Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

Chapter 10

A July haze hung over the valley, dimming outlines; heat shimmered the air above the fields. It was a day without hard edges. The breeze that moved through the valley was soft and warm. The corn was luxuriant, higher than a man’s head. The wheat was golden brown, responsive to any change in the wind; the entire field moved at once, as if it were a single organism rippling a muscle, relieving tension perhaps. Beyond the corn the land broke and tumbled down to meet the river, which looked smooth and unmoving. The river was crystal clear, but from the second floor of the hospital, by a trick of the haze-filtered light, the water became rust-colored and solid, metal dulled by neglect.

Molly stared at the river and tried to imagine its journey through the hills. She let her gaze drift back toward the dock and the boat there, but trees concealed it from the upper floor of the hospital. There was a film of sweat on her face and neck. She lifted her hair from the back of her neck where some of it clung, plastered to her skin.

“Nervous?” Miriam slipped her arm about Molly’s waist.

Molly rested her head against Miriam’s cheek for a second, then straightened again. “I might be.”

“I am,” Miriam said.

“Me too,” Martha said, and she moved to the window also, and put her arm through Molly’s. “I wish they hadn’t chosen us.”

Molly nodded. “But it won’t be for so long.” Martha’s body was hot against her, and she turned from the window. The apartment had been made from three adjoining hospital rooms with the partitions removed; it was long and narrow with six windows, and not one of them was admitting any breeze that late afternoon. Six cots lined the walls; they were narrow, white, austere.

“Let me do your hair now,” Melissa called from the far end of the room. She had been combing and braiding her own hair for the past half hour, and she turned with a flourish. Dressed in a short white tunic with a red sash, corn-straw sandals on her feet, she looked cool and lovely. Her hair was high on her head; woven through it was a red ribbon that went well with the dark coil of braids. The Miriam sisters were inventive and artistic, the style setters, and this was Melissa’s newest creation, which would be copied by the other sisters before the end of the week.

Martha laughed delightedly and sat down and watched Melissa’s skillful fingers start to arrange her hair. An hour later when they left their room, walking two by two, they moved like a single organism and looked as alike as the stalks of wheat.

Other small groups were starting to converge on the auditorium. The Louisa sisters waved and smiled; a group of Ralph brothers swept past in a run, their long hair held back by braided bands, Indian fashion; the Nora sisters stepped aside and let Miriam’s group pass. They looked awed and very respectful. Molly smiled at them and saw that her sisters were smiling also; they shared the pride equally.

As they turned onto the broader path that led to the auditorium steps, they saw several of the breeders peeking at them over the top of a rose hedge. The faces ducked out of sight, and the sisters turned as one, ignoring them, forgetting them instantly. There were the Barry brothers, Molly thought, and tried to pick out Ben. Six little Claras ran toward them, stopped abruptly, and stared at the Miriam sisters until they went up the stairs and into the auditorium.

The party was held in the new auditorium, where the chairs had been replaced by long tables that were being laden with delicacies usually served only at the annual celebration days: The Day of the First Born; Founding Day; The Day of the Flood . . . Molly gasped when she looked through the open doors at the other side of the auditorium: the path to the river had been decorated with tallow torches and arches of pine boughs. Another ceremony would take place at dockside, after the feast. Now music filled the auditorium and sisters and brothers danced at the far end and children scampered among them, playing their own games that appeared governed by random rules. Molly saw her smaller sisters intent on pursuit, and she smiled. Ten years ago that could have been she, and Miri, Melissa, Meg, and Martha. And Miriam would have been somewhere else, having been eluded again, wringing her hands in frustration or stamping her foot in anger that her little sisters were not behaving properly. Two years older than they, she carried her responsibility heavily.

Most of the women wore white tunics with gaudy sashes, and only the Susan sisters had chosen to dress in skirts that swept the floor as they whirled about, now joined hand to hand, now apart, like a flower opening and closing. The men wore tunics, longer and cut more severely than the women’s, and had knotted cords from which hung leather pouches, each one decorated with the symbol of the family of brothers to whom the wearer belonged. Here a stag head, there a coiled snake, or a bird in flight, or a tall pine tree . . .

The Jeremy brothers had worked out an intricate dance, more subdued than the flower dance, but requiring concentration and endurance. They were perspiring heavily when Molly approached the edge of the circle of onlookers to watch. There were six Jeremy brothers, and Jeremy was only two years older than the rest; there was no discernible difference between any of them. Molly couldn’t tell in the confusion of their twisting bodies which one was Jed, who would be one of her fellow travelers down the river of metal.

The music changed, and Molly and her sisters swept out to the floor. Dusk turned to night and the electric lights came on, the bulbs now covered with globes of blue, yellow, red, green. The music grew louder and more and more dancers spun around, while other groups of brothers and sisters lined up at the festive tables. The little Kirby brothers started to cry in unison, and someone took them away to be put to bed. The little Miriam sisters were quiet now, mouselike against a wall, eating cakes with their fingers; all had chosen pink cake with pink icing, which stuck to their fingers, their cheeks, their chins. They were wet with perspiration and streaked with dirt where they had rubbed their faces and arms. One of them was barefoot.

“Look at them!” Miri cried.

“They’ll outgrow it,” Miriam said, and for a moment Molly felt a stab of something she could not identify. Then the Miriam sisters rushed off in a group to the tables and consulted and disagreed on what to choose and finally ended up with plates filled with identical tidbits: lamb kebobs and sausage-filled pastries, sweet-potato sticks glazed with honey, whole green beans, bright and glistening with a vinegar sauce, tiny steaming biscuits.

Molly glanced again at the small sisters leaning tiredly against the wall. No more pink cakes with pink icing, she thought sadly. One of the little sisters smiled shyly at her and she smiled back, and then went with the others to find a seat, to feast and await the ceremonies.

Roger, the eldest of them all, was the master of ceremonies. He said, “A toast to our brothers and our sister who will venture forth at dawn to find — not new lands to conquer, nor adventures to prove their courage, nor riches of gold or silver, but rather that most priceless discovery of all — information. Information we all need, information that will make it possible for us to erupt into a thousand blooms, a million! Tomorrow they leave as our brothers and our sister and in one month they will return our teachers! Jed! Ben! Harvey! Thomas! Lewis! Molly! Come forward and let us toast you and the most priceless gift you will bring to us, your family!”

Molly felt her cheeks burn with pleasure as she made her way through the crowd, now standing and applauding wildly. At the front of the room she joined the others on stage and waited for the cheering and applause to die, and she saw her little sisters standing on chairs, clapping with abandon, their faces red, smeary — they were going to cry, she thought. They couldn’t contain such excitement much longer.

“And now,” Roger said, “for each of you we have a gift . . .”

Molly’s gift was a waterproof bag to carry her sketch pads and pencils and pens in. It was the first time she had ever owned something not shared by her sisters, something uniquely hers. She felt tears welling, and could not hear the rest of the ceremony, was not aware of the other gifts, and presently they were being led to the dock and the final surprise — a pennant flying from the mast of the small boat that would carry them to Washington. The pennant was the color of the midsummer sky, deep blue so clear that in daylight it would blend into the sky perfectly, and in the middle of it, a diagonal lightning blaze of gleaming silver. A canopy covered the forward section of the boat, and it too was blue and silver.

There was another toast, wine that tingled and made her head light, and then another, and now Roger was laughing as he said, “The party will continue, but our brave explorers will retire.” Jed shook his head, and Roger laughed again. “You have no choice, my brother. Your last toast was doctored, and within an hour you will be sound asleep, so you will start your trip fresh and rested. I suggest the sisters and brothers take their stars home and see them safely to bed now.”

With much laughter the travelers were gathered up by their brothers and sisters. Molly protested feebly as her sisters half led, half carried her back to their room.

“I’ll repack your things,” Miriam said, examining the gift bag. “How beautiful this is! Look, it is all carved . . .”

They undressed her and brushed her hair, and Miri caressed her back and rubbed her shoulders, and Melissa brushed fairy kisses on her neck as she unwound the ribbon from her hair.

Molly felt a pleasant inertia envelop her and she could only smile and sigh as her sisters prepared her for bed, and then two of them unrolled the floor mat and waited there as the others guided her to it, all of them laughing at her unsteady walk, the way she almost buckled at the knees, and her attempts to keep her eyes open. On the mat they caressed and delighted her until she floated away from them entirely, and then they carried her to her own cot and pulled the thin summer blanket over her, and Miri bent over and kissed her eyelids tenderly.

Chapter 11

By the end of the first hour, life in the boat had become routine. The shouts had been lost in the distance and there was only the quiet river and the silent woods and fields and the regular splash of oars.

For weeks they had been in training, and now all six were hardened and worked well together. Lewis, who had designed the boat, stood forward on guard against unexpected hazards. Three of the brothers and Molly rowed in the first hitch, and Ben sat forward, behind Lewis.

There was a covered section forward, with the canopy down now, and a permanently closed-in rear section with four bunks. The forward section could be closed as snugly as the rear. Every available inch of space had been used, mostly for food, extra clothes, medical supplies, and waterproof pouches folded neatly, to be filled with documents, maps, whatever they found of value.

Molly rowed and watched the shoreline. They had left the familiar section of the valley, with its cultivated fields; the land was changing. The valley narrowed, then widened, then narrowed again, with steeply rising cliffs to the left, wooded slopes on the right. In the silent morning the trees were unmoving; there was no sound except the splashing of oars.

Her sisters would be in the food-processing kitchens this week, Molly thought, as she watched the oar dip into the clear water. Laughing together, moving together. Perhaps they missed her already . . . She pulled steadily, lifted the oar, watched it dip again.

“Rock! Ten o’clock, twenty yards!” Lewis called.

They shifted course easily to give it a wide berth.

“Nine o’clock, twenty yards!”

Thomas, in front of Molly, was wide-shouldered, his hair the color of straw, and as straight as straw. A slight breeze lifted it and let it fall over and over. His muscles moved fluidly, and perspiration glazed him. Molly thought he would make a fine drawing, a study in musculature. He turned and said something to Harvey, across the boat from him, and they both laughed.

Now the sun was higher and the heat was in their faces, along with the breeze they created moving through the water, slowly, but steadily, smoothly. Molly could feel sweat on her upper lip. Soon they would have to stop to put the canopy in place. It would offer some wind resistance, but they had decided the pluses were greater than the minuses; the trip was planned to provide the maximum of safety and comfort, and neither was to be sacrificed to speed.

Others had gone down the river as far as the juncture with the Shenandoah. There were rocks ahead, then a smooth, long slide into the broader, and unknown, river. And that afternoon Molly would relinquish her place at the oars and start her real mission, a pictorial diary of the trip, including whatever changes in the maps were necessary.

They tried to use the sail, but the wind in the valley was capricious, and they decided to wait until later, perhaps on the Potomac, and try it there. They stopped and set up the canopy and rested, then returned to the oars, and now Molly sat alone, her sketch pad and the river maps on the seat beside her. Her hands felt stiff and she was content to sit quietly. Finally she started to sketch.

They came to the first rapids later that afternoon, and navigated them without difficulty. They joined the Shenandoah and turned north, and when they rested, they were all subdued and even Jed had nothing to laugh about, no jokes to make.

They slept in the boat, riding gently on the water. Molly thought of her sisters, now in their narrow white beds, the mat rolled up and put away. She fought down tears of loneliness. A high breeze stirred the treetops and she imagined they were whispering. She longed to reach out and touch one of the brothers; it mattered little which one of them. She sighed, and heard someone whisper her name. It was Jed. He slipped into her narrow bunk, and with their arms wrapped tightly about each other, they fell asleep.

On the second night they all paired off and comforted one another before they were able to sleep.

The next day they were forced to a stop by rapids and a waterfall. “It isn’t on the map at all,” Molly said, standing on the bank with Lewis. The river had been wide and easy, the valley heavily overgrown with bushes and low trees where once corn and wheat had grown. Then the cliffs moved toward the water, which narrowed and deepened and ran swifter, and sometime since the maps had been printed one of the cliffs had shuddered and dropped massive boulders and debris that now choked the river as far ahead as they could see. The water had spread, filled the valley from side to side. They could hear the thunder of a waterfall ahead.

“We should be nearly at the juncture of the north and south branches of the Shenandoah,” Molly said. She turned to look at the cliffs. “Probably a couple of miles at the most, over there.” She pointed up the cliff that overshadowed them.

Lewis nodded. “We’ll have to go back until we find a place to get the boat out of the water, go overland.”

Molly consulted her map. “Look, this road. It comes nearly to the river back there, then goes over a couple of hills, about three miles, then back down to the river. That should clear the falls. There’s nothing but cliffs on this side between us and the north branch. No road, no trail, nothing.”

Lewis ordered lunch, and after they had eaten and rested they turned the boat and began to row against the current, keeping close to shore, watching for a sign of the road. The current was fast here, and they realized for the first time how hard it would be on the return trip, fighting the current all the way home.

Molly sighted the break in the hills where the old road was. They pulled in closer and found a spot where the boat could be hauled out of the water, and prepared for an overland trek. They had brought wheels and axles and axes to cut trees to make a wagon, and four of the brothers began to unpack what they needed.

Folded neatly away were heavy long pants and boots and long-sleeved shirts, protection more against scratches from bushes than cold, which was not expected while they were gone. Molly and Lewis changed clothes hurriedly and left to look for the best way to get through the scrub growth to the road.

