Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume Two (23 page)

They walked back 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, on the 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.

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.

“David, are you going to pull yourself together? You just giving up?” Walt didn’t wait for a reply. He sat down on the only chair in the tiny room and leaned forward, cupping his chin, 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.”

“I don’t care,” David said.

“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. 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?” David 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.”

David couldn’t stop the rapid calculations he made. “It’s twenty-six weeks,” he said. “We can’t handle that many premature babies.”

“I know that.” Walt 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, 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 hand 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 mostly holes, 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. “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 not 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 moved to the door too fast to let any of them could catch up to him. He and David hurried to the cave entrance and went through, 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. “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. They were all gowned and masked professionally. One of them dropped a basin and three others screamed in unison. David cursed 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 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, but 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.

David watched the boys from the window in Walt’s office. There was Clarence, already looking too pudgy—he’d be fat in another three or four years. And a young Walt, frowning in concentration over a problem that he wouldn’t put on paper until he had a solution. Mark, too pretty almost, but determinedly manly, always trying harder than the others to endure, to jump higher, run faster, hit harder. And D-4, himself… He turned away and pondered the future of the boys, uncles, fathers, grandfathers, all the same age. He was starting a headache again.

“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? Why won’t they talk to us?”

“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, “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 D-l 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.

Behind the hospital he climbed the ridge, 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 and 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 stairway 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. 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.

He had turned and left abruptly and had not spoken to her again in the intervening years. Sometimes he thought he saw her watching him warily, and each time he glared at her and hurried away.

C-l had been like his own child. He had watched her develop, watched her learn to walk, talk, feed herself. His child, his and Celia’s. C-2 had been much the same. A twin, somewhat smaller, identical nevertheless. But C-3 had been different. No, he corrected himself, his perceptions of her had been different. When he looked at her now he saw Celia, and he ached.

He had grown chilled on the ridge, and he realized that the sun had set long ago and the lanterns had been lighted below. The scene looked pretty, like a sentimental picture titled “Rural Life.” The large farmhouse with glowing windows, the blackness of the barn; closer, the hospital and staff building with the cheerful yellow lights in the windows. Stiffly he descended into the valley again. He had missed dinner, but he was not hungry.

“David!” One of the youngest boys, a Five, called to him. David didn’t know whom he had been cloned from. There were people he hadn’t known when they were that young. He stopped and the boy ran to him, then past him, calling as he went, “Dr. Walt wants you.”