CHAPTER 1 - Interplanetary

Dari flew over purple forests, darting between breaks in the clouds to let the sunlight warm his fur. He was finishing up a last survey run of the planet. It wasn’t strictly necessary, there was no essentially new information, but he was there to get to know the ecosystem, and he wanted to say goodbye before leaving.

He descended along the return leg of the flight and landed. His home was an underground complex constructed in-place by automated systems before he had arrived. Probes had mapped the ground, surveyed the biome, taken gene samples of every organism, and built concealed facilities, accessible by phasing through a hillside, before a single person had arrived.

You might call sending the person a waste, but they liked to get a sense of the character of the environment. Predicting future development was as much intuition as anything, and in-person observation gave a feel for how far group behavior was pushing the edge of complexity. From the characteristics of species, they tried to project the ambitions and drives of the civilizations their descendants might one day give rise to. Every one of Dari’s reports suggested this world might be sending its own ships of exploration out in only millions of years, maybe less, and the high output of their sun led to a greater than average energy abundance, leading to curious, flourishing communities of species with rich senses and highly varying behaviors.

Like all worlds with sensing life, they’d watch and preserve it from calamity; the various ‘Great Filters’ had long ago been seen as problems to be solved and harms to be prevented. They were emotionally invested in this world, and they’d be eagerly waiting to see what new cultures would spring from it. They’d intervene subtly, using the lightest touch to help them avoid the worst and least instructive calamities, and set up outposts near enough for their ships to find and make contact when they set out.

Dari padded along the springy flooring of the hallway, heading deeper, and flopped into his hammock. He pulled up his itinerary, squinting at it, then grabbed the glyph for Control out of the air and brushed his thumb against it to open a hyperwave channel.

“Control, you there?”

A soft purr came over the microphone and chirping voice, “Hi, Dari! What’s up? Ready to come home tomorrow?”

“About that…my retrieval’s still scheduled for the same time after local sunrise tomorrow, but you canceled the ship that was scheduled to come out.”

There was a laugh in his ear, the purring grew in self satisfaction, then stopped with the words “Oh, yeah! I forgot to mention—” Dari knew that was a lie “—there’s a preservation mission in the area, they’ll just pick you up on the way back.”

Dari checked through the computer system and it was there. A return preservation activity in his area, and he was scheduled to return with it. Feeling silly for not checking he dismissed it before reading the details. “Oh, there it is…” He felt silly for bothering Control instead of looking it up first.

“See you tomorrow, then, signing off.”

“Oh, you will indeed!” came the reply, almost dissolving into laughter at the end. Dari chuckled and shook his head, deciding to let Mrit have his joke, whatever it was.

There isn’t much bandwidth on research missions, and most of that gets earmarked for all the observations. Apart from occasional voice channels and all the text he could read or write, Dari had several hundred lifetimes worth of immersive environments, alternate lives, epic poems, fields of study, and degree programs sent with him. He spent his last night in study, within a virtuality backed by an expert system allowing him to construct multiple parallel attempts at proof by juggling theorems and implications like building blocks, forking streams of reasoning and building off of them in different ways to see the results. The coyote tired himself, burning off the energy of a completed mission by scrambling up towers of his own intellectual making, searching them for flaws, and jumping to the next as each crumbled beneath his feet and his questioning!

Intellectually exhausted, though his mind rang with the intense play, Dari decided to spend his last night under the stars. He looked over the global weather map and flew outward to a cool forest of tangling vines, unrolled his bed, and watched the now familiar alien stars until he fell asleep.

When he woke up, it was getting late enough he was surprised systems had picked up no transponder in system. They didn’t just forget to pick up space travelers, and he’d been reassured everything was still on schedule, so he would have been informed of any change before now. Even if Mrit was a bit mischievous, Dari had always felt himself in good paws with his ground-controller, so he strapped on his grav-pack, packed up his bed, and flew back.

