Kaspar's Box tk-3

by Jack L. Chalker

  Still, somebody had gone to a lot of trouble and expense for what seemed easy to do right here in a compound out in the bush. Why go to all that trouble, and for so little result? Three engineered babies you could grow in test tubes?

  No, he had some of it, but not all of it, not yet. He was certain of that.

  It was well into the night before the girls returned, much to his relief. Not that he was so terrified for their welfare, of course, but he had to get paid, after all.

  His relief was short-lived, though, when he saw that they were under no apparent spells but dressed quite differently, and followed by a robot cart carrying a ton of packages. They themselves had on loose but rather colorful one-piece dresses, wide, floppy brim hats, fancy designer sunglasses, and nice-looking sandals. They also appeared to have discovered the application of makeup, were wearing earrings and finger rings, wearing painted lips and painted nails.

  “Good god! How’d you get all that?” he asked nervously. “You didn’t spend every single bit of credit I got, did you?”

  “Oh, of course not!” Irish laughed, sounding tired but happy. “We didn’t spend nothin’ at all for these!”

  Murphy frowned. “Then how…? I mean, they got print and retinal checks and you need the money or else here! Or did you just walk out with it while makin’ nobody see you or somethin’ like that?”

  “Oh, nothing like that,” Mary Margaret laughed. “We just did like everybody else. We picked what we wanted, we gave ’em our finger and looked through their eyepiece or whatever it is, and it said we was okay. Worked every place we went.”

  He sat back down, a bit dumbfounded. “Heh! Best damn security system for payment and credit I know, and you girls just breeze right past it ’cause the machines all think they know you and want to make you happy! Sweet Jesus! As hard as I had to work to steal things over me many years!”

  “We didn’t steal,” Irish O’Brian insisted. “We just did what everybody else did for payment and it was good. So who loses? The shops got paid, right? So if there’s no money there, it’s the government’s own fault for giving it to us!”

  “I wanta try on that stuff but I’m beat,” Mary Margaret McBride put in.

  “Me, too,” chipped in Brigit Moran.

  Irish came over to the old captain and kissed him on the forehead. “So can you be a dear man and put them things someplace here for us? I think it’s bedtime.”

  You didn’t argue with these gals, that was clear. He let them go in, get their showers, and stake out their bed places and get settled, then he quietly made certain that the connecting door was completely shut and went back to the comm console.

  “Manual mode. Keyboard, please,” he said quietly.

  In front of him a holographic keyboard appeared. Few could read and write these days, or needed to do either, but there were times when that was a real advantage for someone who could.

  With his index finger he tapped out, “Order of Saint Phineas, Dir.” The same listing came up as before. This time, however, he input, “Call. Low volume.”

  A weak electronic signal buzzed on and off several times. Then a woman’s voice answered, “This is the main number of the Order of Saint Phineas. Leave your message and contact information and someone will get back to you.”

  He waited for the tone, then said softly, “Captain Patrick Murphy, Hotel Aden, suite five five four. I am in early with cargo for you. Please contact me and arrange delivery or pickup. Message ends.”

  He suspected that they already knew he was here, and probably just about all that had happened, via those stones or whatever they were, but it never hurt to go through the motions. Now there was nothing left to do but to wait for contact.

  Truth be told, he almost would miss the girls. If he could get them to trust him with that power of theirs, there was no limit to what they could do, and the fantasy of a man his age with three very pretty companions wasn’t at all unpleasant to him. Still, they’d probably get him in more trouble than he’d ever been in in his whole life just by being their own sweet ditzy selves and, besides, it was beginning to look more and more like the very last folk you’d want to cross would be these Phineas people.

  Still, all the previous deliveries had been a bit older, a bit smarter, and generally just one or two at a time. He really wondered what the future held for these girls, or if they had one once he delivered them. Clearly it wasn’t the trio that this Order was interested in, it was what they carried in their bellies. This was a huge, mostly wild, and very unpopulated world where folks could disappear forever and never be missed, in spite of all those state-of-the-art police controls. Once relieved of their babies and their fancy gem gadgets, they were just three pretty, helpless, far-too-young girls, fit for cleaning up the place or making bushmen a bit less lonely or, if all else failed, providing a nice dinner for some of them creepy crawly types out in the wild.

  He began to feel depressed. Not so much at their fate, but at the very clear evidence that, after all those years and all that shady living, he was somehow developing at least an embryonic conscience.

  The communicator rang softly. He jumped, startled at the sound, then said simply, “Murphy.”

  “Ten hundred tomorrow morning,” said a woman’s voice, not the same one as in the message. “Tanzania Park. North entrance, then to the Great Apes pavilion. Bring your delivery.”

  “How will I know your person?” he asked.

  “They’ll know. And we know you.”

  There was no use in going any further; the line was definitely dead. He sighed. Well, it was more cloak-and-dagger on his part than he was used to in these things, but at least it would be over.

