(urth) Short Story 110: The Cat

[Marc Aramini]

“The Cat” first appeared in the 1983 World Fantasy Convention program book
and is reprinted in *Endangered Species*.

SUMMARY:

In the fifth year of Severian’s reign, Odilo, who encountered Severian near
the antechamber in *Claw of the Conciliator *and later serves as steward
under him, listens to stories being told by cooks and servants on
Hallowmass Eve (called “the full of the Spading Moon”) as he goes to the
kitchen to eat, kicking the chief cook out of his seat. Odilo’s father was
the same age as the Chatelaine Sancha, whom he then recalls as he thinks of
a story to write down for posterity, inspired by the scary Halloween tales
of the kitchen.

He describes Inire's proclivity for the young, and says no doubt that
Sancha's maturity at a young age attracted him. Inire speaks to children he
does not know, and “if her face and her answers please him, he may pause in
the conduct of great affairs to tell her some tale of the worlds beyond
Dis” which the child will forget at adulthood. If he has no time, Inire
will give the child a toy, which women, children, and wise men “call
magical.” If Inire comes upon the child a second time and the toy is
displayed as whole, and if, in lieu of a second toy, the child requests a
story from Inire, they will become his “particular friend and pupil for so
long as she – or more rarely he – may live.”

Sancha becomes his friend when she is seven years old, and Odilo's father
sees them walking together with her cat in her arms. He takes her to his
specula, where beings can be materialized from ethereal waves or
“circumfused to the border of Briah.” Sancha tosses her cat into the circle
of mirrors. The cat disappears. Inire promises to recover the cat, and soon
rumors that Sancha is attended by “some fey thing” start. Things are broken
and the bodies of sparrows presented to her. A scandal instigated by
Sancha's mistress, the Chatelaine Leocadia, between the nearly thirty year
old Lomer and the fourteen year old Sancha ruins her reputation and gets
him sentenced to death, but his mistress, the Chatelaine Nympha, intercedes
on his behalf. Sancha becomes a Chatelaine when her father wills her an
estate in the south and she disappears for 50 years from the House
Absolute, wedding the heir of Fors.

She returns as an old, bent, and hook-nosed woman, dissatisfied with her
daughter-in-law, who calls her a witch. Her helper, Aude, is resentful that
no one told her Sancha had a pet. Her spectral cat was even rumored to walk
upon the keyboard of an electronic organ. Odilo attends her when Sancha lay
dying. A dark paw print appears on her white bedspread, and beside it “a
thing not unlike a doll.” When it is pricked, it bleeds. Father Inire
instructed that the figure be buried with Sancha, and Odilo orders the
bedspread sent to the Chatelaine Leocadia, who had grown very dim of sight.
“She has since gone bline, and yet her maids report that she sees the cat,
which stalks her in her dreams. It is not well for those of high station to
involve the servants of their enemies in their quarrels.”

COMMENTARY: The story is first and foremost a Halloween tale involving
prominent and minor characters from *Book of the New Sun*. The old woman
with a cat which has been transported to a different dimension and long
outlives its normal life span becomes a witch consorting with evil astral
spirits in scandal. In a way, the tale is justice for Lomer, the servant of
Leocadia's enemy, tinged with irony from start to finish. The rather rotund
and probably lazy Odilo forces the chief cook from his chair, and will
later tell a tale to his son (the Odilo who appears on a boat with Severian
at the end of *The Urth of the New Sun* and survives the deluge) in which
he boldly confronts the fierce torturer who appears in the halls of the
House Absolute. Severian’s version of the story is of a rather obsequious
and polite but fearful Steward who cooperates with him, but the Odilo who
narrates “The Cat” is never aware that the torturer he saw is the Autarch
he serves. Lomer still spent his entire life waiting in the antechamber for
his case to be heard by the Autarch – so while he was spared death, his
punishment was a life sentence of waiting.

Sancha’s character is morally ambiguous – with the “face of a peri and eyes
that were always laughing”, she becomes one of Inire’s favorites because of
her hunger for knowledge rather than greed for toys, but her lack of regard
for anything save herself is at times callous. When she sees the specula of
Inire, which could “circumfuse” anything which enters them to the borders
of Briah, “Then Sancha, doubtless thinking it a toy, cast her cat into the
circle.” Aude, the servant Odilo sets up for Sancha in her old age when she
returns from her private estate, says “she believed the cat the only
creature Sancha was ever to love, beyond herself”. (A peri is a Persian
spirit somewhere between angels and truly evil spirits – in earlier sources
they were malignant, denied paradise until a suitable penance was
performed, but in some tales are benevolent – female jinn are known as Peri
if they are good).

The scandal between Lomer and Sancha ruin her reputation and force her to
the South, where she becomes regarded as a strange old witch who has
congress with “diakka” (a term used by the spiritualist Andrew Davis to
denote amoral astral spooks). In her old age, Sancha returns to the House
Absolute, bent and with a prominent hooklike nose that matches the
description of Thecla’s memories, angered that her daughter-in-law called
her a *gligua*, a word for the mystery men of the Araucanian Indians of
Chile who were said to divine the future and have control over rain,
diseases, and even worms (Molina 88). (The use of this particular term also
establishes a pretty good bit of linguistic evidence that Nessus is in
South America, given Chile's location at the extreme southern coast).

