The Slender-Fingered Cats of Bubastis (novel)

The Slender-Fingered Cats of Bubastis was the eleventh full-length Bernice Summerfield novel published by Big Finish Productions. It was written by Xanna Eve Chown.

Publisher's summary
It wasn't true that you could see the Cats from space. It was impossible, a ridiculous idea that wouldn't stand up to even the slightest examination.

And yet there were people on Bubastis who believed it...

Most archaeologists — including Professor Bernice Summerfield — know only two facts about Bubastis: one is that its cheerless swamps are home to five giant stone Cats, whose ancient origins are shrouded in mystery; the other that it has more bugs and beetles than anyone should ever have to deal with.

So when Bernice, Ruth and Jack arrive on the planet to search for a missing girl, they are unprepared for what they will find. Like the insectoid villagers with a decidedly squeamish attitude to mammals. Or the archaeological expedition made up of over-sexed students. Or the alarmingly unprofessional Neon Tsara...

To make matters worse, Jack suddenly finds himself on the wrong side of the law and Ruth has brain-ache from ingesting forbidden historical knowledge. Worse still, Bernice has promised to write a book of poetry that's due to be published in a week... and she can't think of anything to rhyme with "Bubastis".

Chapter titles

 * 1) Before
 * 2) Legion
 * 3) Star Seasons
 * 4) Bil's Office
 * 5) Experimental Library
 * 6) Underground
 * 7) Press Transporter
 * 8) Ruth's Brain
 * 9) Media Buzz
 * 10) Storeroom Two
 * 11) Neon's Office
 * 12) The Cats
 * 13) Girls' Dorm
 * 14) Swamp Walk
 * 15) Bal Village
 * 16) Mina Gloap
 * 17) Storeroom Three
 * 18) Punishment
 * 19) Cat Twenty-Three
 * 20) Ultimatum
 * 21) Leaving Bubastis
 * 22) Friends of Stone
 * 23) After

Plot
Whilst working at the White Rabbit in the hopes of seeing Peter, Benny is shown a message by Irving in which Professor Bil Bil Gloap asks her to write a book of poetry that she has already written in the future. She, Ruth and Jack head to the Star Seasons resort in Irving's shuttle and, after taking the tour twice, they meet with Bil. He tells them that his niece, Mina, went to the nearby Bubastis with Professor Neon Tsara three weeks previously and disappeared five days ago.

Benny volunteers to travel to Bubastis to find Mina, leaving the matter of the poetry book until later. Jack goes to the Experimental Library, curious about the lack of attention given to it during the tour, and is soon joined by Ruth, who receives a message from Benny asking her to find information on the Ancient Bubastians. Whilst Ruth accesses the virtual books on Bubastian history and has the information downloaded into her mind, Jack visits Bil and learns that he saw Benny's yet-to-be-published book thanks to the Experimental Library. He then finds a trapdoor near the library, takes the Future Retrieval Device from the room beneath and hurries back to the shuttle with Ruth.

Jack and Ruth fly to Bubastis and, whilst Jack waits in the shuttle, Ruth joins Benny, who is pretending to be a journalist. They attend Neon's speech about the five Cats of Bubastis, how one of the cats has a total of twenty-three fingers on its front paws instead of twenty-two and how they are hollow and contain a message especially for her. The talk is interrupted by her ex-husband, Octavius Gregory, who claims that she has stolen and exploited the concept of sympathetic archaeology. Neon has him taken to her ship and ends the talk, leaving with the Dean and, unbeknownst to her, with Benny and Ruth following her. The journalists are returned to Star Seasons.

Benny and Ruth are bitten by insects and sleep for six hours. They are found by Jack, who charms Neon when she enters the room and accuses Benny and Ruth of being Friends of Stone. She tells them that Mina went on a solo expedition into the swamps and Allie informs them that the Dean has been killed by the Bal. Benny makes her way to the Cats, leaving Ruth, increasingly overwhelmed by the information in her head, with Jack. She meets Grey Line, a Bal ambassador investigating the Dean's death, and speaks with him about the Cats, but she is soon captured by three servers who shoot Grey Line non-fatally.

Jack decides to hide the Future Retrieval Device in a Bal village. On the way, he meets Rufus, the boy who found the Dean's body, and learns that the Dean was touching Grey Line's antennae and tripped, causing himself to be pierced by the spikes that extended from Grey Line's body due to the unpleasant stimulation he had caused. Jack heads to the village, throws the Device down a Bal toilet and asks about Mina's whereabouts.

Ruth learns from Allie that the Dean is rumoured to have been spending Star Seasons' money on a secret project and is questioned by the servers about the theft of the Future Retrieval Device, which transmitted a distress call when Jack tried to open it. Mina returns to the compound covered in insect bites and Benny and Grey Line are brought back by the servers. Mina is turning blue after eating insects to get high, which Grey Line warns will cause a plague; panicking, he takes Benny hostage and sabotages the Irverfield before heading back to the Bal village with her. Jack arrives, having been called by Ruth when Mina was found, and he is arrested by the servers for theft.