  He wished he had some way to work out with the girls some kind of signal so that, if they got into trouble or didn’t like where they wound up, they could contact him or someone else for help, but it didn’t seem likely he could do it without also giving the same information to these clients of his. The girls weren’t about to take off those Magi stones, and not being able to read, there just was no other way to get private.

  In a way, that made him feel a bit better. If he couldn’t do anything, then he could hardly be guilty of any serious breaches, right? Nobody, not even he, could blame him if it all went wrong for them. Not so long as they had that power and also wanted to go.

  He decided to let them be for this last night and go down to the hotel pub and relax with the best it had, at least until he really believed that himself.

  * * *

  Tanzania Park looked and even operated very much like a metropolitan zoo. It charged an admission, had the usual amenities, and allowed people to see ancient animals, mostly Old Earth species, some long extinct from that planet even before the Great Silence, in a kind of natural habitat recreation, but that wasn’t its primary purpose.

  Like its aquatic, arctic, and other planetary biome zoos, it was a place where the old species were born and bred until strong enough to be released into the wild, and trained as much as possible to be self-sufficient out there. It was also where injured animals came for treatment, was used for research on animal biology and behavior, and as a transit point for outgoing orders as well.

  The three young women loved it.

  Murphy had done his best to brief them that this was it, that they’d be meeting the people they were supposed to meet and going away with them from the park, but that seemed to be the farthest thing from their minds this nice morning. The only thing they’d asked, when he told them earlier at the hotel what was going to be going down and where, was how they were going to get the bulk of their brand-new purchases to wherever they were headed next. Murphy assured them that he’d have all that sent over, and that seemed to be the end of that.

  The cab didn’t look any different from the others waiting outside the hotel and probably wasn’t; if he was bringing the “merchandise” to them, why bother?

  The north entrance was imposing, consisting of giant prefab stonelike columns carved with ancient trib
al symbols, colors, and designs that matched the original long-ago land of these creatures. His finger paid their admission, but he had to work hard to keep the trio from immediately heading for the souvenir shop. It was already almost ten, and the map said they had about two kilometers to walk to get to the Great Apes area. Murphy realized that whoever they’d be meeting probably had them in sight the whole way now and he didn’t want to be perceived as deliberately dawdling to miss the appointment.

  There weren’t a whole lot of people in the park, or so it seemed, but there were small hordes of children running about here and there, often being chased by nearly exhausted teachers or nannies, and now and again there were groups of twos and threes looking like business people killing time or people there on zoological business. A few families, yes, as well, and the occasional, but rare, individual.

  It was already hot and growing hotter and about as humid as air could be without suddenly turning to rain, and the walk in full gravity was hard even on him. He couldn’t understand how the three girls were handling it so well considering their condition; most women he knew that far advanced had backaches and could barely waddle a hundred meters without getting winded or, even more likely, seeking a bathroom. Not them. They looked well enough along, but acted almost as if their condition had little or no effect on their energy, aches and pains, or general mobility. How anyone could seem that energetic carrying a watermelon between their legs was beyond him; it wasn’t at all natural.

  It was further proof that, in spite of their primitive and humble native world, these ones had been designed by someone specifically for this purpose. No wonder they’d all gotten knocked up so young and so easily; their entire design was towards pregnancy as a natural condition. These were baby-making machines, designed not to simply continue evolution but to control it.

  Walking slowly but effortlessly down the path, the trio entered ape country long before their titular guardian got there.

  It was almost as if they were expected. As they came around a corner through the dense jungle on the artificial track carved out for visitors, they suddenly found themselves quite close to a whole colony of large hairy apelike creatures sitting on a pile of rocks above and around a small pool of water.

  The apes seemed nonthreatening and quite pleased for the company. It didn’t take more than a minute for anyone to get the impression that, from their point of view, they were sitting there waiting for the attractions to come and parade by the waiting colony. To the apes, the people were the animals.

  “Jeez! They’re like little hairy people!” Mary Margaret exclaimed.

  “Some of ’em ain’t so little,” Irish responded, gesturing to an area behind and to the right of the ape colony. Up in the trees some really huge apes with bright orange fur and really dumb-looking expressions watched the whole world go by. They seemed very slow and almost to flow rather than merely move between positions, when they moved at all, but there was no question that they were aware of everyone and everything around them.

  “Look! That one’s preggers!” said the blond Brigit Moran, pointing to one of the nearer apes in the group.

  “Yeah! Wow! I think a couple of ’em are,” Irish said, looking at each in turn. “I wonder if they talk?”

  “That’s dumb!” Mary Margaret shot back. “They’re, like, animals. Animals don’t talk!”

  “I had a hog once could grunt ‘Danny Boy’,” Irish insisted. “They ain’t all so dumb.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe. I mean, we’re the ones had to pay to see them, right? And then we got to walk all this way to parade past them. Maybe you’re right at that,” Mary Margaret said thoughtfully.

