Barbary

Chapter Seven

Heather and Barbary followed Yoshi to the one-g level of the station and into the reception hall.

“Wow,” Heather said. “It’s hot in here.” She looked around. “Whoever’s running balance on the station must be having a great time. I never saw so many people all in one place.”

Barbary found the crowd neither large nor dense enough to bother her. Back on earth she had seen riots. Once she had even been caught at the edge of one. But Heather did not need to know about that experience. This crowd surrounded her with cheer and expectation, with eagerness to meet Jeanne Velory. Partitions lay fan-folded against the walls, pulled back to create a large meeting room from areas usually set aside for classes and lectures. All the chairs stood stacked in the corners, for the room did hold too many people for anybody to sit down.

Barbary and Heather made their way slowly through the crowd. Barbary could tell the station-dwellers from the grounders. About half the people here wore rather formal clothes, and the rest dressed like Heather and Yoshi, in T-shirts and drawstring shorts or pants. The grounders looked heavier, somehow, as if the one gravity of the station held them, while the station-dwellers seemed to bring with them the lower gravity of the inner ring. Barbary puzzled over the strange impression, because of course it was impossible. Gravity did not work that way. But that was how it looked to her even if she could not explain it, any more than she could explain the form the tea-steam took, or walking “down” an “up” grade, or the tilt of the elevator floor.

She wondered what she looked like herself: a grounder or — what did the people on the station call themselves? Atlanteans? Einsteinians? All the questions she wanted to ask tumbled over one another in her mind.

“Well. Barbary. Hello.”

She started. Jeanne Velory gazed down at her, her expression pleasant, neutral, cool.

“Oh. Hi.”

“Settling in all right?”

“Yes. Uh… thanks.

Heather nudged her. For the first three or four pokes in the ribs, Barbary had no idea why. Finally she figured it out.

“Jeanne, um, Dr. Velory. This is Heather. My new sister.”

“How do you do, Heather.” Jeanne shook Heather’s small, slender hand. “We never were introduced, the last time I was here.”

“No, I was just a kid then, anyway,” Heather said.

“Have you shown Barbary the station yet?”

“We haven’t had time. Tomorrow, I’m going to start.”

Barbary blushed on being reminded that she had turned down Jeanne’s offer of a guided tour around Outrigger.

“I saw the observation bubble,” Barbary said. “In the transport ship. I found it myself. I stayed in it a lot. Nobody else was ever there.”

Jeanne frowned, hearing the defensiveness in Barbary’s voice, but her expression softened.

“I’m glad you found it,” she said. “And you’re right, hardly anyone else spent any time there. We wasted our time, instead. Arguing. We’d have done a lot better to look at the stars.” She held out her hand to Heather again, then to Barbary. “I hope you like it here.”

“Thanks,” Barbary said.

“Dr. Velory…”

A tall man in a grounder suit touched Jeanne’s shoulder. She let him turn her away to introduce her to a whole group of people, who closed in and cut her off from Barbary and Heather.

“You didn’t tell me you knew her!” Heather said.

“I don’t — we just sat next to each other on the shuttle. She knew who you are, though.”

“Oh, yeah, big deal, everybody knows who I am, Heather the first space-baby. Really tiresome. I tell you, Barbary, it’s great to have somebody else on the station who’s under eighteen.” She grinned. “Let’s go get some punch. Maybe they even have a buffet ... and you can give me a lesson in sleight of hand.”

o0o

The reception was a great success, but for Barbary it went on forever. Only when it began to break up did Heather think they could leave without attracting attention. Barbary had assumed they would be able to appear, then sneak off. Back on earth, no one ever cared if she disappeared. But Heather’s absence would be noticed as much as her presence. Barbary began to see some of the drawbacks of Heather’s life. She still envied her all the years she had spent up here — but she could see the drawbacks.

Now she followed Heather through the crowd. It was thinner, but still thick enough to make finding anyone a problem. Finally they saw Yoshi.

“I’m getting kind of tired,” Heather said to him. “We’re going to go on home.”

“That’s a good idea,” Yoshi said. “I’ll come with you.”

Heather gave Barbary an anxious glance. Barbary took care not to react. She figured she had about one more chance at acting weird in front of Yoshi before he decided she was seriously nuts. Besides, even if he came back with them everything would be all right as long as he did not barge into Heather’s room. And as long as Mick was not yowling at the top of his lungs when they got there.

