The Cause of Death

by Roger MacBride Allen

  He sat, sipping his whrenseed, and thinking, slowly, carefully, methodically, how best to spend the BSI's money to accomplish his own goals.

  FIVEPAXERS

  Hannah set down her fork for a second, shut her eyes, and leaned back in her chair, the image of contentment. "Good food," she said, opening her eyes to look over at Jamie. "Say what else you may about the BSI, but you'll have to admit they stock the galleys on their ships pretty well."

  "Granted," said Jamie, as he tore another piece of garlic bread off the loaf. "I didn't know anyone made ready-to-eat meals this good."

  Hannah shut her eyes and smiled again, just for a second. One day had passed aboard the Hastings, and another; long enough for a sense of a routine to form. Part of that routine was dinner. The other meals she had to insist on, and almost literally drag Jamie away from his work--but, at least for both nights so far, for dinner he came willingly.

  After only a handful of missions together, she had yet to puzzle out everything about her extremely junior partner, but she was starting to get a handle on him. One thing she knew for sure already was that he was a hard worker, and a quick study who took things seriously.

  And the issue she was about to bring up just might get unpleasant very fast. She would have just as soon avoided the topic, but the job required that they both face it. She judged it was the time to do it. But there wouldn't be any harm in approaching the matter indirectly.

  "We still haven't gotten any reply from Pax Humana back on Center," Hannah said, as casually as she could, serving herself another healthy slice of lasagna. "But I have managed to pull together some pretty intriguing information about the job that Hertzmann is on Reqwar to do. What I haven't come up with is anything that links it directly to Pax Humana. Do you have anything on that?"

  "In a way," Jamie said. "It's really a pretty weak connection. Hertzmann is there with his wife and daughter. They're not there rescuing anybody, or arbitrating a war, or that sort of thing. Georg Hertzmann and his wife belong to Pax Humana, but they're on a business deal, with some Pax Humana money behind them."

  Hannah nodded. "I'm not all that surprised. The Paxers do more of that than rescuing or war-stopping. Those sorts of jobs are expensive, and PH has to do a lot of fund-raising, lots of business deals to support their work."

  Jamie looked at Hannah thoughtfully, almost accusingly. "You don't like them much, do you?"

  Hannah set down her fork and shifted in her seat a bit. "I don't have anything against them," she said, "but no, I'm not as for them as much as I gather you are. They are brave people, and they do good work. A lot of them are genuine heroes. But not all of them are heroes, and not everything they do is heroic--no matter how hard they work to make the outside world and themselves believe it. Besides, the only reason Pax Humana can live up to all those proud mottoes about being willing to die, but not to kill is because there are outfits like BSI that will use force when necessary."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Well, there are two angles to it. First off, there were a lot of times when some bunch of xenos were up against PH, one way or the other, and heard about their being willing to die but not kill--and decided to take the Paxers up on it, figuring there wasn't any risk in killing Paxers. PH people got themselves killed--then BSI agents went in after the killers, and caught them--or died trying. After a while, most of the xeno bad guys realized there were consequences to killing Paxers--and so fewer Paxers got killed. Some BSI agents grumble that what really happened was the Paxers traded their casualties for BSI ones."

  "What's the other angle?" Jamie asked.

  "Nearly every decent government prevents violence against its citizens by declaring itself the only entity allowed to use violence. If, say, there's a kidnapping, it's legal for the BSI agents to shoot the bad guys, though it's illegal for the bad guys to shoot back. But if a bunch of virtuous citizens shot the bad guys, they'd be breaking the law just as much as the bad guys. That's why vigilante justice is a contradiction in terms."

  "But the Paxers don't do that sort of thing. They do just the opposite."

  "Right. They walk right into the middle of our hypothetical kidnapping standoff, wearing big signs that say SHOOT ME pinned to their backs. But the bad guys know that the cops will come after them if they do shoot the Paxers--so they don't. The Paxers can afford to risk a nonviolent approach because the bad guys know there are risks involved in killing or harming Paxers."

