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The New Inn, 2089
“This is an age of marvels, I tell you. Well, I’ve been to space for one—cost a penny, but who could have imagined looking down on Earth from space. Made everything in more than seven hundred years of life seem small.” Hob paused a moment and looked at the Old Stranger. There was another thing, but, well, who else would he ask?
He leaned forward. “And—I’m sorry. Was there…? I could have sworn…”
The silence stretched, and for once, it was not Hob who broke it. “I have not known you to be at a loss for words.”
“There was—” Hob cleared his throat. “I can’t believe I’m even going to say this, but…were there a few years there where…the world was run by cats?”
The Old Stranger didn’t smile—exactly—but there was definitely an indulgent light in those eyes.
The words came spilling out. “I haven’t been able to tell anyone, not even my therapist—and let me tell you what a marvelous invention mental health care is. Can you imagine! Health care for your mind! If you can pay for it of course—don’t get me started on the NHS—and for me I have to be a little, uh, careful about how I phrase certain things. But talking about Robyn and Eleanor with someone, I will tell you I cried like a baby…” He cleared his throat again. “Anyway…I swear, I swear—
“There were a few years there where cats were huge, bigger than lorries. Normal house cats. And all of us were tiny and naked and we had to groom them and at night they’d hunt us—” He shuddered.
“Yes,” the Old Stranger said.
Hob’s jaw dropped. “That—that actually happened. Cats ruled the earth. I didn’t just take an extremely long trip on some extremely strong psychedelics. That was real.”
“Yes.”
“What the fuck? I mean, pardon my French, but what the fuck? I mean, I’m the seven-hundred-year-old man, you’re—you,” he waved his hand around vaguely. “I understand that there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy or whatever, but what the actual fuck. You are telling me that the whole world can just be ruled by cats one day and the next not and no one even remembers that it happened!”
“Dreams make the world anew each night. Perhaps the cats dreamed the world they longed for.” That was definitely a smile now.
“You’re saying—that cats—dreamed they ruled over humans—and then they actually did.”
“You humans are not the only creatures in the universe, as much as you like to think you are.”
“Us humans. Right. I hope you don’t mind me saying, but this is an awfully strange time in our acquaintance to start having me on. Cats dreamed themselves masters of the universe and so they were?”
“They dreamed the world so it always was.”
Hob decided to move past that riddle. “So why are we sitting here now in the New Inn and the only cat I currently see is the mouser in the kitchen?”
The Old Stranger tilted his head. “Do you not know?”
Hob leaned back in his chair. Ever since he woke up in his own bed in his own flat again and realized that no one else seemed to think they’d spent the last few years being hunted by mammoth kitties, he’d tried his best not to think about it at all. Block it out, like some odd psychosis brought on by too long a life. That seemed far more plausible, in any case. “There was…a woman. She came and spoke to us, told us of this world, that I remembered and no one else seemed to. Told us that if we all dreamed of it, it would come to pass. Her name was…don’t think I remember. A flower name, I think.”
The Old Stranger smiled again.
“So…we…dreamed ourselves back. Here. To this. And this is how it always was.”
The Old Stranger nodded.
“Why do I think this is funny to you.”
“It caused a small uproar between my siblings. I may have enjoyed that for a time.”
Siblings, Hob thought. He has siblings? And who knew the Old Stranger enjoyed anything? “So what’s to stop a bunch of tortoises or voles or emus from dreaming themselves rulers of the world?”
“None have sought an audience.”
Well, that was alarming in its implications. “Wait—is there an immortal cat somewhere that meets you every hundred years in, in an alley or something because you’re interested?”
“Perhaps.”