Vigilant

Is that coping?

Several times, those of us working in the Circus caught one or another of our volunteer nurses trying to smother a patient. Then the rest of us volunteers punched royal crap out of the would-be mercy killer. We’d pound away, and the Ooloms would wax frantic with horror, some managing to scream, "Stop, stop!" while most just guzzled out, "Aaaaah gaah hah kaaaa!"… a ghastly guttural wailing which was all that kept us from killing whoever fell under our fists. Even so, the beating victims usually had to be hospitalized; but we stuck them in a different part of the compound, because we didn’t want a blood-battered human marring the pretty color scheme of white patients in white beds.

Is that coping?

We made jokes about the dead and dying — none of the jokes fu

The Circus also had a couple field toilets for the Homo sap volunteers working there… and you don’t want to know what rancid cartoons/graffiti got painted on the crapper walls. Someone burned the toilet shacks to the ground soon after the plague ended, and every human in Sallysweet River felt shamed-sheepish-grateful to the vandal.

You’re all welcome.

More coping? Two or three times a day, off-duty miners would carry the latest dead body to a mass grave outside town. We used an ancient tu

One night (inevitable), a mumbly-drunk miner shot a signal flare down the tu

Have I made my point? Don’t think this is self-pity. This is showing you the truth.

Through the whole of the plague, we festered in the brain. Our Oolom neighbors — dead. The patients we nursed — dying. Dozens of Oolom cities — empty, except for carcasses. One night, as a bunch of us kids sat in my dome, passing around a bottle of hoot-owl for an excuse to act drunk… that night, near midnight, my poetic friend Darlene whispered she imagined the Thin Interior stacked with corpses, mountain-high: the heartlands of every continent heaped with dead. Humans living on the coasts would soon see the rivers ru

All of us nodded. We’d had similar nightmares. Guilty nightmares.

Here’s the thing: none of us could shake the idea we were to blame. The Ooloms died, and we didn’t.

How could you not see the timing? Millions of Ooloms lived placidly for nine hundred years without ru

We must have brought something. Or stirred up something. Or created something. Scientists swore the Pteromic microbe didn’t resemble anything from human space, but we refused to believe them.

Do you understand? Not in your head but your gut. Do you grasp it? Do you feel the icy blame of it grabbing your arms and pushing you down under its weight?

No. Because you weren’t there. We were.

It was all our fault. We were marked with the blood of every magnificent old woman we didn’t save. And when we finally stumbled on the cure… Christ, the Ooloms treated Dads like a genius, but humans choked on his name. Olive oil? That was it — olive oil? Not a product of sophisticated research but something we’d had from the start, something we could have mass-synthesized anytime, and yet we sat with thumbs up our cracks while so many succumbed.

When we finally tallied the dead, the humans of Demoth had let more than sixty million Ooloms perish under our care.

Sixty million; 60,000,000; 6x107.

Or to put it another way, 93 percent of all the Ooloms in the universe. The whole of a sentient species nearly driven extinct because we couldn’t spare a little salad dressing.

It took a year (a Demoth year, 478 days of 26.1 hours each) for the slack-splayed Ooloms to regain full mobility… or as much as they ever got back. Muscles paralyzed too long were sometimes lost to atrophy, leaving thousands of the survivors with faltery drags in their speech or fingers that fumbled small objects.

Still, the Ooloms kept telling us they were glad to be alive. After a while, we couldn’t stand the sight of them. They reminded us of too much. They were a burden.

Volunteers stopped coming to the Big Top long before our Ooloms could take care of themselves. Dads had to pay people for the jobs they’d done so willingly before the cure made everyone feel like asses. By that time, though, we’d realized the Ooloms could afford the expense — they were rich now, at least on paper. After all, the surviving Ooloms had inherited the property of the dead. Ninety-three percent of the race extinct = 14.29 times the wealth for everybody left.

Simple mathematics… even when you factor in the economic do

People offplanet called that a silver lining. Those of us on Demoth saw precious little silver in anything.

Seven months after the cure was discovered, while the Circus still played ringmaster to forty-six patients, Rustico Nickel Shaft 12 had a Class B cave-in: the first in the company’s twenty-four-year history. Despite a dozen safety systems, the accident resulted in one reported fatality — Dr. Henry Smallwood, who happened to be on the scene tending a miner’s sprained ankle.

Sharr Crosbie’s mother. Tripped over her own feet.

The clumsy cow.

DATA TUMOR

My ages sixteen, seventeen, eighteen: angry, angry, angry. Survivor guilt and post-traumatic stress.

Hating Dads for being dead, determined to punish Ma because she couldn’t make it all better. I buried myself in a shallow grave of time-wasting: the sick kind, where you don’t like what you’re doing, know you don’t like it, and keep doing it anyway. Playing clot-head games in VR-land; having listless sex with anyone drunk enough to reciprocate; bitch-fighting my mother, my friends, myself…

One day, I got to thinking how I disliked a particular freckle on my arm. So I got a scalpel from my father’s old clinic and cut the freckle off. When the first freckle was gone, another one stood out… so I cut that off too.

Things kind of got out of hand. I still have to wear long sleeves in polite company.

But there’s no point dwelling on any of the witless, reckless ways I nearly sliced myself up, OD’d, or got beaten toothless in semen-stinking back rooms. You could call my lifestyle an ongoing suicide attempt; but it didn’t work, did it?

Didn’t prove anything.