Barbary (7 page)

“Is that what you expect me to do? Copy my mother?” Barbary
said angrily.

“No, that isn’t what I meant at all,” Heather said,
embarrassed. “But it really would be fun. We haven’t finished fixing it up yet.
I was waiting to see how you wanted it to look.”

Barbary hooked her heels on the edge of the chair, hugged
her knees to her chest, and gazed at her shoes. The weight of the secret pocket
pressed against her side.

“I bet you’ll like it if you give it a chance,” Heather
said.

“I need a lot of privacy. I have stuff of my own that I need
to do by myself.”

After a moment, Heather jumped from the upper bunk. Her feet
made a surprisingly loud and solid
thud
when she landed.

“You can have all the privacy you want, then!” She stamped
out and slammed the door behind her,”

Barbary stared at the closed door.

She’ll never be my friend, either, she thought.

But her worry over Mickey crowded out her unhappiness at
having had to drive Heather away. She slipped out of her jacket. Mick had not
moved. Barbary opened the secret pocket, reached inside, and touched the cat’s
soft fur. She hesitated, letting her hand rest on his side, feeling for his
heartbeat, for a breath, even for a twitch. She pulled him out of the pocket.
He lay limp in her hands.

“Mick, it’s okay, wake up, please?” She pressed her ear to
his side. At first she heard nothing. She sat up and stroked his smooth tabby
side, feeling the texture of his stripes, willing him to move. She bent down
again and held her breath to listen.

His paw twitched, and he growled in his sleep.

She sat up, laughing with relief. “You dumb cat,” she said.
“I’m sitting here afraid you’re dead, and you’re just dreaming.”

Someone knocked on the door. With a quick, seared glance
around, Barbary scooped up her jacket and Mickey, dragged open the deep bottom
drawer of the desk with the empty top, the one she supposed must be hers, and
slid Mick into it.

“Barbary?” Yoshi said. “Can I come in?”

Barbary pushed the drawer shut. It squeaked. She flinched,
hoping the noise was inaudible outside. She opened the door and tried to join
Yoshi in the living room. But her foster father guided her back into the room.
He sat on the bunk and patted the blanket beside him. “Please sit down,
Barbary.”

Staring at the floor, Barbary obeyed. So her almost sister
had told on her the first chance she got.

“Heather looked upset when she came out,” Yoshi said. “Did
you two have a fight?”

Maybe this bawling out won’t be as bad as I thought, Barbary
said to herself. Maybe I can get it over with before Mick decides he
has
to
get out of that drawer.

“Not a fight, exactly.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“It wasn’t her fault. I just thought I’d have a room all my
own. I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings.”

“I think you must have, though. Rather badly, the way she
looked.” He folded one leg under him. He was barefoot. “There are quite a few
people on the station. We don’t have a lot of living area. As much space as we
can, we use for research. And right now, with the extra people, it’s very
crowded. After they go home, I think we can find a room for you. That’s the
best I can offer just now. Can you be patient for a while?”

Barbary guessed that the only alternative to patience was
going back to earth.

“Yeah,” she said. She heard a faint scratching from the
desk. “Sure.” She would have said almost anything to get Yoshi to leave. “I’m
really sorry. I’ll tell Heather.”

“Good.” Yoshi got to his feet. “We’re very glad to have you
with us. But the environment’s different. It’s difficult. It takes extra effort
to get along, sometimes.”

“I understand,” Barbary said. “I’ll do better from now on.”

“Okay.” Yoshi went to the door, opened it, and glanced back
with a grin. “I’ll let Heather know you want to talk to her.” He closed the
door.

“Oh,
shit,
” Barbary whispered.

She stopped herself from shouting, but not because she cared
right now whether anyone thought she was civilized. She was afraid Yoshi would
hear her and wonder what she was still so upset about.

But she did not know what to do. Even if she wanted to drug
Mickey again — which she did not — she had no more pills. Besides, she could
not keep him drugged all the time. She had concentrated so hard on how to
smuggle him off earth that she had never thought about what she would do if she
succeeded. Now she had to face that problem.

She heard a louder, more insistent scratching from her desk.

The bedroom door opened and Heather came in.

