Rane listened. She heard about Eli and the Clay’s Ark and Proxima Centauri Two. She listened, but she believed almost nothing.
“You know,” Lupe said when she had been talking for perhaps a half hour, “sometimes I look around and everything seems to be the wrong color. The sun is too bright and … not red. I feel surprised that it isn’t red. I couldn’t figure out what was going on when it first happened. It scared me. But when I told Eli, he said Proxi was red. A cool red star with its three planets hugging in close around it. He bought some red light bulbs in Needles and put them in his den. They’re not right either, really, but every now and then I go over there. Every now and then, everyone goes over there and stays for a while. It relaxes us. When things start to smell funny to you and you feel like you want to eat a live rabbit or rape a man, we’ll take you over there. It helps. Keeps you from jumping out of your skin.”
“I’ve got a better solution for that last feeling,” Ingraham said, grinning. He had gone away and come back. Now he sat watching Rane in a way that made her nervous. In spite of the huge meal Rane had seen him eat, he was munching nuts from a dish on the coffee table.
Lupe looked at him and smiled—all teeth. “You touch her like that and I’ll cut your thing off.”
Ingraham laughed, got up and kissed her, then stood before her, smiling. “You want me to get one of the kids for her to see?”
“Get Jacob if you can catch up with him.”
“Okay.” He went out.
Looking after him, Rane sorted out two impressions. First, that Lupe meant her threat absolutely. She would kill him if she caught him with Rane or any other woman. Second, he knew it. He enjoyed her possessiveness. Thus Rane was probably safe from him in one way at least. Thank God.
“You’re bright,” Lupe said to her softly. “Very bright, but stubborn. You think you can choose your realities. You can’t.”
Rane made herself meet the woman’s eyes. “Reality,” she said with contempt. “My father is a doctor. He really could have gone out on the Ark. He has valuable training, he was within the age range when it left, and he was in good physical shape. Would you believe me if I told you he was a fugitive astronaut?”
“Not if you’re his kid, honey. Nobody with young kids went. No white guy married to a black woman went either. Things never got that loose.”
“And no ignorant con artist who can barely speak English went,” Rane snapped. “If Eli’s convinced you he did, you’re no smarter than he is!”
Surprisingly, Lupe smiled. “You’re a lot less tolerant than I would have expected. A lot less observant too. But it doesn’t matter. Here’s Jacob.”
Ingraham came into the room carrying a small, large-eyed, brown boy. The boy was slender—without childish pudginess—but not bone-thin like the adults. He wore a pair of blue shorts, but no shirt. He was startlingly beautiful, Rane realized when he turned in Ingraham’s arms and faced her. But there was something odd about him. He seemed nothing like the thing that had run past her outside, but he did appear to be built for speed. An odd, slender little boy.
“Come on, miho,” Lupe said. “Let’s show you off a little bit. Come sit with us.”
The boy scrambled against Ingraham, braced, and leaped to the bench on which Rane and Lupe sat. He landed next to Rane, who started violently. Jacob had leaped like a cat and landed on all fours. His legs and arms were clearly intended to be used this way. He was a quadruped. He had hands, however, and fingers. He looked at them, following Rane’s eyes.
“They work,” he said in a clear, slightly deeper than average child’s voice. “They work like yours.” He grasped her arm with the small, startlingly strong, hard hands. Sharp little nails dug into her flesh, and she drew away. Squatting, the boy sniffed his hands, then wiped them on his shorts.
“You smell,” he told Rane, and leaped off the bench and onto it again next to Lupe.
Lupe laughed. “Shame, Jacob. That’s not nice to say.”
“She does,” the boy insisted.
“She’s not one of us yet. She will be soon. Then she’ll smell different.”
Rane completely passed over the insult in her fascination with the boy—the whatever-it-was.
“Can he walk on his feet alone?” she asked Lupe.
