Chapter 2 Nobody’s Baby
FOR DISCRETION’S SAKE, we put the baby back into the basket while we took the lift upward to Deck Four: Ruthie with the child, John with a bag of supplies, and me with too many misgivings.
On Four there was no Greenway of light and leaves dividing the ship into port and starboard, just row after row of long businesslike corridors in soft grays and faceted glass.
The floors were dark retromatted wood, sturdy and scuffed from three hundred years of hurrying feet.
And up here, on the aft side of a small quad with a few benches and one lone red maple beneath a tiny solar lamp, was the two-story space that housed the Detectives’ Bureau, where my colleagues and I worked perpetually to untangle the twisted web of human crime, malfeasance, and deceit.
“The Bureau!” Ruthie whispered in awe, clutching the baby basket to his chest. John’s glance at him was fondly exasperated.
I rolled my eyes. My nephew spent his days elbow-deep in ten thousand people’s glittering memories, or writing complex chains of logic and thought for a mind the size of a small city—and he was impressed by the place where half a dozen nosy people did the majority of their paperwork and made a little coffee to stave off terminal tedium.
No accounting for taste, I suppose.
Ruthie was all aquiver as I led the way into the waiting room on the ground floor, plush with ochre sofas and innocuous magazines and, luckily for me, empty of people waiting.
Normally I’d have stopped him here—but normally he wasn’t carrying anything we needed to keep secret.
“I’ll just take the basket, if you like,” I said casually, reaching out for the handle.
Ruthie pulled it out of my reach, causing the baby to give a gurgle of protest and John to go waxen with alarm.
“Oh no,” my nephew said with all the determination of a horse that’s got the bit and wants to gallop, and there’s nothing a mere human can do to stop it.
“If the baby’s going in, I’m coming, too. ”
I groused, but I yielded. “Very well—but I warn you, Rutherford Talmadge, you’ve built it up so much in your head it’ll never compare to what you’ve envisioned.”
“We’ll see about that,” he insisted.
I groused a little more, just to make my objections felt, and then led our little troupe up the stairs at the back. I tried valiantly to ignore the small, awed intake of breath from my nephew behind me.
Yes, there were our detectives’ offices, all six of them, doors and everything: two glass boxes each on three sides of the upper story.
There was the unrestricted retromat, and the infobank with access to databases most civilians would never see the inside of, and a long sturdy research table between them.
And there was the kitchenette, in a small frame in the center of the main space, with its icebox and autochef and a sink a single person wide.
Ruthie wouldn’t know how to read the centuries’ accumulated memories the way a ship’s detective could. The way I did.
There was the gash in the floor where Baxenden had tackled a very small man with a very large knife seventy-five years ago; a persistent stain on the counter where some kind of acid had eaten into the tile barely one decade into our journey.
The plants in the corners, which Ogilvy babied with distilled water and nitrogenous elixirs and eggshells mixed with coffee grounds—but only when he was stuck on some particularly difficult case.
And the glass in Leloup’s office, the inside surface of which was half covered in tiny slips of paper carefully taped at right angles to one another—he moved them around constantly as clues blossomed and theories coalesced, but the angles always stayed exact and the space between slips was always one precise centimeter, no more and no less.
And a glimpse of my own office: a much-scarred desk, a squeaky chair in need of reupholstering, a small sofa with a divot made by three hundred years’ worth of sitting, and a pile of old books stacked up in the corner of one arm.
The Bureau wasn’t just a room to me, it was home.
I’d spent more of my waking life here than I had in any of the various apartments I’d lived in on board the Fairweather— or even on Earth, before Embarkation.
My memories might have been mostly stored in the Library three decks above, but their duplicates haunted this room like friendly familial ghosts.
My nephew held the baby basket up and whispered, “Remember this, little one. Your first time at the Detectives’ Bureau.”
“Babies that small can’t form memories,” I reminded him.
The baby made a small chirrup, reminding me in turn that I had a job to do.
