Vigilant

PROPOSALS

The shore of Lake Vascho.

I lay on the beach under the quiet blackness of a northern night — clouds still riding fast on the warm spring wind, but not so thick as in Sallysweet River. Stars shone through the cloud gaps, thousands of stars… and I thought of nights once upon a time, sleeping clear and girlish with the whole universe open above me.

The Peacock hovered gently over the water. He’d brought me here. Of course my father wouldn’t let me fall into a bottomless pit.

"Jai," I said. Thank you. Achy and woozy, I stayed flopped out on the sand. Nothing but stars overhead… till the Peacock fluttered up Dads-anxious, only a hand-breadth from my nose.

"I’m all right," I told him. "Well… if you can read my mind, you know I hurt like blazes. 8.5 on the getting-your-arm-torn-off scale. But it’s still minor. I think. How are you?"

Do no. Good.

"Where’s Xe?"

Tic.

"Did you say tico?" I asked.

Tic. Oov Tic.

With Tic.

"Short honeymoon," I said. "First time you two get together in three thousand years, and a day later, she’s off Riding mortals again."

Ve hadadda shunt. It’s what we do.

"You Rode my father, didn’t you?"

Gaha efliredd po. Copodd.

I didn’t Ride your father. I fused.

"Tell me about it."

Bit by bit, in his shy Oolom, the Peacock let his story trickle out.

It started long before the plague — the birth of a baby named Zillif. Or even before that: the very clock-tick of conception. The Peacock slipped into the zygote and Rode through embryo, foetus, infant, child, woman… till mushor changed the woman to a proctor.

The Ride was never fusion; but there was still a tiny mingling. A leakage of energies, Peacock to baby girl… and maybe the other way too, for all I know. Zillif grew up in the Peacock’s glow — as if there were some special element in the air she breathed, giving the woman her own faint shine.

I’d felt it myself. I adored her for it.

To the Peacock, Zillif was just another Ride; when he hitchhiked on someone cradle-to-crypt, it was common for his hosts to rise above the crowd. He liked that specialness. Maybe he even encouraged it to make the Ride more interesting, found ways to spill teeny bits of his brightness into his host’s life. But it was a teasy game, far from full fusion. He’d sworn he would never fuse again… not after the things he’d done while bonded to a Greenstrider, spurred half-mad by his fusion-mate’s lust to kill enemies.

(Oh yes, I’d been right about that. When the Peacock fused with the Greenstrider, the two-in-one creature seethed with all the black murder from the original strider’s heart. Xe’s germ factory may have scored the higher body count, but Peacock/strider fought hard to keep up.)

So. The Peacock Rode passively through Zillif’s life. He took no action, not even when the Pteromic microbe began slacking out Ooloms all over the world. The Peacock held himself back, because the last time he’d got involved, it led to disaster.

Or that was his excuse. Even superintelligent pocket universes lie to themselves, when doing the right thing seems like too much work.

Zillif herself became infected eventually. The Peacock watched, and thought now and then maybe something ought to be done. But not by him; he was out of it. He’d lived through the deaths of lesser creatures many times before: not just his hosts but the people they loved. Griefs and pains and rage at the dying of the light.

So what? So what if the Ooloms died? It wasn’t as if they were an important species. And if they didn’t get killed by this disease, they’d drop from something else. As an immortal, the Peacock prided himself on his sense of perspective.

Zillif resisted the paralysis better than most — part of the Peacock’s reflected shine, that tiny boost from his energies. But in time she succumbed; in time she landed on my roof and got carried to the Circus, where she dazzled a lovestruck girl a few days, then slipped off speechless. "Aaaaah gaah gaaaaaaah hah kaaaaaaaa."

At which point, you’d think the story would end: Zillif left mute, barely alive, waiting for the slacks to fall. The Peacock would Ride her to the end, then pick a new host — human of course, since all the nearby Ooloms were in deplorable Riding condition — and nothing would change. For damned sure, the Peacock wouldn’t intervene.

Except that Zillif was an old old proctor. And in her last three days lying slack, unable to talk, collapsing in on herself… Zillif Zenned out.

Here’s the thing, the crucial thing: Zillif somehow realized the Peacock was there. Maybe she felt the tiny spill of energy from him, maybe there was some burst of mystic intuition, or maybe (anything’s possible) Xe found a way to sneak the truth into Zillif’s brain. For all I know, the old woman may just have gone tico: not cosmic Zen anything, but plain old pre-death delusion. However it happened, Zillif got the idea an advanced alien entity was lurking in the neighborhood; and she began to plead.

She thought she was addressing some emissary from the League of Peoples — some telepathic thing watching from the aether. So she talked to it; she begged; she ranted; asking for a cure, not for herself, but for her people.