They would have to sleep in the woods that night, Molly thought suddenly, and a shudder passed through her. Her sisters would look up from their work uneasily, exchange glances, and return to their chores reluctantly, somehow touched by the same dread she felt. If she were within reach, the others would have come to her, unable to explain why, but irresistibly drawn together.

They had to turn back several times before they found a way the boat could be taken to the road. When they returned to the river, the others had the flat wagon prepared and the boat lashed in place. There was a small fire, on which water was heating for tea. They were all dressed in long pants and boots now.

“We can’t stop,” Lewis said impatiently, glancing at the fire. “We have about four hours until dark, and we should get to the road and make camp before then.”

Ben said quietly, “We can start while Molly has tea and cheese. She is tired and should rest.” Ben was the doctor. Lewis shrugged.

Molly watched as they strapped on the harnesses. She held a mug of tea and a piece of cheese the color of old ivory, and at her feet the fire burned lower. She moved away from it, too warm in the heavy pants and shirt. They were starting to move the boat, four of them pulling together, Thomas pushing from behind. He glanced back at her and grinned, and the boat heaved over a rock, settled, and moved steadily to the left and upward.

Molly took her tea and cheese to the edge of the river, pulled off her boots, and sat with her feet in the tepid water. Each of them had a reason for being on this trip, she knew, and felt not at all superfluous. The Miriam sisters were the only ones who could remember and reproduce exactly what they saw. From earliest childhood they had been trained to develop this gift. It was regrettable that the Miriam sisters were slightly built; she had been chosen for this one skill alone, not for strength and other abilities, as the brothers had been, but that she was as necessary as any of the others was not doubted by anyone.

The water felt cooler to her feet now, and she began to strip off her clothing. She waded out and swam, letting the water flow through her hair, cleanse her skin, soothe her. When she finished, the fire was almost out and, using her mug, she doused it thoroughly, dressed again, and then began to follow the trail left by the brothers and the heavy boat.

Suddenly and without any warning she felt she was being watched. She stopped, listening, trying to see into the woods, but there was no sound in the forest except the high, soft rustling of leaves. She whirled about. Nothing. She drew in her breath sharply and started to walk again. It was not fear, she told herself firmly, and hurried. There wasn’t anything to be afraid of. No animals, nothing. Only burrowing insects had survived: ants, termites . . . She tried to keep her mind on ants — they were the pollinators now — and she found herself looking upward again and again at the swaying trees.

The heat was oppressive, and it seemed the trees were closing in, always closing in, yet never getting any closer. It was being alone for the first time in her life, she told herself. Really alone, out of reach, out of touch. It was loneliness that made her hurry through the undergrowth, now crushed down, hacked out of the way. And she thought, this was why men went mad in the centuries gone by: they went mad from loneliness, from never knowing the comfort of brothers and sisters who were as one, with the same thoughts, the same longings, desires, joys.

She was running, her breath coming in gasps, and she forced herself to stop and breathe deeply a few minutes. She stood leaning against a tree and waited until her pulse was quieter, then she began to walk again, briskly, not letting herself run. But not until she saw the brothers ahead did the fear subside.

That night they made camp in the middle of the rotten roadway deep in the forest. The trees closed over them, blotting out the sky, and their small fire seemed feeble and pale in the immensity of the darkness that pressed in from all sides and above. Molly lay rigidly still, listening for something, anything, for a sound that said they were not alone in the world, that she wasn’t alone in the world. But there was no sound.

The next afternoon Molly sketched the brothers. She was sitting alone, enjoying the sun and the water, which had become smooth and deep. She thought of the brothers, how different they were one from another, and her fingers began to draw them in a way she never had drawn before, never had seen before.

She liked the way Thomas looked. His muscles were long and smooth, his cheekbones high and prominent, neatly dividing his face. She drew his face, using only straight lines that suggested the planes of his cheeks, the narrow sharp nose, the pointed chin. He looked young, younger than the Miriam sisters, although they were nineteen and he was twenty-one.

She closed her eyes and visualized Lewis. Very big, over six feet. Very broad. She drew a rocklike form, a long head and a face that seemed to flow, rounded, fleshy with no bony framework, except for his large nose. The nose didn’t satisfy her. She closed her eyes and after a moment rubbed out the nose she had drawn and put one back that was slightly off center, a bit crooked. Everything was too exaggerated, she knew, but somehow, in overdoing it, she had caught him.

Harvey was tall and rather thin. And great long feet, she thought, smiling at the figure emerging on her pad. Big hands, round eyes, like rings. You just knew, she thought, he would be awkward, stumble over things, knock things down.

Jed was easy. Rotund, every line a curve. Small, almost delicate hands, small bones. Small features centered in his face, all too close together.

Ben was the hardest. Well proportioned, except for his head, which was larger than the others’, he was not so beautifully muscled as Thomas. And his face was merely a face, nothing outstanding about it. She drew his eyebrows heavier than they should have been, and made him squint, the way he did when he listened closely. She narrowed her eyes studying it. It wasn’t right. Too hard. Too firm, too much character, she thought. In ten years he might look more like the sketch than he did now.

“Rocks! Twelve o’clock, thirty yards!” Lewis called. Guiltily Molly flipped the sketch pad to a clean page and began to draw the river and its hazards.

Chapter 12

Ben was bringing his medical notes up to date. Lewis was finishing his daily log. Thomas sat in the rear of the boat and stared back the way they had come. Ben had been watching him closely for the past three days, uncertain what to expect, not liking the change in attitude that Thomas wasn’t even trying to hide any longer.

He wrote: “Separation from our brothers and sisters has been harder on all of us than we expected. Suggest future parties send pairs of likes whenever possible.”

If Thomas became ill, he thought, then what? Even back in the hospital they had no provisions for caring for the mentally ill. Insanity was a community threat, a threat to the brothers and sisters who suffered as much as the affected one. Early on, the family had decided that no community threat could be allowed to survive. If any brother or sister became mentally ill, his or her presence was not to be tolerated. And that, Ben told himself sharply, was the law. Their small group could not afford to lose a pair of hands, though, and that was the reality. And when reality and law clashed, then what?

After a glance at Molly, Ben added another note: “Suggest parties be made up equally of males and females.” She had been more lonely than any of them, he knew. He had watched her fill page after page of her sketchbook, and wondered if that had substituted in some way for the absence of her sisters. Perhaps when Thomas was confronted with his real work he would no longer stare for long periods and start when anyone touched him or called his name.

“We’ll have to change our food-rationing schedule,” Lewis said. “We counted on five days only for this leg of the trip, and it’s been eight. You want to do the food count, Ben?”

Ben nodded. “Tomorrow when we tie up I’ll make an inventory. We might have to cut down.” They shouldn’t, he knew. He made another note. “Suggest double caloric needs.”

Molly’s hand slipped out from under her cheek and dangled over the side of her bunk. Ben had intended to lie with her that night, but it didn’t matter. They were all too tired even for the comfort of sex. Ben sighed and put his notebook down. The last light was fading from the sky. There was only the soft slap of wavelets against the side of the boat and the sound of deep breathing from the rear section. There was a touch of chill in the air. Ben waited until Thomas was asleep, then he lay down.

Molly dreamed of turning over in the boat, of being unable to get out from under it, of searching for a place to surface where the boat would not cut her off from the air above. The water was pale gold, it was turning her skin golden, and she knew that if she let herself remain still for even one moment she would become a golden statue on the bottom of the river forever. She swam harder, desperate to breathe, aching, flailing, yielding to terror. Then hands reached for her, her own hands, as white as snow, and she tried to grasp them. The hands, dozens of them now, closed on nothing, opened, closed. They missed her again and again, and finally she screamed, “Here I am!” And the water rushed to fill her. She started to sink, frozen, only her mind churning with fear, forming over and over the scream of protest her lips were unable to utter.

“Molly, hush. It’s all right.” A quiet voice in her ear penetrated finally, and she jerked awake from the dream. “It’s all right, Molly. You’re all right.”

It was very dark. “Ben?” Molly whispered.

“Yes. You were dreaming.”

She shuddered and moved over so he could lie beside her. She was shivering; the night air had become very cool since they had turned in to the Potomac. Ben was warm, his arm tight about her, and his other hand warm and gentle as he caressed her cold body.

They made no sound to awaken the others as their bodies united in the sexual embrace, and afterward Molly slept again, hard and tight against him.

All the next day the signs of great devastation grew: houses had burned, others had been toppled by storms. The suburbs were being overgrown with shrubs and trees. Debris made the trip harder; sunken boats and collapsed bridges turned the river into a maze where their progress was measured in feet and inches. Again they had found it impossible to use the sail.

Lewis and Molly were together in the prow of the boat, alert for submerged dangers, sometimes calling out in unison, sometimes singly, warning against hazards, neither of them silent for more than a minute or two at a time.

Suddenly Molly pointed and cried, “Fish! There are fish!”

They stared at the school of fish in wonder, and the boat drifted until Lewis shouted, “Obstacle! Eleven o’clock, ten yards!” They pulled the oars hard and the school of fish vanished, but the gloom had lifted. While they rowed, they talked of ways of netting fish for dinner, of drying fish for the return trip, of the excitement in the valley when they learned that fish had survived after all.

None of the ruins they had seen from the river prepared them for the scene of desolation they came upon on the outskirts of Washington. Molly had seen photographs in books of bombed-out cities — Dresden, Hiroshima — and the destruction here seemed every bit as total. The streets were buried under rubble, here and there vines covered the heaps of concrete, and trees had taken root high above the ground, binding the piles of bricks and blocks and marble together. They stayed on the river until it became impassable, and this time the rapids were created by man-made obstacles: old rusting automobiles, a demolished bridge, a graveyard of buses . . .

“It was worthless,” Thomas muttered. “All of this. Worthless.”

“Maybe not,” Lewis said. “There have to be vaults, basements, fireproof storage rooms . . . Maybe not.”

“Worthless,” Thomas said again.

“Let’s tie up and try to figure out just where we are,” Ben said. It was nearly dusk; they couldn’t do anything until morning. “I’ll start dinner. Molly, can you make out anything from the maps?”

She shook her head, her eyes fixed, staring at the nightmare scene before them. Who had done this? Why? It was as if the people had converged here to destroy this place that had failed them in the end so completely.

“Molly!” Ben’s voice sharpened. “There are still a few landmarks, aren’t there?”

She stirred and abruptly turned away from the city. Ben looked at Thomas, and from him to Harvey, who was studying the river ahead.

“They did it on purpose,” Harvey said. “In the end they must have all been mad, obsessed with the idea of destruction.”

Lewis said, “If we can locate ourselves, we’ll find the vaults. All this” — he waved his hand — “was done by savages. It’s all surface damage. The vaults will be intact.”

Molly was turning slowly, examining the landscape in a panoramic survey. She said, “There should be two more bridges, and that will put us at the foot of Capitol Hill, I think. Another two or three miles.”

“Good,” Ben said quietly. “Good. Maybe it isn’t this bad in the center. Thomas, give me a hand, will you?”

Throughout the night the boat moved this way and that as different people, tired but unable to sleep, crept about restlessly, seeking solace from one another.

Before dawn they were all up. They ate quickly and by the first light were on their way over the rubble toward the center of Washington. It appeared the destruction of the inner city was in fact less than on the fringes. Then they realized that here the buildings had been spaced farther apart; open land gave the illusion of less complete ruin. Also, it was obvious that someone had tried to clear away some of the debris.

“Let’s split into pairs here,” Lewis said, taking command once more. “Meet back here at noon. Molly and Jed, over there. Ben and Thomas, that way. Harvey and I will start over there.” He pointed as he spoke, and the others nodded. Molly had identified the locations for them: the Senate Office Building was up there; the Post Office Building; the General Services Building . . .

“We were naïve,” Thomas said suddenly as he and Ben approached the ruined Post Office Building. “We thought there would be a few buildings standing with open doors. All we had to do was walk in, pull out a drawer or two, and get everything we wanted. Be heroes when we got home. Stupid, wasn’t it?”

“We’ve already found out a lot,” Ben said quietly.

“What we’ve learned is that this isn’t the way,” Thomas said sharply. “We aren’t going to accomplish anything.”

They circled the building. The front of it was blocked; around the side, one wall was down almost completely; the insides were charred and gutted.

The fourth building they tried to enter had burned also, but only parts of it had been destroyed. Here they found offices, desks, files. “Small business records!” Thomas said suddenly, whirling away from the files to look at Ben excitedly.

Ben shook his head. “So?”

“We came through a room with telephone directories! Where was it?” Again Ben looked mystified, and Thomas laughed. “Telephone directories! They’ll list warehouses! Factories! Storage depots!”

They found the room where several directories lay in a pile on the floor, and Thomas began to examine one intently. Ben picked up another of the books and started to open it.

“Careful!” Thomas said sharply. “That paper’s brittle. Let’s get out of here.”

“Will that help?” Ben asked, pointing to the directory Thomas carried.

“Yes, but we need the central office of the telephone company. Maybe Molly can find it.”

That afternoon, the next day, and the next the search for useful information continued. Molly updated her Washington map, locating the buildings that contained anything of use, noting the dangerous buildings, the flooded sections — many of the basements were filled with evil-smelling water. She drew many of the skeletons they kept stumbling over. She sketched them as dispassionately as she did the buildings and streets.

On the fourth day they found the central telephone offices, and Thomas stationed himself in one of the rooms and began to go through the directories of the eastern cities, carefully lifting out pages they could use. Ben stopped worrying about him.