By the time he had finished gathering up his belongings, powering everything down and putting it into maintenance standby, it was almost time for departure. Dari phased back out through the hill, and waited.

The ship should have already landed. Mrit prided themself on punctuality and operational efficiency enough that they’d normally have the ship landed, loaded, inspected, and ready to launch on the second of scheduled retrieval, yet Dari stood alone.

After last night he wasn’t going to call until the ship was actually late, he was going to double check his own timekeeping first, and he would wait fifteen minutes more, just to be safe.

The coyote padded back and forth, feeling impatient about the imagined snafu when a cloud passed over the sun, a thick one. Looking up, he saw the grey sky was no brighter than twilight, what light there was coming in from the sides, colored by the low angle and painting the curved, plush undersides of the clouds with reds and pinks.

The sky had darkened exactly at pickup time, and Dari wondered if there might be some atmospheric issue interfering with the landing. If so, they would have called. There’d be wind or rain or something. He connected to planetary weather analysis and got a message back saying it was recalibrating for a change in insolation.

That didn’t make any sense. A Dyson swarm doesn’t just spring up. A planet doesn’t get spun away from its primary overnight with no…

The clouds parted, resolving into long fingers with smooth grey pads and white claws colored by horizontal sunlight. A sparkling green eye peeked down between them, and Dari’s stomach dropped as he saw the iris dilate right above him as a purr started to vibrate the world.

The coyote called ground control only to hear a chirpy, chuckling mew from above. The hand lifted, and in the light he saw a grinning face filling the sky, grey tabby stripes shimmering silver in the starlight. Before he could react it rushed toward him and the furry muzzle bowled him over, nuzzling him across half a continent, a fingertip beneath or behind him keeping him cushioned on fluff and pad. Tectonic movements of facial muscles nudged the coyote up over a fingertip and into a hill as the cheerful voice rang out, a low purr of delight modulating every syllable. “I can hear you fine, I’m right here!”

Mrit looked down at the little planet he held in his hand, and at the even littler coyote sprawled on the hill. Dari hadn’t been hurt, but the cat was pretty sure they’d never seen him so very overcome by surprise before. They restrained the normal feline desire to nuzzle one’s co-worker into an alien landscape and gave him a moment to recover, eyes tracking every move.

Dari’s mind had dissolved into pleasant confusion and refusal to acknowledge events. It was the opposite of traumatic dissociation, his world dissolved into purring and fluff at high velocity combined with the certain knowledge there was no way he would feel quite as in charge again even when he was taller than Mrit once more. Eventually his panting giggles died down and he was able to engage with his surroundings again. Green eyes as big as lakes, reflecting the outlines of continents, looked back at him from a grinning face whose proportions pushed the boundaries of what could be politely described as ‘geological’. Dari tried to look up and make eye-contact, but it didn’t work. Every time he tried to form a sentence while staring up at the planetary feline, he’d get overcome with a fit of giggles. Finally he had to turn away and summon up his inner grumpiness before managing, “Why are you so big? Shouldn’t I be informed about th—”

He was cut off by a fingerpad, diffusely reflecting the sunlight with a slightly satiny sheen, descending on him, pinning him down, flattening him against the cool grass beneath a weighty sky of leathery warmth. “You would have, if you’d ever show up to meetings! You blew off the one where we were discussing how your results fed into our long term plans.”

He didn’t even try to wiggle free. When the fingertip spanned miles, what was the point? Dari mumbled, “If they’re long term plans I can read about them when I get home. It’s not like they aff—”

Mrit lifted their finger. It wasn’t an improvement. The cat looked straight at Dari, eyes gleaming, smiling in delight. He tapped his velvet fingertips lazily on either side of the coyote and a ‘thoom, thoom’ of deep vibration welled up below him, making the ground vibrate against him. The wildlife wasn’t disturbed, except for a few birds that flew off when he yelped at the first impact. “And you ignored the meeting I sent you with a note saying we had to discuss the change in your retrieval! When I brought it up you said, I quote, ‘You decide.’”

