Michael stared at him in disbelief.
“Who said anything about marriage? And what’s wrong with that anyway?”
His father glared back, eyes harsh behind his bifocals. “You know what I’ve told you about genetic drift. We’ve got to protect the mutant line. It was hard enough to establish it in the first place.”
“I know, I know. Gods, do I know!”
“Then you also know that it’s time for you to consider your actions. Your responsibilities. It’s time you started paying attention to Jena. She’s the right age, and there aren’t many others eligible.”
A blond-haired girl, slim yet sultry-looking, smiled across the room at Michael. A golden unity pin glinted at her throat. He forced himself to look the other way, stomach knotting. Clan life was a vise in which he was caught, and he feared it would twist the life out of him.
“So that’s it,” he said bitterly. “Fit in, breed true, conform. Just as I thought.”
“You make it sound like a dreadful fate.”
“Maybe I think it is.” He saw tears in his mother’s eyes, but it was too late to take anything back, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. “I didn’t spend four years at Cornell just to become part of somebody else’s master plan. To be a stud for the clan.”
He heard gasps around him. His father’s face was turning red, a sure sign of another explosion.
“Michael, if you don’t start facing your responsibilities to us, decisions will have to be made for you.”
“As if they haven’t been already.” Defiant, Michael faced him, hands on his hips. “You tell me to act and think like an adult, but when I do, you treat me like a child.”
Every golden eye in the room was locked on him. Michael felt as though he was suffocating. If he didn’t get out of that room he was going to burst. To die.
With a wrench, he turned and, using his telekinetic skill, opened the door from three feet away. Then he was standing outside the shack, his ragged breath making clouds in the cold air. But where to go? The waves’ pounding sent an insistent message. Michael ran for the beach, determined to get as far away from his family as possible.
James Ryton restrained the urge to wince as the door slammed behind his eldest son. Around him, members of the clan muttered disapprovingly, shaking their heads and moving off to talk in small groups.
“Want some friendly advice?” Halden asked.
“Not really, Hal, but I know you well enough to know I’m going to get it anyhow.”
Halden smiled. “You’re just going to chase Michael away if you keep that up.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Ryton sighed. “He reminds me of myself at that age. So hotheaded. I’m afraid he’ll get hurt.”
“You made it through,” Halden said. “Intact, so it seems.”
Ryton gave him a half smile. “More or less. The mental flares are starting, though, Halden. I can feel them, late at night. The clairaudient distortion wakes me up.”
The Book Keeper grasped Ryton’s shoulder. “Take heart. We’re getting closer and closer to some means of controlling them. Maybe even a cure.”
His mouth a bitter line, Ryton pulled away. “I don’t want to spend the next twenty years on neural dampers. Rather kill myself.” His tone was so low, he might have been talking to himself.
“James, don’t talk that way.”
“Sorry, old friend,” Ryton said. He forced a smile. “Let’s discuss something less depressing.”
Halden squeezed his arm. “Your son is smart, a credit to the clan. He’ll come around. Just be patient.”
“Hope you’re right. Have you learned anything else about this so-called supermutant?”
“The rumors are heating up,” the Book Keeper said. “Reports from Brazil of experiments with radiation. On human subjects.”
“Brazil this time? Last time, it was Burma. I don’t believe any of it. Is there any documentation? Hard proof?”
“Not exactly. But there’s been enough noise and thunder to set off discussion in Congress of forming an investigative committee.”
“To Brazil?”
“Where else? An informal junket, of course. It won’t do to ruffle their feathers just when they’re finally paying off so much of their debt to us.”
“Thanks to that triobium lode they found in Bahia. And English laser-mining technology.” Ryton said. “What about Jacobsen? She’ll go, of course.”
Halden shrugged. “She’ll have to. And we’re taking this a bit more seriously than before. I’ve had reports from the West Coast. Russia, too. Our geneticists think it’s possible that whoever these people are, they’ve isolated and coded the mutant genome.”
