The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  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.

  Still, just being strong enough to carry Zillif didn’t make the job simple. The woman flopped. She fluttered. She draped badly, with her glider membranes flapping against my legs like long, trip-hazard petticoats. And even though her four limbs were dysfunctional, they weren’t one hundred percent paralyzed. Zillif still had Ml power in the Oolom equivalent of the triceps muscle for straightening her right arm. She also had the instinctive Oolom urge to stay flat-on-the-bubble balanced, no yaw, no pitch, no roll. Whenever I tipped the skimpiest bit off level, she flailed out her one mobile arm and whacked me in the jaw with her elbow.

  I’d taken similar clonks while tending other paralysis victims—automatic reflexes are all very fine with a full set of muscles, but they can be the devil’s own nuisance when a single surviving muscle keeps firing with nothing to counterbalance it. As I began to trudge gingerly down the steps of the dome (smack in the jaw, crack in the jaw), I found myself wishing Zillif’s last muscles were frozen too.

  Elbow whacks notwithstanding, we made it safe to solid ground. Once down, I took a moment to rearrange my burden into a more comfortable carrying position. The solid part of Zillif’s body was just a thin cylinder, no bigger round than one of my thighs; but the parachute folds of her glider membranes were as bulky as a load of laundry. A load of wet laundry, pressed soggily against me. My jacket made soft squishy-gush sounds when I shifted Zillif’s weight in my arms. Wrung-out rainwater spilled down cold on the flouncy “ladylike” clothes Mother made me wear.

  As I started carrying Zillif along the edge of our fern garden, she murmured, “Your hands are warm, Faye Smallwood. I can feel them against my back.”

  “That would be the legendary human body heat, ma’am.” Ooloms found it a source of rapture and delight that we Homo saps were so exothermal. Their own skin temperatures ran a dozen degrees cooler. Any human walking down the street in an Oolom town could expect Oolom children constantly underfoot, them patting their hands against your ass while they giggled, “You’re hot!”

  “I have heard about human warmth from friends,” Zillif said. “But experiencing it personally is…disturbing.”

  “If the heat is too much for you,” I told her, “I can wrap my hands in my jacket.”

  “No, your temperature is quite pleasant,” she said. “What bothers me is that I knew about human body heat and was still surprised by it. Such things are not supposed to happen to someone in my profession.”

  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.

  “Thank you, Faye Smallwood,” she said. “You’ve been very kind.”

  “Is there anything nice I can bring you?” I asked. “Are you hungry?” Most Ooloms brought to the Circus hadn’t eaten for days, no more than a few liver-nuts or clankbeetles. A woebegone percentage were also dehydrated…not that Zillif had that problem, considering how soaked we both were with rain.

  “I would like food eventually,” she answered, “but not right away.”

  Her voice hinted she wanted something different. I looked around, but didn’t see my father in the hospital yet; usually the light woke him at dawn, but a gray day like this was dark enough he might sleep longer. My bad luck—I was itching to abandon
our new patient to him. “Is there someone you’d like me to check on?” I asked. “I can link into hospital registries all over the world. If you want news about friends or family…”

  “I have a link of my own,” Zillif replied. “All I’ve done for days is check on people I know.”

  “Oh.” Most patients in the Circus had lost too much fingerdeft to push buttons on their wrist-implants…which we Homo saps claimed was a blessing. Otherwise, our charges might learn that 21 percent of the Ooloms on Demoth had already died, with another 47 percent lying in hospitals and gradually feeling their bodies go stale. No one knew how many other casualties still lurked in the deep forests, moping as their sickness worsened or struck dead before reaching human help. The Outward Fleet had recently dispatched the entire Explorer Academy to our planet, four classes of cadets now searching for survivors in what we called the Thin Interior: any place higher than two hundred meters above sea level, where Demoth’s atmosphere became too thready for unprotected humans, but where Ooloms could live quite handily…provided they weren’t lying in slack-muscled heaps at the base of some giant tree.

  And all over the world, in hospitals or the wild, we knew of no disease victim who’d recovered. Not a precious one. There was no hint you were infected till the first symptoms settled in; and from there, Pteromic Paralysis was a one-way trip down a cackling black hole.

  If Zillif could still work her data-link, she must know how grisly the situation was; but when she spoke again, her voice had no trace of the trembles. “Faye Smallwood,” she said, “I’d like to know…your father is participating in the Pascal protocol, is he not?”

  I stiffened. “Yes.” I looked around the Big Top again, wishing Dads would hurry his tail out of bed. “You’ve heard about the protocol?” I asked.