Buried Deep

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “Your solution?” Fifty-six asked.

  “We take an existing space station, like one of the ones orbiting Earth, and evacuate it. The various species who live on that station are not contaminated, so they can go anywhere. We can provide them temporary shelter.”

  Number Fifty-six templed his fingers. Jefferson was beginning to see that as a quirk: Fifty-six did that only when he was intrigued.

  “Go on,” Fifty-six said.

  “When the station is empty, we open it to the Contaminated Ones, letting them live there until this crisis is solved.”

  “If it is not resolved?”

  “Then we abandon the station to them, I guess, and have robotic missions service them.”

  “That last is unworkable,” Fifty-six said. “But we might get around it. There is one great problem though.”

  “What’s that?” Jefferson asked.

  “If we have to, we might decide to destroy the station and the Contaminated Ones. That would be difficult in Earth’s orbit.”

  Jefferson felt his breath catch. Number Fifty-six spoke of mass murder as if it were a simple problem of logistics.

  Maybe to him it was.

  “Um,” Jefferson said, feeling reduced to an attaché at his first posting. “Ah—if we displaced hundreds of people on an emergency basis—people of all species—we’d have to do so with the understanding that their home wouldn’t be destroyed.”

  “If we can’t resolve the contamination,” Number Fifty-six said, “we would have no choice.”

  “We would,” Jefferson said, feeling his cheeks heat up. “Many non-Disty might chose to live with the problem.”

  “And be forever banned from interaction with the Disty? They wouldn’t even be able to go to cities in which there were Disty. It would be more than an inconvenience.” Number Fifty-six glanced at his colleagues, all of whom watched the proceedings with great interest. “Of course, we would pay for any loss of property.”

  “We wouldn’t be able to get people to agree in the first place,” Jefferson said. “We’d be doing this for humanitarian reasons, and you would negate those reasons with—”

  He almost said murder, but he managed to stop himself just in time.

  Number Fifty-six seemed to know where the comment was going anyway. He tilted his oblong head as he looked at Jefferson. Fifty-six’s eyes were glistening in the diffuse artificial light.

  “That word, humanitarian, is so very interesting, isn’t it?” Fifty-six said. “Its cultural assumptions, its biases, are all there in the first five letters. Honestly, we Disty don’t care to be humanitarian. It is not in our nature.”

  Jefferson felt his cheeks grow even warmer. “I wasn’t implying that you would be making any humanitarian moves. I did say, however, that my people would be acting from that impulse. They might find it offensive to our cultural values to make a humanitarian gesture, only to see that gesture result in destruction.”

  He gave himself points for not sounding too defensive, and for managing to avoid the word murder yet again.

  “You are saying that unless we follow your rules in receiving your help, we will cause a great cultural disruption among your people.”

  “Yes,” Jefferson said.

  “Yet you tell us often that humans have no unifying culture. You have many cultures and are quite proud of that fact. You claim diversity is your strength.”

  “Some things are universal.”

  “Yet the cause of this crisis seems to be a lack of humanity,” Number Fifty-six said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “A mass grave. My sources tell me that the bodies within it died at the same time, a time when there were no Disty on Mars. So perhaps some other alien group came into Sahara Dome and destroyed a hundred humans in a single angry gesture, or the humans did this to themselves.”

  Jefferson took a shallow breath. It took all of his strength not to look at the diplomats behind him or at the Peyti sitting one step up. He couldn’t give Fifty-six this point. It would undermine every argument to come, particularly if the Disty wanted to use some space station as a short-term solution.

  “We are not responsible for those deaths,” Jefferson said. “Whatever conspiracy theories your government is developing are wrong. We had no knowledge of those bodies until this turned into a crisis.”

  “Someone did,” Fifty-six said. “Someone used a disgraced corpse to call attention to the mass grave, knowing the Disty would be forced to look through the land before declaring it clean. Someone knew. And if the deaths were caused by humans acting against humans, then that someone was human.”

  Jefferson was out of his depth. “We are trying to save lives here. If you persist in blame and squabbling, your own people will die.”

  “You imply we should then take the fault,” Number Fifty-six said. He slipped off the table. “They might have to die anyway. This contamination is the greatest we have seen in hundreds of years. If we cannot effectively decontaminate, the Contaminated Ones will have to die before they can infect anyone else. You seem to think this does not move me. It does. But I know the risks to my people. Do you know the risks to yours?”

  Jefferson wasn’t sure how to take that. Was it a threat?

  “This will get resolved,” he said.

  “Another human trait,” Fifty-six said. “Unrealistic optimism. Just because you believe it does not make it so.”

  Jefferson had had enough. “That’s a strange thing to tell me, when there is nothing physically wrong with the Disty you’re planning to slaughter.”

  The diplomats behind him gasped. The Peyti raised their fingertips in a sign of displeasure. The Ebe closed their eyes, and the Disty—all but Fifty-six—left the room.

  “You are so certain there is no physical consequence to us from this contamination?” Fifty-six asked.

  Jefferson had already fumbled. He saw no reason in trying to make up for it now.

