built by the original project, when he figured out a very clever and very sideways technique by which to make each nanode act as a quantum gate processor, cycling through its every possible state at the minimum possible temporal granularity. The results of which were, to put it simply, very strange. The best word he could come up for what they created was excess destiny.

"People throw around the word destiny, but rarely do they consider what it means. It implies that the possible future has acted upon the current present to create a feedback loop in which a particular, perhaps optimal, outcome is attained. The effect wasn't limitless, so each nanode was still his own design, but it was the design he would have arrived at in the best of all possible worlds. They then interacted with one another in a complex and mostly incomprehensible manner, obeying irrational laws of quantum behaviour, counting forward to possible future events and sideways to others that might alternatively be occurring. They still did what they were always supposed to do, but now their physical interface with the outside world was just a shell around a core of extreme weirdness that bought destiny into being, second by second.

"It was immediately apparent to even the most unworldly individual that this could be used by a very bad person to do very bad things. One could build the best of all possible weapons, or perhaps arrange for events themselves to conspire against ones enemies. But to destroy his new discovery meant that it might not be there if someone else was to find it again. So what to do?

"I had been planning to introduce a full suite of nanotech augmentation into your system anyway just before you woke up, to correct any residual defects or problems, so we made a deal. He called it 'the date with destiny' as a joke, to conceal what we were doing. The experimental suite of quantum nanotech was safely concealed by introducing it into your bloodstream, where it quite happily did what it was always supposed to do anyway, just better and in a more predestined sort of way.

"In exchange for your keeping the world safe a little longer, he did a favour for me in return. Certain files and records went missing. We couldn't cover up what you were in its entirety, because you were your own proof and faking the records might have put you at risk. Instead, we pulled the source data for Li and for the black cats, leaving the casual observer to reach the not unreasonable conclusion that your mother was human and you were part lioness. The custom neurotransmitters were not readily noticeable, and there was no way for anyone to know what they were intended to do without some sort of additional context.

"Just before your mother died, a couple of years later, I asked her to write you that letter in Chinese, and store it with the sword for you. It was meant to be a clue, a hint, a context for later on, to inspire you to investigate your heritage. I couldn't go back to the place of the star towers without attracting too many questions - they thought my wife was only that, a beautiful girl rescued from a remote province in a moment of charity to keep me warm at nights. But she loved you so very much despite it all, even when you suckled at her breasts and nipped her with your sharp little teeth, she had such a radiant smile. The poison couldn't hurt you now, she insisted, and so she should breastfeed you as much as she could, her good little kitten. I agreed with her about that.

"I kept working on a way to remove the poison from her, but ultimately I failed. By the time I had a fast enough solution, it would have killed her anyway. It was too late already when she was exposed to it. If she'd already had full immortality, it would have peeled the skin from her lips and tongue, let her spit out the poison whole, then grown the skin back. But by the time I could give her that, it was already in every part of her, disguised as every part of her. I thought about giving her the quantum nanotech, to try and change her destiny, but in the end I could not bring myself to do so. There was no way of knowing what would happen, it might make it worse instead of better, or bring about something terrible. She wanted to spend as long with you as possible.

"I remember holding you after the funeral, and singing you a sad song from the place of star towers. She was buried in their traditional fashion, bones stored in a large smoke blackened urn, ash poured in over the top. An urn burial. They made her a narrow tall rectangular grave marker, with the ideograph for 'Li' carved deeply into it, and a picture of a mask shaped like a cat. Late that night the black cats came, and they sang around the grave. I heard them singing, and you woke up, but you weren't afraid.

"I kept working for transgenesis, after she was gone, not because I needed the money but because I never knew whether or not I might need their resources for you, and more importantly, because someone had to keep an eye on them, in case they might try something. They had you as leverage on me, so I had to make sure I had leverage on them. They pushed me, since you were only three years old, to introduce you to extreme sports and video games and physically challenging events, with the ultimate objective of placement into one of the Azatlani Defense Force special assault teams. They sent me documents in which you were described as a 'prototype war cat, one, female.'

"Imagine my surprise when you gravitated to all of that naturally, without requiring any prompting at all. I let them believe that I had carefully led you into it, demonstrating total company loyalty in offering up my own daughter. Instead, you were having an exordinately good time thrashing jump bikes, demonstrating impossibly wired reflexes and, later on, railing anything that still moved and had a pulse. They complained about that, by the way. I told them that my war cat design made allowances for such energetic creatures keeping one another entertained in remote locations, but of course you know better. I was too busy fixing the basics to think that far ahead.

"Whatever. What really matters is that the cats never went away, not after the time I heard them singing, after the funeral. I kept seeing them again, on dark nights, out of the corner of my eye. They appeared in my dreams, where they alternated between black and perfect white, like some sort of zeitform entanglement phenomena. We are witnessing the dawn of an unknown science, I thought. Starting to push beyond the boundaries of the real into the strange. I remembered the time one of my colleagues tried to construct a curve to estimate how many unknown highest level predators might still be out there waiting to be discovered, and how it predicted minus one animals remaining to be found. 'My model is rubbish,' he concluded candidly; I said to him, 'Ah, but what if there really are minus one animals left waiting to be discovered, and you're fixating on the wrong side of zero?' He laughed; he actually laughed, which I'd never seen him do before or since. There's a type of maths you see, perfectly valid, in which rather than positive or negative, all numbers converge on zero or infinity. People who don't know better call it transcendance mathematics, and argue over whether it is in fact the only right way to view the real universe. To my mind a better question is what it implies about the underlying design.

