A TOTAL LOON

Once again, my family wanted to chain me to the bed with leg irons till police judged it safe for me to come out. You can guess what I said to that. Though I said it politely.

Then they had fallback positions. They could ask Protection Central for round-the-clock surveillance. They could hire a bodyguard. They could buy me my own stunner or jelly gun. They could get another dog, but a mean one this time, instead of the shake-hands-and-beg chowhounds Barrett usually brought home. (It was, of course, Barrett himself who suggested this. Whatever problems the family faced, two times out of three Barrett would explain how everything could be fixed if we just bought the right kind of dog.)

A typical view of my family in action. I let them have their shot at bullying me, but all they could really say was, "I’m scared, Faye." And their suggestions were just scrabbly attempts to make a gesture, even if they knew it was useless, so they could pretend the danger was avoidable if only we Did Things Right.

I couldn’t pretend that myself; so I caught a few hours’ sleep, then went in to work.

Unlike most offices in downtown Bonaventure, our Vigil headquarters had never got "humanized"… which meant the office still flaunted the Oolom ambience established preplague. Floor-to-ceiling windows, for example, with wide exterior ledges for easy Oolom landings and takeoffs. Instead of glass, the windows were made of transparent nano membranes: 99 percent solid to keep out birds and insects, but porous enough to let through a hint of breeze and keep the Ooloms from feeling they were totally closed in.

As a bonus, the nanites in the membranes allowed duly appointed proctors to pass back and forth between the offices and the ledge. Walking through was like shoving yourself into a sheet of gelatin — the solid surface turned viscous where you touched it, and sucked clingy-tight to your body as you pressed forward, slurping back together behind you when you came out the other side.

Another thing about our office: it was a tree house.

Ooloms hated making buildings from concrete or steel. They’d do it if they had to — Pump Station 3 dated back to Oolom times, and it had cement walls. (Cement walls with a slew of windows, not to mention dozens of skylights.) Still and all, Ooloms considered such construction materials a last resort: tolerable for plebeian spots like a water-treatment plant, but out of the question for the only Vigil headquarters on all Great St. Caspian. You wouldn’t stow the Mona Lisa in a mud shack, would you?

So the Ooloms put our office in a tree. A sign of their immense respect for the Vigil. Or for trees. This particular tree had "monumental" written all over it: an equatorial species called a reshkent or kapok elm, but dosed with so many growth hormones, not to mention bioengineered goiter-grafts and longevity sap enhancers… well, transforming the original reshkent into our offices was like changing a toothpick to a totem pole. Not just making it whopping amounts bigger, but hanging all kinds of doodads on it.

Picture a massive central trunk twenty meters in diameter, but with a hollow core big enough to hold an elevator shaft. (Even Ooloms needed elevators on occasion: when high winds made flying dangerous, or when carting around office furniture.) Every five meters up the trunk was a bulging ring, like a fat belt around the tree’s girth. A belt that stuck out so far, it was more like a life preserver. Each such ring had enough space to hold four good-sized offices, complete with those nanite windows, plus a desk, chairs, and a darling wee latrine. (Plumbing wastes were converted to fertilizer for the tree itself.)

Our tree had six such "floors," six annular rings spaced bulgy up the trunk… and above all that was a gigantic umbrella of leaves stretched almost fifty meters in every direction, soaking up sun to keep the tree alive. Barely a fifth of those leaves fell each year; the rest hung on, still doing their photon-collection job no matter how crispy they became with cold. Now and then throughout the winter, a leaf grew so heavy with ice that it snapped off its branch, dropped sharp and fast, then shattered like a glass dagger on some window ledge.

At one time, all twenty-four offices in the tree housed proctors; but that was before the plague. Now, Floors One and Two were empty, and I was the only person on Floor Three. Senior proctors filled up the higher floors… except for a vacant room on Floor Five. Chappalar’s office. I could have taken it but didn’t want to. Not even for the better view.

I supposed our new arrival, Master Tic, would claim Chappalar’s old office. He’d also take over Chappalar’s old duties… which might mean he was slated to be my supervisor.

Unless master proctors were too important to waste time riding herd on a novice.

Or unless I got some say in the matter myself; in which case, I’d pick one of the proctors I’d known for seven years, instead of some goggle-wearing outsider who thought he could step into Chappalar’s shoes.

(All right — Ooloms didn’t actually wear shoes. Just flimsy-dick things like ballet slippers made of ort skin. But you know what I mean.)

To find out who’d become my new mentor, I took the elevator straight up to Jupkur’s office on the top ring. Jupkur was Gossip Central for our building — not only did he know everything, but he blabbed it at the least provocation, all the while saying, "Well, I don’t like to talk…"

By luck, Jupkur was in: lying flat on his desk and staring at the ceiling. Don’t ask me why. Since the plague, our Oolom proctors had spent more than two decades immersed in our culture and adapting to our ways. God knows, they worked hard to fit in with our particular brand of Homo sap behavior. Now and then, though, you still caught them acting just plain alien, especially when humans weren’t around.

I found it kind of endearing.

"Welcome back, Faye," Jupkur said without looking in my direction. Ooloms were nigh-on eerie when it came to recognizing people by the sound of their footsteps. (They can even tell when you’ve bought new boots… maybe the only males in the universe who ever notice.)

"You missed an exciting night," he told me, still keeping his gaze on the ceiling. "The rest of us got to loiter till three in the morning, inventing theories of where you might be. Some hypotheses were extremely clever… even witty, though I shouldn’t brag. Then I tried to organize a betting pool, guessing the state of your corpse when the police finally found you. Alas, the others spent too long scrutinizing the rules of the wager; you turned up alive before anyone actually gave me money."

"Sorry."

"Ah well." He sat up and turned toward me. "I’m sure you’ll get in trouble again. We’ve all agreed you’re botjolo."

The word meant "cursed." Or "self-destructive." Which Ooloms considered the same thing.

"You’re so kind," I muttered. "Do you have a minute?"

"Of course. Although if you’re looking for guidance on official Vigil business, Master Tic is your new supervisor and I don’t want to valk him."

Valking was gliding into another person’s flight path. The Oolom equivalent of stepping on someone’s toes.

"That was one of the things I wanted to ask," I said. "Whether Tic was my new mentor. And what he’s doing in Bonaventure."

Jupkur winked at me… which didn’t look any better on him than it did on Oh-God. Some gestures just don’t transfer from one species to another.

"Master Tic is pursuing his own agenda," Jupkur said. "That’s one thing you can be sure of. He has a reputation in various circles… well, one doesn’t like to gossip."

"You love to gossip," I replied.