The meeting just dissolved. Nobody made me any promises. Nobody bowed or scraped. Nobody even looked scared—or felt scared. I checked. Once they got over their surprise, they were even reassured. They could see that Jesse and Rachel were going to be all right. They could see that all I wanted from them was a little co-operation. And now they knew they would be better off if they co-operated. The atmosphere of the house was more relaxed than it had been since the day of my transition.
Seth Dana came up and grinned at me. “Don’t you get the feeling you should have done this two weeks ago?”
I smiled back and shook my head. “I don’t think so. Two weeks ago, I would have had to kill somebody.”
He frowned. “I don’t see why.”
“Everything was too new. You were all on short fuses. You and Ada hadn’t gotten together and mellowed each other, so one or both of you would have been against me. If you had, Karl probably would have, too. He was about ready to strangle me anyway, then.” I shrugged. “This is better. People have had time to cool off.”
He gave me an odd look. “What do you think might have happened if you’d waited a little longer than two weeks, then, let Jesse and Rachel do some mellowing?”
“Jesse and Rachel weren’t mellowing. They were feeding on each other’s hatred, building each other up to jump me.”
“You know,” he said, “I got the impression at first that you just threw this meeting together on the spur of the moment.”
“I did.”
“Yeah. After two weeks of watching everybody and making sure your timing was as right as you could make it.”
Clay Dana came over to where Seth and I were talking. Close up, he looked sort of gray and sick. I thought he must have just had a bad bout of mental interference. “Congratulations,” he said to me. “Now that we all know the new pecking order, do either of you have any aspirins?”
Seth looked at him with concern. “Another headache?”
“Another, hell. It’s the same one I’ve had for three days.”
“From mental interference?” I asked.
“What else?”
“I thought you weren’t getting as much of that now as you used to.”
“I wasn’t,” he said. “It stopped altogether for a few days. That never happened in the middle of a city before. Then, three days ago, it started to come back worse than ever.”
That bothered me. I hadn’t paid much attention to Clay since he arrived, but I knew that anything new and different that went wrong with him, with his out-of-control mental ability, would eventually get blamed on me, on my pattern.
Seth spoke up as though on cue. “Look, Mary, I’ve been meaning to ask you if you could figure out what was happening to Clay. He’s been in really bad shape, and it just about has to have something to do with the pattern.”
“First the aspirins,” said Clay. “Find out what you want after—Hey!”
That “Hey!” was almost a shout. I had gotten rid of his headache for him fast—like switching off a light.
“Okay?” I asked, knowing it was.
“Sure.” He looked at me as though he suddenly wanted to get away from me.
I stayed with him mentally for a few moments longer, trying to find out just what was wrong with him. I didn’t really know what to look for. I just assumed that it had something to do with the pattern. I took a quick look through his memories, thinking that that uncontrolled ability of his might have tuned in on the pattern somehow. But it hadn’t in any way that I could see.
I scanned all the way back to the day he and Seth had arrived at the house. It was quick work but frustrating. I couldn’t find a damned thing. Nothing. I switched my attention to the pattern. I had no idea at all of what to look for there and I was getting mad. I checked the pattern strand that stretched from Seth to me. Seth was in mental contact with Clay sometimes to protect him. Maybe, without realizing it, he had done something more than protect.
He hadn’t.
I had nowhere else to go. There was something especially galling about suffering a defeat now, just minutes after I had won my biggest victory. But what could I do?
I shifted my attention back to Clay. There was a glimmer of something just as I shifted—like the glimmer of a fine spider web that catches the light just for a second and then seems to vanish again. I froze. I shifted back to the pattern, bringing it into focus very slowly. At first there was nothing. Then, just before I would have had a strong, clear focus on the pattern strands of my six actives, there was that glimmer again. I managed to keep it, this time, by not trying to sharpen my focus on it. Like looking at something out of the corner of your eye.
It was a pattern strand. A slender, fragile-seeming thread, like a shadow of one of the comparatively substantial strands of my actives. But it was a pattern strand. Somehow, Clay had become a member of the pattern. How?
