Kaspar's Box

Still, she'd dealt with a lot of them, both men and women, in her time, and even though she couldn't remember dealing with pregnant young women, she was certainly ready to give it a try.

As the captain settled in on the chair behind the partition, Commander Sittithong took the command chair and pressed a small disk on the thin, crescent-shaped desk in front of her. "Send in the first woman. No preference. Any one of them will do."

The door across from the exec slid back and a young woman entered, looking not just hesitant but downright scared.

Murphy had stood, but there was a thin, rigid but functional chair facing the command chair. "Please have a seat if you like," the commander said as softly and as friendly sounding as she could manage.

"Uh, yeah. Thank you, Mum," the woman muttered, and sat. She looked no more comfortable sitting than standing, but apparently it was better than nothing.

The screen area of the desk lit up with the complete files and digest of the initial interview with this young woman. "You are Irish O'Brian? Your true name?"

"Yes, Mum. Me folks thought it sounded good, and I'm certainly Irish."

Sittithong realized that the young woman wasn't making a play on words; she meant it.

"You are…" Good lord! "… seventeen standard years?"

"Yes, Mum. But I'll be eighteen next March."

The commander quickly adjusted to the stock military calendar. "Then you were only sixteen when you… became pregnant?"

"Aye, Mum. Old enough, it seems, though the old superstitions said it was too young and couldn't be done on the first time. Guess they were wrong 'bout that."

O'Brian had a thick accent that was related to Murphy's but was much, much more pronounced. Sittithong guessed that it was the Irish dialect, whatever that meant.

The infobase picked up her mental query and gave her the details on a thin frame to the right of the personnel record. Some small island on Old Earth. A nationality, as it were. The planet the girl was from, though, was Tara Hibernius, a midway colony near the border beyond which they could no longer go. The colony had been established by a group of wealthy conservatives who wanted to found an agricultural society based on an idealized vision of an ancient state of their native land that probably never existed in the first place.

The pattern wasn't uncommon, particularly in the early days of colonization. In fact, such things had been encouraged. The irrational revolutionary nut cases with money and influence and possibly fanaticism as well could be bled off by giving them a chance to prove their ideas, and if you had a wealthy enough benefactor or group, then the Confederation hadn't even had to shell out much to set the places up. When the dissident and the dangerous actually paid to take themselves out of your society, how could you not help but ease the way?

Tara Hibernius was only two wormgate jumps from Vaticanus, too. Strict and very conservative Catholic society. So Murphy might not have been stretching the truth about the place. They might well have imposed technological limitations on the average citizens there just to keep them isolated and their lifestyle mandated just so; this allowed for a cultlike society where people lived in ignorance of what else there was in the universe, the founders' ideal. Back to the land, back to the simple life-it was consistent.

But paying an old reprobate like Murphy to get your pregnant daughter off to some distant planet where she'd be totally unprepared to live wasn't consistent. Some of these cults killed their sinners, but this seemed neither an act of excommunication nor of loving desperation. It made no sense at all.

The computer-aided psychology report on any of the three was no more help. Except for a strong sense of deception, the physiological results were totally contradictory and so were the stories.

"Why were you on Captain Murphy's ship instead of staying back on your native planet?" the exec asked her.

Irish O'Brian shrugged. "It beat the alternative, Mum."

"Indeed? And what was that?"

"Bein' burnt up with the baby and all, Mum."

"The people of your world would have burned you alive?" The exec would have sounded more shocked if she actually believed that it would happen.

"Oh, yes, Mum. Me and me sisters."

"Sisters? I don't see any relationship here."

"Oh, it's a different kind of relation, that," O'Brian replied, sounding casual and innocent. "Sort of sisters in the soul more than in the blood. They'd already got the other ten of us, y'see, so there wasn't no doubt but what they'd do to us."

"They burned ten other young women? You saw this?"

"Yes, Mum. Didn't hav'ta, though. When any one of us goes, well, the others just sort of know, y'see."

"No, I don't see, I'm afraid. I have no idea what you're talking about."