Kate Ukrainka (Human)

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.