Barbary

Chapter Eleven

People filled the hallways around the main meeting room. It was even more crowded than the reception for Jeanne. Barbary and Heather ducked around and between people, till they managed to get inside. They could not see anything, even standing on tiptoe, and though most of the adults around them gave them sympathetic looks, the crowd packed the room far too full for anyone to let them nearer the front.

“Thank you for coming.”

Jeanne Velory’s soft, powerful voice radiated from the speakers.

“Several hours ago, we detected a change in the alien ship’s path,” Jeanne said. “The change was the result of a deliberate application of acceleration.” She paused. “Soon thereafter, we received a radio transmission.”

The silence crumbled into chaos. Barbary imagined Jeanne at the front of the room, quiet and patient, not trying to speak above the clamor or shout anyone down, just waiting until the crowd fell silent.

“A transmission!” Heather shouted. “Holy cats, it’s aliens! Can you believe it?”

“She hasn’t said what it is we’re supposed to be believing, yet,” Barbary said.

Five minutes passed before the chaos settled enough for Jeanne to speak.

“The transmission is quite simple. It arrived in a large number of languages.”

She turned on a recording, and the words flowed over the crowd. Barbary did not understand the first language, nor the second, but quite a few other people did, because they began to murmur to each other.

The crystalline clarity of the voice made Barbary want to sob. She did not know why, except that it was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard in her life.

“Greetings,” it said, when it began speaking in English. “We come in peace to welcome you into civilization. Please do not approach us, but wait for our arrival.”

It changed languages still again. The voice’s beauty continued to increase, as if it were singing.

When the final translation ended, some of the people in the room were crying. Barbary let out the breath she had been holding.

“The alien ship has begun to decelerate,” Jeanne said, “at a rate that would be difficult for our technology to match or for humans to tolerate. It will not, as we previously believed, cross the earth’s orbit and pass us at high speed. Instead, if it continues decelerating, it will reach zero relative velocity a few thousand kilometers from Atlantis.”

The noise of everybody trying to speak made Barbary feel as if she were standing beside a buzz saw. Heather said something, an excited expression on her face, but Barbary could not hear her.

Barbary thought, But it could be an automatic response the alien ship gives every time it comes across some half-civilized bunch of people, like us, who’ve barely even made it into space.

And then she wondered, How could anything so beautiful be a voice from a machine?

Finally she thought, They’re aliens, they can travel to the stars. They can do anything.

The noise level dropped as people began to recover from the first shock of the communication. Barbary began to be able to pick out individual conversations and questions. Everyone was excited, but some were excited with joy, and others with fear. People discussed what the aliens might teach to human beings, or what harm they might cause. She heard several people quote a famous writer, whose theory was that any civilization so advanced it can travel to other stars ought to be too civilized to wage war; and she heard others reply “Hogwash!”

Heather touched Barbary’s arm. Barbary turned toward her sister.

Heather was very pale. Barbary grabbed her arm, afraid she might faint and be trampled. Barbary held her up, not absolutely sure that was what Heather wanted, but willing to risk her sister’s anger if she was mistaken. Barbary thought Heather was leaning on her, but she was so light that it was hard to tell. Barbary bent down, straining to hear.

“Can we get out of here, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Barbary said. “But I’ll try.”

Supporting Heather, Barbary sidled through the crowd. People tried to make way for her, when they noticed her, but most of them remained deep in conversation. Suddenly the whole room quieted. Barbary spied a space and hurried through it before it disappeared. She only had to go about five more meters to reach the door. She wished the meeting were being held in zero g so she could sly around and between all the people in her way. She kept glancing at her sister. Heather gripped Barbary’s arm tight.

The meeting hall fell silent.

“Colleagues,” said the secretary-general of the United Nations, her voice a papery whisper. Her presence was so powerful that Barbary could feel it without even being able to see her, and everyone remained so quiet that they seemed to stop breathing.

Barbary plunged through the doorway, pulling Heather along behind her. Sweat ran down her face. She gasped a breath of the cooler air. Ambassador Begay was still speaking, but out here Barbary could only make out her voice, not her words.

“Are you okay?” she asked Heather.

Heather leaned against the wall.

“I think so,” she said. “Thanks for getting me out of there.

