Read Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang Online
Authors: Kate Wilhelm
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #General
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (5 page)
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"David, how many are up at the northern end of the valley?"
"About one hundred ten now," he said. He thought, two out of three dead, but he didn't say it.
"And the hospital? Was it built?"
"It's there. Walt is running it."
"David, while you're driving, now that you can't watch me for reactions or anything, just tell me about it here. What's been happening, who's alive, who's dead. Everything."
When they stopped for lunch, hours later, she said, "David, will you make love to me now, before the rains start again?"
They lay under a stand of yellow poplars, and the leaves rustled incessantly though no wind could be felt. Under the susurrous trees, their own voices became whispers. She was so thin and so pale, and inside she was so warm and alive; her body rose to meet his and her breasts seemed to lift, to seek his touch, his lips. Her fingers were in his hair, on his back, digging into his flanks, strong now, then relaxed and trembling, then clenched into fists that opened spasmodically; and he felt her nails distantly, aware that his back was being clawed, but distantly, distantly. And finally there were only the susurrant leaves and now and then a long, heaving sigh.
"I've loved you for more than twenty years, did you realize that?" he said after a long time.
She laughed. "Remember when I broke your arm?"
Later, in the cart again, her voice came from behind him, softly, sadly. "We're finished, aren't we, David? You, I, all of us?"
He thought, Walt be damned, promises be damned, secrecy be damned. And he told her about the clones developing under the mountain, in the laboratory deep in the cave.
Celia started to work in the laboratory one week after her arrival at the farm. "It's the only way I'll ever get to see you at all," she said gently when David protested. "I promised Walt that I would work only four hours a day to start. Okay?"
David took her through the lab the following morning. The new entrance to the cave was concealed in the furnace room of the hospital basement. The door was steel, set in the limestone rock that underlay the area. As soon as they stepped through the doorway, the air was cold and David put a coat about Celia's shoulders. "We keep them here at all times," he said, taking a second coat from a wall hanger. "Twice government inspectors have come here, and it might look suspicious if we put them on to go down the cellar. They won't be back."
The passageway was dimly lighted, the floor was smooth. It went four hundred feet to another steel door. This one opened into the first cave chamber, a large, high-domed room. It had been left almost as they had found it, with stalactites and stalagmites on all sides, but now there were many cots, picnic tables and benches, and a row of cooking tables and serving tables. "Our emergency room, for the hot rains," David said, hurrying her through the echoing room. There was another passage, narrower and tougher than the first. At the end of this passage was the animal experiment room.
One wall had been cut through and the computer installed, looking grotesquely out of place against a wall of pale pink travertine. In the center of the room were tanks and vats and pipes, all stainless steel and glass. On either side of these were the tanks that held the animal embryos. Celia stared without moving for several moments, then turned to look at David with startled eyes. "How many tanks do you have?"
"Enough to clone six hundred animals of varying sizes," he said. "We took a lot of them out, put them in the lab on the other side, and we're not using all that we have here. We're afraid our supplies of chemicals will run out, and so far we haven't come up with alternatives that we can extract from anything at our disposal here."
Eddie Beauchamp came from the side of the tanks, jotting figures in a ledger. He grinned at David and Celia. "Slumming?" he asked. He checked his figures against a dial and adjusted it a fraction, and continued down the row checking the other dials, stopping now and again to make a minor adjustment.
Celia's eyes questioned David, and he shook his head. Eddie didn't know what they were doing in the other lab. They walked past the tanks, row after row of them, all sealed, with only needles that moved now and then and the dials on the sides to indicate that there was anything inside. They returned to the corridor. David led her through another doorway, a short passage, then into the second laboratory, this one secured by a lock that he had a key for.
Walt looked up as they entered, nodded, and turned again to
the desk where he was working. Vlasic didn't even look up. Sarah smiled and hurried past them and sat down before a computer console and began to type. Another woman in the room didn't seem to be aware that anyone had come in. Hilda. Celia's aunt. David glanced at Celia, but she was staring wide-eyed at the tanks, and in this room the tanks were glass-fronted. Each was filled with a pale liquid, a yellow so faint that the color seemed almost illusory. Within the tanks, floating in the liquid, were sacs, no larger than small fists. Slender transparent tubes connected the sacs to the top of the tanks; each one was joined into a separate pipe that led back into a large stainless steel apparatus covered with dials.
Celia walked slowly down the aisle between the tanks, stopped once midway, and didn't move again for a long time. David took her arm. She was trembling slightly.
"Are you all right?"
She nodded. "I . . . it's a shock, seeing them. I . . . maybe I didn't quite believe it." There was a film of perspiration on her face.
"Better take off the coat now," David said. "We have to keep it pretty warm in here. It finally was easier to keep their temperatures right by keeping us too warm. The price we pay," he said, smiling slightly.
"All the lights? The heat? The computer? You can generate that much electricity?"
He nodded. "That'll be our tour tomorrow. Like everything else around here, the generating system has bugs in it. We can store enough power for no longer than six hours, and we just don't let it go out for more than six hours. Period."
"Six hours is a lot. If you stop breathing for six minutes, you're dead." With her hands clasped behind her, she stepped closer to the shiny control system at the end of the room. "This isn't the computer. What is it?"
"It's a computer terminal. The computer controls the input of nutrients and oxygen, and the output of toxins. The animal room is on the other side of that wall. Those tanks are linked to it, too. Separate set of systems, but the same machinery."
