“Be good to Margaret for me, Lea. I might not be able to come to see her again.”
She walked out, leaving Lea staring after her.
California.
Was it Doro calling her somehow with this thing in her mind? She knew he had other telepaths—better telepaths. He might be using one of them to reach her. It was possible that he had somehow learned of his son’s death and struck at her through someone else. If he had, his efforts were paying off. She was going to California.
She felt all the terror that the controlled Lea must have known. She couldn’t help herself. She had to go to Forsyth. And if Doro was there, she would be going to her death.
Chapter Five
Mary
When Karl left my room, I lay in bed thinking, remembering. Karl and I had sort of accepted each other over the past two weeks. He had gotten a lot easier to talk to—and I suppose I had too. He had stopped trying to pretend I wasn’t there, and I had stopped resenting him. In fact, I had probably come to depend on him more than I should have. And he really had just worked damned hard to keep me alive. Yet, only a few hours later, he had done enough emotional backsliding to sit by and let me almost kill myself—all because of this pattern thing. I wondered how big a mental leap it would be for him to go from a willingness to let me be killed to a willingness to kill me himself.
Or maybe I was overreacting. Maybe I was just disappointed because I had expected my transition to bring me closer to him. I had expected just what I knew Vivian was afraid of: that, after my transition, she would become excess baggage. If I had to be Karl’s wife, I meant to be his only wife.
But now. … I had never felt anyone’s hostility the way I felt Karl’s just before he went out. That was part of what it meant to be in full control of my telepathic ability. Not a very comfortable part. I knew he had gone to see Doro—had gone to roust Doro out of bed and ask him what the hell had gone wrong. I wondered if anything really had gone wrong.
Doro wanted an empire. He didn’t call it that, but that was what he meant. Maybe I was just one more tool he was using to get it. He needed tools, because an empire of ordinary people wasn’t quite what he had in mind. That, to him, would be like an ordinary person making himself emperor over a lot of cattle. Doro thought a lot of himself, all right. But he didn’t think much of the families of half-crazy latents he had scattered across the country. They were just his breeders—if they were lucky. He didn’t want an empire of them either. He and I had talked about it off and on since I was thirteen. That first conversation said most of it, though.
He had taken me to Disneyland. He did things like that for me now and then while I was growing up. They helped me survive Rina and Emma.
We were sitting at an outdoor table of a cafe having lunch when I asked the key question.
“What are we for, Doro?”
He looked at me through deep blue eyes. He was wearing the body of a tall, thin white man. I knew he knew what I meant, but still he said, “For?”
“Yeah, for. You have so many of us. Rina said your newest wife just had a kid.” He laughed for some reason. I went on. “Are you just keeping us for a hobby—so you’ll have something to do, or what?”
“No doubt that’s part of it.”
“What’s the other part?”
“I’m not sure you’d understand.”
“I’m mixed up in it. I want to know about it whether I understand or not. And I want to know about you.”
He was still smiling. “What about me?”
“Enough about you so that I’ll have a chance to understand why you want us.”
“Why does anyone want a family?”
“Oh, come on, Doro. Families! Dozens of them. Tell me, really. You can start by telling me about your name. How come you only have one, and one I never heard of at that.”
“It’s the name my parents gave me. It’s the only thing they gave me that I still have.”
“Who were your parents?”
“Farmers. They lived in a village along the Nile.”
“Egypt!”
He shook his head. “No, not quite. A little farther south. The Egyptians were our enemies when I was born. They were our former rulers, seeking to become our rulers again.”
“Who were your people?”
“They had another name then, but you would call them Nubians.”
“Black people!”
“Yes.”
“God! You’re white so much of the time, I never thought you might have been born black.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“What do you mean, ‘It doesn’t matter’? It matters to me.”
“It doesn’t matter because I haven’t been any color at all for about four thousand years. Or you could say I’ve been every color. But either way, I don’t have anything more in common with black people—Nubian or otherwise—than I do with whites or Asians.”
“You mean you don’t want to admit you have anything in common with us. But if you were born black, you are black. Still black, no matter what color you take on.”
He crooked his mouth a little in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “You can believe that if it makes you feel better.”
“It’s true!”
He shrugged.
“Well, what race do you think you are?”
“None that I have a name for.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It does when you think about it. I’m not black or white or yellow, because I’m not human, Mary.”
That stopped me cold. He was serious. He couldn’t have been more serious. I stared at him, chilled, scared, believing him even though I didn’t want to believe. I looked down at my plate, slowly finished my hamburger. Then, finally, I asked my question. “If you’re not human, what are you?”
And his seriousness broke. “A ghost?”
“That’s not funny!”
“No. It may even be true. I’m the closest thing to a ghost that I’ve run into in all my years. But that’s not important. What are you looking so frightened for? I’m no more likely to hurt you now than I ever was.”
“What are you?”
