Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Chapter 1

With ebony muzzle arest on wide feline paws, the captain of the Sherpa pillowed his forehead against the hard, foggy coolness of the viewport. His mane, dull golden in the dimness, shielded the solitary sight, his privacy; shrouded his private vision against reflections from cabin lighting, his reflections from the casual observations of crew. Telegrand mourned the passing stars: elusive, fleeting fortune against the sable fur of space. And brooded upon such flickers of celestial light, a memory of other brief and seldom brightnesses, the fangs of one who he'd once wanted, more than anything, to make smile.
"Captain! Captain!" came a call, his ears perking to attention. Telegrand pushed away from the bulkhead, straightened his tunic. The commander can't let his first crew down, he reminded himself.
Especially when they own him.
"Yes, leftenant? Report..." Telegrand snapped the words with more briskness than he'd intended, hoping to disguise ennui - yet unused, he, to the formality of military service, untrained for this sort of thing. He'd seen twentieth century holos: horrid overacting; neurotic, womanizing space captains and their fawning, socially-liberated crews. With a nod to the obvious irony, he was thankful that he'd picked up at least that touch of the martial protocol that discipline required.
"Report from the Bridge, sir!"
The black lion looked all about himself, still wont to succumb to a particular, and particularly embarrassing, faux pas when addressed by a member of his new crew. For the furre that accosted him stood only a foot or so tall, a mouse resembling nothing so much as the pathetically endearing, maddeningly valiant, Reepicheep. A crystal globe surrounded her head, adorned by a jaunty crimson feather at least twice the length of the mouse. Her left paw rested on the hilt of a light saber, which dragged gratingly along the floor beside her tail as she ran - an activity which the crew always seemed to be pursuing.
Telegrand jerked his own gold-tufted tail from the floor, purely by instinct. Letting mice aboard had been Hobson's choice; trusting them with weapons was insane.
The beast made a leg, and with an elaborate flourish of a nonexistent hat, brought the back of a paw to her muzzle. This gesture, too insipidly courtly even in their females, was ultimately thwarted by the presence of the mus' space helmet.
Telegrand wished like nothing else that he could teach the damned mice to just salute.
"Go ahead, Reep - er, Secundus. Sorry."
Bridge report - if Tele wanted a status check, he could simply pad to the other compartment, scan the indicators while scratching himself. Yet this was a new role into which fate, and operating debt, had cast him. He hardly ever got to the bridge these days - control room as it used to be - unflanked by musculine officers and whip-tailed sideboys. And he never, ever got to sit at the lone, comfortable navigation console anymore.
Oh, for the life of the solitary explorer, he thought.
"Right!" shouted Secundus. The mus, in a piping tone that Telegrand was only now getting used to, gave their course, their bearings and speed, related the operational parameters of the engines, cited the normals and recommended optima of the same. She listed the schedule of the day, the rotation of the watch, names and ranks of the officers on deck, and status of the weapons. The ship was at peak of efficiency, to all accounts, and the briefing lasted scarcely twenty minutes.
Telegrand nodded carefully in all the right places. And sighed, knowing the crazy ritual would be repeated in only one hour.
"It is their party," he remonstrated, alone in the silence with himself after the second had been dismissed.
The planet Muslandia, from whence cometh the Mus, Telegrand's crew of late, was a rather baroque and ostentatious place. It had been dragged from vermin obscurity, thrust into the enlightened thick of the interplanetary marketplace by the fortuitous conjunction of certain a successful Cali-terrestrian sales effort, and of Muslandia's obvious primary export.
Porque Somos la Planeta Mas Popular por Toda de la Universia Descubrida? Hay el Queso!

Tele couldn't begrudge them their sudden success, their celestial celebrity. All things considered, it hadn't worked out too badly for him, either.
Caseus Mus, as the cheese was known, was indeed a delight to tempt even the most jaded of palates. And when it was discovered that their chief commodity, a food of cyclopean simplicity and homeric history, was indeed also a powerful hallucinogenic aphrodisiac not unlike the lotus of the Fate-dogged Odysseus, the place and pleasure of the Mus, among the planetary powerful in their stately-domed Xanadu cities, was amply assured.
