Emma was at the typewriter in her dining room when Doro arrived. He had not called to say he was coming, but at least when he walked in without knocking, he was wearing a body she had seen him in before: the body of a small man, black-haired, green-eyed, like Mary. But the hair was straight and this body was white. He threw himself down on Emma’s sofa and waited silently until she finished the page that she was working on.
“What is it?” he asked her when she got up. “Another book?”
She nodded. She was young. She was young most of the time now, because he was around so much. “I’ve discovered that I like writing,” she said. “I should have tried it years earlier than I did.” She sat down in a chair, because he was sprawled over the length of the sofa. He lay there frowning.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Mary’s the matter.”
Emma grimaced. “I’m not surprised. What’s she done?”
“Nothing yet. It’s what she’s going to do after I talk to her. I’m going to put on the brakes, Em. The Patternist section of Forsyth is as big as a small town already. She has enough people.”
“If you ask me, she had enough two years ago. But now that you’re ready to stop her, what are you going to do with all those actives—all those Patternists—when she’s not around any more to maintain the Pattern?”
“I’m not out to kill Mary, Em. The Pattern will still be there.”
“Will it?”
He hesitated. “You think she’ll make me kill her?”
“Yes. And if you’re realistic about it, you’ll think so too.”
He sighed, sat up. “Yes. I don’t expect to salvage many of her people, either. Most of them were animals before she found them. Without her, they’ll revert.”
“Animals … with such power, though.”
“I’ll have to destroy the worst of them.”
Emma winced.
“I thought you’d be more concerned about Mary.”
“I was concerned about her. But it’s too late for her now. You helped her turn herself into something too dangerous to live.”
He stared at her.
“She’s got too much power, Doro. She terrifies me. She’s doing exactly what you always said you wanted to do. But she’s doing it, not you. All those people, those fifteen hundred people in the section, are hers, not yours.”
“But she’s mine.”
“You wouldn’t be thinking about killing her if you believed that was enough.”
“Em. …”He got up and went to sit on the arm of her chair. “What are you afraid of?”
“Your Mary.” She leaned against him. “Your ruthless, egotistical, power-hungry little Mary.”
“Your grandchild.”
“Your creation! Fifteen hundred actives in two years. They bring each other through on an assembly line. And how many conscripted servants—ordinary people unfortunate enough to be taken over by those actives. People forced now to be servants in their own houses. Servants and worse!”
Her outburst seemed to startle him. He looked down at her silently.
“You’re not in control,” she said more softly. “You’ve let them run wild. How many years do you think it will take at this rate for them to take over the city? How long before they begin tampering with the state and federal government?”
“They’re very provincial people, Em. They honestly don’t care what’s happening in Washington or Sacramento or anywhere else as long as they can prevent it from hurting them. They pay attention to what’s going on, but they don’t influence it very often.”
“I wonder how long that will last.”
“Quite a while, even if the Pattern survives. They honestly don’t want the burden of running a whole country full of people. Not when those people can run themselves reasonably well and the Patternists can reap the benefits of their labor.”
“That, they have to have learned from you.”
“Of course.”
“You mentioned Washington and Sacramento. What about here in Forsyth?”
“This is their home territory, Em. They’re interfering too much here to avoid being noticed by Forsyth city government, half asleep as it is. To avoid trouble, they took over the city about a year and a half ago.”
Emma stared at him, aghast.
“They’ve completely taken over the best section of town. They did it quietly, but still Mary thought it safest for them to control key mutes in city hall, in the police department, in—”
“Mutes!”
He looked annoyed, probably with himself. “It’s a convenient term. People without telepathic voices. Ordinary people.”
“I know what it means, Doro. I knew the first time I heard Mary use it. It means niggers!”
“Em—”
“I tell you, you’re out of control, Doro. You’re not one of them. You’re not a telepath. And if you don’t think they look down on us non-telepaths, us niggers, the whole rest of humanity, you’re not paying attention.”
“They don’t look down on me.”
“They don’t look up to you, either. They used to. They used to respect you. Damnit, they used to love you, the originals. The ‘First Family’.” Her tone ridiculed the name that the original seven actives had adopted.
“Obviously this has been bothering you for a long time,” said Doro. “Why haven’t you said anything about it before?”
“It wasn’t necessary.”
He frowned.
“You knew.” Her tone became accusing. “I haven’t told you a single thing that you haven’t been aware of for at least as long as I have.”
He moved uncomfortably. “Sometimes I wonder if you aren’t a little telepathic yourself.”
“I don’t have to be. I know you. And I knew you’d reach a point when no matter how fascinated you were with what Mary was doing no matter how much you loved the girl, she’d have to go. I just wish you’d made up your mind sooner.”
“Back when she brought her first latents through, I decided to give her two years. I’d like to give her a good many more if she’ll co-operate.”
“She won’t. How willing would you be to give up all that power?”
“I’m not asking her to give up anything but this recruitment drive of hers. She’s got a good many of my best latents now. I don’t dare let her go on as she has been.”
“You want the section to grow now by births only?”
“By births, and through the five hundred or so children they’ve collected. Children who’ll eventually go through transition. Have you seen the private school they’ve taken over for the children?”
“No. I keep away from the section as much as I can. I assume Mary knows how I feel about her already. I don’t want to keep reminding her until she decides to change my mind for me.”
Doro started to say something, then stopped.
“What is it?” asked Emma.
