Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

by Kate Wilhelm

  “Water,” Mark said. “That’s a runoff trail from melting snow. It’s different.”

  “How did you learn about the woods? Molly?”

  Mark nodded. “She couldn’t get lost ever. She couldn’t forget how things looked, and if she saw them again, she knew. She taught me. Or else I was born with it, and she showed me how to use it. I can’t get lost either.”

  “Can you teach others?”

  “I guess so. Now that I showed you, you could lead, couldn’t you?” He had turned his back, scanning the woods, and now faced Barry again. “You know which way to start, don’t you?”

  Barry looked carefully about them. The scuff marks were on the path they had just made, where Mark had pointed them out. He saw the water trail, and looked harder for the trail they should follow. There was nothing. He looked again at Mark, who was grinning. “No,” he said. “I don’t know which way to go now.”

  Mark laughed. “Because it’s rocky,” he said. “Come on.” He started again, this time keeping to the edge of a rocky trail.

  “How did you know?” Barry asked. “There’s no sign of them among the rocks.”

  “Because there was no sign anywhere else. It was all that was left. There!” He pointed, and there was another bent tree, this one stronger, older, more firmly rooted. “Someone pulled that spruce down and let it spring back up. Probably more than one did, because it’s still not quite straight, and you can see now that the rocks have been kicked around.”

  The rocky trail deepened and became a creek bed. Mark watched the edges carefully and soon turned again, pointing to scuff marks as he went. The woods were deeper, the gloom more intense here. Thick evergreen trees covered the slope they began to descend, and sometimes they had to wind their way among the branches that touched one another in the spruce forest. The floor was brown, springy with generations of needles.

  Barry found himself holding his breath in order not to disturb the silence of the great forest, and he understood why the others talked of a presence, something that watched as they moved among the trees. The silence was so intense, it was like a dream world where mouths open and close and no noise is heard, where musicians’ instruments are strangely muted, where one screams and screams silently. Behind him he could sense the trees moving in closer, closer.

  Then, suddenly, as if it had been growing a long time and he only now had become aware of it, he found that he was listening to something over and beyond the silence, something that was like a voice, or voices mingling in whispers too distant to make out the words. Like Molly, he thought, and a shiver of fear raced through him. The voices faded. Mark had stopped and was looking about again.

  “They doubled back here,” he said. “They must have had lunch up there and started back, but here they lost their way. See, they went over too far, and kept going farther and farther from the way they had come.”

  Barry could see nothing to indicate they had done that, but he knew he was helpless in that dark forest and he could only follow the boy wherever he led.

  They climbed again and the spruces thinned out and now there were aspens and cottonwoods bordering a stream.

  “You’d think they’d know they hadn’t seen this before,” Mark said with disgust. He was moving faster now. He stopped again and a grin came and went, leaving him looking worried. “Some of them began to run here,” he said. “Wait. I’ll see if they regrouped ahead, or if we have to find any of them.” He vanished before he finished speaking, and Barry sank to the ground to wait for him. The voices came back almost instantly. He looked at the trees that seemed unmoving, and knew that the branches high above were stirring in the wind, that they made the voicelike whispering, but still he strained to hear the words over and over. He put his head down on his knees and tried to will the voices into silence.

  His legs were throbbing, and he was very hot. He could feel trickles of sweat running down his back, and he hunched over more so his shirt was snug across his shoulders, absorbing the sweat. They couldn’t send their people out to live in the forests, he knew. This was a hostile environment, with a spirit of malevolency that would stifle them, craze them, kill them. He could feel the presence now, pressing in on him, drawing closer, feeling him . . . Abruptly he stood up and started to follow Mark.

  Chapter 22

  Barry heard voices again, this time real voices, childish voices, and he waited.

  “Bob, are you all right?” he called when his brother came into view. Bob looked bedraggled and there was dirt on his face; he nodded and waved, breathing heavily.

  “They were climbing toward the knob,” Mark said, suddenly at Barry’s side. He had come upon him from a different direction, invisible until he spoke.

  Now the boys were straggling into the same area, and they looked worse than Bob. Some of them had been crying. Just as Mark had predicted, Barry thought.

  “We thought we might be able to see where we were if we climbed higher,” Bob said, glancing at Mark, as if for approval.

  Mark shook his head. “Always go down, follow a stream, if you don’t know where you are,” he said. “It’ll go to a bigger stream, then finally to the river, and you can follow it back to where you have to go.”

  The boys were watching Mark with open admiration. “Do you know the way down?” one of them asked.

  Mark nodded.

  “Rest a few minutes first,” Barry said. The voices were gone now, the woods merely dark woods, uninhabited by anything at all.

  Mark led them down quickly, not the way they had gone up, not the way he had followed them, but in a more direct line that had them looking over the valley within half an hour.

  “It was a mistake to risk them like that!” Lawrence said angrily. It was the first council meeting since the adventure in the forest.

  “It’s necessary to teach them to live in the woods,” Barry said.

