Lev Saunders

Lev Saunders is the only person on Eden who has ever asked a rabbit for help and had it work twice.

He came aboard in the spring of 2827 UCSD with his mother and a young grey-and-white cat, Zhulik, and spent four weeks in the transfer berths behind the bureau floor while the family's small-livestock application sat in the compliance queue at week five, pending. The berth door was propped with a boot. The cat used the door. What the cat did on the bureau floor in those weeks is on Zhulik's page and on a welfare return that was withdrawn the morning after a Detective Superintendent followed a rabbit's line of sight to the top of a cabinet and then to a fold-down table, where a boy of about eight took one look at her and said the cat's name, in the voice of a child who has been waiting for this. See The Unacceptable Cat (S02E06C01).

The family cleared the queue in early summer and moved to permanent quarters two decks down, with a door that shut on its own. The cat went back to the old door.

Asking the Rabbit

He went to the bureau first, and was told by a detective with a long plait, kindly, that she would keep an eye out, which he correctly understood to be the sound a grown-up makes when a door is closing. He noticed, while she was saying it, a rabbit in a tray on a low shelf, watching him. He went next to Kate Ukrainka's table, because she writes the cat books, and asked whether cats come back. She told him to ask the rabbit. It was a joke. He took it the way every child in her books takes the thing the adult says without meaning it, which is seriously.

He stood in front of Bubochka's tray, did not pick her up, did not ask her anything, and said his cat's name, and where the cat had been, and where the cat was not, in the order those things had happened. Then he waited. He had been read to by someone who understood that the waiting is the question. The rabbit went, and he followed, because a child will follow an animal that is plainly going somewhere, and seven minutes later he lifted the corner of a blanket in a departing family's bedding crate and there was his cat. He carried it home over his shoulder and raised a hand to the author on the way past, spare as a much older person. See Somebody's Cat (S02E07C01).

Four Seconds

In late summer he went back to the bureau because his cat was fine, and the rabbit should know. That is a reason; grown-ups do not think it is. The tray was empty. The sergeant said the rabbit was on the walkway with the cat, as a joke, and Lev said thank you and went to the walkway, where the shift change had stopped moving and the thing everybody calls Muffin sat in the warm patch being given a roll, a glove, and the end of somebody's tea.

He found a rabbit there, in a carrier at a detective's feet, and it was the wrong rabbit: Knopka, who is rabbit all the way down. He watched the specimen try her, and watched her look at the wall of the box and then at his pocket, because he had lunch in it. He saw that the rabbit was right and everybody else was doing something they had not decided to do. So he opened the box, let the rabbit out, picked Muffin up from behind, under the front legs, the way you pick up a cat that will not like it, said no out loud in front of the shift change, and shut it in. It took about four seconds. The walkway started moving again as if it had never stopped. See Four Seconds (S02E10C01).

At the bureau afterwards he said his family would keep it, in the voice of a person who has already asked at home and been told we'll see, which is a yes. When Detective Achebe's pen stopped at the bracket where the species goes, he told her the name, because she seemed to have forgotten it. The application went into the compliance queue at the end of the shift.

The Children's Row

Every child on Eden is given a runner of the Eden strawberry in their first summer aboard, and a place for it on the children's row at the bottom of the ring terraces. In the early autumn of 2827 the terrace loop ran warm for three days, the Warden filed sixty-eight in a hundred for root disease on it, and the Terrace Committee decided to wait for the culture. On the second day Lev read the Warden's notice at the terrace gate, the part of it the bureau's cat was not sitting on, and asked the Warden, once and in order, whether his plant was sick. The Warden said it did not know, that the plant might already carry it, and that if it stopped drinking the terrace water that day it would more likely than not stay well; that the plant was his; and that his window could have terrace light if he wanted it. He said yes please, and carried the plant home in both hands.

Every Eden strawberry on the terraces died. His did not. In the sixth week the Committee's chair, Tomas Brennock, came to the door and asked for a runner, once, and waited, and Lev gave him the one with the most leaves, and told him to change the water every morning. See Sixty-Eight in a Hundred (S02E11C01).

What He Declines

He does not ask a question twice. Each time he has put a case to somebody, he has said it once, in order, and waited.

He does not describe Muffin. He knows it is not a cat, because he has a cat; that is as far as he gets, and he does not mind. Small animals, in his view, are not for describing. They are for picking up or not picking up.

He does not give things to things that ask. His hand went towards his pocket on the walkway and he stopped it, because that was his lunch. He gives things to people who ask once and wait, and when he does, he gives them the good one.

Character Notes

The record holds him from three rooms, and in each one he is the person who does the plain thing the adults in the room have talked themselves out of: naming the cat to a Superintendent, taking a joke as an instruction, picking up an animal that is where it should not be. Barsik's file has him as the deck's answer to a problem the file had said needed courage, and did not: he had not yet learned the small yes, so refusing cost him nothing and nobody thought it rude. The doctrine line that followed ends he is eight, he has a cat, and he is not ours.

His mother is on the record twice and unnamed: filling in something at a fold-down table, and explaining, with the calm of a woman who has explained it before, what the cat's name means. Where his family came from, what they do on Eden, and who read to him are not established. The cat has been told to keep the berth door shut, and the boot is still where it always was.

See also: Zhulik, Bubochka, Knopka, Muffin, Kate Ukrainka, Detective Marisol Achebe, Eden Space Habitat.