The Possession of Paavo Deshin

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  The court cases filed by the Savang against the Grazians told their personal history as well as the history of the complaint.

  Károly Grazian had been a link engineer for ImaginaLink. He was paid to design new and different uses for the tiny chips that everyone had installed within their bodies. Some of the links were simply for communication, but others specialized—embedding cameras in fingertips, or adding taste buds for items humans couldn’t normally taste.

  Ishani Grazian had worked in customer relations for the same firm. She had marketed new and old chips to various consumer groups. Sometimes she found new ways to make old technology work for a particular group.

  Six and a half years ago, the Grazians took a vacation to a major upscale resort on Sava, the home world of the Savang. The resort, Barrier Islands, catered to humans. Its brochures said it provided every possible amenity.

  While there, the Grazians hiked along a mountain trail. Ishani lost her footing and fell five meters to a rock outcropping. The outcropping had only been one meter wide. If Ishani slipped again, she would have fallen forty meters to a valley filled with giant boulders.

  She would not have survived.

  Károly couldn’t reach her manually, so he sent one of their companions for help. Then he unwrapped a thick vine from a nearby tree. He had Ishani loop the vine around her waist and pulled her to safety.

  The parts of the vine that touched human skin died almost instantly. Some chemical native to human skin killed certain plants on Sava. The vine received a kind of toxin. The trees—and their vines—were sacred to the Savang, and destroying any part of them was punishable by death.

  However, Savang law also provided that non-residents of Sava could buy their way free of a legal judgment by paying a set fee. The fee for freedom from a death penalty crime was more than two million credits.

  The evidence against the Grazians seemed clear enough to convict them in a Savang court. But the Grazians and several other former vacationers at the resort brought a class action suit against the Savangs, claiming that the laws protecting the trees and vines were enacted only after the Barrier Island Resort was built. The trees, which grew quickly, were planted around the resort.

  Further, the lawyers said there was no evidence in Savang history that the trees were sacred. The complaint the lawyers filed claimed that the Savang passed the laws, planted the trees and looped the vines near danger spots on trails—trails they could have closed off—with full knowledge that humans would touch the trees or vines, killing them.

  The Grazians and the others in the class action suit claimed the Savang created the laws with the express purpose of extorting money from wealthy human clients of the resort.

  The class action suit started as a stall to prevent the death sentence. But the Savang raised the stakes. They used an old law on their books which demanded that anyone who failed to pay a fine would have to do hard labor in a Savang work camp until the fine was paid or the appeals were settled.

  The Grazians didn’t have the money to pay the fine, and ImaginaLink wouldn’t pay it for them. They faced years of hard labor in an alien work camp—which could kill them long before the appeals finished.

  So they decided to Disappear instead.

  Flint frowned as he examined all of this. There was no mention, in any of the court documents, of the Grazians’ biological child. Was he at the resort? If so, where was he during the fateful hike? He would have been only six months old, unable to walk.

  The questions bothered Flint so much that he stopped looking at the court documents and searched for any information on the Grazians’ children. He found a seven-year-old birth certificate for one Enrique Grazian, whose parents were listed as Ishani and Károly Grazian.

  He found no other information on Enrique. No images, no travel documents, nothing. Not even anything that established the Deshins as the child’s guardians while the Grazians were gone.

  Flint’s stomach twisted. He hated loose ends, and this clearly was one. The Grazians were Paavo Deshin’s parents. They had named him Enrique. He was born six months before the fateful vacation, before his parents Disappeared.

  They clearly left him behind. Somehow the Deshins got him.

  And now the Grazians had returned for him.

  Flint’s frown deepened.

  The return was the key. The return and their carelessness about being identified.

  Flint went deeper into the legal morass. His years as a Retrieval Artist had trained him to how to search through the legalese and find the nuggets of information he needed.

  Still, it took him hours to figure out that the class action suit had been settled. It had not gone to any Multicultural Tribunal. In fact, when it looked like the case was actually going forward, the Savang proposed a settlement.

  Most of the terms of the settlement were confidential, but a few were not. All charges against every single person involved in the suit were dropped.

  Flint assumed that the remaining terms had to do with a financial settlement from the Savang to the humans. The Savang laws remained on the books of Sava, and nothing changed at the resort.

  But the fact that the Savang were willing to settle out of court made him believe that the humans bringing the suit had been right: the laws existed only to trap aliens—in this case humans—who traveled to Sava for vacations. The idea was to bring money to the Savang—as a sort of legal extortion.

  He shoved his chair away from his desk with a kind of low level anger. Had this all happened to him, he would not have settled the suit. Or if he had, he would have made sure a warning was one of his settlement conditions. Other humans had to know the risks they were taking when they went to Sava—particularly when they went to the Barrier Islands Resort.

  He stood and paced. Something else bothered him about all that he had learned.

  He still didn’t understand the Grazians’ actions. He understood why they Disappeared, although he didn’t understand why they failed to take their child with them. Nor did he understand why they had returned for him over six years later.

