Nobody’s Baby
BACK AT THE Palace, the poster on the window was advertising a new flicker, starting in fifteen minutes: Alias Lady Danger, it read, all silhouettes and shadows.
A skyscraper was somehow also a burning cigarette; another was the barrel of a gun; behind them all loomed a svelte woman in a silver frock, her red lips the only spot of color in the image.
Perhaps I deserved a little respite. I nodded to Flora and Anne, and settled in for the show.
Flora’s diary had been right: Anne really was a brilliant projectionist. The scenario itself was a bauble—but the faces, the costumes, the dialogue she put in brought it to life, as Flora’s fingers poured out a stream of glittering notes on the piano to keep the whole thing bobbing along.
In the flicker, a lady detective had to solve the murder of a wealthy industrialist and was torn between the industrialist’s dashing young heir and a quiet housemaid with a murky past. Standard stuff, but sharply and snappily done—at the end of the film the heir had been revealed as the killer, the housemaid had been revealed as the true heiress, and she and the detective waltzed off into the sunset together.
If only real life could be so easily and quickly resolved.
The night scenes did indeed try to flip to day—little stutters in the frames, like something fighting to get free.
I squinted my eyes against them defensively.
Anne cleverly turned one into a thunderstorm, which turned an otherwise cliché balcony love scene into something sinister and fraught.
When the lights came up I leaned back in my chair and waited.
Flora went for the hoover. A tallish older man with hair like wings over his ears moved to the back, plucking the skimmer from Anne’s head. “I know just what the problem is,” he said eagerly, and pulled out a slim screwdriver.
Jason Ipcar could wait: I wanted to watch this technician at work.
The inside of a skimmer was all metal pins and memory-glass tubing.
I could hardly tell where anything started or finished, but Winged Hair tightened something on one side, long fingers sure and steady.
“You’re just too mighty for this poor device, Mother,” said the man I now guessed was Norris.
“Your night scenes are so vivid that you set one of the connections loose.”
“Would imagining more contrast in the scene help any, if it happens again?” Anne asked. “I could always go a bit more Caligari with things. Or you could always teach me how to fix it myself.”
“And give up my secrets? Never,” Norris replied. Flora rolled her eyes and Anne laughed fondly; this had the cadence of an old and much-cherished argument. “Here,” the man said, resting the skimmer on Anne’s head again. “Give her a try.”
The projectionist glanced around; aside from myself, the rest of the audience had wandered back out onto the deck in search of food. She caught my eye and something defiant rose up in her face. “Would you like to see the night I found the baby, Miss Gentleman?”
“Why, yes,” I said, smiling serenely and ignoring the way Norris’s eyes widened and Flora’s shoulders stiffened at the mention of the baby. “What a good idea.”
The lights went down at a touch of the projectionist’s hand. And there on the wall was the Fairweather at night, its long decks quiescent, its solar lamps turned silver with imitation moonlight.
Flora’s secret apartment loomed onscreen like a Gothic manor, as a ghostly hand I presumed was Anne Godfrey’s reached out and keyed open the door with a touch. “You had access?” I asked.
“I took a chance that Flora would have programmed me into the lock,” Anne said.
“Of course I would,” Flora murmured.
There was the living room, a dark mass. Norris truly had repaired the skimmer, for the black was steady and unrelenting until Anne-on-screen toggled on the lights. “Gosh, that’s bleak,” Flora said. “Look how lonely I was without you, Anne.”
“This is about when I heard the baby crying,” Anne said, voice thick, and the perspective began to move quite rapidly toward the stairs to the upper story.
“Wait,” I said, and pointed to a corner of the screen. “Can you show me that more clearly?”
The image paused and spooled back. Shapes on the edge were fuzzier than the center but there on a stand, beneath the lens in the wall, was a telltale brim and circle shape. Imperfectly remembered, but unmistakable.
“Does that look like a skimmer to you, Mr. Norris?” I asked.
He gazed back at me, eyes wide. “It certainly does, Miss Gentleman.”
“And what if I asked you where it had gone?”
He smiled politely. “I’m sure I couldn’t say.”
“That is a skimmer.” Anne’s eyes sharpened as she turned to fix Flora with an accusing glance. There was only one place Flora would have gotten that equipment, and Anne and everyone else in the room knew it. “You told Norris about the baby, but you couldn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t know how—” Flora stammered, but Anne was already turning away and striding out of the room into the kitchen. “Wait!” Flora hurried after, explanations and apologies already tumbling like rose petals from her lips.
I turned back to Norris. “You are the expert, aren’t you, sir? How easy is it for one of these experiences to be falsified?” I waved my hand at the skimmer, the lens, and Anne’s projected memory all together.
Norris’s eye kindled, as I knew it would.
What technician doesn’t love to wax authoritative on their most passionate subject?
“About as easy as it is to lie, more or less,” he said.
“They drift, the same as all human memories do, whether you’re watching a projection or interrogating someone’s testimony of events.
