Vigiant (3 page)

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 finger deft 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.

"On my link." She lowered her voice. "And I understand it. All of it."

Of course she did. A member of the Vigil could pry open government databanks for details kept out of the public information areas... including a no-fancytalk explanation of how we were "treating" the plague.

We'd adopted the Pascal protocol. Named after Blaise Pascal, the first human mathematician to analyze roulette, card games and the craps table. That's what the Pascal protocol was all about: rolling the dice.

When an illness was a hundred percent lethal... when the course of disease was so vicious-fast that victims died within weeks... when conventional treatments showed no ghost of effect... when advanced members of the League of Peoples didn't leap forward to offer a cure... then the Technocracy could authorize physicians to take a fling with the Pascal protocol:
Try anything, treat the side effects, and for God's sake, keep accurate records.

All over Demoth, doctors were squeezing local plants for extracts—hoping some fern or flower had come up with chemical resistance to the Pteromic microbe. Other doctors were crush-powdering insect carapaces, or drawing blood from great sea eels. Some had even placed their bets on chance molecule construction: computers using a random number generator to assemble chains of arbitrary amino acids into heaven knows what. Then the result was injected blindly-blithely-brazenly into patients.

Do you see how desperate we were? No control groups, no controls. No double-blinds, no animal tests, no computer models. Certainly no informed consent—that might jinx the placebo effect, and Christ knows, we needed whatever edge we could get. Especially when a doctor could take it into his head to scrape fuzzy brown goo off some tree bark, then mainline it straight into a patient's artery.

I told you. No one stayed sane.

Some doctors refused to participate in the protocol: they ranted about centuries of medical tradition, and recited Hippocrates in the original Greek. But with Pteromic Paralysis, there was no cure, no remission, no ending save death... and a greedy-glutton death that might gobble every Oolom within weeks. Even my stodgy conservative father admitted it was time to go for a long shot.

But Dads was only a fiddly-dick GP in fiddly-dick Sallysweet River. He had no training in medical research and no equipment for crapshoot organic chemistry. When the Pascal protocol was first proclaimed, he went into a twelve-hour sulk, growling at anyone who'd listen, "What do they think I can do? Why should I even bother?" (Dads was given to monumental sulks. When he became a hero, biographers papered over such pout-parties with the phrase, "At times he could be difficult"... which sounds more noble for all concerned than saying Henry Smallwood was a petulant nelly.)

In the end, Dads grudgingly decided his search for a cure would use something he had near at hand: human food. "At least it won't kill them," he muttered... which wasn't half so certain as he pretended. Ooloms were engineered to eat foodstuffs native to Demoth, as well as crops and animal products their people brought from the Divian homeworld; no one expected they could hold down terrestrial food too.

Take a common Earth grape, for example: chocked juicy with dozens of biological compounds. Some of those compounds are nigh-on universal—you find simple sugars in every starry reach of the galaxy, and Ooloms could easily digest them. On the other hand, your average grape contains a whole lab shelf of more specialized enzymes, proteins, vitamins, and other tools of grapehood... grand for humans, because we've spent three billion years evolving to eat whatever grapes dish out, but to Oolom metabolisms, each chemical was an alien substance with untold poisonous potential.

Natural result: Ooloms didn't eat terrestrial foods. They'd be crazy to take the teeniest nibble. No doubt, in the twenty-five years
Homo saps
had lived on Demoth, some daredevil Oolom must have given it a try; but there'd never been a systematic study. Why would there be? When Ooloms could eat blessed near every leaf and grass on the planet, where's the sense in stuffing them with human
coq au vin
to see if it kills them?

That's how things stood till the plague came... at which point, the scales tipped to the other side of
Why not?
When Ooloms were all going to die anyway, where was the harm in a little
coq au vin,
on the off chance some unexpected terrestrial chemical actually did some good?

So that's what passed for medical treatment under the Big Top: solemnly giving our patients a single grain of wheat or a bead from a raspberry as if it were potent medicine. Ha-ha. Knee-slapping hilarity. Hard to keep a straight face.

The joke turned sour the first time an Oolom came close to dying—a fine old gentleman who jerked into half-slack convulsions after eating a sliver of carrot no bigger than a fingernail paring. The man survived, thanks to emergency whumping and pumping from my father... and it did Dads good to have a success, actually saving a victim from death. (Then the old fellow died three days later, when his diaphragm slacked out. Would have been ironic if it hadn't been inevitable. Dads fiercely wanted to put him on the heart-lung to sustain a semblance of breathing; but we only owned one such machine, and the Ooloms had already voted not to keep a single patient alive at the expense of 120 others. Fine thing, that: death by democracy.)

"If you understand the protocol," I told Zillif, "do you understand the risks?"

"Yes, Faye Smallwood. There are many ways an untried substance could harm me, and only one that could do me good. Still," she said, jockeying her head clumsily to nestle down into the pillow, "I admire the idea of joining a medical experiment. Especially a grand one. There's a chance I shall be instrumental in discovering a cure."

A miniscule chance. But I wished Dads was there with me. A whiff of Zillif's optimism might have perked him up.

My father arrived ten minutes later, his hair mussed wild and his clothes askew.

That's how I'll always remember him—never quite tucked in, as if one emergency after another kept him from pulling himself together. Even in the quiet days before the epidemic, he always managed an air of too-rushed-to-brush. And once the outbreak struck... well, precious little difference actually, unless it was a touch of smugness, now that he'd got a gold-plated excuse for looking like something the cat sicked up.

Not that my mother accepted
any
excuse. Since the plague began, she'd gotten daily more snappish about Dads's tousled state—he was a doctor, for Christ's sake, he should make a decent impression. She was especially infuriated by his beard. Six weeks earlier it had been bold and bushy, teddy-bear brown with just five teasy threads of gray. Then Mother declared the beard was lopsided, wretchedly in need of a trim. Each day she worried at it with embroidery scissors while Dads stood stoic but impatient to get away. By the morning Zillif arrived, my father's beard had been reduced to a five o'clock shadow, clutched tight and dark to his face.

Dads didn't care. He only grew the beard in the first place because he couldn't be bothered to shave.

"This is
Tur
Zillif," I told him.
Tur
was the Oolom politeword for a woman of venerable age.
"Tur
Zillif of the Vigil."

"An honor, Proctor Zillif..." Dads began.

"No," she interrupted. "You mustn't address me by that title. Not when I'm unable to fulfill a proctor's duties."

My father's face curdled with his "difficult-at-times" miffiness; he hated to be corrected by anyone. Since it was undignified to grump at a patient, he turned on me. "I assume you've gathered
Tur
Zillif's medical history?"

"No charts in the bin," I answered straightaway. In a more honest universe, I might have confessed I hadn't even checked the bin as I carried Zillif past the admitting table; but Eden this isn't, and anyway Pook would have handed me a chart if we'd had any available. Our spare chart-pads tended to pile on my father's desk till he downloaded their contents into the house-soul's permanent storage. Dads avoided that task as long as he could, sometimes covering the heap of charts with a bath towel so he wouldn't have to look at them. Each "completed" chart in the stack meant we'd lost another patient.