“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Mary’s the matter.”
Emma grimaced. “I’m not surprised. What’s she done?”
“Nothing yet. It’s what she’s going to do after I talk to her. I’m going to put on the brakes, Em. The Patternist section of Forsyth is as big as a small town already. She has enough people.”
“If you ask me, she had enough two years ago. But now that you’re ready to stop her, what are you going to do with all those actives—all those Patternists—when she’s not around any more to maintain the Pattern?”
“I’m not out to kill Mary, Em. The Pattern will still be there.”
“Will it?”
He hesitated. “You think she’ll make me kill her?”
“Yes. And if you’re realistic about it, you’ll think so too.”
He sighed, sat up. “Yes. I don’t expect to salvage many of her people, either. Most of them were animals before she found them. Without her, they’ll revert.”
“Animals … with such power, though.”
“I’ll have to destroy the worst of them.”
Emma winced.
“I thought you’d be more concerned about Mary.”
“I was concerned about her. But it’s too late for her now. You helped her turn herself into something too dangerous to live.”
He stared at her.
“She’s got too much power, Doro. She terrifies me. She’s doing exactly what you always said you wanted to do. But she’s doing it, not you. All those people, those fifteen hundred people in the section, are hers, not yours.”
“But she’s mine.”
“You wouldn’t be thinking about killing her if you believed that was enough.”
“Em. …”He got up and went to sit on the arm of her chair. “What are you afraid of?”
“Your Mary.” She leaned against him. “Your ruthless, egotistical, power-hungry little Mary.”
“Your grandchild.”
“Your creation! Fifteen hundred actives in two years. They bring each other through on an assembly line. And how many conscripted servants—ordinary people unfortunate enough to be taken over by those actives. People forced now to be servants in their own houses. Servants and worse!”
Her outburst seemed to startle him. He looked down at her silently.
“You’re not in control,” she said more softly. “You’ve let them run wild. How many years do you think it will take at this rate for them to take over the city? How long before they begin tampering with the state and federal government?”
“They’re very provincial people, Em. They honestly don’t care what’s happening in Washington or Sacramento or anywhere else as long as they can prevent it from hurting them. They pay attention to what’s going on, but they don’t influence it very often.”
“I wonder how long that will last.”
“Quite a while, even if the Pattern survives. They honestly don’t want the burden of running a whole country full of people. Not when those people can run themselves reasonably well and the Patternists can reap the benefits of their labor.”
“That, they have to have learned from you.”
“Of course.”
“You mentioned Washington and Sacramento. What about here in Forsyth?”
“This is their home territory, Em. They’re interfering too much here to avoid being noticed by Forsyth city government, half asleep as it is. To avoid trouble, they took over the city about a year and a half ago.”
Emma stared at him, aghast.
“They’ve completely taken over the best section of town. They did it quietly, but still Mary thought it safest for them to control key mutes in city hall, in the police department, in—”
“Mutes!”
He looked annoyed, probably with himself. “It’s a convenient term. People without telepathic voices. Ordinary people.”
“I know what it means, Doro. I knew the first time I heard Mary use it. It means niggers!”
“Em—”
“I tell you, you’re out of control, Doro. You’re not one of them. You’re not a telepath. And if you don’t think they look down on us non-telepaths, us niggers, the whole rest of humanity, you’re not paying attention.”
“They don’t look down on me.”
“They don’t look up to you, either. They used to. They used to respect you. Damnit, they used to love you, the originals. The ‘First Family’.” Her tone ridiculed the name that the original seven actives had adopted.
“Obviously this has been bothering you for a long time,” said Doro. “Why haven’t you said anything about it before?”
“It wasn’t necessary.”
He frowned.
“You knew.” Her tone became accusing. “I haven’t told you a single thing that you haven’t been aware of for at least as long as I have.”
He moved uncomfortably. “Sometimes I wonder if you aren’t a little telepathic yourself.”
“I don’t have to be. I know you. And I knew you’d reach a point when no matter how fascinated you were with what Mary was doing no matter how much you loved the girl, she’d have to go. I just wish you’d made up your mind sooner.”
“Back when she brought her first latents through, I decided to give her two years. I’d like to give her a good many more if she’ll co-operate.”
“She won’t. How willing would you be to give up all that power?”
“I’m not asking her to give up anything but this recruitment drive of hers. She’s got a good many of my best latents now. I don’t dare let her go on as she has been.”
“You want the section to grow now by births only?”
“By births, and through the five hundred or so children they’ve collected. Children who’ll eventually go through transition. Have you seen the private school they’ve taken over for the children?”
“No. I keep away from the section as much as I can. I assume Mary knows how I feel about her already. I don’t want to keep reminding her until she decides to change my mind for me.”
Doro started to say something, then stopped.
“What is it?” asked Emma.
For a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then, “I mentioned you to her once. I said I didn’t want you bothered by any of her people. She gave me a strange look and said she’d already taken care of that. She said, ‘Don’t worry about her. Bitchy old woman that she is, she’s wearing my brand. If anybody even tries to read her, the first thing they’ll see is that she’s my private property’.”