  “Yes,” he said. “If there was physical contamination, you would have had signs of it long before the bodies were dug up. Your people would have been ill for decades—every single one who lived in that section of Sahara Dome.”

  Number Fifty-six seemed small as he stood beside the table. “Your ignorance astounds me. And it should not, considering I have spent most of my adult life among your people. I have thought, in my years in service to this strange dream of allying with cultures that are so foreign from mine as to be unintelligible, that eventually some would learn. You would learn. But you do not. You believe what you see and feel, and deny everything else.”

  Jefferson felt the rebuke but didn’t understand it. Was Fifty-six saying they were physically contaminated? How did that work, then?

  Number Fifty-six templed his fingers, bowed slightly, and started to leave. Then he stopped.

  “Because you are wondering,” he said, and then he paused, tilted his head again, and let his eyes glitter. That seemed to be the Disty equivalent of a polite smile.

  Jefferson didn’t move. He wasn’t sure of the damage he had done.

  “And I know you are wondering,” Fifty-six said, “because I have made it a lifelong mission to understand all I can about the aliens that surround me. Because you are wondering, I will tell you this: My people are ill because of this contamination. They have a sickness of something you might call the soul, although that wouldn’t be accurate quite.”

  Jefferson opened his mouth to ask a question, but Fifty-six held up a hand. It was a startlingly human gesture, and it made Fifty-six seem even smaller.

  “Were there signs of this sickness?” Fifty-six asked, as if neither he nor Jefferson had moved. “No. Of course not. Such a sickness only occurs when what has been buried has been revealed. The contamination becomes real and must be dealt with immediately.”

  “Which we are trying to do,” Jefferson said.

  “We are trying nothing,” Fifty-six said. “Your people have no understanding of this, and think it a foolish overreaction. My own people are trying
to stop a crisis from spreading first, and then we shall deal with the contamination’s source. But at the moment, no one is doing that. No one is trying to clean up the source.”

  “So your people would have stayed fine if this grave had remained buried,” Jefferson said.

  Number Fifty-six shook his head slightly. “Not fine. Better than they are now, but not fine. You have not listened to me.”

  “I have listened to you,” Jefferson said, “and I am hearing a fundamental difference between our peoples. We believe that revealing problems—opening them to the light—is the first step in solving them. You seem to think revealing problems makes matters worse.”

  “Once again, you see only through the prism of your own experience. Someday, Mr. Jefferson, you should try to live in a completely nonhuman environment and see what kind of perspective you will gain. Until then, I think you a poor advocate for your people.”

  Number Fifty-six turned back toward the door, and started to leave.

  “Wait!” Jefferson said. “What about finding a solution?”

  Number Fifty-six stopped, but did not face Jefferson. “I believe we have just discovered that there is no solution, at least not one we can find together. We shall take care of our own. I suggest you do the same.”

  And then he left.

  Jefferson bowed his head. He had never failed so spectacularly before—and had never done so with so much at stake.

  The rift between the Disty and humans had just become insurmountable.

  Forty-nine

  Flint went through his entire list of contacts. He was unable to reach the governor-general, the mayor of Armstrong, and Armstrong’s representative on the council for the United Domes of the Moon. He couldn’t reach any of the city council members either, and the chief of police responded to his link with a pointed message: she didn’t talk with Retrieval Artists.

  He even tried to reach the Alliance, but got only an invitation to leave his message on a board and wait for a response which would arrive “within a few days.”

  Flint was feeling lightheaded and desperate. The office had gotten hot again. He would have to realign his environmental controls—something he had to do, it seemed, monthly. He wiped the sweat off his forehead.

  He hadn’t wanted to contact DeRicci. He knew she was already overwhelmed with the refugee situation. But he had no choice.

  He used her emergency links.

  She responded audio only: “Can this wait?”

  He heard the annoyance in her tone and almost smiled. Noelle DeRicci was under a lot of pressure and wanted less information rather than more.

  “No, Noelle, it can’t. I may have a solution to the Disty crisis.”

  DeRicci cursed, which wasn’t the reaction Flint expected, and then told him to hold on. The link went so silent that he had to check the function to make sure it wasn’t dead.

  Then she appeared, full audio and visual, which he routed to his main desk screen. Seeing a tiny DeRicci on a vision screen made him nervous.

  “Make this fast.” DeRicci’s face was set in harsh lines. “I’m talking to the governor-general right now, and she’s not happy that I closed down the ports.”

  Obviously, DeRicci had gone outside politics to do her job. That didn’t surprise Flint, but he couldn’t ask about it at the moment. He recognized DeRicci’s expression. She was so stressed that she would cut him off if she felt he was wasting her time.

  “I have found a number of survivors of that massacre,” he said.

  “So?”

  “So,” he said, “the Disty can use them to decontaminate their people and the Domes.”

  DeRicci’s eyes narrowed. “I know that. Why should I care about these survivors?”

  “Because a dozen of them are on the Moon.”

