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?”