You’re all welcome.
More coping? Two or three times a day, off-duty miners would carry the latest dead body to a mass grave outside town. We used an ancient tunnel for the burial site — a leftover shaft dug three thousand years earlier by some unknown alien race. This short-lived alien colony had apparently mined the same veins of ore as our own Rustico Nickel… and for all we knew, the site might have had great-and-grand significance for archaeologists. But we filled it with bloated, gas-venting corpses.
One night (inevitable), a mumbly-drunk miner shot a signal flare down the tunnel and blew himself up in a belch of blazing methane. We shoveled the miner’s shocked remains into the shaft along with the crispy Oolom carcasses (chunks of them got spewed out of the tunnel by the explosion), then went back to stowing bodies in exactly the same place. It became a Saturday night ritual to shoot a flare down the shaft to see what burned, but we never hit as big a buildup of gas as that first time. Pity. Maybe getting singed by a thunderflash bang would have helped us "cope."
Have I made my point? Don’t think this is self-pity. This is showing you the truth.
Through the whole of the plague, we festered in the brain. Our Oolom neighbors — dead. The patients we nursed — dying. Dozens of Oolom cities — empty, except for carcasses. One night, as a bunch of us kids sat in my dome, passing around a bottle of hoot-owl for an excuse to act drunk… that night, near midnight, my poetic friend Darlene whispered she imagined the Thin Interior stacked with corpses, mountain-high: the heartlands of every continent heaped with dead. Humans living on the coasts would soon see the rivers running brown with blood and rot and pus.
All of us nodded. We’d had similar nightmares. Guilty nightmares.
Here’s the thing: none of us could shake the idea we were to blame. The Ooloms died, and we didn’t.
How could you not see the timing? Millions of Ooloms lived placidly for nine hundred years without running into the disease. Twenty-five years after Homo saps arrived on Demoth, the slack death gurgled up its poison.
We must have brought something. Or stirred up something. Or created something. Scientists swore the Pteromic microbe didn’t resemble anything from human space, but we refused to believe them.
Do you understand? Not in your head but your gut. Do you grasp it? Do you feel the icy blame of it grabbing your arms and pushing you down under its weight?
No. Because you weren’t there. We were.
It was all our fault. We were marked with the blood of every magnificent old woman we didn’t save. And when we finally stumbled on the cure… Christ, the Ooloms treated Dads like a genius, but humans choked on his name. Olive oil? That was it — olive oil? Not a product of sophisticated research but something we’d had from the start, something we could have mass-synthesized anytime, and yet we sat with thumbs up our cracks while so many succumbed.
When we finally tallied the dead, the humans of Demoth had let more than sixty million Ooloms perish under our care.
Sixty million; 60,000,000; 6x107.
Or to put it another way, 93 percent of all the Ooloms in the universe. The whole of a sentient species nearly driven extinct because we couldn’t spare a little salad dressing.
It took a year (a Demoth year, 478 days of 26.1 hours each) for the slack-splayed Ooloms to regain full mobility… or as much as they ever got back. Muscles paralyzed too long were sometimes lost to atrophy, leaving thousands of the survivors with faltery drags in their speech or fingers that fumbled small objects.
Still, the Ooloms kept telling us they were glad to be alive. After a while, we couldn’t stand the sight of them. They reminded us of too much. They were a burden.
Volunteers stopped coming to the Big Top long before our Ooloms could take care of themselves. Dads had to pay people for the jobs they’d done so willingly before the cure made everyone feel like asses. By that time, though, we’d realized the Ooloms could afford the expense — they were rich now, at least on paper. After all, the surviving Ooloms had inherited the property of the dead. Ninety-three percent of the race extinct = 14.29 times the wealth for everybody left.
Simple mathematics… even when you factor in the economic donnybrook that followed the epidemic. Homo saps and Ooloms both went through manic spending sprees, alternating with agoraphobic depression and every frenzied dementia between; but despite that, most Ooloms came out the other side cushy as rats in velvet.
People offplanet called that a silver lining. Those of us on Demoth saw precious little silver in anything.
Seven months after the cure was discovered, while the Circus still played ringmaster to forty-six patients, Rustico Nickel Shaft 12 had a Class B cave-in: the first in the company’s twenty-four-year history. Despite a dozen safety systems, the accident resulted in one reported fatality — Dr. Henry Smallwood, who happened to be on the scene tending a miner’s sprained ankle.
Sharr Crosbie’s mother. Tripped over her own feet.
The clumsy cow.
DATA TUMOR
My ages sixteen, seventeen, eighteen: angry, angry, angry. Survivor guilt and post-traumatic stress.
Hating Dads for being dead, determined to punish Ma because she couldn’t make it all better. I buried myself in a shallow grave of time-wasting: the sick kind, where you don’t like what you’re doing, know you don’t like it, and keep doing it anyway. Playing clot-head games in VR-land; having listless sex with anyone drunk enough to reciprocate; bitch-fighting my mother, my friends, myself…
One day, I got to thinking how I disliked a particular freckle on my arm. So I got a scalpel from my father’s old clinic and cut the freckle off. When the first freckle was gone, another one stood out… so I cut that off too.
Things kind of got out of hand. I still have to wear long sleeves in polite company.
But there’s no point dwelling on any of the witless, reckless ways I nearly sliced myself up, OD’d, or got beaten toothless in semen-stinking back rooms. You could call my lifestyle an ongoing suicide attempt; but it didn’t work, did it?
Didn’t prove anything.
Didn’t solve the problem.
Faye Smallwood, who once thought she was too strong to be damaged by the world. A glossy girl who suddenly hated shine.
I survived those years mostly because of Sallysweet River itself — tough mining town, yes, but not nearly as rotted-up with focused violence as your average city. We had brawls and drunkards, not gang wars and cold-kill hoodlums.
And I had my protectors: other petty delinquents and rebels, kids like me who’d seen too many corpses. My own bad crowd, eight of us, all convinced that the overabundance of death disproved something about the universe, and the only decent response was to mistrust the whole polite world. To defy. To mutiny against complacent niceness because it had unforgivably let us down.
Idealistic buggers that we were. At age nineteen, we got married — all eight of us.
Quick background data: the humans on Demoth originally hailed from Come-By-Chance, a planet that got settled in the twenty-second century by a small religious sect called the MaryMarch Covenant. The early MaryMarchers believed in a particular type of group marriage — forming your own clan, a commune, a kibbutz, a "life team"…
A family. And at age nineteen, with nothing but ice between Mother and me, some part of my soul longed for any kind of connection.
MaryMarch marriages had fallen out of fashion over the past two hundred years, worn down by contact with more conventional attitudes from mainstream Technocracy society; but they were still legal, here on Demoth as well as our old home on Come-By-Chance. So why shouldn’t a bunch of eight kids from Sallysweet River tie the knot? Such a sweet old-fashioned notion… marrying the boys and girls next door.