Clay's Ark

by Octavia E. Butler

  “I’m going to try something,” he heard Keira say.

  “There’s nothing to try,” Rane told her.

  “Shut up. Let me do something for a change.” She paused, then spoke in an ordinary voice. “Eli or whoever’s out there, if you can hear me, fire three more times.”

  There was nothing.

  “What did you expect?” Rane demanded. “All that stupid talk about seeing in the dark and being able to hear better than other people—”

  “Will you shut up?” Keira tried again. “Eli,” she said, “maybe we can distract them. We can help you get them. You’ll want them now that they’ve been exposed to the disease Help us and we can help you.”

  More silence.

  Keira spoke again softly. “I’m sorry I had to hit you.” She hesitated. “But I did have to. You told me I couldn’t have you, then you made me choose between the little I could have and my father and sister. What would you have done?”

  For a long while, there was no sound at all. Then it seemed to Blake in his pain, in his confusion at what he had heard his daughter say, he heard three evenly timed shots.

  PART 5

  Jacob

  Past 23

  MEDA WANTED A GIRL.

  Eli merely wanted Meda to survive and be well. When that was certain, he would concern himself with the child.

  He worried about her in spite of his confidence in the organism’s ability to keep its hosts alive. This was something new, after all. None of the Ark’s crew had been able to have children during the mission. Their anti-conception implants had been timed to protect them and had worked in spite of the organism since no doctor had survived to remove them.

  Before the Ark left, there had been discussion of the unlikely possibility (emphasized by the media and de-emphasized by everyone connected with the program) that the crew might find itself stranded and playing Adams and Eves on some alien world. Thus, the effectiveness of the implants was intended to last only through the time allotted to the mission and the quarantine period scheduled to follow it. In spite of everything, Eli had been pleased to discover that his had worn off right on time.

  Another fear played up by the media and down by everyone in the program was the possibility that faster-than-light travel might have some negative effect on conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. The Dana Drive that powered the Ark involved an exotic combination of particle physics and psionics. Parapsychological mumbo jumbo, it had been called when Clay Dana presented it. Even when he was able to prove everything he said, even when others were able to duplicate his work and his results, there were outspoken skeptics. After years of tedious, uncertain observation of so-called psychic phenomena, after years of trickery by “psychic” charlatans, some scientists in particular found their prejudices too strong to overcome.

  But the majority were more flexible. They accepted Dana’s work as proof of the psionic potential—specifically, the psychokinetic potential—of just about everyone. Some saw this potential in military terms—the beginnings of a weapons delivery system as close to teleportation as humanity was likely to come. Others, including Clay Dana himself, saw it as a way to the stars. Clay Dana and his supporters demanded the stars. They had clearly feared turn-of-the-century irrationality—religious overzealousness on one side, destructive hedonism on the other, with both heated by ideological intolerance and corporate greed. The Dana faction feared humanity would extinguish itself on Earth, the only world in the solar system that could support human life. There were always hints that the Dana people knew more than they were saying about this possibility. But what they said in Congress, in the White House, to the people by way of the media, turned out to be enough—to the amazement of their opposition. The Dana faction won. The Ark program was begun. The first true astronauts—star voyagers—began their training.

  Because of the psychokinetic element, a human crew was essential. The Dana drive amplified and directed human psychokinetic ability. Surprisingly, some people had too much psychokinetic potential. These could not be trusted with the drive. They over-controlled it, affected it when they did not intend to, made prototypes of the Clay’s Ark “dance” off course. Only strange, old Clay Dana tested out as having too much ability, yet was able to control his drive with a psionic feather touch. Both Eli and Disa had been able to pilot the prototypes and later the Ark itself. This meant they were psionically ordinary. And for some reason, old Dana had taken a liking to them, though Disa admitted to being a little afraid of him. And what she felt about Dana, was what a lot of people watching their TV walls felt about the Ark crew and backup crew. People were curious, but a little afraid—and envious. Earth was becoming less and less a comfortable place to live. Thus it was necessary that the crew have weaknesses and face serious dangers. People knew children had been born on the moon and in space safely, but the gossip networks with their videophone-in shows and their instant polls, their interviews and popular education classes, jacked up their ratings with hours of discussion of whether or not faster-than-light travel could be dangerous to pregnant women and their children. There was even a retrogressive women’s protection movement intended to keep women off the Ark.

  Eli and Disa were too busy to pay much attention to TV nonsense, as they thought of it, but they went along when the implants were proposed. And Eli left frozen sperm behind—just in case—and Disa left several mature eggs.

  Now, Eli wished somehow that his frozen sperm could have been used to impregnate Meda. He knew this was not a reasonable wish, under the circumstances, but he was not feeling very reasonable. He watched Lorene walk Meda back and forth across the room. Meda did not want to walk, but she had tried both sitting and lying down. These, she said, made her feel worse. Lorene walked her slowly, said it would not do her any harm. Lorene had had some nursing experience at a birth center before she married. She had trained to be a midwife to women too poor to go to the better hospitals and too frightened to go to the others.