  Surely, they were bright enough to realize Paavo would have no memory of them. Surely, they knew that their presence in his life would be as disturbing as yanking him out of his tiny world and forcing him to Disappear. Maybe more so.

  Flint went back to his desk. He probably couldn’t find the answers he needed to the Paavo question, but he knew how to find Disappeareds.

  And it shouldn’t be that hard to find Disappeareds who no longer needed to hide.

  If he couldn’t figure out why the Grazians had left Enrique behind, he might simply go ask them himself.

  ***

  Maxine Van Alen was sitting at her desk, tweaking an amicus brief that one of her legal assistants had prepared when the notice flashed across her links.

  Someone wanted to adopt Enrique Grazian.

  She stopped, closed her eyes, and rubbed three fingers across her forehead. In twenty years of practicing Disappearance law, no one had ever tried to adopt a child of a Disappeared—at least not without the Disappeareds’ permission.

  There was—as she always told her associates—a first time for everything.

  She opened her eyes. Her desk sat in the middle of the room, but didn’t dominate it. If anything, upon entering, the eye went to the conference table near the long windows. There were other desks as well, smaller desks that mostly existed for their separate computer access. Those computers weren’t networked to anything within the law office, something she’d had more than one occasion to use.

  The notification that came through her public links had simply flashed in front of her left eye. Like so many legal notifications, this was actually a notification of a notification. In other words, the message she got simply informed her to look at her daily inbox—the one set aside for non-specific legal cases.

  When she got an assigned case, she set up an assigned mailbox within her own computer network. The Grazian case was so old that its mailbox had disappea
red along with the clients.

  If she had even set up a mailbox.

  She often didn’t for the Disappeared.

  Van Alen helped people in trouble determine if they should Disappear. If she felt that they needed a Disappearance service, she pointed them to a good service, not one of the scams that had sprung up in recent years. She facilitated the distribution and/or (usually or) sale of assets, and because she was good, she made sure that the legal trail ended with her.

  In addition to helping people Disappear to avoid such prosecutions, Van Alen and her team of lawyers also argued cases in front of more than thirty Multicultural Tribunals. The amicus brief she’d been reading was for an appellate case that argued these agreements with the alien cultures were not only inhumane, but illegal under centuries of human laws.

  She had signed onto cases like that before or written briefs in support of those cases—and in all of those instances, her side had lost.

  But that didn’t stop her from trying.

  Maxine Van Alen liked nothing more than an impossible task.

  And she suddenly found herself facing one. The Enrique Grazian case presented all sorts of challenges. She slipped the notification language into any agreement that had to do with children of the Disappeared. When she first started doing the notifications, she wasn’t even certain if they’d hold up in a court of law. Then when she realized that the chances of them being activated were slim, she stopped worrying.

  But the worry came back the moment the Grazian notification crossed the lower corner of her left eye.

  Because she would have to represent two Disappeareds in connection with their child. Only the Disappeareds had abandoned their lives and their identities.

  They had given up their claim to legal status in this sector.

  And she wasn’t sure she could even revive it—not without some incredible legal gymnastics.

  Still, she opened the file in her inbox and read the actual notification.

  It was a standard document, stating that it fulfilled the terms of the foster child covenant by serving this timely notice to Attorney Maxine Van Alen of the intent of Luc and Gerda Deshin to legally adopt the child known as Paavo Deshin, a.k.a. Enrique Grazian.

  Everything in the notification was in order. It was a competent legal document that followed every single requirement.

  The only odd note came from the covering letter. The Deshins’ attorney wrote: I find nothing in the documentation in Paavo’s files that links you to his case or his custody. We have fulfilled the notification request as we must do by law. That is the entire extent of our duties, so far as I can tell from this strange notation in Paavo’s Foster Care Agreement. Unless I hear from you within 48 hours, this adoption will proceed as planned.

  Forty-eight hours was not enough time. Van Alen knew that without reviewing any files as well.

  She immediately sent a request for an injunction against the adoption to the appropriate Family Court in the City of Armstrong as well as to Oberholtz, Martinez, and Mlsnavek, the law firm that represented the Deshins. Then Van Alen drafted a request for a closed hearing within six months time, claiming she could not put together all the needed information to block Enrique Grazian’s adoption in a more timely manner.

  She was careful not to use the boy’s new name in her draft. She didn’t want the name to slide through to future drafts. The Deshins’ lawyer could claim that the use of the new name proved that Van Alen (and by implication, her clients) agreed with the merits of their case.

  She wasn’t sure what the merits were. She just needed the time.

  Because right now, she was acting on behalf of Enrique’s parents, who had Disappeared.

  And she had no idea where they were.

  ***

  Gerda wouldn’t leave Luc alone. She kept pinging his emergency links, and every time he asked her to talk to him on their private link, she refused.

  She wanted him to come home.

  Luc didn’t want to go home—not while he was searching for the Grazians and had the new lawyer trying to push through the adoption, maybe that night.

