Free Catalyst by Anne McCaffrey

voice inquire. “I hope I didn’t sit on him while I was birthing this one. Git, have you seen—”
    “He’s right here, Chessie. Causing trouble.” Larger paws and a nudge from an adult muzzle herded me back toward my own mother, who nudged me toward an appropriate dispenser of sustenance.
    “Ah, not my fault, Git. He gets that from his father’s line. Space Jockey is a notorious brawler.”
    “Aren’t they all?”
    My sister was already at an adjoining milk outlet and we applied ourselves to nursing with great zeal while two more siblings were born, washed, and deposited beside us. Then things began to go badly.
    I noticed this because I was sleeping on top of Mother when she began heaving and panting to a degree that I have since felt only during take-offs, landings, and meteor showers. My brother did not survive. Neither my other siblings nor I found this terribly distressing as it meant more available food for us, but Mother was vexed, rather ashamed, she complained to Git, since she had never before lost a kitten, and, by the time she finally succeeded in pushing it out, she was hurt and bleeding to an apparently irregular extent.
    “Where is that boy now that he might come in handy?” Git asked, dumping her own brood unceremoniously, as I divined from their indignant minuscule mewings, and trying to help my mother clean her injuries.
    “Kibble! I want my Kibble!” Mother cried. “She would know how to help me. We’ve done this together many times and I never lost a kitten. Oh, Kibble, where are you?”
    Her cries, strong at first, quickly grew softer as she lost more blood. The tang of it was strong and it made the straw sticky beneath our paws.
    Git’s louder complaints were joined by the sound of her claws rending some resistant substance followed by the thud of her body against the same. “The dirty rats locked my entrance!” she cried. “How are we supposed to provide for these young’uns if we can’t hunt? Let me owwt!”
    I did not understand the full implications of the situation, nor did any of the other kittens, poor blind stumbling little things that we were. But we could hear that Git was distressed and sense that Mother was in mortal pain, so we added our feeble squeaking voices to those of the older cats.
    In between my verbal complaints, I licked my mother as she had licked me to clean and dry me. Although I had not the words to articulate it, I knew that she was on the verge of leaving us, that help must be sought, if only to remove the barrier Git found so irksome. Mother trembled beneath me, and her heartbeat—our steady and strong companion as we awaited birth—had become too quick to give proper emphasis to each thud. Were we all to end before we had made a proper beginning?
    “Boy!” Git called over and over again, and suddenly I saw as clearly as if my eyes had opened a strange-looking biped with blue hind legs and chest, dirty white hind paws, furless arms, and spidery looking forepaws with wormlike things on the ends of its pads. A large round head bore the only fur on the boy’s entire body, and he seemed to have no ears. His eyes were also closed when I first saw him, but when I gave an inner exclamation of surprise, they opened. They were the first eyes I saw, although mine remained closed. They were large, a lighter shade of the same color as his legs and chest. Their initial expression was one I would come to recognize as startled. It quickly shifted so that his whiskerless face with its flattened, split muzzle reflected the fear I felt rising from my mother and through me. I smelled his fear but I also smelledhis wonderful boy smell, tangy and warm mixed with wood and dirt and a bit of what I later identified as onion.
    I had at the time no idea how I conjured this apparition, but was as gratified as I felt after nursing when a short time later there were rustling steps outside, a rattle, a snick, and a rush of clean air, along with a beam of light I saw even