He went around the desk to the upholstered chair that he had splurged on. As he did, he touched a corner of the desk, ordering it to keep its fake wood look and to mask its pop-up screens. He didn’t want Talia to see any of the information he planned to look up.
For the moment, though, he didn’t look up anything. He sat down and leaned back. The chair squeaked beneath his weight.
“Okay,” he said. “First you need to tell me how you found the others.”
He couldn’t call the five clones sisters, as she had. He wasn’t sure how to think about them.
He wasn’t sure if he was ready to think about them at all.
“I didn’t find all of them.” Talia still had her arms wrapped around her stomach. She looked scared.
She’d had some time to think about what he said, and she seemed even more uncomfortable than she had before.
“Maybe you could tell me what’s wrong with looking for them,” she said. “I mean, Mom’s dead. That court ruling was against her, right?”
Talia was referring to a court ruling that Flint had found out about only recently. His wife, Rhonda, had invented a nutrient-rich water that, when tested on another planet, had accidentally destroyed a colony of young Gyonnese.
The Gyonnese were part of the Earth Alliance, and they brought the case before a Multicultural Tribunal. Under Earth Alliance law, anyone who broke a law on a particular place was subject to the laws of that place.
Under Gyonnese law, Rhonda Shindo was guilty of mass murder.
The punishment was also Gyonnese—and considered the worst it could give out. She had to forfeit any and all children to the Gyonnese for the rest of her life.
But the Gyonnese had distinctions between real children and false children. Real children were children like Emmeline—what the Gyonnese called the Originals. Talia was a false child, a clone, a duplicate, and therefore beneath the Gyonnese’s notice.
“I mean,” Talia was saying, “the Gyonnese got to take her real children as a punishment to Mom, right? And if she’s gone, they can’t punish her anymore.”
“I’m not sure,” Flint said. “I’m not an expert in Gyonnese law, which is what prevails here.”
“But they don’t consider me a real child,” Talia said, her voice trembling. “They would never take me. Why would my searching for my sisters put them in danger? They’re not ‘real,’ either.”
Flint rubbed his chin, then tapped his thumbnail against his teeth. He wasn’t quite sure how to explain any of this. But he was going to have to try.
“I’ve worked around Earth Alliance Laws for more than a decade now,” he said, “and they’re difficult and nuanced at best. The thing to remember—and it’s the hardest thing to keep in mind; it’s the thing that makes this so complicated—is that the only reason the Earth Alliance works is that each member agrees to live by another member’s laws whenever the first member is in the other member’s territory. Humans are the worst at doing this. We don’t like laws we don’t understand.”
Talia had slid her arms away from her abdomen. She had crossed them over her chest instead. “I studied this stuff in school.”
“I know,” he said, “but I’ve lived it. This aspect of the Earth Alliance is why I became a Retrieval Artist.”
She frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
He wasn’t sure he could describe those last few weeks he spent as a detective, when he was going to have to give up children for the crimes their parents had committed. He couldn’t give those children to alien governments, knowing the children’s humanity would be broken, and they would become crazed things without much of a life.
“You know the stories,” Flint said. “You’ve heard them all your life. Disappearance companies were invented so that children wouldn’t have to pay for their parents’ crimes, especially when the crimes were minor or nonexistent by human standards, such as stepping on a flower or walking next to a prohibited river bank.”
“I don’t know your story,” she said.
And she didn’t. So he told her, in a truncated way, about those last few weeks, about the baby that would have gone to the Wygnin, the children that he had found in a transport, sobbing for the parents, and the woman who had given herself up for them, so that they wouldn’t suffer for something she had done.
When he was done, Talia stared at him.
“You became a Retrieval Artist because you didn’t want to be a detective anymore?” Talia asked.
He sighed. It wasn’t quite that simple. “When I was a detective, I was sworn to uphold the laws of Armstrong. Those laws function within the laws of the Earth Alliance. If a court decides—as it did with your mother—that her children would be sacrificed because she had broken another species’ law, then I would have to sacrifice those children, if I found them. Do you understand?”
“No,” Talia said. “So why find the people who Disappeared? It seems to me that they had escaped, and you shouldn’t want to get them back.”
“Most of the time, I don’t,” he said. “Most of the time I turn down clients.”
“So when do you take them?”
“When the laws they’ve supposedly broken no longer apply. When the charges are withdrawn. When they’ve come into an inheritance or when there’s a true family emergency, something they need to know about. Even then, I don’t always bring them back to the society they disappeared from. Sometimes I just notify them, and let them decide what to do. Often they’ve built a new life that they don’t want to lose.”
“Like Mom,” Talia said.
“Your mother didn’t Disappear,” Flint said. “She was protected by a strangeness in Gyonnese law.”
“The real child thing,” Talia said.
Flint nodded. “The real versus false child attitudes that the Gyonnese have.”
“Humans have that attitude too,” Talia said.
“Not like the Gyonnese.” He folded his hands over his stomach, pretending a relaxation he didn’t really feel. “Do you understand what happened with your mother? Why she did what she did?”
