Then it wasn’t a virus, he thought. She didn’t know what she was talking about.
“It likes to attach itself to cells the way a virus does,” she continued. “It can multiply that way too. Don’t tune me out yet, Blake,” she said. “I’m no doctor, but I have information for you. Maybe you can use it to help yourself and your kids.”
That got his attention. He sat up, climbed painfully into the antique wooden rocking chair that he had shoved aside when he tried to reach the knife. “I’ll listen,” he said.
“It’s a virus-sized microbe,” she said. “Filtrable. I hear that means damned small.”
“Who told you?”
She looked surprised. “Eli. Who else?”
He could not quite bring himself to ask whether Eli was a doctor.
“He was a minister for a while,” she said as though he had asked. “A boy minister at the turn of the century when the country was full of ministers. Then he went to college and became a geologist. He married a doctor.”
Blake frowned at her. “What are you going to tell me now? That you’re telepathic?”
She shook her head. “I wish we were. We read body language. We see things you wouldn’t even notice—things we didn’t notice before. We don’t work at it; it isn’t a conscious thing. Among ourselves, it’s communication. With strangers, it’s protection.”
“Why haven’t you gotten treatment?”
“What treatment?”
“You haven’t tried to get any treatment, have you? What about Eli’s wife? Hasn’t she—”
“She’s dead. The disease killed her.”
Blake stared at her. “Good God. And you’ve deliberately given it to me?”
“Yes,” she said. “I know it doesn’t make sense to you. It wouldn’t have to me before. But now … You’ll understand eventually. And when you do, I hope you’ll accept our way of living. It’s so damn hard when people don’t. Like having one of my kids go wrong.”
Blake tried to make sense of this. Before he could give up on her again, she got up and went over to him.
“It isn’t necessary for you to understand now,” she said. “For now, just listen and ask questions if you want to. Pretend you believe me.” She touched his face. Repelled, he caught her hand and pushed it away. His cheek hurt a little and he realized she had scratched him again. He touched his face and his hand came away bloody.
“What the hell are you going to do?” he demanded. “Keep scratching me as long as you can find a few inches of clear skin?”
“Not that bad,” she said softly. “I don’t understand why—maybe you will—but people with original infections at the neck or above get the disease faster. And infected people who get a lot of attention from us usually survive. The organism doesn’t use cells up the way a virus does. It combines with them, lives with them, divides with them, changes them just a little. Eli says it’s a symbiont, not a parasite.”
“But it kills,” Blake said.
“Sometimes.” She sounded defensive. “Sometimes people work hard to die. Those bikers, for instance … I took care of Orel—Ingraham, I mean. His first name’s Orel. He hates it. Anyway, I took care of him. He didn’t like me much then, but he let me. He survived okay. But the other biker who had a chance was a real bastard. Lupe stuck with him, but he kept trying to kill her—strangling, smothering, beating … When he tried to burn her to death in her sleep, she got mad and hit him too hard. Broke his neck.”
Blake put most of this aside for later consideration and focused on one implication. “Are you planning to sleep here?” he demanded.
She smiled. “Get used to the idea. After all, I can’t very well rape you, can I?”
He did not answer. He was thinking about his daughters.
She drew a deep breath, touched his hand without scratching this time. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m told I have the sensitivity of a hunk of granite sometimes. None of us are rapists here. No one is going to take your kids to bed against 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 Proxima 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.
“How have you lost so much weight?” she asked as he pulled on a shirt. The clothing belonged to Gabriel Boyd, the father of the family. He was thin, too, though not quite as tall. The pants were too short. “You look like you haven’t eaten for weeks,” Meda said.
“I am hungry,” he admitted.
“My mother says you just ate enough for two people.”
He shrugged. He was still hungry. He was going to have to do something about it soon.
“We don’t have a videophone,” she said, “or a telephone, or even a radio.”
“That’s okay. I don’t want to call anyone.”
“Why not?”
He did not answer.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I want you to get out of here before your father or one of your brothers gets the wrong idea.”
“This is my room.”
That did not surprise him. The room did not look as though it belonged to a young woman. There was no clothing in sight, no perfume or makeup, no frills. But it smelled of her. The bed smelled of her.
“I was in Barstow with my brothers overnight,” she said. “There are some supplies my brothers can’t be trusted to buy, even with a list.” She gave him a sad smile. “So I went to the big city.”
