Vigiant (30 page)

And olive oil got chosen specifically because our cooking never used it. If it changed, no one local would notice the difference.

My father hadn't tripped over a cure. Somehow, he'd
imposed
a new medicine on the world.

Wow. Way to go, Dads.

And I believed it, pure as gospel. It felt like the truth... even if it didn't make sense.

With thoughts jumbling as I entered my room, I nearly didn't notice there was already someone lying on my bed.

"Hi," said Lynn. She picked up a bottle from the nightstand. "Fancy some wine?"

"The family drew lots," Lynn explained as she poured. "Who would keep poor Faye company in quarantine? I won."

"You always win when I'm not there to watch you."

"Not always. Only when I want to." Now that we'd gone all respectable, my other spouses seemed to forget Lynn was a dab hand at picking pockets back in Sallysweet River. Show-off stuff, not actual theft—she'd lift someone's wallet, then give it back. "Oh, you dropped this." She learned to do it to impress me, at a time when I was only ready to laugh at rudeness. Lynn was still precious good at sleight of hand and could cut to the ace of spades in any deck... or draw the short straw whenever she felt like it.

"So how are you doing?" she asked.

"Uninfected, thanks. Which means you got lucky. How could you be so witless, sneaking into hospital when I might have the plague?"

"How do you know I sneaked in?"

I just gave her a look.

"Fine, I sneaked in." She handed me a glass, filled with what smelled like a nice ice wine. My favorite. "We figured you'd need company."

"You wanted to check up on me."

"Of course. We worry."

I held up my glass in a toast. She did too, then we both took a sip. Lovely stuff... which I know is not the proper way to describe wine, but I leave that "Impulsive, with overtones of blackberry" talk to Winston. He was the one who made the wine we were drinking; in the bad old days, Winston brewed a wicked bathtub gin.

"So how's it going?" Lynn asked.

"The plague's back, I've got a pocket universe following me around, and my father was not what he seemed. How was your day?"

"Vicki washed the cat in the toilet."

"You win." I took another sip of wine.

"How was it, going back to Sallysweet River?" Lynn asked after a while. "Appalling? Cathartic?"

"Easy in, easy out," I answered.

"Ahh, Faye, the story of your life." Lynn smiled. "You'll have to do better than that when you see Angie. She's rare keen on this birthwater-angst business. Why not practice your evasions on me?"

"Well, if you want evasions..." I spun around to get comfortable on the bed. Since Lynn's lap was there, I laid my head on it. "The tourist stuff gave me dry heaves. I lived in fear people would recognize me, but they didn't. And I avoided all the old places, except the ones that aren't there anymore."

She stroked my hair. "Last time I visited, the stores were full of your father's picture. What did you think of that?"

"I think you're trying to drive me into a Freudian episode."

"You have so many episodes, dear one, how do you expect me to keep track?"

I snapped my teeth at her hand. She didn't flinch—Lynn never flinched when I came at her, in play or for real, she just let it happen—so I kissed her palm instead. "What do
you
remember of Dads?" I asked.

She shrugged. The shrug made her lap bounce a bit beneath my head. She said, "I remember his beard shrinking, instead of growing..."

"That was my Ma's fault."

"It's still what I remember. I was fifteen. Deathly conscious of appearances." She grabbed my hand and gave it a quick kiss... as if something else had just crossed her mind, God knows what. "Let me think," she said. "I remember how he was so much shorter than you."

"Everyone
was shorter than me."

"True." Lynn herself only came up to my chest—a bony, short, brown woman who would never catch your attention if there was someone else in the room. My polar opposite... which had made for treacly conversations at a certain age, both of us saying how much we'd rather have each other's body.

Took me a while to realize she really meant it.

"What's the last thing you remember about Dads?" The question had just popped into my head.

"The last thing?" Lynn closed her eyes. She was still stroking my hair. "Sharr Crosbie and I were down at the mine offices..."

I sat up right sharp. "What were you doing at the mine?"

