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Mistress Martinet tapped again as she spoke, showing the child growing up in different phases, as she had with the first image.
“However,” she continued, “Those were the same characteristics your mother chose for you, and now she tells me she rather regrets it. She told me to instruct you that you do not want a ‘spineless’ daughter—you need one with some willpower and stamina to follow you into business.”
“My…my mother said I was spineless?” Lilli felt the familiar ache in her heart.
“Oh, not in so many words, my dear,” Mistress Martinet said quickly. “She just wanted you to consider that in order to make your way in the cutthroat world of Yonnite business, one needs a little, ah, how can I put it? A little—”
“Bullshit,” Karn said harshly.
“I beg your pardon?” Mistress Martinet glared at him. “That wasn’t at all what I was going to say. And how dare you interrupt?”
“I said, this whole process of planning some kind of designer child is bullshit,” Karn growled, not backing down a bit. “How can you pick out babies so coldly like this? You ought to take what the Goddess gives you and be grateful for it.”
Lilli wondered if he felt like that because he knew himself to be incapable of fathering children. Maybe this seemed like an extravagant waste to someone who just wished they could have kids and would have been happy with any child as long as they were blessed to have one.
“If you continue to interrupt I’ll…I’ll have you thrown out,” Mistress Martinet warned him, though her face was pale when she said it.
“By who?” Karn glared at her. “I don’t see anyone else around. I’m here to protect my Mistress and I’m not going anywhere. So stop messing with her mind.”
“I’ll just show you the last Candidate,” Mistress Martinet said, turning back to Lilli and ignoring the big Kindred, though she cast a fearful look over her shoulder from time to time to see if he was still watching. He was.
She tapped the screen a third time and yet another baby face appeared. This one had red hair and brown eyes.
“Now, this candidate will be a good mixture of tractability, beauty, and intelligence,” she told Lilli. “This is actually your mother’s first choice, though she wants you to know you can pick for yourself among the three of them.”
“I…I don’t know.” Lilli felt sick. She didn’t want to pick any of the sperm candidates to be impregnated with. She just wanted to go home and forget any of this had ever happened. But how could she? Mistress Martinet was standing right there, ready to tell her mother if she backed out of the insemination. There would be no hiding it or pretending the process hadn’t worked because her mother would know all the details already.
I think I’m actually going to have to go through with this, she thought, and felt like crying. She wasn’t ready to have a baby yet! Not all by herself! She wanted someone to help her raise it. Someone to love it and care for it—not a cold, lifeless nannybot which was only programmed to take care of it and couldn’t really have any feelings for it.
But I have Karn now, she thought, glancing at the big Kindred. Maybe he can help me raise the baby. Maybe I won’t be alone after all.
“Well, if you can’t decide, we’ll go with your mother’s choice,” Mistress Martinet said briskly. She tapped the screen again and said loudly, ‘Prepare the sperm of Candidate three for insemination.”
“What?” Lilli gasped, but the other woman already had her by the arm again and was leading her out of the room.
“Down this way,” she said to Lilli. “It won’t take but a minute and then you’ll have that cute little baby bump in less than an hour.”
“Baby bump?” Lilli’s hand stole down to her lower belly automatically and she wished again that her skirt fit better. What was wrong with it, anyway?
“Oh yes—you’ll start showing almost from the moment of conception. The quick-grow formula makes certain the baby developing inside you grows at an exponential rate.”
As Mistress Martinet spoke, she was leading Lilli into yet another room behind another black door. Only this one was much larger and had more than just blank walls and a view screen.
Forty
The room was divided into two sections by a clear plastiglass barrier. On one side of the barrier were several chairs. On the other was also a chair, but a much different kind of chair than Lilli had ever seen.
It was padded in bright red leather and it looked like it reclined but the bottom part of it appeared to be split into two long sections.
Is that where my legs go? Lilli wondered, feeling sick with dread as she remembered the tales she’ heard. Is the chair split so they can be spread apart while I get inseminated?
