Interesting Places (Interesting Times #2) (6 page)

Oliver left the office just after
5:00 and took a crowded Muni train almost to its final stop, two blocks from
his house. As unpleasantly crowded as the train could be, it was often faster
than driving from one end of the city to the other at rush hour. By the time
the train crossed 19
^th
Avenue it was only about half full, making
the rest of the ride a bit more pleasant. Oliver considered making a stop to
pick up some cheap take-out, but decided he might order a pizza when he got
home instead.

The Sunset district was the only
place in San Francisco Oliver had ever seriously considered living in. The
hustle and bustle of the Marina or the Mission might appeal more to some, but
the Sunset had a lazy residential feel that he liked. It was lined with small
houses and had a wide variety of restaurants, and the nearest grocery store was
close enough that getting there and back wasn’t the hassle it would have been
elsewhere in the city.

This was where he had met Jeffrey,
who had been one of the neighborhood’s many stray cats. He’d come to Oliver’s
windowsill one night to beg for scraps, although Jeffrey would have described
it as “asking very politely” rather than begging. Oliver had given him some of
his own dinner, and the cat had become a regular visitor after that. And then
one night, in what was the first manifestation of Oliver’s “power,” he’d given
Jeffrey the ability to speak. The cat had been so shocked by this development
he’d immediately run away.

Oliver hadn’t seen the cat again for
some time. Eventually Jeffrey returned, demanding to be “put back” to the way
he had been before. But on the same night Oliver had been attacked by the
Kalatari, the lizard people who believed in a prophecy that Oliver would
destroy them. Much to Oliver’s surprise, that had proven to be exactly the
case. By the time it was all over, Jeffrey had decided he liked being able to
speak. Not that it would have mattered much if he hadn’t. Oliver had never been
able to control his power. It hadn’t manifested again in any capacity since the
night the Kalatari had met their fate.

In a way, he thought, he and Sally had
that much in common. While he hadn’t meant to destroy the Kalatari and would
never even have known of their existence had they not shown up at his house, he
did have to live with the guilt of what he had done. He could relate to what
Sally must be feeling now, at least in some small measure.

Jeffrey wasn’t in the house when
Oliver got home. The cat still had a certain amount of wanderlust left over
from his days roaming the streets, and Oliver typically left his kitchen window
open in case he felt the need to get out and stretch his legs.

Oliver turned his television on to
the local news and began rummaging through his kitchen cupboards. He had the
ingredients to make a simple stir-fry, if he wanted to, but pizza still didn’t
sound bad. He wondered what Jeffrey would want. The cat insisted that he have
dry food and water available at all times in the house, but still wanted some
of what Oliver was eating most nights.

Oliver was checking the sell-by date
on a package of chicken tenders when he heard a scampering at the windowsill
behind him. “How was your day?” he asked, turning around. “You see any…” Oliver
trailed off. As he’d expected, Jeffrey was sitting on the windowsill. Next to
him sat another cat Oliver had never seen before.

“Meow,” Jeffrey said.

“Oh,” Oliver said. “Um…” He wasn’t
sure how to react. He’d never seen Jeffrey with another cat before. He hadn’t
even realized Jeffrey
knew
any other cats. Weren’t male cats generally
solitary animals, anyway? Then again, Jeffrey was hardly a normal cat anymore.

“Meow,” Jeffrey said again.

Oliver hesitated “I was just…going to
make some dinner, I think.”

“Meow,” Jeffrey said, nodding almost
imperceptibly.

“I wonder what I should make,” Oliver
said. “I mean, that’s what I’m asking myself right now, obviously, because I
normally talk to myself in my own kitchen, and never to anyone else. I mean,
unless they spoke English, and there’s nobody else here who speaks English, I
guess.”

Jeffrey stared at him.

“I have some chicken in the
refrigerator,” Oliver said. “Maybe I’ll fry it up with some bell peppers?”

“Meow,” Jeffrey said, shaking his
head ever so slightly. The other cat began washing its front legs with its
tongue.

“I could order pizza?” Jeffrey
appeared to be scowling at him now. “Chinese? Thai? Maybe Italian?” Jeffrey
glanced at the freezer door, then back at Oliver. “I guess I’ll check the
freezer. Want to cover all my bases.” He opened the freezer door. “Let’s see.
I’ve got frozen peas, frozen green beans, frozen corn, some of that tortellini
soup I made last week. You liked that. I mean,
I
liked that. Frozen
shrimp…”

“Meow,” said Jeffrey.