“You’re welcome. I’m kind of glad to be outside, too. Want to go home?”

“I think I better.”

They trudged up the corridor, boarded the elevator, and rode to the half-g level.

“Did you see Yoshi anyplace?”

“Uh-uh,” Barbary said.

“I guess he must still be in the library. When he’s writing he sometimes doesn’t even hear PA announcements.” Back in their home territory, Heather regained her strength. She grinned. “That means we’ll probably get to tell him about the aliens.”

They reached the apartment and went inside.

“I really am going to take a nap this time,” Heather said. “Wake me up when Yoshi gets back so we can both tell him, okay?”

“Sure.”

Heather disappeared into her bedroom.

This was the first time Barbary had been by herself with nothing specific to do since she reached Atlantis. The living room seemed large and empty — strange, since it had felt so small the first time she saw it. Then she realized why: Thea had taken her contraption away.

Barbary remembered the aliens’ message: “Please do not approach us,” it had said. Poor Thea — she must be disappointed, after all her work, not to be able to launch her probe.

“Mickey,” Barbary called. She did not see him anywhere in the living room. He must be asleep on the bunk. She crept into the bedroom, hoping not to wake Heather. She chinned herself on the edge of her bed, then climbed the rest of the way to look inside the bookshelves.

No Mick.

Beginning to worry, Barbary leaned over the edge of her bunk. Heather must have fallen asleep as soon as she lay down, because she had not even taken off her shoes or slid under the blanket. But Mick was nowhere to be seen.

Barbary hurried into the living room.

“Mick!”

She hesitated in front of the door to Yoshi’s room and knocked. Receiving only silence, she opened it. The sparse furnishing offered no hiding place for a cat.

Thea! Barbary thought. When she moved her contraption, she must have left the door open long enough for Mick to get out. Maybe she thought it was okay for him to go, but more likely she didn’t even notice him.

Barbary wanted to curse herself out at the top of her voice. It was her fault, not Thea’s, even if Thea had let him out. Barbary should have been more careful. She knew Thea came in and out of the apartment, lost in a fog of plans and calculations, leaving doors open as she passed.

Should she wake Heather? Mick could take care of himself. He would probably come waltzing home in ten minutes, maybe even carrying a big rat that was more or less dead. It was silly to worry about him, now that everyone knew he had permission to be here and a job to do. And Heather looked so tired...

The computer could track Mick by his collar. Heather knew how to get the information from the machine, and Barbary did not. But the computer was smart. Perhaps it would understand the question no matter who asked it.

She turned on her terminal and logged in.

Hi, she typed. Do you know where my cat is?

“What is your cat?” the computer said. Barbary jumped at the sound of the machine’s voice. “Can you hear me?” she said.

“I can hear you.”

She had forgotten the computer could speak — that it always spoke unless the user turned off the sound.

“My cat — Mick — was in the apartment but now he isn’t. He had on a collar with a radio in it. Jeanne said it would tell me where he is in the station.”

“I do not understand ‘cat,’ ‘Mick,’ or ‘collar,’ but I do understand ‘radio.’ Please wait while I obtain more information.”

The screen blinked into fancy patterns that changed like a kaleidoscope. After a minute the voice returned.

“I now understand ‘cat’ and ‘collar,’” she said — Barbary thought the voice sounded like a she — “but I cannot discover the meaning of ‘Mick.’”

“Mick is the cat’s name. It’s short for Mickey. Can you find him?”

“The transmitter has not yet been registered, so I am not currently tracking a frequency for Mick, a cat. However, finding an unregistered transmitter is possible. Please wait.”

Again the kaleidoscopes appeared. At first the pictures had been beautiful, but now Barbary wished she could make them stop and just get an answer to her question.

Several minutes passed, as the patterns became more colorful, before the voice returned.

“The unregistered transmitter is not in the station.”

“But it has to be! Maybe he got out of his collar somehow…?”

She stopped, realizing that the transmitter would still transmit, even if it were not still attached to Mick.

For a minute Barbary thought she was going to cry. All she could think was that Mick must have gotten himself in such a bad place that his collar had been destroyed.

“Did you look everywhere?” she asked.

“Yes,” the computer said. “And I find no unregistered transmitter on the station.”

