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
