Nobody’s Baby #2
Oh, I shouldn’t have liked making her laugh so much. But I did—the pleasure of it spread warmth through my chest, sweet as honey and twice as clinging. I’d better be careful or I’d never get free.
Violet sighed in pleasure. “My dear detective, that’s the opposite of a murder! However did it happen?” she asked, when at last she got hold of herself.
I leaned on the counter, smirking. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
“I absolutely would,” she confirmed. “People are always asking.”
“People ask a yarn store proprietor about how to have babies?”
She lowered those knowing eyes beneath her lashes, looking demure and humble and a lot of other descriptors that weren’t true. “I hear things, is all. You know that’s one of the rules people are most excited to break, once we’re planetside?”
“It won’t be a rule then,” I objected.
“It will still feel like one. Like they’re doing something forbidden, except there won’t be consequences for them to worry about.
The purest kind of thrill.” I could think of others, but I wasn’t about to say so.
Violet went on, “I predict a veritable explosion of infants that first year just as soon as people can pop them out.”
“Well that’s an image.”
She cocked a head at me. “You don’t want to be a parent?”
“Being an aunt suits me better,” I said. Then paused. Then gathered my courage. Then went on. “You?”
“Oh.” She laughed, with the kind of inward sting that one reserved for one’s worst decisions. “I’m long since done with all of that.”
I wasn’t going to ask for the story. Not now, not here. But my not-asking was extremely loud in the silence that followed.
Violet St. Owen sailed the conversation blithely past the gap. “Are you going to have to convene the Crime Committee, do you think?”
Now it was my turn to dread a question, it seemed. I shouldn’t tell her anything. “I’m not certain,” I confessed instead. “It doesn’t appear to have been done on purpose.”
“So not retromatted? Or cloned?” Her eyes widened. “You mean someone carried it for nine months? In space?” She paled, and her voice trembled. “Is she…?”
“She’s just gotten out of Medical,” I said. “Reembodied. Though the baby was born five months ago.”
She chewed her lip. “So it wasn’t the birth that did it?”
“She said she had some kind of stroke.”
“That happened to my sister, when she gave birth to my niece.” It was barely more than a whisper.
Her too-careful expression was like a knife to my heart; I had to blunt that edge. “Ruthie’s petitioning for custody,” I said.
I’d hoped to make her laugh again, but instead she simply relaxed, resting her forearms on the counter and slumping over them as if some thread running through her had been snipped free. “Glad to hear someone in all this is being sensible. Ruthie’s exactly who I’d want to have raising a child.”
“Really?” I asked. “My nephew? Tallish, brown hair, once forgot to eat or bathe for two days because he was excited about a script he’d written for the shipmind? That Ruthie?”
“Of course. It’s something of a running joke, you know, at the Antikythera Club.”
“I didn’t realize you were a member.”
Her smirk overflowed with secrets as she leaned forward. “I’m not.”
“You just hear things,” I breathed.
She nodded. “Everyone knows your nephew is the best scriptwriter on this ship. And the Antikythera Club knows why: because he’s good at breaking a complicated process down into simpler steps.
The Fairweather is an extraordinary creature, really.
Adaptable. Which is to say: The shipmind can learn, and grow.
It’s not so much that your nephew gives Ferry commands—it’s more like he’s teaching the shipmind how to solve its own problems.” That tempting mouth of hers turned up at the corners.
“So from a certain point of view, Ruthie’s been a parent for three centuries now.
How much more practice could someone need? ”
“I’m fairly sure the nappies were a novel experience.” Violet laughed again, and something strained in me relaxed its fibers and unknotted. “We’re calling the baby Peregrine, until he tells us otherwise.”
“Then let’s find you some yarn for the tyke.”
I came away with a stitch chart I could adapt to fit our new small human, as well as several skeins of a cotton so soft it practically floated, in shades of blue from sky to midnight, and one of silver so I could pick out stars in duplicate stitch.
After a good dinner and with a glass of port to hand, I cozied up in my bedroom window seat on the upper story, casting on the first row while the neighborhood all around me enjoyed its evening.
One stitch for the young woman playing violin on the corner, the echoes singing up and down the decks.
One stitch each for the two young men strolling arm in arm out of a restaurant.
Trios and groups, friends and families, I counted them all out beneath my hands as the solar lamps dimmed and the storefronts spilled gold light onto the retromatted wood planks.
One stitch each, every stitch a second, a single moment in time frozen in fiber. To give to an infant—because time was the real gift, passed from one generation to the next.
It was easy to think that time was infinite, here on the Fairweather.
Your body wore out and was replaced; your memories were refreshed with a sip of a drink or the press of a button.
Easy to think we were standing still—but really, we were flying through the universe at incredible speeds.
And the same end was waiting for us that would have met us on Old Earth.
It was just going to take a little longer to get there, that was all.
The faint sound of a bell, and a pair of furtive silhouettes slipped into Violet’s store. Fellow honest knitters like myself? Or passengers more like Violet, with dangerous ideas about power and the law?
I thought the law was the necessary foundation of a solid society; she thought the authorities weren’t to be trusted with too much power. If she was right, then I was wrong, and that rankled. But if I was right, and Violet was wrong—then why did I still want her so much?
I knit until I was sure the question wouldn’t keep me awake.