Mind of My Mind

by Octavia E. Butler

  He parked, turned off the motor, and sat back. “I want you to step out of character for a while,” he said. “Stop working so hard at your role as Rina’s bitchy daughter.”

  I looked at him sidelong. “I usually do when you’re around.”

  “Not enough, maybe. You think we can go into that store and buy—not steal—something other than blue jeans?”

  “Like what?”

  “Come on.” He got out of the car. “Let’s go see what you look good in.”

  I knew what I looked good in. Or at least acceptable in. But why bother when the only guy I was interested in was Doro and nothing I did seemed to reach him? He either had time for me or he didn’t. And if he didn’t, I could have walked around naked and he wouldn’t have noticed.

  But because he wanted it, I chose some dresses, some really nice pants, a few other things. I didn’t steal anything. My headache sort of faded back to normal and my witchy reflection in the dressing-room mirror relaxed back to just strange-looking. Doro had said once that, except for my eyes and coloring, I look a lot like Emma—like the young version of Emma, I mean. My eyes—traffic-light green, Rina called them—and my skin, a kind of light coffee, were gifts from the white man’s body that Doro was wearing when he got Rina pregnant. Some poor guy from a religious colony Doro controlled in Pennsylvania. Doro had people all over.

  When he decided that I had bought enough, he paid for it with a check for more money than I had ever seen in my life. He had some kind of by-mail arrangement with the banks. A lot of banks. He ordered everything delivered to the hotel where he was staying. I waited until we were out of the store to ask him why he’d done that.

  “I want you to stay with me for a few days,” he told me.

  I was surprised, but I just looked at him. “Okay.”

  “You have something to get used to. And for your own sake, I want you to take your time. Do all your yelling and screaming now, while it can’t hurt you.”

  “Oh, Lord. What are you going to give me to yell and scream about?”

  “You’re getting married.”

  I looked at him. He’d said those words or others like them to Rina once. To Emma heaven knew how many times. Evidently, my time had come. “You mean to you, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  I wasn’t afraid until he said that. “Who, then!”

  “One of my sons. Not related to you at all, by the way.”

  “A stranger? Some total stranger and you want me to marry him?”

  “You will marry him.” He didn’t use that tone much with me—or with anyone, I think. It was reserved for when he was telling you to do something he would kill you for not doing. A quiet, chilly tone of voice.

  “Doro, why couldn’t you be him? Take him and let me marry you.”

  “Kill him, you mean.”

  “You kill people all the time.”

  He shook his head. “I wonder if you’re going to grow out of that.”

  “Out of what?”

  “Your total disregard for human life—except for your own, of course.”

  “Oh, come on! Shit, the devil himself is going to preach me a sermon!”

  “Maybe transition will change your thinking.”

  “If it does, I don’t see how I’ll be able to stand you.”

  He smiled. “You don’t realize it, but that might really be a problem. You’re an experimental model. Your predecessors have had trouble with me.”

  “Don’t talk about me like I was a new car or something.” I frowned and looked at him. “What kind of trouble?”

  “Never mind. I won’t talk about you like you were a new car.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said more seriously. “I mean it, Doro. What kind of trouble?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Are any of them still alive?”

  He still didn’t answer.

  I took a deep breath, stared out the window. “Okay, so how do I keep from having trouble with you?”

  He put an arm around me, and for some reason, instead of flinching away, I moved over close to him. “I’m not threatening you,” he said.

  “Yes you are. Tell me about this son of yours.”

  He drove me over to Palo Verde Avenue, where the rich people lived. When he stopped, it was in front of a three-story white stucco mansion. Spanish tile roof, great arched doorway, clusters of palm trees and carefully trimmed shrubs, acres of front lawn, one square block of house and grounds.

  “This is his house,” said Doro.

  “Damn,” I muttered. “He owns it? The whole thing?”

  “Free and clear.”

  “Oh, Lord.” Something occurred to me suddenly. “Is he white?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, Doro. Man, what are you trying to do to me?”

  “Get you some help. You’re going to need it.”

  “What the hell can he do for me that you can’t? God, he’ll take one look at me and … Doro, just the fact that he lives in this part of town tells me that he’s the wrong guy. The first time he says something stupid to me, we’ll kill each other.”

  “I wouldn’t pick any fights with him if I were you. He’s one of my actives.”

  An active: One of Doro’s people who’s already gone through transition and turned into whatever kind of monster Doro has bred him to be. Emma was one kind of active. Rina, in spite of her “good” family, was only a latent. She never quite made it to transition, so her ability was undeveloped. She couldn’t control it or use it deliberately. All she could do was pass it on to me and put up with the mental garbage it exposed her to now and then. Doro said that was why she was crazy.

  “What kind of active is he?” I asked.

  “The most ordinary kind. A telepath. My best telepath—at least until you go through.”

  “You want him to read my mind?”

  “He won’t have much choice about that. If you and he are in the same house, sooner or later he will, as you’ll read his eventually.”

  “You mean he doesn’t have any more control over his ability than I do over mine?”

