CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Career
PART ONE…Immortality Sucks …
Brushing his hands together, Knives stood before the fresh-dug little grave and frowned. He hated to lose.
The little granules of dust and sand stuck to his fingers and palms and would not rub away; the birth-fluids had become sticky and acted as glue with the grime. Poor little female cat was born with a limp and a bad hip, and the deformity made her pregnancy so trying. The thing had struggled in labor for days before Knives returned from the plant buildings, and when he found her he had cut her open to save at least the kittens. Sadly, the cat and all five unborn kittens were now cold in the ground.
Each newborn kitten usually gave him a spark of hope. Perhaps there would be a new Nuisance among them, to be his companion as the legendary cat had. All these seasons of cats in heat, and no companion had come since.
With neither haste nor boredom, he sauntered straight back to his cart and unloaded a few barrels. Storing them in the shed beside the vast cat barn, he retired for the night into his shack, to note the day's events in his records.
Knives, over the years, had become much more than the sole plant manager for Gunsmoke. He knew more about feline anatomy and medicine than perhaps any other creature had ever known. So many cats lived that he had to build several large barns around his compound.
In such a harsh climate, the only source of cat food was plant-provided, and he had learned to tweak a plant output for a high-protein feed once the tins of meats were far too scarce and deeply buried in sands to find. Cats were the second species he kept alive on Gunsmoke, and rather than keep their log on the compound computers, he jotted their lineages and health incidents into paper journals. The plant computers measured time, but it seemed too ridiculous to reference that. After all, what is time in a plant compound? No, it was far more logical to count in cat seasons, converted to Gunsmoke years, converted to Earth years.
To track the months, the years, he kept a concise reference in an index volume, upon each page the summaries of three full Earth years. The journals it summarized were all stacked neatly onto a shelving unit that covered an entire wall of his shack.
Knives washed his hands in a low basin and took a stick of graphite to write in the open journal. He copied the series of numbers from the ear tag he had cut away from the dead cat and noted the number and sex of the young. Closing his eyes, he recalled that view of the cat graveyard, expansive and hidden, with no markers save for Nuisance's, near his shack. It had been so long since Nuisance's bright face had stared into his own. Nuisance didn't notice those years leaving her little body as she grew old and pathetic. Nuisance didn't care about Callisto's absence. Nuisance didn't mind filling a tiny bit of the void Callisto left within him.
And how long had it been? What day, so long ago, had he found Nuisance mewing in the silent plant complex, trotting after him loyally as he ran through the place?
Knives retrieved his index journal and flipped nearly half way into the volume. Just a bit of math. Carry the one…
Approximately 96 years, 2 months, 3 weeks Earth time.
OXO
On Earth itself, his brother was meditating to forget the years. Vash's hands, one real, one an amazingly real prosthetic, were busy changing the medicine patches on Meryl's thin arm.
She smiled up into his face with closed eyes, waiting for him to finish. "I'd like you to hold me," she noted softly, as she had on a daily basis for far too long to count.
He hugged her from tightly, but careful not to stress her little body. "I like to," he replied in a whisper. Any louder and she would've noticed how tight his throat was, choking back tears again. God, the man could cry.
But he wasn't depressed, really. Vash managed to channel his emotions into happiness, for he had little to be sad about. She wasn't feeling pain, and neither was he. There was nothing to regret. He and Meryl had been together for so long, and though they argued a lot, they had squeezed an awful lot of living into these years.
And though things could have been better between she and Tessla, the conflict was to be expected. Tessla didn't want to be born immortal, but was coping beautifully. All the moving and lying were tiring, and she hated not getting credit for her inventions, but she'd adapted well enough.
If only Meryl weren't so stubborn with her ethics. Immortals can't always live by mortal morals. If Tessla wanted to have a new man every week, and was able to avoid falling in love by doing it, then Vash saw no greater harm. Millie hadn't understood, but never judged. But Millie had died seventy years ago, killed by a mugger. Tessla used to mourn the death as that of her true, understanding mother, and Meryl was always bitter that she couldn't have held that position in the plant girl's life.
But no matter. The two were on very gentle terms nowadays. Tessla and Vash both felt that Meryl hadn't much time left, and such quarrels meant nothing in the face of mortality.