“Barstow?” Like most desert towns, it had been water-short and shrinking for years—not that it had ever been big.
“Anything bigger would be too sinful. It might tempt me or contaminate me or something. You know, I’ve only been to L.A. twice in my life.”
He wiped his wet face with dripping hands. She did not know how she tempted him to contaminate her. His compulsion was to touch her, take her hands perhaps, scratch or bite if she pulled away. Sex would have been very satisfying with her, too, though not as satisfying as when she reached her fertile time. She was not the kind of woman who would have attracted him in any way at all before. Now all a woman had to do to attract him was smell uncontaminated.
He looked away from her, sweat soaking into his borrowed clothing. “You’re not missing anything by keeping away from cities,” he said. He had been born in a so-called middle-class residential area of that same vast, deadly Los Angeles she wanted more of, and if not for his grandfather, he would probably already have died there. Many of the people he had grown up with had died of too much L.A. A girl like this one, not pretty, eager for attention and excitement, would not survive a year in L.A.
“We barely have running water here,” she grumbled.
Fool. She had clean, sweet well water here, free for the taking. In stinking L.A., she would have a limited amount of flat, desalinized, purified, expensive ocean water. In L.A., you could tell how little money a man had by how bad he smelled. “You don’t know when you’re well off,” he told her. “But if you’re crazy enough to want to try city life, why don’t you just move?”
She shrugged, looking surprisingly young and vulnerable. “I’m afraid,” she admitted. “I guess I haven’t cut the umbilical yet. But I’m working on it.” She fell silent for a moment, then said, “Asa?”
He looked at her sidelong. “Girl, even my enemies have more sense than to call me that.”
“Elias then,” she said, smiling.
“Eli.”
“Okay.”
“You tell anybody?”
“No.”
That was true. She was enjoying having the secret too much to give it away. Now he had to keep her quiet.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “Why aren’t you being debriefed or paraded down some big city street or something?”
Why was he not in isolation, she meant. Why was he not waiting and contending with a misery no one but him could understand while a dozen doctors discovered what a dangerous man he was? Why was he not dead in an escape attempt? And considering the loss of the ship, its wealth of data, its frozen, dead crew, and its diseased, living crew, debriefing was a laughably mild name for what he would have been put through.
“What
’s the matter?” Meda asked softly. She had a big voice, not intended for speaking softly, but she managed. She had come closer. God help her, why didn’t she go away? Why didn’t he order her away or leave himself?
She touched his arm. “Are you all right?”
His body went on automatic. Helplessly, he grasped her hand. He managed not to scratch her, and tried to feel good about that until he saw that she had a small abrasion on the back of her hand. That was enough. His touch would probably have been enough anyway. Eventually she would have eaten something with that hand or scratched her lip or wiped her mouth or scratched or licked her hand to quiet the slight itching sensation contamination sometimes produced. And the disease organism could live on the skin for hours in spite of normal, haphazard hand-washing. Any person he touched was almost certainly doomed in one way or another.
“Why are your hands wet?” she asked. And when he did not answer, she examined his hands. He had expected her to drop them in disgust, but she did not seem disgusted. She was a big, strong girl. Maybe she could be saved. Maybe he could save her—if he stayed.
He remembered trying vainly to save his wife, Disa. She had been a short, slender woman with no weight to lose, barely big enough to qualify for the space program. The disease had eaten her alive. She had been one of the mission’s two M.D.s, however, and before she died, she and Grove Kenyon, the other doctor, had discovered that the disease organism caused changes that could be beneficial—if the host survived its initial onslaught. Surviving hosts became utterly resistant to more conventional diseases and more efficient at performing certain specialized functions. Only the toxin excreted by the disease organism was life-threatening. Not surprisingly, the human body had no defense against it. But in time the organism changed, adapted, and chemically encouraged its host to adapt. Its by-products ceased to be toxic to its host and the host ceased to react as strongly to increased sexual needs and heightened sensory awareness—inevitable effects of the disease. The needed time was bought by new organisms of the same disease—new organisms introduced after significant adaptation had occurred. The new, unadapted organisms quickly spent themselves neutralizing the toxic wastes of the old. Thus, the new organisms had to be replaced frequently. The host body was a hostile environment for them—an environment already occupied, claimed, chemically marked by others of their kind. Their toxin-neutralization was merely their reflexive effort to survive in that hostile environment.
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