Clay's Ark

Clay's Ark

By Octavia E. Butler

PART 1: PHYSICIAN PAST 1

The ship had been destroyed five days before. He did not remember how. He knew he was alone now, knew he had returned home instead of to the station as planned or to the emergency base on Luna. He knew it was night. For long stretches of time, he knew nothing else.

He walked and climbed automatically, hardly seeing the sand, the rock, the mountains, noticing only those plants that could be useful to him. Hunger and thirst kept him moving. If he did not find water soon, he would die.

He had hidden for five days and two nights, had wandered for nearly three nights with no destination, no goal but food, water, and human companionship. During this time he killed jack rabbits, snakes, even a coyote, with his bare hands or with stones. These he ate raw, splashing their blood over his ragged coverall, drinking as much of it as he could. But he

had found little water.

Now he could smell water the way a dog or a horse might. This was no longer a new sensation. He had become accustomed to using his senses in ways not normally thought human. In his own mind, his humanity had been in question for some time.

He walked. When he reached rocks at the base of a range of mountains, he began to climb, rousing to notice the change only because moving began to require more effort, more of his slowly fading strength.

For a few moments, he was alert, sensitive to the rough, eroded granite beneath his hands and feet, aware that there were people in the direction he had chosen. This was not surprising. On the desert, people would either congregate

around water or bring water with them. On one level, he was eager to join them. He needed the company of other

people almost as badly as he needed water. On another level, he hoped the people would be gone from the water when he reached it. He was able to distinguish the smell of women among them, and he began to sweat. He hoped at least that the women would be gone. If they stayed, if anyone stayed, they risked death. Some of them would surely die.

PRESENT 2

The wind had begun to blow before Blake Maslin left Needles on his way west toward Palos Verdes Enclave and home. City man that he was, Blake did not worry about the weather. His daughter Keira warned him that desert winds could blow cars off the road and that wind-driven sand could blast paint off cars, but he reassured her. He had gotten into the habit of reassuring her without really listening to her fears; there were so many of them.

This time, however, Keira was right. She should have been. The desert had long been an interest of hers, and she knew it better than Blake did. This whole old-fashioned car trip had happened because she knew and loved the desert-and because she wanted to see her grandparents-Blake's parents-in Flagstaff, Arizona, one last time. She wanted to visit

them in the flesh, not just see them on a phone screen. She wanted to be with them while she was still well enough to

enjoy them.

Twenty minutes out of Needles, the wind became a gale. There were heavy, billowing clouds ahead, black and gray slashed by lightning, but there was no rain yet. Nothing to hold down the dust and sand.

For a while Blake tried to continue on. In the back seat, Keira slept, breathing deeply, almost snoring. It bothered him when he could no longer hear her over the buffeting of the wind.

His first-born daughter, Rane, sat beside him, smiling slightly, watching the storm. While he fought to control the car, she enjoyed herself. If Keira had too many fears, Rane had too few. She and Keira were fraternal twins, different in

appearance and behavior. Somehow, Blake had slipped into the habit of thinking of the hardier, more impulsive Rane

as his younger daughter.

A gust of wind slammed into the car broadside, almost blowing it off the road. For several seconds, Blake could see nothing ahead except a wall of pale dust and sand.

Frightened at last, he pulled off the road. His armored, high-suspension Jeep Wagoneer was a hobby, a carefully preserved relic of an earlier, oil-extravagant era. It had once run on one-hundred-percent gasoline, though now it used

ethanol. It was bigger and heavier than the few other cars on the road, and Blake was a good driver. But enough was enough-especially with the girls in the car.

When he was safely stopped, he looked around, saw that other people were stopping too. On the other side of the highway, ghostly in the blowing dust and sand, were three large trucks- expensive private haulers, carrying God-knew- what: anything, from the household possessions of the wealthy, who could still afford the archaic luxury of moving across country, to the necessities of the few remaining desert enclaves and roadside stations, to illegal drugs, weapons, and worse. Several yards ahead, there was a battered Chevrolet and a new little electric something-or-other. Far behind, he could see another private hauler parked at such a strange angle that he knew it had come off the highway barely under control. Only a few thrillseekers in aging tour buses continued on.

From out of the desert over a dirt road Blake had not previously noticed came another car, making its way toward the highway. Blake stared at it, wondering where it could have come from. This part of the highway was bordered on both sides by some of the bleakest desert Blake had ever seen-worn volcanic hills and emptiness.

Incongruously, the car was a beautiful, old, wine-red Mercedes-the last thing Blake would have expected to see coming

out of the wilderness. It drove past him on the sand, traveling east, though the only lanes open to it carried westbound traffic. Blake wondered whether the driver would be foolish enough to try to cross the highway in the storm. He could see three people in the car as it passed but could not tell whether they were men or women. He watched them disappear into the dust behind him, then forgot them as Keira moaned in her sleep.

He looked at her, felt rather than saw that Rane also turned to look. Keira, thin and frail, slept on.

"Back in Needles," Rane said, "I heard a couple of guys talking about her. They thought she was so pretty and fragile." Blake nodded. "I heard them too." He shook his head. Keira had been pretty once-when she was healthy, when she

looked so much like her mother that it hurt him. Now she was ethereal, not quite of this world, people said. She was

only sixteen, but she* had acute myeloblastic leukemia-an adult disease-and she was not responding to treatment. She wore a wig because the epigenetic therapy that should have caused her AML cells to return to normal had not worked, and her doctor, in desperation, had resorted to old-fashioned chemotherapy. This had caused most of her hair to fall out. She had lost so much weight that none of her clothing fit her properly. She said she could see herself fading away. Blake could see her fading, too. As an internist, he could not help seeing more than he wanted to see.

He looked away from Keira and out of the corner of his eye he saw something bright green move at Rane's window. Before he could speak, a man who seemed to come from nowhere tore open her door, which had been locked, and moved to shove his way in beside Rane.

The man was quick, and stronger than any two men should have been, but he was also slightly built and off-balance.

Before he could regain his balance, Rane screamed an obscenity, drew her legs back against her body, and spring- released them so that they slammed into his abdomen.

The man doubled and fell backward onto the ground, his green shirt flapping in the wind. Instantly another man took his place. The second man had a gun.

Frightened, Rane drew back against Blake, and Blake, who had reached for his own automatic rifle sheathed diagonally on the door next to him, froze, staring at the intruder's gun. It was not aimed at him. It was aimed at Rane.

Blake raised his hands, held them in midair, clearly empty. For a long moment, he could not speak. He could only stare at the short, dull black carbine leveled at his daughter.

"You can have my wallet," he said finally. "It's in my pocket."

The man seemed to ignore him.

The red Mercedes pulled up beside Blake's car and Blake could see that there was only one person inside now. A

woman, he thought. He could see what looked like a great deal of long, dark hair.

The man in the green shirt picked himself up and drew a handgun. Now there were two guns, both aimed at Rane. Thug psychologists. The green-shirted one walked around the car toward Blake's side.

"Touch the lock," the remaining one ordered. "Just the lock. Let him in."

Blake obeyed, let Green Shirt open the door and take the rifle. Then, in an inhumanly swift move, the man reached across Blake and ripped out the phone. "City rich!" he muttered contemptuously as Blake realized what he had done. "City slow and stupid. Now take out the wallet and give it to me."

Blake handed his wallet to Green Shirt, moving slowly, watching the guns. Green Shirt snatched the wallet, slammed the door, and went back to the other side where the two cars together offered some protection from the wind. There, he opened the wallet. Surprisingly, he did not check the cash compartment, though Blake actually had over two thousand dollars. He liked to carry small amounts of cash when he traveled. Green Shirt flipped through Blake's computer cards, pulled out his Palos Verdes Enclave identification.

"Doctor," he said. "How about that. Blake Jason Maslin, M.D. Know anybody who needs a doctor, Eli?"

The other gunman gave a humorless laugh. He was a tall, thin black man with skin that had gone gray with more than desert dust. His health may have been better than Keira's, Blake thought, but not by much.

For that matter, Green Shirt, shorter and smaller-boned, did not look healthy himself. He was blond, tanned beneath his coating of dust, though his tan seemed oddly gray. He was balding. His gun shook slightly in his hand. A sick man. They were both sick-sick and dangerous.

Blake put his arm around Rane protectively. Thank God Keira had managed to sleep through everything so far.

"What is this, anyway?" Eli demanded, glancing back at Keira, then staring at Rane. "What kind of cradles have you been robbing. Doc?"

Blake stiffened, felt Rane stiffen against him. His wife Jorah had been black, and he and Rane and Keira had been through this, routine before.

"These are my daughters," Blake said coldly. Without the guns, he would have said more. Without his hand gripping

Rane's shoulder, she would have said much more.

Eli looked surprised, then nodded, accepting. Most people took longer to believe. "Okay," he said. "Get out here, girl." Rane did not move, could not have if she had wanted to. Blake held her where she was. "Dad?" she whispered.

"You have my money," Blake told Eli. "You can have anything else you want. But let my daughters alone!"

Green Shirt glanced into the back seat at Keira. "I think that one's dead," he said casually. This was supposed to be a joke about Keira's sound sleeping, Blake knew, but he could not prevent himself from looking back at her quickly-just to be sure.

"Hey, Eli," Green Shirt said, "they really are his kids, you know."

"I can see," Eli said. "And that makes our lives easier. All we have to do is take one of them and he's ours."

It was beginning to rain-fat, dirty, wind-whipped drops. In the distance, thunder rumbled over the howl of the wind. Eli spoke so softly to Rane that Blake was hardly able to hear. "Is he your father?"

"You just admitted he was," Rane said. "What the hell do you want?"

Eli frowned. "My mother always used to say Think before you speak.' Your mother ever say anything like that to you, girl?"

Rane looked away, silent.

"Is he your father?" Eli repeated. "Yes."

"And you wouldn't want to see him get hurt, would you?"

Rane continued to look away, but could not conceal her fear. "What do you want?"

Ignoring her, Eli held his hand out to Green Shirt. After a moment, Green Shirt gave him the wallet. "Blake Jason Maslin," he read. "Born seven-four-seventy-seven. 'Oh say can you see.' " He looked at Rane. "What's your name, baby?"

Rane hesitated, no doubt repelled by the casual "baby." Normally she tore into people who seemed to be patronizing her. "Rane," she muttered finally. Thunder all but drowned her out.

"Rain? Like this dirty stuff falling on us now?" "Not rain, Rah-ney. It's Norwegian."

"Is it now? Well, listen, Rane, you see that woman over there?" He pointed to the red Mercedes alongside them. "Her

name is Meda Boyd. She's crazy as hell, but she won't hurt you. And if you do what we tell you and don't give us trouble, we won't hurt your father or your sister. You understand?"

Rane nodded, but Eli continued to look at her, waiting. "I understand!" she said. "What do you want me to do?"

"Go get in that car with Meda. She'll drive you. I'll follow with your father."

Rane looked at Blake. He could feel her trembling. "Listen," he began, "you can't do this! You can't just-" Green Shirt placed his gun against Pane's temple. "Why not?" he asked.

Blake jerked Rane away. It was a reflex, a chance he would never have taken if he had had time to think about it. He

pulled her head down against his chest.

At the same moment, Eli pulled Green Shirt's gun hand away, twisting it so that if the gun had gone off, the bullet would have hit the windshield.

The gun did not go off. It should have, Blake realized later, considering Green Shirt's tremor and the suddenness of

Eli's move. But all that happened was some sort of brief, wordless exchange between Eli and Green Shirt. They looked at each other -first with real anger, then with understanding and a certain amount of sheepishness.

"You'd better drive," Eli said. "Let Meda watch the kid."

"Yeah," Green Shirt agreed. "The past catches up with you sometimes." "You okay?"

"Yeah."

"She's a strong girl. Good material." "I know."

"Good material for what?" Blake demanded. He had released Rane, but she stayed close to him, watching Eli.

"Look, Doc," Eli said, "the last thing we want to have to do is kill one of you. But we don't have much time or patience."

"Let my daughters stay with me," Blake said. "I'll cooperate. I'll do anything you want. Just don't-" "We're leaving you one. Don't make us take them both."

"But-"

"Ingraham, get the other kid out here. Get her up."

"No!" Blake shouted. "Please, she's sick. Let her alone!" "What? Carsick?"

"My sister has leukemia," Rane said. "She's dying. What are you going to do? Help her along?" "Rane, for God's sake!" Blake whispered.

Eli and the green-shirted Ingraham looked at each other, then back at Blake. "I thought they could cure that now," Eli said. "Don't they have some kind of protein medicine that reprograms the cells?"

Blake hesitated, wondering how much pity the details of Keira's illness might evoke in the gunmen. He was surprised that Eli knew as much as he did about epigenetic therapy. But Eli's knowledge did not matter. If he was not moved by

Keira's imminent death, nothing else was likely to touch them. "She's receiving therapy," he said.

"And it isn't enough?" Ingraham asked.

Blake shrugged. It hurt to say the words. He could not recall ever having said them aloud. "Shit." Ingraham muttered. "What are we supposed to do with a kid who's already-"

"Shut up," Eli said. "If we've made a mistake, it's too late to cry about it." He glanced back at Keira, then faced Blake. "Sorry, Doc. Her bad luck and ours." He sighed. "Well, you take the good with the bad. We won't hurt her-if you and

Rane do as you're told."

"What are you going to do with us?" Blake asked.

"Don't worry about it. Come on, Rane. Meda's waiting." Rane clung to Blake as she had not for years.

Eli gazed at her steadily, and she stared back but would not move. "Come on, kid," he said softly. "Do it the easy way." Blake wanted to tell her to go-before these people hurt her. Yet the last thing he wanted her to do was leave him. He

was terrified that if they took her, he would never get her back. He stared at the two men. If he had had his gun, he would have shot them without a thought.

"Use your head, Doc," Eli said. "Just slide over to the passenger side. I'll drive. You keep your eyes on Rane. It will

make you feel better. Make you act better, too."

