Vigilant

BLOOD-DROP ORCHIDS

"What’s going on?" Oh-God asked. His words were turning so mumbly I could barely understand.

"Unwelcome guests," I said. "Did you ever have dealings with dipshits?"

"Those pukes? I got standards, missy. No decent Explorer ever worked for the Admiralty." His gaze shifted over to Festina. "You don’t count."

"Smallwood!" a man shouted outside the dome. "We know you’re here, Smallwood. We want to talk."

Christ. It was the Mouth. Who the devil let him out of jail? But then, the Admiralty could afford good lawyers. It could afford bail. It could afford to bribe judges, or make deals with the government behind closed doors. For that matter, it could afford jailbreaks if it was desperate enough to learn how I got a Sperm-tube by the tail.

"Smallwood! You know we mean business. Come out before things get ugly."

Festina muttered, "Dipshits must take the same Bad Dialogue course as starship captains." She raised her voice, and called, "This is Admiral Festina Ramos. I order you sailors to stand down."

"No can do, Admiral," the Mouth yelled. "You aren’t in our chain of command."

Something hit the dome’s structure field. Maybe a sledgehammer. Maybe something heavier. The dome shivered and rattled like tinsel paper, but held solid.

"House-soul, attend," Festina said. "Dome field, one-way transparent, looking out."

The dirt brown color of the dome field started to thin, like smoked glass turning clear. Outside in the compound, Mouth and Muscle stood in tough-guy poses, staring at us… or rather at the blank dome surface, which would still be solid brown from their point of view. The Muscle held a whopping donkey-dick of a gun, one he had to prop over his shoulder to fire. A bazooka? Pity I couldn’t link to the world-soul and look up weapons so illegal not even planetary governments could own one.

"Don’t worry," Oh-God said weakly. "This dome’s as strong as they come. We can hold out…"

The bazooka fired. A finger-sized missile burst out of its muzzle, flashed through the air on a belch of smoke, and exploded against the dome’s shell. Boom. By which I mean BOOM. Blazing, blinding white. The dome field shuddered and snapped with electric crackles.

"No problem," Oh-God said. His voice sounded like gargling.

Tic moved close to Festina and me. "Even if the dome field holds, we can’t afford to sit out a siege. Oh-God’s condition is plunging by the minute. He won’t last much longer." Tic glanced at the dipshits outside. "Could we just drop the dome and rush them?"

Festina shook her head. "Look what he’s got," she said, pointing toward Mouth. Twilight made it hard to see, but the man was holding a pair of fist-sized matte silver balls, one in each hand. "Those are stun grenades," Festina told us. "Same principle as a stun-pistol, but with a good wide field of effect. If we try charging, those grenades will drop us in a second."

"What if one of us sneaks out the back?" I suggested. "Tic flies faster than they can run. If he gets clear of the jamming field, he can call for help."

"And if they notice him leaving," Festina said, "they drop him with a stun grenade. Then they’ve got a hostage."

"Do we have another alternative?" Tic asked. "Is it totally naive to throw ourselves on their mercy? For Oh-God’s sake?"

Damn right, I thought, totally naive. But was it? Yes, the dipshits had been ready to crack open my brain; and I was sure they wouldn’t mind roughing us up, maybe just in revenge for me breaking Mouth’s knee. But would they sit doing butt-nothing and let Oh-God die? That was as good as murder, according to the League of Peoples — the Mouth and Muscle would be branded dangerous non-sentients. Meaning they could never leave Demoth. Meaning if they tried to leave Demoth, their hearts would magically stop the second they got out of our star system.

Were these men really that devoutly loyal to the High Council? Loyal enough to strand themselves on Demoth for the rest of their lives, running and hiding from local police? Maybe. Or maybe they just didn’t think that far ahead — all thought focused on their brain-blinkered mission and let tomorrow take care of itself.

Muscle fired his bazooka again. The dome field jumped and crackled, fighting to hold its structure. At the point of impact the field broke into a crazy-quilt zigzag of colors, like a vidscreen with a three-year-old twirling its control knobs. The jaggies only lasted a second, then damped down, as the dome sucked up power to stabilize itself; but any fool could see the future didn’t look rosy.

"One more blast will do it," Festina muttered. "We’re out of options." She bent and scooped Oh-God from his cot. "Get to the back of the dome," she told us. "When the field collapses, scatter and run. If we spread out fast, maybe we won’t all be in the daze-radius of the grenades."

They’ll just hunt us down in their skimmer, I thought. Let’s try something else. "House-soul, attend," I snapped. "I’m a friend of Xe. Make a pinhole in the dome’s back wall."

