“Come over here and sit down,” Barry said, taking his place behind the desk. The boy crossed the room and sat on a straight chair, perching on the extreme front of it, as if ready to leap up and run.
“Relax,” Bob said, and sat on the edge of the desk, swinging his leg as he regarded the boy. When the five brothers were in the room it seemed very crowded suddenly. The boy looked from one to another of them and finally turned his attention to Barry. He didn’t ask again.
Barry told him about the meeting, and watching him, he thought, there was a little of Ben, and a little of Molly, and for the rest, he had gone into the distant past, dipped into the gene pool, had come up with strangers’ genes, and he was unlike anyone else in the valley. Mark listened intently, the way he listened in class when he was interested. His grasp was immediate and thorough.
“Why do they think what I did was so awful?” he asked when Barry became silent.
Barry looked at his brothers helplessly. This was how it was going to be, he wanted to say to them. No common grounds for understanding. He was an alien in every way.
Suddenly Mark asked, “How can I tell you apart?”
“There’s no need for you to tell us apart,” Barry said firmly.
Mark stood up then. “Should I go get my stuff, bring it to your place?”
“Yes. Now, while the others are in school. And come right back.”
Mark nodded. At the door he paused, glanced at each in turn once more, and said, “Maybe just a tiny, tiny touch of paint, on the tips of the ears, or something . . . ?” He opened the door and ran out, and they could hear him laughing as he raced down the hall.
Chapter 21
Barry glanced about the lecture room and spotted Mark in the rear, looking sleepy and bored. He shrugged; let him be bored. Three of the brothers were working in the labs, and the fourth was busy in the breeders’ quarters; that left the lecture, and Mark had to sit through it if it killed him.
“The problem we raised yesterday, if you’ll recall,” Barry said then, referring briefly to his notes, “is that we have yet to discover the cause of the decline of the clone strains after the fourth generation. The only way we have got around this to date is through constant replenishment of our stocks by the use of sexually reproduced babies who are cloned before the third month in utero. In this way we have been able to maintain our families of brothers and sisters, but admittedly this is not the ideal solution. Can any of you tell me what some of the obvious drawbacks to this system are?” He paused and glanced about. “Karen?”
“There is a slight difference between the babies cloned in the laboratory and those born of human mothers. There is the prenatal influence and also the birth trauma that might alter the sexually reproduced person.”
“Very good,” Barry said. “Comments, anyone?”
“In the beginning they waited two years before they cloned the babies,” Stuart said. “Now we don’t, and that makes the family almost as close as if they were all clones.”
Barry nodded, then pointed to Carl. “If the human baby has a birth defect, caused by a birth trauma, he can be aborted, and still the cloned babies will be all right.”
“That’s hardly in the nature of a drawback,” Barry said, smiling. There was an answering ripple of amusement throughout the class.
He waited a moment, then said, “The genetic pool is unpredictable, its past is unknown, its constituents so varied that when the process is not regulated and controlled, there is always the danger of producing unwanted characteristics. And the even more dangerous threat of losing talents that are important to our community.” He allowed time for this to be grasped, then continued. “The only way to ensure our future, to ensure continuity, is through perfecting the process of cloning, and for this reason we need to expand our facilities, increase our researchers, locate a source of materials to replace what is wearing out and equip the new laboratories, and we need to complete a safe link to that source or sources.”
A hand was raised. Barry nodded. “What if we can’t find enough equipment in good condition soon enough?”
“Then we will have to go to human implantation of the cloned fetus. We have done this in a number of cases, and we have the methods, but it is wasteful of our few human resources, and it would necessitate changing our timetable drastically to use the breeders this way.” He looked over the class, then continued. “Our goal is to remove the need for sexual reproduction. Then we will be able to plan our future. If we need road builders, we can clone fifty or a hundred for this purpose, train them from infancy, and send them out to fulfill their destiny. We can clone boat builders, sailors, send them out to the sea to locate the course of the fish our first explorers discovered in the Potomac. A hundred farmers, to relieve those who would prefer to be working over test tubes than hoeing rows of carrots.”
Another ripple of laughter passed over the students. Barry smiled also; without exception they all worked their hours in the fields.
“For the first time since mankind walked the face of the earth,” he said, “there will be no misfits.”
“And no geniuses,” a voice said lazily, and he looked to the rear of the class to see Mark, still slouched down in his chair, his blue eyes bright, grinning slightly. Deliberately he winked at Barry, then closed both eyes again, and apparently returned to sleep.
“I’ll tell you a story if you want,” Mark said. He stood in the aisle between two rows of three beds each. The Carver brothers had all had appendicitis simultaneously. They looked at him from both sides, and one of them nodded. They were thirteen.
“Once there was a woji,” he said, moving to the window, where he sat cross-legged on a chair with the light behind him.
“What’s a woji?”
“If you ask questions, I won’t tell it,” Mark said. “You’ll see as I go along. This woji lived deep in the woods, and every year when winter came he nearly froze to death. That was because the icy rains soaked him and the snow covered him over, and he had nothing at all to eat because the leaves all fell and he ate leaves. One year he got an idea, and he went to a big spruce tree and told it his idea. At first the spruce tree wouldn’t even consider his suggestion. The woji didn’t go away, though. He kept telling the spruce tree his idea over and over, and finally the spruce tree thought, What did he have to lose? Why not try it? So the spruce tree told the woji to go ahead. For days and days the woji worked on the leaves, rolling them up and making them over into needles. He used some of the needles to sew them all tightly to the tree branches. Then he climbed to the very top of the spruce tree and yelled at the ice wind, and laughed at it and said it couldn’t hurt him now, because he had a home and food to eat all winter.
“The other trees heard him and laughed, and they began to tell each other about the crazy little woji who yelled at the ice wind, and finally the last tree, at the place where the trees end and the snow begins, heard the story. It was a maple tree, and it laughed until its leaves shook. The ice wind heard it laughing and came blowing up, storming and throwing ice, and demanded to know what was so funny. The maple tree told the ice wind about the crazy little woji who had challenged his powers to take the leaves off the trees, and the ice wind became madder and madder. It blew harder and harder. The maple leaves turned red and gold with fear and then fell to the ground, and the tree stood naked before the wind. The ice wind blew south and the other trees shivered and turned color and dropped their leaves.
“Finally the ice wind came to the spruce tree and screamed for the woji to come out. He wouldn’t. He was hidden deep in the spruce needles where the ice wind couldn’t see him or touch him. The wind blew harder and the spruce tree shivered, but its needles held tight and they didn’t turn color at all. The ice wind now called up the ice rain to help, and the spruce tree was covered with icicles, but the needles held on and the woji stayed dry and warm. Then the ice wind got madder than ever and called the snow to help, and it snowed deeper and deeper until the spruce tree looked like a mountain of snow, but deep inside, the woji was warm and content, close to the trunk of the tree, and soon the tree shrugged and the snow fell away from it and it knew the ice wind could no longer hurt it.