On the fifth, and sixth days it rained, a steady gray rain that flooded the low-lying areas and brought water above the basement level in some of the buildings. If the rain kept up very long, the whole city would flood, as it evidently had done over and over in the past. Then the skies cleared and the wind shifted and drove in from the north, and they shivered and continued the search.

As she drew, Molly thought: millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, all gone. She drew the ruined Washington Monument, the broken statue of Lincoln and the words of the inscription that remained on the pedestal: One nation indi . . . She drew the skeletal frame of the Supreme Court Building . . .

They didn’t move camp to the city, but slept aboard the boat every night. They were amassing too much material to take back with them; every evening when they left the city they took back loads of records, books, maps, charts, and after the evening meal each of them went over his own stack of material and tried to sort it. They made extensive notes about the condition of the buildings they explored, the contents, the usefulness of the material in them. The next expedition would be able to go straight to work.

There were the skeletons, some of them on top of the rubble, some half buried, others in the buildings. How easily they could ignore them, Ben mused. Another species, extinct now, a pity. Pass on.

On the ninth evening they made the final choices of what to pack in the boat. They found an intact room in a partially destroyed building and stored the surplus material there for the next group.

On the tenth day they started for home, this time rowing against the current, with a fresh breeze blowing from the northeast, puffing the large single sail they had not been able to use until now. Lewis attached the tiller, and the wind drove them up the river.

Fly, fly! Molly silently urged the boat. She stood in the prow and sang out the hazards, some of them almost before they came into sight. There was a tree stump there, she remembered; and again, a train engine; a sand bar . . . In the afternoon the wind shifted and blew in from due north, and they had to take down the sail or risk being driven onto shore. Gradually the excitement they had all felt earlier gave way to dogged determination, and finally to mindless patience, and when they stopped for the night they all knew they had traveled little more than half the distance they had traveled on this leg of their journey toward the city.

That night Molly dreamed of dancing figures. Joyously she ran toward them, arms outstretched, her feet not touching the ground at all as she raced to join them. Then the air thickened and shimmered and the figures were distorted, and when one of them looked at her, the outline of her face was all wrong, her features wrong, one eye too high, her mouth bent out of shape. Molly stopped, staring at the grotesque face. She was drawn toward it relentlessly through the thick air that changed everything. She struggled and tried to hang back, but her feet moved, her body followed, and she could feel the resisting air close about her suffocatingly. The caricature of her own face grimaced, and the figure raised snake-like arms toward her. Molly came wide awake suddenly, and for several moments didn’t know where she was. Someone was shouting.

It was Thomas, she realized, and Ben and Lewis were struggling with him, getting him out of his bunk, toward the bow of the boat, the canopied section. Harvey moved to the rear and gradually quiet returned, but it was a long time before Molly could go back to sleep.

By the third day the return trip had turned into a nightmare. The wind became gusty, more dangerous than helpful, and they no longer tried to use the sail. The current was swifter, the water muddy. It must have rained much more inland than it had in Washington. Also, the air had a chill that persisted until midday, when the sun became too hot for the warm clothing they had put on earlier. By sundown it was too cool for the lighter garments they had changed into at the lunch break. They were always too hot or too cold.

Ben and Lewis withdrew from the others and watched the sunset from a rise over the river. “They’re hungry, that’s part of the trouble,” Ben said. Lewis nodded. “Also, Molly has started her menstrual period and she won’t let anyone near her. She nearly bit poor Harvey’s head off last night.”

“I’m not worried about Harvey,” Lewis said.

“I know. I don’t know if Thomas is going to make it or not. I tranquilized him at dinner. I don’t know from one day to the next what to expect from him.”

“We can’t carry a dead weight home with us,” Lewis said grimly. “Even with strict rationing, food’s going to be a problem. If he’s tranquilized, he’ll still need to eat, someone else will have to row for him .

“We’ll take him back with us,” Ben said, and suddenly he was in command. “We’ll need to study him, even if he goes home in restraints.”

For a moment they were both silent. “It’s the separation, isn’t it?” Lewis looked south, toward home. “No one predicted anything like this. We’re not like them! We have to scrap the past, the history books, everything. No one predicted this,” he said again quietly. “If we get back, we have to make them understand what happens to us away from our own kind.”

“We’ll get back,” Ben said. “And that’s why I need Thomas. Who could have foreseen this? Now that we’re aware of how different we are from them, we’ll be looking harder. I wonder where else differences will show up when we’re not expecting them to.”

Lewis stood up. “Coming back?”

“In a minute.”

He watched Lewis slip down the embankment and board the boat; then he looked at the sky once more. Men had gone out there, he thought in wonder, and he couldn’t think why. Singly and in small groups they had gone into strange lands, across wide seas, had climbed mountains where no human foot had ever trod. And he couldn’t think why they had done those things. What impulse had driven them from their own kind to perish alone, or among strangers? All those ruined houses they had seen, like the old Sumner house in the valley, designed for one, two, three people, lived in by so few people, deliberately isolating themselves from others of their own kind. Why?

The family used isolation for punishment. A disobedient child left alone in a small room for ten minutes emerged contrite, all traces of rebellion eradicated. They had used isolation to punish David. The doctors knew the full story of the last months that David had lived among them. When he became a threat, they had isolated him permanently, punishment enough. And yet those other men of the distant past had sought isolation, and Ben couldn’t think why.

Chapter 13

For two days it had been raining; the wind was gusting at thirty knots and increasing. “We have to get the boat out of the water,” Lewis said.

They had covered the entire boat with oiled canvas, but water seeped in through cracks and now and then a wave lapped over the side and spilled down into the boat. More and more frequently something heavy rubbed against the boat or crashed into it.

Molly pumped and visualized the river behind them. There had been a bank hours back, but since then there had been no place they could land safely.

“An hour,” Lewis said, as if answering her thoughts. “Shouldn’t take more than an hour to get to that low bank.”

“We can’t go back!” Thomas shouted.

“We can’t stay here!” Harvey snapped at him. “Don’t be an idiot! We’re going to get rammed!”

“I won’t go back!”

“What do you think, Ben?” Lewis asked.

They were huddled together in the prow; Molly was in the midsection manning the pump doggedly, trying to pretend her aching muscles away. The boat shuddered under a new impact, and Ben nodded.

“Can’t stay here. Not going to be a picnic getting back downriver.”

“Let’s get at it,” Lewis said, and stood up.

They were all wet and cold, and afraid. They were within sight of the swirling waters of the Shenandoah where it joined the Potomac, and the eddies that had nearly swamped them on the first leg of their trip now threatened to break the boat apart. They could get no closer to the Shenandoah until the flood subsided.

“Thomas, relieve Molly at the pump. And, Thomas, remember, you don’t think of anything but that pump! And you keep it going!”

Molly got up, continuing to pump until Thomas was in place, ready to take over without interruption. As she started for the rear oar, Lewis said, “You take the prow.” They put the oars back in the locks. The rain pounded them, and Thomas pumped harder. The water was sloshing about their feet, and when the lines to shore were untied the boat swung sharply into the river. The water inside the boat surged back and forth.

“Log! Coming fast! Eight o’clock!” Molly yelled.

They turned the boat, and it shot forward and they were flashing down the river, keeping abreast of the log that was off to their left.

“Stump! Twelve o’clock! Twenty yards!” Molly hardly had time to get the words out. They jerked the boat to the left and flew past the stump. The flood had changed everything. The stump had been ashore when they passed it before. The current became swifter, and they fought to get closer in. “Tree! One o’clock! Twenty yards!” They veered out again and now the log that was pacing them tumbled and came dangerously close. “Log! Nine o’clock! Three yards!”

And on they went in the blinding rain, flying past a newly created shoreline, staying even with the massive log that turned and tumbled alongside them. Suddenly Molly saw the low spot and cried, “Land! Two o’clock, twenty yards!” They drove in sharply to shore. The boat dragged on something hidden in the muddy water and the front half swung out toward the river. It rocked violently and water sloshed in over the side. Lewis and Ben quickly jumped out and, with the brown water swirling about their chests, waded toward shore, dragging the boat in after them. The boat grated over mud and stones, and now the others jumped into the water and dragged the boat higher until it was beached, tilted, but for the moment safe. Molly lay in the mud panting until Lewis said, “We’ve got to get it higher. The river’s rising fast.”

It rained throughout the night and they had to move the boat a second time; then the rain stopped and the sun shone, and that night there was a frost.

Ben cut the rations again. The storm had cost them five more days, and the river was swifter when they returned to it, their progress slower than ever.

Thomas was in the worst shape, Ben thought. He was withdrawn, sunken in depression from which no one could rouse him. Jed was next hardest hit. In time, no doubt, his symptoms would match Thomas’s. Harvey was irritable; he had turned sullen and suspicious of everyone. He suspected that Ben and Lewis were stealing his food, and he watched them intently at mealtime. Molly was haggard, and she looked haunted; her eyes kept turning toward the south and home, and she seemed to be listening, always listening. Lewis was intent on maintaining the boat, but when he stopped working, that same look was on his big face: listening, watching, waiting. Ben couldn’t assess the changes in himself. He knew they were there. Often he would look up suddenly, certain someone had spoken his name softly, only to find no one nearby, no one paying any attention to him. Sometimes he had the feeling that there was a danger he couldn’t see, something hanging over him that made him look to the sky, search the trees. But there was never anything to see. . . .

He wondered suddenly when all sexual activity had stopped. In Washington, or immediately after they left. He had decided it wasn’t working for him. It was too hard to pretend the other men were his brothers; finally, it had been too unsatisfactory, too frustrating. Somehow it had been better with Molly if only because no pretense had been necessary, but even that had failed. Two people trying to become one, neither quite knowing what the other needed or wanted. Or maybe it was hunger that killed the sexual appetite. He wrote in his notebooks.

Molly, watching him, felt as if a thick clear wall separated her from every living thing on earth. Nothing could get through the wall, nothing could touch her in any way, and where the feeling had aroused terror, never fully dormant any longer, now it simply bemused her to think of it. Every day they got closer to home, and curiously it seemed less from their own efforts than from an irresistible pull. They were powerless not to return home. The pull was steady, dragging them back just as they had dragged the boat up the bank to save it from the flood. Their every act was instinctive. And the terror? She didn’t know its source, only that waves of terror coursed through her unexpectedly, and when they did, she felt weak and cold. She could feel her facial muscles tighten during those times, and she was aware of the way her heart leaped, then paused, then raced.

And often when she had been at the oars for a long time, something else happened, and she felt a release. At those times strange visions came to her, strange thoughts that seemed untranslatable into words. She looked about in wonder and the world she saw was unfamiliar, the words she would have used to describe it useless, and only color would do, color and line and light. The terror was stilled, and a gentle peace filled her. Gradually the peace would give way to fatigue and hunger and fear, and then she could mock herself and the visions, and even while mocking, yearn for it all to happen again.

Sometimes when she was forward, watching for hazards, it was almost as if she were alone with the river that seemed to have a voice, and infinite wisdom. The voice murmured too softly to make out the words, but the rhythms were unmistakable: it was speech. One day she wept because she could not understand what it was saying to her. Ben’s hand on her shoulder roused her, and she stared at him blankly.

“Did you hear it too?” she asked, keeping her voice as soft as the river’s.

“What?” He sounded too brusque, too harsh, and she pulled away. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I’m just tired.”

“Molly, I heard nothing! And you heard nothing! We’re pulling in to rest, stretch our legs. You get some tea.”

“All right,” she said, and started around him. But then she paused. “What was it we heard, Ben? It isn’t the river, is it?”

“I told you I heard nothing!” He turned away from her and stood stiffly in the prow of the boat to guide the men at the oars in to shore.

When they turned the last curve in the river and came upon the familiar fields, they had been away from their brothers and sisters for forty-nine days. Thomas and Jed were both drugged into insensibility. The others rowed numbly, starved, dull-eyed, obeying a command stronger than the body’s command to stop. When small boats approached and hands took the lines and towed them to the dock, they continued to stare ahead, not believing yet, still in a recurring dream where this had happened repeatedly.

Molly was pulled to her feet and led ashore. She stared at her sisters, who were strangers to her. And this too was a recurring dream, a nightmare. She swayed, and was grateful for the blackness that descended on her.

The sunshine was soft in the room when Molly opened her eyes; it was very early morning and the air was cool and fresh. There were flowers everywhere. Asters and chrysanthemums, purples, yellows, creamy whites. There were dahlias the size of dinner plates, shocking pink, scarlet. The bed was absolutely still, no water lapping about it, no rocking motions. No odors of sweat and moldy clothing. She felt clean and warm and dry.

“I thought I heard you,” someone said.

Molly looked at the other side of the bed. Miri, or Meg, or . . . She couldn’t tell which one.

“Martha has gone for your breakfast,” the girl said.

Miriam joined them and sat on the edge of Molly’s bed. “How are you now?”

“I’m all right. I’ll get up.”

“No, of course you won’t get up. Breakfast first, then a rubdown and a manicure, and anything else we can think of that will make you more comfortable, and then if you don’t fall asleep again, and if you still want to get up, then you may.” Miriam laughed gently at her as Molly started to rise and sank back down again.

“You’ve been sleeping for two days,” said Miri, or Meg, or whoever it was. “Barry’s been here four times to check on you. He said you need to sleep all you can, and eat all you can.”

There were dim memories of rousing, of drinking broth, of being bathed, but the memories refused to come into sharp focus.

“Are the others all right?” she asked.

“They’re all fine,” Miriam said soothingly.

“Thomas?”

