Eddy told me later, after dinner they tried playing with catnip mice in the kitchen. But the catnip had been chewed out of the mice and they smelled like cat breath, so he and Watson gave mad chase to a toy ball. It was the same kind of toy millions of cats love — you know the one, a round plastic cage with a little ball trapped inside that jingles when it rolls across the floor.

Chocolate watched the ball gravely with his tail up stiff like a flag pole as Eddy and Watson shouldered each other out of the way, punting it around the room. When the ball rolled in front of Chocolate’s feet, he clamped onto it with his murderous teeth almost cracking it apart. Having the ball in his possession, he tore away down the hall with Watson and Mira pounding after him.

Eddy hung back. Digging behind the fridge, he hooked out another ball with his claw — there were at least a dozen back there. Batting it across the floor to Sona, she intercepted it over to Dr. Mina, who studied the toy with intense curiosity.

“It couldn’t be one of those, could it?” Sona asked.

Mina rolled it around thoughtfully with her paw.

“Remarkably similar, but no, it’s not the same.”

Mina’s thoughts were interrupted when two cat-lengths away, Grace suddenly jumped on her brother. The two siblings landed with a heavy thump rattling dishes in the corner cupboard. Locked in a reverse clinch, they raked each other’s faces with their back claws.

Sona gave the doctor a worried look. “Someone’s going to get hurt.”

Eddy laughed. “They do this every night.”

Java and Grace both sprang to their feet, crab-walking around each other, circling for an opening. When Java impulsively bit Grace’s neck, she twisted away with a deep hiss and ran down the hall in a huff.

Java turned his eyes on Sona with a mischievous grin.

“If you’re smart you won’t run,” the doctor advised.

But when Java started toward Sona, she panicked, racing out of the kitchen toward the den with the powerful Bengal cat tearing after her.

Standing in front of a sheaf of papers arrayed on the kitchen counter, Susan Matthews watched the cats run away and burst out laughing.

Across the room, Eddy turned to Dr. Mina. “You’re a beautiful cat.”

Mina frowned suspiciously. “You’re a white cat,” she said, regarding him with a clinical eye, “with light brown markings, and you're overweight. You should eat less and take better care of yourself.”

“That’s why they call me Big Eddy,” he explained amiably. “I’m actually an albino Siamese. My tabby marks change with the temperature. You should see how brown my brothers and I get in the winter!”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Mina snapped. “You have a temperature-sensitive mutation in one of the enzymes in your metabolic pathway from an amino acid to the pigment of your fur, thus rendering little or no dark color, except in the regions of your body that are cooler than 38 to 39.2 degrees centigrade, such as your ears. But that doesn’t explain your so-called tabby stripes.”

Eddy tilted his head. “People say the tabby marks link us back to our ancestors somewhere from North Africa a long time ago.” He looked thoughtfully into Mina's face. “You have them. There’s the typical tabby M on your forehead and you have some of the other stripes.”

“I know that! You don’t have to remind me.”

Eddy drew back in surprise.

“Sorry if I said something wrong, I only meant—”

“Forget it,” she dismissed him brusquely with a wave of her paw. “How can I find out more about the development of cats as a species on Er— I mean on the local Internet?”

“Jump up on this table, doctor.” Eddy invited amiably. “Susan has a flat thing she looks into when she wants to know things.”

Mina hesitated, studying the dinette towering above them.

Thinking she was afraid to jump up, he told her, “It’s OK. Susan says cats shouldn’t have to spend their lives looking up.”

“Someone should write a book about humans,” Mina muttered, jumping up lightly. Eddy's scent distracted her as they drew close. She sniffed the white cat's neck, savoring the animal attraction of a male of her kind.

Eddy turned to her curiously and she pulled back.

“Susan presses this —” he started to explain.

“I’ll do it.” The doctor impatiently shouldered him out of the way.

“That’s good, because I can’t read very well, and —”

Mina ignored him, thinking to herself, How could we possibly have a common language? Common markings, too! We’re different kinds of cats. Unless, . . . unless we also had a common ancestor! But that’s —

“We do have a common ancestor,” Eddy blurted out helpfully. “We all come from the African Wildcat 173,000 years ago.”

Mina snorted. Annoyed the other cat had read her thoughts.

She gave Eddy a fierce look. “So it reads my mind. How much of my thoughts can you understand? Do you know who I am, where I come from? Can you see that far into me?”

Eddy tensed to run.

“Tell me!” she yowled.

“I saw you're not from around here. Just felt it. That's all I know.”

“Keep it to yourself,” Mina warned. She turned away to study the tablet. “Oh, this is ridiculous,” she groused. “This history of cats is based solely on conjecture. The person who wrote this article assumes because people found bones of some cat-like creature carbon dated millions of years back in time, then that animal somehow managed to turn itself into a completely different animal which looked sort of like a cat, which creature eventually turned itself into something even more like a cat, and so-on, until this mythical being became your African Wildcat.”

She turned to Eddy with flashing eyes. “You believe this?”

He managed to stammer, “They found bones on the Island of Cyprus.”

“Yes! They found the skeleton of a cat next to the 9500-year-old remains of a human. So these people conclude that cats must have been tame for at least 12,000 years, otherwise, as it says here,” she consulted the tablet, “how else could a wild cat from northern Africa travel by boat to an island in the Mediterranean Sea?”

“Maybe he sailed it himself?” offered Eddy, ducking away in case she took a swipe at him.

Dr. Mina looked at Eddy for a long moment with an almost imperceptible smile. “Yes, Eddy. Maybe they tamed themselves and sailed boats. But that still doesn’t explain how cats got to Earth.”

“So! What is it you need to ask me?”

Eddy looked up quickly, scraping his foot shyly on the table.

“MeMe told me you fixed Java’s foot. I was wondering if you might be able to—”

Mina groaned. “So you want me to look at one of your little friends, is that it?” She puffed out an impatient breath. “I’ll tell you right now, Eddy, I’m retired. All I want to do with my life from now on, is maybe write a book about the humans on this planet and then go home.”

“This planet?” Suddenly there was a loud crash.

The two cats tore out of the kitchen in a panic.

Bill ran to the door. “What was that noise? Eddy and one of those new cats almost ran over me stampeding up the stairs.”

“Oh, it’s nothing.” Susan smiled weakly. “The pan slipped.”

“What happened, Susan? Your hands are shaking,”

“It’s nothing . . . nothing at all. I . . . I saw them playing with the tablet, and for a minute I thought . . . oh —”

“What?”

“I thought Eddy and that new cat were reading! . . . So silly, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I think so.” Bill agreed, massaging Susan’s shoulders. “You’ve been working too hard. . . Which reminds me, Tom Wilson in the astronomy department told me they’ve been observing unusual sunspot activity. There might be a solar event around Thursday so I’m taking some of my physics students to the observatory to watch for the northern lights. You’re welcome to come along if you like, look at the stars together.”

“Think we’ll see anything this far south?”

“He said it might be a big one. Not the Carrington Event of course, but we should be able to see something amazing in the sky.