Survivor

by Octavia E. Butler

  For the first time in two years, Alanna lay on her own bed at the Mission colony and slid uncomfortably into a meklah dream. She had intended to use these moments of privacy to think, to plan a way to thwart Natahk—and Gehl. They both knew of her marriage. The fact that they kept it secret indicated that they planned to use the information to control her somehow. Natahk could make her a pawn of the Garkohn whenever he chose. And as soon as he realized that she was undoing his work, bringing the Tehkohn and the Missionaries together in peace rather than in war, he would begin to apply pressure. Thus, Alanna’s first moves had to be direct and sweeping. She had to give the Missionaries a hard push so that if she was silenced or killed or abducted again, the Missionaries would go on along the path that she had pointed out to them. To guide them, though, she had to become one of them again—or as much one of them as she had ever been. Now, ironically, her renewed meklah addiction helped her slip back into the ways of her Missionary past. Meklah dreams had their uses.

  Meklah dreams came to people who allowed themselves to reach the second stage of meklah withdrawal—the stage of remembering. The first stage was hunger, uncomplicated, but intense, and distinctly, hunger for one of the many meklah products of the valley. Another ripe sweet meklah fruit or tea made from the leaves of the meklah tree or bread made from the unripe fruit dried and ground to flour or… But the list was endless. Meklah was the staple of the valley. Even meat and fish were seasoned with it. The Garkohn fermented it to make a kind of wine. No one had trouble getting enough of it. The tree was an evergreen that grew wild all over the valley. People were not even conscious of being addicted unless they left the valley—went into the mountains where the tree did not grow. Or unless they simply chose not to eat.

  Fine sweat appeared on Alanna’s forehead. She felt almost sick with hunger. The meklah was demanding. She was tempted to try to eat something that did not contain the meklah just to relieve her hunger a little. But she knew better. Eating anything other than meklah now would start her vomiting and bring her into full withdrawal. The time for her to risk that would come, certainly, but it had not come yet. Best to wait now and let the memories come as she knew they would.

  She closed her eyes, let her thoughts drift into the past. It was not so much remembering as reliving. Only time was distorted so that she could experience the events of days, of months, in only minutes. In her mind, she returned to Earth.

  There, she met a woman, small and slender with hair that was long and very black like Alanna’s hair, and with eyes as narrow as Kohn eyes. And there was a man, as lean and tall as Alanna was now. His coloring was dark brown, almost black, contrasting strangely with the very fair skin of the woman. Alanna stood between them, her eyes only slightly narrowed, her skin a smooth medium brown.

  They protected each other, these two, and together, they protected the child they had created. Even in the end when the Clayarks came to loot and kill, the man and woman held them off long enough for the child to escape.

  Alanna had been eight years old then. And she was on her own. She had grown thin, hard, and feral stealing and foraging for herself. She had lived in the streets of the nearly deserted city of her birth, sometimes venturing out to the open land and to the walled Missionary town. By her fifteenth year when the Missionaries caught her stealing from their cornfield, she was an animal.

  A Missionary guard shot her as she fled with an armload of corn. He was doing his job. Verrick Colony had lost too much in crops and in lives to disease-spreading thieves.

  The shot only wounded her. The guard was stepping in close to finish her when Jules arrived. As she learned later, Jules had just lost his third and last child to the plague of Clay’s Ark. No doubt that was why he reacted so emotionally to a scene that had become all too familiar at the colony.

  He knocked the rifle from the hands of her would-be executioner before the man could fire. Then he lifted Alanna into his arms and carried her back to his home. If she had had the plague, his unwary handling of her could have cost him his life. Alanna, wild with tear and pain, struggled, tried to bite him. Fortunately, she was too weak to succeed.

  She recuperated from her wound in his house and he and his wife Neila began to teach her to be human again. She did not realize until later how difficult she must have made this for them. She bore them no love during those early days, and little gratitude. She obeyed them, when she understood enough to obey, because they were strong and wealthy beyond belief as she understood wealth. They had huge amounts of food and safe dry shelter—and they shared these things with her willingly. She obeyed them hoping to bribe them to continue their extravagance.

  She had to learn Mission doctrine and unlearn many of the words and habits she had used in the wilds. Her habits were “dirty,” her speech “obscene.” She must change.

  She listened and remembered and changed with a speed that startled the Verricks. Pleased, they began to teach her from the Bible and from a book called The Missionaries of Humanity, which interpreted the parts of the Bible that held special meaning for Missionaries. From this last book came the pledge that Alanna had to recite in the church before all the people of Verrick Colony: “I accept the Lord God who made man in His own image and gave him dominion over the universe. I accept Jesus Christ, the Son of God and of a human woman, as living proof of the kinship between God and humankind. The purpose of my life from this day forward will be to fulfill my role in our holy Mission—to preserve and to spread the sacred God-image of humankind.”

  Alanna said the words, even understood them. The Missionaries believed that their shape was sacred while the Clayark beast-shape—that of the four-legged mutant children born to plague survivors—was a work of Satan. So many words. Alanna simply recited the pledge so that Jules and Neila would be pleased and stop bothering her about it.

