In her award-winning novella The Retrieval Artist Kristine Kathryn Rusch gave us an intriguing small scale, star-spanning future. Small in the sense that though colonies had been created on an unspecified number of planets around other stars, humanity was but one of a number of sentient species to do so and we were far from the most significant.
All these races have agreed that crimes committed on their respective worlds are subject to the host race’s legal system, including punishment, and Rusch’s aliens are, indeed, alien so that understanding the various laws are difficult despite years of association. The punishments, on the other hand, are far easier to understand, if not accept.
The most serious offenses visit consequences not on the criminal but on the miscreant’s children. Because of the seriousness, pan-galactic tribunals hear appeals and, like so many systems of justice, the wheels of justice move slowly. That means the convicted have many years and, if they have the money, the ability to attempt to escape. Only among humans, though, have businesses sprung up to assist convicts in disappearing; of course, corresponding operations to track down the disappeared and, more rarely, find ways to retrieve them without endangering their future.
The Disappeared presents the origin story of Miles Flint, the master of all retrieval artists. In this novel he’s a detective with the Armstrong Dome police force on the Moon, only recently promoted from (spaceship) Traffic Control, and partnered with the more experienced, somewhat disgraced Noelle DeRicci. And strange ships start arriving at the dome.
First up, a yacht with three eviscerated bodies is towed in from orbit and DeRicci and Flint are assigned the case. Though there’s absolutely no identification of the people or yacht, it bears the hallmarks of a Disty capital punishment; the Disty being a race of short but powerful aliens who’ve taken Mars as a colony world.
Second, a Wygnin ship has been stopped before leaving with two (human) children. Wygnin law punishes a child of the criminal and the inter-species treaties require Earth Alliance governments to permit this, but the Wygnin lack the documentation required by the letter of the law and so the detectives stall them to try and find a loophole.
Finally, a frantic woman has landed yet another ID-less yacht at Armstrong claiming the crew and passengers were taken by a posse from a third alien group, the Rev. Her story doesn’t quite hang together but lunar politics being what they are, the cops have to treat her carefully and so she’s able to escape while being driven from the port to the precinct.
The cases all turn on Flint’s inability to accept that humans should be punished in ways or for laws that shatter his absolutely reasonable sense of justice and fair play. To give an 18 month old baby boy over to be raised as a Wygnin because her mother built a house–on land the Wygnin willingly sold her, not understanding the human concept of property–that unknown to her killed eggs of a second sentient species living on their world or that a lawyer should face decades of hard time for the subsequent crimes of her client.
Rusch does a good job of weaving these threads together through The Disappeared, finishing by showing us the motivation for Flint’s decision to become the best, or at least the most ethical, retrieval artist. Setting up an entire series of novels which I certainly hope match up to this one.
recommended
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