Notes: What follows are the adventures and observations of the ginger polydactyl cat who made his appearance in episode 1.08, "Fated." Sadly, his time on screen was all too brief (just a few seconds), but I like to think he played a larger role offscreen before his untimely demise.
I owe this story to two great inspirations: the classic I Am A Cat by Natsume Soseki, whose example I shall try to follow; and the Le Chat Qui Rit self-service restaurant in Venice, whose tiramisu has yet to be surpassed in my experience. It is in the latter's honor that I have titled this fic, which if I'm not mistaken can be translated to "The Laughing Cat" or "The Cat Who Laughed".
Le Chat Qui Rit
"Let me try to frame it another way," said Michel, and he moved toward the chest on the far side of the room and gave it a pat.
"I'll bite," said the Queen. "What's in the chest?"
"Ah," said Michel. "That's just the thing. Until we open it up, we can't be sure what we'll find inside. When I closed this chest, it had in it: one live cat; and one glass vial filled with a noxious gas. Now, until I open the lid, one of two possibilities may have taken place: Either, the cat has not broken the vial and it still lives; or, it has, and it has breathed of the toxic fumes and expired. There is simply no way to tell which is the case unless we open the chest, so until we have seen with our own eyes what has become of the vial and the cat, it is as though neither occurrence has yet come to pass, and also that both occurrences exist simultaneously. We could, in a manner of speaking, say that while the lid remains closed, the vial is both whole and broken, the cat, both dead and alive."
"What a horrible experiment!" said the Queen, taking a step back. "Do you really have a cat and a vial of poison gas in there?"
Michel seemed taken aback by her taken abackedness. Perhaps because the Queen had shown far fewer scruples when it came to exposing birds and human beings to toxic fumes and other equally lethal things in the past.
But, in fact, her reaction was far more reasonable than he made it seem. A bird may be pretty and sing, but it is ultimately a very useless thing, more of a nuisance than its worth; and the same could be said of many a human being, who are easily replaced. But a cat is a catcher of all sorts of vermin, and a good catcher is born to it. He cannot be hired or trained. And the castle had been enjoying a rather good run of it lately, in terms of its rodent population.
"I do, Your Grace—but I assure you it wasn't intentional," Michel said quickly, eager to recover lost ground. "The cat jumped into the chest with the vial already in it, entirely of its own accord. I only realized they were in there together after I had shut the lid of the chest, when I remembered seeing a mass of ginger fur inside. Well, by then, you understand, it was too late. If I opened the lid straight-away and the vial happened to be newly broken, I risked inhaling the contents myself."
"I see. So you were too afraid to risk a possibility that may or may not yet have happened to assess whether the cat could be saved."
"Begging your pardon, Your Grace, but whether the cat has broken the vial or not is beside the point," said Michel, which surely meant he could not deny the Queen had him pegged. "I only brought up the example to better explain the nature of prophecy. While an event has not yet happened, all the possibilities remain equally viable; but as decisions are made and actions taken, some of those possibilities are shed until all we are left with is the one that will eventually become reality. Unless we could observe all those incremental decisions and actions in between, with an omniscient perspective akin to God's, our picture of the final outcome will never be perfectly clear until the very moment of its fruition."
"Are you trying to tell me prophecy only works after what it 'foretells' has come to pass?" said the Queen with a wry grin.
It was the kind of grin an executioner wears when he's about to take your head, which is only another one of many reasons an executioner must hide his face. "What use are you, Nostradamus," she said, "if you can only read the future after it has already happened?"
But he insisted, "It's more complicated than that. Prophecy is not an exact science, Your Grace. Sometimes the visions are clear. And, yes, sometimes the full weight and nuance of all their meaning can only be properly interpreted in hindsight. But is it not better to err on the side of caution and heed the warning in the possibilities lest we allow some tragedy that was entirely preventable to run its course?"
"Well?" said the Queen impatiently. "Which is it, Nostradamus? Is the cat dead or alive? Thanks to you, I shall not be at ease until I know!"
Michel lifted the lid of the chest, and sunlight came streaming into my little sanctuary. I suppose I should have been grateful that I now had an exit (I can assure you, I had not chosen the chest as my napping-place because I thought someone would shut me up in it, but that's the nature of prophecy for you); but as it was, I was still rather comfortable where I was and didn't want to open my eyes just yet, present company be damned.
The Queen sucked in a breath—which, given the circumstances, probably wasn't wise. "The vial. It's broken."
Beside her, Michel sighed deeply. "I was rather fond of that one."
Though I would have loved for them to keep belaboring under the assumption that they had killed me, I couldn't help myself any longer. I yawned. And, one thing leading to another, yawning naturally progressed to stretching my front legs and all fourteen toes, and by then my back legs demanded equal treatment. So, since I was already up, I decided I had better make myself scarce before Michel could devise any further experiments to unintentionally subject me to, and find some other quiet place to finish my nap.
"Well, there you have it," I heard the Queen say as I made my exit. "As you said, Nostradamus, both states were simultaneously true. The vial was broken, and the cat is alive. How do you interpret that backwards prophecy?"
"I suppose I confused the vials," said one relieved Michel. "It must not have contained any poison after all."
But the joke was on them. The problem was not with the vial. The problem was with the cat.