“A mutation. A kind of parasite. A god. A devil. You’d be surprised at some of the things people have decided I was.”
I didn’t say anything.
He reached over and took my hand for a moment. “Relax. There’s nothing for you to be afraid of.”
“Am I human?”
He laughed. “Of course you are. Different, but certainly human.”
I wondered whether that was good or bad. Would he have loved me more if I had been more like him? “Am I descended from your … from the Nubians, too?”
“No. Emma was an Ibo woman.” He ate a piece of french fry and watched a couple with about seven yelling little kids troop by. “I don’t know of any of my people who are descended from Nubians. Certainly none of them were descended from my parents.”
“You were an only child?”
“I was one of twelve. I survived, the others didn’t. They all died in infancy or early childhood. I was the youngest and I only survived until I was your age—thirteen.”
“And they were too old to have more kids.”
“Not only that. I died while I was going through something a lot like transition. I had flashes of telepathy, got caught in other people’s thoughts. But of course I didn’t know what it was. I was afraid, hurt. I thrashed around on the ground and made a lot of noise. Unfortunately, both my mother and my father came running. I died then for the first time, and I took them. First my mother, then my father. I didn’t know what I was doing. I took a lot of other people too, all in panic. Finally I ran away from the village, wearing the body of one of my cousins—a young girl. I ran straight into the arms of some Egyptians on a slave raid. They were just about to attack the village. I assume they did attack.”
“You don’t know?”
“Not for sure, but there was no reason for them not to. I couldn’t hu
rt them—or at least not deliberately. I was already half out of my mind over what I had done. I snapped. After that I don’t know what happened. Not then, not for about fifty years after. I figured out much later that the span I didn’t remember, still don’t remember, was about fifty years. I never saw any of the people of my village again.” He paused for a moment. “I came to, wearing the body of a middle-aged man. I was lying on a pallet of filthy, vermin-infested straw in a prison. I was in Egypt, but I didn’t know it. I didn’t know anything. I was a thirteen-year-old boy who had suddenly come awake in someone else’s forty-five-year-old body. I almost snapped again.
“Then the jailer came in and said something to me in a language that, as far as I knew, I had never heard before. When I just lay there staring at him, he kicked me, started to beat me with a small whip he was carrying. I took him, of course. Automatic. Then I got out of there in his body and wandered through the streets of a strange city trying to figure out what a lot of other people have been trying to figure out ever since: Just what in the name of all gods was I?”
“I never thought you might wonder that.”
“I didn’t for long. I came to the conclusion that I was cursed, that I had offended the gods and was being punished. But after I had used my ability a few times deliberately and seen that I could have absolutely anything I wanted, I changed my mind. Decided that the gods had favored me by giving me power.”
“When did you decide that it was okay for you to use that power to make people … make them …”
“Breed them, you mean.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. Breed didn’t sound like the kind of word that should be applied to people. The minute he said it, though, I realized it was the right word for what he was doing.
“It took time for me to get around to that,” he said. “A century or two. I was busy first getting involved in Egyptian religion and politics, then traveling, trading with other peoples. I started to notice the way people bred animals. It stopped being just part of the background for me. I saw different breeds of dogs, of cattle, different ethnic groups of people—how they looked when they kept to themselves and were relatively pure, when there was crossbreeding.”
“And you decided to experiment.”
“In a way. I was able by then to recognize the people … the kinds of people that I would get the most pleasure from if I took them. I guess you could say, the kinds of people who tasted best.”
I suddenly lost my appetite. “God! That’s disgusting.”
“It’s also very basic. One kind of people gave me more pleasure than other kinds, so I tried to collect several of the kind I liked and keep them together. That way, they would breed and I would always have them available when I needed them.”
“And that’s how we began? As food?”
“That’s right.”
I was surprised, but I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t think for one minute that he was going to use me or anybody I knew for food. “What kind of people taste best?” I asked.
“People with a certain mental sensitivity. People who have the beginnings, at least, of some unusual abilities. I found them in every race I encountered, but I never found them in very large numbers.”
I nodded. “Psis,” I said. “There’s the word you need. A word that sort of groups everybody’s abilities together. I read it in a science-fiction magazine.”
“I know about it.”
“You know everything. So people with some psionic ability ‘taste’ better than others. But we’re not still just food, are we?”
“Some of my latents are. But my actives and potential actives are part of another project. They have been for some time.”
“What project?”
“To build a people, a race.”
So that was it. I thought about it for a moment. “A race for you to be part of?” I asked. “Or a race for you to own?”
He smiled. “That’s a good question.”
“What’s the answer?”
“Well … to get an active, I have to bring together people of two different latent families—people who repel each other so strongly that I have to take one of them to bring them together. That means all the actives of each generation are my children. So maybe the answer is … a little of both.”
