Barbary (16 page)

“General announcement regarding the alien craft. Main
meeting room. Immediately.”

“Wow!” Heather said. “Let’s go! Thea, did you hear? There’s
an announcement about the alien ship!”

Thea looked up, frowning and startled.

“An announcement?”

“Yeah, down in the main meeting room. Want to come with us?”

Thea hesitated. “No,” she said. “I want to finish here. I’ll
be along later.”

“Okay, bye, come on, Barbary!”

Heather headed for the door. Barbary took just enough time
to put Mick in the bedroom.

“You be good,” she said. “When I come back, you can go out.”
She hurried after Heather.

People filled the hallways around the main meeting room. It
was even more crowded than the reception for Jeanne. Barbary and Heather ducked
around and between people, till they managed to get inside. They could not see
anything, even standing on tiptoe, and though most of the adults around them
gave them sympathetic looks, the crowd packed the room far too full for anyone
to let them nearer the front.

“Thank you for coming.”

Jeanne Velory’s soft, powerful voice radiated from the
speakers.

“Several hours ago, we detected a change in the alien ship’s
path,” Jeanne said. “The change was the result of a deliberate application of
acceleration.” She paused. “Soon thereafter, we received a radio transmission.”

The silence crumbled into chaos. Barbary imagined Jeanne at
the front of the room, quiet and patient, not trying to speak above the clamor
or shout anyone down, just waiting until the crowd fell silent.

“A transmission!” Heather shouted. “Holy cats, it’s aliens!
Can you believe it?”

“She hasn’t said what it is we’re supposed to be believing,
yet,” Barbary said.

Five minutes passed before the chaos settled enough for
Jeanne to speak.

“The transmission is quite simple. It arrived in a large
number of languages.”

She turned on a recording, and the words flowed over the
crowd. Barbary did not understand the first language, nor the second, but quite
a few other people did, because they began to murmur to each other.

The crystalline clarity of the voice made Barbary want to
sob. She did not know why, except that it was the most beautiful thing she had
ever heard in her life.

“Greetings,” it said, when it began speaking in English. “We
come in peace to welcome you into civilization. Please do not approach us, but
wait for our arrival.”

It changed languages still again. The voice’s beauty
continued to increase, as if it were singing.

When the final translation ended, some of the people in the
room were crying. Barbary let out the breath she had been holding.

“The alien ship has begun to decelerate,” Jeanne said, “at a
rate that would be difficult for our technology to match or for humans to
tolerate. It will not, as we previously believed, cross the earth’s orbit and
pass us at high speed. Instead, if it continues decelerating, it will reach
zero relative velocity a few thousand kilometers from Atlantis.”

The noise of everybody trying to speak made Barbary feel as
if she were standing beside a buzz saw. Heather said something, an excited
expression on her face, but Barbary could not hear her.

Barbary thought, But it could be an automatic response the
alien ship gives every time it comes across some half-civilized bunch of
people, like us, who’ve barely even made it into space.

And then she wondered, How could anything so beautiful be a
voice from a machine?

Finally she thought, They’re aliens, they can travel to the
stars. They can do anything.

The noise level dropped as people began to recover from the
first shock of the communication. Barbary began to be able to pick out
individual conversations and questions. Everyone was excited, but some were
excited with joy, and others with fear. People discussed what the aliens might
teach to human beings, or what harm they might cause. She heard several people
quote a famous writer, whose theory was that any civilization so advanced it
can travel to other stars ought to be too civilized to wage war; and she heard
others reply “Hogwash!”

Heather touched Barbary’s arm. Barbary turned toward her
sister.

Heather was very pale. Barbary grabbed her arm, afraid she
might faint and be trampled. Barbary held her up, not absolutely sure that was
what Heather wanted, but willing to risk her sister’s anger if she was
mistaken. Barbary thought Heather was leaning on her, but she was so light that
it was hard to tell. Barbary bent down, straining to hear.

“Can we get out of here, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Barbary said. “But I’ll try.”

