Orbit 15 - [Anthology] Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “David, how many are up at the northern end of the valley?”

  “About one hundred and ten now,” he said. He thought, two out of three dead, but he didn’t say it.

  “And the hospital? Was it built?”

  “It’s there. Walt is running it.”

  “David, while you’re driving, now that you can’t watch me for reactions or anything, just tell me about it here. What’s been happening, who’s alive, who’s dead. Everything.”

  When they stopped for lunch hours later, she said, “David, will you make love to me now, before the rains start again?”

  They lay under a stand of yellow poplars and the leaves rustled incessantly with a motion that needed no appreciable wind to start. Under the susurrous trees, their own voices became whispers. She was so thin and so pale, and inside she was so warm and alive; her body rose to meet his and her breasts seemed to lift, to seek his touch. Her fingers were in his hair, on his back, digging into his flanks, strong now, then relaxed and trembling, then clenched into fists that opened spasmodically; and he felt her nails distantly, aware that his back was being clawed, but distantly, distantly. And finally there were only the susurrant leaves.

  “I’ve loved you for more than twenty years, did you realize that?” he said.

  She laughed. “Remember when I broke your arm?”

  Later, in the cart again, her voice came from behind him, softly, sadly. “We’re finished, aren’t we, David? You, I, all of us?”

  And he thought, Walt be damned, promises be damned, secrecy be damned. And he told her about the clones developing under the mountain, in the laboratory deep in the Great Bear Cave.

  ~ * ~

  Celia started to work in the laboratory a week later. “It’s the only way I’ll ever get to see you at all,” she said when David protested. “I promised Walt I would work only four hours a day to start. Okay?”

  David took her through the lab the following morning. The entrance to the cave was concealed in the furnace room of the hospital basement. The door was steel, set in the limestone bedrock. As soon as they stepped through the doorway, the air was cold and David put a coat about Celia’s shoulders. “We keep them here at all times,” he said, taking a second coat from a wall hanger. “Twice government inspectors have come here, and it might look suspicious if we put them on to go down the cellar. They won’t be back,” he said. She nodded.

  The passageway was dimly lighted, the floor smooth. It went four hundred feet to another steel door. This one opened into the first cave chamber, a large, high-domed room. It had been left almost as they had found it, with stalactites and stalagmites on all sides, but now there were many cots, and picnic tables and benches, and a row of cooking tables and serving tables. “Our emergency room, for the ‘hot’ rains,” David said, hurrying her through. There was another passage, narrower and rougher than the first. At the end of this passage was the animal experiment room.

  One wall had been cut through and the computer installed, looking grotesquely out of place against a wall of pale pink travertine. In the center of the room were tanks and vats and pipes, all stainless steel and glass. On either side of these were the tanks that held the animal embryos. Celia stared without moving for several moments, then turned to look at David with startled eyes. “How many tanks do you have?”

  “Enough to clone six hundred animals of varying sizes,” he said. “We took a lot of them out, put them in the other side, and we’re not using all that we have here. We’re afraid our supplies of chemicals will run out, and so far we haven’t come up with alternatives that we can extract from anything at our disposal here.”

  Eddie Beauchamp came from the side of the tanks, jotting figures in a ledger. He grinned at David and Celia. “Slumming?” he asked. He checked his figures against a dial and adjusted it a fraction, and continued down the row checking the other dials, stopping now and again to make a minor adjustment.

  Celia’s eyes questioned David and he shook his head. Eddie didn’t know what they were doing in the other lab. They walked past the tanks, row after row of them, all sealed, with only the needles of the meters and gauges to indicate that there was anything inside. They returned to the corridor. David led her through another doorway, another shorter passage, then unlocked a door and took her into the second laboratory.

  Walt looked up as they entered, nodded, turned again to his desk. Vlasic didn’t even look up. Sarah smiled and hurried past them and sat down before a computer console and began to type. Another woman in the room didn’t seem to be aware that anyone had come in. Hilda. Celia’s aunt. David glanced at Celia, but she was staring wide-eyed at the tanks, and in this room the tanks were glass-fronted. Each was filled with a pale liquid, a yellow so faint that the color seemed almost illusory. Floating in the liquid were sacs, no larger than small fists. Slender transparent tubes connected the sacs to the top of the tanks; each one was attached to a pipe that led back into a large stainless steel apparatus which seemed to be covered with dials.

  Celia walked slowly down the aisle between the tanks, stopped midway and didn’t move again for a long time. David took her arm. She was trembling slightly.

  “Are you all right?”

  She nodded. “I . . . it’s a shock, seeing them. I . . . maybe I didn’t quite believe it.” There was a film of perspiration on her face.

  “Better take off the coat now,” David said. “We have to keep it pretty warm in here. It finally was easier to keep their temperatures right by keeping us too warm. The price we pay,” he said, smiling slightly.

  “All the lights? The heat? The computer? You can generate that much electricity?”

  He nodded. “That’ll be
our tour tomorrow, or sometime. Like everything else around here, the generating system has bugs in it. We can store enough power for no longer than six hours, and we just don’t let it go out for more than that.”

  She nodded. “Six hours is a lot. If you stop breathing for six minutes, you’re dead.” With her hands clasped behind her she stepped closer to the shiny control system at the end of the room. “This isn’t the computer. What is it?”

