Bubochka (Rabbit, Smart Pet, Trainee)

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.