Barbary (15 page)

Just before eight o’clock, they rescued Mick from his
admirers and took the elevator down to the control center. Barbary kept
glancing at Heather, to be sure the gravity did not adversely affect her.

They knocked on Jeanne’s door.

“Come in.”

Inside, Jeanne gestured to chairs. The screen of her desk
computer flashed with squares overlying squares, each containing its own
separate message, each blinking at a different, frantic frequency. She turned
her back on them to talk to Barbary and Heather.

“Hi, kids,” she said. “What’s up?”

Heather began. “We thought we ought to tell you…”

A few minutes later, Jeanne put holds on all her urgent
messages. She hurried with Heather and Barbary to the shield level. In the dim
light on the elevator platform, she sat on her heels and looked at the
unfastened panel.

“We came down here so Mick could run around and nobody would
see him,” Heather said.

“Yeah, and he thinks that’s why we’re here now, too.”
Barbary had to wrap her arms around him to keep him from running off across the
hillocks.

“And we think he climbed in there and that’s how he got to
the control center — but we don’t know where he came out. And he couldn’t have
opened it himself, could he?”

“I don’t see how. I don’t think it’s ever been closed,”
Jeanne said. “It doesn’t look to me like the panel’s ever been screwed shut. I
guess that’s better than if it had somehow come loose by itself, which might
mean the whole station was falling apart around us.”

She gazed across the hillocks.

“Quite a place,” she said. “I’ve never been here before.”

“Barbary suggested we should plant grass and things.
Wouldn’t that be neat? It’d be like the gardens, only big enough to walk in.”

“It would be quite an undertaking — but it might be
possible. I’ll look into it. After all the excitement has died down. That is a
good idea, Barbary.”

“Thanks,” Barbary said. “But could we go now? Mick’s getting
crazy, and if I let him go I’m afraid he’ll find another hole to crawl into.”

“Sure.”

They returned to Jeanne’s office.

“I’m going to call the techs and the mechanics in off the
observation platform and put them to work checking the structural integrity of
the station,” Jeanne said when she had closed the door. “But we’ve got a lot of
grounders here, and I don’t want them to panic.”

“So don’t tell anybody, right?” Heather said.

“Don’t go out of your way to spread it around,” Jeanne
replied. “Everybody who lives here will know within a couple of hours. But even
in a crisis we can’t evacuate anyone till the station’s near perigee — they
knew that when they came on board. What we can do is try to maintain some
normality while we check out the station. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry we caused you all this trouble,” Barbary said.

“It’s all right, Barbary,” Jeanne said. “Honestly.
Discovering that the station has rats, and that it’s had no thorough inspections
in the whole time it’s been up here aren’t things I’d’ve chosen to happen. But
it’s better to know about the problems and fix them. We all should be very
grateful to you and Heather — and to Mickey.”

“Okay.”

“Has he caught any more rats?”

“No. But I haven’t had that much chance to let him loose.
I’m kind of scared that he’ll get lost in the elevator again.”

“I’ve been thinking about how to keep track of him. Would he
wear a collar, do you think?”

“He did before — he had to have a license. He didn’t seem to
mind it too much.”

Jeanne gave Barbary a piece of elastic with a
plastic-encased electronic chip glued to it.

“This is makeshift, but it ought to work. It’s a
transmitter. We put them on servomechs, and on tools that we use outside. The
computer tracks them.”

“I’ll show you,” Heather said.

“Great,” Barbary said. She would be happier knowing where
Mick was, and he would be happier not being followed around all the time.

She tied the elastic around Mick’s neck. He flattened his
ears, but he soon grew resigned to the light collar and ignored it.

o0o

When Barbary and Heather returned to the apartment, it
was empty except for Thea’s contraption. A long tube secured a camera and
several other instruments; sensor wires led from the tube to a microprocessor,
which Heather said would connect to the raft’s radio and transmit data to the
station.

