“Unfortunately, being on the beach isn’t a punchable offense,” I said.
“What did it seem like he wanted?”
“I thought he was just digging for dirt. But … I did the robocall thing yesterday morning, so if he’s involved in this company’s operations, he could’ve found out that the toy fairies were undeliverable.”
“Right, and then he went looking for you to find out why.”
I shook my head, still puzzled. “He didn’t even mention it.”
“Of course he didn’t, because he didn’t want us to know about his connection with Mujin Inc.”
“OK, but why? What’s the problem with them?”
“That’s what we’ve got to find out.” Dolph propped his phone up so that the whole front of the hangar, the dangerously grinning head of the St. Clare, and Dolph himself came into view. He lit a cigarette. “Wild guess, it’s something very, very illegal,” he said softly, breathing out smoke. “I really don’t like the look of that company. Everything on their portal is vague, no substance. Looks like it was written by a computer. They’re hiding something.”
“Dolph …” I had a feeling we were better off not knowing what they were hiding. But at the same time, I hated the idea that Parsec may have arranged for … something illegal … to be transported on my ship. And if it was a risk he didn’t want to take himself, it had to be a pretty big one. “Don’t open any of those crates.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
“Are they being shipped, or picked up?”
“Company’s sending someone to pick them up later.”
“Let me know when they arrive.”
“Will do.” Dolph’s voice returned to its normal pitch. “By the way, they recovered some wreckage.”
“What kind of wreckage?”
“Didn’t you see the news last night?”
“I was watching Gemworld Families and getting drunk.”
Irene’s voice shouted from out of shot, “He passed out on my living-room floor.”
“Gemworld Whatsits would do that to me as well,” Dolph cackled. “No, but it was totaled. The search and rescue guy holds up a scrap of something about this big and goes, ‘This may have been a piece of the engine.’ So, I guess that’s that.”
“Did they say anything else on the news?”
“Nope. They didn’t even admit it was Travellers.”
All the same, I had to check for myself, of course. The news links plunged me into the rabbit hole I’d been trying to stay out of. There was very little information, but a whole lot of speculation, and by the time I got to the end of that, my lunch hour had come and gone.
I was eating a hasty sandwich at my desk when Rex’s friend, Robbie Wolfe, turned up. I had called him earlier and asked him to come in for an interview.
“Sorry about this,” I said, brushing crumbs off my desk. I leaned across to shake his hand. Mary withdrew, radiating disapproval. I could see why. Robbie was about twenty, with a baby-face that made him look even younger. Rex hadn’t mentioned that he was so young. But the rugby-player build that Rex had extolled was on full display. His upper body was shrink-wrapped in a holo t-shirt with an embedded scene of two wolves fighting. The whole package screamed thug. That could be a plus, depending on what was inside.
“So did Rex tell you what the job is?” I said. “Nice shirt, by the way.”
“Yessir,” he mumbled, and then something I couldn’t catch.
I got up and shut the window, cutting off the background whoosh and clatter from the railyard. “Sorry, it gets a bit noisy in here. What was that?”
“Rex said you was looking for an admin officer? I always wanted to go to space. Man, I can’t tell you how cool that would be.”
I still had to strain to make out his words. No, I wasn’t going deaf. His English was so oddly accented, it almost sounded like an off-world dialect. I recognized the patois that Shifter youth adopt in order to sound cool, but I’d never tried to actually hold a conversation in it before. Was Lucy going to start talking like this when she got older? I resolved to double my monthly deposits into my St. Anne’s fund.
However, once I got used to Robbie’s verbal tics, he came off as a well-meaning young man. He was still living with his parents in Shiftertown, down in Smith’s End—the bad end of S-Town, but I couldn’t hold that against him. Heck, Dolph lived down there, as well. I interrogated Robbie about his life. He currently worked as a security guard at a skull shop on the Strip, but he was taking an online accounting course. He responded warily to my questions, but he loosened up when I got him talking about rugby. “You don’t play yourself, sir?”
“Naw. Football,” I said, leaving out that the only football I’d played in recent years was with a solid ball, kicking it around with Dolph in deep space.
“Too bad, sir, you look like you could have the form for it,” Robbie said, smiling.
Then came the inevitable question when one Shifter interviews another. “So what’s your animal form, Robbie?”
He proudly thumbed his chest. “Wolf.”
I wasn’t surprised, given his last name. Shiftertown is full of Wolfes, and most of them are what it says on the tin. “Whaddaya know? Me, too.”
He wasn’t to know I could say that to half of everyone.
“Really?! That’s so cool. This is me, on the left here.” He pressed the button built into the neck of his t-shirt, which restarted the gory holo of one wolf—Robbie himself?—rolling another onto its back and setting teeth into its throat. I assumed the blood spray was shopped in.
“Nice selfie,” I said, “but if you decide to take the job, can I ask you to wear something different? That kind of thing wouldn’t make a good impression on the customers.”
“I got the job?!?” Robbie practically leapt out of his chair.
“I’d like to give you a trial,” I said. The fact was, I had no time to devote to the search. I wanted to get it over and done with.