Abruptly, Blake gave in, moved over, pushing Rane. He wanted to believe the gray-skinned black man. It would have been easier to believe him if Blake had had some idea what these people wanted. They were not just one of the local car gangs, obscenely called car families. No one had looked at the money in his wallet. In fact, as he thought about the wallet, Eli tossed it onto the dashboard as though he were finished with it. Were they after more money? Ransom? They did not sound as though they were. And they seemed strangely resigned, as though they did not like what they were doing-almost as though they were under the gun themselves.

Blake hugged Rane. "Watch yourself," he said, trying to sound steadier than he felt. "Be more careful than you usually are -at least until we find out what's going on."

Blake watched Ingraham follow Rane through the muddy downpour, watched her get into the red Mercedes. Ingraham said a few words to the woman, Meda, then exchanged places with her.

When that was done, Eli relaxed. He thrust his gun into his jacket, walked around the Wagoneer as casually as an old

friend, and got in. It never occurred to Blake to try anything. Part of himself had walked away with Rane. His stomach churned with anger, frustration, and worry.

After a moment of spinning its wheels, the Mercedes leaped forward, shot all the way across the highway, and onto another dirt road. The Wagoneer followed easily. Eli patted its dashboard as though it were alive. "Sweet-running car,"

he said. "Big. You don't find them this size any more. Too bad."

"Too bad?"

"Strongest-looking car we saw parked along the highway. We didn't want some piece of junk that would stall or get stuck on us. One tank full and the other nearly full of ethanol. Damn good. We make ethanol."

"You mean it was my car you wanted?"

"We wanted a decent car with two or three healthy, fairly young people in it." He glanced back at Keira. "You can't win

'em all." "But why?"

"Doc, what's the kid's name?" He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at Keira. Blake stared at him.

"Tell her she can get up. She's been awake since Ingraham took your wallet."

Blake turned sharply, found himself looking into Keira's large, frightened eyes. He tried to calm himself for her sake. "Do you feel all right?" he asked.

She nodded, probably lying.

"Sit up," he said. "Do you know what's happened?"

Another nod. If Rane talked too much, Keira didn't talk enough. Even before her illness became apparent, she had been a timid girl, easily frightened, easily intimidated, apparently slow. Patience and observation revealed her intelligence, but most people wasted neither on her.

She sat up slowly, staring at Eli. His coloring was as bad as her own. She could not have helped noticing that, but she said nothing.

"You get an earful?" Eli asked her.

She drew as far away from him as she could get and did not answer.

"You know your sister's in that car up ahead with some friends of mine. You think about that." "She's no danger to you," Blake said angrily.

"Have her give you whatever she's got in her left hand."

Blake frowned, looked toward Keira's left hand. She was wearing a long, multicolored, cotton caftan-a full, flowing garment with long, voluminous sleeves. It was intended to conceal her painfully thin body. At the moment, it also concealed her left hand.

Keira's expression froze into something ugly and determined.

"Kerry," Blake whispered.

She blinked, glanced at him, finally brought her left hand out of the folds of her dress and handed him the large manual screwdriver she had been concealing. Blake could remember misplacing the old screwdriver and not having time to look for it. It looked too large for Keira's thin fingers. Blake doubted that she had the strength to do any harm with it.

With a smaller, sharper instrument, however, she might have been dangerous. Anyone who could look the way she did

now could be dangerous, sick or well.

Blake took the screwdriver from her hand and held on to the hand for a moment. He wanted to reassure her, calm her, but he thought of Rane alone in the car ahead, and no words would come. There was no way everything was going to be all right. And he had always found it difficult to lie to his children.

After a moment, Keira seemed to relax-or at least to give up. She leaned back bonelessly, let her gaze Hicker from Eli to the car ahead. Only her eyes seemed alive.

"What do you want with us?" she whispered. "Why are you doing this?" Blake did not think Eli had heard her over the buffeting of the wind and the hissing patter of the rain. Eli obviously had all he could do to keep the car on the dirt road

and the Mercedes in sight. He ignored completely the long, potentially deadly screwdriver Blake gripped briefly, then

dropped. He was a young man, Blake realized-in his early thirties, perhaps. He looked older-or had looked older before Blake got a close look at him. His face was thin and prematurely lined beneath its coating of dust. His air of weary resignation suggested an older man. He looked older, Blake thought, in much the same way Keira looked older. Her disease had aged her, as apparently his had aged him-whatever his was.

Eli glanced at Keira through the rearview mirror. "Girl," he said, "you won't believe me, but I wish to hell I could let you go."

"Why can't you?" she asked.

"Same reason you can't get rid of your leukemia just by wishing."

Blake frowned. That answer couldn't have made any more sense to Keira than it did to him, but she responded to it. She gave Eli a long thoughtful look and moved slowly toward the middle of the seat away from her place of retreat behind

Blake.

"Do you hurt?" she asked.

He turned to look back at her-actually slowed down and lost sight of the Mercedes for a moment. Then he was occupied with catching up and there was only the sound of the rain as it was whipped against the car.

"In a way," Eli answered finally. "Sometimes. How about you?" Keira hesitated, nodded.

Blake started to speak, then stopped himself. He did not like the understanding that seemed to be growing between his

daughter and this man, but Eli, in his dispute with Ingraham, had already demonstrated his value. "Keira," Eli muttered. "Where did you ever get a name like that?"

"Mom didn't want us to have names that sounded like everybody's." "She saw to that. Your mother living?"

". . .no."

Eli gave Blake a surprisingly sympathetic look. "Didn't think so." There was another long pause. "How old are you?"

"Sixteen."

"That all? Are you the oldest or the youngest?" "Rane and I are twins."

A startled glance. "Well, I guess you're not lying about it, but the two of you barely look like members of the same family -let alone twins."

"I know."

"You got a nickname?" "Kerry."

"Oh yeah. That's better. Listen, Kerry, nobody at the ranch is going to hurt you; I promise you that. Anybody bothers you, you call me. Okay?"

"What about my father and sister?"

Eli shook his head. "I can't work no miracles, girl."

Blake stared at him, but for once, Eli refused to notice. He kept his eyes on the road.

PAST 3

In a high valley surrounded by stark, naked granite weathered round and deceptively smooth-looking, he found a finished house of wood on a stone foundation and the skeletal beginnings of two other houses. There was also a well with a huge, upended metal tank. There were pigs in wood-fenced pens, chickens in coops, rabbits in hutches, a large fenced garden, and a solar still. The still and electricity produced by photovoltaic intensifiers appeared to be the only concessions to modernity the owners of the little homestead had made.

He went to the well, turned the faucet handle of the storage tank, caught the cold, sweet, clear water in his hands, and drank. He had not tasted such water in years. It restored thought, cleared the fog from his mind. Now the senses that had been totally focused on survival were freed to notice other things.

The women, for instance.

He had scented at least one man in the house, but there were several women. Their scents attracted him powerfully. Yet the moment he caught himself moving toward the house in response to that attraction, he began to resist.

For several minutes he stood frozen outside the window of one of the women. He was so close to her he could hear her soft, even breathing. She was asleep, but turning restlessly now and then. He literally could not move. His body

demanded that he go to the woman. He understood the demand, the drive, but he refused to be just an animal governed by instinct. The woman was as near to being in heat as a female human could be. She had reached the most fertile

period of her monthly cycle. It was no wonder she was sleeping so badly. And no wonder he could not move except to

go to her.

He stood where he was, perspiring heavily in the cold night air and struggling to remember that he had resolved to be human plus, not human minus. He was not an animal, not a rapist, not a murderer. Yet he knew that if he let himself be drawn to the woman, he would rape her. If he raped her, if he touched her at all, she might die. He had watched it happen before, and it had driven him to want to die, to try to die himself. He had tried, but he could not deliberately kill himself. He had an unconscious will to survive that transcended any conscious desire, any guilt, any duty to those who had once been his fellow humans.

He tried furiously to convince himself that a break-in and rape would be stupidly self-destructive, but his body was locked into another reality, focused on a more fundamental form of survival. He did not move until the war within had exhausted him, until he had no strength left to take the woman.

Finally, triumphant, he dragged himself back to the well and drank again. The electric pump beside the well switched on suddenly, noisily, and in the distance, dogs began to bark. He looked around, knowing from the sound that the dogs were coming toward him. He had already discovered that dogs disliked him, and, rightly enough, feared him. Now,

however, he had been weakened by days of hunger and thirst and by his own internal conflict. Two or three large dogs

might be able to bring him down and tear him apart.

The dogs came bounding up-two big mongrels, barking and growling. They were put off by his strange scent at first, and they kept back out of his reach while putting on a show of ferocity. He thought by the time they found the courage to attack, he might be ready for at least one of them.

PRESENT 4

Eventually, the Mercedes and the Jeep emerged from the storm into vast, flat, dry desert, still following their arrow- straight dirt road. They approached, then passed between ancient black and red volcanic mountains. Later, they turned sharply from their dirt road onto something that was little more than a poorly marked trail. This led to a range of earth and granite mountains. The two cars headed into the mountains and began winding their way upward.

By then they had been driving for nearly an hour. At first, Blake had seen a few signs of humanity. A small airport, a lonely ranch here and there, many steel towers carrying high voltage lines from the Hidalgo and Joshua Tree Solar Power Plants. (The water shortage had hurt desert settlement even as the desert sun began to be used to combat the fuel shortage. Over much of the desert, communities were dead or dying.) But for some time now, Blake had seen no sign at all that there were other people in the world. It was as though they had left 2021 and gone back in time to primordial desert. The Indians must have seen the land this way.

Blake wondered whether he and his daughters would die in this empty place. It occurred to him that his abductors might be more likely to feel they needed him if they thought of him as their doctor. They might even give him enough of an opening to take his daughters and escape.

"Look," he said to Eli, "you're obviously not well. Neither is your friend Ingraham. I have my bag with me. Maybe I

can help."

"You can't help, Doc," Eli said. "You don't know that."

"Assume that I do." Eli squeezed the car around another of a series of boulders that seemed to have been scattered deliberately along the narrow mountain road. "Assume that I'm at least as complex a man as you are."

Blake stared at him, noting with interest that Eli had dropped the easy, old-fashioned street rhythms that made his speech seem familiar and made him seem no more than another semieducated product of city sewers. If he wished,

then, he could speak flat, standard, correct American English. "What's the matter with you, then?" Blake asked. "Will you tell us?"

"Not yet."

"Why?"

Eli took his time answering. He smiled finally-a smile full of teeth and utterly without humor. "It was a group decision," he said. "We got together and decided that for your sake and ours, people in your position should be protected from too much truth too soon. I was a minority of one, voting for honesty. I could have been a majority of one, but I've played that role long enough. The others thought people like you wouldn't believe the truth, that it would scare you more than necessary and you'd try harder to escape."

To the surprise of both men, Keira laughed. Blake looked back at her, and she fell silent, embarrassed. "I'm sorry," she whispered, "but not knowing is worse. Do they really think we wouldn't do just about anything to get away now?" "Nothing to be sorry for, girl," Eli said. The accent was back. "I agree with you."

"Who are the others who disagreed?" Keira asked.

"People. Just people like you and your father. Meda's family owned the land we live on. Ingraham . . . well, he was with a gang of bikers that came calling one day and tried to rape Meda- among other things. And we have a private hauler and a music student from L.A., a couple of people from Victorville, one from Twentynine Palms, and a few others."

"Ingraham tried to rape someone, and you let him stay?" Blake demanded. He was suddenly glad Ingraham was driving the car ahead. At least he would not have time to try anything until they got where they were going-but what then?

"That was another life," Eli said. "We don't care what he did before. He's one of us now." Blake thought of Ingraham's gun against Rane's head.

Eli seemed to read his thoughts. "Hey," he said, "I know how it looked, but Ingraham wouldn't have shot her. I was afraid you or she might make a dumb move and cause an accident, but there's no way he would have shot her."

"Was the gun empty?" Keira asked.

"Hell no," Eli said, surprised. He hesitated. "Listen, I'll be this straight with you. The safest person of the three of you is Rane. She's young, she's female, and she's healthy. If only one of you makes it, chances are it will be her." He slowed, looked at Blake, then at Keira. "What I'm trying to do is build a fire under you two. I want you to use your minds and your plain damn stubbornness to make a liar of me. I want you all to survive." He stopped the car. "We're here."

"Here" was a small high valley-a little space between the ancient rocks that formed the mountains. There was a large old house of wood and stone and three other wooden houses, less well built. A fifth house was under construction. Two men worked on it with hand tools, hammering and sawing as almost no one did these days.

"Population explosion," Eli said. "We've been lucky lately."

"You mean people have been surviving whatever it is you do to them here?" Blake asked. "That's what I mean," Eli admitted. "We're learning to help them."

"Are you some kind of ... well, some kind of religious group?" Keira asked. "I don't mean any offence, but I've heard there were . . . groups in the mountains."

"Cultists?" Eli said, smiling a real smile. "No, we didn't come up here to worship anybody, girl. There were some religious people up here once, though. Not cultists, just . . . What do you call them? People who never saw sweet reason around the turn of the century, and who decided to make a decent, moral, Godfearing place of their own to raise their kids and wait for the Second Coming."

"Leftovers," Blake said. "At least that's what we called such people when I was younger. But this place looks as though it hasn't been touched by this century or the last one. Looks more like a holdover from the nineteenth."

"Yeah," Eli said, and smiled again. "Get out. Doc. Let's see if I can talk Meda into cooking you folks a meal." He took the keys, then waited until Blake and Keira got out. Then he locked their doors and got out himself.

Blake looked around and decided that almost everything he saw reminded him of descriptions he'd read of subsistence farming more than a century before. Chickens running around loose, pecking at the sand, others in coops and in a large

chicken house and yard. Hogs poking their snouts between the wooden planks of their pens, rabbits in wood-and-wire

hutches, a couple of cows. But every building was topped by photovoltaic intensifiers. The well had an electric pump- clearly an antique-and on the front porch of one of the houses, a woman was using an ancient black Singer sewing machine. There was a large garden growing over perhaps half the valley floor. And near the two most distant houses were small structures that might have been, of all things, outhouses.