Ryton laughed harshly. “Oh, don’t start that. You know they were talking about genome coding twenty or thirty years ago, in the eighties. It’s never been done successfully, especially after that Japanese blunder led to the moratorium on it.”
“Perhaps the moratorium never spread to Brazil.” Halden emptied his mug in a gulp and poured a fresh cup of coffee.
“So what do you hear out of Russia?”
“Sketchy reports. They’re not as well organized there as we are, of course, but on her last trip over, Zenora saw Yakovsky. He told her that they were worried about Brazil too.”
“This should be discussed at the general meeting.”
“I thought so. Tomorrow?”
Ryton nodded. “The implications are frightening. After all, the normals don’t really know what to make of us now. What will happen if a true enhanced mutant is revealed?”
“Oh, you know, the usual. Mass riots. Pogroms. Lynchings.” Halden smiled. “You always look on the dark side, James. An enhanced mutant could be a wonderful thing.”
Wounded, Ryton drew himself up. “I know you think this is amusing, Halden. But I haven’t forgotten 1992. Or Sarah. This could be very dangerous for us.”
“Of course you’re worried,” Halden said diplomatically. “But that was twenty-five years ago. And after all, aren’t we trying to do the same thing in our own way? Create supermutants through inbreeding?”
“No,” Ryton snapped. “What we’re interested in is survival. Safety in numbers. Staying out of trouble, not making the rest of the human race obsolete. Which is what we’ll be accused of if this supermutant thing proves even remotely true. You know the normals are afraid of us to begin with. And if there’s any fact behind this rumor of radiation-enhanced mutants, then what happens to us, Halden? What about us?”
Although there were no sheltering dunes, Michael risked levitating over the waves anyway. It was dusk, and he didn’t think he’d be easily seen. He didn’t like using his mutant abilities in front of strangers, unlike some of his cousins, who enjoyed showing off to shock the normals. But there was no one on the beach.
A crisp wind carried the hint of snow. A few lonely birds picked at seaweed along the water line. Michael marveled at how they managed to survive, even in the heart of winter. They scattered frantically as his shadow moved over them.
Floating above the water was a wonderful game, he thought. He’d always loved it. When he was little, his mother had occasionally tied a rope to him to keep his levitation powers under control. He remembered her patiently tutoring him when he was four years old. “Take a big step and hop! Come on, Michael. Try again.”
His telekinetic abilities had only surfaced in the past three years. He enjoyed experimenting with them. Mentally, he pushed against the surging waters. They pushed back, of course, but he thought that he saw the water give way some.
He was a rarity even in their community; a double mutant. His father was always harping on his precious genes. Preserve. Protect. Marry a mutant girl. Have little mutant kids. Become Book Keeper someday. Don’t show your powers to anybody. Fit in. Fade in. It made him angry just to think about it.
The surf slammed a wave against the shore and the spray came flying toward him. He rose a bit higher to avoid it.
Good little mutants, he thought. They hid like mi
ce, clinging together, sucking up all the breathable air, every personality quirk grating against him like fingernails on a blackboard each time he attended a clan gathering. At least he’d gotten a break from it during college. Seen how the normals lived. And he liked it.
People like Kelly McLeod breathed easily. They were responsible only to themselves, perhaps to their families. But there were no hidden secrets to protect. No claustrophobic traditions to observe, no insular habits to maintain. They were free of the cloying familiarity of clan life. They had no sacred mission, save to be themselves and see what life had to offer.
He admired Kelly’s strong personality, her independence. Most mutant women were restrained, careful, some hidden shadow passing behind their eyes. Even Jena. He felt momentarily ashamed for the way he had ignored her. She was a foxy girl, but she had the wrong color eyes. All mutants had eyes that same strange tawny golden brown, oddly reflective in the dark; an easy way to recognize clan members in unfamiliar places.
Kelly’s eyes were clear blue. He liked their contrast with her light skin and dark hair, liked her finely modeled, pointed nose, her chiseled cheekbones. The way she’d wear black leather and silver chains one day, the next appear with her hair swept up, tiny earrings, and some old-fashioned blouse with a high neck and lace. When she smiled, she revealed less than perfectly aligned teeth, but that was fine with him. He didn’t want her to be a plastic doll. That was part of her attraction.
