Barbary

Chapter Four

Her pulse raced. Barbary stopped. Afraid she would find an irritated crew member holding Mickey by the scruff of his neck, she peeked around the corner.

Her door remained shut, the hallway silent. Barbary crept to her room, opened the door, and slipped inside.

“Mick?” Mickey was nowhere to be seen. “Hey, Mick?” she said again, worried.

Mickey bounded from behind her rumpled jacket and landed against her. He curled in the crook of her arm, purring.

“Hi,” she said, relieved. “I’m glad you kept out of trouble.” She grinned ruefully. “You’re doing better than me.”

She opened one of the bulbs, extended its straw, and squeezed out a glob of milk. Mickey sniffed it. It bounced back and forth, in and out. The sphere flattened, then stretched into a long sausage shape. Never having seen milk behave so strangely, Mick bristled his whiskers and drew away. “Don’t get picky,” Barbary said. “It wasn’t exactly easy getting this for you.”

She coaxed him till he lapped at the quivering white blob. Mickey drank milk even more messily in space than he did back on earth. Droplets flew from the tip of the bulb, beading into spheres before bursting onto Barbary’s shirt or drifting like soap bubbles to the floor. She offered him some chicken, but after sniffing it, he ignored it. She tried to get him to eat a bit of the dry food from her duffel bag, but he showed no more interest in that. He snuggled against her shoulder, closed his eyes, and fell asleep.

Barbary put Mickey on her jacket and cleaned up the spilled milk. She ate a chicken sandwich and drank the other bulb of milk. Then, yawning, she had to figure out how to arrange the sleeping net. Instructions posted beside it claimed to show the way it worked, but it turned out to be much more complicated. When she finally fixed it so she thought she could get into it, she felt exhausted. Though her room was warm enough, she wished she had a blanket to wrap herself in. She remembered a little kid much younger than she, in the group home on earth. He had been inseparable from his old tattered blanket. Right now Barbary understood how he had felt; she wished she had never made fun of him.

She climbed awkwardly into the net, fastened it, and fell fast asleep. When Mickey crawled in beside her, she halfway woke, then went immediately back to sleep.

o0o

By sleeping during the ship’s daytime and only going out of her room when nearly everybody else was in bed, Barbary made it through the three days of the journey from low earth orbit to the research station without Mickey’s being discovered. Under normal circumstances, somebody would probably have noticed her weird behavior. But with all the VIPs to take care of and everybody curious and worried and wondering about the approaching alien ship, no one cared what Barbary did. She smuggled food to Mickey in the secret pocket of her jacket, then sneaked the wrappers and milk bulbs back to the recycling bins. Maybe it was a good thing that Jeanne Velory had reproved her, for without the warning, she might have clogged up the waste chute in her room. If someone came to fix it they would have discovered Mickey.

The problem she had worried most about, after keeping Mick hidden, turned out to be not much of a problem at all. The first time Mick heard the vacuum pump attached to the toilet, he bristled his fur and hissed, but after he realized it was not a big creature that would jump out and get him, he ignored the pump and used the facilities as if they were just like the ones back on earth.

When she could, Barbary explored the ship. She spent a lot of time in the observation bubble. She wanted to take Mickey there and show it to him, but she kept changing her mind about how risky that would be. She never saw anyone else inside the bubble. Maybe VIPs went into space so often that they did not care. Barbary found it impossible to imagine getting tired of the sight.

She did sometimes see people in the cafeteria, even in the middle of the night. Usually they were talking about the alien ship, speculating and supposing. Barbary listened to them, but soon realized that Jeanne had told her everything anyone knew for certain. They would have to wait till they reached Einstein, and the alien ship near it, to find out anything more.

One of the research station’s missions was to search for gravity waves. For that it had to be well away from earth and the moon. That was the reason for its long polar orbit. It reached its greatest distance from earth, its apogee, above the northern hemisphere. Since the alien ship approached on a path well above the plane of the solar system, Einstein was the best place from which to observe the ship’s passing. Or to contact it, if, as Jeanne believed, it carried living beings.

