Butler, Octavia - Clay's Ark

"I could have used you when my children were born," Meda told him as he took her blood pressure. "Didn't you have a doctor?" he asked. He checked her pulse.

"No. Just Eli and Lorene, my sister-in-law. We don't bring anyone here if we don't plan to keep them. And I didn't dare go to a hospital. Imagine how many people I'd infect there."

"Not if you told them the truth."

She watched as he drew blood from her left arm. It went directly into the analyzer as would all her other specimens. "They'd put me in a goddamn cage," she said. "They'd put my kids in one, too. They were born with the disease, you know."

"Did they have any special problems?"

She turned her head to stare directly at him. "Not a one," she said. She made no effort to conceal the fact that she was lying.

"What about you?" Blake asked gently. "Easy births?"

"Yeah," she said. Her defensiveness vanished. "The first one really surprised me. I mean, I was scared. I expected to be in agony, and I don't handle real pain that well. But the kid popped out with no trouble at all. Felt like cramps."

"You were lucky there was no emergency. May I see your children?" "Not until you're safe, Blake."

"Safe?"

"When you've been sick and gotten well again, then we'll have nothing to worry about. We'll show you anything you want."

He frowned. "Do you imagine I'd hurt a child?"

"Probably not," she said. "But you're at the seeking-weakness stage, and Jacob and Joseph would be a hell of a weakness. If you used them, we'd have to kill you. We want you alive, Blake."

He looked away from her in growing desperation. They really were too good-always a step ahead. How many times had they done this-abducted people, made them vanish from the world outside. He had to beat them at a game they

knew all too well. But how?

Meda rubbed his arm with a wet hand. "Look," she said, "it isn't so bad here. You can do a lot of good-maybe more good than you could do anywhere else. You can help us prevent an epidemic."

"It's only a matter of time before your disease gets out of hand," he said. "We've kept that from happening for more than four years."

"Yet it could happen tomorrow."

"No!" She got up and began to pace. "I can't really make you understand until you've felt it, but we'd go crazy if we were caged. We'd probably kill ourselves trying to escape. The compulsion keeps us on a pretty thin edge as it is. Eli says we're holding on to our humanity by our fingernails. I'm not sure we're holding on to it at all. In some ways, I'm more realistic than he is. But maybe we need a little of his idealism. God knows how he's kept it." She glanced at Blake. "He's my kids' father, you know."

"I guessed," Blake said.

"He helps us hold on even if all we're holding on to is an illusion. Take away that illusion and what's left is something you wouldn't want to deal with. You'll see."

"If your veneer of humanity is that thin," Blake said, "it's only a matter of time before someone finds it too thin. And if what you've told me about the disease is true, one person could infect hundreds and those hundreds could infect thousands-all before the first victims began to show symptoms and realize they were sick."

"Your estimate is low," she said. "Now do you see why you have to stay here? You could become that one person."

He did not argue with her. He would escape and go to a hospital; that was all. "I'd like you to undress," he said. He had just collected a little of her sweat and taken-almost painlessly- a minute specimen of her Hesh. The analyzer found something incomprehensible in both-probably the same something it had found in her blood and urine.

"Unidentifiable microbes," the small screen said. It was able to show him tiny, spiderlike organisms in her flesh, some of them caught in the act of reproducing along with her cells-as part of her cells. They were not viruses. According to the computer, they were more complete, independent organisms. Yet they had made themselves at home in human cells in a way that should not have been possible-like plasmids invading and making themselves at home in bacteria. But these were hardly plasmids-solitary rings of DNA. These were more complex organisms that had sought out higher game than bacteria and managed to combine with it without killing it. They had changed it, however, altered it slightly, subtly, cell by cell. In the most basic possible way, they had tampered with Meda's genetic blueprint. They had left her no longer human.

"The ones that live in the brain don't have little legs-cilia, I mean," Meda said over his shoulder. "What?"

"Eli told me they get into the brain cells, too. It sounds frightening, but there isn't anything we can do about it. I guess they'd have to reach the brain to change us so."

She did not know how changed she was. Could there be any hope of reversing such elemental changes? There must be, for his daughters' sake.

"Eli and I used to talk about it a lot," she said. "He wanted me to know everything he knew-in case anything happened to him. He said his wife and the other doctor did autopsies on the crew members who died before them. They found

little round organisms in the brains of every one of them."

"Rabies again," Blake muttered. But no. Rabies was only a virus, preventable and curable.

"Eli's wife tried to make antibodies," Meda said. "It didn't work. I don't remember what else she tried. I didn't understand, anyway. But nothing worked except reinfection. They found out about that by accident. And it works better person-to-person than person-to-syringe. Maybe that's just psychological, but we don't care. We'll use anything that works. That's why I'm here with you."

"You're here to try to make a good carrier of me," he said. She shrugged. "You'll be that or die. I'd rather live myself."

There was another answer. There had to be. He could not find it with only his bag, but others, researchers with lab computers, would sooner or later come up with answers. First, though, they had to be made aware of the questions.

He turned to look at Meda and saw that she had stripped. Surprisingly, she looked less scrawny without her clothing. More like the human female she was not. What could her children be like?

She smiled. "All my clothes are too big," she said. "I put them on and I look like a collection of sticks, I know. Maybe

now I'll buy a few new things next time I'm in town."

He ignored the obvious implication, but could not ignore the way she kept reading him. He became irrationally afraid that she was reading his mind, that he would never be able to keep an escape plan from her. He tried to shake off the feeling as he proceeded with the examination. She-said nothing more. He got the impression she was sparing him,

humoring him.

He asked to examine others in the community when he finished with her, but she was not ready to share him with anyone else.

"Start checking them tomorrow if they'll let you," she said. "You'll smell different then. Less seductive." "Seductive?"

"I mean you'll smell more like one of us. Nobody will take any special pleasure in touching you then." She had dressed again in her loose, ugly clothing. "It's sexual," she said. "Or rather, it feels sexual. Touching you is almost as good as

screwing. It would be good even if I didn't like you. If not for people like you- people we have to catch and keep, I

could never control myself enough to go into town. With no outlet it gets . . . painful and crazy, sort of frenzied when there are a lot of unconverted people around. I have dreams about suddenly finding myself moving through a crowd- maybe on a big city street. Moving through a crowd where I have no choice but to keep touching people. I don't even know whether to call it a nightmare or not. I'm on automatic. It's just happening."