For a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then, “I mentioned you to her once. I said I didn’t want you bothered by any of her people. She gave me a strange look and said she’d already taken care of that. She said, ‘Don’t worry about her. Bitchy old woman that she is, she’s wearing my brand. If anybody even tries to read her, the first thing they’ll see is that she’s my private property’.”
“Her what!”
“She means you’re under her protection, Em. It might not sound like much, but, with it, none of the others are going to touch you. And, apparently, she isn’t interested in controlling you herself.”
Emma shuddered. “How generous of her! She must feel awfully secure in her power. You trained her too well. She’s too much like you.”
“Yes,” said Doro. “I know.”
She looked at him sharply. “Did I hear pride in your voice?”
Doro smiled faintly. “She’s shown me a lot, Em. She’s shown me something I’ve been trying to find out for most of my life.”
“All I can see that she’s shown you is what you’d be like as a young woman. I recall warning you about underestimating young women.”
“Not what I’d be like as a woman. I already know that. I’ve been a woman I-don’t-know-how-many times. No. What I’d be like as a complete entity. What I’d be like if I hadn’t died that first time—died before I was fully formed.”
“Before you were …” Emma frowned. “I don’t understand. How do you know you weren’t fully formed when you died?”
“I know. I’ve seen enough almost-Doros, enough near successes to know I should be telepathic, like Mary. If I were, I would have created a pattern and fed off live hosts instead of killing. As it is, the only time I can feel mind-to-mind contact with another person is when I kill. She and I kill in very much the same way.”
“That’s it?” said Emma. “That’s all you’ve been reaching for, for so long—someone who kills in the same way you do?”
“All?” There was bitterness in his voice. “Does it seem such a small thing, Em, for me to want to know what I am—what I should have been?”
“Not a small thing, no. Not a wise thing either. Your curiosity—and your loneliness, I think—have driven you to make a mistake.”
“Perhaps. I’ve made mistakes before.”
“And survived them. I hope you survive this one. I can see now why you kept your purpose secret for so long.”
“Yes.”
“Does Mary know?”
“Yes. I never told her, but she knows. She saw it herself after a while.”
“No wonder you love her. No wonder she’s still alive. She’s you—the closest thing you’ve ever had to a true daughter.”
“I never told her any of that, either.”
“She knows. You can depend on it.” She paused for a moment. “Doro, is there any way she could. … I mean, if she’s complete and you’re not, she might be able to. …”
“To take me?”
Emma nodded.
“No. If she could, she would never have lived past the morning of her transition. She tried to read me then. If she hadn’t, I would have ordered her to try as soon as I saw her. I wanted to look at her in the only way that would tell me whether she could possibly become a danger to me. I looked, and what I saw told me she couldn’t. She’s like a scaled-down model of me. I could have taken her then, and I can now.”
“It’s been a long time since you’ve seen someone you thought could be dangerous. I hope your judgment is still as good as you think it is.”
“It is. In my life, I’ve met only five people I considered potentially dangerous.”
“And they all died young.”
Doro shrugged,
“I assume you’re not forgetting that Mary can increase her strength by robbing her people.”
“No. It doesn’t make any difference. I watched her very carefully back when she took Rachel and Jess. I could have taken her then. In fact, the extra strength she had acquired made her seem a more attractive victim. Strength alone isn’t enough to beat me. And she has a weakness I don’t have. She doesn’t move. She has just that one body, and when it dies, she dies.” He thought about that and shook his head sadly. “And she will almost certainly die.”
“When?”
“When she—if she disobeys me. I’m going to tell her my decision when I go there today. No more latents. She’ll decide what she wants to do after that.”
Seth Dana came out the back door of Larkin House thinking about the assignment Mary had just given him. The same old thing. Recruit more seconds—more people to help latents through transition. Patternists liked the way their numbers were increasing. Expansion was exciting. It was their own kind growing up, coming of age at last. But seconding was hard work. You were mother, father, friend, and, if your charge needed it, lover to an erratic, frightened, dependent person. People volunteered to be seconds when they were shamed into it. They accepted it as their duty, but they evaded that duty as long as they could. It was Seth’s job to prompt them and then present them with sullen, frightened charges.
He was a kind of matchmaker, sensing easily and accurately which seconds would be compatible with which latents. His worst mistake had been his first, his decision to second Clay. Mary had stopped him then. She had not had to stop him again. He had no more close relatives to warp his judgment.
He got into his car, preoccupied, deciding which Patternists to draft this time. He started the car automatically, then froze, his hand poised halfway to the emergency brake. Someone had shoved the cold steel barrel of a gun against the base of his skull.
Startled from his thoughts, Seth knew a moment of fear.
“Turn off the ignition, Dana,” said a man’s voice.
Reacting finally, Seth read the man. Then he turned off the ignition. With equal ease, he turned off the gunman. He gave the man a mental command, then reached back and took the gun from his suddenly limp hand. He shut the gun in the glove compartment and looked around at the intruder. The man was a mute and a stranger, but Seth had seen him before, in the thoughts of a woman Seth had seconded. A woman named Barbara Landry, who had once been this man’s wife.
“Palmer Landry,” said Seth quietly. “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble for nothing.”
The man stared at Seth, then at his own empty hand. “Why did I give you …? How could you make me …? What’s going on here?”
Seth shrugged. “Nothing now.”
“How do you know who I am? Why did I hand you …?”
“You’re a man who deserted his wife nearly a year ago,” said Seth. “Then suddenly decided he wanted her back. The gun wasn’t necessary.”
“Where is she? Where’s Barbara?”
