Vigiant (8 page)

But now that I'd gone through
müshor...
my altered brain had lost the knack of shying away from uncomfortable truths. And I was scared, scared, scared.

The day I came back from the Proving Center, Angle's son Shaw asked me to do a trick—to show off what the new Mom-Faye could do, tell what the weather was like right now in Comfort Bight. (The biggest city on Demoth, ten thousand klicks to the southwest, sprawled around the mouth of the only major river running through the Ragged Desert.)

Shaw was just curious, an eight-year-old boy making a let's-see request... but I broke down in flash-flood tears. I didn't want to let anything into my brain unsupervised, even a simple "Force one sandstorm, toxicity B, expected duration two hours..."

Uh-oh.

The weather report had seeped in from the world-soul without me consciously asking for it. My bout of the weeps got swallowed by cold, cold terror.

I couldn't control the seed. Data tumor coming up.

But nothing dramatic happened.
Not this time,
I thought after a full minute of waiting.
Maybe the next.

That night I got out my scalpel—the one I'd used when I cut off my freckles all that time ago. In the angry dark days of my teens and twenties, I'd sometimes just rest the blade against my skin, or trace little patterns... very lightly, more of a game than serious intent. I lost points if I actually drew blood.

It'd been years since I last took out the knife. I'd pulled myself together, hadn't I? There was nothing driving me to hurt myself now. And if I was scared to shivers about data tumor, surely I could find a more comforting talisman to hold than razor-sharp steel. Something I could sleep with under my pillow and not worry about accidentally nicking a vein.

I sat naked on the edge of my bed and slowly laid the back of the blade onto my bare thigh—not the sharp side, just the back. That was all right, wasn't it? That was only goofing around.

A link-seed means you can't lie to yourself.

I found my eyes filling with tears as I thought, "It was supposed to be all better now. I've fixed everything, I've passed
müshor,
I shouldn't still be crazy."

Gradually, the cold scalpel warmed to the heat of my skin. After a while, I couldn't feel it anymore—light, thin metal, matching my body temperature... as if it still knew the trick of becoming part of me, after all these years.

Eventually I managed to put the scalpel away, without ever touching the sharp edge to my flesh. But I couldn't bring myself to stash it back in its dark, hard-to-reach hiding place at the rear of my closet. The poor knife would be so lonely back there.

I put it in my purse.

The time came for me to stop hiding mopey at home and get out to work: on City Council docket 11-28, "A Bill to Improve Water-Treatment Facilities in Bonaventure." Mine to scrutinize. Honest-to-God legislation placed in the fear-damp hands of Faye H. Smallwood, Proctor-Probationary.

"Probationary" meant I had an advisor peering over my shoulder through the scrutiny process: a sober, uncleish Oolom named Chappalar. When I first started my studies for the Vigil, Chappalar had struck me as bashful near humans, always half a step back and matching the color of the walls. He windled around town on foot rather than gliding because it bothered him to be the only flying figure in the sky. Each time before a global election, he petitioned the Vigil for transfer to anywhere with more Ooloms... and each time after, he put on a brave face when he found himself reposted to Bonaventure.

Lately though, Chappalar had perked up something considerable. Office gossip said he'd been seen sashaying with a silver-haired
Homo sap
woman, variously described as quiet, chatty, or somewhere in between. Translation: no one had actually talked to her; people had just spied from a distance and invented stories to suit their own tastes.

The usual naysayers tried to stir up a fuss about "mixed relationships," but no one paid attention. Humans and Divian sub-breeds had been doing the dance ever since our races made contact centuries ago. Ever since... well, it's queer to picture the League of Peoples as matchmaking yentas, but after our wave of humans left Earth in the twenty-first century, every alien race we encountered said, "Ooo, you've just
got
to meet the Divians. You have so much in common!"

The Divians lived nowhere near
Homo sap
space—the closest planet of the Divian Spread lay hundreds of parsecs from New Earth. But continuous nudges from other League members pushed us out for what amounted to a set-up blind date: first contact on the moon of an ice giant halfway between our home systems.

And surprise, surprise, we hit it off.

