Back at the base, Dav wrote a draft of the incident from memory and then used the vipix recorded by his shoulder-cam to polish the report. The vipix confirmed most of what he remembered and helped him add some things he had not noticed, such as the Kron-design drones, the number of people evacuating the stonework, and how some of those who had not been injured seemed to manage without EF masks for longer than he would have expected. The Jaraidan rescuers had distributed EF masks, but they had not seemed to be in as big a hurry as Dav would have been.

  It had somewhat surprised Dav that not all the Jaraidans had needed EF masks right after escaping the damaged stonework. Some of the local people seemed to handle the thinner air better than the average human. He made a note that medic researchers might want to investigate further.

  Besides his observations about the drattle attack and how the Jaraidan rescue teams had handled it, the most important part of his report was his encounter with the woman who would not give her name.

  He summarized the interaction and his impressions of the woman for the record, and noted the few things he knew about her: that she was a psi-healer, had some telempathy, admitted to having lived off-world for a few years—possibly studying medicine—and was Taasi’s guardian.

  Her unwillingness to give her name suggested not only that she did not want to be identified but that with a name she could be identified. He wondered why she had used Panlex in the first place if she did not want to raise questions about her identity. Had it been as much a careless impulse as his grabbing for the drattled rock without protective gloves?

  He would go back to trying to identify the woman as one of the Jaraidans known to have lived or studied abroad later, but he had a more urgent task after he submitted his report. He needed to create a data sheet about the “no foreign objects in the body” prohibition and the stricter interpretations the woman had summarized. The medics on both the Kyeros and Trinar base needed to be informed as quickly as possible.

  PASS agents were trained to respect cultural norms and religious beliefs. The Alliance could not function without that respect. To this end, the cultural specialist was supposed to gather all the available information about every possible topic that could affect the interaction between the local people and PASS missions.

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  If Jaraidans did not trust PASS medics because some of the locals had been subjected to practices that they found sacrilegious or offensive, the fault lay with cultural specialists like Dav whose job it was to keep the medics informed of what they could or couldn’t do. Dav marveled that the cultural specialists of the Trinar team—which had been on Jaraida at least a standard year now—had not obtained more information about the “no foreign objects in the body” prohibition and warned against the routine use of transfusions and injections. However, now that he had the information, it was Dav’s responsibility to correct the problem.

  The medics were going to hate the new data sheet at first, of course. No one wants to have more rules and cautions to worry about. In the long run, however, the additional information about the different interpretations of the Code of Jaraida would help medics deal more effectively with Jaraidan patients and develop protocols for treatment that were not at odds with Jaraidan religious beliefs.

  *****

  Usually, Dav’s first step when putting together a data sheet was to research within primary sources as much as he could. In this instance, however, the only primary source he could get hold of was the Code of Jaraida itself. What he needed was interpretations of the Code as it applied to medical practices. There had probably been a good number of these on the Jaraidan locnet before it had completely collapsed, but for now he had to do his research in the wider infi.

  It took him a while to locate three useful sources. One was a fifteen-year-old discussion of the Code of Jaraida by some specialists in a legal forum, another was an eight-year-old article by a Jaraidan student at the prestigious Hoans Medical, explaining why psi-healers made the prohibitions against transplants and implants irrelevant to Jaraidans, and the last was a six-year-old sociology thesis on Jaraidan attitudes to the PanWorld Alliance written by a Jaraidan student at Naulor University. This last was dated because so much had changed since the destruction of Thualat, but the chapter on medicine confirmed what Taasi’s guardian had said, and elaborated further with examples.

  Combining the relevant information from these three sources with what Taasi’s guardian had told him, Dav put together some explanatory data and guidelines for all agents, but especially the medics. He noted, as he sent it up for Harkiv’s approval, that it was a work in progress and that he would add more as he learned more.