Barbary

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “Heather, how about mint?”

  “I think I’ll have coffee, too,” Heather said.

  “Okay.”

  They returned to the table. Barbary wondered how long they had to stay at the table before they could excuse themselves.

  Chhay put a tray full of steaming cups on the table. The steam acted strange in the low gravity. Barbary would have expected it to rise more quickly, but it collected in round clouds over the tray. Barbary discovered she could pull her cup right out from under its steam. But she was too concerned about Mick to wonder much or ask questions about anything else.

  Barbary fidgeted. She kept expecting to be able to smell the soggy shrimp in her pocket.

  Heather poured cream into her coffee till it was barely even tan, then added sugar. Barbary liked coffee black, but if it tasted as bad as Heather thought, she would probably put stuff in it, too. She took a cautious sip.

  Like all the other food aboard the station, the coffee tasted better than any Barbary had ever had before.

  “Is Thea coming to the reception?” Roxane asked Yoshi.

  “How should I know?” Yoshi said.

  “Sorry,” Roxane said. “Didn’t mean to enter forbidden territory.”

  “I’ve barely seen her in a week.” Yoshi turned his cup between his fingers. “Twenty hours a day at the telescope doesn’t give her much time for the mundane things of life. Like talking to her lover or meeting a new member of his family.”

  He stared into his cup. His friends fell silent, then changed the subject. Heather’s cheerfulness faded. Feeling uncomfortable, Barbary pretended not to notice. She had meant to ask Heather who Thea was, but she had forgotten. She was glad when, a few minutes later, Chhay stood up.

  “We better hurry, or we’ll be late.”

  All the others got up and put their dishes into the dishwasher.

  “Okay,” Chhay said. “Whose turn is it to wash them?”

  “Not me,” said Roxane. “I did it last time.”

  “This is stupid,” Yoshi said. He slammed the dishwasher door, slapped the “on” button, and strode from the cafeteria. The dishwasher hummed and emitted a high-pitched whine that rose beyond the limits of human hearing.

  Heather followed her father.

  “Guess it was his turn,” Roxane said dryly. Barbary hurried after her sister.

  “What was that all about?”

  “It used to be a joke,” Heather said. “Because it’s so easy. Who washes the dishes just means who pushes the button. I guess… Yoshi doesn’t feel much like joking today.”

  “He sounded sort of upset, earlier.”

  “Yeah. Because of Thea. They spend a lot of time together. Or anyway they did, till the spaceship appeared. Now, well, she’s real busy. I mean, you can tell — she hasn’t even had time to come meet you yet.”

  Barbary wished Heather would not put her in the middle of a disagreement between Yoshi and his lover. In her experience that was a dangerous place to be. She headed down the hallway toward the apartment.

  “Wait, Barbary,” Heather said. “This way.”

  “Is that a short-cut back to your place?”

  “Uh-uh. This is the way to the reception hall.”

  Barbary stopped. “We’re not going home?”

  “Not till later.”

  The other adults passed. As they turned a corner, Chhay called back, “Come on, kids.”

  “Heather — ” She waited till she was sure she could talk without being overheard. “What about Mick? I have to feed him. My pocket is all full of wet shrimp, and you said we could go back after dinner!”

  “Oh, gee, I’m sorry — I meant after the reception. Besides, when you said not to take anything I thought you meant he wasn’t very hungry.”

  “Oh. No. I just meant —” She almost said that if anybody had noticed Heather’s pulling soggy bits of chicken out of her curry, it would have given them both away. But she did not want to hurt Heather’s feelings. “I just meant you haven’t had a chance to practice sleight of hand.”

  “Well, look, we can’t go back now.”

  “He’s going to be awful hungry.”

  “But it’ll look too suspicious if we miss this party.”

  Yoshi returned.

  “Are you two all right?”

  “Sure,” said Heather. “We’re coming.” She glanced at Barbary as if to say, See what I mean?

  Barbary knew that if she kept behaving strangely, she would be sent back to earth. The friendship Yoshi had felt for her mother, twenty years before, would protect her only so far. She sighed and followed Heather. She tried to forget her pocketful of wet shrimp.

  If I don’t look at them, she said to herself, nobody else will, either.

  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 J
eanne’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.