Barbary

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “It really is different. Because of the spin.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Okay. You’ve got weight here because of the spin, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So if you walk plus-spin — that’s the same direction the station’s spinning — you’re going even faster than the station. Since your weight is proportional to your speed, you feel heavier. And it makes you feel kind of like you’re walking uphill. That’s why when you see people jogging in the one-g level, they usually run plus-spin. They get their exercise faster.”

  “I guess I understand.”

  “Then if you go the opposite way, minus-spin” — Heather turned and ran a few steps in the opposite direction — “you subtract your speed from the station’s speed. That makes you feel lighter. And you think maybe you’re going downhill.”

  “It’s weird,” Barbary said.

  “No, it isn’t!” Heather said. “Oh… I guess it is. But you’ll get used to it. You can feel it even more if you run. Go ahead, try it.”

  Mickey squirmed, trying to escape.

  “I will later,” Barbary said. “But if I run now, Mick will have a fit. How much farther do we have to go?” She put her hand on the outside of the secret pocket and tried to pet Mick to calm him down and hold him still at the same time.

  “To the bottom of the elevator.”

  Inside the elevator, Heather opened a panel, pushed a button marked -3, and slid the panel shut. None of the usual numbers lit up, but they descended. Barbary leaned against the wall where the outlines were painted, hoping she would soon get used to the tilt when the elevator moved.

  Barbary opened her jacket. Mick stuck his head out of the pocket. He looked ready to jump any second.

  “Stay there, Mick!” she said.

  “Hardly anybody ever uses this elevator,” Heather said. “He’s safe now.”

  “Maybe I could let him out?”

  “Probably it’d be all right, but we’ll be where we’re going in a minute.”

  The elevator slowed and stopped.

  “Oh, no!” Heather said.

  Barbary flung her jacket closed, hugging it to her with her hand still inside. Mickey pressed his head against her fingers.

  Jeanne Velory and Ambassador Begay got into the elevator.

  “Hello, Barbary. Hello, Heather,” Jeanne said.

  “Hi.” Mick’s cold nose and prickly whiskers tickled her as he nudged around looking for a way out. “Uh —!”

  “Hi,” Heather said, detecting the note of desperation. “I’m showing Barbary around. We already went on a raft ride to the observation platform.”

  “We haven’t had a chance to see the observation platform from up close yet,” Jeanne said. “You’ve got a good guide, Barbary.”

  “I know,” Barbary said.

  “But aren’t you hot in your jacket?”

  As Barbary tried to think of an answer, Mick hooked his claws around her wrist.

  “You’re Ambassador Begay, aren’t you?” Heather said.

  “Yes, I am.”

  Jeanne introduced Heather and Barbary to the ambassador, and for a horrible moment Barbary thought she would have to shake hands, when it was her right hand inside her jacket holding Mickey still.

  But Heather broke in. “Later on I’m going to show Barbary the computer.” Her voice sounded a little too high and a little too loud. “It has some great games. Have you tried ‘Snarks and Boojums’? It’s really fun.”

  You’re really overdoing it, Heather, Barbary thought, willing the elevator to stop and open, willing Jeanne to get bored with talking to two kids, willing the electricity to go out, anything. All the attention was on her and Heather — mostly on Heather; she had to admit that her sister did a good job of keeping attention off Barbary and Mick — and the whole business was like a scene out of a sappy kids’ movie. The Space Colony Children or something. Ugh, Barbary thought, aren’t we cute. Mick, if you don’t stop biting me I’m going to let you get out, and see what happens then.

  “I haven’t had time to do that yet, either,” Jeanne said.

  “You ought to,” Heather said. “It’s got a lot of physics in it. The computer’s terrific. You can even make up stories on it.”

  “What tales does your computer tell you?” Ambassador Begay asked.

  “You tell it your name and it sort of puts you into the story. It never tells the same one twice.”

  “I see. The stories I know do not change at all. But perhaps you’ll let me tell you one anyway, if we can find the time.”

