“We need to move,” Flint said.
Costard looked at him as if he had told her she had to run in the Moon Marathon. “I’m done with the conversation.”
“No,” he said. “I need to tell you a few more things.”
“You’ve already said you’re not taking the case. You’ve already said that things are much worse than I thought they were—and I thought they were awful. What else can you tell me?”
“Let’s walk.” He beckoned her forward, into an enclosed area between the naturally growing trees. This was a modified greenhouse with open ends. The greenhouse wasn’t designed to grow food, like the greenhouses outside the Dome. This one had only green, leafy plants that seemed very overgrown.
The university had dozens of these open-ended greenhouses all over campus. For the last several years, they had been running experiments on the production of pure oxygen.
This was the natural section, near the trees that had been planted decades ago by some Environmental Sciences students who believed that the Dome would be better off if greenery dominated the interior. Flint knew, because he had studied it, that the natural greenhouses worked on old-fashioned systems—no automation at all. The plants were watered by hand, nurtured by hand, and fertilized by hand.
No electronic devices were allowed near these greenhouses, and even the cameras, which kept track of the moment-by-moment growth, had to film from a distance of at least twenty feet. Because previous studies had shown how sensitive the plants were to what humans called white noise, no sound equipment was allowed nearby either.
Hand-painted signs, tucked into the grass, warned that anyone who entered this area had to shut down their links or be subject to huge fines. Costard started to turn away from the area, but Flint put a hand behind her back.
“Shut down your links,” he said, “including emergency links.”
Her breath caught. It was a matter of trust. If she believed in him, she’d go into a secluded place with no outside access at all.
She touched the back of her hand. He waited until his system confirmed that hers was off before shutting down his own.
They stepped into the greenhouse proper. The air did seem cleaner here. It had a tang to it that Flint found nowhere else on Armstrong, not even in the artificially designed greenhouses. He sometimes came here to sit and think, especially after his injuries last year. He had found this a good place to heal.
“Why the secrecy?” she asked.
“Because,” he said, “what I’m about to tell you can’t go on any record.”
Her face hardened, almost as if she were bracing herself for his words.
“When you queried about Lagrima Jørgen, you aroused interest all over the known universe,” he said. “There were news reports, most of which recycled the M’Kri Tribesman case, but a few were about the skeleton itself.”
“Why is this bad?”
“We don’t know who she was or who she worked for,” Flint said. “Someone did kill her and plant her body on that site.”
Costard nodded. “I’ve thought of that.”
“That someone may still be alive.”
“I thought of that too.”
“And may not be human,” Flint said.
Costard sighed. She obviously hadn’t thought of that. “Meaning they might have weird laws about people who discover the bodies of the dead.”
“Or something about passing guilt through touch, or any kind of strange thing you and I can’t imagine. The news stories weren’t very specific. For all these people know, you could have found some incriminating evidence with that body, or something else that might frighten them.”
Costard reached for one of the long, thin leaves, nearly touched it, then brought her hand back as if she wasn’t sure she could. She looked very small among the overgrown plants; the hardened expression had morphed into something resigned and sad.
“This frightens you, so you won’t take the case,” she said.
Flint shook his head. “I see no reason to take the case.”
She frowned at him.
“It might take years to uncover this woman’s identity. I don’t believe she had a family—or at least one that we can find in your time frame. And now, besides the Disty, there might be other aliens involved.”
“Do you think anyone will take the case?” Costard asked.
“I don’t think you should go to anyone else,” Flint said.
“What? Are you saying I should just accept this? I should go back to Mars like a good little soldier and let them dish out this stupid fate without even trying to stop them?”
“No,” Flint said. “I think you should Disappear.”
She stumbled and gripped a nearby table. One of the plants started to fall, and Flint caught it.
He set it back on the table. Costard stood next to him, both hands on the table.
“You’re a Retrieval Artist. You’re not supposed to tell me to
Disappear,” she said. “Can’t you lose your license for this?”
“We’re not licensed,” he said. “I can do whatever I want.”
“Why would you tell me to Disappear? You, of all people?”
“Because I, of all people, know what you’re fighting. The Disappearance Services were set up for precisely this kind of situation. Under our laws, what you did was normal behavior, helping another agency, doing your work. To the Disty, you have made yourself a part of that death scene, and only a few things might get you out of it, if that.”
“So you’re advising me to break the law?” she asked.
“I’m advising you to take advantage of a loophole. You haven’t been charged with anything on the Moon. You were sent here to solve a problem, with the Disty government’s permission. If you go back to Mars, you’ll be subject to their laws. If you go back to Earth, you will as well. And once that time limit is up, the government of Armstrong will have to give you back to Sahara Dome. There’s no place in the Alliance that Aisha Costard can go and be safe. But if you take a new identity, you will have a lot of places you can go. You will be safe.”
