Vigilant

WATER-OWLS

Something you don’t see every day.

The peacock thingy had materialized and swallowed my hand like a snake… and there at the other end of the tube, fifteen meters across the chamber, was my own plastic-gloved hand protruding from the field of rippling color.

I wiggled my fingers. Which is to say I felt the wiggling down at the end of my arm, except that the wiggling happened fifteen meters away.

Long-distance finger action. Rife with possibilities, that. Or was I just giddy with surprise/shock/bloody damned amazement?

I pulled my hand back. The fingers disappeared from the far end of the tube, and my hand was back attached to my wrist as if it had never gone wandering elsewhere.

The peacock tube winked out of existence. Job done.

Silence. Then Festina let out her breath in a whoosh. "Do you know how many laws of physics you just broke? You can’t be half-in/half-out of a Sperm-tail. They just don’t work like that."

"Maybe you never asked the right way," Tic suggested.

She glared.

Warily, I reached toward the corpse again. The peacock tube shimmered back into existence, and pulled its same hand-swallowing routine. This time its tail wafted down the tunnel and out of sight. I don’t know how far the tube went, but I could feel a gusty breeze pushing against my gloved fingers.

I pulled back. Bye-bye, peacock thingy. It vanished to wherever a deus ex machina hangs out between emergencies.

"This may be a rash hypothesis," Tic said, "but I think the Peacock doesn’t want Smallwood touching the corpse… as if there’s some risk involved. And if it’s risky for her, perhaps it’s risky for everyone."

"Yeah," Yunupur agreed, scuttling back a few paces. "Maybe we should think about this for a while."

I didn’t need to think. Whatever the Peacock was, I trusted its instincts. It wanted to keep me safe from something, and that "something" was likely contagious.

The plague was back.

Yunupur had disinfectant in his tote pack. We made him use it all, soaking his arms up to the shoulder and bathing his gliders too — anything that had come close to the corpse. Then Cheticamp ordered everybody out of the mine till a full Medical Threat Team could fly in.

When Cheticamp radioed for the team, he told them to bring plenty of olive oil.

Outside, it felt colder than before: that stiff wind I’d felt. (Had the Peacock really tubed my hand all the way to the surface?) The sky had turned wintry — chalk white, melancholy, sullen. A sky full of snow, and ready to dump it on our heads.

Cheticamp took Yunupur and the ScrambleTacs off to the police skimmers… either to discuss Iranu’s death, or to start making contingency plans if we really were facing a plague outbreak. Tic went with them to play scrutineer. I suppose I should’ve gone too, but I didn’t. Tough.

Instead, Festina and I hiked down to the shore of Lake Vascho. Neither of us spoke as we walked. We both seemed to have a fondness for quiet.

The wind died. The snow came. Big white flakes sifting down onto the lakeshore. They settled onto the sand, the trees, my hair… Festina’s hair… her eyelashes…

She looked at me looking at her. I pretended I’d been staring at the lake beyond her.

Hard to believe it was the middle of the day. Close to noon, but the clouds were clotted so thick, the world seemed two-thirds to twilight. Everything had got muted down gray. If the wind picked up, started swirling the snow around, we’d have trouble seeing our way back to the skimmer. But why should I worry about getting lost in a blizzard? The Peacock would save me, wouldn’t it? I’m too tired to think about that, I said to myself. Which would have been a good enough excuse to let my old brain coast away from confronting the issue. Didn’t work now. My link-seed’s cruel inability to shut anything out.

Po turzijeff. Kalaff. Not maidservant. Daughter.

Scary enough to knock the breath out of you.

Festina’s voice broke into my thoughts. "What are those things out there? In the ice."

We were standing hard on the edge of the lake — where the sand ran up against the lid of ice covering the water. The things Festina had seen were dark blobs as big as my fist: water-owl eggs, laid in the fall, incubated/frozen all winter long, but due to hatch in another few days, after the ice was gone. The owls were ugly as sin when newborn, slimy oversize tadpoles — nothing a bit like birds. They needed three more months to mature out of their amphibious stage; then they finally became little hoot-fowl, hunting rodents on land and small fish in the water. I started to tell all this to Festina; but the second she found out she was looking at eggs, she got a happy-crazed look in her eye.

"Eggs?" she said. "I collect eggs! I’ve got…" She stopped herself. "I have a collection," she went on, now trying to sound offhanded and only managing stiff. "A collection I could talk about for hours and bore you completely to tears."