Mrit lowered his head to regard Dari, intersecting a sunbeam that lit up his fur into a silver nimbus, whiskers longer than rivers gleaming as they said, “So, I did.”

Dari’s mind spun. It’s not that he doubted Mrit would put that much effort into teaching him a lesson about blowing off meetings. He just wasn’t sure how the cat could have got everyone else to go along with it.

Mrit spoke, possibly guessing his thought, “Their star! It’s hot for an A-type. Bright, along with how much water there is it explains a lot about how pleasant the ecosystem is! But it’s unstable. We’re putting the world in archive until we can find a new primary for it.” They started fidgeting with the planet, and from Dari’s perspective the grinning face disappeared like a sunset, the twin sparkling eyes distorting, the yellowish flecks amid the green blooming and filling the horizon before disappearing and the sky was overcast again.

Now he had context, it was it was plain that Mrit’s palm filled half the sky. Each twitch of a finger and idle movement could be seen to have a cause in tiny motions of great structures beneath the padded palm.

Mrit continued talking, the constant purr of delight at ‘catching’ Dari making them trill every other word. “Since we had to set up a distortion corridor to shrink the planet anyway…” Dari watched the fingers flex above him and tried to dart out of the way even though he know it couldn’t possibly do any good.

“And you told me to handle it” the tip of the cat’s ring-finger came down and Dari was pinned on his back beneath the momentous pad. Something like a six-legged, lavender fossa came to investigate him and began to lick his ears as the self-satisfied explanation continued, “So I decided to go pick up the planet and deliver it to the archive myself! Leave you on it while we shrink it, and save a whole trip.”

The cat was embarrassing him in front of the local wildlife. As soon as Mrit let him up Dari jumped to his feet and turned, running out of the jungle, giving himself a shake. “All right…” Dari said. He glanced up at the sky. He couldn’t quite tell what he wanted to be up there. Every time he imagined making eye contact with the huge feline his knees went weak, but he felt silly looking up at someone’s hand. “So, are we there yet?”

The cat wasn’t looking straight at him, instead he could see the huge fingertips straddling the world, gripping the horizon as Mrit felt the tops of mountains, holding the tiny orb in their paws and turning it this way and that, admiring the way the sun sparkled off ice caps. They leaned down and blew on a great ocean wave to watch it foam up and fragment.

Dari stood breathless, watching Mrit. He knew the cat, his silly mannerisms, the squeaky mew he made if you left his fur mussed after petting him. He recognized their body language, the way he crooked his finger when feeling something, the little half-grin. Nothing about them seemed silly, though. Not any more. Everything that had seemed slightly goofy was newly vast enough to be transfigured into grandeur. Even their love of shiny things took on new significance when the glittering jewel being admired was your whole world.

He saw Mrit look back toward him, pupils dilated. Attention hit him like with the intensity of a laser and he stared upward, knees weak again. The feline smiled down toward him, moving a finger faster than he could think, and a plush wall nudged up behind him, holding him up. “We’re almost back!” Mrit giggled and lowered their head, their purring breath creating a warm front that traveled over the coyote. “I’ve been taking big steps.” they said, then looked up again. Dari couldn’t quite decide between finding Mrit’s enjoyment infectious or being annoyed at his predicament. Feeling a shy warmth in his ears he turned, nuzzling a tiny spot on a fingerpad that loomed taller than any mountain, surmounted by a claw whose point attracted thunderbolts from the tops of nearby clouds.

“If they’re as big as that, I’m surprised we’re not there by now…” the coyote said without thinking, just taking in the scale of the pad, only to feel that laser-beam impact as Mrit looked down at him and said, “Oh! Just stepped through the door. See?”

Their fingertip disappeared. Their face loomed for a moment as they blew, parting the clouds and clearing the sky before they lifted their head and held the planet out at arm’s length. Dari looked up, and he could see, hazy and distorted by the atmosphere, light shining above, coloring the sky blue right around it, and the faint lines of ceiling tiles.

