Chapter 2 Nobody’s Baby
WE TOOK ONE of the janitorial lifts, the better to keep the baby out of sight.
Aft Port Eleven had become the Fairweather’s equivalent of a theater district: The apartments were spangled with retromatted marquees that danced and dazzled, electric script scrolling out the theater names—I counted three separate Orpheums, or was that Orphea?
—while black block letters listed the current offerings for stage and screen: Dance Your Way Home, The Wings of Battle, Twilight Souls, and so on.
Posters with images and start times covered the front windows and blocked light, and food carts studded the walkway selling portable edibles: popcorn, samosas, pastilla, and spring rolls with so many dipping sauces it looked like a painter’s palette.
We found ourselves at the address we sought in the middle of the morning matinee.
THE PALACE, said the glowing blue outlines with gold filigree.
On Earth the signs would have been buzzing from the power needed to set them aflame; on the Fairweather they were silent, all that brilliance compounded of bioluminescence from sources both marine and mycological.
That silence always felt a little eerie to me—as though some vast, hungry creature were lying in wait and holding its breath.
“Give me a moment to get the lay of the land,” I said; Ruthie found a seat on a convenient bench with John standing beside him, blocking anyone’s view into the basket.
I thumbed open the door, passed through the curtained antechamber, and found myself in the theater.
Dim as the place was, it was a minute or two before my eyes adjusted enough to make out details.
It was roughly the same size and layout as Ruthie’s apartment several decks above—but this place’s owner had filled the front room with row after row of sofas upholstered in deep red velvet, all angled to face the screen that stretched the length of the right-hand wall.
Clearly it was a good picture, to judge by the rapt looks and ardent attention on the faces of the people in the audience.
An upright piano near the back wall was being played with well-honed skill by a young woman with light hair.
About half the seats were full, some with solo viewers and others with couples or trios.
They swapped treats back and forth and sipped memory liqueurs, heightening the effect of the flickering scenes.
The image was silvered and shimmering: A young couple were running from something, her in a tattered evening gown and him in a tux missing a sleeve.
The young woman held a baby-shaped bundle in her arms. Frantic, they climbed into a taxicab and sped off as skyscrapers whizzed by in the windows around them.
I had a visceral shock, as I suddenly remembered what it had felt like to ride in an automobile: the leaning around corners, the acceleration and the sense of momentum, the way braking became a weight pressing on you from behind.
Technically the Fairweather was traveling much faster right now than any motorcar could have managed—but you try telling the body that. My stomach swooped.
Back in the ordinary light of the walkway, I gasped and waited for my dazzled eyes to readjust. It had been a long time since I’d tried the flickers—perhaps they’d gotten more potent in the past few decades.
John and Ruthie looked at me with concern.
“That was quick,” John said, putting a steadying hand on my elbow.
Ruthie peered at the poster in the window.
It was a painting of a baby in thick-framed glasses and too-big lab coat.
The young couple, also in lab coats, stood over the baby, mugging comedically but tilted toward one another in a way that any longtime viewer could decode as Romantic Entanglements Ahead.
“The Follies of Youth,” he read in a knowing voice.
“You’ve seen it?”
He nodded eagerly. “What part are they at?” And when I described what I’d seen: “Only about ten more minutes, then,” he said. “It’s about a professor who invents a youth serum that works so well it turns him back into an infant.”
“Shenanigans naturally ensue,” John put in.
Ruthie cackled. “They very much do, yes. At the end of the film the professor is restored to his proper age, the young couple have a passionate kiss, and everyone is exactly the same except better.”
“Very realistic,” I said dryly.
Ruthie tsked. “Nobody goes to the flickers for real life, Aunt Dorothy.”
How he could sound so virtuous about something so frivolous, I’ll never know. The mysteries of a nephew, I suppose.
The passionate kiss was, indeed, very passionate, I found when I slipped back in a few minutes later. Someone sighed, the characters vanished, and the audience stood and stretched as the lights came up.
I went looking for the projectionist.
