'Cats Don't	Chapter one > of four sample chapters
Cry'	by Myra Howerd, June 1992
	Copywrite held by Claudia Klaus, P.O. Box 5102, Mackay M.C., QLD 4741, Australia

Myra sets out on a journey to find a way to save her twin sister Kelly who is laying on a hospital bed, slowly dying from wounds that normal medicine cannot correct. She uses a strange mental artefact that transports her to a time and place where the knowledge resides, but there Myra has to learn to be a complete person in a way she never had to before...

...pause...

Then she was standing on the familiar yellow bluff again, the same impossibly coloured sky above her. She straightened and looked around. Below, in the folds of the valley, was the usual scattering of various grazing herdbeasts, and it suddenly occurred to her that they'd never ever gone down there to find out exactly what sort of animals they were.

Now it was too late, she had no time for satisfying idle curiosity, there were other, vastly more important matters to follow up and very little time to do it in.
What should she do now? Somehow it had seemed so straightforward, so definite when they'd discussed it, back there in... elsewhen...

'There's simply no point in just sitting around here waiting to die, Kelly. I just can't stomach many more doleful flower-bringers, let me go and try to do something about it. Even if I fail at least I'll have tried.'

Kelly had tried desperately to dissuade her, pointing out the dangers, asking what would happen if... if there wasn't anywhere to come back to. If she, Kelly, died. Laying there on the white hospital linen with tubes going into places she hated even thinking about Myra was certain that anything else had to be better. Anything.

In the end Kelly had given in, and they'd planned it together as far as they were able, as far as their common experience allowed. That wasn't much, they both realised it and instead concentrated on the elements that had seemed to work for them in the past, using the dolphin artefact to the limit of their common experience.

The transferral, for instance. It had been Kelly's idea to look for a way to modify the time gradient.

'As it is now I'd be dead before you'd been gone ten minutes, your time!' she said, and they'd pried and poked and experimented to find a way... a method of changing that aspect. It had proven so simple, so direct, like so many of the rulesets they'd already uncovered. Universal. Simply enter the alien artifact from the opposite side. They both hoped the unknowns she would encounter would prove as accommodating...

Now the girl stood on the wild yellow clifftop, her eyes catching the occasional hint of violet amongst the coarse yellow grasses. Flowers, she remembered. Tanu's flowers. Firmly she blocked off those memories and focused on what had to be done.

How had Kelly described it?

'It's as if your very thoughts are monitored, Myra. All I had to do was think coherently and things happened. Even subconscious wishes are acted on, so it takes a great degree of control to... to aim oneself, if that's how you describe it.'

Aim. OK, how do you do that, whoever-you-are in this place? I need to go... to find a way to save my sister's life. I need medical information relevant to a small girl in a hospital bed on Earth, wherever in the Universe that might be now...

Nothing happened. The strange coloured sky stayed as strange, the animals below didn't even lift their heads. Around her ankles she felt the coolness of the breeze that rippled the scrawny growth.

Aim. What do I need? Why won't it work... how can it work! I'm not Kelly, this thing wasn't given to me, I'm Myra, but I need help...

Already she felt the aching loss of the other girl. They'd done everything together, everything! She remembered now that it was always Kelly who had the pragmatic approach, the let's-try-it-and-see attitude that inevitably led to some action, even when she, Myra, objected. After all, there can only be one captain if the ship is to function.

Now the small black-haired girl felt lost. Suddenly the task of deciding on the right action was up to her alone, with no sensible sibling to curb her impetuosity. She knew she was impetuous, that she acted instinctively rather than logically, but it had never mattered before this instant. This time there was no backup, and if she didn't get it right there never would be, ever again.

Aim, Myra!

Desperately she lifted her head to the sky and tried to pierce the film of atmosphere. This sun, she now realised, was much smaller than that of Earth, and as a consequence the sky was darker with stars faintly visible even in the apparent daylight. She searched for evidence of a moon, but either they'd never come at the right time or there simply wasn't one. Probably the latter, she admitted to herself.

Her eyes watered as she stared, trying to focus on the nebulous points of light. Where was this place? The stars she could see made no recognisable pattern at all and they were... brighter, harder. As she looked upward the sky suddenly glittered and...

...pause...

...dissolved into a huge bony face half covered by a leather mask. Then she was falling between a tangle of impossibly long legs onto what seemed to be a floor of plastic, overlaid with a coarse weave carpet.

