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I want to tell you everything, everything all at once.
I don't want to be plod-patient, setting it down in sequence: first the plague, then the cave-in, then the years of Other Business, when everything seemed like a burden to get out of the way before real life could start. Everyone knows this is real life, it's all real life, sixty seconds of real life every minute, no one gets less.
But you can take less. All the time you're swimming in the ocean of real life, it's so precious easy to keep your eyes closed and just tread water. Even so, if you're lucky, you might be caught in a current, a current that's carrying you toward something. . . .
No, too simplistic. We're all caught in currents, dozens of the buggers dragging us in different directions sixty seconds every minute, and it's never as obvious as people want you to believe. You live through a day, and at the end you grumble, "I didn't do anything" . . . but second by second you did do things, you occupied every second, just as you occupy every second of every day.
Here's the thing, the crucial thing: your life is full. And if you don't realize that . . . then you're just like the rest of us, but that's no excuse.
I want to tell you everything, everything at once. I want to explode and leave you splattered bloody with all the things I have to say -- kaboom, and you're covered with me, coated, dripping, deafened by the blast. A flash of instant knowledge: knowledge, not information. Burning hot. Blinding bright. Blasting down the ingrained walls of carrion-comfort cynicism.
How can I do that? How? The peacock can show its whole tail at once; but I can only tell you a story.
The story starts with death. If you weren't there, on the fair green planet Demoth in the year 2427, you can't imagine what the plague was like, and I can't convey the enormity of it. No one stayed sane -- no one. All of us who lived through those days came out the other side mumbling under our breaths, quivering with twitches, tics, and phobias. Real bitch-slapping nightmares of bodies in the streets.
The bodies weren't human. That was the ugliest part of Pterornic Paralysis, the slack death -- us Homo saps were immune. Death counts rose by the day, and we were lily-pure untouched.
It only killed our neighbors.
Our neighbors were Ooloms, a genetically engineered branch of the Divian race: basically humanoid, but with scaly skins that changed color like wide-spectrum chameleons . . . from red to green to blue, and everything in between. Ooloms also came equipped with glider membranes on the general model of flying squirrels -- triangular sails attached at wrists and armpits, then running down their bodies and tapering to a point at their ankles. Their bones were hollow, their tissues light, their internal organs spongy with air vacuoles rather than solidly dense. Given Demoth's forgiving gravity (.78 Earth G), Ooloms had no trouble flapping-gliding-soaring through city or countryside.
I was a countryside girl myself back then: fifteen years old, living in a fiddly-dick mining town called Sallysweet River, population 1600 . . . one of only four human settlements in the vast interior of Great St. Caspian Island. Around us, tundra and trees, stone and forest, stretched proud unbroken-wilderness all the way from my doorstep across a hundred kilometers to the cold ocean coast.
Not that it made me feel small. I was as full of myself as any girl I knew: me, the beautiful, blond, smart, occasionally even sexy Faye Smallwood.
So much for the "before" picture -- before the plague. After? I'll get to that.
It was late summer in Sallysweet River when we first heard tell of the disease. My father, Dr. Henry Smallwood, was the town M.D., always reading the medical newsfeeds to me and giving his on-the-spot opinion. A session with Dads might go like this: "Well then, Faye-girl, here's some offworld laze-about who's come to Demoth for a study of our poisonous animals -- lizards and eels and what-all. Can you imagine? He wants to protect us all from snakebite or some fool thing . . . as if there's a single creature on the planet that wants to bite us. Complete waste of time!"
(Which was and wasn't true. Neither Ooloms nor humans were native to Demoth -- Homo saps had only been around twenty-five years, and Ooloms about nine hundred -- so to the local animal population, we smelled disgustingly alien. Nothing in the woods would ever try to nibble us for food . . . but they'd be fast enough to give us the chomp if we stepped on their tails or threatened their young. I'd never say that to Dads, though; before the plague sent us all stress-crazy, I was his own little girl, and so swoony fond, I never questioned him. When I felt like a fight, I picked one with my mother.)
So. One trickly hot evening, Dads looked up from the newsfeed, and said, "Listen to this, my Faye -- they're reporting a rash of complaints from Ooloms all over the world. Teeny numbnesses: a single finger going limp, or an eyelid, or one side of the tongue. Investigators are expressing concern." Dads snorted. "Sure to be psychosomatic," he told me. "A grand lot of Ooloms have worked themselves into a tizzy about some idle nothing, and now they're having demure little hysterical breakdowns."
I nodded, trusting that Dads knew what he was talking about.
But.
It got worse. More victims. In every last town on the planet. Symptoms slowly spreading. A patient who couldn't move her thumb today might lose all feeling in her little toe tomorrow: one muscle after another shutting down, turning to strengthless putty. It usually started at the extremities and worked gradually in, but there was one man who didn't show a single symptom till all the muscles of his heart, slump, went slack. The night they reported his case on the news, the exodus began.
Vigilant. Copyright © by James Gardner. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
Excerpted from Vigilant by James Alan Gardner
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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