A few months into our first year, the original group of actives broke up. Rachel and Jesse moved out first—moved down the street to a house almost as big as ours. Then Jan moved alone. I had had a talk with her about using her psychometry as a kind of educational tool, or even as an art. At the same time, I told her to keep her hands off Karl. I didn’t have that good a grip on him myself at the time, but I had already decided that, whether I got him or not, she wasn’t going to. She left the next day.
Our new Patternists had been leaving us right along, taking over nearby houses, with Jesse preparing the way for them with the mutes who already lived there. They all had to learn to handle mutes—learn not to smash them and not to make robots of them. That was something Jesse had been able to do easily since his transition.
Seth and Ada moved to a house around the corner and across the street from us. Suddenly Karl and I were the only Patternists in Larkin House. We weren’t back where we’d started or anything. Doro had finally left us, and we had a pair of latents with us. Everybody except Jan and Rachel was seconding somebody then. New Patternists too, as soon as they could be trusted to handle it. But Karl and I were more alone together than we had ever been before. Even Vivian didn’t matter much anymore. She should have left Karl when he gave her the chance. Now she was a placid, bovine little pet. Karl controlled her without even thinking about it.
I was a predator and, frankly, not a very good one. But that was all right, because Karl wasn’t as sure as he had once been that he minded being the prey. He was a little wary, a little amused. He had never really hated me, though. Hell, he and I would have gotten along fine together from back when he first climbed into my bed if it hadn’t been for the Pattern and what the Pattern represented. It represented power. Power that I had and that he would never have. And while that wasn’t something I threw at him, ever, it wasn’t something I denied either.
The Pattern was growing because I searched out latents, had them brought in, and gave them their push toward transition. It was growing because of me. And nobody was better equipped to run it than I was. I hoped Karl could accept that and be comfortable enough with it to accept me. If he couldn’t … well, I wanted him, but I wanted the thing I was building too. If I couldn’t have both, Karl could go his way. I’d move out like the others and let him have his house back. Maybe he knew that.
“You know,” he said one night, “for a while I thought you’d leave, like the others. There isn’t really anything holding you here.” We were in the study listening to the rain outside and not looking at a variety show on the television. Neither of us liked television. I don’t know why we had bothered to turn it on that night.
“I didn’t want to go,” I said. “And since you weren’t absolutely sure you wanted me to, I thought I’d hang around at least a while longer.”
“I thought you might be afraid to leave—afraid that when Doro found out, he’d just order us back together.”
“He might. But I doubt it. He’s already gotten more than he bargained for from us.”
“From you.”
I shrugged.
“Why did you stay?”
“You know why. I wanted to be with you.”
“The husband he chose for you.”
“Yeah.” I turned to face him. “Stupid me, falling in love with my own husband.”
He didn’t look away from me, didn’t even change expression.
After a moment I grinned at him. “Not so stupid. We’re a match.”
He smiled thinly, almost grimly. “You’re changing. I’ve been watching you change, wondering how far you would go.”
“Changing how?”
“Growing up perhaps. I can remember when it was easier to intimidate you.”
“Oh.” I glanced at the television for a moment, listened as some woman tortured a song. “I’m a lot easier to get along with when I don’t feel intimidated.”
“So am I.”
“Yeah.” I listened to a few more bars of the woman’s screaming, then shook my head. “You aren’t paying any attention to this noise, are you?”
“No.”
I got up and turned off the television. Now there was only the soft, rustling sound of the rain outside. “So, what are we going to do?” I asked him.
“We don’t really have to do anything,” he said. “Just let things progress as they have been.”
I stared at him in silent frustration. That “silent” part was an effort. He laughed and moved over next to me.
“You don’t read me very much anymore, do you?”
“I don’t want to read you all the time,” I said. “Talk to me.”
He winced and drew back, muttering something I didn’t quite catch.
“What?” I asked.
“I said how generous of you.”
I frowned. “Generous, hell. You can say whatever you’ve got to say to me.”
“I suppose so. After all, if you read me all the time, I’ll begin to bore you very quickly.”
So that was it! He was afraid he was going to get paid for some of the things he’d done to his women. He was afraid I was going to try to make a male Vivian of him. Not likely. “Keep that up,” I said, “and I won’t have to read you to be bored. You’re not pitiful, Karl, so, coming from you, self-pity is kind of disgusting.”
I thought he would hit me. I’m sure he thought about it. After a moment, though, he just sort of froze over. He stood up. “Find yourself a place tomorrow and get out of here.”
