Nobody’s Baby #3
Or maybe that was the way the Board was radiating pedantic bureaucratic displeasure. As though I’d arranged for an entire baby to be created in secret just to ruin their Thursday afternoon.
Behind me were the bench seats where witnesses waited to give testimony.
Flora and Anne were clutching each other’s hands, Norris was sitting beside his mother looking cool but tense, Hugh Renois was a little bit apart with a dark suit and a vest that was nearly blinding in its plaid intensity.
Ruthie and John had Peregrine in his basket between them; my nephew caught me watching and gave a jaunty little wave.
At last—at long last!—with only a minute to spare, Baxenden slipped in with a carrying case in his hand, and sent me a thumbs-up indicating success.
I gave myself sixty seconds to simply focus on breathing in and out, hoping it would calm my galloping heart.
All too quickly, the current Chair of the Board gaveled the meeting to order and gestured at me to begin.
A hearing was a little bit like a stage play, or perhaps a magic trick, and as I wiped the clamminess from my palms and walked to the podium facing the Board, I had a moment to wish for some of Anne Godfrey’s ability to set the scene and color it persuasively.
But I was only a detective, not an artist. I’d have to hope the truth didn’t need too much dressing up.
“Members of the Board,” I began, “thank you for coming. This is my full report on the passenger currently known as Peregrine, who was born five months ago but who only came to my attention this week. The baby was created in the traditional manner…”
And we were off.
The first bit was straightforward enough: Both Flora and Hugh Renois had visited Medical for examinations, and I had both reports in my hand explaining that the fertility limits we implemented on all bodies had reversed themselves in what seemed to be random chance.
If the couple had never crossed paths with each other, we’d never have known anything about it.
“It’s possible this is more frequent than we realize,” I said, “so I’ve asked the Fairweather to add this to the list of things we check for during a passenger’s annual physical. ”
“Have the controls been reinstituted?” one Board member demanded from beneath a bristling mustache.
“We have made the request,” I said, preserving the parents’ medical privacy.
He harrumphed but didn’t press further.
“When she found out she was pregnant, Flora Tilburn surprised herself and decided to keep the baby,” I went on. “She stopped updating her memory-book—not wanting the ship to learn of the child’s existence—and moved out into an apartment on Forward Port Six. She gave birth alone.”
One of the Board members made a horrified sound.
“She maintained a correspondence with her former roommate, Mrs. Anne Godfrey, and at one point visited a man she erroneously believed to be the father. But most of her days were spent with her son, whom she called Florian—and because she loved the flickers and wanted to share them, she asked her friend’s son, Norris Godfrey, to build her a skimmer of her own.
“This, it turned out, is what killed her.”
Behind me, Anne gasped.
I turned to see Flora’s cheeks had gone pale, and her knuckles were white where her hand clutched Anne’s.
I softened my expression but not my volume, wishing I could have presented this next fact to her more privately.
But I couldn’t risk it getting out before the hearing.
“Flora Tilburn spent hours every day using a skimmer that had been altered to slowly wipe away any memory she tried to project. She believed she needed more practice as a projectionist, because the images seemed cloudy and vague to her. But the more she focused on those memories, the vaguer they got. Until they started to vanish altogether. One by one, piece by piece, her memories—the very stuff of her life—were chipped away. Eventually the strain was too great, and she suffered a fatal stroke while out one day in a clothing shop. She was reembodied, but it had been five months since she updated her memory-book. Her memories of her son were gone.” I reached into the podium and pulled out Flora’s diary in its blue cloth cover, and set it on the evidence table before me.
“At the time of her death, she was keeping a physical diary. Her early entries are detailed and specific, but later ones are baffled and confused. She knew something was wrong—but she didn’t know she’d been so deeply betrayed by a friend. ”
“Who?” Anne demanded.
“Yes, who?” asked the Chair.
“Norris Godfrey,” I replied. “I call him now for questioning.”
Heads swiveled to look at him.
