Pets in Space: Cats, Dogs, and Other Worldly Creatures

by S. E. Smith

  Two or three officers grunted skeptically. Stasia radiated disapproval.

  “So I'd like to send over investigators of a kind that nobody expects. Mr. Jaxdown, can you describe your botswarm?”

  Astounded but trusting his face not to show that, Ten took the kaleidoscope from the canister and methodically explained them, just as he had done with Stasia.

  Stasia's approving nods steadied his nerves. She said, “If we paint blue chevrons on them, they'll look like they belong to the Technicians' Guild and not out of place in the Back Yard.” Ten quickly asked, “Temporary paint in non-critical places?”

  “Of course.”

  “OK.”

  Captain Zilka looked at Ten thoughtfully. “The Back Yard is the part of the Shipyard where ship hull assembly is done. Per the Yardmaster, it is less under his complete command and control than any other quarter of the Yard. And the web of mixed motives and vested interests lies particularly thick there. We'd already asked you to adapt the programming of your botswarm for active, sentient threats. Can you make them recognize and avoid humans in space suits and the kind of machines or equipment that might be found in the Back Yard?”

  Ten felt off balance. He remembered Stasia's words. A hero is somebody who does what they have to do because they’re the only one who can do it. “Yes.”

  “I appreciate your willingness. This unexpected assignment is important—and chancy. You might lose any or even all of your robots, which as I understand are hand-made and priceless. Are you willing to take that risk?”

  Tears pricked the corners of his eyes. But he whispered, “Yes.”

  Stumbling a couple of times because he was anxious and distracted, Ten followed Stasia to the Devices Lab. They quickly altered the kaleidoscope's programming. When they thought they’d gotten it right, they skipped simulating it with the Intelligence in favor of something more tangible: giving the flutterbys a workout in the Ship's zero-gravity Core. With the Ship rotating around it to create spingravity, the Core had large vacant spaces, big enough for weightless volleyball games, but that wasn't the testing ground Stasis had in mind. She showed him the junk depot where broken equipment, compromised parts, and a few entire but malfunctioning machines had been stored, strapped down so none of it could float loose. Ten commanded the flutterbys to explore the junk depot.

  Their wings stayed folded. It wasn't worth damaging the solar-paneled wings for a short test in a place crowded with hard things. On battery power, the flutterbys jetted around with little puffs of gas from their thrusters. They deftly maneuvered around the junk, photographing and analyzing it and peering into narrow crevices. They noted the fact that some of the junk was flexing and moving with respect to other pieces: there were cracks and crannies that changed in size. None of the flutterbys got caught by such a trap.

  Ten was happy about the flutterbys’ performance—but only until Stasia played cat to the flutterbys' mice.

  She caught four of them easily. Their recognition of threat was weak and so was the coordination of the response. Ten visualized the kaleidoscope falling into the hands of sinister saboteurs. It made him feel sick to his stomach.

  Stasia announced, “We've got to give the controller some functionality more like those military swarms—where a human operator can intervene. With the kind of close distances in the Yard that could be a help.”

  Knowing what kind of parts he didn't have in his corner, and how hard it could be to requisition circuitry in the Ship, his shoulders sagged. “I don't have what I need.”

  “I do.” She led him into the crew-residential section of the Ship. To his surprise, Ten found himself being let into Stasia's personal workroom. He hadn't been there before. He had the impression that not a lot of people had.

  He saw numerous drawers with electrical parts. That looked hopeful. The drawer labels were hard to read in the workroom's low light levels, though. He had to peer closely.

  “Sorry, I keep it dark in here.” She paused. He got the impression that what she said next didn’t really follow from what she'd already said. “Saves energy.”

  “I don’t mind.” The Undercity, shadowed by the superskyscraper and powered by an ancient and unreliable electricity grid, had definitely not been well lighted. He was used to that kind of thing. He disliked too-bright lights.

  She turned on a task light on her workbench. They bent over the bench with their heads close together. In this enclosed space, he became aware how nice she smelled.

