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Holding the Bag

by

Marian Mendez

Tork grumbled as he set the coarsely woven cloth sack down beside the bar, "Why am I always stuck with the dirty jobs?"

The man next to him said, "Friend, innit always the way?"

Tork glanced at the fellow, who seemed very cheerful, and smiled back at him, lifting his glass in a toast. "Always."


Vila looked down at Tork, who was crumpled over the table, and snoring. "Can't abide a man who can't hold his liquor," Vila said, shaking his head. He casually picked up Tork's sack and wandered outside, intending to take a look inside, not that he expected much. Tork had said he was a odd jobs man for a rich family. Probably castoffs- but then again, rich folks' castoffs were often worth a second look.

"Hey, you!"

Vila didn't waste time looking around to see who was shouting or whether they really meant him. He clutched the sack to his chest, pressed the communicator button on his teleport bracelet and yelled, "Teleport! Telepo..."

"rt...um, thanks Avon." Vila said on realizing that he had materialized safely aboard the Liberator. He tried to inconspicuously sidle out of the room.

"What is that?" Avon said from his seat behind the teleport console.

"Um... a sack?"

"Vila." Avon got up and came around in front of the console using 'I am being very patient, but it isn't going to last' body language. "I can see it is a sack. What, precisely, is in the sack." He sniffed and waved his hand in front of his face. "It had better not be more bottles of whatever you drank down there."

Vila beamed, then shook his head. "Can't be that. 's not heavy enough."

Avon frowned. "You mean to say you do not even know what you have brought aboard?"

"Er, no, not exactly. But no one could have known I'd be in that ba... back room looking for the information Blake wanted, so it couldn't be a bomb... or a vial of germs... or..." Vila looked at the sack, dubiously.

"Put it down. Gently."

Vila obeyed and stepped back hastily. The bag twitched. Vila leaped back another couple of feet. Avon didn't have a gun with him or the bag would have been vaporized. They watched. The bag continued to twitch, silently, and at apparent random.

Avon went behind the console and returned with an extra-long laser probe. He knelt down and gingerly lifted the edge of the bag with the probe. His eyebrows lifted and he stared, seemingly mesmerized, into the sack.

Vila edged further away. Avon reached his hand into the sack. Vila shouted, "Look out!".

Avon pulled his hand out and turned, brandishing the item he'd taken from the bag. "It's a furry alien!" Vila screamed. Then he looked again. "It's a very small one, though."

Avon balanced the furry white mite in the palm of one hand, looking down on it as the tiny mouth opened and closed, soundlessly. It moved its head blindly seeking.

The clatter of running bootsteps brought both men's attention to the entrance to the teleport. Cally came in, flushed and wild-eyed. "Who brought that on board!" she shrieked, looking at the creature in Avon's hand.

Vila wilted and Avon, without knowing why, took the blame on himself. Afterward he justified it by reasoning that it would be easier living with Cally being angry at him and Vila grateful, than Cally being angry at Vila and suspicious that Avon had a hand in it while Vila complained about his mistreatment. "I did," Avon said. Going by a strict definition, it was even true. Avon had teleported Vila and the sack, which was still squirming, so it must contain even more little furry live things.

"Oh, thank you Avon!" Cally knelt, flung her arms around Avon's neck and proceeded to kiss him quite thoroughly. She took the furry thing from Avon's hand and petted it while he recovered his composure. "I've always wanted one."

Hopefully Vila said, "I found them on the planet and brought them back for you, Cally. Avon just pressed a button."

Cally smiled at Vila. "Then thank you, too, Vila," she said without getting up.

Vila sighed.

Cally opened the bag and carefully folded it back so the contents lay in plain view, a multi-colored mound of fur scraps. "Twelve of them, how lovely!" She folded up the edge of her tunic and began putting the little squirming animals into the makeshift pocket. "Help me take them to the medical unit. I need to make a formula for feeding them."

Vila shrugged and began picking animals up and stowing them in pockets. They were warm and felt nice, soft and fuzzy.

"Presumably you know what they are," Avon said as he stood, baggy silver tunic full of fur.

"They are kittens, Avon. Young cats," she said, expanding on the subject.

"Oh!" Vila nodded, "Like Krantor's cat in the Big Wheel, on Freee..."

Avon and Cally both looked at Vila.

"Vila," Cally said, shaking her head. Avon didn't say anything, but if eyes could burn, Vila would be branded 'Idiot!' across the forehead.

"I wonder why they were in this sack?" Vila said, trying to change the subject.

Cally looked very angry then. "You do not want to know, Vila." Which made Vila's imagination come up with all sorts of nasty things.

"They were probably being disposed of because they are defective," Avon supplied.

"They are NOT!" Cally snapped.

"Well, they're mute. I can't think that's a survival characteristic for a creature this helpless. How is it to attract the parent's attention?"

Cally shook her head. "They are not mute. You're deaf. They're telepathicats." She smiled. "All cats can read human minds, but telepathicats can talk back that way. Right now, they can only send baby-thoughts, like hunger and fear and being cold."

Avon's eyebrows had another workout as he realized he had been ignoring just those sensations ever since Vila appeared with his sack. "And when they grow up?"

"Only simple things, even then, but still, they will be able to talk to us." Cally's smile grew. "To me."

Avon sighed and resigned himself to alien cats. "They'll get into everything," he prophesied, "and make messes, and demand attention when we can least afford it. Frankly, with Vila aboard, that's wasteful duplication of effort."

Vila didn't pay any attention, because he was listening to his cats.

This question was posed after I posted the story to a B7 list and I felt it deserved an honest answer.
 
But what happened to all those adorable little telepathic kittens? Please tell me they found a safe home before Star One, which can't have been far off.

It's an Alternate Universe. Twelve bonded as a family, happy, well-fed, properly nurtured by a telepath, telepathikitties have a tremendous mental attack range and the good sense to know what's dangerous to their pets. The telepathikitties 'smelled' the Andromedans coming, and fried the blobs' brains by long-distance. (That was the day Cally was worried about them because they sat in a circle staring into each other's eyes for hours, even ignoring the robotic mice Avon had made for them.)

They argued over what to do about Travis, but one of them adamantly stood up for him because 'he was cute' so they did a little mental 'surgery' on him, and Travis woke up thinking 'oh, who gives a damn about Blake anyway, I've better things to do', got cosmetic surgery and become a TV talk show host.
By the way, Avon became curious and asked Orac about the origin of telepathicats.

Orac told him that a genetic scientist who loved cats felt nature short-changed them by endowing them with intelligence and an uncontrollable sex drive which was always getting them in trouble. Since the male penis is barbed, no female would willingly mate unless driven to it by the hormonal drive of 'heat'. Unfortunately, the stimulation of the barbs is necessary to induce ovulation in the female.

The scientist began gene-splicing. She changed their anatomy and hormonal systems, eliminating barbs, heat, and the necessity of such rough stimulation, so that gentle prolonged love-making (accompanied by soft purring instead of shrieks) resulted. Unfortunately, cats being lazy, they so rarely bothered to mate that the line would die out.

So the scientist added the ability to send and receive emotions, and the ability to anticipate so they could 'look ahead' and decide that sharing the pleasure of having sex would be more fun than a nap.

Once started in this direction, she further refined them until the result was a cat that not only could clearly let its people know what it wanted, but could figure out what its people wanted, and had sense enough to work out compromises. Somewhere along the line their voices became an unexpressed gene, which didn't bother anyone because by then they'd found out how to purr telepathically, too.

They are effectively more intelligent than normal cats, because they have a longer attention span, a desire to seek solutions that increase their personal happiness, and can reason out the consequences of proposed actions. EG: As Tarrial thought just last night (that's the black one that adopted Avon)  Jumping on the keyboard annoys Avon, who shouts, which hurts my ears. Rubbing against Avon's leg and telepathipurring gets me a bowl of cream.
Rubbing wins.
And  in case you're wondering, sorry,  I don't have any spare telepathikittens  at the moment.