Blake had turned to ask Eli about it when suddenly, Rane was in his arms. He hugged her, startled that even this strange place had made him forget her danger for a moment. Now, flanked by both his daughters, he felt better, stronger. The feeling was irrational, he knew. The girls were no safer for their being with him. Their captors still had the guns. And they were all still trapped in this isolated, atavistic place. Worst of all, something was being planned for them- something they might not survive.

"What did you hear?" he asked Rane while Eli was busy talking to Meda.

"I think they're on some weird drugs or something," Rane whispered. "That guy Ingraham-his hands shake when he isn't using them, and when he is, he has other tics and twitches."

"That doesn't have to mean drugs," Blake said. "What about the woman?"

"Well ... no twitches, but if you think I'm too outspoken, wait until you meet her." "What did she say?"

Uncharacteristically, Rane looked away. "It wasn't anything that would help. I don't want to repeat it."

Keira touched Rane's arm to get her attention. "Was it about you being more likely to survive than the two of us? Because if it was, we got that too."

"Yes." "Plus?"

"Kerry, I'm not going to tell you."

It must have been bad then. There was very little Rane would hesitate to say. Blake resolved to get it out of her later. Now, Eli was coming toward them, motioning them into the wood-and-stone house. The dark-haired woman, Meda, came with him, stopping abruptly in front of Blake so that he had to stop or collide with her. She was a tall bony woman with no attractiveness at all beyond the long, thick, dark brown hair. She may have been attractive once, but now she had no shape, poor coloring, and not even the sense to cover herself as Keira had. She wore jeans cut off at mid-thigh and a man's short-sleeved shirt, buttoned to her skinny midriff, then tied. Blake wondered whether Rane might be right about the drugs.

"For your own sake," Meda said quietly, "you ought to know that we can hear better than most people. I don't usually care who hears what I say, but you might. Now what I told your kid, what she was too embarrassed to repeat, was that I

meant to ask Eli for you. I like your looks. It doesn't matter whether you like mine. Everybody here looks like me,

sooner or later."

"Jesus Christ," Blake muttered disgustedly. He began to laugh, not meaning to, but not able to stop. "You are crazy," he said, still laughing. "All of you." The laughter died finally, and he could only stare at them. They stared back impassively.

"What are you going to do?" he asked Eli. "Give me to her?"

"How can I?" Eli asked. "I don't think I own you. Meda and your kid have a way with words, Doc. With more people like them, we never would have avoided World War Three."

Blake managed to stifle more laughter. He rubbed a hand across his forehead, and was surprised to find it wet. He was standing in the hot desert sun, but between his daughters and his captors, he had hardly noticed.

"What are you going to do with me?" he asked.

"Oh, you'll spend some time with her. That can't be helped. I wish it weren't necessary, but she's your jailer-which is what she was really asking to be. We're going to have to confine you pretty closely for a while, and things will work out better if your jailer is a woman."

"Why?"

"You'll know, Doc. Just give it a little more time. Meanwhile, for the record, what you and Meda do together is your business." He turned, faced Meda. "There are limits," he said softly. "You're getting to like this too goddamn much, you know?"

She glared at him for a moment. "You should talk," she said harshly, though somehow, not quite angrily. She turned and went inside, slamming the door behind her.

Eli sighed. "Lord, I hope you'll all make it-all three of you so we won't have to do this again soon." He glanced to where Ingraham stood watching, managed a crooked smile. "You figure she'll feed us?"

"She'll feed me," Ingraham said, smiling. "She invited me to dinner. Let's go in and see if she's set a place for you."

They herded Blake and the girls into the house, somehow communicating amusement, weariness, hunger, but no threat. It was almost as though the Maslin family had been invited to eat with new friends. Blake shook his head. On his own, he would have tried to break away from these people-whatever they were -long ago. Now . . . He wondered what his

chances were of getting Eli alone, getting his gun and the car keys. If he didn't move soon, Rane or Keira might be

separated from him again. These people were in such bad physical condition, they had to take precautions. Abruptly, it occurred to him that a simple precaution might be to drug something they were to eat or drink. "What are you planning, Doc?" Eli asked as he sat down in a big, leather wing chair.

The house was cool and dark, comfortably well-kept and old. Blake had to fight off the feeling of security it seemed to offer. He sat on a sofa with his daughters on either side of him.

"Doc?" Eli said. Blake looked at him.

"I wonder if I can stop you from getting hurt."

"Forget it," Ingraham said. "He's going to have to try something. Just like you'd have to in his place." "Yeah. Listen, you still have that knife?"

"Sure."

Eli nodded, gestured with one hand. "Come on." "You mark the wall and Meda'll find some way to get you, man." "I'm not going to mark the damn wall. Come on."

"Don't break my knife either." Ingraham reached toward his boot, then his hand seemed to blur. Something flashed toward Eli, Eli blurred, and the floorboards beneath Blake's feet vibrated. Blake looked down, saw that there was a large, heavy knife buried in the floor between his feet. It had hit the wood just short of the oriental rug. He gave Eli a

single outraged glance, then seized the knife, meaning to pull it free. It remained rooted where it was. He pulled again,

using all his strength. Still the knife did not move. It occurred to him that he was making a fool of himself. He sat up straight and glared at Eli.

Eli looked tired and unamused. "Just a trick, Doc." He got up, walked over, and tugged the knife free with little apparent effort. With one long arm, he handed it handle-first to Ingraham, while keeping his attention on Blake. "I know we look scrawny and sick," he said. "We look like one of us alone would equal nothing at all. But if you're going

to survive, you have to understand that guns or no guns, you're no match for us. We're faster, better coordinated,

stronger, and some other things you wouldn't believe yet."

"You think a circus trick is going to make us believe you're superhuman?" Rane demanded. Blake had felt her jump and cringe when the knife hit. She had been frightened, so now she had to attack. His first impulse was to shut her up, but he held back, remembering the value Eli had placed on her. Eli might tell her to shut up himself, but he would not hurt her just for talking. And she might get something out of him.

"We're not superhuman," Eli said quietly. "We're not anything you won't be eventually. We're just . . . different." "And sometimes you hurt," Keira whispered.

Eli looked at her-looked until she stopped studying the pattern on the rug and looked back. "It isn't like your pain," he said. "It isn't as clean as your pain."

"Clean?"

"Mine is kind of like what an addict might feel when he tries to kick his habit." "Drugs?"

"No drugs, I promise you. We don't even use aspirin here." "I use things, I have to."

"We won't stop you."

"What are you?" she pleaded suddenly. "Please tell us."

Eli put his hands behind his back, though not before Blake noticed that they were trembling.

"Hey," Ingraham said softly. "You okay?"

Eli glanced at him angrily. "No, I'm not okay. Are you okay?"

Keira looked from one of them to the other, then spoke to Eli. "What is it you're keeping yourself from doing to me?" "Kerry," Rane cautioned. That was a switch-Rane cautioning. Blake wanted to stop Keira himself, would have stopped her, had he not wanted an answer as badly as she did.

"Give me your hands," Eli said to her. "No!" Blake said, suddenly wary.

But Keira was already extending her hands, palms up, toward Eli. Blake grabbed her hands and pulled them down. "You made a promise!" he said to Eli. "You said you'd keep her safe!"

"Yes." Eli's coloring looked worse than ever in the cool dimness of the room. His voice was almost too soft to be heard.

"I said that." He was perspiring heavily. "What were you going to do?"

"Answer her question. Nothing else."

Blake did not believe him, but saw no point in saying so. Eli smiled as though Blake had spoken the thought aloud anyway. He unclasped his hands, and Blake noticed that even they were dripping wet. Diaphoresis, Blake thought. Excessive sweating-symptomatic of what? Emaciation, trembling, bad coloring, now sweating-plus surprising strength, speed, and coordination. God knew what else. Symptomatic of what?

"Want to hear something funny, Doc?" Eli said in an oddly distant voice. He held his wrist where Blake could see it and pointed to a small double scar that looked black against his gray-brown skin. "A couple of weeks ago while I was helping with the building, I got careless about where I put my hand. A rattlesnake bit me." Eli laughed hollowly. "You know, the damn thing died."

He turned stiffly and went to the door, no longer laughing. "Eli?" Ingraham said.

"I got to get out of here for a while, man, I'm getting punchy. I'll be back." Eli stumbled out the door and away from the house. When Blake could no longer hear him, he spoke to Ingraham. "That did look like a snakebite scar," he said. "What the hell do you think it was?" demanded Ingraham. "I was there. The rattler bit him, tried to crawl off, then

doubled up a few times and died. We kept the tail. Fifteen-bead rattle."

Blake decided he was being lied to. He sighed and leaned back in silent rejection of whatever fantasy might come next. "This whole thing is going to be hard on you, Doc," Ingraham said. "You're going to want to ignore just about everything we say because none of it makes any sense in the world you come from. You'll deny and Rane will try to deny and it won't make a damn bit of difference because one way or another, all three of you are here to stay."

PAST 5

The dogs were winning.

They had attacked almost in unison, furiously, angered by his alien scent. Together, they managed to bring him down before he could hurt either of them. Then the smaller one, who appeared to be part Doberman, bit into the arm he had thrown up to protect his throat.

Pain was the trigger that threw him into his changed body's version of overdrive. Moving faster than the dogs could follow, he rolled, came to his feet, locked both hands together and battered the smaller dog down in midair. The dog gave a short shrieking cry, fell, and lay twitching on the ground.

The larger dog leaped for his throat. He threw himself to one side, avoiding its teeth, but hunger and weariness had taken their toll. He stumbled, fell. The dog lunged again. He knew he could not avoid it this time, knew he was about to die.

Then there was a thunderous sound-a shot, he realized. The dog landed awkwardly, unhurt, but startled by the sound. There was human shouting. Someone pulled the dog back before it could renew its attack.

He looked up and saw a man standing over him, holding an old shotgun. In that brief moment, he noted that the man was frightened both of him and for him, that the man did not want to do harm, but certainly would in self-defense, that

this man, according to his body language, would not harm anything helpless.

That was enough.

He let his weariness, hunger, and pain take him. Leaving his abused body to the care of the stranger with the out-of- date conscience and the old-fashioned shotgun, he passed out.

When he came to, he was in a big, cool, blue-walled room, lying in a clean, comfortable bed. He smiled, lay still for a while, taking mental inventory of his already nearly healed injuries. His arm had been bitten and torn in three places.

His hands and arms had been scratched and bruised. His legs were bruised. Some of this was from climbing the rocks

to this house. Some was from climbing out of the red volcanic mountains where he had hidden when the ship was destroyed. His muscles ached and he was thirsty again. But more important, he was intensely hungry. Food was available now. He could smell it. Someone was cooking pork, roasting it, he thought, so that the savory meat smell drifted through the house and seemed almost edible itself. His body required more food than a normal person's and in spite of his desert kills, he had been hungry for days. The food smells now made him almost sick with hunger.

He found a pitcher of water and a glass on the night table next to his bed. He drank all the water directly from the pitcher, then sat up and looked himself over.

He had been bathed, and clothed in someone's gray pajamas. Whoever had removed his coverall and bathed him was probably ill. They would not realize it for about three weeks, but when the symptoms began to make themselves felt,

chances were, his rescuer would go to a doctor and pass the infection on beyond this isolated place. And chances were,

neither the rescuer nor the doctor would survive-though, of course, both would live long enough to infect others. Many others. Both would be infectious long before they began to exhibit symptoms. The doctor would not recognize the illness, would probably give it first to family and friends.

The ship had died, the three people he had come to love. most had died with it to prevent the epidemic he had probably just begun. He should have died with them. But of the four, only his enhanced survival drive had saved him-much against his will. He had been a prisoner within his own skull, cut off from conscious control of his body. He had watched himself running for cover, saving himself, and thus nullifying the sacrifice of the others. To his sorrow, to his ultimate shame, he, and he alone, had brought the first extraterrestrial life to Earth.

What could he do now? Could he do anything? Was not the whole matter literally out of his hands? Had it ever been otherwise?

A woman came into the room. She was tall and rangy and about fifty-too old to attract his interest in any dangerous

way.

"So," she said, "you're among the living again. I thought you might be. Are you hungry?" "Yes," he croaked. He coughed and tried again. "Please, yes."

"Coming right up," the woman said. "By the way, what's your name?"

"Jake," he lied. "Jacob Moore." Jake Moore had been his maternal grandfather, a good man, an old-style, shouting Baptist preacher who had stepped in and taken the place of his father when his father died. It was a name he would not forget, no matter how his body distracted him. His own name would send this woman hurrying to the nearest phone or radio or whatever people in this desolate place used to communicate with the world outside. She would call the would- be rescuers he had hidden from for three days after the destruction of the ship, and she would feel that she had done him a great favor. Then how many people would he be driven to infect before someone realized what was happening? Or was he wrong? Should he give himself up? Would he be able to tell everything he knew and dump the problem and himself into the laps of others?

The moment the thought came to him, he knew it was impossible. To give himself up would be an act of self- destruction. He would be confined, isolated. He would be prevented from doing the one thing he must do: seeking out new hosts for the alien microorganisms that had made themselves such fundamental parts of his body. Their purpose was now his purpose, and their only purpose was to survive and multiply. All his increased strength, speed, coordination, and sensory ability was to keep him alive and mobile, able to find new hosts or beget them. Many hosts. Perhaps three out of four of those found would die, but that magical fourth was worth any amount of trouble.

The organisms were not intelligent. They could not tell him how to keep himself alive, free, and able to find new hosts. But they became intensely uncomfortable if he did not, and their discomfort was his discomfort. He might interpret what they made him feel as pleasure when he did what was necessary, desirable, essential; or as pain when he tried to do what was terrifying, self-destructive, impossible. But what he was actually feeling were secondhand advance-retreat responses of millions of tiny symbionts.

