Page 89 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Mother Ship is Real!

no shakier a foundation than a lot of what we see in the magazines
to which we submit our work. What I need is the superstructure of
a plot to erect upon it. It could involve cats alone, humans alone or
their interaction.”
Leith Mauker shook his head.
“The problem is, Fred, that you haven’t given us even the basics
of a plot. You have not told us why the mother ship and its
terrestrial followers even exist: did the cats arrive here from outer
space, having found a congenial environment for themselves—but
cannot be completely independent of the external management data
coming from their interstellar vessel? Or did cats evolve a high-tech
civilization long before human history, then lose it—for any of the
reasons we are about to lose ours—after launching the mother ship
to protect the survivors otherwise lost in barbaric descent? The
joke, or irony, of your setup is that cats are usually portrayed as a
very independent species—particularly when compared to dogs.
Anyway, if there’s to be a crisis here, it would have to be an
impending change in circumstances: the ship runs out of fuel and
crashes, leaving hundreds of millions of assorted felines dazed and
confused—if not suddenly and irrevocably feral and vicious—or
mankind interferes with the transmission in some intended or
unintended way. In either event, not a happy outcome.”
“Let me pick up this thread, if you will,” said Perversity
Tinderstack. “First, I am not a crazy cat lady: so I am unbiased with
respect to things feline. You are making cats even more alien than
they already seem to many folks; that is going to make it hard for
non-ailurophiles to empathize with them or have sympathy for their
fate. In the real world we can and do anthropomorphize our pets—
but only if we see ourselves as superior. You are canceling that
feeling, too, by making the cats descendants of an advanced race. So
I say you cannot take their point of view—leave them a mystery.
Your protagonist therefore must be a scientist—or a group of
them—figuring out from the various clues you have provided that
the mother ship is real and that cats everywhere on Earth are in
thrall to its commands. What they do with that knowledge is where
your story might find its center of interest. As I said, what happens

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