James Gardner: Vigilant

She turned her head, aiming for an angle where she could look me sharp in the eye… but with slabs of her neck muscles gone AWOL, she couldn’t manage. "Forgive me if I err," Zillif said, "but you are a young human, are you not? Under age?"

Ooloms cared about such things. "I get the vote two elections from now," I answered. That was two and a half Demoth years away — almost four Earth years.

"May you vote wisely," she told me. It was a common Oolom phrase, and mainly just a pleasantry, the way humans toss off Good luck or Have a safe trip. Zillif, though, put more feeling into the words. Sincerity. A moment later she added, "I haven’t voted in the elections for many years."

She said it blandly, the way people do when they want to see how quick you are on the uptake. I got it right away… and in my surprise, I precious near slipped on the rain-slick grass.

Here’s the thing: Ooloms voted every chance they got. They exulted in it. Compulsive democracy galloped through their veins. Even the paralyzed patients in the Circus were constantly holding plebiscites on what types of music they’d sing, or how they should honor the latest casualties of the disease. A self-respecting Oolom would no more skip voting in an election than a human would skip wearing clothes when the thermometer dropped to brass monkey. Unless…

"Have I the honor," I said formally, "of speaking with a member of the Vigil?"

"Even so," Zillif answered.

It seemed witless to curtsy to a woman I was carrying in my arms. I still gave it a try.

Before Zillif could say more, we rounded the edge of my parents’ dome — a hemisphere of gutless charcoal gray, which my mother claimed was the only proper color for a physician’s personal quarters. Beyond lay the Circus: a muddy meadow under wet canvas, water streaming down into puddles wherever the tenting sagged low.

My father would have preferred to keep the patients indoors, but Ooloms got the claustrophobic chokes at the thought of human buildings. Lynn described Ooloms as "arboreal with a vengeance" — whoever designed their genome must have thought it cute to make Ooloms starvingly hungry for light and fresh air. As a human, I couldn’t complain; the main reason we Homo saps got invited to Demoth was because Ooloms couldn’t stand running their own mine operations.

Before we came, Oolom mines had been pure robot business and increasingly meager for the planet’s needs — once you exhaust the easy veins of ore, remote machine digging doesn’t bring up enough to pay for itself. In 2402, the Demoth government admitted they needed sentient beings working the drills; so they solicited applications from various groups on other planets (Divians, humans, a few alien races), and eventually turned over their whole mining industry to a party from the planet Come-By-Chance. About 500,000 Come-By-Chance humans voluntarily emigrated to new lives on Demoth… including young Dr. Henry Smallwood and his hard-to-please missus.

The Demoth mining industry picked up the moment we arrived. Homo saps didn’t crapulate into panic attacks at the thought of digging underground… just as Ooloms, even sick ones, didn’t mind the cold and wet if they could just feel the wind.

You could surely feel the wind that day under the Big Top. You could hear it too, romping and rollicking like a drunk uncle — the frisk of the breeze and the constant sound of rain. The paradiddle patter on the roof fabric. The dripping splash around the edge.

One hundred and twenty cots lay under the canvas. White sheets, white blankets. From the edge of the yard, every bed looked empty — their Oolom occupants had turned white too, chameleon skins bleaching themselves to match the background. Some half-asleep mornings I’d drag myself to the Circus, see white-on-white, and imagine all the Ooloms were gone: died in the dark, taken off for mass burial.

But no — we only lost two or three patients a night. We also collected two or three new patients every dawn, which made for a glum equilibrium: outgoing deaths = incoming casualties. The construction shop at Rustico Nickel kept promising to build extra cots if we needed them, but we hadn’t asked for any in almost a week.

We were holding even… but it wouldn’t last. Everyone juggling bedpans under the Big Top knew it was just a matter of time before deaths exceeded new arrivals. Whereupon the Circus would begin to empty itself. Show over, the crowd goes home.

The duty nurse saw us coming; he’d filled out a bed assignment by the time we traipsed up. "Row five, cot three," he said, looking at me instead of Zillif. He was a retired miner named Pook — spent every waking minute at the Circus but fiercely avoided personal interaction with the patients. I don’t know if Pook hated Ooloms, sickness, or both. Still, he put in more time under the Big Top than anyone, including Dads and me: keeping records up-to-date, tinkering with our makeshift IV stands, pushing himself till exhaustion wept out of him like sweat.

Pook’s own form of mental breakdown.

As I lugged Zillif down the rows of cots, I automatically held my breath as long as I could — the Circus stank with a circus stink. Urine and feces from patients who couldn’t control themselves. Disinfectant splashed over everything that might carry microbes. The strong metallic smell of Oolom blood, taken as samples so we could plot the advance of the disease. The work sweat of human volunteers, everyone changing bed linen in the gray dawn or rotating the patients to prevent bedsores. The earthiness of mud underfoot, tangled with the lye-soap fragrance of Demoth yellow-grass.

The Ooloms could smell none of it, the bad or the worse. Thanks for that went to a flaw in their engineering. When the prototypes of the breed were created centuries ago, their ability to smell had been lost… derailed as an accidental side effect of the mods made to their bodies, some dead-gap in the skimpy neural pathway leading from nose to brain. The DNA stylists who made them were working on a budget and didn’t consider the shortcoming important enough to correct; and the Ooloms, of course, didn’t know what they were missing.

Lucky them.

Approaching row five, cot three, I wondered who’d occupied this bed the day before. It says something, doesn’t it, that I couldn’t remember. I’d chatted with so many patients over the previous weeks, got to know them…

No, no, no. The point is, I hadn’t got to know them. I’d picked up trivial facts about certain people — where they lived before the plague, what work they did — but I was all surface, no salt. Most patients could barely talk; and I could barely listen. When you’re fifteen you want to be so slick, you want to swallow the world and stool it out… but you haven’t half learned to deaden yourself, not the way adults artfully, reflexively deaden themselves every hour of the day. At fifteen, all you can do is close down bolt-tight: go through the motions of caring and concern but shut your eyes and ears, not let the bad bitchies in. That’s not deadening yourself, it’s internal bleeding. Swinging back and forth from "Oh God, I don’t want to be here," to "Oh Christ, I have to help this person!"

The only reason I didn’t run was an alpha-queen need to save face in front of my friends. To maintain my la-di-dah social position. They were the children of miners; I was the daughter of a doctor. If I wanted that difference to mean something — and mook-stupid, I did — I had to play nurse to the bitter end.

That drove me to stay hard, hold my breath, and lay Zillif on her assigned cot. In the minutes since I picked her up, she’d already turned copper-rust green, the shade of my jacket; but once in bed, her color bleached away fast. By the time I’d arranged her arms and legs, then hospital-folded her glider membranes into the standard bed-patient pattern, Zillif lay white as a bone.