Khui told Sona he felt deeply shocked when he first saw Susan Matthews. People had been extinct for thousands of years on Planet Alna, so Susan was the first person he’d ever seen up close. Khui described her as a towering giant many times taller than a cat, with a voice that hurt his ears, and feet that shook the room. He was terrified of being trampled, particularly on his tail.

It was a good thing Khui never told any of this to Chocolate because at five three and 109 pounds soaking wet, Susan’s gentle voice charmed purrs from the powerful Siamese cat who worshiped the floor she walked on — especially at supper time when she walked on the linoleum with his dinner.

Susan stretched out her hand to make friends with Khui, which shocked him deeply, so he ran away from her and had the surprise of his life.

This was the first time Khui had been in a house built for humans. The way he described it later, the ceilings towering over his head were higher than a starship departure hall. The massive walls, huge giant furniture, chairs, tables, lamps, all seemed like a monstrous nightmare in which he was shrinking away.

There were weird scents, broad woolen carpets, acrid varnish on the wooden doors, the nutty aroma of wallpaper glue, outdoor smells tracked in on the floor, a faint odor drifting in the air from litter boxes used by these strange Earth cats.

Desperate for a place to hide, he crept up the massive stairs to the second floor, taking each tall step carefully, until he was standing in the middle of a hall that was longer than an air car runway.

Some of the huge doors along the hallway were held open by attractive cast iron kittens to let in the evening air. Summer night cries drifted through the open windows. Cicadas buzzed, an owl hooted in a distant tree, peepers called out from the pond, he heard the graak graak of frogs, but they all were sounds that Khui had never heard before.

He looked into each open door with a growing sense of panic at the enormous furniture, the beds for humans the size of wrestling rings, chairs with seats as big as beds for cats, towering shelves crammed with books no cat could ever wrestle down and read. Door knobs, light switches everything up high out of his reach. Nervous twitches raced up and down his spine. He needed to escape to someplace safe so he could hide.

Strange music, the sweet vaguely fishy smell of linseed oil, the acrid scent of turpentine, all drifted down the corridor teasing his senses. Khui glided close along the wall to a door where moonlight flowed across the hall.

Pushing the door wider, he almost lost his whiskers when the old Victorian house gave its heat to the night with a sudden loud crack. Brilliant moonlight beamed in through four tall windows, one to the west and three facing south, splashing an acre of color across three Asian carpets.

Seeing there was no one inside, Khui indulged himself in an unguarded moment of pleasure, digging his claws into the woolen nap of the closest carpet. He carefully sniffed a spot in the weave that someone had tried in vain to wash out. You could never completely rid the scent, he knew. These Earth cats conducted themselves like beasts.

Khui ached to return to his own kind, but realized with a stab of regret they would never accept him again, now that he had stripes all over his fur.

Opposite the far window towered a high-backed wooden chair with legs attached to curved runners on the bottom. Khui puzzled over this, unsure about its purpose and finally gave up. He turned to examine a low table piled high with books. He considered trying out an old burgundy sofa against the end wall, but his attention was distracted by strong unfamiliar odors drifting from a stained credenza opposite the middle window.

Stretching up, he saw that the top was crowded with tubes of paint. Khui had seen painters, but of course they never used colors that smelled like this. He looked over the jumble of rags, jars, canvases, clean brushes, and a palette loaded with daubs of paint all squiggled together in swirls and splashes.

This Susan must be as disorganized as her cats, he thought.

There was a large stretched canvas on a tall easel angled toward the second window. He stared up mystified at the half-finished painting of a woman. He’d seen a cat without fur once.

There was something more interesting to the right of the window. Khui recognized it right away as an old sewing machine, although impossibly large. Cloth pieces overflowed from a basket, so obviously this was a repair station for their protective coverings. His own kind also sewed items, mostly used for sleeping. He had repaired machines like this in his youth.

He was about to jump up onto it for a closer look, when the call of a mockingbird outside the window caught his attention. Although Khui knew nothing about birds, the music the creature made stirred a deep instinct which pulled him creeping to the window. Without knowing why, he called back with little staccato trills

The front yard of the house rolled away down fields and across a highway that ran along the river valley. On the other side of the river, a line of diesel trucks blasted their engines as they labored up route 15. He longed to see one of those trucks up close. The primitive power of exploding hydrocarbons thrilled him. No one he knew had ever seen anything like this, although it shocked him to think of the poisonous byproducts of such a reaction released directly into the air.

Katydids buzzed. That hooting owl took up her cry again, a fox yip-yipped out in the field. A possum’s sudden shriek made his fur bristle so he quickly drew his head back, having no idea what it was.

Khui would have run away right then, but first he needed to investigate the electric aura surrounding a wooden cabinet that was playing music next to the third window. The electric charge from inside the radio's cabinet made his fur stand up and he had to see how it worked.

