One night (inevitable), a mumbly-drunk miner shot a signal flare down the tunnel and blew himself up in a belch of blazing methane. We shoveled the miner’s shocked remains into the shaft along with the crispy Oolom carcasses (chunks of them got spewed out of the tunnel by the explosion), then went back to stowing bodies in exactly the same place. It became a Saturday night ritual to shoot a flare down the shaft to see what burned, but we never hit as big a buildup of gas as that first time. Pity. Maybe getting singed by a thunderflash bang would have helped us "cope."

Have I made my point? Don’t think this is self-pity. This is showing you the truth.

Through the whole of the plague, we festered in the brain. Our Oolom neighbors — dead. The patients we nursed — dying. Dozens of Oolom cities — empty, except for carcasses. One night, as a bunch of us kids sat in my dome, passing around a bottle of hoot-owl for an excuse to act drunk… that night, near midnight, my poetic friend Darlene whispered she imagined the Thin Interior stacked with corpses, mountain-high: the heartlands of every continent heaped with dead. Humans living on the coasts would soon see the rivers running brown with blood and rot and pus.

All of us nodded. We’d had similar nightmares. Guilty nightmares.

Here’s the thing: none of us could shake the idea we were to blame. The Ooloms died, and we didn’t.

How could you not see the timing? Millions of Ooloms lived placidly for nine hundred years without running into the disease. Twenty-five years after Homo saps arrived on Demoth, the slack death gurgled up its poison.

We must have brought something. Or stirred up something. Or created something. Scientists swore the Pteromic microbe didn’t resemble anything from human space, but we refused to believe them.

Do you understand? Not in your head but your gut. Do you grasp it? Do you feel the icy blame of it grabbing your arms and pushing you down under its weight?