The feline’s voice filled the air, “I guess I coulda’ run, but I figured I should watch where I’m going, holding a planet.” Mrit rolled the planet in their palm, seeming to like the feel of it, and Dari’s sky tipped back and forth, leading to an oscillating sunrise and sunset of the light fixture, before they turned and rolled the world a bit further. The sky was filled with a square corner, a hole, leading inward an impossible distance, with flickers of bright colors and movement within. Dari tried to reimagine his memories from his new perspective. His stomach lurched as he ask, “Is that..an office?”

His view bounced—Mrit must have bobbled the planet in their hand—then rolled forward. The office ‘set’ and the sky filled with Mrit’s cupped fingers, seemingly pushing down on the atmosphere. “It’s our office! I was going to finish the report before dropping this at the archive. Why, did you want me to take you around so you could say hi to people first?”

Dari heard a slight frown in Mrit’s voice at the last word. He must have realized his playful look was directed at the wrong side of the world. The fingers beneath him blurred and the suddenly smiling feline looked straight down at him, the titanic cat shifting the world before he could draw breath to speak.

Every time that regard hit him, it was like a warmth, a force pushing him back, “What? No!” He could just imagine everyone else passing the planet around, petting him. He had to stifle an embarrassed yip at the thought.

Mrit looked up, and Dari saw the heavens change, past the fluffy underside of his chin. The light of the hallway gave way to the darkness of the office. He saw, inconceivably high beyond his reach, the cheerfully glowing star-stickers in bright colors he’d stuck to the ceiling. The proprioceptive and tactile impression of having ornamented that celestial expanse with his own hands piled onto the vision of Mrit’s fingertips on the horizon, and the scale of his tininess juxtaposed to his former life started to overwhelm him.

Mrit lay in their hammock and set the planet down their chest, then glanced toward Dari. Beneath the atmospheric haze, they saw the tiny coyote bent under the weight of his emotions and covered the world with their hand, giving it a squeeze. Their palm weighed down, leaving trees unbowed but pressing Dari against to the ground. The coyote was comforted enough to start feeling playfully defiant, “You aren’t just going to sit her using me as a fidget toy while you work, are you?”

Delighted at the question Mrit lifted their hand, looking down and saying, “What? Of course not! I’m going to use this planet as a fidget toy. Your company’s just a bonus.” They giggled and then bumped the planet with one finger, sending it rolling through their fur. They plucked symbols out of the air, whispering to and rearranging them, switching hands each time the planet rolled to one side or the other of their chest so they could bat it the other direction.

Dari didn’t feel the changes in angular momentum, riding on a miniaturized planet is as smooth as anything, and for a while he stared, mesmerized at the fast-forwarding and rewinding of days. Mrit’s eyes, shining in concentration, glowed like twin suns, with the colorful symbols of the interface whirling around them like moons, while the nights were dark skies filled with an ever-shifting pattern of grey tabby fur.

“You’re not just going to leave me on this planet, are you?” Dari asked. He wasn’t quite sure if Mrit was listening on the link to ground control or if the cat could actually hear the sound of his voice. Neither possibility would make him feel less overwhelmed, so he decided against trying to figure it out.

Mrit’s hands stopped. The rolling stopped. A palm filled the sky and two fingertips held the world far below the horizon. Mrit tilted their palm back so they could look straight down and smile. “Tiny coyote belongs on the tiny planet. That’s just common sense.” With that, they went back to work, giggling to themself.

That was a challenge. Dari strapped on his grav-pack. It’s not like there wasn’t air outside the atmosphere. It wasn’t like he couldn’t just fly out there. He wasn’t entirely sure if this would accomplish anything other than making a point, but he didn’t care. The coyote checked the safeties, enabled power, and leaped into the air. He soared over the planet. It was difficult navigating at first, because he had to readjust to looking up and seeing an impossibly huge cat filling the sky, which he’d only got used to on the ground, but after a few instances of startled flailing, he managed to fly toward one of Mrit’s hands. They’d uncurled the fingers, lightly cupping the world so they could watch Dari’s flight. “Where’re you going?”