“Except from people like you,” she said.
He suppressed a sigh. She was horribly uninformed. He supposed most people were. They had simple jobs and even simpler lives, and probably didn’t even think about the intricacies of interstellar justice from day to day.
“Thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands throughout the Alliance, use Disappearance Services every year,” he said. “Most of those people are never thought of again. Most of them escape. Most of them go on to live productive lives somewhere else.”
“Productive,” she muttered.
“Only a few are important enough to have the alien governments or some lawyer or some law enforcement agency spend the money on a Tracker. Fewer have family with enough money, or businesses with enough incentives, to hire a Retrieval Artist to track them down. Even then, our mission isn’t always to bring them back. We also find them to give them inheritances or to notify them that their parents died or to tell them it’s safe to return to their old life. Trackers bring them back to face the legal charges they’d fled. Retrieval Artists often leave Disappeareds in their new identities, living their new lives. Most Disappearances work, and work well.”
“I can’t live somewhere else,” she said. “My work is on Earth. All I know is human bones.”
“You’ll learn something new,” Flint said.
“I don’t want to learn something new,” Costard said. “I want to go home, to my university and my friends and my house. I don’t ever want to see Mars again, and I certainly don’t ever want to hear of the Disty.”
“If you stay in your current life, that won’t happen,” Flint said. “You probably won’t go home, and you’ll probably have to deal with the Disty until the end of what’s going to be a very short life.”
She closed her eyes, her frown deepening. “You can’t see any other way out of this?”
“There’s no easily locatable family for Lagrima J�
�rgen,” he said. “That I do know. And I don’t know the Disty law well enough to know if they’ll accept the family of the woman who posed as Lagrima Jørgen, whatever her identity might be. As I mentioned, the variations are extreme. Check it out. Disty laws are in all of the databases. You can probably access them from the hotel.”
She opened her eyes. They were lined with tears. “I’m not doing this just for me. I’m doing this for the entire team back in Sahara Dome. Everyone, from the detective to the medical examiner, who got near Lagrima’s body are considered contaminated by the Disty. What about them?”
“They’ll have to solve it their own way,” Flint said. “I can’t give them this advice and neither can you. If you do, the Disty’ll monitor the Disappearance Services and none of you will survive.”
“So it’s better for me to get out, and leave them behind.”
“Yes,” he said. “At least you’ll go on living.”
She let go of the table. “You’re so cold.”
He nodded. “You asked me to work for you. The best way I can work for you is to tell you this.”
She stepped toward him, and he saw that switch again, the one she had done when she came to his office. The anger came just as suddenly and just as powerfully.
“I hired you for all of us. Finding the children wasn’t just going to benefit me. It was going to help Sharyn and Petros and everyone else in the SDHPD who worked on this case. I’m using their money to pay your salary, and you tell me to run away from them? How dare you.”
That last she said very softly, as if he were the one who created this entire mess.
“I’m telling you to save your life,” he said. “We can’t save theirs.”
“You don’t know,” she said. “All you have is guesses. You guess that there’s no family. You suppose that the Disty won’t accept family from the same woman if she has a different name. You think the Disty ritual is more complicated. That’s not proof.”
She had a point. But it was more minor than she thought. Her naïveté had been the problem from the beginning. It continued to be the problem now.
“Actual hard facts are rare in my business,” he said, “and they come at great cost. I might be able to find out who Lagrima Jørgen really was, what happened to the children she gave birth to, and who she worked for, but I might not. I might find her family, and I might not. At that point, this will have cost a lot of money—”
“I don’t care about money,” Costard snapped.
He ignored her. “And by the time I find out, you and everyone you seem to be protecting will be long dead.”
“You can’t be sure.”
“No,” he said. “I can’t.”
“So try,” she said.
“At the risk of your life?” he asked.
“It’s already at risk,” she said.
He wanted to take her and force her to face the difficult position she was in. But he doubted she’d listen.
He tried one last argument.
“Look,” he said. “I’ll stay on the case if you promise me you’ll Disappear.”
“Don’t make conditions.” She was shaking with anger. She hadn’t moved away from him, and he could actually feel the force of her emotion.
“If you’ll do that,” he said, “I promise you that I’ll find you the moment your name is cleared.”
She had her mouth open, obviously to continue arguing with him, and then she paused. “You can promise that?”
“Yes,” he said. “Finding Disappeareds is my job.”
“So I might be gone six months,” she said.
“Or six years,” he said.
“But I’d have the chance to come back, and you’ll help the others.”
“To the best of my ability, yes.” He hadn’t planned this, but he was curious. Lagrima Jørgen, through her death, might cause a dozen others. It would be nice to know who this woman was, what she had done, and if there was any way to protect all the people who had been “contaminated” by her.
Costard frowned. “I don’t know anything about Disappearing.”