“Hi,” she said, watchful restraint in her voice. “Yoshi says
you want to talk to me.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. The room’s really
nice. It’ll be fun to share it. I wouldn’t have said what I did, only I’m
awfully tired. I need to take a nap before I fall over —”

“Mrrow,” the desk said, through Barbary’s rush of words.

“What was
that?”
Heather said.

“Nothing. What do you mean? I didn’t hear anything.”

Mick yowled and scratched frantically. If he did not get his
way soon, he would howl so loudly that no one in the apartment could possibly
miss it.

Heather looked curiously at the desk. “What have you got in
there?” she said.

Mickey growled. Barbary yanked the drawer open to keep him
from screeching. He poked his head out, blinked, and sprang out of his hiding
place.

“What’s that?” Heather said. “Is that a rabbit? How did you
get him up here? What’s his name?”

Mickey took a couple of cautious steps, gathered his
powerful hind legs under him, and leaped to the top bunk. He walked across it,
his paws making small padding noises on the puffy comforter.

“A rabbit! Don’t you know anything? He’s a cat!” Barbary
swung around suddenly and grabbed Heather’s shoulders, pushing her hard against
the wall. Heather caught her breath in astonishment.

“If you tell anybody…” Barbary said, “if you tell on us and
they take Mick away, I’ll get you for it if it’s the last thing I do!”

“Tell on you? Are you kidding? I’ve always wanted to see a
cat. I never have before.” She shrugged Barbary’s hands from her shoulders.
“Let me go. Boy, are you dumb. Do you really think you can hide him here
without my help?”

As Barbary watched in surprise, Heather pushed past her and
bounced to the upper bunk, where Mickey was sniffing at corners. He sat down
and looked at her, blinking his big yellow eyes.

“He’s really neat. How did you get him to the station? No
wonder you wanted me out of here. But you should have trusted me first thing.
Will he let me touch him?”

“I don’t know,” Barbary said. “I doubt it. He doesn’t like
strangers much. He might scratch you.”

Heather extended one hand toward him. Barbary stood on the
lower bunk with her elbows on the upper one.

“It’s okay, Mick, she won’t hurt you.”

“Does he understand you?”

“Sometimes he seems like he does,” Barbary said. “Other
times he just ignores you. Cats are like that. He doesn’t do what you tell him
unless he wants to.”

Mickey sniffed at Heather’s outstretched fingers, bristled
his whiskers, and then, to Barbary’s surprise, rubbed his head against
Heather’s hand.

“Oh,” Heather said. “I didn’t know he’d be so soft.”

Barbary showed Heather how to pet Mickey, using long, smooth
strokes going the same way his fur grew. He stretched his hind legs and the nub
of his tail stood straight up.

“He really doesn’t have a tail!” Heather said. “That’s why I
thought he was a rabbit. Rabbits have long ears and a short tail and cats have
short ears and a long tail. That’s what I read. Is he half and half?”

“No, there isn’t any such thing as half and half. That would
be a mess even if you could do it. Cats eat meat and rabbits eat carrots and
stuff. He’s a Manx cat. They don’t have tails.”

“Why not?”

“They just don’t.”

Heather stroked Mickey. Barbary felt a little jealous that
he took to her so quickly. Back on earth, when Barbary found Mick behind the
apartment building where she was living, she had coaxed him for two days to get
him out of his hidey-hole. And at that, he came out only because he was so
hungry he could not resist the smell of the fish she stole for him. Even then,
even though he was almost too weak to stand up, he had growled at her every
time she came near him. It took her three days to make friends with him.

“How did you get him here? Is that why you didn’t want me to
carry your bag?”

“Sort of. It’s got a couple of boxes of cat food in it. But
I couldn’t hide Mickey there. It had to go through security, and they would
have seen him with the x-ray.” She got her jacket out of the drawer and showed
Heather the secret pocket.

“That’s neat,” Heather said. “I never would have thought of
it.”

“I didn’t,” Barbary admitted. “I read a bunch of books on
magic.”

“Magic? Like witches and stuff?”

“Stage magic. Tricks. Sleight of hand. Hiding things you
don’t want anybody to see. You have to get them to look other places.” She
pulled out her silver dollar, showed it to Heather, passed her left hand across
it and made it disappear, then pulled it out of Heather’s ear.