  “I’d like that,” Heather said.

  Barbary struggled to remain expressionless as Mick dug his claws into her hand.

  “Barbary, is your hand all right?” Jeanne said.

  The elevator slowed and stopped and the door slid open. But nobody moved.

  “Yes,” Barbary said. “Why shouldn’t it be? I mean… um… I’m just pretending to be Napoleon. It’s part of the story.”

  She looked at Heather and Heather looked at her and neither one of them could help it. They both burst out laughing. Jeanne watched them quizzically, then stepped outside. Ambassador Begay followed.

  “Getting off?”

  “Uh-uh,” Heather said, gasping for breath. “We’re just riding the elevator. We wanted to come to the bottom and go right back up.” She caught Barbary’s gaze, and they both laughed even harder.

  “Okay,” Jeanne said. “Have fun.”

  As she and the ambassador walked away, Heather lunged forward and jammed her thumb against the “close door” button. As soon as they were safe, she slid to the floor, giggling.

  “Nobody ever comes on this elevator, huh?” Barbary said.

  “Napoleon!” Heather said. “Napoleon? That was great!”

  “Mickey, ouch, stop it, all right, get down if you have to, and if they throw you out the airlock it isn’t my fault!” She loosed her hold on the cat and he sprang to the floor. Barbary slid down beside Heather. “Napoleon. Good grief. What a dumb thing to say. Now Jeanne must really think I’m an idiot.”

  The elevator halted. Barbary grabbed Mick before the doors opened. She carried him out into just about the weirdest place she had ever seen.

  The elevator sat on top of a wide platform. Steps led down on all sides, making it into a ziggurat shape, a stepped pyramid. About twenty steps below, the stairs disappeared into great piles of dirt and rocks, which rose to meet the curved horizon. Support beams projected through the dirt.

  Mick scrabbled at Barbary’s hands, caught his back claws against her palms, and leaped from her grasp. She yelped in surprise and pain. He ran across the platform, down the stairs, and over a hillock into the shadows.

  “Mick!”

  Barbary chased him, but Mick’s rabbity rump vanished into the darkness before she reached the bottom of the stairs. She stopped and put her scratched hand to her mouth. The scratches stung.

  “Mick!”

  Barbary’s eyes became accustomed to the eerie light cast by the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. A few marks around the platform might have been small footprints, but they looked as if a wind had disturbed and blurred them. Mickey’s tracks led across them and vanished.

  “Mick!”

  “It’s okay,” Heather said. “There’s no place he can go, and nobody ever, ever comes down here. Not even me, mostly.”

  “That’s what you said about the elevator.”

  “I said ‘hardly ever’ about the elevator. It leads to other places. But this is the lowest level of the station. It’s the insulation against cosmic rays and solar flares. There isn’t any reason for anybody to come down here. All it is is pulverized moon rock.”

  “Moon rock?” At the bottom of the stairs, Barbary poked at the moon rocks with the toe of her shoe. “It looks like just dirt.”

  “It is,” Heather said. “It is a good radiation shield, though, and once they finished the mass-driver on the moon, it was cheap. The mass-driver throws moon
rocks out here into orbit, you catch them and extract whatever you want that’s useful, then you put the leftovers here. This place is sort of a dump, to tell you the truth. But it makes the station safe to live in.”

  The crushed moon rock felt like ordinary, fine, dry dirt. Barbary’s shoe left an impression just behind Mick’s first pawprint.

  “I never stepped on dirt from the moon before,” Barbary said.

  Heather grinned. “Maybe someday we’ll get a chance to step on moon dust when it’s still on the moon. Come on, I’ll show you around.”

  Heather set off after Mickey. She walked more slowly than usual. Barbary remembered that her sister spent little time in full gravity. Barbary, too, felt the change in gravity even after such a short time of living on the middle level. She felt heavier than back on earth. She halted, but the heavy feeling remained. It was more than the effect of walking plus-spin. Then she realized that the lowest level really did have a greater acceleration than the one-gravity level just above. It might not be enough greater for her to feel it, but she thought she did.