It shouldn’t have worked; Oh-God hadn’t programmed the house-soul to recognize my voice. Or to obey me, even if it knew who the blazes I was. But a pimple of distortion pustuled up in the dome field like a bubble in glass, then popped to open a pinprick puncture to the outside.

"Peacock," I said. "Get us out of here."

One moment there was nothing; then the peacock tube was there, mouth flaring wide in front of me, tapering down to a thread that passed through the pinhole then widened again, wisping up over the trees and off into the twilit sky.

This time, I reacted faster than Festina — I shoved her into the tube. She had Oh-God in her arms; he hollered, "Oh shi…" as they both vanished, like cartoon figures sucked up by the hose of a vacuum cleaner.

"You’re next," I told Tic. He looked like he wanted to argue; so I hit him with a beautiful forearm sweep, knocking him clean off his feet and into the Sperm-tail, light as a rag doll.

Outside in the compound, the bazooka fired again. As the missile struck target, the dome field popped like a soap bubble, obliterated by the force of the explosion. With nothing to stop it, the blast kept coming: the fire, the thunder, a hammer of wind slamming me off my feet. The Peacock’s mouth darted forward to catch me… and then I was spilling down its gullet, spun out like yarn from a spinning wheel, thin as a hair and a universe long.

I don’t remember landing; I must have soaked up enough bazooka blast to black out for a moment. Next thing I knew, Festina was crouched beside me, shaking my shoulder. "Faye. Faye. Come on, Faye, talk to me."

"How about I say, ‘Ouch.’ "

"Better than nothing."

She sat back and gave me the once-over. As much as she could see in the half-gray light. Why was she looking so precious keen at my face? The skin felt tight and tingly, like I’d caught a wicked sunburn: scorch from the explosion. Was that what she was looking at? Or was she just looking at me, her eyes so worried-concerned, full of I don’t know what…

Let it go. Stick with simple thoughts. Like whether I had any major hurts. No, nothing serious. I could wiggle my fingers. I could wiggle my toes. I just needed to stay flat on my back for a second and catch my breath.

"Everyone else all right?" I asked.

"We came through in one piece," she answered. "Oh-God is in terrible shape, but Tic has already called for a med team."

"Then we’re out of the jamming field?"

"Well out."

Something about her voice made me sit up and give my surroundings a good hard stare. The trees overhead were monstrous huge — giants compared to the snow-stunted cactus-pines near Oh-God’s compound. Tallish even when compared to the Vigil’s office tree in Bona-venture. They seemed to stretch forever into the night sky.

Trees never grew that whopping big in Great St. Caspian; our winters were too harsh and punishing, the soil too scanty above bedrock. And I could feel a warm breeze wisping through my hair, cozy against my skin.

We’d come a rare long way.

Off to my left, a spindly row of palm trees separated us from a white-sand beach. Beyond that was water: the ocean (which ocean?) stretching calm to the horizon, where an edge of sun glistened above the sea. In Great St. Caspian, the sun had already set; after half a minute, I could tell this sun was rising.

Oof.

In the other direction sat a clump of grass-walled houses, upscale and airy, with wide-open windows, comfortable verandas, solar panels set into the red-bamboo roofs. On one porch, an ort hopped to the railing, fanned its wings, and clucked dick-smugly at the dawn.

"Where are we?" I whispered.

"Tic got a position fix from the world-soul," Festina replied. "He says it’s the village of Mummichog."

Mummichog. More than ten thousand klicks from Great St. Caspian. South to the equator and halfway around the world.

Why in Christ had the Peacock dropped us here? Because Oh-God mentioned the name? Because I’d asked the world-soul for information about the place? The Peacock had spoken straight mind-to-mind at least once. ("What are you?" Botjolo.) Maybe it could read my mind too — it saw Mummichog floating on the surface of my consciousness and decided that’s where I wanted to go.

Or maybe the Peacock had reasons of its own for wanting us here.

The door of the nearest house slapped open, startling the ort on the porch rail. The little parrot-pterodactyl gawped off a squawk and flapped to the roof, jabbering blistery with outrage. "Mushono!" snapped a voice from the doorway. Shut up. And a middle-aged Oolom man bustled onto the veranda, still fumbling with the neck straps of his tote pack. He looked around, caught sight of us, and called, "Are you the ones who need medical help?"

"Yes," Tic replied. He was kneeling over Oh-God a few paces from Festina and me, tucked under the cover of a skyscraping palm tree. Oh-God was propped with his back against the trunk, his mouth hanging wide-open. He was making sounds in his throat, but had no working muscles left to turn those sounds into words.