Music fascinated Khui because the star ships he served on as engineer traveled on waves of sound. Of course, you couldn’t hear them through airless space. But when sounds were tuned the right way, their harmonics rippled the Saah-Ray, the underlying dimension that flows through everything, melting the barrier of space and time.

The music from this wooden box was different, meant only for listening, to be enjoyed. He’d never seen anything like this machine in any museum. On his planet, a device of this type might not have been seen for at least a hundred thousand years.

Staring in awe before the high cabinet, his eye was attracted to an amber lighted tuning dial. Above it, a small round glass tube displayed a bright green ring with a wedge-shaped shadow across the bottom of the circle.

“It’s called a cat’s eye.” came a voice behind him.

Khui snapped around, his sharp claws gripping the carpet.

“The green light on the front of the old radio. They call it a magic eye, too. But I like cat’s eye better, don’t you?” said the gentle voice.

With terrified eyes, Khui looked up at a huge overstuffed burgundy arm chair standing to the right of the door. Strange he'd missed that when he walked in.

Bathed in a splash of moonlight, sat a slender cat who looked a lot like Grace.

“Watch out, It’s winking at you,” she warned with a little musical laugh.

When Khui looked back at the radio, the green tube narrowed its wedge for an instant.

A pair of bewitching green eyes, sparkling with playful curiosity looked down into his. There was that same white triangle pointing up her face like her sister, but with more gray down her long legs, accented with cute little white boots on her small feet. She had a pretty pink nose, long white whiskers and a very very long thin tail which she held up in an elegant curl like a question mark.

“Who are you?” the soft voice asked. “Forgive me for being so inquisitive. It’s just that I haven't had many visitors lately. You’re new, aren’t you?”

Looking up at the young Earth cat, Khui was reluctant to reveal much about himself. But he knew enough to acknowledge her greeting before he escaped from the room. She would talk to the others and, if that dangerous cat they called Chocolate found out he’d been rude to one of their kind, he would come to grief.

So he said in the Common Cat Language, which for some reason they all seemed to understand, “My name is Khui,” which wasn’t quite enough, so he added, “I am a guest.”

“Oh! Mister Khui. A guest!” She spoke in a voice filled with breathless wonder that made him feel as if he was the most important cat in the world. “How marvelous to meet you! I’m Rose, Java and Grace’s sister.”

So this was Rose! To hear the others talk, the three siblings were some sort of royalty in this house. He'd have to be careful.

But she'd said it was marvelous to meet him. No one had ever said it was marvelous to meet Khui at any time in his life. He scraped his paw uncertainly on the carpet, thinking his best chance of survival would be to run away now before she found out who he really was.

Rose tossed her pretty head toward the radio cabinet, speaking in labored breaths. “They say it’s terribly dangerous inside — so I never touch it. But Java stuck his paw around back and oh boy, did he jump! — He got a caterpillar tail!”

She giggled with a twinkle of mischief in her eye.

In spite on himself, Khui grinned. Although he’d never heard of a caterpillar tail before, he had a pretty good idea what happened to Java.

“This old house feels way too tall for cats, don’t you think?” she observed. “If we had wings, we could tease the little spiders way up there. They must get awfully lonely on the ceiling.”

Khui followed Rose’s gaze up to a corner where he could barely see a spindly spider grappling around a gossamer web. Although his feet still wanted to pull him toward the door, something about this charming cat kept his paws glued to the carpet with an iron grip.

“I like this corner room in the moonlight,” Rose went on cheerfully. “Susan calls it her sewing room — except, this is where she likes to paint pictures. She mostly never mends a single thing — except maybe the broken hearts of some of the little cats who live here.”

Rose laughed playfully, “Does your heart need mending, Mister Khui?”

Khui froze in her gaze.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to joke.” she apologized, wishing she hadn’t tried so hard to get him to talk. But he seemed so interested in Susan’s radio and she simply had to tell somebody what she’d heard playing on it earlier that evening.

“What kind of music do you like, Mister Khui?

He looked at her blankly because it was hard to describe. The music where he came from was different.

“Grace says I’m a romantic. I mean I love pop music, hip-hop and jazz — everything really. But this morning I heard this most amazing composition by John Adams, called — let me think.” Wrinkling up her nose in thought, she finally recalled the name in English,

“Short ride — Short ride in a fast machine!” But she gave up trying to say it in English and told him in Common Cat, which sounded like, “Chirp chrik — shrrou roww, mrrow,” punctuated with a flourish of her long tail.

“Wouldn’t it be so fantastic to go for a ride like that!” she told Khui breathlessly. “MeMe said she met the most amazing blue cats who took her on a ride — all the way out into space! — Can you imagine anything more absolutely awesome!”

Rose kneaded her paws thoughtfully in the soft blanket.

