“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.”
“Thatisa 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 Anneand 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 myopinion she’s the most brilliant projectionist we have on theFairweather, 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 theFairweatheron 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.
