Read an Excerpt
Vigilant
By James Alan Gardner OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1999 James Alan Gardner
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-2741-3
CHAPTER 1
THE SLACK DEATH
I want to tell you everything, everything all at once.
I don't want to be plod-patient, setting it down in sequence: first the plague, then the cave-in, then the years of Other Business, when everything seemed like a burden to get out of the way before real life could start. Everyone knows this is real life, it's all real life, sixty seconds of real life every minute, no one gets less.
But you can take less. All the time you're swimming in the ocean of real life, it's so precious easy to keep your eyes closed and just tread water. Even so, if you're lucky, you might be caught in a current, a current that's carrying you toward something....
No, too simplistic. We're all caught in currents, dozens of the buggers dragging us in different directions sixty seconds every minute, and it's never as obvious as people want you to believe. You live through a day, and at the end you grumble, "I didn't do anything" ... but second by second you did do things, you occupied every second, just as you occupy every second of every day.
Here's the thing, the crucial thing: your life is full. And if you don't realize that ... then you're just like the rest of us, but that's no excuse.
I want to tell you everything, everything at once. I want to explode and leave you splattered bloody with all the things I have to say—kaboom, and you're covered with me, coated, dripping, deafened by the blast. A flash of instant knowledge: knowledge, not information. Burning hot. Blinding bright. Blasting down the ingrained walls of carrion-comfort cynicism.
How can I do that? How? The peacock can show its whole tail at once; but I can only tell you a story.
The story starts with death. If you weren't there, on the fair green planet Demoth in die year 2427, you can't imagine what the plague was like, and I can't convey the enormity of it. No one stayed sane—no one. All of us who lived through those days came out the other side mumbling under our breaths, quivering with twitches, tics, and phobias. Real bitch-slapping nightmares of bodies in the streets.
The bodies weren't human. That was the ugliest part of Pteromic Paralysis, the slack death—us Homo saps were immune. Death counts rose by the day, and we were lily-pure untouched.
It only killed our neighbors.
Our neighbors were Ooloms, a genetically engineered branch of the Divian race: basically humanoid, but with scaly skins that changed color like wide-spectrum chameleons ... from red to green to blue, and everything in between. Ooloms also came equipped with glider membranes on the general model of flying squirrels—triangular sails attached at wrists and armpits, then running down their bodies and tapering to a point at their ankles. Their bones were hollow, their tissues light, their internal organs spongy with air vacuoles rather than solidly dense. Given Demoth's forgiving gravity (.78 Earth G), Ooloms had no trouble flapping-gliding-soaring through city or countryside.
I was a countryside girl myself back then: fifteen years old, living in a fiddly-dick mining town called Sallysweet River, population 1600 ... one of only four human settlements in the vast interior of Great St. Caspian Island. Around us, tundra and trees, stone and forest, stretched proud unbroken—wilderness all the way from my doorstep across a hundred kilometers to the cold ocean coast.
Not that it made me feel small. I was as full of myself as any girl I knew: me, the beautiful, blond, smart, occasionally even sexy Faye Smallwood.
So much for the "before" picture—before the plague. After? I'll get to that.
It was late summer in Sallysweet River when we first heard tell of the disease. My father, Dr. Henry Smallwood, was the town M.D., always reading the medical newsfeeds to me and giving his on-the-spot opinion. A session with Dads might go like this: "Well then, Faye-girl, here's some offworld laze-about who's come to Demoth for a study of our poisonous animals—lizards and eels and what-all. Can you imagine? He wants to protect us all from snakebite or some fool thing ... as if there's a single creature on the planet that wants to bite us. Complete waste of time!"
(Which was and wasn't true. Neither Ooloms nor humans were native to Demoth— [Homo saps had only been around twenty-five years, and Ooloms about nine hundred—so to the local animal population, we smelled disgustingly alien. Nothing in the woods would ever try to nibble us for food ... but they'd be fast enough to give us the chomp if we stepped on their tails or threatened their young. I'd never say that to Dads, though; before the plague sent us all stress-crazy, I was his own little girl, and so swoony fond, I never questioned him. When I felt like a fight, I picked one with my mother.)
So. One trickly hot evening, Dads looked up from the newsfeed, and said, "Listen to this, my Faye—they're reporting a rash of complaints from Ooloms all over the world. Teeny numbnesses: a single finger going limp, or an eyelid, or one side of the tongue. Investigators are expressing concern." Dads snorted. "Sure to be psychosomatic," he told me. "A grand lot of Ooloms have worked themselves into a tizzy about some idle nothing, and now they're having demure little hysterical breakdowns."
I nodded, trusting that Dads knew what he was talking about.
But.
It got worse. More victims. In every last town on the planet. Symptoms slowly spreading. A patient who couldn't move her thumb today might lose all feeling in her little toe tomorrow: one muscle after another shutting down, turning to strengthless putty. It usually started at the extremities and worked gradually in, but there was one man who didn't show a single symptom till all the muscles of his heart, slump, went slack. The night they reported his case on the news, the exodus began.
