Nobody’s Baby
BACK AT THE Bureau, the day was officially in full swing, everyone present and accounted for.
Baxenden was at his desk, humming into his mustache while comparing a spectrum of lipstick samples on small cards in his stout hands.
Forensics of materials was something of a specialty of his.
He’d been a bricklayer once, before finding a body hidden in a wall and asking the kind of questions that annoyed the kind of people who left bodies in walls.
Embarking on the Fairweather had saved his life and given him a new profession; he’d been the first ship’s detective to sign up.
Behind the glass of his office wall, Ogilvy had a book over his gorgeous face—a true potboiler, from the look of it—but the sounds coming from under the pages were defined and definite snores.
Must be between theft cases, or else he’d be retromatting some kind of mulch for the potted palm or pollinating one of the seventeen species of orchid in his office hothouse.
Next door, Mortimer Dellow, tall and authoritative with skin like umber, was carefully scraping flakes of paint from some Old Master–ish thing I didn’t recognize.
There were a few real antiques aboard the Fairweather, so every now and then someone retromatted a copy and tried to claim it as an original Earth piece.
The hard part wasn’t identifying the forgeries—retromatted paint was molecularly marked, after all—but getting the victim to admit they’d been deceived in the first place.
Embarrassment covered up nearly as many crimes as guilt did.
Mortimer had an air of frigid capability, like a vampire or a solicitor, but underneath it was a heart that beat with even more warmth than Ruthie’s, and he had an instinct for people’s hidden wounds that made him one of the kindest men I knew.
Meherbai and Leloup had dug in at opposite long sides of the research table.
She was flipping through a volume I recognized as the Bureau’s official copy of the Fairweather’s legal compendium—the complete one, which covered not only the on-board regulations we were presently operating under, but the much more complex and multivalent codes that would become law only when we made planetfall.
Base system of government, processes for adding laws we’d found useful on the journey, franchise rights and restrictions, the whole life-changing, mind-numbing weight of bureaucracy and justice.
Insofar as we’d managed to describe it, at any rate.
Meherbai tended to see the law as clothing: Proper fit was important, so alterations could be made in service of comfort and safety. A skilled tailor could make something so elegantly fitted that the body wouldn’t even feel it was constrained.
Leloup, on the other hand, tended to view the law as a scalpel, which he used to carve away the parts of people that didn’t fit the law’s ideal shape.
Personally, I took offense at that. Because my specialty was memory crimes, which was a fancy way of saying it was my job to make sure people kept all the most essential parts of themselves.
Once upon a time, in my former life, I’d done crossword puzzles to keep my mind limber; now, I decoded people the same way, letter by letter, until the whole array became clear.
And the more I understood people, the less I liked it when someone wanted them to all be precisely the same. Leloup found comfort in predictability, in routine, and more than anything else he believed the world existed for him to be comfortable in.
I had decided centuries ago: My calling was to bedevil him at every possible opportunity.
It certainly looked like I was doing a bang-up job of it today: He had removed his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves—I’d have sworn he’d even managed to press them in place somehow, so precisely identical were both folded-over cuffs—and was beetling his brows at Meherbai.
“The precedents for punishing stowaways are many and date back to the Architects themselves, Miss Petit—”
“That’s because we found the last stowaway three centuries ago, after a whole month on board,” Meherbai retorted.
“And those were deliberate crimes—I don’t think you can argue this child intended to stow away.
” She twirled her enamel fountain pen with a flourish.
“Unless you want to make the claim that every gamete on board the Fairweather is a stowaway in potentia.”
Leloup sniffed. “I’m sure I don’t wish to discuss gametes at all unless compelled to.
There should be no need, when all our bodies are built.
There are consequently only three possible ways to identify a new person on board: one, as a stowaway; two, as a fraud—which I think would also require intention, wouldn’t you agree?
—or three, as an automaton, a created thing.
” His eyes kindled. “Now there’s a thought—there are quite a few regulations on the books for automata—”
“Am I allowed an opinion?” I interrupted. “Or is this a legal matter above my fumbling understanding?”
“You cannot understand,” Leloup went on, mopping his brow, “because there is no procedure to be understood—”
“But there is,” I said. “There is a very carefully crafted procedure for creating a new identity for a new person. We just didn’t expect to need it for a few hundred years yet.”
Meherbai lit up and began flipping to the back of the compendium.
Leloup gaped at me as if I’d suggested something utterly degenerate.
Like cannibalism. Or fun. “We cannot just pull planetary law forward at our own convenience! It was intended for a very particular political situation and moment in time. It is not a chess piece to be moved about for a player’s advantage. ”
“But it’s already on the books, and I think people will find that reassuring,” I countered. “The baby is going to be shocking enough to most passengers; anything we can do to make it less disruptive will surely be of use.”
Leloup’s mustache was trembling like a butterfly about to cause the storm of the century. “You think we should tell them about the baby.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You think we can keep a whole human hidden from them until he turns twenty? And then just pretend he’s always been here?”
Leloup fussed at his perfectly rolled cuffs and smoothed the sharp points of his shirt collar. “I think telling the passengers that someone has given birth will be a disaster for civil order and general calm.”
Even though I’d had much the same thought, hearing it come out of my nemesis’s mouth turned my opinion around a full 180 degrees. “Well, we know we have to tell the Board of Directors,” I began. “And possibly the Crime Committee.”
“Offense: one baby,” Meherbai murmured, and only grinned when I glared at her.
“So that’s at least twenty people who are inevitably going to find out,” I went on. “When was the last time you knew twenty people who could all keep the same secret?”
Leloup drew himself up. “Frequently, Miss Gentleman!” He raised a hand and began listing them off. “The Board’s backup memory-books, the Hotchkiss Incident, the comet we had to turn to avoid— What is so blasted amusing, may I ask?”
For I was laughing at him helplessly, a sputtering chortle he clearly found offensive. “You just listed off a series of supposedly secret things every passenger on this ship definitely knows about—to prove that the Board is discreet?”
“Ugh, very well.” Leloup rose to his feet with all the wounded majesty of a monarch who had just been dethroned by his own barons.
“You want the passengers to be told? You may tell them. And I will direct to you all the inquiries that result—all questions about reproductive regulations, risks of the baby, risks to the baby, and other forbidden things people now want to try and other fail-safes they worry might also not work. Oh.” He paused, and a hint of a smile slithered over his lips. “And also yours? All the paperwork.”
Well. That knocked the amusement right out of me.
“And, of course…” Leloup’s smile grew, oozing self-satisfaction.
“If you’re going to give this baby all the rights of planetary identity, then he must be given their restrictions as well.
No Library access. No memory-book. No new embodiments.
” His eyes gleamed, glacial and smug. “When he dies, he dies.”
With that finishing blow, Leloup retreated to the right-angled safety and solitude of his office.
Meherbai pushed the law book my way. “Another cup of chai?” she asked sympathetically.
“Please,” I said, shivering. “I could use the warmth.”
She moved toward the kitchenette, and I went looking for the first batch of forms.