Somebody's Cat

The boy came to her table because she writes the cat books, which is the reason most children on Eden come to her table, and she had a rule about it and kept the rule: she does not sign anything, and she always asks their name.

His name was Lev. He was about eight, and he had come to ask whether cats come back.

Kate has an answer to that. She has had three cats and none of them came back, and each one had a boring explanation that was almost certainly the true one, and none of that was any use to a child, so she gave him the professional answer instead, the one that is in all the books. A cat that has gone is not lost. It is somewhere enclosed, or somewhere high, or somewhere warm, and it knows exactly where that is. The question is never whether the cat comes back. It is whether anybody goes to where the cat is.

The story came out the way children tell them, from the end. The family had been in the transfer berths since spring, waiting on a form. The form had cleared. They had moved, this week, to real quarters two decks down, with a door that shut on its own. The cat had been there on the first night and not on the second. His mother had asked at the bureau. The bureau had been kind, and there was no form.

"There isn't," Kate agreed. "I've looked." She did not say when, or how many times.

He had already been to the bureau himself, it turned out, after his mother. A detective with a long plait had crouched down to his height and told him she would keep an eye out, which he had correctly understood to be the sound a grown-up makes when a door is closing. And he had noticed, while she was saying it, a rabbit in a tray on a low shelf, watching him. He mentioned the rabbit the way children mention things, as if it were the point.

The whole floor had a joke that spring that the rabbit had found the last cat. Kate had heard it four times and had laughed politely at each, and had gone home each time and not written it down, because she was the one person on the habitat who was in danger of taking it literally, and she knew what that said about her.

"Then ask the rabbit," she said. It was a joke. She heard it leave her as a joke.

He took it the way every child in her books takes the thing the adult says without meaning it, which is seriously, and said thank you, and went. She watched him go — a boy walking like somebody with an appointment — and thought that she had written that scene, more or less, in her second book, and had never once expected to see it performed. She did not write it down. She has stopped pretending that this means anything except that she intends to keep it.

Nobody had given her an instruction. Bubochka noticed that, and then noticed that she had not waited for one, and put both things away for later.

The boy stood in front of the tray and did not pick her up, which was correct, and did not ask her anything, which was also correct, because he had worked out on the way down that a rabbit cannot answer. He said his cat's name, and where the cat had been, and where the cat was not, in the order those things had happened. Then he waited. He had been read to by someone who understood that the waiting is the question.

She had two facts and a rule. The facts: the family had moved this week, and the cat had gone the second night. The rule was the one every animal on Eden knows and no form does: when your door moves, you go back to the old door. So the cat was in the transfer berths. And the transfer berths, this week, meant the family who were leaving.

She went. The boy followed, because a child will follow an animal that is plainly going somewhere, and no adult on the walkway looked twice at either of them.

The old berth had crates in it, and a family packing, and a shuttle time written on the wall in the plain hand of a quartermaster. Three hours. She did not need three hours. On the lid of a half-filled bedding crate, where nobody had put it, lay a stylus. She knew that stylus. She knew whose habit it was to carry a small thing to a safe place and set it down at the edge as a marker, the way a person leaves their shoes at a door. She stood up on her hind legs beside the crate, and the boy, who was learning fast, looked where she was looking, and lifted the corner of a blanket, and there was his cat: asleep in the warm, in the dark, in the enclosed, exactly as promised, with a small tidy hoard beside him that she recognised item by item.

Do not catch it had been last time's rule. This time the rule was the opposite. The boy caught his cat, and the cat allowed it in the way of cats, and the family packing the crate said oh in the voice of people who had been about to seal a cat into their bedding and ship it to another habitat in perfect good faith.

That was the case. It had taken seven minutes, by the clock on the wall, and it had needed no form because it had never touched one. She filed it anyway, on the way back, while the boy walked ahead with the cat over his shoulder and the cat looked back at her over his: the first case she had ever taken from a client, and the client had been the only person on the habitat who thought she could be asked.

He watched it from the gantry above the transfer dock, because that was where he had gone the moment the trainee's first note came through — lost cat; no form; taking it — and a report about a loading chain is best read directly over one.

He had not been needed. He noted that as a finding, not a feeling.

What he had expected to watch was the chain. In three hours a departing family's crates would go up it, hand to hand, and if one of those crates held a sleeping cat then the cat would go up with them, helped aboard by people who would each have said they were only passing along what somebody earlier had cleared. He had a file on exactly this. The file said the chain stops for nobody. It had not stopped for a valley warden naming the specimen to the quartermaster's face; the note had travelled exactly as far as notes travel. And he had come to the gantry to see whether it would stop for a boy.

He did not find out, and he recorded why with some care, because the reason mattered more than the answer would have. The trainee had not brought the boy to the ramp. She had brought him to the crate, three hours early, before there was a chain to stop. She had understood something he had not put in her log because he had not yet put it into words: the place a refusal works is not the place the institution is strongest. It is the place where there is still a person and not yet a procedure. A crate in a berth is a person's crate. The same crate on the chain belongs to the manifest.

So the quartermaster never had to choose. Barsik filed that as the correct outcome and declined to speculate on the other one, which was the kind of comparison a reader should be left to make.

Two additions to the file.

The first: five objects recovered, in a bedding crate, beside the animal that had put them there. He had been right about where they were. Nobody had asked. He confirmed for the record that this remained the correct arrangement.

The second went into the trainee's log, and he weighed it as usual, because she would read it. She had taken a case with no form, from a client who could not file, on no instruction, and closed it by going to where the thing was before the institution could get between them. He wrote correct rate of progress, and considered stopping there, and did not.

The agency's doctrine is two words. She has found the case those two words do not reach — the one that is over before anything could be filed — and closed it anyway. Note for doctrine: a report is sometimes a person you bring somewhere in time.

Below him the shuttle lifted on schedule, carrying exactly what its manifest said. He stayed on the gantry a while after it had gone. The rail was warm. He had no other reason to be there and did not need one.

The boy came past her table on the way home with the cat over his shoulder, and the cat looked at her with the unrepentant face of an animal who has been found and does not consider this to have been in doubt.

He did not stop. He raised a hand, spare as a much older person, and she raised hers.

Behind him, at a distance a child would not notice and an author could not help noticing, came the rabbit, going back to her tray, looking at nobody. Kate watched her the whole length of the galley. Then she opened the notebook she had closed an hour before and did not write anything in it, and was aware, for the first time in some years, of the difference between not writing a thing down and not having anything to write.

There is a cat in her quarters. It still has no name. She went home the long way and did not decide anything, and knew the difference between that and last week, too.