I looked at her keenly. For some reason, I said, "I bet you don’t talk about your collection to anyone."

She gave a small laugh, half a second too late to be natural. "True." Her eyes flicked in my direction, but jittered away again the instant she met my gaze. "Look, Faye, I want to try to get one of those eggs. That’s all right, isn’t it?"

I nodded. "Water-owls are as common as bloodflies around here. Nature won’t grudge you taking one." I stepped toward the lake. "We can get a stick to break a hole in the ice surface…"

"You stay here," Festina said. "I’ll do this."

"Sure you don’t want help?"

"You stay back to pull me out if I go through the ice." And she slipped down the shore a ways, making a show of heading for a big branch of driftwood.

A shy and private one, our Festina, at least when it came to eggs. A shy and private one in general maybe, anywhere outside her job.

Made sense to me.

I watched her crouch on the shore, jabbing at the ice with one end of her stick. She’d break a hole through soon enough — it might be snowing now, but five days of thaw had thinned down the ice surface pretty well. Once she got a hole, she could use the same stick to scoop out the egg; after which, she’d have an ugly little owl-pole of her own.

Dads had given me a pet water-owl once upon a time. "Starts off icky, ends up flying"… that’s what he told me. Nature hands us yet another parable. And my owl, Jilly, served up a lesson of her own when she got out of her cage one day and never came back.

Lesson: one by one, things vanish from your life. Pets. People. My father, who I sometimes slapped in the face.

Light flickered beside me. I turned and saw the peacock tube, hovering above the lake, just out of reach… thin at this second, no wider than my outstretched hand. A glance over at Festina; she hadn’t seen it. Snowflakes were falling thick, and she wasn’t looking my way — drawn in on herself, all shy and private.

Fair enough.

The Peacock’s Tail was long now, stretching far over the water till the gold-green-violet disappeared amidst the snow. Its body swayed placidly back and forth, like an eel swimming lazily in calm water.

"What are you?" I asked.

Botjolo, said a sad voice in my head. Cursed. Self-destructive.

The language was Oolom but the voice was my father’s. Dead these twenty-seven years.

A moment later, the Peacock was gone.

Festina came toward me, a blob of gooey-jell cradled in both hands. "I’ve got an egg!" she announced. Her hair was speckled with snow, her eyes bright.

"You know you’ve got to keep that in water," I said. "Otherwise, it won’t hatch."

"Hatch?" She looked down in surprise at the lump in her hands. "Right. It’s going to hatch. I’d been thinking…" She broke off. "I only collect eggs. Just the eggs. I’ve never had… what happens when it hatches?"

"The owl-pole eats the egg jelly," I told her. "That’s what the baby lives on for the first few days. Till it’s ready to swim on its own. There’s nothing left of the egg after."

"Oh," Festina murmured. "Oh." She lifted the handful of jelly up to face level and stared at it. Eye to eye.

"They make nice pets," I said. "If you handle them gentle right from the first, they get fair affectionate. They’re a snuggling kind of species."

"I’m sure," Festina answered. "But no." She looked at the egg again. "I’d better put you back."

Slow walk to the hole in the ice. We went together… or maybe Festina went alone, and I just walked beside her. She knelt and slipped the egg back into the water; it bobbed on the surface, the way a snowball floats when you drop it in a creek. "Is that what it’s supposed to do?" she asked.

"It’ll be fine."

"I want to tell it to grow up big and strong," she said, "but that’s so damned maudlin."

"What’s wrong with maudlin? Weep bitter tears of loss, and I’ll never tell a soul."

She was kneeling, I was standing beside her. I bent over and gave a quick kiss to the top of her head. Her hair. She tilted her head around to look at me, her face, my face…

Then a skimmer flew overhead. The Medical Threat Team arriving.

"We’d better get back," Festina said. My mouth was open to say the same thing.

At least I think that’s why my mouth was open.

By the time we got back to the others, the Medical Threat folks were lumbering around in bright orange tightsuits, half of them plodding into the mine while the rest set up shop outside — quite the impressive pathology lab, laid out under a dome field, where we all got examined for the disease.

Simple summary of the next three hours: we were clean, Iranu was not. The deceased was hot, hot, hot — infected from ear-lids to toenails with our old friend Pteromic Paralysis. Or rather our friend’s newly arrived cousin, Pteromic B… kissing close to the original microbe, but with enough differences that it could now affect Freeps.