The back story for this short tale is provided in *The Claw of the
Conciliator.* Lomer’s version of the story, told to Severian, agrees fairly
well with the one we get in “The Cat”:

“I am here by the malice of the Chatelaine Leocadia. I was senescahal to
her rival the Chatelaine Nympha, and when she brought me here to the House
Absolute with her in order that we might review the accounts of the estate
while she attended the rites of the Philomath Phocas, the Chatelaine
Leocadia entrapped me by the aid of Sancha. … They say she is dead now. But
in my days she was a fine, healthy young woman. The Chatelaine Leocadia
persuaded her to it, then caused us to be discovered, as Sancha knew she
would. She was but fourteen, and no crime was charged to her. We had done
nothing in any case; she had only begun to undress me.”

Thecla’s memories come to the fore, and Sev calls Sancha the Dowager of
Fors.

“The Cat” reveals that “the Chatelaine Leocadia, who was said to have
concocted the affair to injure Nympha, suffered nothing.” At least, she
does not suffer until Odilo sends the bedspread under which Sancha died to
her ancient and blind mistress.

The story is also important in establishing the name of the Autarch
fifty-five years before Severian ascends to the throne– Appian – though
whether this is actually the Autarch Severian succeeds is doubtful, for
there is no evidence that his reign lasted quite that long.

This tale is also intimately related to Inire's treatment of Domnina,
Thecla's friend, related in Chapter 20 of *The Shadow of the Torturer*,
“Father Inire's Mirrors”. (Incidentally, Severian recalls it while walking
with Agia in the Botanic Gardens – no doubt the properties of the glass and
the light entering the Gardens bears a relationship to the mirrors of Inire
in their bending of space and perhaps time).

In Thecla's story, she and her thirteen year old friend Domnina play
between Father Inire's two great mirrors, and move candelabra to opposite
ends of them. Inire appears and warns them there is “an imp who waits in
silvered glass and creeps into the eyes of those who look into it.” Thecla
perceives this as an injunction against vanity, but Domnina asks if the imp
is shaped like a tear. Inire indicates that the thing she has seen is
someone else and invites her to return the next day to show her.

When Domnina is taken, Thecla plays with her dolls. When Domnina finally
returns, her face is said to be as white as those of Thecla's dolls. She
was guided through unfamiliar halls to a giant octagonal room painted with
labyrinths. Inire steps through one and says that the fish is nearly
caught. “You can watch the setting of the hook, and learn by what means his
golden scales are to be meshed in our landing net.” She sees a figure in
the center of the enclosure moving up and down and from side to side and
her own form reflected infinitely in the mirrors. She realizes that the
fish was formed by the convergence of light of the eight mirrors. Here
Inire lectures her on the idea of the Fish and the concept of traveling
over great distances: “By what means may travel be effected when the point
of departure is at an astronomical distance from the place of arrival?” He
says that the fliers in the air are as to his mirrors as toy fliers are to
those real ones, then that that things which move quickly become heavy, and
are attracted to objects such as Urth more strongly. When these waves are
positioned in such a way that the wave front is intensified, the light
leaves the universe and re-enters at another place. “Eventually it will be
a real being, if we do not darken the lamp or shift the mirrors. For a
reflected image to exist without an object to originate it violates the
laws of our universe, an therefore an object will be brought into
existence.”

The presence of the doll which appears at Sancha's death and the imagery of
Domnina associated with dolls after seeing the mirrors is interesting, but
it seems more likely that this is the toy Inire gave to Sancha as a child,
one linked especially to her.

LITERARY ALLUSIONS


When Jonas and Severian are incarcerated in the waiting antechamber of the
Autarch, Jonas suddenly begins quoting Lewis Caroll’s *Through the Looking
Glass*: “The White Knight is sliding down the poker.” Lomer’s interminable
fate of eternal waiting in the antechamber has a kind of dream-like terror,
and the general feel of Father Inire with his magic mirrors definitely
evokes Lewis Carroll’s love of little girls and Alice’s passage through her
mirror. In “The Cat”, we even see a slightly less tangible Chesire Cat,
though it is “a gray cat, with many stripes of darker gray” originally.
Inire’s love of young children is a consistent motif throughout *The Book
of the New Sun*, whether his interest be in Thecla’s friend Domnina or the
much older Sancha.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:

When Domnina sees herself reflected in *The Shadow of the Torturer *as a
series of infinite girls (while Thecla stays to play with her dolls), does
Inire create a toy from those reflected light waves, based on the girls he
brings to the mirror? Is the doll that appears when Sancha dies really just
the gift he gave to her when she was a young child, and if so, is it based
on her? Did she toss it into the mirrors with her cat?

CONNECTION WITH OTHER WORKS:

Unlike “The Map”, “The Cat” creates no continuity errors and casts Lewis
Carroll and Halloween themes in the science fantasy Urth setting. The
metatextual commentary of other Hallowmass stories have some relation to
other Wolfe stories: “their talk had turned to all manner of ghosts and
bogeys .. I heard such recounting of larva, lemurs, and the like as would
terrify every child in the Commonwealth – and make every man in it laugh
most heartily.”(See “Many Mansions” and *The Fifth Head of Cerberus *for
further talk of larva, and the widespread presence of strange primates in *New
Sun* is also a matter of some curiousity). It is intimately tied to its
source material in *The Claw of the Conciliator* and consequently to the
ending scenes in *Urth of the New Sun* that feature Odilo.


 Davis, Andrew Jackson. *The Diakka and Their Earthly Victims, Being an
Explanation of Much That is False and Repulsive in Spiritualism*. Boston:
Colby and Rich, Banner of Light Publishing House, 1880.

Molina, Abbe Don J. Ignatius. *The Geographical, Natural, and Civil History
of Chili, Vol. II*. Paternoster Row: Longman, Hurst, Reys, Orme, 1809.
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