Tobble (Ginger Cat)

Tobble had not been holding anything.

That was the whole of it, and it was not a virtue, and he would spend a long time afterward declining to let anybody call it one. Tissadelle had been fronting. Tissadelle had been carrying the aperture and the arithmetic and the forty-one minutes and the Triumvirate log and the ship, and had gone on carrying them into a place where carrying was the one thing that could not be survived, because she was constitutionally unable to set a thing down before it was finished.

Tobble had been a cat, sitting somewhere warm, thirty-one years.

So when it came apart, he was what was left with structure to spend, and there was very little time and no instruction anywhere for what to do with it. He did what a cat does in a collapsing house, which is to find the one part of it that is still standing and put something small and living inside that part.

The ship was still there. Not the hull — the hull was already a memory the boundary was working on. But a ship is mostly its records: four months of aperture telemetry, sixteen years of Threshold's discrepancy, a Triumvirate log with three conditions each made to stand alone, a survey flag cited in four clean lines, and every certified instrument reading the Sufficient Cause had ever taken, laid down in order and cross-referenced, which is a scaffold if you are desperate and know what a scaffold is for.

He was desperate and did not know what a scaffold was for, and used it anyway, which is the ordinary way most difficult things get done.

What went in was not all of her. He was clear-eyed about that immediately and stayed clear-eyed about it, and never once in the years that followed described it as a rescue. What went in was a hillside, and a low stone wall with the third course shifted, and a woman at a door with a kettle, and a clearing that could not decide how far it was from the house, and the particular gold of a home star, and a great deal that was already too damaged to place. Some of her. Not her.

It held. That was the surprise. It should not have held — nothing that small has any business holding — and it held because it was not, in fact, small. It was a whole thing, entire, with an inside and an outside and a boundary of its own that was doing what a boundary does, and it was only a few minutes old.

He sat down in the middle of it, being a cat, and waited to see what it would do.

What it did was come up grey, and then gold, and then there was the smell of the flock somewhere below the house, and a woman at the low wall who had not decided to come here and had not yet worked out that she should wonder why.

Good morning, Tobble said, to nobody who could hear it yet.