Barbary

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  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.”

  “I still meant it as a compliment.”

  “Okay. I believe you. Come on, Barbary, sit up, you’ve got to get used to ignoring what your balance tells you sometimes. You sort of have to rely on your eyes.”

  Barbary raised her head. The dizziness faded.

  “I guess,” she said, “it could get to be fun…”

  “Yeah,” Heather said. “Shall I do it again?”

  “Not quite yet,” Barbary said with her teeth clenched.

  “Okay. I’m not actually supposed to, this close to the station. Besides, we’ll be at the construction site in a minute.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Just there.” Heather pointed straight ahead at a cluster of stars.

  “But…”

  Sunlight touched one edge of a curve of metal. Barbary gasped. As the observation platform and the space station moved in their orbits around each other, the shadow of the station slipped away, leaving the delicate platform in full sunlight.

  “It’s so small,” Barbary said.

  “No, it isn’t. It’s huge. Look, you can just see one of the workers.”

  “Where?” Barbary expected someone in a space suit to appear and scoop up the filigree sphere of the platform like a basketball.

  “There. To the left.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “We’re still a couple of kilometers from it.”

  The clarity of space had tripped Barbary up. She saw that she had mistaken something far away but distinct for something close. Now she could not estimate the platform’s size at all. It grew larger and larger. By the time Barbary spotted the worker who floated deep within the spindly struts and braces, the person was the size of a doll instead of the size of a speck. The platform dwarfed the raft.

  “Hi, Heather,” said a disembodied voice.

  Barbary started, then realized that the voice had come over the radio. A space-suited figure made its way out of the interior of the platform and floated just outside. She looked “up” at them while they looked “up” at her. Barbary felt very weird.

  “Hi, Sasha. This is Barbary.”

  Sasha raised the reflective visor of her helmet. She moved closer to the raft’s bubble and cupped her gloved hands around her faceplate so Barbary could see her. A yellow headband, bright against her dark skin, restrained her curly black hair.

  “Welcome to Atlantis, Barbary.” She had a wonderful, soft accent that Barbary could not place, sort of British, sort of Russian.

  “Thanks.”

  “Are you coming out?”

  “Not this time,” Heather said. “I didn’t bring any suits. I just wanted to show Barbary how the raft works.”

  Sasha chuckled. “Yes. I saw your demonstration.”

  Heather blushed. “I had to dodge a wrench,” she said.

  “Or a foo-fighter?”

  Heather grinned. “Sure. Didn’t you see it? I bet it was a spy from the alien ship.”

  “When you see it again, tell those little green people to stop in for tea,” Sasha said. “Well — Got to get back to work.” She made a graceful dive to the other side of the raft, where a couple of her co-workers joined her. Heather extended the arms of the raft. The equipment clanged, startling Barbary all over again.

  “Thanks, kids,” Sasha said, waving, as she helped tow the equipment over to the platform. “On the way back, don’t hit any of those little green pedestrians.”

  Heather turned the raft end-for-end and headed home. Going back they were upside-down, compared to the way they had arrived, but after a moment it no longer felt upside-down to Barbary.

  “What’s a foo-fighter?”

  “It’s what pilots used to call UFOs — flying saucers — years and years ago, before anybody ever went into space. Some people thought they were alien spaceships coming to contact us, or spy on us, or take over our world, or give us the secrets of the universe. Or something.”

  “Does that make the alien ship a foo-fighter?”

  After a thoughtful pause, Heather said, “I guess it does. But nobody ever found any hard evidence that the old UFOs were real. This one’s kind of different.”

  Heather piloted the raft smoothly into its bay and the airlock began its cycle.

  “That was fun,” Barbary said. She still felt dizzy — but the ride had been fun.

  “How long does it take to learn to drive one of these things?”

  “Anybody can get in one and ride around in it,” Heather said. “But really driving it, with the computer overridden I don’t know. I’ve been doing it since I was a little kid.

  “How long does it take other people?”

  “Couple months, I guess. Mostly they just let the computer do it. It’s more fun to drive it, though. Next time I’ll give you a lesson.”

  “Great.”

  The airlock completed its cycle and the raft slid into the station. Heather opened the canopy and vaulted from her seat. Barbary followed, still uncertain in free fall.

  “Thanks, Heather, Barbary,” Yukiko said.

  “Any time.”

  Heather led Barbary from the hub.

  “What do you want to see next?” she asked. “The labs are pretty neat, and the library — or we could play on the computer —”

  “I ought to go check on Mickey,” Barbary said.

  “Oh, I’m sure he’s okay.”

  “Heather —” Barbary said, exasperated. She stopped for a second to make herself calm down. “I know you want to show me everything, and I want to see it. But Mick’s my responsibility. I have to take care of him and be sure he’s all right. Otherwise I just should have let him loose back on earth where he’d have half a chance without me.”

  Heather walked along in silence for quite a way. Barbary felt certain that her new sister was angry at h
er. She did not know Heather well enough to know how she would react when she got mad.

  “Yeah,” Heather said, to Barbary’s surprise. “Yeah, you’re right. I understand. I hadn’t really thought about it enough, but I see what you mean. You have to protect him. And I’m going to help you.”

  Chapter Eight

  Closer to completion, Thea’s contraption sat on the living room floor. Thea had fallen asleep on the couch. The door to Heather’s room remained tight shut. Barbary slid it open.

  “Lights,” Heather said.

  “Hey, Mick,” Barbary whispered.

  He made the squeaky-purring sound he always made when he woke. From the storage shelf of the upper bunk he yawned and blinked at her. He rose, stretched, and suddenly jumped for the door. Barbary caught him. He turned in her hands and attacked her fingers, partly in fun, but partly in earnest.

  “He’s bored,” Barbary said. “He’s really bored. He hardly ever bites.” She tussled with him, letting him fight with her hand even when he got excited and stuck his claws into her. But he would never get enough exercise pouncing on her hand. “He used to spend just about all night outside, even though it was dangerous. What am I going to do, Heather?”

  “He needs a place where he can run around, huh?”

  “Yeah. But a really private place.”

  Heather sat on top of her desk and leaned her chin on her hand.

  “I know where to go,” she said. “Only we have to get him there. Can you try to hide him in your jacket?”

  “Sometimes he’ll lie still for a little while. Not long, though. Can we go a way that not very many people use? Just in case?”

  “We’ll have to,” Heather said, and jumped up before Barbary could ask what she meant by that. “Where’d you put your jacket?”

  o0o

  Mick crouched in the secret pocket, but Barbary knew he would want to get out soon. She followed Heather along one of the corridors that curved around the inner surface of the station’s wheel.

  “Heather,” Barbary said, “am I just imagining it, or does walking feel different depending on which direction you’re going?”