He thought about kissing her in the McLeod backyard. She hadn’t resisted when he’d put his hands under her bra. If there’d been time, he knew she would have encouraged more, but her father had come out. And he wanted her with a hunger he’d never felt for any mutant girl.
“Call me when you get back from vacation,” she’d said to him, dark hair haloed in the lamplight of her back porch. He couldn’t wait to see her again. But he’d have to be careful that his father didn’t find out.
“A Eurodollar for your thoughts.”
Michael jerked around. There was no one there. In the distance, he could hear a shutter slapping in the wind. Had he imagined somebody speaking to him?
“Aren’t you afraid that one of the normals will see you and faint?” Somebody was speaking to him, all right, but the voice he heard was in his mind, not in his ears. And that mocking, insinuating tenor could only belong to one person. His cousin Skerry. But Halden had said he was gone.…
“Skerry? Where are you?” Michael asked aloud. He had no ability as a sending telepath, and it was forbidden to reach into another’s mind to read it even if you had the gift. Skerry could ask him questions, but he would not delve for answers.
“Behind the snack bar.”
Michael descended quickly and padded over the sand toward the weathered gray building, boarded up against winter winds. He peered around the far corner. Nothing but beach houses and sand.
“You’re getting warmer.”
“C’mon, Skerry, stop screwing around!” He knew he could be standing right next to him, but unless Skerry wanted to be seen, Michael could go on searching for him until New Year’s.
He heard what sounded like a pack of cards being shuffled behind him. Turning, he saw gray diagonal bars that slowly solidified, like a video image, into his cousin. Same old Skerry. Green U.S. Army parka, jeans and boots, curly brown hair, beard, and those radiant eyes, just like his. But where Michael ran toward wiry strength and speed, Skerry was big, muscular, with large shoulders and legs that looked as though they could kick a football across a field. Or knock down a tree. His teeth showed white in a teasing grin. Michael liked his cousin, although he didn’t exactly trust him. But he didn’t exactly distrust him, either. It was difficult to know how to feel about a telepath who pulled disappearing acts.
“You and your old man having words again?”
“Were you at that meeting?”
“Let’s just say I keep tabs on what’s happening with my nearest and dearest.”
“Well, then you know how it is. They want me to marry Jena. Fall in line. Wipe my shoes. Be a good little mutant boy.”
“You sound fed up.”
“I am.”
“So leave.”
Michael shook his head, embarrassed. “I can’t. Maybe you can, but it would kill my parents if I quit the firm and left town.”
Skerry shrugged, pulled out a toothpick, and inserted it into his mouth at a jaunty angle.
“Where’ve you been?” Michael asked.
“Here and there. Big world out there.” He began to saunter down the beach and gestured for Michael to accompany him. They fell into step and walked for several minutes in silence. Skerry paused, looked at him sharply, threw the toothpick into the surf.
“You can’t live your entire life for ’em. You’ll go crazy. And I don’t mean mutant-crazy. You’ve got more choices than you think, but if you don’t take advantage of them now, you never will. Remember that famous mutant life span. Short. Bad ending. Get away and find out who you are.”
“Like you?”
“Maybe.”
“Easier said than done. Besides, if you’ve escaped, what are you doing here?”
Skerry shrugged again. “Nostalgia. Besides, what makes you think I’m really here?” He grinned and began to fade around the edges.
“Skerry, wait. Don’t go.”
“Sorry kid, time’s up. Think about what I said. Get away while you still can. I’ll be in touch.”
It seemed to Michael that the last thing to fade away was Skerry’s smile.
Melanie took a large bite out of her brownie, savoring the rich, dark taste. This was the part of the meeting everybody looked forward to: catching up on gossip, admiring the newest additions to the clan, and discussing politics. Especially politics. Oh, yes, everyone looked forward to it. Everyone but her.
