by Kate Wilhelm
“Why are you saying this?” she whispered, her face ashen.
“So you won’t have any illusions about your little nest here! We can use you, do you understand? As long as you are useful to the community, you’ll be allowed to live here like a princess. Just as long as you’re useful.”
“Useful, how? No one wants to look at my paintings. I’ve finished the maps and drawings of the trip.”
“I’m going to dissect your every thought, your every wish, every dream. I’m going to find out what happened to you, what made you separate yourself from your sisters, what made you decide to become an individual, and when I find out we’ll know how never to allow it to happen again.”
She stared at him, and now her eyes were not luminous but deeply shadowed, hidden. Gently she pulled loose from his hands on her shoulders. “Examine yourself, Ben. Catch yourself listening to voices no one else can hear. Observe yourself. Who else is angry at the way we treat the breeders? Why did you fight to save my life when the good of the community demanded I be put to sleep, like a used-up breeder? Who else even looks at my paintings? Who else would rather be here in this cold dark room with a madwoman than at the celebration? Our coupling is not joyous, Ben. When we embrace it is a hard, bitter, cruel thing we do, and we are filled with sadness and neither of us knows why. Examine yourself, Ben, and then me, and see if there is a cause you can root out and destroy without destroying the carriers.”
Savagely he pulled her to him and pressed her face hard against his chest so she could not speak. She did not struggle against him. “Lies, lies, lies,” he muttered. “You are mad.” He put his cheek against her hair, and her arms shifted and moved up his back to hold him. He pulled away roughly and stood apart from her. Now the darkness had settled heavily in the room and she was only a shadow against shadows.
“I’m leaving now,” he said brusquely. “You shouldn’t have any trouble getting a fire started. I lighted the stove downstairs and the heat should be up here soon. You won’t be cold.”
She didn’t speak, and he turned and hurried from the room. Outside, he started to run through the deep snow, and he ran until he could run no longer and his breath was coming in painful gasps. He turned to look at the house; it was no longer visible through the black trees.
Chapter 17
Now the rain was light and steady, and the wind had died down. The tops of the hills were hidden by clouds and the river hidden by mist. There was a steady sound of hammers, muted by the rain, but reassuring. Under the roof of the boat shed people were working, getting the third boat constructed. Last year they had been farmers, teachers, technicians, scientists; this year they were boat builders.
Ben watched the rain. The brief lull ended and the wind screamed through the valley, driving rain before it in waves. The scene dissolved, and there was only the rain beating on the window.
Molly would wonder if he was coming, he thought. The window shook under the increasing force of the rain. Break! he thought. No, she wouldn’t wonder. She wouldn’t even notice his absence. As suddenly as it had started, the outburst of violence stopped and the sky thinned so that there was almost enough sun to cast shadows. It was all the same to her, he thought, whether he was there or not. While she talked to him, answered his questions, she painted, or sketched, or cleaned brushes; sometimes, restless, she made him walk with her, always up the hills, into the woods, away from the inhabited valley where she was forbidden. And those were the things she would have done alone.
Soon his brothers would join him for the formal meeting they had requested, and he would have to agree to a time for the completion of the report he hadn’t even begun. He looked at his notebook on the long table and turned from it to the window once more. The notebook was filled; he had nothing more to ask her, nothing more to extract from her, and he knew as little today as he had known in the fall.
In his pocket was a small package of sassafras, the first of the season, his gift to her. They would brew tea and sit before the fire, sipping the fragrant, hot drink. They would lie together and he would talk of the valley, of the expansion of the lab facilities, the progress on the boats, the plans for cloning foragers and workers who could repair roads or build bridges or do whatever was required to open a route to Washington, to Philadelphia, to New York. She would ask about her sisters, who were working on textbooks, carefully copying illustrations, charts, graphs, and she would nod gravely when he answered and her gaze would flicker over her own paintings that no one in the valley could or would understand. She would talk about anything, answer any question he asked, except about her paintings.
She understood what she did as little as he, and that was in his notes. She was compelled to paint, to draw, to make tangible those visions that were blurred and ambiguous and even hurtful. The compulsion was stronger than her will to live, he thought bitterly. And now his brothers would join him and make a decision about her.
Would they offer her a bag of seeds and an escort down the river?
Heavy clouds rolled down from the mountains and turned off the feeble light, and again the wind blasted the window and pelted it with hard rain. Ben was standing there watching it when his brothers came into the room and seated themselves.
“We’ll get right to it,” Barry said, just as Ben would have done in his place. “She isn’t better, is she?”
Ben sat down to complete the circle and shook his head.
“In fact, if anything, she’s worse than she was when she came home,” Barry continued. “Isolation has permitted her illness to spread, to intensify, and joining her in isolation, even temporarily, has permitted the disease to infect you.”
