Nobody’s Baby
Dorothy!
The shipmind’s mental voice erupted into my dreams and dragged me into unwilling wakefulness. “Whuzzat? Ferry?” I said, trying to grasp the reins of thoughts that had been galloping elsewhere a moment before.
Your nephew is on the way over, Ferry went on, words tumbling over themselves like a shower of pebbles in my mind.
He said to wake you immediately. The shipmind coughed, a trick it had picked up from Ruthie himself when there was something unpleasant to say.
I think there’s a problem with the child.
“You think?” I asked, before logic caught up with me. “No, of course, you wouldn’t be able to tell, would you?”
I think I might, in time, Ferry went on. A few years, perhaps? When he’s eaten and drunk enough retromatted food that his body holds on to the molecular markers.
Well that was an image to haunt one, for certain. I imagined Peregrine’s toddler shape amorphous and misty, like the ghost of a child wandering the darkened decks.
I shivered involuntarily.
It was just before dawn, according to the nocturnal blue glow of the solar lamps.
They dyed my fern shawl shadow colors as I flung it over my pyjamas and took my place in the window seat.
Soon enough a pair of huddled figures appeared on the corner, breezing behind a drunk woman lounging on a bench overlooking the Greenway.
Peregrine’s wails were audible even with my doors and windows shut, and I saw the woman’s head swivel around and her whole body tilt sideways, trying to follow the unwonted sound of a crying child in a place no child should be.
I hurried downstairs and wrenched open the front door.
Ruthie and John and Peregrine barged in, Ruthie wild-eyed and clutching the howling infant to his shoulder. John immediately locked the door behind them, checked the curtains were snug, and went to the kitchen to perform the same ritual there.
“Honestly,” I said, rubbing the grit from my eyes and hoping the rest of the neighborhood had either slept through the racket or failed to identify the source. “We’re going to have to teach you fellows what lullabies are for.”
Ruthie didn’t so much as crack a smile. “Someone tried to take Peregrine.”
That woke me up, and no mistake. “What? When? Who?”
“Half an hour ago. No idea who.”
John came back out of the kitchen and guided Ruthie into a chair. Ruthie sat without looking down, his face drawn and his knuckles white.
Baby Peregrine yowled and beat at one shoulder with his tiny fists. I could feel a slight hum at the very edges of my mind, which meant Ferry was probably still listening in.
“Here,” John said, and reached for the child.
Ruthie made a noise like he would reject this, then visibly forced himself to let go and gave the baby to his husband. John began pacing the living room, making soothing sounds.
I sat in the other armchair and picked up my knitting; it would give my hands something to fidget with until the crying stopped.
We were lucky: Not five minutes later, the baby was snoring and drooling into John’s coat seams. Wisely, he kept bouncing.
Ruthie leaned forward, pitching his voice low. “After we left Medical, I sat down to rest my eyes a moment in the living room, while John washed his blanket. He tells me you stopped by with paperwork sometime after that?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I slept through you, and I just kept on sleeping. All the advice I’ve been reading says that when the baby sleeps, you should sleep, too.
So I did. John stayed up a bit reading over dinner, then headed upstairs for a shower.
He checked on us again, and then decided to get some sleep himself.
” Ruthie swallowed. “And then, next thing I know, I’m waking up and the door is open and there’s someone standing over me, reaching for Peregrine. ”
I shuddered. “Description?”
“Thought it was a man. Short hair, men’s jacket, thin build. His face was in shadow from the light coming in the door behind him. And then…” He wheezed out the ghost of a laugh. “Peregrine woke up. And he did not want to. And he began to protest.”
“I heard him from upstairs,” John put in as he continued to circuit the room.
“And the kidnapper didn’t expect it, because he jerked back.” Ruthie’s face turned smug beneath the pallor. “And then I began to protest. Rather strenuously. With a fist.”
“You hit him?”
“Unfortunately, no—it is quite hard to issue a decisive and shattering blow to an enemy’s jawbone when you are trying to do it around a very loud, very fragile baby. But I was going in for a second attempt anyway, and this one would have been a face ruiner.”
“And a hand ruiner,” John muttered.
“The intruder turned and ran—John chased him a ways down the deck, but lost him when he turned into the Greenway.”