Supporting Heather, Barbary sidled through the crowd. People
tried to make way for her, when they noticed her, but most of them remained
deep in conversation. Suddenly the whole room quieted. Barbary spied a space
and hurried through it before it disappeared. She only had to go about five
more meters to reach the door. She wished the meeting were being held in zero g
so she could sly around and between all the people in her way. She kept
glancing at her sister. Heather gripped Barbary’s arm tight.

The meeting hall fell silent.

“Colleagues,” said the secretary-general of the United
Nations, her voice a papery whisper. Her presence was so powerful that Barbary
could feel it without even being able to see her, and everyone remained so
quiet that they seemed to stop breathing.

Barbary plunged through the doorway, pulling Heather along
behind her. Sweat ran down her face. She gasped a breath of the cooler air.
Ambassador Begay was still speaking, but out here Barbary could only make out
her voice, not her words.

“Are you okay?” she asked Heather.

Heather leaned against the wall.

“I think so,” she said. “Thanks for getting me out of there.

“You’re welcome. I’m kind of glad to be outside, too. Want
to go home?”

“I think I better.”

They trudged up the corridor, boarded the elevator, and rode
to the half-g level.

“Did you see Yoshi anyplace?”

“Uh-uh,” Barbary said.

“I guess he must still be in the library. When he’s writing
he sometimes doesn’t even hear PA announcements.” Back in their home territory,
Heather regained her strength. She grinned. “That means we’ll probably get to
tell him about the aliens.”

They reached the apartment and went inside.

“I really am going to take a nap this time,” Heather said.
“Wake me up when Yoshi gets back so we can both tell him, okay?”

“Sure.”

Heather disappeared into her bedroom.

This was the first time Barbary had been by herself with
nothing specific to do since she reached Atlantis. The living room seemed large
and empty — strange, since it had felt so small the first time she saw it. Then
she realized why: Thea had taken her contraption away.

Barbary remembered the aliens’ message: “Please do not
approach us,” it had said. Poor Thea — she must be disappointed, after all her
work, not to be able to launch her probe.

“Mickey,” Barbary called. She did not see him anywhere in
the living room. He must be asleep on the bunk. She crept into the bedroom,
hoping not to wake Heather. She chinned herself on the edge of her bed, then
climbed the rest of the way to look inside the bookshelves.

No Mick.

Beginning to worry, Barbary leaned over the edge of her
bunk. Heather must have fallen asleep as soon as she lay down, because she had
not even taken off her shoes or slid under the blanket. But Mick was nowhere to
be seen.

Barbary hurried into the living room.

“Mick!”

She hesitated in front of the door to Yoshi’s room and
knocked. Receiving only silence, she opened it. The sparse furnishing offered
no hiding place for a cat.

Thea! Barbary thought. When she moved her contraption, she
must have left the door open long enough for Mick to get out. Maybe she thought
it was okay for him to go, but more likely she didn’t even notice him.

Barbary wanted to curse herself out at the top of her voice.
It was her fault, not Thea’s, even if Thea had let him out. Barbary should have
been more careful. She knew Thea came in and out of the apartment, lost in a
fog of plans and calculations, leaving doors open as she passed.

Should she wake Heather? Mick could take care of himself. He
would probably come waltzing home in ten minutes, maybe even carrying a big rat
that was more or less dead. It was silly to worry about him, now that everyone
knew he had permission to be here and a job to do. And Heather looked so tired...

The computer could track Mick by his collar. Heather knew
how to get the information from the machine, and Barbary did not. But the
computer was smart. Perhaps it would understand the question no matter who
asked it.

She turned on her terminal and logged in.

Hi, she typed. Do you know where my cat is?

“What is your cat?” the computer said. Barbary jumped at the
sound of the machine’s voice. “Can you hear me?” she said.

“I can hear you.”

She had forgotten the computer could speak — that it always
spoke unless the user turned off the sound.

“My cat — Mick — was in the apartment but now he isn’t. He
had on a collar with a radio in it. Jeanne said it would tell me where he is in
the station.”

