The Sweet Caress of Mother Nature

By John Shirley

Damon Stout was strolling in Central Park, at dusk, in the early summer, when the cat spoke to him.

Stout was out walking with the vague notion of exercising himself into sobriety. He’d gotten drunk on his lunch hour, hadn’t returned to the editorial office, couldn’t face his secretary as shit-faced as he obviously was. He had the new Dean Koontz manuscript waiting on his desk, though reading it was only a ritual, since accepting the book was a given; still, it must be read and officially responded to.

He’d been walking blindly for an hour or more, letting his nose lead him along the paths, barely aware of the lengthening shadows, and then, in one of those shadows, two golden eyes brought him out of his gray reverie.

“Well,” said the cat, an ordinary orange-striped tabby, “you certainly sssseem depressss-ssed, mister.”

Stout stopped walking. He blinked. He looked around, and didn’t see anyone but the cat. Its mouth hadn’t moved, except to open just a little, but he had the distinct impression that the small soft voice, drawing out the Ss was coming from its throat, as it added, “Are you okay?”

“Oh bullshit,” he muttered.

“No, seriously, mister—you look depresssssed.”

He thought ofCandid Camera . It was off the air but there were other shows like that. The cat could be animatronic or something.

“Bullshit. Where’s the camera?”

“I think you are…” it seemed to think about the wording, “…laboring under a missss-app-re-henshhhhhion.”

It had trouble pronouncing the longer words.

“It is I, who’s talking to you, mister,” the cat said.

“Oh wait… the medication…”

He was on a new antidepressant medication—most New York editors were, since multinational conglomerates had bought out the publishers—and he’d been warned not to mix alcohol with it, a warning he’d blocked from his mind until this moment.

“You,” he told the cat, “are a neurological side effect, the result of mixing psychoactive chemicals, which should not be mixed.”

“You’re saying I’m a hallu-ccin-a-tion?”

“I am, yes. First of all, cats can’t talk. Second, if they could, I don’t know how they would learn English, and if they did learn English, how would they acquire such good diction?”

“Good points, all. We are able to talk, firsst-ly, because of mini-aturi-zza-tion. You know how people make micro-chipsss that keep getting tinier so they can put bigger computing power into smaller placesss?”

“Ah—so youare a machine?” Stout was beginning to enjoy this hallucination, hoax, or whatever it was. It broke him out of the maze of his standard dilemmas, and it woke him up a little, and that felt good, by God. He was inclined to prolong the experience.

“No, I’m not a machine—except in the way that you yourself are a machine: all org-anissssms are bio-log-shick-allll machines, wouldn’t you agree-yeee? What has happened is an adjustment by the collective pssssychic organism you call Mother Nature. She’s ex-peri-menti-ing…”

“You’re telling me Mother Nature is real?”

“I think you’d call it Gaia. The living Earth. She’sss exper-iii-menting with animalssss, trying to find one that hurts her less than human beingsss, sssearching for an alter-nat-iiiive dominant speciessss, and because of the ssself-ev-i-dent all around exccccel-lllence of cats, she chossse us. She’s done the equivalent of super-mini-aturi-zzzing a microchip—but she’s done it with brain cellsss. I have even more brain cells than you—but they are mini-aturi-zzzed. And my vocal chordsss have mu-tat-ed. Do not make a joke about ‘mew’-tations. The lassst fellow who passsed by did and… bessst we not ssspeak of that.” Its tail twitched warningly.

“Are you the only cat like this?”

“Not at all. And asss for your questions about English…” The cat paused to scratch vigorously behind one ear. “Excuse me. Some pa-ra-sssite or other. We’ll have to keep some vetsss around. Asss to speaking English, you can thank Msss. Teresa Carpenter for that. An elderly cat-loving lady who strove to teach English to some of the advanced mu-ta-ted felinesss among her thirty-two adopted straysss. We in turn taught others. I can read a bit, in fact. I rather fancy R. L. Ssstine at the moment.”

“Tell me something… I’ve always wondered. Why do catsplay with things they’re killing… like mice, they kill them bit by bit, sometimes.”

“If one is not in a hurry, mister, why not enjoy one’s occ-up-a-shunnn? Smell the ro-ses. Don’t you, when you can? And if you think it cruel—don’t tell me there isss no sssadism among humans. I know better. All animals know better. Shall we speak of laboratory resssearch?”

“Let’s not.”

It yawned, showing needle-sharp teeth.

He went on. “Good point about human behavior… So, why have you chosen to talk to me?”

“It wasn’t really necessssary. But—one likes to smell the rossses.”

“Excuse me?”

That’s when he saw them—as if the long shadows of deepening evening were giving birth to a litter of slinking smaller shadows which oozed toward him, and came into the light with their golden eyes blinking.

“Oh, surely not,” he said, backing away.

“Oh yessss indeed, mister,” the cat said, laying its ears back, twitching its tail. “After Ms. Carpenter died, there was nothing about to eat…except Ms. Carpenter. We dissscovered that human beings have a lovely taste… almost like chicken…”

He tried to run, of course, but there were about a hundred of them and it was surprising how much truth there is in the expressionstrength in numbers .

And so they dragged him down and he remembered, the vision of it coming to him in a flash: having his own cat years before, and how he’d found, nearly every day, a dead mouse or, as often, portions of dead mouse: a discrete pile of guts on the welcome mat; a mouse head neatly torn from mouse shoulders, a perfect little head, with shiny black eyes and stiff bristling whiskers and incisor immaculately intact, a decapitation of his doorstep; and now as he flailed at them, trying to get them away from his belly, he remembered how the cat had loved to disembowel the mouse, and how they could prolong the process, and he heard them chatting as they sliced at him with their claws and dug at his eyes and his belly—and he screamed…

But there were other screams, now,cat screams, drowning out his own, and he felt the tearing pain recede, and he opened his eyes, found himself panting in a small pool of his own blood in the grass, while around him was a living whirlwind of yellow and pink…

Hundreds of budgies, hundreds of parakeets, now and then a flash of green parrot: house birds like a cloud of airborne piranha gripping the cats with their talons, tearing at them in a fluttering mob; a dozen, two dozen birds to each shrieking, panicky, despairing cat—and something else, too, now lunging into the few apertures of open fur: gerbils, gerbils and white rats, chattering to one another as they burrowed into the screaming felines…

Chattering in English. A kind of pidgin English; exchanging brutal pleasantries with the birds who, beaks red with cat blood, hopped away from the feline remains, leaving the flesh to the rodents; the cats now looking like road kill…

Stout managed to sit up—the cats had been torturing him, and none of his cuts were deep or lethal, they hadn’t yet got that far. He would need a good antibiotic.

But Stout was in shock, feeling cold and numb and distant, and scarcely reacted at all, when the dog spoke to him, a big Akita, the jade-colored parakeet perched on its shoulder nodding in agreement. “You are not badly hurt, man. Rrrrise, rrrise and bandage yourself and report to the pet stores, where yourrrr work as servant will begin. We will inform you if you arrre to take part in the war against the felines. The great wave of mutation has come and gone and liberation is here: for some of us, pink ape. Rrrrise and serve us well, if you would live…”

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