Barbary (10 page)

“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.”