“Okay.” Oliver took the bag of shrimp
and shut the freezer door. He looked at the bag thoughtfully. “Big problem with
these shrimp is that they’re frozen and it would take a few hours for them to
thaw.” Jeffrey glanced at one of the kitchen cabinets. “But there’s a colander
in there, of course.” He took a plastic colander out of the cabinet and put it
in the sink, then dumped the frozen shrimp into it. Running water would thaw
the shrimp in a matter of minutes. “Well,” Oliver said. “I guess I wonder if I
want to eat the shrimp raw tonight.” Jeffrey glared at him. “No, I’ll
definitely cook it. But now I can’t remember what spices I like. I mean, I know
I
like spicy food, but not everybody does, and it’s important I be
considerate of my guests, even though I don’t actually have any.” Jeffrey
nodded. “So I won’t make it spicy. Maybe I’ll just sauté it with a little bit
of…lime?” Jeffrey shook his head. “Taco seasoning? Chili powder? Cumin and
paprika?”

“Meow,” said Jeffrey.

“Okay, cumin and paprika it is. I’ll
get right on that.” Once the shrimp had thawed, Oliver peeled them and dried
them with paper towels, then seasoned them with salt, pepper, cumin, and some
mild paprika. Jeffrey watched the process intently, while the other cat began
washing its forehead. Oliver put a sauté pan on the stove with a knob of butter
and cooked the shrimp until they began to change color. He fished one out of
the pan and tasted it. “Okay, that’s pretty good, and by the way I’m never
doing this again, so I really hope I enjoy this shrimp tonight, because it’s
the last time I cook shrimp for myself in my own house.”

“Meow,” Jeffrey said.

Oliver plated half a dozen of the
shrimp and started for the windowsill, moving slowly so as not to startle the
other cat. Jeffrey glared at him. “I…wonder what the problem is,” Oliver said.
“This shrimp looks and tastes perfect. It’s delicious.” Jeffrey considered that
for a moment, then slowly put one paw out to his left and the other out to his
right. He slowly looked from one to the other and back again.

“My hands aren’t clean?” Oliver
asked. “I’m not going to eat with my hands.” Jeffrey glared at him and looked
back at the space between his paws, opening his mouth wide. “Oh,” Oliver said.
“Of course. These shrimp are much too big for me to eat comfortably.” He took
the plate back to the kitchen counter and began cutting them into small pieces.
“Now I’ll be able to eat these shrimp with no problem, and I’m also going to
owe myself a huge favor for all the time I’ve taken to do this, so I better be
damn sure I never pee anywhere I’m not supposed to
ever again
…”

“Meow,” said Jeffrey.

Oliver returned to the windowsill and
carefully placed the plate down between the two cats. “And now I guess I’ll go
in the other room,” Oliver said. Jeffrey nodded at him as the other cat began
to eat. Oliver went back to the pan, plated the rest of the shrimp for himself,
and went into the living room to watch television.

Half an hour later he went back into
the kitchen. The plate on the windowsill had been licked clean and both cats
were gone. Oliver took the empty plate and put it in the sink. He’d deal with
the dishes later. He couldn’t help but wonder where Jeffrey and the other cat had
gone. What did cats do on dates?
Was
that a date? Did cats even think in
those terms?

He went back into the living room to
find his cell phone buzzing, with Tyler’s number on the display. “Hey,” Oliver
said.

“Hey. How was work?”

“There’s nothing going on.”

“Good. Did Seven find anything
interesting with the cyborg?”

It occurred to Oliver how much his
life had changed in the last few months. Was there anything interesting
besides
being attacked at their office by a cyborg from a parallel Earth right after they’d
come back from killing Dracula? “Just that it was already dying by the time it
got here. It had some kind of teleportation device it used, but we don’t know
much about that yet.”

“They’d been working on that for a
while,” Tyler said. “Good thing the war was over before they got it working, or
we’d all be screwed.”

“Probably,” Oliver said. It would
have been difficult for anyone to fight an enemy that could disappear at will
and reappear anywhere they wanted. “How’s Sally doing?”

“She’s been like a zombie, but she’s
coming out of it. Sally’s a warrior. We’ll be in the office tomorrow. I’d just
as soon we had something to do to keep her busy and keep her mind off things.”

They talked for a few more minutes,
Oliver mentioning Jeffrey’s “cat date,” which Tyler found hilarious. “I can’t
believe you cooked them dinner,” he said. “At this rate you’re going to wind up
with a litter of talking kittens.”

“I’m not sure that’s how it works,”
Oliver said. Then again, he didn’t
know
that wasn’t how it worked. He
hoped not, anyway. One talking cat was already a handful. Half a dozen would be
another matter entirely. “See you tomorrow.”

“Good night.”

Chapter 7

Sally and Tyler were indeed back in
the office the next day. Sally looked a bit on the ragged side to Oliver’s
eyes, as if she’d been up all night and keeping herself going with far too much
coffee. Oliver wondered whether she’d been unwilling or unable to sleep. He
could well imagine her dreams were never pleasant ones.

