Barbary

“They’re even prettier when you get outside the station and you’re just in a suit or a raft,” Heather said. “Sometimes I think it ought to be possible to go outside without a suit, and see them without anything at all in the way.”

Barbary glanced at her sister, trying to figure out if Heather was making a joke. If she was, it was not a very good one. Barbary had never felt scared for another person before. She felt scared for Heather.

“It’d be kind of cold out there, without a space suit,” she said.

Heather grinned. “Or really hot. Depends on where you’re standing.”

The elevator stopped and opened. Heather grabbed Barbary and pushed off, soaring across the room. She slyed around the hub. On one side, a number of small spacecraft sat on rails, facing closed hatches in the wall.

“Yukiko, hi, can I take one of the rafts?”

Yukiko straightened from her inspection of a raft’s engines. She carried a torqueless wrench in one hand; a bunch of other tools hung from a sort of apron tied around her waist. She was tiny, only a bit taller than Heather.

“Hi, Heather,” she said. “Yukiko, this is Barbary.”

“Hello, Barbary. I heard you were coming. Welcome to Atlantis.”

“Thanks.” Being recognized everywhere she went felt weird. She supposed she would get used to it.

“I’ll just take my regular raft, okay?” Heather headed toward a blue-gray ship.

“Sure,” Yukiko said. “Have fun. Oh — want to do an errand?”

“Okay. What goes where, and who to?”

Yukiko unfastened a great netted bundle of equipment from the wall and floated it to Heather’s raft. She reached inside the passenger compartment and manipulated some controls. Crab-clawed arms reached out from the raft’s belly and clasped the bundle close.

“Sasha needs it, out on the platform.”

Heather slid into the raft and showed Barbary how to strap in.

“See you later.”

Heather sealed the clear canopy.

“Let’s go,” she said.

The raft glided forward on its rails. The hatch opened, let them pass, and shut behind them. The raft stopped before a second closed hatch. Air hissed loudly as the air lock emptied. The sound diminished to silence.

“Is it like the light switch?” Barbary said. “You work it by talking to it?”

“Right,” Heather said. “You can use hand controls, too, I’ll show you. And you should keep an eye on the gauges, too, just in case something goes wrong.” She pointed to a lighted display. “This one’s for air pressure, so you know the canopy’s properly sealed. And if anything does happen, there’s a survival sack right there.” She pointed to a silvered package in easy reach. “You open it and seal it around you. It’s got its own air supply and an emergency transmitter, and even a window.”

“Is there time to get into it? I mean, if a meteor hits the raft, or something?”

Heather laughed. “If a meteor hit us we’d be vaporized. You wouldn’t have time to get in the sack, but you wouldn’t have time to care, either. The chances of getting hit by a meteor are real low. Around here we’re more likely to run into a loose wrench.”

The gauge displaying air pressure outside the raft dropped to zero. The outer hatch opened. Heather put her hands on the controls.

“You can make it work by telling it how fast you want to be going, but once you get a feeling for it, it’s more fun to drive it.”

The raft slid forward, left its rails, and sailed off into space. All of a sudden they were completely free.

Now Barbary understood why they called the little spaceships “rafts.” She could tell that they were moving because the station fell away behind them, and the acceleration pressed her against her seat, but the motion gave her no perception of speed, no sound of air rushing by or wheels on pavement, just a smooth, peaceful, floating sensation as if they were drifting down a dark, wide river.

“They really let you take this out all by yourself,” Barbary said with wonder.

“Sure.”

“They don’t let kids drive cars, back on earth.”

“That’s dumb. Why not?”

“They don’t think we’re responsible enough, I guess.”

“Hmph,” Heather said, offended. “I’ve never had an accident. I never got drunk and took a raft out to race and nearly ran into the transport, like somebody I could name. And I’ve never run out of fuel, either. It’s adults who do that. Not kids.”

“But you’re not a regular kid.”

“I am too! What do you mean by that?”

“I mean —!” Barbary tried to say exactly what she did mean. “I mean you’re different from most of the other kids I’ve ever met. They’re all kind of silly, and, I don’t know, bored.”

“I get bored sometimes. I can be as silly as anybody, too. Want to see?”

The steering rockets vibrated. The raft spun on its long axis and whipped back to front to back at the same time. The stars and the station spiraled past. Barbary squeezed her eyes shut.

When she looked again, the raft sailed in a perfectly straight line, as if it had never departed from its course. Satisfied and unperturbed, Heather drove on. Barbary felt as if she were still spinning. She clapped her hands over her ears, shut her eyes, and buried her face against her knees.