“I can sleep,” said Underhill. “I just want to know about the Lady May.”
The nurse joined in. She was a little antagonistic. “Don’t you want to know about the other people?”
“They’re okay,” said Underhill. “I knew that before I came in here.”
He stretched his arms and sighed and grinned at them. He could see they were relaxing and were beginning to treat him as a person instead of a patient.
“I’m all right,” he said. “Just let me know when I can go see my Partner.”
A new thought struck him. He looked wildly at the doctor. “They didn’t send her off with the ship, did they?”
“I’ll find out right away,” said the doctor. He gave Underhill a reassuring squeeze of the shoulder and left the room.
The nurse took a napkin off a goblet of chilled fruit juice.
Underhill tried to smile at her. There seemed to be something wrong with the girl. He wished she would go away. First she had started to be friendly and now she was distant again. It’s a nuisance being telepathic, he thought. You keep trying to reach even when you are not making contact.
Suddenly she swung around on him.
“You pinlighters! You and your damn cats!”
Just as she stamped out, he burst into her mind. He saw himself a radiant hero, clad in his smooth suede uniform, the pin-set crown shining like ancient royal jewels around his head. He saw his own face, handsome and masculine, shining out of her mind. He saw himself very far away and he saw himself as she hated him.
She hated him in the secrecy of her own mind. She hated him because he was—she thought—proud, and strange, and rich, better and more beautiful than people like her.
He cut off the sight of her mind and, as he buried his face in the pillow, he caught an image of the Lady May.
“She is a cat,” he thought. “That’s all she is—a cat!”
But that was not how his mind saw her—quick beyond all dreams of speed, sharp, clever, unbelievably graceful, beautiful, wordless and undemanding.
Where would he ever find a woman who could compare with her?
Colophon
Short Fiction
was compiled from short stories published between 1928 and 1955 by
Cordwainer Smith.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Adam Buchbinder,
and is based on transcriptions produced between 2009 and 2019 by
Sankar Viswanathan, Adam Buchbinder, Al Haines, Alex White, The Online Distributed Proofreading Team, and The Online Distributed Proofreaders Canada Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight,
a painting completed in 1894 by
Claude Monet.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
July 6, 2024, 12:24 a.m.
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Uncopyright
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