Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume Two (22 page)

She stopped and raised her head. The rain ran over her cheeks and plastered her hair to her forehead. She dropped the shoulder bag that had weighed her down and ran toward him, and only when he caught her and held her tight and hard did he realize that he was weeping, as she was.

Under the leanto he pulled off her wet clothes and rubbed her dry, then wrapped her in one of his shirts. Her lips were blue, her skin seemed almost translucent; it was unearthly white.

“I knew you’d be here,” she said. Her eyes were very large, deep blue, bluer than he remembered, or bluer in contrast to her pale skin. Always before she had been sunburned.

“I knew you’d come here,” he said. “When did you eat?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t believe it was this bad here. I thought it was propaganda. Everyone thinks it’s propaganda.”

He lighted the Sterno. She sat wrapped in his plaid shirt and watched him as he opened a can of stew.

“Who are those people down there?”

“Squatters. Grandmother and Grandfather Wiston died last year. That gang showed up. They gave Aunt Hilda and Uncle Eddie a choice, join them or get out. They didn’t give Wanda any chance at all. They kept her.”

She stared down into the valley and nodded slowly. “I didn’t know it was this bad. I didn’t believe it.” Without looking back at him, she asked then, “And Mother, Father?”

“They’re dead, Celia. Flu, both of them. Last winter.”

“I didn’t get any letters,” she said. “Almost two years. They made us leave Brazil, you know. But there wasn’t any transportation home. We went to Colombia. They promised to let us go home in three months. And then they came one night, late, almost at dawn, and said we had to get out immediately. There were riots, you know.”

He nodded, although she was still staring down at the farm and couldn’t see. He wanted to tell her to weep for her parents, to cry out, so that he could take her in his arms and try to comfort her. But she continued to sit motionlessly and speak in a dead voice.

“They were coming for us, for the Americans. They blame us, for letting them starve. They really believe that everything is still all right here. I did too. No one believed any of the reports. And the mobs were coming for us. We left on a small boat, a skiff. Nineteen of us. They shot at us when we got too near Cuba.”

David touched her arm and she jerked and trembled. “Celia, turn around and eat now. Don’t talk any longer. Later. You can tell us about it later.”

She shook her head. “Never again. I’ll never mention any of it again, David. I just wanted you to know there was nothing I could do. I wanted to come home and there wasn’t any way.”

The storm was over, and the night air was cool. They huddled under a blanket and sat without talking, drinking hot black coffee. When the cup began to tilt in Celia’s hand, David took it from her and gently lowered her to the bed he had prepared. “I love you, Celia,” he said softly. “I’ve always loved you.”

“I love you, too, David. Always.” Her eyes were closed and her lashes were very black on her white cheeks. David leaned over and kissed her forehead, pulled the blanket higher about her, and watched her sleep for a long time before he lay down beside her.

The next morning they left the oak tree and started for the Sumner farm. She rode Mike until they got to the cart; by then she was trembling with exhaustion and her lips were blue again, although the day was already hot. There wasn’t room for her to lie down in the cart, so he padded the back of the wooden seat with his bedroll and blanket, and let her sit behind him where she could at least put her head back and rest, when the road wasn’t too bumpy. She smiled faintly when he covered her legs with another shirt, the one he had been wearing.

“It isn’t cold, you know,” she said matter-of-factly. “That goddamn bug does something to the heart, I think. No one would tell us anything about it. My symptoms all involve the circulatory system.”

“How bad was it? When did you get it?”

“Eighteen months ago. Just before they made us leave Brazil. It swept Rio. That’s where they took us when we got sick. Not many survived it. Hardly any of the later cases. It became more virulent as time went on.”

He nodded. “Same here. Something like sixty percent fatal, increasing up to eighty percent by now, I guess.”

There was a long silence then, and he thought that perhaps she had drifted off to sleep. The road was no more than pair of ruts that were gradually being reclaimed by the underbrush. Already grass covered it almost totally, except where the rains had washed the dirt away and left only rocks. Mike walked deliberately and David didn’t hurry him.

“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 with a motion that needed no appreciable wind to start. 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. 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.

“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?”

And 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 Great Bear Cave.

Celia started to work in the laboratory a week later. “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 bedrock. 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,” he said. She nodded.

The passageway was dimly lighted, the floor 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. There was another passage, narrower and rougher 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 of the meters and gauges to indicate that there was anything inside. They returned to the corridor. David led her through another doorway, another shorter passage, then unlocked a door and took her into the second laboratory.

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. 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 attached to a pipe that led back into a large stainless steel apparatus which seemed to be covered with dials.

Celia walked slowly down the aisle between the tanks, stopped 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 that.”

She nodded. “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.” He nodded toward the wall. “The animal room is on the other side. Those tanks are linked to it, too. Separate set of systems, but the same machinery.”

She nodded again. 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 stock rooms. 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.”

In August, Avery Handley got through to a shortwave contact in Richmond who 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.”

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 would be a scouting party.

David and Celia left the meeting early. He had volunteered for everything, and 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; 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, the creaking of his cot in the next office. David was getting stiff, and finally he returned to his own bed.

The next day the people worked to get everything up to high ground. 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 hospital rooms and watched together 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.