So the Ooloms surrendered in the end… the ones who didn’t leave it too late. They gave themselves up to humans and let us fight the disease on their behalf. In the shieldlands of Great St. Caspian, that meant the Ooloms headed for Sallysweet River.

When the last shift at Rustico Nickel left work at dawn, the miners would go around town with wooden carts, gathering the bodies that had landed overnight — on roofs, across the Bullet tracks, spread-eagled over the hoods of ore-carriers… wherever the Ooloms’ haphazard flight took them. From there, the body carts trundled along dirt tracks and wood-slat sidewalks till they reached our backyard — a crude field hospital slung together by my father under yellowed-canvas tenting. The Big Top we called it. Or the Circus.

Every human with time to spare helped out under the Big Top: feeding Ooloms who couldn’t feed themselves, or fiddling with catheters, enemas and what-all, for those who’d lost the muscles to keep themselves clean. Sometimes it seemed the whole town was there. My best friend Lynn, Lynn Jones, liked to say, "Everyone’s run off to join the Circus." The schools closed for the duration of the epidemic, so all my friends lent a hand — some working long hours, others coming in skittish for twenty minutes, then disappearing when the stink and suffering became too much to bear.

I could stand the stench; it was the death that squeezed in on me. Our patients’ hearts turning to motionless meat. Diaphragms going slack. Digestive systems no longer pushing food through the intestines, and people rotting from the inside out. Eight weeks after Dads read me that first medical notice, Ooloms started to die in the Circus… and they died and they died and they died.

In those days, I slept with my habitat dome set one-way transparent so I could see outside. Roof and walls were wholly invisible, and I’d moved my room far apart from other bubble-domes in our compound, so their lights scarcely reached me. Bed at night was like lying in open air, vulnerable to storms and stars.