DeRicci almost said no, and then she remembered Flint. “A colleague of mine. He’s the one who warned me about this entire situation.”
Menodi cursed softly.
“I’m only guessing here,” she said, “but considering the Disty’s reaction to whatever this crisis is, they would consider you contaminated.”
DeRicci leaned away from her screen. “How could I be contaminated? I haven’t gone near a Disty and my friend told me via link.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Menodi said. “The Disty react to severe contamination as if it’s virus spread from brain to brain, not just by physical contact, but by breathing the same air, inhabiting the same environment, or sharing the same conversation. My understanding is that this is an old ritual, one that predates science, in which the Disty—trying to avoid real-life contagions, especially lethal ones that caused horrible deaths—set up this system, based it in their religion, and have not departed from it. Ever. It’s one of the rituals that they take the most seriously. And believe me, the Disty take all of their rituals seriously.”
DeRicci didn’t like it. She didn’t even really understand it, but she had learned in previous interactions with aliens that understanding wasn’t necessary. In some cases, it wasn’t even possible. All she could do was deal with the problems created by those beliefs.
“What do you suggest I do?” she asked.
“First,” Menodi said, “don’t tell anyone else about your conversation with a Contaminated One. Human or Disty. Don’t let that information out. I certainly won’t.”
Menodi twirled a strand of hair around her forefinger. She didn’t even seem to be aware she was doing it. She hadn’t fidgeted before. Before she had been merely curious, not quite as nervous as she was now.
“Secondly,” Menodi said, “don’t let those contaminated Disty anywhere near Armstrong. We’ll have the same kind of riot on our hands that Sahara Dome is having. It’ll be a mess. The more contaminated Disty, the more they’ll try to flee, and the more they try to flee…”
She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to. DeRicci was already aware of that problem.
“Is there any solution for this? I mean, the Disty can’t always run from death,” DeRicci said. “They wouldn’t be able to have a society.”
“They have cleansing rituals, involving family members of the deceased. If there is no family, there are other rituals, often involving the Contaminated Ones themselves. Those rituals are conducted by a Disty Death Squad, and often—usually—the cure is worse than the actual problem. Few Contaminated Disty survive that ritual. Humans never do.”
“Wonderful,” DeRicci muttered.
“And that doesn’t solve the problem of place,” Menodi said. “If a place is contaminated, like Sahara Dome, the Disty do their ritual thing with the families—something I have never seen written up or filmed. We have no records of how this works, so I can’t tell you what they do. Only that there is no death rate with the family rituals.”
“Good to know,” DeRicci said.
“But if there is no family, then the Disty do something that would be very familiar to medieval humans.”
DeRicci knew more about the Disty than she knew about medieval humans. “What would that be?”
“They cleanse with fire. If all of Sahara Dome is, by definition, contaminated, it’ll have to be destroyed. All of its interior will be burned, and the exterior—the Dome itself—leveled. The ground might stay contaminated for years after that. Rebuilding might be forbidden for decades, maybe even centuries.”
DeRicci let out a small breath. “Would this happen in Wells too?”
“The one the train passed through? Yes, if the Disty are fleeing it.”
“Could it happen here?”
“Yes,” Menodi said.
That shiver went through DeRicci again. “You’re sure about this? You don’t have to check files or talk to colleagues?”
“I’m sure,” Menodi said.
DeRicci’s head was spinning. “None of this makes any sense.”
“To us, maybe. We don’t have the subcultures that deal with all the death rituals like the Disty do. They have strata upon strata upon strata. There are members of Disty society that aliens never see. Disty diplomats who deal with aliens are the same societal level as the Death Squads, simply because the Disty believe all aliens are peripherally contaminated by death within their culture. The diplomats have to go through some major cleansing procedure just to interact with regular Disty. It’s very complicated.”
More complicated than DeRicci needed. “How quickly do I have to act?”
“How close are they to coming here?” Menodi asked.
“Ships have left Mars.”
“Then you better stop talking to me,” Menodi said. “Send me what information you have. I’ll see what I can dig up.”
“Thanks,” DeRicci said, and signed off. She sent a message to Popova, asking her to download all the nonclassified information. Right now, research wasn’t what DeRicci needed.
She needed to take action.
She got up from the desk and walked to her door, pulling it open. Popova was at her desk, working several screens. Her mouth was moving as well, which meant she was subvocalizing on a link.
“How soon to that meeting?” DeRicci asked.
Popova shrugged and shook her head. She wasn’t getting any cooperation.
DeRicci closed the door and unmuted the sound on her wall screen. Some reporter informed her that some ships had finally made it through the mess that surrounded Mars’s northern hemisphere.
Ships were on their way. Maybe some had escaped earlier and no one had reported it.
She probably had only a few hours before the first ships arrived in restricted Moon space. And it would take at least two hours for the shutdown order to penetrate.
Not to mention however long it would take for the meeting with the various authorities, and that didn’t factor in the time it would take to convince everyone. The very thing DeRicci was terrible at.
