MAGICATS! Read online

  MAGICATS!

  Edited by

  Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-120-7

  Copyright © 2013 by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann

  First printing: May 1984

  Cover art by: Ron Miller

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Electronic version by Baen Books

  Acknowledgment is made for permission to print the following material:

  "Space-Time for Springers" by Fritz Leiber. Copyright © 1958 by Ballantine Books, Inc. First published in Star Science Fiction Stories No. 4 (Ballantine). Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Robert P. Mills.

  "The Game of Rat and Dragon" by Cordwainer Smith. Copyright © 1955 by Galaxy Publishing Co. for Galaxy Science Fiction. Copyright ft) 1963 by Cordwainer Smith. First published in Galaxy, October 1955. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10022.

  "The Cat From Hell" by Stephen King. Copyright © 1977 by Dugent Publishing Corp. From Cavalier, June 1977. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agents, Kirby McCauley, Ltd.

  "Out of Place" by Pamela Sargent. Copyright © 1981 by TZ Publications. First published in The Twilight Zone Magazine, October 1981. Reprinted by permission of the author and her agent, the Joseph Elder Agency.

  "Schrödinger's Cat" by Ursula K. LeGuin. Copyright © 1974, 1982 by Ursula K. Le Guin. From Universe 5 (Random House). Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Virginia Kidd.

  "Groucho" by Ron Goulart. Copyright © 1981 by TZ Publications, Inc. First published in The Twilight Zone Magazine, April 1981. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "My Father, the Cat" by Henry Slesar. Copyright © 1957 by King-Size Publications, Inc. First published in Fantastic Universe, December 1957. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Cat Man" by Byron Liggett. Copyright © 1960 by Hallie Burnett. From the Spring 1960 Story. Reprinted by permission of Hallie Burnett, Inc.

  "Some Are Born Cats" by Terry and Carol Carr. Copyright © 1973 by Rand McNally and Co. From Science Fiction Tales. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

  "The Cat Lover" by Nicholas Breckenridge. Copyright © 1961 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1961. Reprinted by permission of the author's agent, Knox Burger.

  "Jade Blue" by Edward Bryant. Copyright © 1971 by Terry Carr. First published in Universe 1 (Ace). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Tom Cat" by Gary Jennings. Copyright © 1970 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1970. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee" by Gene Wolfe. Copyright © 1970, 1978 by Gene Wolfe. First appeared in Orbit 8 (Putnam). Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Virginia Kidd.

  "The Witch's Cat" by Manly Wade Wellman. Copyright © 1939 by Weird Tales. First appeared in Weird Tales, October 1939, as by Gans T. Field. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Kirby McCauley, Ltd.

  "Antiquities" by John Crowley. Copyright © 1977 by Stuart David Schiff. First published in Whispers (Doubleday). Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Kirby McCauley, Ltd.

  "A Little Intelligence" by Randall Garrett. Copyright © 1958 by Columbia Publications, Inc. First appeared in Future Science Fiction, October 1958. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Tracy Blackstone.

  "The Cat" by Gene Wolfe. Copyright © 1983 by Gene Wolfe. First appeared in the 1983 World Fantasy Convention Program Book. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Virginia Kidd.

  "Afternoon at Schrafft's" by Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann, and Michael Swanwick. Copyright © 1984 by TSR Hobbies, Inc. First published in Amazing Stories, March 1984. Reprinted by permission of the authors and the authors' agent, Virginia Kidd.

  For Susan Allison

  The editors would like to thank the following people for their help and support:

  Virginia Kidd, Jane Butler, Perry Knowlton, Adam Deixel, Stuart Schiff, Trina King, Susan Casper, Jeanne Van Buren Dann, Janet Kagen, Michael Swanwick, Bob Walters, Pat LoBrutto, Al Sarrantonio, Tom Whitehead of the Special Collections Department of the Paley Library at Temple University (and his staff, particularly Connie King and John Betancourt), Edward and Audrey Ferman, Kirby McCauley, Brian Perry of Fat Cat Books (263 Main Street, Johnson City, New York 13790), Edward Bryant, Manly Wade Wellman, Francis Garfield, the convention staff of Constellation, Hallie Burnett, Jan Kardys from Scholastic Magazines, Inc., Gene Wolfe, George Scithers, Pamela Sargent, Beth Meacham, and special thanks to our own editor, Susan Allison.

