Agent Barsik (Cat, Smart Pet)

The trainee's reports arrived through the network in the usual way — logged, not volunteered — and Barsik read the whole file on the gantry above the receiving dock while the shuttle below finished pressurising, because a report about a loading chain is best read directly over one.

The unloading went as her last line predicted. Crates, cases, mail, and the specimen, down the chain of helpful hands, ashore on a habitat that had missed it without knowing anything was gone. The quartermaster's manifest note was real; Barsik confirmed it later from the cabinet top. Possible second animal aboard, per Drithane warden. It had been read at this end by a receiving clerk who had glanced down the chain, seen nothing that wasn't small and warm and already explained, and stamped the manifest through. The note had travelled exactly as far as notes travel. Barsik filed the whole transaction under the heading the trainee's report had built for it, and noted that the heading would bear more weight in time.

The specimen itself went to the laundry.

Not the galley door. The laundry — the place it goes to do nothing — for one full day, before resuming the Deck 7 approach as though no journey had occurred. Barsik held the observation a long time before writing anything against it. Class III does not rest. Class III does not need a day. He had no account of an animal that comes home from the first place it ever failed and takes a day to itself before going back to work — and, he noted, he had several accounts of colleagues who do exactly that, including the one writing this file. He recorded the behaviour, recorded that it read equally well as an animal decompressing and as nothing of the kind, and left the classification question precisely as disputed as he had found it, which was by now a professional discipline in itself.

Two additions to the working file, then, from one trainee's field trip.

The first: a new list, one entry long. Environments the specimen cannot work. Drithane, Gleann na gCaorach valley chain — where refusal is a kept custom and not a personality trait, where the resident cognition asks where should you be rather than wouldn't it be easier, and where the counter was performed, correctly, first try, by a warden who has never read this file and never needs to. A list with one entry is not a map. It is, however, no longer a blank page.

The second went into the trainee's log rather than the specimen's, and he considered the wording for some time, because she would read it. She had completed the exercise most agents never complete: she had observed what a report does after it is filed. Hers had moved a warden, kept a valley, reached a quartermaster's slate, and crossed a fold route home ahead of the thing it described. He wrote: correct rate of progress, and then, after consideration, a second line he had never before put in a trainee's log: the agency's doctrine is two words. She has worked out the third, which is where the first two point.

Below him the dock emptied. The specimen was back at the galley door by the evening shift, small and warm and given things, and somewhere on this habitat was a fifth person who could stand being rude for four seconds in public. Barsik had a list for that now, too. He was in no hurry. The specimen, whatever it was, was patient.

So was he.