“But she said it was terribly dangerous and she was afraid she’d never get back! — It would have been awful if MeMe hadn’t gotten back — because we all love her so much — and she tries so hard”

Rose looked out the window thoughtfully. When she turned back to Khui, she explained, “You know — some bad person almost beat MeMe to death when she was a kitten. She still can’t see straight — They threw her out of a window and she almost starved trying to live on the street in New York — She would have died if Susan hadn’t rescued her. It was a miracle — because Susan doesn’t even remember why she had to go to the city that day.” Rose looked earnestly at Khui and took a breath. “MeMe made me promise not to tell — but I know I can trust you with a secret like that.”

Rose looked out the window again. As she did, Khui stared down at the floor, stabbed with guilt over what he’d nearly done to her friend.

He heard Rose's bright voice saying, “Still, it must have been so incredible to look outside and see the whole round Earth with the stars all around, and the moon . . .”

When Khui looked up again, Rose was studying him with her pretty head turned to one side.

“I did it again, didn’t I, Mister Khui?”

“Not you, Rose.”

At least he had finally said something, and he even sat down on the carpet in front of her chair to share the pool of moonlight. She was making progress.

“Call me Khui,” he said, starting to relax a bit. “Please tell me something about yourself, Rose.”

“There’s not much to tell,” she sighed, tucking her paws together. “As you can see,” she took a deep breath. “I have way too much time on my hands up here, so I sometimes suddenly say things I shouldn’t—”

“Oh no, Rose. You’re very kind, it’s . . . it’s just that I have things on my mind.”

“I know — it will work out,” she said softly. “Those things do.”

And somehow, he felt they would.

Without knowing why, he felt a need to ask this friendly cat about something he couldn't understand. Saving the doctor’s life, had brought him closer to Mina than he’d ever been to any other cat, but it wasn't romantic, it was something else. So he ventured into waters that had always been too deep for a cat from his world to dive into.

“Tell me, Rose. What are friends? I may have one friend myself, but I’m not sure.”

Rose was more than a little surprised.

Only one friend and he wasn’t sure?

“Friends are . . .” She had to think for a moment because she couldn’t remember anyone she knew well who wasn’t her friend.

“Friends are those you’re close to, who care for you as much as you care for them. Not only cats — Susan is my friend — and MeMe is even friends with that funny dog, Drake, who lives next door. I guess friends are those you can be honest with, who are honest with you — The ones we trust.”

“Trust?” Khui said out loud.

Sona had said trust was something she wanted to earn from Grace and the little one, MeMe. She’d said their trust was the most precious thing she ever hoped to win. It hadn't made sense to Khui at the time. It seemed to him that Sona had given into foolish uncontrolled emotions that would only bring her trouble. But after listening to Rose, Khui felt the horizon of his world grow wider. He needed to know what Sona had discovered.

“There are a few close friends,” Rose was saying. “And some you wish you could grab onto and tell them everything’s going to be OK . . . Like Ridley . . . only she wriggles and pushes away from everybody.”

Taking a breath, Rose looked up at the window again.

“And of course some friends are extra special. You must have met MeMe. I can tell her anything and she always understands. She’s been so nice to me, especially since I got . . . I mean, since I’ve had to stay up here all the time.”

Rose held out her paw, wincing a little in pain and said—

“I hope we can be friends, Khui.”

Khui was stunned. Out of nowhere, Rose had reached inside his shell and pulled him out, kicking and screaming like a hermit crab, but out.

He gratefully touched Rose’s paw and they talked some more. Khui wanted to know about the unfamiliar world outside, so Rose explained the curious night sounds, the buzzing cicadas, the hooting owl, and that mockingbird who borrowed his love songs from other birds.

The fox whined again out in the neighbor’s field, so Rose warned Khui about dangerous predators outside, since she could tell from his accent he was from someplace far from the Susquehanna Valley where she’d spent all her life.

Khui told Rose a little about himself. Gaining confidence, he told her about his love for science and machines. Khui was afraid he'd bore a pretty country cat like her, but Rose listened spellbound with her chin on the edge of the seat.

“Yes fast machines, Rose, like the music you love . . . I hope sometime you can see for yourself what it feels like to travel faster than light, where time slows down, and when you come back home after what seems like an age, you find hardly an hour went by.” He was surprised that he could share his innermost thoughts so easily with a perfect stranger. A perfectly beautiful stranger.

As they listened to the antique radio with the green cat’s eye winking at them, Khui felt afraid for the tender-hearted young cat. There was something terribly wrong and he had no idea how to help her.

Khui knew this had never been a chance meeting. Rose had touched the heavens, challenging him with a gift that comes once in a lifetime to a fortunate few with the chance to open his eyes and reach beyond himself.

He wondered if the call that had brought him to Earth had been from Rose. But, why was it that, at the very moment he'd met her, he felt she was about to disappear forever?