Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

by Kate Wilhelm

  Andrew was right, and there was nothing he could do to change that. At least, if Mark was responsible for the series of accidents, they would stop and there would be peace for a while in the valley. But the day Mark led his group out on foot, it was found that the corral had broken down at the far end and the livestock had wandered out and scattered. They were all rounded up except two cows and their calves and a few sheep. And then the accidents did stop, exactly as Andrew had predicted.

  The forest became thicker each day, the trees more massive. This had been a park, protected from cutting, Mark knew, but even he was awed by the size of the trees, some of them so large that a dozen youngsters grasping hands could hardly reach around them. He named those he knew: white oak, silverbell, maple, a grove of birches . . . The days were warm as they headed south. On the fifth day they turned west by southwest, and no one questioned his directions. They did what they were told to do cheerfully and quickly and asked nothing. They were all strong, but their packs were heavy, and they were very young, and it seemed to Mark they were going at a crawl when he wanted to run, but he didn’t push them too fast. They had to be in good shape when they arrived at their destination. In the middle of the afternoon of the tenth day, he told them to stop, and they looked at him, waiting.

  Mark surveyed the wide valley. He had known from studying the maps that it was here, but he hadn’t realized how beautiful it would be. There was a stream, and on either side of it the land rose enough not to be in danger of flooding, but not so steeply that it would be difficult to get water. This was the fringe of the national forest; some of the trees were the giants they had been seeing for days now, others were younger, and would make the logs they would need for their buildings. There was level ground for their crops, grazing ground for the livestock. He sighed, and when he faced his followers he was smiling broadly.

  That afternoon and the following day he started them building lean-tos for temporary shelter; he laid out the corners of the buildings he ordered them to erect, tagged the trees they were to cut and use for the buildings and their campfires, paced off the fields they were to clear, and then, content they had enough to keep them busy until he returned, he told them he was leaving and would return in a few days.

  “But where are you going?” one of them asked, glancing about now as if questioning for the first time what they were doing.

  “It’s a test, isn’t it?” another asked, smiling.

  “Yes,” Mark said soberly. “You could call it a test. In survival. Are there any questions about any of my instructions?” There were none. “I’ll return with a surprise for you,” he said, and they were content.

  He trotted effortlessly through the forest toward the river, and then he followed the river north until he reached the canoe he had hidden in the undergrowth weeks before. In all, it took him four days to return to the valley. He had been gone over two weeks, and he was afraid it might have been too long.

  He approached from the hillside above the valley and lay down in some bushes to watch and wait for darkness. Late in the afternoon the paddle wheel came into view, and when it docked people swarmed out and lined up shoulder to shoulder to unload the boat, passing the salvage from one to the next, onto the shore, and into the boathouse. When lights came on, Mark moved. He started down to the old house, where he had hidden the drugs. Two-thirds of the way down he paused and dropped to his knees. To his right, a hundred yards away, was the cave entrance; the ground had been trampled, the limestone slabs had been covered with dirt. They had found his entrance and sealed it off.

  He waited until he was certain no one was below him watching the house, and then he cautiously made his way down the rest of the way, bellied under the bushes that grew thick about the house, and slid down the coal chute to the basement. He didn’t need a light to find the package, cached behind bricks he had pried loose months earlier. There too was the bottle of wine he had hidden. Working quickly, he added the stolen sleeping pills to the wine and shook it vigorously.

  It was dark when he climbed the hillside once more and hurried toward the breeders’ quarters. He had to get there after they were in their rooms, but before they were asleep. He crept to the building and watched outside the windows until the night nurse made her rounds with the tray. When she had left the dorm room where Brenda and five other women slept, he tapped lightly on the window.

  Brenda grinned when she saw him. She opened the window quickly, and he climbed in and whispered, “Turn off the light. I have wine. We’ll have a party.”

  “They’ll have your skin if they catch you,” one of the women said. They were pleased at the prospect of a party, and already they were dragging out the mat, and one of them was winding her hair up out of the way.

  “Where’s Wanda and Dorothy?” Mark asked. “They should be here, and maybe a couple of others. It’s a big bottle of wine.”

  “I’ll tell them,” Loretta whispered, stifling her laughter.

  “Wait until Nurse is out of sight.” She peeked out, shut the door, and pressed her finger to her lips. After waiting a moment, she looked again, then slipped out.

  “After the party, maybe you and I can get out for a little while?” Brenda said, rubbing her cheek against his.

  Mark nodded. “Any glasses in here?”

  Someone produced glasses, and he began to pour the wine. Others joined them, and now there were eleven of the younger women on the mat drinking the golden wine, muffling giggles and laughter. When they began to yawn, they wandered off to their beds, and those who had come from the other room stretched out on the mat. Mark waited until they were all sleeping soundly, then left quietly. He went to the dock, made certain no one had remained aboard the paddle wheel, and then returned and began to carry the women out, one by one, wrapped like cocoons in their blankets. On his last trip he gathered as many clothes as he could find, closed the window of the dorm, and, panting with fatigue, made his way back to the boat.