We prayed to all the saints this variant was different in other ways too. The original, Pteromic A, had turned out to have a latency period of six months, during which carriers showed no symptoms but were oozing contagious; that’s how the disease had spread to every Oolom on the planet without anyone noticing. Iranu had been down in this mine at most three months… so if the old pattern held, he could have been infecting people three months before he vanished from sight.

That meant all the Freeps at the trade talks. The Ooloms and humans too. Every blessed soul On Demoth could have been exposed, depending on how many species Pteromic B affected.

"If I were a Freep," Yunupur whispered to me, "I’d buy a shitload of stock in olive-oil futures."

He laughed. I precious near smacked him. "One more word like that," I said, "and I’m telling your mother."

Even if you’re young, some things aren’t jokes.

Though the med team pronounced us germ-free, we still got shipped to Bonaventure General and put into quarantine for a day. No one wanted to take the teeniest chance, even if the disease might already be romping through the populace. Our clothes were incinerated. Our bodies were full-immersion-baptized in three types of disinfectant, then irradiated with UV lamps hard to the edge of sunburn. ("Warm!" Festina cried. "I’m finally warm!" Easy for her to say — with that gorgeous cocoa-cream skin, she didn’t have to worry about freckles.)

And, of course, we drank so much olive oil our pores oozed with it. Pustulated with it. Like bodybuilders slathered in lotion.

Tic and Yunupur were singled out for special attention: led off to some Ooloms-only section of Bonaventure’s isolation unit and subjected to unknown indignities over the following 26.1 hours. The next time I saw Tic, he had sticky-plasters patched over his arms, legs, and torso; his only comment was, "No comment."

We humans got off lucky — no one considered us susceptible to the plague, even if the Peacock had worried about me touching Iranu’s corpse. A disease-jump from Oolom to Freep wasn’t a big step; they were different breeds of the same species, not much farther apart than Chihuahuas and Great Danes. Homo saps were utterly different, with biochemistries so alien we were closer kin to terrestrial amoebas than Divian lifeforms. Three different doctors told me the quarantine was only because we might carry the microbes, not that we could be affected by them.

I wondered who to trust: the doctors or the Peacock.

We all had to give statements: full-scale interrogation by investigators in disease-resistant tightsuits. I gave my report four times, to teams from four different agencies… and each team was shadowed by proctors from outside the city, seeing everything, hearing everything, scrutinizing everything. The Vigil was in high gear now, pulling in proctors from the Oolom playground communities to make sure nothing got missed or messed.

When the questions were over, Festina and I retired to her room in the isolation unit. She had a new uniform, a new stunner, a new Bumbler, all flown in from Snug Harbor when her old equipment got impounded by health authorities; so naturally she had to field-strip the gadgets, clean them, program her favorite settings into the Bumbler, and generally fuss to get everything just so.

"This plague is a wimp-ass disease," she told me as she worked. "A latency period of six months? In the Explorer Corps, anything that doesn’t kill within twelve hours is a low-grade nuisance. The med-techs hand you a tube of salve, then send you back to work."

Words saying one thing, eyes the opposite. I could tell she knew the enormity of death. The absences it made. How it got into your eyes and ears and head, so that everything you saw of the world was shaded darker, crueler, bitter indifferent.

Christ Almighty, I didn’t want to go through that again.

Time on our hands and we talked, Festina and me… about true things and trite, present business, past desperations, where we were and who we’d once been.

What it was like to have a link-seed in the brain.

What it was like to have a flaming red birthmark on the face. Being considered "expendable" because of it. The Explorer Corps called themselves ECMs — Expendable Crew Members. And their rallying cry, if you could call it that, was the thing they said whenever one of their number died: "That’s what ‘expendable’ means."

Festina told me she’d once killed her best friend. So I showed her my freckle scars. And my scalpel. Which had been returned to me, unlike everything else I’d been carrying. Hospitals are good at baking scalpels clean… especially as a favor to a woman who fondly keeps a memento of her sainted doctor father.

Festina wanted to touch my scars. So I let her. And she let me touch her cheek… which felt precious soft…

But mostly we just talked. Doctors and nurses right outside the door.

I didn’t understand Sperm-tubes. Festina explained what she knew.

