Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.
“It could be that there are facts for one observer, and facts for another; they need not mesh.”
“Quantum Paradox Points to Shaky Foundations of Reality,” Science, 2020.
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Back when I was a kitten, existing inside a hypothetical box a scientist had trapped me in, one where I might be dead or alive, from here or there, pansexual or not, I was definitely a fan of The Guest Cat, an audiobook that the young scientist, Soni, played at 2x speed while she worked outside my box, tracking waves and particles flashing above us overhead, like a planetarium show, muttering incompletely about radioactive decay and funding competitions to herself, and to invisible colleagues on her phone. She never failed to reward me with fish once I mastered the various tests she put me through, and she half-taught me to be half-literate in English so, even though I ached to feel like a full-feline, I didn’t complain.
One blessed bisected day, after I had successfully distinguished a smell that Soni called “woke” from a smell she called “maga,” and was still relishing the saltwater taste of the herring Soni had bestowed, I could tell something big was going to happen because she turned the audiobook off. Soni opened my cage and said, “Meet Ginger.” I cat-stepped out, and saw another halved-kitten, bristly like a pine-forest, and yet flickering in and out of existence just like me.
“Hello, my name is Aadi, and I use ‘they/them’ pronouns,” mumble-hissed the kitten that Soni kept calling Ginger, or at least, that’s what I heard, filling the blanks between the elisions.
A new part-friend. Blissful. Aadi Cheshire-cat grinned at me from inside their catbox, which was outfitted with some mighty fine scratch posts. The scientists who fed us and cared for us did not know how to groom us. How could they, poor things? We were always flickering and hissing, like static. That warm, sunny afternoon, when I caught sight of Aadi, I was sure their fur would look better if someone else with a tongue that was neither here nor there licked them all over. I tried to suggest this with my half-here half-there glance when I caught them half-looking half-hither at me. After that incident, we could both feel the slow burn.
Please don’t ever break out of this cage, for your sake, for all our sakes, Soni had once said. Now, she said: Schroedinger’s Kitten, if you ever touch Ginger, a new civil war will be upon us.
I fractionally purred under her strokes, the kipper half-alive and half-dead in my belly. What’s war? I mewled. War is a million kittens being strung out, their guts turned into cat’s cradles, she said, but I didn’t get it. At least tell me why you’ve kept me here, I said.
I don’t expect you to understand, but we’re studying polarization in the world, she said. I decided it was half-time, and so I fully butted her finger, but gently, so she wouldn’t get suspicious.
I shouldn’t tell you this, but tomorrow they are going to put a photo of you on social media, she said. Please try and look cute. It’s our last attempt to get funding. Purr, I said, unaware.
As she left the lab, I was already biding my time.
When the scientists were gone, the boxes were kept hooded. But if I thrashed, the black burlap cover would fall. I mewled at Aadi, a sudden fire sparking in my velvet toe-pads and then unspooling upwards, like a nice, stringy piece of fish-gut.
Silence.
Then, a thrumming mewl back.
Hello.
The parts of me that were in this plane of existence rubbed up against the sides of the box. So did the parts of them, unhooded. The working day passed in this way: pure, aching agony.
Then, full moon night. The hot bright light streaming into the lab, where we were the sole subjects, allowed us to gaze into each other’s eye-puzzles. Was that adoration I partly-saw glimmering over there, behind the box’s glittering walls?
I moderated a hairball, pulled from the whitish hairs on my belly, and, even-steven, projectile-vomited it over to them, a tasty love-gift. They half-nuzzled it and half-feigned disinterest, just as I had known they would.
The next morning, my chance came. Soni left my box unlocked while feeding Aadi. She must have thought she’d locked it after taking the phone-call that suddenly interrupted the audio-book. The Guest Cat was playing at top speed, the part about how to lament means both to sorrow and to resent in Japanese. Do you like this story? I mewled, while freeing myself of the box, dying to rub myself against Aadi.
Who cares? said Aadi. All I want is to be a fully black cat.
Turns out that infernal Soni was watching us from a camera in the interferometer. Her voice flicker-flooded into the room. “Schroedinger’s Kitten, get back in the box, now! You have three seconds before the poison flask explodes.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but I didn’t care. I was so close to the loves of my lives. For Aadi smelled like both here and there. They smelled like an intact fish-gut, muscular, yet delicate. All of Soni’s brainwashing fell away from me as gracefully as a cat falling out of a window. Reader, I rubbed up against them. Licking them felt like licking an ending and a beginning.
And then, Soni scorched me. The flask exploded, the poison spilled. I lapped it up and didn’t lap it up. But not before I saw what had happened when Aadi and I touched: The whole lab was awash in black and white, like one of the old movies Soni once showed me. And Aadi? Aadi was black, fully black.
Now, I am gone from the human plane. Forever, I’ll miss my almost-love. Now I know what war is, for my insides feel like a million kitten-guts strung out over the stars like decaying cradles.