Damon Knight - Orbit 15

By the third day the water had started to invade the cornfield, and he pitied the people who stood and watched helplessly. The garden was still being tended, but it would be a meager harvest. By now he had counted twenty-two people; he thought that was all of them. During the storm that lashed the valley that afternoon, he heard Mike whinny. He crawled from the leanto and stood up. Mike, down the slope of the knob, wouldn’t mind the rain much, and he was protected from the wind. Still he whinnied again, and then again. Cautiously, holding his shotgun in one hand, shielding his eyes with the other, David edged around the tree. A figure stumbled up the knob haltingly, stopping with bowed head often, not looking up, probably blinded by the rain. Suddenly David threw the shotgun under the leanto and ran to meet her. “Celia!” he cried. “Celia!”

She stopped and raised her head, and the rain ran over her cheeks, plastered her hair to her forehead. She dropped the shoulder bag that had weighed her down and ran toward him, and only when he caught her and held her tight and hard did he realize that he was weeping, as she was.

Under the leanto he pulled her wet clothes off and rubbed her dry, then wrapped her in one of his shirts. Her lips were blue, her skin seemed almost translucent; it was an unearthly white.

“I knew you’d be here,” she said. Her eyes were very large, deep blue, bluer than he remembered, or bluer in contrast to her pale skin. Always before she had been sunburned.

“I knew you’d come here,” he said. “When did you eat?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t believe it was this bad here. I thought it was propaganda. Everyone thinks it’s propaganda.”

He lighted the Sterno. She sat wrapped in his plaid shirt and watched him as he opened a can of stew.

“Who are those people down there?”

“Squatters. Grandmother and Grandfather Wiston died last year. That gang showed up. They gave Aunt Hilda and Uncle Eddie a choice, join them or get out. They didn’t give Wanda any chance at all. They kept her.”

She stared down the valley and nodded slowly. “I didn’t know it was this bad. I didn’t believe it.” Without looking back at him she asked then, “And Mother, Father?”

“They’re dead, Celia. Flu, both of them. Last winter.”

“I didn’t get any letters,” she said. “Almost two years. They made us leave Brazil, you know. But there wasn’t any transportation home. We went to Colombia. They promised to let us go home in three months. And then they came one night and said we had to get out immediately. There were riots, you know.”

He nodded, although she was still staring down at the valley and couldn’t see. He wanted to tell her to weep for her parents, to cry out, so that he could take her in his arms and try to comfort her. But she continued to sit motionless and speak in a dead voice.

“They were coming for us, for the Americans. They blame us for letting them starve. They really believe that everything is still all right here. I did too. No one believed any of the reports. And the mobs were coming for us. We left on a small boat, a skiff. Nineteen of us. They shot at us when we got too near Cuba.”

David touched her arm, and she jerked and trembled. “Celia, turn around and eat now. Don’t talk any longer. Later. You can tell us about it later.”

She shook her head. “Never again. I’ll never mention any of it again, David. I just wanted you to know there was nothing I could do. I wanted to come home and there wasn’t any way.”

The storm was over, and the night air was cool. They huddled under a blanket and sat without talking, drinking hot black coffee. When the cup began to tilt in Celia’s hand, David took it from her and gently lowered her to the bed he had prepared. “I love you, Celia,” he said softly. “I’ve always loved you.”

“I love you, too, David. Always.” Her eyes were closed and her lashes were very black on her white cheeks. David leaned over and kissed her forehead, pulled the blanket higher about her, and watched her sleep for a long time before he lay down beside her.

The next morning they left the oak tree and started for the Sumner farm. She rode Mike until they got to the cart; by then she was trembling with exhaustion and her lips were blue again, although the day was already hot. There wasn’t room for her to lie down in the cart, so he padded the back of the wooden seat with his bedroll and blanket, and let her sit behind him where she could at least put her head back and rest, when the road wasn’t too bumpy. She smiled faintly when he covered her legs with another shirt, the one he had been wearing.

“It isn’t cold, you know,” she said matter-of-factly. “That goddamn bug does something to the heart, I think. No one would tell us anything about it. My symptoms are all in the circulatory system.”

“How bad was it? When did you get it?”

“Eighteen months ago. Just before they made us leave Brazil. It swept Rio. That’s where they took us when we got sick. Not many survived it. Hardly any of the later cases. It became more virulent as time went on.”

He nodded. “Same here. Something like sixty percent fatal, increasing up to eighty percent by now, I guess.”

There was a long silence then, and he thought perhaps she had drifted off to sleep. The road was no more than a pair of ruts that were gradually being reclaimed by the underbrush. Already grass covered it almost totally, except where the rains had washed the dirt away and left only rocks. Mike walked deliberately, and David didn’t hurry him.

“David, how many are up at the northern end of the valley?”

“About one hundred and ten now,” he said. He thought, two out of three dead, but he didn’t say it.

“And the hospital? Was it built?”

“It’s there. Walt is running it.”

“David, while you’re driving, now that you can’t watch me for reactions or anything, just tell me about it here. What’s been happening, who’s alive, who’s dead. Everything.”

When they stopped for lunch hours later, she said, “David, will you make love to me now, before the rains start again?”

They lay under a stand of yellow poplars and the leaves rustled incessantly with a motion that needed no appreciable wind to start. Under the susurrous trees, their own voices became whispers. She was so thin and so pale, and inside she was so warm and alive; her body rose to meet his and her breasts seemed to lift, to seek his touch. Her fingers were in his hair, on his back, digging into his flanks, strong now, then relaxed and trembling, then clenched into fists that opened spasmodically; and he felt her nails distantly, aware that his back was being clawed, but distantly, distantly. And finally there were only the susurrant leaves.

“I’ve loved you for more than twenty years, did you realize that?” he said.

She laughed. “Remember when I broke your arm?”

Later, in the cart again, her voice came from behind him, softly, sadly. “We’re finished, aren’t we, David? You, I, all of us?”

And he thought, Walt be damned, promises be damned, secrecy be damned. And he told her about the clones developing under the mountain, in the laboratory deep in the Great Bear Cave.

Celia started to work in the laboratory a week later. “It’s the only way I’ll ever get to see you at all,” she said when David protested. “I promised Walt I would work only four hours a day to start. Okay?”

David took her through the lab the following morning. The entrance to the cave was concealed in the furnace room of the hospital basement. The door was steel, set in the limestone bedrock. As soon as they stepped through the doorway, the air was cold and David put a coat about Celia’s shoulders. “We keep them here at all times,” he said, taking a second coat from a wall hanger. “Twice government inspectors have come here, and it might look suspicious if we put them on to go down the cellar. They won’t be back,” he said. She nodded.