"Hello," says Susanna icily.

"Hello." He sits down. "I am so, so sorry that we did this to you. How can we fix it?"

"You can cut it the hell out," Susanna says. "Properly, none of this buck-passing 'not policy'."

" - so, mind, if it were policy it would be much easier to cut it out, I could outlaw it. Getting uniform enforcement of acceptable procedures is much much harder than coming up with them in the first place, or even telling everyone about them, or even exclusively hiring people who promise up and down that they will follow them. We're auditing now to figure out how often this has happened, which will affect how best to address it from here, but I assure you I don't have a 'make people not commit crimes' button hidden under my desk, and you were the victim of a crime."

"You didn't have them arrested, though."

"Not yet. I need the audit to be actually thorough and informative and it's hard to extract cooperation when people think the penalties are unreasonable. The first challenge here is arranging that people agree about what an appalling wrong this was, at which point the police will probably investigate it without being leaned on and we'll get more cooperation here on Earth and something resembling a consensus against permitting that in the next place. I think it's reasonable for Kitty to decide that none of those considerations supersede putting the people who hurt her in jail, but I haven't actually heard that from her yet."

"You know perfectly well Klimati's a creampuff," says Isama. "Kitty'll be just the same."

"A creampuff?" says Kitty. "- it's important that they can't hurt anybody else, but if jail isn't the best way to do that -"

"They won't be doctors again. Jail is not an unwarranted reaction at all, but what I want is everyone really outraged this happened, I think that's what will stop it from happening again, and I think that immediate harsh penalties will actually mean less outrage."

"I can't tell whether you actually believe in consistent enforcement of the law or not."

"The law isn't being consistently enforced right now because this is a new situation and there isn't a strong moral consensus about what the law should be. I'm trying to figure out how to use this to get that, after which consistent enforcement will not require me personally hovering over every hospital on this planet trying to drag prosecutions past unhelpful cops and unhelpful judges."

"Why do you have unhelpful cops and judges?" asks Susanna.

" - we consider it pretty important that people who will not be able to take care of their kids not have kids. At home there are tons and tons of protections against what was done to you here, but they are all aimed at ensuring that no one is sterilized unless they're not going to be able to comply with population controls. And we don't have long-term birth control here. So, from the perspective of a typical Amentan, the only choices are 'might have children they can't take care of at any moment, with no reliable options to avoid that' or 'can't have children', and while what was done would to that typical Amentan be totally unconscionable if you were capable of taking care of children, or totally unconscionable if you were capable of avoiding having children, it's merely very stupid if those things aren't true - stupid because now no one will trust us or go to the hospitals."

"If Kitty had had a child we'd have figured it out," says Susanna.

"I know. I don't believe this was the slightest bit okay. But that's why there'd be unhelpful cops and unhelpful judges, that's how they'd see it. They'll acknowledge that it was stupid and harmful, but because they can see why someone would do it, and because everyone finds the lack of reliable birth control for humans a sort of ongoing inadequacy, it'd be pulling teeth to get a conviction."

"Are you going to tell them they shouldn't sue?" asks Isama.

"Would you let me? I think it's possible that the audit will turn up someone even more outrage-inducing than Kitty and that if it does it might make sense to have that person be the public face of the whole situation and everyone else signed on in a class-action thing. I think that probably you should downplay Kitty's impairments, and that it'll help a lot if Kitty can go in and testify herself and seem like someone whose children would be taken care of if she had some. That's not fair but it's definitely true. I think that you're likely to win and if it's important to you that you win I can make sure of it. But if you just want the money and not the - people trying to justify this - I can just give you the money."

"I can testify," says Kitty. "I can almost always talk if I haven't got a tooth problem making it hard to move my jaw and Susanna can bring me there or send someone to do it."

"Great. Your lawyer will coach you on how to frame it - 'I sometimes freeze up in confusing situations, and having been dragged to an institution immediately after dental surgery was terrifying' plays a lot better than 'I often can't do basic things', that kind of thing - but I'm not going to be better than them at that. I can lean on the judge and to a lesser extent on the press, if you want."

Kitty shrugs uncomfortably.

"You can think about it." He leans back and looks at everyone else. "So, obviously, this upsetting story should have terrible consequences so that no one else is tempted to let this kind of thing fly under the radar. I think that lots and lots of people should drop out of our trial of long-term birth control because they don't trust us anymore. Can you arrange that?"

" - maybe? I've been looking into who wouldn't be upset if we tampered with them but I would've only needed to tamper with a handful and this'd have to be more than that to delay you substantially..."

"I like how you think, though."

"On an unrelated note the fact that Aaron managed, blind, to find an Isama alt in - where -"

"Boston."

"In Boston suggests that we should maybe look harder for a me. If my parents' occupations match I'm miserably wasted as a grey or violating the law or possibly doing research medicine."

"I'd be happy to put out an announcement if you want - she'd have to spend a lot of time outside to look like you -"

"I realize. I'm not sure what kind of announcement to put out, I might just ignore anything cryptic and this isn't exactly public knowledge. Maybe Kefin should wander around listening for the sound of my voice."