The woman touched him to get his attention. She had brought him a tray. He took it on his lap, trying, and in the final, driven instant, failing to return the woman's kindness. He could not spare her. He scratched her wrist just hard enough to draw blood.

"I'm sorry," he said at once. "The rocks . . ." He displayed his jagged nails. "Sorry."

"It's nothing," the woman said. "I'd like to hear how you wound up out here so far from any other settlement. And here." She handed him a linen napkin-real linen. "Wipe your hands and face. Why are you perspiring so? It's cool in here."

PRESENT 6

In surprisingly little time, Meda served a huge meal. There was a whole ham-Blake wondered whether it was homegrown -several chickens, more salad than Blake thought six people could possibly eat, corn on the cob, buttered carrots, green beans, baked potatoes, rolls . . . Blake suspected this was the first meal he had eaten that contained almost nothing from boxes, bags, or cans. Not even salt on most of the food, he realized unhappily. He wondered whether the food was clean and free of live parasites. Could some parasite, some worm, perhaps, be responsible for these people's weight loss? Parasitic worm infestations were almost unknown now, but these people had not chosen to live in the present. They had adopted a nineteenth-century lifestyle. Perhaps they had contracted a nineteenth-century disease. Yet they were strong and alert. If they were sharing their bodies with worms, the worms were damned unusual. Blake picked at the barely seasoned food, eating little of it. He wasn't concerned about any possible worm infestation. That could be taken care of easily once he was free. And since everyone took food from the same serving dishes, selective drugging was impossible. He let the girls eat their fill. And he watched the abductors-especially Eli-eat prodigious amounts.

Keira tried to talk to him during the meal, but he gave the impression of being too busy eating to listen. Blake thought he tried a little too hard to give that impression. Eli was attracted to Keira; that was obvious. Blake hoped his ignoring her meant he was rejecting the attraction. The girl was sixteen, naive, and sheltered. Like most enclave parents, Blake

had done all he could to recreate the safe world of perhaps sixty years past for his children. Enclaves were islands

surrounded by vast, crowded, vulnerable residential areas through which ran sewers of utter lawlessness connecting cesspools-economic ghettos that regularly chewed their inhabitants up and spat the pieces into surrounding communities. The girls knew about such things only superficially. Neither of them would know how to handle a grown man who saw them as fair game. Nothing had ever truly threatened them before.

Meda was staring at Blake.

She must have been doing it for some time now. She had eaten her meal-a whole, roasted chicken plus generous helpings of everything else. Now she nibbled at a thick slice of ham and stared.

"What is it?" he asked her.

She looked at Eli. "Why wait?" she asked.

"God knows I almost didn't," he said. "Do what you want to."

She got up, walked around the table, stood over Blake, staring down at him intently. Sweat ran down her thin, predatory face. "Come on, Doc," she whispered.

Blake was afraid of her. It was ridiculous, but he was afraid.

"Get up," she said. "Come on. Believe it or not, I don't like to humiliate people."

Sweat ran into her eyes, but she did not seem to notice. In a moment, she would take hold of him with her skinny claws. He stood up, stiff with fear of the woman and fear of showing it. He bumped the table, palmed a knife, secretly, he thought. The idea of threatening her with it, maybe using it on her, repelled him, but he gripped it tightly.

"Bring the knife if you want to," she said. "I don't care." She turned and walked to the hall door. There she stood, waiting.

"Dad," Keira said anxiously. "Please ... do what they say." He looked at her, saw that she was frightened too.

She looked from him to Eli, but Eli would not meet her eyes. She faced Blake again. "Dad, don't make them hurt you." What was it about these people? How were they able to terrify when they did nothing? It was as though there were

something other than human about them. Or was it only their several guns? "Dad," Rane said, "do it. They're crazy."

He looked at Eli. If the girls were hurt in any way-any way at all-Eli would pay. Eli seemed to be in charge. He could

permit harm or prevent it. If he did not prevent it, no circus trick would save him.

Eli stared back, and Blake felt that he understood. Eli had shown himself to be unusually perceptive. And now he looked almost as miserable as Blake felt.

Blake turned and followed Meda. He kept the knife. Everyone saw it now, and they let him keep it. That alone was almost enough to make him leave it. They managed to make him feel like a fool for wanting a weapon against armed

people who had kidnapped him and his children at gunpoint. But he would have felt like a bigger fool if he had left the knife behind.

Meda led him into a back bedroom with blue walls, a solid, heavy door, and barred windows.

"My daughter is going to need her medication," he said, wondering why he had not spoken of it to Eli.

"Eli will take care of her," the woman said. Blake thought he heard bitterness in her voice, but her face was expressionless.

"He doesn't know what she needs."

"She knows, doesn't she?" In the instant before he could lie, Meda nodded. "I thought she did. Give me the knife, Blake." She said it quietly as she locked the door and turned to face him. She saw his refusal before he could voice it. "I

didn't want to tear into you in front of your kids," she said. "Human nature being what it is, you probably wouldn't be able to forgive me for that as quickly as you'll forgive me for ... other things. But in here, I'm not going to hold back. I don't have the patience."

"What are you talking about?"

She reached out so quickly that by the time he realized she had moved, she had him by the wrist in a grip just short of bone-cracking. As she forced the knife from his captive hand, he hit at her. He had never hit a woman with his fist before, but he had had enough from this one.

His fist met only air. Inhumanly fast, inhumanly strong, the woman dodged his blow. She caught his fist in her crushing grip.

He lurched against her to throw her off-balance. She fell, dragging him with her, cursing him as they hit the floor. The knife was still between them in one of his captive hands. He fought desperately to keep it, believing that at any moment the noise would draw one or both of the men into the room. What would they do to him for attacking her? He was

committed. He had to keep the knife and, if necessary, threaten to use it on her. His daughters were not the only people

who could be held as hostages.

The woman tried to get him off her. He had managed to fall on top and he weighed perhaps twice what she did. As strong as she was, she did not seem to know how to fight. She managed to take the knife and throw it off to one side so that it skittered under a chair. Angrily, he tried to punch her again. This time he connected. She went limp.

She was not unconscious; only stunned. She tried feebly to stop him when he went after the knife, but she no longer had the strength.

The knife was embedded in the wall behind the chair. Before he could pull it free, she was on him again. This time, she hit him. While he lay semiconscious, she retrieved the knife, opened a window, and threw it out between the bars. Then

she staggered back to him, sat down on the floor next to him, hugging her knees, resting her forehead against them. She did not look as though she could see him. She was temptingly close, and as his vision cleared, he was tempted.

"You start that shit again, I'll break your jaw!" she muttered. She stretched out on the rug beside him, rubbing her jaw.

"If I break your bones, you won't survive," she said. "You'll be like those damn bikers. We had to hurt them because there were too many of them for us to take it easy. All but two wound up with broken bones or other serious injuries. They died."

"They died of their injuries ... or of a disease?" "It's a disease," she said.

"Have I been infected?"

She turned her head to look at him, smiled sadly. "Oh yes." "The food?"

"No. The food was just food. Me." "Contact?"

"No, inoculation." She lifted his right arm, exposing the bloody scratches she had made. They hurt now that she had drawn his attention to them.

"You would have done that even if I hadn't had the knife?" he asked. "Yes."

"All right, you've done it. Get away from me."

"No, we'll talk now. You're our first doctor. We've wanted one for a long time." Blake said nothing.

"It's something like a virus," she said. "Except that it can live and multiply on its own for a few hours if it has warmth and moisture."

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 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.

"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.

But the original invading organisms had too much of a start. Or, if they were not well started, if the new organisms were introduced too soon, those new organisms simply became part of the original invasion, and the host, the patient, was no better, no worse.

The meager statistics provided by the crew and the few experimental animals they managed to raise from frozen embryos seemed to support these findings. All four of the surviving crew members had been reinfected several times. There were no survivors among the first crew members stricken. These had been isolated and restrained. Their vital functions had been continually monitored and restored when they failed. But finally their brains had ceased to function. Reinfection was the answer, then-or an answer. A partial answer. Without it, everyone died. With it, some lived. Disa had died. Meda was obviously stronger. Perhaps she could live.

PRESENT 8

Meda brought Blake his bag when he asked for it and permitted him to examine her. She even permitted him to cleanse the scratches she had made on his arm and face, though she warned it would do no good. It had never done any good before when someone was infected, she said. The organisms were aggressive and fast. He had the disease.

She or someone else had found and sabotaged his panic button with one of the newer permanent glues. With these, permanent meant permanent. He could not use the bag to call for help. Otherwise, the bag was intact. For Keira's sake in particular, it was one of the best. His scope would probably give him a look at the Clay's Ark organism, even if it was as small as Meda had said. He needed all the information he could get before he made his escape. It was not only a matter of his wanting to pass the information on. He also needed to know now of any weaknesses these people had. They were too good to be true in every way except appearance. He had to find something he could use against them.

"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."

"You'd like it to happen," he said, watching her.

"Pigshit!" she said, abruptly angry. "If I wanted it to happen, it would happen. I'd get in my car and I'd drive. I could infect people in towns from here to New York. And I'd do exactly that if I ever had to leave this place. There would be no one to help me, stop me." She hesitated, then sat down on the bed beside him. He managed not to recoil when she took his hand. He was getting information from her. Let her touch him as long as she kept talking.

"You've got to understand," she said. "It's really hard on us the way we limit our growth. We can only do it because we're so isolated. But if you escaped-with or without your kids-we'd have to escape too before you could send people here to corral us. I don't know where we'd go, but chances are, we'd have to split up. Now you imagine, for instance, Ingraham out there on his own. He was high-strung before, and damned undisciplined. He doesn't shake because there's more wrong with him than with the rest of us. He shakes because he's holding himself back almost all the time. He respects Eli and he loves Lupe. She's going to have his kid. But you force him out of here, and all by himself, he'll start an epidemic you won't believe."

"And you're saying that will be my fault," Blake said angrily. She was boxing him in. Everything she said was intended to close another exit.

"We'll do anything to avoid being locked up," she said. "I'll do anything to keep my sons from being taken from me." "Nobody would take your-"

"Shut your mouth! They'd take them. They'd treat them like things. If they killed them-accidentally or deliberately, it would just be one of their problems solved."

"Meda, listen-"

"So if you're afraid of an epidemic, Doctor, don't even think about leaving us. Even if you spread the word, you can't possibly stop us." She switched tracks abruptly. "I'm starving. Do you want anything to eat?"

He was disoriented for a moment. "Food?" "We eat a lot. You'll see."

"What if you didn't?" he asked, immediately alert. "I mean, I couldn't have put away the meal I saw you eat only a few hours ago. What if you just ate normally?"

"We do eat normally-for us." "You know what I mean."

"Yeah, I know. You're still seeking weakness. Well, you've found one. W^e eat a lot. Now what are you going to do?

Destroy our food supply?" She produced a key from somewhere, seemingly by magic. Her hands actually were quicker than his eyes. "Don't even think about doing anything to the food," she said. "Someday I'll tell you how people like you smell to my kids." She let herself out and slammed the door behind her.

She returned sometime later, bringing him a ham sandwich and a fruit salad. "I'd like to see my daughters," he told her.

"I'll see," she said. "Maybe I can bring you one of them for a few minutes."

Her cooperativeness pleased but did not surprise him. She had children of her own and she could see that his concern was genuine; there was no reason for her to find that concern suspect.

He was lying down, tired and frightened, hanging on to the bare bones of an escape plan when Eli brought Keira in. Keira seemed calm. Eli left her without saying a word. He locked her in and probably stood outside listening.

"Are you all right?" Blake asked.

She answered the question he intended rather than the one he had asked. "He hasn't touched me," she said. She did not sit down, but stood in the middle of the room and looked at Blake. He looked back, realizing that for her sake, he could

not touch her either. Such a simple, terrible thing. He could not touch her.

"He said Meda scratched you," she whispered. Blake nodded.

"He told me about the disease and . . . where he got it. I didn't know what to think. Do you believe him?"

" 'Her' in my case." Blake stared through the bars of the window into the desert night. "I believe. Maybe I shouldn't, but

I do."

"Rane always says I'll believe anything. At first, I was afraid to believe this. I do now, though." "Have you seen Rane?"

"No. Daddy?"

He looked away from the bright full moon, met her eyes and saw that in a moment she would come to him, disease or no disease.

"No!" he said sharply.

"Why?" she demanded. "What difference does it make? Someone's going to touch me sooner or later, anyway. And even if they don't, I've probably already got the disease-from the salad or the bread or the furniture or the dishes . . . What's the difference?" She wiped away tears angrily. She tended to cry when she got upset, whether she wanted to or

not.

"Why hasn't he touched you?"

She looked at Blake, looked away. "He likes me. He's afraid he'll kill me." "I wonder how long that will stop him?"

"Not long. He obviously feels terrible. Sooner or later, he's going to just grab me."

Blake opened his bag again, turned it on, and keyed in a prescription form. "ARE YOU LOCKED UP?" he typed. "ARE YOUR WINDOWS BARRED?"

She shook her head, mouthed, "No bars." "THEN YOU CAN ESCAPE!"

"Alone?" she mouthed. She shook her head.

"YOU MUST!" he typed. "AT TWO A.M., I'LL TRY. I WANT YOU WITH ME!" Aloud, he said, "I can't help you, Kerry."

"I know," she whispered. "Most of the time, I'm not even worried about myself. I'm worried about you and Rane. I

don't even know where Rane is."

He began typing soundlessly again. "THEN BREAK FREE ALONE! THEY THINK YOU'RE HELPLESS. THEY'LL BE CARELESS WITH YOU."

She shook her head as she read the words. "I can't," she mouthed. "I can't!" "Are you having any pain?" he asked aloud. "Did you take your medicine?"

"No pain," she said softly. "I had some, but I told Eli and he got my medicine from the car. He wore what he called his town gloves." She glanced at the door. "He said if he wasn't careful, he could transmit the disease just by paying for

supplies. They all have to wear special gloves when they're in town."