The deck surged beneath the negalion's paws, and he steadied himself unconsciously, balancing with supple, self-aware tail. "Must be another drill beginning," he sighed.
With the epiphanic entry of Mouse Cheese onto the galactic gourmet scene (and likewise, due to its late-discovered effects, into the seedy realm of those purveyors of recreational substances, and managers of Erotovision arcades), there followed more for the mice than simple riches and precocious galactic sophistication.
Caseus Mus was declared contraband.
Which, of course, did nothing so much as to raise the price, fuel the demand for the precious commodity, create a niche for clandestine delivery, and a cottage industry of imitators (L' Mous Qui Riit being the brand most popular with children). The humble makers of the first psychocheese, in aprons and powdered wigs, were astonished - and delighted! It was the ultimate in clash of cultures, and the bacterial inoculant which fermented their fromage, now the most coveted of secrets.
Telegrand's paw crossed to opposite wrist, and his communicator came alight with his frustration. "Bridget, I thought I asked you to warn me when they started their stunts." He was, he realized, even more short now than he had been with the mouse.
An odd face appeared, suspended in the air above the fur of Tele's arm: a friend and the present pilot of the ship, yet neither crew nor Mus.
"Kitty!" the cheerful ligna feline hollered shockingly, a wooden cat with a paw-rubbed walnut finish and limed oak accents. The gunmetal pins of her jaw pivoted wide in a warm, open smile. Tele knew that Bridget's verbal response had been neither flippant nor endearing, for she chose to address any furred being - of any species, gender, or rank whatsoever - by that one evocative vocative. To Bridget, everyfur was a cat.
Telegrand shook his head, golden mane catching a nonexistent breeze in the sterile, fetid mousenest that his shrinking ship had become. He wasn't angry, of course; nor surprised, really - to be sure! But the weirdness of the day, he somehow knew, could only be just beginning.
He and Bridget were old friends, close even before their scruff-of-the-neck days of illegal cheese trafficking. It had been a good time in their lives, both newly freed of that constraint of the socialized thought called kittenhood, both newly awaked to the unlimited possibilities of a universe newly without limits, as seen from the control deck of their own first ship.
And both newly awaken to other possibilities, too.
It had been a fixer-upper, with only a few trillion miles on it, and good shocks. Tele and Bridget purchased the ship, scraping together from the limited pool of resources availible to their young unequitied selves, leveraged by a generous endowment of incurable hope that their youth did so amply provide. They'd assiduously slaved, expended arduous purple hours of effort and their little remaining gold to overhaul that wolf of a vessel unto an Assyrian spaceworthiness lost long to it before they were ever born. Everything that went into the Dawn Treader was top of the line, or had been, once. The brand new star drive, a replacement that was both costly and dear, was critical for the speed-vixen into which they wanted to convert the ship. Yet even as they worked, rebuilt and repaired, polished and scrubbed, the bright and shiny alloy of their plans was abraded by causal uncertainty of the future, and faith upon the morrow dulled the face of yet-today.
They improvised.
And somewhere in that carefree time of youth and dreams, of broad plans and grease and sweat and radiation - somewhere between Antares and the Magellanic Cloud - he and Bridget had become lovers. The yiff was incredible. But it was his dream of space, of running high ahead a brisk solar wind at brink of the void between stars, that was Telegrand's own true mate. The two felines, one of fur and one of varnish, fell gradually apart. And the bittersweet memory of it, which he cherished strong as the nestegg of a bitter wisdom yet to come, was heavy still within his heart. After all, he thought, on such occasions of angst and additives as unfailingly awoke the memory, you never forget your first time.
But Telegrand wasn't demanding explanation of the ligna feline on the bridge now, as he scowled at Bridget's image on his arm, she sitting at the helm and responding efficiently to tart commands from the musculine first officer. Commands which made the ship sidle and shake, yet again. The negalion sought balance, with mind and tail both. Neither even as had Telegrand given explanation himself - of himself - once, when he ceased to frequent her berth long ago, he knew there were things between them that would never be shared.
"Just be careful," he whispered, knowing that the mus Primus would surely be close enough to hear. "This isn't Treader you know."