“He’s in the hospital, but he’ll be fine too.”

For many days they babied her; her blistered hands healed and her back stopped aching, and she regained some of the weight she had lost.

But she had changed, she thought, studying herself in the large mirror at the end of the room. Of course, she was still thin and gaunt. She looked at Miri’s smooth face, and knew the difference lay deeper than that. Miri looked empty. When the animation faded, when she was no longer laughing or talking, there was nothing there. Her face became a mask that hid nothing.

“We’ll never let you out of sight again!” Martha whispered, coming up behind her. The others echoed it vehemently.

“I thought of you every day, almost every minute,” Miri said.

“And we all thought of you together each evening after dinner. We just sat here in a circle on the mat and thought of you,” Melissa said.

“Especially when it got so long,” Miri said in a whisper. “We were so afraid. We kept calling you and calling you, silently, but all of us together. Calling you home over and over.”

“I heard you,” Molly said. Her voice sounded almost harsh. She saw Miriam shake her head at the sisters, and they fell silent. “We all heard you calling. You brought us home,” Molly said, softening her voice with an effort.

They hadn’t asked her anything about the trip, about Washington, about her sketchbooks, which they had unpacked and must have looked at. Several times she had started to speak of the river, the ruins, and each time she had failed. There was no way she could make them understand. Presently she would have to get to work on the sketches, using them as guides and drawing in detail what she had seen, what it had been like from start to finish. But she didn’t want to speak of it. Instead they talked of the valley and what had happened in the seven weeks of Molly’s absence. Nothing, she thought. Nothing at all. Everything was exactly as it always had been.

The sisters had been excused from work in order to speed Molly’s recovery. They chatted and gossiped and caught up on mending and took walks and read together, and as Molly’s strength returned, they played together on the mat in the middle of the room. Molly took no part in their play. Toward the end of the week, when they dragged the mat out and opened it, Miriam poured small glasses of amber wine and they toasted Molly and drew her to the mat with them. Her head was spinning pleasantly and she looked at Miriam, who smiled at her.

How beautiful the sisters are, she thought, how silky their hair, and smooth their skin; each body was unmarred, flawless.

“You’ve been away so long,” Miriam whispered.

“Something’s still down there on the river,” Molly said foolishly, wanting to weep.

“Bring it home, darling. Reach out and bring back all the parts of you.”

And slowly she reached out for the other part of herself, the part that had watched and listened and had brought her peace. That was the part that had built the clear hard wall, she thought distantly. The wall had been built to protect her, and now she was tearing it down again.

She felt she was speeding down the river, flying over the water, now swirling brown and muddy and dangerous, now smooth and deep blue-green and inviting, now white foam as it shattered over rocks . . . She sped down the river and tried to find that other self, to submerge it and become whole again with her sisters . . . Over her the trees murmured and beneath her the water whispered back, and she was between them, not touching either, and she knew that when she found that other self she would have to kill it, to destroy it totally, or the whispers would never go away. And she thought of the peace she had found, and the visions she had seen.

Not yet! she cried silently, and stopped her race down the river, and was once more in the room with her sisters. Not yet, she thought again, quietly. She opened her eyes and smiled at Miriam, who was watching her anxiously.

“Is it all right now?” Miriam asked.

“Everything is fine,” Molly said, and somewhere she thought she could hear that other voice murmur softly before it faded away. She reached out and put her arms about Miriam’s body and drew her down to the mat and stroked her back, her hip, her thigh. “Everything is fine,” she whispered again.

Later, when the others slept, she stood shivering by the window and looked out at the valley. Autumn was very early. Each year it came a little earlier than the previous year. But it was warm in the large room; her chill was not caused by the season or the night air. She thought of the mat play and tears stood in her eyes. The sisters hadn’t changed. The valley was unchanged. And yet everything was different. She knew something had died. Something else had come alive, and it frightened her and isolated her in a way that distance and the river had not been able to do.

She looked at the dim forms on the beds and wondered if Miriam suspected. Molly’s body had responded; she had laughed and wept with the others, and if there had been one part of her not involved, one part alive and watchful, it had not interfered.

She could have done it, she thought. She could have destroyed that other part with Miriam’s help, and the help of the sisters. She should have, she thought, and shivered again. Her thoughts were chaotic; there was something that had come to live within her, something that was vaguely threatening, and yet could give her peace as nothing else could. The beginnings of insanity, she thought wildly. She would become incoherent, scream at nothing, try to do violence to others or to herself. Or maybe she was going to die. Eternal peace. But what she had felt was not simply the absence of pain and fear, but the peace that comes after a great accomplishment, a fulfillment.

And she knew it was important that she let the visions come, that she find time to be alone in order to allow them to fill her. She thought of the sisters despairingly: they would never permit her to be alone again. Together they made a whole; the absence of one of them left the others incomplete. They would call and call her.

Chapter 14

Now the harvest had been gathered; apples hung red and heavy on the trees, and the maples blazed like torches against endless blue skies. Sycamores and birches burned gold, and the sumac’s red deepened until it looked almost black. Every morning each blade of grass was edged in frost; it gleamed and glistened until it was melted by the rising sun. The passion of the autumn colors never had been so intense, Molly thought. How the light under the maples changed! And the pale glow that surrounded the sycamores!

“Molly?” Miriam’s voice roused her from the window, and she turned reluctantly. “Molly, what are you doing?”

“Nothing. Thinking of the work for today.”

Miriam paused. “Will it take you much longer? We miss you.”

“I don’t think so,” Molly said, and started for the door. Miriam moved slightly; her movement was enough to make Molly stop again. “Another two or three weeks,” Molly said quickly, not wanting Miriam’s hand on her arm.

Miriam nodded, and the moment passed when she could have touched Molly, could have held her. She felt baffled. Again and again when she would have embraced Molly, the moment passed, just as it now had, and they stood apart, not touching.

Molly left her in the large room, and presently Miriam walked to the hospital. “Are you too busy?” she asked, standing in the doorway to Ben’s office. “I would like to talk with you.”

“Miriam?” The inflection was automatic, as was her slight nod. Only Miriam would come alone; a younger sister would have been accompanied by her. “Come in. It’s about Molly, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” She closed the door and sat down opposite his desk. His desk was covered with papers, notes, his medical notebook that he had carried on the trip with him. She looked from the papers to the man, and thought he was different too. Like Molly. Like all of them who had gone away.

“You told me to come back if it didn’t get better,” she said. “She’s worse than before. She’s bringing unhappiness to all the sisters. Can’t you do something for her?”

Ben sighed and leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. “It’s going to take time.”

Miriam shook her head. “You said that before. How is Thomas, and Jed? How are you?”

“We’re all coming around,” Ben said, smiling slightly. “She will too, Miriam. Believe me, she will.”

Miriam leaned toward him. “I don’t believe you. I don’t think she wants to come back to us. She’s resisting us. I wish she hadn’t come back at all if this is how she’s going to be from now on. It’s too hard on the other sisters.” She had become very pale, and her voice shook; she turned away from him.

“I’ll speak to her,” Ben said.

Miriam drew a piece of paper from her pocket. She unfolded it and put it on his desk. “Look at that. What does it mean?”

They were the caricatures Molly had sketched of the brothers early in the trip. Ben studied them, the one of himself in particular. Was he really that grim-looking? That determined? And surely his eyebrows were not that heavy and menacing?

“She’s mocking us! Mocking all of you. She has no right to make fun of our brothers like that,” Miriam said. “She’s watching all the time, watching her sisters as they work and play. She won’t participate unless I give her wine, and even then I can feel a difference. Always watching us. Everyone.”

Ben smoothed the sketch paper and asked, “What do you propose we do, Miriam?”

“I don’t know. Make her stop working on the drawings of the trip. That’s keeping her mind on it, on what happened. Make her join her sisters in their daily work, as she used to. Stop letting her isolate herself for hours in that small room.”

“She has to be alone to do the drawings,” Ben said. “Just as I have to be alone to write my report, and Lewis has to be alone to assess the capabilities of the boat and the changes needed in it.”

“But you and Lewis, the others, are all doing it because you must, and she is doing it because she wants to. She wants to be alone! She looks for excuses to be alone, and she’s working on other things, not just the trip drawings. Make her let you in that room, let you see what else she’s been doing!”

Ben nodded slowly. “I’ll see her today,” he said.

After Miriam had gone, Ben studied the sketches again, and he smiled slightly. She certainly had captured them, he thought. Cruelly, coldly, and accurately. He folded the paper and put it in his leather pouch, and thought about Molly and the others.

He had lied about Thomas. He wasn’t back to normal, and might never be normal again. He had become almost totally dependent on his brothers. He refused to be separated from them even momentarily, and he slept with one or another of them every night. Jed was somewhat better, but he too showed a need for constant reassurance.

Lewis seemed virtually untouched by the voyage. He had stepped out of this life and back into it almost casually. Harvey was nervous, but less so than he had been a week ago, much less than when he first rejoined his brothers. Eventually he would be well.

And he, Ben. What about Ben? he asked himself mockingly. He was recovered, he decided.

He went to talk to Molly. She had a room in the hospital administration wing. He tapped lightly at the door, then opened it before she answered. They so seldom closed doors, rarely in the day, but it seemed natural for her to have closed her door, just as he felt it natural to close his when he was working. He stood for a moment looking at her. Had she slid something under the paper that lay on her drawing board? He couldn’t be certain. She sat with her back to the window, the board tilted before her.

“Hello, Ben.”

“Can you spare a few minutes?”

“Yes. Miriam sent you, didn’t she? I thought she would.”

“Your sisters are very concerned about you.”

She looked down at the table and touched a paper.

She was different, Ben thought. No one would ever mistake her for Miriam, or another of the sisters. He came around the table and looked at the drawing. Her sketch pad was open to a page filled with small, hastily done line drawings of buildings, ruined streets, hills of rubble. She was doing a full page of one section of Washington. For a moment he had a curious feeling of being there, seeing the devastation, the tragedy of a lost era; Molly had the power to put images from his mind onto paper. He turned and looked out the window at the hills, which were splashes of color now with the sun full on them.

Watching him, Molly thought: neither Thomas nor Jed would talk with her at all. Thomas shied away as if she carried plague, and Jed remembered other things, urgent things he had to do. Harvey talked too much, and said nothing. And Lewis was too busy.

But she could talk with Ben, she thought. They could relive the trip with each other, they could try to understand what had happened, for whatever had happened to her had happened to him. She could see it in his face, in the way he had turned so abruptly from her drawing. Something lay within him, ready to awaken, ready to whisper to him, if he would let it, just as it lay within her and changed the world she saw. It spoke to her, not in words, but in colors, in symbols that she didn’t understand, in dreams, in visions that passed fleetingly through her mind. She watched him where he stood, with the sun shining on him. Light fell on his arm in a way that made each hair gleam golden, a forest of golden trees on a brown plain. He shifted and the twilight on the plain turned the trees black.

“Little sister,” he began, and she smiled and shook her head.

“Don’t call me that,” she said. “Call me . . . whatever you want, but not that.” She had disturbed him; a frown came and went, leaving his face unreadable. “Molly,” she said. “Just call me Molly.”

But now he couldn’t think what it was he had started to say to her. The difference was in her expression, he thought suddenly. Physically she was identical to Miriam, to the other sisters, only the expression was changed. She looked more mature, harder? That wasn’t it, but he thought it was close to what he meant. Determined. Deeper.

“I want to see you on a regular basis for a while,” Ben said abruptly. He hadn’t started to say that at all, hadn’t even thought of it until he said it.

Molly nodded slowly.

Still he hesitated, puzzled about what else he might say.

“You should set the time,” Molly said gently.

“Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, immediately after lunch,” he said brusquely. He made a note in his book.

“Starting today? Or should I wait until Monday?”

She was mocking him, he thought angrily, and snapped his book shut. He wheeled about and strode to the door. “Today,” he said.

Her voice held him at the door. “Do you think I’m losing my mind, Ben? Miriam does.”

He stood with his hand on the knob, not looking at her. The question jolted him. He should reassure her, he knew, say something soothing, something about Miriam’s great concern, something. “Immediately after lunch,” he said harshly, and let himself out.

Molly retrieved the paper she had slid under the Washington drawing and studied it for a time with her eyes narrowed. It was the valley, distorted somewhat so that she could get in the old mill, the hospital, and the Sumner house, all lined up in a way that suggested relatedness. It wasn’t right, however, and she couldn’t decide what was wrong. There were faint marks where the people were to go in the drawing, a cluster of them at the mill, more at the entrance to the hospital, a group in the field behind the old house. She erased the marks and sketched in, very lightly, a single figure, a man, who stood in the field. She drew another figure, a woman, walking between the hospital and the house. It was the size of everything, she thought. The buildings, especially the mill, were so large, the figures so small, dwarfed by the things they had made. She thought of the skeletons she had seen in Washington; a body reduced to bones was smaller still. She would make her figures emaciated, almost skeletal, stark . . .

Suddenly she snatched up the paper, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it into the wastecan. She buried her face in her arms.

They would have a “Ceremony for the Lost” for her, she thought distantly. The sisters would be comforted by the others, and the party would last until dawn as they all demonstrated their solidarity in the face of grievous loss. In the light of the rising sun the remaining sisters would join hands, forming a circle, and after that she would cease to exist for them. No longer would she torment them with her new strangeness, her apartness. No one had the right to bring unhappiness to the brothers or sisters, she thought. No one had the right to exist if such existence was a threat to the family. That was the law.

