Barbary

Chapter Ten

That night, Barbary lay in bed. Mick purred beside her. She felt peaceful and happy for the first time since she had arrived on the station.

“Barbary?” Heather said.

“I thought you were asleep,” Barbary whispered.

“Uh-uh. I feel kind of tired, but I don’t feel like going to sleep.”

“Are you sure —” She stopped. Heather would just get annoyed if Barbary asked if she were all right. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s hard to go to sleep after everything that’s happened.”

“I think we ought to tell Jeanne about the open panel.”

“If we do, we’ll have to tell her we were down there.”

“Yeah. But, after all — nobody ever told me I couldn’t, and it isn’t dangerous, so there’s no reason why I shouldn’t, and besides, if there’s sloppy stuff like that anywhere else on the station, we all ought to look for it, because it could be dangerous.”

“If you think we ought to tell her, then I guess we ought to tell her.”

“It’s probably lucky for all of us that you brought Mickey,” Heather said. “Maybe you saved all our lives.”

Within a few minutes she was breathing slowly and regularly in the way Barbary had already learned meant she was sound asleep.

o0o

Barbary woke early. Burrowed under her covers, Heather slept. Now that Barbary did not have to worry about Mick’s whereabouts every minute, he was, of course, purring right next to her. She petted him and tickled his belly, and he play-fought with her hand.

“Today you get to go to work,” she whispered. “You get to go hunting, and if you catch anything they’ll keep on liking you. Don’t catch all the rats, though, or they won’t need us anymore.”

Bored with playing, he jumped, bounced from the bunk to the desk to the floor, and stopped to lick his paw.

“Got dirty, huh?” she said, and grinned.

She went to take a shower. In half gravity, the big droplets drifted and spread across her skin. She dressed and padded barefoot into the living room. Heather was curled up on the couch next to Mick.

“Good morning,” she said. “I called Jeanne’s office and we have an appointment with her at eight.”

The door of Yoshi’s room was closed. Thea’s contraption lay on the floor with a plastic cover thrown over it.

“It looks finished,” Heather said. “She must have put the lenses in. The plastic’s to keep it all clean.”

“Here’s something you ought to know about cats and keeping stuff clean,” Barbary said. “Cats shed.”

“Well, I know, and he pisses too, but not on the floor —”

“No, shed. His hair falls out and grows back in again. You’re always finding cat hair around. We’ll have to vacuum, or whatever you do, more often.”

Heather looked at Mick with a curious, doubtful expression.

“It’s not that bad,” Barbary said. “And I brush him, so that helps.”

“I don’t mind,” Heather said. “Only I can’t imagine what he’ll look like without any hair.”

“He doesn’t lose all his hair!” Barbary said, trying not to laugh. “Just a little at a time. You can’t even tell, except between winter and spring. Then he goes from having heavy fur to less fur. I don’t know what he’ll do here where there isn’t any winter or spring.”

“I’m glad he doesn’t lose all his fur,” Heather said. “It’s awfully pretty.”

They went for breakfast. Mick followed, delighted to be let out of their room. He bounded sideways like a kitten, slid to a stop, and scampered past them going the other direction. Barbary smiled to see him having so much fun, but the problem with letting him free was that she still worried where he would go and what might happen to him. He might end up in the elevator shaft. She could screw the panel on the shield level into place, but she had no idea how Mick had gotten out of the shaft and into the control center. Somewhere there had to be another hole, or loose panel, or something. She was glad they were going to tell Jeanne about the opening.

Everyone in the cafeteria noticed their arrival. Barbary had been novelty enough, but Mick was a wonder. Most of the people on the station had been here several years. Several said the same thing as the technician in the control center: “I don’t miss much about earth, but I do miss having a pet.” Barbary began to wonder why no one before her had smuggled one on board.

She and Heather ate toast and fruit while the adults fussed over Mick and brought him milk and bits of fish and generally fawned over him. He took it all as if he had been waiting for everyone to notice that he was completely exceptional. Barbary kept an eye on him, half expecting him to stop lapping his milk and spit and claw at one of the people stroking him.

“I don’t get it,” she said to Heather. “Back on earth he’d hardly let anybody but me get close enough to touch him. And if they did, he bit them.”