The Peacock found himself answering… the same way he talked to me sometimes, mind to mind. And for three days Zillif wrestled with him, angel by the ladder, fighting to break the Peacock away from passive watching, so that he’d goddamned do something.

I can’t tell you what she said; but her whole life had been devoted to speaking with powerful people, putting together common sense and good argument to shift folks away from ill-advised plans. To the last, Zillif was a member of the Vigil… and her silent one-on-one with the Peacock was the most important battle of her life.

The queer thing is I was there through it all, holding her hand, sponging her down, checking her IVs and catheters and monitor cords. I was there, I was with her, but I was pure bliss-ignorant that the war for the Oolom race was raging right in front of me. Zillif vs. the Peacock… doing something vs. staying aloof.

You already know who won.

When Zillif finally persuaded the Peacock to take action, he left her body — snipping off that tiny thread of spilled energy. Zillif died like a light clicking out, blink, like that. In the outside world, young Faye began to cry as her heart withered… not realizing that what looked like pointless defeat was actually the old woman’s greatest triumph.

Because now, the Peacock was flying.

Out of Zillif, into the closest available healer — bonding, fusing with Dr. Henry Smallwood, because the Peacock needed to work through a pair of physical hands. In a way, my father died scant seconds after Zillif herself: he became a two-in-one creature, half man, half Peacock, the old submerged in the new. Not that Dads would consider it a bad deal; I imagine he’d leap at any chance to stomp the Pteromic microbe’s vicious little butt.

It needed a joint effort to construct the cure — not just Dads and the Peacock, but Xe too. Xe knew how the germ factory worked, and she was hooked into all the digital intelligence in the world. It only took a few hours for so much processing power to come up with a medicine… after which, Dads/Peacock/Xe hacked into the recipe database and made the change in olive oil. Epidemic closed.

All that time, the Peacock still believed Xe was tico, nago, wuta; he thought he was just using her, exploiting the way she was bound to the obelisk computer. Poor Peacock never realized Xe was eager to help: that she’d gone sane-sorry-sentient over the years, and was heartsick dismayed how her germ factory was near to pulling off another genocide. If their places had been switched, the Peacock imprisoned, Xe loose, she wouldn’t have needed a marathon debate with Zillif before she took action.

So I tell myself. Maybe Xe would have been just as don’t-get-involved as her mate. Both of them needed to damned well grow up… which they eventually did.

Seven months passed after the cure was tossed out to the world. Dads and the Peacock stayed fused all that time — fused for life. At unguarded moments, they glowed in the dark: my mother saw the flickery peacock colors shining just under my father’s skin.

Then the afternoon shift at Rustico Nickel set off a bomb on the outer defense perimeter of the Greenstrider bunker. Cave-in alarms started clanging, and Dads/Peacock faced a decision. The Peacock could rescue the trapped miners, but only by cutting the connection with my father. That would, of course, be fatal. To save the miners, Henry Smallwood had to die.

The Peacock told me Dads didn’t hesitate an instant.

So the Peacock separated itself, threaded its tube-body through the rockfall, and ferried the miners to safety. Yes, Dads died — energy ripped from his human body like a gusher of blood, leaving him cold, cold, cold. But… the Peacock still held on to a chunk of my father’s memories, motivations, sentiments. Such as a love for his daughter.

Guess who the Peacock caught a Ride with next — a quiet little nonfusion ever-watching Ride. And guess whom the Peacock protected off and on through the next twenty-seven years.

Now we’d come full circle: same crisis, same solution. Peacocks weren’t fitted for getting things done in our human world; not when it meant working hands-on with computers, security interlocks, things like that. The simple ways they could communicate with us (telepathy, link-seed) were too slow-awkward-clumsy to whip up a cure for Pteromic B and C — like shouting instructions through a wall at a not-too-bright child.

That was the Peacock’s analogy, not mine. From my side, the communication seemed fair successful — yes, the Peacock spoke Oolom rather than English because he’d been immersed in the language for nine hundred years… but I’d been immersed in Oolom all my life too, and I understood it just fine. Apparently that wasn’t good enough: mere words were too limiting for a superintelligent pocket universe trying to get life-and-death information across to a half-wit meat-woman.

All right. If the Peacock believed the only way to produce a cure was fusing with someone, how could a meat-woman argue?

"Fusing," I said. "You or Xe — you have to fuse with someone to make the medicine."

Dooloo. Yes.

"No other way."

Po. No.

The Peacock waited, lights dappling the ice and water.

Giving me the choice. You can have this, daughter, if it’s what you want.

