Bubochka (Rabbit, Smart Pet, Trainee)

Barsik's instructions had been short, because his instructions were always short. Go with the delegation. Observe how a world watches its own sky. File, not volunteer.

Bubochka had asked what she should observe about it. He had said that if he told her, she would observe that, and nothing else. This was the sort of answer Barsik gave. She had learned to put them away whole, like a seed, and wait for them to be about something.

Drithane was cold, and the air was thin, and being a rabbit here was a completely different job. On Eden, nobody looked at her twice. That was the whole point of her. Here, everyone looked twice. The shepherd looked at her the way she looked at her dogs, which was a looking-at with arithmetic in it. The children of the valley came to visit her on purpose. One small boy explained to her, seriously and at length, which nights the sky would do its sparks, and showed her the calendar on the kitchen wall with the crossing hours marked in red, and told her that everyone turned their lights out for it, and that nobody made them.

She filed all of it. She was getting faster at filing.

At first she had worried that being interesting broke her cover, because her training so far was mostly about being ignored. But by the second day she understood something she suspected was the beginning of the lesson: being interesting was also a kind of cover. When people found you interesting, they explained you to themselves straight away — pet, mascot, poor creature, so far from home — and then they were finished with the question. Nobody keeps asking about a thing they have already explained.

The shepherd was the only one who had not finished with the question. Bubochka had noticed her noticing the basket. She put that away whole, too.