“I don’t think you need to warn people about him anymore,” Heather said. “He could get away if he wanted. I think he likes the attention. Maybe he likes being in space so much he’s just calmed down. Or maybe…”

“What?”

“Maybe he knows practically everybody likes him here. Did they, back on earth?”

“No,” Barbary said. “Not at all. Mostly they thought he was a nuisance and I ought to get rid of him.”

“There, see? Nobody thinks that up here. Even if somebody doesn’t like cats, they’d probably rather put up with Mick than have a bunch of rodents running around loose.”

“I guess you’re right.”

Just before eight o’clock, they rescued Mick from his admirers and took the elevator down to the control center. Barbary kept glancing at Heather, to be sure the gravity did not adversely affect her.

They knocked on Jeanne’s door.

“Come in.”

Inside, Jeanne gestured to chairs. The screen of her desk computer flashed with squares overlying squares, each containing its own separate message, each blinking at a different, frantic frequency. She turned her back on them to talk to Barbary and Heather.

“Hi, kids,” she said. “What’s up?”

Heather began. “We thought we ought to tell you…”

A few minutes later, Jeanne put holds on all her urgent messages. She hurried with Heather and Barbary to the shield level. In the dim light on the elevator platform, she sat on her heels and looked at the unfastened panel.

“We came down here so Mick could run around and nobody would see him,” Heather said.

“Yeah, and he thinks that’s why we’re here now, too.” Barbary had to wrap her arms around him to keep him from running off across the hillocks.

“And we think he climbed in there and that’s how he got to the control center — but we don’t know where he came out. And he couldn’t have opened it himself, could he?”

“I don’t see how. I don’t think it’s ever been closed,” Jeanne said. “It doesn’t look to me like the panel’s ever been screwed shut. I guess that’s better than if it had somehow come loose by itself, which might mean the whole station was falling apart around us.”

She gazed across the hillocks.

“Quite a place,” she said. “I’ve never been here before.”

“Barbary suggested we should plant grass and things. Wouldn’t that be neat? It’d be like the gardens, only big enough to walk in.”

“It would be quite an undertaking — but it might be possible. I’ll look into it. After all the excitement has died down. That is a good idea, Barbary.”

“Thanks,” Barbary said. “But could we go now? Mick’s getting crazy, and if I let him go I’m afraid he’ll find another hole to crawl into.”

“Sure.”

They returned to Jeanne’s office.

“I’m going to call the techs and the mechanics in off the observation platform and put them to work checking the structural integrity of the station,” Jeanne said when she had closed the door. “But we’ve got a lot of grounders here, and I don’t want them to panic.”

“So don’t tell anybody, right?” Heather said.

“Don’t go out of your way to spread it around,” Jeanne replied. “Everybody who lives here will know within a couple of hours. But even in a crisis we can’t evacuate anyone till the station’s near perigee — they knew that when they came on board. What we can do is try to maintain some normality while we check out the station. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry we caused you all this trouble,” Barbary said.

“It’s all right, Barbary,” Jeanne said. “Honestly. Discovering that the station has rats, and that it’s had no thorough inspections in the whole time it’s been up here aren’t things I’d’ve chosen to happen. But it’s better to know about the problems and fix them. We all should be very grateful to you and Heather — and to Mickey.”

“Okay.”

“Has he caught any more rats?”

“No. But I haven’t had that much chance to let him loose. I’m kind of scared that he’ll get lost in the elevator again.”

“I’ve been thinking about how to keep track of him. Would he wear a collar, do you think?”

“He did before — he had to have a license. He didn’t seem to mind it too much.”

Jeanne gave Barbary a piece of elastic with a plastic-encased electronic chip glued to it.

“This is makeshift, but it ought to work. It’s a transmitter. We put them on servomechs, and on tools that we use outside. The computer tracks them.”

“I’ll show you,” Heather said.

“Great,” Barbary said. She would be happier knowing where Mick was, and he would be happier not being followed around all the time.

She tied the elastic around Mick’s neck. He flattened his ears, but he soon grew resigned to the light collar and ignored it.

o0o

When Barbary and Heather returned to the apartment, it was empty except for Thea’s contraption. A long tube secured a camera and several other instruments; sensor wires led from the tube to a microprocessor, which Heather said would connect to the raft’s radio and transmit data to the station.