  But for the very first time in their relationship, Gerda wouldn’t listen to him. She wanted to talk to him, and she wasn’t going to do it through any encrypted channel. Nor was she going to drag Paavo to the office.

  Not that Luc blamed her. The day’s trauma would have disturbed even the most emotionally stable child. While Paavo was brilliant and charming and enjoyable, he was anything but emotionally stable.

  Luc steadied himself as he walked through the front door of his own home. He had made sure no one followed him here. He had security planted throughout the neighborhood, not just bots, cameras, and warning signs, but some real human beings as well.

  Right now, he had no idea what the Grazians were trying to do, but they weren’t going to succeed in stealing his son.

  The house always smelled faintly of mint, which Gerda had heard was calming, and usually, the scent worked. Usually, Luc smelled it, and smiled softly to himself, realizing he had come home.

  But not this afternoon. This afternoon, his heart was racing, and he was breathing shallowly. As he stepped into the living room, he realized he was closer to panic than he had been in years.

  He didn’t want to lose any of this. He didn’t want to lose his house or his family.

  He didn’t want to lose his son.

  Before he called for Gerda, he looked for Paavo. He pushed open the door to the boy’s room, expecting to see his son asleep on the bed. The covers were mussed, but Paavo wasn’t there.

  Luc’s heart sped up. “Gerda?” he called.

  She came out of the kitchen, a towel in her hands. Her lips were thin, and frown lines had formed around her mouth and eyes.

  Luc had forgotten, until that moment, what a formidable woman his wife could be.

  “It’s about time,” she said. “We have a very serious problem and we need to solve it now.”

  He didn’t like her tone. She made it sound like he hadn’t done anything all day.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” he snapped. “If you hadn’t demanded I come home—”

  “If I hadn’t demanded that you come home, then we would be in even more trouble,” she said.

  Something about her expression caught him. He had never seen that look on her face. “What’s wrong? Did they get Paavo?”

  “He’s in the kitchen,” she said. “He’s fine.”

  But Luc had to see for himself. He hurried into the kitchen. Paavo was sitting in his favorite chair, his small, too-thin body hunched over the table.

  He looked up and Luc winced at the sadness in his son’s face.

  ***

  Sometimes his dad scared him, but not right now. Paavo heard his dad’s voice from the living room, but didn’t believe his dad was here until his dad burst into the kitchen. His dad was tall and athletic, the opposite of Paavo, and he was always so smart and so calm.

  Only he didn’t seem calm right now.

  He hurried to Paavo and wrapped his arms around him, pulling him from the chair in a gigantic hug, so tight that it took Paavo’s breath away.

  “Daddy?” Paavo managed. “Are you okay?”

  His dad eased Paavo back just enough so that they could look each other in the face. Unlike his mom, his dad could hold Paavo and not seem tired or winded, even though Paavo was getting taller and heavier by the day.

  “Now that I know you are.” His dad smoothed Paavo’s hair away from his forehead. “I won’t let anyone take you, you know that, right?”

  Paavo did know that. Whatever his dad could prevent, he would. Paavo felt a relief so big that tears threatened.

  His dad wiped at the bottom of Paavo’s eyes. Clearly he’d seen the tears and this time, they didn’t bother his dad.

  “I know you’re scared, Paavo,” his dad said, “but we’ll solve this. I promise.”

  Paavo nodded and put his head against his dad’s shoulder, like he used to do
when he was little.

  “Thanks, Daddy,” he said, and snuggled closer. “Thanks so much.”

  ***

  Luc held his son for a long moment. Paavo hadn’t cuddled like this in a year, maybe more. Luc had started to wonder if his brilliant, difficult son was outgrowing him. At some point, Paavo would realize that his dad wasn’t that smart.

  Luc was just tough and determined. He liked having smart people around him, and he listened to them. He didn’t always take their advice, but he listened. He knew how to take responsibility, he knew how to act, and he knew what he wanted.

  Most people didn’t know those things.

  But his wife did. She came up to his side and put her hand on Paavo’s back.

  “We have to talk,” she said to Luc.

  He nodded, just enough to answer her, but not enough to disturb Paavo. He was about to carry Paavo to his room, when Paavo stirred.

  “This isn’t stuff you want me to hear, is it?” he said to his mom.

  She sighed. Sometimes, she said, it was difficult having a precocious child. He understood too much and not enough at the same time.

  “It’ll be better if we can talk in private,” she said.

  Luc expected protests—that was usually how Paavo reacted—but this time, Paavo just nodded. He let go of Luc’s neck, and let Luc set him down.

  “Can I stay in here?” Paavo asked, and Luc suddenly understood that his son was afraid to go back to his room.

  “Yes,” Gerda said. “We’ll shut the door.”

  Paavo returned to the table. He had been working some kind of puzzle there. One of the teachers had given him puzzles, not computerized things either, but very old fashioned, very expensive toys from Earth, saying that a puzzle of 3000 pieces or more would challenge Paavo’s mind and rest it at the same time.