Mind of My Mind

Mind of My Mind

Octavia E. Butler

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC. GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

1977

For all but the first few centuries of his 4000-year life, the Nubian Doro has struggled to build a new race of men. He has survived as a result of millennia of genetic mutations; his people exist as a result of nearly 4000 years of controlled breeding he has masterminded.

Now six of Doro’s most promising “actives” have been drawn to the side of his chosen disciple, Mary. A young woman possessed of an unheard of power: the telepathic pattern that enables her to regenerate the mutilated discards of Doro’s eugenics. A pattern that forces her into an inevitable struggle against the man who has been her father, her lover, and her master: Doro.

A frightening, chilling “pre-sequel” to Octavia Butler’s first novel, Patternmaster.

Prologue

DORO

Doro’s widow in the southern California city of Forsyth had become a prostitute. Doro had left her alone for eighteen months. Too long. For the sake of the daughter she had borne him, he should have visited her more often. Now it was almost too late.

Doro watched her without letting her know that he was in town. He saw the men come and go from her new, wrong-side-of-the-tracks apartment. He saw that most of her time away from home was spent in the local bars.

Sometime during his eighteen-month absence, she had moved from the house he had bought her—an expensive house in a good neighborhood. And though he had made arrangements with a Forsyth bank for her to receive a liberal monthly allowance, she still needed the men. And the liquor. He was not surprised.

By the time he knocked at her door, the main thing he wanted to do was see whether his daughter was all right. When the woman opened the door, he pushed past her into the apartment without speaking.

She was half drunk and slurred her words a little as she called after him. “Hey, wait a minute. Who the hell do you think you—”

“Shut up, Rina.”

She hadn’t recognized him, of course. He was wearing a body that she had never seen before. But like all his people, she knew him the instant he spoke. She stared at him, round-eyed, silent.

There was a man sitting on her couch drinking directly from a bottle of Santa Fe Port. Doro glanced at him, then spoke to Rina. “Get rid of him.”

The man started to protest immediately. Doro ignored him and went on to the bedroom, following his tracking sense to Mary, his daughter. The child was asleep, her breathing softly even. Doro turned on a light and looked at her more closely. She was three years old now, small and thin, not especially healthy-looking. Her nose was running.

Doro touched her forehead lightly but felt no trace of fever. The bedroom contained only a bed and a three-legged chest of drawers. There was a pile of dirty clothes in one corner on the floor. The rest of the floor was bare wood—no carpeting.

Doro took in all this without surprise, without changing his neutral expression. He uncovered the child, saw that she was sleeping nude, saw the bruises and welts on her back and legs. He shook his head and sighed, covered the little girl up carefully, and went back out to the living room. There the man and Rina were cursing at each other. Doro waited in silence until he was sure that Rina was honestly, in fact desperately, trying to get rid of her “guest” but that the man was refusing to budge. Then Doro walked over to the man.

The man was short and slight, not much more than a boy, really. Rina might have been able to throw him out physically, but she had not. Now it was too late. She stumbled back away from him, silent, abruptly terrified as Doro approached.

The man rose unsteadily to face Doro. Doro saw that he had put his bottle down and taken out a large pocket knife. Unlike Rina, he did not slur his words at all when he

spoke. “Now, listen, you— Hold it! I said hold it!”

He broke off abruptly, slashing at Doro as Doro advanced on him. Doro made no effort to avoid the knife. It sliced easily through the flesh of his abdomen but he never felt the pain. He abandoned his body the instant the knife touched him.

Surprise and anger were the first emotions Doro tasted in the man’s mind. Surprise, anger, then fear. There was always fear. Then yielding. Not all Doro’s victims gave in so quickly, but this one was half anesthetized with wine. This one saw Doro as only Doro’s victims ever saw him. Then, stunned, he gave up his life almost without a struggle. Doro consumed him, an easy if not especially satisfying meal.

Rina had gasped and begun to raise her hand to her mouth as the man slashed at Doro. When Doro finished his kill, Rina’s hand was just touching her lips.

Doro stood uncomfortably disoriented, mildly sick to his stomach, the hand of his newly acquired body still clutching its bloody knife. On the floor lay the body that Doro had been wearing when he came in. It had been strong, healthy, in excellent physical condition. The one he had now was nothing beside it. He glanced at Rina in annoyance. Rina shrank back against the wall.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “Do you think you’re safer over there?”

“Don’t hurt me,” she said. “Please.”

“Why would you beat a three-year-old like that, Rina?”

“I didn’t do it! I swear. It was a guy who brought me home a couple of nights ago. Mary woke up screaming from a nightmare or something, and he—”

“Hell,” said Doro in disgust. “Is that supposed to be an excuse?”

Rina began to cry silently, tears streaming down her face. “You don’t know,” she said in a low voice. “You don’t understand what it’s like for me having that kid here.” She was no longer slurring her words, in spite of her tears. Her fear had sobered her. She wiped her eyes. “I really didn’t hit her. You know I wouldn’t dare lie to you.” She stared at Doro for a moment, then shook her head. “I’ve wanted to hit her though—so many times. I can hardly even stand to go near her sober any more …” She looked at the body cooling on the floor and began to tremble.

Doro went to her. She stiffened with terror as he touched her. Then, after a moment, when she realized that he was doing nothing more than putting his arm around her, she let him lead her back to the couch.

She sat with him, beginning to relax, the tension going out of her body. When he spoke to her, his tone was gentle, without threat.

“I’ll take Mary if you want me to, Rina. I’ll find a home for her.”

She said nothing for a long while. He did not hurry her. She looked at him, then closed her eyes, shook her head. Finally she put her head on his shoulder and spoke softly. “I’m sick,” she said. “Tell me I’ll be well if you take her.”

“You’ll be as well as you were before Mary was born.”

“Then?” She shuddered against him. “No. I was sick then too. Sick and alone. If you take Mary away, you won’t come back to me, will you?”

“No. I won’t.”

“You said, ‘I want you to have a baby,’ and I said, ‘I hate kids, especially babies,’ and you said, ‘That doesn’t matter.’ And it didn’t.”

“Shall I take her, Rina?”

“No. Are you going to get rid of that corpse for me?” She nudged his former body

with one foot.

“I’ll have someone take care of it.”

“I can’t do anything,” she said. “My hands shake and sometimes I hear voices. I sweat and my head hurts and I want to cry or I want to scream. Nothing helps but taking a drink—or maybe finding a guy.”

“You won’t drink so much from now on.”

There was another long silence. “You always want so damn much. Shall I give up men, too?”

“If I come back and find Mary black and blue again, I’ll take her. If anything worse happens to her, I’ll kill you.”

She looked at him without fear. “You mean I can keep my men if I keep them away from Mary. All right.”

Doro sighed, started to speak, then shrugged.

“I can’t help it,” she said. “Something is wrong with me. I can’t help it.”

“I know.”

“You made me what I am. I ought to hate your guts for what you made me.”

“You don’t hate me. And you don’t have to defend yourself to me. I don’t condemn you.” He caressed her, wondering idly how she could want life badly enough to fight as hard as she had to fight to keep it. In producing her daughter, she had performed the function she had been born to perform. Doro had demanded that much of her as he had demanded it of others, her ancestors long before her. There had been a time when he disposed of people like her as soon as they had produced the number of offspring he desired. They were inevitably poor parents and their children grew up more comfortably with adoptive parents. Now, though, if such people wanted to live after having served him, he let them. He treated them kindly, as servants who had been faithful. Their gratitude often made them his best servants in spite of their seeming weakness. And the weakness didn’t bother him. Rina was right. It was his fault—a result of his breeding program. Rina, in fact, was a minor favorite with him when she was sober.

“I’ll be careful,” she said. “No one will hurt Mary again. Will you stay with me for a while?”

“Only for a few days. Long enough to help you move out of here.”

She looked alarmed. “I don’t want to move. I can’t stand it out there where I was, by myself.”

“I’m not going to send you back to our old house. I’m just going to take you a few blocks over to Dell Street where one of your relatives lives. She has a duplex and you’re going to live in one side of it.”

“I don’t have any relatives left alive around here.”

He smiled. “Rina, this part of Forsyth is full of your relatives. Actually, that’s why you came back to it. You don’t know them, and you wouldn’t like most of them if you met them, but you need to be close to them.”

“Why?”

“Let’s just say, so you won’t be by yourself.”

She shrugged, neither understanding nor really caring. “If people around here are my relatives, are they your people too?”

“Of course.”

“And … this woman I’m going to live next door to-what is she to me?”

“Your grandmother several times removed.”

Rina’s terror returned full force. “You mean she’s like you? Immortal?”

“No. Not like me. She doesn’t kill—at least not the way I do. She’s still wearing the same body she was born into. And she won’t hurt you. But she might be able to help with Mary.”

“All for Mary. She must be important, poor kid.”

“She’s very important.”

Rina was suddenly the concerned mother, frowning at him worriedly. “She won’t just be like me? Sick? Crazy?”

“She’ll be like you at first, but she’ll grow out of it. It isn’t really a disease, you know.”

“It is to me. But I’ll keep her, and move, like you said, to this grandmother’s house. What’s the woman’s name?”

“Emma. She started to call herself Emma about one hundred fifty years ago as a joke. It means grandmother or ancestress.”

“It means she’s somebody you can trust to watch me and see that I don’t hurt Mary.”

“Yes.”

“I won’t. I’ll learn to be her mother at least … a little more. I can do that much—raise a child who’ll be important to you.”

