“Why abandon a baby they cared about?” John asked.
“Let’s go ask them,” I replied. I’d taken the opportunity to sidle up to the infobank and do a quick search for who might have retromatted those objects in the past few months. Only one home had done both a basket and a piece of fabric of that type: an address on Aft Port Eleven.
“You’d best take your chai to go,” Meherbai said, “before—”
“What,” said someone with genteel horror, “isthat?”
I closed my eyes briefly, calling silently for strength. It was always wise to prepare myself before beginning any conversation with Leloup. “Surely you’ve seen babies before, Aloïs?” I asked, and turned around.
There he was, my cordial nemesis, one irritating inch taller than me. He was currently just past the peak of middle age, with a small mustache, a soft paternal face, and a mind like a mandoline. “I have also seen murderers, madame,” hehuffed, “but would be equally displeased to find one of them in my office this morning.”
“Hang on—this baby hasn’t killed anyone,” Ruthie said, staunch in the infant’s defense.
“Perhaps it has,” Leloup returned crisply. “Childbirth is often so dangerous. This child may have been the instrument of one—or more—of its parents’ demise. Until you find the mother, you cannot know.”
“Perhaps you should interrogate the baby,” Meherbai put in, eyes twinkling. I scowled at her for encouraging him.
Too late. “Would that I could!” Leloup said with a sigh, and a finger to his mustache. “But, alas, this baby has no identification number to put at the top of the form—it has not paid for a berth on our fine ship, so it has no home, no bank account, no memory-book, none of the usual methods we use to distinguish one person from another. How can you interrogate a person who does not exist?”
“Oh, if that’s all,” Ruthie said, “I expect you might as well ask how a person who does not exist could soil his nappies so many times in one day—but this little man seems to have already solved that philosophical conundrum.”
Leloup gave my nephew the particular, profound look of consternation only Ruthie could elicit.
My nephew simply smiled, innocent as the dawn.
I was delighted to see Leloup rendered speechless. However, it couldn’t last: Best to leave before he found his tongueagain to lecture us. “Shall we go see what his mother can tell us?” I asked.
John shook hands farewell with Meherbai, I nodded regally to Leloup and took my chai with one hand and Ruthie’s elbow with the other, and the little group of us passed once again through the waiting room and out of the Bureau.
WE TOOK ONEof the janitorial lifts, the better to keep the baby out of sight. Aft Port Eleven had become theFairweather’s equivalent of a theater district: The apartments were spangled with retromatted marquees that danced and dazzled, electric script scrolling out the theater names—I counted three separate Orpheums, or was that Orphea?—while black block letters listed the current offerings for stage and screen:Dance Your Way Home,The Wings of Battle,Twilight Souls, and so on. Posters with images and start times covered the front windows and blocked light, and food carts studded the walkway selling portable edibles: popcorn, samosas, pastilla, and spring rolls with so many dipping sauces it looked like a painter’s palette.
We found ourselves at the address we sought in the middle of the morning matinee.THE PALACE, said the glowing blue outlines with gold filigree. On Earth the signs wouldhave been buzzing from the power needed to set them aflame; on theFairweatherthey were silent, all that brilliance compounded of bioluminescence from sources both marine and mycological.
That silence always felt a little eerie to me—as though some vast, hungry creature were lying in wait and holding its breath.
“Give me a moment to get the lay of the land,” I said; Ruthie found a seat on a convenient bench with John standing beside him, blocking anyone’s view into the basket.
I thumbed open the door, passed through the curtained antechamber, and found myself in the theater.
Dim as the place was, it was a minute or two before my eyes adjusted enough to make out details. It was roughly the same size and layout as Ruthie’s apartment several decks above—but this place’s owner had filled the front room with row after row of sofas upholstered in deep red velvet, all angled to face the screen that stretched the length of the right-hand wall. Clearly it was a good picture, to judge by the rapt looks and ardent attention on the faces of the people in the audience. An upright piano near the back wall was being played with well-honed skill by a young woman with light hair.
About half the seats were full, some with solo viewers and others with couples or trios. They swapped treats back and forth and sipped memory liqueurs, heightening the effect ofthe flickering scenes. The image was silvered and shimmering: A young couple were running from something, her in a tattered evening gown and him in a tux missing a sleeve. The young woman held a baby-shaped bundle in her arms. Frantic, they climbed into a taxicab and sped off as skyscrapers whizzed by in the windows around them.
I had a visceral shock, as I suddenly remembered what it had felt like to ride in an automobile: the leaning around corners, the acceleration and the sense of momentum, the way braking became a weight pressing on you from behind. Technically theFairweatherwas traveling much faster right now than any motorcar could have managed—but you try telling the body that. My stomach swooped.
Back in the ordinary light of the walkway, I gasped and waited for my dazzled eyes to readjust. It had been a long time since I’d tried the flickers—perhaps they’d gotten more potent in the past few decades. John and Ruthie looked at me with concern. “That was quick,” John said, putting a steadying hand on my elbow.
Ruthie peered at the poster in the window. It was a painting of a baby in thick-framed glasses and too-big lab coat. The young couple, also in lab coats, stood over the baby, mugging comedically but tilted toward one another in a way that any longtime viewer could decode as Romantic Entanglements Ahead. “The Follies of Youth,” he read in a knowing voice.
“You’ve seen it?”
He nodded eagerly. “What part are they at?” And when I described what I’d seen: “Only about ten more minutes, then,” he said. “It’s about a professor who invents a youth serum that works so well it turns him back into an infant.”
“Shenanigans naturally ensue,” John put in.
Ruthie cackled. “They very much do, yes. At the end of the film the professor is restored to his proper age, the young couple have a passionate kiss, and everyone is exactly the same except better.”
“Very realistic,” I said dryly.