Yoshi had left them a note on the computer — on a piece of paper taped to the terminal. His handwriting was clear and elegant.

“Lessons,” the note said. “Rest.” And finally, “I am in the library.”

Heather sighed. “Vacation’s over, I guess. Oh, well, lessons are kind of fun.”

Mick prowled around the room, pausing now and then at the door to the outside corridor, but Barbary was not quite ready to let him out into the station. She decided to wait till Heather showed her how to follow the signal on his collar.

Heather introduced Barbary to the computer. They each had a terminal which contained a great deal of built-in information, and which would also call up the station’s main library banks and look for whatever it did not have.

“If you can get all that right here,” Barbary asked, why did Yoshi go to the library?”

“To write,” Heather said. “He went to the book library, not the computer library. A lot of people brought books from earth because they like to read that way instead of on the computer. I don’t understand why myself. But that’s how it is. Some of them got together and put their books all in one place so they’d have a library. Anybody can borrow the books. Yoshi likes to work up there.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s a poet.”

“Oh. I mean what does he really do?”

“He really is a poet!” Heather said. “People are, you know.”

“Okay, okay, I just never heard of a poet on a space station before.”

“I guess maybe you haven’t heard of everything in the whole universe yet, then, have you?”

“What are you so mad about?”

“How would you feel if you did something important something nobody else could do — and somebody said, ‘Oh, that’s nice, but what do you really do?’”

“I’d be mad,” Barbary admitted.

“Well.”

“Um, I’m sorry,” Barbary said. “Can anybody read one of his poems?”

“You can read everything he’s published. It’s in the library.”

“The computer library?”

“No, the book library.”

“Why isn’t it in the computer?”

“Yoshi doesn’t like computers much.”

“Oh.” She could think of several questions, but she was afraid she might upset Heather again, so for the moment she kept her silence. Besides, Heather turned on the two terminals and began to show her how to use hers. Almost everyone had computers on earth, so Barbary knew something about them. But it seemed to her that they always judged and graded her and reported her failures to adults.

“I won’t hang over your shoulder,” Heather said. “But I’ll be right here if you need to ask anything.” She set both terminals to respond on the screen, rather than by speaking, so she and Barbary could work without interfering with each other.

“Okay.”

Heather perched cross-legged on a chair and immersed herself in her own work.

Barbary’s computer was smarter than any other she had ever met. And though it acted friendly, it knew a great deal about her. All her records were in memory somewhere, and while she supposed she should not care if a computer had read them, she hoped Heather had not done so. She asked the machine if anybody could read anyone else’s records.

It scrolled its reply on the screen. “No, that requires special permission.”

Barbary felt relieved. She was not very adept at schoolwork.

The computer chatted with her. It never forgot anything she told it, and it never made fun of her for forgetting things it told to her.

But Barbary realized that it was doing what computers always did. She stood and pushed away the keyboard. In the low gravity her chair tumbled over backward and bounced across the room.

Heather blinked at her, far away.

“What’s the matter?”

“This thing is testing me.”

Heather looked confused for a moment. “I guess you could call it that. It’s finding out what you know so it can tailor lessons for you.”

“That’s what people always say it’s doing, but what they mean is, it’s testing you. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t think of it that way. But even if I did, I probably wouldn’t have thought to say so — why are you so upset? All the teaching computers I ever heard of work like this.”

“I don’t like to be tested — I particularly don’t like to be tested when I don’t know I’m being tested.” She recalled one time in particular, when she had been judged by people hidden behind a one-way mirror. Without talking to her, they had decided that she had to go to a different foster family. She “was not adjusting well,” whatever that meant. The original family was easier to live with, and a lot more fun, than most of the people she had stayed with. No one, not even the family, ever could or would explain why she had to leave. She had been moved around so often that she would have been glad to stay in a difficult place if she just did not have to move again. But the juvenile authority said she must move; so she moved.

“It is just trying to help you, Barbary.”

“Uh-huh. I’ve heard that before.”

“What did it say that made you so mad?”

