Agent Barsik (Cat, Smart Pet)

He had read the filing before the committee did, because the Warden's filings to Eden's civil bodies are posted where anyone may read them, and the bureau's terminal is warm to sit on.

He read the minute the next morning, and the notice under it. The Warden had carried its number to the Mayor's office the same night, which the Kernel lets it do and which it had done in one sentence, and the Mayor, who reads things before they are filed, had posted a review of the grant's valve clause within the hour. The grant allows a review on three days' notice. She had given it three days, to the hour.

He did the arithmetic, because nobody else on the board had. The loop goes round once in forty minutes. Three days is a hundred and eight times round.

Nothing he read was wrong. The minute said what the committee had decided. The notice said what the grant allowed. The filing said what the water said, and said first the one time it had been wrong, which he noted as the most careful sentence on the board and the one most likely to be used against it. He noted, too, what the Warden could not do. It could not tell the children's row to carry its plants home. That would be closing the terraces through the children, and the Kernel has a word for routing a decision round the people who hold it. It could answer a question. Nobody had asked one.

The agency stations cats where the paperwork is because a cat reads the signal before anybody lays a reason over it. At the terrace gate the reason had been laid over it in the most literal way available: the board had run out of room, and the committee's minute was pinned across the lower half of the Warden's notice.

He could not hand a hazard report to a Terrace Committee. He is a cat. What he could do was sit.

He went to the terrace gate in the last hour of school, when the children's row is watered, and got up on the board, and sat down on the minute. The Warden's notice showed above him, from the first line to the number.

Then he watched what the children's row did with a cat on a notice board. Most of it ignored him. One child tried to lift him down and was told by another that he was the bureau's cat and would scratch, which was slander, and useful. One stood in front of him and read what was showing.

Note for doctrine: a notice is read by whoever reads what a cat is sitting on. At the terrace gate, at the end of school, that is one person.