by Kate Wilhelm
“All right.”
“Promise. You won’t forget?”
“I won’t forget. I promise.”
He watched her wind the sash, and when she was gone he reached out and yanked the cover from the window and looked for her. He didn’t see her; she must have gone through the building, out the other end. He rolled over and fell asleep again.
And now, Mark thought, he was happy. The nightmares were gone, the sudden flashes of terror that he couldn’t explain stopped sweeping over him. The mysteries had been answered, and he knew what the books meant when the authors spoke of finding happiness, as if it were a thing that perseverance would lead one to. He examined the world with new eyes, and everything he saw was beautiful and good.
During the day while studying, he would stop, think with terrible fear that she was gone, lost, had fallen into the river, something. He would drop what he was doing and race from building to building searching for her, not to speak to her, just to see her, to know she was all right. He might find her in the cafeteria with her sisters at such times, and from a distance he would count them and then search for the one with the special something that separated her from all others.
Every night she came to him, and she taught him what she had been taught by her sisters, by the other men, and his joy intensified until he wondered how the others had stood it before him, how he could stand it.
In the afternoons he ran to the old house, where he was making her a pendant. It was the sun, two inches in diameter, made of clay. It had three coats of yellow paint, and he added a fourth. In the old house he read again the chapters on physiology, sexual responses, femininity, everything he could find that touched on his happiness in any way
She would say no one night soon, and he would give her the pendant to show he understood, and he would read to her. Poetry. Sonnets from Shakespeare or Wordsworth, something soft and romantic. And afterward he would teach her to play chess, and they would spend platonic evenings together learning all about each other.
Seventeen nights, he thought, waiting for her. Seventeen nights so far. The cover was over the window, his room was clean, ready. When his door opened and Andrew stood there, Mark jumped up in a panic.
“What’s wrong? Has something happened to Rose? What happened?”
“Come with me,” Andrew said sternly. Behind him one of his brothers watched.
“Tell me what’s wrong!” Mark yelled, and tried to run past them.
The doctors caught his arms and held him. “We’ll take you to her,” Andrew said.
Mark stopped trying to yank away, and a new coldness seemed to enter him. Wordlessly they walked through the building, out the far end, and along the pathways cleared in the snow to one of the dormitories. Now he struggled again, but briefly, and he permitted them to lead him to one of the rooms. At the door they all stopped, and then Andrew gave Mark a slight push and he entered alone.
“No!” he cried. “No!”
There was a tangle of naked bodies, doing all the things to one another she had told him about. At his scream of anguish she raised her head, as they all did, but he knew it was Rose his eyes had picked out of all the rest. She was on her knees, one of the brothers behind her; she had been nuzzling one of her sisters.
He could see their mouths moving, knew they were talking, yelling. He turned and ran. Andrew got in front of him, his mouth opening, closing, opening. Mark doubled his fist and hit blindly, first Andrew, then the other doctor.
“Where is he?” Barry demanded. “Where did he go this time of night?”
“I don’t know,” Andrew said sulkily. His mouth was swollen and it hurt.
“You shouldn’t have done that to him! Of course he went wild with his first taste of sex. What did you think would happen to him? He’s never had it with anyone at all! Why did that foolish girl come to you?”
“She didn’t know what to do. She was afraid to tell him no. She tried to explain everything to him, but he wouldn’t listen. He ordered her back night after night.”
“Why didn’t you come to us about it?” Barry asked bitterly. “What made you think shock treatment like that would take care of the problem?”
“I knew you’d say leave him alone. You say that about everything he does. Leave him alone, it’ll take care of itself. I didn’t think it would.”
Barry went to the window and looked out at the black, cold night. The snow was several feet deep, and the temperature dropped to near zero almost every night.
“He’ll come back when he gets cold enough,” Andrew said. “He’ll come back furious with all of us, and with me in particular. But he will come back. We’re all he has.” He left abruptly.
“He’s right,” Bruce said. He sounded tired. Barry looked quickly at his brother, then at the others, who had remained silent while Andrew reported. They were as worried about the boy as he was, and as tired as he was of the apparently endless stream of troubles caused by him.
“He can’t go to the old house,” Bruce said after a moment. “He knows he’d freeze there. The chimney’s plugged, he can’t have a fire. That leaves the woods. Even he can’t survive in the woods at night in this weather.”
Andrew had sent a dozen of the younger brothers to search all the buildings, even the breeders’ quarters, and another group had gone to the old house to look. There was no sign, of Mark. Toward dawn the snow started again.
Mark had found the cave by accident. Picking berries on the cliff over the farmhouse one day, he had felt a cold draft of air on his bare legs and had found the source. A hole in the hill, a place where two limestone rocks came together unevenly. There were caves throughout the hills. He had found several others before this one, and there was the cave where the laboratories were.
He had dug carefully behind one of the limestone slabs, and gradually had opened the mouth of the cave enough to get through it. There was a narrow passage; then a room, another passage, another larger room. Over the years since finding it he had taken in wood to burn, clothes, blankets, food.
