“I’m sure the Board will appreciate it,” I said, and rose to my feet.
So there we had it: one child, two parents, all properly identified and informed and promising not to do it again. The most urgent matter had been addressed. But there were still too many questions left for me to count the business as resolved—the most glaring one being, of course: Who had been the person caring for the baby after Flora had her stroke?
Who else had known about the child?
We paused outside Mr. Renois’s office, bathed in the rainbow glow of Aft Port Eleven. Ruthie had the baby out of the basket and cradled on his shoulder; he swayed softly back and forth as the marquee lights tinted his face and the child’s half yellow and half blue.
Perhaps that was why the sausage vendor across the deck didn’t notice the baby right away—until the thing raised his head and gave a happy, hungry shriek.
The sausage vendor stared at the small blue-yellow face and shrieked back.
“Time to go,” I said firmly.
We hurried into the nearest lift, and Ruthie spun to face me, still clutching the child in possessive hands. “Aunt Dorothy, I’m officially petitioning for custody.”
“What?” John blurted.
I pinched the bridge of my nose and leaned against the lift wall. “Of course you are.”
“Someone has to love him,” my nephew said stubbornly. “If his parents aren’t going to do it, then someone else has to pick up the slack. He deserves nothing less.” His hand loomed large where it spread across the baby’s back. He cast John a glance that was half defiance, half pleading. “I loved him the instant I saw him on our doorstep.”
John’s face softened. “I know you did.”
“We still haven’t found out who was taking care of him during the two days Flora was in Medical being reembodied,” I said. “Maybe someone else already wants him.”
“We could put out a bulletin,” John said, but without conviction.
For a moment I winced at the prospect of telling the whole ship’s population that there was a new person on board. That babies could happen, in spite of everything. It was never wise to give the passengersideas.Some of them would immediately want babies of their own, and they wouldn’t stop there. They were going to start questioning restrictions on everything. What would be next: Candles? Poisons?
Weapons?
Ruthie’s grip on the baby tightened; the infant made a noise of protest. Ruthie murmured soothingly and bounced him a little.
I had to admit, the child did look—comfortable, there on my nephew’s shoulder.
Ruthie’s eyes met mine. They were the same eyes my sister had had, back on Earth. And right now they had the same set look she would get sometimes, when no amount of arguing or logic or good sense was going to change her mind.
I yielded to the inevitable. Would save me trouble in the long run, or so I hoped. “Tell you what: We’ll leave the custody question aside for now. But—” I said, holding up a hand against my nephew’s protests, “for now, I will let you pick the name we put on his paperwork.”
“Peregrine,” Ruthie said at once. He rested his chin briefly against the top of the infant’s head. “Because he’s a wanderer.”
Well.
I cleared my throat, and a second time for good measure. John Pengelly sucked in a small, helpless breath, and if he raised his hand to swipe briefly at the corner of one eye I very carefully took no notice.
BACK AT THEBureau, the day was officially in full swing, everyone present and accounted for.
Baxenden was at his desk, humming into his mustache while comparing a spectrum of lipstick samples on small cards in his stout hands. Forensics of materials was something of a specialty of his. He’d been a bricklayer once, before finding a body hidden in a wall and asking the kind of questions that annoyed the kind of people who left bodies in walls. Embarking on theFairweatherhad saved his life and given him a new profession; he’d been the first ship’s detective to sign up.
Behind the glass of his office wall, Ogilvy had a book over his gorgeous face—a true potboiler, from the look of it—but the sounds coming from under the pages were defined and definite snores. Must be between theft cases, or else he’d be retromatting some kind of mulch for the pottedpalm or pollinating one of the seventeen species of orchid in his office hothouse.
Next door, Mortimer Dellow, tall and authoritative with skin like umber, was carefully scraping flakes of paint from some Old Master–ish thing I didn’t recognize. There were a few real antiques aboard theFairweather, so every now and then someone retromatted a copy and tried to claim it as an original Earth piece. The hard part wasn’t identifying the forgeries—retromatted paint was molecularly marked, after all—but getting the victim to admit they’d been deceived in the first place. Embarrassment covered up nearly as many crimes as guilt did.
Mortimer had an air of frigid capability, like a vampire or a solicitor, but underneath it was a heart that beat with even more warmth than Ruthie’s, and he had an instinct for people’s hidden wounds that made him one of the kindest men I knew.
Meherbai and Leloup had dug in at opposite long sides of the research table. She was flipping through a volume I recognized as the Bureau’s official copy of theFairweather’s legal compendium—the complete one, which covered not only the on-board regulations we were presently operating under, but the much more complex and multivalent codes that would become law only when we made planetfall. Base system of government, processes for adding laws we’d found useful on the journey, franchise rights and restrictions, thewhole life-changing, mind-numbing weight of bureaucracy and justice. Insofar as we’d managed to describe it, at any rate.
Meherbai tended to see the law as clothing: Proper fit was important, so alterations could be made in service of comfort and safety. A skilled tailor could make something so elegantly fitted that the body wouldn’t even feel it was constrained.