  Meda stopped for a moment beside Eli’s chair, rested her hand heavily on his shoulder. “What are you doing?” she asked. “Feeling guilty and helpless?”

  He only looked at her.

  She patted his shoulder. “Men are supposed to feel that way. They do in the books I’ve read.”

  He could not help himself. He laughed, stood up, kissed her wet forehead, then walked with her a little until she wanted to sit down in the big armchair. He was surprised she did not want to lie down, but Lorene did not seem surprised so he said nothing. He pulled another chair over and sat beside her, holding her hand and listening as she panted and sometimes made low noises in her throat as the contractions came and went. He was terrified for her, but he sat still, trying to show strength and steadiness. She was doing all the work, after all, pushing, enduring the pain and risk, giving birth to their child without the medical help she might need. If she could do that and hold together, he could hold together, too.

  She never screamed or used any of the profanity she had picked up from him. In fact, she seemed surprised that the birth happened so easily. The baby, when it came, looked like a gray, hairless monkey, Eli thought. By the time Lorene had tied and cut the cord and cleaned the baby up, it was not gray any longer, but a healthy brown. Lorene wrapped it in a blanket and handed it to Meda, still in her chair. Meda examined it minutely, touching and looking, crying a little and smiling. Finally, she handed the child to Eli. He took it eagerly, needing to hold it and look at it and understand that this was his son.

  The baby never cried, but it was clearly breathing well. Its eyes were calm and surprisingly lively. Its arms were long and slender—without the baby pudginess Eli had expected, but he had no real idea how a newborn should look. Maybe they grew pudgy later, or maybe Clay’s Ark babies never grew pudgy. It was enough that this baby seemed healthy and alert. Its legs were doubled against its body, but freed of the blanket, they straightened a little and kicked in the air. They were as long and slender as the arms. And the feet were long and narrow. Eli
looked at the little face and the child seemed to look back curiously. He wondered how much it could see. It had a full head of thick, curly black hair and large ears. When it yawned, Eli saw that it already had several teeth. That could make nursing hard on Meda.

  Eli reached for a tiny, thin hand and the boy grasped his finger surprisingly tightly. After a moment, Eli grinned.

  The child startled him by smiling back at him. Somehow, it did not seem to be mirroring his grin. Its smile seemed almost sly—the unbabylike gesture of one who knew something he was not telling.

  Present 24

  SOMEHOW, BLAKE LOST TRACK of time. He was aware of sporadic shooting, aware that the house was under siege, that Rane and Keira were first with him, then gone. He worried about them when he realized they were gone, wondered where they were. He worried about his own helplessness and confusion.

  Once the man called Badger came in to see him, bringing several other people along. The group shouted and stank and made Blake feel sicker than ever—all but one woman. She was no cleaner than the others, but her scent was different, compelling. She was just another car rat, but he found himself reaching out to her, groping for her with his cuffed hands. He heard shouts of laughter, then her voice, low and mocking.

  “Hey there,” she said, taking his hands. “You’re not going to die on us, are you? Nobody’ll buy you back dead.” She had a deep, throaty voice that would have been sexy had it not been so empty of caring. He knew she was laughing at him—at his pain, at his helplessness, even at his interest in her. He knew, but all he could think about was that he wanted her. He could not help himself. Her scent drew him irresistibly. He tried to pull her down beside him. She laughed and pulled away.

  “Maybe later, wallie,” she whispered. At least she had the kindness to whisper, not shout like the others. He was confused for a moment by her calling him “wallie.” She knew his name. They all did. Then, murkily, he realized she was referring to the fact that he lived in a walled enclave. He wondered whether he would ever see it again.

  The woman nudged him with her foot. “How about that?” she said. “Want me to come back when you’re feeling better?”

  Her friends brayed out their laughter.

  But she did come back that night. And this time she only pretended to mock him as she unbound his hands and feet. “Don’t do anything dumb now. You hurt me or get outside this room, Badger will cut your head off.”

  He opened his eyes and saw that she was nude, kneeling down beside him on the rug of his bare room. She fumbled with his belt. “Let’s see what you’ve got, wallie. Big old rifle or little handgun.”

  For a moment, he thought she was Meda, but her hair, now free of the scarf she had worn before, was a startling white. She was a tall, sun-browned woman, plump, but not really fat. Her scent was incredible. It so controlled him, he could not focus on whether she was pretty or not. It did not matter.

  He could not have thought he had the strength to hold her as he did with his newly freed hands and make love to her once and again and again. In the end, the woman seemed surprised herself, and pleased, willing to drop some of her carrat emotional armor. Without being asked, she got him a blanket from somewhere. He remembered Rane and Keira trying to beg one for him, and being refused. When he asked the woman for food, she brought him a cold beer and a plate of bread and roast beef left over from the car gang’s dinner. The gang, sealed in as it was, had been living off the ranch family’s large pantry and freezer.

  The meat was too well-done and too highly seasoned for Blake’s newly sensitive taste, but he ate it anyway. The gang fed him as well as they ate themselves, but it was not enough. It was never enough. He consumed the extra meal ravenously.