"Yet they deliberately spread the disease to people like us," Blake said. He wiped everything he had typed and began again on a clean form. "YOU MUST ESCAPE! THERE'S AN EPIDEMIC BREWING HERE! WE MUST GIVE WARNING, GET TREATMENT!"

She was shaking her head again. God, why hadn't Meda sent Rane to him? Rane would be afraid, too, but that would not stop her.

"EVEN IF I FAIL," he typed, "YOU MUST TAKE THE CAR AND GO--OR WE COULD ALL DIE. DO YOU REMEMBER HOW TO START THE CAR WITHOUT THE KEY?"

She nodded.

"THEN CO! SEND BACK HELP. GIVE WARNING!"

Tears ran down her face, but she did not seem to notice them. He spoke aloud with painfully calculated brutality. "Meda told me people with serious injuries die of the disease. She's seen them die. She didn't say anything about people with serious illnesses, but Kerry, she didn't have to." He gave her a long look, trying to read her, reach her. She knew

he was right. She wanted to please him. But she had to overcome her own fear.

He typed, "SOONER OR LATER, ELI WILL TOUCH YOU-AT LEAST." She read the words without responding.

"BE NEAR THE WAGONEER TONIGHT," he typed. "AT TWO." She swallowed, nodded once.

At that moment, there was a sound at the door. Instantly, Blake shut off the computer, automatically wiping the prescription form and everything he had typed. He closed the bag and turned to face the door just as Eli opened it.

Blake looked at Keira, aching to hug her. He felt he was about to lose her in one way or another, but he could not touch her.

PAST 9

Within twenty-four hours, Eli had infected everyone on the mountaintop ranch. He had also talked the old man, Gabriel Boyd, into giving him a job as a handyman. Boyd was not willing to pay much more than room and board, but room and board was all Eli really wanted-a chance to stay and perhaps save some of these people.

He was given a cot in a back room that had been used for storage. He was given his meals with the family, and he worked alongside the men of the family. He knew nothing about ranching or building houses, but he was strong and willing and quick. Also, he knew his Bible. This in particular impressed both the old man and his wife. Few people read the Bible now, except as literature. Religion was about as far out of fashion as it had ever been in the United States-a reaction against the intense religious feeling at the turn of the century. But Eli had been a boy preacher during that strange, not entirely sane time. He had been precocious and sincere, had read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and could still talk about it knowledgeably. Also, Eli knew how to be easygoing and personable, a refugee from the city, grateful to be away from the city. He knew how to win people over even as he condemned them to illness and possible death.

He wanted them all to start showing symptoms at about the same time, and he wanted that time to be soon. Left to themselves, infected people feeling their symptoms tended to huddle together in an us-against-the-world attitude. If everyone became ill at the same time, he would have less trouble keeping individuals from trying to go for help. He had started what could become an epidemic. Now, if he were going to be able to live with himself at all, he had to contain it.

He worked hard on the house that was intended for the son named Christian-Chris to everyone but his father. Christian's wife Gwyn was going to have a baby and Christian had decided that the house would be finished before the baby arrived. Eli did not know or care whether this was possible, but he liked Christian and Gwyn. He worried about what the disease might do to a pregnant woman and her child. Whatever happened would be his fault.

Sometimes guilt and fear rode him very nearly into insanity, and only the exhausting hard work of building kept him connected to the world outside himself. He liked these people. They were decent, kind, and in spite of the angry God they worshipped, they were remarkably peaceful and uncorrupted by the cynicism and violence outside. They were

good people." Yet it was inevitable that some of them would die.

The daughter Meda was doing her best to add to his burdens by seducing him. She had no subtlety, did not attempt any. "I'd like to sleep with you," she told him when she got her courage up. He had known since he met her that she wanted to sleep with someone, and would settle for him. He fended her off gently.

"Girl, what are you trying to do? Get yourself in trouble and get me shot? Your people have been good to me." "They wouldn't," she said, "if I told them who you are. They think heaven is only for God and his chosen."

He became serious. "Don't play games with me, Meda. I like your honesty and I like you, but don't threaten me."

She grinned. "You know I wouldn't tell." "I know."

"And if I can keep one secret, I can keep two." She touched his face. "I'm not going to let you alone."

Her touch produced an interesting tingle. She was coming into her time. He had apparently arrived just after her time of fertility the month before. That had been a blessing. He had been able to avoid the other two young women, but Meda would not let him avoid her. Now, she had no idea the trouble she was courting. She probably imagined a romantic

interlude. She did not imagine being thrown on the rocky ground and hurt-inevitably hurt.

"No," he said, pushing her away. She was still smiling when he turned from her and began hammering in siding nails. She watched for a while, and he discovered he enjoyed the attention. He had not believed women outside the crew would want to look at him with his body so changed. Meda was trouble, but he was sorry when she decided to leave. She looked as though she had lost a little weight, he noticed.

As she walked away, her brother Christian came out of the main house and stopped her. They were too far from Eli to worry about his hearing them, but he heard every word.

"That guy been talking to you, Mead?" Christian demanded. Eli could not recall having heard Christian refer to him as

"that guy" before. For Christian this was damned unfriendly.

"Sure he has," Meda said. "I came out here to talk to him. Why shouldn't he talk to me?" Blast her honesty! "What'd you say to him?"

"What did you do this morning, Chris? Look in the mirror and mistake yourself for Dad?" "What did he say to you?"

Eli looked at them and saw even over the distance that she smiled sadly. "Relax," she told her brother. "He said no. He said the family had been good to him and he didn't want trouble."

Christian gave an oddly brittle laugh. "Anybody who recognizes you as trouble has the right idea," he said. "If that guy were white, I'd tell you to marry him."

Meda watched her brother with visibly growing confusion. Living in the house, Eli had heard enough to know Christian

was her favorite brother. They had shared secrets since childhood. Christian knew how tired she was of being an isolated virgin, and she knew how nervous he was about becoming a father. Right now, she knew there was something wrong with him.

"Did you break down and buy some perfume?" he asked. "You smell good."

Eli put down his hammer and stood up. It was beginning. Meda had bathed and she smelled of soap, but she was not wearing perfume. She was simply coming into her time. If she and her brothers lived, they would have to learn to avoid each other at these times. Now, however, Eli might have to help them. He stood still, waiting to see whether Christian could control himself. He realized Meda might not be as much in control as she should be either. He would not let them commit incest. They would be losing enough of their humanity shortly.

Eli jumped down from the floor of the house and started toward them. At that moment, Christian reached up and touched Meda's face with one trembling hand. Then, with a strange, whining cry, he folded slowly to the ground, out cold.

PRESENT 10

When Eli and Keira were gone, Blake opened his bag and turned it on again. He punched in his identity code, then the words "TIMED SLEEP" and the number three. He hit the deliver button. Moments later, he had a capsule that would put him to sleep for three hours and let him awake fully alert. Next he ordered a much less precise dosage for Meda. This he ordered in injectable form-a sleep tab.

He placed Meda's dosage under the pillow he intended to use, then turned off the bag and closed it. He stripped to his shorts, and got into bed. Remembering Keira, he doubted that he could have slept at all without the capsule. And he had to sleep. If he did not, Meda would look at him and realize he was up to something. She might even figure out what it was. He did not underestimate her any longer.

He thought he heard her come in before he dozed off, thought she called his name. He may have muttered something before the drug took full effect.

He awakened on time, clearheaded, aware of what he must do. The room was full of moonlight and Meda lay snoring softly beside him. It amused him that she snored. It seemed utterly right that she should.

He was surprised to find himself feeling sorry for her as he eased the sleep tab from beneath his pillow and pressed it to

her thin, bare right arm. She repelled him, but she was not responsible for what she had become. There was no pain involved, but at his touch, she jumped, came awake, found him leaning over her. "What did you do?" she demanded, fully alert.

He touched her hair, thinking he would have to hit her again, not wanting to hit her, not wanting to hurt her at all. Perhaps that was what she saw in his expression-if she could see him well enough to read his expression. She smiled uncertainly, turned her face to meet his caressing hand.

Then the smile vanished. "Oh God," she said. "What have you done?" She reached for him, but her hands had no strength. She tried to get up and almost slid out of bed. Finally the drug stopped her. She moaned and slipped into unconsciousness.

Blake stared at her, feeling irrationally guilty. He straightened her body, placed her in a more comfortable-looking

position, and covered her. She would awaken in three or four hours.

He dressed, looked around the room, noticed at once that his bag was gone. He looked through the closet and in the bathroom, searched the bedroom, but the bag was not to be found. Finally, desperately, he forgot the bag and began searching for the key that would let him out of the room. Since he already knew where it was not, he began by searching the one place he had ignored: the bed and Meda herself. He found it on a chain around her neck. It hung down inside her gown where he could not have touched it normally without awakening her.

Seconds later, he let himself out of the room. Feeling his way carefully, silently, he reached the front door. He wondered just before he let himself out whether these people posted a watch. If they did, he was probably finished. He hoped they had enough confidence in their ability to handle their prisoners not to bother with guards.

He slipped out and closed the door behind him. From where he stood on the porch, he could see no one. Things looked confusingly different in the moonlight. For several seconds, he could not find the car. It had been moved. He feared it had been hidden and he would have to risk stealing another. Then he saw it in the distance near one of the outhouses. Getting it started without his key would be no problem if he had time to disconnect the trap-alarm system. The alarm itself was sound and indelible dye sprayed over any would-be thief. If the thief persisted, he was sprayed with a nausea gas. The gas was utterly disabling whether it was breathed or merely came in contact with the skin. A car -even a fuel- gulper like this one-was a prestige item. The automobile age had peaked and passed. People who drove cars or rode motorcycles now were either professional drivers, the rich, law-enforcement people, or parasites. The pros, the rich, and the police usually went to even greater, deadlier lengths than Blake had to protect their vehicles.

Hugging the shadows, Blake worked his way toward his car. He had reached it and used his own special catch to get past the hood lock when someone spoke to him.

"You don't have to do that. I have the keys."

He turned sharply, found himself facing Keira. Solemnly, she handed him his keys. He stared at them. "I took them," she said. She shrugged. "Now you won't have to worry about touching me."

"You exposed yourself just to get the keys?" he demanded.

"No." She was in shadow. He could not see her well enough to be certain of her expression, but she sounded odd. He took the keys and her hand, held both for a moment, then hugged her tightly, probably painfully, though she did not complain. Then he held her by her shoulders and spoke what he strongly suspected was nonsense. "Meda says the disease is transmitted by inoculation, not contact. Don't touch your mouth or scratch your skin until you wash."

She did not seem to hear. "I hit him, Dad." "Good. Get in the car."

"He had some books-made of paper, I mean-and an old bookend in the shape of an elephant. It was made of cast iron." "Get in, Kerry!"

"I didn't want to hurt him. I didn't think I could hit him hard enough to do any real harm." She got in through the door he had opened.

He started to close the door, then instead squatted beside her. "Kerry, did you hear anything about Rane? Do you know

where she is?"

"With Ingraham and Lupe. I don't know which house they're in."

She did not know. And how many people would he wake up if he tried to find out? One would be enough to recapture him. He had not even been bright enough to get himself another knife -not that the first one had done him any good. What he needed was a gun.

"Daddy, I heard something," Keira said.

He froze, listened, heard it himself-someone moving around carelessly in the house nearest to him. It may have been just someone going to the bathroom, but it frightened him. He rounded the car in a few long steps, got in, and heedless of noise, started the engine. At that moment, someone opened the door of the house from which the noise had come. It was a man, a stranger, who actually managed to catch the car as Blake swung it around toward the rocky trail that led down from the ranch. The stranger tried to tear Blake's door open as Ingraham had earlier. But with the car moving and his body inadequately braced, he failed to break the lock. He was dragged several yards as Blake picked up speed. As a final gesture, he managed to release his hold with one hand, raise his fist, and smash it into the window beside Blake's head. Like the lock, the glass held. It broke, cracks raying outward in all directions from the impact of the blow, but it

did not shatter. Its breaking amazed Blake. The glass was special, expected to stop bullets with less damage. Blake realized again how powerful these people were. If they caught him, they could literally tear him limb from limb.

He drove on, praying that he would see Rane, that he would have a chance to pick her up. But he saw only stick people- menacing, utterly terrifying in their difference and their intensity. In the moonlight, they seemed other than human. One refused to move from the car's path, apparently trying to make Blake swerve and hit a house or a huge rock.

Blake did not swerve. No experienced city driver would have swerved or slowed. At the last possible instant, the

"victim" leaped aside and clung to the rock like an insect.

Something that moved like a cat, but was too big to be a cat, ran alongside the car briefly, and Keira screamed. "Don't hit him," she said. "Don't hurt him!"

The car accelerated, leaving the running thing behind. "What the hell was that?" Blake asked.

"Be careful," she said. "Remember the rocks Eli had to dodge around."

He remembered. It was impossible to speed past those boulders. On the other hand, it was very possible that Meda's people in the mountains above could start rockslides that would close the narrow road entirely if he crept along slowly. As though in answer to his thought, he heard a rumbling from above. Praying as he had not since childhood, he drove

on, managed to swerve around one boulder just in time to see a rockslide beginning ahead.

He pushed the accelerator to the floor, sped past the slide area as the first rocks came down. Twice the car was hit by rocks big enough to shake it, but Blake managed to stay on the road. He did not slow down until he came to a sharp curve around which he thought he recalled a rock.

There was a rock. Many rocks. Another slide had blocked the road with a steep hill of loose rocks and dirt. Blake had no time to think. The car would climb the slide or it would not. It was a Jeep, after all, antique or no.

The car struggled for traction in the loose dirt and rock, then shuddered heavily as something landed on its roof. The something made an indentation they could see inside the car.

Suddenly Keira pushed her door open. Blake grabbed for her, not understanding. His hand just missed her as she leaned

out. Then he saw what she had seen-a small, bloody face hanging upside down from the cartop.

"Rane!" he shouted. He leaned across Keira, indifferent for the moment to the way Keira bruised almost at a touch. He caught Rane's arm, pulled her down and into the car across Keira, then slammed the door and locked it as something else began tearing at it.