  “They won’t have to live out there. The best thing we can do with the woods is clear them as quickly as possible. We’ll have a shelter for them down below the falls where they’ll live, just as they live here, in a clearing.”

  “As soon as you’re away from this clearing, the woods make themselves felt,” Barry said. “Everyone has reported the same terror, the feeling of being closed in by the trees, of being threatened by them. They have to learn how to live with that.”

  “They’ll never live in the woods,” Lawrence said with finality. “They’ll live in a dormitory building on the bank of the river, and when they travel, they’ll go by boat, and when they stop, they’ll stop in another clearing where there is decent shelter, where the woods have been beaten back and will be kept back.” He emphasized his words by hitting his fist on the tabletop as he spoke.

  Barry regarded Lawrence bitterly. “We can run the laboratories five more years, Lawrence! Five years! We have almost nine hundred people in this valley right now. Most of them are children, being trained to forage for us, to find those things we need to survive. And they won’t find them on the banks of your tamed rivers! They’re going to have to make expeditions to New York, to Philadelphia, to New Jersey. And who’s going to go before them and clear back the woods for them? We train those children now to cope with the woods, or we’ll die, all of us!”

  “It was a mistake to rush into this,” Lawrence said. “We should have waited until we knew how much we could find and get back to the valley before we got into this so deeply.”

  Barry nodded. “You can’t have it both ways,” he said. “We made the decision. Every year we wait, the less there is for us to forage in the cities. And we have to salvage what we can. Without it we die anyway, more slowly perhaps than with the timetable we now have, but in the end it would be the same. We can’t exist without the tools, the hardware, the information that’s in the cities. And now we’re committed to this path, and we have to do our best to see that these children are equipped as well as possible to survive when we send them out.”

  Five years, he thought, that’s all they needed. Fi
ve years to find a source of laboratory equipment — tubing, stainless steel tanks, centrifuges . . . Computer components, wiring, wafers . . . They knew the things they needed had been stored carefully, they had the papers to prove that. They would find the right warehouses, weathertight, dry, with acres of well-stacked shelves. It was a gamble, producing so many children in so short a time, but a gamble they had taken knowingly, aware of the consequences if anything went wrong along the way. They might be hungry before the five years were over; whether or not the valley could adequately feed over a thousand people had been endlessly debated. For the kind of restocking they required, they needed a lot of people, and in five years they would know if they had gambled foolishly.

  Four hundred fifty children between five and eleven years, that was what was in the kitty, Barry thought. That was the extent of the gamble. And in four years the first eighty of them would leave the valley, possibly forever, but if they returned, if even a few of them returned with materials, with information about Philadelphia or New York, with anything of value, the gamble would have paid off.

  It was agreed that the training program as outlined by Barry should be continued on a trial basis, risking no more than three groups — thirty children. And further, if the children were psychologically damaged by the equipment, they were not to be salvaged, and the experiment would be discontinued immediately. Barry left the meeting satisfied.

  “What will I get out of it?” Mark demanded.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you get a teacher, and the brothers and sisters get training. What do I get?”

  “What do you want? You’ll have companionship. More than you have now.”

  “They won’t play with me,” Mark said. “They’ll listen and do what I say because they’re afraid and they know I’m not, but they won’t play with me. I want my own room again.”

  Barry glanced at his brothers and knew they would all agree to that instantly. It had been a nuisance having the boy in their communal bedroom. By mutual consent they had not dragged the mat out in his presence, and their talk had been censored — when they remembered he was there. Barry nodded. “Not back in the dormitory, here in this building.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Then here’s what we’ll do. Once a week each group will go out, one hour at a time to start with, and not more than a few minutes from a place where they can see the valley. After several exposures of this limited duration and distance, you’ll take them farther, keep them longer. Are there games you could play with them in the woods to help them become accustomed to being there?” There was no longer any question of not including Mark in this phase of the training.

  Mark sat on a branch hidden by thick foliage from below and watched the boys stumbling about the edges of the clearing, looking for the path he had left them to follow. It was as if they were blind, he thought wonderingly. All they really cared about was staying close together, not becoming separated even momentarily. This was the third time this week Mark had tried this game with the clones; the other two groups had failed also.

  At first he had enjoyed leading them out into the woods; their frank admiration of him had been pleasant, unexpected, and for once he had felt the differences that separated them might be lessened when they learned some of the things he knew, when they could all play together among the whispering trees. He knew now such hopes had been wrong. The differences were more pronounced than ever, and the early admiration was turning into something else, something he could not really understand. They seemed to dislike him more, to be almost afraid of him, certainly resentful of him.

  He whistled and watched the reaction pass over them all simultaneously, like grass being blown by a gust of wind. Even knowing the direction, they were not able to find his trail. Disgustedly he left the tree, sliding part way, dropping agilely from branch to branch where it was too rough to slide. He joined the boys and glanced at Barry, who also looked disgusted.

  “Are we going back now?” one of the boys asked.

  “No,” Barry said. “Mark, I want you to take two of the boys a short distance away, try to hide with them. Let’s see if the others can find you.”

