“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. Sure. 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 gro
unds 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?”
“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.
“The one thing I can’t do,” he said softly, “is prevent my people from committing suicide.” Whatever there was about his voice that made it recognizable no matter what body it came from was much stronger. I felt the way I had once when I was ten years old and at a public swimming pool. I couldn’t swim and some fool pushed me into twelve feet of water. I remember I just held my breath and waited. Somebody had told me to do that once, and, scared as I was, I did it. Sure enough, I floated to the surface, where I could breathe and where I could reach the edge of the pool. Now I lay still beneath Doro’s body, waiting.
He reached out to the night table and picked up a switchblade knife. “This came with the body I’m wearing,” he said. He rolled off me and lay on his back. He pressed a stud on the knife and about six inches of blade jumped out.
“As I recall, you like knives,” he said. He took my hand and closed my fingers around the handle of the knife. “It doesn’t really matter where you cut me. Just drive the knife in to the hilt anywhere in this body and the shock will force me to jump.”
I threw the knife across the room. Broke the dresser mirror. “You could at least make him get rid of that damn woman!” I said bitterly.
He just lay there.
“Someday there’s going to be a way for me to hurt you, Doro. Don’t think I won’t do it.”
He shrugged. He didn’t believe it. Neither did I, really. Who the hell could hurt him?
“I loved you. Why are you humiliating me like this?”
“Look,” he said, “if he has the woman there to turn to, he’s a lot less likely to let you goad him into hurting you.”
“I’d be a lot less likely to goad him into anything if you’d get rid of Vivian.”
“You underestimate yourself,” he said grimly. “Besides, he’s in love with Vivian. If I made him get rid of her, I guarantee you he’d take it out on you.”
“I just wish I could find a way to take this out on you.”
He got up and looked down at me. “Change your clothes,” he said. “Then we’ll go.”
I looked at myself and saw that my pants and blouse were smeared with blood from his hand. I changed my clothes, then packed the rest of my things. Finally, we drove over to Palo Verde A
venue.
While Doro introduced us, Karl and Vivian stood together looking like sister and brother and staring at my eyes. Which gave them at least one thing in common with everybody else who meets me for the first time. There were times when I wished for a nice, bland pair of brown eyes. Like Karl’s or Vivian’s. Oh, well.
I watched Vivian, saw how pretty she was, how nervous she was. She was no bigger than me, thank God, and she looked scared, which was promising. Doro had told me Karl wouldn’t let her really resent me or feel angry or humiliated. Wouldn’t let her! She was a Goddamn robot and she didn’t even know it. Or, rather, she did know it but she wasn’t allowed to care.
Karl looked like one of the bright, ambitious, bookish white guys I remembered from high school. Intense, hair already thinning. Doro had said he was twenty-eight, but he looked older. And he sounded … well, he sounded just the way I would have expected a well-brought-up guy to sound when he’s trying to be polite to somebody he can’t stand. Strained.
After the short, stiff introductions, Doro took Vivian’s hand as though this wasn’t the first time he had taken it, and said, “Let’s let them get acquainted. How about a swim?”
Vivian looked at Karl and Karl nodded. She and Doro went out together. I watched them go, wondering about things that weren’t exactly any of my business. I looked at Karl but his face was closed and cold. Then I forgot about Vivian and Doro and wondered what the hell Karl and I were supposed to do now. We were in his tennis-court-sized living room, with its wood paneling and its big white fireplace. We were sitting near the fireplace and we both stared into it instead of at each other.
Then, finally, I decided to get things started. “Do you suppose there’s any way we can do this and still have a little pride left?”
Karl looked surprised. I wondered what Doro had been telling him about me. “I was wondering if there was any way for us to manage it at all,” he said.
I shrugged. “You know as well as I do that we don’t have any choice about that. Do you know what kind of help you’re supposed to give me?”
“I’m to shield you from the thoughts and emotions you receive when they get to be too much for you. Doro seems to think they will.”
Seed to Harvest: Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, and Patternmaster (Patternist) Page 32