I could think of only one answer. The pattern was made up of actives. Just actives, no latents until now. No latents period. Clay was on his way to transition.
The moment the thought hit me, I knew it was right. After a ten-year delay, Clay was going to make it. I tried to tell myself that I wasn’t sure. After all, I had never seen anyone who was about to go into transition before. But I couldn’t even make myself doubt. Clay was going to come through. He would belong to me, like the others. I knew it.
I brought my attention back to Seth and Clay, who stood waiting.
“That took long enough,” said Seth. “What did you find out?”
“That your brother’s not a latent any more,” I said. “That he’s headed toward transition.”
There was a moment of complete silence. Then came quick, bitter disappointment radiating from both men. They didn’t believe me.
Seth spoke quietly. “Mary, Doro himself gave up on Clay years ago, said he wouldn’t ever reach transition.”
“I know it. But there was no pattern back then.”
“But Doro explained that—”
“Damnit, Seth, I’m explaining that Doro was wrong. He might know a hell of a lot, but he can’t foretell the future. And he can’t use my pattern to see what I can see!”
Karl came up as I was talking. When I finished, he asked, “What are you shouting about now?”
I told him and he just shrugged.
“Doro wants to see us both in the library,” he said. “Now.”
“Wait a minute,” said Seth. “She can’t leave now.” He looked at me. “You’ve got to tell us how you know … how after all these years this could happen.” So they were beginning to believe me.
“I’ll have to talk to you after I see what Doro wants,” I said. “It probably won’t take long.”
I followed Karl away from them, hoping I could get back to them soon. I wanted to learn more about what was happening to Clay myself. I was excited about it. But now, Doro and the Dana brothers aside, there was something else I had to do.
“Karl.”
We had almost reached the library door. He stopped, looked at me.
“Thanks for your help.”
“You didn’t need it.”
“Yes I did. I might not have been able to stop myself from killing if they had pushed me harder.”
Karl nodded disinterestedly, turned to go into the library.
“Wait a minute.”
He gave me a look of annoyance.
“I have a feeling that, even though you sided with me, you’re the only one in the house that I haven’t really won over.”
“You didn’t win anyone over,” he said. “You bludgeoned the others into submission. I had already submitted.”
“The hell with that,” I said. I lowered my gaze a little, stared at his chest instead of his face. He was wearing a blue shirt open at the neck so that a little of his mat of brown chest hair showed. “I did what I had to do,” I said. “What I was evidently born to do. I’m not fighting it any more, for the same reason Jesse and Rachel probably won’t fight me any more. It doesn’t do any good.”
“Don’t you think I understand that?”
“If you understand it, why are you still holding it against me?”
“Because Jesse was right about one thing. It doesn’t really matter whether what you’re doing to us is your fault or not. You’re doing it. I’m not fighting you, but you shouldn’t expect me to thank you, either.”
“I don’t.”
He looked a little wary. “Just what do you want from me?”
“You know damn well what I want.”
“Do I?” He stared at me for a long moment. “I suppose I do. Doro must be leaving.” He turned and walked away.
I let him go this time. I felt like throwing something at him, but I let him go. The son of a bitch had Jan and Vivian both, and he had the nerve to talk about Doro and me. Or, rather, he had the nerve to use Doro to try to hurt me. If he couldn’t get away from me, he’d hurt me. He shouldn’t have been able to hurt me. But he was.
In the library, Doro was sitting at the reading table leafing through a book, and probably reading it. He read fast. Karl and I sat opposite him with an empty chair between us.
“I’ll be leaving tomorrow,” said Doro.
I felt rather than saw Karl’s glance at me. I ignored him. Doro went on.
“Mary, it looks as though you’ve established yourself fairly well. I don’t think anyone will bother you again.”
“No.”
“You’re just going to leave?” said Karl. “Don’t you have any plans for us now that Mary has become what you seemed to want her to become?”
“Mary’s plan sounded all right to me,” said Doro. “It might be harder for the group of you to organize your lives, held together as you are. But I’d rather give you a chance to try it. Let you find out whether you can build something of your own.”
“Or at least of Mary’s own,” said Karl bitterly.