“Her what!”
“She means you’re under her protection, Em. It might not sound like much, but, with it, none of the others are going to touch you. And, apparently, she isn’t interested in controlling you herself.”
Emma shuddered. “How generous of her! She must feel awfully secure in her power. You trained her too well. She’s too much like you.”
“Yes,” said Doro. “I know.”
She looked at him sharply. “Did I hear pride in your voice?”
Doro smiled faintly. “She’s shown me a lot, Em. She’s shown me something I’ve been trying to find out for most of my life.”
“All I can see that she’s shown you is what you’d be like as a young woman. I recall warning you about underestimating young women.”
“Not what I’d be like as a woman. I already know that. I’ve been a woman I-don’t-know-how-many times. No. What I’d be like as a complete entity. What I’d be like if I hadn’t died that first time—died before I was fully formed.”
“Before you were …” Emma frowned. “I don’t understand. How do you know you weren’t fully formed when you died?”
“I know. I’ve seen enough almost-Doros, enough near successes to know I should be telepathic, like Mary. If I were, I would have created a pattern and fed off live hosts instead of killing. As it is, the only time I can feel mind-to-mind contact with another person is when I kill. She and I kill in very much the same way.”
�
��That’s it?” said Emma. “That’s all you’ve been reaching for, for so long—someone who kills in the same way you do?”
“All?” There was bitterness in his voice. “Does it seem such a small thing, Em, for me to want to know what I am—what I should have been?”
“Not a small thing, no. Not a wise thing either. Your curiosity—and your loneliness, I think—have driven you to make a mistake.”
“Perhaps. I’ve made mistakes before.”
“And survived them. I hope you survive this one. I can see now why you kept your purpose secret for so long.”
“Yes.”
“Does Mary know?”
“Yes. I never told her, but she knows. She saw it herself after a while.”
“No wonder you love her. No wonder she’s still alive. She’s you—the closest thing you’ve ever had to a true daughter.”
“I never told her any of that, either.”
“She knows. You can depend on it.” She paused for a moment. “Doro, is there any way she could. … I mean, if she’s complete and you’re not, she might be able to. …”
“To take me?”
Emma nodded.
“No. If she could, she would never have lived past the morning of her transition. She tried to read me then. If she hadn’t, I would have ordered her to try as soon as I saw her. I wanted to look at her in the only way that would tell me whether she could possibly become a danger to me. I looked, and what I saw told me she couldn’t. She’s like a scaled-down model of me. I could have taken her then, and I can now.”
“It’s been a long time since you’ve seen someone you thought could be dangerous. I hope your judgment is still as good as you think it is.”
“It is. In my life, I’ve met only five people I considered potentially dangerous.”
“And they all died young.”
Doro shrugged,
“I assume you’re not forgetting that Mary can increase her strength by robbing her people.”
“No. It doesn’t make any difference. I watched her very carefully back when she took Rachel and Jess. I could have taken her then. In fact, the extra strength she had acquired made her seem a more attractive victim. Strength alone isn’t enough to beat me. And she has a weakness I don’t have. She doesn’t move. She has just that one body, and when it dies, she dies.” He thought about that and shook his head sadly. “And she will almost certainly die.”
“When?”
“When she—if she disobeys me. I’m going to tell her my decision when I go there today. No more latents. She’ll decide what she wants to do after that.”
Seth
Seth Dana came out the back door of Larkin House thinking about the assignment Mary had just given him. The same old thing. Recruit more seconds—more people to help latents through transition. Patternists liked the way their numbers were increasing. Expansion was exciting. It was their own kind growing up, coming of age at last. But seconding was hard work. You were mother, father, friend, and, if your charge needed it, lover to an erratic, frightened, dependent person. People volunteered to be seconds when they were shamed into it. They accepted it as their duty, but they evaded that duty as long as they could. It was Seth’s job to prompt them and then present them with sullen, frightened charges.
He was a kind of matchmaker, sensing easily and accurately which seconds would be compatible with which latents. His worst mistake had been his first, his decision to second Clay. Mary had stopped him then. She had not had to stop him again. He had no more close relatives to warp his judgment.
He got into his car, preoccupied, deciding which Patternists to draft this time. He started the car automatically, then froze, his hand poised halfway to the emergency brake. Someone had shoved the cold steel barrel of a gun against the base of his skull.
Startled from his thoughts, Seth knew a moment of fear.
“Turn off the ignition, Dana,” said a man’s voice.
Reacting finally, Seth read the man. Then he turned off the ignition. With equal ease, he turned off the gunman. He gave the man a mental command, then reached back and took the gun from his suddenly limp hand. He shut the gun in the glove compartment and looked around at the intruder. The man was a mute and a stranger, but Seth had seen him before, in the thoughts of a woman Seth had seconded. A woman named Barbara Landry, who had once been this man’s wife.