Barbary had succeeded in forgetting about the shrimp until she started home. Just as the books on stage magic claimed, her ignoring something had kept others from noticing it. But as soon as she got on the elevator to the inner ring, she became uncomfortably aware of the damp handful of crustaceans in her pocket. And she thought she could smell them, too. She glanced sidelong at Yoshi, but he stared out at the stars, somewhere else entirely.

“What’s that funny — Oh!” Heather stopped herself just as Barbary elbowed her in the ribs. “Ow!”

“What’s the matter?” Yoshi was not too distracted to hear the protest in Heather’s voice. “What’s wrong? Are you two fighting?”

“Fighting?” Heather said. “No — why would we fight?”

“I thought you said, ‘ow,’” Yoshi said to Heather, and to Barbary he said, frowning, “and I thought you hit her.”

“Hit her!” Barbary said. “Why would I hit her?” She was offended. She would never hit Heather. Elbowing somebody in the ribs was not hitting them, and besides Heather was a lot smaller than she was. She had barely nudged her, and that only to get her attention.

“She didn’t hit me!” Heather said, just as offended. “And I said ‘oh’ — I was thinking about something.”

“I see,” Yoshi said.

Barbary knew that Yoshi meant the opposite. Of course he could not see; how could he? She hoped he might put this whole day down to tiredness and excitement, and let her start fresh in the morning.

The elevator stopped. They all got out and turned the corner.

The door to Yoshi and Heather’s apartment stood ajar.

Somehow, Barbary managed to keep walking. Her knees felt like oatmeal. Mick must have howled. Someone had heard him and found him and taken him away.

“Hmm,” Yoshi said. “Thea must be here.” He strode on ahead.

Heather grabbed Barbary’s hand. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “Thea wouldn’t have any reason to go in our room.”

They hurried after Yoshi.

He stood just inside the doorway, looking at a jumble of delicate bits of machinery and electronics spread across the living room floor. Heather stopped short. Barbary caught her breath.

Thea — Barbary assumed it was Thea — came out of Heather’s room, leaving the door open.

Thea grinned. “Hi. You must be Barbary. Welcome to Atlantis.” She waved something at Heather. “Heather, I borrowed your sticky tape. Hope that’s okay.”

“Uh…” Heather said. “Yeah, sure, anytime.” Both she and Barbary stared at the door.

Barbary expected Mick to come sauntering through the doorway any second. But nothing happened.

Where is he? Barbary thought.

“Where’ve you all been?” Thea said, kneeling in the midst of the contraption.

“At the reception.”

“The reception? Oh, lordy, the reception.” Thea sat on her heels. “I thought that was Friday.”

“It is. So is today.”

Thea ran her hands over her light brown hair. A few strands fell free and curled around her face. “I must be losing my mind. I thought today was Wednesday.

“Thea, I’m worried about you,” Yoshi said.

“Worried? Why?”

“You’re usually only one day off.”

Barbary would have been offended if someone said that to her. Thea took it in stride. Perhaps it was the truth.

“I wasn’t paying attention — I have to get this thing finished. I need some floor space to put it together. That’s okay, isn’t it?”

Yoshi looked as if he had to decide whether to lose his temper or laugh. He chose laughter.

“Of course it is,” he said. “And this way, I might even get to see you once in a while.”

“Well,” Heather said cheerily, “We’ll leave you two alone. Time for bed.” She grabbed Barbary by the hand, dragged her into the bedroom, and closed the door.

On the foot of the upper bunk, Mick sat with his paws curled under his chest. He blinked like an owl, and then he yawned.

Heather started to giggle.

“He must have been in the bookcase,” Barbary said. “And just now come out —”

“Maybe,” Heather said. “But I bet he was right where he is all along. Just watching the world go by.”

“But Thea —!”

“Watching Thea go by, too. You’ll really like her, when you get to know her. She’s great. When she’s thinking about something, a bomb could go off right beside her and she’d never even notice it.”

“Kind of dangerous,” Barbary said.

“If there were any bombs around. But good luck for us.”

