Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

by Kate Wilhelm

  Molly looked at the floor and waited for memories to return, and for a long time there was nothing but the terror of nightmare remembered in emotions, not in details.

  They had strapped her to a table, many times, she thought, and they had done things to her that she could not recall. There had been another time when some of the women had held her down and done things to her. She shuddered violently and closed her eyes. The memory receded. Mark, she thought suddenly, very clearly. Mark! She jumped up and looked about wildly. The woman who had befriended her hurried over and caught her arm.

  “Look, Molly, they’ll put you under again if you make trouble. Understand? Just sit still until our break, and I’ll talk to you then.”

  “Where is Mark?” Molly whispered.

  The woman glanced about and said in an undertone, “He’s all right. Now sit down! Here comes a nurse.”

  Molly sat down again and stared at the floor until the nurse glanced about the room and left once more. Mark was all right. There was ice on the ground. Winter. He was six, then. She remembered nothing of the late summer, the fall. What had they done to her?

  The hours until the break passed painfully slowly. Occasionally one or another of the women would look at her and there was awareness, not the incurious glances that had been given her before. The word was spreading that she was back, and they were watching her, perhaps to see what she would do now, perhaps to welcome her, perhaps for some reason she couldn’t guess. She looked at the floor. Her hands were clenched, her nails digging into her palms. She relaxed them. They had taken her to a hospital room, but not the usual hospital, one in the breeder’s quarters. They had examined her thoroughly. She remembered injections, answering questions, pills . . . It was too blurred. Her hands had clenched again.

  “Molly, come on. We’ll have tea and I’ll tell you what I can.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Sondra. Come on.”

  She should have known, Molly thought, following Sondra. She remembered suddenly the ceremony given for Sondra, who was only three or four years older than she. She had been nine or ten, she thought.

  The tea was a pale yellow drink she couldn’t identify. After one sip she put it down and looked across the lounge toward the uncovered window. “What month is this?”

  “January.” Sondra finished her tea and leaned forward and said in a low voice, “Listen, Molly, they’ve taken you off the drugs and they’ll be watching you for the next few weeks to see how you behave. If you cause trouble, they’ll put you on something again. You’ve been conditioned. Just don’t fight it, and you’ll be all right.”

  Molly felt she could understand only half of what Sondra was saying to her. Again she looked about the lounge; in here the chairs were comfortable and there were tables at convenient intervals. Women were in clusters of threes and fours, chatting, now and then glancing at her. Some of them smiled, one winked. There were thirty women in the room, she thought in disbelief. Thirty breeders!

  “Am I pregnant?” she asked suddenly, and pressed her hands against her stomach.

  “I don’t think so. If you are, it’s still awfully early, but I doubt it. They tried every month since you’ve been here and it didn’t take before. I doubt it took the last time either.”

  Molly sagged against her chair and closed her eyes hard. That’s what they had done to her on the table. She felt tears form and roll down her cheeks and was not able to stop them. Then Sondra’s arm was about her shoulders, and she held her tightly.

  “It hits all of us like that, Molly. It’s the separation, the being alone for the first time. You don’t get used to it, but you learn to live with it and it doesn’t hurt so much after a while.”

  Molly shook her head, unable as yet to speak. No, she thought distinctly, it was not the separation, it was the humiliation of being treated like an object, of being drugged and then used, forced to cooperate in that procedure unquestioningly.

  “We have to go back now,” Sondra said. “You won’t have to do anything for another day or two, long enough to collect your thoughts, get used to everything all over again.”

  “Sondra, wait. You said Mark is all right? Where is he?”

  “He’s in school with the others. They won’t hurt him or anything. They’re very good to all the children. You remember that, don’t you?”

  Molly nodded. “Did they clone him?”

  Sondra shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” She grimaced then and pressed her hand to her stomach. She looked very old and tired, and except for her bulging stomach, too thin.

  “How many times have you been pregnant?” Molly asked. “How long have you been here?”

  “Seven, counting now,” Sondra said without hesitation. “I was brought here twenty years ago.”

  Molly stared at her then and shook her head. But she had been nine or ten when they mourned Sondra. “How long have I been here?” she whispered finally.

  “Molly, not too fast. Try to relax this first day.”

  “How long?”

  “A year and a half. Now come on.”

  All afternoon she sat quietly, and the memories became slightly less blurred, but she could not account for a year and a half. It was gone from her life as if a fold had been made and the two ends now touching excluded whatever had happened in the section that made up the loop, a year and a half.

  He was seven, then. Seven, no longer an infant. She shook her head. In the afternoon one of the doctors strolled through the room, stopping to speak to several of the women. He approached Molly and she said, “Good afternoon, Doctor,” just as the others had done.

  “How are you feeling, Molly?”

  “Well, thank you.”

  He moved on.

  Molly looked at the floor again. She felt as if she had watched the small interlude from a great distance, unable to alter a nuance of it. Conditioning, she thought. That was what Sondra had meant. How else had they conditioned her? To spread her legs obligingly when they approached with their instruments, with the carefully hoarded sperm? She forced her fingers open again and flexed them. They were sore from gripping so hard.

  Suddenly she looked up, but the doctor had gone. Who was he? For a moment she felt dizzy, then the room steadied again. She had called him Doctor, hadn’t even questioned the lack of a name. Had it been Barry? Bruce? Another part of her conditioning, she thought bitterly. The breeders were the lost, they no longer had the right to know one of the clones from another. The Doctor. The Nurse. She bowed her head once more.

  The routine was easy after a few days. They were given soporifics at bedtime and stimulants at breakfast, all disguised in the thin yellow tea that Molly wouldn’t drink. Some of the women wept at night, others succumbed rapidly to the drugged tea and slept heavily. There was a lot of sexual activity; they had their mats, just as everyone else. Through the day they worked in the various departments of the clothing section. They had free time in the late afternoon, books to read, games in the lounge, guitars and violins available to them.

  “It really isn’t bad,” Sondra said a few days after Molly’s awakening. “They take good care of us, the very best. If you prick your finger, they come running and watch over you like a baby. It’s not bad.”

  Molly didn’t respond. Sondra was tall and heavy, in her sixth month; her eyes varied from brightly alert to dull and unseeing. They watched Sondra, Molly thought, and at the least sign of depression or emotional upset they changed the dosage and kept her operating on an even level.

  “They don’t keep most of the new ones under as long as they did you,” Sondra said another time. “I guess that’s because most of us were only fourteen or fifteen when we came here, and you were older.”

  Molly nodded. They had been children, easy to condition into breeding machines who thought it really wasn’t that bad a life. Except at night, when many of them wept for their sisters.

  “Why do they want so many babies?” Molly asked. “We thought they were reducing the huma
n babies, not increasing the number.”

  “For workers and road builders, dam builders. They’re hurting for materials from the cities, chemicals mostly, I think. They’re making more clones of the babies too, we hear. They’ll have an army to send out to build their roads and keep the rivers open.”

  “How do you know so much about what’s going on? We always thought you were kept more isolated than that.”

  “No secrets in this whole valley,” Sondra said complacently. “Some of the girls work in the nursery, some in the kitchens, and they hear things.”

  “And what about Mark? Do you ever hear anything about him?”

  Sondra shrugged. “I don’t know anything about him,” she said. “He’s a boy, like the other boys, I guess. Only he doesn’t have any brothers. They say he wanders off alone a lot.”

  She would watch for him, she thought. Sooner or later she would see him over the rose hedge. Before that time arrived, she was summoned to the Doctor’s office.

  She followed the Nurse docilely and entered the office. The Doctor was behind his desk.

  “Good afternoon, Molly.”

  “Good afternoon, Doctor,” she said, and wondered, was he Barry, or Bruce, or Bob. . . ?

  “Are the other women treating you all right?”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  A series of such questions, followed by Yes, Doctor, or No, Doctor. Where was it supposed to go, she wondered, and became more wary.

  “Is there anything you want or need?”

  “May I have a sketch pad?”

  Something changed, and she knew this was the reason for her visit. She had made a mistake; perhaps they had conditioned her not to think of sketching again, never to think again of painting . . . she tried to remember what they had said to her, had done to her. Nothing came. She should not have asked for it, she thought again. A mistake.

  The Doctor opened his desk drawer and took out her sketch pad and charcoal pencil. He pushed them across the desk toward her.

  Desperately Molly tried to remember. What was he watching for? What was she supposed to do? Slowly she reached for the pad and pencil, and for a moment she felt a tremor in her hand and her stomach churned as a wave of nausea rose. The sensations passed, but she had stopped the forward movement of her hand, and she stared at it. Now she knew. She moistened her lips and started to move her hand again. The sensations returned for a scant moment, long enough to register, then they faded away. She didn’t look up at the Doctor, who was watching her closely. Again she moistened her lips. She was almost touching the pad now. Abruptly she jerked her hand back and jumped up from her chair and looked wildly about the room, one hand clutching her stomach, the other pressed against her mouth.

  She started to run to the door, but his voice held her. “Come, sit down, Molly. You’ll be all right now.”

  When she looked again at his desk the pad and pencil were gone. Reluctantly she sat down, afraid of what new tricks he might have prepared for her, afraid of the inevitable mistake she was certain to make — and then another year and a half in limbo? A whole lifetime in limbo? She didn’t look at the Doctor.

  There were a few more inane questions, and she was dismissed. As she walked back to her room she understood why the breeders didn’t try to leave the area, why they never spoke to a clone, although they were separated only by a hedge.

  All of March was wind-blown and water-soaked, with icy rains that did not let up for days at a time. April’s rains were softer, but the river continued to rise through most of the month as the snow water cascaded down from the hills. May started cold and wet, but by midmonth the sun was warm and the farm workers were busy in the fields.

  Soon, Molly thought, standing at the rear of the breeders’ area, looking up the hillside. The dogwoods were blooming, and over them the redbud trees glowed. The trees were all clothed in new greenery and the ground was fast losing its feel of a wet sponge. Soon, she repeated, and went inside to her sewing table.

  Three times she had traversed the inhabited area of the valley. The first time, she had vomited violently; the next time, warned, she had struggled against nausea and terror, and when she passed the clone hospital she had almost fainted. The third time her reaction had been less powerful, and the same feelings had passed through her quickly, as if a memory had been stimulated momentarily.

  She might have other, even more drastic reactions to the Sumner house, she thought, but now she knew she did not have to yield to the conditioned responses. Soon, she thought again, bending over her sewing.

  Four times they had put her in the breeders’ hospital ward and installed a constant temperature gauge, and when the temperature was right, Nurse had come in with her tray and said cheerfully, “Let’s try again, shall we, Molly?” And obediently Molly had opened her legs and lain still while the sperm were inserted with the shiny, cold instrument. “Now, remember, don’t move for a while,” Nurse then said, still cheerful, brisk, and had left her lying, unmoving, on the narrow cot. And two hours later she was allowed to dress and leave again. Four times, she thought bitterly. A thing, an object, press this button and this is what comes out, all predictable, on cue.

  She left the breeders’ compound on a dark, moonless night. She carried a large laundry bag that she had been filling slowly, secretly, for almost three months. There was no one awake; there was nothing of danger in the valley, perhaps in the entire world, but she hurried, avoiding the path, keeping to the sound-muffling grass. The thick growth surrounding the Sumner house created a darkness that was like a hole in space, a blackness that would swallow up anything that chanced too close. She hesitated, then felt her way between the trees and bushes until she came to the house.

  She still had two hours before dawn, another hour or so before her absence was discovered. She left her bundle on the porch and made her way around the house to the back door, which opened at a touch. Nothing happened to her as she entered, and she breathed a sigh of relief. But then no one had expected her to get this far ever again. She felt her way up the stairs to her old room; it was as she had left it, she thought at first, but something was wrong, something had been changed. It was too dark to see anything at all, but the feeling of difference persisted and she found the bed and sat down to wait for dawn so she could see the room, see her paintings.

  When she could see, she gasped. Someone had spread her paintings out, had stood them all up around the walls, on chairs, on the old desk she never had used. She went into the other room, where she had painted, and there on the bench that Mark had used for his clay, instead of the half-dozen crude figures he had shaped, there were dozens of clay objects: pots, heads, animals, fish, a foot, two hands . . . Weakly Molly leaned against the doorframe and wept.

  The room was bright when she pushed away from the door. She had delayed too long; she had to hurry now. She ran down the stairs and out of the house, picked up her bag, and started climbing the hill. Two hundred feet up she stopped and began to search for the spot she and Mark had found once: a sheltered spot behind blackberry bushes, protected by an overhanging ledge of limestone. From there she could see the house but could not be seen from below. The bushes had grown, the spot was even more hidden than she remembered. When she finally found it she sank down to the ground in relief. The sun was high, they would know by now that she was gone. Presently a few of them would come to look over the Sumner house, not really expecting to find her, but because they were thorough.

  They came before noon, spent an hour looking around the house and yard, then left. Probably it would be safe now to return to the house, she thought, but she did not stir from her hole in the hill. They returned shortly before dark, and spent more time going over the same ground they had covered before. Now she knew it was safe to go to the house. They never went out after dark, except in groups; they would not expect her to wander about in the dark alone. She stood up, easing the stiffness out of her legs and back. The ground was damp, and this spot was cool, sheltered from the sun.

&
nbsp; She lay on the bed. She knew she would hear him when he entered the house, but she couldn’t sleep, except in a fitful, dream-filled doze: Ben lying with her; Ben sitting before the fire sipping pink, fragrant tea; Ben looking at her painting and becoming pale . . . Mark scrambling up the stairs, his legs going this way and that, a frown of determination on his face. Mark squatting over a single leaf of a fern, still rolled tightly at the end, and studying it intently, as if willing it to uncoil as he watched. Mark, his hands pudgy and grimy, gleaming wet, pushing the clay this way, smoothing it, pushing it that way, frowning at it, oblivious of her . . .

  She sat up suddenly, wide awake. He had come into the house. She could hear the stairs creak slightly under his feet. He stopped, listening. He must sense her there, she thought, and her heart quickened. She went to the door of the workroom and waited for him.

  He had a candle. For a moment he didn’t see her. He put the candle down on the table and only then looked around cautiously.

  “Mark!” she said softly. “Mark!”

  His face was lighted. Ben’s face, she thought, and something of hers. Then his face twisted and when she took a step toward him, he took a step backward.

  “Mark?” she said again, but now she could feel a hard, cold hand squeezing her heart, making it painful for her to breathe. What had they done to him? She took another step.

  “Why did you come here?” he yelled suddenly. “This is my room! Why did you come back? I hate you!” he screamed.

  Chapter 19

  The cold hand squeezed harder. Molly felt for the door-frame behind her and held it tightly. “Why do you come here?” she whispered. “Why?”

  “It’s all your fault! You spoiled everything. They laugh at me and lock me up. . .”

  “And you still come here. Why?”

  Suddenly he darted to the workbench and swept it clean. The elephant, the heads, the foot, hands, everything crashed to the floor and he jumped up and down on the pieces, sobbing incoherently, screaming sounds that were not words. Molly didn’t move. The rampage stopped as abruptly as it began. Mark looked down at the gray dust, the fragments that remained.