Neon has Ruth detained with Jack when they voice their opposition to her use of Tsara bombs to enter the Cats and they are locked in a storeroom, where Jack admits to having stolen the Device. They escape using a hydrocan-opener and find Benny suspended in a cage in the abandoned village, made to write out the Bal's extensive Rule Book as penance for Mina's crime. The trio head to the Cats and watch Neon blast her way inside the one that she believes has twenty-three fingers, although Benny counts only the usual twenty-two. The Cat is destroyed and skeletons fall out, which Ruth identifies as the Nobal, cat people who sealed themselves inside the statue after eating a new strain of bug which drove them insane.

The Bal arrive and easily dispose of the servers. Grey Line presents the Device, which he mistook for a bomb, and his people come to believe that he has the plague, but Benny realises that the Bal poem supposedly describing the alleged plague is actually a description of the Bal, written by the Nobal. Jack swallows the Device to prove that it is not a bomb and Grey Line bans mammals from returning to Bubastis, but tells Benny that they will investigate the bones and potentially replace their year of crochet with a year of Bubastian history, meaning that each Bal will spend a year studying the past.

Irivng's shuttle is repaired by a group of students and Benny, Ruth and Jack return to Star Seasons with Neon and the students. They find Bil held at gunpoint by Gregory, who is dismayed to learn that he has failed to prevent Neon from destroying the Cat. The two of them start kissing and Bil locks them in his office. He is delighted to receive the book of poetry that Benny hastily wrote on the journey and tell her that the Experimental Library will be abandoned due to it leading to the end of proper research and its potential to be abused; according to Bexx Branagh's article, the Dean built it in order to get his hands on lottery numbers.

Characters

 * Bernice Summerfield
 * Ruth
 * Jack
 * Irving Braxiatel
 * Bil Bil Gloap
 * Octavius Gregory
 * Grey Line
 * Bexx Branagh
 * Danni
 * Neon Tsara
 * The Dean
 * Allie
 * Haven
 * Rufus
 * Blue Shimmer
 * Green Tinge
 * Mina Gloap
 * Jenny
 * Dave
 * Light Pink
 * Hint of Purple
 * Shiny Rose

Worldbuilding

 * The Bal are the largest insects on Bubastis. They are mammal-phobic.
 * Jack has been offered the chance to buy eight illegally-imported micro-puppies.
 * Bil is an etymologist. His field is diachronic linguistics.
 * Mina Gloap is the daughter of Bil's brother.
 * Bil has a photo cube of Mina.
 * Uphill retired as Dean a year ago. He moved to a village near Shining Lake on Altan.
 * Benny and Bil were stuck on Salva Noctra for a time.
 * The Traditional Winter Library is based on a private collection from Earth circa 1900.
 * Ruth remembers Benny showing her a 20th century book called Zombies and Shit.
 * Star Seasons Today is the only newspaper on Star Seasons.
 * Jack has a cousin called Coba who has a shuttle-drive.
 * Rupert had a crush on Mina, but then got back together with Cindy.
 * Neon has read Rintilda Vigintitres's diaries.
 * Bill Drummond was an Earth philosopher.
 * Eris is a goddess of Discord and Chaos.
 * Neon's mother was twenty-three when she met Neon's father. Her father invented the Tsara bomb, ostensibly for use on demolition sites, which was subsequently outlawed.
 * Neon's grandfather owns twenty-three moons.
 * Neon tells a story of when she was looking for a temple in the jungles of Sarspun.
 * Rufus told Allie that the Dean had been killed.
 * The Bal are hermaphrodites.
 * About five members of Team Neon are students of Coast Central-Barside Tech.
 * Allie studies Ancient Social Media with Joe, who is nicknamed "the Walrus".
 * Allie is dating Haven, who studies combined theology and press relations.
 * Allie's father owns a farm.
 * Jack finds a small bottle of Wound-Seal.
 * Jack mentions xenophobia and erythrophobia.
 * Blue Shimmer's name in Bal is Vervafellil.
 * Andrea is a Friend of Stone.
 * Eugenie is a planet covered in mist and inhabited by the Eugenieans, who resemble vaporous sheep. Bil launches Benny's book, Orisons in Two Languages, there.
 * Escutcheon is a university planet where Bil celebrates the completion of his thesis, Linguistic and Semantic Indeterminacy in the Homonous Languages of Bubastis and Eugenie - A Comparative Study. He sold its publishing and televid rights, leading to the publishing of One word, two meanings: The linguistic phenomenon that will blow your brain! and the creation of the spin-off show I say potato, you say potato.

Continuity

 * Irving now has a shuttle. (AUDIO: Everybody Loves Irving)
 * Benny mentions once having a cat as a pet. (PROSE: The Dying Days, etc.)