Mick stood, stretched, and jumped to the floor. He sat at Barbary’s feet, twitching his whiskers as he sniffed the air. She brought out the shrimp.

“This is disgusting,” she said, peeling away bits of sodden paper napkin from the squashed and disintegrating shellfish. “I don’t know if he’ll even eat it.”

But he did.

o0o

Barbary let Mick under her covers. He curled up next to her, purring and occupying at least half the bed. Barbary tickled him under the chin.

“We made it through a whole day, Mick,” she whispered. “I don’t know how, but we did.”

He nuzzled her side and went to sleep. Barbary lay very still, marveling at the way half gravity felt, at her new family, at being here at all. A moment later, she fell asleep too.

o0o

When Barbary woke, Mick occupied three-quarters of the bunk instead of half. Barbary pushed herself into the corner formed by the mattress and the cool, solid wall. She tried to doze, but it was hopeless. She fished for her watch: five o’clock, station time. Most of the people on Atlantis kept to a regular 24-hour schedule, just because they were used to it and it was simpler to keep track of. Nobody would be up yet. Barbary’s stomach growled. Last night, she had been so anxious to get food for Mickey that she had neglected to eat much herself.

She slipped out of her bunk, leaving Mick curled sleeping in its center. Perhaps Yoshi and Heather kept some food in their tiny kitchen, at least some milk that she could divide with Mick.

Heather slept on as Barbary got dressed. She lay so quiet, so still — Barbary remembered her sister’s bad heart, and for a moment felt afraid. But when she listened, she could hear Heather’s soft, shallow breathing.

Mick stuck his nose out from beneath the covers and mrrowed.

“Good morning.” Barbary opened the door. Mick stood, ready to come exploring. “It’s probably all right,” Barbary whispered, “but just to be safe you better stay here.” She slipped out.

“Hi.”

Barbary spun around, frightened.

“Sorry,” Thea said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Uh, that’s okay.” Barbary slid the door shut. “I didn’t think anybody’d be up this early.”

This morning, Thea’s gadget looked more like a real machine than a collection of random parts.

“Most people aren’t,” she said.

“Have you been up all night?”

Thea looked at her watch. “Not quite — not yet, anyway.” She grinned. “I figure I’ve got two or three hours to go before I can claim to have missed a whole night’s sleep.” She stood up and stretched. “Do you always get up this early?”

“No. Hardly ever.”

“Is Heather awake?”

“Uh-uh — I mean,” she said quickly to cover the conversation she had been having with Mick, in case Thea had heard, “she sort of turned over, so I said she should go back to sleep. I guess she did.”

“She likes to sleep late, that’s for sure,” Thea said. “But once she gets going, there’s no stopping her. Want some coffee?”

“Sure.”

Thea poured two cups. Barbary sipped hers. Thea stared at her contraption.

“Is that a camera?” Barbary asked.

“A telescopic camera, yes.”

“To look at the aliens with?”

Thea arched one eyebrow and regarded Barbary with approval. “‘That’s right. The politicians have gummed up the works so nobody can go out and take a look at the thing in person — so I’m going to mount a camera on one of the rafts and send it on a grand tour.”

“Is that allowed?”

“Everybody in the astronomy department knows about it — but if the muck-de-mucks knew, they’d probably forbid it. Saying no is easier than saying okay. They’ve already taken over all the information from the other probe I sent out — the one that detected the alien ship in the first place.” She gestured toward the series of comet photos Barbary had noticed the previous evening. This was the first chance Barbary had had to look at them.

The first two photos showed an ordinary comet, a blurry streak against the stars. But in the third photo, the spot of light had become clearer and sharper. A real comet grew fuzzier with vaporized ice as it approached the sun.

Barbary stared at the last two photos.

The images Thea had captured could not be mistaken for a chunk of rock or ice, even less for a human creation. The alien ship sprawled in all dimensions, flowing out in angles and curves that no one on earth ever imagined for a spacecraft. It was exquisitely beautiful and exquisitely alien.

“I’m supposed to be an astronomer and this is supposed to be a research station,” Thea said. “But now that we have something to research, the politicians are getting all nervous.”

“That’s crummy,” Barbary said.

“That’s what I thought. So it’s guerrilla time.”

“Gorilla time?”

“Guerrilla, as in warfare. That’s when you go around behind somebody else’s rules, especially if the rules don’t make sense.”