  “He has a great deal more control than you. That’s why he’ll be able to help you during and after your transition. But none of my telepaths can shield out the rest of the world entirely. Sometimes things that they don’t want to sense filter through to them. More often, though, they just get nosy and snoop through other people’s thoughts.”

  “Is it because he’s an active that you won’t take him? No moralizing this time.”

  “Yes. He’s too rare and too valuable to kill so carelessly. So are you. You and he aren’t quite the same kind of creature, but I think you’re alike enough to be complementary.”

  “Does he know about me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “He feels just about the way you do.”

  “Great.” I slumped back in the seat. “Doro … will you tell me, why marriage? I don’t have to marry him for him to give me whatever help I’m supposed to need. Hell, I don’t even have to marry him to have a baby by him, if that’s what you want.”

  “That might be what I want once I’ve seen how you come through transition. All I want now is to get the two of you to realize that you might as well accept each other. I want you tied together in a way you’ll both respect in spite of yourselves.”

  “You mean we’ll be less likely to kill each other if we’re married.”

  “Well … he’ll be less likely to kill you. The match is going to be pretty uneven for a while. I’d keep low if I were you.”

  “Isn’t there any way at all that I can get out of this?”

  “No.”

  I felt like crying. I couldn’t remember when I’d done that last. And the worst of it was, I knew that, as bad as I felt now, it was nothing to what I’d be feeling when I actually met this son. Somehow, I’d never thought of myself as just another of Doro’s breeders—just another Goddamn brood mare. Rina was. Emma was for sure. But me, I was special. S
ure. Doro had said it himself. An experiment. Apparently an experiment that had failed several times before. And Doro was trying to shore it up now by pairing me with this stranger.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Karl. Karl Larkin.”

  “Yeah. When do I have to marry him?”

  “In a week or two.”

  I would have put up more of a fight if I had known how to fight Doro. I never much wanted to fight him before. I remember, once when he was staying with Rina, an electronics company out in Carson—one of the businesses that he controlled—was losing money. Doro had the guy who ran the company for him come to our house to talk. Even then I knew that was a hell of a put-down to the guy. Our house was a shack compared to what he was used to. Anyway, Doro wanted to find out whether the guy was stealing, having real trouble, or was just plain incompetent. It turned out the guy was stealing. Big salary, pretty young wife, big house in Beverly Hills, and he was stealing from Doro. Stupid.

  The guy was Doro’s—born Doro’s, just like me. And every dime of his original investment had been Doro’s. Still, he cursed and complained and found reasons why, with all the work he’d done, he deserved more money. Then he ran.

  Doro had shrugged. He had eaten dinner with us, got up, stretched, and finally gone out after the guy. The next day, he came back wearing the guy’s body.

  You didn’t cheat him. You didn’t steal from him or lie to him. You didn’t disobey him. He’d find you out, then he’d kill you. How could you fight that? He wasn’t telepathic, but I had never seen anyone get a lie past him. And I had never known anyone to escape him. He did have some kind of tracking sense. He locked in on people. Anybody he’d met once, he could find again. He thought about them, and he knew which way to go to get to them. Once he was close to them, they didn’t have a chance.

  I put my head against his shoulder and closed my eyes. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He took me back to his hotel and bought me lunch. I hadn’t had breakfast, so I was hungry. Then we went up to his room and made love. Really. I would call it screwing when I had to do it with his damn fool son. I had been in love with Doro since I was twelve. He had made me wait until I was eighteen. Now he was going to marry me off to somebody else. I probably loved him in self-defense. Hating him was too dangerous.

  We had a week together. He decided to take me to Karl when I started passing out with the mental stuff I was picking up. It surprised him the first time it happened. Evidently I was closer to transition than he had thought.

  Chapter Two

  Doro

  Actives were nearly always troublesome, Doro thought as he drove his car down Karl Larkin’s long driveway. He already knew that Karl was not in his house, that he was somewhere in the backyard, probably in the pool. Doro let his tracking sense guide him. He had thought it would be safest to visit Karl once more before he placed Mary with him. Both Karl and Mary were too valuable to take chances with. Mary, if she survived transition, could prove invaluable. She would never have to know the whole reason for her existence—the thing Doro hoped to discover through her. It would be enough if she simply matured and paired successfully with Karl. Eventually the two of them could be told part of the truth—that they were a first, that Doro had never before been able to keep a pair of active telepaths together without killing one of them and taking that one’s place. This would be explanation enough for them. Because by the time they had been together for a while they would know how hard it was for two actives to be together without losing themselves, merging into each other uncontrollably. They would understand why, always before, actives had been rigidly unwilling to permit such merging—why actives had defended their individuality, why they had killed each other.

  Karl was in the pool. Doro could see him across a parklike expanse of grass and trees. Before Doro could reach him, though, the gardener, who had been mowing the lawn, drove up to Doro on his riding mower.

  “Sir?” he said tentatively.

  “It’s me,” said Doro.

  The gardener smiled. “I thought it must be. Welcome back.”