“Not so well,” Lupe answered. “He tries sometimes because we all do, but it’s not natural to him. He gets tired, even sore if he keeps at it. And it’s too slow for him. You like to move fast, don’t you, mijo? She lifted the strange little body and placed it on her lap. Jacob immediately put his ear to her belly.
“I can hear it,” he announced.
“Hear the baby?” Rane asked.
“Its heartbeat,” Lupe said. “He can hear it without putting his ear to me. It’s just a game he likes. He says this one’s going to be a girl. He doesn’t understand how he can tell, but he knows. Smell, maybe.”
“Guessing, maybe,” Rane said.
“Oh no, he does know. He’s called it right four times so far. Now women come and ask him.”
“But … but, Lupe—”
“Stop for a moment,” Lupe said. Then to the boy, “Okay, niño. Back out to play. Take some nuts.”
The boy leaped down from her lap, trotted on all fours to the china nut dish on the plain, homemade coffee table. He took a handful of nuts, stuffed them into the pocket of his shorts and zipped it shut. He seemed to have no trouble using his hands. They were smaller than Rane thought they should have been, but he was less clumsy with them than a normal child would have been. He was certainly much faster than any normal child, probably faster than most adults. All his movements were smooth and graceful. A graceful four-year-old.
He stopped in front of her—beautiful child head, sleek catlike body. A miniature sphinx. What would it be when it grew up? Not a man, certainly.
“I don’t like you either,” Jacob said. “You’re fat and you smell and you’re ugly!”
“Jacob!” Lupe stood up and started toward him. “Vayase! Ahora mismo! Outside!”
Jacob bounded out the door. No, human beings did not move that way. How had any disease made such a creature of a child?
“He’s telling the truth, you know,” Lupe said. “You do look fat and odd to him, though you’re not. And you smell … different. Also, he couldn’t miss how much you were repelled by him.”
“I don’t understand how such a thing could happen,” Rane whispered.
“It’s the disease, I told you. We don’t even have a name for it—the disease of Clay’s Ark. All our children are like Jacob.”
“All … ?” Rane swallowed. “All animals? All things?”
“Shit!” Lupe said. “You’re worse than I was. You should be more tolerant. He’s a little boy.”
Rane stared at her pregnant belly.
“Oh yes,” Lupe said. “This child will be like Jacob too, just as my son is. Beautiful and different. And, chica, your children will be like him too. The disease doesn’t go away. It just settles in and stays with you and you pass it on to strangers and to your children.”
“Or you get treatment!” Rane said. “What the hell are you doing sitting in the middle of the desert giving birth to monsters and kidnapping people?”
Lupe smiled. “Eli says we’re preserving humanity. I agree with him. We are. Our own humanity and everyone else’s because we let people alone. We isolate ourselves as much as we can, and the people outside stay alive and healthy—most of them.”
“Most,” Rane said with bitterness. “Most for now. But even now, not me. Not my father or sister. And what about you? You don’t belong here either, do you?”
“I do now,” Lupe said. “Before, I was a private hauler. You know. Good money if you survive. My truck broke down all the way over on I-Fifteen, and Eli caught me outside. When I realized what he had done to me, I thought I would bide my time and kill him. Now, I think I’d kill anyone who tried to hurt him. He’s family.”
“Why?” demanded Rane. “If you really beli
eve he’s the cause of this sickness—and you know he’s the guy who kidnapped you …” Rane shook her head. “Didn’t you have a husband or anything back in the real world? What about your business?”
“I was divorced,” Lupe said. “I lived in the truck on the road.” She paused. Her voice became wistful. “I miss the road. I almost got killed more times than I like to think about, but I miss it.”
Rane listened without comprehension. A woman who could be nostalgic for work that kept nearly killing her could probably make any irrational adjustment.
