'Yes,' he said. He did not lie to her. 'I was a soldier once.'
'So, are you going to let me see you?' she asked, and he could tell it was not a great need. The unknown was more primary. Good lassie, he thought.
'No,' he said. 'Not yet. What if you told?'
'What if I told?' she asked.
He could smell her change. The potent smell of her sex was beginning to fill the small chamber.
'They would kill me,' he said. She turned out the light.
Ali could tell that hell was starting to get to them.
This was Jonah's vista, the beast's gut as hollowed earth. It was the basement of their souls. As children they had all learned it was forbidden to enter this place, short of God's damnation. Yet here they were, and it scared them.
Perhaps not unnaturally, it was her they began to turn to. Men and women, scientists and soldiers, began seeking her out to make their confessions. Freighted with myths, they wanted out from their burden of sins. It was a way of keeping their sanity. Strangely, she was not prepared for their need.
It was always done singly. One of them would drift back or catch her alone in camp. Sister, they would murmur. A minute before, they had called her Ali. But then they would say Sister, and she would know what they wanted of her: to become a stranger to them, a loving stranger, nameless, all-forgiving.
'I'm not a priest,' Ali told them. 'I can't absolve you.'
'You're a nun,' they would say, as if the distinction were meaningless. And then it would start, the recitation of fears and regrets, their weaknesses and rancor and vendettas, their appetites and perversions. Things they dared not speak aloud to one another, they spoke to her.
In ecumenical parlance, it was now called reconciliation. Their hunger for it astonished her. At times, she felt trapped by their autobiographies. They wanted her to protect them from their own monsters.
Ali first noticed Molly's condition during an afternoon poker game. It was just the two of them in a small raft. Molly showed a pair of aces. That was when Ali saw her hands.
'You're bleeding,' she said.
Molly's smile wavered. 'No big deal. It comes and goes.'
'Since when?'
'I don't know.' She was evasive. 'A month ago.'
'What happened? This looks terrible.'
There was a hole scraped in the flesh of each palm. Some of the meat looked cored out. It wasn't an incision, but it wasn't an ulcer, either. It looked eaten by acid, except acid would have cauterized the wound.
'Blisters,' said Molly. Her eyes had developed dark circles. She kept her scalp shaved short out of habit, but it no longer suggested bountiful good health.
'Maybe one of the docs should take a look,' Ali said. Molly closed her fists. 'There's nothing wrong with me.'
'I was just concerned,' said Ali. 'We don't have to talk about it.'
'You were implying something's wrong.' Molly's eyes began to bleed.
Taking no chances, the team's physicians quarantined the two women in a raft tugged a hundred yards behind the rest.
Ali understood. The possibility of some exotic disease had the expedition in a state of terror. But she resented Walker's soldiers watching them with sniperscopes. She was not allowed a walkie-talkie to communicate with the group because Shoat said they would only use it to beg and wheedle. By the morning of the fourth day, Ali was exhausted.
A quarter-mile to the front, a dinghy detached from the flotilla and started back toward her. Time for the daily house call. The doctors were wearing respirators and paper scrubs and latex gloves. Ali had called them cowards yesterday, and was sorry now. They were doing their best.
They drifted close and nodded to Ali. One flashed his light on Molly. Her beautiful lips were cracked. Her lush body was withering. The ulcerations had spread over her body. She turned her head from their light.
One of the physicians came into Ali's boat. She got into theirs, and the other doctor
paddled her a short distance away to talk.
'We can't make sense of it,' he said. His voice was muffled by the respirator. 'We did the blood test again. It could still turn out to be an insect venom, or an allergic reaction. Whatever it is, you don't have it. You don't have to be out here with her.'
Ali ignored the temptation. No one else would volunteer, they were too frightened. And Molly could not be alone. 'Another transfusion,' Ali said. 'She needs more blood.'
'We've given her five pints already. She's like a sieve. We may as well pour it into the water.'
'You've given up?'
'Of course not,' the doctor said. 'We'll all keep fighting for her.'
The doctor paddled her back to the quarantine raft. Ali felt cold and wooden. Molly was going to die.
As they paddled away, the physicians discarded their protective garments. They tore the paper suits from their limbs, stripped away their latex gloves, and left them like skins floating on the current.
Molly's wounds deepened. She began to sweat a rank grease through her pores. They put her on antibiotics, but that didn't help. A fever set in. Ali could feel its heat just by leaning across her.
Another time, Ali opened her eyes and Ike was sitting in his gray and black kayak alongside the quarantine raft, for all the world a killer whale bobbing on slow currents. He was not wearing the requisite scrubs and respirator, and his disregard was a small miracle to Ali. He tied his kayak to them and slipped from it onto the raft.
'I came to see you,' he said to her. Molly lay asleep between Ali's legs.
'It's in her lungs,' Ali reported. 'She's suffocating on fungus.'
Ike slipped one hand beneath Molly's cropped head and raised it gently and bent down. Ali thought he meant to kiss her. Instead, he sniffed at her open mouth. Her teeth were stained red. 'It won't be long,' he said, as if that were a mercy. 'You should say prayers for her.'
'Oh, Ike,' sighed Ali. Suddenly she wanted to be held, but could not bring herself to ask for it. 'She's too young. And this isn't the right place. She asked me what will happen to her body.'
'I know what to do,' he said, and did not elaborate. 'Has she told you how this happened?'
'No one knows,' said Ali.
'She does,' he said.
Later, Molly confessed. There was none of that Sister, Sister for her. At first it seemed like a joke. 'Hey, Al,' she opened. 'Wanna hear something off the wall?'
Small spasms clenched and unclenched the woman's long body. She strained to get control, at least from the neck up.