She shrieked in terror and fright as she landed and tried to grasp at the pseudo-carpet but instead found herself sliding down what was now a steeply tilted floor, between a veritable forest of leather clad shins. Each time she thought she had a grip the floor waltzed away from under her again, nearly returning her to where she'd started from.

When she stopped the howls of fright to catch her breath the screams continued outside her head, now emanating from other, bassier throats as the floor abruptly slamming upwards and sideways in a corkscrew motion. A ghastly hooting noise added itself to the cacophony and then she was pinned to the same odd floor with an enormous weight growing on her chest.

She couldn't even get enough breath to cry out, but dimly realised it was inertia pinning her down, her own weight was smearing her into the alien carpet, killing her slowly by suffocation.
With a slamming roar the weight disappeared, replaced with a sickening twisting no-gravity that gave her time to hurriedly gasp a breath and begin to scramble to her hands and knees.

Abruptly she was floating as the floor dropped away and then an arm reached out to snatch her out of mid-air, pulling her face down into the suffocating confines of a leather lap, there to be tightly held while what she now recognised to be some sort of craft continued with its fantastic manoeuvres.

She used the respite to take stock of herself, checking for damage. The huge arm that pinned her down did so firmly but without deliberate cruelty. Her face was pressed into the strangely smelling clothing and the rest of her body was sprawled across the immense... lap? It was difficult to think of any other term for it.

At least her personal world was relatively stable now that she wasn't being flung about like a rag doll, but around her the gyrations continued, with her... captor? ...adding his or her voice to the din. Myra could hear and feel the rumble of his voice... she decided on 'male' for no good reason she could muster, there was no evidence for it visible where she sat... in her ear, pressed up against his jerkin as it was.

She squirmed around, drawing up her legs and twisting to free her right breast where it had become caught against some cold, hard, metal object, finally assuming a near sitting position that gave her some sort of view of the interior of the craft. The restraining arm initially tightened when she began her movements, but relaxed just enough for her to make the adjustments.

Overhead were dim orange lights spaced regularly along the full length of the ceiling panels, giving her at last an appreciation of the size and nature of the conveyance. From where she sat near one end of the cabin she could see the other end some twenty meters away where the roof panels curved downwards. Every spare centimetre seemed to be packed with near-identical alien bodies, two rows of them facing each other and grasping various metal contrivances that she now guessed had to be weapons.

Weapons! Was this then a military craft?

Another look confirmed the impression. The scene reminded her of the old movies she'd seen of parachutists all lined up and ready to go when the green light came on. Surely this wouldn't be the same, surely all these... creatures... didn't intend to open a door somewhere and leap out? Then she saw the weapons again and decided that no military group would attempt anything like that with weapons held in their hands. If it really was a drop they'd be securely strapped on or about their person...

The overall impression she had of the aliens... for that's what she decided they had to be... was of wrinkled leather. They seemed humanoid, at least they had arms and legs and heads in the same general manner as humans, in spite of their size. Their faces had two eyes, a nose only partly visible behind the leather visors, peculiarly large ears that folded back against the head, and thin lips in long, gaunt looking faces, all brown and wrinkled like the leather they wore.

Briefly Myra wondered what they thought of her, a naked pink brown creature only an eighth their mass at best... She turned her head and looked towards the nearer end of the strange craft and gasped, for only an alien arms length away a half partition separated her from the cockpit, if that was the correct word to apply to the arrangement. Two more aliens sat in front of controls and instruments, while out through the quite small windows Myra could see streaks of cloud.

As she watched it was immediately plain that the pilots were desperately trying to control the craft, to prevent what must be a suicidal manoeuvre of some kind. They strained at controls that seemed to have no effect, even as the girl watched the clouds tore aside and she saw that they were hurtling towards a greybrown landscape, still far below but clearly the inevitable destiny of the doomed craft.

She gasped and froze in disbelief.

No! Her mind screamed. Don't let us crash! Kelly needs me, I can't die yet... Pull up, pull up!

Immediately there was a coldness in her mind, gripping, questioning, a frozen deja vu that went as quickly as it came. Then the efforts of the sweating pilots began to have some effect and she saw the browns and greys and some greens roll under the nose and the sudden weight increase pressed her down into the alien flesh. Around her the air rumbled with speech, all of it totally incomprehensible to her although it wasn't too hard to infer the content from the fear-laced tones. Clearly she had arrived at a bad time.

