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The worst thing, Oswald Glen Baskerville thought to himself as he closed the nursery door on the Mars station behind him and allowed himself a moment of weakness to press his forehead against the cool metal, was that Lacie hadn’t even given the girls names.
His sister had always been flighty, as brilliant as she was flippant, had flown in the face of every rule she’d ever met and left a trail of adoring admirers in her wake, but…God, he’d always assumed Lacie had no intention of ever having children, not that she would impregnate herself as another one of her experiments or games and leave two nameless little girls behind when she died.
And the girls were far too old to be nameless, and honestly they were far too old for Oswald to have known nothing about them, too. They had looked to be almost ten, which meant that Lacie had been hiding them nearly the entire time she and her brother had been working to establish this station, and…
Oswald loved kids. He had always wanted some of his own, though he’d given up hope of that ever happening after Levi had taken him and Lacie in to start this branch of the Baskerville Space Program. Had Lacie asked—had she ever told him about these girls—he would have helped her hide and care for them in a heartbeat. She had to have known that.
…Hadn’t she?
Lacie hadn’t named the girls. Oswald had always wanted children.
Lacie had never wanted children.
“Jack,” Oswald said, half in blank relief, half in trepidation of his only friend’s anger at Lacie’s death, after the astronaut entered the station, already releasing the valves on his helmet to shake out his long hair.
Jack grinned brightly at him. “Hey, Oswald! How are you doing?”
“I…” Oswald glanced around the room. Lottie was fussing over the other two occupants of Jack’s spacecraft, the two orphan children who’d passed the same test he and Lacie had all those years ago, and Fang and Doug were attempting to introduce Lily to her two new playmates, though the girl seemed very against moving out from behind Fang’s bright red uniform. “Walk with me.”
“Alright,” Jack said, pleasant as ever, as though Lacie weren’t a frozen corpse floating somewhere in orbit just about now, as though the last time they’d spoken, Jack hadn’t screamed and cursed Oswald for allowing Lacie’s death.
Her death, in the name of science.
Her death, as Levi had ordered it.
Jack had given Lacie an opportunity to flee, and Oswald had told her point-blank that if she took it he would turn a blind eye, as if he’d ever been able to stop his sister been doing anything she set her mind to.
She had smiled at him, said that she knew, that he’d always been a little bit soft, and that was the last thing that he ever heard from her: she’d said something else, as she was dying, but he hadn’t heard it.
“So,” Jack said, after they’d been walking for long enough that no other Baskerville was in earshot, “are you going to introduce me to the twins?”
Oswald’s head snapped toward Jack. “What?! How—how do you know about the twins?”
Jack smiled, his eyes dancing like a clear swift stream. “Levi mentioned them to me,” he said. Oswald’s eyes widened; the last he’d heard from Levi, he was dying of cancer and making that everyone else’s problem. “Apparently, he dropped off the sperm sample the last time he was up here and Lacie fucked around with it and completed the rest. All he told me was that she’d managed to get twins instead of the one child they were aiming for, though he refused to say what, exactly, their goals were.”
“Levi was last here two years ago,” Oswald said hollowly. “The girls…they can’t be any younger than ten years old. Nine, maybe, but…”
He and Jack stared at each other.
“...She wanted a spare body for herself,” Jack said slowly, his eyes lighting up with hope like a drought.
Oswald shook his head. “That was her scheme with that AI, remember? B-Rabbit? After that whole debacle, I doubt she’d try it again with an actual human child, something that is even more likely to develop sentience than your average stuffed toy.”
“Speaking of that stuffed toy,” Jack mused, “what ever did you do with it? I know Lacie took it out of the Core before she died—she didn’t want to leave the active AI running the station with easy access to the inactive AI—but I never found out where it went.”
“I left it in the nursery,” Oswald admitted. “It looks like a stuffed rabbit, so it won’t look out of place since there’s half a million stuffed rabbits in there, and there are better toys in there, so neither twin ought to touch it.”
Jack nodded. “Do the twins have names?” he asked. “If they’re around ten, I would think they do!”
Oswald shook his head. “I like the name Alice,” he said, “but I can’t figure out which twin to give the name to, and I can’t think of another name, either.”
Oswald could, in fact, think of another girls’ name. He had been a fan of Jacqueline for years now, but he couldn’t say that to Jack’s face, and besides, he would want to get Lacie’s permission before naming one of her daughters after Jack Vessalius, the boy Lacie had toyed with on-and-off for years, someone she kept around for Jack’s unrequited love and Oswald’s humiliating little crush, because Lacie may have preferred women and Glen Baskervilles were supposed to remain unattached but Oswald had eyes and those eyes could see that Jack Vessalius was cute.
“If you spell Alice A-L-Y-S-S, it’s practically two different names,” Jack said intelligently.
Oswald, who communicated nearly entirely through emails when he wasn’t speaking to Jack, nodded. “You’re right,” he said. He paused, thought about his reasons behind choosing the name Alice. “The dark-haired girl is Alice with an ‘i’,” he said. “The light-haired one is Alyss with a ‘y’.”
Jack grinned. “Can I meet them?” he asked.
“No.”
The girls took to their names well, which Oswald was relieved about. They did have to be removed from the nursery after their budding and fierce rivalry with the two new children Jack had brought, Gilbert and Vincent, but as long as Alyss was allowed to keep her kitten Cheshire and Alice her stuffed animal rabbit Oz (something Oswald swore he’d seen somewhere before, though he couldn’t quite place it—probably, he told himself, because there were half a million stuffed rabbits in that room, including Lacie’s old AI the B-Rabbit) the twins accepted the change with minimal complaining. Oswald was relieved: he had quickly discovered, after gaining the twins and the brothers in quick succession, that he did not actually know how to handle children, unless that child was Gilbert, who was a perfect angel.
Though really, it wasn’t surprising that Oswald was so attached to little Gilbert: Gilbert was going to be his successor, the next Glen Baskerville. The name change paperwork was almost complete, though it took forever to send messages to and from Earth, which had delayed it a near-ridiculous amount.
But it would come in soon, and all Oswald would have to do was sign it as Gilbert’s legal guardian and send it back to Earth, guaranteeing the stability of the Baskerville Space Station for decades to come.
Surely, absolutely nothing could or would go wrong.