All right. I closed my eyes and leaned back in my chair. Let something come. Start with tigers.
"Tigers are Indian, aren't they?”
"I don't know. Someone downstairs could tell you." A lot of the museum below us was gallery and display rooms, and I knew Arthur Guthlac, the head guide and Assistant to the Museum's Chief of General Staff.
"Were there any Indians in the crew?”
He handed me a wafer. "Complete dossiers and pictures." I dumped it in my wrist-comp.
"Any more pictures of the… things?”
"Hundreds. They've been sending them back continually. This will give you the general idea. You see they remembered to give them thumbs.”
He began flicking them up. No, I didn't like them. None of the Jenny Hannifers were whole, just as if they really had been burned or suddenly exposed to explosive decompression in space. Some were only fragments. Big catlike beings with thumbs. They were colored orange with some variations of shade from near red to near yellow and darker markings. One was smaller than the others. I was fairly experienced in dealing with sickness, pathology even, that was part of the job, but this was something different.
It was wrong that someone should have gone to so much care to concoct a hoax, and shown such ingenuity in its details. I thought again of what years in space might do to human beings – really thought about it – and realized for the first time how brave those first colonists of Wunderland and Plateau and Jinx and the rest had been.
There were holos of allegedly dissected 'aliens', too: cartilaginous ribs that covered the stomach region, blood that varied in color between purple and orange, presumably an analogue for arterial and venous, streams of data that purported to be DNA codings, skeletons, analysis of alien alimentary-canal contents and muscle tissue purporting to contain odd proteins, sheets of what was allegedly alien script, looking like claw marks. There were also holos of what purported to be alien skulls.
"There's possibly a connection with your other work," the controller went on. "Or in any case, it seems to fall into our area as much as anyone else's. Your clearance has been upgraded one threshold in case you need special information. With our own people, normal need-to-know should be enough.”
I was getting signals that Alfred O'Brien was a nervous man taking a risk, and perhaps carrying me with him. I guessed opinion in the higher reaches was still divided on how to deal with this. A wrong decision, and early retirement; a very wrong decision, and… because, bizarre as it was, it could be serious.
Colonists were all volunteers, and could hardly be anything else. But they also went through rigorous screening and selection. It was quite right that rumors or reports of odd mental diseases in space could kill enthusiasm for colonizing ventures. And, yes, the ferocious three-meter tiger-cat images, however created, did have a disturbing quality about them. Somehow too many of them were difficult to look at for too long, whole or in pieces. But were they utterly unfamiliar? Why did I ask myself that question?
Deep, deep in memory, something stirred. What? I'd never seen anything much like these supposed aliens before, but… I looked at the dissection pictures again. There was the tiniest suggestion, somewhere in the back of my mind…
"The skulls might be a starting point," I said.
"Oh. How so?”
"I feel they look… familiar somehow.”
"Good. It's good if you've got a starting point, I mean.”
"Can I tell Arthur Guthlac about it? I know he's been interested in biological history.”
"If you think so. But only what he needs to know.”
"Its an odd job.”
"That's why we need you.”
"It's needle-in-a-haystack territory.”
"I know." He picked up a sheet of paper and passed it to me. "I don't know if its much of a start, but I've had the computers search for literary references to 'space' and 'cat' together. There isn't much. Here's one you might not know: An ancient Australian poem by an author Gwen Harwood, called 'Schrodinger's Cat Preaches to the Mice':”
Silk whisperings of knife on stone, due sacrifice, and my meat came. Caressing whispers, then my own choice among leaps by leaping flame.
What shape is space? Space will put on the shape of any cat Know this: my servant Schrodinger is gone before me to prepare a place…
I looked down to the end: Dead or alive? The case defies all questions. Let the lid be locked. Truth, from your little beady eyes, is hidden. I will not be mocked.
Quantum mechanics has no place for what's there without observation. Classical physics cannot trace spontaneous disintegration.
If the box holds a living cat no scientist on earth can tell. But, I'll be waiting, sleek and fat. Verily all will not be well if, to the peril of your souls you think me gone. Know that this house is mine, that kittens by mouse-holes wait, who have never seen a mouse.
He handed me a card embossed with the symbol of a level of authority I had encountered only two or three times before.
"Stay away from 'docs," he said. "That's your permit to do so. In fact your order to do so. No medication till further notice. We're turning you loose exactly as you are.”
"You do believe in taking risks, don't you?”
"You're not a schizie. You won't kill anyone. At least, I don't think so. But this is an intellectual problem. You'll need that intuition of yours as sharp as you can get it. And your wits sharp, too.
" 'Space will put on the shape of any cat… ' " he quoted again as I left him. "It was written four hundred years ago.”
CHAPTER 2
My first-year politics tutorials this week dealt with Nazi foreign policy and the lead-up to the war. I decided to loosen things a bit and just generally chat… How strange that university politics students should never have heard of the little ships that took the British Expeditionary Force off the beaches in May 1940. Or de Gaulle. Or a Spitfire. No knowledge of any of it… This was the stuff that was supposed never to be forgotten thirty, forty years ago. Next week we do the Holocaust…
– Letter to the author, October 10,1991
Snow whirled round. A snarling roar shook the eardrums. Over the crest of a snow-covered ridge a saber-toothed head appeared, fangs dripping. With a single fluid motion the feline leaped to the top of the rock, poised for a moment, the eyes in its flat head blazing at us.
I caught myself flinching, sudden instinctive terror mixing with awe at the size and malevolence of the thing. Shrieking, the great cat launched itself through the air at us, its body suddenly seeming to elongate to an impossible narrowness.
It passed between us and there was a scream of animal pain and terror as its huge incisors sank into its prey. Blood spurted.
Arthur Guthlac turned off the holo, and the Pleistocene gallery faded.
"Kids love it," he said. "For some reason the Smilodon's even more popular than Tyrannosaurus Rex these days.”
"Love it! It actually scared me!”
"Preschool children still have vestiges of the savage in them. You of all people should understand that. They like to be scared. They like a bit of bloodshed too.”
"I'm aware of it," I told him. "Part of my job is to detect antisocial behavior early. And I don't particularly like to be scared.”
Guthlac laughed. A laugh with an edge in it.
"But you, my dear Karl, are a mature, adjusted human being. Not one of our little savages.”
Warm air flowed gently round as the gallery returned to its normal temperature. A voice announced the museum would be closing in ten minutes as we stepped out of the gallery into the corridor.
I wondered if he was aware of the real meaning of the word 'adjusted' in my case. It probably didn't matter.
"That's better," I told him. "You make this place a lot too cold for comfort.”
"The Pleistocene was cold. That's why you had the mammoth and mastodon, the cave bear and the dire wolf and the saber-toothed tiger. Big bodies save heat. An age of giants and ice. Then a monkey adapted to the cold by growing a big brain and that was the end of the story.”