He kissed her, believing her. If the child had not been such an important part of his breeding program, he would not have put a watch on her at all. After a while he got up and went to call one of his people to come and get his former body out of the apartment.

EMMA

Emma was in the kitchen fixing her breakfast when she heard someone at her front door. She hobbled through the dining room toward the door, but before she could reach it, it opened and a slight young man stepped in.

Emma stopped where she was, straightened her usually bent body, and stared a question at the young man. She was not afraid. A couple of boys had broken in to rob her recently and she had given them quite a surprise.

“It’s me, Em,” said the young man, smiling.

Emma relaxed, smiled herself, but she did not let her body sink back into its stoop. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in New York.”

“I suddenly realized that it had been too long since I checked on one of my people.”

“You don’t mean me.”

“A relative of yours—a little girl.”

Emma raised an eyebrow at him, then drew a deep breath. “Let’s sit down, Doro. Ask me the favor you’re going to ask me from a comfortable chair.”

He actually looked a little sheepish. They sat down in the living room.

“Well?” said Emma.

“I see you have someone living in your other apartment,” he said.

“Family,” said Emma. “A great-grandson whose wife just died. He works and I keep an eye on the kids when they get home from school.”

“How soon can you move him out?”

Emma stared at him expressionlessly. “The question is, will I move him out at all?

Why should I?”

“I have a youngster who’s going to be too much for her mother in a few years. Right now, though, her mother is too much for her.”

“Doro, the kids next door really need my help. Even with guidance, you know they’re going to have a hard time.”

“But almost anyone could help those children, Em. On the other hand, you’re just about the only one I’d trust to help the child I’m talking about.”

Emma frowned. “Her mother abuses her?”

“So far, she only lets other people abuse her.”

“Sounds as though the child would be better off adopted into another family.”

“I don’t want to do that if I can avoid it. She’s probably going to have a strong need to be among her relatives. And you’re the only relative she has that I’d care to trust her with. She’s part of an experiment that’s important to me, Em.”

“Important to you. To you! And what shall I do with my great-grandson and his children?”

“Surely one of your apartment complexes has a vacancy. And you can pay a baby sitter for the kids. You’re already providing for God knows how many indigent relatives. This should be fairly easy.”

“That’s not the point.”

He leaned back and sat looking at her. “Are you going to turn me down?”

“How old is the child?”

“Three.”

“And just what is she going to grow up into?”

“A telepath. One with more control of her ability than any I’ve produced so far, I hope. And from the body I used to father her, I hope she’ll have inherited a few other abilities.”

“What other abilities?”

“Em, I can’t tell you all of it. If I do, in a few years she’ll read it in your mind.”

“What difference would that make? Why shouldn’t she know what she is?”

“Because she’s an experiment. It will be better for her to learn the nature of her abilities slowly, from experience. If she’s anything like her predecessors, the more slowly she learns the better it will be for the people around her.”

“Who were her predecessors?”

“Failures. Dangerous failures.”

Emma sighed. “Dead failures.” She wondered what he would say if she refused to help. She didn’t like having anything to do with his projects when she could help it. They always involved children, always had to do with his breeding programs. For all but the first few centuries of his four-thousand-year life, he had been struggling to build a race around himself. He existed apparently as a result of a mutation millennia past. His people existed as a result of less wildly divergent mutations and as a result of nearly four thousand years of controlled breeding. He now had several strong mutant strains, which he combined or kept separate, as he wished. And behind him he had an untold number of failures, dangerous or only pathetic, which he had destroyed as casually as other people slaughtered cattle.

“You must tell me something about your hopes for the girl,” Emma said. “Just what kind of danger are you trying to expose me to?”

He laid a hand on her bony shoulder. “Very little, Em. If you have a hand in raising the girl, she should come out reasonably controllable. In fact, I was thinking of giving you the whole job of raising her.”

“No! Absolutely not. I’ve raised enough children. More than enough.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say. All right. Just let me move her and her mother in next door, where you can keep an eye on them.”

“What are you going to do with her after she’s matured?—if she’s a success, I mean.”

He sighed. “Well, I guess I can tell you that. She’s part of my latest attempt to bring my active telepaths together. I’m going to try to mate her with another telepath without killing either of them myself. And I’m hoping that she and the boy I have in mind are stable enough to stay together without killing each other. That will be a beginning.”

Emma shook her head as he spoke. How many lives had he thrown away over the years in pursuit of that dream? “Doro, they’ve never been together. Why don’t you leave them alone? Let them stay separate. They avoid each other naturally when you’re not pushing them together.”

“I want them together. Did you think I had given up?”

“I keep hoping you’ll give up for the sake of your people.”

“And settle for the string of warring tribes that I’ve got now? Not that most of them are even that united. Just families of people who don’t like their own members much even though they usually need to be near them. Families who can’t tolerate members of my other families at all. They all tolerate ordinary people well enough, though. They would have merged back into the general population long ago if I didn’t police them.”

“Perhaps they should. They would be happier.”

“Would you be happier without your gifts, Emma? Would you like to be an ordinary human?”

“Of course not. But how many others are in full control of their abilities, as I am? And how many spend their lives in abject misery because they have ‘gifts’ that they can’t control or even understand?” She sighed. “You can’t take credit for me, anyway. I’m almost as much of an accident as you are. My people had been separated from one of your families for hundreds of years before I was born. They had merged with the people they took refuge among, and they still managed to produce me.”

And Doro had been trying to duplicate the happy accident of her birth ever since. She had known him for three hundred years now, had borne him thirty-seven children through his various incarnations. None of her children had proved to be especially long-lived. Those who might have been were tortured, unstable people. They committed suicide. The rest lived normal spans and died natural deaths. Emma had seen to that last. She had not been able to keep track of her many grandchildren, but her children she had protected. From the beginning of her relationship with Doro, she had warned him that if he murdered even one of her children, she would bear him no more.

At first Doro had valued her and her new strain too much to punish her for her “arrogance.” Later, as he became accustomed to her, to the idea of her immortality, he began to value her as more than just a breeder. She became a companion to him, a wife to whom he always returned. Both he and she married other people from time to time, but such matings were temporary.

For a while, Emma even believed in his race-building dream. But as he allowed her to know more of his methods of fulfilling that dream, her enthusiasm waned. No dream was

worth the things he did to people.

It was his casually murderous attitude that finally caused her to tire of him, about two centuries into their relationship. She had turned away from him in disgust when he murdered a young woman who had borne him the three children he had demanded of her. For Emma, it had finally been too much.

But, by then, Doro had been a part of her life for too long, had become too important to her. She could not simply walk away from him, even if he had been willing to let her. She needed him, but she no longer wanted him. And she no longer wanted to be one of his people, supporting his butchery. There was only one escape, and she began preparing herself to take it. She began preparing herself to die.

And Doro, startled, alarmed, began to mend his ways somewhat. He gave her his word that he would no longer kill breeders who became useless to him. Then he asked her to live. He came to her, finally, as one human being to another, and asked her not to leave him. She hadn’t left him. He had never commanded her again.

“Will you take the mother and child, Em?”

“Yes. You know I will. Poor things.”

“Not so poor if I’m successful.”

She made a sound of disgust.

He smiled. “I’ll be seeing you more often, too, with the girl living next door.”

“Well, that’s something.” She reached out and took one of Doro’s hands between her own, observing the contrast. His was smooth and soft. The hand of a young man who had clearly never done any manual labor. Her hands were claws, hard, skinny, with veins and tendons prominent. She began to fill her hands out, smooth them, straighten the long fingers until the hands were those of a young woman, attractive in themselves but incongruous on the ends of withered, ancient arms.

“I wish the child were a boy instead of a girl,” she said. “I’m afraid she isn’t going to like me much for a while. At least not until she’s old enough to see you clearly.”

“I didn’t want a boy,” he said. “I’ve had trouble with boys in … in the special role I want her to fill.”

“Oh.” She wondered how many boy children he had slaughtered as a result of his trouble.

“I wanted a girl, and I wanted her to be one of the youngest of her generation of actives. Both those factors will help keep her in line. She’ll be less likely to rebel against my plans for her.”

“I think you underestimate young girls,” said Emma. She had filled out her arms, rounding them, making them slender rather than skinny. Now she raised a hand to her face. She passed her fingers over her forehead and down her cheek. The flesh became smooth and flawless as she went on speaking. “Although, for this girl’s own sake, I hope you’re not underestimating her.”

Doro watched her with the interest he had always shown when she reshaped herself. “I can’t understand why you spend so much of your time as an old woman,” he said.

She cleared her throat. “I am an old woman.” She spoke now in a quiet, youthful contralto. “And most people are only too glad to leave an ugly old woman alone.”

He touched the newly smooth skin of her face, his expression concerned. “You need this project, Em. Even though you don’t want it. I’ve left you alone too long.”

“Not really.” She smiled. “I’ve finally written the trilogy of novels that I was planning

when we lived together last. History. My story. The critics marveled at my realism. My work is powerful, compelling. I’m a born storyteller.”

He laughed. “Hurry and finish reshaping yourself and I’ll give you some more material.”

PART ONE

Chapter One

MARY

I was in my bedroom reading a novel when somebody came banging on the door really loud, like the police. I thought it was the police until I got up, looked out the window, and saw one of Rina’s johns standing there. I wouldn’t have bothered to answer, but the fool was kicking at the door like he wanted to break it in. I went to the kitchen and got one of our small cast-iron skillets—the size just big enough to hold two eggs. Then I went to the door. The stupid bastard was drunk.