Bridget nodded, an atypically straightforward response. She made eye contact, too. Then followed with an outburst assuredly more in character.
"Cucumbers! White Bread! The British are Coming!"
The negalion switched off, shaking the troubles between his ears, tossing his mane in unconscious defiance. Her fursonality was too familiar to annoy, too annoying to ever become really familiar to his heart of hearts. Telegrand wondered if that wasn't really why things hadn't worked out between himself and Bridget. Yet he was too honest to let this particular arm of Shiva, self-pity, have its flame-proferring way with him.
He'd done it to himself, he knew. Not even the collapse of cheese smuggling that came with legalization, and the loss of their first ship, had been the gravitational influence on his life as had one certain night in a far-away port of call, with a leopardess whose name he never knew.
Bridget, kindly, pretended that she hadn't known, either.
Telegrand leaned against the porthole again, scanned blackness for errant specks of light, the shards of diamond on the velvet of space. Looked, too, for nothingnesss where there should only be stars. It's all between having, and not having, he thought. Isn't that always the way things are?
But Telegrand was strong, leonine in heart, not given to brooding and mooning about. He was accustomed to being in control, assured and stable. Capable, even when beyond his known limits. When Bridget passed out of his life, he'd managed to keep an even keel, loose bight, sails full to the wind.
Still, when illegal cheese transport and distribution passed the way of bootlegged ethanol, the reordering of market forces, the New Economy, had changed everything. First faced with the prospect of criminalization of their cheese export (Muslandia, as an autonomous celestial body, could still produce the stuff), the mice did the only sensible thing. They shot the bottom out from their own price structure, literally giving away Caseus Mus, advertising free cheese across all planets of the galaxy to prevent excess retail markups - scalping of the rind, they called it. And Mouse Cheese, scrumptious beyond the moist and creamy dreams of the most ardent afficionados of the curd, drew great popular attention, critical connoisseur acclaim.
Certainly the cheese piqued the interest of those baser sorts with whom the Mus would soon become all too familiar. A psychoactive and erotogenic delicacy that could be grilled into a sandwich would understandably find less ordinary venues, make friends in low places. Did the mice realize this, he wondered, or did they simply underestimate the power of cheese to which the galaxy was soon beholden?
Telegrand didn't know. Perhaps it was all part of being swept about by greater forces, brisked to and fro by The Great Cosmic Tail. He could grok that.
And by the time that unfortunate vagary of genetic mutation, the legislators, passed bills to outlaw Caseus Mus, it had become as common as an earlier psycho-erotic comestible once popularized in wartime, the caffeinated cola beverage in a shapely glass bottle.
Telegrand's paw raised, with unconscious authority, as he approached the hatch to the combination cargo space/engineering room. It was where the engines lived anyway, at least the portions physically inside the hull. Star drive motors are so odd nowadays, he thought: with Heisenberg's uncertainty, it's hard to know even where they are. The security scanner identified his pawpad, and the portal dilated with a flash of brightness from within.
He surveyed the space. And shook his mane. The ladies' head on the Dawn Treader was bigger than this compartment. And the Treader's hold - he couldn't see the aft bulkhead from the space doors. He and Bridget ran cheese in that derelict of a ship which they'd dragged on Charon's raft back from the bank of Styx, just a single case of Caseus M. at first, secreted like a boyfur's smutmag under the mattress of their berth. They blew the profits from their first take on fuel alone, wiped out their purse.
With the second payment in paw and the rich, cheesy taste of previous success in their muzzles, and emboldened to accept a bigger load, they purchased the fastest warp engines that credits could buy.
Tele fluffed up the sleeping bag laid across the starboard manifold. Bridget was berthing to port. The mice had christened the captain's quarters as "The Admiralty Suite", and taken up residence therein. "At least I'm getting paid for this," he consoled himself. It wasn't all that bad. Hell, his smuggling days had been worse, often. At least there wasn't the threat of capture, exile to a penal planet, or the good fortune of simply being blown out of known space by an Enforcer's gunship - or by the guns of another informal distribution entrepreneur!