Doro looked from one of us to the other.
“He’s still holding the pattern against me,” I said. “But he might be right, anyway. I might have something we can start working on together.” I told him about Clay Dana. He sat there listening, and looking more and more as though he didn’t believe me.
“Clay lost any chance he had for becoming an active over ten years ago,” he said.
“Ten years ago he didn’t have the pattern to help him along.”
“I find it hard to believe the pattern is helping him now. How could it? What did you do?”
“I don’t know, exactly. But it must be the pattern. What other new thing has there been in his life in the past two weeks? He was a latent before he came here. And if I can push one latent toward transition, why can’t I push others?”
“Oh, my God,” muttered Karl. I ignored him.
“Look,” I said, “we actives were all latents once. We moved up. Why can’t others?”
“The others weren’t bred for it. Clay was, and I can see now that you were right about him. But that doesn’t mean—”
“You can see?”
“Of course. How could I have raised generations of actives if I wasn’t able to judge my people’s potential?”
“Oh, yeah.” The ones who tasted good, yes. “Doro, I want to try bringing other latents to transition.”
“How?”
“By doing to them the only thing I’d ever done to Clay before today. By reading them. Just reading them.”
Doro shook his head. “Go ahead. It won’t work.”
Yes, it would. I felt sure that it would. And I could try it without even leaving the room. I thought of two of my cousins, a brother and sister—Jamie and Christine Hanson. We used to get into trouble together when we were little. As we grew older and started to receive mental interference, we got more antisocial. We abandoned each other and started to get into trouble separately. Doro didn’t pay any attention to Jamie and Christine, and their parents had given up on them years ago. No transition was supposed to come along and put them back in control of their lives, so, let alone, they’d probably wind up in prison or in the morgue before they were a lot older. But I wasn’t going to let them alone.
I reached out to the old neighborhood, got a bird’s-eye view of it all at once. Dell Street and Forsyth Avenue. Emma’s house. I could have focused in tight and read Rina or Emma. Instead, I followed Forsyth Avenue south past Piedras Altas, where heaven knew how many of my relatives lived, and on to Cooper Street, where I had even more family. On Cooper I recognized the Hanson house and focused in on it.
Christine was inside screaming at her mother. I noticed that she had shaved her head—probably more to get on her mother’s nerves than for any other reason. I didn’t pay any attention to what they were fighting about. I read her the way you skim pages of a phone book looking for a number. Only, I wasn’t looking for anything. I noticed that she’d been pregnant three times—one miscarriage and two abortions. And she was only nineteen. And she’d been with some idiot friends when they decided to rob a liquor store. Some other things. I didn’t care. I just read her. Then I went after Jamie.
I found him sitting on an old sofa in the garage, fooling around with a guitar. I read him and learned, among other things, that he had just gotten out of jail a few days before. He had been driving drunk, smashed into a parked car, backed up, drove away. But somebody got his license number. Ninety days.
Now that he was out, he couldn’t take the running battle that was usually going on inside the house. So he was living in the garage until some money came his way and he could get his own place.
I shifted my attention to the pattern. I knew what to look for now. My experience with Clay had taught me. Slender threads, fragile, tentative, soon to grow into the real thing. I found them stretching between me and both Hansons. Both of them. They were mine.
I snapped back to the library, excited, elated. “I did it!”
I’m not quite sure what expression I was wearing, but Doro frowned and drew back from me a little.
“I did it! I got two more! You’re going to have your damn empire sooner than you thought.”
“Which two?” He spoke very quietly.
“Hanson. Christine and Jamie. They live over on Cooper Street. You used to see them around Emma’s house sometimes when I was little.”
“I remember.” He stared down at the table for several seconds, still frowning. I assumed he was doing his own checking.
Karl reached over and touched my arm. “Show me,” he said.
Not tell him, show him. Just like that. And just minutes after our little conversation in the hall. If he had caught me in any other mood I would have told him to go to hell. But I felt good. I opened to him.
He looked at the way I had brought the Hansons in, and he looked at my memories on Clay. That was all.