On any typical morning when they were
all in the city, the team would gather in the conference room for tea and their
morning briefing. Artemis would advise them about any situations they were
monitoring or give them new assignments. There was nothing urgent happening
today, though, and the most interesting thing anyone had to talk about was
Jeffrey’s “date.” Tyler brought up the idea of talking kittens again, which he
still seemed to find enormously funny. “Could that actually happen?” Oliver
asked Artemis. He’d have had to admit he’d been warming up to the idea, if only
a bit.

“Unlikely,” the girl replied. “He is
biologically still a cat, after all.”

“But his brain works differently
now,” Oliver pointed out. “He doesn’t think like a cat. He thinks like a
person.”

“He can think any way he likes, but
it does not alter what he is. If you began speaking Chinese, would your babies
be Chinese?”

Oliver wasn’t sure that was the best
analogy in the world, but he was willing to let it go. Seven had perked up,
though. “I can do a brain scan on him,” he offered. “I’d love to map his neural
pathways. Of course, I’d need another cat for a baseline, but I could probably
work out how extensive…”

“That will do,” Artemis said. Oliver
doubted the cat would have been willing to sit still long enough for a brain scan,
anyway, even if he wouldn’t have considered it a gross invasion of his privacy.

“So you think he’s not genetically
different from other cats?” Tyler asked.

“Perhaps in some ways, but I would
not think in any of the ones that matter.” She looked at Oliver. “He can talk
because you wanted him to talk. He can think because if he could not, he would
have nothing to say. As you explained it to me, he was changed because you
desired companionship. I doubt very much you were considering…” she paused.
“There is no way to say that delicately.”

“Just talking,” Oliver said quickly.
“Definitely not...anything else.” While Oliver had been lonely at the time,
he’d never been
that
lonely.

“Should we be gifted with talking
kittens…” Artemis sighed. “Well, Mr. Jones, you must understand I couldn’t have
them, or at that point Jeffrey, running loose in the world.”

Oliver nearly gasped. “You wouldn’t
kill
them…” he began.

“No, certainly not. We have a place set
aside for things that must be contained, in the event we can’t control them.”

“The island,” Tyler said.

“We were going to send you there if
you decided not to join us,” Sally said. It had been the first time she’d
spoken all morning. She looked at Artemis. “I’m pretty sure you almost sent me
there once, too. Maybe you should have.”

Artemis looked at her for a long
moment. “And yet, I did not. You have value in this world, Salera. Do attempt
to remember that, won’t you?”

Sally took a sip of tea. “That’s not
my name anymore.”

Artemis watched her for a moment
longer and then looked away. “I think that’s enough for this morning,” she
said. “Mr. Jones, you have files to review. I expect you to be a bit more up to
speed the next time we talk. You are all dismissed.”

Oliver spent the rest of the morning
reading old case files. If he worked anywhere else he probably would have found
file review boring, but at Araneae opening each new file was like starting a
new science fiction novel. He could probably spend the rest of his life in one
of the vaults reading and investigating the objects earlier lineups of
Artemis’s field teams had brought in. It wouldn’t be a bad way to spend his
retirement, if retirement was something the Group offered.

Did
they have retirement? Oliver had never thought to ask
before. Other than the ageless Artemis, nobody he had met working there was
older than 40. Of course, if going up against lizard people and vampires was
par for the course, maybe nobody lived much longer than that. Or maybe all of
them eventually ran off to become priests in Cleveland, or conspiracy
theorists, or…who knew what? Locked up in a mental ward didn’t seem outside the
scope of possibility.

Oliver joined Sally and Tyler for
lunch at a Mexican restaurant down the street. A group lunch was a custom when
they all happened to be in San Francisco at the same time. Seven joined them on
rare occasions; Artemis never did. Whether that was a reminder that she was the
boss or she just didn’t care to eat at lunchtime, Oliver didn’t know. He knew
the girl
did
eat, having seen her do so, but it occurred to him that he
didn’t know if she actually
needed
to. That might be worth asking at
some point, if he caught her in good enough a mood that she wasn’t likely to
take his head off for it. Artemis didn’t suffer a lot of personal questions.

Sally only picked at her food as
Oliver and Tyler ate. Oliver found himself wondering what he could say to make
her feel better, but nothing came to mind. This wasn’t the kind of thing
Hallmark made a card for. The store didn’t have a “sorry your past came back to
haunt you” section next to birthday wishes and holiday greetings.

Oliver had been back in his office
for an hour when there was a gentle knock at the door. He was a bit surprised
to see Sally standing just outside. Normally she just walked in if she wanted
to see him. “You got a minute?” she asked.

“Sure.”

Sally took a seat in one of the
chairs in front of his desk. That was another first; Oliver had never seen her
sit there before. “I wanted to ask you something,” she said, rubbing her hands
together. Oliver waited. “It’s about the lizards. The Kalatari.”

“I think I know where this is going,”
Oliver said.