“Thanks. I mean it. Thank you so much, sir. I wasn’t going to say anything, but my mom lost her job a while back, and we’re struggling …”
He poured forth the story of his family’s financial travails. I wasn’t sure how much of it to believe, but privately decided to tack another ten percent onto the wage I had been going to offer him, bringing it up to what I had been paying Kimmie. “When are you going to complete that accounting course?” I asked him.
“Well, that’s the thing, sir. I can’t get nothing done at home. There’s six of us, plus my sister’s boyfriend and their kid …”
Mary put her head in. “Telephone, Mr. Starrunner,” she said with the look that meant you need to take this call.
I winced. “Sorry, Robbie, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Robbie glanced at the clock and leapt up. “I’m gonna be late for work! Sorry, sir, thank you, I’ll call you—” He vanished with all the speed of a rugby forward chasing the ball. Mary wrinkled her nose.
My brain flooded with nightmare scenarios involving the police, or alternatively Lucy’s school. I thumbed my call waiting. “Uni-Ex Shipping,” I said tersely.
“Michael Starrunner?”
“Yes?”
It was none of the things I feared. It never is, is it? Whatever you’re afraid of, the universe is cooking up something worse.
“This is Ponce de Leon Immigration and Asylum Processing. You co-signed asylum applications for three human minors, Pippa, Jan, and Leaf?”
20
With a jolt, I remembered the three refugee kids. Shamefully, I had hardly thought about them since I deposited them in asylum processing two days ago. Too much on my plate.
“Yes,” I said.
“If I could just confirm the details. They are refugees from Gvm Uye Sachttra, and they reached Ponce de Leon on July 28th, 3419, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“We have reached a decision in this case, and I’m calling to notify you of that decision.” The caller was a human, but she was doing a goo
d job of sounding like a robot. Maybe working in asylum processing does that to you. “Jan and Leaf have been offered asylum on Ponce de Leon. Pippa has been refused asylum. She will be deported to—”
“What?!” I interrupted. “Her application’s been turned down??”
“Yes, sir, that is correct. She will be—”
Outrage boiled up. “I think you need to take another look at the applicable sections of the law,” I said, leaning forward and stabbing a finger on the desk, as if she could see me. “The Refugee Convention clearly states that human refugees, if they reach Ponce de Leon or any other signatory Heartworld, will be given asylum on the principles of human solidarity and subsidiarity.” I heard the words in Kimmie’s voice as I said them. “Those kids clearly qualify as refugees.”
“Yes, sir, however, the law makes an exception in the case of applicants with communicable diseases. Such applicants cannot be given asylum, as they would endanger the local population. Therefore, your applicants are currently being held in quarantine—”
“Wait. They have diseases? What disease?”
“No, sir, only one of them. The older female applicant, Pippa. However, the other two have expressed that they would prefer to be deported with her, and we are prepared to honor their preference, dependent on—”
I interrupted again. I couldn’t believe this. “What’s she got? Are you sure?”
“Yes, I am sure,” the voice said with a touch of asperity. “A lot hangs on these tests, so we make sure we get them right. There is no doubt, I’m afraid. She’s infected with interstellar variant kuru.”
*
I could have left it there.
Could have put down the phone, said a little prayer for the kids, and gone on with my day.
I came damn close. I looked out of the window at the industrial skyline, and then at the framed original of Uni-Ex’s Ponce de Leon landing license on the wall, thinking that I didn’t need this.
The hesitation only lasted a moment or two. I got up, tossed the uneaten part of my sandwich, and told Mary I would be out for the rest of the day.
*
The detention center turned out to be unbearably grim. I had lived on Ponce de Leon half my life, and driven past the immigrations building hundreds of times, without ever visiting the walled compound behind it. Grudgingly admitted after another round of phone calls, I parked my truck in the employee lot and roamed from one admin building to the next, getting grumpier and grumpier, until I located the detention center. It was a concrete people-hutch. Bars covered the windows. Faint alien voices, and whiffs of alien smells, wafted out—a body-check of otherworldliness in that all-too-human place.
The quarantine wing had no windows.
No sounds, smells, or germs could escape from there, let alone any people.
I had to speak to the kids by intercom through a thick glass window, as if they were in jail.
Their asylum agent, the woman I’d spoken to on the phone, sat by my shoulder the whole time.
On the other side of the glass, Pippa, Jan, and Leaf sat in a row on a couch, wearing identical peppermint-colored tunics and shorts.
Their expressions tied my heartstrings into a knot.
Pippa’s face streamed with tears. She leaned into the intercom mic, clutching it in both hands. “I can’t have kuru!” she sobbed. “Tell them, Mike! Tell them I’m fine!”
I said to the asylum agent, “This is ridiculous. She doesn’t have any symptoms.”
“It’s got a long incubation period,” the agent said. She was a heavy-set woman with permanent makeup that made her look like a clown. A sad clown. In person, she clearly felt for the kids. “We wouldn’t necessarily expect her to present any symptoms yet.”
