the new dormitory was dark except for the pale lights spaced regularly in the halls. mark darted down the hallway and went inside one of the rooms. there was too little light to make out details; only the shapes of sleeping boys on the white beds could be seen at first. the windows were dark shadows.
mark stood by the door silently and waited for his eyes to adjust; the shapes emerged from darkness and became dark and light areas—arms, faces, hair. his bare feet made no sound as he approached the first cot, and again he stopped; this time his wait was shorter. the boy on the cot didn’t stir. slowly mark opened a small bottle of ink, made from blackberries and walnuts, and dipped a fine brush into it. he had been holding the ink next to his chest; it was warm. moving very carefully, he leaned over the sleeping boy and quickly painted the numeral 1 on the boy’s cheek. the boy didn’t move.
mark backed away from the first bed, went to another, and again paused to make certain the boy was sleeping deeply. this time he painted a 2.
presently he left the room and hurried to the next one. he repeated the procedure there. if the boy was sleeping on his stomach, his face buried in the covers, mark painted a number on his hand or arm.
shortly before dawn mark put the top back on his bottle of ink and crept to his own room, a cubicle large enough to contain only his cot and some shelves above it. he put the ink on a shelf, making no attempt to hide it. then he sat cross-legged on his bed and waited.
he was a slightly built boy, with dark, abundant hair that made his head seem overlarge, not conspicuously so, but noticeable if one examined him closely. the only startling feature was his eyes, a blue of such intensity and depth that they were unforgettable. he sat patiently, a slight smile playing on his lips, deepening, leaving, forming again. the light outside his window brightened; it was spring and the air had a luminosity that was missing in other seasons.
now he could hear voices, and his smile deepened, widened his mouth. the voices were loud and angry. he began to laugh, and was weak from laughter when his door opened and five boys entered. there was so little room they had to line up with their legs tight against his cot.
“good morning, one, two, three, four, five,” mark said, choking on the words with new laughter. they flushed angrily and he doubled over, unable to contain himself.
“where is he?” miriam asked. she had entered the conference room and was still standing at the door.
barry was at the head of the table. “sit down, miriam,” he said. “you know what he did?”
she sat at the other end of the long table and nodded. “who doesn’t? it’s all over, that’s all anyone’s talking about.” she glanced at the others. the doctors were there, lawrence, thomas, sara . . . a full council meeting.
“has he said anything?” she asked.
thomas shrugged. “he didn’t deny it.”
“did he say why he did it?”
“so he could tell them apart,” barry said.
for a brief moment miriam thought she heard a trace of amusement in his voice, but nothing of it showed on his face. she felt tight with fury, as if somehow she might be held responsible for the boy, for his aberrant behavior. she wouldn’t have it, she thought angrily. she leaned forward, her hands pressed on the tabletop, and demanded, “what are you going to do about him? why don’t you control him?”
“this meeting has been called to discuss that,” barry said. “have you any suggestions?”
she shook her head, still furious, unappeased. she shouldn’t even be there, she thought. the boy was nothing to her; she had avoided contact with him from the beginning. by inviting her to the meeting, they had made a link that in reality didn’t exist. again she shook her head and now she leaned back in her chair, as if to divorce herself from the proceedings.
“we’ll have to punish him,” lawrence said after a moment of silence. “the only question is how.”
how? barry wondered. not isolation; he thrived on it, sought it out at every turn. not extra work; he was still working off his last escapade. only three months ago he had gotten inside the girls’ rooms and mixed up their ribbons and sashes so that no group had anything matching. it had taken hours for them to get everything back in place. and now this, and this time it would take weeks for the ink to wear off.
lawrence spoke again, his voice thoughtful, a slight frown on his face. “we should admit we made a mistake,” he said. “there is no place for him among us. the boys his age reject him; he has no friends. he is capricious and willful, brilliant and moronic by turns. we made a mistake with him. now his pranks are only that, childish pranks, but in five years? ten years? what can we expect from him in the future?” he directed his questions at barry.
