Devil’s Catvocate (Alistair)

The man was black. Balding. Young. Dressed business-preppy. Talked with an out-of-town accent. And received bonus points for speaking respectfully to the little cat, but not the maximum number. For that, he would have had to address the feline as Mister Cat.

The white tomcat with his black spots here and there stood, and stretched lazily. A light vertical jump brought him to the thin top of the bench’s back; a few velvet pawed steps brought him to a perch just shy of the man’s shoulder. He peered down, tail hanging long behind him.

The man was impressing no one with his fast page flipping. No cat, in any case. Calley recognized the cover, though not what language this particular copy was in. Sophie’s World? He was vaguely familiar with it. A girl whose dorm room he had once purred his way into had been reading it for some class or another. He seemed to recall a line from an early chapter.

Lazily, the little cat licked at its shoulder. Its fur soaked in the sunlight. Its tail gave another flick.

“Who are you?” It asked, pausing only momentarily between its tongue strokes. Its baby blue eyes looked at the shoulder it was grooming, not the man. “Where does goodness come from?” This being a more pressing question in his mind, then such trivial matters as ‘the world’.

>> “Since there was no way for you to know that I am not one to scare easily or be faced by shapeshifters, you were just rather rude to me. Therefore the answer to your first question would for the moment be ‘none of your business,’ and for the other one you will have to settle for the short version of my views on the subject, which is simply ‘I can’t tell you.’”

The little cat moved downwards, in well-practiced tongue strokes, from shoulder to chest, as the man replied to his questions with his own brand of rudeness. That simply would not do. A cat has full rights to be rude; it is a cat. A human? My, how rude. It lifted one forepaw, and began to give proper attention to its underarm as it replied.

“What a quaint and curious assumption of reality, Alice. A shape shifter, you say? A shape shifter, indeed. Since you did not ask what I am, I shall not tell; I will, however, grace you with a few humble suggestions.”

Leaving his fur to dry, he fell fluidly from bench top to seat, landing lightly on two paws, then four. “To begin with the first case, one need not be a shifter to be a cat—I may, of course, be a body snatcher, switcher, possessor, possessee, or controller. These five are distinct, mind you.”

“In the sixth,” here the cat paused a moment to hold perfectly still, watching as a pigeon came to an unwise roost near their bench. (His bench, really; he was beneficently loaning a corner of it to the man.) It caught sight of his rapidly dilating pupils: somewhere at the root of its mind, survival instincts far more intelligent than it kicked in. A cooing fluff of feathers burst back into the sky: the cat slipped back into his speech. “One need not be a cat at all, if one is only concerned with a cat’s appearance. I could easily be an illusionist, an illusion, an astral projection, a projection of form, a projection of mind, a projection of dream, a twist in reality’s normal seeming, an atypical assumption of light’s refractive properties, or a ghost. Again: those were distinct, mind.”

“To speak of case fifteen, I need few words: insanity, Sir. Consider it.” The cat stretched himself across the bench anew, reclaiming the sunbeam he’d been in when the man had first got the grave gumption to gravitate towards his location.

“Case sixteen, of course, is a close to my heart: sometimes a cat, Watson, is merely a cat.” Not to imply there was anything ‘mere’ about him: anyone could clearly tell that his whiskers held a particularly fine taper, that his artfully long tail was of a well-breed length, and that his fur was diligently maintained in proper condition.

“My next questions for you, then, are these: Who is it that told you a cat cannot speak, and why ever did you believe them?” Baby blue eyes blinked towards a content, half-lidded state. Oh, le Autumn sun! Thou art so tenderly warm, upon a basking cat’s rearwards-side.

The little cat’s black-tipped tail curled, straightened, curled. His baby blue eyes blinked lazily as he lounged.

What a singularly uninteresting man. It had taken him two hundred and fourteen words over seven long sentences to say he had been wrong when—as anyone familiar with cats knows—that point had never been up for debate. A cat, after all, is always right. Even when it escapes outside in the middle of a blizzard: it is right. When it cries to come back in, and huddles pitifully against the side of the house: it is right. When it suspiciously appraises that backwards stranger in the hallway mirror: it is right. When it is wrong: it is right. Contradictions were for lesser animals than cats.

The man did not seem inclined to continue their conversation—his still-open book spoke more eloquently than his dry words. Having properly noted this... the cat keep talking. (Not to be confused with tirading: as before, the cat’s tone held nothing particularly angry. More declarative, really.)

“Apology accepted,” the cat said. It rolled onto its back, so as to more properly offer its tummy into the tender caresses of the sun. “Well then. Toasters have souls. Believe, or disbelieve?”

One of its paws twitched happily in the air; whether this was of its voluntary control or not was up for debate. “Personally, I believe. That a simple collection of mechanical parts has come together to create something with an entirely new function and purpose suggests, likewise, the creation of something larger than their mere sum—a soul, as it were.” Not, of course, to say that he actually believed. That would be like saying he believed in the human soul.

Believing in the human soul was a subject that made his hind legs twitch to scratching at his ears; after all, that raised the question of an immortal soul. An immortal soul raised several other questions. Including, of course, one he had started with—that of ‘goodness’. He was fairly certain his own collection of parts summed to something non-positive, on the moral scale.

The cat’s paw kept twitching in the air, it tilted its head back until its ears flattened between skull and bench, and looked at the man from below the shadow of its white chin.

“Naturally, I shall construct my definition thusly: ‘a soul is that indefinable thing which makes a thing into a something; that anything that may be nothing; yet it exists, unless it does not.’ “

The man’s mistake, of course, was in qualifying his statement: ‘if you’re really interested in what I believe’. Heh. Did he forget, perchance, to which species it was he spoke?

“And your definition, Sir? To make sure we are on the same page, mind.”

A light purr drifted from his chest. The influence of the sun, no doubt.