“I didn’t have anybody,” Lupe said. “We lived in a cesspool. My parents’ house got caught in a gang war, got bombed. One of the gangs wanted to make a no-man’s-land, you know. They needed to put some space between their territory and their rivals’. So they bombed some houses, torched others. They got their no-man’s-land. My parents, my brother, and a lot of other people got killed. My ex-husband, he’s a wino somewhere. Who cares? So I was alone. I’m not alone here. I’m part of something, and it feels good. Even Orel. There was a time when I carried two guns plus the truck’s usual defenses—and defensively, my truck was a goddamn tank—all to fight off people like him: bike packers, car bums, rogue truckers, every slimy maggot crawling over what’s left of the highway system. But they’re not all as bad as I thought. Orel isn’t. Take away the gang and give him something better and he turns into a person. A man.” Rane listened with interest in spite of herself. She could not understand Lupe’s interest in a man like Ingraham but she was beginning to respect Lupe. Rane liked to think of herself as tough, but she had an uncomfortable suspicion she could not have survived Lupe’s life. She had never been alone, never been without someone who would help her if she could not help herself. Now none of the people who cared about her could help her. Her father, her sister, two sets of grandparents, and on her mother’s side, a number of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Only a few of them were close to her, but every one of them could be counted on to come running if a member of the family needed help. Now, the only ones who knew of her need needed help as badly as she did.
Past 13
GABRIEL BOYD DIED.
Death was a relief to him, an end to more than physical suffering. Alive, he was frightened, confused, full of self-loathing for feelings he could neither control nor understand.
He had had to be put to bed because he was no longer able to keep his balance. He overcompensated, first for walking up and down steps, then for negotiating the irregularities of the ground outside, finally for walking over a level surface. He could crawl, but nothing more.
As his sensitivity increased, he began to react with terror to slight sounds and cringe at the slightest touch. Most food—even the smell of food—nauseated him, though he was always hungry. Eli fed him ground, unseasoned raw meat, fresh vegetables, and fruit. He ate a little of this and kept it down.
His eyes had to be covered since any slight movement frightened him. His movements, even in bed, were either exaggerated and awkward or fine and incredibly controlled. He could no longer feed himself. Then he could no longer eat or drink even if fed. On the Ark, he would have been fed intravenously. But no member of the Ark crew who reached this stage had survived, reinfection or no. Eli and a weeping Meda cared for him, then for his wife, whose symptoms also worsened. He lost control of all his bodily functions. He urinated and defecated, spat and drooled. His body twitched and convulsed and sweated profusely. He probably shed enough disease organisms to contaminate a city.
On the fourth day following the onset of symptoms, he died—probably of dehydration and exhaustion. On life support, he would have lasted longer, but the end would have been the same. Eli was glad there were no facilities for prolonging the old man’s suffering.
Meda’s mother died a day later as did her two brothers and a tiny, perfectly formed nephew born three months too soon.
Meda herself never really sickened. She became more and more despondent as her family died, became almost suicidal, but her physical symptoms remained bearable. She was learning to use her enhanced senses or at least tolerate them. And in spite of all the horror, every night and sometimes during the day, she went to Eli or he came to her. Without discussion, he moved into her room. She did not understand how she could touch him with the disaster he had brought to her family happening all around her. Yet she found comfort with him. And, though she did not know it, she gave him comfort, eased his guilt by continuing to live. They leaned on each other desperately, and somehow held each other up.
Her father realized what they were doing before he died. He first cursed her, called her a harlot. Then he apologized and wept. He seized Eli’s wrist with only a ghost of the great strength he should have possessed.
“Take care of her!” he whispered. It was more a command than a request. Even more softly, he said, “I know it might have been me or one of her brothers if not for you. Take care of her, please.”
To Eli’s own surprise, he wept. He was trapped in a vise of guilt and grief. He was alive because of the old man. Gabriel Boyd had given him a home and thus kept him from drifting into a town and spreading the disease. It was his grandfather all over again—a stern, godly old man who took in strays. A dangerous practice these days—taking in strays.
He worried about Meda. Worried that he might not be able to take care of her—that she might die in spite of her apparent adjustment. That would make him a complete failure. That would drive him away even if her sisters-in-law lived. In his mind, only her living would ease his questioning of his own humanity. He had stayed to save her. Now she must live or he was a monster, utterly evil, completely without control of the thing that made him monstrous.