“Probably at her house.” Seth had personally brought Barbara Landry from New York two months before. A month and a half later, she had come through transition. Almost immediately, she had discovered that Bartholomew House—and Caleb Bartholomew—suited her perfectly. Seth hadn’t bothered to erase her from the memories of the people she knew in New York. None of them had been friends. None of them had really cared what happened to her. But, apparently, she had told a couple of them where she was going, and with whom. And when Landry came back looking for her, he had found the information waiting. Seth had been careless. And Palmer Landry had been lucky. No one had noticed him watching Larkin House, and the person he had asked to point out Seth Dana had been an unsuspecting mute.
“You mean to tell me you’ve gotten rid of Barbara already?” Landry demanded.
“I never had her,” said Seth. “Never wanted her, for that matter, nor she me. I just helped her when she happened to need help.”
“Sure. You’re Santa Claus. Just tell me where she’s living.”
“I’ll take you there if you want.” He had intended to draft Bartholomew into some seconding anyway. But later. Bartholomew House was right across the street.
“Who’s she living with?” asked Landry.
“Her family,” said Seth. “She found a house she fit into quicker than most of us do.”
“House?” The man frowned. “Whorehouse?”
“Hell no!” Seth looked around at him. Landry had a justifiably low opinion of his wife. Latents were hard people to live with. But Seth had not realized that it was that low. “We live communally here, several of us to a house. So when we say house, we don’t just mean the building. We mean household. We mean people.”
“What the hell are you? Some kind of religious nuts or something?”
Seth was about to answer him when Barbara Landry herself came out the back door of Larkin House.
The sound of her footsteps caused Landry to turn. He saw her, shouted her name once, then was out of the car, running toward her.
Barbara Landry was weak, as Patternists went, and she was inexperienced at handling her new abilities. That last made her a possible danger to her husband. Seth reached out to warn her, but he was a second too late.
Recoiling in surprise from Landry’s sudden rush, Barbara instinctively used her new defenses. Instead of controlling him gently, she stopped him solidly, suddenly, as though she had hit him, as though she had clubbed him down. He fell, unconscious, without ever having touched her.
“My God,” Barbara whispered horrified. “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I had come to see you. Then I sensed him out here threatening you. I came to ask you not to hurt him.”
“He’ll be all right,” said Seth. “No thanks to you. You’re going to kill somebody if you don’t learn to be careful.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
He lectured her as though she were still his charge. “I’ve warned you. No matter how weak you are as a Patternist, you’re a powerhouse as far as any ordinary mute is concerned.”
She nodded solemnly. “I’ll be careful. But, Seth, would you help him for me? I mean, after he comes to. He probably needs money, and I know he needs even more to forget about me. I don’t even like to think about what I put him through when we were together.”
“He wants to be with you.”
“No!”
“He could be programmed to live very comfortably here, Barbara. Matter of fact, he’d be happier here than anywhere else.”
“I don’t want him enslaved! I’ve done enough to him. Seth, please. Help him and let him go.”
Seth smiled finally. “All right, honey, in exchange for a promise from you.”
“What?”
“That you’ll go back to Bart and make him give you a few more lessons on how to handle mutes without killing them.”
She nodded, embarrassed.
“Oh, yeah, and tell him he’s going to second a couple of people for me. I’m bringing the first one over tomorrow.”
“Oh, but—”
“No excuses. Save me the trouble of arguing with him and I’ll do a good job for you here.” He gestured toward Landry.
She smiled at him. “You would anyway. But, all right, I’ll do your dirty work for you.” She turned and went down the driveway. She was a rare Patternist. Like Seth, she cared what happened to the people she had left behind in the mute world. Seth had always liked her. Now he would see that her husband got as good a start as Clay had gotten.
Rachel’s newest assignment had bothered her from the moment Mary gave it to her. It was still bothering her now, as she stood at the entrance of a long communal driveway that led back into a court of dilapidated, dirty, green stucco houses. The houses were small—no more than three or four rooms each. The yards were littered with beer cans and wine bottles, and they were overgrown with weeds and shrubs gone wild. The look of the place seemed to confirm Rachel’s suspicions.
Farther up the driveway, a group of teen-age boys tossed around a pair of dice and a surprisingly large amount of money. Intent on their game, they paid no attention to Rachel. She let her perception sweep over them and found three that she would have to come back for. Three latents who lived in the court, but who were not as bad off as those Mary had sent Rachel after.
This was a pocket of Emma’s descendants hidden away in a corner of Los Angeles, suffering without knowing why, without knowing who they were. The women in three of the houses were sisters. They hated each other, usually spoke only to trade obscenities. Yet they continued to live near each other, satisfying a need they did not realize they had. One of them still had a husband. All three had children. Rachel had come for the youngest sister—the one whose husband was still with her. This one lived in the third house back, with her husband and their two young children. Rachel looked at the house and realized that she had been unconsciously refraining from probing it. She was going entirely on what Mary had told her. That meant that there were surely things inside that she would not want to see. Mary swept the areas she checked so quickly that she received nothing more than a momentary feeling of anxiety from the latents who were in serious trouble. She was like a machine, sweeping, detecting latents here and there mixed in with the mute population. And the worst ones, she gave to Rachel.
“Come on, Rae,” she would say. “You know they’re going to die if I send anybody else.”
And she was right. Only Rachel could handle the most pathetic of Doro’s discards. Or only she had been able to until now. Now her students were beginning to come into their own. The one she had with her now was just about ready to work alone. Miguela Daniels. Her father had married a Mexican woman, a mute. But he traced his own lineage back to Emma through both his parents. And Miguela was turning out to be a very good healer. Miguela came up beside her.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked.
“You,” Rachel told her. “All right, let’s go in. You won’t like it, though.”
“I can already feel that.”
As they went to the door, Rachel finally swept the house with her perception and moaned to herself. She did not knock. The door was locked, but the people inside were beyond answering her knock.
The top portion of the door had once been a window, but the glass had long ago been broken. The hole had been covered by an oversized piece of plywood.
“Keep your attention on the boys in the back,” Rachel told Miguela. “They can’t see us from here, but this might be noisy.”
“You could get one of them to break in.”
“No, I can do it. Just watch.”
Miguela nodded.
Rachel took hold of the overhanging edge of plywood, braced herself, and pulled. The wood was dry and old and thin. Rachel had hardly begun to put pressure on it when it gave along its line of nails and part of it came away in her hands. She broke off more of it until she could push the rest in and unlock the door. The smell that greeted them made Rachel hold her breath for a few seconds. Miguela breathed it and gagged.
“What’s that Goddamn stink!”
Rachel said nothing. She pushed the door open and went in. Miguela grimaced and followed.
Just inside the door lay a young man, the husband, half propped up against the wall. Around him were the many bottles he had already managed to empty. In his hand was one he had not quite emptied yet. He tried to get up as the two women came in, but he was too drunk or too sick or too weak from hunger. Probably all three. “Hey,” he said, his voice slurred and low. “What you think you’re doing? Get out of my house.”
Rachel scanned him quickly while Miguela went through the kitchen, into the bedroom. The man was a latent, like his wife. That was why the two of them had so much trouble. They had not only the usual mental interference to contend with, but they unwittingly interfered with each other. They were both of Emma’s family and they would make good Patternists, but, as latents, they were killing each other. The man on the floor was of no use to himself or anyone else as he was now.
He was filthy—not only unwashed but incontinent. He wallowed in his own feces and vomit, contributing his share to the strong evil smell of the place.
From the bedroom, Miguela cried out, “Mother of God! Rachel, come in here quickly.”
Rachel turned from the man, intending to go to her. But, as she turned, there was a sound, a weak, thin cry from the sofa. Rachel realized abruptly that what she had thought were only bundles of rags were actually the two children she had sensed in the house. She went to them quickly.
They were skin and bones, both breathing shallowly, unevenly, making small sounds from time to time. Malnourished, dehydrated, bruised, beaten, and filthy, they lay unconscious. Mercifully unconscious.
“Rachel—” Miguela seemed to choke. “Rachel, come here. Please!”
Rachel left the children reluctantly, went to the bedroom. In the bedroom there was another child, an infant who was beyond even Rachel’s ability. It had been dead for at least a few days. Neither Rachel nor Mary had sensed it before, because both had scanned for life, touching the living minds in the house and skimming over everything else.
The baby’s starved body was crawling with maggots, but it still showed the marks of its parents’ abuse. The head was a ruin. It had been hit with something or slammed into something. The legs were twisted as no infant’s legs would have twisted normally. The child had been tortured to death. The man and the woman had fed on each other’s insanity until they murdered one child and left the others dying. Rachel had stolen enough latents from prisons and insane asylums to know how often such things happened. Sometimes the best a latent could do was realize that the mental interference, the madness, was not going to stop, and then end their own lives before they killed others.
Staring down at the dead child in its ancient, peeling crib, Rachel wondered how even Doro had managed to keep so many latents alive for so long. How had he done it, and how had he been able to stand himself for doing it? But, then, Doro had nothing even faintly resembling a conscience.
The crib was at the foot of an old, steel-frame bed. On the bed lay the mother, semiconscious, muttering drunkenly from time to time. “Johnny, the baby’s crying again.” And then, “Johnny, make the baby stop crying! I can’t stand to hear him crying all the time.” She wept a little herself now, her eyes open, unseeing.
Miguela and Rachel looked at each other, Miguela in horror, Rachel in weariness and disgust.
“You were right,” said Miguela. “I don’t like this one damn bit. And this is the kind of thing you want me to handle?”
“There are too many of them for me,” said Rachel. “The more help I get, the fewer of these bad ones will die.”
“They deserve to die for what they did to that baby—” She choked again and Rachel saw that she was holding back tears.
“You’re the last person I’d expect to hold latents responsible for what they do,” Rachel told her. “Do I have to remind you what you did?” Miguela, unstable and violent, had set fire to the house of a woman whose testimony had caused her to spend some time in Juvenile Hall. The woman had burned to death.
Miguela closed her eyes, not crying but not casting any more stones, either. “You know,” she said after a moment, “I was glad I turned out to be a healer, because I thought I could make up for that, somehow. And here I am bitching.”
“Bitch all you want to,” said Rachel. “As long as you do your work. You’re going to handle these people.”
“All of them? By myself?”
“I’ll be standing by—not that you’ll need me. You’re ready. Why don’t you back the van in and I’ll draft a couple of the boys out back to help us carry bodies.”
Miguela started to go, then stopped. “You know, sometimes I wish we could make Doro pay for scenes like this. He’s the one who deserves all the blame.”
“He’s also the one who’ll never pay. Only his victims pay.” Miguela shook her head and went out after the van.