Ooloms and all other Divian subspecies have an instinct to isolate themselves when they're sick. "Oooo," as my father put it angrily, "we're feeling plumb poorly, better separate ourselves from the herd so we don't infect others. The cack-headed idjits."
Dads hated that communal instinct. Because of it, infected Ooloms didn't stay in cities or towns where they'd be close to medical facilities; they headed for the woods, the wilderness, to be on their own. Their species had no trouble living rough out there—they'd been specifically engineered to thrive on Demoth's native greenery. Leaves and bark pulled from trees, seedpods hanging by the hundreds all year round ... the Ooloms could eat, they could glide, they could wait, as the paralysis crept stealthily through their bodies.
They stayed out there, isolated and degenerating from disease, as summer surrendered to wistful fall. Then they began drifting back, when their muscles had frozen to the point that even such grand hunter-gatherers could no longer fend for themselves.
In my dreams I still see them floating in the night: paralyzed bodies black against the stars, gliding over Sallysweet River like kites cut free of their strings. They waited till they were inches near helpless ... barely able to control their direction of flight. The ones we found often had branches lashed to their arms or legs with cord-vine, to give themselves a more rigid flying structure after major muscles failed. Most tied their mouths closed too; otherwise, their jaws fell open, and they swallowed insects during flight.
So the Ooloms surrendered in the end ... the ones who didn't leave it too late. They gave themselves up to humans and let us fight the disease on their behalf. In the shieldlands of Great St. Caspian, that meant the Ooloms headed for Sallysweet River.
When the last shift at Rustico Nickel left work at dawn, the miners would go around town with wooden carts, gathering the bodies that had landed overnight—on roofs, across the Bullet tracks, spread-eagled over the hoods of ore-carriers ... wherever the Ooloms' haphazard flight took them. From there, the body carts trundled along dirt tracks and wood-slat sidewalks till they reached our backyard—a crude field hospital slung together by my father under yellowed-canvas tenting. The Big Top we called it. Or the Circus.
Every human with time to spare helped out under the Big Top: feeding Ooloms who couldn't feed themselves, or fiddling with catheters, enemas and what-all, for those who'd lost the muscles to keep themselves clean. Sometimes it seemed the whole town was there. My best Mend Lynn, Lynn Jones, liked to say, "Everyone's run off to join the Circus." The schools closed for the duration of the epidemic, so all my friends lent a hand—some working long hours, others coming in skittish for twenty minutes, then disappearing when the stink and suffering became too much to bear.
I could stand the stench; it was the death that squeezed in on me. Our patients' hearts turning to motionless meat. Diaphragms going slack. Digestive systems no longer pushing food through the intestines, and people rotting from the inside out. Eight weeks after Dads read me that first medical notice, Ooloms started to die in the Circus ... and they died and they died and they died.
In those days, I slept with my habitat dome set one-way transparent so I could see outside. Roof and walls were wholly invisible, and I'd moved my room far apart from other bubble-domes in our compound, so their lights scarcely reached me. Bed at night was like lying in open air, vulnerable to storms and stars.
My mother (who grew up mainstream and oh-so-proper on New Earth) thought only sluts slept clear. She couldn't stop making remarks about her "exhibitionist" daughter; she was fair frantic-sure I pranced naked around my room, pretending people could peer in as easily as I could peer out.
That they could see me. That I wanted them to see.
Just my mother's feverish imagination. The death-filled weeks of the plague had sent her spiraling into shrill neurosis, where she believed everything I did had some perverse sexual subtext. Truth was, I kept my dome oneway clear so I could tell if an Oolom crash-landed nearby. I hated the thought of a paralyzed body caught in the honey bushes outside my habitat. Not that I was stirred by concern for some poor person suffering ... I just got the cold icks, worrying there might be a limp, corpselike thing lying unseen on the other side of my wall.
One morning, it happened: a gray drizzly dawn, with the rain beading and runneling down the dome, making a soft patter that keeps you in a fuzz between waking and sleep. Lovely. Dreamy. Then something slapped against the clear roof of my room.
The sound barely penetrated my doze. Gradually I became aware the timbre of the rain had changed, now spittering off wet-washed skin rather than the dome's invisible structure field. I opened my eyes ...
...and found myself staring up at an Oolom woman, plastered against the dome like a drenched sheet on glass. Her face was spread wide as if she were screaming.
I almost screamed myself. Not fear, just the jolt of being startled—the sudden sight of her, splashed five meters above me. Heaven knows, I'd seen enough Ooloms in the same condition: the drooping jaw, the eyes wide-open because the eyelid muscles could no longer blink. (All Divian species blink from the bottom lid up; the slackness of paralysis made Oolom eyes sag open under gravity's pull.)