  The moon dirt filled the level with a long series of low hills. As far as Barbary could see, till the rising horizon disappeared beneath the roof, the ground rose and fell regularly.

  “Why did they fill it with hills?” Barbary asked. The spooky, silent dimness made her whisper.

  “They didn’t,” Heather said in a normal tone that sounded so loud Barbary almost jumped. “When I found it, a few years ago, the surface was flat. Kind of irregular, but mostly flat. Then — it changed. I don’t know what formed the hills and valleys. Resonance with the spin, I guess, but I haven’t figured out how to calculate it yet.”

  “What does everybody else think?”

  Heather reached the top of one of the hills and paused, trying to pretend her breathing came easily. Her forehead gleamed with sweat. Barbary wondered if she should try to persuade Heather to go back upstairs before they found Mick. But she decided she had better not, at least not yet.

  “I don’t think anybody else knows about the hills,” Heather said. “They’re all so busy… I’ve only come down here five or six times. And… I never told anybody, because I figured they’d say I have to stay out. So I can’t very well ask.”

  “I guess not,” Barbary said.

  Here and there a fluorescent light had burned out, further dimming the low illumination. Barbary had to squint to see much at all. She walked down a hill, following Mickey’s tracks.

  “How did you find out about this place?” she asked.

  “I’ve explored everywhere,” Heather said. “I realized when I was pretty little that you couldn’t get to a lot of places without doing something special, so I started looking for the special ways.”

  “Like the extra panel in the elevator.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Are all the other places as spooky as this one?”

  Heather laughed. The cheerful sound lightened the dim atmosphere.

  “No. This is the spookiest. Most places aren’t exactly hidden, they’re just out of the way. Like the ventilators and the recyclers.”

  Mick’s tracks led into the valley between two hillocks and up the side of a third rise. Barbary glanced back. Her footprints made clear indentations in the dirt, but the elevator island had nearly vanished between the low ceiling and the tops of the hills.

  “How fast does the dirt change?” she asked. “I mean will our footprints disappear?”

  “No,” Heather said. “In a couple months they’ll fade away. But we can’t get lost even if they did vanish. There’s more than one elevator, so even if you got turned around, you’d find your way out eventually.”

  “Mick!” Barbary called, in a soft voice. “Kitty, kitty!”

  “Won’t he come back to you?”

  Abashed, Barbary stopped calling him. “He always has before,” she said. “Except, he does it when he wants to, not always when you want him to.” She had no good reason for feeling so uncertain about him.

  “He’ll be okay,” Heather said. “He’s only been gone a few minutes.”

  “I hope he doesn’t think he can stay out all night, like he did back on earth,” Barbary said. “If he does, we might be here for a while.”

  Heather started to say something, but stopped. Before Barbary could ask what was the matter, Heather changed the topic.

  “Come on,” she said. “We can follow Mick’s tracks so we’ll be close to him when he does decide to come back.”

  “They ought to plant grass or something,” Barbary said. The bare hillocks extended as far as she could see. “Then you’d have a park. It might be kind of pretty.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Heather said. “It really is! It would be sort of like being in one of the colonies. They’d have to change the lights…” She glanced around, as if imagining grass, flowers, trees.

  She reached the top of a rise and stopped, breathing harder. Barbary felt as if she’d taken a slow walk around the block.

  “You better go upstairs,” Barbary said. “You’ve been down here kind of a long time, I’ll stay and find Mick —”

  “I’m okay, Barbary,” Heather said. “I’m supposed to spend some time at one g, and usually I don’t get around to it, so it’s good that I’m here.”

  “But if Mick decides to hide out for a couple of hours—”

  “We might have to go home for a while and come back and get him later.”

  Barbary said nothing. She did not want to leave Mick here. Probably it was much safer than being out on the street at night back on earth. But still she did not want to leave him here.