“Hey,” he mumbled. “Where’s Rina? Tell Rina I wanna see her.”

“Rina’s not here, man. Come back around five this evening.”

He swayed a little, stared down at me. “I said tell Rina I wanna see her.”

“And I said she’s not here!” I would have shut the door in his face, but I knew he’d just start kicking it again unless he managed to understand what I was saying.

“Not here?”

“You got it.”

“Well.” He narrowed his eyes a little and sort of peered at me. “How about you?”

“Not me, man.” I started to shut the door. I hate these scenes, really. The idiot shoved me and the door out of his way and came on in. That’s what I get for being short and skinny. Ninety-eight pounds. At nineteen, I looked thirteen. Guys got the wrong idea.

“Man, you better get out of here,” I warned him. “Come back at five. Rina’s the whore, not me.”

“Maybe it’s time for you to learn.” He stared at me. “What’s that you got in your hand?”

I didn’t say anything else. I had done my bit for nonviolence.

“I said what the hell you got in your—”

He lunged toward me. I side-stepped him and bashed his stupid head in. I left him lying where he fell, got my purse, and went out. Let Rina or Emma see to him.

I didn’t know where I was going. I just wanted to get away from the house. I had a headache, and every now and then I would hear voices—a word, a scream, somebody crying. Hear them inside my head. Doro said that meant I was close to my change, my transition. Doro said that was good. I wished I could give him some of the pain and the craziness of it and let him see how good it was. I felt like hell all the time, and he came around grinning.

I walked over to Maple Avenue and there was a bus coming. A Los Angeles bus. On impulse, I got on. Not that there was anything for me in L.A. There wasn’t anything for me anywhere except maybe wherever Doro was. If I was lucky, when Rina and Emma found that idiot lying in our living room, they would call Doro. They called him whenever they thought I was about to blow. The way things were now, I was always

about to blow.

I got off the bus in downtown L.A. and went to a drugstore. I didn’t remember until I was inside that the only money I had was bus fare. So I slipped a bottle of aspirin into my purse and walked out with it. Doro told me a few years ago that he’d beat the hell out of me if I ever got picked up for stealing. I had been stealing since I was seven years old, and I had never been caught. I used to steal presents for Rina back when I was still trying to pretend it meant something that she was my mother. Anyway, now I knew what I was going to do in L.A. I was going “shopping.”

I didn’t try very hard, but I got a few things. Got a nice little Sony portable radio— one of the tiny ones. I just walked out of a discount store with it while the salesman who had been showing it to me went to stop some kid from pulling down a display of plastic dishes. Got some perfume. I didn’t like the way it smelled though, so I threw it away. I took four aspirins and my headache kind of dulled down a little. I got a blouse and a halter and some junky costume jewelry. I threw the jewelry away, too, after I got a better look at it. Trash. And I got a couple of paperbacks. Always some books. If I didn’t have anything to read, I’d really go crazy.

On my way back to Forsyth, somebody screamed bloody murder inside my head. Along with that, I felt like I was being hit in the face. Sometimes I got things mixed up. I couldn’t tell what was really happening to me and what I was picking up accidentally from other people’s minds. This time, I was getting onto a bus when it happened, and I just froze. I had enough control to hold myself there, to not scream or fall on the ground from the beating I felt like I was taking. But you don’t stop half on and half off a bus at Seventh and Broadway at five in the evening. You could get killed.

I wasn’t exactly trampled. I just kept getting shoved out of the way. Somebody shoved me away from the door of the bus. Other people pushed me out of their way. I couldn’t react. All I could do was hang on, wait it out.

And then it was over. I was barely able to get on the bus before it pulled away. I had to stand up all the way to Forsyth. I did my best to knock a couple of people down when I got off.

I didn’t want to go home. Even if Rina and Emma had called Doro, he couldn’t have gotten there yet. I didn’t want to hear Rina’s mouth. But then I started to wonder about the john—how bad I had hurt him, if maybe he was dead. I decided to go home to see.

There was nothing else to do, anyway. Forsyth is a dead town. Rich people, old people, mostly white people. Even the southwest side, where we lived, wasn’t a ghetto— or at least not a racial ghetto. It was full of poor bastards from any race you want to name—all working like hell to get out of there. Except us. Rina had been out, Doro told me, but she had come back. I never have thought my mother was very bright.

We lived in a corner house—Dell Street and Forsyth Avenue—so I walked home on the side of Dell Street opposite our house. I wanted to see if there were any police cars around the corner before I went in. If there had been any, I would have kept going. Doro would have gotten me out of any trouble I got into, I knew. But then he would have half killed me. It wasn’t worth it.

Rina and Emma were waiting for me. I wasn’t surprised. There was this little drama we had to go through.

Rina: Do you realize you could have killed that man! Do you want us to go to prison!

Emma: Can’t you think for once in your life? Why’d you leave him here? Why didn’t

you at least—at least—come and get me? For God’s sake, girl …

Rina: What did you hit him for? Will you tell us that?

They hadn’t given me a chance to tell them anything.

Rina: He was just a harmless old guy. Hell, he wouldn’t have hurt—

Emma: Doro is on his way here now, Mary, and you’d better have a good reason for what you did.

And, finally, I got a word in. “It was either hit him or screw him.”

“Oh, Lord,” muttered Rina. “Can’t you talk decent even when Emma is here?”

“I talk as decent as you taught me, Momma! Besides, what do you want me to say? ‘Make love to him?’ I wouldn’t have loved it. And if he had managed to do it, I would have made sure I killed him.”

“You did enough,” said Emma. She was calming down.

“What did you do with him, anyway?” I asked.

“Put him in the hospital.” She shrugged. “Fractured skull.”

“They didn’t say anything at the hospital?”

“The way he smelled? I just shriveled myself up a little more and told them my grandson drank too much and fell on his head.”

I laughed. She used that little-old-lady act to get sympathy from strangers, or at least to throw them off guard. Most of the time when Doro wasn’t around, she was old and frail-looking. It was nothing but an act, though. I saw a guy try to snatch her purse once while she was hobbling down the street. She broke his arm.

“Was that guy really your grandson?” I asked.

“I’m afraid so.”

I glanced at Rina with disgust. “You can’t find anybody but relatives to screw? God!”

“It’s none of your business.”

“I wouldn’t pretend to be so disgusted with the idea of incest if I were you, Mary.” Emma sort of bared her teeth at me. It wasn’t a smile. She and I didn’t get along most of the time. She thought she knew everything. And she thought Doro was her private property. I got up and went to my room.

Doro arrived the next day.

I remember once when I was about six years old I was sitting on his lap frowning up into his latest face. “Shouldn’t I call you ‘Daddy’?” I asked. Until then, I had called him Doro, like everybody else did.

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” he said. And he smiled. “Later, you won’t like it.”

I didn’t understand, and I was a stubborn kid anyway. I called him “Daddy.” He didn’t seem to mind. But, of course, later, I didn’t like it. It still bothered me a little, and Doro and Emma both knew it. I had the feeling they laughed about it together.

Doro was a black man this time. That was a relief, because, the last couple of visits, he’d been white. He just walked into my bedroom early in the morning and sat down on my bed. That woke me up. All I saw was this big stranger sitting on the side of my bed.

“Say something,” I said quickly.

“It’s me,” he said.

I let go of the steak knife I slept with and sat up. “Can I kiss you, or are you going to jump me, too?”

He pulled back my blankets and ran his hand down the side of the bed next to the wall. Of course he found the steak knife. I kept it sheathed in the tight little handle you’re

supposed to use to pick up the mattress. He threw it out the door. “Leave the knives and

frying pans in the kitchen, where they belong,” he said.

“That guy was going to rape me, Doro.”

“You’re going to kill somebody.”

“Not unless I have to. If people leave me alone, I’ll leave them alone.”

He picked up a pair of jeans from the floor, where I had left them, and threw them in my face. “Get dressed,” he said. “I want to show you something. I want to make a point in a way that even you might understand.”

He got up and went out of the room.

I threw the jeans back on the floor and went to the closet for some clean ones. My head was aching already.

He drove me to the city jail. He parked outside the wall and just sat there.

“What now?” I asked.

“You tell me.”

“Doro, why did you bring me here?”

“As I said, to make a point.”

“What point? That if I’m not a good little girl, this is where I’ll wind up? God! Let’s get away from here.” Something was wrong with me. Or something was about to be wrong. Really wrong. I was picking up shadows of crazy emotions.

“Why should we go?” he asked.

“My head … !” I could feel myself losing control. “Doro, please …” I screamed. I tried to hang on. Tried to just shut down, the way I had the day before. Freeze. But I was caught in a nightmare. The kind of nightmare where the walls are coming together on you and you can’t get out. The kind where you’re locked in some dark, narrow place and you can’t get out. The kind where you’re at a zoo locked up like the animals, and you can’t get out!

I had never been afraid of the dark. Not even when I was little. And I’d never been afraid of small, closed places. And the only place I had ever seen a room where the walls formed a vise was in a bad movie. But I screamed my head off outside that jail. I started flailing around, and Doro grabbed me to keep me from jumping out of the car. I almost made him have an accident, as he was trying to drive away.

Finally, when we were a good, long way from the jail, I calmed down. I sat bent over in the seat, holding my head.

