Clay's Ark (25 page)

hands and knees. With the help of an adult, he could sit up like a dog or cat begging for food. As time passed, he grew

strong enough to do this alone. He learned to sit back on his haunches comfortably while using his hands.

He was a beautiful, precocious child, but he was a quadruped. His senses were even keener than those of his parents

and his strength would have made him a real problem for parents of only normal strength. And he was a carrier. Eli and

Meda did not learn this for certain until later, but they suspected it from the first.

Most important, though, the boy was not human.

Eli could not accept this. Again and again, he tried to teach Jacob to walk upright. A human child walked upright. A

boy, a man, walked upright. No son of Eli's would run on all fours like a dog.

Day after day, he kept at Jacob until the little boy sprawled on his stomach and screamed in rebellion.

"Baby, he's too young," Meda said not for the first time. "He doesn't have the balance. His legs aren't strong enough

yet."

Chances were, they never would be, and she knew it. She tried to protect the boy from Eli. That shamed and angered

Eli so that he could not talk to her about it.

She tried to protect his son from him!

And perhaps Jacob needed her protection. There were times when Eli could not even look at the boy. What in hell was

going to happen to a kid who ran around on all fours? A freak who could not hide his strangeness. What kind of life

could he have? Even in this isolated section of desert, he might be mistaken for an animal and shot. And what in

heaven's name would be done with him if he were captured instead of killed? Would he be sent off to a hospital for

"study" or caged and restricted like even the best of the various apes able to communicate through sign language? Or

would he simply be stared at, harassed, tormented by normal people? If he spread the disease, it would quickly be

traced to him. He would definitely be caged or killed then.

Eli loved the boy desperately, longed to give him the gift of humanity that children everywhere else on earth took for

granted. Sometimes Eli sat and watched the boy as he played. At first, Jacob would come over to him and demand

attention, even try, Eli believed, to comfort his father or understand his bleakness. Then the boy stopped coming near

him. Eli had never turned him away, had even ceased trying to get him to walk upright. In fact, Eli was finally

accepting the idea that Jacob would never walk on his hind legs with any more ease or grace than a dog doing tricks.

Yet the boy began to avoid him.

Eli was slow in noticing. Not until he called Jacob and saw that the boy cringed away from him did he realize that it

had been many days since Jacob had touched him voluntarily.

Many days. How many? Eli thought back.

A week, perhaps. The boy had ceased to come near him or touch him exactly when he began wondering if it were not a

cruelty to leave such a hopeless child alive.

PRESENT 26

Rane sat frightened and alone among members of the car family. They had put her on the floor against a wall in what

had been the living room of the ranch house. She was still shackled, feeling miserable and tired. Her arms, legs, and

back ached with wanting to change position. Once she had inched away from the wall and lain down. The instant she

closed her eyes, there was a hand on her left breast and another on her right thigh.

She had sat up quickly and squirmed away from the hands. The car rats had only laughed. They could have raped her.

She thought they might eventually. At that moment, they were preoccupied with the ranch women-a mother and her

thirteen-year-old daughter. There was also a twelve-year-old son. Rane had heard some of the car rats had raped him,

too. She didn't doubt it. They had placed her opposite an open hall door that was directly across from the door of the

bedroom-cell of what was left of the ranch family. She could not help seeing occasional car rats going in or out, zipping

or unzipping their pants. She could not help hearing moaning, pleading, praying, weeping, screaming whenever the

room door was opened. The ranch house was solidly built. Sounds did not carry well unless doors were open. Rane

suspected the car rats had put her where she was so that she could see and hear what was in store for her.

They were watching a movie from the ranch family's library -a 1998 classic about the Second Coming of Christ. There

had been a whole genre of such films just before the turn of the century. Some were religious, some antireligious, some

merely exploitive-Sodom-and-Gomorrah films. Some were cause-oriented-God arrives as a woman or a dolphin or a

throwaway kid. And some were science fiction. God arrives from Eighty-two Eridani Seven.

Well, maybe God had arrived a few years late from Proxima Centauri Two. God in the form of a deadly little microbe

that for its own procreation made a father try to rape his dying daughter-and made the daughter not mind.

Rane squeezed her eyes shut, -willing the tears not to come again, failing. What was worse? Being raped by three or

four car rats before she was ransomed or submitting to Eli's people and microbe? Or were the two the same now that

the car gang was infected? No, she would probably have been safer back with Stephen Kaneshiro, who could have hurt

her but had not, who had tried to share part of himself with her even though she had not understood.

