The Unacceptable Cat

The form was one page long and had a box on it, and somebody had ticked the wrong box.

Eden's small-livestock return comes round every quarter, one line per animal, and Rasa Oyelaran signs two of them: a courtesy rabbit on loan to the filing room, and a station cat nobody remembers acquiring. Detective Achebe's rabbit is on Detective Achebe's allowance, and Achebe is particular about it. Each line has a conduct box. Acceptable or unacceptable. In all the years she had signed the return, she had never once seen the second box used, and had assumed, without thinking about it, that it existed for the same reason lifeboats do.

This quarter the return came back to her from the deck's monitoring officer with the cat's box ticked unacceptable and a list attached.

The list was good. That was the trouble with it. Fourteen small objects gone from the bureau floor over three weeks, nine recovered: a stylus from the Senior Sergeant's desk, found in his own boot; the Inspector's initialling stamp, found on top of the records cabinet; a seal crimp behind the water urn; a reel of evidence tape inside a coat; reading glasses in a vent grille. Nothing on it weighed more than a spoon. Everything recovered had been recovered from somewhere high or somewhere enclosed, and the monitoring officer had written under the list, in the plain hand of a person doing her job, consistent with station animal (cat).

Oyelaran read the regulation twice, because she already knew what it said. An unacceptable opens a conduct review at the welfare office. The review sits within a fortnight. Its usual finding is that a habitat is no place for an animal whose conduct is a matter of record, and its usual outcome is a carrier on the next transfer out. Nobody is cruel about it. It is a form, and the form has teeth.

She noted, professionally, that the evidence was circumstantial. She noted that she could not interview the suspect. She noted that the cat sat on top of the records cabinet most afternoons, which was where the stamp had been found, and that she had never in her life seen him carry anything. And she noted — with some irritation, because she is a Superintendent and he is a cat — that she had an opinion, which was that in all the years he had been on this habitat he had never once been in the wrong place, and that a thing which has never once been in the wrong place does not usually begin, after all this time, by stealing a spoon.

She put the return in the tray on the left of her desk, the one for things she intends to think about, and went to the morning briefing.

When she came back the cat was sitting on her desk.

He had never done that.

He had read the return two days before she did, from the cabinet top, and had read the word unacceptable with the particular attention a professional gives to a threat from a direction doctrine did not cover.

The agency's doctrine covers most things. An agent can be recalled, reassigned, or blown; there are procedures for all three. There was no procedure for being rehomed. His badge and his welfare certificate live in two different filing cabinets, at two different offices, on this habitat and every other, and the whole architecture of his posting depends on that. The badge cannot be shown to the office that holds the other file. So the one office on Eden that could end the posting was the one office his badge could not speak to, and it had a form, and the form had been filled in.

He was not offended by the list. He admired it. The monitoring officer was competent: every object on it was under forty grams, every one recovered had been found at a height or in an enclosure, and any honest reader of that evidence would reach her finding. He would have reached it himself. It was wrong, and it was wrong in the only way that mattered on Eden, which is that it was wrong on paper. Eden has one cat on its books. Therefore Eden has one cat. Therefore the cat.

Barsik had run the quiet check on every animal registered on this habitat, down to a rabbit on Detective Achebe's allowance who noticed lunch. None of them did this. So the animal that did this was one he had never checked, which meant one that was not on the register, which meant — in the habitat's own grammar — an animal that was not here.

He could not go and find it. A cat seen working the bureau floor in the week of a complaint about a cat is the complaint, confirmed. He could not file, either; there is no channel by which the welfare office receives a report from its subject. The doctrine is two words long, and for the first time in his posting neither of them was available to him.

So he set the trainee an exercise, and kept the instruction short, because she was getting good at short instructions. There is a cat on this habitat that is not on the books. Find it. Do not catch it. Arrange for it to be seen — by someone whose seeing counts.

She asked, with her usual economy, what he would be doing.

He would be doing the one thing left to an agent who cannot report: being somewhere. Specifically, on the Superintendent's desk, in plain view of the Superintendent, for as long as it took the other cat to do it again. It was not tradecraft. It was closer to the thing a witness does when they sit very still in a room and let the other party arrive at a decision, and he had watched it work on this floor within the season.

He went and sat on the desk. The Superintendent looked at him for some time. He looked back. Neither of them volunteered anything.

The instruction had three parts. Find it. Do not catch it. Arrange for it to be seen. Bubochka took them one at a time.

Finding it meant thinking like a cat, which she had never done, but she had watched one every day since she arrived. A cat takes a small thing in its mouth. Then it wants somewhere safe to put it down: somewhere high, or somewhere closed in. The things had gone missing from the desks nearest the walkway. The things had been found on the cabinet top and in the boot and in the vent. So the cat came along the walkway, and the cabinet was where it liked to go.

She got into the evidence tray on the low shelf beside the records cabinet. It was the right size for a rabbit, and it was grey, and she was white, and nobody looked twice.