“How long do you suppose you could stay even as sane as you are in the midst of a concentration of emotions like that?” he asked.

I didn’t say anything.

“Most of the prisoners there aren’t half as bothered by their thoughts and fears as you were,” he said. “They don’t like where they are, but they can live with it. You can’t. Wouldn’t you rather even be raped than wind up in a place like this even for a short time?”

“You got any aspirin?” I asked. My head was throbbing so that I could hardly hear him. And for some stupid reason, I had left my new bottle of aspirin at home on my night table.

“In the glove compartment,” he said. “No water, though.”

I fumbled open the glove compartment, found the aspirin, and swallowed four. He was stopped for a red light, watching me.

“You’re going to get sick, doing that.”

“Thanks to you, I’m already sick.”

“You don’t listen, girl. I talk to you and you don’t listen. For your own good, I have to show you.”

“From now on, I’ll listen. Just tell me.” I sat back and waited for the aspirin to work. Then I realized that he wasn’t taking me home.

“Where are we going? You don’t have another treat for me, do you?”

“Yes. But not the way you mean.”

“What is it? Where are we going?”

“Here.”

We were on South Ocean Avenue, in the good part of Forsyth’s downtown shopping district. He was driving into the parking lot of Orman’s, one of the best stores in town.

He parked, turned off the motor, and sat back. “I want you to step out of character for a while,” he said. “Stop working so hard at your role as Rina’s bitchy daughter.”

I looked at him sidelong. “I usually do when you’re around.”

“Not enough, maybe. You think we can go into that store and buy—not steal— something other than blue jeans?”

“Like what?”

“Come on.” He got out of the car. “Let’s go see what you look good in.”

I knew what I looked good in. Or at least acceptable in. But why bother when the only guy I was interested in was Doro and nothing I did seemed to reach him? He either had time for me or he didn’t.

And if he didn’t, I could have walked around naked and he wouldn’t have noticed.

But because he wanted it, I chose some dresses, some really nice pants, a few other things. I didn’t steal anything. My headache sort of faded back to normal and my witchy reflection in the dressing-room mirror relaxed back to just strange-looking. Doro had said once that, except for my eyes and coloring, I look a lot like Emma—like the young version of Emma, I mean. My eyes—traffic-light green, Rina called them—and my skin, a kind of light coffee, were gifts from the white man’s body that Doro was wearing when he got Rina pregnant. Some poor guy from a religious colony Doro controlled in Pennsylvania. Doro had people all over.

When he decided that I had bought enough, he paid for it with a check for more money than I had ever seen in my life. He had some kind of by-mail arrangement with the banks. A lot of banks. He ordered everything delivered to the hotel where he was staying. I waited until we were out of the store to ask him why he’d done that.

“I want you to stay with me for a few days,” he told me.

I was surprised, but I just looked at him. “Okay.”

“You have something to get used to. And for your own sake, I want you to take your time. Do all your yelling and screaming now, while it can’t hurt you.”

“Oh, Lord. What are you going to give me to yell and scream about?”

“You’re getting married.”

I looked at him. He’d said those words or others like them to Rina once. To Emma heaven knew how many times. Evidently, my time had come. “You mean to you, don’t you?”

“No.”

I wasn’t afraid until he said that. “Who, then!”

“One of my sons. Not related to you at all, by the way.”

“A stranger? Some total stranger and you want me to marry him?”

“You will marry him.” He didn’t use that tone much with me—or with anyone, I think. It was reserved for when he was telling you to do something he would kill you for not doing. A quiet, chilly tone of voice.

“Doro, why couldn’t you be him? Take him and let me marry you.”

“Kill him, you mean.”

“You kill people all the time.”

He shook his head. “I wonder if you’re going to grow out of that.”

“Out of what?”

“Your total disregard for human life—except for your own, of course.”

“Oh, come on! Shit, the devil himself is going to preach me a sermon!”

“Maybe transition will change your thinking.”

“If it does, I don’t see how I’ll be able to stand you.”

He smiled. “You don’t realize it, but that might really be a problem. You’re an experimental model. Your predecessors have had trouble with me.”

“Don’t talk about me like I was a new car or something.” I frowned and looked at him. “What kind of trouble?”

“Never mind. I won’t talk about you like you were a new car.”

“Wait a minute,” I said more seriously. “I mean it, Doro. What kind of trouble?”

He didn’t answer.

“Are any of them still alive?”

He still didn’t answer.

I took a deep breath, stared out the window. “Okay, so how do I keep from having trouble with you?”

He put an arm around me, and for some reason, instead of flinching away, I moved over close to him. “I’m not threatening you,” he said.

“Yes you are. Tell me about this son of yours.”

He drove me over to Palo Verde Avenue, where the rich people lived. When he stopped, it was in front of a three-story white stucco mansion. Spanish tile roof, great arched doorway, clusters of palm trees and carefully trimmed shrubs, acres of front lawn, one square block of house and grounds.

“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 back yard, 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 grounds 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 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 fist fight?”

“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 girl friend 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 Avenue.

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.”

“Did they for you?”

“In a way. I passed out a few times.”

“Shit, I’m already doing that. It hasn’t killed me yet. Did anybody help you?”

“Not that way. All I had was someone to keep me from banging myself up too badly physically.”

“Then, why the hell … ? No offense, but why am I supposed to need you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, well. I guess it doesn’t matter. It’s his decision and we’re stuck with it. All we can do is try to find the least uncomfortable way of living with it.”

“We’ll work something out.” He stood up. “Let me show you around the house.”

He showed me his fantastic library first, and that helped me warm to him a little. A guy with a room like that in his house couldn’t be all bad. Like the living room, it was huge, with that beautiful wood paneling. The fireplace and the windows were the only spots of wall not covered with books. Most of the floor was covered by the biggest oriental rug I had ever seen. There was a long, solid, heavy wooden reading table, a big desk, a lot of upholstered chairs. The high ceiling was wood carved in a regular octagonal pattern and hung with four small, simple chandeliers. While I was growing up, Forsyth Public Library was my second home. It was someplace I could go and be by myself. I could get away from Rina and her whining and her johns and away from Emma period. I actually liked the little old ladies who worked there, and they sort of adopted me. That was where I got into the habit of reading everything I could get my hands on. And now … well, old-fashioned libraries of wood and stone and books were still like home to me. The city tore down Forsyth Public a few years ago and built a new one of steel and glass and concrete and air conditioning that was always turned too high. A cold box. I went to it two or three times, then gave up. But Karl’s library was perfect. I had walked away from him to look at some of the book titles.

“You like books?”

I jumped. I hadn’t heard him come up beside me. “I love them. I hope you don’t care if I spend a lot of time in here.”

Karl made a straight line of his mouth and glanced over at his desk. His desk, right. His work area.

“Okay, so I won’t spend a lot of time in here. Show me my room, will you?”

“You can use the library whenever I’m not working in here,” he said.

“Thanks.” I could see there was going to be a certain coldness about this library, too.

He showed me the rest of the first floor before he took me up to what was going to be my bedroom. Large, businesslike kitchen. Large, businesslike cook. She was friendly, though, and she was a black woman. That helped. Formal dining room. Small, handsome study—why the hell couldn’t Karl work there? Game room with billiard table. Large service porch. As big as the house was, though, it was smaller than it looked from the outside. I thought it might turn out to be a more comfortable home than I had expected.

Karl and I stood on the porch and looked out at his park of a back yard. Tennis court. Swimming pool and bath house. We could see Doro and Vivian splashing around in the pool. Grass. Trees. There was a multicar garage off to one side, and I got a glimpse of a cottage almost hidden by trees.

“The gardener and his wife live out there,” Karl told me. “His wife is the maid. The cook helps with the housework, too, when she isn’t busy in the kitchen. She lives upstairs, in the servants’ quarters.”

“Did you inherit all this or something?” I asked. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d said, “None of your business.”

“I had one of my people sign it over to me,” he said. “He was going to put it up for sale anyway and he didn’t need the money.”

I looked at him. The expression on his thin, angular face hadn’t changed at all. I hooted with laughter. I couldn’t help it. “You stole it! Oh, God. Beautiful; you’re human,

after all. And here I have to make do with shoplifting.”

He gave me a forced smile. “I’ll show you where your room is now.”

“Okay. Can I ask you another question?”

He shrugged.

“How do you feel about black people?”

He looked at me, one eyebrow raised. “You’ve seen my cook.”

“Right. So how do you feel about black people?”

“I’ve known exactly two of them well before now. They were all right.” Emphasis on the “they.”

I frowned, looked at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That you shouldn’t get the idea that I dislike you because you’re black.”

“Oh.”

“I wouldn’t want you here no matter what color you were.”

I sighed. “You’re going to make this even harder than it has to be, aren’t you?”

“You asked.”

“Well … I’m no happier to be here than you are to have me, but we’re either going to have to get used to each other or we’re going to have to keep out of each other’s way a lot. Which won’t be easy even in a house as big as this.”

“Why did you and Doro fight?”

“What?” My first thought was that he was reading my mind. Then I realized that even if he hadn’t seen Doro’s hand, I had a big bruise on my jaw.

“You know damn well why we fought.”

“Tell me. I answered your questions.”

“Why does a telepath bother to ask questions?”

“Out of courtesy. Shall I stop?”

“No! We fought … because Doro didn’t tell me about Vivian until about two hours ago.”

There was a long pause. Then, “I see. How did you feel about marrying me before you found out about Vivian?”

