“I can’t imagine a Ripple being lost to history.” Swanny peers up at his actual grandpa, a potatoish man Ripple never met, whose business cards, even now, materialize inexplicably in the pockets of the family’s coats, between the cushions of the house’s various couches and divans. Networking from beyond the grave. “It must be fascinating to learn the intricacies of one’s family line. Mine is shrouded in mystery.”
“What?”
Swanny sighs deeply. “You know I lost my father as an infant. When he died, the secrets of my ancestry died along with him. I have no proof, of course, but I believe he and my mother shared more than just a bed. They may have been cousins—perhaps even first.”
Hooligan chooses this moment to squat behind a potted ficus a few yards away. Whatever, Ripple will deal with that later. “I don’t think so.”
“We mustn’t judge them, Duncan. Their passion, though forbidden, made me what I am.”
“No, I mean, Dad studied your genome. He had the printouts all over his desk for weeks. No way he’d set us up if you had mutant blood.”
Swanny removes a finger from her mouth. “I did not claim to have ‘mutant blood.’?”
“I just mean no way your parents were first cousins. Wait, I’ll show you.” Ripple takes the device out of the pocket of his Kevlar vest, prestidigitates the document onto the screen. “See?”
Pedigree: The Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg. A maze of lines, straight and squiggled, a flow chart of love and its consequences. Swanny squints as if she’s never seen one before, even though that’s impossible. At underschool, family trees hung framed in everybody’s rooms.
“Where are my parents?” she asks.
“Down here, at the bottom.” Ripple zooms in on the text. “Look, Chet Dahlberg—that’s your dad. Kid of Veronica Golden and Chase Dahlberg—scroll up, here’s who they’re related to. Those green dots stand for money. And see, your mom’s way over on this side. Coming out of nowhere. Penelope Gibich.”
“Let me see that.” Swanny snatches the LookyGlass. “Gibich? Am I even pronouncing that correctly? I always assumed Mother was born a Dahlberg.”
Ripple shrugs. “It’s just a name.”
“It’s her identity, Duncan. Names are lineage—linguistic DNA, passed down from parent to child—the cargo of words we carry from this life to the next. To be a Dahlberg…well, it’s something quite refined.”
“Shouldn’t you be glad you’re not inbred?”
Swanny runs her tongue over her teeth thoughtfully, like she’s making sure they’re all still there. “I suppose.”
Speaking of breeding: “Want to see what our kid looks like?”
“Pardon?”
“It’s just a projection, but the margin of error is slight.” Ripple steps close to her and adeptly strokes the LookyGlass in her hand. “Check it out. He’s got your eyes.”
The algorithmically derived infant shoots out of the device in three dimensions, a hologram hovering in a beam of light. They’ve mapped out every detail, down to the pendant of spit bubbles dangling from his chin.
“Dad says we have to name him Duncan Humphrey Ripple the Sixth, but I like Jutt better. I don’t even know if it’s a real name, I just like the way it sounds. Jutt.”
“Good lord, Duncan. You’re planning so far ahead.” Her cheeks color; she looks away. “I haven’t even started freezing my eggs yet. And I might prefer a girl.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa. She’s acting like he just made a declaration of love or something. Maybe their baby wasn’t the right thing to show her on a first date. He takes back the LookyGlass. “It’s not like I want him either. I just had to check that he wasn’t too ugly. He’s gotta extend my brand.”
Swanny circles the simulated rug rat, sizing it up from all angles. Appraising it. “When the time comes, we must be certain to give him the freedoms denied us.”
“Totally agreed.” But wait a minute, Ripple’s the one who wants out of here. “What would you do, if you could do whatever you wanted?”
“One can always do what one wants, Duncan. It’s just a question of calculating the consequences.”
Huh? He switches off the baby. “You mean like running away?”
“We all have our urges.”
“Yeah? Where would you go?”
“I suppose I would live among the common people and give myself over to a life of disgraceful hedonism. Or I’d go on a journey—but all the places I love best exist only in novels.” She sighs. “Perhaps I’d press myself between the pages of a book.”
Hedonism? Does that mean sex? Ripple always kind of thought sex and reading were mutually exclusive. But maybe Swanny’s got wires crossed in her brain somewhere and her fantasies take the form of words. Maybe all he would have to do is figure out the exact right thing to say and she’d be writhing in his arms, the way she was on the floor just now, only lustier. He’s far down this path before he remembers that he has an actual human waiting to fuck him upstairs.
“I’d be a fireman,” he declares brashly.
Swanny nods, unimpressed. “Oh yes, you mentioned that at dinner.”
“I was just about to enlist when they shut down the department.”
That wasn’t exactly how it happened. A few years after the first dragon attacks—when the volunteer fire department was experiencing its first real drop-off in numbers, as fallen members no longer proved so easy to replace—the city adopted a radical tactic: mandatory conscription into the cause for any local male over the age of sixteen. The girls were spared, in the hope that their potential for healthy pregnancy would prevent the city from depopulating still further, but the families of boys like Ripple either had to see their sons off to likely death and disfigurement in a state-issued yellow slicker, or, at great cost, purchase a series of exemptions, which gave the pro in question a one-year reprieve, renewals available. Humphrey had done the latter, of course, but when Ripple was in the process of flunking underschool, Ripple made a series of impassioned and unsuccessful appeals to let his exemption expire. As the videographers rolled, he argued that he wasn’t made for “bookwork,” that his dad should let him out of his “guilted cage” so he could soar to the heights of heroism. The Sprawl ate it up, and Ripple was actually scrolling through some flattering ratings numbers when Humphrey came by his room one unfilmed afternoon.
“I assume you were just grandstanding for the cameras.” Humphrey picked up a bag of BacoCrisps from the floor, saw that it was empty, and dropped it again. “But if you feel that risking your life for a transparently shortsighted and foolhardy cause would force you to buckle down and impose some discipline on yourself, far be it from me to stand in your way.”
“Uhhhhhhh…” Ripple drew out the null syllable as long as he could.