“You want to build an empire, all right,” he said when he was finished. “But Doro isn’t the one you want to build it for.”
“Does it matter?” I asked.
And Doro answered. “No, it doesn’t. All that matters is that you obey me.” There was something frightening, something too intense about the way he was looking at me.
It was my turn to draw back a little. “I’ve always obeyed you.”
“More or less. It could get harder now, though. Sometimes it’s harder for a leader to obey. And sometimes it’s harder to be lenient with a disobedient leader.”
“I understand.”
“No you don’t. Not yet. But I think you’re capable of understanding. That’s why I’m willing to let you go ahead with what you’re planning.”
“It isn’t exactly a plan yet,” I said. “I haven’t had time to think. … I just want to start bringing in latents, letting the pattern push them through transition—you were satisfied that the Hansons were on their way, I guess.”
“Yes.”
“Good. The houses in this neighborhood have room for a lot more people. All our neighbors can be persuaded to take in house guests.”
“All of them?” said Karl sarcastically. “How many latents are you planning to enslave?”
“None,” I said. “But I mean to have as many of them brought through transition as I can.”
“Why?” Doro asked. “I mean aside from the fact that you’ve suddenly discovered you enjoy power.”
“You should talk.”
“Is there a reason?”
I thought about it. I needed a few hours of solitude to think and nose around other people’s heads and decide what I was doing myself. “They’re latents,” I said. “And if Rina and the Hanson family and just about all the rest of my relatives are any indication, latents live like dogs. They spend most of their lives sharing other people’s pain and slowly going crazy. Why should they have to go through that if I can give them a better way?”
“Are you so sure it is better?” asked Karl.
“You’re damn right I am. How many latents do you imagine burn the hands off their kids like your mother did—or worse? And you know Doro doesn’t pay attention to those kids. How could he? God knows how many thousands of them there are. So they get shitted on, and if they live to grow up, they shit on their own kids.”
“And you’re going to save them all.” Karl radiated sarcasm.
I turned to look at him.
“You’re not exactly vicious, Mary,” he said. “But you’re not altruistic, either. Why pretend to be?”
“Wait a minute, Karl,” said Doro. And then to me, “Mary, as angry as he’s just made you, I think he’s right. I think there’s a reason for what you want to do that you haven’t faced yet. Think about it.”
I had been just about to explode at Karl. Somehow, though, when Doro said the same thing in different words, it didn’t bother me as much. Well, why did I want to see as many latents as possible brought through transition? So I could be an empress? I wouldn’t even say that out loud. It sounded too stupid. But, whatever I called myself, I was definitely going to wind up with a lot of people taking orders from me, and that really didn’t sound like such a bad thing. And as for altruism, whether it was my real motive or not, every latent we brought into the pattern would benefit from being there. He would regain control of his life and be able to use his energy for something besides fighting to stay sane. But, honestly, as bad as it sounds, I had known that latents were suffering for most of my life. I grew up watching one of them suffer. Rina. Of course I couldn’t have done anything about it until now, but I hadn’t really wanted to do anything. I hadn’t cared. Not even during the time, just before my transition, when I found out just how much latents suffered. After all, I knew I wasn’t going to be one much longer.
Altruism, ambition—what else was there?
Need?
Did I need those latents, somehow? Was that why I was so enthusiastic, so happy that I was going to get them? I knew I wanted them in the pattern. They belonged to me and I wanted them. The only way to find out for sure whether or not I needed them was to leave them alone and see how I fared without them. I didn’t want to do that.
“I’m not sure what you want me to say,” I told him. “You’re right. I want to bring latents through for my own satisfaction. I admit that. I want them here around me. But as for why. …” I shook my head.
“You don’t have to kill,” said Doro quietly. “But you do have to feed. And six people aren’t enough.”
Karl looked startled. “Wait a minute, are you saying she’s going to have to keep doing what she did to Jesse and Rachel? That she’ll have to choose one or two of us regularly and—”
“I don’t know,” said Doro. “It’s possible, of course. And if it turns out to be true, I would think you’d want her to fill the neighborhood with other actives. But, on the other hand, she didn’t take Rachel and Jesse because she wanted them. She took them in self-defense.” He looked at me. “You haven’t been an active long enough for this to mean much, but in the two weeks since your transition, have you felt any need, any inclination to take anyone?”