Our two species
are
precious close to each other in basic anatomy, intelligence level, evolutionary history... light-years closer than any other species we've encountered in the League. Yes, Divians change colors and have ears like grapefruit nailed to their heads; but when they and
Homo saps
got together, it wasn't like meeting aliens. More like tagging up with someone from the far side of your own planet—quaint accent and a bag of bewildering customs, but basically a regular joe who shares a slew of your interests.

Curiosity gets piqued. Bonds form.

As for species differences, you can prize them as exotic novelties rather than obstacles. Spice. They give you something to giggle over in the wee hours of the morning.

Understand, I'm talking about Chappalar and his friend now. Because I'm a married woman.

The gist of Bon Cty Ccl 11-28 was improving two water-treatment plants around town; ergo, to kick off our scrutiny of the bill, Chappalar and I decided to tour those plants. We also decided to tour the three plants that
weren't
scheduled for upgrades... partly for comparison, and partly to make sure city council was putting money where funds were needed most. (Fact: some plant managers are more likable/persuasive/politically connected than others. Guess whose plants get financial handouts. While plants run by folks who are unpopular/undemanding/unrelated to the mayor only get significant allocations when equipment falls to pieces. Or when the Vigil gets loud and cranky in council meetings.)

All of which meant that my first official act as proctor was a tour of Pump Station 3, just beyond the petting zoo on the edge of Cabot Park.

It was the butt end of winter in Bonaventure. Snow still sat in sodden clumps on the ground, but you could feel the kiss of spring in the air: a licky toddler's kiss that smeared your skin wet with condensation. The city's first thaw of the year. No one was fooled by it—Great St. Caspian winters never surrendered graciously—but give or take a few more bitch-slapping blizzards, greener times were on their way.

My stroll from home followed the shore of Coal Smear Creek, where park staff had just posted thin ice signs: those red-and-black ones with sensors that trigger sirens if someone steps off the bank. You need such precautions in Cabot Park; all winter, kids use the frozen creek for hockey or figure skating (Oolom kids for ice-sailing), and they hate to quit as long as the surface looks solid. Even with the signs, one or two dunces take a through-the-ice soaker every year... as Lynn's son Leo could attest. Except that Leo never breathes a word about what happened. It's Lynn herself who tells the story every time Leo brings a girl home.

Anyway. Picture a gray winter morning, with mist in the hollows, and moist air that doesn't feel cold even if it's only three degrees above freezing. The thaw has begun, trickling along the cement walkways and dripping out of the trees. Life is stirring from hibernation, and even a woman with poison ivy in her brain can let herself loosen up.

I remember the snowstriders that morning—white birds running across the top of the drifts. Every few seconds, they'd plunge their beaks through the crust and pull out frostfly cocoons to gobble. Like all native Demoth birds, they had no real feathers; instead they were coated in downy clouds of fuzz, giving them the look of ankle-high dust balls with small snowshoed feet.

Suddenly, the striders scree-scree-screeched and took to their wings; they'd spotted a looming shadow floating above the snowscape. Hoar falcon? Kite-manta?

Without a sound, Chappalar landed on the path beside me. Out for an early-morning glide. All by himself. And he had the air of a man who'd be wearing a huge smile, if he were the sort of man who wore huge smiles.

"Good morning, Proctor Faye," he said. "Lovely day." Like most older Ooloms, he'd learned English from braingrab lessons originally coded on New Earth. It gave him a la-di-dah mainstream accent that always sounded snooty to my MaryMarch ears.

"Good morning yourself, you," I told him. "You're looking like the cat that went down on the canary. Pleasant night, was it? You slept well? In good company?"

His outer ear sheaths flicked closed in a split second, then inched back open—the Oolom equivalent of a blush.
"Se holo leejemm,"
he muttered. You hear too much. "Sometimes I find humans disturbingly intuitive."

"Only the women," I said. "So you had a willy wag night?"

"I passed an agreeable evening," he answered primly.

"Se julo leejedd,"
I told him. I'm hearing too little. "Don't you know
Homo saps
live for juicy gossip?"

He didn't reply right away; but he walked with a rare bounce to his step, even for an Oolom. (They always bounce—they're light, and their glider membranes catch the breeze. On windy days, Ooloms think nothing of linking arms with any human who's walking the same direction, using you for an anchor to keep from blowing away. At least, that's the story I get from all the Oolom men who latch on to me in the street.)

