Mind of My Mind

by Octavia E. Butler

  “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.

  Chapter Eleven

  Mary

  Karl was settling some kind of dispute when I got home. He was standing between two Patternist men who were trying to glare each other to death. Their communication was all mental and easy for me to ignore as I walked through the living room. I went to the library and began to call in my searchers. As usual, they were scattered around the country—around the continent. Doro had begun planting the best of his families from Africa, Europe, and Asia in various parts of North America hundreds of years before. He had decided then that the North American continent was big enough to give them room to avoid each other and that it would be racially diverse enough to absorb them all. Now I had peopl
e in three countries demanding to know why they should stop their searches before they had found all the latents they sensed—why they should abandon potential Patternists. I didn’t blame them for being mad, but I wasn’t about to tell them, one by one, what the problem was. I pulled a “Do it because I said so!” on them and broke contact before they could argue more.

  Karl came into the library as I was finishing and said, “What are you doing sitting in here in the dark?”

  I was in contact with a Patternist in Chicago who was crying in anger and frustration at my “stupid, arbitrary, dictatorial orders. …” On and on.

  Just get your ass on the next plane to L.A., I told her. I broke contact with her and blinked as Karl turned on the light. I hadn’t realized it was so late.

  “Uh-oh,” he said, looking at me. “I’ll listen if you want to talk about it.”

  I just opened and gave it all to him.

  “Twenty years,” he said, frowning. “But why? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Doro doesn’t have to make sense,” I said. “Although in this case I think he has his reasons. I think it’s interesting that he first denied that he and I were competitors.”

  Karl looked hard at me. “I don’t think that’s a point you should emphasize to him.”

  “I wasn’t emphasizing it. I was letting him know I understood it, and that because I understood it I was willing to accept a reasonable limitation—willing to settle for just the worst of the latents.”

  “But it didn’t do any good.”

  “No.”

  “I wonder why. It sounds fairly harmless, and he would be able to check on you just by questioning you now and then.”

  “Maybe it was something I said—although he knew it already.”

  “What?”

  “That the really bad latents turn out to be my best Patternists. They’re probably the victims that give him the most pleasure too, when he can catch them before they kill themselves or get themselves locked up. I’ll bet that half brother of mine was a mess before Doro took him.”

  “Competition again,” said Karl. “Possible.” He looked at me curiously. “Does it bother you that the body he’s wearing was your brother?”

  “No. I never knew the man. Doro’s appetite in general bothers me. He warned me that it would. But I can keep quiet about it as long as he isn’t taking my Patternists.”

  “For all we know, that could be next.”

  “God! No, he wouldn’t do that while I’m still alive. The only Patternist he’s likely to take right now is me.” Something occurred to me suddenly. “Wait a minute! He may have left me more clues to whatever the hell he’s doing than I thought.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll get back to you in a minute.” I reached out to the old neighborhood, to Emma. I could reach her fast now, because she belonged to me. I had a kind of link with her that would let me know the minute some other Patternist touched her, and at the same time let the Patternist know she was mine. I had that kind of connection with Rina too, since she was too old for me to risk her life by trying to push her into transition.

  I read Emma, saw that Doro had been to see her just a few hours before. And he’d talked a lot. Now since he knew Emma was mine, knew that anything he said to her I would eventually pickup, I assumed that he had been talking at least partly to me. Perhaps more to me than about me. I looked at Karl. “This morning, Doro told Emma he was afraid I’d disobey him in this and make him kill me.”

  “Obviously he was wrong,” said Karl.

  “But he seemed so sure about it—and Emma seemed so sure. I can discount Emma, I guess. She’s frightened enough of me—and jealous enough of me—to want me dead. But Doro. …”

  “Do you have any intention of defying him?”

  “None … now.” I stared down at the table. “I wouldn’t risk the people, the Pattern, even if I were willing to risk myself. I’m wondering, though. …”

  “Wondering what?”

  “Well, remember when we started this—when I pulled in Christine and Jamie Hanson?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you and Doro and I tried to figure out why I was so eager to bring in more people. Doro finally decided that I needed them for the same reasons he needed them. For sustenance.”

  Karl smiled faintly, which had to be a mark of how much he had relaxed and accepted his place in the Pattern. “Don’t you think fifteen hundred people might be enough to sustain you?”

  I looked at him. “You don’t know how much I’d like to say yes to that.”

  His smile vanished. “For the sake of the fifteen hundred, you’d better say yes to it.”

  “Yeah. I just wish I could be sure that saying yes was enough.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “I might be too much like Doro.” I sighed. “I’m supposed to be like him. He finally admitted that to Emma this morning. Have you ever seen him when he needs a change really badly?”

