Vigilantes by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page A

clients.
    Retrieval Artists were a human phenomenon—at least as far as he knew. He always found that a bit ironic. Humans formed the Earth Alliance, primarily, at first, as a trading partnership with other species. But the partnerships would have quickly fallen apart without more complicated legal agreements.
    As the known universe expanded, so did the need to protect all different types of species from each other’s laws. Plus, each group needed a treaty to work with the other groups.
    And inadvertent crimes, things that seemed small to one group, were often life-and-death to other groups.
    Because the original organizers of the Earth Alliance were business types, with very little loyalty to any one form of government, their biggest focus was on the way that money, business, and trade flowed between species. If a person got crushed by an alien legal system, so be it, as long as a corporation could freely participate.
    The Earth Alliance itself nearly collapsed early on, as humans finally realized what they had signed into, and how much risk it put them at individually. The corporations—by then, many of them interstellar—faced losing trillions almost immediately if the Earth Alliance collapsed.
    At that moment, the Disappearance services sprang up. Cynics said they were created by the corporations to keep the humans inside the Earth Alliance. Legal officials believed that criminal enterprises always filled a vacuum, and no matter what anyone said, Disappearance services were illegal.
    But over the centuries, the evidence showed that the services were a mix of both—criminal enterprises and corporation-formed dodges, as well as good-hearted (originally nonprofit) organizations that attempted to save lives threatened by a single uninformed act.
    In doing his due diligence on his potential clients, Flint always started with that uninformed act. He wanted to see if it were truly uninformed. He’d turned down dozens of clients who, he discovered, would deliberately go into alien environments and break their laws for financial gain. They wanted him to let them know when it was safe to return or to test old identities.
    He refused to do any of that. Repeatedly.
    Researching those uninformed acts had often led him deep into alien databases, but he’d always looked at those databases from a human perspective—could a human being reasonably know that their particular action was against the law? Was this so-called crime a major cultural taboo or was it simply something so local that not even the majority of the culture knew about it? Was the corporation (or the human) educated in the ways of that culture? Or were they venturing into that culture for the very first time?
    All fairly easy questions to answer, even with a minimal knowledge of the alien culture.
    The questions he had to answer now, with the Peyti, required a more detailed knowledge of the ways that the Peyti culture worked. He was stunned to realize how little he actually knew about the Peyti: They’d been deeply involved in human life and human customs for hundreds of years, but he hadn’t realized until this week how little humans had been involved in Peyti life.
    It wasn’t just Peyti either. Humans seemed to remain uninvolved with all of their alien partners—at least on a day-to-day level. Oh, the experts were involved: those who studied the other cultures or had to work in them for corporate jobs.
    But to get as deeply enmeshed in Peyti day-to-day life as the Peyti had become in human day-to-day existence, that didn’t happen at all.
    And it was already placing him at a disadvantage.
    He’d gotten used to having Peyti lawyers, a few Peyti teachers (dealing with Earth Alliance matters), and a lot of Peyti students around, but he’d never done more than interact with them the way one did with people one had no interest in.
    His face was flushed, and it wasn’t because of the temperature in the office. That hadn’t changed. He hadn’t realized until