“I hope it works.”

“So do I. By the time the ship gets in visual range close enough to see details, I mean — the VIPs will probably try to lock up all the light telescopes as well as the probe data. I don’t see how they can, though. It’d be like trying to take away every computer in the station. Practically everybody has one.”

“Why would they try, then?”

“Fear.”

“It seems like they’d want to know all they can find out before the ship gets here.”

“They have tame scientists to tell them what they want to know. They can’t figure the rest of us out, and they’re afraid we might tell them something that doesn’t fit in with their pet theories.”

“Like what?”

Thea paused, then shrugged and gestured to her camera. “When I get a transmission from this bird, I’ll let you know.”

The look on Thea’s face reminded Barbary of Jeanne, when Jeanne had said, “A lot of people think the alien ship is a derelict. I don’t believe it, myself.”

o0o

Heather sat on the top bunk, skritching Mick behind the ears.

“But it would be too suspicious to tell Thea to stay out of our room, Barbary. Besides, what would she think? I’d hurt her feelings.”

“But she shouldn’t just walk in. What would she say, if you walked right into her room?”

“Probably, ‘Hi, sit down, have a cup of coffee.’”

“Oh.”

“Honest, Barbary, she hardly ever comes in here. She never has before and she probably won’t ever again. It was just a fluke. Mick will be okay.”

“I guess.” She tired to persuade herself that Heather was right.

“If you’re worried about him, why don’t you bring him with us?”

“I can’t, he’d never sit still for it.”

“But you could put him in your jacket, in the hidden pocket.”

“He wouldn’t stay. He only stayed before because I drugged him.”

“Oh.” Heather rested her chin on her fist and frowned. “How about a briefcase?”

“What’s a briefcase?”

“It’s a big leather satchel people used to carry papers around in.”

“Why’d they do that?”

“They didn’t have computers. They had to write everything down. In this novel I read, the hero carried his cat around in a briefcase.”

“Maybe you could train some cats to do that,” Barbary said, “but I don’t think Mick would like it. And where would we get a briefcase, anyway?”

“It’s the principle of the thing. We could use a box.”

“We’d look pretty stupid walking around the station carrying a box with airholes punched in the side.”

“Maybe so,” Heather said. “But I can’t think of anything else.”

“He’s fed and everything. He’ll probably just sleep all morning anyway. He’ll be okay. It’s just…”

“What?”

“After a while he’s going to get bored with this one room. He’ll want to run around. If he could do that, someplace where nobody else would see…”

“There’s lots of places nobody ever goes but me. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who even knows about them. I’ll show them to you. But first I want to take you for a ride.”

Barbary skritched Mick behind the ears. He barely raised his head, his eyes closed, then he put one paw over his face and fell asleep.

o0o

As the elevator rose toward the zero-gravity hub, Barbary and Heather watched the stars through the clear wall of the elevator.

“They’re even prettier when you get outside the station and you’re just in a suit or a raft,” Heather said. “Sometimes I think it ought to be possible to go outside without a suit, and see them without anything at all in the way.”

Barbary glanced at her sister, trying to figure out if Heather was making a joke. If she was, it was not a very good one. Barbary had never felt scared for another person before. She felt scared for Heather.

“It’d be kind of cold out there, without a space suit,” she said.

Heather grinned. “Or really hot. Depends on where you’re standing.”

The elevator stopped and opened. Heather grabbed Barbary and pushed off, soaring across the room. She slyed around the hub. On one side, a number of small spacecraft sat on rails, facing closed hatches in the wall.

“Yukiko, hi, can I take one of the rafts?”

Yukiko straightened from her inspection of a raft’s engines. She carried a torqueless wrench in one hand; a bunch of other tools hung from a sort of apron tied around her waist. She was tiny, only a bit taller than Heather.

“Hi, Heather,” she said. “Yukiko, this is Barbary.”

“Hello, Barbary. I heard you were coming. Welcome to Atlantis.”

“Thanks.” Being recognized everywhere she went felt weird. She supposed she would get used to it.

“I’ll just take my regular raft, okay?” Heather headed toward a blue-gray ship.

“Sure,” Yukiko said. “Have fun. Oh — want to do an errand?”

