Clay's Ark

by Octavia E. Butler

  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.

  Lupe smiled. “That one isn’t lazy. She’s sitting there cooking up an escape plan.”

  Startled, Rane turned to look at her. Lupe laughed, but Stephen seemed concerned. He put down a can of paint and came over to Rane. He was a small, brown man, so heavily tanned that he and Rane were about the same color. He was clean-shaven and longhaired, his black hair pulled back and loosely bound with a rubber band. Under different circumstances, she would have welcomed attention from him, even been a little overwhelmed. He was as thin as everyone else on the ranch, but he was also one of the best-looking men Rane had ever seen. Somehow, his thinness did not detract from his good looks. Yet he had the disease. She braced herself against the renewed offen
se of his touch.

  But this time he did not touch her. He clearly wanted to, but he held back.

  “If you’ll come with me,” he said, “I won’t touch you.”

  “Do I have a choice?” she asked.

  “Yes, but I’d like you to come. I want to talk to you.”

  Rane glanced at Lupe, saw that she was paying no attention. Stephen did not seem fearsome. He was her size and not afflicted with any twitches or trembling. She sensed none of Ingraham’s quick temper behind the quiet, black eyes. More important, she was learning absolutely nothing sitting in Lupe’s living room and being stroked like an animal whenever someone thought of her. She needed to look around, find a way out of this place.

  She stood up, looked at Stephen, waiting for him to lead the way.

  “We’re going outside,” he said. “I’ll show you around while we talk. Don’t run, though. If you run, I’ll have to hurt you—and that’s the last thing I’d want to do.”

  There was no special warmth in his voice when he said these last words, but Rane was suddenly suspicious.

  Breaking his word, Stephen took her arm and led her out. She did not mind, really. At least this time he had a reason to touch her.

  He took her to a corral where two cows and a half-grown heifer were eating hay. Far off to one side, there was another corral from which a bull stared at the cows.

  “This place is full of babies and pregnant women,” he said. “We need plenty of milk.” The heifer came over to them and he rubbed its broad face.

  “You can get a disease from drinking raw milk,” Rane said.

  “We know that. We’re careful—although we’re not sure we have to be. We don’t seem to get other diseases once we have this one.”

  “It’s not worth it!”

  He looked surprised at her vehemence. “Rane, you’ll be all right. Young women don’t have anything to worry about. It’s older women and all men who take the risk.”

  “So I’ve heard. That means my father could die. And, young or not, my sister will probably die sooner than she would have without you people. And me. What do I do if I live? Give birth to one little animal after another?”

  He turned her around so that she faced him. “Our children are not animals!” he said. “We are not interested in hearing them called animals.”

  She pulled free of him, not at all surprised that he let her. “I never cared much for the idea of aborting children,” she said, “but if I thought for a moment that I was carrying another Jacob, I’d be willing to abort it with an old wire coat hanger!”

  She had managed to horrify him—which was what she had intended. She was completely serious, and he, of all people, had to know it.

  “You know they planned to give you to me,” he said softly.

  “I suspected. So I wanted you to know how I felt.”

  “Your feelings will change. Ours did. The disease changes you.”

  “Makes you like having four-legged kids?”

  “Makes you like having kids. Makes you need to have them. And when they come, you love them. I wonder … What’s the chemical composition of love? Human babies are ugly even when they’re normal, but we love them. If we didn’t the species would die. Our babies here—well, if we didn’t love them, if we weren’t damned protective of them, the Clay’s Ark organism on Earth would die. It isn’t intelligent, but, God, is it ever built to survive.”

  “I won’t change,” Rane said.

  He smiled and shook his head. “You’re a strong girl, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.” He paused. “You don’t have to come to me until you want to. We’re not rapists here. And you … Well, you’re interesting right now, but not as interesting as you will be.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He put his arm around her. She was surprised that the gesture did not offend her. “You’ll find out eventually. For now, it doesn’t matter.”

  They walked away from the heifer and she mooed after them.

  “Cows don’t seem to get the disease,” he commented. “Dogs get it and it kills them. It kills all the types of cold-blooded things that have bitten us—snakes, scorpions, insects … There may not be anything on Earth that can penetrate our flesh and come away unchanged. Except our own kind, of course. I can’t prove it, but I’ll bet those cows are carriers.”

  “The scope attachment of my father’s bag could probably tell you that,” Rane said. “Though he may not be in any mood to use it.”

  “I can use it,” he said.

  She looked at his face, lineless in spite of his thinness. He was the youngest person she had seen so far—in his early twenties, perhaps, or his late teens. “You were in school before, weren’t you,” she guessed.