“I just don’t like being tested and graded all the time! I thought maybe here things would be different.”

“But it isn’t grading you.”

“Then why’s it doing what it’s doing?”

“It needs to find out what you know already about different subjects. Otherwise it’d have to start from the beginning on everything, which would drive you crazy, it’d be so boring, or it’d have to say, Oh, she’s twelve, she ought to be here — but nobody is ever right on the average for their age in everything, so it would be behind you or ahead of you, and you wouldn’t like that either.”

“But it will tell everybody what I’m behind on, and they’ll say I’m stupid.”

“Stupid! Anybody who thinks you’re stupid is stupid!”

Barbary glared at the floor with her fists clenched.

“Hey, Barbary,” Heather said.

“Yeah.”

“You can trust me. Honest.”

Barbary raised her head. The screen glowed as the patient computer waited for a reply, now and then scrolling out a line of encouragement or a hint. The letters blurred and Barbary blinked them back into focus.

“I’m trying,” she whispered. “I guess it must not seem like it. But I am.”

Heather hopped off her chair, came around the edge of computer table, and hugged her hard.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s going to be okay.”

o0o

Once Barbary knew the computer would not report on her to some social worker, she began to enjoy working with it. The time passed so fast she hardly noticed it.

She squeezed her eyes shut, opened them, and looked at the computer screen again. She still had trouble bringing the letters into focus, and she wondered what was wrong. Finished with his prowling, Mick curled near her, purring. For a while he tried to catch the cursor with his paw, but after batting at it a few times, he recognized the glass screen as some weird kind of window and gave up trying to catch the little moving light behind it.

“Hey, Heather, do you have any aspirin?”

Heather glanced up from her own work.

“Sure. What’s wrong?”

“My eyes kind of hurt. I never worked on a computer this long before.”

“Really? This isn’t very long at all.”

She followed Heather into the bathroom and found out where they kept the aspirin. Barbary gulped a couple down.

“You ought to rest your eyes in between staring at the screen,” Heather said. “Like if you’re thinking about how you want to write something, you should close your eyes, or look at something way on the other side of the room.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“That way you can keep going about as long as you want.”

Barbary hoped she would not have to spend all day every day at the computer. Heather had been engrossed in whatever she was doing. It was probably so far ahead of whatever Barbary knew that Barbary would not even be able to understand an explanation, much less the subject.

“Why don’t you lie down for a little while?” Heather said. “That’ll make the headache go away.”

“I will if you will.”

“I guess I ought to,” Heather said.

When they returned to the living room, Thea had uncovered her contraption.

“Hi, Thea. How’s it going?”

“Oh, it’s nearly finished,” Thea said. “I’m checking the braces, to be sure it’ll fit into a raft. I’m going to try it out in a little while.”

“Hey, neat,” Heather said. “Can we help?”

“There’s not that much to do,” Thea said. “But sure, you’re welcome to come along when I take it out.”

Mick strolled over and climbed into her lap.

“Nice kitty,” Thea said, scratching him under the chin. “You are a nice kitty, but the last thing I need is cat hair in my lenses.”

Thea picked him up and offered him to Barbary, holding him behind the front legs so his paws stuck out in front of him. He bristled his whiskers and looked about to growl. Barbary rescued him.

“We’ll take him into our room with us,” she said. In a low voice, to Heather, she said, “Pretty soon you better show me how to keep track of him so I can let him out.”

“That’ll only take a second,” Heather said, delighted to have an excuse to put off her afternoon nap a few minutes longer. “Let’s do it right now!”

As she headed back to her computer, the call-signal chimed. Heather accepted the message:

“General announcement regarding the alien craft. Main meeting room. Immediately.”

“Wow!” Heather said. “Let’s go! Thea, did you hear? There’s an announcement about the alien ship!”

Thea looked up, frowning and startled.

“An announcement?”

“Yeah, down in the main meeting room. Want to come with us?”

Thea hesitated. “No,” she said. “I want to finish here. I’ll be along later.”

“Okay, bye, come on, Barbary!”

Heather headed for the door. Barbary took just enough time to put Mick in the bedroom.

“You be good,” she said. “When I come back, you can go out.” She hurried after Heather.