“But you have to!”

“It is outside the station.”

“Outside? How could it be outside? Where?”

“The transmission corresponds to the position of a raft that is heading away from the station.”

Then Barbary knew what had happened.

o0o

Barbary ran down the hall and punched at the controls of the elevator. By the time it arrived, she was about to go looking for the stairs, despite the distance to the hub. When the doors slid open, she plunged inside, still panting. She hit the control for top level, the nearest to the center, the hub, and grabbed a handhold to steady herself against the tilt.

The elevator halted and she rushed out.

She propelled herself off the floor and into the air. Tumbling and struggling, she managed to grab a strap. She thudded against the wall and bounced to a halt. Here she had no weight, but she still had momentum, and ramming into the wall hurt. When her balance returned, she grabbed the next handhold, and the next, and crawled toward the launch chamber. However much she wanted to run, she would have to move — to sly — smoothly and carefully. As she was about to enter the raft chamber, she heard voices, arguing. She stopped herself and listened, too desperate even to be embarrassed about eavesdropping.

“I tell you I didn’t know about the message!” Thea shouted. “If you’d announced it when it first came in — if it weren’t for this infernal secrecy —”

“You should have known better,” the vice president replied.

“This is a research station, I’m an astronomer. I’m supposed to be doing research.”

“It’s quite possible that you’ve committed a diplomatic faux pas in the most important meeting since… since… the beginning of history!”

“All right, dammit,” Thea said. “I’ve already turned it around. What more do you want?”

Barbary peeked around the doorjamb. The vice president sat in one of the skating chairs that transported novices in free fall. His two bodyguards clung to straps. Thea and Yukiko floated nearby, studying a display.

“Besides,” Thea said, grumbling, “‘Please do not approach us’? What the hell does that mean? We aren’t approaching them. It’s just a drone with a camera. If they’re so advanced, they can tell it doesn’t have any artificial intelligence, and there’s nobody in it.”

But there is! Barbary thought. Mick’s in there — he’s got to be!

He must have climbed into Thea’s contraption, into the central pipe that formed the basic frame. And he either liked it there too much to leave, or he was too scared or too interested to jump out while Thea carried the contraption to the raft.

“I see you’re willing to risk the possibility that the aliens will consider your ‘experiment’ hostile,” the vice president said. “I’m sure your colleagues will be happy to know you’re so cavalier about their lives.”

“I told you I’m bringing it back!”

Barbary let out her breath. Maybe it would be all right. The raft would turn before the aliens decided to shoot it, and Mick would be in the station again long before the raft ran out of air.

“We’ll have to broadcast an explanation and an apology,” the vice president said. “And you’d better prepare yourself for a disciplinary hearing.”

“You can’t discipline me!” Thea said. “I’m a citizen.”

“We’ll see.” He paused. “How long before the craft returns to the station?”

“It’s only been out forty-five minutes,” Thea said. “It’ll take about an hour to decelerate, turn, and come back. Since I don’t have to conserve its fuel anymore.”

“Thea,” Yukiko said, “it isn’t responding.”

“What?”

Barbary clenched her fists around the handhold.

It has to come back! she thought. It has to!

“It has to be responding,” Thea said, with equal desperation.

“It isn’t. It’s still accelerating.”

After a long silence, during which Barbary was afraid to sneak a look inside the launch chamber, Thea said, “You’re right.”

In the intense quiet, Barbary could hear her own heart pounding. She bit her lip.

“I’m going to the control chamber,” the vice president said. “The military attaché will have to know what’s happened. He’ll be able to deal with the logistics of destroying the probe.”

Barbary froze. The vice president’s chair buzzed toward her. If she jumped out in front of him and asked him not to shoot Mickey —

He would probably laugh at her.

If his bodyguards did not shoot her for jumping out at him.

She hid in a nearby corridor till he, his bodyguards, and Thea and Yukiko entered the elevator, still arguing.

After they were out of sight, Barbary entered the launch chamber. Heather’s raft sat on its tracks, waiting to go out again. Barbary floated to it, opened its door, and slid into the seat.

She stared at the controls. She thought she remembered what Heather had done, but she was not certain. She was not even sure she could figure out in which direction to go to find the alien ship, and Mick’s raft. Away from the sun, she guessed. But there was an awful lot of nothing out there, and rafts were awfully small.