She watched the younger children levitating in a circle near the fireplace and, for a moment, wished she were a child again so she could join them. But more than age separated her from that happy group by the fire, and from the clan crowding the room. Melanie was a mutant, of course. All it took was a look into her golden eyes to see that. But she was a null. Dysfunctional.
Everybody in the clan treated her politely, of course. Too politely. They acted as though she were mentally retarded. Their pity was as difficult to swallow as the contempt of the nonmutants at school.
Across the room, Marol proudly held on to her infant son, Sefrim, as he levitated peacefully above her lap, asleep.
I don’t even have as much ability as a mutant infant, Melanie thought.
She wished she’d stormed out with Michael. Or brought some of her mother’s Valedrine with her. She was coming to dread these gatherings as much as her older brother. More. At least he was gifted. She didn’t really know what she was.
Don’t cry, she told herself fiercely. Don’t let them see you cry.
Could she help it that she had the golden eyes but not a shred of mutant power? Oh, how she’d practiced in her room for hours when she thought nobody knew, praying that her abilities were just late in maturing.
She was meant to be telekinetic—she felt it in her bones. But strain as she might, until she’d given herself headaches from concentrating on moving an orange across the room, or even across a table, nothing ever happened. The orange stayed put.
Once she’d gotten her period, Melanie began to give up hope. Almost every mutant girl had developed her power by then. So Melanie tried to understand, if not accept. But when Michael developed a second ability, she realized that she’d been singled out by some cruel and malicious god for special torment. Her older brother had somehow received both his own and her powers!
A hand touched her shoulder gently, affectionately. Melanie looked up to see Aunt Zenora smiling down at her. Uncle Halden’s wife was certainly built to suit him, she thought. Big and brassy, just like him. She wore half a dozen golden unity pins along one sleeve: six golden eyes framed by linked arms. Zenora was active in the Mutant Union and was alwa
ys passing out pins at clan meetings.
Zenora hugged her. “How’s school?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“You must be, let’s see now, a junior?”
“Senior.”
“Well, have you been thinking about college?” Zenora asked. “A career?”
Melanie shrugged. “Dad wants me to work with him.”
“Sounds like a good idea to me.”
“I suppose.” The thought of working with her father and brother made Melanie’s stomach turn. What she wanted to do was become a video jock. The first mutant video jock. But that was as unlikely as her suddenly levitating and walking across the ceiling.
Zenora was drawn away into a political discussion in which every third sentence seemed to include the name of Senator Eleanor Jacobsen. Melanie shook her head. Politics bored her. She saw her mother sitting on the old red sofa and joined her.
“Zenora’s ever the firebrand,” Sue Li said, smiling.
“I think she’d rather talk politics than do anything else, even cook,” Melanie said. “I’ll bet she wears a mutant unity pin to bed.”
Jena walked by, eyes cast downward.
Sue Li sighed. “Your brother is causing trouble for us. I’m embarrassed for that girl.”
“I’m not,” Melanie said. “Jena’s got a hundred boyfriends. I’m sorry for Michael.”
“What do you mean?” Her mother looked at her sharply. She felt her face grow hot.
“Well, he doesn’t like Jena. I mean, he does, but not the way you want him to,” Melanie squirmed. “I think it’s not fair to try and make him do what he doesn’t want to do.”
That’s very loyal,” Sue Li said, her mouth a prim line.
Privately, Melanie thought that Jena was a smug pain whose only close personal relationship was with her mirror. But she felt perversely pleased to see somebody else subjected to the clan’s scrutiny and sympathy, for once. She reached for another brownie and wondered if Zenora was a good cook because she was a mutant, or despite it.
Warm yellow light filled the windows of the Ryton bungalow and spilled out into the dark. The sun had been down for nearly an hour. Michael opened the door carefully, ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble. His mother was sitting at the kitchen table, reading, with her back to him. Melanie and his father were nowhere in sight. She looked up from her notescreen as he entered the room.
The Mutant Season Page 3