Just why a culture of rich and dissipated mice - gentlefurs, cads and bons vivants all - should suddenly take a fancy to space soldiering, Telegrand couldn't imagine. Whatever. As long as they paid at the end of the day.
And pay the Mus could. Telegrand chuckled to himself, turning about thrice and composing himself for a nap in that same fashion known to felines in all times and in all worlds. Perhaps he could get used to the silly Mus after all.
The trade in illegal cheese had once flourished, and Bridget and Tele took the muzzle-dry risks, raked in the credits from their consignees, who paid top price, even pushing Telegrand to accept bonuses simply to prevent him from splitting the cargo with their competitors. At first the dangers weren't all that great. Diplomatic clout on the part of the Mus, who had already made great strategic inroads with the elite and effete, the gourmets and gourmands, the powerful and those who own the powerful, thwarted the too-aggressive interdict of the cheese runners by military fighter squadrons. True, there were sometimes casualties and confrontations, for the mice were not at all adept in politics, and uninterested in illegal distribution and illicit market creation: they simply loved their cheese, with a devotion uncompeted. And Mouse Cheese commanded dear prices, kingly ransoms, as befits the food of the gods.
Telegrand smirked when he thought of it, his own first taste. He'd sneaked up to the loft above his family's shuttle hangar, turned out the cushions on the decrepit old sofa passing its retirement years there. From under his hidden copies of Victoria's Secret and PlayCat, he carefully dug out the cellophane-wrapped wedge that he'd saved allowance for months to buy. Cheese, yiffbooks, and a pocket full of Kleenex, and Tele became a lion that day.
It was the universal lust, gustatory and otherwise, for Caseus Mus which the mice had spread so widely that literally made the galaxy beat a path through the aether to their door. Telegrand and the Dawn Treader were never at loose ends for another load of danger and excitement. He'd had some close calls himself, too. But overall it had been fun. He lay back on his bed, chest and sheath swelling with the satisfaction and his nurturing, old memories.
It had come to an end quite suddenly, a whimper at the end of a long, roaring day. Bridget came running into the cabin, her grain raised, joints loose with fear and rattling like a discount-store bolt in a nuclear reactor. She couldn't bear to break the news to Tele. The mice of Muslandia had just broken the market for contraband cheese - they cut off the supply!
Telegrand laughed as he played it over in his head, his reactions, predictions at the time. Bridget was sure the self-imposed embargo couldn't last. The mice surely wouldn't stand by and watch the empire they'd created fall to pieces. Not to mention their incredible fortune. Tele nodded, adding himself that it was probably just a temporary move to drive up the price. Bridget agreed.
So the feline pair set out on their first vacation. With a respectable ship, now rebuilt and upgraded multiple times, and so much money to-paw that they simply needn't worry, they sailed around the galaxy carpe-ing the diem. Bridget partied, lived large. Telegrand grabbed the brass ring himself, working even harder at enjoying the time, for somewhere at the back of his thoughts lurked the notion that perhaps the mice were shutting them down for good. Or worse. They burned reaction mass, shed money like a comet rushing on towards its moth-candle death in a inescapable sun.
Tele's ears perked, hearing now a scamper of paws, the drag of Jedi weapons from the corridor. He wondered if he'd forgotten to lock the hatch, then remembered he wasn't in his own accessible quarters, but the relative security of the engine room.
A little privacy, time to unwind was what he needed. He realized he'd been out of sorts lately, wanted to rest and get himself back on track again. At least the gently mrrring of the drive motors beneath him was soothing in sleep. But sleep wasn't an option, not with a shipload of crazy Mus, more dangerous than the contraband they'd ever produced.
He remembered the shortage of cheese becoming acute, in those days, and the price skyrocketing. Entrepreneurs from seven planets had waylaid him, plied Telegrand with offers various: recreational substances, valuable minerals, spoogey art. They figured he could leverage his relationship with the Mus, use his "in" to procure a new supply. What Telegrand didn't tell them, of course, was that he had no such connections. He ate, drank, yiffed at their expense. Brokered waves of deals of increasing daring and implosive complexity. And took only consolation in the very fact that he'd never worked for the Mus, himself an independent distributor buying and selling, making his hay while the suns shone.
