Nobody’s Baby #2
It didn’t bring me any closer to our kidnapper, but I felt heaps more cheerful about the case all the same.
I SENT A note to Melodie Chee at the Rococo—a delightful woman, an absolute gem of a cocktail mixer—to confirm Mr. Ipcar’s alibi, and gathered my things. The solar lights were beginning to shade into twilight’s lavender; it had been a long, exhausting day, and I was grateful for it to be over.
When I made my way home, every inch of my soul bruised from too many kinds of pettiness—as though I’d been trampled by the feet of a million furious ants—it was only to find an official summons from the Board.
They were demanding a hearing on what they were calling the Infant Incident, and they wanted it two days from now in the Star Chamber. With witnesses.
Most of the time a detective could simply submit their report in paper form and never hear a thing about it again.
Truth found, questions answered, wrapped up neatly with a bow and put away in a box somewhere like a grandparent’s love letters.
Occasionally one of us unearthed the kind of iniquity that required convening the Crime Committee for a trial, which was a long drawn-out process that moved very slowly and in which everyone spoke very carefully through a phalanx of legal representatives.
This was neither of those things: A hearing was called when there came an event whose mystery the Board felt they needed to understand, and whose complexity they wanted me to answer for firsthand.
Perhaps a trial would come later—certainly I had been planning to recommend one in my full write-up of the case—but at present the Board wanted to be able to ask questions and receive answers and feel as though they were doing their duty as governors of the ship and its passengers.
I generally approved of meddling and nosiness—except, of course, when it was turned against me. Alas, answering to the Board was a part of the job, and I could see little use in fighting it.
I whipped up a hasty dinner for myself from the autochef and began laying out the facts of the case.
Timelines, names of witnesses, loose ends still in need of tying, and, for that last one, a lengthy dive into some very specific, uncommon databases.
John and Ruthie’s custody petition, too, since this would be my best opportunity of seeing that addressed with due speed.
Otherwise that kind of paperwork could take a year or more.
Hours later, swimming in text, my head snapped up as someone knocked softly on my door.
A flash of panic, hastily tamped down. A kidnapper was not, I told myself, likely to knock before entering. And anyway the baby wasn’t here.
I rubbed the crust from my eyes and opened the door—only to find Violet St. Owen there on the threshold, looking like all my weaknesses made flesh.
Her hair was up, her smile was shy, and the solar-lamp evening made her skin glow gold.
She was wearing a blue knit dress she’d no doubt made herself, festooned with bobbles, and it looked so soft and touchable it made me want to throw myself into her arms and weep.
“I came to see how your baby blanket was coming along,” she said, and then—stars help me—dimpled.
“But I suppose you haven’t had much in the way of knitting time today. ”
“Come in and have a drink,” I said, stepping back and yielding to the inevitable. “I’ll tell you all about it.”
Sexual temptations were easy to resist—it felt noble somehow to lust and pine in romantic silence.
But I’d been buffeted by a thousand passengers’ very loud fears and nightmares for the past several hours, as I defended the well-being of a tiny human who had no idea what kind of chaos he’d accidentally set off by merely being brought into the world.
I was in desperate need of some kindness and a listening ear.
I couldn’t trust Violet in everything, but I could trust her for this.
I went to the autochef for drinks while Violet pulled a spare chair up to the table.
The surface was littered with my notes and outlines, not to mention the forms I’d been filling in to officially notify the people I was calling as witnesses.
It was a dismaying amount of paper, white and suffocating as a snowbank.
Violet clearly thought so, too, frowning as she nudged things just enough to make room for the glass I brought her: a double pour of starlight sparkling on the ocean. “Is the case going well or not? I can’t tell by looking.”
“Put it this way,” I said, sitting down hard and taking a long pull of mostly gin with a hint of winter’s first snow. “I’m almost at the part where I seriously consider putting out my own eyes with a pair of fountain pens.”
Violet raised her glass in a sardonic toast. “Paperwork seems a shabby reward for the preservation of law and order.”
“Paperwork is law and order,” I countered. “The papers are what make us a society and not just a gaggle of desperate people sharing a geography. We set up a system because a system can be permanent, where human beings are not.”