Wrong aim, she thought wryly, her earth-made humour coming to the rescue of her sanity. Surely there couldn't be anywhere less suited to finding the answer to her problem... As this thought flashed through her mind another instantly followed, filling her with a new horror.

She hadn't stopped to find out from Kelly how she got back!

Now ice gripped her heart. How could she be so stupid! How had Kelly managed it? She had no idea, all she remembered was that wherever the other girl went, so she followed...

Bitterly she reviewed her decisions since leaving her sister. In the shortest possible time she'd managed to get herself transported into a situation that promised to kill her at any moment, and not only was she unlikely to get help, but she couldn't get back, even to the situation she'd had before. There was no choice but to continue and see what came of her in this crazy world she'd gatecrashed.

Or was she really that stuck?
She closed her eyes and carefully visualised the clifftop of yellow grass, constructing it in her mind as carefully as she knew how, then tensed and...

...pause...

There was the merest flicker, a rainbow flash before her eyelids, then she was opening her eyes onto the same packed aircraft interior.

She stirred and felt the restraining alien arms move to counter the movement, holding her firmly on the somewhat bony lap. Around her the excited voices were drowned out now by the thunder of atmosphere against the outside the craft, and with a shock Myra recognised it as a new element, another strangeness piled on top of everything else.

Again her mind froze and coldly the truth crystallised in her brain. This wasn't an aircraft, it was a spacecraft!

The strange new frigid part of her mind confirmed this instantly, while yet another portion began the usual objections. She knew that if Kelly had suggested that she'd have been merciless in her ridicule, but now...

Whatever its nature, the vehicle was now slowing and dropping quite rapidly towards the forest below. They were nearly horizontal again in what on Earth she would have called a normal flight attitude, with the result that her view of the ground was now considerably restricted, but there was no doubt that the still sweating pilots were trying to land. It was plain from the sudden silence among the aliens ranked in the back that they too were aware of it, willing the ship down. Then there were trees flashing past the nose, g-forces abruptly forcing them downwards as the craft banked and turned tightly to come down at last with a remarkably small bump onto the planetary surface.

But what planet? Whose planet?

That had to be the vital question, Myra thought. Was it the homeworld of the aliens she saw around her?

'No' the cold part of her mind informed her. Not theirs? Then were they invaders? Refugees? Shipwrecked crewmen? It hardly seemed likely from the excessive number of weapons in evidence. If she was watching the TV or a movie back at home... she flinched at the thought of the probable distance between here and there... these characters would be part of a military landing force. Did this mean she was in a war zone...?

She looked nervously down the length of the cabin, wondering what was coming next. None of the aliens moved for a second or two, then one of the pilots turned and rumbled at the one holding Myra. Everyone else listened, she could feel the silence. Her captor seemed to consider a few moments longer, then barked an order.

At once the pilot turned to do something at his control panel and at the far end of the passenger area there was the hiss of machinery as the whole rear section lifted up and away. At the bark of more orders one whole row of soldiers grabbed their weapons and darted out onto this new world, quickly dispersing in several directions. At least Myra assumed they did, she couldn't actually see anything of them once they'd left the hull. All she could see was a patch of bare brown earth exactly like ground she'd seen on... Earth. She was going to have to watch her choice of words, she realised.

Then she felt her captor reaching around to unfasten his... belt? and she was unceremoniously dumped on the now empty seat opposite as the second row of soldiers raced out the rear aperture in single file, scattering exactly as the others had.

Myra picked herself up and rubbed her arm where the alien had last gripped her, looking around the now almost deserted cabin. The only occupants remaining apart from herself were the two pilots and a single soldier now crouched at the rear door, weapon in hand, obviously a guard.

What could she do now? Certainly she didn't intend to rush outside into someone else's war. If these... men were as unfamiliar with the planet as she was they could be expected to shoot at anything unfamiliar. She would, she was sure.

Carefully she stood up in the high padded seat and swung one bare leg over to the seat most recently occupied by her alien captor, for from there she could see down into the cockpit and the crewmen there.

Why had they stayed behind when everyone else seemed hell-bent on getting away from the ship as quickly as possible? Was there something wrong with the craft? Myra decided that would have to be the first thing to find out while the war games were conducted outside...

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