“It won’t work,” said Barry in a doleful voice. “We’ll have to tell her.”
Douglas shook his head. “We can’t do that. You know just what she’ll do. She’ll bring down the umpteen volumes of notes she’s made on this experiment, and ask us if we’re going to let it all come to naught.”
“He’s right,” Albert said. “I can picture the scene now. The big organ-pipe voice blasting us for our lack of faith, the accusations of ingratitude—”
“Ingratitude?” William shouted. “She twisted us and pushed us and molded us without asking our permission. Hell, she created us with her laboratory tricks. But that didn’t give her the right to make zombies out of us.”
“Still,” Martin said, “we can’t just go to her and tell her that it’s all over. The shock would kill her.
“Well?” Richard asked in the silence that followed. “What’s wrong with that?”
For a moment, no one spoke. The house was quiet; we heard footsteps descending the stairs. We froze.
Mother appeared, an imperial figure even in her old housecoat. “You boys are kicking up too much of a racket down here,” she boomed. “I know you’re glad to see each other again after a year, but I need my sleep.”
She turned and strode upstairs again. We heard her bedroom door slam shut. For an instant we were all ten-year-olds again, diligently studying our books for fear of Mother’s displeasure.
I moistened my lips. “Well?” I asked. “I call for a vote on Richard’s suggestion.”
Martin, as a chemist, prepared the drink, using Donald’s medical advice as his guide. Saul, Stephen, and Raymond dug a grave, in the woods at the back of our property. Douglas and Mark built the coffin.
Richard, ending his criminal career with a murder to which we were all accessories before the fact, carried the fatal beverage upstairs to Mother the next morning, and persuaded her to sip it. One sip was all that was necessary; Martin had done his work well.
Leonard offered us a legal opinion: It was justifiable homicide. We placed the body in its coffin and carried it out across the fields. Richard, Peter, Jonas and Charles were her pallbearers; the others of us followed in their path.
We lowered the body into the ground and John said a few words over her. Then, slowly, we closed over the grave and replaced the sod, and began the walk back to the house.
“She died happy,” Anthony said. “She never suspected the size of her failure.” It was her epitaph.
As our banker, James supervised the division of her assets, which were considerable, into thirty-one equal parts. Noel composed a short figment of prose which we agreed summed up our sentiments.
We left the farm that night, scattering in every direction, anxious to begin life. All that went before was a dream from which we now awakened. We agreed to meet at the farm each year, on the anniversary of her death, in memory of the woman who had so painstakingly divided a zygote into thirty-two viable cells, and who had spent a score of years conducting an experiment based on a theory that had proved to be utterly false.
We felt no regret, no qualm. We had done what needed to be done, and on that last day some of us had finally functioned in the professions for which Mother had intended us.
I, too. My first and last work of history will be this, an account of Mother and her experiment, which records the beginning and the end of her work. And now it is complete.