  Preface

  By Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann

  Cats may not rank among the very earliest of domesticated animals—that honor is usually reserved for dogs, oxen, horses, and sheep—but even a conservative estimate has them throwing their lot in with the human race no later than about 1500 b.c. This means that people have had cats around the house for at least four thousand years—perhaps even going back as far as the time when the "house" was a skin tent, or a mud-and-wattle hut—and yet in all that time they have still not made up their minds just how they feel about them.

  Humanity's relationship with the cat is much more complex and contradictory than the simple master-slave (or consumer-consumed) relationship that obtains with most domestic animals. At one time or another throughout history, cats have been worshipped as gods, and been hunted down and slaughtered as emissaries of the Devil. To many Amerindian tribes, they were the only animals without souls, avatars of evil, while to some French peasants they were the earthly embodiment of the Corn Spirit, venerated as the luck of the harvest. Herodotus reports the case of a Greek soldier who was torn apart by an angry Egyptian mob for injuring a cat, while in medieval Europe (no one believes this one, but see Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror for confirmation) it was a popular pastime to nail cats to a post and then attempt to batter them to death with your head without being blinded in the process (see, there are worse forms of popular entertainment than television; even an evening spent watching old Gilligan's Island reruns is classier that that). Cats have earned their own sparse livings as catchers of rats and mice, grudgingly tolerated by the farm families they serve, and they have been spoiled and pampered as pets, often with a lavishness and luxury far beyond what many human beings can afford for themselves. Sometimes they are eaten (we're willing to bet that there are still poor people in this country who eat "roof rabbit" every now and then), more often we kill other animals to feed to them (where did you think cat food comes from?). One person will casually drown a sackful of kittens, with no sense of repugnance or remorse, while another will take a sick cat to a veterinarian and spend hundreds of dollars in the attempt to nurse it back to health. Cats probably inspire greater extremes of hate and love than any other animal (with the possible exception of snakes)—we have all known people who clearly love their cats far more than they ever did their children, and who fill their houses with outrageous numbers of them; and we have also all seen grown men and women reduced to cold sweats and trembling terror by the presence of a small, relatively harmless animal dozens of times weaker, smaller, lighter, and less formidable than themselves (not even poisonous, for goodness sake!). Folklore portrays cats equally as cold, aloof, and cruel, and as affectionate, playful and loving, and we hold both i
mages in our minds at once with seemingly no feeling of paradox or contradiction. It is perhaps not surprising that cats are one of the few animals that are almost universally believed to have supernatural powers, nor is it really odd that both pro-cat/anti-cat books should find themselves sharing the bestseller lists.

  It's probably a reflection of humanity's multifaceted, sophisticated, and passionately contradictory relationship with cats that so much more fiction has been written about them than about any other kind of domestic animal (one is almost tempted to say: than about any animal). It would perhaps be possible to find a few good fantasy or SF stories about, say, dogs or horses (let us, mercifully, not even consider the idea of a Great Science Fiction Stories About Sheep anthology), but there might be one such story for every ten stories about cats (and we're willing to bet that most of the horse and dog stories would be juvenile fiction, while most cat stories are decidedly not aimed at children). There have been a lot of cat stories written over the years. Even eliminating all the cat stories that are not clearly identifiable as fantasy or science fiction (the first and most obvious winnowing screen we employed when putting this book together), we were still left with a huge amount of material to read. For instance, most of the major nineteenth-century writers—Twain, Le Fanu, Saki, Poe, Kipling, Doyle, Stoker, Bierce—wrote fantasy stories about cats, as did early twentieth-century writers such as Lovecraft, Benet, Wodehouse, Blackwood, de la Mare, Sayers, and many others. To say nothing of more contemporary stories.