"But the cats, the cats they were all too real. After I'd seen them lurking around a couple of times, and they kept coming back, I went through all my field gear and found my old night-vision contact lenses, so that I could see them clearly. Sometimes they would just appear, and in some wavelengths you could see the wake where a spheroidal space had opened in the air because there was simply nothing there, no background. It wasn't visible in daylight; it was hard to see even if you shone lights directly into the field, because all it did was smear the light out a bit. But it consumed heat and electricity very effectively, leaving a cold spot in thermal vision. The cats would come through and then leave it open for a while, if they planned to go back to wherever they'd just been. Other times, they'd slither through and then it would disappear completely.

"I think you saw them a couple of times, when you were little. But it's strangely easy to forget them, as though you hadn't seen them at all. It's part of what they do, to avoid being found or captured. They find you, rather than the other way around.

"I watched them for a long time, late at night when you were asleep. But I never tried to follow them back to where they came from, because then you might have been left all alone. I enjoyed watching them, I left out food for them sometimes. Small wonder that they still think cats are gods, in Khem. They were my very own huge life-size miracle, huffing steam in the dark and occasionally causing the lights to flicker. They liked to be stroked and their ears scratched, but only according to their own schedule.

"Fast forward a decade or two, and you were off learning the use of weapons at a distant posting on a stormy coast. Yes, I still remember your letter about what happened there, and what happened to your friend. But before any of that, just shortly after you left, things finally went critical inside the transgenesis project. My friend, the computer scientist - he turned up dead in one of those not really 'accidents' that sometimes happen to people who speak out enough about bad and secret things that they're not supposed to reveal. He had spent all the intervening years carefully directing lines of research away from the direction of his accidental success, and diverting attention from the original objectives of the project with bywords like 'the efficient use of the resources we already have' and 'practical civilian applications for additional profit.' He had also become more and more outspoken about the levels of secrecy involved, and the use of the technology to design weapons instead of helping people. Most of the other founders of the project had joined in.

"Somehow they found out that we had been creatively suppressing our own research. I can only assume that they overreacted and threatened him, and that he then threatened to go public with everything, including the stuff we'd kept hidden. If they were smart, they would have grabbed him and made him talk, but I think someone got angry and didn't actually think it through. It's hard to kill someone who's really very immortal, but there were experimental weapons at the transgenesis facility designed for that express purpose. They said it was an 'industrial accident' but I'm fairly certain it was a type twelve ball lightning cannon, a weapon for which I'd accidentally laid the groundwork myself after submitting my earlier reports, one of which included a summary of the effects and a few rough equations of how it might work, based on having seen one hit a water barrel. They saw it instead as a handy way to apply something on the order of a million joules to a one litre volume of charged air, with a fairly decent drift speed. You can work out for yourself just how fatal that would be at short range. Someone threatened him with it and then made the mistake of actually pulling the trigger.

"Which, dreadful as it is to say, bought the rest of us some time. We quieted down, worked hard, and spent every spare moment planning our respective exits. We knew it would take them several months or more to go through everything, determine exactly who had hidden what, and then grab the individuals in question and make them talk, before firing the more harmless individuals and arranging something less traceable for any special cases. I didn't want to be a 'special case' so I decided to go for something a little bit more extreme than just fleeing the scene. They couldn't find me, I reasoned, if I wasn't actually there anymore.

"I requested some time off, which was fine with them, and effectively misleading. I said it was because of my grief over the death of my friend in the accident. They thought it meant that I was innocent, because I knew it gave them all the time they needed to check the files. I even promised not to leave the city, which made it perfectly acceptable for them to issue all manner of warnings 'to ensure my own safety, until this incident is sorted out.' They thought that if I was guilty, I'd pretend to keep working and then try to disappear abruptly.

"There was a place near our house, in the city, where they kept construction materials for the civil engineering authority. It was an easy walk for someone who knew the neighborhood, who had lived there for the last two decades, who knew all the hidden shortcuts from walking his daughter to school. I took my field gear and the night vision contacts, and went for a walk, slipping through the darkness just like the cats always had. I went out and I waited and I sat, sitting on a cold pile of standardized overpass bridge girders, until the cats showed up and began to slink around, climbing along and over fences and materials, scurrying through wide-gauge concrete pipes waiting to carry rainwater off beneath the city. I had bought a roll of pressed cold sausage meat, the type with the greased paper skin that peels back. I offered it to them and they were happy to stay around, nibbling at pieces of this free treat.

"The thermal contacts showed clearly where they had come through, and I walked out through the same place, with my hand on the flanks of one of the cats, just in case they were somehow necessary to the whole process. And I found myself here, with a curious lapse in my memory, like I'd forgotten the past minute or two. Strange, isn't it?