She tapped a finger against her teeth, noting her own nervous gesture. She was worried too. She clasped her hands together, trying to keep them still.
No matter what decision she made, it would be bad. If she did the political thing and tried to get everyone on board, then she might miss the opportunity to keep this problem from spreading to the Moon. Flint had called nearly half an hour before. He had already been convinced, and she trusted him. Still, she had had to search for her own expert, get her own information, before she believed it.
Powers or not, guidelines or not, it was all up to her. She was going to have to take action just to save lives. She’d deal with the consequences later.
Rudra, she sent to Popova, I need you in here now. Put someone else on the meeting. Make sure they tell the governor-general it would be best if she comes here in person.
I’m in the middle—
Now, Rudra, DeRicci sent and signed off.
She walked to those windows, looking out at the calm street. People still walked by. Aircars went about their business. The Dome had changed color ever so slightly as it moved its way toward evening.
No one else had figured out the problem. But then, why would they? As Menodi said, the Disty were hard to know. Even the experts were uncertain.
“Yes?” Popova said from behind her.
DeRicci turned, surprised she hadn’t heard the door open. But she’d been so lost in her thoughts…
She squared her shoulders. Popova was the first test.
“In the next fifteen minutes, we are issuing two orders Moon-wide,” DeRicci said. “In the first, we close every single port to space traffic. No one lands, no matter where the ship is from.”
“We can’t—”
“Next,” DeRicci said, not letting Popova state her objection, “we send up security teams from every city with a space traffic control. We extend our restricted space above the Moon, and we defend it.”
“What?” Popova said.
<
br /> “You heard me,” DeRicci said. “This is a serious crisis. I don’t have time to explain it to you, and yes I know we don’t have the authority to do this. I’m not even sure the governor-general does. I’m going to bluff my way past every mayor and local police chief, if I have to. No one knows what’s going on with this office, and we’re going to use it to our advantage, do you understand?”
“Um, no, actually. How can we—”
“I’ll teach you,” DeRicci said, sounding more confident than she felt. “I’ll show you how to do this if you’re willing. But if you feel that law is more important than saving lives, get back on your links and set up that meeting. I’ll do this alone.”
Popova stared at her as if she hadn’t ever seen DeRicci before. “This is the Disty thing?”
DeRicci nodded.
“It really does move from Dome to Dome?”
“And world to world,” DeRicci said, not exactly lying.
“Oh, my God.” Popova bit her lower lip, obviously considering all that DeRicci had told her. “Oh, my God.”
“We’ll panic later,” DeRicci said. “Right now, we have a small window in which to take action. I need you beside me. If you can’t do it, I’ll go alone. What do you say?”
Popova blinked, then nodded.
“Okay, boss,” she said, looking more ruffled than DeRicci had ever seen her. “Tell me exactly what to do.”
Forty-two
Flint had been researching the massacre survivors for more than an hour. He had his network search for information by family name, starting with the names and addresses listed in that lawsuit against Jørgen. He let the system work on separate screens, tracing family trees, following the public records from person to person to person.
But he handled the details. First, he went through the court records and determined which survivors were descendents of people who had died and which ones were actual survivors. He set the descendents aside, letting the network trace them.
If he could get an actual survivor, one who was related to other victims, he figured that was a lot more powerful than some great-great-grandchild. He figured there had to be a number of actual survivors out there. Somewhere in the body of the case, the text mentioned that children beneath the age of four were taken from their families and sent away before, as, or after the massacre happened. Unfortunately, the record wasn’t too clear on that part.
And Flint couldn’t think about contamination of the survivors. He assumed that because the Disty used family members in their decontamination rituals, the actual survivor contamination didn’t matter.
But he couldn’t be sure. He was all in a knot, thinking about a ritual he didn’t entirely understand.
Still, he felt the actual survivors were the way to go. And all of them would be between the ages of 100 and 104. Not all of them would still be alive, but some of them would.
Public records, especially from places as far away as the Outlying Colonies, were a mess. Names flitted in and out, identifying data changed, identifying numbers varied from colony to colony, world to world. Flint was dealing with records so old that many of them were encrypted in a fashion he hadn’t seen since his early days as a computer tech. He didn’t have the time to decode, so he didn’t.
Instead, he took what he could, used it as best as he could, and skipped over the gaps in information. If this were a case in which he had months or years instead of hours, he would make a detailed month-by-month account of each survivor’s life.
But he didn’t have that kind of time. Instead, he had to be happy with year by year, and in a few cases, settle for decade by decade.
And even in those cases, he would have holes—several missing years or an inexplicable jump. At one moment, the survivor lived in the Outlying Colonies; at the next, he was back in this solar system. Flint had found a few like that, and they were all dead ends.
At some point—and he wasn’t sure when that was—he would simply have to give all the information he had to Scott-Olson or DeRicci or someone in the Alliance who had contact with the Disty.