That night he huddled in the second room and stared dry-eyed into the fire he had made, certain no one would ever find him. He hated them all, Andrew and his brothers most of all. As soon as the snow melted, he would run away, forever. He would go south. He would make a longer canoe, a seventeen-foot one this time, and steal enough supplies to last him and he would keep going until he reached the Gulf of Mexico. Let them train the boys and girls themselves, let them find the warehouses, find the dangerous radioactive places if they could. First he would burn down everything in the valley. And then he would go.
He stared at the flames until his eyes felt afire. There were no voices in the cave, only the fire crackling and popping. The firelight flickered over the stalagmites and stalactites, making them appear red and gold. The smoke was carried away from his face and the air was good; it even felt warm after the cold night air. He thought about the time he and Molly had hidden on the hillside near the cave entrance while Barry and his brothers searched for them. At the thought of Barry, his mouth tightened. Barry, Andrew, Warren, Michael, Ethan . . . All doctors, all the same. How he hated them!
He rolled in his blanket and when he closed his eyes, he saw Molly again, smiling gently at him, playing checkers, digging mud for him to model. And suddenly the tears came.
He never had explored the cave past the second room, but in the days that followed, he began a systematic exploration. There were several small openings off the room, and one by one he investigated them, until he was brought up by a sealed passage, or a drop-off, or a ceiling so high he couldn’t get to any of the holes there might be up there. He used torches, and his steps were sometimes reckless, but he didn’t care if he fell or not, if he got trapped or not. He lost track of how many days he had been in the cave; when he was hungry he ate, when he was thirsty he went to the entrance, scooped up snow, and took it back with him to melt. When he was sleepy he slept.
On one of his last exploratory trips he heard water ru
nning, and he stopped abruptly. He had traveled far, he knew. Over a mile. Maybe two miles. He tried to remember how long his torch had been when he started. Almost full length, and now it was less than a third of that. Another torch hung on his belt, just in case he needed it, but he never had gone so far that he had needed a second torch to get back.
He had lighted the second torch before he came upon the cave river. Now he felt a new excitement as he realized this had to be the same water that ran through the laboratory cave. It was one system, then, and even if no opening existed other than the one cut by the river, the two sections were linked.
He followed the river until it vanished into a hole in the cave wall; he would have to swim to go any further. He squatted and stared at the hole. The river appeared in the laboratory cave from just such a hole.
Another time he would come back with his rope and more torches. He turned to go back to his large room with the fire and food, and now he paid attention to his torch so he could estimate how far he traveled, how far that wall was from his familiar section of the cave. But he knew where he was. He knew on the other side of that wall there was the laboratory, and beyond it the hospital and the dormitories.
He slept one more time in the cavern, and the next day he left it to return to the community. He had eaten very little for the past few days; he felt half starved and was very tired.
The snow was inches deeper than it had been, and it was snowing when he arrived in the valley once more. It was nearly dark by the time he got to the hospital building and entered. He saw several people but spoke to no one and went straight to his room, where he pulled off his outer clothes and fell into bed. He was nearly asleep when Barry appeared in the doorway.
“Are you all right?” Barry asked.
Mark nodded silently. Barry hesitated a moment, then entered. He stood over the bed. Mark looked up at him without speaking, and Barry reached down and touched his cheek, then his hair.
“You’re cold,” he said. “Are you hungry?”
Mark nodded.
“I’ll bring you something,” Barry said. But before he opened the door he turned once more. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Mark, I’m truly sorry.” He left quickly.
After he was gone Mark realized they had thought he was dead, and the look he had seen on Barry’s face was the same look he could remember seeing on Molly’s face a long time ago.
He didn’t care, he thought. They couldn’t do anything now to make up for what they had done to him. They hated him and thought he was weak, thought they could control him the way they controlled the clones. And they were wrong. It wasn’t enough for Barry to say he was sorry; they would all be sorry before he was done.
When he heard Barry returning with food, he closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep, not willing to see again that soft, vulnerable look.
Barry left the tray, and when he was gone, Mark ate ravenously. He pulled the cover over him and before he fell asleep he thought again of Molly. She had known he’d come to feel like this and she had said to wait, wait until he was a man, to learn everything he could first. Her face and Barry’s face seemed to blend together, and he fell asleep.
Chapter 27
Andrew had called the meeting, was in charge from start to finish. No one disputed his authority now to take control of the council meetings. Barry watched him from a side chair and tried to feel some of the excitement the younger brother showed.
“Those of you who want to look over the charts and records, please do so. I have given you the barest summary, not our methods. We can reproduce indefinitely through cloning. We have finally solved the problem that has plagued us from the beginning, the problem of the fifth-generation decline. The fifth, sixth, tenth, one-hundredth, they’ll all be perfect now.”
“But only those clones from our youngest people survive,” Miriam said drily.
“We’ll work that out too,” Andrew said impatiently. “In manipulating the enzymes there are some organisms that react with what appears to be almost an allergic collapse. We’ll find out why and take care of it.”
