Gently Mark touched her cheek and drew her close to him. She was trembling violently. “Shh, shh,” Mark soothed her. “It’s all right. You’re all right now.”
No walls held them in, he thought, stroking her hair. No fence restrained them, yet they could not approach the river; they could not get nearer the mill than she was now; they could not pass the rose hedge, or go into the woods. But Molly did it, he thought grimly. And they would too.
“I have to go back,” she said presently. The haunted look had come over her face. The emptiness, she had called it. “You wouldn’t know what it means,” she said, trying to explain. “We aren’t separate, you see. My sisters and I were like one thing, one creature, and now I’m a fragment of that creature. Sometimes I can forget it for a short time, when I’m with you I can forget for a while, but it always comes back, and the emptiness comes again. If you turned me inside out, there wouldn’t be anything at all there.”
“Brenda, I have to talk to you first,” Mark said. “You’ve been here four years, haven’t you? And you’ve had two pregnancies. It’s almost time again, isn’t it?”
She nodded and pulled on her tunic.
“Listen, Brenda. This time it won’t be like before. They plan to use the breeders to clone themselves through implantations of cloned cells. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
She shook her head, but she was listening, watching.
“All right. They’ve changed something in the chemicals they use for the clones in the tanks. Now they can keep on cloning the same person over and over, but he’s a neuter. The new clones can’t think for themselves; they can’t conceive, can’t impregnate, they’ll never have children of their own. And the council members are afraid they’ll lose the scientific skills, the craftsmanship, Miriam’s skill at drawing, her eidetic visual memory — all that might be lost if they don’t ensure it in the next generation through cloning. Since they can’t use the tanks, they’ll use the fertile women as hosts. They’ll implant you with clones, triplets. And in nine months you’ll have three new Andrews, or three new Miriams, or Lawrences, or whatever. They’ll use the strongest, healthiest young women for this. And they’ll continue to use artificial insemination for the others. When they produce another new talent they can use, they’ll clone him several times, implant the clones in your bodies and produce more of him.”
She was staring at him now, openly puzzled by his intensity. “What difference does it make?” she asked. “If that’s how we can best serve the community, that’s what we have to do.”
“The new babies from the tanks won’t even have names,” Mark said. “They’ll be the Bennies, or the Bonnies, or the Annes, all of them, and their clones will be called that, and theirs.”
She laced her sandal without speaking.
“And you, how many sets of triplets do you think your body can produce? Three? Four?”
She was no longer listening.
Mark climbed the hill over the valley and sat on a limestone rock, looking at the people below, at the sprawling farm that had grown year by year until it filled the whole valley all the way to the bend in the river. Only the old house was an oasis of trees in the autumn fields, which looked like a desert now. Livestock were moving slowly toward the large barns. A group of small boys swept into view, playing something that involved a lot of running, falling down, and running again. Twenty or more of them played together. He was too far away to hear them, but he knew they were laughing.
“What’s wrong with it?” he said aloud, and was surprised by the sound of his voice. The wind stirred the trees, but there were no words, no answer.
They were content, happy even, and he, the outsider, in his discontent would destroy that to satisfy what had to be selfish desires. In his loneliness he would disrupt an entire community that was thriving and satisfied.
Below him the Ella sisters came into view, ten of them, each a physical carbon copy of his mother. For a moment the vision of Molly peeking out from behind a bush, laughing with him, came to mind. It vanished, and he watched the girls walk toward the dormitory. Three of the Miriam sisters came out, and the two groups stopped and talked.
Mark remembered how Molly had made people come to life on paper, a touch here, another there, an eyebrow raised too much, a dimple drawn too deep, always something not just right, but which made the sketch take on life. They couldn’t do that, he knew. Not Miriam, not her little Ella sisters, none of them. That was gone, lost forever maybe. Each generation lost something; sometimes it couldn’t be regained, sometimes it couldn’t be identified immediately. Everett’s little brothers couldn’t cope with a new emergency with the computer terminal; they couldn’t improvise long enough to save the growing fetuses in the tanks if the electricity failed for several days. As long as the elders could foresee the probable troubles that might arise and train the young clones in how to handle them, they were safe enough, but accidents had a way of not being foreseen, catastrophes had a way of not being predictable, and a major accident might destroy everything in the valley simply because none of them had been trained to deal with that specific situation.
He remembered a conversation he had had with Barry. “We’re living on the top of a pyramid,” he had said, “supported by the massive base, rising above it, above everything that has made it possible. We’re responsible for nothing, not the structure itself, not anything above us. We owe nothing to the pyramid, and are totally dependent on it. If the pyramid crumbles and returns to dust, there is nothing we can do to prevent it, or even to save ourselves. When the base goes, the top goes with it, no matter how elaborate the life is that has developed there. The top will return to dust along with the base when the collapse comes. If a new structure is to rise, it must start at the ground, not on top of what has been built during the centuries past.”
“You’d drag everyone back into savagery!”
“I would help them down from the point of the pyramid. It’s rotting away. The snow and ice from one direction, weather and age from the others. It will collapse, and when it does, the only ones who can survive will be those who are free from it, in no way dependent on it.”
The cities are dead; Molly had told him, and it was true. Ironically, the technology that made life in the valley possible might be able to sustain that life only long enough to doom any chance of recovery after the pyramid started to tilt. The top would slide down one of the sides and sink into the debris at the bottom, along with all the other technologies that had seemed perfect and infinite.
No one understood the computer, Mark thought, just as no one but the Lawrence brothers understood the paddle-wheel boat and the steam engine that drove it. The younger brothers could repair it, restore it to its original condition, as long as the materials were at hand, but they didn’t know how either one worked, the computer or the boat, and if a screw was missing, none of them would be able to fashion a substitute. In that fact lay the inevitable destruction of the valley and everyone in it.
But they were happy, he reminded himself, as lights began to come on in the valley. Even the breeders were content; they were well cared for, pampered compared to the women who foraged each summer and those who worked long hours in the fields and gardens. And if they became too lonely, there was the comfort of drugs.
They were happy because they didn’t have enough imagination to look ahead, he thought, and anyone who tried to tell them there were dangers was by definition an enemy of the community. In disrupting their perfect existence, he had become an enemy.
His restless gaze moved over the valley, and finally stopped on the mill, and like his ancestor before him he understood that was the weak spot, the place where the valley was vulnerable.