“Better,” I said. “There’s nothing boring about you when you get mad.”
He started to walk away from me in disgust. I got up quickly and caught him by the hand. He could have pulled away easily, but he didn’t. I took that to be significant and moved closer to him.
“You ought to trust me,” I said. “By now you ought to trust me.”
“I’m not sure trust is an issue here.”
“It is.” I reached up and touched his face. “A very basic issue. You know it.”
He began to look harassed, as though I was really getting on his nerves. Or maybe as though I was really getting to him in another way. I slipped my arms around him hopefully. It had been a long time. Too long.
“Come on, Karl, humor me. What’s it going to cost you?” Plenty. And he knew it.
We stood together for a long moment, my head against his chest. Finally he sighed and steered us back to the sofa. We lay down together, just touching, holding each other.
“Will you unshield?” he asked.
I was surprised but I didn’t mind. I unshielded. And he lowered his shield so that there were no mental barriers between us. We seemed to flow together—frighteningly at first. I felt as though I were losing myself, combining so thoroughly with him that I wouldn’t be able to free myself again. If he hadn’t been so calm, I would have tried to reshield after the first couple of seconds. But I could see that he wasn’t afraid, that he wanted me to stay as I was, that nothing irreversible was happening. I realized that he had done this with Jan. I could see the experience in his memory. It was something like the blending that he did naturally with the shieldless, mute women he had had. Jan hadn’t liked it. She didn’t much like any kind of direct mind-to-mind contact. But she had been so lonely among us, and so without purpose, that she had endured this mental blending just to keep Karl interested in her. But the blending wasn’t an act that one person could enjoy while the other grimly endured.
I closed my eyes and explored the thing that Karl and I had become. A unit. I was aware of the sensations of his body and my own. I could feel my own desire for him exciting him and his excitement circling back to me.
We lost control. The spiral of our own emotions got out of hand. We hurt each other a little. I wound up with bruises and he had nail marks and bites. Later I took one look at what was left of the dress I had been wearing and threw it away.
But, my God, it was worth it.
“We’re going to have to be more careful when we do that again,” he said, examining some of his scratches.
I laughed and moved his hands away. The wounds were small. I healed them quickly. I found others and healed them too. He watched me with interest.
“Very efficient,” he said. He met my eyes. “It seems you’ve won.”
“All by myself?”
He smiled. “What, then? We’ve won?”
“Sure. Want to go take a shower together?”
At the end of the Pattern’s first year of existence, we all knew we had something that was working. Something new. We were learning to do everything as we went along. Soon after Karl and I got together, we found latents with latent children. That could have turned out really bad. We discovered we were “allergic” to children of our own kind. We were more dangerous to them than their latent parents were. That was when Ada discovered her specialty. She was the only one of us who could tolerate children and care for them. She began using mutes as foster parents, and she began to take over the small private school not far from us. And she and Seth moved back to Larkin House.
They had been the last to leave, and now they were the first to return. They had only left, they said, because the others were leaving. Not because they wanted to be out of Larkin House. They didn’t. They were as comfortable with us as our new Patternists were with each other in their groups, their “families” of unrelated adults. We Patternists seemed to be more social creatures than mutes were. Not one of our new Patternists chose to live alone. Even those who wanted to go out on their own waited until they could find at least one other person to join them. Then, slowly, the pair collected others. Their house grew.
Rachel and Jesse came back to us a few days after Seth and Ada. They were a little shamefaced, ready to admit that they wanted back into the comfort they had not realized they had found until they walked away from it.
Jan just reappeared. I read her. She had been lonely as hell in the house she had chosen, but she didn’t say anything to us. She wanted to live with us, and she wanted to use her ability. She thought she would be content if she could do those two things. She was learning to paint, and even the worst of her paintings lived. You touched them and they catapulted you into another world. A world of her imagination. Some of the new Patternists who were related to her began coming to her to learn to use whatever psychometric ability they had. She taught them, took lovers from among them, and worked to improve her art. And she was happier than she had ever been before.
The seven of us became the First Family. It was a joke at first. Karl made some comparison between our position in the section and the position of the President’s family in the nation. The name stuck. I think we all thought it was a little silly at first, but we got used to it. Karl did his bit to help me get used to it.
“We could do something about making it more of a family,” he said. “We’d be the first ones to try it, too. That would give some validity to our title.”
The Pattern was just over a year old then. I looked at him uncertainly, not quite sure he was saying what I thought he was saying.
“Try that again?”
“We could have a baby.”