  Murphy by this time had caught up, although he was a bit winded and his calves were already threatening revolution. He spotted a comfortable-looking bench under the jungle canopy and made for it, sinking down onto the seat and feeling blessed relief. This was where they were instructed to be, and by his watch they were within a couple of minutes of being on time, so he was satisfied at that.

  “Can we go over and pet them or somethin’?” Mary Margaret wondered.

  Irish shook her head. “Don’t think so. I bet there’s some kinda wall we can’t see around. Remember, just ’cause they kinda look like us don’t mean that they wouldn’t like to beat the livin’ shit out of us. We all know more human animals that’d do that, don’t we?”

  The other two nodded seriously and made no attempt to get closer to the pool and its colony of large chimpanzees.

  Murphy looked at the apes, both the chimps on the ground and the orangutans in the trees, and wondered if they weren’t a lot smarter than they were supposed to be.

  You’re gettin’ paranoid, Murphy, he chided himself. But who wouldn’t be after a week or two like he’d just had with those three?

  Truth was, he wondered if they could possibly be as airheaded as they let on. Could they really match wits against those apes over there? And which group would win the intellectual battle?

  He also wondered why anybody bothered to keep great apes around and preserved in their natural habitats like this. What good were they? Kind of like keeping a prehistoric virus around because it was the ancestor of pneumonia. Just because people and apes shared a family tree didn’t seem to him sufficient reason for some folks, some civilizations, to actually pay not only for their preservation but also for real live pairs or colonies of them for some distant colonial worlds who would find better use for those resources making sure that they came through the upcoming economic and social train wreck everybody knew had to be coming.

  He thought he heard someone come up in back of him. Turning while not getting up, he found himself staring down an enormous black-pelted gorilla not three meters from the back of his head.

  That made him move faster than he dreamed he was still capable of moving.

  The gorilla didn’t try and lunge, and seemed almost amused by his reaction, like it had deliberately crept up behind him just to spook him and see what he would do.

  “So, you big muscle-bound beast,” Murphy called to him, “think you could catch Murphy in a panic, eh? Well, here I am!”

  The gorilla, on all fours but seeming more massive for all that, looked up at him, seemed almost to smile, snorted loudly in the captain’s direction, then turned and vanished back into the forest.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Murphy swore aloud. “Why the hell would anyone want to make sure a brute like that survived and prospered is beyond me!”

  He turned to see how the girls were taking his sneak attack and suddenly realized that he was alone in the glen. Alone as far as humans went, anyway. The chimps and orangs were still watching and they seemed highly amused.

  “Girls! Where are you?” he shouted out as loud as he could, causing the chimps at least to start jumping up and down and screeching at him in obvious mockery of his genuine concern.

  He walked slowly towards them, almost ready to grab one and make it tell him where the girls were hiding, but just beyond the edge of the track he felt the solidity and crackle of an energy barrier.

  He tested it out, and it seemed to go the length of the track as far as he could see in either direction. Okay, so they didn’t go that way, at least not unless they were using that infernal power stuff again.

  He walked back to the bench, then around it, and immediately hit the same sort of barrier on the bench side as well.

  Thinking that they might have gone towards the exit, he walked back up the track for a hundred meters or so, all exhaustion forgotten, until he could actually see almost to the north gate. People, yes, in increasing numbers, but no sign of the girls.

  He quickly whirled and walked back down past the chimps and around the curve where, he found, he had almost as good practical visibility to the next area. A young couple seemed to be walking slowly and close together, hand in hand, enjoying the day, and there was a maintenance robot moving towards him to his right, apparently collecting trash and checking the status of the energy barrier as
well.

  He doubted that the girls were trying that invisibility or not notice trick; that seemed to require a long period of time chanting together to get themselves in synch. And while they did have some level of hypnotic abilities, they weren’t all that clever and no good at all at preplanning, so he doubted if they were biding their time and then controlling his mind so that he wouldn’t notice them going. Not that they’d have to. He’d been having enough concerns with that gorilla.

  He went back over to the bench and sank back down onto it. Most likely simple diversion. They might have put the gorilla up to it somehow, but he doubted it. Easier to just wait until his attention was fully somewhere else and then move. If it hadn’t been the gorilla, it would have been something or, eventually, somebody.

  After a half hour he was convinced that it wasn’t any trick of the girls that had caused it, either. They would have come back and lorded it over him by now.

  He felt kind of empty, almost, and it surprised him. As much as he wanted to be rid of them, they’d been the closest thing to family he’d had in fifty years.

  Slowly, suddenly feeling the weight of his years, he walked back up to the nearest entrance to the park and looked for a taxi, settling instead for the maglev about two blocks farther down. It was cheaper, and he wasn’t in any hurry any more.

  When he got back to the room he half expected them to be there, but when the door opened, it revealed a suite so immaculate it seemed as if nobody had ever stayed in it. Everything had been made up, and it seemed sterile, empty. It was another minute or so before he realized that the packages the three had brought in last night were also nowhere to be seen, nor was the mess in cosmetics, bath oils, and the like they’d littered the bathroom with even that morning.