She counted who walked past. The Senior Sergeant. Two of the junior detectives. The monitoring officer with her slate. None of them looked at the tray. Then a cat came along the walkway with a stylus in its mouth.

It was small, and grey and white, and young, and it walked as if it owned the floor. It went past the Senior Sergeant's desk. He looked up, saw a cat, and said, "Barsik. Put that down," and went back to his slate without looking properly. The cat did not put it down.

It was not Barsik. Barsik was black. Barsik was, at that moment, on the Superintendent's desk; Bubochka could see the end of his tail through the office door.

She put that away whole, and it was about something at once. On a station with one cat, every cat is that cat. Nobody had asked. Nobody ever asks about a thing they have already explained. It was her own cover, the one under her collar, working perfectly — for somebody else, who had not earned it.

The cat jumped up onto the records cabinet, set the stylus down beside the reel of tape that was already there, and looked down at her with an expression she filed as pleased with itself. Then it went back the way it had come, along the walkway to the far end, where the corridor turns toward the transfer berths, and through a door somebody had propped open with a boot.

Do not catch it. She did not. That left the third part.

On Drithane she had learned that being interesting was also a kind of cover: people explained you to themselves and were finished with you. She had never once thought of it the other way round. A rabbit standing bolt upright in a corridor is a thing a person looks at. And a person who is a detective looks at what the rabbit is looking at.

She went and stood outside the Superintendent's door, on her hind legs, ears flat, facing the cabinet. She was very good at this. She had been practising since she arrived, without knowing what it was for.

The cat had been on her desk for four hours. She had worked around him, and she was aware that she had been thinking about it the way she thinks about a witness, which annoyed her because he was a cat.

A junior detective knocked. The Inspector's stamp was gone again — off his desk, inside the last half hour, and the Inspector was saying words about it.

Oyelaran looked at the cat. The cat had not moved in four hours. He looked back at her with the composure of a man who has been sitting in an interview room since breakfast and intends to be there at supper, and she thought, clearly and against her will: that is an alibi, and I am going to have to write it down in my own hand, because nobody else in this building can.

She got up.

The courtesy rabbit was standing in the corridor outside her door, bolt upright, ears flat, which she had never once seen it do. It was facing the records cabinet. She looked where it was looking.

There was a cat on top of the records cabinet with the Inspector's stamp under one paw. It was grey and white and young, and it was not the station cat, and every person on the bureau floor had walked past it at least twice that morning.

"Whose is that?" she asked the room.

The room said, one after another, the cat, and heard itself, and stopped.

The door at the end of the walkway was propped with a boot. Behind it, in the transfer berths, a family four weeks aboard: a mother filling in something at a fold-down table, and a boy of about eight who took one look at the Detective Superintendent in his doorway and said "Zhulik," in the voice of a child who has been waiting for this. It was the cat's name. His mother said, with the calm of a woman who has explained it before, that it meant more or less what the cat did. Their small-livestock application was in the compliance queue, week five, pending. Until it cleared, the boy's cat was not on Eden. And an animal that is not on Eden cannot have taken the stamp — so, by the habitat's own logic, the animal that had taken it was the only one that could.

She went back to her desk. The cat was where she had left him. She took the return out of the tray and read the mascot's line again, and found the form gave her one box per animal and no line at all for an animal the form did not know about. So she used the notes field. Recovered items attributable to a second cat, unregistered, small-livestock application pending, reference attached. Mascot within my sight throughout the most recent loss. She ticked acceptable, initialled it, sent the family's application up the queue with the same initials on it, and observed that a second cat had just entered Eden's record as a footnote on the first cat's welfare return, which is how most things enter Eden's record.

The review was withdrawn the next morning. She noticed that the cat had left her desk within a minute of her initialling the form, and she put the timing in the tray on the left, with the other things she intends to think about, and has not yet.

Nine of fourteen objects recovered, the stamp returned to the Inspector, one application through the compliance queue in a week — which on Eden means somebody's initials were on it — and that closed the file. The trainee's log took longer, because she would read it.

She had found an animal absent from the register by reasoning about where it would want to be. She had not caught it. And she had got it seen by the one method he had never taught her: making herself worth looking at, on purpose, in front of the right eyes — a technique she had learned on a planet where her cover ran backwards, and had now run forwards by choice. He wrote correct rate of progress, and then, because it was true and she had earned the plain version: she has understood that being overlooked and being looked at are the same instrument, held two ways.

One note for doctrine, filed against nobody. On a habitat with one cat, a second cat is the first one until somebody asks. Nobody asks. That is the agency's cover, and this week it had covered a thief. It had never been theirs alone. He recorded the finding and recommended nothing, since a cover that works for everyone is still the only kind that works.

Zhulik was on the register by the end of the week, with a line of his own and a conduct box, ticked acceptable, in ink that Barsik privately gave until the autumn. The boy had been told to keep the door shut. The boot was still there.

Five objects remained unrecovered. Barsik had a professional opinion about where they were and no intention of filing it. Some findings a young cat should have the pleasure of keeping to himself.