“Could we?”
“Seriously, Mary. I’d like us to have a child.”
“Why?”
He gave me a look of disgust.
“I mean … we wouldn’t be able to keep it with us.”
“I know that.”
I thought about it, surprised that I hadn’t really thought about it before. But, then, I had never wanted children. With Doro around, though, I had assumed that sooner or later I would be ordered to produce some. Ordered. Somehow, being asked was better.
“We can have a child if you want,” I said.
He thought for a moment. “I don’t imagine you could arrange for it to be a boy?”
I arranged for it to be a boy. I was a healer by then. I could not only choose the child’s sex but insure his good health and my own good health while I was pregnant. So being pregnant was no excuse for me to slow our expansion.
I was pulling in latents from all over the country. I could pick them out of the surrounding mute population without trouble. It didn’t matter anymore that I had never met them or that they were three thousand miles away when I focused in on them. My range, like the distance the Patternists could travel from me, had increased as the Pattern had grown. Now I located latents by their bursts of telepathic activity and gave a general picture of their location to one of my Patternists. The Patternist could pinpoint them more closely when he was within a few miles of them.
So the Pattern grew. Karl and I had a son: Karl August Larkin. The name of the man whose body Doro had used to father me was Gerold August. I had never made any gesture in his memory before, and I probably never would again. But having the baby had made me sentimental.
Doro wasn’t around to watch us much as we grew. He checked on us every few months, probably to remind us—remind me—where the final authority still rested. He showed up twice while I was pregnant. Then we didn’t see him again until August was two months old. He showed up at a time when we weren’t having any big problems. I was kind of glad to see him. Kind of proud that I was running things so smoothly. I didn’t realize he’d come to put an end to that.
He came in and looked at my flat stomach and said, “Boy or girl?” I hadn’t bothered to tell him I’d deliberately conceived a boy.
So Karl and I sat around and probably bored him with talk about the baby. I was surprised when he said he wanted to see it.
“Why?” I asked. “Babies his age all look pretty much alike. What is there to see?”
Both men frowned at me.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “Let’s go see the baby. Come on.”
Doro got up, but Karl stayed where he was. “You two go ahead,” he said. “I was out to see him this morning. My head won’t take it again for a while.”
No wonder he could afford to be indignant at my attitude! He was setting me up. I wished Ada was around to take Doro in. August wasn’t at the school itself, but he was at one of the buffer houses surrounding the school. That was almost as bad. The static from the school and from children in general didn’t hit me as hard as it did most of the others, but it still wasn’t very pleasant.
We went in. Doro stared at August, and August stared back from the arms of Evelyn Winthrop, the mute woman who took care of him. Then we left.
“Drive somewhere far enough from the school for you to be comfortable, and park,” said Doro when we got back to the car. “I want to talk to you.”
“About the baby?”
“No. Something else. Although I suppose I should compliment you on your son.”
I shrugged.
“You don’t give a damn about him, do you?”
I turned onto a quiet, tree-lined street and parked. “He’s got all his parts,” I said. “Healthy mentally and physically. I saw to that. Watched him very carefully before he was born. Now I keep an eye on Evelyn and her husband to be sure they’re giving him the care he needs. Beyond that, you’re right.”
“Jan all over again.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m not criticizing you. Telepaths are always the worst possible parents. I thought the Pattern might change that, but it hasn’t. Most actives have to be bulldozed into even having children. You and Karl surprised me.”
“Karl wanted a child.”
“And you wanted Karl.”
“I already had him by then. But the idea of having a child wasn’t that repulsive. It still isn’t. I’d do it again. Now, what did you want to talk to me about?”
“Your doing it again.”
“What?”
“Or at least having your people do it. Because that’s the only way I’m going to allow the Pattern to grow for a while.”
I turned to look at him. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m suspending your latent-gathering as of today. You’re to call your people in from their searches, and recruit no more new Patternists.”
“But—but why? What have we done, Doro?”
“Nothing. Nothing but grow. And that’s the problem. I’m not punishing you; I’m slowing you down a little. I’m being cautious.”
“For what? Why should you be cautious about our growth? The mutes don’t know anything about us, and they’d have a hard time hurting us if they did. We aren’t hurting each other. I’m in control. There’s been no unusual trouble.”
“Mary … fifteen hundred adults and five hundred children in only two years! It’s time you stopped devoting all your energy to growth and started figuring out just what it is you’re growing. You’re one woman holding everything together. Your only possible successor at this point is about two months old. There’d be a blood bath if anything happened to you. If you were hit by a car tomorrow, your people would disintegrate—all over each other.”