  When they were finished, the controller’s touchscreen showed many more details: readouts of each bot's exact location, orientation and position were accompanied by arrows that could redirect each bot with a touch.

  They checked the communication links with the flutterbys. The flutterbys’ status lights blinked as they interpreted the signals. The flutterbys responded with the correct motions two-thirds of the time. “Good but still not great,” Stasia decided. “They still can’t deal with a human-intelligent threat.”

  She gave him a searching blue gaze.

  An increasingly insistent thought occupied Anastasia Steed’s mind. I've got one more bright idea, but Blue only knows how well it'll go over.

  A scatter of sparks swirled across the bench.

  Hah. It's about time you showed up.

  She reflexively clenched her hands, though there was nothing to fight. This was a different sort of challenge. She was about to show Ten something that people could react very differently to. Some people—Ship people especially—asked a lot of questions and were incredulous at her answers or insistently asked unanswerable questions. Other people—particularly Gotayelans, who tended to be superstitious—got spooked and went away.

  She dimmed the lighting down even further, so Ten could see how the sparks were nodes in a complex web of faint lines of light in a patch of faintly glowing air. Ten had the same stare he gave circuits or machines when he wanted to figure something out. She told him, “Meet the only telfer in the Ship. 'Telfer' is short for St. Elmo's Fire, which was an electrical display that appeared on points of the the masts of sailing ships in the olden days and of the escape towers of rockets in the almost-as-old days on Earth. St. Elmo's fire was harmless and taken to be some kind of a holy sign by ancient sailors. The telfers are creatures of deep space and consist of plasma and highly complex magnetic fields. This particular telfer is one I found in Starcloud and it came home with me. If they ever turn up in the Shipyard, they are considered pests, but this one is a pet. Its name is Spike.”

  Ten blinked. “I'm glad to meet you, Spike.”.

  “Extend a finger to it.”

  “It tingles. It's reacting to me—some of its light changed color. What an excellent pet.”

  For once in a blazing blue moon here is someone who accepts Spike for what Spike is. “It's very smart. Either it’s a genius among telfers, or telfers are smarter than we can explain. It can understand electric circuits and electronic devices by seeping into them. It doesn't damage anything. Watch.” She deliberately pointed at the telfer then at the controller. Spike followed her gesture. Ten went rigid, but didn’t protest. The metal skin of the controller sparkled as Spike swirled across it. Spike looked interested, insofar as a faint, sparkling patch of plasma could look interested. “Check the readouts.”

  “There's some electrical noise—some of the circuits had transient spikes!—but nothing is out of spec.”

  “Now I think it understands the purpose of the controller, and probably of the flutterbys too. So. . . .”

  He blinked three times as he digested that. “So. . .?”

  “We invite Spike into the kaleidoscope. I think Spike can help the kaleidoscope outwit the saboteurs.”

  She saw Ten’s throat muscles work as he swallowed hard. Finally he said, “But remember what Captain Zilka said. It may go wrong. The saboteurs may try to destroy the flutterbys.”

  “She's right. I've got a bad feeling myself.”

  “Would that hurt Spike?”

  That qu
estion caught her by surprise, and she was touched. Ten was thinking about Spike's safety and her own feelings, as much as he was thinking about the welfare of his beloved flutterbys. She admitted, “I'm scared of that. But more scared of saboteurs ending this mission before it begins, delaying it, or worst of all planting the seeds of failure with the result that some of us get killed.”

  Ten thought for a long while. Then he nodded.

  Stasia pointed at each bot in turn, this time not just with her index finger but with that and her middle finger. Spike followed her gestures. Each flutterby sparkled as Spike investigated the little machines one by one.

  Intellby, the brain of the kaleidoscope, sparkled most of all.

  “Looks like Spike finds that one the most interesting,” she said. “Figures.”

  And then Spike faded.

  “Where is it?”

  “It decided to go for a ride in Intellby.”

  His eyes widened, but he didn't object.

  They took the kaleidoscope back to the core. Now it was the middle of the Ship's night. No one else was around. They were alone.

  Ten launched the flutterbys at a part of the junk depot was new to them. They industriously studied the junk, photographing, mapping, and analyzing various objects.

