Vigiant (5 page)

Queer thing, that: how you can feel you're blazing on the verge of radiance one day, then suddenly know for a fact you're dog-puke banal.

When I told Dads that Zillif could no longer talk, he upped her dosage of cinnamon. I wept at the futility.

Zillif died on a bright autumn morning, with the sun beaming grandly detached through the stained yellow canvas. You'd think there'd be scarcely a difference between a limp paralyzed body and a dead one; but there is. One second there's the Yes of life... then there's meaningless meat. Something gone and something gone and something gone.

Three hours later, we discovered a cure for the disease.

Olive oil. So farcical, I wanted to scream. Later, I bellowed my head off... out in the tree-starved tundra, where the deep beds of carpet moss drank up the sound. Cool, sleek, stronger-than-real-life Faye Smallwood blubbering into her hands, wiping her nose on her sleeve, crying because the world was harder than she was.

Olive oil. Cloying, tongue-gucking stuff. Nothing a Sallysweet River family would ever spoon over its food.

One of my school friends saw the results first—Sharr Crosbie, daughter of two miners. Sweet girl, no harm in her, though I couldn't stand being in the same room with her ever after. To my shame, I've inherited my father's talent for sulks. But it rankled my heart, the witless way she told her story over and over, to me, to our parents, to the full news media.

"I was with this poor old man, in precious bad shape..." (False, Sharr-girl, false; he'd only just come in, and had some motion in his toes as well as a hint of bowel control—better condition than most of our patients.) "... and I was washing him off, you know, a sponge bath, the way he liked..." (All our Ooloms hated sponge baths; they grumbled and whined how the sponges tickled.) "... so I was wiping round his face when I spilled a dab of soap in his eye..." (The clumsy cow.) "... and he closed his eyes. He closed his eyes!"

Sharr squealed. People raced in, then went wild. Pook came close to breaking the patient's chart, punching buttons to see what the man's medication was.

Olive oil. Olive oil.

Dads came running from his office. "Who's hurt, what's wrong?" Then he ordered everybody to clear the hell back while he did some tests. Blood samples. Tissue grams. A needle-point biopsy into the man's huge shoulder muscle.

By then, the whole town was standing nearby, watching, holding each other's hands, crossing fingers or making a show of praying—everyone but me. I was sitting on Zillif's empty cot, telling myself there was no blessed way I'd join that crowd of fools, believing anything important could happen in Sallysweet River, now or ever...

Shrieking cheers of victory. Bedlam. Piss-wetting hysteria. When people began to stampede, hugging and kissing everyone in sight, I scuttled to the angry sanctuary of my room.

We had no more deaths under the Big Top.
Tur
Zillif, my Lady Zillif, was the last.

Afterward, on tear-soaked sleepless nights, I told myself she could have been the last plague death on all Demoth. The idea was self-pitying rubbish: hundreds more must have died in the time it took to relay the news around the planet... the time it took to start food synthesizers pumping out olive oil... the time it took the olive oil to have an effect...

But our olive oil worked. It contained an enzyme hash that ripped the Pteromic microbe to protoplasmic tatters. With the microbe gone, Oolom muscles began to repair themselves.

My father was a hero.

I was so blind-raging furious with him.

One more memory of the day Zillif died: trying to lose myself in the forest at night. Looking for the blackest shadows. Pressing my weep-wrinkled face against the taut cool trunk of a bluebarrel tree. Damply kissing its cucumber-smooth bark, as a substitute for all the kisses, dreams, lives, redemptions that had been strangled for me in the instant of Zillif's death.

Till a twig cracked behind me, and I wheeled around.

It was a young man in the black uniform of an Explorer cadet. Given the dark, I could barely make out his silhouette... but that was enough to show the man's "pass-ticket" for becoming an Explorer. His left arm was only half the length of his right, and the hand on that arm was a pudgy babyish thing with too few fingers.

"Something wrong?" he asked.

Swiping at tears, I snapped, "I don't need you."

"Few do," the man answered drily. "But I need
you
to go home now. We're searching the woods for Oolom survivors, and you show up as hot as a bonfire on our scans. Compared to Ooloms anyway. You're confusing our readouts."