But there was Jacob to think of. All the Jacobs. Stephen Kaneshiro could not give her a human child. It did not matter

what the car gang gave her. They would free her as soon as they had the ransom money. Then she could have a doctor

take care of the disease and any possible pregnancy. If only the car family did not kill her before the ransom was paid.

Somehow, in spite of the noise from across the hall, in spite of its effect on her, she fell asleep sitting up. If there were

more hands, she did not feel them.

When she awoke, she was intensely hungry. The movie was over, and the car rats were shooting and shouting and

stinking with sweat so foul she could almost taste it. Her first impulse was to try to drag herself away from them, but

her hunger was too intense. Even her head throbbed with it.

She begged the nearest car rat for food, but he shoved her aside with one foot and kept reloading guns as they were

passed to him. Most were not passed to him. Their users reloaded them themselves in a couple of seconds. Others were

older, slower, more likely to jam. These the reloader handled.

Helplessly, automatically, Rane inched toward the kitchen. She knew where it was. She and Keira had been left in it

when they were rescued from their father.

Rane shook her aching head, not wanting to think about that. She did not know where Keira was or what was

happening to her. She cared, but she did not want to think about it now. She was not even sure where her father was.

She worried about him because he was obviously sick. He might hurt himself and not even know it. The car rats might

hurt him because he could not respond to their orders. But as worried as she was about him, she could not keep her

mind on him. She was so weak, so sick with hunger, and the kitchen seemed so far away.

She was not sure how far she had gone across the vast room when someone stopped her.

"Where the hell do you think you're going, sis? What's the matter with you?"

"I'm hungry," she gasped.

"Hungry? Shit, you're sick. You're soaking wet."

Rane managed to look up, see that it was a deep-voiced woman who had stopped her, not a man as she had thought. Of

course. She smelled like a woman. Rane shook her head, trying to remember whether men and women had always

smelled noticeably different. But she could not keep her mind on the question.

"Please," she begged, "just give me some food."

"You're probably not even strong enough to eat."

"Please," Rane wept. She had done more crying in the past few days than she had in the past several years. She could

not recall feeling so utterly helpless before. What would happen if the woman prevented her from reaching food? She

was already in more pain than she thought could result from hunger.

"You get back to your place and keep from underfoot," the woman said. She was large and blocky. Rane at her best

could not have gotten past her. Now, all but helpless, Rane felt herself dragged back to her place at the wall.

"Stay put!" the woman said, then stomped away in her heavy boots. Immediately, Rane began crawling toward the

kitchen again. She could not help herself.

She had her hand stepped on once, painfully, and someone shouted at her and cursed her, but no one stopped her again.

She reached the kitchen, noticed peripherally that someone had found a gunport there alongside the sink. A bald,

shirtless man stood before it, firing mechanically. The man had enough hair on his body to cover several heads.

A gorilla, Rane thought. No more human than the things he was firing at. Jesus, was anyone negotiating with her

grandparents or were they all here trying to kill Eli's people? How long had the siege gone on? Two days? Three?

More? She could not remember.

She managed to drag herself upright by using the handles of the large refrigerator, then stand while she pulled one of

the doors open. There was little food to be found. A few fresh vegetables -tomatoes, a limp carrot, two cucumbers,

green onions, green beans.

She ate everything she could find. By the time the shooting let up and the hairy man on the other side of the kitchen had

time to pay attention to her, she had opened the other side of the refrigerator and found several steaks probably

intended for the night's dinner. The steaks were raw, some of them still icy. There was some cooked meat, too-what

was left of a pair of large roasts scraped together onto one platter.

Without thinking, Rane chose the raw meat. Its coldness disturbed her but the fact that it was raw did not even

penetrate her consciousness until she had cleaned the bone of the first steak and was beginning the second. Raw

smelled better than cooked, that was all.

Finally she began to feel stronger, aware enough for her bloody hands and the bloody meat she held to startle her. She

had never liked her meat even medium rare, had always eaten it well-done or, as Keira said, burned. But this meat,

except for its coldness, was the best thing she had ever tasted.

Now the car rat saw what she was doing, and, amazed, came to take the second steak from her. She did her best to bite

off one of his fingers. If her bound hands and feet had not restricted her movement, she would have succeeded. As it

was, her unexpected swiftness and ferocity drove the car rat back.

"Goddamn," he said staring at her as she tore off a piece of steak. "Goddamn, you and your whole family are crazy."

He was an ape. Heavy brow ridges, flattened, broken nose, body hair no one would believe. But now that she had eaten,

now that she felt stronger, she realized he smelled interesting.

She finished her steak while he watched, repelled and fascinated. Then she wiped her mouth and smiled. "I won't hurt