“You agreed with them.”
“They had some valid points. I wasn’t brave enough to leave when they did. Worse: I wasn’t unselfish enough.”
Ruthven had a sudden thought. “Are you the friend who hid the Jade Pineapple for them?”
“Yes,” Aesop said grumpily. “But I got nervous, being the only person who knew where it was. Nero was starting to suspect that I knew something about Burbage and Banksia’s retreat. Then the Anne Boleyn Incident happened — Abydos and Lancaster’s antics around her execution gave me the idea. I borrowed the Violet Sunflower, to delete the memory of where I put the Jade Pineapple, so no one would be able to force me to give it back. But I messed it up — completely blanked myself. They put me in with the kittens. Later, when the time aisles brought me a purple migraine from hell, I remembered everything I had done. Everything I was.”
“You’re not even complicit in the worst things the Founders have done,” Ruthven said. “That came later — the memory erasures, the manipulation.”
“Don’t let me off the hook,” said Aesop. “We were irresponsible, right from the start. We treated Time like she was some kind of chew toy.”
“I think you’ve been punished enough,” said Ruthven, scratching her ears again. “Don’t you?”
They ate the pineapple upside-down cake, all three slices between them, since Oxford had not returned.
“Brush your teeth later,” Ruthven warned.
“You’re not the boss of me,” said Aesop, licking syrup off her whiskers.
“Why did you do it?” he blurted out.
Aesop gave him a steady look with those yellow-green eyes of hers. He was almost getting used to her purple panther-like appearance. “I wasn’t going to leave you alone forever. I needed time to deal with having my memory back.”
“No,” he said. “Not that. Why did you steal the Artefacts and run away from your time in the first place?”
Something odd crossed her face. Embarrassment, he realised.
“Humans,” admitted Aesop. “Banksia is full of scientific curiosity. Nero is desperate for everyone to think he’s marvellous. I played on all that when I talked them into it. Just because I wanted to meet a human.”
“We’re really all gone, then?” Ruthven said, remembering the trial. Humans were due to go extinct in the late twenty-eighth century, according to the Judicial Felicitas. “What happened to us?”
Four centuries or so. That was less time than lay between Sappho and Catullus. Between Richard the Lionheart and Elizabeth I. Between the ‘death’ of Anne Boleyn and the filming of Cramberleigh. Four centuries was nothing.
“No idea,” said Aesop, having the grace to sound apologetic. “Mewtopia didn’t care much about history, let alone the rise and fall of humanity.”
That was… something that Ruthven needed to pack away to process when he was feeling more emotionally robust.
“How did you find out about us in the first place?” he asked. “What got you curious?”
“Oh, here we go.” Aesop ducked her head, looking embarrassed. “Something I found deep in the archives. A show you might have heard of, actually.”
“Not Cramberleigh?” Ruthven was both awed and horrified all at once. Cramberleigh had survived beyond humanity itself! “The cats had it archived?”
Aesop placed a comforting paw on his arm. “Only three episodes, I’m afraid.”
“Three episodes.” Awe gave way to a kind of numb shock. Somehow it was easier to deal with this tragedy than the loss of the human race. Three episodes of Cramberleigh to represent the entire history of the show? Which three? His brain immediately started spiralling. “Which three?” he demanded.2
Aesop patted him again. “4F.”
“That Horrible Cat? That one’s still lost.”
“Clearly someone finds it between now and the thirtieth century.”
Was it even a good episode? Ruthven didn’t know. It was probably not a good idea to nip to the thirtieth century to grab it. “What else?”
“13G,” said Aesop, making innocent eyes.
“Curiosity Killed the Cat,” Ruthven completed automatically. His ability to match production codes to stories was his primary superpower. A suspicion crept up his spine. “Did they only save the episodes with ‘cat’ in the title? Tell me the last one wasn’t Cat’s Cradle?”
Cat’s Cradle was one the worst Return to Cramberleigh episode of all-time. Only three episodes saved and that was one of them?
“I can’t emphasise enough how little importance my people place on history that doesn’t involve cats,” said Aesop. “The same goes for pop culture.”3
“But there are no actual cats in any of those episodes of Cramberleigh!” protested Ruthven. “Unless 4F has cats in it?”
“No. Just dumb squishy humans with their dumb squishy problems. But it was enough to get me curious about meeting my own dumb squishy humans.”
“Questions like, can I steal precious time travel artefacts and run away to befriend an extinct species?”
Aesop looked approving. “That is one of my all-time favourite questions.”
Ruthven shook his head. “Cramberleigh has a lot to answer for.”
“Indeed.”
Aesop was so big that Ruthven could lean his chin on her head and hug her entire body without squashing her. It was pretty great.