Yoshi had left them a note on the computer — on a piece of
paper taped to the terminal. His handwriting was clear and elegant.

“Lessons,” the note said. “Rest.” And finally, “I am in the
library.”

Heather sighed. “Vacation’s over, I guess. Oh, well, lessons
are kind of fun.”

Mick prowled around the room, pausing now and then at the
door to the outside corridor, but Barbary was not quite ready to let him out
into the station. She decided to wait till Heather showed her how to follow the
signal on his collar.

Heather introduced Barbary to the computer. They each had a
terminal which contained a great deal of built-in information, and which would
also call up the station’s main library banks and look for whatever it did not
have.

“If you can get all that right here,” Barbary asked, why did
Yoshi go to the library?”

“To write,” Heather said. “He went to the book library, not
the computer library. A lot of people brought books from earth because they
like to read that way instead of on the computer. I don’t understand why
myself. But that’s how it is. Some of them got together and put their books all
in one place so they’d have a library. Anybody can borrow the books. Yoshi likes
to work up there.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s a poet.”

“Oh. I mean what does he really do?”

“He really is a poet!” Heather said. “People are, you know.”

“Okay, okay, I just never heard of a poet on a space station
before.”

“I guess maybe you haven’t heard of everything in the whole
universe yet, then, have you?”

“What are you so mad about?”

“How would you feel if you did something important something
nobody else could do — and somebody said, ‘Oh, that’s nice, but what do you
really do?’”

“I’d be mad,” Barbary admitted.

“Well.”

“Um, I’m sorry,” Barbary said. “Can anybody read one of his
poems?”

“You can read everything he’s published. It’s in the
library.”

“The computer library?”

“No, the book library.”

“Why isn’t it in the computer?”

“Yoshi doesn’t like computers much.”

“Oh.” She could think of several questions, but she was
afraid she might upset Heather again, so for the moment she kept her silence.
Besides, Heather turned on the two terminals and began to show her how to use
hers. Almost everyone had computers on earth, so Barbary knew something about
them. But it seemed to her that they always judged and graded her and reported
her failures to adults.

“I won’t hang over your shoulder,” Heather said. “But I’ll
be right here if you need to ask anything.” She set both terminals to respond
on the screen, rather than by speaking, so she and Barbary could work without
interfering with each other.

“Okay.”

Heather perched cross-legged on a chair and immersed herself
in her own work.

Barbary’s computer was smarter than any other she had ever
met. And though it acted friendly, it knew a great deal about her. All her
records were in memory somewhere, and while she supposed she should not care if
a computer had read them, she hoped Heather had not done so. She asked the
machine if anybody could read anyone else’s records.

It scrolled its reply on the screen. “No, that requires
special permission.”

Barbary felt relieved. She was not very adept at schoolwork.

The computer chatted with her. It never forgot anything she
told it, and it never made fun of her for forgetting things it told to her.

But Barbary realized that it was doing what computers always
did. She stood and pushed away the keyboard. In the low gravity her chair
tumbled over backward and bounced across the room.

Heather blinked at her, far away.

“What’s the matter?”

“This thing is testing me.”

Heather looked confused for a moment. “I guess you could
call it that. It’s finding out what you know so it can tailor lessons for you.”

“That’s what people always say it’s doing, but what they
mean is, it’s testing you. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t think of it that way. But even if I did, I
probably wouldn’t have thought to say so — why are you so upset? All the
teaching computers I ever heard of work like this.”

“I don’t like to be tested — I particularly don’t like to be
tested when I don’t know I’m being tested.” She recalled one time in
particular, when she had been judged by people hidden behind a one-way mirror.
Without talking to her, they had decided that she had to go to a different
foster family. She “was not adjusting well,” whatever that meant. The original
family was easier to live with, and a lot more fun, than most of the people she
had stayed with. No one, not even the family, ever could or would explain why
she had to leave. She had been moved around so often that she would have been
glad to stay in a difficult place if she just did not have to move again. But
the juvenile authority said she must move; so she moved.