“No,” I said. “Never. The idea disgusted me until I did it. Then I felt … well, you probably know.”
“He might know,” said Karl. “But I don’t.”
I opened and projected the sensation.
He jumped, whispered, “Jesus Christ.” From him it sounded more like praying than cursing. “If that’s what you felt, I’m surprised you didn’t go ahead and take the rest of us.”
“It’s possible that she was only saving the rest of you for another time,” said Doro. “But I don’t think so. Somehow, her ability reminds me more of Rachel’s. Rachel could have left her congregations unconscious or dead, but she never did. Never felt inclined to. It was easy for her to be careful, easy for her not to really take anyone. But, to a lesser degree, she took everyone. She gained what she needed, and her congregations lost nothing more than they could afford. Nothing that they couldn’t easily replace. Nothing that they even noticed was gone.”
Karl sat frowning at Doro for several seconds after Doro had finished. Then he turned to look at me. “Open to me again.”
I sighed and did it. He would be easier to live with if he knew whether Doro was right or wrong—or at least knew he couldn’t find out. I watched him, not really caring what he found. I stopped him just as he was about to break contact.
You and I are going to have to talk later.
About what?
About making some kind of truce before you manage to goad me into hitting back at you.
He changed the subject. Do you realize you’re exactly the kind of parasite he’s described? Except, of course, you prey on actives instead of ordinary people.
I can see what you’ve found. I do seem to be taking a tiny amount of strength from you and from the others. But it’s so small it’s not bothering any of you.
That’s not the point.
The point is, you don’t want me taking anything. Do you have to be told that I don’t know how to stop it any more than I know how it got started ?
I know. The thought carried overtones of weary frustration. He broke contact, spoke to Doro. “You’re right about her. She’s like Rachel.”
Doro nodded. “That’s best for all of you. Are you going to help her with her cousins?”
“Help her?”
“I’ve never seen a person born to be a latent suddenly pushed into transition. I’m assuming they’ll have their problems and need help.”
Karl looked at me. “Do you want my help again?”
“Of course I do.”
“You’ll need at least one other person.”
“Seth.”
“Yes.” He looked at Doro. “Are you finished with us?”
Doro nodded.
“All right.” He got up. “Come on, Mary. We may as well have that talk before you get back to Seth and Clay.”
Doro did not leave the Larkin house, as he had planned. Suddenly there was too much going on. Suddenly things were getting out of hand—or at least out of his hands.
Mary was doing very well. She was driven by her own need to enlarge the pattern and aided not only by Doro’s advice but by the experience of the six other actives. From the probing Doro had made her do and the snooping she had done on her own, she now had detailed mental outlines of the other actives’ lives. Knowing what they had done in the past helped her decide what she could reasonably ask them to do now. Knowing Seth, for instance, made her decide to take Clay from him, take charge of Clay herself.
“How necessary is the pain of transition?” she asked Doro before making her decision. “Karl said you told him to hold off helping me until I was desperate. Why?”
“Because, in earlier generations of actives, the more help the person in transition received, the longer it took him to form his own shield.” Doro grimaced remembering. “Before I understood that, I had several potentially good people die of injuries that wouldn’t have happened if their transitions had ended when they should have. And I had others who died of sheer exhaustion.”
Mary shuddered. “Sounds like it would be best to leave them alone completely.” She glanced at Doro. “Which is probably why I’m the only one out of the seven of us who had any help.”
“You were also the only one of the seven to have a seventeen-hour transition. Ten to twelve hours is more normal. Seventeen isn’t that bad, though, and since your predecessors died whenever I left them alone in transition, I decided that you needed someone. Actually, Karl did a good job.”
“I think I’ll pass on the favor,” she said, “by doing a good job for Clay Dana before his brother helps him to death.” She went to Seth, told him what Doro had just told her, then told him that she, not Seth, would attend Clay at Clay’s transition. Later she repeated the conversation to Doro.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Seth had said. “No. No way.”