But as the alien ship drifted farther and farther into the solar system, it showed no sign of life. It continued to ignore radio signals. Many people argued that the ship must be under conscious control, for the chances of its passing so close to the solar system were otherwise terribly small. But others continued to think that the ship must have been drifting, dead, for millions for years. They thought it was only luck that brought the ship near enough to notice.

o0o

The days passed. Einstein appeared first as a large bright spot, then as a sparkly Christmas tree ornament, finally as a huge spinning double wheel growing larger each minute. A few hours before docking, Outrigger’s acceleration stopped. The transport had reached a velocity just slightly greater than the velocity of Einstein; soon it would catch up to the station. Outrigger’s steering rockets vibrated softy, orienting the transport to dock.

Barbary knew she had to go to the debarkation lounge and strap in with the other passengers. But as long as she could, she delayed leaving her room. Feeling nervous, she checked for the hundredth time to be sure she had left nothing behind. She had hardly anything to forget. Her bag had been packed for hours.

“All passengers proceed to debarkation lounge immediately. Fifteen minutes to docking burn.”

The intercom had begun broadcasting the message an hour before. The “immediately” was new. Pretty soon somebody would probably come to fetch stragglers. But Barbary procrastinated, so she could put off drugging Mick till the last minute. She did not know how long it would be before she could find a private place where it would be safe for him to wake.

Barbary unbuttoned her pants pocket and took out a small white envelope. It contained a broken chunk of pill, the last bit of sedative. She wondered, as she always did, if it was the right size. She had had to break up a tranquilizer meant for a person, and estimate how much to give Mickey. That was one of the reasons she was afraid the drug might kill him. Mick watched her, unblinking, as she pushed toward him with the pill hidden in her hand.

“You know I’ve got it, don’t you?” she said. “I know you don’t like it, but you have to take it. Unless you want to lie still in my pocket for the next couple of hours. Fat chance.”

She reached for him. He stretched his body till his hind feet touched a wall, leaped, and sailed past her.

“Mickey!” she said, louder than she meant to. “Come on, don’t play, we can’t afford it.” He touched the far wall with his front paws and bounded, turning a back flip. He maneuvered with certainty and grace even in weightlessness, while Barbary still felt awkward.

“If you had a tail, I could understand,’ she said. “You’d use it to balance with.”

Mick sailed from wall to wall to wall like a bird, or at least a flying squirrel. He spread himself out like a squirrel when he leaped, and the stub where his tail would have been twitched back and forth.

Barbary stopped trying to catch him. She waited till he got tired of springing faster and faster back and forth. He caught his claws in a net to stop himself. Maybe he had made himself dizzy, because when he retracted his claws, he floated away from the wall without kicking off.

He watched her upside down.

He was vulnerable while he was floating. Barbary caught him in midair.

“Ha,” she said. “Outsmarted yourself, didn’t you?”

Barbary held Mick against her body so she could feed him the pill. She had to steady him with her left arm, open his mouth with her left hand, and stick the pill down his throat with her right hand. He growled as she forced his jaws apart. Since she had no free hand with which to steady herself, she tumbled in a slow circle.

“Shh,” she said to Mick. “It isn’t that bad.”

He bit her and she yelped, but she kept hold of him and pushed the pill to the back of his tongue as he tried to twist away from her. She held his mouth shut and stroked his throat to help him swallow.

“There, see? Now you’ll go to sleep and when you wake up — ouch!” He dug in his claws and jumped. She let him elude her. He hovered in the farthest corner, growling, his fur fluffed up. Barbary waited. After five minutes his growling faltered as he began to feel drowsy. His eyelids drooped, and he meowed. Barbary floated to him and took him in her arms.

“I’m sorry, Mick, I know you hate it. I don’t know what’s going to happen, either. I hope everything will be all right when you wake up. For a change.” She cuddled him till he went limp with sleep.

Barbary slid him into the secret pocket, put on the baggy jacket, grabbed her duffel bag, and hurried out just as the intercom clicked on again. “All passengers to the disembarkation deck. Urgent. All passengers —”

o0o

Barbary trembled with nervousness. She had arrived at the lounge in plenty of time to strap in before the burn. Nevertheless, one of the crew members had hustled her to a seat and bawled her out. Now it seemed as though she had been sitting there for hours, because of course the docking burn was not fifteen minutes away, but nearer forty-five. Barbary tried to concentrate on the sight of Einstein, a vast wheel within a wheel spinning in the center of a TV screen as Outrigger approached its hub. But her attention kept returning to Mickey’s warm weight in the secret pocket.

Jeanne Velory was the last person to get to the lounge. Barbary hoped she would see her and smile at her, or even just nod, but she did not. She strapped herself in, leaned back, and closed her eyes. For a moment, strain showed in her face. It had never before occurred to Barbary that Jeanne might be nervous about her new job, her new home, and the alien ship on top of everything else. How could she not be nervous?

Barbary still envied her, but she felt a little sorry for her, too, and she wished she had been able to be more honest with her.

What difference does it make? Barbary thought. She’s too important. She’d never have time to be friends anyway.

Outrigger suddenly vibrated. Einstein appeared to move slightly as the transport’s orientation changed. The steering rockets guided them. Barbary grew almost sure she could feel another motion, that of Mickey waking up. The sedative should have kept him asleep much longer. Barbary wondered if he could have developed a resistance to the sleeping drug… A moment later she felt just as sure that he lay too still, that he had stopped breathing. Maybe this time the sedative had been too much for him.

She prevented herself from reaching inside the secret pocket.

The clang, transmitted through the skin of the transport as it docked against Einstein, scared her for a moment. She caught her breath.

They had reached the research station.

She was home.

Maybe she would get to stay here. But she had thought she had found home, other times, and she had always been sent away.

Without Jeanne to vouch for her, Barbary had to wait to be unstrapped and taken into the station. At the very last, when everybody else had disembarked, a crew member freed her and towed her out of the lounge. Barbary felt embarrassed that he assumed she was completely incompetent in zero g.

Inside the research station, the crewmember maneuvered Barbary over and through the chaos of the waiting room. People floated free, dangled from handholds, or let crew members strap them into the skating-chairs that moved along the narrow tracks in the walls. The crew member deposited her at a web strap.

“You’re being met?”

Barbary nodded.

“Okay. Stay here till they find you.”

After the crew member left, Barbary realized she did not even know for sure if anyone knew she was on this flight. She should have tried to call them from Outrigger, but she had been so concerned about keeping out of sight and keeping Mick hidden that she never thought to try. It was too late now.

She hooked one arm through the web strap and held on to her duffel bag with the same hand, then took the chance of reaching into the secret pocket. Her fingers brushed Mickey’s soft fur. He was lying very, very still.

“Let me carry that, okay?”

Barbary felt a tug on her duffel bag. She snatched it back and jerked her hand away from Mick.

“I’ll carry it myself!” She flopped around like a hooked fish and finally came to rest facing the person who had spoken to her.

She did not recognize her at first. Barbary knew that Heather was her own age, but the little girl hovering before her was much smaller, very thin, and looked only eight or nine. She had hardly any color to her skin, though her hair and eyes were black. Who else could she be but Heather?

“Jeez,” she said, “what’s the matter?”

Barbary was too embarrassed to admit she had reacted as she would have back on earth. Nobody would try to steal anything out here. For one thing — where would they go?

“You surprised me,” Barbary said. “I just I like to carry my own stuff, okay?”

“Sure. You are Barbary, aren’t you? Dumb question, you have to be. I’m Heather. We’re practically sisters.” Heather sounded far less fragile than she looked.

Maybe people who are born on space stations are just naturally littler, Barbary thought.

“Hi,” she said. She had meant to begin well here. She hoped she had not already started to make a mess of everything.

“Aren’t you hot in that jacket? You don’t need it here on Atlantis.” Heather wore shorts and a tank top.

“Atlantis?” Barbary tried to divert the conversation so Heather would not get suspicious about her jacket. And, besides — Atlantis?

Heather grinned. “That isn’t the official name, I know, but that’s what we all call it. Atlantis was a mythical continent. Its people were supposed to have a high-tech civilization when all the other human beings were still wrapping themselves up in animal skins.”

“Yeah,” Barbary said, “but Atlantis sank.”

“That’s a good point,” Heather said. “I hadn’t thought of that. I guess nobody else did, either. Do you know how to sly yet?”

