I waved to indicate yes, swallowing my bite of sandwich.
“How much do you remember of my mother?”
I paused, looking at him narrowly. He was serious—as serious as my nephew ever got, anyway—and there was a light in his eyes that I hadn’t seen before.
This wasn’t an idle question, I realized. This was about… before. John must have told him the secret.
To be honest, I was less than surprised. John’s training, like mine, meant he was aware of certain facts about the origin of our journey that were not publicly known among theFairweather’s passenger population. Nothing dangerous, merely… unsettling. I’d been expecting John to fill Ruthie in at some point—honestly, when I’d learned it, I’d asked why Ruthie and the other scriptwriters hadn’t been told, but had been fobbed off with some murmurings about security and discretion and other nonsense.
But now Ruthie knew, and knew that I knew. Poor John—I hoped the conversation hadn’t been too hard on him.
My nephew was still waiting for my answer. I pulled together the tattered threads of ancient memories, such as remained. “You look like her,” I said. “You even talk like her. I remember being at her wedding to your father, and holding her hand during the divorce trial. They were still quite scandalous proceedings then, so she moved with you to the States to raise you in a society that wouldn’t hold it against you quite so much. And I remember… we had a cottage, growing up, a small thing in the farthest corner of the estate.Meant for a hunting lodge, but Mother had it done over so it was more like a tea cake, all pastels and soft cushions. We basically lived there in summers, your mother and I.”
He nodded, his eyes distant.
I braced myself and gentled my voice. “You?”
It was a while before he answered. “Her perfume,” he said. “Lilacs.”
I’d forgotten that, and had to catch my breath.
“I found a bottle in a shop once that smelled right. I keep it on the nightstand, so every now and then I can smell it and try to remember more.” He blinked hastily and shrugged, shifting in his seat. “I know she loved me,” he said. “I only wish…”
“You wish you remembered her loving you,” I said. “Instead of simply knowing it.” He nodded and promptly busied himself with his own sandwich.
It was a dodge—one his mother never would have made. Perhaps he took after me in some ways, after so many centuries. But I, too, yearned for a subject change. “Could I ask for your technical expertise?”
Ruthie nodded, wiping a droplet of au jus from the corner of his mouth.
“Could someone alter a skimmer to erase someone’s memories?”
“Theoretically yes,” he said, somewhat muffled, then chewed a bit and thought a bit and swallowed. “Theskimmers use the same kind of light we use to record memory-books in the Library—and all the bodies on theFairweatherare particularly sensitive to that kind of light. The molecular markers, you see.”
“How precise is it?”
“Not very, I expect—you wouldn’t be able to choose your targets. The most you could do would be to erase whatever memory the person was trying to project. Might take several attempts. Would be dangerous, too, for the person you’re working on.” He picked at the crusts of his prime rib dip. “Skimmers aren’t as powerful as anything in the Library, but they’re still nothing to go fooling around with.”
“Could you induce a stroke by trying to erase a memory?”
“I should bloody well thinkso— Hangon, this is about Flora, isn’t it? That’s how she died, do you think?”
I grimaced but nodded.
Violet was going to be disappointed if it turned out this opposite-of-a-murder involved something that looked an awful lot like murder.
A shame—it had seemed such a pleasant, wholesome case at first.
BETWEEN THE ANTIKYTHERAClub visit and the times we’d had to move Peregrine around the ship, rumors about the baby’s existence were flooding theFairweather’s public communication channels. I was keeping abreast of some of the more ludicrous conspiracy theories—particularly the one that said Medical’s retromats had broken down and we were all going to have to be babies again if we wanted new bodies—so I managed to catch the moment when the Board’s official announcement came through, essentially unchanged from the draft I’d sent them. And with my name appended in case passengers had further questions.
All hell, in textual form, broke loose.
I spent the following hour in the Antikythera bar. Ruthie took the baby after lunch and John continued his shift, pouring memory cocktails for club members and casting anxious glances my way. I typed replies to alarmedfriends and broadcast calming, repetitive statements from my pocket watch until my finger bones ached, taking only occasional breaks to listen to two mathematicians debate the geometry of compression at beyond light speeds, or some such thing. It was a relief to bathe briefly in a river of words that I didn’t understand and wasn’t required to respond to.
Then, with a wealth of dread, I returned to my office in the Bureau, where I was sure people were waiting to speak to me in person rather than by note.
My dread proved thoroughly justified when Jason Ipcar turned up. Leloup savoringly knocked on my office door to inform me of the arrival, before retreating to the Jason-free serenity of his own office.
The scenario writer stood up from the ochre sofa when I opened the door to the waiting room. He looked me up, looked me down, and let his lip curl with disdain. “You Dorothy Gentleman?” he asked without preamble.