God knows, there’d be any number of volunteers if I nellied out. Who wouldn’t want to hook up with something so far beyond yourself? Suddenly being able to hear the thoughts of everybody around you… understanding so much more about the universe… escaping the mumbly, sweaty, witless, gross, ungracious, unlovable, cowardly, lazy, parasitic, not-good-enough self that you hated so goddamned much…

Except at that moment, I didn’t want to lose me. Me. Our wayward Faye. Here I had the chance to become a fused creature, wise, amazing, important… and all of a sudden, I found myself thinking it would be a sorrowful loss.

Queer thing, that. I realized I’d been getting interested in who I might become.

Well. Bad timing, that was all. Even if I wasn’t quite so angry at myself as I’d once been, there was such a thing as responsibility. Duty. The Peacock was giving me a chance to help my world, and I was new-Faye enough that I couldn’t shuck this off on someone else.

"If it has to be done, it has to be done," I said aloud. "Fuse away."

Gentle as snowflakes, the Peacock shimmered down to touch my face.

Is there an opposite of data tumor? Data sunrise? Or maybe sunrise without the data, not a cold transfer of facts but a warm peaceful dawn.

The light of Dads’s love for me, still strongly remembered after so many years.

The shine of so many other loves, received by the Peacock as it Rode me down through the decades. Angie. Barrett. Peter. Egerton. Darlene. Winston. Lynn. All the kids.

Chappalar. Oh-God.

A flame from Festina. A twinkle from Tic. Even a battered spark from my mother.

All the radiance the Peacock had soaked up from those around me while I’d wallowed in fears of darkness: light blooming-blossoming-dawning in my mind.

Everything all at once.

Yes, there was darkness. Everyone has darkness — furies, pettiness, ugly impulses. Perhaps the Peacock shielded me, filtered some shadows out, I don’t know. I saw the darkness, but I felt the light. Blazing all around.

The Peacock’s Tail, spread for me to see.

Look at me. Look at them. Look at you.

Then the tail folded itself away. The moment faded. And I was only me again: not fused, not bonded, not two-in-one. Just Faye, with all her light and shadow. The Peacock hadn’t taken me, it had only given me one last shoot through the chute…

…and dumped me in the open air, just outside the bunker in Sallysweet River.

I got to my feet as I heard the sound of footsteps. Festina raced up the tunnel toward me, sprinting, wrapping her arms around my neck. Pulling my head down, kissing me hard.

Tic was right behind her. In the dark tundra midnight, he glowed.

"Xe?" I asked.

"Yes," Tic said. "We fused hours ago."

"Hours?"

"There was no point wasting time, Smallwood. While you and Ramos dallied with bad company, I was saving the world." He gave me a playful squeeze on the shoulder — thank God, not the dislocated one. "The medicines are finished, Smallwood! Mission accomplished. I’d already figured out the necessary formulas before you let me loose. Before you let Xe loose. Which is me because I’m Xe." He squeezed my shoulder again. "And Xe says it would be a staggering pity if the world lost your splendid physique, so get yourself some medicine as soon as possible."

I smiled; but my thoughts were jumbling back to Lake Vascho. The Peacock must have known he didn’t have to fuse with me — not if Tic/Xe had already whipped up a cure on their own. So why…

"To give you a choice, Smallwood," Tic said. Reading my thoughts, answering my question. "To see if you really wanted to stop being you. It was your chance to escape; and your chance to realize you weren’t so ready to give up on yourself as you thought. That man of mine has developed a positive mania for helping people with their lives…"

"Where is he?" I asked. "The Peacock."

"Gone off to be with the world-soul for a while. Which means, Smallwood, you’ll be sharing him with other proctors, but at least you’ll hear the nanites giggle." Tic rolled his eyes. "Demanding little brutes. Imagine playing mother to a few trillion of the rascals. It’s time for their father to do his share of the sitting. As for me…" Tic’s glow brightened. "After three thousand years, I deserve to get out and have fun. As the most ass-kicking mind-reading Zenned-out proctor this planet has ever seen."

With a laughing leap, he soared into the air: spreading his gliders, catching the wind, pushing himself higher with a few flaps of his arms, till he was flying above the trees, racing the clouds, heading God knows where. For a second, he looked back over his shoulder and roared, "1.000000001 with the universe, Smallwood!" Then his shimmery glow was lost in the night.

As Festina strapped up my aching shoulder, the world-soul (the Peacock) told me a police squad was already on the way. Cheticamp and the ScrambleTacs were getting dragged out to Sallysweet River yet again… thanks to my own link-seed. When the Mouth had got shot, one of the acid wads hit the radio-jammer he carried on his shoulder. In time, the jammer fritzed out; and there I was, back on the air, with all the world scanning for my frequency.

Tic/Xe got to me first, of course, tubed in by my own Peacock. But the cops were only thirty minutes away, screaming to my rescue — the spoilsport buggers.

At least Festina and I had the half hour.