Heather said the computer could drive the raft

She turned it on.

“Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you.”

“Do you know where the raft with the transmitter is?”

“Yes.”

“I want to go there.”

“Please wait.”

The kaleidoscope patterns appeared. Barbary gritted her teeth. Computers were supposed to know everything instantly.

But if it knew the location of Mick’s raft, why was it making her wait? The only reason she could think of was that it was reporting her.

She slapped the switch that turned off the computer. She did not know if that would keep it from reporting her — if that was what it was doing — but it was the only thing she could think of. She would have to find Mick herself. She pulled down the door and sealed it and tried to remember what control Heather had used first.

“Open up!”

Barbary started at the muffled voice and the rap on the transparent roof.

Heather stared in at her. She looked furious.

Barbary opened the hatch.

“Move over!”

“Heather, they’re going to shoot Thea’s contraption, and Mick’s inside it. I have to stop them.”

“Move over!”

Barbary obeyed.

Heather swung in, slammed the hatch shut, and fastened her seat belt.

“Your computer told me part of it, and I figured out the rest.” She took over the controls.

“Thea tried to make her camera come back, but it wouldn’t.”

“Mick probably knocked loose some of the connections.”

Their raft slid into the airlock. The hatch closed.

“I just hope I got here soon enough to get us out,” Heather said. “I bet they’ll freeze all the hatches in about two seconds, if they haven’t already.”

The outer door slid open.

Heather made a sound of triumph and slammed on the power. The acceleration pushed them both back into their seats.

With the raft accelerating and the station growing smaller behind them, Heather glared at Barbary.

“Now,” she said. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“There wasn’t time,” Barbary said.

“Oh.” Heather’s scowl softened. “That’s a good point.”

Barbary squinted into starry space. “How do you know where to go?”

“It’s not that hard. From where the station is now, and the direction and speed the ship’s approaching, it has to be lined up with Betelgeuse, if Atlantis is directly behind us.”

Barbary tried to imagine the geometry of the arrangement Heather described, with all the elements moving independently of one another, and came to the conclusion that it was hard, even if Heather was so used to it that she didn’t know it.

She peered into the blackness, unable to make out anything but the bright multicolored points of stars.

Heather drew a piece of equipment from the control panel.

It looked like a face mask attached to a corrugated rubber pipe. Heather fiddled with a control.

“Here,” she said, and pushed the mask toward Barbary. “You can focus with this knob if you need to.”

The image of the alien ship floated before her, a sharp, clear three-dimensional miniature, a jumble of spheres and cylinders, panels, struts’ and irregularities, some with the hard-edged gleam of metal, some with the softer gloss of plastic, some with a rough and organic appearance, like tree bark. But for all Barbary knew, alien plastic looked like tree bark and their trees looked like steel. If they had trees, or plastic, or steel.

“Can you make it show Mick’s raft?”

“That’s harder,” Heather said, “since I don’t know what course Thea used. But I’ll try.” She bent over the mask, fiddling.

“Hey, Barbary,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Were you really going to come out here all by yourself?”

“I guess so. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.”

“That was brave.”

“Dumb, though,” Barbary said. She never would have remembered the right controls, and she would have headed off in the wrong direction. “I guess you would have had to come out and get me and Mick both.”

“Still, it was brave.”

“Did you find Mick yet?” Barbary asked, embarrassed.

“Uh-uh, not yet.”

“Can we use his transmitter?”

Heather glanced up, frowning.

“We could,” she said, “but we can’t, if you see what I mean. We’d have to use the computer, and if we turn it on it would probably lock our controls and take us home. But we’ll find him, don’t worry.”

“Okay,” Barbary said. “How long before we catch up to him, do you think?”

“It sort of depends on how fast the raft went out and how rapidly it was accelerating. Which I don’t know. But it couldn’t have been too fast, or it would use up all its fuel before it got to the ship. Then it wouldn’t be able to maneuver, so it would just fly by very fast. Without much time to take pictures. So it has to be going slowly, instead. Anyway, we ought to catch up within a couple of hours. I don’t want us to run out of fuel — and I don’t want to get going so fast that we go right past without seeing Mick.”