“Most people don’t,” Flint said. “That’s why there are Disappearance Services.”
“And you won’t tell me which one to go to, will you?” she asked.
He shook his head. “That’s not part of my job.”
“With me gone, how will you get paid?”
“You and I will go to my office and set up a system for billing and payment through the SDHPD. It is their money, right?”
She nodded.
“Then I’ll work with them.”
“All right,” she said, and let out a vast sigh.
Flint started to leave the greenhouse, but she didn’t follow. Her gaze met his, her eyes wide and vulnerable.
“I’m terrified,” she whispered.
“I know,” he said, and offered her no more comfort. She was about to change everything in her life.
There was no comfort left to give.
Eighteen
Sharyn Scott-Olson had never met with the Human Advisory Council before. Until a few hours ago, she hadn’t even been certain she knew their names.
The meeting was held in a clean room in the Stanshut Government Office Building. The building had been named for the first governor of Sahara Dome, a man who ruled over a completely human colony. At that point, no one had heard of the Disty.
Scott-Olson wished that were still the case.
She sat in a wooden chair, built with recycled wood from some of the human buildings that the Disty had torn down. Most everything in this room was made of ancient or recycled wood. The conference table was one solid piece of wood, and the walls and ceiling had been paneled with it.
Every hour, someone came through the room and checked for loose chips, planted cameras or microphones, or illegal links. She had watched them check after she had come into the room, and the sight reassured her. She had never seen equipment that sophisticated.
Before they let her into the room, they had shut off her embedded links and confiscated her embellishments. She had come into the clean room feeling naked and alone.
She wasn’t even allowed to have Batson beside her. Batson, who had started this entire procedure. He had gone to the head of the Human-Disty Relations Department, who had apparently stopped Batson before he could say much at all.
“The Advisory board needs to hear this,” the man had said. “They’re our buffer.”
It was Batson who explained the concept of buffer to her. If the Human-Disty Relations Department heard each conflict, they might become tainted in some way, according to Disty law. So the department was set up in a particularly Disty fashion: there were layers of underlings who heard items first, made decisions, or filtered information upward, through a series of meetings in clean rooms or with a handful of completely unlinked people.
The Disty looked the other way, just like they did in their own society, acting like the layers protected both original parties from any taint or tampering.
Scott-Olson still wasn’t sure how that prevention worked, but she didn’t question it. At least there was some sort of system in place.
Supposedly, she was meeting with the lowest of the low on the Advisory Council. At least three of the people at this level had never been networked. They were alone in their own heads. They had to use public boards just to get news, and those boards had to work on screens. No instant messages flashing across the bottom edges of their vision, and worse, in Scott-Olson’s point of view, no emergency links.
If these people ever got into trouble, they’d be completely and utterly alone. They would have no way of getting help with just a single thought. They would have to hope someone saw the problem or was close enough to hear them scream.
Such a primitive system unnerved Scott-Olson. She could never have agreed to a job on this council if that were the main requirement, no matter how much she believed in the system.
She had been waiting nearly fifteen minutes when the councilors
filed in. At this level, all five councilors were old, with a lot of experience in various aspects of Martian government. That was the other strange thing about this system: the more experience you had, the less overt power you had. People with the expertise to make the decisions about what information was valuable and what wasn’t had to be several levels below Disty observation so that they wouldn’t be subject to the arbitrary nature of Disty laws.
The councilors entered through a side door that had, until that moment, been hidden in the paneling. They were laughing as if one of them had made a joke a moment before coming into the room.
The laughter made Scott-Olson uncomfortable.
So did the councilors. All five of them—three men and two women—were unenhanced elderly. They had the wrinkled skin and rheumy eyes; they moved with that hesitation common to people who knew their bones were fragile.
To see the unenhanced look so vibrant seemed unnatural to her.
Still she sat stiffly, her hands clasped in her lap, her ankles crossed and to one side. She was the thinnest one in the room, and hence the coldest. The temperature felt ten degrees below government-accepted normal.
The councilors sat around the conference table. One of the women, whose white hair was so thin her age-spotted skull shown through it, beckoned Scott-Olson to come forward.
“Join us at the table, dear,” the woman said, her voice husky with age. “We don’t bite.”
“Although we might nibble,” one of the men said.
The group laughed.
Scott-Olson stood, trying to match faces with names without the aid of her links. The woman who spoke to her was Tilly Kazickas, whom Scott-Olson finally recognized by the hair. The other woman, Dagmar Yupanqui, had thick hair that looked like it had yellowed with age.
“We haven’t got all afternoon, young lady,” said a second man. He had a thin face, almost as if someone had cut the bones on either side with a very sharp knife and overlaid the work with wrinkled fabric.
He had to be Linus Squyres, who was well-known within the human government for his patronizing attitudes. Scott-Olson had certainly not been called “young lady” since she entered puberty.
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