Violet’s mouth flattened. “You’re presuming the system is supposed to serve the people, rather than the people serving the system.”
“It is.”
“It is, if you’re thinking like a good person. Trouble is, when you tell people the system is good because it’s different than people, some people hear: The system is more important than people. And then they act accordingly. And someone who doesn’t deserve it gets hurt.”
“You’re not wrong,” I sighed, thinking of Leloup. “Here’s the main thrust: I am trying to find a paperwork way to say that this baby deserves to be classified as a passenger, no different than the rest of us.”
Violet nodded. “And the bulk of the law is standing in your way?”
“Not the bulk,” I protested, then slumped a little.
“About a half-bulk,” I admitted. “Maybe two-thirds.” I explained the bind I was in, where there was no current process for designating someone as a passenger.
Using planetary law would almost certainly get Peregrine an official identity, and swiftly, but he’d only have the one lifetime available to him and would never actually see the planet whose laws governed his existence.
“So either he belongs to the planet he never sets foot on, or he’s designated an automaton or a pet or a—a piece of luggage,” I finished.
“And either way, he won’t be granted a memory-book.
It feels like sentencing him to death. I cannot permit that to happen, but I can’t see how to prevent it. ”
Violet was silent a long while, long fingers tapping on the side of her highball glass. “I think you might be too focused on the process,” she said at last.
“What do you mean?”
She smiled. “How much of that baby blanket do you have done?”
I brought over my knitting and showed her my few scant rows. Barely more than a border, at this point, and only a hint of the gradient I was building.
Violet took the baby blanket carefully, slipped the needle out of the loops, and gave the working yarn a confident pull. An entire row unraveled beneath my horrified eyes. “Steady on!” I said.
“Oh, as if you’ve never frogged a project before,” she said.
“Now look.” She held up the unraveled working yarn, which was not smooth and silky like the rest of the skein.
No, it zigged and zagged back and forth from where I’d knitted with it.
“The yarn carries the memory of how it was handled,” Violet said.
“You can pull out all the stitches, but you can’t erase the experience.
It’s a part of the material now. Just like the baby is a part of the Fairweather’s society, no matter what the paperwork says about it. ”
I was still staring at that kinky bit of wool. “You’re saying the yarn remembers.”
“I’m saying Peregrine is a passenger. He’s on this ship, the same as the rest of us.
That is a plain fact. So instead of trying to unlock the law with cleverness as if it were a puzzle box, or a riddle set by a wizard in a fairy tale, go right to the heart of the question and ask yourself: What does any passenger deserve? ”
“The yarn remembers,” I repeated, and began to laugh.
Violet peered at me, her bright eyes puzzled. “Just how strong was that drink?” she murmured.
“Just strong enough,” I replied—and impulsively grabbed her hand, raising it to my lips. “Thank you,” I said. “You’ve given me a wonderful idea about how to turn the law against itself.”
“Well, it’s not crime,” Violet replied, blushing, “but I suppose if it’s the best you can do.”
MY STOMACH WAS fluttering, my hands were clammy, and I was in my sharpest-tailored suit. Sweat had already begun to gather at the small of my back, and I would have to be careful not to lock my knees lest I pass out in front of the Board and all my witnesses.
There were five minutes to go until the hearing started, and I was still waiting on my most important piece of evidence. Baxenden had promised to bring it as promptly as he could, but until then I could only pace beside my podium and fret.
Calling this room the Star Chamber had been someone’s idea of wit.
There was a dais at one round end, on which the Board took seats behind a long length of scarred and polished wood.
Not retromatted, I recalled—they’d installed this before leaving Earth.
Something about remembering our roots, branching out onto other worlds, the usual kind of overwrought symbolism that public institutions were so fond of.
They called this room the Star Chamber because it was open to the stars.
Or looked it, anyway: The round walls were carved out with arches of diamond-glass that peered out onto the sparkles and streaks of space.
Grand windows curved into a dome above as well, with delicate tracery like the stone of an ancient cathedral.
It was meant to remind us to be humble, I suppose, but it only really left me feeling cold and exposed beneath all that space.