"You want me to go after a clone?” He spoke out loud.
The Gyonnese scuttled backward. He had done the equivalent of shouting.
"I'm sorry,” he whispered. “I did not mean to speak so loudly. But by law, clones are humans, not items to be recovered."
That wasn't entirely true. Within the Alliance, clones were considered human for some parts of the law—if one was killed, it would be considered a homicide—but in other parts, clones were just as insignificant as the Fifths of the Gyonnese. In many parts of the Alliance, clones had no economic legal standing. The original child received the inheritance and all the protections accorded to a child in a family. The law considered the cloned child as if it were an orphan.
As far as Yu was concerned, however, clones were humans. He did not recover humans.
"You'll need a Retrieval Artist to find this Fifth,” he said. Retrieval Artists usually hunted for Disappeareds, people who went missing on purpose, usually to avoid prosecution or death by any one of fifty different alien cultures.
"We have contacted seven such highly recommended ‘Artists,'” the speaker said, “before it became clear to us that none will take our money. They work for humans only."
Of course. Yu hadn't thought of that. Retrieval Artists worked against alien cultures, not with them.
"A Tracker, then,” Yu whispered. “Someone used to finding people. I find things."
"A Fifth is not a person as we understand it,” the speaker said.
That statement was accurate as far as it went. “Person,” as the Gyonnese used the word, only counted the Original.
"Does this Fifth live within the Alliance?” Yu asked.
"Yes.” The speaker scuttled toward him. He realized that the Gyonnese thought the question meant he would take the job.
He took one step back, which was the Gyonnese equivalent of putting up his hands. “The reason I ask is this. If I recover a human Fifth that lives within the Alliance, I am breaking human laws. The action would be called a kidnapping. I could go to prison for the rest of my life."
He wasn't sure they understood what a kidnapping was, but they did understand prison. The Gyonnese had something similar for their own people, which was, he had heard, degrees worse.
All of the Gyonnese turned away from him. They merged into a small circle. They were discussing something, but he couldn't hear because they had shut off their amplifiers.
His stomach ached. He hadn't eaten well since Athenia ruined his life, and now the stress of this encounter was making him both hungry and nauseous. He wanted this meeting to end. He couldn't help the Gyonnese, and he wasn't sure how long it would take to convince them of that fact.
After a few minutes, they separated. They formed around him in a semicircle. The Gyonnese used circles as their primary meeting formation, and to include him inside one was a great honor.
"We understand kidnapping. We have studied much human law,” the speaker said to him. “We did not realize that such an act would apply to a Fifth. Our apologies."
Yu felt his shoulders relax. He would be able to leave soon. “I accept your apologies."
"We have another proposition for you instead,” the speaker said.
Yu had hunch he wouldn't like this one either, but he couldn't very well leave the circle.
"What's that?"
"We need you to recover a human criminal."
He was so nervous he wanted to make a joke: would any human criminal do? But he said nothing. He waited.
"Her name is Rhonda Flint. She has murdered generations of Gyonnese. She has been found guilty in Alliance court, but she has not complied with the court's orders."
"She's Disappeared?” he asked.
"No,” the Gyonnese said. “She must turn over her Original child. But she has not done so. That child has Disappeared, or so we believe."
"And no Retrieval Artist will help with this either, I suppose,” Yu said. “But I know for a fact that Trackers will."
"Trackers believe the child dead."
Despite himself, Yu was intrigued. “You don't?"
"We think the Original might indeed be dead. But Rhonda Flint lives with a child, which we believe to be a Fifth. If the child is not a Fifth, we want that child. If the child is a Fifth, then Rhonda Flint is in violation of her court order. She has hidden the Original in such a way as to invalidate our legal rights. We want to take her to court, but the only way we can do that is to bring her ourselves."
"Trackers,” Yu whispered. “They are your only hope."
"Trackers must be hired through a human government. None will cooperate with us. We have a human lawyer who claims that such refusals negate Alliance law, but as we said, we cannot bring the case without her. So bring her to us. The same terms as before."
"I don't understand,” he whispered. He had never seen the Gyonnese so serious. “The court can compel her to come forward."
"The court believes circumstances have discharged her debt,” the speaker said.
"For mass murder?” The shock almost made him raise his voice again, but at the last second he caught himself.
"That is the problem. The Alliance—the humans within the Alliance do not believe that she has committed a true crime. That is the problem with this system all along.” The speaker crossed his long arms over his torso. It was an attempt to mimic the human gesture, but every time Yu saw it, it looked like sausages wrapped around a stick.
"I still don't understand,” Yu whispered.
"You humans allow what you call Disappearance Services for people like Rhonda Flint—"
"I thought she hadn't Disappeared,” Yu whispered.
A nearby Gyonnese touched the speaker behind his back. The speaker's whiskers flailed slightly, making a sound that didn't reach the amplifier.
"She did not Disappear, because the court and her corporation protect her. But let me be clear. It is the same thing. You humans commit crimes, serious crimes, and they do not fit in your customs, so you allow those criminals to escape, to build new identities. It is causing rifts in the Earth Alliance, one that may lead to the exclusion of humans from the Alliance if the situation isn't remedied."