“Okay. What goes where, and who to?”

Yukiko unfastened a great netted bundle of equipment from the wall and floated it to Heather’s raft. She reached inside the passenger compartment and manipulated some controls. Crab-clawed arms reached out from the raft’s belly and clasped the bundle close.

“Sasha needs it, out on the platform.”

Heather slid into the raft and showed Barbary how to strap in.

“See you later.”

Heather sealed the clear canopy.

“Let’s go,” she said.

The raft glided forward on its rails. The hatch opened, let them pass, and shut behind them. The raft stopped before a second closed hatch. Air hissed loudly as the air lock emptied. The sound diminished to silence.

“Is it like the light switch?” Barbary said. “You work it by talking to it?”

“Right,” Heather said. “You can use hand controls, too, I’ll show you. And you should keep an eye on the gauges, too, just in case something goes wrong.” She pointed to a lighted display. “This one’s for air pressure, so you know the canopy’s properly sealed. And if anything does happen, there’s a survival sack right there.” She pointed to a silvered package in easy reach. “You open it and seal it around you. It’s got its own air supply and an emergency transmitter, and even a window.”

“Is there time to get into it? I mean, if a meteor hits the raft, or something?”

Heather laughed. “If a meteor hit us we’d be vaporized. You wouldn’t have time to get in the sack, but you wouldn’t have time to care, either. The chances of getting hit by a meteor are real low. Around here we’re more likely to run into a loose wrench.”

The gauge displaying air pressure outside the raft dropped to zero. The outer hatch opened. Heather put her hands on the controls.

“You can make it work by telling it how fast you want to be going, but once you get a feeling for it, it’s more fun to drive it.”

The raft slid forward, left its rails, and sailed off into space. All of a sudden they were completely free.

Now Barbary understood why they called the little spaceships “rafts.” She could tell that they were moving because the station fell away behind them, and the acceleration pressed her against her seat, but the motion gave her no perception of speed, no sound of air rushing by or wheels on pavement, just a smooth, peaceful, floating sensation as if they were drifting down a dark, wide river.

“They really let you take this out all by yourself,” Barbary said with wonder.

“Sure.”

“They don’t let kids drive cars, back on earth.”

“That’s dumb. Why not?”

“They don’t think we’re responsible enough, I guess.”

“Hmph,” Heather said, offended. “I’ve never had an accident. I never got drunk and took a raft out to race and nearly ran into the transport, like somebody I could name. And I’ve never run out of fuel, either. It’s adults who do that. Not kids.”

“But you’re not a regular kid.”

“I am too! What do you mean by that?”

“I mean —!” Barbary tried to say exactly what she did mean. “I mean you’re different from most of the other kids I’ve ever met. They’re all kind of silly, and, I don’t know, bored.”

“I get bored sometimes. I can be as silly as anybody, too. Want to see?”

The steering rockets vibrated. The raft spun on its long axis and whipped back to front to back at the same time. The stars and the station spiraled past. Barbary squeezed her eyes shut.

When she looked again, the raft sailed in a perfectly straight line, as if it had never departed from its course. Satisfied and unperturbed, Heather drove on. Barbary felt as if she were still spinning. She clapped her hands over her ears, shut her eyes, and buried her face against her knees.

“I meant it as a compliment!” she said.

“Oh,” Heather said. She patted Barbary’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. But I hate it when people give me that, ‘Oh, isn’t she mature?’ stuff. I feel like they expect me to die any minute.”

“I still meant it as a compliment.”

“Okay. I believe you. Come on, Barbary, sit up, you’ve got to get used to ignoring what your balance tells you sometimes. You sort of have to rely on your eyes.”

Barbary raised her head. The dizziness faded.

“I guess,” she said, “it could get to be fun…”

“Yeah,” Heather said. “Shall I do it again?”

“Not quite yet,” Barbary said with her teeth clenched.

“Okay. I’m not actually supposed to, this close to the station. Besides, we’ll be at the construction site in a minute.”

“Where is it?”

“Just there.” Heather pointed straight ahead at a cluster of stars.

“But…”

Sunlight touched one edge of a curve of metal. Barbary gasped. As the observation platform and the space station moved in their orbits around each other, the shadow of the station slipped away, leaving the delicate platform in full sunlight.