"We'd been shopping together when somebody beeped Sharr. Said Mother Crosbie had been in an accident, hurt her leg. So we caught a ride up to the mine; Sharr wanted to see that her mother was all right, and I went for moral support." She eased me back onto her lap. "Don't wrinkle your brow, dear one—you liked Sharr too, once upon a time. Before you decided to blame her for everything."

I started to protest, then stopped. The blasted link-seed wouldn't let me lie to myself. I hated Sharr; I had no reason to hate Sharr; I blamed her for things she didn't do. "Go on," I told Lynn. Nestling down warm against her.

"We got to the mine infirmary, and your father was already there, looking at Mother Crosbie's ankle. Saying it was only sprained, not broken. He put it into a foam-cast just to keep it safe for a few days, then gave her a talk about staying off the leg, making sure she had good circulation to the toes, blah, blah, blah."

"This was in the infirmary?" I asked.

"Where else?"

The infirmary was a single-room dome clustered in with Rustico's other outbuildings, all above ground. "How did Dads end up in the mine when the cave-in happened?"

"You don't know?" Lynn's hand stopped stroking my hair for a moment. "My own brother carried a copy of the report over to your compound."

"Which he gave to my mother. Who went into shrieking hysterics and tried to scratch my face to ribbons." I closed my eyes, remembering. "She screamed it was all my fault for leading a life of sin. God's revenge or something like that... not that she spent much effort believing in God, but she devoutly believed I was utter dirt."

"You believed it too," Lynn murmured softly. "We all look forward to the day you change your mind."

Not a direction I wanted the conversation to go. "The point is," I said, "I never heard the exact details of Dads's death."

"You actively avoided finding out. Because you knew it would be more fun having Freudian episodes thirty years later."

"Twenty-seven years. I could tell you the number of days, but that would be showing off."

Lynn pretended to tweak my nose. "What a one you are. If I tell you what happened that day, do you promise to get over all your psychological traumas in the blink of an eye?"

"Yes, Mom-Lynn." I took her hand and squeezed it to me.

"Then here's what I know... and I was on the spot through the whole thing. Not underground, of course, but I was plunk there in the infirmary when they started bringing up survivors. I heard all the details..."

Lynn's story.

Dads was talking Mother Crosbie through the care and maintenance of sprains, when suddenly he stopped mid-sentence. "Damn!" he said. "They've hit a..."

("Hit what?" I asked. "And who's they?"

"He must have meant the miners," Lynn replied. "The official explanation for the cave-in was they'd broken into a pocket of natural gas."

"But how did Dads know?"

Shrug.)

The next thing Lynn knew, Demoth was shaking. Not hard—just a teeny tremor, like the rumble when an ore-wagon goes by. Considering the number of ore-wagons trundling around the mine's upper compound, Lynn didn't realize anything was wrong till Dads sprinted for the door. Seconds after he left, alarms went off full-hoot in the classic SOS pattern: three short, three long, three short.

Lynn's parents were both miners. She knew the signals meant "Cave-in."

Mother Crosbie shouted, "Damn it!" and tried to hobble out of the infirmary—scrambling to help whoever’d got trapped down the mine. Sharr made it to the door first and barred the way: "No, no, too dangerous"... which was just a scared daughter talking, because Sharr didn't know bugger-all about what'd happened, any more than anyone else did at that point.

Mother and daughter squabbled for a bit, Sharr in panic, her mother going on about how other miners might need her; then the company nurse barreled into the room and said everyone was deputized to help him get ready to receive wounded. Sharr's mother let herself be persuaded she'd be more help in the infirmary than limping underground, slowing down the rescue teams. They all began to set up cots, break out medical supplies, that sort of thing... as if they were doing bed duty at the Circus again.

When everything was ready, they waited.

The first survivors arrived half an hour later. "Like a bomb going off," one said: a tunnel wall had blown clean out, cutting off half the afternoon shift on the other side of a thousand tons of rubble. The casualties arriving at the infirmary had broken arms, legs, ribs... but they'd still been standing on the lucky side of the explosion. At least they hadn't been trapped. Now anyone who could dig was down in the caved-in tunnel, frantically using lasers and ultrasound powderers to flake away the rock-fall, aiming toward those who'd been walled in.

