Not that my mother accepted any excuse. Since the plague began, she’d gotten daily more snappish about Dads’s tousled state — he was a doctor, for Christ’s sake, he should make a decent impression. She was especially infuriated by his beard. Six weeks earlier it had been bold and bushy, teddy-bear brown with just five teasy threads of gray. Then Mother declared the beard was lopsided, wretchedly in need of a trim. Each day she worried at it with embroidery scissors while Dads stood stoic but impatient to get away. By the morning Zillif arrived, my father’s beard had been reduced to a five o’clock shadow, clutched tight and dark to his face.

Dads didn’t care. He only grew the beard in the first place because he couldn’t be bothered to shave.

"This is Tur Zillif," I told him. Tur was the Oolom politeword for a woman of venerable age. "Tur Zillif of the Vigil."

"An honor, Proctor Zillif…" Dads began.

"No," she interrupted. "You mustn’t address me by that title. Not when I’m unable to fulfill a proctor’s duties."

My father’s face curdled with his "difficult-at-times" miffiness; he hated to be corrected by anyone. Since it was undignified to grump at a patient, he turned on me. "I assume you’ve gathered Tur Zillif’s medical history?"

"No charts in the bin," I answered straightaway. In a more honest universe, I might have confessed I hadn’t even checked the bin as I carried Zillif past the admitting table; but Eden this isn’t, and anyway Pook would have handed me a chart if we’d had any available. Our spare chart-pads tended to pile on my father’s desk till he downloaded their contents into the house-soul’s permanent storage. Dads avoided that task as long as he could, sometimes covering the heap of charts with a bath towel so he wouldn’t have to look at them. Each "completed" chart in the stack meant we’d lost another patient.