“The lock was wiped when he entered,” John added. “So we can’t trace him that way.”
And I couldn’t help, either, Ferry added plaintively.
The shipmind could be queried about any individual’s present location, but for privacy’s sake didn’t store records of passenger movement.
And there were a hundred perfectly legitimate, innocent reasons why a person would be in the Greenway in the middle of the night.
“So we decided to come here,” Ruthie finished.
“Because what good is having an aunt for a ship’s detective if you have to do all your own detecting?
” He planted his hands on his knees and sat up in the armchair.
“I demand a full investigation into Crimes Committed and their potential involvement in the first attempted kidnapping of a minor that the Fairweather has seen in three hundred years.”
Oh, stars save us.
I dropped my head into my hands. Crimes Committed was a myth from the Antikythera Club, a running joke about some mysterious villain who collected all the dangerous inventions and frightening schemes club members created (when they weren’t dreaming up useful technology and advancing scientific knowledge, which devices were naturally passed along to the Board).
If Crimes Committed was real, that was probably what Violet was up to—but I didn’t want to think Violet would ever be a menace to my family.
“Allow me to investigate on my own, please, Ruthie. The three of you can stay here—I’ll ask for a guard, and have Ferry revoke all accesses but mine and yours until we can figure out what’s happened. ”
Ruthie grumbled. John said, “I’ll have to call in for my shift.”
“Wait—don’t do that,” I said, as an idea occurred. John was the most talented mixer of memory cocktails at the Antikythera Club. A place of overstuffed furniture, decadent food, and wild and wide-ranging intellects. “You and Ruthie should both go in. And you should take Peregrine with you.”
“I don’t see how cocktails are going to help this situation,” Ruthie protested, though his eyes spoke of yearning.
“Couldn’t hurt,” John murmured, mid-bounce.
“Think of it this way,” I said. “You could stay here, alone, in a place they know you’ll run to, exhausted and fearful.
We already know the intruder can bypass the door locks.
Or … you could take Peregrine to the Antikythera, where he will be the absolute center of at least a dozen wide-awake, brilliant people’s rapt attention—and where entry is also heavily restricted and the entrance monitored around the clock. ”
Ruthie gave a little laugh, desperation ringing in every note of it. “Well,” he said, “that settles it. Cocktails it is.”
I finished my coffee, decided the ship-wide announcement couldn’t wait, sent it off urgently for the Board’s approval, and escorted my little trio to the Antikythera Club’s doorway.
Gaskill was the door-warden on duty this morning, a broad-shouldered, stone-faced woman I’d never once seen crack a smile. She stared for a long moment at the baby, whom Ruthie had reclaimed and was holding close to his chest like a bear cradling a wayward cub.
Slowly, Gaskill leaned down and peered into the child’s eyes.
Peregrine blinked up at her innocently—and burped.
Gaskill reared back with widened eyes, but thumbed open the wide front door. “Two guests,” she said, her voice a low rumble. Was that an amused tilt at the corners of her mouth? “You can sign for both of you, Miss Gentleman.”
“I’m not staying,” I said, and so I put down Peregrine’s name on the guest ledger, bid farewell to my nephew and his beloved, and walked through the brightening day to Flora Tilburn’s secret apartment.
It was clearly time for a more thorough investigation of the premises.
The lock was still wiped, the food still wilted, the frocks still somehow sad on their lonely hangers.
Something about sequin fabric in shadow never failed to seem tragic.
I shut the closet doors and went through the bedroom—and there, between the mattress and its retromatted frame, I found a slim hardback bound in blue cloth, almost filled with handwriting in blue ink.
Flora Tilburn had been keeping a diary.
I didn’t even have to pretend I wasn’t going to read it. This was an official investigation, a child’s safety was at stake, and nobody was around to chide me about privacy and discretion. For once, I didn’t have to feel guilty about indulging my curiosity.
So how perverse of me to feel that pang of guilt, regardless.
Flora had gone to such lengths to hide her secrets from everyone, and some part of me hated having to undo all that work and hurt her in a way she didn’t deserve.
But more of me wanted to learn what she’d been up to—so into the diary I went.
Dear Diary, she began, because of course she did.
This is how they always start in the flickers, so this is how I’ll begin. I need to remember everything, and now that I’m not updating my memory-book in the Library this is the only way.