All My Sins Remembered Read Free Page B

them?”
    “Um… not really.” Their brandies came; Crowell inhaled the fumes deeply and drank with obvious relish.
    “No brandy in the Confederación like Bruuchian. A pity you don’t export.”
    “The Company’s supposed to be working on that. That and the native handcrafts.” His shoulders twitched in a shrug. “But kilogram for kilogram, they make much more on rare earths. Every planet makes beverages and most have busy autochthones.”
    “Yes, the Bruuchians… things have changed?”
    Jonathon took a small sip of brandy and nodded. “Both in the long view and, well, recently. Have you heard that the natives’ average life-span is down?”
    Otto McGavin knew but Crowell shook his head, no.
    “In the past six years, down some twenty-five per cent. I think the average life-span of a male is down to about twelve years. Bruuchian, that is; about sixteen Standard. Of course, they don’t seem to mind.”
    “Of course not,” Crowell mused. “They would see it as a blessing.” The Bruuchians preserved their dead in a secret rite and the carcasses were treated as living creatures, with more status in the family than anyone who was still moving around. They were consulted as oracles, the oldest living family member divining their advice by studying the corpses’ immobile features.
    “Any theories?”
    “Well, most of the males work in the mines; there is some bismuth associated with the rare-earth deposits; bismuth is a powerful cumulative poison to their systems. But the mineralogists swear there’s not enough bismuth in the dust they breathe to cause any health problems. And of course the creatures won’t let us have a body for autopsy. It’s a sticky situation.”
    “Quite so, I can see. But I recall the Bruuchians having enjoyed small doses of bismuth as a narcotic—could they simply have found a large source and gone on a species-wide orgy?”
    “I don’t think so. I’ve looked into the matter rather closely—God knows, Deirdre’s always harping on it. There aren’t any natural concentrations of bismuth on the planet, and even if there were, the creatures lack the technology, the basic grasp of science, needed to refine it.” Crowell winced inwardly every time Lyndham called them “creatures.”
    “The Company doesn’t mine it,” Lyndham continued, “and it’s on the ‘forbidden imports’ list. No, I really think bismuth poisoning is the wrong tack.”
    Crowell drummed two fingers on the table, gathering his thoughts. “Excepting metabolic quirks like that, they seem quite a hardy people. Could it be overwork?”
    “No possibility, absolutely none. Ever since your book came out, there’s been a Confederacion observer, a xenobiologist, keeping track of the creatures. Every one that works in the mines has a serial number tattooed on his foot. They’re logged in and out, and not allowed to spend more than eight hours a day in the mines. Otherwise, they would, of course. Strange creatures.”
    “True.” In the home, Bruuchians were placid, even lazy. In places defined as work areas, though, they would routinely work themselves to exhaustion—not exactly a survival trait. “Took me nine years to find out why.”
The disappearances
, the Otto part of his brain was whispering, reminding… “You said something about ‘recent’ changes?”
    “Um.” Jonathon fluttered his hands and took another sip. “It’s rather distressing. You know, we still have only about five hundred people on the planet, permanent personnel.”
    “Really? I’d expected more by now.”
    “Company doesn’t encourage immigration; no jobs. At any rate, we’re a pretty closely knit group; everybody knows just about everybody else. More like a family, we like to think, than just a group of people with a common employer.
    “Well, people have been… missing, disappearing, over the past few months. They must be dead, since humans can’t survive on native food, and our own food supply is closely monitored,