Vigilant

by James Alan Gardner

  “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 day
s 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.

  The kind of disorientation you got from riding a Sperm-tube?

  Last point: according to the miners, the lights in the tunnel were green and gold and purple and blue.

  The Peacock. There twenty-seven years ago. On the spot when my father died.

  13

  WOLFPACK

  Next afternoon Lynn and I were released…after some wrangling with medical authorities, who were royally cranked to have Lynn show up as an uninvited guest. More tests. More olive oil. But none of us Homo saps showed a single occurrence of the Pteromic microbe.

  Nor did Tic. Nor did Yunupur.

  “Pteromic B doesn’t affect Ooloms,” Yunupur reported. “It refuses to grow or even play passenger in Oolom tissue cultures. As far as anyone can tell, this bug only latches on to Freeps.”

  All of us, police, proctors, and assorted companions, had gathered in Bonaventure General’s VIP suite—a grotty little staff lounge that got commandeered whenever patients needed to hide from the press. That need was great upon us now: a full-fledged media gangbang was scrumming its way through the hospital, looking for broadcast prey.

  Reporters didn’t know all the details—the police had bottled up word about killer androids, for example—but buckets of facts were already circulating. Like the return of the plague; health authorities had decided the public must be told, to make sure everyone started swigging olive oil. And, of course, our government was obliged to inform the Freep embassy that Kowkow Iranu’s body had turned up. Within minutes, each person on the embassy staff was dickering with news agencies, selling the story to the highest bidder.

  (When I called home, Winston told me I’d been offered half a million for spilling everything I knew. Then we shared a restrained proctor-lawyer giggle, reciting together the Criminal Code sections governing Vigil members who breached the public trust for personal gain.)

  Still and all, we could get past the reporters whenever we needed to—our platoon of ScrambleTacs could spearhead through the journalistic hordes. The question was what happened after that. Where did we go from here?

  “I go onto the sidelines,” Cheticamp said gloomily. “This business ranks light-years above my authority—it’s world federal now. I’ll be given a wank-off title like ‘Bonaventure Liaison’ while the feddies take over the meat of the investigation.”

  “Ditto me,” Yunupur agreed. “The Global Health Agency is in charge now. I’m just a special thanks to in the autopsy report.”

  “It’s the same in the Vigil,” Tic said. “Bonaventure is now hip-deep in senior proctors, scrutinizing everything from fire hydrants to tea leaves.” He glanced at me. “Sorry to pass on bad news, Smallwood, but you’ve been reassigned: no more scrutinizing the police. For the next few weeks, you’re watching Traffic & Roads. Snow removal. Filling up potholes. Unplugging storm sewers. And since I’m your mentor, I’ve been ordered to accompany you on these urgent investigations.” He gave a weak grin. “For some inscrutable reason, the other proctors don’t want a Zenned-out loon valking them.”

  Silence. Gloom.

  “Come on,” Lynn said at last. “Is it so bad that other people are involved? No one likes to get shoved aside, but it’s witless to go all territorial. These new folks are good, aren’t they? I should blessed well hope they’re the best Demoth has to offer.”

  She looked around the room, waiting for anyone to say otherwise. No one spoke. The people who would take over—who’d already taken over in the time we were quarantined—would definitely be the best. Our government agencies had buckets of flaws, but they could cut the political dog crap in a genuine emergency. And if they didn’t take this situation seriously, the Vigil would wheedle and whinge till they did: till they assigned top-notch personnel with appropriate authority and resources to address the issues properly.

  “Yeah sure,” Yunupur said at last. “This is a job for experts. After all, what do I know about exotic diseases? Zilch. And I tend to jump to wild conclusions.”

  “What wild conclusions?” Tic asked immediately. “What’s the first idea that popped into your mind?”

  A great fan of gut feelings, our Tic.

  “Ahh…” Yunupur sounded embarrassed. �
�I keep imagining this disease was manufactured artificially. You know—germ warfare.”

  Prickly silence. Then Festina cleared her throat. “Why do you say that?”

  “Just…I can’t see how it could have evolved naturally. I mean, this six-month incubation period, when you’re contagious but nonsymptomatic. Doesn’t that sound way too convenient? Like someone wanted to infect the entire population before doctors noticed anything. Then the disease breaks out and people die in eight to twelve weeks, no exceptions. That’s weird too. Natural microorganisms don’t get far if they always kill their hosts. That’s like setting fire to your own house—especially for a germ that only inhabits one species. Natural microbes do better if they don’t kill their hosts at all…or at least if they let the hosts linger, infecting others all the while.

  “But the thing that’s really got me stumped,” Yunupur continued, “is this switch from Ooloms to Freeps. It wouldn’t be so odd if Pteromic B infected both races— that’s business as usual for germs, expanding their range of targets. But why should it immediately stop affecting Ooloms? That’s counterproductive evolution-wise.”

  He frowned for a moment, then let his face ease to a laugh. “See? I’m not cut out for this disease research stuff. An epidemiologist would just say random mutation can have bizarre effects. Microbes don’t have deliberate purpose in mutating. Changes just happen. Accidents. Flukes. A miniscule shift in DNA can have a huge impact in actual behavior, but there’s no conscious plan.”

  I glanced at Tic. As I expected, he’d gone all pensive. Never tell him microbes didn’t have a conscious plan.

  Getting out of the hospital came off as a fancy song-and-dance number from some cast-of-thousands show.

  The cast = police, proctors, Festina, and Lynn, plus a mob of overacting extras who’d be listed in the credits as The Media Wolfpack (Print, Broadcast, VR, and Other).

  The dance = a phalanx of ScrambleTacs surrounding the lead characters (including that blushing blond starlet, Faye Smallwood), all pushing forward through a battalion of journalists who jostled each other for room to thrust out their microphones, their cameras, their VR bobbins, their precious pretty faces, their hard, determined chins.