There she was, a slim brunette with bobbed hair sitting in a high director’s chair at the back.
She was pulling from her head the flat gray skimmer that plucked the images from her mind and cast them out where the rest of us could watch them.
Actual film stock was of course wildly impractical on board a spaceship—even worse than the candles—so instead people donned a skimmer, whose long ribbon fed into a lens and a light on the wall, and beamed their memories out for the entertainment of their fellow passengers.
It was not precisely the same technology used for the memory-books in the Library.
Skimmers didn’t store anything; they merely reflected what the brain beneath was focused on.
How had Ruthie described it? Memory-books were architecture: complex three-dimensional plans of the mind, meant to be re-created precisely.
Skimmers offered something more like photographs, quick snaps of a single moment from one point of view, a brief slice of conscious thought made visible through light and shadow.
People had started by trying to replicate the movies they’d seen on Earth—Buster Keaton, Louise Brooks, Laurel and Hardy.
But even when projectors worked from a script held in their hands, little changes crept in—lines of dialogue sprouted synonyms and paraphrases, hemlines and hat angles shifted—and then at some point someone realized that if you were already projecting a remembered story that had happened to someone else (Laurel, say, or Hardy), then you could probably project a story that had never actually happened at all.
So someone asked: What if Laurel and Hardy had made a picture with Louise Brooks?
That first experiment, the first new film in fifty years, had been a sensation.
While retrospectives still happened from time to time—I saw The Navigator anytime it was showing—by far the bulk was now people imagining new stories, right in the open where anyone with a ticket could watch.
It was an art, really, to dream so persuasively that other people could slip into it.
Like building a café out of raindrops and then inviting someone over for tea.
In the Palace, this theater’s projectionist was staring quietly but quite intently at the piano player, who had stood from the bench and was now hoovering the carpet to clear away the crumbs, popcorn kernels, and all the detritus of silver-screen dreams. At the end of the row she turned to the brunette with a smile—a smile I’d seen more than once this morning.
She was the model for the leading lady in the film I’d just caught the end of.
She was also our abandoned baby’s mother. I’d stake my detective’s privileges on it.
I pulled out my pocket watch and sent John and Ruthie a hasty note, then stepped forward.
The blonde was now peering at the skimmer where her friend held it. “Is it still giving you trouble with the night scenes?”
“They keep wanting to turn into daytime.”
“I’m sure Norris will know what’s wrong.”
“Yes,” said the projectionist, with a wry twist to her lips, “I’m sure my son will be thrilled to be of help.”
“Mrs. Anne Godfrey?” I asked. This address listed two residents.
“That’s me,” said the brunette, still in the director’s chair.
I smiled at the blonde. “Then you must be Miss Flora Tilburn.”
“That’s right,” she said. Her twinkling eye ran down and then up my figure, making Mrs. Godfrey’s brow crease.
I smiled lightly at Miss Tilburn. “I think I may have something that belongs to you,” I said.
With exquisite timing, John and Ruthie came in the door. The baby had apparently behaved himself long enough, because he began to cry almost as soon as they entered the theater.
I kept my eyes on Miss Tilburn, who was staring at the baby with her mouth hanging open in an attitude of complete surprise that was rather fetching, honestly.
Mrs. Godfrey, however, had hunched herself into a ball, guilt splashing a dull red over her cheeks.
“What is that?” Miss Tilburn asked.
“That, I believe, is your child,” I replied.
The baby helpfully cried harder. His grasping hands opened and closed like hungry little starfish.
“Hang on,” Ruthie muttered, “I’ve got something here…” And he pulled from his coat pocket one of the bottles I’d made for him. Thus muffled, the baby resumed feeding. And staring.
His mother was doing the same. “I don’t…” Either Miss Tilburn was genuinely flummoxed or she was the greatest actress anyone on the Fairweather had ever seen. “I’m not…” She shook her head, helpless, gazing down as if hypnotized into eyes the exact shape and shade of her own.
I turned to the brunette. “Mrs. Godfrey? Can you clarify?”
The projectionist burst into tears.