Miriam was looking very old, Barry realized suddenly. He hadn’t noticed it before, but her hair was white and her face was thin, with fine lines around her eyes, and she looked tired unto death.
She looked at Andrew with a disarming smile. “I expect you to be able to solve the problem you have created, Andrew,” she said, “but will the younger doctors be able to?”
“We shall continue to use the breeders,” Andrew said with a touch of impatience. “We’ll use them to clone those children who are particularly intelligent. We’ll go to implantations of clones using the breeders as hosts to ensure a continuing population of capable adults to carry on affairs . . .”
Barry found his attention wandering. The doctors had gone over it all before the council meeting; nothing new would come out here. Two castes, he thought. The leaders, and the workers, who were always expendable. Was that what they had foreseen in the beginning? He knew it was not possible to find any answers to his question. The clones wrote the books, and each generation had felt free to change the books to conform to their own beliefs. He had made a few such changes himself, in fact. And now Andrew would change them again. And this would be the final change; none of the new people would ever think of altering anything.
“. . . even more costly in terms of manpower than we expected,” Andrew was saying. “The glaciers are moving into Philadelphia at an accelerating rate. We may have only two or three more years to bring out what is salvageable, and it is costing us dearly. We will need hundreds of foragers to go south and east to the coastal cities. We now have some excellent models — the Edward brothers proved especially adept at foraging, as did your own little sisters, the Ella sisters. We’ll use them.”
“My little Ella sisters couldn’t transcribe a landscape to a map if you strung them by the heels and threatened to slice them inch by inch until they did,” Miriam said sharply. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. They can do only those things they have been taught, exactly as they’ve been taught.”
“They can’t draw maps, but they can return to where they’ve been,” Andrew said, no longer trying to conceal his displeasure at the turn the meeting had taken. “That’s all we require of them. The implanted clones will do the thinking for them.”
“Then it’s true,” Miriam said. “If you change the formula, you can produce only those clones you are talking about.”
“Right. We can’t handle two different chemical processes, two formulae, two kinds of clones. We’ve decided this is the best way to proceed at this time, and meanwhile we’ll be working on the process, I can assure you. We shall wait until the tanks are empty, in seven months, then make the changes. And we are working out a timetable to plan for the best time to clone the council members and those others who are needed in leadership capacities. We are not rushing into a new procedure without considering every aspect, I promise you, Miriam. At each step we will inform this group of our progress . . .”
In a tightly thatched lean-to near the mill Mark rested on his elbow and looked at the girl at his side. She was his age, nineteen. “You’re cold,” he said.
She nodded. “We won’t be able to do this much longer.”
“You could meet me in the old farmhouse,” he said.
“You know I can’t.”
“What happens if you try to cross the line? A dragon comes out and breathes fire on you?”
She laughed
“Really, what happens? Have you ever tried?”
Now she sat up and hugged her arms about her bare body. “I’m really cold. I should get dressed.”
Mark held her tunic out of reach. “First tell me what happens.”
She snatched, missed, and fell across him, and for a moment they lay close together. He pulled a cover over her and stroked her back. “What happens?”
She sighed and drew away from him. “I tried it once,” she said. “I wanted to go home, to my sisters. I c
ried and cried, and that didn’t help. I could see the lights, and knew they were just a few hundred feet away. I ran at first, then I began to feel strange, faint, I guess. I had to stop. I was determined to get to the dorm. I walked then, not very fast, ready to grab something if I started to faint. When I got closer to the off-limits line — it’s a hedge, you know, just a rose hedge, open at both ends so it’s no trouble at all to go around. When I got close to it, the feeling came over me again and everything began to spin. I waited a long time and it didn’t stop, but I thought, if I kept my eyes on my feet and didn’t pay any attention to anything else, I could walk anyway. I began to walk again.” She was lying rigidly beside him now, and her voice was almost inaudible when she went on. “And I started to vomit. I kept vomiting, until I didn’t have anything left in me, and then I threw up blood. And I suppose I really did faint. I woke up back in the breeders’ room.”
Gently Mark touched her cheek and drew her close to him. She was trembling violently. “Shh, shh,” Mark soothed her. “It’s all right. You’re all right now.”
No walls held them in, he thought, stroking her hair. No fence restrained them, yet they could not approach the river; they could not get nearer the mill than she was now; they could not pass the rose hedge, or go into the woods. But Molly did it, he thought grimly. And they would too.
“I have to go back,” she said presently. The haunted look had come over her face. The emptiness, she had called it. “You wouldn’t know what it means,” she said, trying to explain. “We aren’t separate, you see. My sisters and I were like one thing, one creature, and now I’m a fragment of that creature. Sometimes I can forget it for a short time, when I’m with you I can forget for a while, but it always comes back, and the emptiness comes again. If you turned me inside out, there wouldn’t be anything at all there.”
“Brenda, I have to talk to you first,” Mark said. “You’ve been here four years, haven’t you? And you’ve had two pregnancies. It’s almost time again, isn’t it?”