Agent Barsik (Cat, Smart Pet)

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.