For several seconds, I didn't move. Instinct—freeze, someone's watching. But the woman overhead couldn't see me through the dome; from the outside, the field was opaque navy blue, a repressed, severe shade my mother decreed mandatory to prevent the neighbors thinking I was odd.
Odd = sexual. My mother's ongoing obsession.
My own sanity had its share of wobbles too, especially with a half-dead Oolom sprawled gaping above me. Ripe with the squirming creeps, I slid from my bed, threw on some clothes, and hurried out into the rain.
From the ground, I couldn't see the Oolom on my roof— not with drizzle smearying my eyes and the woman's chameleon scales already changed color to match the dome's navy blue. (The chameleon effect was glandular, not muscle-driven; it worked no matter how paralyzed an Oolom might be.)
I didn't waste time peering up into the rain; the woman couldn't have gone anywhere, could she? Lifting my arm, I whispered to the control implant tucked skin-under my left wrist. "House-soul, attend. Faye's room, dome field: access stairs, please."
The dome's navy hemisphere quivered a moment, like silk rippling in the wind. Then it restabilized into the same shape, but with a flight of steep steps leading over in an arc, up one side and down the other. I climbed the steps two at a time till I reached the top and skittered over the slippery-smooth surface to where the woman lay.
She lifted her head ... which is to say she tilted it half-askew, as if she only had working muscles on one side of her neck. "Good morning," she whispered, framing the words as best she could with only a thread's control over her jaw. After weeks of tending patients in similar condition, I could understand her well enough. "A soft day," she said, rain trickling unhindered over her eyeballs.
"Very soft," I agreed. My hair was already sodden and streaming. In the pouring damp, I envied Oolom skins: tough and waterproof as well-oiled leather. On the other hand, human anatomy had its strong points too, especially in the design of ears. Ooloms hear with fluid-filled globe-sacs, fist-sized spherical eardrums mounted high on either side of the head. Usually, they're protected by retractable sheath tissue, like eyelids that close around the ear-balls. Ear-lids you could call them—a thin inner one for day-to-day, plus a thick outer one to provide extra muffling against vicious-loud noises. Your average Oolom hardly ever opens both ear-lids, except when listening for whispers as faint as an aphid's sigh ... or when the muscles controlling the lids go limp with paralysis.
This woman's ear-lids lay in useless crumples on her scalp, like sloughed-off snakeskins. It left her hearing-globes exposed and vulnerable: inflated balloons of raw eardrum, battered hard by rain.
Straightaway, I cupped my hands above her to shield her ears from the drops. Though her face scarcely had a working muscle left, I could see a clinch of tension ease out of her features, and she let her head relax back against the dome. The whish of soft drizzle might still sound like hammers to her—naked Oolom ears are so sensitive, they can catch a human heartbeat at five paces—but at least I'd ended any direct pain from the splash.
"Jai," the woman whispered: "Thank you" in Oolom. For a moment she lay worn-out quiet, just breathing softly. Then she added, "Fé leejemm."
I bowed in response. The words were Oolom for "You hear the thunder," a phrase of approval doled out to people who do what decency requires. The related phrase, Fé leejedd (I hear the thunder) got used in the sense of "I do the things that are obviously right" ... or in the parlance of the League of Peoples, "I am a sentient being."
"My name is Zillif," the woman said in her whisper. "And you?"
"Faye," I replied, as softly as I could to avoid hurting her ears. "Faye Smallwood."
"From the family of Dr. Henry Smallwood?"
"His daughter."
Another knot of tension loosened on the woman's half-slack face. "I deliver myself to you," she whispered. "I declare myself unfit to make my own decisions. Fé leejedd po."
Fé leejedd po. I cannot hear the thunder. I can't trust myself to do what's right.
Every patient in my dad's field hospital mumbled those words from time to time. They seemed relieved when they could give up responsibility for their lives.
As delicately as my wet fingers could, I arranged Zillif's ear-lids to cover her exposed globe-sacs. Sooner or later the limp skin-sheaths would slide off again; there was nothing holding them in place. But with a spit-coat of luck, they'd stay put the two minutes I'd need to carry her down to the Circus. There, Dads could suture-clip the sheaths into suitable positions: inner one closed for comfort, outer one open so we nursing folks didn't have to shout ourselves hoarse to be heard. Every last Oolom under the Big Top had been rigged the same way.
When Zillif's ear-globes were safe, I slipped my arms under her body and lifted. She weighed no more than a child, though she measured a full hand taller than I. Light Oolom body, low Demoth gravity. I, of course, was lifting with the glossy-hard strength of a Homo sap designed for full Earth G: "A strapping girl," as Lynn liked to tease me. "Prime Amazonian beef." Can I help it if I grew up tall and broad-shouldered? Not to mention, a doctor's daughter is never allowed to skip (a) her monthly muscle-preservative injections, or (b) her daily twenty minutes of Home-G exercise in the simulator.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Vigilant by James Alan Gardner. Copyright © 1999 James Alan Gardner. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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