Blake hit the accelerator and the car leaped onto the loose dirt and rock. For an instant, the wheels spun uselessly, throwing out sand. Then they round traction and the car lunged up the slide. A rock bounced off the windshield, chipping it slightly. Another hit the top, doing no important damage.

Blake reached the crest of the slide, rolled down it, and sped on down the mountain. Minutes later, they were in open desert. Keira and Rane, still tangled together, both hurting, both silent with terror until they looked around and saw that they had left the mountains and their captivity behind. Then they hugged each other, Rane laughing and Keira crying. Rane's bare arms and her face had been cut and bruised somehow. If she had not been contaminated before, she was now. Blake worried, but said nothing. Contamination had probably been inevitable from the moment of capture. Its effects did not have to be inevitable, however. The disease could be studied, understood, stopped, or at least controlled- and it had to be. The disease was only a disease. It was the willing human carriers intent on spreading it that made it so deadly.

Blake relaxed in his seat and surveyed the damage to the car. Nothing terminal. Nothing that would stop him from reaching civilization and getting medical care. He wondered why Eli's people had not shot him, or at least shot at him. Bullets would have been more effective than rocks. But then, it was like Eli to hold back. He had saved Rane from Ingraham, held off contaminating Keira-probably for as long as he could-even tried bloodlessly to avoid a fight with Blake, though he could probably have broken Blake's bones with no effort.

"How did you get free?" Keira was asking Rane. "Did you have to hurt someone?"

"I was tied up for the night," Rane said. "Jacob let me loose. He didn't like me, but he couldn't stand the thought of anything being tied up. Then you two broke away and everyone was too busy chasing you to watch me. I almost killed myself running and falling down that goddamn mountain."

"Jacob?" Blake said. "Isn't that one of Meda's sons?"

The girls looked at each other, then at him warily. "You know about Jacob?" Rane asked. "Only that Meda has a son by that name."

"He's her son and Eli's." There was an odd pause. For the second time in twenty-four hours, Rane seemed unwilling to say what was on her mind. "Have you seen him?" she asked.

"No. But I don't imagine he would be normal. Not after what the bag told me about Meda." ". . . he isn't."

"What's he like?"

"You saw him," Keira said softly. "He ran alongside the car for a few seconds. That was him." Blake frowned, gave her a quick glance. "But that was ... an animal."

"Disease-induced mutation. Every child born to them after they get the disease is mutated that way. Jacob is the oldest of eleven."

Blake glanced at Keira. She was not looking at him, would not look at him.

"Jacob's beautiful, really," she continued. "The way he moves-catlike, smooth, graceful, very fast. And he's as bright as or brighter than any other kid his age. He's-"

"Not human," Blake said flatly. "Jesus, what are they breeding back there?"

The girls looked at each other again, shifted uncomfortably, sharing some understanding that excluded him. Now neither would face him. Suddenly he wanted to be excluded. He drove on in silence, suspicion growing in his mind. He concentrated on putting distance between himself and those who would certainly follow-though he could not help wondering whether what followed was really worse than what they carried with them.

PART 2: P.O.W. PAST 11

Within a day of Christian's collapse, Eli had seven irrational people huddling around him. They had no idea what was happening to them, but they knew they were in trouble. They were cftmbative, fearful, confused, lustful, driven, guilt- ridden, and utterly miserable.

They huddled together, not knowing what to do. They were fearful of going near outsiders with their painfully enhanced senses and their odd compulsions, but Eli was one of them. More, he was complete. He smelled right to them. And he could see their needs clearer than they could. He could respond to them as they required, offering comfort, sternness, advice, brute strength, whatever was necessary from moment to moment.

He found comfort in shepherding them. It was as though in a very real way, he was making them his family-a family with ugly problems.

Meda found both her brothers and her father after her, and she, like them, was alternately lustful and horrified. Her father suffered more than the others. He felt he had gone from patriarch and man of God to criminally depraved pervert

unable to keep his hands off his own daughter. Nor could he accept these feelings as his own. They must be signs of

either demonic possession or God's punishment for some terrible sin. He and his sons were badly frightened.

His wife and daughters-in-law were terrified. Not only were they unable to understand the behavior of their men, but they were confused and embarrassed by their own enhanced sensory awareness. They could smell the men and each other as they never had before. They kept trying to wash away normal scents that would not vanish. They spoke more softly as they realized the substantial walls no longer stopped sound as well as they had. They discovered they were able to see in the dark-whether they wanted to or not. Touching, even accidentally, became a startlingly intense sensual experience. The women ceased to touch each other. They also ceased to touch the men except for their own husbands. And Eli.

They all developed huge appetites as their bodies changed. Worse, they developed unusual tastes, and this frightened them.

"I'm so hungry," Gwyn told Eli on the day her symptoms became undeniable. She gestured toward a pair of chickens- part of the Boyd flock of thousands. This pair were scratching and pecking at the sand in the shade of the well tank.

"Suddenly, those things smell good to me," she said. "Can you believe that? They smell edible."

"They are," Eli said softly. It had been necessary for him to supplement his diet with one or two of them or with several eggs every night when the family was asleep.

"But how could they smell good raw?" Gwyn said. "And alive?"

Living prey smelled wonderful, Eli knew. But Gwyn was not ready to face that yet. "Go raid the refrigerator," he told her. "Maybe Junior is hungry."

She looked down at her pregnant belly and tried to smile, but she was clearly frightened.

He did what he would never have done before this day. He took her arm and led her back to the house to the kitchen. There he saw to it that she ate. She seemed to appreciate the attention.

"Something feels wrong," she said once. "Not with the baby," she added quickly when Eli looked alarmed. "I don't know. The food tastes too sweet or too salty or too spicy or too something. It tasted okay yesterday, but now . . . When

I started to eat, I thought I was going to be sick. But that's not right either. It's not really nauseating. It's just ... I don't know."

"Bad?" he asked, knowing the answer.

"Not really. Just different." She shook her head, picked up a piece of cold fried chicken. "This is okay, but I'm not sure the ones running around outside wouldn't be better."

Eli said nothing. Since his return to Earth, he knew he preferred his food raw and unseasoned. It tasted better. Yet he would go on eating cooked food. It was a human thing that he clung to. His changed body seemed able to digest almost anything. It tempted him by making nonhuman behavior pleasurable, but most of the time, it let him decide, let him choose to cling to as much of his humanity as he could.

Though certain drives at certain times inevitably went out of control.

Meda brought him her symptoms and her suspicions not long after he left Gwyn.

"This is your doing," she said. "Everybody's crazy except you. You've done something to us."

"Yes," he admitted, breathing in the scent of her. She had some idea now what she was doing to him just by coming near.

"What have you done?" she demanded. "What do you feel?" he asked, facing her.

She blinked, turned away frightened. "What have you done?" she repeated.

"It's a disease." He took a deep breath. He had never imagined that telling her would be easy. He had already decided to be as straightforward as possible. "It's an extraterrestrial disease. It will change you, but no more than I'm changed."

"A disease?" She frowned. "You came back sick and gave us a disease? Did you know you had it?" "Yes."

"And you knew we could catch it?"

He nodded.

"Then you gave it to us deliberately!" "No, not deliberately."

"But if you knew . . ."

"Meda . . ." He wanted to touch her, take her by the shoulders and reassure her. But if he began to touch her, he would not be able to stop. "Meda, you'll be all right. I'll take care of you. I stayed to take care of you."

"You came here to give us a disease!"

"No!" He turned his head toward the well tank. "No, I came ... to get water and food." "But you-"

"I couldn't die. I wanted to, but I couldn't. I can go out of my mind; I can become an animal; but I can't kill myself." "What about the others, the crew?"

"All dead like I told you, like your Barstow news said. The disease took some of them-before we found out how to help them." A half-truth. A deletion. Disa and two others had died in spite of the help they got. "The others died here-with

the ship. Someone-maybe more than one-apparently managed a little sabotage. I wish they'd done it in space, or back

on Proxi Two."

"How do you know someone sabotaged the ship? Maybe it was an accident." "I don't know. I don't remember. I blacked out."

"How did you get off the ship?"

"I don't know. I have off-and-on memories of running, hiding. I know I took shelter in mountains of volcanic rock, lived in a half-collapsed lava tunnel for three days and two nights. I nearly starved to death."

"People can't starve in just three days." "We can. You and me, now."

She only stared at him.

"It was raining," he continued. "I remember we deliberately chose to land in a storm in the middle of nowhere so we could get away before anyone found out what we were. Even with speeded up reflexes, increased strength, and enhanced senses, we nearly disintegrated, then nearly crashed. We kept them from shooting us down by talking. God, we talked. The brave heros giving all the information they could before they crashed. Before they died. We could no more imagine ourselves dying than we could imagine not coming straight in to Earth. It was a magnet for us in more ways than one. All those people ... all those . . . billions of uninfected people."

"You came to infect . . . everybody?" she whispered.

"We had to come. We couldn't not come; it was impossible. But we thought we could control it once we were here. We thought we could take only a few people at a time. A few isolated people. That's why we chose such an empty place." "Why would you think you could have any . . . any luck controlling yourselves here in the middle of all the billions if

you couldn't control yourselves on Proxima Centauri Two?"

"We weren't sure," he said. "Maybe it was just something we told ourselves to keep from going completely crazy. On the other hand . . ." He looked at her, glad she was alive and well enough to be her questioning, demanding self. "On the other hand, maybe we were right. I don't want to leave this place to reach anyone else. Not now. Not yet."

"You've done enough damage here." "Do you want to leave?"

"Eli, I live here!"

"Doesn't matter. Do you want to go to a hospital? See if somebody can figure out a cure?" She looked uncomfortable, a little frightened. "I was wondering why you didn't do that."

"I can't. Can you?"

"What do you mean you can't?"

"Go if you can. I'll ... try not to stop you. I'll try." "This is my home! I don't have to go anywhere!" "Meda-"

"Why don't you leave! You're the cause of all this! You're the problem!" "Shall I go, Meda?"

Silence. He had frightened and confused her, touched a brand new tender spot that she might not have discovered on her own for a while. She wanted to stay with her own kind. Being alone was terrifying, mind-numbing, he knew.

"You went away," she said, reading him unconsciously. "You left the rest of the crew." "Not deliberately."

"Do you ever do anything deliberately?" She came a little closer to him. "You got out. Only you."

He realized where she was headed and did not want to hear her, but she continued. "The one sure way you could have known when to run is if you were the saboteur."

His hands gripped each other. If they had gripped anything else at that moment, they would have crushed it. "Do you think I haven't thought about that?" he said. "I've tried to remember."

"If I were you, I wouldn't want to remember."

"But I've tried. Not that it makes any difference in the end. The others died and I should have died. If I did it, I killed my friends then made their deaths meaningless. If someone else did it, my survival made the sacrifice meaningless anyway."

"The dogs died," she said. "Remember? One of them was hurt, but not bad. The other wasn't hurt at all, but they died. We' couldn't understand it."

"I'm sorry."

"They died! Maybe we'll die!"

"You won't die. I'll take care of you."

She touched his face, finally, traced the few premature lines there. "You aren't sure," she said. "My touch hurts you, doesn't it?"

He said nothing. His body had gone rigid. Its center, its focus was where her fingers caressed.

"It must hurt you to hold back," she said. "Your holding back hurts me." There were agonizing seconds of silence. "You probably were the saboteur," she said. "You're strong enough to hurt yourself, so you thought you were strong enough to kill yourself. I want you. But I wish you had succeeded. I wish you had died."

He had no more strength of will at all. He seized her, dragged her behind the well, pushed her to the ground. She was not surprised, did not struggle. In fact, with her own drives compelling her, she helped him.

But it was not only passion or physical pain that caused her to scratch and tear at his body with her nails.

PRESENT 12

When Orel Ingraham grasped Rane's arm and led her from Meda's house, she held her terror at bay by planning her escape. She would go either with her father and Keira or without them. If she had to leave them behind, she would send help back to them. She had no idea which law enforcement group policed this wilderness area, but she would find out. All that mattered now was escaping. Living long enough to escape, and escaping.

She was terrified of Ingraham, certain that he was crazy, that he would kill her if she were not careful. If she committed herself to a poorly planned escape attempt and he caught her, he would certainly kill her.

She noticed no trembling in the hand that held her arm. There were no facial tics now, no trembling anywhere. She did not know whether that was a good sign or not, but it comforted her. It made him seem more normal, less dangerous.

As they walked, she looked around, memorizing the placement of the animal pens, the houses, the large chicken house, and something that was probably a barn. The buildings and large rocks could be excellent hiding places.

The people were spooky; she saw only a few, all adults. They were busy feeding the animals, gardening, repairing tools. One woman sat in front of a house, cleaning a chicken. Rane watched with interest. She planned to be a doctor

eventually, and was pleased that the sight did not repel her. What did repel her was the way people looked at her. Each

person she passed paused for a moment to stare at her. They were all scrawny and their eyes seemed larger than normal in their gaunt faces. They looked at her with hunger or lust. They looked so intently she felt as though they had reached for her with their thin fingers. She could imagine them all grabbing her.

At one point, an animal whizzed past-something lean and brown and catlike, running at a startling speed. It was much bigger than a housecat. Rane stared after it, wondering what it had been.

"Show-off," Ingraham muttered. But he was smiling. The smile made him look years younger, less intense, saner. Rane dared to question him.

"What was that?" she asked.

"Jacob," Ingraham answered. "Stark naked as usual." "Naked?" Rane said, frowning. "What was it?"

He led her onto the porch of an unpainted, but otherwise complete, wooden house. There he stopped her. "Not 'it,' " he said, "him. That was one of Meda's kids. No, shut up and listen!"

Rane closed her mouth, swallowing her protests. But the running thing had definitely not been a child.

"Our kids look like that," he said. "You may as well get used to it because yours are going to look like that too. It's a disease that we have, and now you have it-or you'll soon get it. There isn't a damn thing you can do about it."