  Mark nodded. He glanced at the ten boys and knew it made no difference which two went with him. He pointed to the two nearest him and turned and went into the woods, the boys at his heels.

  Again he left a trail that anyone with eyes could follow, and as soon as they were out of sight of the larger group he began to circle around to get behind the boys in the clearing, not trying for distance at all, since they couldn’t follow a trail even three feet. Finally he stopped. He put his fingers to his lips and the other two nodded, and they sat down to wait. They looked desperately afraid, sat touching at the arms, their legs touching. Mark could hear their brothers now, not following the trail, but coming straight for them. Too fast, he thought suddenly. The way they were rushing was dangerous.

  The brothers he was with jumped up excitedly, and in a moment the others rushed into sight. Their reunion was jubilant and triumphant, and even Barry looked pleased. Mark drew back and watched, his warning about rushing in strange woods stilled.

  “That’s enough for today,” Barry said. “Very good, boys. Very good indeed. Who knows the way back?”

  They were all flushed with their first success in the woods, and they began to point one way after another, laughing, elbowing each other. Barry laughed with them. “I’d better lead you out of here,” he said.

  He looked about for Mark, but he was not there. For a moment Barry felt a thrill of fear. It passed almost too quickly to be identified, and he turned and started to walk toward the massive oak tree that was the last tree before the long slope down to the valley. At least he had learned that much, he thought, and he knew the boys also should have learned that much by now. The grin of triumph at their earlier success faded, and he felt the weight of doubts and disappointment settle over him again.

  Twice more he looked back for Mark and failed to spot him in the dense woods. Mark saw him looking and made no sign. He watched the boys tripping, laughing, touching, and he felt his eyes burn and a strange emptiness almost like nausea gripped him. When they were out of sight down in the valley, he stretched out on the ground and looked up through the thick branches that veiled the sky, breaking it up into fragments of light, black against white, or white through black. By squinting his eyes he could make the black merge and the light pieces take precedence, then recede once more.

  “They hate me,” he whispered, and the trees whispered back, but he could not make out the words. Just leaves in the wind, he thought suddenly, not voices at all. He sat up and threw a handful of rotted leaves at the nearest tree trunk, and somewhere he thought someone laughed. The woji. “You’re not real, either,” he said softly. “I made you up. You can’t laugh at me.”

  The sound persisted, grew louder, and suddenly he stood up and looked back over his shoulder at a black cloud bank that had been forming all afternoon. Now the trees were crying out warnings to him, and he began to scramble down the slope, not following the boys and Barry, but heading for the old farmhouse.

  The house was completely hidden by a thicket of bushes and trees. Like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, he thought, trotting toward it. The wind howled, hurling bits of dirt, twigs, leaves stripped from the trees. He crawled through the bushes and in the shelter the wind seemed very distant. The entire sky was darkening fast, and the wind was dangerous, he knew. Tornado weather, that’s what they called it. There had been a rash of tornados two years ago; they all feared them now.

  At the house, he didn’t pause. He opened the coal chute, concealed by a tangle of ivy, and slid down and landed lightly in the black basement. He felt about for his candle and sulfur matches, and then went upstairs, where he watched the weather through a chink in the boarded-up window in the top bedroom. The house was completely boarded up now, doors, windows, the chimney sealed. They had decided it was not good for him to spend time alone i
n the old building, but they hadn’t known about the coal chute and what they had done actually was to provide him with a sanctuary where no one could follow.

  The storm roared through the valley and left as abruptly as it had started. The heavy rain became a spatter, then a drizzle; it stopped and presently the sun was shining again. Mark left the window. There was an oil lantern in the bedroom. He lighted the lamp and looked at his mother’s paintings, as he had done many times in the years since she had taken him camping. She knew, he thought. Always that one person, in the fields, at the doorway, on the river or ocean. Always just one. She knew what it was like. Without warning he started to sob, and threw himself down on the floor and wept until he was weak. Then he slept.

  He dreamed the trees took him by the hand and led him to his mother and she held him close and sang and told him stories and they laughed together.

  “Is it working?” Bob asked. “Can they be trained to live in the wilderness?”

  Mark was in the corner of the room, sitting cross-legged on the floor, forgotten by the doctors. He looked up from the book he was reading and waited for the answer.

  “I don’t know,” Barry said. “Not for a lifetime, I don’t think. For short periods, yes. But they’ll never be woodsmen, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Should we go ahead with the others next summer? Are they getting enough out of it to make a large-scale attempt?”

  Bruce shrugged. “It’s been a training program for us too,” he said. “I know I don’t want to keep going back into those dismal woods. I dread my days more and more.”

  “Me too,” Bob said. “That’s why I brought this up now. Is there any real point to it?”

  “You’re thinking about the camp-out next week, aren’t you?” Barry asked.

  “Yes. I don’t want to go. I know the boys are dreading it. You must be anxious about it.”

  Barry nodded. “You and I are too aware of what happened to Ben and Molly. But what’s going to happen to those children when they leave here and have to spend night after night in the woods? If preparation like this can ease it for them, we have to do it.”