  “No. But I know that’s not a safe time to be near him.”

  “Right. If he’s really in trouble, he’s liable to lose control—just take whoever’s closest to him. Usually, though, he prevents himself from getting into that situation by changing often and keeping to healthy, young bodies. I seem to prefer young minds—not necessarily healthy.”

  “But with so many young minds already here, there’s no reason for you to defy Doro and go after more.”

  “There are more of them out there, Karl. I’m afraid that might be reason enough. Now that I’m thinking about it. …” I glanced at him. “You’ve felt how eager I am when I go after new people—the first ones two years ago, and the last ones this morning. I don’t like thinking about what my life will be like now that I can’t go after any more of them.”

  He put one elbow on the table and rested his chin on his hand. “You know, in his way, I think Doro does love you.”

  I stared at him in surprise. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Am I right?”

  “He loves me. What passes for love with him.”

  “Don’t belittle it. I think it’s the only lever you have that might move him—make him change his mind.”

  “I’ve never in my life been able to change his mind once he’s made it up. His love … it lasts as long as I do what he tells me.”

  “All right, then; you may not have any influence. But you’ll find out for sure, won’t you. You’ll try.”

  I took a deep breath, nodded. “I’ll try anything within reason. But I don’t think anything less than my complete obedience will satisfy him. I’ve made him wary and uncomfortable. I’ve been moving too fast, and letting him see me too clearly.”

  “It sounds as though you’re saying he’s afraid of you. And if you believe that, you’re deluding yourself. Dangerously.”

  “No, not afraid. Cautious. He’s alive because he’s cautious. And I’m too powerful. Fifteen hundred people aren’t giving me any trouble at all. Whatever the Pattern is, I’m not likely to overload it soon. Doro isn’t worried that I can’t handle the thing I’m building. He’s worried that I can.”

  Karl thought about that for a long moment. “If you’re right, if he is worried, it might not only be because you’re competing with him and taking his people.”

  I looked at him questioningly.

  “It might be because you could use those people against him. You can’t hurt him alone, but if you took strength from some of us—or all of us….”

  “He made a point of telling Emma that wouldn’t work.”

  “Did he convince you?”

  “He didn’t have to. I already knew better than to try anything like that with him.”

  “You had no reason to risk trying it before now. Now … you might have to try something. Or let us try. There should be enough Patternists now for us to overwhelm him without your help.”

  “No way.”

  “It’s never been tried. You don’t know—”

  “I know. You cou
ldn’t do it. Not even all fifteen hundred of you together, because, as far as he’s concerned, you wouldn’t really be together. He’d take you one at a time, but so fast you’d fall like dominoes. I know. Because that’s something I could do myself.”

  He frowned. “That’s out, then. But I don’t understand why he’s so convinced that you couldn’t defeat him using our strength.”

  “He said, ‘Strength alone isn’t enough to defeat me.’ And part of the reason he gave is that I can’t change bodies. But that doesn’t hold up. I can kill his body with a thought, and that same thought will force him to attack me on a mental level. My territory.”

  “That sounds promising.”

  “Yes, but he knows it as well as I do. That means he has some other reason for his confidence. The only thing I can think of is my own ignorance. I just don’t know how to take him. He’s not a Patternist, he’s not a mute—he’s bound to have some surprises for me. If I go after him, the chances are I’ll be dead before I can figure out how to kill him. He knows so much more than I do.”

  “But he’s never faced anyone like you before. You’d be as new to him as he is to you.”

  “But killing is a way of life to him, Karl. He’s damned good at it. And he has killed people who he thought were dangerous to him before. He claims I don’t even have the potential to be dangerous to him personally.”

  “Do you imagine he’s never made a mistake?”

  “He’s still alive.”

  “No wonder. Look how good he is at scaring hell out of his opponents before he faces them. If you accept him as all-knowing and invulnerable, you’d better be able to live without recruiting for as long as he says. Because you’ll be in no shape to face him. You’ll have already beaten yourself!”

  We stared at each other for a long moment, and I could see that he was as worried as he sounded. “You know I’m not going to give him my life,” I said quietly. “Or the lives of my Patternists. If I have to fight him, it will be a battle, not a rout.”

  “You’ll take strength from us.”

  I winced, looked away. “Some of you at least.”

  “The strongest of us. Beginning with me.”

  I nodded. To protect them, I had to risk them. They could be killed even if I wasn’t. If I was desperate and rushed, as I probably would be, I might take too much of their strength. And I would be killing them. Not Doro. They were my people, and I would be killing them.