  “You eat like a damn coyote,” the woman complained. “You want some more?”

  He nodded, his mouth full.

  She got him more and watched while he ate. He wondered why she stayed, but he did not mind. He did not want to be alone. The food made him feel much better—less totally focused on his discomfort. “Who the hell are you, anyway?” he asked.

  “Smoke,” she said, touching her hair.

  “Smoke,” he muttered. “First Badger, now Smoke.”

  “Those are our family names,” she said. “We don’t keep the same names once we’re adopted into a family. My name before was Petra.”

  He smiled. “I like that better. Thank you, Petra.”

  To his surprise, she blushed.

  “Are my daughters all right?” he asked.

  She looked surprised. “They’re okay. They say you screamed at them to get out. Hell, we heard you screaming. And with what you were calling them, we didn’t figure they were your blood daughters. We thought you might hurt them.”

  Screaming? He did not remember. Screaming at Rane and Keira? Why?

  Fragments of what seemed to be a dream began to drift back to him. But it was a dream of Jorah, his wife, not of the girls. Jorah, smooth and dark as bittersweet chocolate, soft and gentle, or so people thought when they saw her or heard her voice. Later they discovered the steel the softness disguised.

  The dream recaptured him slowly, and he could see her as she had been with the cesspool kids she taught. The kids liked her or at least respected her. They knew she cared about them. The bigger, more troublesome ones knew she had a gun. She was too idealistic for her own good, but she was not suicidal.

  He saw her as she had been when he met her at UCLA. He was going to fight diseases of the body and she, diseases of a society that seemed to her too shortsighted and indifferent to survive. She preached at him about old-fashioned, long-lost causes—human rights, the elderly, the ecology, throwaway children, corporate government, the vast rich-poor gap and the shrinking middle class. …She should have been born twenty or thirty years earlier. He could not get particularly involved in her causes. He did not believe there was anything he could do to keep the country, the world from flushing itself down the toilet. He meant to take care of his own and do what he could for the others, but he had few illusions.

  Still, he could not keep away from her. She was an earlier, happier compulsion. He let her preach at him because he was afraid if he did not, she would find someone else with open ears. He knew her family did not like her interest in him. They were people who had worked themselves out of one of the worst cesspools in the southland. They had nurtured Jorah’s social conscience too long to let it fall victim to a white man who had never suffered a day in his life and who thought social causes were passé.

  He married her anyway, had two daughters with her, even acquired something of a social conscience through her. Eventually, he began putting in time at one of the cesspool hospitals. It was like trying to empty the Pacific with a spoon, but he kept at it—as she kept at her teaching until a young sewer slug blew away most of the back of her head with a new submachine gun. The slug was thirteen years old. He did not know Jorah. He had just stolen the gun and wanted to try it out. Jorah was handy.

  Why had Blake dreamed of her, then recalled her so vividly? And what did she have to do with his driving Rane and Keira away?

  “Are they really your kids?”

  He jumped, looked around, was surprised to see that Petra was still there.

  “The two girls. Are they your kids?”

  “Of course.”

  “Shit, I felt sorry for them. You were calling them sluts and whores and slugs and sewage—everything you could think of. One of them was crying.”

  “But … why would I do that?”

  “You asking me? Hell, who knows? You hit your head pretty hard against the steering wheel. Maybe you just went crazy for awhile.”

  “But …” But why had he dreamed of Jorah? Such a realistic dream—as though she were with him again. As though the utterly senseless killing had never happened. As though he could touch her, love her again.

  Keira.

  His mind flinched away from thinking of her. She was a too-thin, too-frail, younger version of Jorah. She had that sa
me incredible skin. And she had, Blake knew, more of her mother’s steel than most people realized.

  Christ, had he tried to rape Keira?

  Had he?

  The girl was so weak. Could he have tried and failed? “Jesus,” he whispered.

  “You okay?” Petra asked.

  He looked at her, realized she was only a few years older than Rane and Keira. A young girl, still able to drop the carrat identity and take pleasure in doing so.

  “I’m all right,” he lied. “Listen, now that you’ve told me about the girls, I have to see them. One of them, at least. I have to apologize.”

  She looked away. “I don’t know if I can bring them.”

  He understood her, and wished he had not. The girls might not be alone. “Try,” he said, “please.”

  “Okay.” But she stopped to kiss him and he was caught up again in the scent and feel of her. She giggled like a delighted child and lay down with him again.

  By the time she went away and came back with Keira, he was badly frightened. He was no longer in control of himself. Tiny microbes controlled him, had forced him to have sex with a young girl when an instant before, sex had been the farthest thing from his mind. What had they made him do to his daughter?

  Keira came into the room much as she had come into another room—how many days ago? Eli had released her then for a few painful minutes. Who had released her this time? God, what would Jorah think of the way he was taking care of their children?

  “Dad?”

  She had a bruise on the side of her face. It was swollen and puffy. She could not conceal the fact that she did not want to get near him. And, heaven help him, her scent was as good as Petra’s had been.

  “Did I hit you?” he asked, looking at her swollen face.