  He nodded. “College. Music major. I got a little sidetracked taking biology and chemistry classes, though.”

  “What were you going to be?”

  “A concert violinist. I’ve been playing since I was four.”

  “And now you’re willing to give it all up and move back to the twentieth century?”

  He stopped at a large wooden bin, opened it, and watched as a couple of dozen chickens came running and gathered around, clucking. He opened one of the six large metal barrels, took out a handful of cracked corn, and threw it to them. This was clearly what they were waiting for. They began pecking up the corn quickly before the newcomers who came in from every direction could take it from them. Stephen threw a little more of the corn, then closed the bin.

  “It’s almost sunset,” he said. “You’d think they’d be too busy deciding where they were going to roost to watch the bin.”

  “Don’t you care that you’re never going to be a musician?” she demanded.

  He looked down at his hands, rubbed them together. “Yes.”

  His voice had dropped low into his own private pain. She stood silent, feeling awkward, for once not knowing what to say. Then he looked up at her, smiled faintly. “It was an old passion,” he said. “I haven’t touched a violin for months. I didn’t know what that would be like.”

  “What is it like?” she asked.

  He began to walk so that she almost missed his answer. “An amputation,” he whispered.

  She walked with him, let him lead her out to the garden, passing the Wagoneer on the way. The sight of it jarred her, reminded her that she should be watching for a way of escape.

  “Did you ever see food growing?” he asked, bending to turn a deep green watermelon over and look at its yellow bottom. “Ripe,” he commented. “You wouldn’t believe how sweet they are.” He was distracting. He moved from one subject to another, drawing her with him, keeping her emotionally involved in whatever he chose.

  “I don’t care about food growing,” she said. “Listen, Stephen, my father is a good doctor. Let him examine you—maybe the disease can be cured. If he can’t help you himself, he’ll know who can.”

  “We don’t leave the ranch,” he said, “except to bring in supplies and converts.”

  “You’ll never be a violinist here!”

  “I’ll never be a violinist,” he said. “Don’t you think I know that?” He never raised his voice. His expression changed only slightly. But she felt as though he had shouted at her. She watched him with fascination.

  “Why?” she asked. “What’s holding you here?”

  “I belong here. These are my people now.”

  “Why? Because they gave you a disease?”

  “Yes.”

  “That doesn’t make sense!” she said angrily.

  “It will.”

  His apparent passivity infuriated her. “You were probably nothing as a violinist. You probably didn’t have anything to lose. That’s why you don’t care!”

  His face froze over. “If you want to get rid of me,” he said, “go on saying things like that.”

  In that moment, she realized she did not want to get rid of him. He seemed human and the others did not. Just a few minutes with him had made her want
to cling to him and avoid the stick people and animal children who were her alternative. But she would not cling to him. She would not cling to anyone.

  “I don’t care what you do,” she said. “I don’t understand why anyone would want to stay here, and you haven’t said anything to help me understand.”

  “Nothing I say would really help.” He sighed. “When your symptoms start, you’ll understand. That’s all. But try this. I was married. My wife played the piano—played it maybe better than I played the violin. We had a son who was only a year old when I saw him last. If I stay here, my wife can go on playing the piano. The world will go on being a place where people have time for music and beauty. My son can grow up and do whatever he wants to. My parents have some money. They’ll see that he has his chance. But if I try to turn myself in, I know I’ll lose control and spread the disease. I would begin the process of turning the world into a place with no time for anything but survival. In the end, Jacob and his kind would inherit everything. My son … might never live to be a man.”

  She was silent for several seconds when he finished. She found herself wanting to say something comforting, and that was insane. “You’ve sacrificed my family to spare yours,” she said bitterly.

  He pulled an ear of corn from its stalk, husked it, and began eating it raw. He tore at it like an animal, not looking at her.

  “Someone sacrificed you, too,” she said finally. “I know that. But Jesus, isn’t it time to break the chain? You and I could get away together. We could get help.”

  “You haven’t heard me,” he said. “I knew you wouldn’t. Listen! We’re infectious for as much as two weeks before we start to show symptoms—except for people like you who won’t have two weeks between infection and symptoms. How many people do you think the average person could infect in two weeks of city life? How many could his victims infect?—and with an extraterrestrial organism. There’s no cure, Rane, and by the time one is found—if one can be found—it will probably be too late. It isn’t only my family I’m protecting. It’s everyone. It’s the future. As Eli told me, the organism is a damned efficient invader.”