Barbary (5 page)

If she doesn’t want to be friends, Barbary thought, just
because I can’t do exactly what she wants me to, exactly when she wants me to
do it, then, tough. That’s an adult for you.

Slowly, this time, Barbary headed for her room.

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?