Dari didn’t answer, instead the building up speed. He intended to fly off-world and land on the side of one of Mrit’s fingers. He planned his course, accelerated, and as he pulled upward, he bounced off an invisible elastic membrane. He was thrown back, the grav-pack sending him swooping wildly but keeping him from falling. Mrit started giggling as he made the attempt again and bounced once more.

“What gives?!” called Dari, spiraling away, turning and reorienting himself, finding a spot to hover where he could face somewhat in Mrit’s direction without straining their neck.

“Oh…” the feline giggled, purring louder as they leaned in, “Uh, that narrative potential gradient field that keeps me from causing a stampede every time I boop your nose?” Mrit demonstrated, teasingly bumping the little coyote with a fingertip the size of an island. Dari bobbed in the atmosphere, then bounced between Mrit’s middle finger and thumb a few times as the cat playfully batted him back and forth, the impacts like falling into a warm, leather couch. “You’re kinda’…too tiny to push through it.”

They giggled a little more, then scooped the world up in their hands, looking down at it, “But don’t worry. The Grand Starcat will lift you from your world after they finish work!”

Dari put his hands on his hips, trying to give Mrit a defiant look. “Grand *Starcat?!” Mrit just leaned in closer until the entire sky above Dari was a single green eye. They purred in a low whisper, “I think I’m pretty grand!”

Dari was struck dumb long enough that it gave Mrit the chance to back at the report and say, “Oh, dear, I’ll never finish this with my hands busy!” and with that they leaned forward and rolled the planet out of their hand and into a spot between their feet at the other end of the hammock. Dari didn’t realize what was happening for a moment until a huge paw rushed forward to fill the sky. Not even the whole thing, the satin gleam of a smooth pawpad outlined its curved surface, illuminated fluff seeming to give it a glowing nebular halo. It descended. “M—”

The giant whose fidgeting could spin the world through a year’s worth of days in a minute rubbed the planet between the balls of their footpaws, pushing Dari down through the atmosphere, and weighing him down between inexorably soft pad and springy grass before he could articulate the first phoneme. The rest of the word came out in a shocked gasp, “—rit!”

The coyote barked in complaint, wiggling, pushing up on the pad. It wasn’t unyielding, not at all! Soft and pleasant he could push and wiggle beneath it, but it seemed endless. Soft and gentle is no easier to escape if it spreads out for hundreds or thousands of miles.

Mrit purred and chirped to themself, flexing their toes, taking a while to enjoy feeling the contour of the land against their paw. Their pad shifted, dragging Dari back and forth, the surface flexing with even the tiniest movement. Mrit could feel the tiny living warmth of their friend, every move of his arms, even the way his fingers splayed as he pressed against their pad. Still working, not missing a beat, they enumerated a few other valuable goals that had been accomplished in the recovery operation.

“Mrit!” came a plaintive howl. The ball pad had slid far back, and the feline’s toes moved at tectonic scale, lifting, lowering, rolling over Dari again, slowing to enjoy the feel of his fur, the finest and softest picofluff. Through giggles the coyote said “I don’t think this is the dignified, respectful process they had in mind for World Archival.”

Mrit had just entered “Opportunity for” then paused, glancing toward their footpaws. They pinned the tiny coyote in a meadow of lavender clover, rubbing a toepad over him, feeling his fur and movement over a few tiny areas. “Nothing disrespectful about rubbing a civilization underpaw if you’re nice about it!”

This assertion was so outlandish Dari couldn’t even be annoyed by it, “What?”