Jesse pulled his car up sharply in front of a handsome, redbrick, Georgian mansion. He got out, strode down the pathway and through the front door without bothering to knock. He went straight to the stairs and up them to the second floor. There, in a back bedroom, he found Stephen Gilroy, the Patternist owner of the house, sitting beside the bed of a young mute woman. The woman’s face was covered with blood. It had been slashed and hacked to pieces. She was unconscious.
“My God,” muttered Jesse as he crossed the room to the bed. “Did you send for a healer?”
Gilroy nodded. “Rachel wasn’t around, so I—”
“I know. She’s on an assignment.”
“I called one of her kids. I just wish he’d get here.”
One of her students, he meant. Even Jesse found himself referring to Rachel’s students as “her kids.”
There was the sound of the front door opening and slamming again. Someone else ran up the bare, wooden stairs, and, a moment later, a breathless young man hurried into the room. He was one of Rachel’s relatives, of course, and as Rachel would have in a healing situation, he took over immediately.
“You’ll have to leave me alone with her,” he said. “I can handle the injuries, but I work best when I’m alone with my patient.”
“Her eyes are hurt, too, I think,” said Gilroy. “Are you sure you—”
The healer unshielded to show them that his self-confidence was real and based on experience. “Don’t worry about her. She’ll be all right.”
Jesse and Stephen Gilroy left the room, went down to Gilroy’s study.
Jesse spoke with quiet fury. “The main reason I got here so fast was so I could see the damage through my own eyes instead of somebody’s memory. I want to remember it when I go after Hannibal.”
“I should go after him,” said Gilroy softly, bitterly. He was a slender, dark-haired man with very pale skin. “I would go after him if he hadn’t already proved to me how little good that does.” His voice was full of self-disgust.
“People who abuse mutes are my responsibility,” said Jesse. “Because mutes are my responsibility. Hannibal is even a relative of mine. I’ll take care of him.”
Gilroy shrugged. “You gave her to me; he took her from me. You ordered him to send her back; he sent her back in pieces. Now you’ll punish him. What will that inspire him to do to her?”
“Nothing,” said Jesse. “I promise you. I’ve talked to Mary and Karl about him. This isn’t the first time he’s sliced somebody up. He’s still the animal he was when he was a latent.”
“That’s what’s bothering me. He’d think nothing of killing Arlene when you’re finished with him. I’m surprised he hasn’t killed her already. He knows I can’t stop him.”
“There’s no sense beating yourself with that, Gil. Except for the members of the First Family, nobody can stop him. He’s the strongest telepath we’ve ever brought through transition. And the first thing he did, once he was through, was to smash his way through the shielding of his second and nearly kill her. For no reason. He just discovered that he could do it, so he did it.”
“Somebody should have smashed him then and there.”
“That’s what Doro said. He claims he used to cull out people like Hannibal as soon as he spotted them.”
“Well, I hate to find myself agreeing with Doro but—”
“So do I. But he made us. He knows just how far wrong we can go. Hannibal is too strong for Rachel or her kids to help him. Especially since he doesn’t really want help. And he’s too dangerous for us to tolerate any longer.”
Gilroy’s eyes widened. “You are going to kill him, then?”
Jesse nodded. “That’s why I had to talk to Karl and Mary. We don’t like to give up on one of our own, but Hannibal is a Goddamn cancer.”
“You’re going to do it yourself?”
“As soon as I leave here.”
“With his strength … are you sure you can?”
“I’m First Family, Gil.”
“But still—”
“Nobody who needed the Pattern to push him into transition can stand against one of us—not when we mean to kill.” Jesse shrugged. “Doro had to breed us to be strong enough to come through without being prodded. After all, when the time came for us, there was nobody who could prod us without killing us.” He stood up. “Look, contact me when that healer finishes with Arlene, will you? I just want to be sure she’s all right.”
Gilroy nodded, stood up. They walked to the door together and Jesse noticed that there were three Patternists in the living room. Two women and a man.
“Your house is growing,” he said to Gilroy. “How many now?”
“Five. Five Patternists.”
“The best of the people you’ve seconded, I’ll bet.”
Gilroy smiled, said nothing.
“You know,” said Jesse as they reached the door. “That Hannibal … he even looks like me. Reminds me a little of myself a couple of years ago. There, but for the grace of Doro, go I. Shit.”
Holding a smooth, rectangular block of wood between her hands, Jan Sholto closed her eyes and reached back in her disorderly memory. She reached back two years, to the creation of the Pattern. She had not only her own memories of that event but the memories of each of the original Patternists. They had unshielded and let her read them—not that they could have stopped her by refusing to open. Mary wasn’t the only one who could read people through their shields. No one except Doro could come into physical contact with Jan without showing her some portion of his thoughts and memories. In this case, though, physical contact hadn’t been necessary. The others had shown their approval of what she was doing by co-operating with her. She was creating another learning block—assembling their memories into a work that would not only tell the new Patternists of their beginnings but show them.
She was teacher to all the new Patternists as they came through. For over a year now, seconds had used her learning blocks to give their charges quick, complete knowledge of the section’s rules and regulations. Other learning blocks offered them choices, showed them the opportunities available to them for making their own place within the section.
Abruptly, Jan reached Mary’s memories. They jarred her with their raw intensity, overwhelmed her as other people’s memories rarely did any more. They were good material, but Jan knew she would have to modify them. Left as they were they would dominate everything else Jan was trying to record.