“My grandmother married Doro,” I said. “And, of course, my mother married him. I’ve expected to marry him myself ever since I was old enough to know what was going on. I wanted to. I loved him.”

“Past tense?”

I almost didn’t answer. I realized that I was ashamed. “No.”

“Not even after he decides to marry you off to a stranger?”

“I’ve loved him for years. I guess it takes me a while to turn my emotions around.”

“You probably never will. I’ve met several of his people since my transition. He uses me to keep them in line without killing them. And he’s done terrible things to some of them. But I’ve never met one who hates him. Those who don’t kill themselves by attacking him as soon as he acts against them always seem to forgive him.”

Somehow that didn’t surprise me. “Do you hate him?”

“No.”

“In spite of … everything?” I remembered Vivian going out hand in hand with Doro.

“In spite of everything,” he said quietly.

“Can you read his mind?”

“No.”

“But why not? He says he’s not a telepath. How could he stop you?”

“You’ll find out after your transition. This will be your room.” We were on the second floor. He opened the door he had stopped in front of.

The bedroom was white, and I guess you could call it elegant. There was a small crystal chandelier. There was a huge bed and a large dresser with a beautiful mirror. I’d have to be careful how I threw things. There was a closet that was going to look empty even after I hung up the new clothes Doro had bought me. There were chairs, little tables

…

It was just a really nice room. I peered into the mirror at my bruise. Then I sat down in a chair by the window and looked out at the front lawn as I spoke to Karl. “What do I do after my transition?”

“Do?”

“Well, I’ll be able to read minds. I’ll be able to steal better without getting caught—if I still want to. I’ll be able to snoop through other people’s secrets, even make robots of people. But …”

“But?”

“What am I supposed to do—except maybe have babies?” I turned to face him and saw by his expression that he wished I hadn’t said that last. I didn’t care.

“I’m sure Doro will find some work for you,” he said. “He probably already has something in mind.”

Just at that moment, someone was hit by a car. I sensed enough to know that it was nearby, within a few blocks of Karl’s house. I felt the impact. I might have said something. Then I felt the pain. A slow-motion avalanche of pain. I know I screamed then. That hit me harder than anything I’d ever received. Finally the pain got to be too much for the accident victim. He passed out. I almost passed out with him. I found myself curled into a tight knot on the chair, my feet up and my head down and throbbing.

I looked up to see whether Karl was still there, and found him watching me. He looked interested but not concerned, not inclined to give me any of the help he was supposed to give. I had a feeling that, if I survived transition, I would do it on my own.

“There’s aspirin in the bathroom,” he said, nodding toward a closed door. Then he turned and left.

Five days later, we were married at city hall. For those five days, I might as well have been alone in that big house. Doro left the day he brought me, and didn’t come back. I saw Karl and Vivian at meals or ran into them accidentally around the house. They were always polite. I wasn’t.

I tried talking to the servants, but they were silent, contented slaves. They worked, or they sat in their quarters watching television and waiting for the master’s voice.

I joined Karl and Vivian out by the pool one day and what looked like a really interesting conversation came to a dead halt.

The only times I ever felt comfortable was when I was in my room with the door shut, or in the library when Karl wasn’t home. He spent a lot of time in Los Angeles keeping an eye on the businesses he controlled for Doro and the ones he had taken over for his own, personal profit. Evidently he did more for them than just steal part of their profits. For me, he did nothing at all.

Doro showed up to see us married. Not that there was any kind of ceremony beyond the bare essentials. He went home with us—or with Vivian and me. Karl dropped the

three of us off, then headed for L.A. Doro challenged Vivian to a game of tennis. I walked three blocks to a bus stop, caught a bus, and rode.

I knew where I was going. I had to transfer to get there, so there was no way for me to pretend to myself that I had wound up there by accident. I got off at Maple and Dell and walked straight to Rina’s house.

Rina was home, but she had company. I could hear her and her company yelling at each other way out on the sidewalk. I walked around the corner and knocked on Emma’s door. She opened it, looked at me, stood back from the door. I went in and sat down in the big overstuffed chair near the door. I closed my eyes for a while and the ugly old house seemed to go around me like a blanket, shutting out the cold. I took a deep breath, felt relief, release.

Emma laid a hand on my forehead and I looked up at her. She was young. That meant she had had Doro with her recently. I didn’t look anything like her when she was young. Doro was crazy. I wished I did look that good.

“You were supposed to get married,” she said.

“I did. Today.”

She frowned. “Where’s your husband?”

“I don’t know. Or care.”

She sort of half smiled in her know-it-all way that I had always resented before. Now I didn’t care. She could throw all the sarcasm she wanted to at me if she just let me sit there for a while.

“Stay here for a while,” she said.

I looked at her, surprised.

“Stay until someone comes to get you.”

“They might not even know I’ve gone anywhere. I didn’t say anything. I just left.”

“Honey, you’re talking about Doro and an active telepath. They know, believe me.”

“I guess so. I came here on the bus, though. I don’t mind going back that way.” I never liked depending on other people and their cars, anyway. When I rode the bus, I went when I wanted, where I wanted.

“Stay put. Doro might not have heard you yet.”

“What?”

“You’ve said something by coming here. Now the way to make sure that Doro’s heard you is to inconvenience him a little. Just stay where you are. Are you hungry?”

“Yeah.”

She brought me cold chicken, potato salad, and a Coke. Brought it to me like I was a guest. She’d never brought me anything she could send me after before in her life.

“Emma.”

She had gone back to whatever she was doing at her desk in the dining room. The desk was half covered with official-looking papers. She looked around.

“Thanks,” I said quietly.

She just nodded.

Karl came after me that night. I answered the door, saw him, and turned to say good-by to Emma, but she was right there looking at Karl.

“You’re too high, Karl,” she said quietly. “You’ve forgotten where you came from.”

He looked at her, then looked away. His expression didn’t change, but his voice, when he spoke, was softer than normal. “That isn’t it.”

“It doesn’t really matter. If you’ve got a problem, you know who to complain to about it—or who to take it out on.”

He drew a deep breath, met her eyes again, smiled his thin smile. “I hear, Em.”

I didn’t say anything to him until we were in the car together. Then, “Is she one of the two?”

He gave me a kind of puzzled glance, then seemed to remember. He nodded.

“Where do you know her from?”

“She took care of me once when I was between foster homes. That was before Doro found a permanent home for me. She took care of me again when I was approaching transition. My adoptive parents couldn’t handle me.” He smiled again.

“What happened to your real parents—real mother, I mean?”

“She … died.”

I turned to look at him. His expression had gone grim. “By herself,” I asked, “or with help?”

“It’s an ugly story.”

I shrugged. “Okay.” I looked out the window.

“But, then, you’re no stranger to ugly stories.” He paused. “She was an alcoholic, my mother. And she wasn’t exactly normal—sane—during those rare times when she was sober. Doro says she was too sensitive. Anyway, when I was about three, I did something that made her mad. I don’t remember what. But I remember very clearly what happened afterward. For punishment, she held my hand over the flame of our gas range. She held it there until it was completely charred. But I was lucky. Doro came to see her later that same day. I wasn’t even aware of when he killed her. I remember, I wasn’t aware of anything but alternating pain and exhaustion between the time she burned me and the time Doro’s healer arrived. You might know the healer. She’s one of Emma’s granddaughters. Over a period of weeks, she regenerated the stump that I had left into a new hand. Even now, ten years after my transition, I don’t understand how she did it. She does for other people the things Emma can only do for herself. When she had finished, Doro placed me with saner people.”

I whistled. “So that’s what Emma meant.”

“Yes.”

I moved uncomfortably in the seat. “As for the rest of what she said, Karl …”

“She was right.”

“I don’t want anything from you.”

He shrugged.

He didn’t say much more to me that night. Doro was still at the house, paying a lot of attention to Vivian. I had dinner with them all, then went to bed. I could put up with them until my transition, surely. Then maybe for a change I’d be one of the owners instead of one of the owned.

I was almost asleep when Karl came up to my room. Neither of us put a light on but there was light enough from one of the windows for me to see him. He took off his robe, threw it into a chair and climbed into bed with me.

I didn’t say anything. I had plenty to say and all of it was pretty caustic. I didn’t doubt that I could have gotten rid of him if I had wanted to. But I didn’t bother. I didn’t want him but I was stuck with him. Why play games?

He was all right, though. Gentle and, thank God, silent. I didn’t know whether he had

come to me out of charity, duty, or curiosity, and I didn’t want to know. I knew he still resented me—at least resented me. Maybe that was why, when we were finished, he got up and went to get his robe. He was going back to his own room.

“Karl.”

I could see him turn to look in my direction.

“Stay the night.”

“You want me to?” I didn’t blame him for sounding surprised. I was surprised.

“Yes. Come on back.” I didn’t want to be alone. I couldn’t have put into words how much I suddenly didn’t want to be alone, couldn’t stand to be alone, how much it scared me. I found myself remembering how Rina would pace the floor at night sometimes. I would see her crying and pacing and holding her head. After a while, she would go out and come back with some bum who usually looked a little like her—like us. She’d keep him with her the rest of the night even if he didn’t have a dime in his pocket, even if he was too drunk to do anything. And sometimes even if he knocked her around and called her names that trash like him didn’t have the right to call anybody. I used to wonder how Rina could live with herself. Now, apparently, I was going to find out.