  He untied the mooring ropes and let the boat glide with the current, using a paddle to keep it close to the shore. Downriver, nearly opposite the old house, he snagged a rock and drew the boat into shore and tied it securely. One more thing, he thought, very tired now. One more thing.

  He ran to the old house and slid down the chute, then hurried upstairs. He didn’t use a light, but went straight to the paintings and started to pick up the first one. Behind him a match flared, and he froze.

  “Why did you come back?” Barry asked roughly. “Why didn’t you stay out there in the woods where you belong?”

  “I came back for my things,” Mark said, and turned. Barry was alone. He was lighting the oil lamp. Mark made a motion toward the window, and Barry shook his head.

  “It won’t do any good. They wired the stairs. If anyone comes up here, it rings an alarm in Andrew’s room. They’ll be on their way in a minute or two.”

  Mark scooped up the painting, then another and another. “Why are you here?”

  “To warn you.”

  “Why? Why did you suspect I’d come back?”

  “I don’t know why. I don’t want to know why. I’ve been sleeping downstairs, in the library. You won’t have time to get them all,” he said urgently as Mark picked up more paintings. “They’ll be here fast. They think you tried to burn down the mill, dam the stream, poison the clones in the tanks. They won’t stop to ask any questions this time.”

  “I didn’t try to kill the clones,” Mark said, not looking at Barry. “I knew the computer would sound an alarm before the contaminated water was used. How did they find out?”

  “They sent some of the boys down into the water, and a couple of them actually managed to swim out the other side, and after that, it wasn’t hard. Four were killed in the attempt,” he said without inflection.

  “I’m sorry,” Mark said. “I didn’t want that.”

  Barry shrugged. “You have to go.”

  “I’m ready.”

  “You’ll die out there,” Barry said, in the same de
ad voice. “You and those children you took with you. They won’t be able to breed, you know. Maybe one girl, maybe two, but then what?”

  “I’ve taken some of the women from the breeders’ compound,” Mark said.

  Now Barry registered shock and disbelief. “How?”

  “It doesn’t matter how. I have them. And we’ll make it. I planned it very carefully. We’ll make it.”

  “That’s what it was all for?” Barry said. “The fire, the dam, the contaminated water, the seed grains you took? That’s what it was all for?” he said again, this time not looking at Mark, but searching the remaining paintings as if they held the answer. “You even have livestock,” he said.

  Mark nodded. “They’re safe. I’ll get them in a week or two.”

  “They’ll track you down,” Barry said slowly. “They think you’re a menace, they won’t rest until they find you.”

  “They can’t find us,” Mark said. “The ones who could are in Philadelphia. By the time they get back there won’t be any signs of us anywhere.”

  “Have you thought what it will be like?” Barry cried, suddenly losing the rigid control he had achieved. “They’ll fear you and hate you! It isn’t fair to make them all suffer. And they’ll come to hate you for it. They’ll die out there! One by one, and each one will make the survivors hate more. In the end you’ll all die mean and miserable deaths.

  Mark shook his head. “If we don’t make it,” he said, “there won’t be anyone at all left on earth. The pyramid is tilting. The pressure from the great white wall is bearing down on it, and it cannot stand.”

  “And if you make it, you’ll sink back into savagery. It will be a thousand years, five thousand, before a man can climb out of the pit you’re digging him. They’ll be animals!”

  “And you’ll be dead.” Mark glanced swiftly about the room, then hurried to the door. He paused there and looked at Barry steadily. “You won’t understand this. No one’s alive but me who could understand it. I love you, Barry. You’re strange to me, alien, not human. All of you are. But I didn’t destroy them when I could have and wanted to because I loved you. Good-bye, Barry.”

  For a moment they continued to look at each other, and then Mark turned and ran lightly down the stairs. Behind him he heard the sound of something breaking, but he didn’t stop. He left by the back door, and was through the trees and into the field when Andrew and his companions drew near. Mark stopped and listened.

  “He’s still up there,” someone said. “I can see him.”

  Barry had broken the boards on the window so he could be seen. He was buying time for him, Mark realized, and keeping low, he began to run toward the river.

  “That’s what it was all for,” Barry whispered again, and now he addressed himself to the walnut head that was Molly. He held the head between his hands and sat down at the exposed window with the lamp behind him. “That’s what it was all for,” he said one more time, and he wondered if Molly had always been smiling. He didn’t look up when flames started to crackle through the house, but he held the carved head tighter against his chest as if to protect it.

  Far down the river Mark stood in the paddle wheel watching the flames, and he wept. When the boat bumped a rock, he began to fire the engine and then, under power, continued downriver. When he reached the Shenandoah he turned south and followed it until the big boat could go no farther. It was almost dawn. He sorted the clothes he had gathered together in the women’s quarters and made up packs of the boat’s provisions; they would need everything they could carry.

  When the women began to stir, he would give them tea and cornbread, and get them ashore. He would take the boat out to the middle of the river and let it float downstream again. They would need it back in the valley. Then he and the women would start through the forests toward home.