  Hannah took a sip of wine and went on. "It takes real courage to do what the Paxers do. But they can only afford to take the moral high ground of nonviolence because BSI and the other law-enforcement and military organizations don't take a vow of nonviolence. The point is you can be a very good and brave person and do good and brave things--and still cause a lot of needless trouble. There's the old saying--the path to Hell is paved with good intentions."

  "I think that saying is supposed to mean you can cause harm by accident while you're trying to do good," said Jamie stiffly.

  "Maybe," Hannah replied. "I've always thought it was another way to say the ends justify the means--or rather, showing that they don't justify the means. I want to buy food to give to starving orphans, so it's all right for me to rob a bank to get the money--and if three guards get killed in the shoot-out, well, it was their own fault for getting between me and my trying to do a good deed. The Paxers tend to assume that they are so good that whatever they do must be right. If you disagree, then you must not only be wrong, but opposed to doing good--maybe you're even evil."

  "That's laying in on awfully thick," said Jamie.

  "I'm just exaggerating to make a point: A lot of times the ethics and morals of a situation are a lot more ambiguous than Pax Humana wants them to be. The best--or least bad--summing-up you could make of their involvement in the various human-Kendari disputes would be to say that the Paxers have made the problems more complicated. Some would just say they've made things worse. I've heard the Paxers being accused of betraying the human race."

  Jamie toyed with his food for a moment, took a bite, and spoke. "You said something a while back about it almost being a compliment that they turned me down. Should I be glad that a no-good organization didn't want me?"

  It was hard to miss the belligerence in his remark, but Hannah gave it her best shot. "No, that wasn't it at all--and I didn't mean to suggest that Pax Humana were bad people. What I thought was a compliment was that they didn't turn you down completely. According to what you said in the self-disclosure section of your file, they told you to come back in a few years and try them again because you weren't ready to join Pax Humana--yet. They were telling you to come back when you had a little experience under your belt."

  "Experience provided by the Bureau of Special Investigations," Jamie said.

  Hannah looked him straight in the eye. "Exactly," she said. She wasn't going to tiptoe around a discussion of her partner's limits and abilities--not when both their lives might depend on understanding them. "You're too smart not to know that you were sending a very mixed set of signals, applying to both organizations at once. But you should take it as a very strong compliment that both organizations considered your application very carefully. Neither rejected you. One just told you to try again later, and the other, the BSI, said yes--in spite of those mixed signals."

  Hannah leaned in closer to the table. "Let me be very clear about what worries me. You might, someday, sign up with Pax Humana. If so, fine--but that will be the day you resign from the Bureau of Special Investigations, because the PH membership oath includes a renunciation of all forms of violence, and a BSI agent can't swear to any such thing. Until then--you are BSI all the way. You're ready to defend yourself, and defend me, and use all appropriate means to fulfill your assignment--even if that means shoot to kill. Are we clear on that?"

  Jamie went pale, then flushed, but his face took on an annoyed, stubborn look that Hannah found very reassuring under the circumstances. "We're clear," he said. "That's the way I've play
ed it so far, and I'll keep at it."

  "Good." Very good. And I'll make sure you stay clear on that point. After all, her orders were to bring him back alive. Kelly hadn't said she had to be polite about it. She finished her lasagna and let her silence close that particular topic of conversation.

  What she was hoping for was that Jamie wouldn't let the silence linger. If he wanted to brood and sulk, that would spell trouble. She wanted him to speak next, make it his decision to move past the argument.

  But the silence sat there for a time, unchallenged by either of them, neither of them so much as looking at the other. It reminded Hannah all too painfully of the strained and angry quiet around her family's dinner table. Just the fleeting memory of it was enough to tie her stomach in knots.

  "Did, did, ah, you get anywhere on what sort of business deal Hertzmann was working on?" Jamie asked at last. He stood up, cleared the dishes from the table, and loaded them into the cleaner. Plainly he was trying as hard as he could to pretend things were okay.