  “It’s a computer terminal. The computer controls the input of nutrients and oxygen, and the output of toxins.” He nodded toward the wall. “The animal room is on the other side. Those tanks are linked to it, too. Separate set of systems, but the same machinery.”

  She nodded again. They went through the nursery for the animals, and then the nursery for the human babies. There was the dissection room, several small offices where the scientists could withdraw to work, the stock rooms. In every room except the one where the human clones were being grown, people were working. “They never saw a bunsen burner or a test tube before, but they have become scientists and technicians practically overnight,” David said. “And thank God for that, or it never would have worked. I don’t know what they think we’re doing now, but they don’t ask questions. They just do their jobs.”

  In August, Avery Handley got through to a shortwave contact in Richmond who warned of a band of marauders working up the valley. “They’re bad,” he said. “They took over the Phillpotts’ place, ransacked it, and then burned it to the ground.”

  In September they fought off the first attack. In October they learned the band was grouping for a second attack, this time with thirty to forty men. “We can’t keep fighting them off,” Walt said. “They must know we have food here. They’ll come from all directions this time. They know we’re watching for them.”

  “We should blow up the dam,” Clarence said. “Wait until they’re in the upper valley and flood them out.”

  The meeting was being held in the cafeteria, with everyone present. Celia’s hand tightened in David’s, but she didn’t protest. No one protested.

  “They’ll try to take the mill,” Clarence went on. “They’ll probably think there’s wheat there, or something.” A dozen men volunteered to stand guard at the mill. Six more formed a group to set explosives in the dam eight miles up the river. Others would be a scouting party.

  David and Celia left the meeting early. He had volunteered for everything and had been turned down. He was not one of the expendable ones. The rains had become “hot” again, and the people were all sleeping in the cave. David and Celia, Walt, Vlasic, the others who worked in the various labs, all slept there on cots. In one of the small offices David held Celia’s hand and they whispered before they fell asleep. Their talk was of their childhood.

  Long after Celia fell asleep David stared into the blackness, still holding her hand. She had grown even thinner, and earlier that week when he had tried to get her to leave the lab to rest, Walt had said, “Leave her be.” She stirred fitfully, and he knelt by the side of her cot and held her; he could feel her heart flutter wildly for a moment. Then she was still again and slowly he released her and sat on the stone floor with his eyes closed. Later he heard Walt moving about, the creaking of his cot in the next office. David was getting stiff, and finally he returned to his own bed.

  The next day the people worked to get everything up to high ground. Nothing could be spared, and board by board they carried a barn up the hillside and stacked the pieces. Two days later the signal was given and the dam was destroyed. David and Celia stood in one of the upper hospital rooms and watched together as the wall of water roared down the valley. It was like a jet takeoff; a crowd furious with an umpire’s decision; an express train out of control; a roar like nothing he had ever heard, or like everything he had ever heard, recombined to make this noise that shook the building, that vibrated in his bones. A wall of water, fifteen feet high, twenty feet high, raced down the valley, accelerating as it came, smashing, destroying everything in its path.

  They walked back through the empty hospital, through the long dimly lighted passage, through the large chamber where the people were trying to find comfortable positions on the cots, on the benches, through the smaller passages and finally into the lab office.

  “How many people did we kill?” she asked, stepping out of her jeans. She turned her back to lay her clothes on the foot of her cot. Her buttocks were nearly as flat as an adolescent boy’s. When she faced him again, her ribs seemed to be straining against her skin. She looked at him for a moment, and then came to him and held his head tight against her chest as he sat on his cot and she stood naked before him. He could feel her tears as they fell onto his cheek.

  There was a hard freeze in November, and with the valley flooded and the road and bridges gone, they knew they were safe from attack, at least until spring. The people had moved out of the cave again, and work in the lab went on at the same numbing pace. The fetuses were developing, growing, moving now with sudden motions of feet and elbows. David was working on substitutes for the chemicals that already were substituting for amniotic fluids. He worked each day until his vision blurred, or his hands refused to obey his directions, or Walt ordered him out of the lab. Celia was working longer hours now, still resting in the middle of the day for several hours, but she returned after that and stayed almost as late as David did.

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

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

  ~ * ~

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

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

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

  “I don’t care,” David said.

  “You’re going to care! Because those babies are going to come busting out of those sacs, and those babies are the only hope we have, and you know it. Our genes, yours, mine, Celia’s, those genes are the only thing that stand between us and oblivion.” He was white, his lips were pale, his eyes sunken. There was a tic in his cheek that David never had seen before.

  “Why now?” David asked. “Why change the plan and tell them now, so far ahead of time?”

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

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

  “I know that.” Walt put his head back and closed his eyes. “We don’t have much choice,” he said. “We lost one yesterday. Three today. We have to bring them out and treat them like preemies.”

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

  “I have to sleep,” Walt said. “Then a meeting, posted for seven. After that we prepare the nursery for a hell of a lot of preemies. As soon as we’re ready, we be
gin getting them out. That’ll be morning. We need nurses, half a dozen, more if we can get them. Sarah says Margaret would be good. I don’t know.”

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

  Walt mumbled something, and one hand fell off the chair arm. He jerked upright.

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