  Doro nodded, went over to the pool. Karl owned his servants more thoroughly than even Doro usually owned people. Karl owned their minds. They were just ordinary people who had answered an ad in the Los Angeles Times. Karl did no entertaining—was almost a hermit except for the succession of women whom he lured in and kept until they bored him. The servants existed more to look after the house and grounds than to look after Karl himself. Still, he had chosen them less for their professional competence than for the fact that they had few if any living relatives. Few people to be pacified if he accidentally got too rough with them. He would not have hurt them deliberately. He had conditioned them, programmed them carefully to do their work and to obey him in every way. He had programmed them to be content with their jobs. He even paid them well. But his power made him dangerous to ordinary people—especially to those who worked near him every day. In an instant of uncontrolled anger, he could have killed them all.

  Karl hauled himself out of the water when he saw Doro approaching. Then he leaned down and offered his hand to a second person, whom Doro had not noticed. Vivian, of course. A small, pretty, brown-haired woman whom Doro had prevented Karl from marrying.

  Karl gave him a questioning look. “I was afraid you were bringing my prospective bride.”

  “Tomorrow,” said Doro. He sat down on the dry end of the long, low diving board.

  Karl shook his head, sat down on the concrete opposite him. “I never thought you’d do something like this to me.”

  “You seem to have accepted it.”

  “You didn’t give me much of a choice.” He glanced at Vivian, who had come to sit beside him. As he owned the servants, he owned her. Doro had been surprised to find him wanting to marry her. Karl usually had little but contempt for the women he owned.

  “Do you intend to keep Vivian here?” Doro asked.

  “You bet I do. Or are you going to stop me from doing that, too?”

  “No. It will make things more difficult for you, but that’s your problem.”

  “You seem to do all right handling harems.”

  Doro shrugged. “The girl will react badly to her.” He looked at Vivian. “When’s the last time you were in a fight?”

  Vivian frowned. “A fight? A fistfight?”

  “Knock-down, drag-out.”

  “God! Not since I was in third grade. Does she fight?”

  “Fractured a man’s skull last week with a frying pan. Of course, the man deserved it. He was trying to rape her. But she’s been known to use violence on far less provocation.”

  Vivian looked at Karl wide-eyed. Karl shook his head. “You know I’m not going to let her get away with anything like that here.”

  “For a while, you might have to,” said Doro.

  “Oh, come on. Be reasonable. We have to protect ourselves.”

  “Sure you do. But not by tampering with her mind. She’s too close to transition. I’ve seen potential actives pushed into transition prematurely that way. They usually die.”

  “What am I supposed to do with her, then?”

  “I hope talking to her will be enough. I’ve done what I could to make her wary of you. And she’s not stupid. But she’s every bit as unstable as you were when you were near transition. Also, she comes from the kind of home where violence is pretty ordinary.”

  Karl stared down at the concrete for a moment. “You should have had her adopted. After all, I’d be in pretty bad shape myself if you had left me with my mother.”

  “You would never have lived to grow up if I had left you with your mother. Her mother wasn’t quite as bad. And her family tends to cluster together more than yours. They need to be near each other more, and some of them get along together a little more peacefully than your family—not that they really like each other any better. They don’t.”

  “What’s the girl going to do about needing her family when you bring her here?”
<
br />   “I’m hoping she’ll transfer her need to you.”

  Karl groaned.

  “I’m also hoping that you won’t find that such a bad thing after a while. You should try to accept her, for the sake of your own comfort.”

  “What if talking to her doesn’t quiet her down? You never answered that.”

  Doro shrugged. “Then use her methods. Beat the hell out of her. Don’t let her near anything she can hit or cut you with for a while afterward, though.”

  Mary

  I turned twenty just two days before Doro took me to Karl. Later, I decided Vivian must have been my birthday present. Somehow, Doro forgot to tell me about her until the last minute. Slipped his mind.

  So I was not only going to marry a total stranger, a white man, a telepath who wouldn’t even let me think in private, but I was going to marry a man who intended to keep his girlfriend right there in the same house with me. Son of a bitch!

  I threw a fit. I finally did the yelling and screaming Doro had warned me I would do. I couldn’t help it, I just went out of control. The whole thing was so Goddamn humiliating! Doro hit me and I bit a piece out of his hand. We sort of stood each other off. He knew that if I hurt him much worse, I would force him out of the body he was wearing—into my body. He’d take me, and all his efforts to get me this far would be wasted. I knew it myself, but I was past caring. I felt like a dog somebody was taking to be bred.

  “Now, listen,” he began. “This is stupid. You know you’re going to—”

  We both moved at the same time. He meant to hit me. I meant to dodge and kick him. But he moved a lot faster than I expected. He hit me with his fist—not hard enough to knock me unconscious, but hard enough to stop me from doing anything to him for a while.

  He picked me up from where I had fallen, threw me onto the bed, and pinned me there. For a minute, he just glared down at me, his face for once looking like the mask it was. There’s usually nothing frightening about the way he looks—nothing to give him away. Now, though, he looked like a corpse some undertaker had done a bad job on. Like whatever he really was had withdrawn way down inside the body and wasn’t bothering to animate anything but the eyes. I had to force myself to stare back at him.