Nina Osier: Matushka

“Katy.” Romanova sighed. “No, it isn’t. Never has been, never will be! We’ve had our share of social and political difficulties here, we’re a long way from being perfect; but that kind of intrusion on our citizens’ privacy is something we just wouldn’t dream of tolerating. A Terran-owned business tried doing that at its Narsatian outlet a few years ago, and they were forced to either take the damned scanner out or close down.”

The younger woman came out of the bathroom, clad now in a winter-weight bathrobe (although this autumn morning was rapidly warming toward a beautiful day) and looking comfortable at last. She sat in a chair, clearly joining Romanova on the edge of the bed didn’t enter her mind. She said, “All right. You want to know how it happened, don’t you, uh—Katy?”

Better, Romanova thought. She nodded, smiled gently and said, “Yes. Not that you have to tell me a single thing, Rachel; it’s enough that Dan wants us to help you. He’s like a son to both Linc and me. We love him that way, and if you matter to him that’s all we need to know. But I am curious, and of course the more I do know about this the better able I’ll be to help.”

The woman who had been the Archangel’s executive officer drew a long breath. She started talking, slowly and almost haltingly at first; then more rapidly and more naturally, until finally she almost forgot Catherine Romanova was there.

“Dan left the Archangel at Savgorod, when the order came down from Fleet Command throwing all the scramblers out of the Service,” Kane said, staring down at hands that were clasped in her lap. “From what the standard calendar says, that was eighteen months ago. For me it was ten weeks ago. He didn’t have a chance to say good-bye to me, or to anyone else for that matter. The order was waiting when we reached port, Captain Giandrea implemented it immediately just the way he was required to, and the next thing I knew someone was reporting to my office and telling me she was the ship’s new chief engineer. Damned if Fleet Command hadn’t even set us up with a replacement for Dan, they did that with all the scramblers who were department heads on starships or at frontier bases. At least they had sense enough to realize that if they didn’t do that, they were going to have a lot of furious captains and base commanders on their hands. As it was we lost four more officers off Archangel in addition to Dan, and Giandrea was rushing around filling those berths before we had to sail again.”

Romanova nodded, and said nothing because she sensed that to do so would break the quiet spell that Kane was weaving for herself to help her remember easily and speak freely. But the former fleet admiral remembered that order well, because it had been issued by her own office—after she had bitterly and passionately, but unsuccessfully, fought against it when her civilian superior had told her it must be done.

Retirement had first entered her thoughts on that day, and when she had come home to their apartment on the grounds of the Academy and had found its commanding officer—her husband, Captain Lincoln Casey—actually in tears after having had to disband the separate college-within-a-university at which newly promoted “scramblers” were given accelerated training before being confirmed in their field promotions to officer status—that had done it. In forty years, she had never seen Linc cry like that. It had taken some time for them to extricate themselves gracefully from their combined commitments and responsibilities, but from that moment on there had been no question they must do so. Especially when Linc, who like other Morthan hybrids had always been immune to human ailments, began suffering a series of relatively minor but debilitating illnesses—and crushing fatigue, a weariness that had not lifted until after they had arrived here.

The institution to which both had given their lives had betrayed them, and she could listen now to Rachel Kane’s tale of a similar betrayal with understanding even though Kane’s situation had been a far more personal one.

The young woman continued, “Of course I didn’t know I was pregnant then. If I had…oh, I don’t know what I would have done! Savgorod’s not Terra, I wouldn’t have been scanned for a gen every time I moved around there, but it’s a small place and I’d have been recognizable just by sight. Anyhow, I didn’t realize anything was wrong until we were back out in space. I’d noticed before Dan left that I felt funny. Almost like I did the other times the medics were getting me ready for an ova harvesting session…but that always happened while I was on Terra, before; and I was always told in advance, so I wouldn’t have sex with anyone and risk in-body fertilization. It always was a pain, the preparation phase made me horny as hell and then I had to be celibate.”

She said that casually—clearly procreation, and the powerful feelings that prompted it, had different connotations for her than they had for Romanova. Not that sex was anything dirty or shameful on Narsai, or on Kesra where Katy had spent most of her married life (her first married life, that was); but in both places it was a private and even rather sacred matter, and most women didn’t talk about their desires to strangers in the earthy way that Kane was doing now.

“I sure wasn’t celibate that time!” Kane said, and smiled to herself reminiscently. “The last week Dan was aboard, I couldn’t get enough of him. We’d been lovers before that, he approached me for the first time months earlier; but until that week it was just a typical shipboard pairing. Junior officer makes the first move on senior officer, so there’s no question of the more powerful person exploiting the less powerful one. Senior officer likes the idea, and they bed together whenever their shifts allow it. So you’d have thought the CMO would have known he needed to warn me to either knock it off or have Dan take a contraceptive, that’s the kind of thing that everyone on board knows is happening! But it was just my luck to draw a doc who didn’t pay any attention to ship’s gossip, and I don’t suppose I could have expected him to realize all the implications of treating me the way the medics at my creating lab did.”

Probably that poor starship chief medical officer hadn’t known what to make of being instructed to bring a female gen to fertility and then harvest her, Romanova thought with grim amusement. That would have put him between the proverbial rock and hard place ethically—which wasn’t all that unusual a spot, of course, for health professionals whose loyalty to their patients as people must always be balanced against their greater loyalty to the Service to whom those patients belonged body and soul for as long as their oaths were on record. But Kane had been right when she had remarked, a little while ago, that female gens on starships were unheard of. So it was likely that the medic who had been treating her hadn’t known how to regard her, as a human woman with all the normal reproductive rights and responsibilities that went with that status or as a sort of walking egg farm.

Who was simultaneously his ship’s executive officer. If that medic had been a confused soul who had made an enormous mistake, Romanova found it hard to blame him for it.

Kane was speaking again. “We’d been underway for a few days when I realized I needed to see the doc about why I was feeling the way I was. I did that self-scan in my quarters first just on general principles; I’d noticed that something about taking care of me was making him uncomfortable, and I guess I was hoping I could self-treat if it was just some kind of cycle problem. And then I was sitting there on my berth, looking at three little somethings inside me. And I felt…I don’t know what I felt. Not anything I ever expected to feel, anyway!”