why the humans are ruled by a cat queen or why the cats are considered divine or why everything is underground and some of it is really modern and some looks ancient. I don’t get how the walls slid around as we passed through it, and I don’t get why you could send a cat into space and have all of these other cat spaceships laying around your yards and serving as skylights for the next layer of tunnels. This is a weird place. I love cats a lot but I just don’t get it.”
Chione shrugged. “I don’t understand how you can live among the stars either, or what the cats did there. I wish I did. Renpet’s distant ancestors traveled through space long before they settled among our earthly ancestors and taught them so much that is part of our culture even today, though many of their ancient teachings have been lost. When first we came to this planet, we brought with us the mummies of the original divine cats. Our society is a remnant of one that once revered them above all other deities. Many of the mummies of sacred cats were stolen and destroyed by foreigners, but many of those were the mummies of less nobly born cats, sacrificed by unscrupulous priests in the long ago. We have preserved the original remains lo these many millennia and brought them with us when we migrated. Our royalty claim descent from these starfarers and teachers.”
“Is Pshaw-Ra royalty?”
“He is of the royal line, yes, though the power passes frommother to daughter. But my father, who was once the servant of Pshaw-Ra, said that he bore the closest resemblance of any cat he knew to those described in the sacred texts.”
“Did the cats write those?”
“They dictated them to the ancestors. They had great powers of thought transference through which they imparted their advanced ideas.”
“Like what happens between Chester and me or you and Renpet?”
“Yes, only much more potent.”
Jubal chewed the corner of his lower lip thoughtfully. “One other thing I don’t get, then—from what I’ve read, back in the early days when the new worlds were being settled, there wasn’t much of a luggage allowance—how did your people get to bring a bunch of cat mummies?”
“We would not leave them behind! We had to leave many of the sacred implements as it was …”
“The sacred scratching post, that kind of thing?” he asked. He was a little put off by all the “sacred” this, that, and the other thing. He loved Chester and thought he was very smart, but he didn’t revere his cat particularly.
She smiled at him as if he’d said something very bright, and he felt bad for being sarcastic. “Yes, all of those things. The sarcophagi of the mummies were small, and I suppose were easily disguised as other things those in charge might have considered more useful. The sacred cats were thought to be mere pets, rather than our leaders.”
“So the whole thought transference thing continued up until the time your people left Earth?”
“Only occasionally, among certain individuals with a special affinity, an important ingredient in a bond even now. But those cats who coupled their minds with the minds of human interpreters directed us.”
Jubal wondered how much it was the word of the cat passingthrough the interpreter that did the directing, and how much it would have been the interpreter making up edicts that would suit his own purposes and saying they were from the divine kitty.
Chester looked up at him through slitted eyes.
You don’t think a mere cat could come up with that on his own? Is that it?
No, no, that’s not what I mean. I know you’re smart and everything, but wouldn’t inventing space travel interfere with your napping, hunting, eating, and the other stuff you seem to need to do every day to be happy?
Inventing feline space travel would be a lot like hunting … and we are natural-born explorers with a lot of what you humans call scientific curiosity
.
Jubal was stung to suddenly be lumped with “you
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