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

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 animalsтАФlizards 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 thatwants to bite us. Complete waste of time!"

(Which was and wasn't true. Neither Ooloms nor humans were native to DemothтАФHomo sapshad only
been around twenty-five years, and Ooloms about nine hundredтАФso 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
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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
FayeтАФthey'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.

Ooloms and all other Divian subspecies have an instinct to isolate themselves when they're sick. "Oooo,"
as my father put it angrily, "we're feeling plumb poorly, better separate ourselves from the herd so we
don't infect others. The cack-headed idjits."

Dads hated that communal instinct. Because of it, infected Ooloms didn't stay in cities or towns where
they'd be close to medical facilities; they headed for the woods, the wilderness, to be on their own. Their
species had no trouble living rough out thereтАФthey'd been specifically engineered to thrive on Demoth's
native greenery. Leaves and bark pulled from trees, seedpods hanging by the hundreds all year round...
the Ooloms could eat, they could glide, they could wait, as the paralysis crept stealthily through their
bodies.

They stayed out there, isolated and degenerating from disease, as summer surrendered to wistful fall.
Then they began drifting back, when their muscles had frozen to the point that even such grand
hunter-gatherers could no longer fend for themselves.

In my dreams I still see them floating in the night: paralyzed bodies black against the stars, gliding over
Sallysweet River like kites cut free of their strings. They waited till they were inches near helpless... barely