Vigilant lop-3

by James Alan Gardner

  "Which puts it before Chappalar’s murder," Festina observed.

  "Could it be as much as three months?" Cheticamp asked. "That’s how long he’s been missing."

  "Wouldn’t surprise me," Yunupur said. He lifted his scanning device and ran it over the corpse again. "Yeah sure, three months could work. There hasn’t been much decay, but it’s cold, and there are precious few insects this far down the mine. A corpse could stay intact for a long time."

  "Considering how cold it is," Festina murmured, "I’m surprised the body isn’t frozen stiff."

  "It’s not quite as cold as freezing," Cheticamp replied, "and this far underground the temperature doesn’t change much, no matter what happens outside."

  "True," said Yunupur. "Now let’s keep looking for cause of death."

  He opened Iranu’s shirt. No injuries.

  Ditto the trousers. No obvious damage.

  He rolled the body over to examine its back. Nothing unusual.

  When Yunupur rolled the body faceup again, the eyes slumped open and the jaw sagged. "He is a limp bugger, isn’t he?" Yunupur murmured.

  "Slack," I said. "He’s slack."

  I looked around the room. The ScrambleTacs were young; Yunupur too. They wouldn’t remember. Cheticamp was old enough, but maybe he didn’t have much contact with the sick and dying back then. Festina came from offplanet. Tic had fled into the jungle, hoping he’d die before the Explorers found him; then he’d lain in bed longer than almost anyone, never seeing what other slack bodies looked like.

  Only I had seen. And from the moment Iranu’s arms slumped like muscleless water bags, my skin had been crawling with deja vu.

  Yunupur was right: Freep corpses weren’t normally so flaccid.

  "Are you saying…" Cheticamp began.

  "Nonsense!" Tic interrupted. "The plague didn’t affect Freeps."

  "Diseases have a way of adapting," Festina said grimly.

  "Oh bosh!" Yunupur rippled with laughter. Or at least his gliders gave a little shimmy. "Let’s not turn melodramatic, shall we? There’s an old maxim from medical school: when you hear hoofbeats, assume it’s a leaner, not some alien beast like a horse. If this poor chump is dead without a mark on him, he was probably just poisoned. Or he overdosed on something. Or he had a garden-variety heart attack, or a stroke, or he choked on an ort bone. There hasn’t been a single case of the dreaded scourge since the epidemic itself."

  "Let me touch him," I said. "I know the feel of slack muscles. I remember fierce clearly."

  "Look, Mom-Faye, if you’re truly worried, I’ll tell the autopsy lab to put some muscle tissue under the microscope…"

  "No!" I snapped. "We have to know now, before you take the body back to the city. If it’s carrying a new strain of the plague — one that affects other species besides Ooloms…"

  "Then we isolate the deceased in a sterile body bag and take the usual precautions at the lab," Yunupur said. "It’s not like we handle any corpse sloppily."

  "I want to touch it. I want to know now."

  "You won’t know," Yunupur told me. "You can’t diagnose just by touch. Anyway, it’s been twenty-seven years since you’ve seen a plague victim… and those were all Ooloms, with a completely different musculature than Freeps…"

  "Let her touch the corpse," Tic said quietly. "Why not?"

  Yunupur looked to Cheticamp. The police captain shrugged. "Where’s the harm?"

  "There’s harm if she gets upset over nothing," Yunupur muttered. "I’ve heard stories about our Mom-Faye." But he pulled out a clean pair of protective gloves and tossed them to me.

  I put them on fast, trying not to think why I was doing this. Another freckles-and-scalpel thing? My chance to catch the plague, if this was a strain that affected more than Ooloms?

  A bit of that. But I genuinely wanted to know; and I was convinced I would recognize the feel of the plague. The aura of the disease, as well the queer sloppiness of a slack muscle. I knew the enemy. I’d massaged and kneaded and rubbed down… carried unmoving bodies, alive and dead…

  I’d know. I was harsh certain I’d know. One squeeze of Iranu’s biceps, or his chest, or the limp muscles of his face…

  His eyes hung wide-open and his mouth too. Like Zillif’s face on the roof of my dome, so long ago.