Karl came back to my bed without another word. I didn’t know what he was thinking, but he could have really hurt me with just a few words. He didn’t. I tried to thank him for that.

Chapter Three

KARL

The warehouse was enormous. Whitten Coleman Service Building, serving thirty-three department stores over three states. Doro had begun the chain seventy years before, when he bought a store for a small, stable family of his people. The job of the family was simply to grow and prosper and eventually become one of Doro’s sources of money. Descendants of the original family still held a controlling interest in the company. They were obedient and self-sufficient, and, for the most part, Doro let them alone. Through the years, their calls to him for help had become fewer. As they grew in size and experience, they became more able to handle their own problems. Doro still visited them from time to time, though. Sometimes he asked favors of them. Sometimes they asked favors of him. This was one of the latter times. Karl, Doro, the warehouse manager, and the chief of security walked through the warehouse toward the loading docks. Karl had never been inside the warehouse before, but now he led the way through the maze of dusty stock areas and busy marking rooms. In turn, he was led by the thoughts of several workers who were efficiently preparing to steal several thousand dollars’ worth of Whitten Coleman merchandise. They had gotten away with several earlier thefts in spite of the security people who watched them, and the cameras trained on them.

Quietly, Karl pointed out the thieves—including two security men—and explained their methods to the security chief. And he told the chief where the group had hidden what they had left of the merchandise they had already stolen. He had almost finished when he realized that something was wrong with Mary.

He maintained a mental link with the girl now that he was married to her. And now that Doro had made clear what would happen to him if Mary died in transition.

Something about the girl’s expanding ability had changed. Suddenly she was no longer passively absorbing the usual ambient mental noise. She was unwittingly reaching out for it, drawing it to her. The last fragments of what Doro called her childhood shield—the mental protection that served young actives until they were old enough to stand transition—was crumbling away. She was in transition.

Karl broke off what he was saying to the security chief. Suddenly he was caught up in the experience Mary was having. She was running, screaming …

No. No, it wasn’t Mary who was running. It was another woman—the woman Mary was receiving from. The two were one. One woman running down stark white corridors. A woman fleeing from men who were also dressed in white. She gibbered and babbled and wept. Suddenly she realized that her own body was covered with slimy yellow worms. She tore at the worms frantically to get them off. They changed their coloring from yellow to yellow streaked with red. They began to burrow into her flesh. The woman fell to the floor tearing at herself, vomiting, urinating.

She hardly felt the restraining hands of her pursuers, or the prick of the needle. She did not have even enough awareness of the world outside her own mind to be grateful for the eventual oblivion.

Karl snapped back to the reality of the warehouse with a jolt. He found himself holding on to the steel support of some overhead shelving. His hands hurt from grasping it so tightly. He shook his head, saw Doro and the two warehousemen staring at him. The warehousemen looked concerned. Doro looked expectant. Karl spoke to Doro. “I’ve got to get home. Now.”

Doro nodded. “I’ll drive you. Come on.”

Karl followed him out of the building, then blindly, mechanically got in on the driver’s side. Doro spoke to him sharply. Karl jumped, frowned, moved over. Doro was right. Karl was in no shape to drive. Karl was in no shape to do anything. It was as though he were plunging into his own transition again.

“You’re too close to her,” said Doro. “Pull back a little. See if you can sense what’s happening to her without being caught up in it.”

Pull back. How? How had he gotten so close, anyway? He had never been caught up in Mary’s pretransition experiences.

“You know what to expect,” Doro told him. “At this point she’s going to be reaching for the worst possible stuff. That’s what’s familiar to her. That’s what’s going to attract her attention. She’ll get an avalanche of it—violence, pain, fear, whatever. I don’t want you caught up in it unless she obviously needs help.”

Karl said nothing. He was already trying to separate himself from Mary. The mental link he had established with her had grown into something more than he had intended it to be. If two minds could be tangled together, his and Mary’s were.

Then he realized that she had become aware of him, was watching him as he tried to untangle himself. He had never permitted her to be aware of his mental probing before. He stopped what he was doing now, concerned that he had frightened her. She would have enough fear to contend with within the next twelve hours without his adding to it.

But she was not afraid. She was glad to have him with her. She was relieved to discover that she was not facing the worst hours of her life alone.

Karl relaxed for a few minutes, less eager to leave her now. He could still remember how glad he had been to have Emma with him during his transition. Emma couldn’t help mentally, but she was a human presence with him, drawing him back to sanity, reality. He could do at least that much for Mary.

“How is she?” Doro asked.

“All right. She understands what’s happening.”

“Something is liable to snatch her away again any minute.”

“I know.”

“When it happens, let it happen. Watch, but stay out of it. If you see a way to help her, don’t.”

“I thought that’s what I was for. To help.”

“You are, later, when she can’t help herself. When she’s ready to give up.”

Karl glanced at Doro while keeping most of his attention on Mary. “Do you lose a lot of her kind?”

Doro smiled grimly. “She doesn’t have a ‘kind.’ She’s unique. So are you, though you aren’t as unusual as I hope she’ll be. I’ve been working toward both of you for a good many generations. But yes.” The smile vanished. “Several of her unsuccessful predecessors have died in transition.”

Karl nodded. “And I’ll bet most of them took somebody with them. Somebody who

was trying to help them.”

Doro said nothing.

“I thought so,” said Karl. “And I already know from Mary’s thoughts that you killed the ones who managed to survive transition.”

“If you know, why bring it up?”

Karl sighed. “I guess because it still surprises me that you can do things like that. Or maybe I’m just wondering whether she or I will still be alive this time tomorrow—even if we both survive her transition.”

“Bring her through for me, Karl, and you’ll be all right.”

“And her?”

“She’s a dangerous kind of experiment. Believe me, if she turns out to be another failure, you’ll want her dead more than I will.”

“I wish I knew what the hell you were doing. Aside from playing God, I mean.”

“You know enough.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“You know what I want of you. That’s enough.”

It never did any good to argue with Doro. Karl leaned back and finished disentangling himself from Mary. He would be with her in person soon. And even without Doro’s warning he would not have wanted to go through much more of her transition with her. Before he broke the connection, he let her know that he was on his way to her, that she wouldn’t be alone long. It had been two weeks since their marriage, two weeks since she had called him back to her bed. He hadn’t gone out of his way to hurt her since then.

He watched Doro maneuver the car into the right lane so that they could get on the Forsyth Freeway. Doro cut across the lanes, wove through the light traffic carelessly, speeding as usual. He had no more regard for traffic laws than he did for any other laws. Karl wondered how many accidents Doro had caused or been involved in. Not that it mattered to Doro. Had human life ever mattered to Doro beyond his interest in human husbandry? Could a creature who had to look upon ordinary people literally as food and shelter ever understand how strongly those people valued life? But yes, of course he could. He understood it well enough to use it to keep his people in line. He probably even understood it well enough to know how Karl and Mary both felt now. It just didn’t make any difference. He didn’t care.

Fifteen minutes later, Doro pulled into Karl’s driveway. Karl was out of the car and heading for the house before Doro brought the car to a full stop. Karl knew that Mary was in the midst of another experience. He had felt it begin. He had kept her under carefully distant observation even after he had severed the link between them. Now, though, even without a deliberately established link, he was having trouble preventing himself from merging into her experience. Mary was trapped in the mind of a man who had to eventually burn to death. The man was trapped inside a burning house. Mary was experiencing his every sensation.

Karl went up the back stairs two at a time and ran through the servants’ quarters toward the front of the house. He knew Mary was in her room, lying down, knew that, for some reason, Vivian was with her.

He walked into the room and looked first at Mary, who lay in the middle of her bed, her body rolled into a tight, fetal knot. She made small noises in her throat like choked screams or moans, but she did not move. Karl sat down on the bed next to her and looked

at Vivian.

“Is she going to be all right?” Vivian asked.

“I think so.”

“Are you going to be all right?”

“If she is, I will be.”

She got up, came to rest one hand on his shoulder. “You mean, if she comes through all right, Doro won’t kill you.”

He looked at her, surprised. One of the things he liked about her was that she could still surprise him. He left her enough mental privacy for that. He had read his previous women more than he read her and they had quickly become boring. He had hardly read Vivian at all until she had asked him to condition her and let her stay with him, help her stay, in spite of Mary. He had not wanted to do it, but he had not wanted to lose her, either. The conditioning he had imposed on her kept her from feeling jealousy or hatred toward Mary. But it did not prevent her from seeing things clearly and drawing her own conclusions.

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “Both Mary and I are going to make it all right.”

She looked at Mary, who still lay knotted in the agony of her experience. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Nothing.”

“Can I … can I stay. I’ll keep out of the way. I just—”

“Vee, no.”

“I just want to see what she has to go through. I want to see that the price she has to pay to … to be like you is too high.”

“You can’t stay. You know you can’t.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, dropped her hand to her side. “Then, let me go. Let me leave you.”

He stared at her, surprised, stricken. “You know you’re free to go if that’s really what you want. But I’m asking you not to.”

“I’ll become an outsider if I don’t leave you now.” She shrugged hopelessly. “I’ll be alone. You and Mary will be alike, and I’ll be alone.” There was no anger or resentment in her, he could see. Her conditioning was holding well enough. But she had been much more aware of Mary’s loneliness than Karl had realized. And when Karl began occasionally sleeping with Mary, Vivian had begun to see Mary’s life as a preview of her own. “You won’t need me,” she said softly. “You’ll only come to me now and then to be kind.”

