"Andre Norton - Cat Fantastic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

was something concealed by a putrid red-orange flare. She looked away quickly. Even half-seen, it made
her ill. She blinked and looked up, beyond. Whatever was there, and she could but dimly perceive this,
also, was cloaked in living blue-green light. It confused her completely.
She felt fury from the evil red entity. She was not the one they expected. She had taken that one's place,
and all their time and effort had gone for naught. They were determined to clear the Gate and try again.
She must move the bus immediately. Why this sensible demand seemed evil she did not know, but she
had no doubt whatever.
From the benificent beings lapped in their cool loveliness, she felt . . . rejection? No, they did not reject
her, they warned her. She must not remove the blockage in the gate. What the red entities sought to
replace it with was Wrong. She must return or die, but she must not return!
The cat squirmed and cried. Judith swung the knapsack off and set it on the sunny earth in front of the
bus. She opened it and turned back the towel. The cat lay on her side panting. Two small dark lumps lay
where she had pushed them. Judith touched each gently. Dead kittens. Poor little things. She hoped this
next one would live. Maybe it would if she blew into its nostrils or massaged it to get its heart beating.
Her whole world became too small to hold the impossibilities outside the knapsack. There, in the cat
giving birth, was reality.
The kitten slid out smoothly. The cat panted a moment, then sat up and checked the small, damp baby .
She opened her mouth and made an almost inaudible sound. Judith found herself crying. This one was
dead, too. There could be more. She'd better take the dead ones away now, before the new mother
could worry about them.
She reached in. The cat had chewed off the cords, licked away the cawls, and the lifeless infants were
still warm and soft. Judith continued to cry. She wasn't sure why, because she knew it was better for em
to die at birth than to have to be put to sleep or to go homeless. But they were so perfect and so
innocent. She held them in her cupped palms and cried.
She didn't want to set them on the bare, scraped dirt while she went back in for something with which to
dig. So, without thinking, she put them on the great block of stone.
The sound, the sensation of being drowned in bloodred flame, the incredible shock of the reaction to that
simple move took her senses. When she regained consciousness, she was lying on soft grass and the cat
was meowing in her ear. Judith sat up. The surface of the stone had been burned black-except for three
smallkitten shaped white spots. The entity concealed by the red-orange light was gone. No longer fuzzy,
whatever she looked at seemed too sharp-edged, too real.
The cat meowed.
"Oh, the knapsack tipped over." Judith righted it. The cat leaped in and pawed at the towel. Judith
removed it carefully, supporting it as fully as she could. She set it down and parted the folds. Two small
black and gray kittens mewled and wriggled. The cat pushed between Judith's hands and settled herself
by her babies. She purred.
Someone chuckled softly.
Judith, her mouth open in shock, turned her head to look up so quickly that she became dizzy again. She
decided she was hearing things and lay down.
Someone said something her ears heard as gibberish but her mind understood as, "It's too soon. Give her
more time. Come away for now."
Nothing was real, and she was absolutely sure she was dead. This was neither heaven nor hell, though it
seemed to have attributes of both, but it was outside the world of what was and what was not. Judith
knew no other ways of going outside, beyond, than those of conscious fantasy, madness, or death. She
had not made up any of this, if she was mad she could do nothing about it, but if she was dead, she found
she didn't mind. She sat up very slowly this time. The dizziness seemed to have passed.
Even more slowly, she got to her feet. The lovely spring world she had seen through the opening was all
around her. Holding onto the Bookmobile, she began circling it to the right. The vehicle just
stopped-ceased to exist-not as if cut, she could not see into the interior-at the rear edge of the blocked
opening from there to here. She continued on around the stones and along the side of the bus to the open