“in five years he will be downriver, as you know. it is during the next few years that we have to find a way to manage him better.”
sara moved slightly in her chair, and barry turned to her. “we have found that he is not made repentant by being isolated,” sara said. “it is his nature to be an isolate, therefore by not allowing him the privacy he craves we will have found the correct punishment for him.”
barry shook his head. “we discussed that before,” he said. “it would not be fair to the others to force them to accept him, an outsider. he is disruptive among his peers; they should not be punished along with him.”
“not his peers,” sara said emphatically. “you and your brothers voted to keep him here in order to study him for clues in how to train others to endure separate existences. it is your responsibility to accept him among yourselves, to let his punishment be to have to live with you under your watchful eyes. or else admit lawrence is right, that we made a mistake, and that it is better to correct the mistake now than to let it continue to compound.”
“you would punish us for the misdeeds of the boy?” bruce asked.
“that boy wouldn’t be here if it were not for you and your brothers,” sara said distinctly. “if you’ll recall, at our first meeting concerning him, the rest of us voted to rid ourselves of him. we foresaw trouble from the beginning, and it was your arguments about his possible usefulness that finally swayed us. if you want to keep him, then you keep him with you, under your observation, away from the other children, who are constantly being hurt by him and his pranks. he is an isolate, an aberration, a troublemaker. these meetings have become more frequent, his pranks more destructive. how many more hours must we spend discussing his behavior?”
“you know that isn’t practical,” barry said impatiently. “we’re in the lab half the time, in the breeders’ quarters, in the hospital. those aren’t places for a child of ten.”
“then get rid of him,” sara said. she sat back now and crossed her arms over her chest.
barry looked at miriam, whose lips were tightly compressed. she met his gaze coldly. he turned to lawrence.
“can you think of any other way?” lawrence asked. “we’ve tried everything we can think of, and nothing has worked. those boys were angry enough to kill him this morning. next time there might be violence. have you thought what violence would do to this community?”
they were a people without violence in their history. physical punishment had never been considered, because it was impossible to hurt one without hurting others equally. that didn’t apply to mark, barry thought suddenly, but he didn’t say it. the thought of hurting him, of causing him physical pain, was repugnant. he glanced at his brothers and saw the same confusion on their faces that he was feeling. they couldn’t abandon the boy. he did hold clues about how man lived alone; they needed him. his mind refused to probe more deeply than that: they needed to study him. there were so many things about human beings that were incomprehensible to them; mark might be the link that would enable them to understand.
the fact that the boy was ben’s child, that ben and his brothers had been as one, had nothing to do with it. he felt no particular bond to the boy. none at all. if anyone could feel such a bond, it should be miriam, he thought, and looked at her for a sign that she felt something. her face was stony, her eyes avoided him. too rigid, he realized, too cold.
and if that were so, he thought coolly, as if thinking about an experiment with insensate material, then it truly was a mistake to keep the boy with them. if that one child had the power to hurt the miriam sisters as well as the barry brothers, he was a mistake. it was unthinkable that an outsider could somehow reach in and twist the old hurts so much that they became new hurts, with even more destructive aftermaths.
“we could do it,” bob said suddenly. “there are risks, of course, but we could manage him. in four years,” he continued, looking now at sara, “he’ll be sent out with the road crew, and from then on, he won’t be a threat to any of us. but we will need him when we begin to reach out to try to understand the cities. he can scout out the paths, survive alone in the woods without danger of mental breakdown through separation. we’ll need him.”
sara nodded. “and if we have to have another meeting such as this one, can we agree today that it will be our final meeting?”
the barry brothers exchanged glances, then reluctantly nodded and barry said, “agreed. we manage him or get rid of him.”
the doctors returned to barry’s office, where mark was waiting for them. he was standing at the window, a small dark figure against the glare of sunlight. he turned to face them, and his own face seemed featureless. the sun touched his hair and made it gleam with red-gold highlights.
“what will you do with me?” he asked. his voice was steady.
“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.
