[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
settling down in their posh isolated villages, whileHomo saps found their own
Page 26
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
places on islands and coastal plains anywhere close to sea level, where the
air was thick enough for human lungs to bite into.
And for twenty years after the plague, I sorted myself out too... until
finally, at the age of thirty-five, I walked into Bonaventure's office of the
College Vigilant to ask how I could join.
I'd had jobs before. "Warm-body" jobs like keeping an eye on
nanotech-performance monitors, or hauling drums of proto-nute to houses whose
food synthesizers weren't hooked up to the mains. I'd also had "Faye" jobs
like prancing the puss in stripperamas, or nude modeling for local artists. (A
lot of sculptors loved the button scars on my arms, where I used to have
freckles.)
But mostly I bared the butt for Ooloms. Oolom men found human women
outrageously, capaciously sexy because we were sobig. Torso big, I mean they
couldn't care less about cleavage or crotch, but they turned goggle-eyed at
the expanse of a human back. Their own Oolom females were so much thinner...
and some quirk of the Oolom male psyche had a gut reaction, thickness =
arousal. "You're sowide!" one admirer crooned to me.
Gives a whole new meaning to calling women "broads."
Some of the other strippers, the ones who flicked tricks on the side, told me
their customers often took a woman's shoulder measurements so they could brag
to the boys back home. Considering my own mesomorph build, I could have been
the choice rumpus room of the back streets... but I never sank quite that far.
I'd take off my clothes for money where was the crime in treating myself like
meat? but selling my swish was just too disloyal to my spouses.
They were my family. I could devalue myself, but not them.
Which meant that as years went on, as Darlene and Angie and Lynn all had
children, I gradually spent more time home helping with the kids than playing
Miss Udder around town. The children called me "Mom-Faye"... not the same tug
on the heart as plain old "Mom," but I was too much the coward to have babies
of my own: afraid it would change me, afraid that it wouldn't.
Even just being Mom-Faye changed me in time. You know how it goes: after a
full day of feeding/bathing/diapering, you're too tired to spark out for a
night strutting bare-ass, and doing squats with a barbell, naked. You say,
"I'll cheapen myself tomorrow"... and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
creeps in this petty pace till you wake one day, look in the mirror, and don't
straight off feel disgust. Such a shock. That your soul may not be an
irredeemable cesspool.
Then quick, while you're still brave, ask yourself what you'd want to do with
your mortal existence if the universe weren't a total dog's vomit.
What do you want? To live in the real. To name the lies.Wa supesh i rabi
ganosh. An aspiration you haven't let yourself think about for twenty years...
but when you ask, it's right on top of your mind, like the perfume of roses
coming from a locked cupboard.
"This is the only thing in my head that approaches an honest dream. So why in
the name of Mary and all her saints don't I get off my cowardly butt and make
this happen?"
The Vigil accepted my application on the spot. They accepted everyone's
application on the spot. If you weren't proctor material, they had seven years
Page 27
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
of brutal training to weed you out.
A student of the College Vigilant. Just like that.
My family treated it as a lark. "I always like when you get an enthusiasm,"
Lynn told me. "You're such less trouble for a while... till someone pisses you
off, and you chuck everything with loose ends dangling." She said the same
when I took up piano, and when I bought all those awful chairs to learn
reupholstering. The younger kids giggled about Mom-Faye getting into politics,
the older kids did impersonations of me losing my temper at a bureaucrat ("Oh
you think you're a clever little man, do you?"), and all four of my husbands
asked, "How much will this cost?"
The unsupportive sods.
I studied. Classes, sims, direct info braingrabs. Most of the work I did over
the world-net; but when I needed face-to-face, I turned to the proctors in
town, the ones who scrutinized Bonaventure City Council a dozen sharp-witted
people, generously serving as teachers and mentors during my seven years as
student. Three were human; the rest were Oolom, living amongHomo saps for the
good of the Vigil.
The Ooloms treated me with sunbeam kindness... even as they perched on my
shoulders to add more weight when I did push-ups. They knew the Vigil had to
build back its numbers, and that meant encouraging anyone who could grit
through the training. Even with two decades to recover from the epidemic, the
Vigil was running strapped, barely enough proctors to scrutinize the
governments of our world.
I grew stronger, more disciplined. That was the easy part. The hard part was
yanking myself out of a pit of cynicism twenty years deep, up to a place where
maybe I could believe in an ideal or two. When I talked to fellow students,
lots of them felt the same way. They'd gloated when signing up for the Vigil:
keen for the chance to rip into politicians, to show up important people as
fools and to tell the world, "There, you blind buggers, that's the brainless
corrupt government you elected."
But.
The Vigil wasn't about humiliating bad guys. It wasn't about punishing
bureaucrats if they disregarded the side effects of some proposed bill. There
were no scorecards, no banners, no late-night celebrations where senior
proctors offered you champagne toasts for making heads roll.
When you succeeded, government worked better. Passed good laws. Met the
public need. That was your sole reward real people became better off. Safer,
or more prosperous, or more blessed by intangibles. (Art. Freedom. Clean air.)
It takes time to shift your outlook: you start by thinking all politics is
rat puke, all politicos are hypocrites, and oh, it'll be rare delicious to
kneecap the bastards; but you end simply looking at laws, not lawmakers, and
believing there is such a thing as attainable good.
Idealism. I, Faye Smallwood, was capable of idealism.
It surprised the bejeezus out of me.
I graduated from the College Vigilant in the twenty-seventh year after the
Page 28
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
plague. Standard Earth Technocracy years, not local ones: a.d. 2454. I had
just turned forty-two.
My family threw me a surprise party the night beforemüshor. my rite of
passage into the Vigil itself. Of course I knew the party was coming our whole
blessed household tittered with whispers, conversations stopping or lurching
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]