And of course strongly creative, imaginative people can fill in all sorts of details that may or may not have been actually present at the time. ”
I nodded. “Imaginative people like your mother, you mean.”
“Precisely.”
“She is obviously very talented—how many people are in her league? I’m afraid I don’t get around to a show as often as I’d like.”
“Well,” said Norris, “I confess to being biased, but in my opinion she’s the most brilliant projectionist we have on the Fairweather, bar none.”
“Quite a compliment from someone of your caliber,” I said, doing my best to sound impressed in spite of myself.
A little bit of awe, a little bit of grudging reluctance.
Then I slid in the rapier’s point. “If she’s good enough to create out of whole cloth, do you think it’s possible she could uncreate as well?
Use a flicker to overwrite a real memory with a false one, for instance—or even erase a memory altogether? ”
Norris drew back. “How little you must think of people, Miss Gentleman. Memories are remarkably persistent. If someone sat you down and told you an obvious lie, you wouldn’t throw the truth away like some flimsy piece of trash.”
You might be surprised, I thought. But I said: “What if someone told you the same lie every morning, across the cozy, familiar breakfast table? Wouldn’t you eventually give it some weight?”
His mouth went flat, his distaste plain. “Only if you had some reason to believe the lie. Some weakness of character, or something to gain.”
And, I guessed, it would work best on subjects who were already isolated. No other interactions to undermine your programming, no counternarratives to the one you were trying to instill.
Norris was still watching me too closely. “You say you don’t see many flickers, miss—so what brought you here to the Palace this afternoon?”
“Didn’t your mother tell you?” I said sweetly. “I’m a ship’s detective.”
Norris was very good at hiding his thoughts: If I hadn’t been watching for it, I’d not have seen that giveaway little flinch at all. “Can I assume you’re here about the child?”
“Why else?” I replied. “How did you first learn about him?”
He cast a quick glance over his shoulder to the kitchen, whence the sounds of an argument conducted in near-whispers still reached us.
“Flora’d been feeling ill and gaining weight.
I’d come by to replace one of the projector lenses while my mother was out, and she passed out right in front of me.
I was helping her up when the baby kicked for the first time—and we realized the truth at nearly the same moment.
” He shook his head. “I’ll never forget the look on her face: She was clearly horrified. I’m sure I looked much the same.”
“But she didn’t tell her roommate?” I pressed. “Her best friend?”
“She refused to,” he said. “And quite frankly, I agreed with her.” He chewed his lip a bit, then leaned in. “Can I confess something to you, Miss Gentleman?”
I matched his tone. “Anything, Mr. Godfrey.”
“When my mother first met Flora, I didn’t react well to their friendship.
She’s such a flighty thing—bought a place on the Fairweather on a whim in her late teens, has never had a settled partner, lives for the flickers and the parties and the nightlife.
The kind of butterfly lifestyle that people normally grow out of, except here she’s had no reason to.
And my mother was a widow who raised me all on her own.
She had to scrape together every last cent to pay for our berths on this ship—but she did it, worked herself nearly to the bone just so she and I would have a better life together far away from Earth.
” His tone was absolutely, utterly sincere as he said: “I love her dearly, and there is nothing I would not do to keep her safe.”
“And you didn’t trust Flora to love her quite so well,” I murmured back.
“Not at first,” he confirmed, running a hand through his graying hair.
“But it was clear even to me that Flora was trying. That she was doing the best she could, as the person she was. But when we realized Flora was going to become a mother—when she was looking at that level of sacrifice, of putting someone else first, of caring for a child and letting that duty transform her, shape her, transmute her into the kind of person who could do all those necessary things, out of love…” He shrugged.
“Well, to be perfectly honest, I thought it would be good for her. She could better understand what my mother went through, could understand a child’s need for stability, for constancy.
It would be the thing to bring them permanently together … eventually.”
“But you still didn’t want her to tell Anne?”
He shook his head. “I know my mother well, Miss Gentleman. She’d have done everything for Flora’s child. It would have come naturally to her. She’d have ended up with a second son to raise—and Flora would have gone waltzing off to the next party, blissful and unaltered.”
“Truly, a terrible fate,” I murmured before I could help myself. His eyes narrowed. “Thank you so much for your time, Mr. Godfrey,” I went on. “I’ll be sure to find you if I have any more questions about the skimmers.”
“Any time, Miss Gentleman,” he said, and flicked a glance at the kitchen with a sigh. “I’m afraid I have several other visits to make this afternoon—please make my farewells to my mother and to Flora?”
I promised to do so, and he gathered his things and slipped out the door.
Norris had been leading my list of suspects for the intruder who’d tried to take Peregrine—he’d known about the child, had the technical skill to breach the lock, and had the short hair Ruthie had described—but for the life of me I couldn’t see any reason for him to attempt the kidnapping.
Even if he’d quietly—or not so quietly—wished to separate his mother and Flora, that depended on Peregrine being kept hidden from Anne, and that level of secrecy was no longer possible.
I didn’t trust him—but nor did I think he was desperate. I’d have to look further afield for my kidnapper, it seemed.