"What’s wrong with him?" the unknown Oolom asked. Without waiting for an answer, he launched himself off the porch and glided down to land at Oh-God’s side. "If I didn’t know better, I’d say he’s got plague."

"He has," Tic answered. "We’ve given him olive oil, but it hasn’t helped. Are you a doctor?"

"Closest thing you’ll find in Mummichog," the other Oolom replied. "Biochemist and paramedic. My name’s Voostor. Let’s get this fellow up to the house."

Festina was already lifting Oh-God into her arms. "Can you help him?"

"I’ve got emergency heart-lung equipment," Voostor replied. "Not fancy, but it’ll keep him alive till a real med team arrives. They’re scrambling an ambulance down from Pistolet; should be here in three-quarters of an hour. In the meantime, I’m supposed to fill in. Come on."

He led the way across his house’s lawn… a lawn of jaw-dropping green. Eye-watering. Even mouth-watering to someone who’d just spent ten months slogging through the white/gray/black of winter. I felt guilty for noticing something as trivial as grass when Oh-God was near to dying; but how could I ignore the rising sun and the warmth and the head-dizzy smell of Demothian orchids growing somewhere close by?

As I climbed the porch steps (railings twined with fat crimson blooms of obscenely lush face-flowers), I remembered I was still wearing my Great St. Caspian parka. I took it off; and, freckle scars or not, I slid up my shirtsleeves to feel the lick of sun on my arms.

I don’t want to say where that ranked on the orgasm scale.

Inside, the house was a speckly mix of sun and shadow: dapples of light shining through gaps in the grass walls, sunbeams flat horizontal in the budding dawn. "Through here," Voostor said; and we followed him past a parlor filled with cane furniture, into a back room where dusty medical equipment lined the walls. "This was all donated by the oil company," he explained. "They have workers living in town; I’m paid a stipend to be on call if someone gets sick. Almost never happens. Apart from bandaging minor bang-ups, I’ve never had to use the equipment before." His face fell. "And now suddenly I get a case of plague."

"Plague? Plague?" A woman’s voice sounded sharply in an outer room. "What’s this about plague?"

"Nothing to worry about," Voostor called back. In a lower voice, he said, "My wife. She had a hard time during the epidemic."

"I know," I said. I only had a second to steel myself before my mother marched into the room.

Twenty-three years since I’d seen her… except that looking at her was half like sizing myself up in a mirror. Blond her, blond me. Blue eyes, blue eyes. Amazonian, Amazonian. Vigil training had given me a titch better muscle definition, but Mother had obviously kept herself active; in shorts and sleeveless blouse, she looked fit enough to wrestle a shanshan. How old was she now, sixty-eight? As if that mattered with YouthBoost. She could pass for thirty. The same way I could pass for thirty. And we could pass for each other’s sister. Not twins, but not near as different as I’d been telling myself the past two decades.

We both did our hair the same way now — basic bangs’n’butch. Coincidence enough to scare the bejeezus out of me. It was a common style these days, and supposedly flattering to the shape of my face… which meant it suited the shape of her face too.

But still. Christ Almighty.

When she first came into the room, she didn’t notice me — all her attention was centered on the examination table and Oh-God’s slackening body. Mother had done her share of time under the Big Top; she could recognize Pteromic Paralysis as easily as any person alive. A pitiful sound came out of her throat: part gasp, part choke, part sob. She wheeled away from the sight of Oh-God lying slack on the edge of death… and her eyes lit on me.

Twenty-three years since we’d seen each other. I’d changed a healthy lot more than she had, enough so I could see her wavering on the lip of doubt; then her gaze dropped to the scars on my arms, and that was that.

"Faye." Her voice was pure ice.

"Hello, Mother."

"Mother?" Festina blurted. Voostor twitched in surprise, but Tic broke into a pouchy grin. The daft old bugger was just the sort to love coincidences… which is to say, he probably didn’t believe in them. When you’re at 1.0001 with the universe, synchronicity follows you around like a spaniel.

"Why doesn’t this surprise me?" Mother asked. "Voostor’s first-ever emergency, and it’s my daughter bringing in a case of plague. You’re a curse, Faye. A walking evil."

"Then let’s walk," I told her. "We can talk while your… husband… looks after his patient."

She stared at me a moment. A hard stare, as if it were nigh-on impossible for me to say anything she would ever want to hear. "All right," she said at last. "We’ll have a homey little mother-daughter chat."

She motioned me toward the door. As I passed in front of her, she pulled back to make sure I didn’t accidentally touch her.

We strolled out the back door, across another brazenly green lawn and into a shady grove of trees — tropical trees of a breed I didn’t recognize, with big clumps of rubbery leaves prodding out close to the path. The leaves were all soaked with dew, like fat wet fingers that slapped against you as you walked. Since I was still carrying my parka, I held it out in front of me; let it get soaked instead of me.

