NO KNOCKING, said the sign that had been hastily taped to the door.ABSOLUTELY NO KNOCKING, YES THIS MEANS YOU.
I stifled a smile, passed my thumb over the lock, and let myself in.
And froze, breath catching.
The baby was sleeping. Curled up in the crook of my nephew’s arm, wrapped in a blanket. Snoring softly, with tiny motions of his fists and occasional small smackings of the mouth. Above him, slouched in the armchair, brow lightly creased and under eyes lightly smudged with fatigue, Ruthie whistled out a snore of his own. His plaid tie askew, his sweater-vest hillocked up, his shirtsleeves creased beyond the bounds of all politeness. The baby looked preternaturally angelic in slumber; my nephew looked as though he’d been bedeviled into complete and utter exhaustion.
For a moment, I simply stood there watching the little mouth make silent, sleepy chewing shapes. For all I’d beenunsettled by the idea of him, a baby created farther away from Earth than any baby before… Well, now he was here, and he was human, and that was that. Ruthie already loved him; how could I help following suit?
Soft water sounds came from the doorway on the room’s far side. I tiptoed carefully past the sleeping pair and found John in the kitchen.
My nephew-in-law was hand-washing his cashmere blanket in the sink. I waved a silent hello when he looked around. “I’ve brought you some forms for signatures,” I murmured. “That is, if you haven’t rebelled against Ruthie’s demand for custody.”
John looked briefly wistful, then shook his head. “When you love someone who deserves it, you have to be willing to adapt a little. I had thought I wouldn’t have to think about children until planetfall, but…” He stopped, wistfulness turning warmer as he gazed off into the distance above the kitchen sink. “Ruthie was up most of the night with him. No bitterness, no hesitation.” He swirled the fabric in the soap, suds catching the light with tiny, fragile rainbows. “I had gotten into the habit of thinking myself the practical one,” he said. “But what Ruthie—and Peregrine—have taught me today is that there are kinds of practicality in which I am a fumbling amateur, and Ruthie is something of a savant.”
“Ruthie has a way of upending assumptions,” I said. “It’s one of his virtues.”
“One of his best.” John rinsed the soap away and let the liquid drain out. Strong hands pressed the water from the cashmere fabric, careful not to twist the delicate fibers. He spread one corner out, turning it back and forth in the light. “I think I got most of the stains out, happy to say.”
“Why not just retromat a new blanket?”
His eyes crinkled with a sly smile. “This one isn’t retromatted.”
“Not—you mean—” I gaped. Apparently my nephew’s husband was laundering a priceless antique in his kitchen sink. He rolled the blanket up in a towel, his hands careful, almost reverent, even as they pressed more water out with sure and steady pressure.
We’d all been permitted one Earth object when we embarked—heirlooms, we called them. Some were personal mementoes, some were valuables, but all of them were something physical from the planet of our origin, something real, something more than a memory of Old Earth. Every person should have something like that. Especially someone who had no chance at those memories in the first place.
It haunted me as I walked home beneath the stretching trees.
I’d felt old even when we first embarked; after so long,the thought of starting fresh—of being someone who hadn’t made any memories yet—was more than a little horrifying. We didn’t have poverty on board theFairweather—that was rather the point—but the thought of less than a year’s worth of memory felt like the nearest thing to it.
This must be why you brought a new baby gifts, I realized. You wrapped them in blankets because you wished you could wrap them in knowledge; you showered them with clothes and soft things because you couldn’t shower them with the learned experience of your years and decades. It’s why people liked handmade things for infants, even when those makes had faults.
So, exhausted though I was, I walked right past my door and a little way down the street, to the yarn store run by Violet St. Owen. A passenger’s personal wealth went back into the General Fund at their death, but shared business assets remained; this worked reasonably well to encourage people to create stores and communal services rather than simply hoard cash individually. Violet’s previous co-owner was now gone—an event I’d had an unfortunately close connection to—and an impulse to atone for my involvement had led me to become Violet’s silent investor.
It was an easy enough job, since she asked literally nothing of me. Possibly because she was afraid of what a nosy and sharp-eyed detective would find if she went poking around.
There were people who turned to crime for profit, andthere were people who turned to crime for fun. Violet was something closer to the latter, as far as I could guess—except that instead of reveling in the killer’s illicit thrills or the liar’s glee in deception, she considered crime something of a righteous vocation. A democratic impulse for chaos and unruliness. A way to take power back from the authorities and share it around a little, she’d once explained, when we’d had occasion to discuss the ethics of killing in self-defense.
I had my doubts about her philosophy, personally, but she hadn’t ended up being a murderess that time, and I’d never been able to concretely prove her involvement in anything else. So we waltzed round each other, suspecting but never certain, retreating when the other advanced, never making contact but never more than a breath away, either.
Maybe if I’d trusted her more, I’d have taken her to bed a year ago when we first met. Maybe if she trusted anyone at all, she’d have let me.
In addition to possible crime, she definitely ran the best yarn store on the entireFairweather. Either one would have been enough to fascinate me: Together, they made her more irresistible than all her golden hair and sultry smiles. Though I was far from indifferent to those, too.
She sent me just such a smile as I entered her shop beneath the familiar ding of the bell. Her skirt was ankle-length and black; her ochre cardigan a long, luxurious drape of laceweight yarn with a complex pattern of fans. Her hands werebusy with something in a wool the exact shade of a pomegranate’s heart, as though she were trying to knit with a skein of temptation itself.
“Hullo, Violet,” I said. “Planned any murders lately?”
“Oh, scads,” she replied. “I hope you’ve come to take me into custody?” And she cheekily presented her wrists for the handcuffs. The skin at the base of her palms looked velvet-soft, the tendons strong beneath from years of skill and practice. I wanted to trace them with my tongue, feel them tense and tighten.
I must have been staring, because she smiled smugly and picked up her knitting again. “How can I help a ship’s detective today?”
“I’m looking for a pattern,” I said, getting my tongue back under control.
“Aren’t you always.” She glanced at me sloe-eyed. “What kind of pattern?”
“Something small. Rectangular. Soft, so as not to irritate delicate skin.”
