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Jubal’s own age waited beside the pallet.
    Jubal decided he wanted to meet the boy and went to greet him. Chester jumped onto the pallet, accepted a grooming from his mother, had a drink, and lay down to rest.
    “I am Edfu, keeper of Bahiti,” said the boy who accompanied the pallet, gesturing to a large and rather wild looking spotted cat, who used the boy’s gesturing hand to rub against his ears in an affectionate way. Edfu’s Standard was heavily accented but understandable. “Welcome. We have long waited for the Grand Vizier’s return, but little did we imagine he would bring with him such bounty—so many beautiful new cats!”
    “We didn’t have much choice,” Jubal told him. “There was sort of a—misunderstanding with the government.”
    “Your government does not like cats? Or are these cats perhapsexiled members of a larger royal family?” Edfu’s voice dropped when he asked the last question.
    “No, no, nothing like that. Our cats don’t have a royal family—neither do the people, actually—but these are very special cats just the same.”
    “So have we heard! It is said that the Grand Vizier told the queen that each cat among them has extra toes and that they hunt among the stars!” Said by whom? Jubal wondered, but then he realized that the kind of bond he had with Chester was commonplace here, where cats and humans routinely shared communication. If the cats wanted to, of course.
    “Well, a lot of them have extra toes. My kitten Chester does. This is him, here.” He reached over and scratched Chester’s ears and was given a brief
prrt
for his trouble. “But not all of them. They are all good hunters, though, and all of them come from ships where they were sort of security and morale officers, I guess you could say. It’s what their ancestors have been doing for a long time. Chester’s supposed to look like the very first Barque Cat of all, his own many times great-granddad Tuxedo Thomas.”
    “Ahhh! So these cats help you to hunt?”
    “No, they do the hunting,” he said. “Don’t yours?”
    Edfu looked a bit puzzled. “It’s much too dangerous.”
    Jubal thought that was pretty odd but it would be rude to say so, and besides, he was tired and hot, and to his surprise, Edfu seemed to be too. Beulah offered her sunscreen to the woman she walked beside and rubbed some on Sosi. The woman was fanning the pallet full of cats just as another woman was fanning Bahiti, Chester, Pshaw-Ra, and the others on that pallet.
    “Is it always this hot?” he asked Edfu.
    “Yes,” Edfu said.
    “How do you stand it?”
    “Our houses and the temple are cool. Our work is done under the city.”
    “Do kids work too?”
    “There are not many. I tend to Bahiti and that is my work. That is my mother, Eshe, wielding the fan.”
    “Is fan wielding a part-time job or what she does for a living, besides being your mom, I mean?”
    Edfu gave him quizzical look. “Part-time? Living? Oh! Oh no. My mother is an engineer who designs and maintains the underground structures.” When he saw Jubal still watching the fan going up and down, he said, “What she does—what we all do at this time is strictly ceremonial. We seldom stray far from the city.”
    “How about your dad? What’s he do?”
    “He is a medical assistant,” Edfu said. “That’s him at the front of the pallet, on the right side.” He pointed to one of the bearers. His father was dripping sweat and panting. They were climbing a tall dune now and it was slippery.
    “If this is the welcoming ceremony, it’s a good thing you don’t get visitors more often,” Jubal said, starting to pant a little himself. “I thought you might send flitters for us.”
    Edfu looked a little confused, but before Jubal could explain, the other boy pointed. “Behold, Bubastis!”
    Spread out below them was a city shaped differently than any Jubal had seen before. In its center was a tall stepped pyramid—ziggurat, he thought they were called—and