Frederik Pohl Star of Stars

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The new name lasted all of three days, to be replaced by Gummitch, which
showed signs of becoming permanent.
The little cat was on the verge of truly growing up, at least so Gummitch
overheard Old Horsemeat comment to Kitty-Come-Here. A few short weeks, Old
Horsemeat said, and Gummitch's fiery flesh would harden, his slim neck thicken, the
electricity vanish from everything but his fur, and all his delightful kittenish qualities
rapidly give way to the earth-bound singlemindness of a tom. They'd be lucky, Old
Horsemeat concluded, if he didn't turn com-pletely surly like Ashurbanipal.
Gummitch listened to these predictions with gay uncon-cern and with secret
amusement from his vantage point of superior knowledge, in the same spirit that he
accepted so many phases of his outwardly conventional existence: the murderous
sidelong looks he got from Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra as he devoured his own
horsemeat from his own little tin pan, because they sometimes were given canned
catfood but he never; the stark idiocy of Baby, who didn't know the difference
between a live cat and a stuffed teddy bear and who tried to cover up his ignorance
by making goo-goo noises and poking indiscriminately at all eyes; the far more
serious because cleverly hidden maliciousness of Sissy, who had to be watched
out for warily especially when you were alone and whose retarded even warped
development, Gummitch knew, was Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here's
deepest, most secret, worry (more of Sissy and her evil ways soon); the limited
intellect of Kitty-Come-Here, who despite the amounts of coffee she drank was quite
as featherbrained as kittens are supposed to be and who firmly believed, for
example, that kittens operated in the same space-time as other beings that to get
from here to there they had to cross the space between and similar fallacies; the
mental stodginess of even Old Horsemeat, who although he understood quite a bit of
the secret doctrine and talked intelligently to Gummitch when they were alone,
nevertheless suffered from the limitations of his status a rather nice old god but a
maddeningly slow-witted one.
But Gummitch could easily forgive all this massed inadequacy and downright
brutishness in his felino-human household, because he was aware that he alone knew
the real truth about himself and about other kittens and babies as well, the truth
which was hidden from weaker minds, the truth that was as intrinsically incredible as
the germ theory of disease or the origin of the whole great universe in the explosion
of a single atom.
As a baby kitten Gummitch had believed that Old Horsemeat's two hands were
hairless kittens permanently attached to the ends of Old Horsemeat's arms but having
an independent life of their own. How he had hated and loved those two five-legged
sallow monsters, his first playmates, comforters and battle-opponents!
Well, even that fantastic discarded notion was but a trifling fancy compared to the
real truth about himself!
The forehead of Zeus split open to give birth to Minerva. Gummitch had been
born from the waist-fold of a dirty old terrycloth bathrobe, Old Horsemeat's basic
garment. The kitten was intuitively certain of it and had proved it to himself as well as
any Descartes or Aristotle. In a kitten-size tuck of that ancient bathrobe the atoms of
his body had gathered and quickened into life. His earliest memories were of
snoozing wrapped in terrycloth, warmed by Old Horsemeat's heat. Old Horsemeat
and Kitty-Come-Here were his true parents. The other theory of his origin, the one
he heard Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here recount from time to time that he
had been the only sur-viving kitten of a litter abandoned next door, that he had had
the shakes from vitamin deficiency and lost the tip of his tail and the hair on his paws
and had to be nursed back to life and health with warm yellowish milk-and-vitamins
fed from an eyedropper that other theory was just one of those rationalizations
with which mysterious nature cloaks the birth of heroes, perhaps wisely veiling the
truth from minds unable to bear it, a rationalization as false as Kitty-Come-Here and
Old Horsemeat's touching belief that Sissy and Baby were their children rather than
the cubs of Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra.
The day that Gummitch had discovered by pure intui-tion the secret of his birth he
had been filled with a wild instant excitement. He had only kept it from tearing him to
pieces by rushing out to the kitchen and striking and devouring a fried scallop,
torturing it fiendishly first for twenty minutes.
And the secret of his birth was only the beginning. His intellectual faculties [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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