"Did you see Dr. Smallwood?" Lynn asked a survivor. Lynn, Lynn, heartsore in love with me even then. She worried about Dads for my sake.

A gashed-up miner told her, "Smallwood was down there before anyone else. Checking us over. Making sure we were safe to move."

The ground shook again. Precious lightly. A tiny settling in the earth, nothing more. Down in the mine the rescuers backed off fast, pulling well up the tunnel to safer ground... all but Henry Smallwood, who was fixing an immobilization collar around the neck of a man who might have broken his spine. A tiny section of the tunnel roof collapsed, almost nothing at all—a token scattering of rock that separated Smallwood from the other rescuers for a bit.

Clearing away that rock took at most ten minutes. They found the man Dads had been working on, out cold but still alive. They also found my father: dead as haddock, though there wasn't a mark on him. The official diagnosis two days later said his heart failed from stress... all keyed-up, and when the roof came down, the jolt of fear must have been too much for him. Still, the miners told everyone he'd died in the cave-in. Call it tribute to a man who'd been right there with them, doing whatever he could.

One last thing the rescue team found when they broke through the baby cave-in: all the missing miners. The ones who'd been on the other side of the big cave-in, trapped behind tonnes of debris. The debris was still there, as solid as ever. Somehow the miners had passed through ten meters of hard-choked stone.

"Somehow they'd passed..."
I sat bolt up again.

"Faye," Lynn said, putting her arms round my neck. "You know miners. They invent folklore—all that time down in the dark. My parents were forever talking about queer things in the mine: eerie lights, strange sounds..."

"I never heard stories like that."

"No? Maybe the miners didn't want those tales getting back to your father. He might knock off points from their psych profiles, next time Rustico sent them for a fitness checkup."

"But how did the miners get past the rockfall?" I asked.

"Someone saw a light," Lynn answered. "They turned off their lanterns to see it better, then followed the light forward. Next thing they knew, they were past the blockage." She gave my shoulder a quick squeeze. "Of course it sounds odd, dear one, but remember they were dizzy and disoriented. All of them injured, and maybe more gas fumes in the air. The second tremor just dislodged enough of the rockfall for them to climb over—and the light they were heading for was probably the torch-wand your father used."

"If the rockfall had enough of a gap for them to climb over," I said, "why did the rescue team think the blockage was still solid?"

"Because they only gave it a quick glance. No one wanted to hang around in that tunnel. They hustled everyone out and didn't go back till robot crews shored up everything safely."

"Still..."

Lynn smiled. "Yes, Faye, it's all puzzling-queer. But things get confused during crises.
People
get confused. They look back and say, 'Christ, how did that happen?' But it
did
happen, so there has to be a rational explanation."

"The Mines Commission must have held an inquiry," I said. "About the cave-in... the law requires an official review."

"Yes," Lynn agreed. "And what they reviewed was the mine's safety systems. Whether the explosion could have been prevented. Whether emergency response procedures were good enough. They didn't waste time questioning a lucky break."

She was right. In the time she'd been speaking, I'd accessed the Mines Commission and the minutes of the inquiry. The whole proceedings were now bedded down in my mind—the testimony of witnesses, reports on physical evidence, the conclusions of the panel's experts.

Curious point #1: Rustico Nickel had met all safety requirements and then some. The "natural-gas-explosion" theory was accepted only because no one could offer a better explanation... and flat on the record, none of the experts liked it. Sallysweet River sat on shield-stone four billion years old; older than life on our planet, older than the biological processes that produce natural gas and other explosive fumes. So where did the natural gas come from?

Curious point #2: Dr. Henry Smallwood's body was too cold. When he was found, he'd been dead ten minutes at most. Yet he was right icy, as if he'd been passing time in a refrigerator—colder than the tunnel itself.

Curious point #3: Lynn said the trapped miners had seen a light and followed it. She'd also called them dizzy and disoriented, maybe from breathing gas fumes. But when I checked the inquiry records, I saw she'd got that backward. The miners saw lights a-flicker in the darkness; when they moved toward the lights,
then
they suddenly felt dizzy and disoriented.