Talia shrugged. That had been the answer she had given him from the beginning. Maybe she didn’t understand, not on a deep level. If she understood, she wouldn’t have searched for the other clones.
“All right,” he said. “Let me tell you this as I understand it. And remember, I learned about it at the same time I learned about you. I never got a chance to ask your mother about it before she died. I’ll never know the whole story.”
“Me either,” Talia muttered. But she watched him warily, clearly waiting for him to continue.
“Your mother,” he said, “started working for Aleyd Corporation when we were married and living here in Armstrong.”
“You weren’t a police officer then,” Talia said.
“No, I worked in computers,” Flint said.
She started. Apparently, he hadn’t told her that.
“Your mother was a brilliant researcher who specialized in biology and chemistry. She was the up-and-coming genius in the family, not me.”
He smiled at that memory.
“We didn’t realize the toll it would take on us. When she got pregnant with Emmeline, we figured we had good jobs and we’d be able to have to time to raise a nice-sized family. We—or maybe it was just me—weren’t much more ambitious than that. Kids, a nice house, good jobs, a good life.”
He shook his head. He had come a long way from that man. He could barely remember what it was like to be him.
“Your mom got so busy at work that by the time Emmeline was only a few weeks old, I became her primary care-giver. I did almost everything for the household. It got so that Emmeline wouldn’t even go to your mom when she came home from work.”
Talia hadn’t moved. She was rigid, but attentive, as if this part of the story was the most important part.
“I didn’t know that your mom was working on this top secret project for Aleyd. It was a nutrient-rich water that was like a high-end fertilizer
, only supposedly better, something that could be brought to arid, water-poor places like this Moon, and make the growing cycles more productive.”
“That’s the crap they tested on Gyonne,” Talia said.
“Yeah,” Flint said softly, deciding not to reprimand her for her language. “That’s the stuff.”
“The stuff in the holo,” she said.
He nodded. When Rhonda had been kidnapped, her kidnappers had left a holo in the house. Talia had seen the holo. It had been devastating, detailing Rhonda’s crimes in a horrifying manner.
“I know all of that,” Talia said. “About her convictions and how the Gyonnese don’t consider me a real child. That’s how she could raise me.”
“That’s right,” Flint said. But he didn’t think that Rhonda had created Talia just for the sake of raising a child.
He had a hunch—one that he couldn’t prove—that Rhonda had created the clones to substitute for Emmeline when the Gyonnese came to collect on their debt.
Only Emmeline died, and the Gyonnese were never able to collect. Because they believed her to be the real child.
The others didn’t count.
“Okay,” Talia said, “here’s what I don’t get. You said I was incautious, that I might hurt the others by looking for them. But I don’t see how that’s possible. I mean, the judgment was against Mom, and it didn’t apply to me or the other five because the Gyonnese don’t consider us real children. Emmeline is dead. So I don’t know how I could be endangering anyone.”
Flint took a deep breath. This was where it got tricky.
“We’re in the realm of supposition now,” Flint said. “And in my job, I have to suppose. I have to look at worse-case scenarios because if I don’t, people will die.”
“So you’re going to make stuff up?”
He shook his head. “You’re looking at the upside, the logical upside, of the case against your mother. You’re assuming that the Gyonnese react the way humans do and will now realize that they’ll never get their vengeance and no one will be punished for those crimes.”
“You think they were crimes,” Talia said softly.
He had never discussed it with her, not like this. He’d made sure she understood the holo, that she knew about the court case, that she knew who had ordered her mother taken and why.
But he had never discussed the case, not like this.
“Yeah,” he said, “I think they’re crimes.”
“But Celestine Gonzalez, she said that the Gyonnese should understand that humans don’t consider this a crime at all.”
He frowned at the mention of one of the lawyers who had worked for Rhonda. And for him, after Rhonda died. Gonzalez, who had taken a liking to Talia, had helped Flint adopt her before he brought her back to the Moon.
“Why did she say that?” Flint asked.
“Because the larva weren’t grown yet. They were just, you know, things. And there was no difference between them and the ones that split off. So why not just call the Seconds an Original, and not worry about it?”
Flint stared at his daughter. He couldn’t believe that Gonzalez had said that to her, to a cloned child. He suspected that Gonzalez hadn’t been that explicit—or if she had, she had been discussing a point of law.
The woman had been very careful to guard Talia’s feelings the rest of the time.
This was where the path he was on—the new parent path—seemed even more treacherous. What would be best for Talia? Telling her the truth? Telling it harshly? Or glossing over this part of the conversation and letting her come to the realization on her own?
“Tal,” he said gently, “think about what you just said.”
“It’s not like cloning,” she said. “It would be like the destruction of the fertilized eggs. They hadn’t developed into a person yet. No one knew them. They didn’t have experiences, so they weren’t different from each other. They were just biological matter.”
“So we believe,” Flint said. “And not all of us believe that, either. But the Gyonnese are different from us. And who’s to know if the Originals aren’t somehow different from creation from the Seconds and Thirds?”
