Barbary

“Oh.” She could think of several questions, but she was afraid she might upset Heather again, so for the moment she kept her silence. Besides, Heather turned on the two terminals and began to show her how to use hers. Almost everyone had computers on earth, so Barbary knew something about them. But it seemed to her that they always judged and graded her and reported her failures to adults.

“I won’t hang over your shoulder,” Heather said. “But I’ll be right here if you need to ask anything.” She set both terminals to respond on the screen, rather than by speaking, so she and Barbary could work without interfering with each other.

“Okay.”

Heather perched cross-legged on a chair and immersed herself in her own work.

Barbary’s computer was smarter than any other she had ever met. And though it acted friendly, it knew a great deal about her. All her records were in memory somewhere, and while she supposed she should not care if a computer had read them, she hoped Heather had not done so. She asked the machine if anybody could read anyone else’s records.

It scrolled its reply on the screen. “No, that requires special permission.”

Barbary felt relieved. She was not very adept at schoolwork.

The computer chatted with her. It never forgot anything she told it, and it never made fun of her for forgetting things it told to her.

But Barbary realized that it was doing what computers always did. She stood and pushed away the keyboard. In the low gravity her chair tumbled over backward and bounced across the room.

Heather blinked at her, far away.

“What’s the matter?”

“This thing is testing me.”

Heather looked confused for a moment. “I guess you could call it that. It’s finding out what you know so it can tailor lessons for you.”

“That’s what people always say it’s doing, but what they mean is, it’s testing you. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t think of it that way. But even if I did, I probably wouldn’t have thought to say so — why are you so upset? All the teaching computers I ever heard of work like this.”

“I don’t like to be tested — I particularly don’t like to be tested when I don’t know I’m being tested.” She recalled one time in particular, when she had been judged by people hidden behind a one-way mirror. Without talking to her, they had decided that she had to go to a different foster family. She “was not adjusting well,” whatever that meant. The original family was easier to live with, and a lot more fun, than most of the people she had stayed with. No one, not even the family, ever could or would explain why she had to leave. She had been moved around so often that she would have been glad to stay in a difficult place if she just did not have to move again. But the juvenile authority said she must move; so she moved.

“It is just trying to help you, Barbary.”

“Uh-huh. I’ve heard that before.”

“What did it say that made you so mad?”

“I just don’t like being tested and graded all the time! I thought maybe here things would be different.”

“But it isn’t grading you.”

“Then why’s it doing what it’s doing?”

“It needs to find out what you know already about different subjects. Otherwise it’d have to start from the beginning on everything, which would drive you crazy, it’d be so boring, or it’d have to say, Oh, she’s twelve, she ought to be

here

— but nobody is ever right on the average for their age in everything, so it would be behind you or ahead of you, and you wouldn’t like that either.”

“But it will tell everybody what I’m behind on, and they’ll say I’m stupid.”

“Stupid! Anybody who thinks you’re stupid is stupid!”

Barbary glared at the floor with her fists clenched.

“Hey, Barbary,” Heather said.

“Yeah.”

“You can trust me. Honest.”

Barbary raised her head. The screen glowed as the patient computer waited for a reply, now and then scrolling out a line of encouragement or a hint. The letters blurred and Barbary blinked them back into focus.

“I’m trying,” she whispered. “I guess it must not seem like it. But I am.”

Heather hopped off her chair, came around the edge of computer table, and hugged her hard.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s going to be okay.”

o0o

Once Barbary knew the computer would not report on her to some social worker, she began to enjoy working with it. The time passed so fast she hardly noticed it.

She squeezed her eyes shut, opened them, and looked at the computer screen again. She still had trouble bringing the letters into focus, and she wondered what was wrong. Finished with his prowling, Mick curled near her, purring. For a while he tried to catch the cursor with his paw, but after batting at it a few times, he recognized the glass screen as some weird kind of window and gave up trying to catch the little moving light behind it.

“Hey, Heather, do you have any aspirin?”

Heather glanced up from her own work.

“Sure. What’s wrong?”

“My eyes kind of hurt. I never worked on a computer this long before.”

“Really? This isn’t very long at all.”