n the spacefaring future, humanity has forged diplomatic relationships with several sentient alien species. But these species all possess laws and judicial codes far different from those known by man—and any human being who breaks their laws, even in error, is subject to their forms of punishment, regardless of how cruel or arbitrary those sentences might seem by our standards. What's worse, humanity's government has sworn to honor all these alien laws, and cooperates in the extradition of any fugitives the aliens want. For instance, one race, the Disty, punishes fugitives with savage vengeance killings—and human authorities are forced to respect their right to commit these murders on human soil, as long as the Disty can prove their victims were in fact criminals under their system of law.
Because many people have offended these alien races without even meaning to and wish to escape the harsh punishments they inflict, a cottage industry has arisen to help such victims of extraterrestrial justice disappear and start new lives for themselves under different identities.
The novel takes place in Armstrong, a domed city on the moon. Two police detectives, Flint and DeRicci, find themselves embroiled in a number of separate and simultaneous extradition crises. One involves a fugitive named Ekaterina, who is wanted by the race known as the Rev. If she is caught, she will be imprisoned and subjected to backbreaking labor which will probably kill her. Another case involves an engineer named Jamal, who once offended a race known as the Wygnin. The Wygnin punish crimes by taking the firstborn of the convicted. When they take human children, they perform special surgical and psychological treatments to make the children as much like Wygnin as possible, a process which is often known to render the victims neither human or Wygnin, but insane invalids unsuccessful at belonging to either race. Jamal is desperate to save his own two children from being abducted by the Wygnin, but he cannot count on help from Terran authorities, since under interspecies law the Wygnin have every right to his children.
Detectives Flint and DeRicci need to uphold the law. But can they satisfy their own senses of justice, when their sympathies lie more with the hapless humans the aliens want, and not with the unforgiving alien systems of justice?
Accomplished glimpse of the criminal mind
Kristine Kathryn Rusch is one of imaginative fiction's most accomplished and versatile authors. As wellknown for her fantasy and horror as she is for her science fiction, she especially excels in tales of the collision between human and alien cultures.
The Disappeared is a fine example of her skill at creating conflict between characters who may be antagonists to each other but who all remain sympathetic within their own viewpoints. Take the fugitive lawyer, Ekaterina. She's wily, resourceful and ruthless. Her crime, which was essentially doing the right thing by human standards, has made her a wanted criminal to the Rev, whose prison system will work her to the edge of death. We want her to escape, because it's right for her to escape.
But she's not the only protagonist. The cops searching for her, Flint and DeRicci, are also sympathetic characters in their own right—in no small part because they know they're obliged to do their duty even when they find that duty distasteful and horrifying. They don't want to give an essentially innocent woman to the Rev, but they know they'll have to. Nor do they want to hand Jamal's innocent children over to the Wygnin, but they know that this, too, falls within the realm of duty, and they're determined to do their jobs ... even as they use all the skills at their respective commands to delay that awful justice while they search for alternatives. The result is diplomatic brinkmanship at its most precarious ... and a moral juggling act which gives the novel its considerable strength.