The air was almost liquid with orchid perfume now… and suddenly I realized the grove was filled with flowers, tiny ones, as short and slender as bean sprouts. Some hung from branches just over my head, thin white stems curled to corkscrews; some hid behind tree roots beside the path, their blossoms small and red as blood drops. A few sat in special planters, sections of small trees with the pith scooped away and filled by soil, enough to support a single dainty bud of pale yellow, or mauve, or pure jewel blue. But most of the tiny orchids were planted the way they’d be found in open jungle: in whatever nook or cranny let them set down a foothold.

The effect was subtle — subtle enough to rip your breath away. Not flashy, but exquisite. The more you looked, the more you saw. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of miniscule blooms, quietly congregated and meticulously maintained. "This is Voostor’s pride and joy," Mother said — the first words she’d spoken since we left the others. "We have greenhouses farther back on the property, and fields where we grow crops; but this is where Voostor spends his time. Planting new species that he finds in the rain forest."

Her voice was carefully neutral. I couldn’t tell what she thought of her new husband’s hobby — whether she took pride, or thought it a daft waste of time. My mother was the sort of woman who could go either way; you never knew what she’d respect and what she’d disdain.

"I love this place," I said. "An honest-to-God masterpiece."

"Hmph." Not ready to let herself care about my opinion. "Why did you come here, Faye?"

"It’s complicated," I told her. "Not mother-daughter complicated, if that’s what you’re worried about. I don’t want to borrow money, and I’m not in trouble… well, not my usual sort of trouble anyway. Do you listen to the news?"

"No. We don’t get it here." Her answer had a hard edge to it. When Dads became the hero of Demoth, Mother had shuddered under the media limelight. Reporters hounded her cruelly for quotes about the great Henry Smallwood, especially after his death. Her nerves were too chip-brittle for the barrage; one morning she just didn’t get out of bed. The next two weeks I played nurse for her, almost like a dutiful daughter, even if I bitched and backbit for fear of getting too close… and even if Ma spent those two weeks accusing me of taking pictures of her while she slept and selling them to the news services.

In time, that bad spell passed; but it didn’t surprise me she’d settled in a place like Mummichog, where news didn’t happen and didn’t get burbled in the street. It didn’t surprise me either that she’d chosen a husband who cared more about the planting of miniature flowers than catching suppertime broadcasts. My mother would rather float undisturbed in a placid backwater than heed the ripples and streams of current events.

Or at least that’s how she’d been when I was a teenager. Perhaps she’d become less fragile over the years, because she now turned to face me with a direct question. "Has the plague broken out again?" Mother asked.

"A new strain," I said. "It only attacks Freeps and may be resistant to olive oil."

"Really. Let’s hope they discover another cure soon." She paused, then added, "Maybe that will make the world forget your father."

She waited to see how I’d react to that. Did she expect me to get upset? To defend his sacred memory? Once upon a time, I would have jumped at any chance to scream that I wished she’d died instead of him; but no more. That desperate old need to hurt her had burned out its rage long ago. "Lately," I said, all calm and mild, "I’ve been learning queer things about Dads. Events surrounding his death. And something the world-soul let him do that should have been impossible. Do you know anything about that?"

"Why should I know anything about anything?" She sounded more tired than angry. "And why should you show up on my doorstep, suddenly interested about your father after all these years? Have you joined a recovery program, Faye? Going down a checklist of psychological baggage… things you’re supposed to clean up before you get a membership pin?"

"I’m a proctor now, Ma. With the Vigil. And believe it or not, I’m investigating something important."

"About the plague?"

"That seems to be part of it."

We’d reached a bower on the edge of the grove: a wooden bench under a dozen small plant baskets hanging from the trees. The orchids inside them were plain forgettable white, but they gave off a head-swimming smell, like fruit on the cusp of decay. Mother waved for me to sit on the bench. "You go ahead," I told her, but she didn’t.

We stayed there, both standing, each waiting for the other to sit first.

"You’re really with the Vigil?" she finally asked.

I nodded.

"Do they pay you?"

"Some," I said with a slight smile. "Nothing extravagant."

"Hmph." She laid her hand on the back of the bench, but made no move to sit. "I don’t remember anything about your father."

"Come on," I said. "A complete blank?"

"You know what I mean. I don’t remember anything special."

"Nothing that took you by surprise?" I asked.

"Well…" She turned her eyes away from me, back toward the house. I had the impression she was running through a dozen memories and censoring them all. "There’s this place," she finally said.

