Vigiant (4 page)

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 su-pesh 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-Yeah-Sures 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'sdescriptions 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.

God, oh God... listening to Zillif, I wanted a nimble soul. I wanted a soul, period. And by all the saints and our Holy Mother, I wanted to make myself
radiant.
Bright as glorious fire. Valuable. Important to important events. Jawdropper stunning, yet plangently meaningful. I wanted to be the one to discover a cure for the plague; to find awe-pummeling treasures in the alien ruins dotted around our planet; to dazzle the universe by being beautiful and smart and talented and wise and loved and memorable and chic and productive and sultry and happy and
alive...

On the afternoon of the fifth day, Zillif lost her ability to speak—tongue, lips, and jaw all went slack in the same second. Mid-sentence. "Faye Smallwood, why are you always so..." Then an ugly gargly sound, throat still pushing up noise with nothing to shape it. My friend Lynn called that sound "unloaded uvula exercise"... although Ooloms didn't have uvulas, not big obvious ones like in
Homo sap
anatomy. "Aaaaah gaah gaaaaaaah hah kaaaaaaaa."

"Faye Smallwood, why are you always so aaaaah gaah gaaaaaaah hah kaaaaaaaa..."

I put my fingers soft to Zillif's lips to stop her. It felt so fiercely, fiery, lonesomely intimate, that touch. Days before and after, I touched Zillif high up and low down, washing, swabbing every nook and cranny... but that was just playing nurse, doing a job with my hands. Only that one touch stays with me—my fingertips on her loose limp mouth, hush, it's over.

She stopped trying to talk, stopped making the fraggly jaggly un-Zillif noise. I would have kissed her if I'd had any way to get her permission. But she was closed off now: eyes, face, hands, voice, everything mudpuddled but heart and lungs.

In the following days, I still sat with her when I had the chance... held her hand till her fragile fingers changed from bed-linen white to my own fairish tan; but I felt too tongue-tied to speak much on my own. What could I talk about to such a woman? The weather? The latest death statistics? Whatever vapid fiddly-dick dreams might pass through a backwater girl's head?