“I do not understand ‘cat,’ ‘Mick,’ or ‘collar,’ but I do
understand ‘radio.’ Please wait while I obtain more information.”

The screen blinked into fancy patterns that changed like a
kaleidoscope. After a minute the voice returned.

“I now understand ‘cat’ and ‘collar,’” she said — Barbary
thought the voice sounded like a she — “but I cannot discover the meaning of
‘Mick.’”

“Mick is the cat’s name. It’s short for Mickey. Can you find
him?”

“The transmitter has not yet been registered, so I am not
currently tracking a frequency for Mick, a cat. However, finding an
unregistered transmitter is possible. Please wait.”

Again the kaleidoscopes appeared. At first the pictures had
been beautiful, but now Barbary wished she could make them stop and just get an
answer to her question.

Several minutes passed, as the patterns became more
colorful, before the voice returned.

“The unregistered transmitter is not in the station.”

“But it has to be! Maybe he got out of his collar somehow…?”

She stopped, realizing that the transmitter would still
transmit, even if it were not still attached to Mick.

For a minute Barbary thought she was going to cry. All she
could think was that Mick must have gotten himself in such a bad place that his
collar had been destroyed.

“Did you look everywhere?” she asked.

“Yes,” the computer said. “And I find no unregistered
transmitter on the station.”

“But you have to!”

“It is outside the station.”

“Outside? How could it be outside? Where?”

“The transmission corresponds to the position of a raft that
is heading away from the station.”

Then Barbary knew what had happened.

o0o

Barbary ran down the hall and punched at the controls
of the elevator. By the time it arrived, she was about to go looking for the
stairs, despite the distance to the hub. When the doors slid open, she plunged
inside, still panting. She hit the control for top level, the nearest to the
center, the hub, and grabbed a handhold to steady herself against the tilt.

The elevator halted and she rushed out.

She propelled herself off the floor and into the air.
Tumbling and struggling, she managed to grab a strap. She thudded against the
wall and bounced to a halt. Here she had no weight, but she still had momentum,
and ramming into the wall hurt. When her balance returned, she grabbed the next
handhold, and the next, and crawled toward the launch chamber. However much she
wanted to run, she would have to move — to sly — smoothly and carefully. As she
was about to enter the raft chamber, she heard voices, arguing. She stopped
herself and listened, too desperate even to be embarrassed about eavesdropping.

“I tell you I didn’t
know
about the message!” Thea
shouted. “If you’d announced it when it first came in — if it weren’t
for this infernal secrecy —”

“You should have known better,” the vice president replied.

“This is a research station, I’m an astronomer. I’m supposed
to be doing research.”

“It’s quite possible that you’ve committed a diplomatic faux
pas in the most important meeting since… since… the beginning of history!”

“All right, dammit,” Thea said. “I’ve already turned it
around. What more do you want?”

Barbary peeked around the doorjamb. The vice president sat
in one of the skating chairs that transported novices in free fall. His two
bodyguards clung to straps. Thea and Yukiko floated nearby, studying a display.

“Besides,” Thea said, grumbling, “‘Please do not approach
us’? What the hell does that mean? We
aren’t
approaching them. It’s just
a drone with a camera. If they’re so advanced, they can tell it doesn’t have
any artificial intelligence, and there’s nobody in it.”

But there is! Barbary thought. Mick’s in there — he’s got to
be!

He must have climbed into Thea’s contraption, into the
central pipe that formed the basic frame. And he either liked it there too much
to leave, or he was too scared or too interested to jump out while Thea carried
the contraption to the raft.

“I see you’re willing to risk the possibility that the aliens
will consider your ‘experiment’ hostile,” the vice president said. “I’m sure
your colleagues will be happy to know you’re so cavalier about their lives.”

“I
told
you I’m bringing it back!”

Barbary let out her breath. Maybe it would be all right. The
raft would turn before the aliens decided to shoot it, and Mick would be in the
station again long before the raft ran out of air.