“How’d you do that?”

“I’ll show you sometime, if you want to learn how to do it.
Otherwise I’m supposed to keep it a secret. Anyway, that’s sort of how I hid
Mick.”

She turned the jacket over so the outside pockets showed.
“With this, everybody looks at all the pockets and thinks, ‘Isn’t that cute,’
or something, and they don’t notice that there’s another pocket on the inside,
and a big lump where Mickey is.”

“I sure didn’t,” Heather said.

Mickey finished exploring the upper bunk, stuck his nose in
the bookcase at the head of it, walked inside, and curled up. It was a tight
fit, but he looked happy.

“Maybe we can train him to stay there when somebody comes
in,” Heather said. “Nobody would ever see him.”

“It’s hard to train a cat,” Barbary said. “They do what they
want. But maybe he’ll just decide he likes it there. Then we won’t have to
train him.”

Heather flopped down on the bunk, nose to nose with Mickey.
He stretched forward and sniffed her face.

Heather giggled. “His nose is cold!”

“It’s supposed to be. If it isn’t, that means he’s sick.”

“Huh. I didn’t know that.”

“Don’t you have any animals up here at all?”

“In the labs, mice and rats and some monkeys. But they have
to stay in their cages, because everybody’s afraid they’ll get away and infest
the station. The mice and rats, I mean, not the monkeys.”

Barbary started to say that she thought it would be very
boring to live somewhere where there were no other animals than people, but
then she realized that before she found Mickey, she had never lived around
animals, either, and had never particularly missed them. People did not keep
pets in cities very much anymore, or if they did they kept them inside all the
time. Barbary had never seen a horse or a cow except in a zoo.

“We’ll have to be careful,” Heather said. “There’s a rule
against pets on the station. People have been trying to change it for a while,
but it’s just one of those dumb bureaucratic rules where you might get in
trouble if you change it, but nothing happens if you don’t change it, so you
leave it the way it is.”

“What will happen if somebody finds him?”

Heather turned over so she could see her. “Um… I don’t
know.”

“You’d get in trouble.”

Heather shrugged. “Probably.”

“I’d get in trouble.”

“Well, yeah.”

“What about Mick?”

Heather did not answer for a moment. Then she said, “They’d
probably take him away.”

At that moment there was a knock on the door.

Heather sat up so fast she banged her head against the
ceiling. Barbary vaulted to her side.

“Heather? Barbary?” Yoshi said. “If Barbary’s going to get a
nap before we go to dinner, she’ll have to do it now. The reception for Jeanne
Velory is at nineteen hundred.”

“Ouch,” Heather said.

“What did you say?”

“She said okay,” Barbary said. She leaned toward Heather.
“Are you okay?” she whispered.

“Is something wrong?” Yoshi sounded worried, as if he feared
Barbary and Heather had really begun to fight. After what had happened earlier,
Barbary could not blame him.

The door slid open. Barbary threw herself around to sit
against Heather’s bookshelf, hiding Mickey.

Yoshi stuck his head into the room. Heather managed to smile,
but she had a glazed expression.

“Heather, it wouldn’t hurt for you to take a nap, too.”

 Mickey butted his head against Barbary’s back, trying to
nudge past her. He pushed his paw between her and the wall, extending his claws
to scratch at her side. Barbary was very ticklish. She tried not to squirm.

“Right,” Heather said groggily to Yoshi.

“We’ve just been talking,” Barbary said.

“Maybe one of you should sleep in the other room.”

“We’ll turn out the light and be quiet, honest.” Mick’s
claws dug into the sensitive place under her arm. She caught her breath.

“All right,” Yoshi said, though he still looked concerned.
“But don’t talk the whole time. Agreed?”

“Sure.” Barbary’s voice sounded funny to her, because she
was trying to talk without inhaling or exhaling. As soon as she took a breath,
she would begin to giggle.

Yoshi slid the door closed behind him. Heather immediately
clapped her hands to her head, and Barbary flung herself forward with a muffled
shriek of laughter.

“I’m glad you think it’s so funny,” Heather whispered.

“I’m sorry,” Barbary said. “I wasn’t laughing at you. Mick
was tickling me. I almost couldn’t stand it.”