The Nine Lives of Catseye Gomez Read online

  The

  Nine Lives of

  Catseye Gomez

  Simon Hawke

  Copyright © 1992

  Content

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Dedication

  With a fond tip of the fedora, this one is dedicated to The Master, Mickey Spillane, and his immortal creation, Mike Hammer. Some things never change. And some things never should.

  One

  JUST when you think you've got the whole game knocked and are ready to settle back for the sweet ride of comfort and security, life comes along and deals you a hand you wouldn't bet on in a game of penny ante with a bunch of Cub Scouts. I guess I should've known better. An old trooper like me should be used to it by now. I've had more ups and downs than a yo-yo in the hands of a hyperactive ten-year-old, but I guess even old troopers get complacent.

  See, the secret to dealing with the curve balls life has a tendency to throw at you is to roll with the punches and always land on your feet. I'm good at that. You might say it's an inbred talent. Name's Gomez. I'm a cat. A thaumagenetic feline, if you want to get precise about it. That means I'm no ordinary cat, which by now I guess you might have gathered. What I am is a product of thaumagenetic engineering, a marriage of sorcery and science, and that means I'm a few giant steps removed from my ordinary feline cousins.

  Don't get me wrong, when I say "ordinary," I don't mean it as a put-down. I get along just fine with my ordinary cousins-most of them anyway-but the fact is that so-called ordinary cats still basically look and act pretty much the way Nature had intended. Me, I'm a whole different ball of wax. I'm a whole lot smarter. I can talk and I can read, and that ain't bragging, brother, it's just the way my brain was engineered. Don't ask about the details-I'm no scientist, and I'm certainly no sorcerer, though I know a lot more about sorcery than science, mainly because I've lived with an adept. It's an interesting story, and one that's probably worth telling.

  See, back in the old days, what they refer to now as "the pre-Collapse period," science and technology were pretty much the basis for reality. Nobody believed in magic. Nobody worth taking seriously, anyway. There have always been people who've believed in all sorts of crazy nonsense, from UFOs to dead celebrities hanging out at the local 7-Eleven, and back then, anyone who seriously believed in magic was either given a nice rubber room to play in or featured in the supermarket tabloids. However, all that changed, and rather dramatically too, when the clock finally ran out on them and the world was plunged into the Collapse.

  You've studied about it in school and you've heard the stories from the old folks who still remember it. It was pretty ugly. Back then, people had believed there was no such thing as a limit to growth. They were always robbing Peter to pay Paul, living on borrowed time and handing down their problems to the next generation. Now, you can only do that sort of thing for so long before it comes time to pay the piper. Well, the time came, and they paid. They paid big-time.

  See, they'd finally managed to use up most of their natural resources, and what they hadn't used up, they'd poisoned. No more fossil fuels. The wells ran dry. The air wasn't fit to breathe. The water wasn't fit to drink. The overpopulated urban centers were choking on their own garbage and drowning in their own effluvium. Yeah, not a pretty image. Environmental disaster never is, especially when it happens on a global scale.

  The warning signs had all been there, and they'd been around for years, only nobody paid attention. Greed, power politics, venality, corruption, all those sterling traits of human nature that often make me wonder why the cockroach isn't the dominant species on Earth today led to the disaster now known as the Collapse. It all finally fell apart. The doomsayers had been proven right, but they probably took little comfort in the accuracy of their foresight.

  Like I said, it got pretty ugly for a while. Governments collapsed, economies collapsed, law and order collapsed.... I guess that's why they called it the Collapse. The darkened cities became free-fire zones. The outlying areas became a no-man's-land of guerilla warfare among small and well-armed enclaves. It was everybody's favorite postholocaust scenario, except that it never took a holocaust to bring it about. The real miracle was that nobody freaked out and pushed the button, but then, they'd already trashed the world almost to the point of oblivion and were probably desperate to save what little they had left. Saner minds prevailed, though sanity was an extremely relative term in those days. (And in many ways, it still is, but that's another story.)