  Hannah nodded, stood up herself, and reached around Jamie for the coffeepot and a couple of cups--and tried to hide her own sense of relief. If he had started to brood and sulk, it could have soured things for a long time.

  She sat down and poured a cup for each of them. "I'm still working the details up," she said, "and believe me, there's a lot of holes in the sources, and I'm making some guesses that could be wrong. But, if I have this straight, Herztmann's company is working with a Stannlar organization, if you can believe that."

  Jamie looked at her in surprise as he sat back down. "I'm not sure I do. I didn't know the Stannlar did business with humans at all." The Stannlar were friendly enough, but if humans were the younger of the two Younger Races, then the Stannlar were among the oldest of the Elder. Supposedly there were a good number of living Stannlar Consortia that were themselves older than the human race. What sort of common ground could a human have with a being hundreds of thousands of years old?

  "Most Stannlar don't--but, and don't ask me how--Hertzmann managed to team up with a pair of young Consortia. I barely knew there were such beings. Anyway, Hertzmann got some of that Pax Humana money together and formed a corporation, more or less, with these two Stannlar Consortia. That corporation has been hired to do an out-of-warranty repair on Reqwar's terrestrial ecology."

  "What? How could there be a warranty on the terrestrial ecology?"

  "Well, not a warranty, really. It's more an option to renew with a new service provider."

  "You're going to have to back up here a little bit," Jamie said. "Renew what? How?"

  "How is the key to it all," said Hannah. "How is the problem. But let me go back a bit--like five hundred million years or so. That's what I've been digging into today, mostly. Comparative early biology." She grinned. "You have to study a little of everything in the BSI."

  Jamie smiled back. "I've been finding that out."

  "Anyway, the point is that all the life on Earth was in the water, the oceans, until about four hundred and seventy million years ago. The continents were lifeless barren rock. It took a long time for plant life to establish itself on land, and land animals couldn't really get started until there were enough terrestrial plants for them to eat. The oceans were full of complex life- forms--trilobites and early fish and so on--for close on a hundred and eighty million years before there was any significant colonization of the land.

  "Reqwar is following about the same pattern--but it's a about five hundred million years behind. What this ties into is that the Elder Races have hugely complicated rules about settling on planets. You're not allowed to wipe out the local terrestrial ecosystem. But you can establish your colony on a world that doesn't yet have land-based life, but does have reasonably advanced sea life--the equivalent of those trilobites and primitive fish. Seaborne plant life will give you oxygen in the air, among other things. You can harvest sea life as food and feedstock until your own farms and so on are established. You'll have to process the seafood to make it edible for your species, but the Elder Races all know how to do that already.

  "The catch is that while there aren't exactly rules or laws saying your species can't colonize a planet forever, the universal experience and received wisdom is that even the longest-lived intelligent species isn't likely to remain on a colonized world for more than a few million years at most.

  "Sooner or later something will happen--politics, trade, a plague, a war, a change in fashion, even evolution of the intelligent species in question. Something is going to cause species X to abandon its colony on planet Y. And when that happens, the species is expected to clean up after itself, at least biologically.

  "No one much worries if they leave cities or roads or whatever behind. Erosion and geology will take care of things like that, sooner or later. But they aren't supposed to leave any imported life-forms behind. The worry is that without intelligent species X around to supervise, you'll get overbreeding, or nasty mutations, or maybe critters that excrete something toxic, or that remove some vital nutrient from the environment.

  "That's why it's handy to set up shop on a world without life on land. You can set up your own complete ecosystem, with all the plants and animals from home. You won't ruin the local terrestrial ecology, because it isn't there yet. And when your people leave, they can wipe out everything on land, again without worrying too much about interfering with the planet's development. The imported life-forms will have processed some nutrients that will get washed into the sea and get eaten, and maybe put more oxygen in the air. But stuff like that either won't harm the oceanic ecosystem, or the ocean life can actually make use of it."

