Bubochka (Rabbit, Smart Pet, Trainee)

Barsik's instruction was four words long, which was long for him. Do nothing. Do it well.

Bubochka had asked, in her usual way, how one did nothing well. He had said that she would know it was going well when it became difficult, and had gone back to the cabinet top.

It became difficult on the first morning. The detective with the notebook hid a stylus behind the water urn, at the height of a rabbit's eye, in a place no person would look, and Bubochka saw her do it, because Bubochka sees everything on the floor and always has; that is what she is for. The difficulty was not seeing. It was the other half: not looking. Every animal on Eden is looked at, and she had learned on Drithane that being looked at was a kind of cover. This was different. This was being looked at by somebody who had not finished explaining her, and who was a detective, and who wrote things down.

The shepherd had been the first. The shepherd had read her the way she read her dogs, with arithmetic in it, and had then let it go, because a valley has other work. The detective would not let it go. Bubochka could see her not letting it go, day after day, in the way she glanced at the tray on her way past: not the glance a person gives a rabbit but the one a person gives an instrument they have not finished calibrating.

So Bubochka did nothing. She watched the floor the way a rabbit watches a floor. She did not turn her head when the second object went under the evidence shelf, or the third into the gap by the records-room door. She let her subsystem want to file each one and did not file them; she had learned at the drithle that wanting to classify a thing and doing it are two different acts, and only the second one shows.

She did not do nothing about everything. At the third hour of the night pass, when the floor was empty, the housekeeping unit came through on its slow, square route, and paused at the urn, and took the stylus, and moved on. She filed that. It was not part of her nothing; it was a fact about the floor, and the floor is her job. The next night it took the second object, and the night after that the third, and each time it stopped afterward at the records-room door and did something with its front panel that she could not see and could guess, because everything on Eden generates a form.

Six days. She had not known that a rabbit could be tired from sitting still. She put that away for later, too, and on the sixth morning the detective got up from her desk and went toward the records room with her notebook, and Bubochka did not watch her go.