She joined her sisters for lunch in the cafeteria, and tried to share their gaiety as they talked of the coming-of-age party for the Julie sisters that night.

“Remember,” Meg said, laughing mischievously, “no matter how many offers we get, we refuse all bracelets. And whoever sees the Clark brothers first slips on a bracelet before he can stop her.” She laughed deep in her throat. Twice they had tried to get to the Clark brothers and twice other sisters had beaten them. Tonight they were separating, to take up posts along the path to the auditorium to lie in wait for the young Clark brothers, whose cheeks were still downy, who had crossed the threshold into adulthood only that autumn.

“They’ll all cry ‘Unfair!’ ” Miriam said, protesting feebly.

“I know,” Meg said, laughing again.

Melissa laughed with her and Martha smiled, looking at Molly. “I’m to be at the first hedge,” she said. “You wait by the path to the mill.” Her eyes sparkled. “I’ve got the bracelets all ready. They’re red, with six little silver bells tied in place. How he’ll jingle, whoever gets the bracelet!” The six bells meant all the sisters were inviting all the brothers.

All over the cafeteria groups were huddled just like this, Molly thought, glancing about. Small groups of people, all conspiring, planning their conquests with glee, setting traps . . . Look-alikes, she thought, like dolls.

The Julie sisters had blond hair, hanging loose and held back with tiaras made of deep red flowers. They had chosen long tunics that dipped down low in the back, high in the front in drapes that emphasized their breasts charmingly. They were shy, smiling, saying little, eating nothing. They were fourteen.

Molly looked away from them suddenly and her eyes burned. Six years ago she had stood there, just like that, blushing, afraid and proud, wearing the bracelet of the Henry brothers. The Henry brothers, she thought suddenly. Her first man had been Henry, and she had forgotten that. She looked at the bracelet on her left wrist, and looked away again. One of the sisters had gotten to Clark first, and later Molly and her sisters would play with the Clark brothers on the mat. So smooth still, their faces were as smooth as the Julie faces.

People were trying to match up the bracelets now, and there was much laughter as everyone milled about the long tables and made excuses to examine each other’s bracelets.

“Why didn’t you come to my office this afternoon?”

Molly whirled about to find Ben at her elbow. “I forgot,” she said.

“You didn’t forget.”

She looked down and saw that he still wore his own bracelet. It was plain, grass braided without adornment, without the brothers’ symbol. Slowly, without looking at him, she began to pluck the silver bells from her own bracelet and when there was only one left on it, she slipped the bracelet off her wrist and reached out to put it on his. For a moment he resisted, then he held out his hand and the bracelet slid over his knuckles, over the jutting wrist bone. Only then did Molly look into his face. It was a mask — hard, unfamiliar, forbidding. If she could peel off the mask, she thought, there would be something different.

Abruptly Ben nodded, and turned and left her. She watched him go. Miriam and the others would be angry, she thought. Now there would be an extra Clark brother. It didn’t matter, but Miriam had counted on all of them to participate, and now it would be uneven.

The Julie sisters were dancing with the Lawrence brothers, two by two, and Molly felt a pang of sadness suddenly. Lewis was fertile, perhaps others of his group were also. If one of the Julie sisters conceived and was sent to the breeders’ compound, the next party for them would be the Ceremony for the Lost. She watched them and couldn’t tell which man was Lewis, which Lawrence, Lester . . .

She danced with Barry, then with Meg and Justin, then with Miriam and Clark, and again with Meg and Melissa and two of the Jeremy brothers; not with Jed, though, who stood against the wall and watched his brothers anxiously. He still wore his own bracelet. The other brothers had an assortment of bracelets on their wrists. Poor Jed, Molly thought, and almost wished she had given hers to him.

She sat with Martha and Curtis and ate a minced-beef sandwich and drank more of the amber wine that made her head swim delightfully. Then she danced with one of the Julie sisters, who was looking solemn now as the hour grew late. Presently the Lawrence brothers would claim them for the rest of the night.

The music changed. One of the Lawrence brothers claimed the girl Molly had danced with; the girl looked at him with a timid smile that appeared, vanished, appeared again. He danced her away.

Molly felt a tap on her arm, and turned to face Ben. He was unsmiling. He held out his arm for her and they danced, not speaking, neither of them smiling. He danced her to the table, where they stopped and he handed her a small glass of wine. Silently they drank, and then walked together from the auditorium. Molly caught a glimpse of Miriam’s face as they left. Defiantly she held her back stiffer, her head higher, and went out into the cold night with Ben.

Chapter 15

“I would like to sit down by the river for a little while,” she said. “Are you cold?” Ben asked, and when she said yes, he got cloaks for them both.

Molly watched the pale water, changing, always changing, and always the same, and she could feel him near, not touching, not speaking. Thin clouds chased across the face of the swelling moon. Soon it would be full, the harvest moon, the end of Indian summer. The man was so cleanly outlined, so unambiguous, she thought. A misshapen bowl, like an artifact made by inexpert hands that would improve with practice.

The moon in the river moved, separated into long shiny ropes that coiled, slid apart, came together, formed a wide band of luminous water that looked solid, then broke up again. Against the shore the voice of the river was gentle, secretive.

“Are you cold?” Ben asked again. His face was pale in the moonlight, his eyebrows darker than in daylight, straight, heavy. He could have been scowling at her; it was hard to tell. She shook her head, and he turned toward the river again.

The river was alive, she thought, and just when you thought you knew it, it changed and showed another face, another mood. Tonight it was beguiling, full of promise, and even knowing the promises to be false, she could hear the voice whispering to her persuasively, could sense the pull of the river.

And Ben thought of the river, swollen in floodtide, flashing bright over gravel, over rocks, breaking up into foam against boulders. He saw again the small fire on the bank, the figure of the girl standing there silhouetted against the gleaming water while the brothers pulled the boat up the hill.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come today,” she said suddenly in a small voice. “I got almost to your door, and then didn’t come the rest of the way. I don’t know why.”

There was a shout of laughter from the auditorium, and he wished he and Molly had walked farther up the river before stopping. A cloud covered the face of the moon and the river turned black, and only its voice was there, and the peculiar smell of the fresh water.

“Are you cold?” he asked again, as if the moonlight had held warmth that now was gone.

She moved closer to him. “Coming home,” she said softly, dreamily, “I kept hearing the river talk to me, and the trees, and the clouds. I suppose it was fatigue and hunger, but I really heard them, only I couldn’t understand the words most of the time. Did you hear them, Ben?”

He shook his head, and although she couldn’t see him now with the cloud over the face of the moon, she knew he was denying the voices. She sighed.

“What would happen if you had an idea, something you wanted to work out alone?” she asked after a moment.

Ben shifted uneasily. “It happens,” he said carefully. “We discuss it and usually, unless there’s a good reason, a shortage of equipment, or supplies, something like that, whoever has the idea goes ahead with it.”

Now the cloud had freed the moon; the light seemed brighter after the brief darkness. “What if the others didn’t see the value of the idea?” Molly asked.

“Then it would have no value, and no one would want to waste time on it.”

“But what if it was something you couldn’t explain exactly, something you couldn’t put into words?”

“What is the real question, Molly?” Ben asked, turning to face her. Her face was as pale as the moon, with deep shadows for eyes, her mouth black, not smiling. She looked up at him, and the moon was reflected in her eyes, and she seemed somehow luminous, as if the light came from within her, and he realized that Molly was beautiful. He never had seen it before and now it shocked him that the thought formed, forced itself on him.

Molly stood up suddenly. “I’ll show you,” she said. “In my room.”

They walked back to the hospital side by side, not touching, and Ben thought: of course, the Miriam sisters were all beautiful, most of the sisters were. Just as most of the brothers were handsome. It was a given. And it was meaningless.

She pulled a blind down on the window in her little room and threw her cloak on the chair behind her worktable. Then she pulled out drawings, sorting through them. Finally she handed one to him.

It was a woman, no one he knew, but vaguely familiar. Sara, he realized; changed, but Sara. Beside her, mirrors reached into infinity, and in each mirror was another woman, each Sara, but none exactly like her. Here a scowl tightened the mouth, there a wide smile, another was laughing, another had graying hair, wrinkles . . . He looked at Molly in bewilderment.

She handed him another drawing. There was a tree, nothing more. A tree rising out of a solid rock. An impossible thing and he felt unsettled by it.

Another drawing. She thrust it at him. A tiny boat on a vast sea that filled the paper from margin to margin. There was a solitary figure in the boat, so small it was insignificant, impossible to identify.

He felt upset by the drawings. He looked at Molly on the other side of the drawing table; she was staring at him intently. She looked feverish, her cheeks flushed, her eyes too bright.

“I need help, Ben,” she said, her voice low and compelling. “You have to help me.”

“What?”

“Ben, I have to do those things in paints. I don’t know why, but I have to. And others. It won’t work with pencil, or pen and ink. I need color and light! Please!”

She was weeping. Ben stared at her in surprise. This was her secret then? She wanted to paint? He suppressed an urge to smile at her, as if she were a child pleading for what was already hers.

She read his expression and sat down and put her head back against the cloak. She closed her eyes. “Miriam understands, and so do my sisters,” she said tiredly, and now the high color in her cheeks faded and she looked very young and weary. “They won’t let me do it.”

“Why not? What’s wrong with painting?”

“I . . . they don’t like the way the pictures make them feel. They think it’s dangerous. Miriam thinks so. The others will too.”

Ben looked at the tiny boat in the endless ocean. “But you don’t have to paint this one, do you? Can’t you do something else?”

She shook her head. Her eyes were still closed. “If someone had a bad heart, would you treat his ear because it was easier?” Now she looked at him, and there was no mockery at all in her face.

“Have you talked to Miriam?”

“She took some drawings I did of the brothers on the trip. She didn’t like them. She kept them. I don’t have to talk to her, or the others. I know what they will say. I bring them only pain anymore.” She thought of them with the Clark brothers on the mat, laughing, sipping the amber wine, caressing the smooth boy/man bodies. It wasn’t group sex, she thought suddenly. It was male and female broken up into parts, just as the moon broke on the smooth river. The sisters made one organism, female; the Clark brothers made up one organism, male, and when they embraced, the female organism would not be completely satisfied because it was not whole that night. One part of its body was missing, had been missing for a long time. And the missing part, like an amputated limb, caused phantom pain.

“Molly.” Ben’s voice was gentle. He touched her arm and she started. “Come to my room with me. It is very late. Soon it will be dawn.”

“You don’t have to,” she said. “I thought I wouldn’t tell you, that’s why I turned around before I got to your office today. Then tonight, I thought I had to tell you because I needed help. You don’t have to.”

Almost reluctantly Ben said, “Come with me, Molly. To my room. I want you to.”

Chapter 16

Snow fell lazily, silently; no wind blew, and the sky seemed low enough to touch. The snow built up on level surfaces, on tree branches, on the needles of the pines and spruces. It sifted down through a crack between a gutter and the roof of the hospital and built a short wall of snow that soon would topple of its own weight. Snow covered the land, unsullied, pure, layer on layer so that in protected spots where no intermittent sun melted it and no wind disturbed it, the snow depth had grown to six, seven, even eight feet. Against the whiteness, shadowed into grays and blues, the river gleamed black. The clouds were so thick the light that lay over the land seemed to come upward from the snow. The light was very dim, and in the distance the snow and sky and air merged and there were no boundaries.

No boundaries, Molly thought. It was all one. She stood at her window. Behind her an easel waited with a painting on it, but she couldn’t think of it now. The snow, the strange light that came from below, the wholeness of the scene outside held her.

“Molly!”

She turned sharply. Miriam stood in the doorway, still wearing her outdoor clothing, snow clinging to her shoulders, her hood.

“I said, Meg’s been hurt! Didn’t you hear me?”

“Hurt? How? What happened?”

Miriam stared at her for a moment, then shook her head. “You didn’t know, did you?”

Molly felt disoriented, as if she were a stranger who had wandered in and understood nothing. The painting looked garish, ugly, meaningless to her. Now she could sense Meg’s pain and fear, and the sisters’ presence easing it. They needed her, she thought clearly, and didn’t understand why, and Meg faded from her thoughts. “Where is she?” she asked. “What happened? I’ll come with you.”

Miriam looked at her and shook her head. “Don’t come,” she said. “Stay here.” She went away.

When Molly learned where Meg was and went to the hospital room to be with her sisters, they would not let her in.

Ben looked at his brothers and shrugged at the question: What were they to do about Molly? Exile her, as they had exiled David? Isolate her in a hospital room? Quarter her with the breeders — the mothers? Ignore the problem? They had discussed every alternative and were satisfied with none.

“There’s nothing to indicate she is making progress,” Barry said. “Nothing to indicate she even wants to resume a normal life.”

“Since there’s no precedent for anything like this, whatever we decide will have to be the right thing,” Bruce said soberly. His thick eyebrows drew together, separated. “Ben, she’s your patient. You haven’t said a thing. You were certain that allowing her to paint would be therapeutic, but it wasn’t. Have you any other suggestions?”

“When I asked permission to withdraw from my work in the lab and study psychology instead, it was refused. The rest of us who went to Washington have made a complete recovery, a functional recovery,” he added drily. “Except Molly. We don’t know enough to know why, how to treat her, if she’ll ever recover. I say, give it time. She isn’t needed in the classrooms, let her paint. Give her a room of her own and leave her alone.”