  Then Stasia went after them.

  They eluded her better than the last time.

  She floated away behind the junk, sneaked to a different vantage point, and waited. When Analyby2 jetted in her direction, settled on a piece of metal, and busily analyzed it with laser reflectometry, she gave it time to start running its analysis program. Then she sprang out making a grab at it.

  Ten used the controller: he had Analyby2 jet up and rotate, so it zipped away from Stasia. The controller registered the Analyby’s unhappy report of aborted analysis. Stasia did a supple ricochet and came back after Analyby2.

  Then one of the little Explorbys flew at her face fanning its solar arrays.

  “Gaah!” She reflexively ducked, missed a handhold she’d aimed for, and drifted until she collided with the volleyball net. Extricating herself from the net, she asked, “Was that little action your command?”

  “No!”

  “Then Spike did it—sent one of the more expendable ones at me.”

  The Explorby spun on its axis with its solar panels vibrating.

  “Spike thinks it’s a game!”

  Ten looked at his robot with an unreadable expression.

  “Good enough. We need to talk.”

  “Talk?”

  “Talk.” She towed him to a kind of chimney—a gap in the junk, just wide enough for the two of them to remain shoulder to shoulder and not drift apart or rotate to odd angles relative to each other. “Sad that it's not your robots controlling themselves? Is that too much for you to take?”

  He shrugged.

  “Think it through. There are no wrong answers.”

  He said slowly, “They were already doing better than just a few days ago. We did good work.”

  She nodded.

  “With Spike—it’s different. It’s not what I ever intended.” He scowled.

  Damn, he was cute when he scowled.

  She needed—and wanted—his complete cooperation. Unfortunately, persuasion was not her specialty. Honesty was. That would have to do. “Starcloud will be worse than possible saboteurs in the Shipyard.”

  He blinked. “I was just trying to get the flutterbys up to the requirements for the demo. I haven’t imagined what would happen in Starcloud.”

  “Nobody imagined Starcloud until we accidentally fell in. We found the Starbirds—birds, but people like us, scientists even, shipwrecked in Starcloud—taking refuge in a marooned Avendisan science ship. We think the Avendisan crew left the ship in a lifeboat. They may still be alive if we can find them, yet another reason for the Impending Mission, although a long shot. The Starbirds are very much alive and very much in danger and we promised to go back for them. They’re hiding in that Avendisan ship and doing all they can to not be conspicuous. Hiding is a way of life and death in Starcloud. We hid out for a while in a hexatom shell. A hexatom is a protoplasmic creature that makes crystal shells, floats around in space, and photosynthesizes from stellar radiation. The shells are huge. Big enough, when empty, to hide a chunky spaceship in! That's one place we need your flutterbys—to explore hextaom shells and see what's in there, besides telfers. That was where we got Spike. There were dozens of telfers inside it.

  “When we needed water for reaction mass, we went to an ice moon, and we found weird creatures like living stacks of ice. They damned near wrecked our ship, the Lodestar. Only a quick getaway saved us. We realized that the ice sliders came from a vast rift system in the moon. That's another place we need the flutterbys to explore. And above else, there are the monsters. The monsters have built orbiting rings of wrecked spaceships and only a fraction of those wrecks were human-built. The monsters live in wrecked spaceships like armor. If we’re ever going to defeat them, it may be because your robots go in and see the monsters as they really are without their shells. If we’re going to begin to explore the wrecks of a hundred or a thousand alien civilizations’ starships, we’ll want your flutterbys to go in first. Starcloud is all of that. And probably more we didn't notice because we were busy staying alive.”

  Ten bunched himself up. “That is—a stranger place that I ever imagined sending the kaleidoscope into.”

  Intellby jetted into the chimney. It viewed both of them. Then it settled on Ten’s shoulder, gripping his shirt with its flexfeet. Ten’s eyes widened.

  “In Starcloud, we are going to need all the help we can get.”

  Ten said in a small, vulnerable voice, “I’m glad Spike may be able to help.”