“Vee, will you stay until tomorrow?”

She said nothing.

“Stay at least until tomorrow. We’ve got to talk.” He reinforced the request with a subtle mental command. She had no telepathic ability at all. She would not be consciously aware of the command, but she would respond to it. She would stay until the next day, as he had asked, and she would think her staying was her own decision. He promised himself that he would not coerce her further. Already it was getting too easy to treat her like just another pet.

She drew a deep breath. “I don’t know what good it will do,” she said. “But yes, I’ll stay that long.” She turned to go out of the room and ran into Doro. He caught her as she was stumbling blindly around him, and held her.

Doro looked at Mary, who had finally straightened herself out on the bed. She looked back at him wearily.

“Good luck,” he said quietly.

She continued to watch him, not responding at all.

He turned and left with Vivian, still holding her as she cried.

Karl looked down at Mary.

She continued to stare after Doro and Vivian. She spoke softly. “Why is it Doro is always so kind to people after he messes up their lives?”

Karl took a tissue from the box on her night table and wiped her face. It was wet with perspiration.

She gave him a tired half smile. “You being ‘kind’ to me, man?”

“That wasn’t my word,” said Karl.

“No?”

“Look,” he said, “you know how it’s going to be from now on. One bad experience after another. Why don’t you use this time to rest?”

“When it’s over, if I’m still alive, I’ll rest.” And then explosively, “Shit!”

He felt her caught up in someone else’s fear, stark terror. Then he was caught too. He was too close to her again.

For a moment, he let the alien terror roll over him, engulf him. He broke into an icy sweat. Abruptly he was elsewhere—standing outside in the back yard of a house built near the edge of one of the canyons. Coming up the slope from the canyon was the longest, thickest snake he had ever seen. It was coming toward him. He couldn’t move. He was terrified of snakes. Abruptly he turned to run. He caught his foot on a lawn sprinkler, fell screaming, his body twisting, thrashing. He felt his own leg snap as he hit the ground. But the break registered less on him than the snake. And the snake was coming closer.

Karl had had enough. He drew back, screened out the man’s terror. At that instant, Mary screamed.

As Karl watched, she turned on her side, curling up again, pressing her face into the pillow so that the sounds she made were muffled.

He watched her mentally as well, or watched the ophidiophobe whose mind held her. He thought he understood something now. Something he had wondered about. He knew how Mary’s expanding talent, acting without control, was opening one pathway after another to other people’s raw emotions. And now he realized that when he let himself be caught up in those emotions, he was standing in the middle of an open pathway. He was shielding her from the infant fumbling of her own ability by accepting the consequences of that fumbling himself. That was why Doro had told him to back off. When he was too close to Mary, he was helping her. He was preventing her from going through the suffering that was normal for a person in transition. And since the suffering was normal, perhaps it was in some way necessary. Perhaps an active could not mature without it. Perhaps that was why Doro had warned him to help Mary only when she could no longer help herself.

“Karl?”

He looked at her, realizing that he had let his attention wander. He didn’t know what had finally happened to the frightened man. He didn’t care.

“What did you do?” she asked. “I could feel myself getting caught up in something

else. Then for a while it was gone.”

He told her what he had learned, and what he had guessed. “So at least now I know how to help you,” he finished. “That gives you a better chance.”

“I thought Doro would tell you how to help me.”

“No, I think half Doro’s pleasure comes from watching us, running us through mazes like rats and seeing how well we figure things out.”

“Sure,” she said. “What are a few rat lives?” She took a deep breath. “And, speaking of lives, Karl, don’t help me unless I’m about to lose mine. Let me try to get through this on my own.”

“I’ll do whatever seems necessary as you progress,” he said. “You’re going to have to trust my judgment. I’ve been through this already.”

“Yeah, you’ve been through it,” she said. He saw her hands tighten into fists as something clutched at her mind before she could finish. But she managed to get a few more words out. “And you went through it on your own. Alone.”

She struggled all evening, all night, and well into the next morning. During her few lucid moments he tried to show her how to interpose her own mind shield between herself and the world outside, how to control her ability and regain the mental peace that she had not known for months. That was what he had had to learn to bring his own transition to an end. If she didn’t want his protection, perhaps he could at least show her how to protect herself.

But she did not seem to be able to learn.

She was growing weaker and wearier. Dangerously weary. She seemed ready to sink into oblivion with the unfortunate people whose thoughts possessed her. She had passed out a few times, earlier. Now, though, he was afraid to let her go again. She was too weak. He was afraid she might never regain consciousness.

He lay beside her on the bed listening to her ragged breathing, knowing that she was with a fifteen-year-old boy somewhere in Los Angeles. The boy was being methodically beaten to death by three older boys—members of a rival gang.

Just watching the things she had to live through was sickening. Why couldn’t she pick up the simple shielding technique?

She started to get up from the bed. Her self-control was all but gone. She was moving as the boy moved miles away. He was trying to get up from the ground. He didn’t know what he was doing. Neither did she.

Karl caught her and held her down, thankful, not for the first time that night, that she was small. He managed to catch her hands before she could slash him again with her nails. The blood was hardly dry on his face where she had scratched him before. He held her, pinning her with his weight, waiting for it to end.

Then, abruptly, he was tired of waiting. He opened his mind to the experience and took the finish of the beating himself.

When it was over, he stayed with her, ready to take anything else that might sweep her away. Even now she was stubborn enough not to want him there, but he no longer cared what she wanted. He brushed aside her wordless protests and tried to show her again how to erect shielding of her own. Again he failed. She still couldn’t do it.

But after a while, she seemed to be doing something.

Staying with her mentally, Karl opened his eyes and moved away from her body. Something was happening that he did not understand. She had not been able to learn from

him, but she was using him somehow. She had ceased to protest his mental presence. In fact, her attention seemed to be on something else entirely. Her body was relaxed. Her thoughts were her own, but they were not coherent. He could make no sense of them. He sensed other people with her mentally, but he could not reach them even clearly enough to identify them.

“What are you doing?” he asked aloud. He didn’t like having to ask.

She didn’t seem to hear him.

1 asked what you were doing! He gave her his annoyance with the thought.

Mary noticed him then, and somehow drew him closer to her. He seemed to see her arms reaching out, her hands grasping him, though her body did not move. Suddenly suspicious, he tried to break contact with her. Before he could complete the attempt, his universe exploded.

MARY

I couldn’t have said what I was doing. I knew Karl was still with me. His mental voice was still reaching me. I didn’t mean to grab him the way I did. I didn’t realize until afterward that I had done it. And even then, it seemed a perfectly natural thing to do. It was what I had done to the others.

Others, yes. Five of them. They seemed to be far away from me, perhaps scattered around the country. Actives like Karl, like me. People I had noticed during the last minutes of my transition. People who had noticed me at the same time. Their thoughts told me what they were, but I became aware of them—“saw” them—as bright points of light, like stars. They formed a shifting pattern of light and color. I had brought them together somehow. Now I was holding them together—and they didn’t want to be held.

Their pattern went through kaleidoscopic changes in design as they tried to break free of me. They were bright, darting fragments of fear and surprise, like insects beating themselves against glass. Then they were long strands of fire, stretching away from me, but somehow never stretching quite far enough to escape. They were writhing, shapeless things, merging into each other, breaking apart, rolling together again as a tidal wave of light, as a single clawing hand.

I was their target. They tore at me desperately with the hand they had formed. I didn’t feel it. All I could feel was their emotions. Desperation, anger, fear, hatred … They tore at me harmlessly, tore at each other in their confusion. Finally they wore themselves out.

They rested grouped around me, relaxed. They were threads of fire again, each thread touching me, linked with me. I was comfortable with them that way. I didn’t understand how or why I was holding them, but I didn’t mind doing it. It felt right. I didn’t want them frightened or angry or hating me. I wanted them the way they were now, at ease, comfortable with me.

I realized that there was something really proprietary about my feelings toward them. As though I was supposed to have charge over them and they were supposed to accept me. But I also realized that I had no idea how dangerous it might be for me to hold a group of experienced active telepaths on mental leashes. Not that it would have mattered if I had known, though, since I couldn’t find a way to let them go. At least they were peaceful now. And I was so tired. I drifted off to sleep.

It was light out when Karl woke me by sitting up in bed and pulling the blankets off me. Late morning. Ten o’clock by the clock on my night table. It was a strange awakening for me. My head didn’t hurt. For the first time in months, I didn’t have even a slight headache. I didn’t realize until I moved, though, that several other parts of my body hurt like hell. I had strained muscles, bruises, scratches—most of them self-inflicted, I guessed. At least, none of them were very serious; they were just going to leave me sore for a while.

I moved, gasped, then groaned and kept still. Karl looked down at me without saying anything. I could see a set of deep, ugly scratches down the left side of his face, and I knew I had put them there. I reached up to touch his face, ignoring the way my arm and shoulder muscles protested. “Hey, I’m sorry. I hope that’s all I did.”

“It isn’t.”

“Oh, boy. What else?”

“This.” He did something—tugged at the mental strand of himself that still connected him to me. That brought me fully awake. I had forgotten about my captives, my pattern. Karl’s sudden tug was startling, but it didn’t hurt me, or him. And I noticed that it didn’t seem to bother the five others. Karl could tug only his own strand. The other strands remained relaxed. I knew what Karl wanted. I spoke to him softly.

“I’d let you go if I knew how. This isn’t something I did on purpose.”

