Four Seconds

The Inspector's office did not say Muffin. It said that Deck 7's walkway had failed to clear at shift change three times running, that the Warden's crowd-density line had logged it as a flow event each time, and that the bureau might like to send somebody. Sixty-one Unattended Article Reports had come off the walkway on the third night, one form per article: gloves, a spoon, a child's shoe, a great many small bags of things. People had set them down to free a hand. The office did not say what the hand had been freed for.

Marisol Achebe was the somebody, because she was junior and because she was already standing up. She was standing up because it was lunch, and Knopka's carrier was on her desk with Knopka in it, on her way home from a morning of being tested by Detective Nakamura. The test had involved a stapler. Knopka had noticed lunch.

She took the carrier with her. She would think, later, that she had done it because a detective walking a walkway with a rabbit in a box looks like a person going somewhere, and a person going somewhere is not asked to stop. That was true. It was also the case that she did not want to leave the rabbit on the desk with the floor in the mood it was in.

The walkway was full and not moving. It had the shape of a crowd that has forgotten why it is one. In the middle of it, at the point where the galley's warm air crosses the floor, was the reason, and everyone in the crowd was bent a little towards it the way grass bends towards a gap in a hedge.

She saw a very young dog. She would have said so if asked, and she was not asked, and she has since read eleven statements, and agrees with one of them, and has stopped being sure. It was small and it was warm and it had been given, in the time she stood there, a piece of bread, the end of somebody's tea, a bootlace, and a look from a cook that she would have called love if it had been aimed at a person.

She knew what the file said to do. She had read the paper twice, and had not asked whose it was, which on this floor is manners. Somebody has to refuse it, out loud, in front of the others. Her whole method, the one thing she was good at, was to sit still and say nothing and let the other party talk themselves into a decision. She stood still. She said nothing. And she understood, with the clarity that comes to a person who has just picked up the wrong tool, that the thing in the warm patch had been sitting still and saying nothing for nine months, and was better at it than she was.

She set the carrier down, because her arm was tired, and did not notice that she had just set something down on the walkway to free a hand.

Lev went to the bureau because his cat was fine, and the rabbit should know.

That is a reason. Grown-ups do not think it is a reason, but Lev had been read to by someone who understood that when a thing is finished you go and tell the person who did it, and the rabbit had done it. So he went up the two decks and along to the bureau, with a piece of his lunch in his pocket in case the rabbit wanted it, and the tray on the low shelf was empty.

The sergeant at the desk said the rabbit was on the walkway with the cat. He said it the way grown-ups say things they think are jokes. Lev said thank you and went to the walkway.

The walkway was full of people not moving. He was small, so he went through under their elbows, and came out at the front, and there was a detective with a long plait standing very still, and a box with a rabbit in it at her feet, and in the warm place on the floor was Muffin.

He knew it was Muffin because everybody said so. He knew it was not a cat, because he had a cat. It was the size Zhulik had been in the spring, and it was not a cat, and that was as far as he got, and he did not mind. Small animals are not for describing. They are for picking up or not picking up.

Everybody was giving it things. A cook gave it a bit of a roll. A woman gave it her glove, which is not even food. It did something, each time. Lev could not have said what. It did something, and the person's face went soft and their hand went out, and Lev felt his own hand go towards his pocket and stopped it, because that was his lunch.

Then it tried the rabbit.

The rabbit was looking at the wall of the box. Muffin did its thing at the rabbit, whatever the thing was, and the rabbit went on looking at the wall, and then the rabbit turned round and looked at Lev's pocket instead, because the rabbit had noticed lunch.

That was all. But Lev had been watching a whole walkway of people give an animal things because they could not not, and then he had watched a rabbit not give it anything because a rabbit does not know how, and he saw that the rabbit was right and everybody else was doing something they had not decided to do.

So he did what you do with a small animal that is where it should not be. He opened the box, and the rabbit hopped out and went straight past everyone's feet towards the galley, where the warm was. He crouched down and picked Muffin up from behind, under the front legs, the way you pick up a cat that will not like it, and it did its thing at him, close up, right into his face.

"No," Lev said. Out loud. In front of everybody.

He put it in the box and shut the door. It took about four seconds. Nobody said anything, and then the cook laughed, once, the way people laugh when a thing they have been afraid of turns out to be a box.

He picked the box up. It was heavier than a rabbit. He looked round for the detective, because it was her box, and she was looking at him the way his mother had looked at the quartermaster on the day of the crate. Then she went to get her rabbit, and he walked back to the bureau with the box, and she walked behind him, and the walkway started moving again as if it had never stopped.

The box opened. There was floor, and a great many feet, and past the feet the warm was coming from somewhere.

She went to where the warm was coming from. It was a door, and the warm came out at the bottom of it, and there was a saucer.

She sat down against the warm. The saucer had had something in it. Somebody picked her up. She noticed that lunch had gone the other way, and looked at the wall.

He watched it from the bin at the end of the walkway, because that was where he had gone when the Inspector's office referred a matter it could not name, and the trainee was beside him, because he had told her the exercise was to watch what a detective did with a form that did not exist.

He had not expected the detective to be eight.

He recorded the sequence with some care, because the sequence was the finding. The thing had been worked on by a deck for nine months and had been refused once before, by a valley warden at a ramp, to no effect. It had now been refused a second time. Not at a ramp. On the floor, in front of the shift change, by a person the shift change could see, and the thing that made it work was not courage. It was the absence of something. The boy had not yet learned the small yes. Nobody had taught him that a hand goes out when a face goes soft, so his had not, and a refusal that costs nothing is not rude, and cannot be, and the deck had watched it happen and had not thought it rude either.

He would like it recorded that he had proposed doing this to a grown person, and had written that he knew what he was proposing, and that the deck had solved the problem he had written about by producing somebody it could not be done to.

He did not describe the thing in the box. He declined to, as usual, and noted the declining. The boy had picked it up as if it were a cat that would not like it, which was a reading, and the trainee's log said a rabbit, or the size of one, which was another, and the detective's said dog. Three readings, no finding. Correct.

The last part he watched from the cabinet top, because the form was on the detective's desk and a form is best read from above.

There is one form on Eden that does not ask what a thing is. He had known this for a year and had not been able to use it, because he is a cat, and the form needs a keeper. It asks two things: who keeps the animal, and how it behaves. The boy said his family would keep it, in the voice of a person who has already asked at home and been told we'll see, which is a yes. The detective wrote the family's berth in the keeper's box. Then she came to the bracket where the species goes, and stopped.

Nobody on this habitat has ever been able to write what goes in that bracket. Eleven statements, four cats of different colours. He watched her pen not move.

"Muffin," the boy said. Not helping. Telling her the name, because she seemed to have forgotten it.

She wrote it. The word that had kept every hazard form on the deck from being filed for nine months went into a pet register without any trouble at all, because a pet register does not mind what a thing is called. The application went into the compliance queue at the end of the shift, which is where things on Eden go to become ordinary, and takes three weeks.

He added one line to doctrine and weighed it, because the trainee would read it.

The counter is a person who can stand being rude for four seconds. Note for doctrine: it is also a person who has not yet learned that it is rude. The agency has one on the deck. He is eight, he has a cat, and he is not ours.

Below him the boy went home with the box, and the detective went home with her rabbit, and the warm patch by the galley door was empty for the first time in nine months. The cook stood in the doorway a while and looked at it. Barsik noted that, and did not file it, and stayed on the cabinet until the floor had finished being surprised.