  Epilogue

  Mark kept behind trees as he approached the ridge over the valley once more. Twenty years, he thought. Twenty years since he had seen it. It was possible they had set up an elaborate alarm system, but he thought not. Not up here anyway. From all appearances, the woods up here had not been entered for many years. He ran the last few feet to the ridge, concealed himself behind a tangle of wild grapes, and looked below. For a long time he didn’t move, hardly breathed, and then he slowly began to walk down the slope.

  There was no sign of life. Aspens grew in the fields, willows crowded the riverbanks; around the buildings the junipers and pines that had once been kept trimmed now grew high and almost hid the buildings. The rose hedge had become a thicket. He started and whirled around at a sudden shriek that sounded almost human. A dozen large birds launched themselves into the air and flew awkwardly toward the nearest copse. The chickens had gone wild, he thought in wonder. And the livestock? He could see no sign of cattle, but they would be in the woods, along the riverbanks, spreading throughout the region.

  He walked on. Again he stopped. One of the dormitories was gone, no trace of it anywhere. A tornado, he thought, and he saw it now, a line of destruction that time had smoothed over, erased; a path where there were no buildings, no large trees, only the new growth of alders and aspens and grasses that would hold the ground until the spruces made it down the hillside, until the maple and oak seeds could be blown in to land on a hospitable site and take root. He followed the swath cut by the tornado, more certain as he moved that that was what had happened. But it couldn’t account for the death of the entire community. Not that alone. Then he saw the ruins of the mill and stopped.

  The mill had been destroyed, and only the foundation and rusting machinery indicated that it had once stood there, the mechanical queen ant of the community, giving all the will to live, the energy, the means to sustain life.

  The end would have come quickly without the mill, without the power. He didn’t go any closer to it. He bowed his head and stumbled down toward the river, not wanting to see anything else.

  He traveled homeward more slowly than he had come, stopping often to look at the trees, the brilliant green carpet of mosses, and now and again he watched a glittering locust beat heavily through the sunlight, its iridescent wings appearing in flashes of color, then disappearing when it changed direction and didn’t catch the light exactly right. The locusts had come back; there were wasps again, and worms in the ground. He stopped at a mammoth white oak that overlooked a valley and thought about the changes the tree had witnessed silently. The leaves rustled over him, and he put his cheek against the tree for a moment, then went on.

  Sometimes the loneliness had been almost too much, he thought, and always at those times he had found comfort in the woods, where he sought nothing human. He wondered if the others were still lonely; no one spoke of it any longer. He smiled as he thought of how the women had wept and screamed and straggled behind him, only to run to catch up once more.

  At the top of the hill overlooking his valley he paused, then leaned against a silver maple to watch the activities below. Men and women worked in the fields — weeding the sugar cane, hoeing corn, picking beans. Others had torn down one wall of the bathhouse and were busy expanding the facilities; more of the fired-clay tiles were being put in, fitted closely around the great fireplace in order to have a constant supply of hot water. Some of the older children were doing something to the water wheel — he couldn’t tell what.

  A dozen or more children were picking blackberries along the edges of the fields. They wore long-sleeved shirts and long pants, so they wouldn’t become too scratched. They finished, put down their baskets, and began to pull off the confining clothes. Then, naked, nut-brown, laughing, they started toward the settlement. No two of them were alike.

  Five thousand years of savagery, Barry had believed, but that was time measured on the steps of the pyramid, not by those who lived any part of it. Mark had led his people into a timeless period, where the recurring seasons and the cycles of the heavens and of life, birth, and death marked their days. Now the joys of men and women, and their agonies, were private affa
irs that would come and go without a trace. In the timeless period life became the goal, not the re-creation of the past or the elaborate structuring of the future. The fan of possibilities had almost closed, but was opening once more, and each new child widened its spread. More than that couldn’t be asked.

  Four canoes came into view on the river; the boys and girls had been out netting fish. Now they raced one another home. Soon, Mark knew, some of them would ask the community’s permission to take the canoes on a trip of exploration, not searching for anything in particular, but out of curiosity about their world. The older adults would be fearful, unwilling for them to leave, but Mark would grant permission, and even if he didn’t, they would go. They had to.

  Mark pushed himself away from the tree and started down the hill, impatient suddenly to be home again. He was greeted by Linda, who held out her hand to him. She was nineteen, large with child, his child.

  “I’m glad you’re home,” Linda said softly. “It has been lonesome.”

  “And you’re not lonely now?” he asked, putting his arm about her shoulders.

  “No.”

  The naked children saw him then and raced toward him, laughing, talking excitedly. Their hands and lips were stained with blackberries. He tightened his grip on Linda’s shoulder. She looked at him questioningly, and he loosened his grasp, afraid he had hurt her.

  “Why are you smiling like that?” she asked.

  “Because I’m happy to be home. I was lonely too,” he said, and it was part of the truth, and the other part he knew he could not explain to her. Because all the children were different.

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  Document creation date: 28.01.2010

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