Agent Barsik (Cat, Smart Pet)

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.