“You’re too close to Clay,” she had told him. “You’ve spent more than ten years shielding him from pain.”
“That doesn’t make any difference.”
“The hell it doesn’t! What’s your judgment going to be like when you have to hold off shielding him—when you have to decide whether he’s in enough trouble for you to risk helping him? How objective do you think you’re going to be when he’s lying in front of you screaming?”
“Objective …!”
“His life is going to depend on what you decide to do, man—or decide not to do.” She looked at Clay. “How objective do you think he can be? It’s your life.”
Clay looked uncomfortable, spoke to his brother. “Could she be right, Seth? Could this be something you should leave to somebody else?”
“No!” said Seth instantly. And then again, with a little less certainty, “No.”
“Seth?”
“Look, I can handle it. Have I ever let you down?”
And Mary broke in. “You probably never have, Seth, and I’m not going to give you a chance to ruin your record.”
Seth turned to look at her. “Are you saying you’re going to force me to stand aside?” His tone made the words more a challenge than a question.
“Yes,” said Mary.
Seth stared at her in surprise. Then, slowly, he relaxed. “You could do it,” he said quietly. “You could knock me cold when the time came. But, Mary, if anything happens to my brother, you’d better not let me come to.”
“Clay will be all right,” she said. “I plan to see to it. And I’m really not interested in knocking you out. I hope you won’t make me do it.”
“Then, tell me why. Make me understand why you’re interfering in something that shouldn’t even be any of your business.”
“I started it, man. I’m the reason for it. If it’s anybody’s business, it’s mine. Now, Clay has a better chance with me than he has with you because I can see what’s happening to him both mentally and physically. I’m going to know if he really needs help. I’m not going to have to guess.”
“What can you do but guess? You’re barely out of transition yourself.”
“I’ve got seven transition experiences to draw on. And you can believe I’ve studied all of them. Now it’s settled, Seth.”
Seth took it. Doro watched him with interest after Mary reported the conversation. And Doro caught Seth watching Mary. Seth did not seem angry or vindictive. It was more as though he was waiting for something to happen. He had accepted Mary’s authority as, years before, he had accepted Doro’s. Now he watched to see how she handled it. He seemed surprised when, days later, she gave him charge of her cousin Jamie, but he accepted the responsibility. After that, he seemed to relax a little.
Rachel was on her feet again two days after her attack on Mary. Jesse, more severely weakened, was in bed a day longer. Both became quieter, more cautious people. They, too, watched Mary—warily. Mary sent Rachel to kidnap the Hansons. Forsyth was a small city; Rachel could go across town without much discomfort. She wouldn’t be staying long, anyway.
“Make their parents believe they’ve left home for good,” Mary told her. “Because, one way or another, they have. You shouldn’t have much tampering to do, though. The parents aren’t going to be sorry to lose them.”
Rachel frowned. “Even so, it seems wrong to just go in and take them—people’s children. …”
“They’re not children. Hell, Jamie’s a year older than I am. And if we don’t take them, they probably won’t make it through transition. If they don’t manage to kill themselves by losing control at a bad time, somebody else will kill them by taking them to a hospital. You can imagine what it would be like to be a mental sponge picking up everything in a hospital.”
Rachel shuddered, nodded, turned to go. Then she stopped and faced Mary again. “I was talking to Karl about what you’re trying to do—the community of actives that you want to put together.”
“Yes?”
“Well, if I have to stay here, I’d rather live in a community of actives—if such a thing is possible. I’d like us to stop hiding so much and start finding out what we’re really capable of.”
“You’ve been thinking about it,” said Mary.
“I had time,” said Rachel dryly. “What I’m working up to is that I’m willing to help you. Help more than just going after these kids, I mean.”
Mary smiled, looked pleased but not surprised. “I would have asked you,” she said. “I’m glad I didn’t have to. I didn’t ask you to help anybody through transition because I wanted you standing by for all three transitions in case some medical problem comes up. Jan broke her arm during her transition and you probably know Jesse did some kind of damage to his back that could have been serious. It will be best if you’re sort of on call.”
