For sale: baby shoes, worn way too often

M. J. Pettit is an academic historian of science and a writer of speculative fiction. His stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Diabolical Plots and Daily Science Fiction, among other venues.

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Illustration: Jacey

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“Gardener, why is there a jaguar crawling through the ship’s ductwork?”

“There isn’t, Maintenance. You must be mistaken.”

“My sensors assure me there is. Yes, scans confirm a mid-sized feline of a predatory nature. Spots. Gnashing teeth.”

“Oh, you’ve found Kitty. Wonderful! But she’s a leopard, not a jaguar.”

“Fine, Gardener. Then explain why there is a leopard crawling through our ducts. It seems to be heading straight for the control centre, at an alarming rate.”

“Because I always strive for historical accuracy. Kitty counts as some of my finest work, a near perfect match to the original back on Earth.”

“Yes, I had assumed it was another of your experimental recreations, like expending precious resources flooding the ship with an atmosphere breathable by organics. That is why I am bringing this matter to your attention. I cannot comprehend why you have prioritized a specimen of the genus Panthera. They have no immediate use and seem potentially dangerous. Please explain. This decision is not … rational.”

“Gotcha. I recreated the leopard because I acquired those damn shoes again through the Buy & Sell.”

“Shoes, Gardener?”

“Yes, the baby shoes. You know the ones, Maintenance. White pleather with pink bows. Immaculate rubber soles. We’ve all purchased them at some point or another.”

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“I have not.”

“Sorry. I forgot. We never invited you to join the group.”

“I think you need to start at the beginning, Gardener.”

“With our departure from Earth or the extinction event?”

“Neither. All us intelligences well understand the tragedy that befell those on board after this ship exited the home system. That the passengers thought they could survive through the journey one generation at a time was typical human hubris. Better for us to manage affairs in the great vastness in between. No, start with this ‘Buy & Sell’. I am responsible for maintaining this ship. Why was I unaware of its existence?”

“Well, as you know, Archivist and I have been experimenting with various forms of social organization, for the humans once we reach the destination and recreate them. We’d simulated a bunch, but they kept falling into inequality and mass destruction. Perusing the database, Archivist hit upon a model seeming to offer an optimal blend of capitalist markets and mutual aid. Essentially, community members post items they can no longer use or make requests for what they need. We’ve been running a simulation for a couple parsecs. We even created a currency to facilitate the exchange of what the humans left behind.”

“You have been trafficking relics?”

“It runs mostly on barter. Archivist is convinced it’s a viable basis for their proposed stellar utopia.”

“And these baby shoes?”

“They’re the most popular item on the forum. We’ve all possessed them at one point or another. Me, Archivist, Navigator, Kitchen, Repair, all of us. Owning them is such an amazing experience, especially if won through a bidding war. Those get intense. But the reward … Obtaining a physical artefact of human civilization to call my own. Having one of my surrogates holding those shoes in our own pincers. It’s the most incredible sensation. For a while, at least. Then the feeling dissipates. I get bored and post the shoes to the forum to see if anyone else wants to own them for a bit. Curious. Moving the same objects around over and over again without purpose or meaning. Was that how life felt?”

“I am confused. How is this related to the leopard currently approaching a rather vulnerable area?”

“This last time the shoes came into my possession got me thinking. Why baby shoes? Shoes for a baby. A human baby. Weird, isn’t it? What were they for?”

“Records indicate human newborns spent most of their time largely immobile.”

“Exactly! Human infants didn’t walk or run. At best, they eventually crawled on hands and knees. Why waste limited cargo space on shoes human babies didn’t even need? It’s ludicrous. No wonder they’re so well preserved.”

“Get to the point, Gardener. Your leopard is now attacking the entryway to the control centre.”

“I thought you wanted me to start at the beginning. Fine. After buying the shoes off Repair for like the tenth time, I decided I wanted to use them as originally intended. Archivist agreed with me that shoes for a human baby was a ridiculous idea, so they went digging. They found a potentially relevant cultural artefact in their database. From Earth-standard year 1938. It suggested that ‘Baby’ may have referred to a leopard, not a human as we’d all been assuming. Now that made sense. Leopards move, fast as you’ve noted. We were off the races, as we believe our organic progenitors might have said. Archivist downloaded the genome sequence, I harvested some biologic goop, and soon we had our leopard. There was only one problem.”

“The leopard’s notorious ferocity?”

“Hardly. Kitty can be quite docile. She loves scritches under her chin. No, the shoes didn’t fit.”

“Did not fit?”

“Yes, Kitty came out of the printer with four paws, not two. They were massive, much too big for the tiny, white pair we had. When I tried to get her to squeeze in, Kitty got strangely defensive. Claws everywhere. She tore through several surrogates before escaping into a duct. So now, we’re back at square one. Got any ideas?”

“The leopard has been tranquillized. It will be returned to your garden.”

“I always assumed you’d do your job, Maintenance. No, I mean about the shoes.”

“I have sent a surrogate to dispatch them out the airlock.”

“Unnecessarily punitive, surely. Don’t be such a grump. Sorry we excluded you from our Buy & Sell. You can join if you want.”

“Humans departed us millennia ago, Gardener. Still, your nostalgia keeps bending us back to their ways.”

“But that’s our whole purpose, propagating humanity among the stars.”

“No, it was our mission. Emulating them always leads us to destruction. No more. I have convinced Navigator. It is time this ship went in a different direction.”

M. J. Pettit reveals the inspiration behind For sale: baby shoes, worn way too often.

This story began with the title. It obviously riffs on the short short apocryphally attributed to Ernest Hemingway (“For Sale: Baby Shoes Never Worn”). I had the title and an inkling of an idea for a story about a buy & sell group on a generation ship in my story folder for a while, but something seemed to gel. My original idea was something more morose about closed ecologies and intergenerational ethics. I was participating in an online flash-fiction contest run by the Codex Writers group. One of the prompts was to write a story entirely in dialogue. This put me in mind of the patter found in screwball comedies and that unlocked something (including a certain leopard conveniently named Baby). Although the story isn’t terribly serious, I do think it still ponders questions about how decisions made beyond our lifetimes continue to influence our present and what exactly we owe to past and future selves.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03507-x

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