Barry was shaking his head. “Psychology is a dead end for us,” he said. “It revives the cult of the individual. When a unit is functioning, the members are self-curing. As for letting her remain in the hospital . . . She is a constant source of pain and confusion to her sisters. Meg will be all right, but Molly didn’t even know her sister had fallen, had a broken arm. The sisters needed her and she didn’t answer. We all know and agree it is our duty to safeguard the well-being of the unit, not the various individuals within it. If there is a conflict between those two choices, we must abandon the individual. That is a given. The only question is how.”

Ben stood up and went to the window. He could see the breeders’ quarters across the hedge. Not there, he thought vehemently. They would never accept her. They might even kill her if she were put among them. Only a month ago they had had the Ceremony for the Lost for Janet, who was now counted among the breeders, who was undergoing drug and hypnotic conditioning to force her to accept her new status as a fertile female who would bring forth a child as often as the doctors decided it was necessary. And the new children would be transferred to the nursery at birth, and the breeders would then have time to regain good health, to grow strong enough to do it again, and again, and again . . .

“No point in putting her in there,” Bob said, going to stand by Ben at the window. “Better if we simply admit there’s no solution and resort to euthanasia. It would be less cruel.”

Ben felt a weight in his chest and turned toward his brothers. They were right, he thought distantly. “If it happens again,” he said, speaking slowly, uncertain where his own thoughts were taking him, “we will have this same agonizing meeting again, the same useless alternatives to discuss and discard.”

Barry nodded. “I know. That’s what’s giving me bad dreams. With more and more people needed to forage, to repair the roads, to make expeditions to the cities, there might be more cases like Molly’s.”

“Let me have her,” Ben said abruptly. “I’ll put her in the old Sumner house. We’ll have the Ceremony for the Lost and declare her gone. The Miriam sisters will close the gap and feel no more pain, and I’ll be able to study this reaction.”

“It is very cold in the house,” Ben said, “but the stove will warm it. Do you like these rooms?”

They had gone over the entire house, and Molly had chosen the second-floor wing facing the river. There were wide windows without curtains, and the cold afternoon light filled the room, but in the summer it would be warm and bright with sunshine, and always there was the river to gaze at. The adjoining room had been a nursery or a dressing room, she thought. It was smaller with high double windows that reached almost to the ceiling. She would paint in that room. There was a tiny balcony outside the windows.

Already the sounds of music were drifting across the valley as the ceremony began. There would be dancing, a feast, and much wine.

“The electricity is off,” Ben said harshly. “The wires are bad. We’ll get them fixed as soon as the snow melts.”

“I don’t care about that. I like the lamps and the fireplace. I can burn wood in the stove.”

“The Andrew brothers will keep you supplied with wood. They’ll bring anything you need. They will leave everything on the porch.”

She moved to the window. The sun, covered with thin clouds, hung on the edge of the hill. It would start its slide down the other side, and darkness would follow swiftly. For the first time in her life she would be alone at night. She stood with her back to Ben, gazing at the river and thinking about the old house, so far away from the other buildings in the valley, hidden by trees and bushes that had grown as high as trees.

If she had a bad dream and stirred in her sleep or cried out, no one would hear her, no one would be at her side to soothe her, comfort her.

“Molly.” Ben’s voice was still too harsh, as if he were terribly angry with her, and she didn’t know why he should be angry. “I can stay with you tonight if you’re afraid. . .”

She turned to look at him then, her face shadowed, the cold light and snow and gray sky behind her, and Ben knew she was not afraid. He felt as he had that night by the river: she was beautiful, and the light in the room came from her, from her eyes. “You’re happy, aren’t you?” he said wonderingly.

She nodded. “I’ll make a fire in my fireplace. And then I’ll drag that chair up close to it and sit and watch the flames and listen to the music, and after a while, I’ll go to bed, and maybe read for a little bit, by lamplight, until I get sleepy . . .“ She smiled at him. “It’s all right, Ben. I feel . . . I don’t know how I feel. Like something’s gone that was heavy and hard to live with. It’s gone, and I feel light and free and yes, even happy. So maybe I am crazy. Maybe that’s what going crazy means.” She turned to the window again. “Do the breeders feel happy?” she asked after a moment.

“No.”

“What is it like for them?”

“I’ll make your fire. The chimney’s open. I checked.”

“What happens to them, Ben?”

“They are given a course in learning how to be mothers. Eventually they like that life, I think.”

“Do they feel free?”

He had started to put logs in the grate, and now he dropped a large one with a crash and stood up. He went to her and swung her away from the window. “They never stop suffering from the separation,” he said. “They cry themselves to sleep night after night, and they are on drugs all the time, and they have sessions of conditioning to make them accept it, but every night they cry themselves to sleep. Is that what you wanted to hear? You wanted to think they were as free as you are now, free to be alone, to do what they want with no thought of their responsibilities to the others. It’s not like that! We need them, and we use them the only way we can, to do the least harm to the sisters who are not breeders. When they’re through breeding, if they are fit, they work in the nursery. If they’re not fit, we put them to sleep. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“Why are you saying this?” she whispered, her face ashen.

“So you won’t have any illusions about your little nest here! We can use you, do you understand? As long as you are useful to the community, you’ll be allowed to live here like a princess. Just as long as you’re useful.”

“Useful, how? No one wants to look at my paintings. I’ve finished the maps and drawings of the trip.”

“I’m going to dissect your every thought, your every wish, every dream. I’m going to find out what happened to you, what made you separate yourself from your sisters, what made you decide to become an individual, and when I find out we’ll know how never to allow it to happen again.”

She stared at him, and now her eyes were not luminous but deeply shadowed, hidden. Gently she pulled loose from his hands on her shoulders. “Examine yourself, Ben. Catch yourself listening to voices no one else can hear. Observe yourself. Who else is angry at the way we treat the breeders? Why did you fight to save my life when the good of the community demanded I be put to sleep, like a used-up breeder? Who else even looks at my paintings? Who else would rather be here in this cold dark room with a madwoman than at the celebration? Our coupling is not joyous, Ben. When we embrace it is a hard, bitter, cruel thing we do, and we are filled with sadness and neither of us knows why. Examine yourself, Ben, and then me, and see if there is a cause you can root out and destroy without destroying the carriers.”

Savagely he pulled her to him and pressed her face hard against his chest so she could not speak. She did not struggle against him. “Lies, lies, lies,” he muttered. “You are mad.” He put his cheek against her hair, and her arms shifted and moved up his back to hold him. He pulled away roughly and stood apart from her. Now the darkness had settled heavily in the room and she was only a shadow against shadows.

“I’m leaving now,” he said brusquely. “You shouldn’t have any trouble getting a fire started. I lighted the stove downstairs and the heat should be up here soon. You won’t be cold.”

She didn’t speak, and he turned and hurried from the room. Outside, he started to run through the deep snow, and he ran until he could run no longer and his breath was coming in painful gasps. He turned to look at the house; it was no longer visible through the black trees.

Chapter 17

Now the rain was light and steady, and the wind had died down. The tops of the hills were hidden by clouds and the river hidden by mist. There was a steady sound of hammers, muted by the rain, but reassuring. Under the roof of the boat shed people were working, getting the third boat constructed. Last year they had been farmers, teachers, technicians, scientists; this year they were boat builders.

Ben watched the rain. The brief lull ended and the wind screamed through the valley, driving rain before it in waves. The scene dissolved, and there was only the rain beating on the window.

Molly would wonder if he was coming, he thought. The window shook under the increasing force of the rain. Break! he thought. No, she wouldn’t wonder. She wouldn’t even notice his absence. As suddenly as it had started, the outburst of violence stopped and the sky thinned so that there was almost enough sun to cast shadows. It was all the same to her, he thought, whether he was there or not. While she talked to him, answered his questions, she painted, or sketched, or cleaned brushes; sometimes, restless, she made him walk with her, always up the hills, into the woods, away from the inhabited valley where she was forbidden. And those were the things she would have done alone.

Soon his brothers would join him for the formal meeting they had requested, and he would have to agree to a time for the completion of the report he hadn’t even begun. He looked at his notebook on the long table and turned from it to the window once more. The notebook was filled; he had nothing more to ask her, nothing more to extract from her, and he knew as little today as he had known in the fall.

In his pocket was a small package of sassafras, the first of the season, his gift to her. They would brew tea and sit before the fire, sipping the fragrant, hot drink. They would lie together and he would talk of the valley, of the expansion of the lab facilities, the progress on the boats, the plans for cloning foragers and workers who could repair roads or build bridges or do whatever was required to open a route to Washington, to Philadelphia, to New York. She would ask about her sisters, who were working on textbooks, carefully copying illustrations, charts, graphs, and she would nod gravely when he answered and her gaze would flicker over her own paintings that no one in the valley could or would understand. She would talk about anything, answer any question he asked, except about her paintings.

She understood what she did as little as he, and that was in his notes. She was compelled to paint, to draw, to make tangible those visions that were blurred and ambiguous and even hurtful. The compulsion was stronger than her will to live, he thought bitterly. And now his brothers would join him and make a decision about her.

Would they offer her a bag of seeds and an escort down the river?

Heavy clouds rolled down from the mountains and turned off the feeble light, and again the wind blasted the window and pelted it with hard rain. Ben was standing there watching it when his brothers came into the room and seated themselves.

“We’ll get right to it,” Barry said, just as Ben would have done in his place. “She isn’t better, is she?”

Ben sat down to complete the circle and shook his head.

“In fact, if anything, she’s worse than she was when she came home,” Barry continued. “Isolation has permitted her illness to spread, to intensify, and joining her in isolation, even temporarily, has permitted the disease to infect you.”

Ben looked at his brothers in surprise and confusion. Had there been clues, hints that they were thinking along those lines? He realized that by asking the question he had answered another. He should have known. In a perfectly functioning unit there are no secrets. Slowly he shook his head, and he spoke very carefully. “For a time, I believed I was ill also, but I continued to function according to our schedule, our needs, and I dismissed the thoughts that had troubled me. In what way have I given offense?”

Barry shook his head impatiently.

For a moment Ben could sense their unhappiness. “I have a theory about Molly that perhaps applies also to me.” They waited. “Always before us, in infancy there was a period when ego development naturally occurred, and if all went well during that period, the individual was formed, separate from his parents. With us such a development is not necessary, or even possible, because our brothers or sisters obviate the need for separate existence, and instead a unit consciousness is formed. There are very old studies of identical twins that recognized this unit or group consciousness, but the researchers were not prepared to understand the mechanism. Very little attention was paid to it, and little further study.” He stood up and moved again to the window. The rain was steady and hard now. “I suggest that we all still have the capability for individual ego development latent within us. It becomes dormant when the physiological time passes for its spontaneous emergence, but with Molly, and perhaps with others, if there is enough stimulus, under the proper conditions, this development is activated.”

“The proper conditions being separation from the brothers or sisters under stressful circumstances?” Barry asked thoughtfully.

“I think so. But the important thing now,” Ben said urgently, “is to let it develop and see what happens. I can’t predict her future behavior. I don’t know what to expect from one day to the next.”

Barry and Bruce exchanged glances, and then looked at the other brothers. Ben tried to interpret the looks and failed. He felt chilled and turned to watch the rain instead.

“We will decide tomorrow,” Barry said finally. “But whatever our decision about Molly is, there is another decision that we made that is unaltered. You must not continue to see her, Ben. For your own welfare, and ours, we must forbid your visits to her.”

Ben nodded in agreement. “I’ll have to tell her,” he said.

At the tone in his voice Barry again looked at the other brothers, and reluctantly they agreed.

“Why are you so surprised?” Molly asked. “This had to happen.”

“I brought you some tea,” Ben said brusquely.

Molly took his package and looked down at it for a long time. “I have a present for you,” she said softly. “I was going to give it to you another time, but . . . I’ll go get it.”

She left and returned quickly with a small packet, no more than five inches square. It was a folded paper and, when opened, it had several faces, all of them variations of Ben’s. In the center was a man’s massive head, with fierce eyebrows and penetrating eyes, surrounded by four others, all resembling one another enough to show relationship.

“Who are they?”

“In the middle is the old man who owned this house. I found photographs in the attic. That is his son, David’s father, and that one is David. That’s you.”

“Or Barry, or Bruce, or any of the others before us,” Ben said curtly. He didn’t like the composite picture. He didn’t like looking at the faces of men who had lived such different, inexplicable lives, and who looked so much like him.

“I don’t think so,” Molly said, squinting her eyes at the picture, then studying him. “There’s something about the eyes they just don’t have. Theirs only see outward, I think, and yours, and those of the other men in the picture, they can look both ways.”

Suddenly she laughed and drew him to the fire. “But put it away and let’s have our tea, and a cookie. I’ve been getting more than I can eat and I saved a lot. We’ll have a party!”

“I don’t want any tea,” Ben said. Not looking at her, watching the flames in the grate, he asked, “Don’t you even care?”

“Care?”

Ben heard the pain there, sharp, undeniable. He closed his eyes hard.

“Should I weep and howl and tear my clothes, and bang my head on the wall? Should I beg you not to leave me, to stay with me always? Should I throw myself from the topmost window of this house? Should I grow thin and pale and wither away like a flower in the autumn, killed by the cold it never understands? How should I show I care, Ben? Tell me what I should do.”

He felt her hand on his cheek and opened his eyes and found they were burning.

“Come with me, Ben,” she said gently. “And afterwards perhaps we shall weep together when we say goodbye.”

