Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (6 page)

       "One second," she said. She made a notation, put her pencil in the open book, and stood up.

       David was aware of her, as he always was, even when totally preoccupied with his own work. He was aware that she stood up, that she didn't move for a moment, and when she said, in a tremulous voice that betrayed disbelief, "David . . . David . . ." he was already starting to his feet. He caught her as she crumpled.

       Her eyes were open, her look almost quizzical, asking what he could not answer, expecting no answer. A tremor passed through her and she closed her eyes, and although her lids fluttered, she did not open them again.

       Walt looked David over and shrugged. "You look like hell," he said.

       David made no response. He knew he looked like hell. He felt like hell. He watched Walt as if from a great distance.

       "David, are you going to pull yourself together? You just giving up?" He didn't wait for a reply. He sat down on the only chair in the tiny room and leaned forward, cupping his chin in his hands, staring at the floor. "We've got to tell them. Sarah thinks there'll be trouble. So do I."

       David stood at the window, looking at the bleak landscape, done in grays and blacks and mud colors. It was raining, but the rain had become clean. The river was a gray swirling monster that he could glimpse from up here, a dull reflection of the dull sky.

       "They might try to storm the lab," Walt went on. "God knows what they might decide to do."

       David made no motion but continued to stare at the sullen

sky.

       "God damn it! You turn around here and listen to me, you asshole! You think I'm going to let all this work, all this planning, go up in one irrational act! You think I won't kill anyone who tries to stop it now!" Walt had jumped up with his outburst, and he swung David around and yelled into his face. "You think I'm going to let you sit up here and die? Not today, David. Not yet. What you decide to do next week, I don't give a damn, but today I need you, and you, by God, are going to be there!"

       "I don't care," David said quietly.

       "You're going to care! Because those babies are going to come busting out of those sacs, and those babies are the only hope we have, and you know it. Our genes, yours, mine, Celia's, those genes are the only thing that stand between us and oblivion. And I won't allow it, David! I refuse it!"

       David felt only a great weariness. "We're all dead. Today or tomorrow. Why prolong it? The price is too high for adding a year or two."

       "No price is too high!"

       Slowly Walt's face seemed to come into focus. He was white, his lips were pale, his eyes sunken. There was a tic in his cheek that David never had seen before. "Why now?" he asked. "Why change the plan and tell them now, so far ahead of time?"

       "Because it isn't that far ahead of time." Walt rubbed his eyes hard. "Something's going wrong, David. I don't know what it is. Something's not working. I think we're going to have our hands full with prematures."

       In spite of himself David made rapid calculations. "It's twentysix weeks," he said. "We can't handle that many premature babies."

       "I know that." Walt sat down once more, and this time put his head back and closed his eyes. "We don't have much choice," he said. "We lost one yesterday. Three today. We have to bring them out and treat them like preemies."

       Slowly David nodded. "Which ones?" he asked, but he knew. Walt told him the names, and again he nodded. He had known that they were not his, not Walt's, not Celia's. "What are you planning?" he asked then, and sat down on the side of his bed.

       "I have to sleep," Walt said. "Then a meeting, posted for

seven. After that we prepare the nursery for a hell of a lot of preemies. As soon as we're ready we begin getting them out. That'll be morning. We need nurses, half a dozen, more if we can get them. Sarah says Margaret would be good. I don't know."

       David didn't know either. Margaret's four-year-old son had been one of the first to die of the plague, and she had lost a baby in stillbirth. He trusted Sarah's judgment, however. "Think between them they can get enough others, tell them what to do, see that they do it properly?"

       Walt mumbled something, and one of his hands fell off the chair arm. He jerked upright.

       "Okay, Walt, you get in my bed," David said, almost resentfully. "I'll go down to the lab, get things rolling there. I'll come up for you at six thirty." Walt didn't protest, but fell onto the bed without bothering to take off his shoes. David pulled them off. Walt's socks were more holes than not, but probably they kept his ankles warm. David left them on, pulled the blanket over him, and went to the lab.

       At seven the hospital cafeteria was crowded when Walt stood up to make his announcement. First he had Avery Handley run down his log of diminishing shortwave contacts, with the accompanying grim stories of plague, famine, disease, spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, and sterility. It was the same story worldwide. They listened apathetically; they could not care any longer what was happening to any part of the world that was not their small part. Avery finished and sat down once more.

       Walt looked small, David thought in surprise. He had always thought of him as a fairly large man, but he wasn't. He was only five feet nine, and now he was very thin and hard-looking, like a gamecock, trimmed of all excess with only the essentials needed to carry on the fight remaining. Walt studied the assembled people and deliberately said, "There's not a person in this room hungry tonight. We don't have any more plague here. The rain is washing away the radioactivity, and we have food stores that will carry us for years even if we can't plant crops in the spring. We have men capable of doing just about anything we might ever want done." He paused and looked at them again, from left to right, back again, taking his time. He had their absolute attention. "What we don't have," he said, his voice hard and flat now, "is a woman who can conceive a child, or a man who could impregnate her if she was able to bear."

       There was a ripple of movement, like a collective sigh, but no one spoke. Walt said, "You know how we are getting our meat. You know the cattle are good, the chickens are good. Tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen, we will have our own babies developed the same way."

       There was a moment of utter silence, of stillness, then they broke. Clarence leaped to his feet shouting at Walt. Vernon fought to get to the front of the room, but there were too many people between him and Walt. One of the women pulled on Walt's arm, almost dragging him over, screaming in his face. Walt yanked free and climbed onto a table. "Stop this! I'm going to answer any questions, but I can't hear any one of you this way."