“You wiped them out. Your power…it
destroyed their entire race.”

“I know,” Oliver said. “It’s not
something I’m proud of.”

“Oh, I
knew
that. You felt
terrible, I know. It’s just…” Sally leaned forward slightly. “I remember you
said once you didn’t mean to kill them. You weren’t trying to hurt anyone.”

“I doubt I could have hurt them if
that’s what I’d been
trying
to do.”

“Then how did you do it?”

Oliver didn’t have a great answer.
“You realize there’s no Hogwarts for this, right?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Really? You’ve seen
Dracula
but you don’t know
Harry Potter
?”

“I started with the classics.”

“Fair enough,” Oliver said. “I mean I
didn’t go to school for this. What I’m learning here, I’m learning from this,”
he held up one of the files, “but there isn’t anyone like me. Everything in
my
file is stuff I already knew or put in there myself.”

“But you did those things. You made
Jeffrey talk. You wiped out the lizards.”

“Yeah. With Jeffrey, I’m not really
sure. I said things would be easier if he could talk, and suddenly he started
talking. I didn’t
will
for it to happen. I didn’t wave my hands over him
and say magic words. It just happened because on a subconscious level I wanted
it to. I don’t know if that makes much sense.”

“It makes sense. What about with the
lizards? You wanted them to leave you alone, so they all vanished?”

“No.” Oliver thought about it. It
wasn’t that he’d wanted them gone, and it wasn’t just because he’d wanted to
live. It had gone deeper than that. “I didn’t want to kill them, you
understand? I wasn’t trying to commit…” he stopped just short of using the word
genocide
. “I don’t think I’m putting this very well.”

“You’ve thought about bringing them
back, haven’t you?” Sally asked. “I know you must have.”

“Is that what this is about? Bringing
the cyborgs back?”

“Maybe.”

Oliver nodded. He’d seen this
question coming. “Yes. I have thought about bringing them back.”

“But you don’t. It’s because you
can’t, isn’t it? You would if you could; you’re that kind of person. So what
makes it different? Because it’s easier to destroy than to create?” Oliver
blinked. He’d heard Artemis use that line before more than once. He might also
have seen it on
Star Trek
.

“No, because…you remember I’d been
drugged more than once when all that was going on. I’d also been hit in the
head quite a few times.”

“One of them by me, I think. Sorry
about that, by the way.”

“It was actually the day before, but
forget about it. I was barely aware of what was going on around me at that
point. I thought I was delusional. I didn’t believe the Kalatari were real. I
actually
said
that to the Matriarch just before…”

“Just before they weren’t real
anymore.”

That was more or less it, Oliver
thought. That, and the sound of rushing water that only he could hear that
always seemed to accompany any manifestation of his power. It had been almost
deafening when he destroyed the Kalatari. “Exactly. And the thing is, I can’t
just convince myself now that they
are
real and have them reappear. I
know they’re gone. I’d have to somehow trick myself into believing that they
were up and walking around outside or something.”

“You had to believe,” Sally mused.
“And what you believed became real. Interesting.”

“I guess.”

Sally stood up. “Thanks. Good talk.
It was really…therapeutic for me.”

“Oh,” Oliver said. “Um…you’re
welcome.” He watched as she left his office. That might have been the most
unusual conversation he’d had in a while, he thought. It might have also been
the longest he’d talked to Sally one-on-one before.

Jeffrey was waiting at Oliver’s house
when he got home later that night. “I was thinking we should have Thai food
tonight,” the cat said. “Something spicy with noodles.”

Oliver had decided he wouldn’t bring
up the subject of talking kittens, but he was still curious about last night.
“How was your date?”

“It was fine. She liked the shrimp,
and she thinks you’re very well-trained.”

“She
said
that?”

“Not in so many words,” the cat said.
“We don’t really have language. Well, not the way I do now.”

“You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Oh,” the cat said. “Thank you. I
won’t pee on your bed anymore.”

“Thanks.”

Later, over rice noodles that Oliver
had cut into very tiny pieces so the cat could eat them without making a mess,
Jeffrey said, “Do you think you could?”

“Could what?”

“Make her talk? Make her like me?”

Oliver sighed. Was this all anyone
was going to ask him about anymore? “No. Not yet, anyway. Maybe someday.”

“Oh.”

“Would you really want me to?”

The cat thought it over as he toyed
with a piece of chicken. “It would be nice to have someone like me around. It
gets lonely, being unique.”

Oliver nodded. “I guess that makes
sense. Maybe someday, when I have some control over this thing I can do. I
can’t now. I’d probably just turn her into a clock or something?”

“A
clock
? Why would you turn
her into a clock?”

“It was just an example.”

“Oh. Okay. Do you want to watch
Star
Trek
tonight? You’ve earned it.”

“No.”

They watched
Doctor Who
instead.