“We promise never to harm her,” Barry said quietly. “If she has need of one of us, someone will go care for her. She will be permitted to live out her life in the Sumner house. We shall never display or permit others to display her paintings, but we shall preserve them carefully so that our descendants may study them and understand the steps we have taken today.” He paused and then said, “Furthermore, Ben, our brother, will accompany the contingent who will go down the river to set up a base camp for future groups to use.” Now he looked up from the paper before him.

Ben nodded gravely. The decisions were just and compassionate. He shared his brothers’ anguish, and knew the suffering would not end until the boats returned and they could hold the Ceremony for the Lost for him. Only then would they all be freed again.

Molly watched the boats glide down the river, Ben standing in the prow of the lead boat, the wind streaming his hair. He didn’t turn to look at the Sumner house until the boat started around the first curve that would take it out of sight, and then briefly she saw his pale face, and he was gone, the boat was gone.

Molly continued to stand at the wide windows for a long time after the boats had disappeared. She remembered the voice of the river, the answering voices from the high treetops, the way the wind moved the upper levels without stirring a blade of grass. She remembered the silence and darkness that had pressed in on them at night, touching them, testing them, tasting them, the intruders. And her hand moved to her stomach and pressed against the flesh there, against the new life that was growing within her.

The summer heat gave way to early September frosts and the boats returned, and this time another stood in the prow. The trees burned red and gold and snows fell and in January Molly gave birth to her son, alone, unaided, and lay looking at the infant in the crook of her arm and smiled at him. “I love you,” she whispered tenderly. “And your name shall be Mark.”

All through the latter stages of her pregnancy Molly had told herself almost daily that tomorrow she would send a message to Barry, that she would submit to his authority and allow herself to be placed in the breeders’ quarters. Now, looking at the red infant with his eyes screwed so tightly closed he seemed without eyes, she knew she would never give him up.

Each morning the Andrew brothers brought firewood, her basket of supplies, whatever she asked for, deposited it all on her porch, and left again, and she saw no one, except at a distance. As soon as Mark could understand her words, she began to impress upon him the need for silence while the Andrew brothers were near the house. When he grew older and started to ask “why” about everything, she had to tell him the Andrew brothers would take him away from her and put him in a school and they would never see each other again. It was the first and only time she saw him react with terror, and after that he was as quiet as she when the young doctors were there.

He learned to walk and talk early; he began to read when he was four, and for long periods he would curl up near the fireplace with one of the brittle books from the downstairs library. Some of them were children’s books, others were not; he didn’t seem to mind. They played hide-and-seek throughout the house and, when the weather was pleasant, up and down the hillside behind the house, out of sight of the others in the valley, who would never under any circumstances enter the woods unless ordered to do so. Molly sang to him and told him stories from the books, and made up other stories when they exhausted the books. One day Mark told her a story, and she laughed delightedly, and after that sometimes she was the storyteller and sometimes he was. While she painted he drew pictures, or painted also, and more and more often played with the river clay she brought him, and made shapes that they dried in the sun on the balcony.

They wandered farther up the hillside as he became sturdier. One day in the summer when he was five, they remained in the woods far several hours, Molly pointing out the ferns and liverworts to him, drawing his attention to the way the sunlight changed the colors of the delicate green leaves, deepened the rich greens to nearly black.

“Time,” she said finally.

He shook his head. “Let’s climb to the top and look at the whole world.”

“Next time,” she said. “We’ll bring our lunch and climb all the way up. Next time.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

They walked back down slowly, stopping often to examine a rock, a new plant, the bark of an ancient tree, whatever caught his interest. At the edge of the woods they paused and looked about carefully before leaving the shelter of the trees. Then they ran to the kitchen door hand in hand and, laughing, tried to get through together.

“You’re getting too big,” Molly cried, and allowed him to enter first.

Mark stopped abruptly, yanked on her hand, and turned to run. One of the Barry brothers stepped from the dining room into the kitchen, and another closed the door to the outside and stood behind them. The other three entered the kitchen silently and stared in disbelief at the boy.

Finally one of them spoke. “Ben’s?”

Molly nodded. Her hand clutched Mark’s in a grip that must have hurt him. He stood close to her and looked at the brothers fearfully.

“When?” the brother asked.

“Five years ago, in January.”

The spokesman sighed heavily. “You’ll have to come with us, Molly. The boy too.”

She shook her head and felt weak with terror. “No! Leave us alone. We’re not hurting anyone! Leave us alone!”

“It’s the law,” the brother said harshly. “You know it as well as we do.”

“You promised!”

“The agreement we made didn’t cover this.” He took a step closer to her. Mark tore his hand free from her grasp and flew at the doctor.

“Leave my mother alone! Go away! Don’t you hurt my mother!”

Someone caught Molly’s arms and held her, and another of them caught Mark and lifted him as he kicked and lashed out furiously, screaming all the while.

“Don’t hurt him!” Molly cried, and struggled to free herself. She hardly felt the pinprick of the injection. Dimly she heard one last scream of anguish from Mark, and then there was nothing.

Chapter 18

Molly blinked and shut her eyes against the glare of a silver frost that covered everything. She stood still and tried to remember where she was, who she was, anything. When she opened her eyes again, the blinding glare still dazzled her. She felt as if she had awakened after a long, nightmare-haunted dream that was becoming more and more dim as she tried to recapture it. Someone nudged her.

“You’ll freeze out here,” someone said close by. Molly turned to look at the woman, a stranger. “Come on, get inside,” the woman said louder. Then she leaned forward and looked at Molly closely. “Oh, you’re back, aren’t you?”

She took Molly by the arm and guided her inside a warm building. Other women looked up idly and then bent down over their sewing again. Some of them were obviously pregnant. Some of them were dull-eyed, vacant-looking, doing nothing.

The woman helping Molly took her to a chair and stood by her side long enough to say, “Just sit still for a while. You’ll start remembering in a little bit.” Then she left and took her place at one of the machines and began stitching.

Molly looked at the floor and waited for memories to return, and for a long time there was nothing but the terror of nightmare remembered in emotions, not in details.

They had strapped her to a table, many times, she thought, and they had done things to her that she could not recall. There had been another time when some of the women had held her down and done things to her. She shuddered violently and closed her eyes. The memory receded. Mark, she thought suddenly, very clearly. Mark! She jumped up and looked about wildly. The woman who had befriended her hurried over and caught her arm.

“Look, Molly, they’ll put you under again if you make trouble. Understand? Just sit still until our break, and I’ll talk to you then.”

“Where is Mark?” Molly whispered.

The woman glanced about and said in an undertone, “He’s all right. Now sit down! Here comes a nurse.”

Molly sat down again and stared at the floor until the nurse glanced about the room and left once more. Mark was all right. There was ice on the ground. Winter. He was six, then. She remembered nothing of the late summer, the fall. What had they done to her?

The hours until the break passed painfully slowly. Occasionally one or another of the women would look at her and there was awareness, not the incurious glances that had been given her before. The word was spreading that she was back, and they were watching her, perhaps to see what she would do now, perhaps to welcome her, perhaps for some reason she couldn’t guess. She looked at the floor. Her hands were clenched, her nails digging into her palms. She relaxed them. They had taken her to a hospital room, but not the usual hospital, one in the breeder’s quarters. They had examined her thoroughly. She remembered injections, answering questions, pills . . . It was too blurred. Her hands had clenched again.

“Molly, come on. We’ll have tea and I’ll tell you what I can.”

“Who are you?”

“Sondra. Come on.”

She should have known, Molly thought, following Sondra. She remembered suddenly the ceremony given for Sondra, who was only three or four years older than she. She had been nine or ten, she thought.

The tea was a pale yellow drink she couldn’t identify. After one sip she put it down and looked across the lounge toward the uncovered window. “What month is this?”

“January.” Sondra finished her tea and leaned forward and said in a low voice, “Listen, Molly, they’ve taken you off the drugs and they’ll be watching you for the next few weeks to see how you behave. If you cause trouble, they’ll put you on something again. You’ve been conditioned. Just don’t fight it, and you’ll be all right.”

Molly felt she could understand only half of what Sondra was saying to her. Again she looked about the lounge; in here the chairs were comfortable and there were tables at convenient intervals. Women were in clusters of threes and fours, chatting, now and then glancing at her. Some of them smiled, one winked. There were thirty women in the room, she thought in disbelief. Thirty breeders!

“Am I pregnant?” she asked suddenly, and pressed her hands against her stomach.

“I don’t think so. If you are, it’s still awfully early, but I doubt it. They tried every month since you’ve been here and it didn’t take before. I doubt it took the last time either.”

Molly sagged against her chair and closed her eyes hard. That’s what they had done to her on the table. She felt tears form and roll down her cheeks and was not able to stop them. Then Sondra’s arm was about her shoulders, and she held her tightly.

“It hits all of us like that, Molly. It’s the separation, the being alone for the first time. You don’t get used to it, but you learn to live with it and it doesn’t hurt so much after a while.”

Molly shook her head, unable as yet to speak. No, she thought distinctly, it was not the separation, it was the humiliation of being treated like an object, of being drugged and then used, forced to cooperate in that procedure unquestioningly.

“We have to go back now,” Sondra said. “You won’t have to do anything for another day or two, long enough to collect your thoughts, get used to everything all over again.”

“Sondra, wait. You said Mark is all right? Where is he?”

“He’s in school with the others. They won’t hurt him or anything. They’re very good to all the children. You remember that, don’t you?”

Molly nodded. “Did they clone him?”

Sondra shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” She grimaced then and pressed her hand to her stomach. She looked very old and tired, and except for her bulging stomach, too thin.

“How many times have you been pregnant?” Molly asked. “How long have you been here?”

“Seven, counting now,” Sondra said without hesitation. “I was brought here twenty years ago.”

Molly stared at her then and shook her head. But she had been nine or ten when they mourned Sondra. “How long have I been here?” she whispered finally.

“Molly, not too fast. Try to relax this first day.”

“How long?”

“A year and a half. Now come on.”

All afternoon she sat quietly, and the memories became slightly less blurred, but she could not account for a year and a half. It was gone from her life as if a fold had been made and the two ends now touching excluded whatever had happened in the section that made up the loop, a year and a half.

He was seven, then. Seven, no longer an infant. She shook her head. In the afternoon one of the doctors strolled through the room, stopping to speak to several of the women. He approached Molly and she said, “Good afternoon, Doctor,” just as the others had done.

“How are you feeling, Molly?”

“Well, thank you.”

He moved on.

Molly looked at the floor again. She felt as if she had watched the small interlude from a great distance, unable to alter a nuance of it. Conditioning, she thought. That was what Sondra had meant. How else had they conditioned her? To spread her legs obligingly when they approached with their instruments, with the carefully hoarded sperm? She forced her fingers open again and flexed them. They were sore from gripping so hard.

Suddenly she looked up, but the doctor had gone. Who was he? For a moment she felt dizzy, then the room steadied again. She had called him Doctor, hadn’t even questioned the lack of a name. Had it been Barry? Bruce? Another part of her conditioning, she thought bitterly. The breeders were the lost, they no longer had the right to know one of the clones from another. The Doctor. The Nurse. She bowed her head once more.

The routine was easy after a few days. They were given soporifics at bedtime and stimulants at breakfast, all disguised in the thin yellow tea that Molly wouldn’t drink. Some of the women wept at night, others succumbed rapidly to the drugged tea and slept heavily. There was a lot of sexual activity; they had their mats, just as everyone else. Through the day they worked in the various departments of the clothing section. They had free time in the late afternoon, books to read, games in the lounge, guitars and violins available to them.

“It really isn’t bad,” Sondra said a few days after Molly’s awakening. “They take good care of us, the very best. If you prick your finger, they come running and watch over you like a baby. It’s not bad.”

Molly didn’t respond. Sondra was tall and heavy, in her sixth month; her eyes varied from brightly alert to dull and unseeing. They watched Sondra, Molly thought, and at the least sign of depression or emotional upset they changed the dosage and kept her operating on an even level.

“They don’t keep most of the new ones under as long as they did you,” Sondra said another time. “I guess that’s because most of us were only fourteen or fifteen when we came here, and you were older.”

Molly nodded. They had been children, easy to condition into breeding machines who thought it really wasn’t that bad a life. Except at night, when many of them wept for their sisters.

“Why do they want so many babies?” Molly asked. “We thought they were reducing the human babies, not increasing the number.”

“For workers and road builders, dam builders. They’re hurting for materials from the cities, chemicals mostly, I think. They’re making more clones of the babies too, we hear. They’ll have an army to send out to build their roads and keep the rivers open.”

“How do you know so much about what’s going on? We always thought you were kept more isolated than that.”

“No secrets in this whole valley,” Sondra said complacently. “Some of the girls work in the nursery, some in the kitchens, and they hear things.”

“And what about Mark? Do you ever hear anything about him?”

Sondra shrugged. “I don’t know anything about him,” she said. “He’s a boy, like the other boys, I guess. Only he doesn’t have any brothers. They say he wanders off alone a lot.”

She would watch for him, she thought. Sooner or later she would see him over the rose hedge. Before that time arrived, she was summoned to the Doctor’s office.

She followed the Nurse docilely and entered the office. The Doctor was behind his desk.

“Good afternoon, Molly.”

“Good afternoon, Doctor,” she said, and wondered, was he Barry, or Bruce, or Bob. . . ?

“Are the other women treating you all right?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

A series of such questions, followed by Yes, Doctor, or No, Doctor. Where was it supposed to go, she wondered, and became more wary.

“Is there anything you want or need?”

“May I have a sketch pad?”