“Huh?”

“Sly. That’s ‘swim’ and ‘fly’ — it’s how you get around in zero g.”

“A little, I guess,” Barbary said. “But I can’t do it very well.”

“Okay, I’ll tow you. It’s a lot faster than getting you a chair, and they’re pretty silly anyway. People only use them who are too chicken to try slying.” Heather took Barbary’s hand. “Come on, let’s go find Yoshi. He’s looking for you, too.”

Barbary untangled herself and her duffel bag from the web strap. Heather pushed off. Barbary relaxed and let herself be towed. She kept a tight hold on her bag. If it got loose and banged against something, it might come untied. It would be ridiculous if she smuggled Mickey on board but got caught because the cat food spilled all over. Afraid of the drug’s effect on Mick, she both hoped and feared to feel him move. She would not look toward him. If she pretended nothing was unusual, nothing was wrong, she would not see a white-tipped tabby paw push through the front of her coat, opening the way for a pink nose and white whiskers…

Heather got all the way to the other side of the doughnut-shaped room without running into a single dignitary. Considering the crowd and the confusion, that was quite a feat.

“Here’s Yoshi!” Heather said. “Yoshi! I found her!”

Yoshi rotated as Heather swooped toward him. He caught them both and swung them around and to a stop. Heather laughed. Barbary swallowed hard and clutched the duffel bag.

“Where’s Thea?” Heather asked.

“I don’t know,” Yoshi said. “She said she’d come, but I guess she forgot.”

Yoshi, Heather’s father and Barbary’s mother’s best friend from college, was of medium height, compact and athletic. Barbary liked his smile. He had none of Heather’s frailty, but she had his good looks and dark hair and eyes.

Yoshi gave Barbary a hug. “Barbary, I’m very glad you’re here.” He held her away to look at her, and hugged her again. In the air above them, Heather did free somersaults, turning fast twice, her knees hugged to her chest, then stretching out her arms and legs to spin once slowly. She caught a strap and stopped.

Barbary suddenly felt quite shy. She did not know what to say to Yoshi, or how to thank him for all he had done, without sounding silly and sentimental.

“I’m glad I’m here, too,” she said. “I didn’t think they’d ever let me come.”

“It should never have taken so long,” Yoshi said. “And after all that, to have to fight with every diplomat on earth just for a shuttle ticket —” He shook his head, then smiled again. “You look a lot like your mother.”

Barbary shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Haven’t you even seen a picture of her?”

Barbary shook her head. “Not for a long time. I had some stuff, but it got lost. I don’t know. I don’t remember.” She did remember. She used to have some smoke-damaged photographs, and a ring. In one of the places she stayed, the ring disappeared. In another, they threw away her photos as a punishment. She pretended not to care, because she would not give anyone the satisfaction of hurting her. Who cared about a bunch of old pictures, you couldn’t see anything on them anyway. That’s what she said out loud.

It was true that the images were out of focus, obscured by time and misfortune, and only two-dimensional anyway. She had no clear memory of her mother’s face, either from life or from pictures. But she did care.

“I’ve got a couple of snapshots,” Yoshi said. “They’re from a long time ago, but still… I’ll get you some copies.”

Yoshi glanced at the diplomats and assistants and secretaries who surrounded them. Most of them looked awkward and uncomfortable in zero g. “This crowd will be about as useful as a flock of sheep.” To Barbary he said, “Did anyone tell you what’s happened?”

“Yes,” she said. “But it’s still a secret back on earth.”

“They’re afraid an announcement will make the grounders panic,” Heather said.

“I didn’t panic,” Barbary said.

“But you’re not a grounder anymore.”

“Grounder or not has nothing to do with it,” Yoshi said. “More than a handful of people should know what’s going on. When we meet that ship — it’s history. Even if it’s a derelict. That’s the majority view. Which I don’t subscribe to.” He reached for Barbary’s hand. “Aren’t you hot in that jacket?”

“No. Yes. A little. It’s easier to wear it than carry it.”

“Okay. Ready?”

Barbary nodded. Yoshi and Heather pushed off, towing Barbary behind them.