  Not until she began to hear other Missionaries talk about exiling her back to the wilds, or at least sending her to another colony, did she begin to realize what valuable allies she had in the Verricks.

  The colonists had never really accepted her. She represented the wild outsiders, diseased and healthy, who had preyed on them for years. Most Missionary adults were content to express their displeasure by complaining to each other. But their children were more direct. Alanna was sometimes followed by a jeering crowd of Missionary children. She first ignored them, then regarded them with silent contempt—children who had never known hunger, soft children who would not have lasted a day in the wilds. Several of them were adolescents, as old as she was or older. Old enough to know better.

  Alanna made no move against them until they attacked her. Then she put her back against the wall of the nearest house and fought them as though she had never left the wilds. She brought down four of them—one with her fist, one with a newly shod foot, and two with a stone she snatched up. The rest fled screaming back to their parents.

  And their parents were outraged.

  So the wild human had gone berserk. Just what everyone had been afraid of. After all, what could you expect from a creature more animal than human.

  Jules came to Alanna’s defense at once. He met with the people in the church and told them they had been lucky. Alanna had been attacked by at least ten people, he said, and yet she had not killed even one—though surely with her experience, she could have. Was that the behavior of a savage wild human? Which Missionary, attacked by ten people, would control himself as carefully?

  When the meeting was over and the people had gone away grumbling more quietly, Jules went home and asked Alanna whether she actually had held back.

  “You mean, could I have killed?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I could have.”

  He looked at a particularly large bruise on one side of her face. She had not come through the righting unbloodied. “Why didn’t you?” he asked.

  “It’s a sin among the people here. Your Bible said it was a sin.”

  “‘Thou shalt not kill,’” quoted Jules.
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br />   “Not that,” she said. “It was one of the other verses that came to me. ‘He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall surely be put to death.’”

  Jules looked away from her for a moment, said nothing.

  “If I had killed, wouldn’t the people here have killed me?”

  For a time she thought Jules would not answer her. Then, “Yes. They probably would have, regardless of the circumstances. And I don’t think I would have been able to stop them.”

  “You would have tried?”

  “Don’t make it necessary for me to try. For your own sake, Alanna, be careful.”

  “I’m careful. All the time. I think the ones who attacked me have learned to be careful too now.”

  He grinned suddenly. “Yes, I don’t think they’ll bother you again. You taught them a lesson they needed.”

  She began to draw closer to him then. Twice, he had stood against his people for her. He had chosen to do this—as her parents, on that final day, had chosen to stay behind and fight. From the time of her parents’ death, she had not been close to another person. Others were, at best, competitors for the limited food supply. At worst, they were Clayarks, predators, willing to eat the flesh of normal humans whom they considered inferior primitives. But the Verricks had been different from the first. She could remember a time when she was recovering from her gunshot wound—a time when Neila sat beside her and put food into her mouth. This was the most overwhelming of her early Missionary experiences. In the wilds, if someone was weak and attempting to eat, someone else might come to pry the food out of his mouth—but never to put food in. And Neila Verrick had done another thing for her.

  An older woman, Beatrice Stamp, had been visiting Neila while Alanna was recuperating. Alanna was pretending to be asleep. She often did that during her recuperation when people other than the Verricks were in the house. Thus she avoided seeing the smiles that even she could read as false, and the frowns from more honest people that were all too real. But Beatrice Stamp had already had her look at the captive wild human—she was one of those who had smiled. Now she had come to see Neila for another reason.

  “Neila, I’ve been talking to some of the others and they agree. If we’re going to keep the girl in the colony, surely she’d be happier with her own kind.”

  There had been a moment of silence, then Neila spoke quietly. “Her own kind? Who are you suggesting I give my daughter to, Bea?”

  The older woman sighed. “Oh, my. I knew this was going to be difficult. But, Neila, the girl isn’t white.”

  “She’s Afro-Asian from what she says of her parents. Black father, Asian mother.”

  “Well, we don’t have any Asians, but one of our black families might…”

  “She has a home, Bea. Right here.”

  “But…”

  “Most of the blacks here are no more interested than the whites in adopting a wild human. The ones who are interested have already been here. Jules and I turned them down.”

  “…so I’d heard.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I thought that after you’d had a few days with the girl, you might…reconsider.”

  There was the sound of Neila’s laughter. “Come to my senses, you mean.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean!” snapped the older woman. “Several of us feel that you and Jules ought to be setting a better example for the young people here—not encouraging them to mix and…”

  “Bring it up at the next council meeting, Bea.” Neila sounded weary.

  “I had hoped we wouldn’t have to do that.”

  “If you feel it needs doing, do it. Now I’m awfully busy, so unless you had something else you wanted to discuss…”

  Beatrice Stamp left, offended. Later when Alanna’s speech was a little better—from the beginning, she understood more than she could say—she asked Neila about the incident. And she learned for the first time how important some Missionaries believed their own coloring to be.

  “We’ll be getting our ship soon,” said Neila. “We’ll be immigrating to a world all our own. I wonder whether people like Bea really think our small colony can survive separating itself into this and that race.”