“Palmer Landry,” said Seth quietly. “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble for nothing.”
The man stared at Seth, then at his own empty hand. “Why did I give you …? How could you make me …? What’s going on here?”
Seth shrugged. “Nothing now.”
“How do you know who I am? Why did I hand you …?”
“You’re a man who deserted his wife nearly a year ago,” said Seth. “Then suddenly decided he wanted her back. The gun wasn’t necessary.”
“Where is she? Where’s Barbara?”
“Probably at her house.” Seth had personally brought Barbara Landry from New York two months before. A month and a half later, she had come through transition. Almost immediately, she had discovered that Bartholomew House—and Caleb Bartholomew—suited her perfectly. Seth hadn’t bothered to erase her from the memories of the people she knew in New York. None of them had been friends. None of them had really cared what happened to her. But, apparently, she had told a couple of them where she was going, and with whom. And when Landry came back looking for her, he had found the information waiting. Seth had been careless. And Palmer Landry had been lucky. No one had noticed him watching Larkin House, and the person he had asked to point out Seth Dana had been an unsuspecting mute.
“You mean to tell me you’ve gotten rid of Barbara already?” Landry demanded.
“I never had her,” said Seth. “Never wanted her, for that matter, nor she me. I just helped her when she happened to need help.”
“Sure. You’re Santa Claus. Just tell me where she’s living.”
“I’ll take you there if you want.” He had intended to draft Bartholomew into some seconding anyway. But later. Bartholomew House was right across the street.
“Who’s she living with?” asked Landry.
“Her family,” said Seth. “She found a house she fit into quicker than most of us do.”
“House?” The man frowned. “Whorehouse?”
“Hell no!” Seth looked around at him. Landry had a justifiably low opinion of his wife. Latents were hard people to live with. But Seth had not realized that it was that low. “We live communally here, several of us to a house. So when we say house, we don’t just mean the building. We mean household. We mean people.”
“What the hell are you? Some kind of religious nuts or something?”
Seth was about to answer him when Barbara Landry herself came out the back door of Larkin House.
The sound of her footsteps caused Landry to turn. He saw her, shouted her name once, then was out of the car, running toward her.
Barbara Landry was weak, as Patternists went, and she was inexperienced at handling her new abilities. That last made her a possible danger to her husband. Seth reached out to warn her, but he was a second too late.
Recoiling in surprise from Landry’s sudden rush, Barbara instinctively used her new defenses. Instead of controlling him gently, she stopped him solidly, suddenly, as though she had hit him, as though she had clubbed him down. He fell, unconscious, without ever having touched her.
“My God,” Barbara whispered horrified. “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I had come to see you. Then I sensed him out here threatening you. I came to ask you not to hurt him.”
“He’ll be all right,” said Seth. “No thanks to you. You’re going to kill somebody if you don’t learn to be careful.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
He lectured her as though she were still his charge. “I’ve warned you. No matter how weak you are as a Patternist, you’re a powerhouse as far as any ordinary mute is concerned.”
She nodded solemnly. “I’ll b
e careful. But, Seth, would you help him for me? I mean, after he comes to. He probably needs money, and I know he needs even more to forget about me. I don’t even like to think about what I put him through when we were together.”
“He wants to be with you.”
“No!”
“He could be programmed to live very comfortably here, Barbara. Matter of fact, he’d be happier here than anywhere else.”
“I don’t want him enslaved! I’ve done enough to him. Seth, please. Help him and let him go.”
Seth smiled finally. “All right, honey, in exchange for a promise from you.”
“What?”
“That you’ll go back to Bart and make him give you a few more lessons on how to handle mutes without killing them.”
She nodded, embarrassed.
“Oh, yeah, and tell him he’s going to second a couple of people for me. I’m bringing the first one over tomorrow.”
“Oh, but—”
“No excuses. Save me the trouble of arguing with him and I’ll do a good job for you here.” He gestured toward Landry.
She smiled at him. “You would anyway. But, all right, I’ll do your dirty work for you.” She turned and went down the driveway. She was a rare Patternist. Like Seth, she cared what happened to the people she had left behind in the mute world. Seth had always liked her. Now he would see that her husband got as good a start as Clay had gotten.
Rachel
Rachel’s newest assignment had bothered her from the moment Mary gave it to her. It was still bothering her now, as she stood at the entrance of a long communal driveway that led back into a court of dilapidated, dirty, green stucco houses. The houses were small—no more than three or four rooms each. The yards were littered with beer cans and wine bottles, and they were overgrown with weeds and shrubs gone wild. The look of the place seemed to confirm Rachel’s suspicions.
Farther up the driveway, a group of teen-age boys tossed around a pair of dice and a surprisingly large amount of money. Intent on their game, they paid no attention to Rachel. She let her perception sweep over them and found three that she would have to come back for. Three latents who lived in the court, but who were not as bad off as those Mary had sent Rachel after.
Seed to Harvest: Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, and Patternmaster (Patternist) Page 45