I couldn’t have been more shocked if I’d walked into the room and seen him brandishing a bloody knife over a murdered corpse. Or wearing navy shoes with black trousers.
The hardest part of being a ship’s detective was having to see people at the nadir of what they could bear. And John had clearly reached that point.
He was sitting in the center of the floor, surrounded by various lengths of wood. Two of them were clutched in splinter-wracked hands. One lay snapped to one side, beside a metal spring frame with several springs gone sproing.
John looked up at me with haunted eyes. “Dorothy, what are you doing here?”
“Ruthie sent me a note,” I replied. I nudged a spar aside with one toe, thinking ominously of shipwrecks. “Where is my dear nephew?”
“Upstairs,” John said, and shuddered. “With that creature.”
And so thus warned, I ascended to the bedrooms on the second floor.
I could hear the child even before I raised my hand to knock. It was that awful, colicky wail, the kind that went through you like a drill until you fell to pieces. I pushed open the door to the bedroom.
The large bed was as disheveled and exhausted as a feckless youth on day five of a lost weekend. Striding back and forth beside it, bare feet tangling in the coverlet and kicking it aside by turns, was Ruthie: brown curls mussed, sweater sleeves rolled up, bags beneath his eyes, and with—yes indeed—a baby in his arms. He was bouncing it, up and down, as he walked, back and forth, making soothing little shushing sounds in a hopeful voice.
I couldn’t resist a fond auntly smile—no matter that my body was currently midtwenties, and Ruthie a good decade older than that. Nephews were nephews, no matter the age.
Ruthie looked up and seized on me, the way a sailor washed overboard seizes the life buoy bobbing by in the maelstrom. “Finally!” he cried, though it had been, at most, ten minutes since my note. “Take this for a moment, will you? I have to see about John.”
And he deposited the squalling bundle in my arms and left the room.
The baby wailed harder.
I took a deep and bracing breath.
If I was going to solve the mystery of where this baby had come from, I was first going to have to solve the mystery of how to get them to shut their adorable trap. And fast, before the three of us lost our minds.
The baby wailed again. I ignored that for the moment and looked the infant over. They were young, quite young.No teeth, as my nephew had noticed, and young enough to be colicky. They had a pinafore-type garment wrapped around them, and beneath that—fortunately—was a diaper that—fortunately—was fresh and properly applied to their—likelyhis—anatomy. So that was one problem we weren’t having yet.
Oh, sweet stars, we were going to have to toilet train him at some point, weren’t we?
My arms must have tensed, or else the baby didn’t like that thought any more than I did. The wails increased.
I had one other card to play. Most of my memories of Earth were faded things by now, fragile and weathered as album photographs. But some moments stayed shining. My first kiss in a London sunrise. The smell of the sea on a summer afternoon when I was eight. And the first time I’d met Ruthie, when after two weeks of a miserable ocean crossing, I walked into my sister’s New York brownstone and she’d put a tiny, burbling little human being into my arms.
I went back down the stairs and stepped into the middle of an argument. Ruthie and John both went silent as I appeared, identical looks of dread painted over their faces.
I ignored them to walk to the kitchen, the babe’s persistent cries trailing behind me like a scarf.
The retromat had no trouble producing a bottle just like the one I’d used all those hundreds of years ago. The nipple popped into the open mouth, the lips snapped shut, andthen—blissful silence. The thoughtful sucking noises barely even qualified as sounds, in comparison.
The baby stared up at me, his eyes full of wonder as he slurped down the memory of a meal from three centuries before.
“Hello there,” I whispered, smiling back.
I swayed gently back and forth, mostly for something to do, and after a long minute Ruthie appeared at my side. “Oh,” he whispered, hardly more than a breath. “Oh, Aunt Dorothy, you saint. You miracle worker.”
I pursed my lips. “He was hungry, that’s all,” I said, not whispering, though I kept my tones low and soothing. “I’ll fill your icebox before I leave here. You can take over with your own memories after that.”
“How in the stars did you do that?” John rasped. Ruthie shushed a warning, but it was hardly needed: John’s voice sounded as worn out as though every scream of the baby’s had been scraped from his own vocal cords. And then his eyes sharpened, some of his usual keenness coming back. “How long will it last?”
“Not too long, I fear,” I said. “They cry when they’re hungry, they cry when they need changing, they cry when they’re confused—and they’re always confused. They’ve got no memories, you see—only experiences. Everything is brand-new, unfamiliar, all the sharp edges unblunted.” Icrooned at the small bundle in my arms. “Who wouldn’t cry?”
John visibly gathered himself. “It’s fine when he’s quiet,” he said. “I’m not afraid of the mess. It’s only—the noise,” he said, and shuddered.
Ruthie patted him consolingly on the shoulder.