  She put an arm around his shoulder. “If I'm a hero, so are you. With my help and Spike’s you’ve made it work.”

  His dark eyes reflected a distant security light like a star.

  They talked, then, about other things, finally his past and hers. He told her about the Earth she’d never known from a perspective she’d known nothing about, and she admired him for who he’d turned out to be. Telling him about her family on Green somehow didn’t hurt. It felt more like healing, especially when his arm found its way around her and stayed there.

  He was a perfect size. Not awkwardly taller than she in spingravity, not inconveniently longer than she in weightlessness. She wondered about that blanket of his in the Devices Lab. Surely he had a bunkroom of his own to sleep in—even with many new Risers up, he wouldn't be expected to sleep on the floor under his workbench! Of course there might be a roommate who snored, or two or three sharing a bunk in shifts. She, on the other hand, had a perfectly good bunk, sized for one average person. She and Ten would fit just fine together there.

  He sighed. “Are we going to tell the Captain the kaleidoscope works?”

  “Well, we can tune it even more.” She checked the smartwatch on her wrist and jumped. “Great Blue day, no we can’t. We’re out of time!”

  They hurried to find Captain Zilka in the Ship’s dining hall. With her meal almost untouched on the table, she stood looking out one of the tall narrow windows.

  “Ma’am, the botswarm is ready!” Ten announced breathlessly.

  The Captain’s eyebrow lifted. That may have had less to do with their news than with the fact that they had rushed into the Captain's presence holding hands. Stasia let go of Ten’s hand, giving it a little squeeze as she did.

  Captain Zilka said slowly, “I have an idea.”

  Just one? Stasia thought interestedly. Captain Zilka specialized in dramatic ideas.

  Zilka pointed at the window. As the Ship rotated, a bright tangle of metallic pieces joined together by white threads—manrated tunnels and chases, but they looked threadlike from here—slid up the window. “Behold the Shipyard in all its conspiracy-ridden glory. Would you like to see it from the inside, Mr. Jaxdown?”

  “What? Wait a blazing Blue minute,” Stasia protested. “If
anybody's gonna go in and fight the saboteurs it’ll be me!”

  “A fighter isn't what I need. Stand down, little sister, and let me explain.”

  Stasia reminded herself that Zilka was her Captain, and her friend as well, and listened to Zilka’s plan.

  “Tira Morr-Gann, meet Ten Jaxdown,” said Captain Zilka.

  Tira gave Ten a firm handshake. She could probably feel the nervous sweat on his palm, he thought.

  They were in the conference room again but this time without Zilka’s officers. She told Tira, “A lot of Ship people are white, yellow, black—different races as they existed on Old Earth and conspicuous among Gotayelans. Ten, however, is a racial mix. I think that makes him best able to pass for Gotayelan. Also, he's not too tall, which further helps the resemblance to Gotayelans when someone like me stands out like a tall poppy.”

  Tira was in on the plan, seething with indignation that saboteurs had compromised the honor of her Guild. Her English had veered well toward the Gotayelan dialect. “You're right, Ma'am, you are, you are. I can say he my cousin from Downside Northtown, new member of the Techs Guild, that explains why just a little bit clumsy in spingravity.” She put her hand on Ten’s shoulder. “Happens so that ‘Ten’ is a Gotayelan name, even. Always good somebody can recognize own name called out in warning if trouble brews up.”

  Stasia gave an alarmed squeak. “How often does trouble brew in the Shipyard?”

  “Not never,” Tira said complacently. She gave Ten an appraising look. “Size five coverall, blue for Techs, I go get.” She left to do so. Stasia went to give the flutterbys their deceptive paint jobs.

  Ten watched her leave.

  Part of his talent was to observe how things moved and to know what kind of connectivity let them move like that. So his robots’ wings, legs, sample claws, and other moving parts worked better than the same parts on other inventors’ robots. He’d never looked at people that way before. He did now. Spingravity—odd facsimile of gravity that it was—made human movements unexpectedly revealing. Maybe that was because humans had evolved in the full gravity of Earth, and spingravity imitated it imperfectly.