  The Collapse had plunged the world into a modern dark age, where the machinery all stopped and mankind's feral instincts took over. It wasn't very pretty. And then something happened that no one had expected, something that came from so far out of left field it took decades before the public consciousness could even deal with it. Magic was reborn.

  Actually, to be precise, it had never really died. It had simply been forgotten. What little history of magic use remained had long since been relegated to myth and folklore. Even today, most people don't know what it's really all about... and if they did, they'd lose their cookies.

  Tom Malory set it all down in his book, The Wizard of Camelot, or most of it, anyway. There were certain things he had held back, but only because he would have caused a panic if he'd told the whole truth and nothing but. This isn't the original Tom Malory, you understand, the one who wrote Le Morte d'Arthur, in which he set down the legend of King Arthur for posterity. This was his namesake, and no relation, a guy who'd been a soldier in the British army and an urban Strike Force cop in London during the Collapse. What happened to that Malory has become widespread public knowledge. He wrote about it afterward and retired a rich man, but for the record, he was right there, from the beginning, when magic came back into the world.

  He'd moved his family out of London, to the countryside, where it was somewhat safer, but life was still no picnic. They were living hand to mouth, just barely getting by, and his kids were freezing in the biting cold of the English winter. No fuel available. There was some coal and there was wood, but it was a seller's market, and Malory could not afford the going rate. What was the poor guy going to do, watch as his wife and kids died of pneumonia? No, of course not. He did what any self-respecting man would do when caught in such a situation. He went out to steal what he could.

  Not far from where he lived, there was a small forest preserve, one of the few wooded areas left standing in that defoliated world. It was surrounded by tall fencing and barbed wire, patrolled by well-armed guards, and the grounds inside the enclosure had been mined. But Malory was a desperate man, and he'd had commando training. He managed to break in, with an ax. The way he tells it, he wasn't really sane at the time. He'd passed the breaking point. He didn't think that the most he could carry was a measly armload, assuming he didn't get caught while he was chopping wood in a protected national preserve, and it was hardly worth the risk. It certainly never occurred to him that what he'd done was about to change the world. He just broke in there, desperate and feverish, and went a short ways in, so that he'd be out of sight of the perimeter, and what he came across was the biggest grandaddy of an oak tree he had ever seen.

  What happened after that is legend now. He looked at this huge tree, miraculously left standing after all those years of people chopping down everything in sight, stared at it, at this leviathan that could keep his family warm for months, maybe even years, and he just went crazy. He screamed and attacked it with his ax, but all he ever got in was ju
st that one first blow, because the moment the ax had struck the tree, a bolt of lightning came down from the thunderclouds roiling overhead and split the oak right down the middle. And standing there, right smack in the center of the split, was Merlin, the legendary wizard to King Arthur.

  Turns out it wasn't a legend, after all. For two thousand some odd years, after the sorceress Morgan le Fay had tricked him and entombed him in that living oak, protected by a spell, Merlin Ambrosius had slept in some kind of enchanted, suspended animation, dreaming the events that took place in the world outside. It wasn't Tom Malory who broke the spell; he just happened to be there when the enchantment ran its course and Merlin was released. But he was there, at Merlin's side, when the Second Thaumaturgic Age began and the world was dragged kicking and screaming out of the Collapse and into a magical new dawn.

  All this happened many years before I was born, of course, and I wouldn't be the cat I am today if Merlin hadn't brought back magic to the world and founded schools of thaumaturgy that would teach the old forgotten arts to his new pupils. The twenty-third-century world of today has come a long way from the Collapse. The union of magic and technology has brought about a kinder, gentler world in many ways. Thaumaturgy is a nonpolluting resource, and so the air is clean now, even in the cities. Cracked and buckled pavement has been replaced by grassy causeways, since vehicles that operate by magic skim above the surface and have no need of asphalt roads. Acid rain is something that's just read about in history books now, and magic properly applied by reclamation engineers has cleaned up landfills and toxic-waste dumps and brought new meaning to the term biodegradable.