“I will be,” said Rachel. She left to get the Hansons.
Mary looked after her for a moment, then walked over to the sofa nearest to the fireplace, where Doro was sitting with a closed book on his lap.
“You’re always around,” she said. “My shadow.”
“You don’t mind.”
“No. I’m used to you. In fact, I’m really going to miss you when you leave. But, then, you won’t be leaving soon. You’re hooked. You’ve got to see what happens here.”
She couldn’t have been more right. And it wasn’t just the three coming transitions that he wanted to see. They were important, but Mary herself was more important. Her people were submitting now, all but Karl. And she would overcome Karl’s resistance slowly.
Doro had wondered what Mary would do with her people once she had subdued them. Before she discovered Clay’s potential, she had probably wondered herself. Now, though … Doro had reworded Karl’s question. How many latents did she think she wanted to bring through? “All of them, of course,” she had said.
Now Doro was waiting. He didn’t want to put limits on her, yet. He was hoping that she would not like the responsibility she was creating for herself. He was hoping that, before too long, she would begin to limit herself. If she didn’t, he would have to step in. Success—his and hers—was coming too quickly. Worse, all of it depended on her. If anything happened to her, the pattern would die with her. It was possible that her actives, new and old, would revert to their old, deadly incompatibility without it. Doro would lose a large percentage of his best breeding stock. This quick success could set him back several hundred years.
Mary gave Karl charge of her bald girl cousin, Christine, and then probably wished she hadn’t. Surprisingly, Christine’s shaved head did not make her ugly. And, unfortunately, her inferior position in the house did not make her cautious. Fortunately, Karl wasn’t interested. Christine just didn’t have the judgment yet to realize how totally vulnerable she was. Mary had a private talk with her.
Mary gave Christine and Jamie a single, intensive session of telepathic indoctrination. They learned what they were, learned their history, learned about Doro, who had neglected their branch of Emma’s family for two generations. They learned what was going to happen to them, what they were becoming part of. They learned that every other active in the house had gone through what they were facing and that, while it wasn’t pleasant, they could stand it. The double rewards of peace of mind and power made it worthwhile.
The Hansons learned, and they believed. It wouldn’t have been easy for them to disbelieve information force-fed directly into their minds. Once the indoctrination was over, though, they were let alone mentally. They became part of the house, accepting Mary’s authority and their own pain with uncharacteristic docility.
Jamie went into transition first, about a month after he moved to Larkin House. He was young, strong, and surprisingly healthy in spite of having tried every pill or powder he could get his hands on.
He came through. He had sprained his wrist, blackened one of Seth’s eyes, and broken the bed he was lying on, but he came through. He became an active. Seth was as proud as though he had just become a father.
Clay, who should have been first, was next. He came through in a short, intense transition that almost killed him. He actually suffered heart failure, but Mary got his heart started again and kept it going until Rachel arrived. Clay’s transition was over in only five hours. It left him with none of the usual bruises and strains, because Mary did not try to restrain him with her own body or tie him down. She simply paralyzed his voluntary muscles and he lay motionless while his mind writhed through chaos.
Clay became an active, but not a telepathic active. His budding telepathic ability vanished with the end of his transition. But he was compensated for it, as he soon learned.
When his transition ended and he was at peace, he saw that a tray of food had been left beside his bed. He could just see it out of the corner of his eye. He was still paralyzed and could not reach it, but in his confusion and hunger, he did not realize this. He reached for it anyway.
In particular, he reached for the bowl of soup that he could see steaming so near him. It was not until he lifted the soup and drew it to him that he realized that he was not using his hands. The soup hovered without visible support a few inches above his chest. Startled, Clay let it fall. At the same instant, he moved to get away from it. He shot about three feet to one side and into the air. And stayed suspended there, terrified.
Slowly, the terror in his eyes was replaced by understanding. He looked around his bedroom at Rachel, at Doro, and, finally, at Mary. Mary apparently released him then from his paralysis, because he began to move his arms and legs now like a human spider hanging in mid-air from an invisible web. Slowly, deliberately, Clay lowered himself to the bed. Then he drifted upward again, apparently finding it an easy thing to do. He looked at Mary, spoke apparently in answer to some thought she had projected to him.