“It’s so small,” Barbary said.

“No, it isn’t. It’s huge. Look, you can just see one of the workers.”

“Where?” Barbary expected someone in a space suit to appear and scoop up the filigree sphere of the platform like a basketball.

“There. To the left.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“We’re still a couple of kilometers from it.”

The clarity of space had tripped Barbary up. She saw that she had mistaken something far away but distinct for something close. Now she could not estimate the platform’s size at all. It grew larger and larger. By the time Barbary spotted the worker who floated deep within the spindly struts and braces, the person was the size of a doll instead of the size of a speck. The platform dwarfed the raft.

“Hi, Heather,” said a disembodied voice.

Barbary started, then realized that the voice had come over the radio. A space-suited figure made its way out of the interior of the platform and floated just outside. She looked “up” at them while they looked “up” at her. Barbary felt very weird.

“Hi, Sasha. This is Barbary.”

Sasha raised the reflective visor of her helmet. She moved closer to the raft’s bubble and cupped her gloved hands around her faceplate so Barbary could see her. A yellow headband, bright against her dark skin, restrained her curly black hair.

“Welcome to Atlantis, Barbary.” She had a wonderful, soft accent that Barbary could not place, sort of British, sort of Russian.

“Thanks.”

“Are you coming out?”

“Not this time,” Heather said. “I didn’t bring any suits. I just wanted to show Barbary how the raft works.”

Sasha chuckled. “Yes. I saw your demonstration.”

Heather blushed. “I had to dodge a wrench,” she said.

“Or a foo-fighter?”

Heather grinned. “Sure. Didn’t you see it? I bet it was a spy from the alien ship.”

“When you see it again, tell those little green people to stop in for tea,” Sasha said. “Well — Got to get back to work.” She made a graceful dive to the other side of the raft, where a couple of her co-workers joined her. Heather extended the arms of the raft. The equipment clanged, startling Barbary all over again.

“Thanks, kids,” Sasha said, waving, as she helped tow the equipment over to the platform. “On the way back, don’t hit any of those little green pedestrians.”

Heather turned the raft end-for-end and headed home. Going back they were upside-down, compared to the way they had arrived, but after a moment it no longer felt upside-down to Barbary.

“What’s a foo-fighter?”

“It’s what pilots used to call UFOs — flying saucers — years and years ago, before anybody ever went into space. Some people thought they were alien spaceships coming to contact us, or spy on us, or take over our world, or give us the secrets of the universe. Or something.”

“Does that make the alien ship a foo-fighter?”

After a thoughtful pause, Heather said, “I guess it does. But nobody ever found any hard evidence that the old UFOs were real. This one’s kind of different.”

Heather piloted the raft smoothly into its bay and the airlock began its cycle.

“That was fun,” Barbary said. She still felt dizzy — but the ride had been fun.

“How long does it take to learn to drive one of these things?”

“Anybody can get in one and ride around in it,” Heather said. “But really driving it, with the computer overridden I don’t know. I’ve been doing it since I was a little kid.

“How long does it take other people?”

“Couple months, I guess. Mostly they just let the computer do it. It’s more fun to drive it, though. Next time I’ll give you a lesson.”

“Great.”

The airlock completed its cycle and the raft slid into the station. Heather opened the canopy and vaulted from her seat. Barbary followed, still uncertain in free fall.

“Thanks, Heather, Barbary,” Yukiko said.

“Any time.”

Heather led Barbary from the hub.

“What do you want to see next?” she asked. “The labs are pretty neat, and the library — or we could play on the computer —”

“I ought to go check on Mickey,” Barbary said.

“Oh, I’m sure he’s okay.”

“Heather —” Barbary said, exasperated. She stopped for a second to make herself calm down. “I know you want to show me everything, and I want to see it. But Mick’s my responsibility. I have to take care of him and be sure he’s all right. Otherwise I just should have let him loose back on earth where he’d have half a chance without me.”

Heather walked along in silence for quite a way. Barbary felt certain that her new sister was angry at her. She did not know Heather well enough to know how she would react when she got mad.

“Yeah,” Heather said, to Barbary’s surprise. “Yeah, you’re right. I understand. I hadn’t really thought about it enough, but I see what you mean. You have to protect him. And I’m going to help you.”