Yu's head hurt. This was much more complex than he was used to.
"Okay,” he whispered. “By your standards, she's a criminal."
"By anyone's standards,” the speaker said. “She has committed mass murder. She is not going to be punished. We are going to demand punishment."
"Or what?” Yu asked. “Cause an interstellar incident?"
"That is not your concern. Your concern is recovering this woman for us."
It sounds like you never had her, Yu almost said. But he knew better.
"I'm not licensed for human trafficking,” he whispered. No one in the Alliance was.
"It is simply the recovery of an unwilling criminal,” the speaker said.
"Which I'm not trained for either. I work with things. Hire a Tracker."
"This woman works for one of the largest corporations in the human universe. No human government is going to cross it."
Which, Yu realized, was the crux of the problem.
"We will double the fee we initially offered you,” the speaker said.
The coldness grew worse. Clearly, he was their last hope.
"Show me what she did,” he whispered, knowing he was already lost.
* * * *
Rhonda Flint worked for one of the largest corporations in the known universe. Aleyd developed products all over the Alliance. Twenty years ago, the corporation had leased a lot of land on Gyonne, and had negotiated various deals with the Gyonnese to market the Gyonnese's farming techniques to poor regions of planets with difficult environments.
The Gyonnese had a terraforming technique that worked extremely well with unusual environments. Aleyd would market that in exchange for permission to lease Gyonnese land for its work on colonial products.
One of those products was a new fertilizer designed by Rhonda Flint. It was a
n aerial spray, which she tested near one of the Gyonnese's larval beds.
The spray was lethal to Gyonnese larvae. Sixty thousand Gyonnese larvae died. Had these larvae grown, they would have been Original Gyonnese. One hundred and twenty thousand families probably lost the ability to reproduce. The effect to the Gyonnese was devastating. It was as if an entire section of the planet had been wiped out.
For the first time in his life, Yu understood both sides of an argument. The Gyonnese larvae had already split. The genetic material had been preserved in a secondary larval bed. From a human perspective, the equivalent of a twin's fetus had been lost. While that was a tragedy, it wasn't like losing an existing child.
But to the Gyonnese, who considered anything divided from the Original to be inferior, entire families had been destroyed forever.
The Fifteenth Multicultural Tribunal had no Gyonnese sitting on that particular bench at that particular time. For the court, the incident was an intellectual exercise. While it understood the Gyonnese position, it did not show much compassion for what was, to the Gyonnese, the loss of sixty thousand children.
As her punishment, Rhonda Flint was to give up all her children—living and any born in the future—to the Gyonnese. But Rhonda Flint's daughter died in a horrible accident not long after the court's final ruling. If Flint had succeeded in cloning the child, the clones would not be considered children under the ruling or, indeed, under Gyonnese law.
But the Gyonnese were sophisticated. They understood that to humans, children—whether they were cloned or created naturally—were considered human. They knew that Rhonda Flint would consider the clone a true child. So they, rightly, believed she had circumvented the rule of law.
The Gyonnese had given Yu all this material and sent him to a diplomatic conference room to learn about it. He watched the spraying, saw the Gyonnese mourn their young, watched the end of the trial. He saw a visibly frightened human woman burst into tears when the verdict was called. Her lawyer had argued that she wasn't liable for her actions, that the corporation was.
While the Gyonnese had ended all of their contracts with Aleyd, they believed punishment needed a living face. And that face belonged to Rhonda Flint.
The court agreed.
It was convenient that Flint's daughter died shortly thereafter.
Yu was shaking when he finished with the materials. Not just because of what he had seen, but because he knew—on a visceral level—that the woman he saw sobbing on the holoimages before him was a mass murderer.
The Gyonnese adored their children. Because families could only have one—not by law, just a simple matter of biology—the Originals were so precious that they were kept from outsiders until they reached young adulthood. Even then the Gyonnese treated the young with an affection that touched him more than he wanted to admit.
If the Gyonnese were right, and this woman had her daughter—the original child—cloned, then she was skirting the law and the legal ruling. And that was wrong.
Of course no Tracker would take this case. Human governments wouldn't understand it.
And Retrieval Artists—at least the ones Yu had met—would think that the Gyonnese were overreacting. After all, there were four other identical “children” per larva. Humans would believe that those children should be treated equally with the Original. But the truth of it was, those children were not equal to the Gyonnese.
And that was what mattered.
Before, Yu hesitantly took the case for the money. Now he was going to bring back Rhonda Flint to face the courts again because it was the right thing to do.
Hadad Yu was normally not the kind of man who did the right thing.
He wasn't quite sure what to do with his strong visceral reaction to Rhonda Flint's crimes. Perhaps he had learned a kind of empathy for the Gyonnese that he hadn't realized. Or perhaps he needed a kind of hatred to go against his essential nature and recover a human instead of an item.
Whatever the cause, he was now on the case. He would remain that way until Rhonda Flint was in Gyonnese custody—something he would bring about with the same kind of precision he used toward finding missing items.
