John took heart from that and pulled a deep breath into his lungs. “Here,” he said, and took the baby and the bottle from me. Settling back into an armchair, he absently pulled a cashmere blanket down from the back and wrapped it around the infant, who was now looking as blissful and serene as a cat in a patch of sunlight.
It wouldn’t last, and I knew it, but still my heart caught at the sight. Just so does the youth ever make fools of their elders. “So,” I said, and turned my gaze upon my benighted nephew. “Tell me how it happened.”
“Well,” Ruthie said faintly. “Well. Since you asked.” He coughed, and went red, and coughed again, and looked helplessly at John. “Sometimes, when two people—”
“Not babies in general,” I interjected, flat horror grabbing me by the throat. “This baby in particular. How did he come to be”—I waved around at the thoughtful decor and precisely placed furnishings of the living room, but also at our great ship and all the universe around it—“here?”
“Oh,” Ruthie breathed, relief swirling around him like fog around a particularly dim lamppost. Then hebrightened. “Aunt Dorothy, it was just like the flickers! A baby in a basket!”
“There was,” John confirmed, “a basket.”
“And crying!”
“And,” John said darkly, with unplumbed depths of venom, “crying.”
“I don’t suppose there was a bit of unusual fabric the baby was swaddled in?” I groused. “Some piece of jewelry with a mysterious crest or set of initials?” Mysterious babies were an absolute cliché in the movies and stage plays down on Aft Port Eleven, particularly the nostalgic kind set back on Earth. The baby would turn out to be Lord Such-and-Such’s lost heir, and conveniently festooned with clues to the child’s origin and proper thread in the social fabric. They were always miracles, plot-wise: repairing sundered family relationships, letting two idiots confess a long-hidden love, generally knitting severed social ties back together seamlessly.
It was too much to expect from a person who couldn’t even form comprehensible words yet.
“There was nothing in the basket but the baby,” Ruthie said, slumping back. “I’m as disappointed as you are!”
Ruthie could never be as disappointed as I was. He hadn’t the constitution.
Even now, he was gazing down at the infant with an expression of pure besotment. “Our first baby,” he sighed.
John’s eyebrows quirked in alarm. “A little premature, don’t you think?”
“By many hundreds of years,” I said dryly. “Where was this basket found?”
Ruthie grinned. “On the doorstep, of course. Someone rang the bell two nights ago, just after dinner, and when we opened the door, there was the basket.” He blinked. “I say, you don’t think thebaby—”
“No, Ruthie, I don’t think the baby rang the bell.” I considered. “Do you think the baby was left for you? Or for John?”
John’s eyebrows shot up as high as eyebrows could go without rocketing straight off his face. “Me? Why me?” he squeaked.
“Why Ruthie?”
“A fair point,” he conceded. The baby murmured, and John’s gaze narrowed. “But most importantly: How do we give himback?”
“I’m not sure they want the baby back. In fact, I’m fairly certain they don’t.”
My nephew sucked in a breath. “Why wouldn’t they want him?” Ruthie said, the same way he’d have said,Why wouldn’t they wantme?
“If they wanted the baby,” I countered, “they’d hardly have left them on your doorstep, would they?” I tapped my fingers. “They could have left him in the Greenway,too—someone would have found him there within a few minutes.”
“Especially once he started making noise,” John muttered.
“So those are our initial questions,” I went on. “One, who left the baby, and two, who are the parents?”
Ruthie’s brow scrunched. “Aren’t those the same question?”
“Maybe—maybe not. And three…” I braced myself. “Is this baby the only one, or are there more?”
John blanched like a whale that has just felt the first harpoon. “Surely not.”
I rose from my seat and reached for my coat. “We’ll just have to take it one baby at a time. And we start by taking the baby to the Bureau.”
John looked grim, Ruthie looked thrilled, and the baby—well, the baby spit up all over John’s cashmere blanket.