Something changed, and she knew this was the reason for her visit. She had made a mistake; perhaps they had conditioned her not to think of sketching again, never to think again of painting . . . she tried to remember what they had said to her, had done to her. Nothing came. She should not have asked for it, she thought again. A mistake.

The Doctor opened his desk drawer and took out her sketch pad and charcoal pencil. He pushed them across the desk toward her.

Desperately Molly tried to remember. What was he watching for? What was she supposed to do? Slowly she reached for the pad and pencil, and for a moment she felt a tremor in her hand and her stomach churned as a wave of nausea rose. The sensations passed, but she had stopped the forward movement of her hand, and she stared at it. Now she knew. She moistened her lips and started to move her hand again. The sensations returned for a scant moment, long enough to register, then they faded away. She didn’t look up at the Doctor, who was watching her closely. Again she moistened her lips. She was almost touching the pad now. Abruptly she jerked her hand back and jumped up from her chair and looked wildly about the room, one hand clutching her stomach, the other pressed against her mouth.

She started to run to the door, but his voice held her. “Come, sit down, Molly. You’ll be all right now.”

When she looked again at his desk the pad and pencil were gone. Reluctantly she sat down, afraid of what new tricks he might have prepared for her, afraid of the inevitable mistake she was certain to make — and then another year and a half in limbo? A whole lifetime in limbo? She didn’t look at the Doctor.

There were a few more inane questions, and she was dismissed. As she walked back to her room she understood why the breeders didn’t try to leave the area, why they never spoke to a clone, although they were separated only by a hedge.

All of March was wind-blown and water-soaked, with icy rains that did not let up for days at a time. April’s rains were softer, but the river continued to rise through most of the month as the snow water cascaded down from the hills. May started cold and wet, but by midmonth the sun was warm and the farm workers were busy in the fields.

Soon, Molly thought, standing at the rear of the breeders’ area, looking up the hillside. The dogwoods were blooming, and over them the redbud trees glowed. The trees were all clothed in new greenery and the ground was fast losing its feel of a wet sponge. Soon, she repeated, and went inside to her sewing table.

Three times she had traversed the inhabited area of the valley. The first time, she had vomited violently; the next time, warned, she had struggled against nausea and terror, and when she passed the clone hospital she had almost fainted. The third time her reaction had been less powerful, and the same feelings had passed through her quickly, as if a memory had been stimulated momentarily.

She might have other, even more drastic reactions to the Sumner house, she thought, but now she knew she did not have to yield to the conditioned responses. Soon, she thought again, bending over her sewing.

Four times they had put her in the breeders’ hospital ward and installed a constant temperature gauge, and when the temperature was right, Nurse had come in with her tray and said cheerfully, “Let’s try again, shall we, Molly?” And obediently Molly had opened her legs and lain still while the sperm were inserted with the shiny, cold instrument. “Now, remember, don’t move for a while,” Nurse then said, still cheerful, brisk, and had left her lying, unmoving, on the narrow cot. And two hours later she was allowed to dress and leave again. Four times, she thought bitterly. A thing, an object, press this button and this is what comes out, all predictable, on cue.

She left the breeders’ compound on a dark, moonless night. She carried a large laundry bag that she had been filling slowly, secretly, for almost three months. There was no one awake; there was nothing of danger in the valley, perhaps in the entire world, but she hurried, avoiding the path, keeping to the sound-muffling grass. The thick growth surrounding the Sumner house created a darkness that was like a hole in space, a blackness that would swallow up anything that chanced too close. She hesitated, then felt her way between the trees and bushes until she came to the house.

She still had two hours before dawn, another hour or so before her absence was discovered. She left her bundle on the porch and made her way around the house to the back door, which opened at a touch. Nothing happened to her as she entered, and she breathed a sigh of relief. But then no one had expected her to get this far ever again. She felt her way up the stairs to her old room; it was as she had left it, she thought at first, but something was wrong, something had been changed. It was too dark to see anything at all, but the feeling of difference persisted and she found the bed and sat down to wait for dawn so she could see the room, see her paintings.

When she could see, she gasped. Someone had spread her paintings out, had stood them all up around the walls, on chairs, on the old desk she never had used. She went into the other room, where she had painted, and there on the bench that Mark had used for his clay, instead of the half-dozen crude figures he had shaped, there were dozens of clay objects: pots, heads, animals, fish, a foot, two hands . . . Weakly Molly leaned against the doorframe and wept.

The room was bright when she pushed away from the door. She had delayed too long; she had to hurry now. She ran down the stairs and out of the house, picked up her bag, and started climbing the hill. Two hundred feet up she stopped and began to search for the spot she and Mark had found once: a sheltered spot behind blackberry bushes, protected by an overhanging ledge of limestone. From there she could see the house but could not be seen from below. The bushes had grown, the spot was even more hidden than she remembered. When she finally found it she sank down to the ground in relief. The sun was high, they would know by now that she was gone. Presently a few of them would come to look over the Sumner house, not really expecting to find her, but because they were thorough.

They came before noon, spent an hour looking around the house and yard, then left. Probably it would be safe now to return to the house, she thought, but she did not stir from her hole in the hill. They returned shortly before dark, and spent more time going over the same ground they had covered before. Now she knew it was safe to go to the house. They never went out after dark, except in groups; they would not expect her to wander about in the dark alone. She stood up, easing the stiffness out of her legs and back. The ground was damp, and this spot was cool, sheltered from the sun.

She lay on the bed. She knew she would hear him when he entered the house, but she couldn’t sleep, except in a fitful, dream-filled doze: Ben lying with her; Ben sitting before the fire sipping pink, fragrant tea; Ben looking at her painting and becoming pale . . . Mark scrambling up the stairs, his legs going this way and that, a frown of determination on his face. Mark squatting over a single leaf of a fern, still rolled tightly at the end, and studying it intently, as if willing it to uncoil as he watched. Mark, his hands pudgy and grimy, gleaming wet, pushing the clay this way, smoothing it, pushing it that way, frowning at it, oblivious of her . . .

She sat up suddenly, wide awake. He had come into the house. She could hear the stairs creak slightly under his feet. He stopped, listening. He must sense her there, she thought, and her heart quickened. She went to the door of the workroom and waited for him.

He had a candle. For a moment he didn’t see her. He put the candle down on the table and only then looked around cautiously.

“Mark!” she said softly. “Mark!”

His face was lighted. Ben’s face, she thought, and something of hers. Then his face twisted and when she took a step toward him, he took a step backward.

“Mark?” she said again, but now she could feel a hard, cold hand squeezing her heart, making it painful for her to breathe. What had they done to him? She took another step.

“Why did you come here?” he yelled suddenly. “This is my room! Why did you come back? I hate you!” he screamed.

Chapter 19

The cold hand squeezed harder. Molly felt for the door-frame behind her and held it tightly. “Why do you come here?” she whispered. “Why?”

“It’s all your fault! You spoiled everything. They laugh at me and lock me up. . .”

“And you still come here. Why?”

Suddenly he darted to the workbench and swept it clean. The elephant, the heads, the foot, hands, everything crashed to the floor and he jumped up and down on the pieces, sobbing incoherently, screaming sounds that were not words. Molly didn’t move. The rampage stopped as abruptly as it began. Mark looked down at the gray dust, the fragments that remained.

“I’ll tell you why you come back,” Molly said quietly. She still held the doorframe hard. “They punish you by locking you up in a small room, don’t they? And it doesn’t frighten you. In the small room you can hear yourself, can’t you? In your mind’s eye you see the clay, the stone you will shape. You see the form emerging, and it is almost as if you are simply freeing it, allowing it to come into being. That other self that speaks to you, it knows what the shape is in the clay. It tells you through your hands, in dreams, in images that no one but you can see. And they tell you this is sick, or bad, or disobedient. Don’t they?”

He was watching her now. “Don’t they?” she repeated. He nodded.

“Mark, they’ll never understand. They can’t hear that other self whispering, always whispering. They can’t see the pictures. They’ll never hear or get a glimpse of that other self. The brothers and sisters overwhelm it. The whisper becomes fainter, the images dimmer, until finally they are gone, the other self gives up. Perhaps it dies.” She paused and looked at him, then said softly, “You come here because you can find that self here, just as I could find my other self here. And that’s more important than anything they can give you, or take away from you.”

He looked down at the floor, at the shambles of the pieces he had made, and wiped his face with his arm. “Mother,” he said, and stopped.

Now Molly moved. Somehow she reached him before he could speak again and she held him tightly and he held her, and they both wept.

“I’m sorry I busted everything.”

“You’ll make more.”

“I wanted to show you.”

“I looked at them all. They were very good. The hands especially.”

“They were hard. The fingers were funny, but I couldn’t make them not funny.”

“Hands are the hardest of all.”

He finally pushed away from her slightly, and she let him go. He wiped his face again. “Are you going to hide here?”

“No. They’ll be back looking for me.”

“Why did you come here?”

“To keep a promise,” she said softly. “Do you remember our last walk up the hill, you wanted to climb to the top, and I said next time? Remember?”

“I’ve got some food we can take,” he said excitedly. “I hide it here so when I get hungry I’ll have something.”

“Good. We’ll use it. We’ll start as soon as it gets light enough to see.”

It was a beautiful day, with high thin clouds in the north, the rest of the sky unmarred, breathtakingly clear. Each hill, each mountain in the distance, was sharply outlined; no haze had formed yet, the breeze was gentle and warm. The silence was so complete that the woman and boy were both reluctant to break it with speech, and they walked quietly. When they paused to rest, she smiled at him and he grinned back and then lay with his hands under his head and stared at the sky.

“What’s in your big pack?” he asked as they climbed later. She had made a small pack for him to carry, and she still carried the laundry bag, now strapped to her back.

“You’ll see,” she said. “A surprise.”

And later he said, “It’s farther than it looked, isn’t it? Will we get there before dark?”

“Long before dark,” she said. “But it is far. Do you want to rest again?”

He nodded and they sat under a spruce tree. The spruces were coming down the mountains, she thought, recalling in detail old forestry maps of the region.

“Do you still read much?” she asked.

Mark shifted uneasily and looked at the sky, then at the trees, and finally grunted noncommittally.

“So did I,” she said. “The old house is full of books, isn’t it? They’re so brittle, though, you have to be careful with them. After you went to sleep every night I sat up and read everything in the house.”

“Did you read the one about Indians?” he asked, and rolled over on his stomach and propped his head up in his cupped hands. “They knew how to do everything, make fires, make canoes, tents, everything.”

“And there’s one about how boys, a club or something, used to go camping and relearn all the Indian methods. It can still be done,” she said dreamily.

“And what you can eat in the woods, and stuff like that? I read that one.”

They walked, rested, talked about the books in the old house, talked about the things Mark planned to make, climbed some more, and late in the afternoon they came to the summit of the mountain and looked down over the entire valley, all the way to the Shenandoah River in the distance.

Molly found a spot that was level and sheltered, and Mark finally got to see the surprise she had prepared for him: blankets, some preserved food, fruits, meat, six pieces of cornbread, and corn to pop over the open fire. After they ate, they pushed spruce needles into mounds and Mark rolled up in his blanket and yawned.

“What’s that noise?” he asked after a moment.

“The trees,” Molly said softly. “The wind moves up there even when we can’t feel it down here, and the trees and wind tell each other secrets.”

Mark laughed and yawned again. “They’re talking about us,” he said. Molly smiled in the dark. “I can almost hear the words,” he said.

“We’re the first human beings they’ve seen in a long time,” she said. “They’re probably surprised that there are any more of us around.”

“I won’t go back either!” Mark shouted at her. They had eaten the last of the cornbread and dried apples, and the fire was out, the ground smoothed around it.

“Mark, listen to me. They will put me back in the breeders’ compound. Do you understand? I won’t be allowed out again. They will give me medicines that will keep me very quiet and I won’t know anything or anyone. That will be my life back there. But you? You have so much to learn. Read all the books in the old house, learn everything you can from them. And one day you might decide to leave, but not until you’re a man, Mark.”

“I’m staying with you.”

She shook her head. “Remember the voices of the trees? When you’re lonely, go into the woods and let the trees talk to you. Maybe you’ll hear my voice there too. I’ll never be far away, if you listen.”

“Where are you going?”

“Down the river, to the Shenandoah, to look for your father. They won’t bother me there.”

Tears stood in his eyes, but he didn’t shed them. He lifted his pack and put his arms through the harness. They started down the mountain again. Midway down they stopped. “You can see the valley from here,” Molly said. “I won’t go any farther with you.”

He didn’t look at her.

“Good-bye, Mark.”

“Will the trees talk to me if you’re not there?”

“Always. If you listen. The others are looking to the cities to save them, and the cities are dead and ruined. But the trees are alive, and when you need them, they’ll talk to you. I promise you that, Mark.”

Now he came to her and hugged her hard. “I love you,” he said. Then he turned and started down the hill, and she stood watching him until her tears blinded her and she could no longer see him.

She waited until he emerged from the woods and started across the cleared valley. Then she turned and walked south, toward the Shenandoah. All that night the trees whispered to her. When she awakened, she knew the trees had accepted her; they didn’t stop their murmuring as they had always done in the past when she stirred about. Over and under and through their voices she could hear the voice of the river, still far off, and beyond it, she was certain she could hear Ben’s voice, growing stronger as she hurried toward him. She could smell the fresh water now; and the voices of the river and the trees and Ben’s voice blended as they called to her to hurry. She ran toward him joyously. He caught her and together they floated down, down into the cool, sweet water.