Free The Mountain Cage by Pamela Sargent

scientific inquiry, in the form that we know it, would ever have developed if all of Europe had been overrun by the Mongol armies.
    It was Greg Benford who asked me to contribute a story to an alternate history anthology he was editing with Martin H. Greenberg, What Might Have Been: Alternate Americas, and immediately I thought of the Mongol conquest that Western Europe had so narrowly avoided. Surely the Mongols, sooner or later, would have begun looking for new conquests, and perhaps the sailing ships and nautical skills of the people they conquered would eventually have brought them to our shores. It was an inspiration, which had the additional pleasure of allowing me to bring the Mongols to the island of Manhattan and then up the Hudson River to meet the Mohawks who once inhabited my own home town of Albany, New York.
    Which points up one of the particular joys of the alternate history story: being able to bring people together who could not possibly have met in our “real” world.
     
     

 
    THE MOUNTAIN CAGE
     
    Mewleen had found a broken mirror along the road. The shards glittered as she swiped at one with her paw, gazing intently at the glass. She meowed and hunched forward.
    Hrurr licked one pale paw, wondering if Mewleen would manage to shatter the barrier, though he doubted that she could crawl through even if she did; the mirror fragments were too small. He shook himself, then padded over to her side.
    Another cat, thick-furred, stared out at him from a jagged piece of glass. Hrurr tilted his head; the other cat did the same. He meowed; the other cat opened his mouth, but the barrier blocked the sound. A second cat, black and white, appeared near the pale stranger as Mewleen moved closer to Hrurr.
    “She looks like you,” Hrurr said to his companion. “She even has a white patch on her head.”
    “Of course. She is the Mewleen of that world.”
    Hrurr narrowed his eyes. He had seen such cats before, always behind barriers, always out of reach. They remained in their own world, while he was in this one; he wondered if theirs was better.
    Mewleen sat on her haunches. “Do you know what I think, Hrurr? There are moments when we are all between worlds, when the sights before us vanish and we stand in the formless void of possibility. Take one path, and a fat mouse might be yours. Take another, and a two-legs gives you milk and a dark place to sleep. Take a third, and you spend a cold and hungry night. At the moment before choosing, all these possibilities have the same reality, but when you take one path—”
    “When you take one path, that’s that.” Hrurr stepped to one side, then pounced on his piece of glass, thinking that he might catch his other self unaware, but the cat behind the barrier leaped up at him at the same instant. “It means that you weren’t going to take the other paths at all, so they weren’t really possibilities.”
    “But they were for that moment.” Mewleen’s tail curled. “I see a branching. I see other worlds in which all possibilities exist. I’ll go back home today, but that cat there may make another choice.”
    Hrurr put a paw on the shard holding his twin. That cat might still have a home.
    “Come with me,” Mewleen said as she rolled in the road, showing her white belly. “My two-legged ones will feed you, and when they see that I want you with me, they’ll honor you and let you stay. They must serve me, after all.”
    His tail twitched. He had grown restless even before losing his own two-legged creatures, before that night when others of their kind had come for them, dragging them from his house and throwing them inside the gaping mouth of a large, square metal beast. He had stayed away after that, lingering on the outskirts of town, pondering what might happen in a world where two-legged ones turned on one another and forgot their obligations to cats. He had gone back to his house only once; a banner with a black swastika in its center had been hung from