Kate Ukrainka

Kate Ukrainka is best known off Eden for Tales from the Old Hearth, the nostalgic-fantasy collection read across the Earth-diaspora communities of the Concordance, and best known on Eden for something much smaller: a run of children's books about Smart Pets, written since she moved onto the habitat, and read to a great many people's children by a great many people who have never opened the Old Hearth books at all.

She lives on Eden for the ordinary reason anyone does — she came, and then did not leave — and the habitat turns up in the new work the way a place does when you stop noticing it: a galley door, a service void, a deck where everyone knows everyone's business and files none of it. She has said she is not writing about Eden. She has also said she cannot think where else it would be.

What She Writes About

The subject of the Smart Pet books is not the subsystem. It is the position: what it is like to be an animal that understands considerably more than anyone in the room has arranged to be told, and to have no good way of saying so. Ukrainka writes that from the inside and without condescension, which is the whole of why the books work, and it is the reason they are read to children who will grow up sharing a habitat with the real thing.

She is not interested in the technology and has never pretended otherwise. Asked, in one of the two interviews she has given since arriving, how a cognitive subsystem actually works, she answered that she had looked it up twice, understood it both times for about a day, and did not think a six-year-old was owed the diagram. What a six-year-old was owed, she said, was the truth about the animal.

The Cats

She loves cats. She has never once managed to keep one.

Marusya went into the service voids off Deck 4 in her first year aboard and did not come out; the voids on that deck run three levels and were surveyed properly by nobody. Zirka moved four doors along to a family with better hours and more lap between them, and lived there in evident contentment for six years in full view of Kate's own door, about which Kate maintains she was fine. The grey one left with a rotation — a family posted off-habitat packed it in perfect good faith, having spent two years assuming it was theirs, and by the time the apology came back down the relay the ship was six weeks gone and everybody was very sorry.

Every one of those is an ordinary thing that happens on a habitat, and each has a boring explanation that is almost certainly the true one. That is precisely what makes the set difficult to look at: there is no pattern in it, only a woman who has had three cats and kept none of them. Nobody has ever laid the three side by side, including her. The first two happened years before she ever moved her mornings to Deck 7, which forecloses the tidiest explanation anyone reaching for one would reach for first.

There is a cat in her quarters now. It has been there five weeks. She has not named it yet, and she has caught herself not naming it, and she does not care for what that appears to mean about her.

She does not write cats that die, and she has never once written a cat that is not found by the end of the book. A reviewer on Threshold called this the sentimental weakness of an otherwise unsentimental writer. It is the only note she has ever been given that she declined to discuss.

The Objection, and Her Answer

This is the point on which certification people lose patience with her. In the books, a Smart Pet's subsystem is a small quiet friend who lives behind the eyes — a second presence, kindly, separate, sometimes asleep. That is not what a certified cognitive subsystem is. It is not a person, it does not have a view, and the entire regulatory architecture around a Smart Pet exists precisely because a subsystem is a governed component and not a companion. Welfare inspectors have written to her about it. She keeps the letters.

Her answer has been consistent and is on the record in her author's note: she is not describing the hardware, she is describing what it is like to carry it, and she is not going to teach a child that the animal in front of them is a device with an animal wrapped round it. Whether that is a defensible position or a sentimental one is a live argument on Eden — and it is a fair summary of why her books are filed in the Codex as one author's account rather than anywhere the record states fact.

Wendell

She and Detective Inspector Wendell Albercombe were together for a few months, some years ago now. It was not a disaster and there is no story in it, which is the difficulty with telling it: their interests diverged, they lost touch, and both of those sentences are true and neither is what happened.

What happened is that the replies got slower. She noticed the first time and told herself it was the caseload, because it was the caseload. She noticed the fourth time and told herself the same thing, with less of it left. Somewhere after that she worked out that she had begun writing messages calculated to be easy to answer — short ones, ones that asked nothing, ones a tired man could clear in a line — and that she had been doing it for a while without having decided to.

She stopped. Not as a test, and not in anger; she simply reached the end of what she was willing to make small. He did not write to ask why, and she has never held that against him with any conviction, on the grounds that a man who was going to ask would have asked considerably earlier.

She does not want him back and has never made any move suggesting otherwise. What she took out of it is professional and slightly unfair, and she is aware of both: an eye for the exact moment a person begins asking for less than they need in order to keep something easy for somebody else. It is all over the Smart Pet books. Every animal in them is trying to say something to somebody who is busy, and every one of them is being adored instead of heard.

Character Notes

She writes in the Deck 7 galley in the mornings, at the table nearest the warm-air vent, and has done for years. Albercombe's caseload takes him through Deck 7 about twice a month. In several years this has produced no conversation at all, and neither of them has arranged for it to.

What has passed through that doorway in that time, and what she has and has not put in a book about it, is not a question anyone has yet thought to ask her.

See also: The Cat Who Would Not Say, The Domovyk Who Stayed, Detective Inspector Wendell Albercombe, Bramble and the Backwards Key, Smart Pet.