Ben looked at his brothers in surprise and confusion. Had there been clues, hints that they were thinking along those lines? He realized that by asking the question he had answered another. He should have known. In a perfectly functioning unit there are no secrets. Slowly he shook his head, and he spoke very carefully. “For a time, I believed I was ill also, but I continued to function according to our schedule, our needs, and I dismissed the thoughts that had troubled me. In what way have I given offense?”
Barry shook his head impatiently.
For a moment Ben could sense their unhappiness. “I have a theory about Molly that perhaps applies also to me.” They waited. “Always before us, in infancy there was a period when ego development naturally occurred, and if all went well during that period, the individual was formed, separate from his parents. With us such a development is not necessary, or even possible, because our brothers or sisters obviate the need for separate existence, and instead a unit consciousness is formed. There are very old studies of identical twins that recognized this unit or group consciousness, but the researchers were not prepared to understand the mechanism. Very little attention was paid to it, and little further study.” He stood up and moved again to the window. The rain was steady and hard now. “I suggest that we all still have the capability for individual ego development latent within us. It becomes dormant when the physiological time passes for its spontaneous emergence, but with Molly, and perhaps with others, if there is enough stimulus, under the proper conditions, this development is activated.”
“The proper conditions being separation from the brothers or sisters under stressful circumstances?” Barry asked thoughtfully.
“I think so. But the important thing now,” Ben said urgently, “is to let it develop and see what happens. I can’t predict her future behavior. I don’t know what to expect from one day to the next.”
Barry and Bruce exchanged glances, and then looked at the other brothers. Ben tried to interpret the looks and failed. He felt chilled and turned to watch the rain instead.
“We will decide tomorrow,” Barry said finally. “But whatever our decision about Molly is, there is another decision that we made that is unaltered. You must not continue to see her, Ben. For your own welfare, and ours, we must forbid your visits to her.”
Ben nodded in agreement. “I’ll have to te
ll her,” he said.
At the tone in his voice Barry again looked at the other brothers, and reluctantly they agreed.
“Why are you so surprised?” Molly asked. “This had to happen.”
“I brought you some tea,” Ben said brusquely.
Molly took his package and looked down at it for a long time. “I have a present for you,” she said softly. “I was going to give it to you another time, but . . . I’ll go get it.”
She left and returned quickly with a small packet, no more than five inches square. It was a folded paper and, when opened, it had several faces, all of them variations of Ben’s. In the center was a man’s massive head, with fierce eyebrows and penetrating eyes, surrounded by four others, all resembling one another enough to show relationship.
“Who are they?”
“In the middle is the old man who owned this house. I found photographs in the attic. That is his son, David’s father, and that one is David. That’s you.”
“Or Barry, or Bruce, or any of the others before us,” Ben said curtly. He didn’t like the composite picture. He didn’t like looking at the faces of men who had lived such different, inexplicable lives, and who looked so much like him.
“I don’t think so,” Molly said, squinting her eyes at the picture, then studying him. “There’s something about the eyes they just don’t have. Theirs only see outward, I think, and yours, and those of the other men in the picture, they can look both ways.”
Suddenly she laughed and drew him to the fire. “But put it away and let’s have our tea, and a cookie. I’ve been getting more than I can eat and I saved a lot. We’ll have a party!”
“I don’t want any tea,” Ben said. Not looking at her, watching the flames in the grate, he asked, “Don’t you even care?”
“Care?”
Ben heard the pain there, sharp, undeniable. He closed his eyes hard.
“Should I weep and howl and tear my clothes, and bang my head on the wall? Should I beg you not to leave me, to stay with me always? Should I throw myself from the topmost window of this house? Should I grow thin and pale and wither away like a flower in the autumn, killed by the cold it never understands? How should I show I care, Ben? Tell me what I should do.”
He felt her hand on his cheek and opened his eyes and found they were burning.
“Come with me, Ben,” she said gently. “And afterwards perhaps we shall weep together when we say goodbye.”
“We promise never to harm her,” Barry said quietly. “If she has need of one of us, someone will go care for her. She will be permitted to live out her life in the Sumner house. We shall never display or permit others to display her paintings, but we shall preserve them carefully so that our descendants may study them and understand the steps we have taken today.” He paused and then said, “Furthermore, Ben, our brother, will accompany the contingent who will go down the river to set up a base camp for future groups to use.” Now he looked up from the paper before him.
Ben nodded gravely. The decisions were just and compassionate. He shared his brothers’ anguish, and knew the suffering would not end until the boats returned and they could hold the Ceremony for the Lost for him. Only then would they all be freed again.
Molly watched the boats glide down the river, Ben standing in the prow of the lead boat, the wind streaming his hair. He didn’t turn to look at the Sumner house until the boat started around the first curve that would take it out of sight, and then briefly she saw his pale face, and he was gone, the boat was gone.
Molly continued to stand at the wide windows for a long time after the boats had disappeared. She remembered the voice of the river, the answering voices from the high treetops, the way the wind moved the upper levels without stirring a blade of grass. She remembered the silence and darkness that had pressed in on them at night, touching them, testing them, tasting them, the intruders. And her hand moved to her stomach and pressed against the flesh there, against the new life that was growing within her.