* * * *
First, he used the Gyonnese's information as the basis for his own research. He quickly learned that Rhonda Flint had moved from Armstrong on the Moon to Valhalla Basin on Callisto, one of Jupiter's moons. Callisto was the home base for Aleyd, which had turned Valhalla Basin into a company town where everyone had a connection to the corporation, even the visitors.
Second, Yu made certain that the original daughter was truly dead. He looked at the police reports, studied the visuals. He soon learned that Rhonda Flint now called herself Rhonda Shindo. Flint had been her married name. She had followed an old-fashioned custom and taken on the identity of the man who had fathered that daughter, a man Rhonda Flint/Shindo eventually abandoned.
Finally, Yu hired an assistant, a man he'd worked with before. Janus Nafti was strong and compliant. He was a big man who shaved his head and wore tattoos as if they were disguises. He wasn't very smart, but he worked hard. Nafti didn't question, did as he was told, and rarely spoke unless spoken to.
Yu promised him double the usual fee, telling Nafti that the Gyonnese were paying him twice as much as usual.
The rest of the preparations were simple. Yu researched Aleyd, Valhalla Basin, and Flint/Shindo herself. He learned that she now had an on-site job. She was allowed no contacts with races other than humans, and she kept her name off most research, even projects she spearheaded.
She claimed, in one paper she had delivered at an Earth-based conference, that she had taken a less adventurous position so that she could be home after school every day to be with her daughter.
Which led Yu to the Aleyd recruitment information system. He put in a request for Valhalla Basin, claiming he had family, and learned exactly how the systems worked there.
The houses were owned by the corporation and given to the employees according to pay grade. He even found floor plans and rough smart house schematics. He learned when the schools started, when they let out for the day, and which schools catered to what level of income.
Income was a specious term, since much of Aleyd's payments for its Valhalla Basin employees came in services, from medical care to shopping bonuses, all of which varied by pay grade. Essentially, everything he wanted to know about the entire community was available on Aleyd's recruitment site, including how to get through the port at Valhalla Basin with a minimum of fuss.
All of that relieved him. Kidnapping a human—no matter what the law or the Gyonnese called it—would be the most difficult thing he had ever done. He was happy that finding her, and figuring out the best times to take her, was easier than he expected.
He hoped everything else would be as well.
* * * *
Getting into Valhalla Basin's port required very little cunning. He bought seventy-five pieces of high-end Earth-made real wood furniture and resold them to Aleyd Corporation. His arrival on Callisto, then, was just that of a businessman making a delivery. He claimed a crew complement of three—two men and one woman—and hoped that no one would check how many crewmembers he brought into Valhalla Basin because the only one traveling with him was Nafti.
They unloaded the furniture quickly. They had permission to stay for three days, should they need it. Yu hoped they wouldn't need it.
He had memorized the map of Valhalla Basin, but nothing had prepared him for the real thing.
He had expected Valhalla Basin to resemble the Moon's largest city, Armstrong, with its cobbled-together dome, built over time, and buildings of all different styles and shapes.
But Valhalla Basin was uniform. The buildings in the downtown area seemed to have been built at the same time by the same architect. The dome was also uniform—one arched vista dominated by Jupiter, which loomed over the city like a round attacking ship.
He didn't need public transport to get to the neighborhoods. When he landed, he recei
ved credits, courtesy of Aleyd, to spend in local hotels, restaurants, and stores. The credits let him rent a vehicle for the day.
He wasn't sure if he should call the vehicle a car: it was larger than any car he'd ever seen, with six wheels instead of the usual four. The driver sat in the center, and any passengers had their own section behind him.
He had chosen the vehicle because the sectioned areas could be shut off and the doors double-locked from the front—a child-protection feature, he was told, but which seemed more like a prison to him.
Everything about Valhalla Basin seemed geared toward families and business. The downtown, with its austere silver buildings that turned color when the dome itself did, had the no-nonsense image cultivated by most Earth-based corporations. But the neighborhoods had a regimented personality.
He drove himself, Nafti, and what little equipment he'd brought into the neighborhoods, leaving the vehicle's talking guidebook on. The guidebook was designed for prospective employees, so its patter was upbeat and positive.
Even without the talking guidebook, Yu could tell when he got to the upscale neighborhoods. The more upscale the neighborhood, the more housing color varied. The houses got larger as well.
The talking guidebook explained all of this, also mentioning the perks of the house computer systems, something Yu had studied in depth before he arrived.
He'd paid a colleague to hack into the systems of the company that designed all the household computers for Valhalla Basin. The colleague had downloaded all the specs for the various systems, with a step-by-step guide for diverting the security system, wiping the memory clean, and taking over the House system without alerting the authorities.
Yu had run through it all on a practice model. He had made no mistakes, and his colleague believed he was ready to handle an actual House system.
Yu hated field-testing, but in this case, he had no choice. He had to disable Flint/Shindo's House computer before he did anything else.
He parked half a block away from the address he had obtained through Aleyd's corporate records. Rhonda Shindo and daughter lived in upper-level professional housing. Shindo had opted for the best possible kitchen and a spa in the corner of the back yard instead of a bonus room. She used the spare bedroom as a home office and added the optional second bathroom.
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