Ruthietsked. “Nobody goes to the flickers for real life, Aunt Dorothy.”
How he could sound so virtuous about something so frivolous, I’ll never know. The mysteries of a nephew, I suppose.
The passionate kiss was, indeed, very passionate, I found when I slipped back in a few minutes later. Someone sighed, the characters vanished, and the audience stood and stretched as the lights came up.
I went looking for the projectionist.
There she was, a slim brunette with bobbed hair sitting in a high director’s chair at the back. She was pulling from her head the flat gray skimmer that plucked the images from her mind and cast them out where the rest of us could watch them. Actual film stock was of course wildly impractical onboard a spaceship—even worse than the candles—so instead people donned a skimmer, whose long ribbon fed into a lens and a light on the wall, and beamed their memories out for the entertainment of their fellow passengers.
It was not precisely the same technology used for the memory-books in the Library. Skimmers didn’t store anything; they merely reflected what the brain beneath was focused on. How had Ruthie described it? Memory-books were architecture: complex three-dimensional plans of the mind, meant to be re-created precisely. Skimmers offered something more like photographs, quick snaps of a single moment from one point of view, a brief slice of conscious thought made visible through light and shadow.
People had started by trying to replicate the movies they’d seen on Earth—Buster Keaton, Louise Brooks, Laurel and Hardy. But even when projectors worked from a script held in their hands, little changes crept in—lines of dialogue sprouted synonyms and paraphrases, hemlines and hat angles shifted—and then at some point someone realized that if you were already projecting a remembered story that had happened to someone else (Laurel, say, or Hardy), then you could probably project a story that had never actually happened at all.
So someone asked: What if Laurel and Hardy had made a picture with Louise Brooks?
That first experiment, the first new film in fifty years, had been a sensation. While retrospectives still happened from time to time—I sawThe Navigatoranytime it was showing—by far the bulk was now people imagining new stories, right in the open where anyone with a ticket could watch. It was an art, really, to dream so persuasively that other people could slip into it. Like building a café out of raindrops and then inviting someone over for tea.
In the Palace, this theater’s projectionist was staring quietly but quite intently at the piano player, who had stood from the bench and was now hoovering the carpet to clear away the crumbs, popcorn kernels, and all the detritus of silver-screen dreams. At the end of the row she turned to the brunette with a smile—a smile I’d seen more than once this morning.
She was the model for the leading lady in the film I’d just caught the end of.
She was also our abandoned baby’s mother. I’d stake my detective’s privileges on it.
I pulled out my pocket watch and sent John and Ruthie a hasty note, then stepped forward.
The blonde was now peering at the skimmer where her friend held it. “Is it still giving you trouble with the night scenes?”
“They keep wanting to turn into daytime.”
“I’m sure Norris will know what’s wrong.”
“Yes,” said the projectionist, with a wry twist to her lips, “I’m sure my son will be thrilled to be of help.”
“Mrs. Anne Godfrey?” I asked. This address listed two residents.
“That’s me,” said the brunette, still in the director’s chair.
I smiled at the blonde. “Then you must be Miss Flora Tilburn.”
“That’s right,” she said. Her twinkling eye ran down and then up my figure, making Mrs. Godfrey’s brow crease.
I smiled lightly at Miss Tilburn. “I think I may have something that belongs to you,” I said.
With exquisite timing, John and Ruthie came in the door. The baby had apparently behaved himself long enough, because he began to cry almost as soon as they entered the theater.
I kept my eyes on Miss Tilburn, who was staring at the baby with her mouth hanging open in an attitude of complete surprise that was rather fetching, honestly.
Mrs. Godfrey, however, had hunched herself into a ball, guilt splashing a dull red over her cheeks.
“What is that?” Miss Tilburn asked.
“That, I believe, is your child,” I replied.
The baby helpfully cried harder. His grasping hands opened and closed like hungry little starfish.
“Hang on,” Ruthie muttered, “I’ve got something here…”And he pulled from his coat pocket one of the bottles I’d made for him. Thus muffled, the baby resumed feeding. And staring.
His mother was doing the same. “I don’t…” Either Miss Tilburn was genuinely flummoxed or she was the greatest actress anyone on theFairweatherhad ever seen. “I’m not…” She shook her head, helpless, gazing down as if hypnotized into eyes the exact shape and shade of her own.