Mrit just continued, sliding their paw forward, the planet rolling beneath it, settling into the arch of the other paw. The bit of clover containing Dari ended up tucked against the leading curve of Mrit’s ballpad. “And the only civilization there now is ours, that you brought with you! And nobody can complain about a cat playing with their own civilization, right? That’s what we’re for!”

Mrit giggled to themself and entered the rest of the sentence “bonding and socialization between flight and ground crew.”

Being up against but not under the ballpad of Mrit’s paw, Dari wasn’t actually pinned. He switched on the thrust of his grav-pack and leaped into the air, hurtling upward between Mrit’s toes. They cat couldn’t help being wiggly, and so toepads hundreds of miles thick rushed by as he Dari flew past them, then rushed back the other direction with the cat’s idle toe flex. “You’re weird!” the coyote proclaimed.

Mrit took that as a victory. Dari had a comeback for everything. If They’d known all they needed to do was be a hundred million times taller than the coyote to win an argument, they’d have considered it sooner. They didn’t get right back to work, though. Once Dari ascended past their toepads, they felt the disturbed air rustle their fur. With a delighted sound like ‘tsriiu!’ they scrunched their toes, the upwardly mobile coyote thwupped into suddenly moving fluff. Dari’s sudden barking was muffled more when they were pushed forward against the ballpad.

Mrit decided that if there was ever a time to monologue like a villain in their life, this was it.

“Sure. When a world’s area of space gets unstable we stick it in a holo-stellarium and go find or build them a new star, and we always put it back before they get good enough at astronomy to tell the difference.” Mrit explained. “Afterward, when we contact them, they might find out if they look up their own pre-contact records.”

The cat let out a ‘hrrft’ of frustration and started rolling the sphere between their paws, from splayed toes to heel. This let Dari free again, and the coyote, unsure where to go began navigating upward, getting pressed under pad for a few seconds now and then, before they landed in a spot where they could see the edges of the vast paws without being trapped beneath them. “I take it you have a better idea?” Dari asked.

Mrit giggled, adding “Brainstorming for better archival practice.” to the list of accomplishments before calling the report done. They playfully turned their paw and tapped a toe far ahead of Dari, the coyote’s sky filling with flexing grey pad that just hung there, though it didn’t come down to pin him yet. “Yes! It’s like all those worlds that want to know why we didn’t leave them messages to find as soon as they started scanning the sky, hiding while we sat there watching them! Now we’re directly taking care of a world and never letting them know?” They slid their toes back, tapping them against the ground, making it vibrate beneath Dari. The coyote took to the air again, trying to dodge between the massive digits, but Mrit kept speaking, rolling the world against one footpaw with the toes of the other, so Dari’s attempts to fly upward kept ending with him flying into the cat’s sole or being ‘bobbled’ in the air with their toes.

“Forget the stellaria! Imagine if I could take a world home. Watch over it, talk to the inhabitants as they evolves. Give them a few pointers in metallurgy. Why, I could nudge anyone who tries to take over the world back home…”

Dari dropped in the air. He noticed Mrit was getting caught up in their monologue and they weren’t tracking his movement as well. He called out, “And you’d let them develop? You seem a bit of a…pawtocrat…” Getting the sudden glimmer of a plan, he flew along one side of Mrit’s footpaw, navigating along it to ruffle the fur the wrong way with his whole body, steering up and down to widen the swath, feeling the soft, fine strands blur past him.

Mrit lifted his other foot, bringing it near, toes reaching to smooth and rub at the ruffled area. Dari kept flying, up toward the ankle, moving as far as he could before he bounced back off the enclosing field. Mrit continued, “Everyone ends up at the same place, more or less, if they don’t mess up enough that we have to intervene early.”

Mrit kept rubbing and scratching along the side of his footpaw, then up toward the ankle. They didn’t even seem to notice the connection to Dari’s actions. “World with a benevolent cat guardian is worth trying once! Forget trying to land on a planet. Let them build ships to land on my finger and take off again!”