Talia bit her lower lip. “So you think Mom really killed entire families?”
Flint nodded. “But not deliberately, and not alone. That’s where the Gyonnese make their mistake. The corporation is liable and so is everyone along the decision-making chain. I’m sure your mother wouldn’t have wanted that water tested on a windy day. I’m sure that she would have been cautious, if she had been on-site, to make certain nothing went wrong.”
At least that was what he wanted to believe, on his best days. On his bad days, he wondered if Aleyd hadn’t been testing the nutrient-rich water as a weapon—a seemingly innocuous weapon that could be “accidentally” deployed when the wind blew in the wrong direction.
“It was an accident?” Talia asked.
“Sometimes terrible things happen,” Flint said, “and we can’t do anything about them.”
“Like Emmeline’s death,” Talia said. “She would have had to be punished for what Mom did.”
“She would have had to live with the Gyonnese,” Flint said. “I’ve never learned what that meant, how they would have raised her, how they would have treated her. The punishment, in their mind, was that your mother wouldn’t ever see her children again.”
“But Mom’s gone. So how can she still be punished?”
“She can’t,” Flint said. “But the Gyonnese never got their punishment. They can’t revive the case—thanks to all the treaties that exist within the Earth Alliance. Once a judgment is rendered, it’s either appealed or it stands. Your mother’s judgment was appealed, and the appeal was denied, so it stands. The Gyonnese can’t go after someone else now.”
“But if Emmeline were still alive, they could take her?” Talia asked.
“I don’t know,” Flint said. “I’d have to be an expert in Gyonnese law to give you an answer on that.”
“Someone can answer it, though,” Talia said.
“I’m sure,” Flint said.
“So you think that maybe she’s still alive?”
His heart jumped. He hoped that reaction hadn’t shown on his face.
But Talia didn’t seem to notice. She was still talking. “Like maybe Mom concealed her with the other clones? Or Disappeared her?”
“No,” Flint said, although he thought it was a distant possibility. “I’m much more concerned about the fact that the Gyonnese paid to have your mother kidnapped.”
“What do you mean?” Talia asked. She clearly hadn’t thought of this before.
“The judgment had been rendered. The case was settled. They had no right, under Alliance law, to interview her, let alone take her away from Callisto.”
“It was an illegal act,” Talia said.
Flint nodded. “Which is why they hired a Recovery Man. A Tracker wouldn’t bring her to them because she hadn’t done anything wrong. Retrieval Artists don’t work with alien governments. We only work with humans.”
And only to find true Disappeareds. No one Flint knew, not even the most unethical Retrieval Artists, would have taken the Gyonnese case.
“Recovery Men kidnap people?” Talia asked.
“Usually they don’t work with sentient creatures at all, be they human or Disty or any other species that we know of. They might take a plant or a creature everyone believes to be unintelligent, but even that can be stretching it. Usually Recovery Men specialize in rare artifacts.”
“Why would he take the job then?” Talia asked.
Flint shrugged. They might never know. He’d received word from Detective Zagrando on Callisto that the Earth Alliance authorities had made some kind of deal with the Recovery Man, and had let him go.
Zagrando had been angry: the Earth Alliance authorities hadn’t even asked a lot of questions about the case. They seemed to want the whole thing to go away.
“The Recovery Man’s not the issue,” Flint said. “The Gyo
nnese are.”
“What did he say? Why did they hire him?”
Flint did know the answer to that. Zagrando had given him that information shortly after Flint had returned from Callisto.
“He said they believed they could use your mother to show the illegality of human behavior with regard to Earth Alliance law. He mentioned bringing down the Disappearance Services, but the authorities believe that the Gyonnese were going to use the cloning and the tacit approval of Aleyd Corporation, not to mention the Earth Alliance itself, to show how corrupt the system was.”
“Why didn’t they just indict her or whatever it is that lawyers do?” Talia’s voice was getting tight. She was clearly getting upset.
“The Gyonnese believed no one would bring charges. And they might have been right. At that point, Aleyd might have used their own internal Disappearance Company to help the two of you Disappear. Or they might have tied up everything in court until you and your mother were long dead.”
Talia frowned. “I still don’t know why this is important, why it means I might have done something wrong.”
“I never said you did anything wrong,” Flint said. “But you hadn’t looked at all the possibilities. The Gyonnese are looking for a test case. They believe your mother committed a heinous crime against them—”
“You believe it, too,” Talia said.
She sounded accusing. But he wasn’t going to lie about how he felt. And he wasn’t going to soften Rhonda’s actions any more than he already had.
“What happened in that larval colony,” Flint said, “was one of the defining moments of Gyonnese culture. The Gyonnese don’t want to let it go. With your mother gone, they might go after her heirs.”
“Heirs,” Talia repeated.
“You, for one,” Flint said.
“And the others?” Talia asked.
“Under Earth Alliance law, the other clones aren’t able to inherit from your mother’s estate.” Technically, Talia wasn’t, either—Rhonda had never given Talia full legal status as a child, like Flint had done. But he hadn’t told her that.
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