  I knelt. I reached toward the dead man’s arm.

  A peacock tube erupted out of nowhere, and suddenly my hand was on the other side of the room.

  WATER-OWLS

  Something you don’t see every day.

  The peacock thingy had materialized and swallowed my hand like a snake… and there at the other end of the tube, fifteen meters across the chamber, was my own plastic-gloved hand protruding from the field of rippling color.

  I wiggled my fingers. Which is to say I felt the wiggling down at the end of my arm, except that the wiggling happened fifteen meters away.

  Long-distance finger action. Rife with possibilities, that. Or was I just giddy with surprise/shock/bloody damned amazement?

  I pulled my hand back. The fingers disappeared from the far end of the tube, and my hand was back attached to my wrist as if it had never gone wandering elsewhere.

  The peacock tube winked out of existence. Job done.

  Silence. Then Festina let out her breath in a whoosh. "Do you know how many laws of physics you just broke? You can’t be half-in/half-out of a Sperm-tail. They just don’t work like that."

  "Maybe you never asked the right way," Tic suggested.

  She glared.

  Warily, I reached toward the corpse again. The peacock tube shimmered back into existence, and pulled its same hand-swallowing routine. This time its tail wafted down the tunnel and out of sight. I don’t know how far the tube went, but I could feel a gusty breeze pushing against my gloved fingers.

  I pulled back. Bye-bye, peacock thingy. It vanished to wherever a deus ex machina hangs out between emergencies.

  "This may be a rash hypothesis," Tic said, "but I think the Peacock doesn’t want Smallwood touching the corpse… as if there’s some risk involved. And if it’s risky for her, perhaps it’s risky for everyone."

  "Yeah," Yunupur agreed, scuttling back a few paces. "Maybe we should think about this for a while."

  I didn’t need to think. Whatever the Peacock was, I trusted its instincts. It wanted to keep me safe from something, and that "something" was likely contagious.

  The plague was back.

  Yunupur had disinfectant in his tote pack. We made him use it all, soaking his arms up to the shoulder and bathing his gliders too — anything that had come close to the corpse. Then Cheticamp ordered everybody out of the mine till a full Medical Threat Team could fly in.

  When Cheticamp radioed for the team, he told them to bring plenty of olive oil.

  Outside, it felt colder than before: that stiff wind I’d felt. (Had the Peacock really tubed my hand all the way to the surface?) The sky had turned wintry — chalk white, melancholy, sullen. A sky full of snow, and ready to dump it on our heads.

  Cheticamp took Yunupur and the ScrambleTacs off to the police skimmers… either to discuss Iranu’s death, or to start making contingency plans if we really were facing a plague outbreak. Tic went with them to play scrutineer. I suppose I should’ve gone too, but I didn’t. Tough.

  Instead, Festina and I hiked down to the shore of Lake Vascho. Neither of us spoke as we walked. We both seemed to have a fondness for quiet.

  The wind died. The snow came. Big white flakes sifting down onto the lakeshore. They settled onto the sand, the trees, my hair… Festina’s hair… her eyelashes…

  She looked at me looking at her. I pretended I’d been staring at the lake beyond her.

  Hard to believe it was the middle of the day. Close to noon, but the clouds were clotted so thick, the world seemed two-thirds to twilight. Everything had got muted down gray. If the wind picked up, started swirling the snow around, we’d have trouble seeing our way back to the skimmer. But why should I worry about getting
lost in a blizzard? The Peacock would save me, wouldn’t it? I’m too tired to think about that, I said to myself. Which would have been a good enough excuse to let my old brain coast away from confronting the issue. Didn’t work now. My link-seed’s cruel inability to shut anything out.

  Po turzijeff. Kalaff. Not maidservant. Daughter.

  Scary enough to knock the breath out of you.

  Festina’s voice broke into my thoughts. "What are those things out there? In the ice."

  We were standing hard on the edge of the lake — where the sand ran up against the lid of ice covering the water. The things Festina had seen were dark blobs as big as my fist: water-owl eggs, laid in the fall, incubated/frozen all winter long, but due to hatch in another few days, after the ice was gone. The owls were ugly as sin when newborn, slimy oversize tadpoles — nothing a bit like birds. They needed three more months to mature out of their amphibious stage; then they finally became little hoot-fowl, hunting rodents on land and small fish in the water. I started to tell all this to Festina; but the second she found out she was looking at eggs, she got a happy-crazed look in her eye.