  All told, we must have read close to two hundred stories in the course of researching this book; we had room to use fewer than twenty of them. Further winnowing was obviously in order, and we were forced to make several hard decisions:

  The first was that the stories should actually be about cats: Felis catus, the ordinary, garden-variety house cat (or, at most, his genetically engineered descendants of the far future), and not about lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, pumas, lynx, jaguars, or black panthers. We lost several good stories at this point—including Kit Reed's "Automatic Tiger," Ward Moore's "The Boy Who Spoke Cat," and Stephen King's "Night of the Tiger"—but then things began to become a bit more manageable. Next, we decided that the story must center around the cat itself, that the cat must be an integral part of the plot. This eliminated stories that just happen to have a cat in them somewhere (the protagonist's pet, maybe), but where the cat doesn't really figure in the significant movement of the plot; it eliminated a large number of science fiction stories where the hero has a superpowered cat or catlike creature of some sort as a sidekick (but where the cat's role remains that of a sidekick, peripheral to the real action), and an equally large number of fantasy stories where a witch's familiar (usually the traditional black cat) is mentioned in passing but isn't really at the center of the story; it also eliminated the staggeringly large number of SF stories where the protagonists encounter "catlike" aliens—usually either giant talking (or telepathic) cats, four-footed variety (as in Phyllis Gotlieb's "Son of the Morning"), or two-legged catlike humanoids, usually complete with fur, whiskers, tails, and claws (the sensuous Tigerishka, from Fritz Leiber's The Wanderer, is probably the classic—and classiest—example).

  Next, since most of the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century material (stories by Poe, Benet, Lovecraft, Stoker, Le Fanu, and so on) was already heavily anthologized and likely to be already familiar to our audience, we decided to concentrate primarily on contemporary stories, stories published during the last thirty years (although we couldn't resist adding one little-known classic by Manly Wade Wellman from a 1939 Weird Tales).

  Our last—and, we believe, most important—decision was to go for as much variety and diversity in story type as possible.

  In most of the classic cat stories from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, the cat is almost invariably evil, a sinister, stalking emissary of Satan, either ghost, demon, killer werebeast, or witch's evil familiar. And while that certainly is a valid expression of one side, the dark side, of humanity's contradictory relationship with cats (represented here in chillers by King, Crowley, Burger, and Liggett), we felt that some of the previous anthologies of cat stories suffered from this unrelieved uniformity of mood, presenting story after story in which the cats are monstrous and evil. We wanted also to examine the more positive side of humanity's long association with cats, the light side, the side in which cats are perceived as companions and friends and even benefactors (it is interesting, for example, that while many fantasy writers still tend to portray cats as evil creatures—Wellman and Slesar are exceptions here—science fiction writers almost without exception portray them as helpmates, and often even as guardians).

  So, variety is the watchword here. Here you will find both fantasy and science fiction, tragedy and comedy, gentle nostalgia and bone-chilling horror. Cats as victims, cats as killers. Cats who build their own feline societies, cats who accompany humankind to the stars. Cats who can talk. Cats who can fly. Cats who have been reshaped into strange forms by the sophisticated genetic science of the future. Cats who are magicians. Cats who write television scripts. Ghost cats. Non-causal cats. Feral cats. Cats who love and nurture, cats implacably bent on revenge. Cats who save people, cats who are saved by people. Cats who are servants, cats who are masters. Witches' cats. Cats who guard your dreams, cats who'll haunt your nightmares.

  Funny cats. Deadly cats.

  Magic cats.

  Space-Time for Springers

  By Fritz Leiber

  This story has been reprinted before, but it was impossible to even consider not including it in an anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories about cats, as it is quite possibly the single best story of that sort ever to be written.