Sighing, Jan put her block aside. Of course it would be Mary’s thoughts that gave trouble. Mary was trouble. That small body of hers was deceptive. Yet it had been Mary who saw possible use for Jan’s psychometry. A few months after Mary had begun drawing in latents, she had decided to learn as much as she could about the special abilities of the rest of the First Family. In investigating Jan’s psychometry, she had discovered that she could read some objects herself in a fragmented, blurred way, but that she could read much more clearly anything that Jan had handled.
“You read impressions from the things you touch,” she had said to Jan. “But I think you put impressions into things, too.”
“Of course I do,” Jan had said impatiently. “Everyone does every time they touch something.”
“No, I mean … you kind of amplify what’s already there.”
“Not deliberately.”
“Nobody ever noticed it before?”
“No one pays any attention to my psychometry. It’s just something I do to amuse myself.”
Mary was silent for a long moment, thinking. Then, “Have you ever liked the impressions that you got from something enough to keep them? Not just keep them in your memory but in the thing, the object itself—like keeping a film or a tape recording.”
“I have some very old things that I’ve kept. They have ancient memories stored in them.”
“Get them.”
“Please get them,” mimicked Jan. “May I see them, please?” Mary had taken to her new power too easily. She loved to order people around.
“The hell with you,” said Mary. “Get them.”
“They’re my property!”
“Your property.” The green eyes glittered. “I’ll trade you last night for them.”
Jan froze, staring at her. The night before, Jan had been with Karl. It was not the first time, but Mary had never mentioned it before. Jan had tried to convince herself that Mary did not know. Now, confronted with proof that she was wrong, she managed to control her fear. She wanted to ask what Mary traded Vivian for all the mute woman’s nights with Karl, but she said nothing. She got up and went to get her collection of ancient artifacts stolen from various museums.
Mary handled one piece after another, first frowning, then slowly taking on a look of amazement. “This is fantastic,” she said. She was holding just a fragment of what had been an intricately painted jar. A jar that held the story of the woman whose hands shaped it 6,500 years ago. A woman of a Neolithic village that had existed somewhere in what was now Iran. “Why is it so pure?” asked Mary. “God knows how many people have touched it since this woman owned it. But she’s all I can sense.”
“She was all I ever wanted to sense,” said Jan. “The fragment has been buried for most of the time between our lives and hers. That’s the only reason there was any of her left in it at all.”
“Now there’s nothing but her. How did you get rid of the others?”
Jan frowned. “There were archaeologists and some other people at first, but I didn’t want them. I just didn’t want them.”
Mary handed her the fragment. “Am I in it now?”
“No, it’s set. I had to learn to freeze them so that I didn’t disturb them myself every time I handled them. I never tried letting another telepath handle them, but you haven’t disturbed this one.”
“Or the others, most likely. You like seconding, Jan?”
Jan looked at her through narrowed eyes. “You know I hate it. But what does that have to do with my artifacts?”
“Your artifacts just might stop you from ever having to second anybody else. If you can get to know your own abilities a little better and use them for more than your own amusement they can open another way for you to contribute to the Pattern.”
“What way?”
“A new art. A new form of education and entertainment—better than the movies, because you really live it, and you absorb it quicker and more completely than you do books. Maybe.” She snatched up the jar fragment and a small Sumerian clay tablet and ran out to try them on someone. Minutes later she was back, grinning.
“I tried them on Seth and Ada. All I told them to do was hold these things and unshield. They picked up everything. Look, you show me you can use what you’ve got for more than a toy and you’re off seconding for good.” The rush of words stopped for a moment, and when Mary spoke again, her tone had changed. “And, Jan, guess what else you’re off of for good.”
Jan had wanted to kill her. Instead, she had thrown her energy into refining her talent and finding uses for it. Instead, she had begun to create a new art.
Ada Dragan waited patiently in the principal’s office of what was finally her school. A mute guardian who was programmed to notice such things had reported that one of her latent foster children—a fifteen-year-old girl—was having serious pretransition difficulties.
From the office, Ada looked out at the walled grounds of the school. It had been a private school, situated right there in the Palo Verde neighborhood. A school where people who were dissatisfied with the Forsyth Unified School District, and who could afford an alternative, sent their children. Now those people had been persuaded to send their children elsewhere.
This fall semester, only a month old, was the beginning of the first all-Patternist year. Ada welcomed it with relief. She had been working gradually toward the takeover, feeling her way for almost two years. Finally it was done. She had learned the needs of the children and overcome her own shyness enough to meet those needs. On paper, mutes still owned the school. But Ada and her Patternist assistants owned the mutes. And Ada herself was in full charge, responsible only to Mary.
It was a responsibility that had chosen Ada more than she had chosen it. She had discovered that she worked easily with children, enjoyed them, while most Patternists could not work with them at all. Only some of her relatives were able to assist her. Other Patternists found the emotional noise of children’s minds intolerable. Children’s emotional noise penetrated not only the general protection of the Pattern but the individual mental shields of the Patternists. It frayed their nerves, chipped away their tempers, and put the children in real danger. It made Patternists potentially even worse parents than latents.
Thus, no matter how much Patternists wanted to insure their future as a race—and they did want it now—they could not care for the children who were that future. They had to draft mutes to do it for them. First Doro, and now Mary, was creating a race that could not tolerate its own young.
Ada turned away from the window just as the mute guardian brought the girl in. The mute was Helen Dietrich, an elementary-school teacher who, with her husband, also cared for four latent children. Jan had moved the Dietrichs and several other teachers into the section, where they could do both jobs.
