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.
Dads glared at me, just on general humphy principles, then turned back to Zillif. “We start by getting as much information about you as we can—your health history, personal details…”
“Names of my next of kin?” she asked.
My father chewed on that a second, obviously reconsidering whatever tack he’d intended to take. If he could help it, he never flat out talked to patients about the possibility of death; he’d assembled a thesaurus full of phrases that gave the required message when absolutely necessary (“prepare for the worst,” “put your affairs in order”) without actually having to admit he couldn’t save everybody from the Abyss. Dads hated patients who wanted to contemplate their own mortality.
“All right,” he told Zillif in a low voice, “we both know the prognosis is unfavorable.” Unfavorable: another willy-word from the Dads book of euphemisms. “But,” he continued, “people are working on this. We never know when there’ll be a breakthrough.”
“In the next two weeks, do you think?”
I bit my lip. Once again, Zillif proved she had canny sources of information: two weeks was the median survival time for an Oolom with her degree of paralysis.
“No one can guess when a breakthrough might come,” Dads answered, his voice all prickly. “It could take some time; but then again, it might have happened this very second, somewhere in the world. In the meantime, we’re doing our best. We’ll put you on an experimental medication—”
“What medication?” Zillif interrupted.
Dads glowered at me as if I were the one who’d annoyed him, then undipped a notepad from his belt. He pressed a touch-square on the pad, but I could tell he didn’t need to look at the result; he always knew what “treatment” he’d scheduled for the next patient
to come in. “You’ll be trying a terrestrial substance called cinnamon,” he told Zillif. “It’s the bark from an Earth-native tree.” Dads gave me a look, as if I’d accused him of something. “Humans have a rare long tradition of obtaining medicine from tree bark. Quinine…” He stopped and waved his hand airily, trying to make it look as if there were too many to list. More likely, he couldn’t think of any others.
“Cinnamon,” Zillif said slowly. “Cinnamon.” Speaking like a woman who’s been told the name of her grandchild and wants to hear how it sounds on her own tongue. “Will I be the first patient to try this cinnamon?”
“The first Oolom,” I replied, before Dads concocted some gollygosh story about promising clinical tests all over the planet. Lately, he’d shown a fondness for manufacturing unjustified optimism in patients—at least I hoped that’s why he made such wild-eyed claims, and not that he really believed them. I told Zillif, “We coordinate our tests with other hospitals to avoid unwanted duplication.”
“A tree bark named cinnamon,” she murmured. As if she was pleased to know her place in the worldwide medical experiment—how she’d make her global contribution to finding a cure, even while lying mud-still in Sallysweet River. “My people enjoy many types of native bark,” she said. “You can make a nice salad, just from the trees in this neighborhood. Bluebarrels, whitespots, paper-peels…and of course, chillslaps for color…”
My father and I let her talk—slurry words spoken with putty-muscled lips. After a while, Dads sent me to grate fresh cinnamon while he got the names of Zillif’s next of kin.
Here’s the thing: fifteen-year-olds can fall crazy in love faster than a sigh. In love with a singer, in love with a song, in love with kittens or cookies or Coleridge or Christ, and deeply-ecstatically-drunkenly.
Cynics will say the love never lasts—that you adore impressionist painters for a week, programming your walls with blowups from Monet and Degas, then suddenly, under all those water lilies and po-faced ballerinas, you stumble across a verse of Sufi poetry and boom, you’re a Muslim mystic, memorizing parables and meditating on the Ineffable Garden.
Yes, some teenage passions are superficial; but some are boundlessly-breathlessly-ardently transformative. In the blink of an eye or as slow as ice melting, your heart can be changed/lost/found forever.
The way I fell in love with Zillif over the following days. Evolving from apprehension about a woman on my roof, to casual interest in the patient I’d dropped off at the Circus, then metamorphosing into love, love, love.
Not sexual love. Not puppy love. Capital-R Romantic love, longing to vanquish enemies in her name, hanging on her slur-tongued words as if they were perfume that went straight to my brain.
What did we talk about? The sun when it shone, the moons when they rose, my friends, her grandchildren, the wildflowers I picked one afternoon near the town’s dump of mine tailings…
But mostly we talked about the Vigil. I wanted to hear everything. (Everything all at once.)
Nine hundred years earlier, the first Oolom colony on Demoth had been founded by a Divian billionaire who wanted to show the world he could design a Utopia. Scary idea, that. But the man did have one good idea: the Vigil. A constitutionally entrenched organization for watchdogging the government. Empowered to open any government file no matter how secret, to interrogate public officials from the lowliest sewer worker to the Speaker-General, to scrutinize every department and bureau and commission and regulation board that operated on any jurisdictional level: federal, territorial, trade region, or municipal. To monitor all the politicians, bureaucrats, consultants…and to report unflinchingly when any of those petty emperors had no clothes.
You could dismiss it as a typical rich man’s idea—fiscal-philosophical auditors riding herd over the government. On any other planet, the Vigil would soon become flap-in-the-wind powerless, or a scheming cabal of puppeteers behind the throne; but the Ooloms, the brilliant, careful Ooloms, found a secret way to make it work.
