I run Station R-1042. There are 23 miners and me, all males. Once upon a time, I was a miner, until a fool mishandled a plasma torch. The insurance company won't let me do pressure suit work any more. I worked out a deal with the mining company: they gave me a cash settlement and a no-suit job, and I save them the cost of a medical retirement and paying for additional "rehabilitation". Up here, I don't need legs, and no one cares if I look ugly or not. I do all the administrative work, see the miners get fed, maintain equipment which can be serviced inside, like pressure suits, and I even serve as the station medic. That's not as hard as it sounds, because an artificial intelligence program does all the brainwork; I just set the broken bones. Bad cases, of course, are sedated and sent down home. Oh, yes, I also run the company store.
Actually, there are two company stores. There's the legitimate one, which carries "sundries" for the miners, things like depilatory cream and after-shave. (Some brands are banned, because the air-conditioning can't handle them) Then there's the "black market store", which I run on the side. It obtains hard to get items, the ones not in the Hudson Bay Trading Co. catalog, like the life-size inflatable plastic doll one of the guys ordered. I long ago figured out how to smuggle items like that into the station, something only I, as administrator, could pull off successfully. I do pretty well, financially.
Some of the miners are Gay, and as long as they are discrete, that's fine. A few are single, and if I don't cater to their needs, as best I can, with "distractions" and entertainment, XXX videos and such, things get pretty tense around here. Fights break out, things like that. Some of the guys have families, down home, and work here to support them. The union contract calls for a free one-hour video link every two hundred working hours, for those who are legally married. The several minute delay (depending on the Earth's orbital position) makes it hard to carry on a two-way conversation, but at least they can see the wife and kids. We have to watch out for the married guys, especially right after their call home. Sometimes they go berserk. Since I'm not married, I don't even get to look at a woman.
All this is leading up to the subject of this story. One of my not so legitimate contacts makes me an offer. Through certain contacts in a mortuary, the people he represented had obtained tissue samples from "Sirena", the famous porno star. A select few could order a clone of Sirena. Cloning a complete human, brain and all, is "universally" illegal, of course, but after the Libertarian revolt in Belise, it can be done. The tricky part is getting her out of Belise. Interpol gets on your case.
Anyway, in a moment of weakness, I put in an order. I'm probably the only person on R-1042 with the capital for such a purchase and the know-how to get her here. I figure the company need never find out there are 25 of us, not 24, on R-1042, and, like so many other guys, I really miss female companionship. For an ugly guy like me to have a wife like Sirena, hey, it seems like the chance of a lifetime. The problem is, I'd been reading too much science fiction. I should have known better.
A little more than a year after I made my deposit, they tell me she's ready, full grown, a perfect clone of the original. It takes all my ingenuity to get her here, but finally a special pressure-tight container arrives, in among the spare parts and food and stuff the company sends up from time to time. The container masses a thousand kilos, but that's no problem in microgravity, and, as administrator, I know just the place to hide it.
Now comes the difficult part. Sirena was shipped in her "womb", an artificial life support canister in which she floats in a sort of synthetic amniotic fluid. I peer in through the viewport and see her there. She's fully adult, beautiful, but still has her umbilical cord. Her hair, which has never been cut, practically fills the extra volume of the container. I hadn't realized the original wasn't a real blonde. Hey, I should complain? I have the only woman this side of Space Colony Sagan.
It takes about thirty hours of hard work to make her operational, so to speak. Meanwhile, some of the guys are complaining about the food (so what else is new?), and a suit regulator doesn't get fixed (there are plenty of spares), but I manage to bring my mail-order bride to life, so to speak. A lot of the process is automatic, of course, but some things require hands-on work, like inserting the airway to clear her lungs and tying off her belly button. I didn't do a great job on my first "delivery"; she has a real "outie". Still, things go pretty well. Her vital signs, blood pressure and all, are good. Then it's just a case of waiting for the sedative to wear off.
I thought I was all prepared. I had smuggled in clothes, Frederick's of Hollywood, mostly, and hair stuff, and cosmetics, all that, ahead of time. I even thought to buy contraceptives.
So what does my beautiful bride do, the first time she sees me? She cries and wiggles. Now, here's where I realize the error of my ways. You expect, if you read that sort of "speculative fiction", that a clone of Sirena is going to act like Sirena, right? She'll have a sexy voice, a sultry glance, and an unlimited libido. Well, those SF authors never thought it through, and, of course, they never saw a real clone.