“It is just trying to help you, Barbary.”

“Uh-huh. I’ve heard that before.”

“What did it say that made you so mad?”

“I just don’t like being tested and graded all the time! I
thought maybe here things would be different.”

“But it isn’t grading you.”

“Then why’s it doing what it’s doing?”

“It needs to find out what you know already about different
subjects. Otherwise it’d have to start from the beginning on everything, which
would drive you crazy, it’d be so boring, or it’d have to say, Oh, she’s
twelve, she ought to be
here
— but nobody is ever right on the average
for their age in everything, so it would be behind you or ahead of you, and you
wouldn’t like that either.”

“But it will tell everybody what I’m behind on, and they’ll
say I’m stupid.”

“Stupid! Anybody who thinks you’re stupid is stupid!”

Barbary glared at the floor with her fists clenched.

“Hey, Barbary,” Heather said.

“Yeah.”

“You can trust me. Honest.”

Barbary raised her head. The screen glowed as the patient
computer waited for a reply, now and then scrolling out a line of encouragement
or a hint. The letters blurred and Barbary blinked them back into focus.

“I’m trying,” she whispered. “I guess it must not seem like
it. But I am.”

Heather hopped off her chair, came around the edge of
computer table, and hugged her hard.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s going to be okay.”

o0o

Once Barbary knew the computer would not report on her
to some social worker, she began to enjoy working with it. The time passed so
fast she hardly noticed it.

She squeezed her eyes shut, opened them, and looked at the
computer screen again. She still had trouble bringing the letters into focus,
and she wondered what was wrong. Finished with his prowling, Mick curled near
her, purring. For a while he tried to catch the cursor with his paw, but after
batting at it a few times, he recognized the glass screen as some weird kind of
window and gave up trying to catch the little moving light behind it.

“Hey, Heather, do you have any aspirin?”

Heather glanced up from her own work.

“Sure. What’s wrong?”

“My eyes kind of hurt. I never worked on a computer this
long before.”

“Really? This isn’t very long at all.”

She followed Heather into the bathroom and found out where
they kept the aspirin. Barbary gulped a couple down.

“You ought to rest your eyes in between staring at the
screen,” Heather said. “Like if you’re thinking about how you want to write
something, you should close your eyes, or look at something way on the other
side of the room.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“That way you can keep going about as long as you want.”

Barbary hoped she would not have to spend all day every day
at the computer. Heather had been engrossed in whatever she was doing. It was
probably so far ahead of whatever Barbary knew that Barbary would not even be
able to understand an explanation, much less the subject.

“Why don’t you lie down for a little while?” Heather said.
“That’ll make the headache go away.”

“I will if you will.”

“I guess I ought to,” Heather said.

When they returned to the living room, Thea had uncovered
her contraption.

“Hi, Thea. How’s it going?”

“Oh, it’s nearly finished,” Thea said. “I’m checking the
braces, to be sure it’ll fit into a raft. I’m going to try it out in a little
while.”

“Hey, neat,” Heather said. “Can we help?”

“There’s not that much to do,” Thea said. “But sure, you’re
welcome to come along when I take it out.”

Mick strolled over and climbed into her lap.

“Nice kitty,” Thea said, scratching him under the chin. “You
are a nice kitty, but the last thing I need is cat hair in my lenses.”

Thea picked him up and offered him to Barbary, holding him
behind the front legs so his paws stuck out in front of him. He bristled his
whiskers and looked about to growl. Barbary rescued him.

“We’ll take him into our room with us,” she said. In a low
voice, to Heather, she said, “Pretty soon you better show me how to keep track
of him so I can let him out.”

“That’ll only take a second,” Heather said, delighted to
have an excuse to put off her afternoon nap a few minutes longer. “Let’s do it
right now!”

As she headed back to her computer, the call-signal chimed.
Heather accepted the message: