Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

by Kate Wilhelm

  “Ow! Woji!” he wailed, and suddenly two groups of the boys turned and started to run. “Woji! Danger!”

  Others turned now and joined the flight, and Gary shouted at them vainly, and then he and his brothers were hurrying back the way they had come.

  Laughing to himself, Mark trotted away. He headed west, toward the valley.

  Bruce stood over the bed where the boy lay sleeping. “Is he going to be all right?”

  Bob nodded. “He’s been half awake several times, babbling about snow and ice most of the time. He recognized me when I examined him this morning.”

  Bruce nodded. Mark had been sleeping for almost thirty hours. Physically he was out of danger, and probably hadn’t been in real danger at all. Nothing rest and food couldn’t cure anyway, but his babblings about the white wall had sounded insane. Barry had ordered everyone to leave the boy alone until he awakened naturally. Barry had been with him most of the time, and would return within the hour. There was nothing anyone could do until Mark woke up.

  Later that afternoon Barry sent for Andrew, who had asked to be present when Mark began to talk. They sat on either side of the bed and watched the boy stir, rousing from the deep sleep that had quieted him so thoroughly that he had appeared dead.

  Mark opened his eyes and saw Barry. “Don’t put me in the hospital,” he said faintly, and closed his eyes again. Presently he opened his eyes and looked about the room, then back to Barry. “I’m in the hospital, aren’t I? Is anything wrong with me?”

  “Not a thing,” Barry said. “You passed out from exhaustion and hunger, that’s all.”

  “I would like to go to my own room then,” Mark said, and tried to rise.

  Barry gently restrained him. “Mark, don’t be afraid of me, please. I promise you I won’t hurt you now or ever. I promise that.” For a moment the boy resisted the pressure of his hands, then he relaxed. “Thank you, Mark,” Barry said. “Do you feel like talking yet?”

  Mark nodded. “I’m thirsty,” he said. He drank deeply. He began to describe his trip north. He told it completely, even how he had frightened Gary and his brothers and routed the expedition to Philadelphia. He was aware that Andrew tightened his lips at that part of the story, but he kept his eyes on Barry and told them everything.

  “And then you came back,” Barry said. “How?”

  “‘Through the woods. I made a raft to cross the river.” Barry nodded. He wanted to weep, and didn’t know why. He patted Mark’s arm. “Rest now,” he said. “We’ll get word to them to stay in Washington until we dig up some radiation detectors.”

  “Impossible!” Andrew said angrily outside the door. “Gary was exactly right in pressing on to Philadelphia. That boy destroyed a year’s training in one night.”

  “I’m going too,” Barry had said, and he was with Mark now in Washington. Two of the younger doctors were also with them. The young expedition members were frightened and disorganized; the work had come to a stop, and they had been waiting in the main building for someone to come give them new instructions.

  “When did they start out again?” Barry demanded.

  ‘The day after they got back here,” one of the young boys said.

  “Forty boys!” Barry muttered. “And six fools.” He turned to Mark. “Would we accomplish anything by starting after them this afternoon?”

  Mark shrugged. “I could alone. Do you want me to go after them?”

  “No, not by yourself. Anthony and I will go, and Alistair will stay here and see that things get moving again.”

  Mark looked at the two doctors doubtfully. Anthony was pale, and Barry looked uncomfortable.

  “They’ve had about ten days,” Mark said. “They should be in the city by now, if they didn’t get lost. I don’t think it would make much difference if we leave now or wait until morning.”

  “Morning, then,” Barry said shortly. “You could use another night’s sleep.”

  They traveled fast, and now and again Mark pointed out where the others had camped, where they had gone astray, where they had realized their error and headed in the right direction again. On the second day his lips tightened and he looked angry, but said nothing until late in the afternoon. “They’re too far west, getting farther off all the time,” he said. “They might miss Philadelphia altogether if they don’t head east again. They must have been trying to bypass the swamps.”

  Barry was too tired to care, and Anthony merely grunted. At least, Barry thought, stretching out by the fire, they were too tired at night to listen for strange noises, and that was good. He fell asleep even as he was thinking this.

  On the fourth day Mark stopped and pointed ahead. At first Barry could see no difference, but then he realized they were looking at the kind of stunted growth Mark had talked about. Anthony unpacked the Geiger counter and it began to register immediately. It became more insistent as they moved ahead, and Mark led them to the left, keeping well back from the radioactive area.

  “They went in, didn’t they?” Barry said.

  Mark nodded. They were keeping their distance from the contaminated ground, and when the counter sounded its warning, they moved south again until it became quieter. That night they decided to keep moving west until they were able to get around the radioactive area, and enter Philadelphia from that direction, if possible.

  “We’ll run into the snowfields that way,” Mark said.

  “Not afraid of snow, are you?” Barry said.

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Right. Then we go west tomorrow, and if we can’t turn north by night, we come back and try going east, see if we pick up a trail or anything that way.”

  They traveled all day through an intermittent rain, and hourly the temperature fell until it was near freezing when they made camp that night.

  “How much farther?” Barry asked.

  “Tomorrow,” Mark said. “You can smell it from here.” Barry could smell only the fire, the wet woods, the food cooking. He studied Mark, then shook his head.

  “I don’t want to go any farther,” Anthony said suddenly. He was standing by the fire, too rigid, a listening look on his face.

  “It’s a river,” Mark said. “It must be pretty close. There’s ice on all the rivers, and it hits the banks now and then. That’s what you hear.”

  Anthony sat down, but the intent look didn’t leave his face. The next morning they headed west again. By noon they were among hills, and now they knew that as soon as they got high enough to see over the trees they would be able to see the snow, if there was any snow to see.

  They stood on the hill and stared, and Barry understood Mark’s nightmares. The trees at the edge of the snow were stark, like trees in the middle of winter. Beyond them other trees had snow halfway up their trunks, and their naked branches stood unmoving, some of them at odd angles, where the pressure had already knocked them over and the snow had prevented their falling. Up higher there were no trees visible at all, only snow.

  “Is it still growing?” Barry asked in a hushed voice. No one answered. After a few more minutes, they turned and hurried back the way they had come. As they circled Philadelphia heading east, the Geiger counter kept warning them to stay back, and they could get no closer to the city from this direction than they had been able to from the west. Then they found the first bodies.

  Six boys had come out together. Two had fallen near each other; the others had left them, continued another half-mile and collapsed. The bodies were all radioactive.

  “Don’t get near them,” Barry said as Anthony started to kneel by the first bodies. “We don’t dare touch them,” he said.

  “I should have stayed,” Mark whispered. He was staring at the sprawled bodies. There was mud on their faces. “I shouldn’t have left. I should have kept after them, to make sure they didn’t go on. I should have stayed.”

  Barry shook his arm, and Mark kept staring, repeating over and over, “I should have stayed with them. I should . . .” Barry slapped him hard, then again,
and Mark bowed his head and stumbled away, reeling into trees and bushes as he rushed away from the bodies, away from Barry and Anthony. Barry ran after him and caught his arm.

  “Mark! Stop this! Stop it, do you hear me!” He shook him hard again. “Let’s get back to Washington.”

  Mark’s cheeks were glistening with tears. He pulled away from Barry and started to walk again, and he didn’t look back at the bodies.

  Barry and Bruce waited for Anthony and Andrew, who had requested, demanded, time to talk to them. “It’s about him again, isn’t it?” Bruce said.

  “I suppose.”

  “Something’s got to be done,” Bruce said. “You and I both know we can’t let him go on this way. They’ll demand a council meeting next, and that’ll be the end of it.”

  Barry knew. Andrew and his brother entered and sat down. They both looked grim and angry.

  “I don’t deny he had a bad time during the summer,” Andrew said abruptly. “That isn’t the point now. But whatever happened to him has affected his mind, and that is the point. He’s behaving in a childish, irresponsible way that simply cannot be tolerated.”

  Again and again since summer these sessions had been held. Mark had drawn a line of honey from an ant hill up the wall into the Andrew brothers’ quarters, and the ants had followed. Mark had soaked every match he could get his hands on in a salt solution, dried them carefully, and restacked them in the boxes, and not one of them had lighted, and he had sat with a straight face and watched one after another of the older brothers try to get a fire. Mark had removed every nameplate from every door in the dormitories. He had tied the Patrick brothers’ feet together as they slept and then yelled to them to come quickly.

  “He’s gone too far this time,” Andrew said. “He stole the yellow Report to Hospital tags, and he’s been sending dozens of women to the hospital to be tested for pregnancy. They’re in a panic, our staff is overworked as it is, and no one has time to sort out this kind of insanity.”

  “We’ll talk to him,” Barry said.

  “That’s not good enough any longer! You’ve talked and talked. He promises not to do that particular thing again, and then does something worse. We can’t live with this constant disruption!”

  “Andrew, he had a series of terrible shocks last summer. And he’s had too much responsibility for a boy his age. He feels a dreadful guilt over the deaths of all those children. It isn’t unnatural for him to revert to childish behavior now. Give him time, he’ll get over it.”

  “No!” Andrew said, standing up with a swift, furious motion. “No! No more time! What will it be next?” He glanced at his brother, who nodded. “We feel that we are his targets. Not you, not the others; we are. Why he feels this hostility toward me and my brothers I don’t know, but it’s here, and we don’t want to have to worry about him constantly, wondering what he’ll do next.”

  Barry stood up. “And I say I’ll handle it.”

  For a moment Andrew faced him defiantly, then said, “Very well. But, Barry, it can’t go on. It has to stop now.”

  “It will stop.”

  The younger brothers left, and Bruce sat down. “How?”

  “I don’t know how. It’s his isolation. He can’t talk this out with anyone, doesn’t play with anyone . . . We have to force him to participate in those areas where the others would accept him.”

  Bruce agreed. “Like the Winona sisters’ coming-of-age party next week.”

  Later that day Barry told Mark he was to attend the party. Mark had never been formally accepted into the adult community, and would not be honored by a party just for him.

  He shook his head. “No, thank you, I’d rather not.”

  “I didn’t invite you,” Barry said grimly. “I’m ordering you to attend and to participate. Do you understand?”

  Mark glanced at him quickly. “I understand, but I don’t want to go.”

  “If you don’t go, I’m hauling you out of this cozy little room, away from your books and your solitude, and putting you back in our room, back in the lecture rooms when you’re not in school or at work. Now do you understand?”

  Mark nodded, but didn’t look at Barry again. “All right,” he said sullenly.

  Chapter 26

  The party had started already when Mark entered the auditorium. They were dancing at the far end, and between him and the dancers a group of girls stood whispering. They turned to look at him, and one of them left the group. There was giggling behind her, and she motioned her sisters to stop, but the giggling continued.

  “Hello, Mark,” she said. “I’m Susan.”

  Before he realized what she was doing she had slipped off her bracelet and was trying to put it over his hand. There were six little bows on the bracelet.

  “No,” Mark said hurriedly, and jerked away. “I . . . No. I’m sorry.” He backed up a step, turned and ran, and the giggling started again, louder than before.

  He ran to the dock and stood looking at the black water. He shouldn’t have run. Susan and her sisters were seventeen, maybe even a little older. In one night they would have taught him everything, he thought bitterly, and he had turned and run. The music grew louder; soon they would eat and then leave in couples, in groups, everyone but Mark, and the children too young for the mat play. He thought of Susan and her sisters and he was first hot, then cold, then flushing hot again.

  “Mark?”

  He stiffened. They wouldn’t have followed him, he thought in panic. He whirled around.

  “It’s Rose,” she said. “I won’t give you my bracelet unless you want it.”

  She came closer, and he turned his back and pretended to be looking at something in the river, afraid she would be able to see him in the dark, see the redness he could feel pounding in his neck and cheeks, sense his wet palms. Rose, he thought, his age, one of the girls he had trained in the woods. For him to blush and become bashful before her was more intolerable than running from Susan had been.

  “I’m busy,” he said.

  “I know. I saw you before. It’s all right. They shouldn’t have done that, not all of them together. We all told them not to.”

  He didn’t reply, and she moved to his side. “There’s nothing to see, is there?”

  “No. You’ll get cold out here.”

  “You will too.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Nothing. Next summer I’ll be old enough to go to Washington or Philadelphia.”

  He turned angrily. “I’m going to my room.”

  “Why did I make you mad? Don’t you want me to go to Washington? Don’t you like me?”

  “Yes. I’m going now.”

  She put her hand on his arm and he stopped; he felt he couldn’t move. “May I go to your room with you?” she asked, and now she sounded like the girl who had asked in the woods if the mushrooms were all dangerous, if the things in the trees had told him how to find his way, if he really could become invisible if he wanted to.

  “You’ll go back to your sisters and laugh at me like Susan did,” he said.

  “No!” she whispered. “Never! Susan wasn’t laughing at you. They were scared, that’s why they were all so nervous. Susan was most scared of all because she was picked to put the bracelet on you. They weren’t laughing at you.”

  As she spoke she released his arm and took a step back from him, then another. Now he could see the pale blur of her face. She was shaking her head as she talked.

  “Scared? What do you mean?”

  “You can do things no one else can do,” she said, still speaking very softly, almost in a whisper. “You can make things no one ever saw, and you can tell stories no one ever heard, and you can disappear and travel through the woods like the wind. You’re not like the other boys. Not like our elders. Not like anyone else. And we know you don’t like any of us because you never choose anyone to lie with.”

  “Why did you come after me if you’re so afraid of me?”

  “I don’t know. I saw you run and . .
. I don’t know.” He felt the hot flush race through him again, and he began to walk. “If you want to go with me, I don’t care,” he said roughly, not looking back. “I’m going to my room now.” He could not hear her footsteps for the pounding in his ears. He walked swiftly, making a wide berth of the auditorium, and he knew she was running to keep up. He led her around the hospital, not wanting to walk down the brightly lighted corridor with her at his heels. At the far end he opened the door and glanced inside before he entered. He let the door go and almost ran to his room, and he heard her quick footsteps as she came after him.

  “What are you doing?” she asked at the doorway.

  “I’m putting the cover over the window,” he said, and his voice sounded angry even to him. “So no one can look at us. I put it there a lot.”

  “But why?”

  He tried not to look at her when he climbed down from the chair, but again and again he found himself watching. She was unwinding a long sash that had gone around her neck, criss-crossed at her breasts, and circled her waist several times. The sash was violet, almost the color of her eyes. Her hair was a pale brown. He remembered that during the summer it had been blond. There were freckles across her nose, on her arms.

  She finished with the sash and now lifted her tunic, and with one motion took it off. Suddenly Mark’s fingers seemed to come to life and without his willing it they began to pull off his tunic.

  Later she said she had to go, and he said not yet, and they dozed with his arms tight about her. When she again said she had to go, he woke up completely. “Not yet,” he said. When he woke the second time it was daylight and she was pulling on her tunic.

  “You have to come back,” Mark said. “Tonight, after dinner. Will you?”