What I bought was a 51 kilo woman with the mind of a newborn babe. In some respects, it's less mind, because neural pathways that are formed soon after birth in a normal human never form in a clone and can't, once she's adult. For instance, her eyes are perfectly normal, anatomically, but she can't see, not the way you and I do. She has no depth perception, no ability to distinguish foreground and background. She can see light, but she's effectively blind, because she never had the opportunity to lie in her crib, playing with a mobile, or to be carried around by a loving mother. Her brain just never learned to see.
It's the same thing with speech. She has a voice box. She even has a husky voice. But she hasn't learned to speak, doesn't seem to have the mental capacity to associate sounds with objects, never mind abstract ideas.
I suppose she has the built-in neural wiring to learn to walk, but how can she learn to walk in microgravity?
I go back and read the "fine print" of my purchase contract. Yes, they had delivered everything they said they would, a healthy female with the body of a porno star in her prime. Well, not quite; she has no muscle tone, no strength, but even that caveat is buried in there, in the details of the contract -- "Customer is advised that an exercise regimen will be required before full strength is developed." Well, there's no way I could get my money back. Even if they agreed to take her back, there is no way to ship a living, breathing, food-dependent woman back down home without exposing the whole illegal operation.
OK, I'm stuck with a real moral dilemma. I have on my hands a sexy-looking woman, with the mind of a day-old baby. In every legal and moral respect, she is a human being. To cut my losses and push her out an air lock would be murder. I would think of it as murder, and so would the law. On the other hand, how am I to keep her? She isn't even, for God's sake, toilet trained, and I certainly hadn't thought to buy lots of adult-size diapers.
For a couple hundred hours, during which I get very little sleep and almost have a mutiny on my hands, I play father to my baby. I clean up her bodily excretions. I feed her with an improvised syringe. I move her limbs, trying to teach her to resist, so as to develop some muscle, but it seems not to have much effect. The only thing that helps at all is my cosmetic efforts. I cut her hair and perm it. Asleep, if she hasn't messed herself, she looks great.
Finally, a delegation comes to file a formal union grievance, claiming I'm not delivering services they had come to expect. I agree. "Sykes," I say, "I have been working on the greatest thing ever to come to R-1042. For the sake of worker morale, I'm not even going to charge you for it."
"This had better be good," says Sykes, the spokesman, who is supporting a wife and kids down home.
"Sykes," I say, "what do you miss most, being away from your family?"
"Well," he says, "I miss my wife, of course, but the worst part is the kids. I've got a little girl -- she's five now -- and I missed everything, her first steps, her first words, you know, her childhood. My oldest daughter, she's dating now, and I remember her as a ten-year old! An hour's video can't make up for that."
"Sykes, you miss being a father."
"Yeah."
"The other guys the same?"
"Yeah. Even the Gay guys, some of them wish they were parents, mothers maybe -- I don't know."
"OK, I'm making the union a present, a live human baby to take care of, to love and to cuddle, a baby that needs you. She can't walk yet. She can't talk yet. She has to be fed. She's all yours, so all twenty-three of you guys can have the pleasure of being a father, during your off time, of course. How does that sound?"
They all agree that it sounds too good to be true, but they like the idea, if I can deliver. So I do. I literally hand my "bride" to 23 sex-starved miners.
Several Earth years have passed since then. Morale has never been higher. Production is up. Fights and disturbances and accidents are down. The company loves me.
Even though some miners have rotated down home and been replaced, every one of them regards himself as Sirena's parent. With coaching around the clock -- there are never less than three or four fussing over her every need -- Sirena has learned how to get around, how to feed herself, how to properly dispose of her excrement, and even how to talk. If you snap your fingers, she'll say, in her sexy voice, "I need lovin', Stud," and everyone laughs. She serves the miners their food; we're the only asteroid with table service in the chow hall, and our waitress is stunningly beautiful, table grade, centerfold material.
You might think everything is hunky-dory. Well, I still lose sleep worrying about Sirena. She's never had a mother. She's never had children to play with, never learned about selfishness and deception and the other sins of humankind. Her luscious body is fully functional, but, with 23 fathers to guard her chastity, she doesn't know what it is to be a woman. She couldn't survive down home, wouldn't last a minute on the street. I suppose she'll have to live out her natural life span here on R-1042, and she'll die a virgin.