This girl, Ada recalled, had been a particularly unfortunate case—one of Rachel’s assignments. Her life with the pair of latents who were her parents had left both her body and her mind a mass of scar tissue. Rachel had worked hard to right the damage. Now Ada wondered just how good a job she had done.
“Page,” said Helen Dietrich nervously, “this is Ada Dragan. She’s here to help you.”
The girl stared at Ada through dark, sullen eyes. “I’ve already seen the school psychologist,” she volunteered. “It didn’t do any good.”
Ada nodded. The school psychologist was a kind of experiment. He was completely ignorant of the fact that the Patternists now owned him. He was being allowed to learn as much as he could on his own. Nothing was hidden from him. But, on the other hand, nothing was handed to him. He, and a few others like him scattered around the section, were being used to calculate just how much information ordinary mutes needed to come to understand their situation.
“I’m not a psychologist,” said Ada. “Nor a psychiatrist.”
“Why not?” asked the girl. She extended her arms, which she had been holding behind her. Both wrists were bandaged. “I’m crazy, aren’t I?”
Ada only glanced at the bandages. Helen Dietrich had told her about the suicide attempt. Ada spoke to the mute. “Helen, it might be easier on you if you left now.”
The woman met Ada’s eyes and realized that she was really being offered a choice. “I’d rather stay,” she said. “I’ll have to handle this again.”
“All right.” Ada faced the girl again. Very carefully, she read her. It was difficult here at the school, where so many other child minds intruded. This was one time when they became a nuisance. But, in spite of the nuisance, Ada had to handle the girl gently. At fifteen, Page was not too young to be nearing transition. Children who lived in the section, surrounded by Patternists and thus by the Pattern, did not need direct contact with Mary to push them into transition. The Pattern pushed them as soon as their bodies and minds could tolerate the shock. And this girl seemed ready—unless Rachel had just missed some mental problem and the girl was suffering needlessly. That was what Ada had to find out. She maintained contact with Page as she questioned her.
“Why did you try to kill yourself?”
The young mind made an effort to hold itself emotionless, but failed. The thought broke through, To keep from killing others. Aloud, the girl spoke harshly. “Because I wanted to die! It’s my life. If I want to end it, it’s my business.”
She had not been told what she was. Children were told when they were about her age. They spent a few days with Ada or more likely, with one of Ada’s assistants, and they learned a little of their history and got some idea what their future would be like. Ada had dubbed these sessions “orientation classes.” Page was scheduled for one next month, but apparently, nature had decided to rush things.
“You won’t be allowed to kill yourself, Page. You realize that, don’t you?” Deftly, Ada planted the mental command as she spoke so that even as the girl opened her mouth to insist that she would try again, she realized that she could not—or, rather, realized that she no longer wanted to. That she had changed her mind.
Page stood still for a moment, her mouth open, then backed away from Ada in horror. “You did that! I felt it. It was you!”
Ada stared at her in surprise. No nontelepath, no latent should have known—
“You’re one of them,” the girl accused shrilly.
Mrs. Dietrich stood frowning at her. “I don’t understand. What’s wrong with the girl?”
Page faced her. “Nothing!” Then, more softly, “Oh, God, everything. Everything.” She looked down at her arms. “I’m not sick. I’m not crazy, either. But if I tell you what … what she is,” she gestured sharply toward Ada, “you’d let me be locked up. You wouldn’t believe—”
“Tell her what I am, Page,” said Ada quietly. She could feel the girl’s terror bleating against her mind.
“You read people’s minds! You make them do things they don’t want to do. You’re not human!” She raised a hand to her mouth, muffling her next words slightly. “Oh, God, you’re not human … and neither am I!” She was crying now, working herself into hysterics. “Now go ahead and lock me up,” she said. “At least then I won’t be able to hurt anyone.”
Ada looked over at Helen Dietrich. “That’s it, really. She knows just enough about what’s happening to her to be frightened by it. She thinks she’s becoming something that will hurt you or your husband or one of the other children.”
“Oh, Page.” The mute woman tried to put her arms around the girl, but Page twisted away.
“You already knew! You brought me to her even though you knew what she was!”
“Be still, Page,” said Ada quietly. And the girl lapsed into terrified silence. To the mute, Ada said, “Leave now, Helen. She’ll be all right.” This time, no choice was offered and Helen Dietrich left obediently. The girl, attempting to flee with her found herself seemingly rooted to the floor. Realizing that she was trapped, she collapsed, crying in helpless panic. Ada went to her, knelt beside her.
“Page …” She laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder and felt the shoulder trembling. “Listen to me.”
The girl continued to cry.
“You’re not going to be hurt. You’re certainly not going to be locked up. Now, listen.”
After a moment the words seemed to penetrate. Page looked up at her. Clearly still frightened, she allowed Ada to help her from the floor onto one of the chairs. Her tears slowed, stopped, and she wiped her face with tissue from a box on the principal’s desk.
“You should ask questions,” said Ada softly. “You could have saved yourself a lot of needless worrying.”
Page breathed deeply, trying to still her trembling. “I don’t even know what to ask. Except … what’s going to happen to me?”
“You’re going to grow up. You’re going to become the kind of adult your parents should have been but couldn’t become alone.”
“My parents,” said Page with quiet loathing. “I hope you locked them up. They’re animals.”
“They were. They aren’t now, though. We were able to help them—just as we’ve helped you, as we’ll go on helping you.” The girl should not have remembered enough about her parents to hate them. Rachel was always especially careful about that. But there was no mistaking the emotion behind the girl’s words.