  Graduate schools of thaumaturgy turn out new adepts each year, of varying levels of talent and achievement, from lower-grade adept up through the ranks to wizard, sorcerer, and mage. Your basic lower-grade adept is usually someone with just enough talent to master a few fairly undemanding spells, such as levitation and impulsion, which are used to drive taxicabs and trucks. A wizard can do considerably more, such as maintaining the spells that allow power plants to stay on line, and certification as a sorcerer opens up the corporate world to the adept, with a career and lifestyle right up at the top of the social pecking order. Nothing like living high and skimming off the cream. But not all sorcerers opt for the business world. Some go into the fields of art and entertainment, and that's where I come in.

  One of the most respected positions in the world of art is occupied by the thaumagenetic engineer adept, part scientist, part sorcerer, who specializes in creating hybridized new life forms for the enrichment of your private life. A thaumagene is the ultimate form of pet these days. You can go out and get yourself a snat, a cute and furry little creature that's a magical hybrid of a snail and cat. It's soft and cuddly, and it purrs and vibrates and clings to walls and ceilings. Silly things, but they're very big with single women. Or you can get yourself a paragriffin, a hybrid of a parrot and a miniature lion, or perhaps a leopard. It flies and talks, and you can teach it songs. Or, if that's not to your taste, you can get a dobra, a hybrid of a cobra and a dog, and you'll have something spectacularly ugly that you can take for walks out in the park, and pity the poor burglar who tries to break into your home. If you've really got the scratch, you can get yourself a living sculpture, something crafted out of precious stones and metals, then magically animated. Just the thing for the coffee table or the breakfast nook. Me, I'm at the low end of the scale, and I make no bones about it. I'm your basic thaumagene, economy-class model, one of the two traditional categories of pet. You got your dogs, and you got your cats. Look normal, act pretty much like they're supposed to, only with highly developed brains and the capacity to speak and reason. We're the most inexpensive kind of thaumagene, and, consequently, there's more of us around.

  Personally, I like the way I am. I'd rather look like an ordinary cat than like some high-toned piece of living art. I'm not pretentious, just your basic milk and kibbles kind of guy. Black, with white markings on my face and paws. I've got one distinguishing characteristic, though, and that's Betsy, my magic Chinese turquoise eyeball. See, I never had what you might call a normal sort of life, normal for a thaumagene, at any rate. Back when I was still a kitten, even then, I had my pride. Sitting in a window of a thaumagene shop, mewing and pawing at the glass each time some skirt came by to take a peek and mutter, "Oh, how cute"-no, sir, not my style. I wanted out. And so I slipped the lock on my little cubicle one night and struck out on my own. Guess I've always been the independent type.

  Those were lean and hungry days. Living by my wits in the alleys and back streets of Sante Fe, New Mexico, scratching and clawing for survival, eating out of garbage cans and dumpsters, sleeping in basement window wells and thrown-out cardboard boxes, it wasn't easy, I can tell you that. But it was freedom, Jack, and I loved the sweet and heady taste of it. I never knew the pampered life, and I guess that made me what I am today. I had my share of scraps, some of which I won and some of which I lost, but as I grew older and leaner and meaner, the losses came less frequently. It was in one of those scraps in which I barely squeaked through by the skin of my tail that I lost my eye. Ran into a dog that wanted what I'd scored for dinner. I was hungry and I didn't want to share. Well, turned out the dog was a coyote, and by the time he decided I was more trouble than I was worth, I'd gotten chewed up pretty bad. Scratch one eyeball. Hurt like hell, but I had the satisfaction of not backing down. Stupid? Maybe, but you back down once, you'll back down twice, and it can get to be a habit. I've got enough bad habits as it is.