"Each one is a spacetime outside spacetime. A self-contained pocket universe that can travel through the real universe faster than light, without relativistic or inertial effects. The colored tube is the region where the two universes touch each other… where you get spontaneous generation of photons and other particles because of boundary effects. And don’t ask me to explain boundary effects, because it’s all just double-talk for something we don’t understand. Four hundred years since the League of Peoples gave us star drives, and we still know fuck-all about them.

"If you want another boundary effect," she went on, "it’s that weird-shit hallucination you get as you pass down a Sperm-tube. Supposedly the sensation only happens when you pass from the outside universe into the tube universe and when you go back out again; but it sure as hell feels like you’re experiencing every twist of the tail as you travel along, not just at beginning and end." She gave me a curious look. "What did you feel when your arm went in one end and your hand came out the other?"

"Not much," I replied. "Like everything was connected normally, except my fingers were on the far side of the room."

Festina shook her head in wonder. "Admiralty manuals say that once you start entering a tube universe, you have to go all the way inside before you can try to leave again. You aren’t allowed to straddle universes for more than a quantum second. There’s some sort of exclusion principle… which probably means as much as ‘boundary effect,’ considering what you did this morning."

"I didn’t do it," I said. "The Peacock did."

"Who’s the Peacock? Whoever generated the Sperm-tube?"

"I’m pretty sure the tube itself is intelligent… which probably means the universe inside. It’s a conscious entity. It, uhh…"

I stopped myself from saying the Peacock had talked to me. Festina was looking dubious already.

"Sentient universes make nice stories," she said. "There’s a tradition of such tales going back centuries: sentient stars, sentient planets, sentient galaxies of dark matter… but that’s all crap for the fic-chips. It’s dangerous to believe in fictions, Faye. Stupid beliefs get people killed."

"So if you were in a haunted house," I said, "you’d be the one who goes into the attic to prove there aren’t ghosts?"

"No," she answered. "I’d be the one on the front lawn with a flamethrower. Shouting, ‘Anything sentient better come out fast, cuz I’m burning this place to cinders.’ I don’t believe in ghosts… but I really don’t believe in taking chances."

An attendant came to the door — a human female in her late twenties, who should have been a woman but was still dragging her heels back at girl. Too goddamned chirpy by half. "Lights out in fifteen minutes, ladies! And here, your last olive oil for the day."

"It doesn’t even taste like olive oil," Festina grumbled. "There’s a strange aftertaste. You put something extra in it, right? Antibiotics or immunoboosts."

"What a sourpuss!" the attendant said. "This oil came straight from the synthesizer. I poured it myself. And before you go making harsh remarks about hospital food, all our synthesizers download their recipes straight from the world-soul’s databanks. This is one hundred percent pure olive oil. Extra virgin." She tittered at the word. She would.

Festina muttered, "Your world-soul doesn’t know dick about olive oil." She glanced at me. "Your people were originally colonists from Come-By-Chance, right? How much do you use olive oil in your cooking?"

"Not at all," I admitted. "Our cuisine tends toward cod cheeks, potatoes, and kidney pie."

"Oh but in fancy restaurants," the attendant said, "in the fancy restaurants… well, in fancy restaurants you still get cod cheeks, but they’ve got a parsley garnish."

"Hmmph." Festina glared at the midget beaker of oil she was supposed to swallow. "On Agua, we understood olive oil. Good olive oil. Fried in it, poured it over salads, dripped it into every batter, made olive bread… and our synthesizers never produced crap with this aftertaste. If you ask me, your recipe database has a bug in it. And you unenlightened clods don’t know olive oil well enough to tell the difference."

All right, Festina-girl, those are fighting words. I reached out with my link-seed up to the North Orbital Terminus, to the ships docked there. Greetings in the name of Xe. Might I converse with a ship-soul not native to Demoth?

A dozen yes’s — not the spoken sound of ship computers saying, "Yes," but an amiable knowledge of ships willing to talk. Xe’s name opened doors… something to think about another time.

I want to compare your recipe for olive oil with the one used by Demoth’s world-soul. Is that acceptable?

More yes’s — I wasn’t asking for confidential information, was I? Every ore-hauler and passenger liner in orbit had its synthesizer database programmed from its home planet; and the planetary databases themselves would have been initialized from the master one on New Earth, official reference point for synthesizers throughout the Technocracy. On a staple like olive oil, the databases should all agree. Then I could rag on Festina she was just being a baby. That our olive oil was the same as everyone else’s, down to the last molecule, and let’s have no more of this "Agua cooks better than Demoth" malarkey.