Maybe it was a lot of both. Maybe he hadn’t told me just how experimental I was—just what different things I was supposed to do. And maybe he hadn’t told Karl, either.
I got out of bed trying to ignore the parts of me that hurt. I took a long, hot bath, hoping to soak away some of the pain. It helped a little. By the time I finally dressed and went downstairs, nobody but Doro was still around.
“Tell me about it while you’re having breakfast,” he said.
“Hasn’t Karl already told you?”
“Yes. Now I want to hear it from you.”
I told him. I didn’t add in any of my suspicions. I just told him and watched him. He didn’t look happy.
“What can you tell me about the other actives you’re holding?” he asked.
I almost said “nothing” before I realized it wasn’t true. “I can tell where they are,” I said. “And I can tell them apart. I know their names and I know—” I stopped, looked at him. “The more I concentrate on them, the more I find out about them. How much do you want to know?”
“Just tell me their names.”
“A test? All right. Rachel Davidson, a healer. She’s some relation to Emma. She works churches pretending to be a faith healer, but faith doesn’t have anything to do with it. She—”
“Just their names, Mary.”
“Okay. Jesse Bernarr, Jan Sholto, Ada Dragan, and Seth Dana. There’s something strange about Seth.”
“What?”
“Something wrong, painful. But no, wait a minute, it’s not Seth who has something wrong with him. It’s Seth’s brother, Clay. I see. Clay’s a latent and Seth is protecting him.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that most of these people are shielded?”
“I didn’t realize they were.” I checked quickly. “You’re right. Everyone but Seth is shielded. Hell, I’m still shielded. I forgot the shield was there, but it is. Not even thinned a little.”
“But you don’t have any trouble reading them through it?”
“No. It’s one-way communication, though. I can read them, but none of them have managed to find out who I am. And none of them realize when I’m reading them. A while ago, when Karl was reading me, I could feel it. I knew when he started, when he stopped, and what he got.”
“Can you tell whether any of the others are closer to you, closer to Forsyth now than they were when you first became aware of them?”
I checked. It was like turning my head to read a wall chart. That easy. And I noticed what I hadn’t noticed before. “Two of them are a lot closer. Rachel and Seth. They’re approaching from slightly different directions, and Rachel’s coming much faster, but, Doro, they’re both on their way here.”
“And the others?”
I checked again. “They’ll be coming too. They can’t help it. I see that now. My pattern is pulling them here.”
Doro said something that I knew had to be a curse even though it was in a foreign language. He came over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. He looked worried. That was unusual for him. I sat there knowing damned well that he was thinking he was going to have to kill me. This pattern thing wasn’t part of his plan, then. I was an experiment going bad before his eyes.
I looked up at him. I wasn’t afraid. I realized that I should have been, but I wasn’t. “Give it a chance,” I said quietly. “Let the five of them get here, and let’s see how they react.”
“You don’t know how badly my actives usually react to each other.”
“Karl’s reaction to me was bad enough. Why did you put us together if you didn’t think we could get along?”
“You and Karl are more stable than the others; you come from four of my best lines. You were supposed to get along fairly wel
l together.”
“Another experiment. All right, it can still work. Just give it a chance. After all, what have you got to lose?”
“Some very valuable people.”
I stood up and faced him. “You want to throw me away before you see how valuable I might be?”
“Girl, I don’t want to throw you away at all.”
“Give me a chance, then.”
“A chance to do what?”
“To find out whether this group of actives is different—or whether I can make them different. To find out whether I or my pattern can keep them from killing each other, or me. That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
He looked at me. After a moment, he nodded. I didn’t even feel relieved. But, then, I had never really felt threatened. I smiled at him. “You’re curious, aren’t you?”
He looked surprised.
“I know you. You really want to see what will happen—if it will be different from what’s happened before. Because this has happened before, hasn’t it?”
“Not quite.”
“What was different before? I might be able to learn from my predecessors’ mistakes.”
“Do you think anything you could have learned before your transition could have helped you avoid trapping my actives in your pattern?”
I took a deep breath. “No. But tell me anyway. I want to know.”
“No you don’t. But I’ll tell you. Your predecessors were parasites, Mary. Not quite the way I am, but parasites nevertheless. And so are you.”
I thought about that, then shook my head slowly. “But I haven’t hurt anybody. Karl was right next to me and I didn’t—”
“I said you weren’t like me. I’m fairly sure you could have killed Karl, though. I suspect Karl realizes that.”
I sat down. He had finally said something that really hit me. I had kind of built Karl up as a superman in my mind. I could see how he owned Vivian and the servants. His house and his life style were clear evidence of his power. He wasn’t Doro, but he was a good second. “I could have killed him? How?”
“Why? Want to try it?”
“Oh, shit, Doro, come on. I want to know how to avoid trying it. Or is that going to be impossible too?”
Seed to Harvest: Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, and Patternmaster (Patternist) Page 38