  Enter Paulie. Professor Paul Ramirez was his full name, and he was Dean of the College of Sorcerers at the university. He found me in the street, where I'd collapsed, too tired and too weak and too full of pain to move another step. He picked me up and took me home with him, and I was so messed up, I didn't have the strength to argue. He nursed me back to health and, when I got better, took me to a thaumagenetic vet. I could've had a brand-new eyeball, cloned and grown in a vat, but Paul was not a rich man, despite being a sorcerer. He was a teacher, and teachers do it for the love of teaching. It sure as hell ain't for the money. The best he could do for me was a prosthetic eyeball, made of turquoise. It was a stone he'd had around, intending to get it made into a ring someday, but he gave it to the vet, who cut it and set it nicely in my eye socket.

  Frankly, I liked it a lot better than some fancy, cut-glass eye. It's a Chinese turquoise, of a beautiful, robin's-egg-blue shade, with a fine, vertical matrix running through it that almost resembles a feline pupil. I thought it gave me character, and the other felines in the neighborhood agreed. A foxy, little alabaster Persian by the name of Snowball dubbed me Catseye, and the handle stuck. Catseye Gomez I became, unregenerate hardcase and all-around troubleshooter.

  I never did become a pet. Paulie was an all-right guy, but I was just too damned set in my ways to change. You want some servile creature that gets all excited when you come walking through the door, rubs up against your legs and has an orgasm when you stroke it, go get yourself a poodle, man, that ain't my thing. But Paulie understood that. We were both loners, in our way, and we just sort of took up with each other, both of us coming and going pretty much the way we pleased. Paulie had his career, I had my wandering ways.

  Every now and then, Paulie'd have a bunch of students from the college over for some Java and late-night conversation. One time, one of them left behind a book. Something he'd been reading for a pre-Collapse literature class. I found it on the floor. The ability to read had been bred into me, but up to then, all I'd ever read were labels on greasy, thrown-out cans of tuna I'd picked out of the garbage, and the oil soaked newspapers fish heads were wrapped in. This was something new. I read the tide. I, the Jury, by some guy named Spillane.

  It was a tale about a private eye named Hammer. Mike Hammer. Tough guy who packed a .45 and took no crap from anybody. Once I'd started it, I couldn't stop till I had read it all. This Hammer was a guy after my own heart, an hombre I could really understand. It was like
coming home. This guy Spillane knew about the hard life. He knew the streets and alleys, the shadows where the lizards lurk, the baser side of human nature-of all nature, for that matter- and the never-give-an-inch attitude it takes to make it through the cold, dark night. Man, I was hooked.

  When Paulie got home, all I could talk about was this guy Spillane, and the stories he told about Mike Hammer, and I wanted more. Paulie'd never heard of him, but he found that kid's professor and asked him about this writer named Spillane. It wasn't easy, and it took a lot of searching through the antique bookshops of the city, but Paulie eventually brought home everything this guy Spillane had ever written. My Gun Is Quick. Vengeance Is Mine. One Lonely Night and The Big Kill and Kiss Me Deadly and the rest of them. Man, this guy could write. It was as if he knew all about the kind of life I'd led, only Mike Hammer was a human, not a cat. Not much difference beyond that, though. Give either of us any shit and we'd rip your throat right out.

  I got through all the Spillane books, and Paulie found me more. He brought home books by Ross MacDonald, stories about a private eye by the name of Lew Archer, maybe not as tough as Hammer, but just as uncompromising in his way. That led to Raymond Chandler and his hero, Phil Marlowe, and then to Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade and the Continental Op. Maybe things were different back in the days they wrote those books, but I realized one thing. Not all humans were the same. Some were just like me. Tough and feral creatures of the night, hard-bitten scrappers who fought the good fight, grabbed life by the throat and shook it, wringing out each precious drop of blood and letting its hot fire flow coursing through their veins. I would've understood those guys, and I would've been proud to know them. And in some ways, Paulie was like that, only a lot more civilized.

  I found that out the way I've learned everything else. The hard way. You'll remember when I said that if most people knew what magic was really all about, they'd lose their cookies? Well, here's how I found out.