Fellow detective Meherbai Petit, in close-tailored tweed, was at the kitchenette’s abbreviated counter measuring spiced powder into a carafe. She looked up and smiled, creases lining her warm brown skin at the corners of her eyes. “Hullo, Dot,” she said. “Fancy a cup?”
“Love one,” I said. Coffee or tea or espresso or chai, it didn’t matter: Everything Meherbai brewed was delicious—and could jolt the dead into wakefulness. She did for caffeinated beverages what Monet had done for water lilies.
She cocked her head, brown eyes glinting with interest. “And something for the baby?”
Behind me, Ruthie gave a muffled gasp. “How did she know?” he whispered.
Since the child was currently waving its precious little fists around in the open air above the rim of the basket, it wasn’t a particularly staggering leap of logic on Meherbai’s part.
“What else can you tell us?” Ruthie demanded, delighted.
Meherbai set the milk to heating and raised a brow at me.
I shrugged and waved: Please yourself.
The other detective stepped forward and bent over the basket, her short dark waves falling over her temples. The baby made the sounds babies make when faces come into view. His fist curled around one long brown finger when Meherbai held out a hand.
The detective smiled, her smoky voice amused. “Well, it’s a human. Brand-new—four months, maybe? Five?” She waggled her finger, moving the tiny pale fist that clenched tight around it. “Someone’s taken good care of you, that’s certain.”
“You think so?” Ruthie asked.
“Unless you made the basket and the clothes?” My nephew shook his head.
“Then yes—those are old patterns, and well remembered. Things someone hasn’t had cause to think about in hundreds of years, but they came out perfectly.
Or imperfectly, which is much harder to do.
Look at the variation in the basket weave, and the lace on the cloth. ”
“Why abandon a baby they cared about?” John asked.
“Let’s go ask them,” I replied. I’d taken the opportunity to sidle up to the infobank and do a quick search for who might have retromatted those objects in the past few months. Only one home had done both a basket and a piece of fabric of that type: an address on Aft Port Eleven.
“You’d best take your chai to go,” Meherbai said, “before—”
“What,” said someone with genteel horror, “is that?”
I closed my eyes briefly, calling silently for strength. It was always wise to prepare myself before beginning any conversation with Leloup. “Surely you’ve seen babies before, Alo?s?” I asked, and turned around.
There he was, my cordial nemesis, one irritating inch taller than me.
He was currently just past the peak of middle age, with a small mustache, a soft paternal face, and a mind like a mandoline.
“I have also seen murderers, madame,” he huffed, “but would be equally displeased to find one of them in my office this morning.”
“Hang on—this baby hasn’t killed anyone,” Ruthie said, staunch in the infant’s defense.
“Perhaps it has,” Leloup returned crisply. “Childbirth is often so dangerous. This child may have been the instrument of one—or more—of its parents’ demise. Until you find the mother, you cannot know.”
“Perhaps you should interrogate the baby,” Meherbai put in, eyes twinkling. I scowled at her for encouraging him.
Too late. “Would that I could!” Leloup said with a sigh, and a finger to his mustache.
“But, alas, this baby has no identification number to put at the top of the form—it has not paid for a berth on our fine ship, so it has no home, no bank account, no memory-book, none of the usual methods we use to distinguish one person from another. How can you interrogate a person who does not exist?”
“Oh, if that’s all,” Ruthie said, “I expect you might as well ask how a person who does not exist could soil his nappies so many times in one day—but this little man seems to have already solved that philosophical conundrum.”
Leloup gave my nephew the particular, profound look of consternation only Ruthie could elicit.
My nephew simply smiled, innocent as the dawn.
I was delighted to see Leloup rendered speechless. However, it couldn’t last: Best to leave before he found his tongue again to lecture us. “Shall we go see what his mother can tell us?” I asked.
John shook hands farewell with Meherbai, I nodded regally to Leloup and took my chai with one hand and Ruthie’s elbow with the other, and the little group of us passed once again through the waiting room and out of the Bureau.