       For the next three hours they questioned, argued, prayed, formed alliances, reformed them as arguments broke out in the smaller groups. At ten Walt took his place on the table again and called out. "We will recess this discussion until tomorrow night at seven. Coffee will be served now, and I understand we have cakes and sandwiches." He jumped from the table and left before any of them could catch up with him, and he and David hurried to the cave entrance, locking the massive door behind them.

       "Clarence was ugly," Walt muttered. "Bastard."

       David's father, Walt, and Clarence were brothers, David reminded himself, but he couldn't help regarding Clarence as an outsider, a stranger with a fat belly and a lot of money who expected instant obedience from the world.

       "They might organize," Walt said after a moment. "They might form a committee to protest this act of the devil. We'll have to be ready for them."

       David nodded. They had counted on delaying this meeting until they had live babies, human babies that laughed and gurgled and took milk from the bottle hungrily. Instead they would have a room full of not-quite-finished preemies, certainly not human-looking, with no more human appeal than a calf born too soon.

       They worked all night preparing the nursery. Sarah had enlisted Margaret, Hilda, Lucy, and half a dozen other women, who were all gowned and masked professionally. One of them dropped a basin and three others screamed in unison. David cursed, but under his breath. They would be all right when they had the babies, he told himself.

       The bloodless births started at five forty-five, and at twelve thirty they had twenty-five infants. Four died in the first hour, another died three hours later, and the rest of them thrived. The only baby left in the tanks was the fetus that would be Celia, nine weeks younger than the others.

       The first visitor Walt permitted in the nursery was Clarence, and after that there was no further talk of destroying the inhuman monstrosities.

       There was a celebration party, and names were suggested and a drawing was held to select eleven female names and ten male. In the record book the babies were labeled R-l strain; Repopulation

1. But in David's mind, as in Walt's, the babies were W-l, D-l, and soon, C-l . . .

       For the next months there was no shortage of nurses, male or female, no shortage of help doing any of the chores that so few had done before. Everyone wanted to become a doctor or a biologist, Walt grumbled. He was sleeping more now, and the fatigue lines on his face were smoothing out. Often he would nudge David and tow him along, away from the nursery, propel him toward his own room in the hospital, and see to it that he remained there for a night's sleep. One night as they walked side by side back to their rooms, Walt said, "Now you understand what I meant when I said this was all that mattered, don't you?"

       David understood. Every time he looked down at the tiny, pink new Celia he understood more fully.

       "They're inhuman, aren't they?" he said bitterly to Walt. "They come and go and we know nothing about them. What do they think? Why do they hang so close to each other?"

       "Remember that old cliché, generation gap? It's here, I reckon." Walt was looking very old. He was tired, and seldom tried to hide it any longer. He looked up at David and said quietly, "Maybe they're afraid of us."

       David nodded. He had thought of that. "I know why Hilda did it," he said. "I didn't at the time, but now I know." Hilda had strangled the small girl who looked more like her every day.

       "Me too." Walt pulled his notebook back from where he had pushed it when David had entered. "It's a bit spooky to walk into a crowd that's all you, in various stages of growth. They do cling to their own kind." He started to write then, and David left him.

       Spooky, he thought, and veered from the laboratory, where he had been heading originally. Let the damn embryos do their thing without him. He knew he didn't want to enter because Dl or D-2 would be there working. The D-4 strain would be the one, though, to prove or disprove the experiment. If Four didn't make it, then chances were that Five wouldn't either, and then what? A mistake. Whoops, wrong, sir. Sorry about that.

       He climbed the ridge behind the hospital, over the cave, and sat down on an outcrop of limestone that felt cool and smooth. The boys were clearing another field. They worked well together, with little conversation but much laughter that seemed to arise spontaneously. A line of girls came into view, from nearer the river; they were carrying baskets of berries. Blackberries and gunpowder, he thought suddenly, and he remembered the ancient celebrations of the Fourth of July, with blackberry stains and fireworks, and sulfur for the chiggers. And birds. Thrushes, meadowlarks, warblers, purple martins.

       Three Celias came into view, swinging easily with the weight of the baskets, a stairstep succession of Celias. He shouldn't do that, he reminded himself harshly. They weren't Celias, none of them had that name. They were Mary and Ann and something else. He couldn't remember for a moment the third one's name, and he knew it didn't matter. They were each and every one Celia. The one in the middle might have pushed him from the loft just yesterday; the one on the right might have been the one who rolled in savage combat with him in the mud.

       Once, three years ago, he had had a fantasy in which Celia-3 had come to him shyly and asked that he take her. In the fantasy he had taken her; and in his dreams for weeks to come, he had taken her, over and over and over again. And he had awakened weeping for his own Celia. Unable to endure it any longer, he had sought out C-3 and asked her haltingly if she would come to his room with him, and she had drawn back quickly, involuntarily, with fear written too clearly on her smooth face for her to pretend it was not there.

       "David, forgive me. I was startled . . ."

       They were promiscuous, indeed it was practically required of them to be free in their loving. No one could anticipate how many of them eventually would be fertile, what the percentage of boys to girls would be. Walt was able to test the males, but since the tests for female fertility required rabbits which they did not have, he said the best test for fertility was pregnancy. The children lived together, and promiscuity was the norm. But only with one another. They all shunned the elders. David had felt his eyes burning as the girl spoke, still moving away from him.