Dari saw his chance. He coaxed maximum thrust from the grav-pack and, once he reached it, he grabbed the tip of Mrit’s toeclaw. “Besides, from your experience—” Mrit’s footpaw tilted, pointing as they stretched their toes up to rub and smooth the disturbed fur. Dari felt like he was being pushed through a warm elastic soap-bubble that squeezed around him, nearly pulling him off the claw as he passed the field.

“—don’t you think most tiny worlds—” Mrit slid the paw Dari was clinging to back and crossed their ankle over their knee, leaving the other paw to play with the now uninhabited world.

“—would like a big friend to play with and play with them?” Mrit was idly bouncing the footpaw crossed over their knee when their ears perked up.

Dari was about to proclaim how clever they were, having kept the cat talking, using his own claw to escape the planet. It was just how you were supposed to escape giant villains holding the world between their paws! This new open expanse was his own world, sure a bit bigger, but he could fly and…

He yipped and hanged on tighter. Before there’d been a world. Things his own size. Mountains were huge, yes, but only about as mountains should be. There was a sky-filling cat, yes. An impossible intrusion from the outside, but at least there’d been an inside. And he had been in it.

Now he looked out. Around. There was only the cat. In every other direction there was emptiness. Without him even realizing it, he’d been moved so far from the world he’d called home for months he couldn’t even see it. He made out what he thought might be the hammock below, but it was more alien than the alien world.

With everything else of his scale removed, all there was…was Cat.

He imagined flying. Flying around the world, soaring above the mountains, they made him feel quite capable, but the mountains on that world never rose above the feline’s toepads. He could fly through the air, covering interplanetary distances to travel from toeclaw to ankle or make their way to Mlit’s knee. How long might it take him to find the way to Mlit’s eye? Maybe he would need a better engine to navigate the feline. Thoughts of cartographic voyages around the cat in a starship made his scale feel so absurd he clung to the toeclaw, and yelped with accumulated realization of scale, shivering.

Attention drawn by the yelp, Mrit looked downward. A flexible cat, they lifted their paw up to eye-level, leaning forward to observe their tiny passenger. Seeing him a bit scared, Mrit touched a fingerpad to their claw, supporting Dari. He said in a soft whisper, “Aww. Hi there, Explorer. Let go and relax. I’ll hang on to you for the trip.”

The cat kept perfectly still, waiting for Dari to release his grip on their claw. Once they felt the minuscule weight settle on the pad, they sat up slowly. While Dari hugged their fingertip, they leaned over and snagged the planet, slipping it in their pocket as they stood up from the hammock. They kept Dari in their vision while they walked to the Archive.

The coyote lay there, nuzzling into Mrit’s fingertip. He found the sense of vitality coming from it was instantly calming, and his breath and tailwagging entrained to ratios of that huge pulse. Soon he calmed, looking up at the friendly green eyes. Mrit, who had temporarily lost their teasing aspect, asked, “Feeling okay?” and waited for the mumbled “Yeah” before using the edge of their ring finger to slide Dari down into their palm, so they could curl their fingers around him. Voice lilting, they said “Don’t worry, just a walk down the hall here…”

Keeping their paw curled around Dari, they walked the rest of the way. When they arrived, they raised the coyote up, fingers out, palm flat. “Hey, you did most of the work, you deserve to participate. Stand up!”

Mrit pulled the planet out of their pocket and straightened, giving Dari a chance to stand up on their palm. Then, the cat who had, just a moment before, been playing with it between their paws, reverently placed the world into the stellarium.

The two of them spoke in unison: “This is the way the world doesn’t end.” their heads bowed for a moment, eyes open. The cat looking down on the tiny world from above, the coyote looking out over the vast expanse of Mrit’s pad saw it rotating in its simulated patch of space.

Mrit closed the door to the cupboard, then looked toward their palm. “Okay, I can restore you in the next room.” before asking, either teasing or hopeful, “Unless you’d like to come visit for the weekend first?”