Kate Wilhelm - Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

The council meeting had gone on most of the day, and when it ended Miriam asked Barry to walk with her. He looked at her questioningly, but she shook her head. They walked by the river, and when they were out of sight of the others she said, “I would like you to do me a favor, if you will. I would like to visit the old farmhouse. Can you get inside?”

Barry stopped in surprise. “Why?”

“I don’t know why. I keep thinking I want to see Molly’s paintings. I never did see them, you know.”

“But why?”

“Can you get in?”

He nodded, and they started to walk again. When do you want to go?”

“Is it too late now?”

The rear door of the farmhouse was loosely boarded. They didn’t even need a crowbar to open it. Barry led the way up the stairs, carrying the oil lamp high, casting strange shadows on the wall beside him. The house felt very empty, as if Mark had not been there for a long time.

Miriam looked at the paintings quietly, not touching them, holding her hands tightly clasped before her as she went from one to another. “They should be moved,” she said finally. “They will rot away to nothing in here.”

When she came to the carving of Molly that Mark had made, she touched it, almost reverently. “It is she,” she said softly. “He has her gift, doesn’t he?”

“He has the gift,” Barry said.

Miriam rested her hand on the head. “Andrew plans to kill him.”

“I know.”

“He has served his purpose, and now he is a threat and must go.” She ran her finger down the cheek of walnut. “Look, it’s too high and sharp, but that makes it more like her instead of less. I don’t understand why that is, do you?”

Barry shook his head.

“Will he try to save himself?” Miriam asked, not looking at him, her voice tightly controlled.

“I don’t know. How can he? He can’t survive alone in the woods. Andrew won’t allow him to remain in the community many more months.”

Miriam sighed and withdrew her hand from the carved head. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and it was not clear whether she spoke to him or to Molly.

Barry went to the window overlooking the valley and looked through the peephole Mark had made in the boards. How pretty it was, he thought, the gathering dusk, with pale lights glowing in the distance and the black hills encircling it all. “Miriam,” he asked, “if you knew a way to help him, would you?”

For a long time she was silent, and he thought she would not answer. Then she said, “No. Andrew is right. He is not a physical threat now, but his presence is painful. It is as if he is a reminder of something that is too elusive to grasp, something that is hurtful, even deadly, and in his presence we try to regain it and fail over and over. We will stop feeling this pain when he is gone, not before then.” She joined him at the window. “In a year or two he will threaten us in other ways. That is what is important,” she said, nodding toward the valley. “Not any individual, even if his death kills us both.”

Barry put his arm about her shoulder then, and they stood looking out together. Suddenly Miriam stiffened and said, “Look, a fire!”

There was a faint line of brightness that grew as they watched, spreading in both directions, becoming two lines, moving downward and upward. Something erupted, blazed brightly, then subsided, and the lines moved onward.

“It will burn down the mill!” Miriam cried, and ran from the window to the stairs. “Come on, Barry! It’s just above the mill!”

Barry stood by the window as if transfixed by the moving lines of fire. He had done it, Barry thought. Mark was trying to burn down the mill.

Hundreds of people spread out over the hillside putting out the brush fire. Others patrolled the grounds surrounding the generating plant to make certain no sparks were blown in by the wind. Hoses were put into service to wet down the bushes and trees, to soak the roof of the large wooden building. Only when the water pressure failed did anyone realize they had a second serious problem on their hands.

The flow of water in the swift stream that ran the plant had dwindled to a trickle. All over the valley the lights blinked out as the system compensated for the sudden loss and diverted the electricity to the laboratory. The auxiliary system took over and the lab continued to function, but on reduced power. Everything was turned off except the circuits directly tied into the tanks containing the clones.

Throughout the night the scientists, doctors, and technicians worked to meet the crisis. They had drilled often enough to know exactly what to do in this emergency, and no clones were lost, but the system had been damaged by the uncontrolled stoppage.

Other men began to wade upstream to find the cause of the diminished flow of water. In the first light of morning they stumbled upon a landslide that had almost dammed the small river, and work was started immediately to clear it.

“Did you try to burn down the mill?” Barry demanded.

“No. If I wanted to burn it down, I would have lighted a fire at the mill, not in the woods. If I wanted to burn it down, I would burn it down.” Mark stood before Barry’s desk, not defiant, not frightened. He waited.

“Where were you all night?”

“In the old house. I was reading about Norfolk, studying maps . . .”

“Never mind about that.” Barry drummed his fingers on his desk, pushed back the charts he had been studying, and stood up. “Listen to me, Mark. Some of them think you’re responsible for the fire, the dam, everything. I made the point you just made: if you had tried to burn down the mill, you could have done it easily enough without going through all that. The question is still open. The mill is off limits to you. So is the laboratory, and the boat works. Do you understand?”

Mark nodded. Explosives for river clearing were kept in the boat-works building.

“I was at the old house when the fire started,” Barry said suddenly, and his voice was very cold and hard. “I saw a curious thing. It looked like an eruption of some sort. I’ve thought a lot about it. It could have been an explosion, enough to start the landslide. Of course, no one could have seen it from the valley, and whatever noise it made would have been masked if it were underground even a little bit, and by the noise everyone was making fighting the fire.”

“Barry,” Mark said, interrupting him. “A few years ago you said something to me that was very important, and I believed you then and still believe you. You said you wouldn’t hurt me. Do you remember?” Barry nodded, still cold and watchful. “I say that to you now, Barry. These people are my people too, you know. I promise you I won’t ever try to hurt them. I have never done anything purposely to harm any of them, and I never will. I promise that.”

Barry watched him distrustfully, and Mark smiled softly. “I’ve never lied to you, you know. No matter what I had done, I admitted it if you asked. I’m not lying now.”

Abruptly Barry sat down again. “Why were you looking up Norfolk? What is Norfolk?”

“There was a naval base there, one of the biggest on the East Coast. When the end was coming, they must have put hundreds of ships into dry dock. The ocean levels have been dropping. Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Bay, it will be low there too, and those ships are high and dry — they called it mothballing them. I began to think of the metal in the ships. Stainless steel, copper, brass . . . Some of those ships held crews of a thousand men, with supplies for that many, medicines, test tubes, everything.”

Barry felt the doubts fading, and the nagging feeling of something not cleared up vanished as they talked of the possibilities of manning an expedition to Norfolk early in the spring. Only much later did he realize he had not asked the crucial questions: Had Mark started the fire, for whatever reason, and had he blasted loose the rocks that had slid down into the stream, for whatever reason?