Yoshi sailed from wall to brace to floor, around small groups of people, past doors and monkey-bars and tracks. He oriented himself as if the edge of the doughnut-shaped room were the floor, and the flat top and bottom its edges. Barbary would have put herself ninety degrees the other way, so the flat parts of the room were floor and ceiling, and the curving places were walls. That would have felt more natural. Farther out toward the rim of the station, the curving wall would be the floor, so Yoshi’s orientation made more sense. Heather, when she was not holding Barbary’s hand, paid no attention at all to walls or floor or ceiling. She swooped from one point to another, turned upside-down or sideways to the direction her father was facing. She acted as if she saw no difference at all.

They slyed over the juncture between spinning and non-spinning parts of the station. The slow relative motion was hardly noticeable. They got into one of the elevators. It had a weird paint job: white footprints on the surface of one wall, which was green, and the outlines of people on the beige wall opposite the elevator door.

“This will be the floor when we reach bottom,” Yoshi said, indicating the footprints. “But this wall will tilt on the way down.” He used a strap to hold himself against the wall with the outlines, and to keep his feet on the surface with the footprints. Heather did the same.

“You want to be pretty firmly planted,” Yoshi said. “Between the momentum and the spin, it’s a fairly strange feeling.” He drew Barbary beside him.

The elevator started to move. Barbary felt as if she were leaning against a steeply-tilted wall. Startled, she grabbed Yoshi and held on, afraid they were going to crash.

“It’s okay,” Yoshi said. “You see what I mean.”

“It’s supposed to work like this?”

“This is the way the laws of physics make it work.”

As they fell, the tilt changed, making Barbary feel as if she were standing more and more upright.

Heather seemed not even to notice the odd sensation. “Turn around,” she said, “and look over this way.”

“What?” Barbary suspected a trick, for Heather was directing her to face the side wall. “Why?”

“Just do it, trust me, quick!” She pushed Barbary around, not very hard. Barbary could have resisted, but she decided to give Heather a chance. She faced the wall. It was glass — she had not realized that till now because the metal casing beyond was featureless and very smooth.

Its edge passed up the window, like a shade rising, and suddenly Barbary was looking out at the station, from inside it, with the universe beyond.

“Ohh…” she said. Heather squeezed her hand.

The stars were as beautiful as they had been from the observation deck of the transport ship. But the overwhelming sight was the station, a huge wheel within a wheel spinning past the stars. As they dropped through one of the spokes, the wheels grew larger, much larger than she had expected, even knowing the dimensions, even seeing the station on the screen in the transport’s lounge.

Shadows in space were very black and distinct. Some distance away, a silvery craft sprang suddenly into view. Invisible one moment, the next it was in plain sight. Nothing was out there for it to hide behind — then Barbary understood that it had been in the shadow of the station. She was used to thinking of shadows as falling on a surface, not as great lightless volumes of space stretching out into infinity. She shivered.

“It’s beautiful,” she said to Heather.

“I want to show you everything! We can drop off your bag and go see the labs and the garden and the observatory —”

“You mean right now?” Barbary said, stricken.

“Sure!”

“Heather, honey, Barbary’s been traveling for a long time, she’s tired,” Yoshi said. “Let’s get her settled before you two start exploring.”

“Okay, sure, that makes sense,” Heather said, sounding downcast. “But there’s an awful lot to see, and you need to be able to find your way around.”

“Hold tight,” Yoshi said. “Feet on the floor?”

The elevator braked. Barbary’s stomach lurched. She was afraid that after all, after going through everything, now at the end of the trip she would throw up. She fought down the queasiness.

The tilt vanished: the floor steadied and leveled out. They had stopped at the inner wheel, which was about halfway to the outside rim of the station. Barbary thought she weighed maybe half here what she did on earth. It was hard to tell, though, after several days in nearly zero g. The elevator doors opened. Yoshi and Heather glided out.

“Why did we stop on this level?” Barbary asked.

“We live on this level,” Yoshi said.

“Oh… The booklet said all the living quarters are out on the rim.” The rim rotated with an acceleration of one gravity.

“Most of them are,” Yoshi said. “But we live here.”

Heather, walking faster, left Yoshi and Barbary a little way behind. Barbary wondered what it was that she and her father were not telling.