He turned and slipped back into the darkness. Bristling with an attack of the stubborns, I stayed where I was, muttering, "Who does he think he is?" and occasionally aiming peevish kicks at the undergrowth.

Then an Admiralty skimmer flew overhead with loudspeakers blaring. "Greetings to all Ooloms. We have found a cure. Please go immediately to the nearest human settlement..."

I slouched back to our home compound and ordered the house-soul to turn my dome black.

Outside and inside.

Reading what I've just written about the plague—it makes me cringe. Too polite, too
nice...
as if, deary-dear, we were all a wee bit strained but coping.

We weren't coping. Never think that. You have to understand what mass death does.

My mother flew into spitting slapping furies, accusing me of doing the dance with every boy/man/fence post in town (and half the girls/women/punch bowls). She'd invent the most graphic details of what I supposedly did, kinkies I scarce understood even after Ma shrieked explanations in my face.

Is that coping?

Another treat during the epidemic: my father hit me. And I hit him back. Not a fight, a ritual... one smack from him and one from me.

Desperation. A way of touching each other when hugs felt too puny.

Dads always hit me on the arm. Even today, I can close my eyes and bring back fresh memories of the sting, the burn, the surprised red flush on my skin.

I hit Dads on the face. His beard scratchy under my hand; me slapping hard enough to give my palm whisker burn. So it felt anyway.

When he discovered the cure, I stopped hitting him. I stopped touching him at all. Temper. Stubbornness. The lonelier I ached for him, the more mulish I got. But at times I prayed we could start smacking each other again.

Is that coping?

Several times, those of us working in the Circus caught one or another of our volunteer nurses trying to smother a patient. Then the rest of us volunteers punched royal crap out of the would-be mercy killer. We'd pound away, and the Ooloms would wax frantic with horror, some managing to scream, "Stop, stop!" while most just guzzled out, "Aaaaah gaah hah kaaaa!"... a ghastly guttural wailing which was all that kept us from killing whoever fell under our fists. Even so, the beating victims usually had to be hospitalized; but we stuck them in a different part of the compound, because we didn't want a blood-battered human marring the pretty color scheme of white patients in white beds.

Is that coping?

We made jokes about the dead and dying—none of the jokes funny, but we laughed and laughed. When Ooloms were asleep, we laid bits of crimson cloth on their chests just to see their skins change color. (Crimson was our favorite because it looked like bloodspill.) We could send each other into hiccups just by whispering the word, "Plaid." And the day my friend Peter managed to spell his name on an Oolom's back...

The Circus also had a couple field toilets for the
Homo sap
volunteers working there... and you don't want to know what rancid cartoons/graffiti got painted on the crapper walls. Someone burned the toilet shacks to the ground soon after the plague ended, and every human in Sallysweet River felt shamed-sheepish-grateful to the vandal.

You're all welcome.

More coping? Two or three times a day, off-duty miners would carry the latest dead body to a mass grave outside town. We used an ancient tunnel for the burial site—a leftover shaft dug three thousand years earlier by some unknown alien race. This short-lived alien colony had apparently mined the same veins of ore as our own Rustico Nickel... and for all we knew, the site might have had great-and-grand significance for archaeologists. But we filled it with bloated, gas-venting corpses.

One night (inevitable), a mumbly-drunk miner shot a signal flare down the tunnel and blew himself up in a belch of blazing methane. We shoveled the miner's shocked remains into the shaft along with the crispy Oolom carcasses (chunks of them got spewed out of the tunnel by the explosion), then went back to stowing bodies in exactly the same place. It became a Saturday night ritual to shoot a flare down the shaft to see what burned, but we never hit as big a buildup of gas as that first time. Pity. Maybe getting singed by a thunderflash bang would have helped us "cope."

Have I made my point? Don't think this is self-pity. This is showing you the truth.

Through the whole of the plague, we festered in the brain. Our Oolom neighbors—dead. The patients we nursed—dying. Dozens of Oolom cities—empty, except for carcasses. One night, as a bunch of us kids sat in my dome, passing around a bottle of hoot-owl for an excuse to act drunk... that night, near midnight, my poetic friend Darlene whispered she imagined the Thin Interior stacked with corpses, mountain-high: the heartlands of every continent heaped with dead. Humans living on the coasts would soon see the rivers running brown with blood and rot and pus.