"Which place?"

"Mummichog. The house, a good-sized tract of rain forest and cleared fields… I never knew he owned it until he died."

"Dads owned this estate here?"

"Surprising, isn’t it?" Mother said. "But property was cheap after the plague. I’ve always thought he bought it as a present for me and was just waiting for my birthday to give me the news. Heaven knows, I would have been happy for a place to escape from Great St. Caspian winters."

"So he bought it after the plague? After he found the cure?"

"That’s what the lawyer told me when she read the will. Does it matter?"

"Maybe." I couldn’t believe it was empty coincidence my father bought property in Mummichog — one of Iranu’s favorite spots to visit. Dads knew something about this place. "Is there anything special here, ma?"

"It’s warm and quiet. Like heaven after Sallysweet River."

That could have been another shot at me — testing, to see if I’d get pissy. After Dads died, Mother was stuck in Sallysweet River because of me: because I refused to leave, and because the law wouldn’t let her abandon me while I was underage. We spent a few years there, inventing ways to torment each other… me picking on a frail-nerved woman, her grinding away at a jagged-edge girl whose soul was bleeding. Perfect partners in desperation, both acting as if we could ease our own miseries by making the other feel worse.

I got out by getting married. Mother got out the very same day, just up and left the church the instant I said, "I do." In the years between Dads’s death and her escape, Mother never once mentioned she had this place in Mummichog waiting as a getaway. Her secret inheritance. Five months after she left, a text-only message reached me (IN ARGENTIA, LIVING WITH AN OOLOM PHARMER, WON’T BE BACK)… and that was that.

If Mummichog was heaven, we’d both done our best to make Sallysweet River hell. A mother-daughter project, showing rare fine solidarity.

I glanced at her for a second, the way she looked so much like me in a mirror. She met my stare… maybe seeing the similarity too, I don’t know. Or maybe seeing the old teenage Faye, who’d hurt her and hurt her and hurt her.

Best to stick to business.

"Is there anything special about the land, Ma?" I asked. "Something that might interest an archaeologist?"

"You’re an archaeologist now, Faye?"

"I told you, I’m a proctor." Was she trying to catch me in a lie? Christ, I must have been a piss-awful liar in the old days, if I could be caught as easy as that. "I’m a proctor investigating the movements of an archaeologist, and he visited Mummichog now and then. A Freep named Kowkow Iranu."

"A Freep?" She frowned. "We’ve had Freep trespassers over the years, back in the rain forest part of our property. Voostor sees their tracks now and then; he’s heard they own land on either side of ours and take shortcuts through our jungle."

Probably the Iranus, buying land close to ours. But I suspected that Dads beat them to the most important part of the site.

"Are there any old mines in that area?" I asked. "Like the mines near Sallysweet River?"

"You’ll have to ask Voostor," she answered. "I haven’t spent much time back there. Too many insects. Poisonous creepy-crawlies." She gave a theatrical shudder. "Shall we head back to the house?"

"Your choice."

We walked back through the grove. From time to time, I stopped to look at more wee orchids, growing out from the trunks of trees or dangling on long threads from somewhere up in the canopy. Each time I paused, Mother did too… watching me out of the corner of her eye, trying not to be caught doing it.

Sizing me up. Wondering who I was. Or perhaps just wondering when I’d go away.

At the edge of the grove I suddenly turned to her. "You drove me crazy," I said, "and I drove you crazy, but that was long ago. It’s witless, both of us acting like ice."

She bit her lip. "You’re sure you aren’t on a recovery program, Faye?"

"When you join the Vigil, you stop being able to ignore the obvious. Like the way I acted the slut just to drive you frantic. That was flat-out childish. I’m sorry."

"Oh," she said. "You’re sorry. That’s all right then. Or is this where I say I’m sorry too, and we have a big hug?"

"Watch it, Ma — if we start trying to hurt each other again, we might see how much we have in common. We’ll end up bonding in spite of ourselves."

"Do you think so?" She glanced toward the house as if she was considering whether to run away inside. Flee, or stay and be brave a little while longer. Finally, she gave me a sideways glance that skipped past my eyes without meeting them. "You are looking good, Faye. For someone your size. I always said you could be a pretty girl if you’d just cut down the debauchery."

"You never said that in your life."

"True. But you’re looking good. You’re…" Suddenly, she spun away and started across the lawn. Without turning around, she murmured, "He glowed."

"What?" I hurried along behind her. "Who glowed?"

"Your father. At night. In bed. After he discovered the cure." She was moving fast, not looking in my direction. "Now and then," she said, "he glowed with faint colored lights."

She ran up the back steps and into the house, refusing to say another word.