The summer heat gave way to early September frosts and the boats returned, and this time another stood in the prow. The trees burned red and gold and snows fell and in January Molly gave birth to her son, alone, unaided, and lay looking at the infant in the crook of her arm and smiled at him. “I love you,” she whispered tenderly. “And your name shall be Mark.”
All through the latter stages of her pregnancy Molly had told herself almost daily that tomorrow she would send a message to Barry, that she would submit to his authority and allow herself to be placed in the breeders’ quarters. Now, looking at the red infant with his eyes screwed so tightly closed he seemed without eyes, she knew she would never give him up.
Each morning the Andrew brothers brought firewood, her basket of supplies, whatever she asked for, deposited it all on her porch, and left again, and she saw no one, except at a distance. As soon as Mark could understand her words, she began to impress upon him the need for silence while the Andrew brothers were near the house. When he grew older and started to ask “why” about everything, she had to tell him the Andrew brothers would take him away from her and put him in a school and they would never see each other again. It was the first and only time she saw him react with terror, and after that he was as quiet as she when the young doctors were there.
He learned to walk and talk early; he began to read when he was four, and for long periods he would curl up near the fireplace with one of the brittle books from the downstairs library. Some of them were children’s books, others were not; he didn’t seem to mind. They played hide-and-seek throughout the house and, when the weather was pleasant, up and down the hillside behind the house, out of sight of the others in the valley, who would never under any circumstances enter the woods unless ordered to do so. Molly sang to him and told him stories from the books, and made up other stories when they exhausted the books. One day Mark told her a story, and she laughed delightedly, and after that sometimes she was the storyteller and sometimes he was. While she painted he drew pictures, or painted also, and more and more often played with the river clay she brought him, and made shapes that they dried in the sun on the balcony.
They wandered farther up the hillside as he became sturdier. One day in the summer when he was five, they remained in the woods far several hours, Molly pointing out the ferns and liverworts to him, drawing his attention to the way the sunlight changed the colors of the delicate green leaves, deepened the rich greens to nearly black.
“Time,” she said finally.
He shook his head. “Let’s climb to the top and look at the whole world.”
“Next time,” she said. “We’ll bring our lunch and climb all the way up. Next time.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
They walked back down slowly, stopping often to examine a rock, a new plant, the bark of an ancient tree, whatever caught his interest. At the edge of the woods they paused and looked about carefully before leaving the shelter of the trees. Then they ran to the kitchen door hand in hand and, laughing, tried to get through together.
“You’re getting too big,” Molly cried, and allowed him to enter first.
Mark stopped abruptly, yanked on her hand, and turned to run. One of the Barry brothers stepped from the dining room into the kitchen, and another closed the door to the outside and stood behind them. The other three entered the kitchen silently and stared in disbelief at the boy.
Finally one of them spoke. “Ben’s?”
Molly nodded. Her hand clutched Mark’s in a grip that must have hurt him. He stood close to her and looked at the brothers fearfully.
“When?” the brother asked.
“Five years ago, in January.”
The spokesman sighed heavily. “You’ll have to come with us, Molly. The boy too.”
She shook her head and felt weak with terror. “No! Leave us alone. We’re not hurting anyone! Leave us alone!”
“It’s the law,” the brother said harshly. “You know it as well as we do.�
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“You promised!”
“The agreement we made didn’t cover this.” He took a step closer to her. Mark tore his hand free from her grasp and flew at the doctor.
“Leave my mother alone! Go away! Don’t you hurt my mother!”
Someone caught Molly’s arms and held her, and another of them caught Mark and lifted him as he kicked and lashed out furiously, screaming all the while.
“Don’t hurt him!” Molly cried, and struggled to free herself. She hardly felt the pinprick of the injection. Dimly she heard one last scream of anguish from Mark, and then there was nothing.
Chapter 18
Molly blinked and shut her eyes against the glare of a silver frost that covered everything. She stood still and tried to remember where she was, who she was, anything. When she opened her eyes again, the blinding glare still dazzled her. She felt as if she had awakened after a long, nightmare-haunted dream that was becoming more and more dim as she tried to recapture it. Someone nudged her.
“You’ll freeze out here,” someone said close by. Molly turned to look at the woman, a stranger. “Come on, get inside,” the woman said louder. Then she leaned forward and looked at Molly closely. “Oh, you’re back, aren’t you?”
She took Molly by the arm and guided her inside a warm building. Other women looked up idly and then bent down over their sewing again. Some of them were obviously pregnant. Some of them were dull-eyed, vacant-looking, doing nothing.
The woman helping Molly took her to a chair and stood by her side long enough to say, “Just sit still for a while. You’ll start remembering in a little bit.” Then she left and took her place at one of the machines and began stitching.