At some point, Flint would have to declare this investigation done, and let the experts handle it: Let them send a search team to the Outlying Colonies to bring the descendent of a survivor back for some weird ritual that might mean nothing at all to the descendent. Flint certainly didn’t have the authority to do that. He wasn’t sure anyone had.
But that wouldn’t be his problem. His problem right now was filtering the wealth of information before him, and making it useful as quickly as possible—a problem he wasn’t sure he would ever really solve.
Forty-three
Roderick Jefferson sat on a tabletop in a conference room that had been modified to satisfy the Disty’s need for weird protocol. The room was stair-stepped upward, and had been designed with long tables that curved toward a main table at the base of those stairs. Behind the tables sat the chairs preferred by most Alliance members. This was a general session room, designed for a hundred delegates or more, all of whom would be discussing one issue. At each place were nodes that allowed the delegate to listen to the debate in his own language without the delegate having to filter the information through his own personal links.
Jefferson loved the formality of the general sessions. He believed in diplomacy, he truly did. It was his one true religion, the thing that kept him going, the thing that made his life worth living from day to day.
But that wasn’t to say he found it easy.
Number Fifty-six, a wily old Disty, sat across from him. Jefferson had had run-ins with Fifty-six before. To most humans, Fifty-six looked no different from other Disty. But Jefferson had been around him long enough to recognize the particular bend of his long fingers, and the strange, almost invisible markings along the inside of his arms. Fifty-six also had a particularly raspy voice for a Disty, something Jefferson learned years later came from some sort of accident or handicap, a defect that other Disty found repulsive.
Jefferson’s headache was worse. He hadn’t entirely gotten rid of his hangover—or perhaps he had, and the fifteen minutes he had spent with his forehead pressed against the table while he waited for Fifty-six to arrive had given him an all-new headache.
Or maybe it was just the damn negotiation. Jefferson had no idea how he was going to resolve this.
Ogden had abandoned him. Once she had set up the room—removing all of the tabletop items in the first six rows, roping off the chairs so no human accidentally sat in them, and letting all the parties know that this session would be doubly backed up for posterity, she had vanished. She hadn’t even said good-bye—which had been a bright move on her part, because Jefferson would have begged her to stay.
She seemed to be the only competent member of his species who was involved in this mess.
Behind him sat the human representative to Mars, a flaky woman who seemed to believe that diplomacy was about genetic modification, not actually learning the culture. Behind her sat other human representatives, most of whom Jefferson did not know and did not care to know. All he had done after shaking their hands was instruct the group to remain quiet. He would do all the talking for the human populations of the Alliance, just like he had been hired to do.
But it wasn’t easy. The Disty were angrier than he had ever seen them. Number Fifty-six was managing to remain calm—at least superficially. But the Disty behind him—representatives of at least two major Disty corporations based on Mars, and the Disty representative from Amoma, the Disty home world—seemed so furious that they refused to sit on the tabletop.
Instead, they stood behind Fifty-six and stared down at Jefferson, something considered beyond rude in Disty culture. He ignored them as best as he could, not sure if that was the right tactic. But no one commented on it, so he supposed he was doing well.
It seemed to be the only thing he was doing well. He had started with denials—the wrong thing to do, apparently—claiming the humans had no designs on Mars and certainly weren’t trying to toss the
Disty out.
That just made the Disty even more hostile, and one Disty, whose position Jefferson never did get, stomped out of the room.
Fifty-six then calmly told Jefferson that negotiations would be over when Fifty-six was the only Disty left.
“I cannot control them,” Fifty-six said with complete disingenuousness. Jefferson knew that Fifty-six had planned this strategy.
At that point, Jefferson decided that truth was his only weapon. “I have no idea where those bodies came from,” he said. “I’ve got no information on other gravesites on Mars. I don’t know if some human group a century ago did this in protest to the growing Disty control of what had once been humancentric Domes. I’ll do my best to find out.”
That caught Fifty-six’s attention, and actually made the remaining Disty climb on the table and sit down. The table shook while they all took their places
“You acknowledge that this could be a human plot?” Fifty-six said.
“I think anything’s a possibility at this point,” Jefferson said. “But I can unequivocally state that the humans currently represented by the Alliance had nothing to do with this, and actually prefer Disty control of Mars.”
Prefer was probably too strong a word. There was always talk, particularly among Earthbound humans, that the Disty were too close, that their control of Mars was unnatural, and that they had used superior economic power to steal the planet, one Dome at a time.
But that was talk, harmless talk. At least, that was what Jefferson used to think. Now he wasn’t so sure. As one of his personal links kept the disaster unfolding image by image on a window in the upper corner of his right eye’s vision, he wondered if someone had known all along that this kind of thing would cause the Disty to go crazy.
Jefferson chose to believe that mass grave was unconnected to human-Disty politics, and probably had something to do with humanity’s long history of violence against its own kind.
Fifty-six acknowledged that could be possible as well, and finally the negotiations reached a more cordial level. That had been a half an hour ago, and what had seemed like a real breakthrough now seemed like the only breakthrough the negotiations would have.
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