  “She’ll make trouble?” said Alanna.

  Neila smiled unpleasantly. “She’d like to, but she wouldn’t dare. The people here are too bound together already. She has no support except from her little clique of aging bigots.”

  “I’ll stay here then?”

  “Do you want to stay here, Lanna, with Jules and me?”

  “Yes.” Food, shelter, warm clothing, kindness. “Yes.”

  “This is your home then.” Neila hugged her. For the first time, Alanna did not try to pull away. She was growing used to being touched.

  Verrick Colony remained on Earth for two more years before it received its Mission Ship. By then, the Missionaries and Alanna had gotten used to each other. There was no more trouble even from Beatrice Stamp and her friends. Alanna had made a few friends herself. She had learned to read and write, and she could quote more from the Bible than most lifelong Missionaries. She was careful to observe Mission law even when, as often happened, it seemed foolish to her. She was as much a Missionary as she would ever become.

  Finally, with the Missionaries of Verrick Colony, she prepared to leave Earth. There would be no returning. The Mission Ship would take the colonists and their supplies to a habitable new world, then it would die. It would become nothing more than a carcass to be cannibalized. The ship’s builders were taking no chances. Only Earth’s first starship, the Clay’s Ark, had been allowed to return after its voyage. With it had come the Clayark microorganism, secure inside the bodies of the surviving members of the crew. The men and women of the crew, driven by a disease-induced need to spread their affliction, evaded their mandatory quarantine and examination. They escaped easily since no one had expected them to try to escape. Then they disappeared into the general population and gleefully began spreading a world-wide epidemic. The Clayark plague had killed over half the population. It was still killing, and still causing the distinctive Clayark mutation in the young of its surviving victims.

  The Missionaries were not leaving solely to escape the Clayark plague though. As Neila Verrick told Alanna on their last night at Verrick Colony, “We’re going to fulfill our part in the Mission. We’re going to spread the Sacred Image to one more world.”

  Alanna sat comfortably on the bare floor of the Verrick house listening to the pious words, and knowing that Neila believed them. But Alanna had heard words less pious from other Missionaries—words that bothered her. She frowned, spoke to Neila.

  “Some people are saying the ship is a trick. They say there is no ship and we’re being led like cattle to be slaughtered.”

  Neila sighed, put aside the book she had held open on her lap. She was sitting in a rocking chair made of wood. Her favorite chair, soon to be abandoned with the rest of the settlement’s furniture. “Do you believe the rumor, Lanna?”

  “That we are to be slaughtered? Even the people who say it don’t believe it. If they did, nothing would move them from here.”

  Neila gave her a small relieved smile. “Exactly. And just to put your mind fully at ease, I’ll tell you, I know the starships are real. I’ve seen them. I’ve seen them launched with Missionaries aboard. Most of the people here haven’t had that experience, and they’re a little afraid.”

  “They say the people who build the ships aren’t Missionaries, so why should they help Missionaries.”

  “Because they’re human—more or less. Because they care whether or not the human species survives. We Missionaries are their insurance. They have no choice but to stay here with the Clayarks. They think they can survive, but whether they can or not, they hope we will. Some of us, at least.”

  “They can’t leave even though they have the ships?” said Alanna.

  “That’s right. We’re lucky. If they could have left, they might have abandoned most of us. Their wea
kness gives us a chance.”

  “What weakness? What’s wrong with them?”

  “Some Missionaries say God has quarantined them on Earth in their city, their Forsyth. Chained them here for their own attempt at altering the Sacred Image.”

  “I’ve heard that talk.”

  “And you don’t believe it—just as you don’t really believe other more important things.”

  Alanna said nothing.

  Neila shook her head. “Well, for once, I agree with you. The people who now live in Forsyth began altering themselves slowly by selective breeding thousands of years ago. Their founder is supposed to have gotten the idea from the way the people of his ancient time bred animals. He guided his people to breed themselves as carefully as the rest of us breed our best animals. But through it all, they’ve retained the Sacred Image. They never meant to change it. It was their minds that they were struggling to reshape. And they worked only with people who were already slightly different. They began with small mutations and bred themselves to the power they have now. Now they can hear and see and heal and kill and more, all with their minds. And they still have all their physical senses. The power of their minds is extra.

  “About fifty years ago, when the plague began to get out of hand, the people of Forsyth stopped pretending to be less than they were, and…”

  “They pretended? They were in hiding in spite of all their power?”

  Neila hesitated. “Yes. But not out of fear. They hid to keep their privacy and to live in their own way. Anyway, they stopped hiding. They brought scientists and technicians from all over the world and put them to work on more ships like the Clay’s Ark—or larger and better than the Ark. The people of Forsyth already knew something about starships. Some of them had secretly had a hand in the building of the Ark. But now, they wanted the best possible ships. They wanted to find a world of their own and leave Earth to the Clayarks. But the first load of them to leave died before they were much beyond the orbit of the moon. Those back here could feel them dying, but couldn’t help them. The distance was too great. After that, those here did some careful experimenting. They found that the telepathic adults—and most of the adults are telepathic—weren’t able to break free of the mental ties they had with those they left here on Earth.