“The whole world believes my father is a monster, but he didn’t do what they said,” Zahra said. “It isn’t about what I deserve. It’s about what he deserves. His memory. He deserves to be remembered for the work he did, not for the crimes he didn’t commit. My brother and sister deserve to know he was a good man.”

It took me a second to understand. “Dr. Lago was your father?”

“Yes.”

Dr. Lago had been a smiling and jovial man with a round face, laughing eyes, and soft shoulders. I had known he had a family on Earth, because everybody who had family on Earth spoke about missing them, but I had given them no thought until afterward. Only then had I learned that his wife was an epidemiologist who took her children and vanished into the North American desert after his death. My aunt had told me that the Councils were trying to locate Mariah Dove, but she thought they ought to be left alone. No children deserved to suffer for what their father had done.

“He didn’t release the parasite,” Zahra said. “Dr. Summers said—in the message we found, she said it wasn’t his fault. It came from the probe. They took every precaution, but something escaped when they opened it up. She thought the people from Mournful Evening Song had sent it back to Earth on purpose.”

This must have been a beautiful planet, once, the woman in the messages had said. But we weren’t the first to find it.

I shook my head. “They didn’t send it. Not on purpose. It found them. That’s what’s in the messages from UC33-X. They found an alien civilization that had been destroyed.”

“Alien?” Zahra said, surprised. “That’s in the messages?”

“The ones that were never released. It sounds like they were exploring it when they began to get infected. I don’t think the woman who launched the probe meant to send it to Earth. I think she meant to warn us.”

In keeping the recovered fragments to himself, Lago had also kept that warning from his colleagues. They might have proceeded differently if they had heard the whole of what the messages had to say. Or they might not have changed a thing, except that everybody would know it was not a virus, and he would not have been blamed.