Barbary

Heather stroked Mickey. Barbary felt a little jealous that he took to her so quickly. Back on earth, when Barbary found Mick behind the apartment building where she was living, she had coaxed him for two days to get him out of his hidey-hole. And at that, he came out only because he was so hungry he could not resist the smell of the fish she stole for him. Even then, even though he was almost too weak to stand up, he had growled at her every time she came near him. It took her three days to make friends with him.

“How did you get him here? Is that why you didn’t want me to carry your bag?”

“Sort of. It’s got a couple of boxes of cat food in it. But I couldn’t hide Mickey there. It had to go through security, and they would have seen him with the x-ray.” She got her jacket out of the drawer and showed Heather the secret pocket.

“That’s neat,” Heather said. “I never would have thought of it.”

“I didn’t,” Barbary admitted. “I read a bunch of books on magic.”

“Magic? Like witches and stuff?”

“Stage magic. Tricks. Sleight of hand. Hiding things you don’t want anybody to see. You have to get them to look other places.” She pulled out her silver dollar, showed it to Heather, passed her left hand across it and made it disappear, then pulled it out of Heather’s ear.

“How’d you do that?”

“I’ll show you sometime, if you want to learn how to do it. Otherwise I’m supposed to keep it a secret. Anyway, that’s sort of how I hid Mick.”

She turned the jacket over so the outside pockets showed. “With this, everybody looks at all the pockets and thinks, ‘Isn’t that cute,’ or something, and they don’t notice that there’s another pocket on the inside, and a big lump where Mickey is.”

“I sure didn’t,” Heather said.

Mickey finished exploring the upper bunk, stuck his nose in the bookcase at the head of it, walked inside, and curled up. It was a tight fit, but he looked happy.

“Maybe we can train him to stay there when somebody comes in,” Heather said. “Nobody would ever see him.”

“It’s hard to train a cat,” Barbary said. “They do what they want. But maybe he’ll just decide he likes it there. Then we won’t have to train him.”

Heather flopped down on the bunk, nose to nose with Mickey. He stretched forward and sniffed her face.

Heather giggled. “His nose is cold!”

“It’s supposed to be. If it isn’t, that means he’s sick.”

“Huh. I didn’t know that.”

“Don’t you have any animals up here at all?”

“In the labs, mice and rats and some monkeys. But they have to stay in their cages, because everybody’s afraid they’ll get away and infest the station. The mice and rats, I mean, not the monkeys.”

Barbary started to say that she thought it would be very boring to live somewhere where there were no other animals than people, but then she realized that before she found Mickey, she had never lived around animals, either, and had never particularly missed them. People did not keep pets in cities very much anymore, or if they did they kept them inside all the time. Barbary had never seen a horse or a cow except in a zoo.

“We’ll have to be careful,” Heather said. “There’s a rule against pets on the station. People have been trying to change it for a while, but it’s just one of those dumb bureaucratic rules where you might get in trouble if you change it, but nothing happens if you don’t change it, so you leave it the way it is.”

“What will happen if somebody finds him?”

Heather turned over so she could see her. “Um… I don’t know.”

“You’d get in trouble.”

Heather shrugged. “Probably.”

“I’d get in trouble.”

“Well, yeah.”

“What about Mick?”

Heather did not answer for a moment. Then she said, “They’d probably take him away.”

At that moment there was a knock on the door.

Chapter Six

Heather sat up so fast she banged her head against the ceiling. Barbary vaulted to her side.

“Heather? Barbary?” Yoshi said. “If Barbary’s going to get a nap before we go to dinner, she’ll have to do it now. The reception for Jeanne Velory is at nineteen hundred.”

“Ouch,” Heather said.

“What did you say?”

“She said okay,” Barbary said. She leaned toward Heather. “Are you okay?” she whispered.

“Is something wrong?” Yoshi sounded worried, as if he feared Barbary and Heather had really begun to fight. After what had happened earlier, Barbary could not blame him.

The door slid open. Barbary threw herself around to sit against Heather’s bookshelf, hiding Mickey.

Yoshi stuck his head into the room. Heather managed to smile, but she had a glazed expression.

“Heather, it wouldn’t hurt for you to take a nap, too.”

 Mickey butted his head against Barbary’s back, trying to nudge past her. He pushed his paw between her and the wall, extending his claws to scratch at her side. Barbary was very ticklish. She tried not to squirm.

“Right,” Heather said groggily to Yoshi.

“We’ve just been talking,” Barbary said.

“Maybe one of you should sleep in the other room.”

“We’ll turn out the light and be quiet, honest.” Mick’s claws dug into the sensitive place under her arm. She caught her breath.