With no further explanation, he took her into the house and turned her over to a tall, pregnant woman whose hair was almost long enough for her to trip over.

Lupe, the woman's name was. She was sharp-featured with thin arms and legs. In spite of her pregnancy, she clearly belonged among these people. She wore a caftan much like Keira's. Her pregnant belly looked like a balloon beneath it.

She reached for Rane with thin, grasping hands.

Rane drew back, but Ingraham still held her. She could not escape. The woman caught Rane's other arm and held it in a grip just short of painful. The thinness was deceptive. These people were all abnormally strong.

"Don't be afraid," the woman said with a slight accent. "We have to touch you, but we won't hurt you." Her voice was the friendliest thing Rane had heard since her capture. Rane tried to relax, tried to trust the friendly voice.

"Why do you have to touch me?" she asked.

"Because you're not one of us yet," Lupe said. "You will be. Be still." She reached up so quickly that Rane had no chance to struggle, and made scratches across Rane's left cheek.

Rane squealed in surprise and pain, and, too late, jerked her head back. "What did you do that for?" she demanded. They ignored her. "You're in a hurry," Ingraham said to Lupe.

"Eli says the sooner the better with this one and her father," Lupe told him.

"While he takes his time with his. Treats her like she'll break if he touches her." "She might. We never had anybody who was already sick."

"Yeah. I got us a healthy one, though."

They talked about her as though she were not there, Rane thought. Or as though she were no more than an animal who could not understand.

She tried to pull free when Lupe took her away from Ingraham and sat her down on a long wooden bench. There, finally, she released Rane and stood before her studying Rane's angry, hostile posture. Lupe shook her head.

"I lied," she told Rane. "We are going to hurt you. You're going to fight us every chance you get, aren't you? You're going to make us hurt you." The corners of her mouth turned downward. "Too bad. I can tell you from experience, it

won't help. It might kill you."

Rane glanced at the woman's claws and said nothing. Lupe was as crazy as Ingraham and even more unpredictable with her soft words and sharp nails. Rane was terrified of her-and furious at her for inspiring fear. Why should one thin- limbed, pregnant woman be so frightening? One thin-limbed, startlingly strong, pregnant woman who sat down beside Rane and caressed Rane's arm absently.

Rane looked at Ingraham-actually found herself looking for help from the man who had held a gun to her head. To her utter humiliation, he laughed. Rane's vision blurred and for an instant, she saw herself smashing his head with a rock. Suddenly Lupe grasped her chin, turned her head until she could see only Lupe, hear only Lupe.

"Chica, nothing has ever truly hurt you before," Lupe said. "Nothing has even threatened you enough to make you believe you could die. Not even your sister's illness. So now you must learn a hard lesson very quickly. No, don't say anything yet. Just listen. You think I'm threatening you, but I'm not. At least, not in the way you believe. We have given you a disease that can kill you. That's what you need to understand. Some of our differences are signs of that disease. You must decide whether it's better to live with such signs or die. Listen."

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, nino," 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, nino?" 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, nino. 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 believe 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 simply 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, but 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 long-haired, 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 offense 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, Cod, 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."

"I don't believe you!"

"I know. Nobody believes it at first. I didn't."

Rane walked away from him as he picked a tomato and began to eat. He never washed anything. Ate them just as they grew out of the dirt. Rane had never seen food growing this way before, but it did not impress her. She wondered whether they fertilized it with the contents of the outhouse and the animal pens. It was just the sort of filthy anachronistic thing they might do.

She climbed some rocks-huge, rough rounded mounds of granite-and stood on top, staring down. To her surprise, she saw the road winding below. Then Stephen was beside her. She started violently to find him there in a space that had been empty a second before. He must have leaped up, almost the way Jacob would leap.

"We can all jump," he said. "We can run pretty fast, too. You should remember that." "I wasn't trying to get away."

"Not yet. But remember anyway." He paused. "Do you know how they caught me seven months ago?" "You've only been here seven months?"

"I drove right into their settlement," he said. "I'd gone to see my folks in Albuquerque and on my way home, I decided to do some exploring. I discovered a mountain road that wasn't on my maps, and thought I'd find out where it led. I

found out."

"Why were you driving?" Rane asked. "You should have flown."

"I loved to drive. It was a kind of hobby. I'll bet your father has the same affliction."

"Yeah. He has a Porsche and a Mercedes at home. He won't even drive them outside the enclave." "A Porsche? You're kidding. What year?"

She looked at him, saw excitement on his face for the first time and laughed. Something familiar at last. Car craziness. "1982 Porsche 930 Turbo. My mother used to call it his other wife. My sister and I figured it was his other kid."

He laughed, too, then sobered. "It's getting dark, Rane. We should go in."

She did not want to go in-back to Lupe and Ingraham. Back to hands that made her cringe. Stephen's hands did not make her cringe any longer.

"I don't have a house, yet," he said. "I have a room in Meda's house."

She could not look at him now. She had never slept with a man. The thought of doing so now with a stranger-even a likable stranger confused and frightened her. The thought of conceiving a child in this place-if you could call them children-terrified her.

"Back to Lupe, then," he said. He put his arm around her, and startled her by snatching her up and jumping off the

rocks. They landed safe and unhurt amid stalks of corn. She thought she weighed at least as much as he did, but her weight did not seem to bother him.

"You're not a screamer," he said. "Good." He set her on her feet. "Am I like your wife?" she asked timidly as they walked back. "No," he answered.

"But ... do you like me?"

"Yes."

She looked at him uncertainly, wondering if he were laughing at her. "I wish you talked more," she said.

Later that night, Lupe tied Rane to a bed.

"We don't have bars yet," Ingraham said. "You should have gone with Stephen."

"Shut up," Lupe told him. "Tying people up is no joke. Neither is trying to send a kid to bed with a guy she doesn't even know. We gotta find a better way. I'm sick of this."

Ingraham said nothing more.

Rane found no comfort in Lupe's sentiment. Tied as she was, she had to ask even to go to the bathroom. And she could not sleep on her side as was her custom. She lay miserable and sleepless, twisting her wrists in the hope of freeing at least one. The twisting hurt enough to make her stop after a while. Then she tried to reach one of her wrists with her

teeth. And failed.

By then she was crying tears of frustration and anger. She was totally unprepared for the sudden weight across her stomach that knocked the breath out of her. This time she would have screamed if she had been able to.

She caught her breath, feeling as though she had been punched, then saw Jacob dim and shadowy in the darkness above her.

"You can't bite the rope," he said. "Your teeth are too dull."

"What are you doing here?" she demanded.

"Nothing." He stared down at her from the pose of a seated cat. "I came in the window." Rane sighed, closed her eyes. "I think I'm glad you're here," she whispered. "Even you." "Why don't you like me?" he demanded.

She shook her head, answered honestly because she was too tired to humor him. "Because you look different. Because

I'm afraid of you."

"You are? Of me?" He sounded pleased. He also sounded closer. She opened her eyes and saw that he had stretched out beside her. She tried to draw away, but could not.

"You are afraid of me," he said gleefully. "I'm going to sleep here."

She could have called Lupe. She made a conscious decision not to. The boy was harmless in spite of his appearance, and he did not understand that what she feared was not him personally, but what he represented. Most important, she did not think she could stand to be alone again.

Sometime after midnight, when she had developed a headache from lack of sleep, he awoke and with unchildlike alertness, asked if her arms hurt.

"They hurt," she said. "And I can't sleep and I'm cold."

To her surprise, he pulled her blankets up to her chin. "Bikers put a rope on me," he said. "They pulled me and said,

'Heel, heel!' "

Rane shook her head in disgust. Jacob could not help what he was. He did not deserve such treatment. "Daddy hit some of them and they died."

"Good for him," Rane muttered. Then she realized she was talking about Eli, who might even now be raping Keira. Confusion, frustration, and weariness set in heavily, and she could not stop the tears. She made no sound, but

somehow, the child knew. He touched her face with one of his hard little hands, and when she turned her head away

angrily, he turned his attention to her right wrist. "What are you doing?" she demanded.

As though in answer, she found her wrist suddenly free.

"My teeth are sharp," Jacob announced. He climbed over her and started on her left wrist. In seconds, it too was free. "Oh God," she said, hugging herself with aching arms and numb hands. She made herself reach out to the child. "Thank you, Jacob."

"You taste good," he said. "I thought you would. You smell like food."

She drew her hand back quickly, heard his gleeful laugh. Let him laugh. He had freed her. How the hell a four year old could have teeth that cut rope was beyond her, but she didn't care. If he had been a little less strange, she would have hugged him.

"Something is happening outside," he said.

"What?"

"People moving around and talking." He bounded off the bed and to the window. "They're your people," he said. He leaped silently to the high window sill, then down the other side.

Then even she heard the noise outside-a car starting, people running. There was shouting, and finally what must be happening penetrated her weary mind. Her people-her father and sister . . .

She got out of bed, taking time only to slip into her shoes and grab her pants and shirt. She threw both on over the thin

gown Lupe had brought her from her luggage and she went through the window. She would have climbed through it naked if she had had to.

She got out in time to see the Wagoneer disappearing down the mountain road, stick people in hot pursuit. Her father had left her!

She took a few useless steps after them, then turned without conscious thought and ran in the opposite direction-toward the rocks she and Stephen Kaneshiro had stood on. Toward the road below where her father would almost certainly be

passing soon. It occurred to her as she headed for the steep incline that she could be killed. The thought did not slow her. Either way, the stick people would not tie her down again.

PART 3: MANNA PAST 15

Now Eli would become an active criminal as well as the carrier of a disease. Now, with the help of Lorene and Meda, he would abduct a man. He would take Meda's father's Ford and go to what was left of old U.S. 95. Meda knew 95 from State Highway 62 to Interstate 40. It was desolate country, she said. No towns, almost no private haulers on the road. Just a few daredevil sightseers, taking their chances among the bike packs and car families, and a few well-armed, individualistic ranchers.

Eli worried about taking Meda along. She was four months pregnant, and he worried about both her and the child. She was not an easy woman to become attached to, but the attachment had happened. Now he could not lose her. He could not lose her.

Meda had always been physically strong, had taken pride in being able to match her brothers at hard work and hard

play. Now the disease had made her even stronger, and her new strength had made her overconfident.

She would not, she told Eli, sit at home, trembling and wondering whether her child's father had survived. She intended to see that he survived-and, he thought, maybe get herself killed in the process.

Eli swung from anger to amusement to secret gratitude for her concern. There were still bad times with her-times when she cursed him and mourned her family. But thess times came less frequently. Both the disease organism and the child inside her were driving her toward him. Perhaps she had even begun to forgive him a little.

Now she helped him plan.

"We can hide here," she said, using an old paper auto club map. "There's a junction. A dirt road runs into Ninety-five. There are some hills."

All four of them sat clustered at one end of the large dining room table. Lorene, who was to have the new man if he lived; Gwyn, who was already pregnant again and in less immediate need of a man of her own; Meda; and Eli.

Covertly, Eli watched Gwyn, saw that she seemed at ease, uninterested in the map. A few weeks before, she would have torn the yellowed paper in her eagerness to take part and get a man for herself. Now, pregnant by Eli, she was

content. The organism had turned them all into breeding animals. "What do you think?" Meda asked him.

He looked at the map. "Damn lonely stretch of road," he said. "Anyone working here?" He pointed to a quarry that

should have been nearby.

Meda shook her head. "Too dangerous. What this highway really is at that point is a sewer. From what I've heard about city sewers, the only reason they're worse is because they have more sewer rats. But the gangs here are just as dangerous, and the haulers . . . body-parts dealers, arms smugglers-that kind. The few holdout ranchers are dangerous too. If they don't know you, they shoot on sight."

"Dangerous," Eli said. "And close. Too close to us here. I used to see lights from Ninety-five when I went out at night." When he went out to kill and eat chickens to supplement Meda's mother's idea of three good meals. "I think I saw lights

from State Highway Sixty-two, too. If we accidentally catch anyone important, I don't want search parties coming right

to us."

Meda gave a short, bitter laugh. "People disappear out here all the time, Eli. It's expected. And nobody's important enough these days to search this country for."

Eli glanced up from the map and smiled. "I am. Or I would be if anyone knew I was alive." "Come on," she said, irritated, "you know what I mean."

"Yeah. I hear bike gangs and car families can be damned vindictive, though, if they think you've hurt one of theirs.

Let's go up to I-Forty. If things are bad there, we could even go on to I-Fifteen." "That far?" Meda said. "Fuel, Eli."

"No problem. We'll take the Ford. With its twin tanks it can go just about anywhere within reason and come back without a fill-up."

"And there are more people on Forty and Fifteen," Lorene said. "Real people, not just sewer rats. I could get an honest hauler or a farmer or a city man." She sounded like an eager child listing Christmas possibilities. In a moment, Eli

would have to make her hear herself. Left on her own, she could do a lot of harm before she realized what was happening to her.

"The Ford's been to Victorville and back without fuel problems," Gwyn said lazily. She was from Victorville, Eli knew.

Christian had met her there, where she had worked with her brothers at their mother's roadside station. She shrugged. "I

don't think we'll have a fuel problem."

Meda looked at her strangely, probably because of her lazy tone, then spoke to Eli. "I assume you want to use Ninety- five for going and coming."

"We can use it for going," he said. "If you think it's worth the detour."

She shook her head. "Car families set up roadblocks. Armored tour buses and private haulers just bull their way through, but cars get caught. Especially one car alone."

"We'll use this network of dirt roads, then. I like them better anyway. You know the best ones?"

She nodded. "In good weather, some of them are smoother than Ninety-five, anyway."

"And the dirt roads will give captives the idea they're more isolated than they are. They won't be able to prowl around and find out the truth the way I did until they've made it through the crisis period. After that, they won't care."

"Are you sure they won't?" Meda asked. "I mean . . . this is our home, but some stranger . . ." "This will be his home."

Lorene giggled. "I'll make him feel at home. You just catch him."