"Of course, this is me we're talking about, so my plan was better than that. Going to see what was on the other side was just the first step. I took further walks, to accustom the cats to my presence. They go to other places too, not just here, but this is their home place, their lair. There are hot springs out back, inside the caves, inside the mountain. They live in the caves and wash themselves, way up here in this remote place, where there's no-one to disturb them. Anything they need is just a step away, after all. You should see them swimming in the warm pools, it's marvelous to see, even if it does sometimes leave them smelling slightly of sulfur. They get mistaken for hellhounds every once in a while.

"So I bought through all of my old field kit, and everything I could scavenge from the house, and a multi-purpose household nanoforge, and all my electronic devices, and a portable fusion generator from way back, and everything else I could think of, and wrapped it all in tarpaulins and made a big supply cache out of it. I told the neighbors and my friends that I was cleaning out the house and replacing old stuff, I ordered outrageous amounts of food and then threw a barbeque to celebrate the memory of my old friend. The more stuff I did, the more it confused them. It probably confused you too, my dear, afterwards, but I had to cover my trail well. You learn that early on, when you go hunting unknown creatures.

"One of the things I rapidly discovered was that time goes faster here, in this place, by a factor of several hundred or so. The first time I looked around for several minutes, and when I got back it was the following night. Once I'd worked out the numbers, I'd go to the construction yard, bribe the cats, bundle up the supplies in advance and then push them through using a long steel bar.

"As soon as I'd cached everything I could think of that I might want but couldn't make over here, and because I was starting to run out of time, I made sure that everything was finalised, including my will in case I was reported missing or dead. I discreetly destroyed all evidence of my past projects and explorations, except for the letter your mother had written for you. I wanted someone to keep an eye on you for me while I was away, to keep you safe, and so I gave copies of the original files to another friend of my acquaintance, the only one I could think of who might well be completely above all of the machinations going on. You might have met him, after I left - everyone always called him the old man, because he always had been. Had this uncanny habit of knowing what you were about to do or say before you did. I gave him the files and he said, 'You'll like it there, it's a beautiful place. A little remote for some, maybe.' I hadn't told him where I was going, and now I didn't have to.

"On the last night, I went out just before sunset and arrived at the construction yard shortly after night had fallen. I was going to simply leave as soon as the cats appeared, but then I had an idea. The yard was full of all sorts of handy construction materials I could never have gotten to or from our house without raising suspicion, but if I simply took as much as I could in one night and then left at dawn, it would look like simple theft. Most of the equipment to hand was potentially valuable, but because it was so large, they didn't have to guard it. There was no way it could be stolen without someone noticing.

"So, I spent the night sliding girder after girder through an empty space into nothing. Many objects were too heavy, but the girders were perfect. They'd been made specifically to be modular, so that a one or two person crew could move and stack them. The big ones were heavy but had a clean finish and could be dragged easily off the stack. I took all the associated components too, everything you might need to build the skeleton of a mid-size bridge. The pieces were designed to be interlocking, but I pushed through some extra tools and equipment as well, everything I found after breaking into a poorly bolted builders shed at the corner of the site. The cats were especially intrigued by a portable arc welding tool, and spent lots of time sniffing at it and nudging it carefully with their paws. When I ran out of time at sunrise, and the cats started disappearing back through into nothingness, I followed them.

"The rest, well, you can imagine that for yourself. I had a very entertaining time designing my new house here. At first I slept in the caves where it was warm, but once I was set up properly I built the house around the entrance. There were plenty of stones to chose from, and there's a tar seep further down the mountain, where the geothermal heat has baked the hydrocarbons out of the rock. Throw in some black cat fur, of which there is plenty because they love being groomed, and there's all the caulking you could ever need. I made the roof from the cache tarpaulins to start with, then used the samples I'd brought with me to grow a wooden floor and ceiling, and some support beams where the trunks grew upward between them. All I had to do was tie down the vines or weave them into place, once or twice a day, until they grew together. One vine grew three times around the room sideways in under a year. It's a beautiful house to sit and think, and play with the cats.

"I used the overpass girders later, to build a bridge, just as they were always intended, although I like to think my bridge is quite a clever piece of design, given the location and physical constraints. That way I can travel between the geothermal caves and the ancient amphitheatre at will, and also travel further down the road and into the rest of the mountains. There are lots of other ruins down there, in different places, but it's easier to travel to them by going with the cats to their favorite sunning spots. I've learned many things, travelling with the cats.

"I learned that Azatlan was gone, for example, some time later. When the cats never took me back there, but only to other places nearby, I realized that they must be avoiding it for a reason. Questions asked in foreign lands, again, got me many versions of the myth, in which Azatlan was destroyed by the higher powers for its pride and its madness, and sunken beneath the waves. But one legend gave me more hope than the rest, because it featured a man who was also a dragon and a woman who was also a cat, and their escape to the land of Khem after a terrible battle. I knew you were truly immortal, so I waited; hoping that one day, eventually, your destiny would bring you back to me."

~*~