“If I were hit by a car and there were anything at all of me left alive, I’d survive. If I couldn’t put myself together again Rachel would do it.”
“Mary, what I’m saying is that you’re irreplaceable. You’re all your people have got. Now, you can go on playing the part of their savior if you do as I’ve told you. Or you can destroy them by plunging on headlong as you are now.”
“Are you saying I have to stop recruiting until August is old enough to replace me if anything happens to me?”
“Yes. And for safety’s sake, I suggest that you not make August an only child.”
“Wait twenty years?”
“It only sounds like a long time, Mary believe me.” He smiled a little. “Besides, not only are you a potential immortal as a descendant of Emma, but you have your own and Rachel’s healing ability to keep you young if your potential for longevity doesn’t work out.”
“Twenty Goddamn years …!”
“You would have something firm and well established to bring your people into by then, too. You wouldn’t be just spreading haphazardly over the city.”
“We aren’t doing that now! You know we aren’t. We’re growing deliberately into Santa Elena, because that’s where the living room we need is. Jesse is working right now to prepare a new section of Santa Elena for us. We’ve got the school in the most protected part of our Palo Alto district. We didn’t manage that by accident! The people don’t just move wherever they want to. They go to Jesse and he shows them what’s available.”
“And all that’s available is what you take from mutes. You don’t build anything of your own.”
“We build ourselves!”
“You will build yourselves more slowly now.”
I knew that tone of voice. I used it myself from time to time. I knew he was letting me argue so that I’d have time to get used to the idea, not because there was any chance of changing his mind. But twenty years!
“Doro, do you know what kind of work I’ve had Rachel doing for most of the past two years?”
“I know.”
“Have you seen the people she brings in—walking corpses most of them? That is if they can even walk.”
“Yes.”
“My people, so far gone they look like they’ve been through Dachau!”
“Mary—”
“They turn out to be my best telepaths when they’re like that, you know? That’s why they’re in such bad shape as latents. They’re so sensitive, they pick up everything.”
“Mary, listen.”
“How many of those people do you imagine will die, probably in agony, in twenty years?”
“It doesn’t matter, Mary. It doesn’t matter at all.”
End of conversation. At least as far as he was concerned. But I just couldn’t let go.
“You’ve been watching them die for thousands of years,” I said. “You’ve learned not to care. I’ve just been saving them for two years, but I’ve already learned the opposite lesson. I care.”
“I was afraid you would.”
“Is it such a bad thing?”
“It’s going to hurt you. It’s already started to hurt you.”
“You could let me go after just the worst ones. Just the ones who would die without me.”
“No.”
“Goddamnit, Doro, they’d die anyway. What could you lose?”
He looked at me silently for a long moment. “Do you remember what I told you on the day, two years ago, when you discovered Clay Dana’s potential?”
The crap about obeying. I remembered, all right. “I wondered when you’d get to that.”
“You know I meant it.”
I slumped back in the seat, wondering what I was going to do. I took his hand almost absently. “What a pity we had to become competitors!”
“We haven’t. There’s enough for both of us.”
I looked down at his hand, calloused, with fingers that were too long. It hit me how much like my own, big, ugly hands it was, and I took another look at the body he was wearing—green-eyed, black-haired. … “Who is this you’re wearing?” I asked.
He raised an eyebrow. “A relative of your father—as you’ve probably already guessed.”
“What relation?”
His expression hardened. “A son. Your older half brother.” He wasn’t just giving me information. He was challenging me with it.
“Right,” I said. “Just the kind of person I would be looking for. A close relative, a potentially good Patternist, and a likely victim to ease your hunger. You know damn well we’re competitors, Doro.”
I had never spoken that bluntly to him before. He stared at me as though I’d surprised him—which was what I had set out to do.
“Hey,” I said softly. “You know what I am. You made me what I am. Don’t cut me off from the thing I was born to do. Just let me have the worst of the latents. Rachel’s kind. Okay that, and I won’t touch any of the others.”
He shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry, Mary.”
“But why?” I yelled. “Why?”
“Let’s get back to the house. You can start calling your people in.”
I got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked around to the sidewalk. I couldn’t stay sitting there beside him for a minute longer. I would have done something stupid and useless—and probably suicidal. He called to me a couple of times, but, thank God, he had the sense not to come after me.
I walked home. Palo Alto wasn’t far. I needed to burn off some of my anger before I got home, anyway.