A week later — after too much god-awful-tasting medicine, too much physiotherapy on my shoulder, and too much round-the-clock surveillance from the staff of Bonaventure General — Festina and I were officially declared healthy. Safe to walk the streets again without infecting others, or degenerating into the gibbering madness of poor Maya Cuttack. (Maya’s dead banged-up body had finally got fished out of the pit — she’d fallen through the bridge when it turned liquid, never even trying to save herself. When medical researchers finished picking at her corpse, she’d be incinerated to dust.)

Festina and I stepped out the front doors of the hospital, into a bright spring morning. The snow was gone; the trees were beginning to bud. "Gorgeous day," I said, spreading my arms wide in the sunshine. There was only the skimpiest twitch of pain in my shoulder — it’d soon be as good as new, curvy enough to attract Oolom lechers and strong enough to shove them away. "Want to wander down to the park?" I asked Festina. "They’ve got a nice little petting zoo."

"Aren’t your family coming to pick you up?"

"I asked them not to."

She looked at me with those sharp green eyes. "Okay. Let’s walk."

Cabot Park wasn’t very far off; Bonaventure is so small, nothing is very far off. Soon we were leaning against a tree, watching a leaner lean against the damaged wall of Pump Station 3.

I said, "So. Do you want to get married?"

Festina turned to me, mouth dropped open. She gaped for a count of three, then pulled herself together. "Aren’t you supposed to get down on one knee to say that?"

"Maybe on your home planet," I told her. "On Demoth, it’s usually more like rolling over in bed and propping yourself up on one elbow. Hey, you want to get married or what?"

She laughed, then looked at me keenly. "Are you serious about this, Faye?"

"Lynn sneaked into the hospital a few nights this week," I said. "We’ve talked it over, and she thinks it could work."

"So you can just add people to the group whenever you feel like it?"

"More or less. The others usually let me have what I want. Though Barrett won’t say yes unless you like dogs."

"Bloody hell," she muttered. "You are serious."

"Absolutely." I reached out and took her hand. "Sure, it’s complicated. And you don’t know bugger-all about my spouses, or the kids, or what marriage means on Demoth… any of that. But here’s the thing: I think you need a family, and I’m offering mine. All of them are good people, and you’ll have plenty of time to get to know them…"

"Faye," she interrupted. Just my name; and I could feel the no hanging heavy in her voice. "I have to go back to work. I have to leave Demoth."

"I know," I answered. "But does it need to be right away? The galaxy can get along without you a little while longer."

"Then I’d just be leading you on. A few laughs, then off I go."

"Festina," I said, "I’ll be all right. I’ve got a family. I may have a case of the wistfuls for a while, but I’ll bear up. You’re the one who’ll be heading out alone. And you’re going to feel it."

She lowered her eyes. "I know, Faye. I know. But I have to go back to my job. For the past two years, I’ve been spinning my wheels — trying to fit into my predecessor’s shoes, playing the desk-job spymaster. If there’s one thing I’ve learned on Demoth, that’s not who I am." She gave a rueful smile. "I like getting my hands dirty. I like digging truths out of mysteries. God help me, I like exploring… which is as far as you can get from being an Explorer, but that’s where I am now."

"And with all that exploring," I said, "you’ll never come back to Demoth?"

"Faye." And this time, that one word meant yes, not no.

I pulled a package out of my coat pocket. "A going-away present," I said.

Festina looked embarrassed. "You knew I’d say no?"

"If you said yes, it would have been an engagement present." I pushed it into her hands. "Here."

"Where’d you get this?"

"From Lynn, last night. Open it."

Thank God, Lynn had been the one to wrap it. She always does a beautiful job. Me, I never have the patience. All energy, no finesse, our Faye.

Festina opened the wrapper, then the box. There, tucked up in tissue paper, was a clear glass bottle holding a water-owl egg. "From Lake Vascho," I told her. "The family went there for a picnic yesterday, so they could all say they helped get you the gift. In case you said yes. The other eggs were hatched and gone, but that one never opened. It happens sometimes." I took a deep breath. "So there you go. I’m giving you a dud egg."

She wrapped her arms softly around my neck and just held me. A tear trickled down her cheek.

Sometime, when she got back to the navy base or maybe up to her flagship, she’d take the bottle out of the box and find the other present I’d asked Lynn to hide in the tissue paper: my scalpel, retrieved by the cops from the dipshits’ skimmer, quietly passed by Cheticamp back to my family.

The egg was a gift from my other spouses; the knife was a gift from me. A sign/promise/oath that I was past needing it.

I’d wrapped the blade in tape so Festina wouldn’t cut herself when she found it. That knife had drawn enough blood in its time.

Its time was over. And the past, after all, was past.

Copyright © 1999 by James Alan Gardner

ISBN: 0-380-80208-2