She lived. He stayed with her constantly during the period when she might try to take her life. Later when the organism took firmer hold, suicide would be impossible. Now, he watched her.
Most of the time she hated him at least as much as she needed him. She lost weight and her clothing sagged on her. She gained strength, and when she hit him, it hurt. Guiltily, he did not strike back.
She helped him wash the corpses of her parents, her brothers, and her nephew. For him it was a penance he would not permit himself to avoid. For her it was a good-bye.
They wrapped the bodies in clean sheets, took them to a place she had chosen. There, together, they broke the ground, dug the graves. The sisters-in-law did not help, but they crept out to stand red-eyed over the graves as Eli read from Lamentations and from Job. They cried and Meda said a prayer and it was over.
Later, Meda tried to comfort her sisters-in-law. They were older than she, but she had a more dominant personality, and they tended to defer to her—except in one important way. They preferred to be comforted by Eli. Their drives were as much increased as Meda’s and they had no men.
Meda understood their need, and resented it. Even when she hated Eli, she did not want to share him. Her possessiveness seemed to surprise her, but it did not surprise Eli. He would have been equally possessive of her if there had been another man on the ranch. He saw to it that Gwyn and Lorene were reinfected until he was certain they would live. Then he avoided temptation as best he could until Meda was comfortably pregnant—and her pregnancy did comfort her. She did not understand why. She had been isolated and sheltered by her parents, brought up to believe having a child outside marriage was a great sin. But her pregnancy relieved tension she had not recognized until it was gone. It also relieved tension she had recognized all too clearly.
“I’m going to sleep with Lorene,” Eli told her one day. “It’s her time.”
Meda rubbed her stomach and looked at him. “I don’t want you to,” she said. He could see that she meant the words, but he heard little passion behind them. She had some idea what he was feeling, and she knew positively what Lorene was feeling. She wanted to hold on to him, but she had already resigned herself to his going.
“There are no other men,” he said unnecessarily.
“Will you come back?”
“Yes!” he said at once. Then more tentatively, “Shall I?”
“Yes!” she said matching his tone. She put her hand to her stomach. “This is your child too!”
She did not know how much he wanted to be a father to it. He had been afraid she would do what she could to make that difficult.
“We need men for Lorene and Gwyn,” she said.
He nodded. He was glad she had said it. She would share the responsibility this time when they infected two more men. He had known all along what had to be done. He had not thought the women were ready to hear it until now. The other deaths had seemed too fresh in their minds. Without meaning to, he had enjoyed the harem feeling the three women gave him. When he realized how much he enjoyed it, he wanted to look for other men at once. He found any feeling that would have been repugnant before his illness, but that was now attractive, to be suspect. He would not give the organism another fragment of himself, of his humanity. He would not let it make him a stud with three mares. He would make a colony, an enclave on the ranch. A human gathering, not a herd. A gathering headed where, God knew, but wherever they were headed, since they were not going to die, they had to grow.
Present 14
LUPE AND INGRAHAM SHARED Rane with a newcomer introduced as Stephen Kaneshiro. No one explained what he was doing there. He offered to help with the wall painting when Lupe and Ingraham got out the paint and brushes—real brushes—but Rane did not get the impression he lived with them. He touched her from time to time as Lupe and Ingraham did. After a couple of hours of this, she stopped cringing and trying to avoid their fingers. They were not hurting her. There was no more scratching. They were endurable.
Eventually the reason for Stephen’s presence became clear to her.
The painting had been going on for a while when Lupe asked her if she wanted to help. She shook her head. She knew the request might really be a command, but she decided to wait and see. Lupe simply shrugged and turned back to the wall she was working on. The two men were on their way to work on the outside of the house. Stephen stopped, looked at her, then at Lupe. “Do you suppose she’ll be this lazy when she has her own house?” he asked.
Seed to Harvest: Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, and Patternmaster (Patternist) Page 59