  Jamie frowned. "But even if intelligent species X evacuated a particular planet in the most orderly way possible, it could never be certain it had killed all the microbes and insects and so on it had brought along. If something like a rat or a cockroach managed to establish itself--"

  "Exactly."

  "And things would be even worse if species X went extinct, or their colony just collapsed. There wouldn't be any hope at all of a cleanup. Even if species X survived when the colony gave out, the rest of the population of species X might not have the time or the wealth or the inclination for the cleanup."

  "Right again. So how do you solve that?"

  "That's obvious. You genetically engineer every species you introduce. You insert a kill-gene, maybe multiple kill-genes, just in case one k-gene fails or mutates. Insert some bit of genetic code that wouldn't do anything until it was activated, but that would kill or sterilize the life-form when it was activated. Probably the tidiest thing would be to make every living thing susceptible to one of a series of viruses that caused sterility."

  "You're almost there," said Hannah, "but suppose species X dies out before it can release the sterilizing viruses?"

  Jamie thought. "I don't know exactly what sort of mechanism you'd use to make it work, but you'd have to rig things so that, instead of taking action to wipe out imported life-forms, you'd have to take action to prevent them from being wiped out. If the intelligent xeno species is still around and still running the planet, it can push the 'reset' button every hundred years or so. But if species X collapses or leaves the planet, it won't be there to push the button--and good-bye to the species with the kill switch--and every species that relied on it as a food source. I guess you wouldn't have to kill off all the species directly--just the core species that supplied the main structure of the ecology. Probably mostly plants or their local equivalent."

  "Full marks--except for one assumption you made, on account of your not thinking like a member of one of the Elder Races, and a fiddly cultural detail you don't know about the Reqwar Pavlat."

  "Okay. I'll bite. What did I miss?"

  "Elder Races species take the long view. They rig that 'reset' button to be pushed every ten thousand or hundred thousand years, not just every century. And the Reqwar Pavlat won't or can't do genetic engineering themselves."

  "So they hired someone else to
do it? Another species?"

  "Right. Some species called the Kreflar, if I have that right."

  "Never heard of them."

  Hannah grinned evilly. "No reason why you should have. They managed to go extinct themselves, about the same time the Neanderthals checked out. But the punch line is that they didn't just do the genetic mods for Reqwar before they died out. They encrypted their work."

  Jamie sat bolt upright. "What? Encrypted DNA? Is that even possible?"

  "I have no idea. But this isn't DNA--it's whatever genetic code life from the Pavlat home world uses. And encryption must be possible with that genetic material because the Kreflar did it. In effect, you have to know the password before you can reset the clocks on all the kill-genes."

  "And the people who know the passwords are all dead."

  "And the kill-genes are starting to activate," Hannah said. "Unless or until Georg and his friends manage to decrypt the code and reset the timers, Reqwar's entire terrestrial ecology is going to collapse and die out within one or two human lifetimes.

  "In other words," Hannah went on, "the stakes on this case are a lot higher than where one man serves out a prison sentence. The question is whether much of anyone on Reqwar will be alive by the time he finishes serving it."

  SIXMIRACLES

  Marta Hertzmann stared at the display screen as she slowly and carefully shifted the scan-scope's field of view to the next encoding site. She spotted the telltale encrypt-start sequence and used the marker controls to lock in on it. She glanced down at her status boards. The learning sequencer was following right along with her, recording all her actions. She highlighted the encrypt-start sequence and flagged it, then moved down the gene to the encyprt-stop marker, and repeated the process. That was the last one on that gene--and, praise be, the last encrypt site for that species.

  She let out a sigh of relief, saved her work, and lifted her hands away from the controls, being careful not to joggle anything. Delicate work. Delicate, intricate work. Soon, very soon, she hoped, the learning systems would have enough parameters to automate the process.