  The color left her face. Then her mouth opened slightly and she shook her head. She understood exactly what that meant. It meant a solution. It meant that the crisis would end.

  “I’ve been trying to hand these names off to someone, anyone, but no one was taking my calls.”

  “Except stupid ole me,” DeRicci said, and actually smiled. “Can you send me that information? Encrypted.”

  “Doing so as we speak,” Flint said.

  “You’re sure all the information is accurate?”

  “Most of it to the day, a few to the month. Good luck with this, Noelle.”

  “Thanks, Miles. You have no idea what you’ve done.” Then she signed off.

  He clasped his hands behind his head, leaned back in his chair, and let out a huge sigh of relief. He had done what he could. He had served his clients in Sahara Dome, and he might have stopped a crisis—provided DeRicci could make timely use of those names.

  Having the governor-general in DeRicci’s office made the likelihood of success all that much greater.

  Flint stood. He deserved a good meal and a long rest. If the crisis settled down—when the crisis settled down—he would send a final bill to Sahara Dome.

  And then he would consider this case closed.

  Fifty

  It took DeRicci nearly the full fifteen minutes to explain everything to the governor-general. Getting the governor-general to understand that family members could somehow help with the decontamination process took the most time.

  Finally, DeRicci had the governor-general talk to Menodi at the University of Armstrong—after warning both of them to keep the conversation short.

  Then, without telling the governor-general where she had gotten the information, DeRicci told her that there were a dozen such survivors—real members of the families that died—on the Moon.

  The governor-general’s eyes lit up. “We can actually solve this? We can use our Disty to perform some sort of ritual when these ships land?”

  “I don’t think so,” DeRicci said, and wished she hadn’t limited the conversation with Menodi after all. “I think we’re better off contacting the Alliance, and letting the Disty High Command take this over.”

  The governor-general studied DeRicci for a moment, then sighed. “I suppose you’re right. Let me make the contact and see what we have to do.”

  She walked to a far corner of the room so that she could have some privacy while using audio and visual links. DeRicci let her have the entire office.

  DeRicci went into Popova’s office, where she had initially taken Flint’s call. Popova was at her desk, placating various people, from the UDM councilors who were still on standby for a meeting that might never happen to mayors of the port cities who were beginning to get nervous about the growing number of Disty vessels hovering outside the restricted space.

  “How many ships are there?” DeRicci asked.

  “Fifty at last count.” Popova nodded toward the wall screen. Vessels floated against an invisible line, following the requests of the various Moon governments.

  “Have any tried to cross?” DeRicci asked.

  “Not yet,” Popova said, “but it’s only a matter of time.”

  “How many more are coming?”

  Popova shook her head. “It looks like they solved the issues with the space traffic control near Sahara Dome, so a lot of ships have taken off in the last few hours. No one knows how many because Sahara Dome isn’t talking to anyone. And other Disty are fleeing from southern cities on Mars—only no one thinks those Disty are contaminated. They’re just scared.”

  “Lovely,” DeRicci said.

  The governor-general summoned her along the links. DeRicci sighed and went back into her office.

  The governor-general was using part of DeRicci’s wall screen as a personal viewing screen. A woman DeRicci had never seen before peered out. In the corner, an Alliance logo marked the transmission.

  “Can you assure me—us—that these names are legitimate?” the governor-general asked.

  “Yes,” DeRicci said. She trusted Flint. He wouldn’t have contacted her otherwise.

  “You got them how?” the governor-general asked.

  “I put a r
esearcher on this the moment I heard of it,” DeRicci said, hoping she wasn’t lying too badly. “It took some time and some luck, but I got this information in return.”

  The woman on the screen nodded. “My sources tell me we have to get those survivors to Sahara Dome. I’ll talk to one of the Disty here and make sure of procedure. You get those survivors ready to leave the Moon.”

  “Will do,” the governor-general said.

  “I’ll be back in touch with instructions shortly,” the woman responded, and signed off. For a moment, the Alliance logo filled the screen, and then the news reappeared, tiny images of Mars with even tinier ships coming off it like dust in a windstorm.

  “You heard her,” the governor-general said. “Round these people up.”

  “That’s a problem,” DeRicci said. “These survivors are scattered all over the Moon. We don’t have a Moon-wide security force to handle this. We’ll need the cooperation of all the mayors.”

  The governor-general sighed. “I’m sure they will when they understand.”

  “And,” DeRicci said, “if these survivors have to leave the Moon, how do we get them out of here? The United Domes has no fleet.”

  “I guess we commandeer a private ship,” the governor-general said. “We’ll bring them all to Armstrong, and leave out of this Dome.”

  “We don’t have the authority to commandeer a ship,” DeRicci said. “We could hire one, but I worry about attracting media attention. If they hear anything about this, they’ll be all over it, and I think we need to keep this quiet.”

  “Agreed,” the governor-general said.

  “We also have a problem with the pilot, whoever it’s going to be,” DeRicci said. “We need someone experienced, who won’t buckle under any kind of pressure.”

  “See what you can do about that,” the governor-general snapped. “I’ll handle the mayors.”