Eli turned to look at her.

"You know," she said, still laughing, "this is the kind of thing you always read about men doing to women-kidnapping them, then the women getting to like the idea. I think I'm going to enjoy reversing things."

Silence. Meda and Gwyn sat staring at Lorene, clearly repelled.

"We won't touch him," Eli told Lorene. "We'll leave it to you to give him the disease." Lorene's smile vanished. She looked from Meda and Gwyn to Eli.

"He might die on you," Eli continued. "If he does, we'll get you another one." She frowned as though she did not understand.

"We'll get you as many as necessary," he said.

"You don't have any right to make me feel guilty!" she whispered. Her voice rose abruptly. "This is all your fault! My husband-"

"Remember him!" Eli said. "Remember how it felt to lose him. Chances are, you'll be taking someone else's husband soon."

"You have no right-"

"No, I don't," he said. "But then, there isn't anyone else to say these things to you. And you have to hear them. You have to understand what you are-why you feel what you feel."

"It's because you killed-"

"No. Listen, Lori. It's because you're the host, the vehicle of an extraterrestrial organism. It's because that organism needs new hosts, new vehicles. You need to infect a man and have children and you won't get any peace until you do. I understand that. God knows I understand it. The organism is a damned efficient invader. Five people died because I couldn't fight it. Now, it's possible that at least one person will die because you can't fight it."

"No," Lorene whispered, shaking her head.

"It's something we can't forget or ignore," Eli continued. "We've lost part of our humanity. We can lose more without even realizing it. All we have to do is forget what we carry, and what it needs." He paused. She had turned away, and he waited until she faced him again. "So we'll get you a man," he said. "And we'll turn him over to you. You'll give him the disease and you'll care for him. If he dies, you'll bury him."

Lorene got up and stumbled out of the room.

PRESENT 16

When Blake and Meda had gone, when Ingraham had led Rane away, Eli and Keira sat alone at the large dining room table. Keira looked across at Eli bleakly.

"My sister," she whispered. Rane had looked so frozen when Ingraham led her out, so terrified. "She'll be all right," Eli said. "She's tough."

Keira shook her head. "People think that. She needs to have them think that."

He smiled. "I know. I should have said she's strong. Maybe stronger than even she knows."

A woman carrying a crying child of about three years came into the house. The child, Keira could see, was a little girl wearing only underpants. She had a beautiful face and a dark, shaggy head of hair. There was something wrong with the way she sat on the woman's arm, though-something Keira could not help noticing, yet could not quite identify.

The woman smiled wearily at Eli. "Red room," she said. Eli nodded.

The woman stared at Keira for a moment. Keira thought she stared hungrily. When she had gone into a room off the living room and shut the long, sliding door, Keira faced Eli.

"What's going on?" she said. "Tell me."

He looked at her hungrily, too, but then leaned back in his chair and told her. No more hints, no more delays. When he finished, she asked questions and he answered them. At one point, the woman and child came out of the red room and Eli called them to him.

"Lorene, bring Zera over. I want you both to meet Kerry."

The woman, blond and thin, came over with her hungry eyes and her strange child. She looked at Keira, then at Eli. "Why is there still a table between you two?" she asked. "I'll bet there's no table between that guy and Meda."

"Is that what I called you over here for?" he asked, annoyed. "Don't you want to brag about your kid a little?" Lorene faced Keira almost hostilely.

Keira and the child had been staring at each other. Keira roused herself, met Lorene's suspicious eyes. "I'd like to see her."

"You see her," Lorene said. "She's no freak. She's supposed to be this way. They're all this way."

"I know," Keira said. "Eli has told me. She's beautiful."

Lorene put her daughter on the table and the child immediately sat down, catlike, arms braced against the floor. "Stand up," Lorene said, pushing at the little girl's hindquarters. "Let the lady see you."

"No!" Zera said firmly. To Keira, that proved something about her was normal. Before Keira's illness, she had been called on to take care of little toddler cousins who sometimes seemed not to know any other word.

Then Zera did get up, and in a single fluid motion, she launched herself at Eli. He seemed to pluck her out of the air, laughing as he caught her.

"Little girl, I'm going to miss some day. You're getting faster."

"What would happen if you did miss?" Keira asked. "She wouldn't hurt herself, would she?" "No, she'd be okay. Lands on her feet like a cat. Lorene does miss sometimes."

"I never miss," Lorene said, offended. "I just step aside sometimes. I'm not always in the mood to be jumped on." Eli put Zera back on the table and this time, she walked a few steps, leaped off the table, and stood beside Lorene.

Keira smiled, enjoying the child's smooth, catlike way of moving. Then she frowned. "A kid that age should be kind of clumsy and weak. How can she be so coordinated?"

"We've talked about that," Eli said. "They do go through a clumsy period, of course. Last year, Zee fell down all the

time. But if you think she's agile now, you should see Jacob. He's four." "What will they be like when they're adults?"

"We don't know," Lorene said softly. "Maybe they peak early-or maybe they're going to be as fast as cheetahs some day. Sometimes we're afraid for them."

Keira nodded, looked at the child. She was perfect. A perfect, lean, little four-legged thing with shaggy uncombed hair and a beautiful little face. "A baby sphinx," Keira said, smiling.

"Think you could handle having one like this someday?"

Keira glanced at her, smiled sadly, then turned back to Zera. "I think I could handle it," she said.

Zera took a few steps toward her. Keira knew that if the child scratched or bit her, she would get the disease. Yet she could not bring herself to be afraid. The child was as strange a being as Keira had ever seen, but she was a child. Keira

reached out to her, but Zera drew back.

"Hey," Keira said softly. "What do you have to be afraid of?" She smiled. "Come here."

The little girl mirrored the smile tentatively, edged toward Keira again. She was a little cat not sure it should trust the strange hand. She even sniffed without getting quite close enough to touch.

"Do I smell good?" Keira asked. "Meat!" the child said loudly.

Startled, Keira drew back. She expected to be scratched or bitten eventually, but she did not want to have to shake Zera

off her fingers. Anything as sleek and catlike as this child probably had sharp teeth. "Zee!" Lorene said. "Don't bite!"

Zera looked back at her and grinned, then faced Keira. "I don't bite."

The teeth did look sharp, but Keira decided to trust her. She started to reach out again, this time to lift the child into her lap, but Eli spoke up.

"Kerry!"

She looked across the table at him. "No."

His voice made her think of a warning rattle. She drew back, not frightened, but wondering what was wrong with him. Lorene seemed angry. She picked up Zera and faced Eli. "What kind of game are you playing?" she demanded. "What's the kid here for? Decoration?"

Eli looked up at her.

"Don't give me that look. Go do what you're supposed to do. Then you can take care of her! And if she doesn't make it, you can-"

Eli was on his feet, inches from her, looming over her. Keira held her breath, certain he would hit the woman and perhaps by accident, hurt the child.

Lorene stood her ground. "You're soaking wet," she said calmly. "You're putting yourself through hell. Why?"

He seemed to sag. He touched Lorene's face, then Zera's shaggy head. "You two get the hell out of here, will you?" "What is it!" Lorene insisted.

"Leukemia," Eli said.

There was silence for a moment. Then Lorene sighed. "Oh." She shook her head. "Oh shit." She turned and walked away.

When she had gone through the front door, Keira spoke to Eli. "What are you going to do?" she asked. He said nothing.

"If you touch me," she said, "how soon will I die?" "It isn't touch."

"I know. I mean-" "You might live."

"You don't think so."

More silence.

"I'm not afraid," she said. "I don't know why I'm not, but. . . You should have let me play with Zera. She wouldn't have known and Lorene wouldn't have cared."

"Don't tell me what I ought to do."

She could not fear him-not even when he wanted her to. "Is Zera your daughter?" "No. She calls me Daddy, though. Her father's dead."

"You have kids?" "Oh yes."

"I always thought someday I'd like to."

"You've prepared yourself to die, haven't you?" She shrugged. "Can anyone, really?"

"I can't. To me, talking about it is like talking about the reality of elves and gnomes." He smiled wryly. "If the organism were intelligent, I'd say it didn't believe in death."

"But it will kill me."

He got up, pushing his chair away angrily. "Come on!"

He led her into the hall and to a large bedroom. "I'm going to lock you in," he said. "The windows are locked, but I guess even you could kick them out if you wanted to. If you do, don't expect any consideration from the people you meet outside."

She only looked at him.

Abruptly, he turned and left the room, slamming the door behind him.

Keira lay down on the bed feeling listless, not quite in pain, but unable to worry about Eli, his guilt, the compulsion that would surely overcome him soon. Her body was warning her. If she did not get her medication soon, she would feel worse. She closed her eyes, hoping to fall asleep. She had the beginnings of a headache, or what felt like the beginnings

of one. Sometimes the dull, threatening discomfort could go on for hours without really turning into a headache. She

rolled over, away from the wet place her sweating body had made. Clay's Ark victims were not the only people who could sweat profusely without heat. Her joints hurt her when she moved.

She had decided she was to be left alone for the night when Eli came in. She could see him vaguely outlined in the moonlight. Apparently, he could see her much better.

"Fool," he said. "Why didn't you tell me you felt bad? You've got medicine in the car, haven't you?" Not caring whether he could see or not, she nodded.

"I thought so. Get up. Come show me where it is."

She did not feel like moving at all, but she got up and followed him out. In the dining room, she watched him pull on a pair of black, cloth-lined, plastic gloves.

"Town gloves," he said. "People take us for bikers in stores sometimes. I had a guy serve me once with a shotgun next to him. Damn fool. I could have had the gun anytime I wanted it. And all the while I was protecting him from the

disease."

Why are you protecting me? she thought, but she said nothing. She followed him out to the car, which had been moved farther from the house. There, she showed him the compartment that contained her medicine. She had left it on the seat once, not thinking, and someone had nearly managed to smash into the car to get it, no doubt hoping for drugs. They would have been disappointed. They might have gotten into her chemotherapy medicines and made themselves thoroughly sick.

"Where's your father's bag?" Eli asked.

She was startled, but she hid her surprise. "Why do you want it?" "He wants it. Meda says she's going to let him examine her." "Why?"

"He wants to. It gives him the feeling he's doing something significant, something familiar that he can control. Knowing Meda, I suspect he needs something like that right now."

"Can I see him?"

"Later, maybe. Where's the bag?"

This time, she couldn't help glancing toward the bag's compartment. It was only a tiny glance. She did not think he had seen it. But he went straight to the compartment, located the hidden keyhole, stared at it for a moment, then selected the right key on the first try.

"You never turn on any lights," Keira said. "Does the disease help you see in the dark?"

"Yes." He took the bag from its compartment. "Take your medicine to your room. All of it." "The bag won't work for you," she said. "It's coded. Only my father can use it."

He just smiled.

She had to suppress an impulse to touch him. The feeling surprised her and she stood looking at him until he turned abruptly and strode away. She watched him, realizing he may have felt as bad as she did. His smile had dissolved into a pinched, half-starved look before he turned away.

She stood where she was, first looking after him, then looking up at the clear black sky with its vast spray of stars. The desert sky at night was fascinating and calming to her. She knew she should follow Eli, but she stayed, wondering which of the countless stars was Proxima Centauri-or rather, which was Alpha Centauri. She knew that Proxima could

not be seen separately by the unaided eye. A red star whose light a little girl born on Earth longed for.

"Hi," a child's voice said from somewhere nearby.

Keira jumped, then looked around. At her feet stood a sphinxlike boy somewhat larger than Zera. "Daddy said you have to come in," the boy said.

"Is Eli your daddy?" "Yes. I'm Jacob."

"Does anyone call you Jake?" "No."

"Lucky boy. I'm Keira-no matter what you hear anyone else say. Okay?"

"Okay. You have to come in." "I'm coming."

The boy walked beside her companionably. "You're nicer than the other one," he said. "Other one?"

"Like you, but not as brown."

"Rane? My sister?" "Is she your sister?"

"Where is she? Where did you see her?" "She didn't like me."

"Jacob, where did you see her?" "Do you like me?"

"At the moment, no." She stopped and stooped to bring herself closer to eye level with him. Her joints did not care much for the gesture. "Jacob, tell me where my sister is."

"You do like me," he said. "But I think Daddy will get mad at me if I tell you."

"Damn right, he will," Eli's voice said.

Keira looked up, saw him, and stood up, wondering how anyone could move so silently in sand that crunched underfoot. The boy moved that way, too.

"Eli, why can't I know where my sister is?" she asked. "What's happening to her?" Eli seemed to ignore her, spoke to his son. "Hey, little boy, come on up here."

He did not bend at all, but Jacob leaped into his arms. Then the boy turned to look down at Keira.

"You tell Kerry what her sister was doing last time you saw her," Eli said. The boy frowned. "Keira?"

"Yes. Tell her."

"You should call her Keira. That's what she likes." "Do you?" Eli asked her.

"Yes! Now will you please tell me about Rane?"

"She was with Stephen," Jacob said. "They looked at the cows and fed the chickens and Stephen ate some stuff in the garden. Stephen jumped with her and she didn't like it."

"Jumped?" Keira said.

"From some rocks. She liked him." Keira looked at Eli, questioning.

"Stephen Kaneshiro is our bachelor," Eli said, heading for the house again. Keira followed automatically. "He saw the two of you and asked about you. I aimed him at Rane."

"And she likes him."

"I'd say so. This little kid reads people pretty clearly." "Is she with him?"

"She could have been. Stephen said it was too soon for her, so she's alone. Kerry, she's all right, I promise you. Beyond infecting her, no one wants to hurt her."

"Keira," Jacob said into Eli's ear.

Eli laughed. "Yeah," he said. He looked at the boy. "You know it's time for you to go to bed. Past time."

"Mom already put me to bed."

"I figured she had. What'll it take to get you to stay there?" Jacob grinned and said nothing.

"The kids are more nocturnal than we are," Eli said. "We try to adjust them more to our hours for their own protection. They don't realize the danger they're in when they roam around at night."