Bubochka (Rabbit, Smart Pet, Trainee)

The lights went out the way a tide goes out. Not all at once, and nobody announcing it — just the far end of the valley going dark first, then the middle, then the near houses, then the shepherd's own windows, until the only lights left were the little red ones on the delegation's instruments, which the Survey people had asked permission to keep. The warden had said the sky wouldn't mind the small ones. It was strange to hear the sky spoken about that way, like a neighbour whose comfort you would naturally consider.

Then the sky started.

Bubochka had been told what the drithle would look like, by the boy, by the shepherd, by two separate Survey briefings with diagrams in them. All of them had been correct and none of them had been right. The sparks were slow. That was the thing the diagrams could not say. Each one lit up high and quiet, drifted a little way, and went out gently, the way an ember settles — hundreds of them, gold-white, with no sound at all. The whole valley stood in the dark and watched, and the animals were quiet too: the herds still on the hillside, the dogs sitting by their people, everything on the planet pointed the same way.

She noticed that she could feel her own subsystem wanting to classify it, and that she did not let it. That went in the report as well, although she did not yet know under what heading.

Afterwards, when the lights came back on the same slow way, she began her filing while the delegation talked over their readings. Her report was one page. What the sky did, what the valley did, what the animals did, in that order. At the end she wrote the thing she was most sure of and least able to prove, in the plain words Barsik said a trainee should prefer: the custom is not for looking at the sparks. It is for not being the sort of place that would miss them. Then she filed it, and did not volunteer it, and got into the wool basket with the view of the room, because the room, unlike the sky, was still working.