  "Eggs?" she said. "I collect eggs! I’ve got…" She stopped herself. "I have a collection," she went on, now trying to sound offhanded and only managing stiff. "A collection I could talk about for hours and bore you completely to tears."

  I looked at her keenly. For some reason, I said, "I bet you don’t talk about your collection to anyone."

  She gave a small laugh, half a second too late to be natural. "True." Her eyes flicked in my direction, but jittered away again the instant she met my gaze. "Look, Faye, I want to try to get one of those eggs. That’s all right, isn’t it?"

  I nodded. "Water-owls are as common as bloodflies around here. Nature won’t grudge you taking one." I stepped toward the lake. "We can get a stick to break a hole in the ice surface…"

  "You stay here," Festina said. "I’ll do this."

  "Sure you don’t want help?"

  "You stay back to pull me out if I go through the ice." And she slipped down the shore a ways, making a show of heading for a big branch of driftwood.

  A shy and private one, our Festina, at least when it came to eggs. A shy and private one in general maybe, anywhere outside her job.

  Made sense to me.

  I watched her crouch on the shore, jabbing at the ice with one end of her stick. She’d break a hole through soon enough — it might be snowing now, but five days of thaw had thinned down the ice surface pretty well. Once she got a hole, she could use the same stick to scoop out the egg; after which, she’d have an ugly little owl-pole of her own.

  Dads had given me a pet water-owl once upon a time. "Starts off icky, ends up flying"… that’s what he told me. Nature hands us yet another parable. And my owl, Jilly, served up a lesson of her own when she got out of her cage one day and never came back.

  Lesson: one by one, things vanish from your life. Pets. People. My father, who I sometimes slapped in the face.

  Light flickered beside me. I turned and saw the peacock tube, hovering above the lake, just out of reach… thin at this second, no wider than my outstretched hand. A glance over at Festina; she hadn’t seen it. Snowflakes were falling thick, and she wasn’t looking my way — drawn in on herself, all shy and private.

  Fair enough.

  The Peacock’s Tail was long now, stretching far over the water till the gold-green-violet disappeared amidst the snow. Its body swayed placidly back and forth, like an eel swimming lazily in calm water.

  "What are you?" I asked.

  Botjolo, said a sad voice in my head. Cursed. Self-destructive.

  The language was Oolom but the voice was my father’s. Dead these twenty-seven years.

  A moment later, the Peacock was gone.

  Festina came toward me, a blob of gooey-jell cradled in both hands. "I’ve got an egg!" she announced. Her hair was speckled with snow, her eyes bright.

  "You know you’ve got to keep that in water," I said. "Otherwise, it won’t hatch."

  "Hatch?" She looked down in surprise at the lump in her hands. "Right. It’s going to hatch. I’d been thinking…" She broke off. "I only collect eggs. Just the eggs. I’ve never had… what happens when it hatches?"

  "The owl-pole eats the egg jelly," I told her. "That’s what the baby lives on for the first few days. Till it’s ready to swim on its own. There’s nothing left of the egg after."

  "Oh," Festina murmured. "Oh." She lifted the handful of jelly up to face level and stared at it. Eye to eye.

  "They make nice pets," I said. "If you handle them gentle right from the first, they get fair affectionate. They’re a snuggling kind of species."

  "I’m sure," Festina answered. "But no." She looked at the egg again. "I’d better put you back."

  Slow walk to the hole in the ice. We went together… or maybe Festina went alone, and I just walked beside her. She knelt and slipped the egg back into the water; it bobbed on the surface, the way a snowball floats when you drop it in a creek. "Is that what it’s supposed to do?" she asked.

  "It’ll be fine."

  "I want to tell it to grow up big and strong," she said, "but that’s so damned maudlin."

  "What’s wrong with maudlin? Weep bitter tears of loss, and I’ll never tell a soul."

