Barbary (6 page)

“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.

Barbary followed Heather. The corridor rose before and
behind them, for it followed the arc of the station’s inner wheel. But though
Barbary could see that the hall curved upward, she felt as if she were walking
down a gentle incline. It was a very strange sensation.

Heather turned right, into a crossways hall, and both the
curve of the floor and the perception of going down disappeared.

Barbary followed Heather around a second right turn. Now
they were walking the opposite direction from the way they had started. Again
the hall looked like it rose, but this time Barbary felt as if she were walking
up a shallow incline.

She had no chance to ask what was going on. A few paces
beyond the corner, Heather opened a door and went inside. Yoshi followed.

Barbary entered a small, sparsely furnished living room.

Of course it had no windows. People who lived in space
needed more protection from solar radiation and cosmic rays than glass or
plastic could give. The station had lots of observation ports, but Barbary
would have to learn to be careful how long she gazed through them, and she
would have to keep track of the readings on her radiation tag.

Pictures and posters covered the wall. Barbary had always
plastered the walls of her room — whenever she had stayed in one place long
enough — with star posters, astronomical artwork, and magazine pictures from
the
Ares
mission. Here lakes, forests, meadows, and a long mural of
mountains covered the walls. In one corner, though, a sequence of small photos
traced the development of a comet. Barbary wanted to look at those more
closely.

The kitchen area contained little more than one would need
for making coffee or heating soup. No room there for leftovers to steal for
Mick. On the other hand, if people ate cafeteria-style, she might have an even
easier time getting his food.

She could worry about that later. Right now she needed to
make sure he was all right.

“Can I see my room?” she asked.

Heather glided past a basket-weave couch. “I’ll show it to
you!”

Barbary followed, dragging her duffel bag. It was not very
heavy in this gravity, but she was awfully tired.

Heather opened a door. Barbary followed her inside.

Heather jumped more than her own height into the air,
spinning, and landed neatly on a bunk. “Isn’t it great?” she said. “We redid it
when we knew you were coming. I’ve been sleeping on the top bunk, but if you
like it better we can switch.”

Barbary sat down abruptly on a spindly-legged chair. Two
matching desks stood nearby. The top of one was bare; the other held tapes and
a plush animal.

“I thought...” she said, “I thought I was going to get my
own room.

Heather sat still, trying to conceal her disappointment.

“But it’ll be fun to share the room,” Heather said. “Like
your mom and my mom and Yoshi and the others rented a house together in
college.”