  Barbary and Heather tramped on across the small hills and valleys, following Mick’s faint pawprints. He had scampered back and forth, sprinting one way, then the other, stopping, hurtling off in another direction. Barbary wished she had seen him, because he was fun to watch when he played like that.

  They followed his tracks for a long way. The elevator had long ago vanished above the horizon, so everything looked exactly the same in every direction.

  “I know we can’t get lost,” she said. “But it sure is strange down here.”

  “Yeah,” Heather said. Her voice was very soft. Barbary could not tell in this light if her sister looked pale, but she was definitely sweating.

  “Maybe you’d better rest,” Barbary said.

  “No, I’m okay, honest.”

  Suddenly her knees collapsed and she sat down hard in the dirt.

  “Heather!”

  “Well, I will be,” Heather said, sounding disgusted. “In a minute.”

  “Come on, I’m going to get you back to the elevator.”

  Heather fended off her help. “I just want to sit here for a while.”

  “You’ve got to get out of this gravity — I bet I can carry you piggyback.”

  “What’s piggyback?” Heather asked skeptically.

  “You sort of sit on my back and I put my hands under your knees.”

  It was easier to show her than tell her, so she did. Heather felt light and frail when Barbary picked her up. “Now just wrap your arms around my neck. Only try not to strangle me.”

  Heather hugged herself against Barbary’s back. As she reached around to hold on, her hand brushed Barbary’s bare throat.

  “Jeez, your hands are cold!” Barbary said. “Do you want to wear my jacket?”

  “Uh-uh,” Heather said. “My hands are always cold. Honest. I’ll be okay.”

  But her voice was so feathery and weak that Barbary felt afraid. She turned back to retrace her footsteps, for she was no longer certain in which direction the elevator lay.

  “Wait, Barbary, there’s a different elevator the same way we were going. It’s nearer than the other one. And maybe we’ll find Mick.”

  “Okay.”

  Barbary trotted over the hillocks, following Heather’s directions, now and then crossing Mick’s track. Soon the base of a second elevator platform sank from the horizon as they neared it. Mick�
�s pawprints led right to it, but she could not see Mick.

  Barbary climbed the steps and let Heather down.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Better,” Heather said. “That was kind of fun.”

  Barbary grinned. Heather did look better now. She hoped it was not just because the light was brighter.

  “You get the elevator,” Barbary said. “I’ll see if maybe Mick is on the other side.”

  She ran down the stairs two at a time. Mick’s trail circled the platform, led onto the first step. She found a faint dusty pawprint. She climbed the stairs, calling him. But he was not at the top of the platform behind the elevator, or on either side.

  “Heather,” she called, “did Mick come around that way?”

  “No, I haven’t seen him. But the elevator’s here. I can’t keep it very long, somebody might get suspicious.”

  “I can’t find him,” Barbary said.

  “I’ll let it go for now.”

  “Go on up. I’ll come in a while.” Before Heather could reply, Barbary returned to the lowest step and followed it all around the square base. But the only pawprints were those she had already found. No prints led away from the platform. She turned, hoping to see Mick behind her, sneaking up like a character in some slapstick comedy. Barbary did not feel much like laughing. Besides, he was not there.

  The only place Mick could have hidden was on the elevator. Somehow it must have arrived before Barbary and Heather, then it opened, then he got in, and now he was loose in the ship for anybody to discover. Barbary ran up the steps, panting. She reached the closed elevator door. Heather was nowhere to be seen. She must have gone home. Barbary pushed the elevator panel, pressing her hand against its lighted surface as if her intensity could make it return faster.

  Maybe somehow she had missed seeing him. She ran to the corner of the elevator housing and looked beyond its edge. She saw nothing. She ran past the elevator doors and glanced down that side of the platform. Heather stared at the wall.

  “Heather, what’s wrong? You were supposed to go back up!”

  “You better come here,” Heather said.

  Barbary joined her.