All of us nodded. We'd had similar nightmares.
Guilty
nightmares.

Here's the thing: none of us could shake the idea we were to blame. The Ooloms died, and we didn't.

How could you not see the timing? Millions of Ooloms lived placidly for nine hundred years without running into the disease. Twenty-five years after
Homo saps
arrived on Demoth, the slack death gurgled up its poison.

We must have brought something. Or stirred up something. Or created something. Scientists swore the Pteromic microbe didn't resemble anything from human space, but we refused to believe them.

Do you understand? Not in your head but your gut. Do you
grasp
it? Do you feel the icy blame of it grabbing your arms and pushing you down under its weight?

No. Because you weren't there. We were.

It was all our fault. We were marked with the blood of every magnificent old woman we didn't save. And when we finally stumbled on the cure... Christ, the Ooloms treated Dads like a genius, but humans choked on his name. Olive oil? That was it—olive oil? Not a product of sophisticated research but something we'd had from the start, something we could have mass-synthesized anytime, and yet we sat with thumbs up our cracks while so many succumbed.

When we finally tallied the dead, the humans of Demoth had let more than sixty million Ooloms perish under our care.

Sixty million; 60,000,000; 6x10
⁷
.

Or to put it another way, 93 percent of all the Ooloms in the universe. The whole of a sentient species nearly driven extinct because we couldn't spare a little salad dressing.

It took a year (a Demoth year, 478 days of 26.1 hours each) for the slack-splayed Ooloms to regain full mobility... or as much as they ever got back. Muscles paralyzed too long were sometimes lost to atrophy, leaving thousands of the survivors with faltery drags in their speech or fingers that fumbled small objects.

Still, the Ooloms kept telling us they were glad to be alive. After a while, we couldn't stand the sight of them. They reminded us of too much. They were a burden.

Volunteers stopped coming to the Big Top long before our Ooloms could take care of themselves. Dads had to pay people for the jobs they'd done so willingly before the cure made everyone feel like asses. By that time, though, we'd realized the Ooloms could afford the expense—they were rich now, at least on paper. After all, the surviving Ooloms had inherited the property of the dead. Ninety-three percent of the race extinct = 14.29 times the wealth for everybody left.

Simple mathematics... even when you factor in the economic donnybrook that followed the epidemic.
Homo saps
and Ooloms both went through manic spending sprees, alternating with agoraphobic depression and every frenzied dementia between; but despite that, most Ooloms came out the other side cushy as rats in velvet.

People offplanet called that a silver lining. Those of us on Demoth saw precious little silver in anything.

Seven months after the cure was discovered, while the Circus still played ringmaster to forty-six patients, Rustico Nickel Shaft 12 had a Class B cave-in: the first in the company's twenty-four-year history. Despite a dozen safety systems, the accident resulted in one reported fatality—Dr. Henry Smallwood, who happened to be on the scene tending a miner's sprained ankle.

Sharr Crosbie's mother. Tripped over her own feet.

The clumsy cow.

My ages sixteen, seventeen, eighteen: angry, angry, angry. Survivor guilt and post-traumatic stress.

Hating Dads for being dead, determined to punish Ma because she couldn't make it all better. I buried myself in a shallow grave of time-wasting: the sick kind, where you don't like what you're doing, know you don't like it, and keep doing it anyway. Playing clot-head games in VR-land; having listless sex with anyone drunk enough to reciprocate; bitch-fighting my mother, my friends, myself...

One day, I got to thinking how I disliked a particular freckle on my arm. So I got a scalpel from my father's old clinic and cut the freckle off. When the first freckle was gone, another one stood out... so I cut that off too.

Things kind of got out of hand. I still have to wear long sleeves in polite company.

But there's no point dwelling on any of the witless, reckless ways I nearly sliced myself up, OD'd, or got beaten toothless in semen-stinking back rooms. You could call my lifestyle an ongoing suicide attempt; but it didn't work, did it?

Didn't prove anything.