“You should have killed them,” she said. “You should have cut their filthy throats!” She fell silent and stared down at her left arm. She touched the arm with her right hand, frowned at it. Ada knew then that the conditioning Rachel had imposed on the girl was still breaking down. From Page’s mind Ada took the memory of a twisted, useless left arm permanently bent at the elbow, the hand hanging from it rag-limp, dead. The whole arm had been dead, thanks to an early violent beating that Page had received from her father. A beating and no medical attention. But Rachel had repaired the damage. Page’s arm was normal now, but she was just remembering that it should not have been. And she was remembering more about her parents. Ada had to try to ease the knowledge.
“Our healers were able to do as much for your parents’ minds as they were for your body,” she said. “Your parents are different people now, living different lives. They’re … sane people now. They aren’t responsible for what they did when you knew them.”
“You’re afraid I’ll try to get even.”
“We can’t let you do that.”
“You can’t make me forgive them, either.” She stopped, frightened, suddenly realizing that Ada could probably do just that. “I hate them! I’d … I’d kill them myself if you sent me back to them.” But she spoke without conviction.
“You won’t be sent back to them,” said Ada. “And I think, once you find out for yourself what made them the way they were, you’ll know why we helped them instead of punishing them.”
“They’re … like you now?”
“They’re both telepaths, yes.” At thirty-seven, they were the oldest people to come through transition successfully. They had almost died in spite of everything Rachel could do. And they and three others who did die made Mary realize that most latents who hadn’t been brought through by the time they were thirty-five shouldn’t be brought through at all. To make their lives more comfortable, Mary had worked out a way of destroying their uncontrollable ability without harming them otherwise. At least then they could live the rest of their lives as normal mutes. But Page’s parents had made it. They were strong Patternists, as Page would be strong.
“I’ll be like you, too, then, won’t I?” the girl asked.
“You will, yes. Soon.”
“What will I be then to the Dietrichs?”
“You’ll be the first of their foster children to grow up. They’ll remember you.”
“But … they’re not like you. I can tell that much. I can feel a difference.”
“They’re not telepaths.”
“They’re slaves!” Her tone was accusing.
“Yes.”
Page was silent for a moment, startled by Ada’s willingness to admit such a thing. “Just like that? Yes, you make slaves of people? I’m going to be part of a group that makes slaves of people?”
“Page—”
“Why do you think I tried to die?”
“Because you didn’t understand. You still don’t.”
“I know about being a slave! My parents taught me. My father used to strip me naked, tie me to the bed, and beat me, and then—”
“I know about that, Page.”
“And I know about being a slave.” The girl’s voice was leaden. “I don’t want to be a part of anything that makes people slaves.”
“You have no choice. Neither do we.”
“You could stop doing it.”
“You’d still be with your parents if we didn’t do it. We couldn’t have cared for you.” She took a deep breath. “We don’t harm people like the Dietrichs in any way. In fact they’re healthier and more comfortable now than they were before we found them. And the work they’re doing for us is work they enjoy.”
“If they didn’t enjoy it, you’d change their minds for them.”
“We might, but they wouldn’t be aware of it. They would be content.”
The girl stared at her. “Do you think that makes it better?”
“Not better. Kinder, in a frightening sort of way, I know. I’m not pretending that theirs is the best possible way of life, Page—although they think it is. They’re slaves and I wouldn’t trade places with them. But we, our kind, couldn’t exist long without them.”
“Then maybe we shouldn’t exist! If our way is to enslave good people like the Dietrichs and let animals like my parents go free, the world would be better without us.”
Ada looked away from her for a moment, then faced her sadly. “You haven’t understood me. Perhaps you don’t want to; I wouldn’t blame you. The Dietrichs, Page, those good people who took you in, cared for you, loved you. Why, do you imagine, they did all that?”
And abruptly, Page understood. “No!” she shouted. “No. They wanted me. They told me so.”
Ada said nothing.
“They might have been taking in foster children, anyway.”
“You know better.”
“No.” The girl glared at Ada furiously, still trying to make herself believe the lie. Then something in her expression crumbled. How did it feel, after all, to learn that the foster parents you adored, the only parents who had ever shown you love, loved you only because they had been programmed to?
Ada watched her, fully aware of what she was going through, but choosing for a moment to ignore it. “We call ourselves Patternists,” she said quietly. “This is our school. You and the others here are our children. We want the best for you even though we’re not capable of giving it to you personally. It isn’t possible for us to take you into our homes and give you the care you need. It just isn’t possible. You’ll understand why soon. So we make other arrangements.”
The girl was crying silently, her head bowed, her face wet with tears and twisted with pain. Now Ada went to her, put an arm around her. She continued to speak, now offering comfort in her words. The girl was going to be too strong to be soothed with lies or partial amnesia. She had already proved that. Nothing would do for her but the truth. But that truth was not entirely disillusioning.
“The Dietrichs deserve the love and respect you feel for them, Page, because you’re right about them. They are good people. They love children naturally. All we did was focus that love on you, on the others. In your case we didn’t even have to focus it much. I didn’t think we would. That’s why I chose them for you—and you for them.”
Finally Page looked up. “You did? You?”
“Yes.”
She thought about that, then leaned her head to one side, against Ada’s arm. “Then I guess it’s only right that you be the one to take me away from them.”
Ada said nothing.
Page lifted her head, met Ada’s eyes. “You are going to take me away, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“I know. But it’s time.”
Page nodded, lowered her head again to rest it against Ada’s arm.