Not that Zillif told me the secret. I only learned that much later. Zillif just told me the Vigil’s motto: Wa supesh i rabi ganosh. LIVE IN THE REAL AND NAME THE LIES.
Can you imagine how those words gave me the luscious chills? Fifteen years old, viscerally idealistic no matter how blasé I thought I was, my heart zinging wildly from the overload of death and the need to think our existence could mean more than worm food…
Live in the real. Name the lies.
Rage against the dying of the light.
And Tur Zillif herself. Lady Zillif, my Lady Zillif. The shining presence of her: quiet yet arresting, as if there were a second electrical lifeform crackling under the skin of her dying body. As if she was what it truly meant to be real, and the rest of us were just pathetic fakes, too caught up in the busywork ballet to recognize our own emptiness.
A grounded woman. Like a Zen master…or a Shaolin or a Sufi or a shaman or a saint, all those caricatures of wisdom who show up in bad fic-chips to spout fortune-cookie prattle and guide the hero to a state of villain-whupping enlightenment. Except that Zillif was really there. Wherever you get when you stop being everywhere else and just are, moment to moment, sixty seconds a minute.
Do you understand? It sounds so trite as I try to describe it. The most profound revelations are glib Yeah-YeahSures till they’ve made you bleed.
Besides, I was in love. Pumped loony with a teenage girl’s hero worship. So screw the suggestion that Zillif occupied some higher plane of consciousness, dismiss it as infatuation for all I care. The woman blew me away; leave it at that. And let’s get back to the Vigil because that’s less dicey to talk about.
So the Vigil: an honored-honorable-honest body of disciplined scrutineers. Any age, any sex, any species, provided you could tough out the seven years of training and the final müshor—the initiation/retreat/ordeal that marked your transition from student to full-fledged proctor. But I didn’t know about müshor back then; I was only familiar with the Vigil’s public side. The big cases, like exposing a Fisheries Minister who’d taken bribes, or that whole mess about illegal practices in the Federal Justice Division. The small cases, like ragging on Traffic & Roads to fill the great whacking pothole on Gambo Street, or quietly suggesting it was high time a certain junior-school teacher learned to like kids.
Then there was the Vigil’s bread and butter: reviewing proposed legislation put forward by each level of government. Truth to tell, I barely paid attention to most Vigil critiques when they were broadcast—any talk about politics and the economy always struck me as so damned tawdry—but even a flighty fifteen-year-old could see that proctors were dealing with important issues. “Here are the people this bill will hurt. Here are the people this bill will make rich. Here are the risks involved. Here are the things that will change.” Time and time and time again, the Vigil opened up the subjects no politician, corporate news service, or interest group wanted to mention.
“Why is that special?” you ask. “Watchdog groups are a daydream a dozen.” Too true. But the Vigil had a stunning track record for getting things right. The predictions. The context. The true motivations. Unlike every other watchdog group in creation, they didn’t cry wolf just to attract attention. They didn’t have a locked-in agenda. And they had what amounted to police powers over the government, search and seizure, poke and probe, opening the closed doors.
No one could count how many legislative fiascoes the Vigil had prevented…because Demoth almost never had legislative fiascoes. Lawmakers were more careful with a crack squad of proctors looking over their shoulders; and if budget numbers didn’t quite make sense, bureaucrats were usually quick to correct any discrepancies the Vigil pointed out. On occasions when soft-spoken suggestions didn’t work, proctors were empowered to publish their findings to the world whenever they chose to do so— reports with a credibility no journalist or lobby group has had since the dawn of time.
If worst came to worst, the Vigil had one more sycophant-stopping power guaranteed by
Demoth’s ancient constitution: vote qualification tests. Before legislators voted on a bill, the proctor scrutinizing that vote could set a test to determine whether the politicians understood what the bill actually meant. Those who failed the test could only sit and grind their teeth in public humiliation while those who passed made an informed decision. It didn’t totally eliminate witless results—what could?—but at least it meant people knew what they were voting for.
“Always, always, always,” Zillif told me, “a proctor concentrates on the bill at hand. Never the intention, always the fact. Politics is filled with fine intentions, and with well-meaning people who want to do good. But the Vigil asks, will this bill do what its sponsors claim? Will it work? And what else will it do, what side effects, what loopholes? Who really gets the benefit, the reward, the money? The Vigil analyzes the consequences of what is really on the table, and we tell the world. Then it’s up to the people to decide if that’s what they want.”
I soaked up Zillif’s descriptions of how proctors trained to control their own political bias—not eliminating it (impossible), but bringing it out in the open, grabbing it by the ears and devil’s-advocating one bias for a while, then another, then another, like walking around a sculpture so you could view it from all sides. Proctors also got broad science training so they wouldn’t wallow in arrogant ignorance; they studied history, sociology, psychology, math, public medicine, ecology, xenology, accounting, monetary dynamics, and of course, the hard science: physics/chemistry/information/micro-bi.
Twined in with these mental disciplines were physical ones—an organism that lives for its brain alone turns clack-stupid in its specialization, complexifying simple things to impress itself with its own cleverness. Healthy sane awake people know how to get out of their heads and into their skins. So Vigil members grounded themselves with Oolom disciplines we humans would call yoga, qigong, meditation, martial arts: nimbling up the body to nimble up the soul.
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