  She was kneeling, I was standing beside her. I bent over and gave a quick kiss to the top of her head. Her hair. She tilted her head around to look at me, her face, my face…

  Then a skimmer flew overhead. The Medical Threat Team arriving.

  "We’d better get back," Festina said. My mouth was open to say the same thing.

  At least I think that’s why my mouth was open.

  By the time we got back to the others, the Medical Threat folks were lumbering around in bright orange tightsuits, half of them plodding into the mine while the rest set up shop outside — quite the impressive pathology lab, laid out under a dome field, where we all got examined for the disease.

  Simple summary of the next three hours: we were clean, Iranu was not. The deceased was hot, hot, hot — infected from ear-lids to toenails with our old friend Pteromic Paralysis. Or rather our friend’s newly arrived cousin, Pteromic B… kissing close to the original microbe, but with enough differences that it could now affect Freeps.

  We prayed to all the saints this variant was different in other ways too. The original, Pteromic A, had turned out to have a latency period of six months, during which carriers showed no symptoms but were oozing contagious; that’s how the disease had spread to every Oolom on the planet without anyone noticing. Iranu had been down in this mine at most three months… so if the old pattern held, he could have been infecting people three months before he vanished from sight.

  That meant all the Freeps at the trade talks. The Ooloms and humans too. Every blessed soul On Demoth could have been exposed, depending on how many species Pteromic B affected.

  "If I were a Freep," Yunupur whispered to me, "I’d buy a shitload of stock in olive-oil futures."

  He laughed. I precious near smacked him. "One more word like that," I said, "and I’m telling your mother."

  Even if you’re young, some things aren’t jokes.

  Though the med team pronounced us germ-free, we still got shipped to Bonaventure General and put into quarantine for a day. No one wanted to take the teeniest chance, even if the disease might already be romping through the populace. Our clothes were incinerated. Our bodies were full-immersion-baptized in three types of disinfectant, then irradiated with UV lamps hard to the edge of sunburn. ("Warm!" Festina cried. "I’m finally warm!" Easy for her to say — with that gorgeous cocoa-cream skin, she didn’t have to worry about freckles.)

  And, of course, we drank so much olive oil our pores oozed with it. Pustulated with it. Like bodybuilders slathered in lotion.

  Tic and Yunupur were singled out for special attention: led off to some Ooloms-only section of Bonaventure’s isolation unit and subjected to unknown indignities over the follow
ing 26.1 hours. The next time I saw Tic, he had sticky-plasters patched over his arms, legs, and torso; his only comment was, "No comment."

  We humans got off lucky — no one considered us susceptible to the plague, even if the Peacock had worried about me touching Iranu’s corpse. A disease-jump from Oolom to Freep wasn’t a big step; they were different breeds of the same species, not much farther apart than Chihuahuas and Great Danes. Homo saps were utterly different, with biochemistries so alien we were closer kin to terrestrial amoebas than Divian lifeforms. Three different doctors told me the quarantine was only because we might carry the microbes, not that we could be affected by them.

  I wondered who to trust: the doctors or the Peacock.

  We all had to give statements: full-scale interrogation by investigators in disease-resistant tightsuits. I gave my report four times, to teams from four different agencies… and each team was shadowed by proctors from outside the city, seeing everything, hearing everything, scrutinizing everything. The Vigil was in high gear now, pulling in proctors from the Oolom playground communities to make sure nothing got missed or messed.

  When the questions were over, Festina and I retired to her room in the isolation unit. She had a new uniform, a new stunner, a new Bumbler, all flown in from Snug Harbor when her old equipment got impounded by health authorities; so naturally she had to field-strip the gadgets, clean them, program her favorite settings into the Bumbler, and generally fuss to get everything just so.

  "This plague is a wimp-ass disease," she told me as she worked. "A latency period of six months? In the Explorer Corps, anything that doesn’t kill within twelve hours is a low-grade nuisance. The med-techs hand you a tube of salve, then send you back to work."

  Words saying one thing, eyes the opposite. I could tell she knew the enormity of death. The absences it made. How it got into your eyes and ears and head, so that everything you saw of the world was shaded darker, crueler, bitter indifferent.