"James Alan Gardner - League of Peoples 03 - Vigilant" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

Here's the thing, the crucial thing: your life is full. And if you don't realize that... then you're just like the
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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 sayтАФkaboom, 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 saneтАФno
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 Pteromic Paralysis, the slack deathтАФusHomo
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
squirrelsтАФtriangular 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 unbrokenтАФwilderness 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" pictureтАФbefore 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