That day in the lives of Telegrand and Bridget, their carefree colorful whirlwind of a vacation, lasted ten years.
And then the Mus flushed the game.
"Tele! Tele!" Bridget was in a worse state than he'd ever seen. He lay comfortable now on his bunk, remembering her panic. But he didn't lie abed that day when she'd finally stopped sputtering to tell him the news. The mice had done the unthinkable. Dashing hope of any but remote future profits, the Mus of Muslandia had opened the Gates of Paradise once more. But this time, with a difference.
In the decade of hiatus from their shipping operations, the Mus had been less than idle. Years of profits from the Prohibition period, wisely invested off-planet in, paradoxically, Mouse Cheese futures, had allowed them the capital for a most perilous adventure.
They'd been less than idle, mused Telegrand. Oh, how the galaxy would soon know that!
The Mus had waited for the interdiction, the armed planetary blockade, to wane, as all political projects for the greater moral good soon must. Then they simply legalized Caseus Mus across the universe, by making it universal.
Using every resource they had, the Mus had produced cheese. Much, much more cheese than they ever had before! Nearly one hundred million times the amount that had been sold so far. By the time word of the incoming political payload had reached the ears of legislators, it was beyond apogee. The entire immense fleet of erstwhile cheese smugglers, idle for half a generation and intoxicated with a decade of dreams of renewed profits, was diverging from Muslandia to all parts of the known universe. The well-to-do, as well they might, soon sent ships, desperate for that delicacy denied. Fearful that the supply might again be cut off - for good - they prepared to hoard, to cellar and store and cache and warehouse, against a feasting day of famine. And all manner of legitimate shippers, eager to be part of the rush, carried of prodigious amounts of Caseus Mus to the eight corners of the galaxy.
The personal entertainment industry, eager to repeat its previous trip on the psychedelic and salacious effects of the cheese, liberated the rest.
Space wasn't large enough for the armadas and phalanxes that converged on Muslandia. "Come back soon, and godspeed!" said the mice, as each ship prepared to lift. "And your next load is free, too!" The law of cubic space was far greater than the law of legislators, more immanent than any warship in the universe. No power or blockade could halt the rapidly expanding sphere of cargo vessels, yachts, and freighters speeding like the ring of a supernova from the atmosphere of Muslandia, a shockwave of elemental new cheese.
In the excitement, the mice moved more product off their loading docks and out of their warehouses than could be hoarded or consumed in near term across the entire galaxy. Ships wandered between stars, unable to find a receiver for their load of cheese. The mice moved it everywhere, saturating the markets and inundating societies in every arm of the spiral. There was no going back, no way to contain the rush. The Mus had won.
No legislator, no matter how deep his grass-roots, nor how mulched with manure, will attempt to make the universal illegal - except those who natural selection has relegated to the ignominy of blind cave worms. And while the laws against Caseus Psychoerotica Mus still remain on the books today, the mindset of Prohibition was crushed like so many grapes beneath the paws of bacchic virgins.
Telegrand sat up, his tail dangling over the edge of the manifold superstructure. He stretched, a slow, sensuous feline affair that truly would take all of nine lives to properly enjoy. The crazy mice, he yawned, had indeed broken the interdiction, destroyed Prohibition with a single stroke. But they'd ruined forever the commodity market as far as their own Mouse Cheese empire was concerned. There would never again be their accustomed astronomical profits, their enormous public acclaim.
He wondered if the mice had know that economic reality, their eventual public relations defeat.
But then again, who was to say what the Mus ever knew? Or what their grand purpose was.
As far as Tele himself knew, these days they were all getting interested in military matters. Planetary defense. Space travel. Throughout their entire history, Technology had never been gracious to the Mus, bestowing her styro-gilded gifts upon others exclusively, and water-borne travel was the most sophisticated thing the Mus had ever attempted.
Maybe this lot will get tired of space, Telegrand thought. Go back to cheese making, perhaps.
Or maybe not.
The compartment lights went red, and klaxons flooded the tiny space. The negalion pounced to his paws, raced for the hatch.
"Tele! Tele!" Bridget was in a worse state than he'd ever seen, ever, as she appeared unbidden at his wrist. "They're coming!"