  Fritz Leiber is one of the truly seminal figures in the development of modern fantasy and SF, with a forty-year career that stretches from the "Golden Age" Astounding of the 1940's to the present day, with no sign of slackening of vigor or faltering of imagination and invention. Probably no other figure of his generation (with the possible exception of L. Sprague de Camp) has written in as many different genres as Leiber, or been as important as he has been to the development of each. Leiber can be considered one of the fathers of modern "heroic fantasy," and his long sequence of stories about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser remains one of the most complex and intelligent bodies of work in the entire subgenre of "Sword & Sorcery" (which term Leiber himself is usually credited with coining). He is also widely considered to be one of the best—if not the best—writers of the supernatural horror tale since Lovecraft and Poe, and was writing updated "modern" or "urban" horror stories like "Smoke Ghost" and the classic Conjure Wife long before the Big Horror Boom of the middle 1970's brought that form to popular attention. In science fiction, stories like "Coming Attraction" and the brilliant The Big Time, among many others, were among the best things ever to grace the pages of the H. L. Gold-edited Galaxy of the 1950's. The Big Time won a well-deserved Hugo Award in 1959, and since then Leiber has gone on to win a slew of other awards—all told, six Hugos and four Nebulas, plus two World Fantasy Awards—one of them the Life Achievement Award—and a Grandmaster of Fantasy Award. Leiber's books include The Wanderer, Our Lady of Darkness, The Green Millennium, Gather, Darkness, the collections The Best of Fritz Leiber, The Book of Fritz Leiber, and The Mind Spider, and the long sequence of Fafhrd/Gray Mouser books, the best of which are probably The Swords of Lankhmar and Swords in the Mist.

  Cats have long been a recurrent motif in Leiber's work—along with chess, the theatre, and slightly kinky sex. Here he tells the story of Gummitch the superkitten—I.Q. 160, potential future author of Invisible Signs and Secret Wonders and Slit Eyes Look at Life—and his funny and poignant journey toward an odd kind of apotheosis. . . .

  Gummitch was a superkitten, as he knew very well, with an I.Q. of about 160. Of course, he didn't talk. But everybody knows that I.Q. tests based on language ability are very one-sided. Besides, he would talk as soon as they
started setting a place for him at table and pouring him coffee. Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra ate horsemeat from pans on the floor and they didn't talk. Baby dined in his crib on milk from a bottle and he didn't talk. Sissy sat at table but they didn't pour her coffee and she didn't talk—not one word. Father and Mother (whom Gummitch had nicknamed Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here) sat at table and poured each other coffee and they did talk. Q.E.D.

  Meanwhile, he would get by very well on thought projection and intuitive understanding of all human speech—not even to mention cat patois, which almost any civilized animal could play by ear. The dramatic monologues and Socratic dialogues, the quiz and panel show appearances, the felidological expedition to darkest Africa (where he would uncover the real truth behind lions and tigers), the exploration of the outer planets—all these could wait. The same went for the books for which he was ceaselessly accumulating material: The Encyclopedia of Odors, Anthropofeline Psychology, Invisible Signs and Secret Wonders, Space-Time for Springers, Slit Eyes Look at Life, et cetera. For the present it was enough to live existence to the hilt and soak up knowledge, missing no experience proper to his age level—to rush about with tail aflame.

  So to all outward appearances Gummitch was just a vividly normal kitten, as shown by the succession of nicknames he bore along the magic path that led from blue-eyed infancy toward puberty: Little One, Squawker, Portly, Bumble (for purring not clumsiness), Old Starved-to-Death, Fierso, Lover-boy (affection not sex), Spook and Catnik. Of these only the last perhaps requires further explanation: the Russians had just sent Muttnik up after Sputnik, so that when one evening Gummitch streaked three times across the firmament of the living room floor in the same direction, past the fixed stars of the humans and the comparatively slow-moving heavenly bodies of the two older cats, and Kitty-Come-Here quoted the line from Keats: