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Virtually, A Cat

Written by Jody Lynn Nye

Illustrated by Lee Kuruganti

The burly male technician loomed over the smaller man in engineer’s orange coveralls as if by sheer size he would drive home his message.

“I swear, Ardway, if you tell me one more cat story, I’m going to kayo you and put you out the airlock!”

“I thought you liked hearing them, Callan,” Benny Ardway said, wondering if he could wriggle his skinny frame any farther into the bulkhead of the forward engineering compartment to escape his shipmate’s wrath. He lifted apologetic, round blue eyes to the engineer. “You laughed. I thought you enjoyed hearing about Parky and Blivit.”

“Once, on the way out of orbit, was okay. Twice, while we were waiting for the calculations to jumpspace. But you have to have told the same damned stories a million times since we broke atmosphere,” Callan said, sticking a furious finger in his shipmate’s face, “and enough’s enough!”

“All right,” Ardway said, meekly. Callan gave him one more glower, then kicked off the wall to continue replacing modules in the astrogation console. Ardway handed himself down to his keyboard and looked out at the blackness of nonspace, wishing he could swim all the way back to Earth. He felt bereft. No one on board the ship felt the way he did about cats. No one understood what it was costing him to make this long trip, knowing that back on Earth his pets were missing him. No, not his pets: his family.

When he’d been assigned to the Calliope, the station quartermaster had told him that he was entitled to bring with him 20 kg. of personal gear. Perfect, he had thought. Both of his cats together didn’t weigh more than ten. Add to that their food dishes, maybe one more kilo. The corps supplied his uniforms, his tools, dishes, food, and bunk space. He could use a discarded cabinet casing for the cats’ litter pan. That left him nine kilograms for bookcubes and personal items. The cats would sleep with him. No bunk had ever been too small to contain all three of them. He had even asked his assigned bunkmate, the communications officer named Polson, if he liked cats, and Polson had said he did. It was going to be great.

Ardway had weighed everything several times to make certain everything he was bringing fell under the allowable limit. He even had half a kilo to spare. He had been devastated when, upon reaching the launch center with his luggage, he learned that his cats wouldn’t be allowed to come with him.

“We can’t have animals in deep space,” the mission commander said, as if shocked that Ardway would even consider such a thing. He regarded the cats in their carrier with horror. Ardway recalled having moved between Captain Thurston and the cats to protect them in case the officer went crazy. The way his nostrils puffed out reminded Ardway of Parky about to have a fit. “They could panic! Destroy precious equipment! Er, soil, er, the environment.”

“Sir, they’re very clean animals,” Ardway had protested. “They’re both neutered shorthairs. They won’t cause any kind of fuss.”

“You must be out of your mind!” Captain Thurston said, crossing his arms. He was the poster-boy type for the deep space program, tall, handsome, muscular, and crew-cut, the physical opposite of Ardway, who was hollow-chested and mousy-haired. “Get those animals out of here, and I mean stat!”

There was nothing Ardway could do. He’d signed an ironclad contract, and he really did want to be in on this project. Who wouldn’t want a crack at being astronavigator on the first team to use the new jump technology for a long-range jaunt outside the solar system? NASA had wanted him, too. He was the lead software designer who had come up with the format for the benchmark system that kept the ship on beam. The program ran like a top, but NASA thought it would be better to have him out there with them in case something went wrong on a long test, after the eighteenth century custom of sending the engineer to sea with the ship he’d designed. Ardway thought he could leverage his desirability into making them agree to let the cats come, but they waved his signature in front of him, and told him to get over it. He’d only be gone two years. Two years! Ardway felt as if his heart would be torn apart.

The only way Ardway could cope was to have lots of reminders of the cats with him. With ten kilos of his personal allowance freed up, he was able to pack in a personal viewer and hundreds of videos of the cats playing and sleeping. He enlisted a trusted friend to watch over his pets, set up a mail account between his apartment and the communication station at Canaveral so he could get updates on his pets, and shared stories about Parky and Blivit with his new shipmates. Alas, the first wasn’t satisfying enough, and the last endured only as long as the patience of the final person on board the Calliope who would listen to him. That had been Callan.

Ardway watched the technician’s orange-clad legs floating weightlessly under the console. The flutter kick Callan made to keep himself in place reminded him of his orange tiger cat, Parky, lying on his side in the sun batting idly at a ribbon. He opened his mouth to say so, and very quickly closed it again. Callan might really put him outside in nonspace. Ardway glanced at the clock and decided to take a break. The program didn’t need him at that moment. No one did. His job had really been done the day he finished debugging the system, more than a month ago, and wouldn’t begin again unless something went wrong. In the meantime, he was useless baggage. He slid out of his chair, nodded to the helm officer, Frida Lawes, and handwalked out of the forward engineering compartment and made for the break room.

The Calliope had been designed to support up to fifteen crew members for a period of at least three years for her mission to Gliese 86. The ship’s complement was ten crew members, and the mission was intended to run only twenty-two months. If the bounce technology worked as planned, they would break space periodically, once just outside Sol’s heliopause, then enter the tunnel under normal space for approximately five months, surfacing occasionally to make sure they were still on beam, and emerge on the edge of the heliopause of Gliese, counting on Ardway’s program and his skill to get them there safely. The crew would undertake as much exploration of the star system as they could manage in their time frame, followed by the turnaround journey. All the crew cabins except the mission commander’s were doubles. The break room, the mess hall, and the exercise center were common areas. Six private one-man carrels were available when the pressures of the mission and communal living got to be too much for human nature. That wasn’t Ardway’s problem. He wanted company. They just didn’t want him.

“Coffee,” he told the wall in the break room. A hatch slid open in the mural, and Ardway took the insulated bulb. The food service system made pretty good coffee, scrambled eggs, oatmeal, and spaghetti sauce – anything soft. Any food with texture kind of suffered in processing. He floated over to an outer bulkhead where he secured himself on a loop to watch the entertainment hologram in the center of the room. It showed a couple of earnest men in surgical greens leaning over a patient and calling for tests. Reruns already? Who cared? He wondered if he had time to go back to his cabin and watch one of his personal tapes. Maybe the one of black and white Blivit washing herself.

“Hey, Benny!” Cora Handley, the ship’s blue-suited medical officer, swung into the room and noticed him hanging there all by himself. The oldest member of the crew, she’d been on more long-range flights than anyone else in the service. She was only around fifty, but her hair was almost pure white. Except for that and the ‘spaceman’s squint’, she looked thirty. “What’s the word from your cat sitter? How are the Terrible Two?”

Ardway perked up. “You won’t believe it, Doc,” he said, delighted to expand upon his favorite subject. “Melanie said that she showed them my message tape, and they both sat in front of the screen watching me. She said Blivit reached up to touch me through the screen. She couldn’t, of course,” Ardway said, sinking into depression again. If only it was that simple. His hands ached for the stroke of fur, to feel that soft vibration of a deep, throaty purr. “She said they are eating well, but I had to remind her to give Parky his vitamins where Blivit can’t see it, because she thinks they’re a treat, and she gets jealous . . .”

“Later, honey,” Handley said, hastily, her pleasant face contorting. “I’m running a stress test on the commander. Look, twenty-two months isn’t that long a time. You’ll be back there before you notice.” Handley ordered herself a coffee, and somersaulted out of the room with the bulb bobbing beside her.

Ardway appreciated her kind words. She was very sweet, but she was a hundred percent wrong. He noticed, all right. He noticed at the beginning of every sleep shift when no firm, furry bodies snuggled in with him, pushing him away from his pillow. He noticed at every mealtime when there were no sets of green or gold eyes looking up at him, hoping for the choicest morsels. He noticed when no friendly shoulders bumped into his legs while he sat at his console. And the worst was that no one wanted to hear about his troubles. Ardway blamed the space program for being shortsighted. If they’d let him have his little friends, he wouldn’t have to talk about them all the time. They’d even be good for crew morale. He drank his coffee and went back to his station. Just like the state of warp, the outlook for him looked black.

****

The Calliope broke space on schedule, and exactly where Ardway’s computer told them they’d be: on the very edge of the Sol system, in among the junk in the Oort cloud that surrounded the open space. The sun was a tiny dot at the edge of the astrogation screen. Ardway’s loneliness was put on hold for a time while the ship went on manual helm to explore the belt. Everyone got excited, as they were able to employ their specialties for the first time in the mission.

Spinning frozen boulders the size of small moons danced in the giant circle that surrounded his home system like a ring of mountains. Ardway enjoyed the narrow squeaks as he steered the ship close to chunks of space debris, fascinated by the largest amount of solid matter that existed anywhere but a planet. The geophysics team, Johnson and Mackay, gathered samples using both the ship’s grappling arms, and a short-range small retrieval unit that, like Ardway’s nav system, was on its shakedown cruise. The retrieval unit was nothing more or less than an empty spacesuit that went on tethered spacewalks by itself. Unmanned spacewalks were another of the service’s bright ideas to protect the fragile human beings in the crew from being exposed to radiation or accidents. The retrieval suit went out the airlock and acted as a kind of waldo while someone in the ship wearing the corresponding receptor-motivator unit felt everything the suit did, and saw everything the camera in the helmet did. The system was terrifically flexible and adaptable. When the suit successfully collected an interesting chunk of rock, Johnson made it do an end-zone disco boogie as the crew cheered.

The fun was short-lived. Once they reentered the blackness of warp space, an idled Ardway became morose, and simply didn’t talk to people for a while. He holed up in the privacy cubicles with his collection of home videos and his thoughts. Unable actually to be with his precious cats he spent a lot of time imagining himself home with them, in his personal heaven-on-earth. All right, so his bachelor flat was small and about twenty floors up with an unreliable lift; it had a great view to the south that allowed his pets to have sunlight all day, most suitable for naps and stretching. He had had so many happy days, playing with Parky and Blivit, reading with them on his lap, talking to them, and just enjoying the companionship.

He knew the others in the crew watched him and worried. Every so often he’d leave the privacy cubicle grinning over a particularly cute video or picture and catch the eye of one or another of his fellows, who would hastily look away. Ardway wondered if he could be dropped out of the service for cat addiction. But it’d be worth it. The cats were his companions, his friends, his comfort. Life like this wasn’t the life he wanted to lead. It was great during the big moments, the discoveries, but enduring the long stretches without his little friends was devastating. The view out the ports was an unchanging black, but he knew, intellectually as well as emotionally, that he was flying farther and farther away from his cats. He lived for the moments when they broke out of jump and received beamed messages from Earth. New video from Melanie of Parky and Blivit lifted his spirits like nothing else. He ached for them, and the longing got worse and worse as time went by. No one on the ship understood. No one wanted to hear about it.

With little to do and an indifferent company to keep, Ardway began to be lax about shift times, showing up when he felt like it. Who cared? Not the other people in the crew. His program didn’t need him. He started to go without shaving, and occasionally without bathing. By the twelfth week he sometimes wouldn’t even bother to get out of his bunk unless he was hungry or had to use the head. Ardway knew his behavior was unhealthy, but he simply could not motivate himself. He began to spend his break times in his privacy cubicle, screening videos, and coming out only when he was called. No one seemed to miss him. Except his cats.

Late one evening shift in the third month of the mission, Ardway heard a tap on the cubicle door. On the little viewscreen, Parky had just jumped out from behind the couch and assaulted Blivit, who’d just been having a drink, and was minding her own business as she walked back to her favorite sprawl spot. The two of them rolled together, rabbit-kicking at one another’s bellies. The tap sounded again.

“Just a minute,” Ardway called. He didn’t want to miss the best part. Here it came: Parky and Blivit rolled into the couch. The contact surprised them. They jumped apart, and sat at opposite ends of the open area washing themselves to cover their discomfiture. Ardway laughed and shook his head. He unlocked the door.

“Benny?” It was Mel Johnson, the junior geophysicist, a large, dark-skinned, friendly man with big hands. “Hey, buddy, we don’t see a lot of you any more.”

“I’m there when you need me,” Ardway said, defensively. He popped the cartridge out of the video reader and prepared to load another one.

“Yeah, but you’re not there, man. You haven’t been yourself since about four weeks ago.” Johnson looked at the recorder and met Ardway’s eyes with sympathy. “You miss ’em that much, huh? No,” he held up a hand as Ardway took a deep breath. “Don’t tell me your stories again, man. Tell them to your diary. I’m tired of ’em, too.

“I think even the computer is tired of them,” Ardway said, with rueful humor. “I do miss them. I can’t even tell you how much. I’d give everything for a cat. I can’t last two years like this. I’m going to go crazy!”

“Well, what is it you really miss?” Johnson asked, propping himself in the door frame so Ardway couldn’t shut him out. “You’ve got one of those virtual pets on your screen, right? Feed me, clean me, scold me . . . ?”

Ardway dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “It’s not the same. Feeling Parky rub against my leg in the morning when I’m getting his breakfast. That’s after Blivit has woken me up by jumping on my . . . my bladder to make sure I’m awake. The way they cuddle into my arm or my lap when I’m reading, even the way they run across me when they’re fighting!”

“Yes, yes,” Johnson said hastily, throwing his hands up, and Ardway remembered Johnson had been very patient about listening for weeks even when it was clear he’d had it up to his neck with Ardway’s favorite topic. “Let me think about it.”

“You think you can convince the brass to bring me a cat? Way out here?” Ardway was full of hope. Maybe Johnson, a disinterested party, could succeed where he had failed.

****

Not even for the finest astrogator in the service, which Ardway was proving to be. No living animals would be put into danger, or be able to put the crew of the deep-space mission into danger. Besides, as the message from NASA said tartly, nothing in the space program existed that could catch up with the Calliope in less time than it would take to return to Earth on their normal schedule. Ardway read a copy of the reply Johnson received. There had been half a dozen attachments, but Ardway didn’t read those. All he was interested in was the denial. He fell into a real depression, refusing to come out of his quarters or the privacy cubicle, sometimes not even for meals.

A couple of weeks later, Johnson’s voice came again outside the privacy cubicle, tried to persuade him to open up the enamel box. Ardway sat with his arms folded, refusing to budge. Eventually, he heard fumbling on the bulkhead and swearing. Callan’s sweating red face appeared as the door slid open.

“I’m taking the locks off all these doors,” Callan said, and turned to Johnson. “He’s all yours.”

“C’mon, buddy,” Johnson said, bravely ignoring the stink of unwashed and unshaved crewman as he took Ardway’s arm and pulling him toward the geophysics lab. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

In the white-enameled room, all the exhibits the crew had gathered on their stops were in clear, vacuum-sealed cases to prevent direct human exposure. Against one wall was the lightweight waldo-suit Johnson wore to gather specimens.

“You know what this does, right?” Johnson said, pointing to the suit. “It’s a remote-control unit for the one outside. The suit that corresponds to the motions made by this one was in a compartment behind a panel on the skin of the ship.”

“I know all that,” Ardway said, waving it away.

“But do you know how it gets its feedback? On the inside, it’s got a fine mesh suit of two kinds of sensors fused together, receivers and responders. Together, they’re only about a micron thick, like a second skin. The cloth is thinner than nylon stockings. If the suit picks up a rock, I can feel the shape of it in my hand as if I’d picked it up myself. If the suit takes a knock from a meteor, I get knocked ass over teakettle. Of course, the responses are toned down so that I can take it without getting hurt. I can feel that the rock is cold, but not the burning cold of deep space. I get pushed around by the responders, but not enough to do more than bruise me a little.”

“So?” Ardway said.

“So I made you a suit, man,” Johnson said, opening a compartment and taking out a wad of tan cloth about the size of his fist. “Instead of getting real output from out there, I’ve used your home movies to program the computer for sufficient characteristic behavior. I’m plotting the right size, shape and motion in three points in space which the suit will respond to.”

“So what?”

“So when you wear the suit,” Johnson said, smiling broadly, “you’ll have your own virtual cat around you. No one will be able to see it, or hear it, including you, but you’ll be able to feel it.”

Ardway let hope gleam in his eyes. “That’d save my life, Mel.”

“And our sanity,” Johnson said.

****

The sensor suit worked exactly as Johnson had said it would. When hooked up to the central computer, Ardway could feel subtle motions against his arms and legs. Nothing like a cat, yet, but it was promising. The program Johnson adapted needed to be debugged first, and Ardway jumped in to help. He pored over the code for days on end, motivated for the first time since he had left home. He gave Johnson his best videos and pictures, along with precise measurements of the two animals that he had made when he thought they would be coming along on the mission. Johnson devoted his spare shifts for a week helping him to fine-tune the responders so they would push against Ardway’s skin in the right sequence and at the right amount of pressure. The testing had to be done during the gravity periods each day so the plotting for ship placement would be accurate. Not unlike the benchmarking program, Ardway thought.

“Okay,” Johnson said, kneeling at Ardway’s side to adjust the flat control box in the middle of his back. Ardway wore nothing but the suit and a pair of boxer shorts over it. The suit itself was of pale tan filaments, not all that much darker than his skin, and was so fine he felt the cold of the floor through the feet, and the breeze from the ventilation fan. “You know, you can shower in this. And should. The sensors work best when they’re kept clean. Okay, try it. The cat ought to be right about there.” Johnson stood up and pointed to a spot approximately three feet up over a white dot painted on the floor.

Ardway put out a hand in space, and was surprised as it ran into an obstruction. He couldn’t see it, but his body told him it was there. His hand insisted there was something solid in the way. He ran a hand over the form. It was shaped approximately like a cat. The soft ears bent under the pressure of his glove, but the hard round skull resisted the downward motion. Encouraged, Ardway stroked his hand down its back. The spine arched upward to meet his caress. The edges were very rough, but Johnson tweaked the programming until the sawtooth spine under his palm melted into a surface like silken fur. Ardway felt the body shift. A rough tongue, at first limp as corduroy but stiffened with a little help into wet sandpaper, occasionally licked the back of his hand.

“It’s wonderful, Mel,” Ardway said, feeling a lump rise in his throat. “I don’t know how to thank you.” Then it disappeared. Ardway felt around with both hands.

“Where did it go?” he asked.

“On the floor, man,” Johnson said, consulting the monitor. “Wait.” In a moment, the firm body reasserted itself, rubbing against Ardway’s calf. It was such a real sensation, he could almost picture himself home again.

“It’s wonderful,” Ardway said again, shaking his head in wonder. “You’re a true friend, Mel.”

Johnson stood away from his screen and stretched his long back. “I’m starved. Let’s stop for a while and get something to eat.” For the first time in weeks, Ardway felt as if he had an appetite. He followed eagerly.

The two of them headed for the mess room. Ardway walked along, feeling the occasional sensation of the pressure against his leg as the programming caused the “cat” to bump into him impatiently.

“It’s following me,” Ardway said, with delight.

“It’s yours.”

If the rest of the crew was surprised to see Ardway in his underwear, they didn’t say anything as he and Johnson sat down to a meal. He tucked into his dinner as though he hadn’t eaten since he’d left Earth. Then, suddenly, he felt sharp pain in his knee.

“Ow! The damned suit attacked me!”

“It’s in the programming, man,” Johnson said. “It just scratched you. What’s it want?”

“It’s hungry,” Ardway said, after a moment’s thought. “That’s what Parky always does. What do I do?”

“What you would do at home. Pretend to throw him something. Or try to teach him not to beg at the table. Maybe it’ll learn. Maybe it won’t. It’s a cat. It’ll act like one.”

With an incredulous glance at his friend, Ardway reached into his plate-bowl, a clear globe with a gasket to admit his hand or fork but to keep the rest of his food from floating away in zero-gee, picked up an imaginary morsel between thumb and forefinger, and tossed it onto the floor. Instantly, the invisible presence left his side. Ardway could imagine the cat chomping and chewing at his offering, or maybe symbolically burying it in the floor the way Blivit always did. He hoped the bit had been something the cat considered good. In a moment, he felt a light touch on his kneecap, a little paw, beseeching and thanking in one soundless motion. He reached down toward the invisible presence, felt his palm stopped by a hard, round object, the cat’s head. It shifted, maneuvering his hand downward a couple of inches to a softer surface that must be its throat. Automatically, his fingers curved and began scratching lightly against the presence the glove told him was there. Incredibly, a gentle vibration