James Gardner: Vigilant

Nine hundred years earlier, the first Oolom colony on Demoth had been founded by a Divian billionaire who wanted to show the world he could design a Utopia. Scary idea, that. But the man did have one good idea: the Vigil. A constitutionally entrenched organization for watchdogging the government. Empowered to open any government file no matter how secret, to interrogate public officials from the lowliest sewer worker to the Speaker-General, to scrutinize every department and bureau and commission and regulation board that operated on any jurisdictional level: federal, territorial, trade region, or municipal. To monitor all the politicians, bureaucrats, consultants… and to report unflinchingly when any of those petty emperors had no clothes.

You could dismiss it as a typical rich man’s idea — fiscal-philosophical auditors riding herd over the government. On any other planet, the Vigil would soon become flap-in-the-wind powerless, or a scheming cabal of puppeteers behind the throne; but the Ooloms, the brilliant, careful Ooloms, found a secret way to make it work.

Not that Zillif told me the secret. I only learned that much later. Zillif just told me the Vigil’s motto: Wa su-pesh i rabi ganosh. live in the real and name the lies.

Can you imagine how those words gave me the luscious chills? Fifteen years old, viscerally idealistic no matter how blase I thought I was, my heart zinging wildly from the overload of death and the need to think our existence could mean more than worm food…

Live in the real. Name the lies.

Rage against the dying of the light.

And Tur Zillif herself. Lady Zillif, my Lady Zillif. The shining presence of her: quiet yet arresting, as if there were a second electrical lifeform crackling under the skin of her dying body. As if she was what it truly meant to be real, and the rest of us were just pathetic fakes, too caught up in the busywork ballet to recognize our own emptiness.

A grounded woman. Like a Zen master… or a Shaolin or a Sufi or a shaman or a saint, all those caricatures of wisdom who show up in bad fic-chips to spout fortune-cookie prattle and guide the hero to a state of villain-whupping enlightenment. Except that Zillif was really there. Wherever you get when you stop being everywhere else and just are, moment to moment, sixty seconds a minute.

Do you understand? It sounds so trite as I try to describe it. The most profound revelations are glib Yeah-Yeah-Sures till they’ve made you bleed.

Besides, I was in love. Pumped loony with a teenage girl’s hero worship. So screw the suggestion that Zillif occupied some higher plane of consciousness, dismiss it as infatuation for all I care. The woman blew me away; leave it at that. And let’s get back to the Vigil because that’s less dicey to talk about.

So the Vigil: an honored-honorable-honest body of disciplined scrutineers. Any age, any sex, any species, provided you could tough out the seven years of training and the final mushor — the initiation/retreat/ordeal that marked your transition from student to full-fledged proctor. But I didn’t know about mushor back then; I was only familiar with the Vigil’s public side. The big cases, like exposing a Fisheries Minister who’d taken bribes, or that whole mess about illegal practices in the Federal Justice Division. The small cases, like ragging on Traffic Roads to fill the great whacking pothole on Gambo Street, or quietly suggesting it was high time a certain junior-school teacher learned to like kids.

Then there was the Vigil’s bread and butter: reviewing proposed legislation put forward by each level of government. Truth to tell, I barely paid attention to most Vigil critiques when they were broadcast — any talk about politics and the economy always struck me as so damned tawdry — but even a flighty fifteen-year-old could see that proctors were dealing with important issues. "Here are the people this bill will hurt. Here are the people this bill will make rich. Here are the risks involved. Here are the things that will change." Time and time and time again, the Vigil opened up the subjects no politician, corporate news service, or interest group wanted to mention.

"Why is that special?" you ask. "Watchdog groups are a daydream a dozen." Too true. But the Vigil had a stunning track record for getting things right. The predictions. The context. The true motivations. Unlike every other watchdog group in creation, they didn’t cry wolf just to attract attention. They didn’t have a locked-in agenda. And they had what amounted to police powers over the government, search and seizure, poke and probe, opening the closed doors.

No one could count how many legislative fiascoes the Vigil had prevented… because Demoth almost never had legislative fiascoes. Lawmakers were more careful with a crack squad of proctors looking over their shoulders; and if budget numbers didn’t quite make sense, bureaucrats were usually quick to correct any discrepancies the Vigil pointed out. On occasions when soft-spoken suggestions didn’t work, proctors were empowered to publish their findings to the world whenever they chose to do so — reports with a credibility no journalist or lobby group has had since the dawn of time.

If worst came to worst, the Vigil had one more sycophant-stopping power guaranteed by Demoth’s ancient constitution: vote qualification tests. Before legislators voted on a bill, the proctor scrutinizing that vote could set a test to determine whether the politicians understood what the bill actually meant. Those who failed the test could only sit and grind their teeth in public humiliation while those who passed made an informed decision. It didn’t totally eliminate witless results — what could? — but at least it meant people knew what they were voting for.

"Always, always, always," Zillif told me, "a proctor concentrates on the bill at hand. Never the intention, always the fact. Politics is filled with fine intentions, and with well-meaning people who want to do good.

But the Vigil asks, will this bill do what its sponsors claim? Will it work? And what else will it do, what side effects, what loopholes? Who really gets the benefit, the reward, the money? The Vigil analyzes the consequences of what is really on the table, and we tell the world. Then it’s up to the people to decide if that’s what they want."

I soaked up Zillif’sdescriptions of how proctors trained to control their own political bias — not eliminating it (impossible), but bringing it out in the open, grabbing it by the ears and devil’s-advocating one bias for a while, then another, then another, like walking around a sculpture so you could view it from all sides. Proctors also got broad science training so they wouldn’t wallow in arrogant ignorance; they studied history, sociology, psychology, math, public medicine, ecology, xenology, accounting, monetary dynamics, and of course, the hard science: physics/chemistry/information/microbi.

Twined in with these mental disciplines were physical ones — an organism that lives for its brain alone turns clack-stupid in its specialization, complexifying simple things to impress itself with its own cleverness. Healthy sane awake people know how to get out of their heads and into their skins. So Vigil members grounded themselves with Oolom disciplines we humans would call yoga, qigong, meditation, martial arts: nimbling up the body to nimble up the soul.

God, oh God… listening to Zillif, I wanted a nimble soul. I wanted a soul, period. And by all the saints and our Holy Mother, I wanted to make myself radiant. Bright as glorious fire. Valuable. Important to important events. Jawdropper stunning, yet plangently meaningful. I wanted to be the one to discover a cure for the plague; to find awe-pummeling treasures in the alien ruins dotted around our planet; to dazzle the universe by being beautiful and smart and talented and wise and loved and memorable and chic and productive and sultry and happy and alive…