Butler, Octavia - Clay's Ark

their wills." "So you say!"

"It's true. Our men don't rape. They don't have to."

"You haven't had to do any of the things you've done."

"But we have. Like I said, you'll understand eventually. For now, you'll just have to accept what I tell you. We're changed, but we have ethics. We aren't animals."

Blake thought that was exactly what they were, but he kept quiet. There was no point in arguing with her. But Rane and

Keira . . . What was happening to them?

Meda took a chair from the desk on the other side of the room and brought it over so that she could sit next to him. He watched her swing her thin body around. She moved like a man. She must have been a powerful-looking woman before

her illness. Yet the illness had reduced her to wiry thinness. What would it do to Keira who had no weight to lose, who

already had a disease that was slowly killing her?

Meda sat down and took his hands. "I wish you could believe me," she said. "This is the worst time for you. I wish I

could help more."

"Help!" He snatched his hands away from her, disgusted. She was still perspiring heavily. In a cool room, she was soaking wet. And no doubt the perspiration was loaded with disease organisms. "You've 'helped' enough!"

She wiped her face and smiled grimly. "You still bring out the worst in me. You don't feel or smell like one of us-like an infected person-yet."

"Smell?"

"Oh yes. Part of your body language, part of your identity is your odor. And one of your earliest symptoms is going to be suddenly smelling things you never consciously noticed before. Eli found our place by following his nose. He was lost in the desert. We had water, and he smelled it."

"He came here? This was your home, then?"

". . . yes."

He wondered about her sudden pensiveness, but took no time to question it. He had something more important to ask. "Where did Eli come from, Meda? Where did he catch the disease?"

She hesitated. "Look, I'll tell you if you want me to. It's my job to explain things to you. But there are some things you'll have to understand before I tell you about Eli. First, like I said, I scratched your face just now so you'd get sick sooner. Most people take about three weeks to start feeling symptoms. Sometimes a little longer. You'll feel yours a lot

sooner-and you should be infectious in a few days."

"That could mean I'll die sooner," Blake said.

"I'm not going to give you up that easily," she said. "You're going to make it!" "Why did you rush things for me?"

"We're afraid of you. We want you on our side because you might be able to help us save more converts-that's what Eli calls them. We ... we care about the people we lose. But we have to be sure of you, and we can't until you're one of us.

Right now, you're sort of in-between. You're not one of us yet, but you're . . . not normal either. If you escaped now and

managed to reach other people, you'd eventually give them the disease. You'd spread it to everyone you could reach, and you wouldn't be able to stay and help them. Nobody can fight the compulsion alone. We need each other."

"Who did Eli have?" Blake asked. "His wife?"

"He had nobody. That was the problem. But before I get into that, I want to be sure you understand that there's no way to leave here without starting an epidemic. The compulsion quiets down a little after you've been sick. You should have enough control then to go into town and buy whatever you'll need that isn't in that computerized bag Eli says you have."

"Buy medical supplies?" "Yes."

"You're going to trust me enough to let me go into town?"

"Yes, but nobody travels alone. There's too much temptation to do harm. Blake, you aren't ever going to be comfortable among ordinary people again."

He didn't know how he would have felt if he had believed her. But in fact, he meant to take any opportunity to escape that came his way. He did not intend to live his life as an emaciated carrier of a deadly disease. Yet he was afraid.

Some of what Meda had said about the disease reminded him of another illness-one he had read about years before. He could not remember the name of it. It was something people did not get any longer-something old and deadly that

people had once gotten from animals. And the animals had gone out of their way to spread it. The name came to him

suddenly: rabies.

She watched him silently. "You don't believe me, but you're afraid," she said. "That's a start. There's a lot to be afraid of."

He stifled an impulse to deny his fear or explain it. "You were going to tell me about Eli," he said. She nodded. "Remember that ship a few years ago-the Clay's Ark?"

"The Ark? You mean the starship?"

"Yeah. Brand new technology, tested all to hell, and it still blew up when it got back from the Centauri system. People figured the scientists rushed things so they would have something flashy to keep them from losing their funding again. At least, that's what I read. The Ark came down about thirty miles from here. It was supposed to land at one of the space stations or on the moon, but it came all the way home. And before it blew up, Eli got out."

"Eli . . . ? What are you telling me?"

"His name is Asa Elias Doyle. He was their geologist. In case you haven't noticed, he can drop that dumb accent of his whenever he wants to. The disease is from the second planet of Prox-ima Centauri. It killed ten of a crew of fourteen. I

think more would have lived, but they began by isolating anyone who got sick. Then they found they had to restrain

them to keep them isolated." She shuddered. "That amounted to slow death by torture.

"Anyway, four survived to come home. I think they had to come home. The compulsion drove them. But when they landed something went wrong. Maybe for once, someone managed to break the compulsion. The ship was destroyed. Only Eli managed to get out. But in one way, that didn't matter. He brought Proxi Two back to us as well as a crew of fourteen could have. And now . . . now it's as Terran as you or me."

PAST 7

A few minutes of careful listening told him there were seven people sharing the isolated wood-and-stone house with him. There were the two adult sons and a twenty-year-old daughter, who had spent the night in Barstow. There was their mother, who had brought food and who had been kind, and the sons' new young wives, who were eager for the

separate houses to be finished. There was the white-haired patriarch of the household -a stern man who believed in an outdated, angry God and who knew how to use a shotgun. He reminded himself of this last when he met the daughter. Meda, her name was.

Meda introduced herself by walking into the room he had been given just as he pulled on a borrowed pair of pants. And instead of retreating when she saw that he was dressing, she stayed to watch. He was so glad she was not the woman of the night before, the woman whose scent had frozen him outside her window, that her brazenness did not bother him.

This one's scent was far more interesting than a man's would have been, but she had not yet reached that dangerous

time in her cycle. She was big like her mother-perhaps six feet tall, and stocky where her mother was becoming old- woman thin. Meda was brown-haired, heavily tanned, and strong-looking-probably used to hard work.

She stared at him curiously and was unable to conceal her disappointment at his thin, wiry body. He did not blame her. He was disgusted with his appearance himself, though he knew how deceptive it was. He had been good-looking once. Women had never been a problem for him.

This woman, however, was a problem already. Her expression said she recognized him. That was completely

unexpected- that someone in this isolated place would keep up with current events enough to know what one of fourteen astronauts looked like. Unfortunately, his face had changed less than the rest of him. It had always been thin. And with the Ark returning, there must have been a great rebroadcasting and republishing of old pictures. This woman had probably just seen several of them in Barstow.