The Wanderer

This fantastic eyrie was so like the viewpoint of dream, so like what is lightly called “the mind’s eye,” that Paul could hardly say whether he were living only in his fancy or in the whole great starry cosmos; for once, imagination and reality were seamlessly mated.

Pushing his shoulders from the great warm window with less effort than a sigh, he looked sideways and down at the fantastic figure beside him, seeming in silhouette more than ever like a slim woman costumed for a cat ballet. Her hind legs were sprawled out, her forepaws folded together-to cushion her chin, so that her head was up and he saw in black outline the snub nose, the height of her forehead and the spearpoints of her ears. Her tail arched off beyond her, where its tip twitched in a slow rhythm against the stars. She looked like a slim black sphinx.

’Tigerishka,” he said softly, “there was once a long-haired monkey who lived hungry and died young. His name was Franz Schubert. He wrote hundreds of monkey songs — pongo ballads and ape laments. One of them was to words written by an altogether forgotten monkey called Schmidt von Lьbeck. That monkey song strikes me now as if it had been written for you and your people. At least, it’s named for your planet — Der Wanderer…The Wanderer. I’ll sing it for you…”

He began, “Ich komme von Gebirge her…

“No,” he said, breaking off, “let me put it in my own language and change some of the pictures just a little, to fit better, without changing any of the key lines or the feeling.”

The words and phrases he wanted came effortlessly.

He heard a soft rustling wail, all exactly pitched, in more voices than one, and he realized that Tigerisbka was lifting the piano accompaniment from his mind and reproducing it with a lonelier beat than even the piano gets.

After the sixth bar, he came in:

I come here from the stars alone, The way is twisted, the deeps moan. I wander on, am seldom gay, And keep on asking, “What’s the way?” All space is dark, the suns are cold, The flowers are pale and life is old. Talk that’s not noise is getting rare — I am a stranger everywhere. Where are you, world that’s all my own? — Longed for and sought, but never known; The cosmos that’s as green as hope, One fiercely flowered, starward slope; The world where all my friends can walk, My dead stand up, nor white as chalk, The universe that talks my talk — Where are you? I wander on, am seldom gay, And keep on asking, “What’s the way?” A ghostly answer comes from space: “There where you are not — there’s your place.”

When the last line was sung, and Tigerishka had hummed the accompaniment out to its end, she sighed and said softly: “That’s us, all right. He must have had a little cat in him, that Schubert monkey — and that Schmidt monkey, too. You’ve got a little cat in you, Paul…”

He looked for a moment at the slim, star-edged figure beside him and then he reached out a hand that was star-edged, too, and laid it on her shoulder. He sensed no tightening, no anger, under the faintly warm, dry, short soft fur. After a moment, although it was nothing he’d consciously planned — perhaps the fur was giving cues to his fingers — he began to scratch gently the curving margin between shoulder and neck, exactly as he might have done to Miaow.

For a while she did not move, although he thought he felt muscles relaxing under the fur. Then there was the faint murmur of a barely-breathed purr — just a flutter of sound — and she leaned her head against his hand so that her ear brushed his wrist He shifted his kneading toward the back of her neck and she raised her head, rolling it from side to side with a deeper fluttering purr. Then she rolled her body away from him a quarter turn, and for a moment he thought it was to tell him to stop, but quickly discovered it was only that she wanted to be scratched under the chin. And then he felt a silky finger press against the back of his neck and draw smoothly down his body and he realized it was the tip of her tail caressing him.

“Tigerishka?” he murmured.