They went through the nursery for the animals, and then the nursery for the human babies. There was the dissection room, several small offices where the scientists could withdraw to work, the stockrooms. In every room except the one where the human clones were being grown, people were working. "They never used a Bunsen burner or a test tube before, but they have become scientists and technicians practically overnight," David said. "And thank God for that, or it never would have worked. I don't know what they think we're doing now, but they don't ask questions. They just do their jobs."
Walt assigned Celia to work under Vlasic. Whenever David looked up to see her in the laboratory, he felt a stab of joy. She increased her workday to six hours. When David fell into bed exhausted after fourteen or sixteen hours, she was there to hold him and love him.
In August, Avery Handley reported that his shortwave contact in Richmond warned of a band of marauders who were working their way up the valley. "They're bad," he said gravely. "They took over the Phillotts' place, ransacked it, and then burned it to the ground."
After that they kept guards posted day and night. And that same week Avery announced that there was war in the Middle East. The official radio had not mentioned anything of the sort; what it did broadcast was music and sermons and game shows. Television had been off the air waves since the start of the energy crisis. "They're using the bomb," Avery said. "Don't know who, but someone is. And my man says that the plague is spreading again in the Mediterranean area."
In September they fought off the first attack. In October they learned the band was grouping for a second attack, this time with thirty to forty men. "We can't keep fighting them off," Walt said. "They must know we have food here. They'll come from all directions this time. They know we're watching for them."
"We should blow up the dam," Clarence said. "Wait until they're in the upper valley and flood them out."
The meeting was being held in the cafeteria, with everyone present. Celia's hand tightened in David's, but she didn't protest. No one protested.
"They'll try to take the mill," Clarence went on. "They probably think there's wheat there, or something." A dozen men volunteered to stand guard at the mill. Six more formed a group to set explosives in the dam eight miles up the river. Others formed a scouting party.
David and Celia left the meeting early. He had volunteered for everything, and each time had been turned down. He was not one of the expendable ones. The rains had become "hot" again, and the people were all sleeping in the cave. David and Celia, Walt, Vlasic, the others who worked in the various labs, all slept there on cots. In one of the small offices David held Celia's hand and they whispered before they fell asleep. Their talk was of their childhood.
Long after Celia fell asleep he stared into the blackness, still holding her hand. She had grown even thinner, and earlier that week when he had tried to get her to leave the lab to rest, Walt had said, "Leave her be." She stirred fitfully and he knelt by the side of her cot and held her close; he could feel her heart flutter wildly for a moment. Then she was still again, and slowly he released her and sat on the stone floor with his eyes closed. Later he heard Walt moving about, and the creaking of his cot in the next office. David was getting stiff, and finally he returned to his own bed and fell asleep.
The next day the people worked to get everything up to high ground. They would lose three houses when the dam was blown up, the barn near the road, and the road itself. Nothing could be spared, and board by board they carried a barn up the hillside and stacked the pieces. Two days later the signal was given and the dam was destroyed.
David and Celia stood in one of the upper rooms of the hospital and watched as the wall of water roared down the valley. It was like a jet takeoff; a crowd furious with an umpire's decision; an express train out of control; a roar like nothing he had ever heard, or like everything he had ever heard, recombined to make this noise that shook the building, that vibrated in his bones. A wall of water, fifteen feet high, twenty feet high, raced down the valley, accelerating as it came, smashing, destroying everything in its path.
When the roar was gone and the water stood high on the land, swirling, thick with debris, Celia said in a faint voice, "Is it worth this, David?"
He tightened his arm about her shoulders. "We had to do it," he said.
"I know. But it seems so futile sometimes. We're all dead, fighting right down the line, but dead. As dead as those men must be by now."
"We're making it work, honey. You know that. You've been working right there. Thirty new lives!"
She shook her head. "Thirty more dead people. Do you remember Sunday school, David? They took me every week. Did you go?"
He nodded.
"And Wednesdaynight Bible school? I keep thinking of it now. And I wonder if this isn't God's doing after all. I can't help it. I keep wondering. And I had become an atheist." She laughed and suddenly spun around. "Let's go to bed, now. Here in the hospital. Let's pick a fancy room, a suite. . . ."
He reached for her, but suddenly a violent gust of wind drove a hard blast of rain against the window. It came like that, without preliminary, just a sudden deluge. Celia shuddered. "God's will," she said dully. "We have to get back to the cave, don't we?"
They walked through the empty hospital, through the long, dimly lighted passage, through the large chamber where the people were trying to find comfortable positions on the cots and benches, through the smaller passages and finally into the lab office.
"How many people did we kill?" Celia asked, stepping out of her jeans. She turned her back to put her clothes on the foot of her cot. Her buttocks were nearly as flat as an adolescent boy's. When she faced him again, her ribs seemed to be straining against her skin. She looked at him for a moment, and then came to him and held his head tight against her chest as he sat on his cot and she stood naked before him. He could feel her tears as they fell onto his cheek.
There was a hard freeze in November, and with the valley flooded and the road and bridges gone, they knew they were safe from attack, at least until spring. The people had moved out of the cave again, and work in the lab went on at the same numbing pace. The fetuses were developing, growing, moving now with sudden motions of feet and elbows. David was working on substitutes for the chemicals that already were substituting for amniotic fluids. He worked each day until his vision blurred, or his hands refused to obey his directions, or Walt ordered him out of the lab. Celia was working longer hours now, still resting in the middle of the day for several hours, but she returned after that and stayed almost as late as David did.
He passed her chair and kissed the top of her head. She looked up at him and smiled, then returned to her figures. Peter started a centrifuge. Vlasic made a last adjustment on the end tank of nutrients that were to be diluted and fed to the embryos, then called out, "Celia, you ready to count chicks?"
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