Interstellar variant kuru is among the nastiest infectious disease agents humanity has yet encountered on our haphazard tour of the Orion Spur. I had looked it all up on my way to the spaceport, my horror growing as I read the details. Kuru was an old Earth disease that damaged brain tissues, leading to the familiar catalog of tremors, dementia, and death. So far, so similar to other prion diseases. But at some point along the way, kuru got weaponized. The interstellar variant now prevalent in the Hurtworlds, and a few other unfortunate planets, is more virulent … and incurable. IVK prions just shrug their ugly little misshapen protein shoulders at the treatments that work on spongiform encephalopathies, for instance. No doubt, more research would crack the problem, but it’s a relatively new disease, affecting a relatively tiny number of people. On top of that, humans seem to be the only species affected by it. So the research hasn’t been done yet. In this day and age, it seems impossible that there are still any truly incurable diseases—but there are, and interstellar variant kuru is one of them.
Incurable.
Terminal.
What an awful thing to lay on a sixteen-year-old.
Even sitting safely on my side of the glass, I felt the cold edge of Pippa’s shock and terror washing over my skin.
“This is ridiculous,” I said aggressively. “She can’t have anything like that. She was on my spaceship, and I’m fine. They’re fine,” I added, gesturing to Jan and Leaf.
The agent said, “Sir, not all communicable diseases are equally communicable. To catch kuru from an infected person, you would have to consume their …” She hesitated, and a moue of disgust crimped her perma-red lips. “Their infected tissues.”
I nodded. I had read that on the internet.
“So there’s very little risk of transmission, although we would advise you and your crew members to get tested to be on the safe side.”
“In that case, why’s she behind that glass? If there’s no risk of transmission, why can they be in there with her, but I’ve got to stay out here?”
“You are a permanent resident of Ponce de Leon, and they aren’t,” the agent said shortly. Poor woman—I was giving her hell. “Interstellar variant kuru is a scheduled disease, and for that reason they can’t leave this facility. As I said on the phone, the younger children have chosen deportation, so—”
“So how’d she get it?” I broke in.
Pippa, listening, joined her crackly intercom voice to mine. “I can’t have it! If I did, they would, too!” She hugged her two younger charges. “They don’t, so I can’t! We’ve lived together since we were little! We share everything!”
“As I said,” the agent repeated reluctantly, “the only transmission vector is …”
“I’m not a cannibal!” Pippa screamed.
Her voice carried around the visitor room. Heads turned. Eyebrows went up. I smiled weakly at my fellow offended humans and aliens of civilized upbringing.
The unpleasant fact was, some people are cannibals. Always have been, always will be, I guess. From the primitive inhabitants of Earth’s vanished wildernesses, to remote colony worlds where things have gone badly wrong with the food supply or with people’s minds, human beings are capable of eating other human beings. And a few of them do.
But that wasn’t to say Pippa had, or ever would. I believed her. I said, “And there are no other transmission vectors, right? So you see—”
It was the agent’s turn to interrupt me. “In a place like the camp they came from, people tend to eat whatever they can get, I’m afraid.”
Jan took the intercom mic from Pippa’s hands. “We were poor,” he said heatedly, “but not starving.”
Leaf spoke up. “We only ever ate food aid! Just in case—” Jan glowered at her. She stuffed the hem of her tunic into her mouth.
Into the silence, the agent said, “Another possibility, unfortunately, is that she was deliberately poisoned. So the relevant question to ask, Mr. Starrunner, is where does she come from?” The agent turned on me with a glare that said I should have asked this question before I decided to bring the children to Ponce de Leon on my ship.
And I should have. I admit it.
But I hadn’t.
I said feebly, “They’re from Gvm Uye Sachttra …”
The agent nodded, correctly taking this as a measure of my ignorance. The fact was, I made a point of staying informed … but there’s so much information. It was a full-time job just to stay up-to-date on the hundred-odd planets I visited on a semi-regular basis. I knew next to nothing about other planets—the hundreds, or it could be thousands for all I knew, of planets where humanity was thriving, or struggling, or had never gotten a foothold, or had gotten a foothold and was now losing it, sinking into the wretched death spiral of colony failure, with no one even watching except maybe some Travellers waiting for them to get weak enough to take.
I assumed that was the sort of place the humans on Gvm Uye Sachttra came from. I had assumed they were lucky to even be where they were. Most of them had acted like it.
Hesitantly, I leaned forward to the intercom and said to Pippa: “Where do you come from?”
She didn’t answer. She had buried her face in her hands. She was sobbing wildly.
“Weren’t you born in that camp?”
She went on crying. Jan awkwardly patted her back. Leaf lay across Pippa’s knees with her head wedged in between Pippa’s lap and her upper body, her dark hair mingling with the curtain of Pippa’s fair locks, sucking on the hem of her tunic.
“They won’t tell us, either,” the asylum agent said.
I went on staring through the glass at the kids, wondering what horrors lay locked in their past.
“It’s unfortunate. However …” The agent’s voice shifted abruptly into her impersonal phone register. “We do have to discuss the issue of deportation costs for the two younger children. The older girl will be deported at government expense …”
“To where?”
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