“Are you kidding? I can fly! This is good enough for me.”
“You’re not a member of the pattern any more,” she said. She seemed saddened, subdued.
“That means I’m free to go, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. If you want to.”
“And I won’t be getting any more mental interference?”
“No. You can’t pull it in any more. You’re not even an out-of-control telepath. You’re not a telepath at all.”
“Lady, you read my mind. You’ll see that’s no tragedy to me. All that so-called power ever brought me was grief. Now that I’m free of it, I think I’ll go back to Arizona—raise myself a few cows, maybe a few kids.”
“Good luck,” said Mary softly.
He drifted close to her, grinned at her. “You wouldn’t believe how easy this is.” He lifted her clear off the floor, brought her up to eye level with him. She gazed at him, unafraid. “What I’ve got is better than what you’ve got,” he joked.
She smiled at him finally. “No it isn’t, man. But I’m glad you think it is. Put me down.”
He lowered both her and himself to the floor as though he had been doing it all his life. Then he looked at Doro. “Is this something brand-new, or have you seen it before?”
“Psychokinesis,” said Doro. “I’ve seen it before. Seen it several times in your father’s family, in fact, although I’ve never seen it come about this smoothly before.”
“You call that transition smooth?” said Mary.
“Well, with the heart problem, no, I guess not. But it could have been worse. Believe me, this room could be a shambles, with everyone in it injured or dead. I’ve seen it happen.”
“My kind throw things,” guessed Clay.
“They throw everything,” said Doro. “Including some things that are nailed down securely. Instead of doing that, I think you might have turned your ability inward a little and caused your own heart to stop.”
Clay shook himself. “I could have. I didn’t know what I was doing, most of the time.”
“A psychokinetic always has a good chance of killing himself before he learns to control his ability.”
“That may be the way it was,” said Mary. “But it won’t be that way anymore.”
Doro heard the determination in her voice and sighed to himself. She had just shared a good portion of Clay’s agony as she worked to keep him alive, and immediately she was committing herself to do it again. She had found her work. She was some sort of mental queen bee, gathering her workers to her instead of giving birth to them. She would be totally dedicated, and difficult to reason with or limit. Difficult, or perhaps impossible.
Christine Hanson came through in an ordinary transition, perhaps a little easier than most. She made more noise than either of the men because pain, even slight pain, terrified her. She had had a harder time than the others during the pretransition period, too. Finally, hoarse but otherwise unhurt, Christine completed her transition. She remained a telepath, like her brother. It was possible that one or both of them might learn to heal, and it was possible that they, Rachel, and Mary might be very long-lived.
Whatever potential Jamie and Christine had, they accepted their places in the pattern easily. They were Mary’s first grateful pattern members. And their membership brought an unexpected benefit that Jesse accidentally discovered. Now all the members could move farther from Mary without discomfort. Suddenly, more people meant more freedom.
Doro watched and worried silently. The day after Christine’s transition, Mary began pulling in more of her cousins. And Ada, who knew a few of her relatives, began trying to reach them in Washington. Doro could have helped. He knew the locations of all his important latent families. But as far as he was concerned, things were moving too quickly even without his help. He said nothing.
He had decided to give Mary two years to make what she could of her people. That was enough time for her to begin building the society she envisioned—what she was already calling a Patternist society. But two years should still leave Doro time to cut his losses—if it became necessary—without sacrificing too large a percentage of his breeding stock.
He had admitted to himself that he didn’t want to kill Mary. She was easily controllable in most matters, because she loved him; and she was a success. Or a partial success. She was giving him a united people, a group finally recognizable as the seeds of the race he had been working to create. They were a people who belonged to him, since Mary belonged to him. But they were not a people he could be part of. As Mary’s pattern brought them together, it shut him out. Together, the “Patternists” were growing into something that he could observe, hamper, or destroy but not something he could join. They were his goal, half accomplished. He watched them with carefully concealed emotions of suspicion and envy.