Norris didn’t look at all surprised, only resigned, as he walked forward and took a seat in the broad wooden witness chair.
His cool face chilled further at the faces turned his way.
Then he sneered at Peregrine, of all people, fussing innocently in my nephew’s protective arms. “I suppose he’s already told you everything. ”
“My nephew?” I asked.
“The baby.”
We all looked at the infant, and then back at Norris. But the man seemed to be serious. “Of course he has,” I said, papering over my astonishment with pure, artificial confidence. “But we will require you to fill in the gaps anyway, Mr. Godfrey. What did you have against Flora?”
“Absolutely nothing,” he said.
“And yet you tried to erase all her memories of your mother.”
“I had to,” he said, and that sneer returned in full force.
It was an ugly expression, the kind that no amount of physical beauty could overcome.
Hugh Renois’s nose wrinkled to see it, and Flora actually flinched away.
“Just because she meant no harm doesn’t mean no harm was done.
She is a flighty, frivolous soul who only lives for flighty, frivolous entertainment.
Absolutely nothing wrong with that—until she pulled my poor, vulnerable mother into her orbit. ”
I thought of Flora’s diary, which had almost as much of Anne in it as Flora. “How did they meet?”
“In Medical, after a reembodiment. They started taking walks together, and Flora invited her to a matinee. Then it was shows every evening, and let’s move in together, and five years ago they actually started the Palace to show flickers of their own devising.
” His hands on the wooden railing were clenched tight, nails biting into the ancient wood.
“And suddenly she had no room in her schedule for her son—her own flesh and blood. If I hadn’t been a skimmer technician, I might have never seen her at all.
But Flora thought she was blossoming,” he spat.
“She thought my mother was finally starting to live.”
“You said I had a point,” Flora put in.
“Because I knew if I fought with you, I would lose my mother completely,” he said, whirling to glare at her.
“And then you found out you were having a child. A replacement for me, whom you would have let my mother help raise—until I convinced you, using your own selfish words, that she deserved her freedom.”
Flora flushed with the urge to argue, but subsided when Anne pressed her hand.
“Was that when you worked out how to erase Flora’s memories?” I asked.
“Erasing memories was never my intention,” Norris protested.
“I was trying to discover a way to transmit memories. To carry them whole from the projectionist into the viewer. The substance, not merely the reflection.” He turned to look at Anne, and his eyes softened.
“So that I would not be dependent upon my mother for the memories of my father.”
“I did the best I could,” Anne said sadly. “I showed you everything I remembered.”
“You did,” Norris said. “And then you stopped. You had better things to do. You forgot that without you, I could never see my father’s face at all.”
“It’s been three hundred years!”
“Oh, is that all?” he scoffed. “Three centuries and you stop being a mother. How long, I wonder, could you manage to stay a friend?” He glared down at where Flora’s hand entwined with Anne’s.
His mother only tightened her grip. Her face was sad but stoic. “How did you manage to hide this resentment from me for so long?”
“It’s easy to hide things from someone who isn’t looking,” he said cuttingly.
“So when Flora moved out,” I slid in, picking up the thread, “you saw an opportunity. You couldn’t steal your mother’s memories like you wanted—”
“It is not theft to want what’s mine by right!”
“—so you decided instead to take away the woman she loved.”
Norris looked at Flora, not unkindly. “You couldn’t put her first, now that you had a child to care for—he deserved to be your first priority. You weren’t meant to die. You were only meant to forget.”
“But she did die,” I said. “The way you altered the skimmer is very hard on the human mind, I’m told. Just because you meant no harm doesn’t mean no harm was done.”
Norris waved a dismissive hand. “You don’t know anything about it. You said yourself you barely even go to the flickers.”
“I’ve learned a great deal since then,” I said. “And besides, we have the skimmer right here.”
I signaled Baxenden, who stepped forward. The case he carried was opened, and within it was the now-familiar shape: a flat-brimmed hat, a lens, and a light.
Norris was staring at it like it was a viper. “That’s not possible,” he said. “I destroyed it, I know I did.”