Download and compare, I ordered our own world-soul. A pause. From the world-soul. Not for processing but for something else. I got the queerest impression the world-soul was deciding whether to lie to me… like when you catch kids making a mess, and you can see on their faces, they’re wondering if they can fib their way out.

Then the responses on the comparison. Different. Different. Different.

The Demoth formula for olive oil didn’t match a single ship in orbit.

Holy Mother of God.

Quick comparisons: the foreign ships all agreed with each other. Demoth was the odd recipe out. It had unexpected extra ingredients, several long-chain organic molecules the world-soul claimed were not indexed in the biochem database.

Lord thundering Jesus.

Sometime since Homo saps came to Demoth — since human foods got added to the Oolom computer banks — the recipe for olive oil had been corrupted. Or reprogrammed. And our ways of cooking used so little olive oil, no one had ever raised a fuss.

Coincidence? Not blessed likely.

Access backup archives, I ordered the world-soul. The yearly backups we took of all standard databases. Find the year our olive-oil recipe deviated from initial settings.

The answer came back bolt-fast… too quick for the world-soul to have loaded and checked the off-line backups. It already knew the answer.

The change came the year of the plague.

What caused the change? I asked.

The answer appeared in my head, almost as if it’d been spoken aloud in cover-your-ass computerese.

The database was reprogrammed by a user with sufficient permissions to make the modification. Dr. Henry Smallwood.

I left Festina without spilling a word of what I’d just learned. One mumbly good night, then I scuttled off toward the isolation room that held my assigned bed. Me thinking all the while.

Dads was a humble country doctor. He didn’t have permissions to tamper with standard databases. That took passwords, retinal identification, secondary confirmation from government authorities, oversight by a team of programmers and biochemists. Synthesizer recipes had diamond-hard security, tighter than any other data on the planet… because if a fumble-fingered programmer accidentally changed the formula for sugar into strychnine, you could kill a million people in the time it took to make supper.

But.

Suppose the world-soul was telling the truth. That somehow, twenty-seven years ago, Dads had reprogrammed the formula for olive oil. Changed it to include something extra, with the teeny aftertaste Festina noticed.

Something that cured the plague.

So when synthesizers all over the world produced olive oil, they manufactured the cure.

And olive oil got chosen specifically because our cooking never used it. If it changed, no one local would notice the difference.

My father hadn’t tripped over a cure. Somehow, he’d imposed a new medicine on the world.

Wow. Way to go, Dads.

And I believed it, pure as gospel. It felt like the truth… even if it didn’t make sense.

With thoughts jumbling as I entered my room, I nearly didn’t notice there was already someone lying on my bed.

"Hi," said Lynn. She picked up a bottle from the nightstand. "Fancy some wine?"

"The family drew lots," Lynn explained as she poured. "Who would keep poor Faye company in quarantine? I won."

"You always win when I’m not there to watch you."

"Not always. Only when I want to." Now that we’d gone all respectable, my other spouses seemed to forget Lynn was a dab hand at picking pockets back in Sallysweet River. Show-off stuff, not actual theft — she’d lift someone’s wallet, then give it back. "Oh, you dropped this." She learned to do it to impress me, at a time when I was only ready to laugh at rudeness. Lynn was still precious good at sleight of hand and could cut to the ace of spades in any deck… or draw the short straw whenever she felt like it.

"So how are you doing?" she asked.

"Uninfected, thanks. Which means you got lucky. How could you be so witless, sneaking into hospital when I might have the plague?"

"How do you know I sneaked in?"

I just gave her a look.

"Fine, I sneaked in." She handed me a glass, filled with what smelled like a nice ice wine. My favorite. "We figured you’d need company."

"You wanted to check up on me."

"Of course. We worry."

I held up my glass in a toast. She did too, then we both took a sip. Lovely stuff… which I know is not the proper way to describe wine, but I leave that "Impulsive, with overtones of blackberry" talk to Winston. He was the one who made the wine we were drinking; in the bad old days, Winston brewed a wicked bathtub gin.

"So how’s it going?" Lynn asked.

"The plague’s back, I’ve got a pocket universe following me around, and my father was not what he seemed. How was your day?"

"Vicki washed the cat in the toilet."

"You win." I took another sip of wine.

"How was it, going back to Sallysweet River?" Lynn asked after a while. "Appalling? Cathartic?"

"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 days 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.