Bounce, bounce, bounce. Finally Chappalar broke the silence. "Her name is Maya. Human, but you don't know her. One hundred and ten years old, but she has never missed a YouthBoost treatment. She is in excellent physical health."

I snickered. YouthBoost kept us all in "excellent physical health." If Chappalar mentioned it, he must have been struck by some wonderment of Maya's condition. Perhaps she was a
wide
woman.

"Tell Mom-Faye all about it," I said, taking him gleefully by the arm.

"Tell Mom-Faye my lips are sealed," he replied, detaching himself pointedly. "Whatever goes on between people is either private or universal. I shall not divulge the private, and you can download the universal yourself."

By which I suppose he meant picking up some Oolom/human porn-chips. No need, Chappalar-boy, no need. I'd seen enough of those in my dissolute past to know the basic interspecies geometries. What I wanted now were pure vicarious specifics.

But no matter how I wheedled, Chappalar refused to give blow-by-bump details of the night before. Truth to tell, he didn't speak much at all. He was too busy smiling, bouncing, soaking up the feel of the thaw. I could guess how his mind was fluttering with the inevitable morning-after speculations. Does she really... What if she... Should I... How soon can we...

"You're so cute," I told him.

Maybe he didn't hear—he kept closing his ear-lids tight as if he wanted to be alone with his thoughts, then opening them wide as if he wanted to embrace every sound in the world.

Christ, he made me want to fall fresh in love myself. Good weather for it too. I broke into a jog to keep up with his bounce.

The pump station formed one wall of the Cabot Park petting zoo—three stories high (the wall), fifty meters long, covered with a glossy mosaic of a woodland that had never existed. By some rare magic, this forest combined Earth cedars, Divian sugar-saps, and Demoth raspfeather palms. (Truth to tell, I'd never seen a real Earth tree outside VR; just a few potted saplings at the NatHist Museum in Pistolet. No Demoth government would be daft enough to endanger the local ecology, letting people plant alien trees out in the open.)

The petting zoo had the same kind of contrived cross-mix as the trees in the mosaic. From Earth, donkeys and sheep; from the Divian homeworld, domesticated orts (chicken-sized pterodactyls, given to annoying squawks but gentle with children); and from Demoth itself, fuzz-worms and leaners. (Fuzzworms resemble rolls of frayed brown carpet—boring to look at, but furry-soft to pet. Leaners are herd animals, like morose short-legged goats with the hides of armadillos. In the wild, they like to rest by leaning against rocks and trees; in the zoo, they flop themselves against the legs of visitors, gravely staring up into your face with a wrinkled, "You don't mind, do you?" expression.)

As Chappalar and I crossed the zoo grounds, two leaners followed us... one clearly hoping we'd brought sponge-corn from the concession stand, the other a robot chaperoning the first. Every real creature in Cabot Park had a look-alike robot companion, programmed to make sure normal animal behavior didn't become too much of a nuisance. If, for example, the leaner chose me as its resting post, all well and good (apart from mud stains and leaner smell on my parka); but if the beast went for Chappalar, the robot would cut in like Dads at a dance party, standing sentry between Chappalar and the leaner till the animal went elsewhere.

Here's the thing: an adult
Homo sap
could hold the leaner's weight easily. Chappalar, though, would be knocked ass over teakettle and possibly crushed. Leaners never got it through their dumpy heads that even though Ooloms looked tall and strong, they were actually breakably light. Ergo the need for robot lifeguards—otherwise, the League of Peoples would ask why we let potentially dangerous animals get rough on our sentient citizens.

The League had very strict rules against putting sentients at needless risk. Either you followed those rules, or you got declared non-sentient yourself.

You didn't want that. The League also had very strict rules for dealing with dangerous non-sentient creatures.

The door to the pump-station building was locked. Routine safety precaution? Or was some paranoid someone truly worried about saboteurs tampering with the city water supply? No. Most likely the staff locked the door for fear some leaner might rest against it and accidentally push it open. Before long, the plant would be full of orts and donkeys, not to mention sheep drowning themselves in the filtration vats. Who wants woolly water?