“You’re shielded against me,” he said. “Open and let me see if there’s anything I can do.”

I hadn’t realized I was shielded at all. He had tried so hard to teach me to form my own shield, and I hadn’t been able to do it. Apparently I had finally picked up the technique without even realizing it—picked it up when I couldn’t stand any more of the mental garbage I was getting.

So now I had a shield. I examined it curiously. It was a mental wall, a mental globe with me inside. Nothing was reaching me through it except the strands of the pattern. I wondered how I was supposed to open it for him. As I wondered, it began to disintegrate.

It surprised me, scared me. I wanted it back.

And it was back.

Well, that wasn’t hard to understand. The shield kept me secure as long as I wanted it to. And there were degrees of security.

I began the disintegration process again, felt the shield grow thinner. I let it become a kind of screen—something I could receive other people’s thoughts through. I experimented until I could hold it just heavy enough to keep out the kind of mental noise I had been picking up before and during my transition. It kept out the noise, but it didn’t keep me in. I could reach out and sense whatever there was to be sensed. I swept my perception through the house experimentally.

I sensed Vivian still asleep in Doro’s bed. And, in another way, I sensed Doro beside her. Actually, I only sensed a human shape beside her—a body. I was aware of it in the way I was aware of the lamp on the night table beside it. I could read Vivian’s thoughts with no effort at all. But somehow, without realizing it, I had drawn back from trying to read the mind of that other body. Now, cautiously, I started to reach into Doro’s mind. It was like stepping off a cliff.

I jerked back instantly, thickening my screen to a shield and struggling to regain my balance. As fast as I had moved to draw away, I had the feeling I had almost fallen. Safe

as I knew I was in my own bed, I had the feeling that I had just come very near death.

“You see?” said Karl as I lay gasping. “I told you you’d find out why actives don’t read his mind. Now open again.”

“But what was it? What happened?”

“You almost committed suicide.”

I stared at him.

“Telepaths are the people he kills most easily,” he said. “Normally he can only kill the person physically nearest to him. But he can kill telepaths no matter where they are. Or, rather, he can if they help him by trying to read his mind. It’s like begging him to take you.”

“And you let me do it?”

“I could hardly have stopped you.”

“You could have warned me! You were watching me, reading me. I could feel you with me. You knew what I was going to do before I did it.”

“Your own senses warned you. You chose to ignore them.”

He was colder than he had been on the day I met him. He was sitting there beside me in bed acting like I was his enemy. “Karl, what’s the matter with you? You just worked your ass off trying to save my life. Now, for heaven’s sake, you’d let me blunder to my death without saying a word.”

He took a deep breath. “Just open again. I won’t hurt you. But I’ve got to find a way out of whatever it is you’ve caught me in.”

I opened. Obviously, he wasn’t going to act human again until I did. I felt him reach into my mind, watched him review my memories—all those that had anything to do with the pattern. There wasn’t much.

So, in a couple of seconds he knew how little I knew. He had already found out he couldn’t break away from the pattern. Now he knew for sure that I couldn’t let him go either. He knew there wasn’t even a way for him to force me to let him go. I wondered why he thought he’d have to force me—why he thought I wouldn’t have let him go if I could have. He answered my thought aloud.

“I just didn’t believe anyone could create and maintain a trap like that without knowing what they were doing,” he said. “You’re holding six powerful people captive. How can you do that by accident or instinct or whatever?”

“I don’t know.”

He withdrew from my thoughts in disgust. “You also have some very Dorolike ideas,” he said. “I don’t know how the others feel about it, Mary, but you don’t own me.”

It took me a minute to realize what he was talking about. Then I remembered. My proprietary feelings. “Are you going to blame me for thoughts I had while I was in transition?” I asked. “You know I was out of my head.”

“You were when you first started to think that way. But you aren’t now, and you’re still thinking that way.”

That was true. I couldn’t help the feeling of rightness that I had about the pattern— about the people of the pattern being my people. I felt it even more strongly than I had felt Doro’s mental keep-out sign. But that didn’t matter. I sighed. “Look, Karl, no matter what I feel, you find me a way to break this thing, free you and the others, and I’ll cooperate in any way I can.”

He had gotten up. He was standing by the bed watching me with what looked like

hatred. “You’d better,” he said quietly. He turned and left the room.

PART TWO

Chapter Four

SETH DANA

There was water. That was the important thing. There was a well covered by a tall, silver-colored tank. And beside it there was an electric pump housed in a small wooden shed. The electricity was shut off, but the power poles were all sturdily upright, and the wire that had been run in from the main road looked all right. Seth decided to have the electricity turned on as soon as possible. Otherwise he and Clay would either have to haul water from town or get it from some of the nearer houses.

Seth looked over at Clay, saw that his brother was examining the pump. Clay looked calm, relaxed. That alone made Seth’s decision to buy him this desert property worthwhile. There were few neighbors, and those widely scattered. The nearest town was twenty miles away. Adamsville. And it wasn’t much of a town. About twelve hundred dull, peaceful people. Clay had been reasonably comfortable even while they were passing through it. Seth wiped the sweat from his forehead and stepped into the shadow cast by the well’s tank. Just morning and it was hot already.

“Pump look all right, Clay?”

“Looks fine. Just waiting for some electricity.”

“How about you?” He knew exactly how Clay was, but he wanted to hear his brother say it aloud.

“I’m all right too.” Clay shook his head. “Man, I better be. If I can’t make it out here, I can’t make it anywhere. I’m not picking up anything now.”

“You will, sooner or later,” said Seth. “But probably not much. Not even as much as if you were in Adamsville.”

Clay nodded, wiped his brow, and went to look at the shack that had served to house the land’s former occupant. An old man had lived there pretty much as a hermit. He had built the shack just as, several years before, he had built a real house—a home for his wife and children. A home that they had lived in for only a few days when the wind blew down the power lines and they had to resort to candles. One of the children had invented a game to play with the candles. In the resulting fire, the man had lost his wife, his two sons, and most of his sanity. He had lived on the property as a recluse until his death, a few months back. Seth had bought the property from his surviving daughter, now an adult. He had bought it in the hope that his latent brother might finally find peace there.

Clay shouldn’t have been a latent. He was thirty, a year older than Seth, and he should have gone through transition at least a decade before. Even Doro had expected him to. Doro was father to both of them. He had actually worn one body long enough to father two children on the same woman with it. Their mother had been annoyed. She liked variety.

Well, she had variety in Clay and Seth. One son was not only a failure but a helpless failure. Clay was abnormally sensitive even for a latent. But as a latent, he had no control. Without Seth he would be insane or dead by now. Doro had suggested privately to Seth that a quick, easy death might be kindest. Seth had been able to listen to such talk calmly only because he had been through his own agonizing latent period before his transition. He knew what Clay would have to put up with for the rest of his life. And he knew Doro was doing something he had never done before. He was allowing Seth to make an important decision.

“No,” Seth had said. “I’ll take care of him.” And he had done it. He had been nineteen then to Clay’s twenty. Clay had not cared much for the idea of being taken care of by anyone, least of all his younger brother. But pain had dulled his pride.

They had traveled around the country together, content with no one place for long. Sometimes Seth worked—when he wanted to. Sometimes he stole. Often he shielded his brother and accepted punishment in his stead. Clay never asked it. He saved what was left of his pride by not asking. He was too unstable to work. He got jobs, but inevitably he lost them. Some violent event caught his mind and afterward he had to lie, tell people he was an epileptic. Employers seemed to accept his explanation, but afterward they found reason to fire him. Seth could have stopped them, could have seen to it that they considered Clay their most valuable employee. But Clay didn’t want it that way. “What’s the point?” he had said more than once. “I can’t do the work. The hell with it.”

Clay was slowly deciding to kill himself. It was slow because, in spite of everything, Clay did not want to die. He was just becoming less and less able to tolerate the pain of living.

So now a lonely piece of land. A so-called ranch in the middle of the Arizona desert. Clay could have a few animals, a garden, whatever he wanted. Whatever he could take care of in view of the fact that he would be incapacitated part of the time. He would be receiving money from some income property Seth had insisted on stealing for him in Phoenix, but in more personal ways he would be self-sufficient. He would be able to bear his own pain—now that there would be less of it. He would be able to make his land productive. He would be able to take care of himself. If he was to live at all, he would have to be able to do that.

“Hey, come on in here,” Clay was calling from within the hermit’s shack. “Take a look at this thing.”

Seth went into the shack. Clay was in what had been a combination kitchen-bedroomliving room. The only other room was piled high with bales of newspapers and magazines and stacked with tools. A storage room, apparently. What Clay was looking at was a large cast-iron wood-burning stove.

Seth laughed. “Maybe we can sell that thing as an antique and use the money to buy an electric stove. We’ll need one.”

“What we?” demanded Clay.

“Well, you, then. You don’t want to have to fight with that thing every time you want to eat, do you?”

“Never mind the stove. You’re starting to sound like you changed your mind about leaving.”

“No I haven’t. I’m going as soon as you’re settled in here. And—” He stopped, looked away from Clay. There was something he had not mentioned to his brother yet.

“And what?”

“And as soon as you get somebody to help you.”

Clay stared at him. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Man, you need somebody.”

“The hell I do! Some crazy old man lived out here by himself, but me, I need somebody. No! No way!”

“You want to try to drive the van into town yourself?” Suddenly Seth was shouting. “How many people you figure you’ll kill along the way? Aside from yourself, I mean.” Clay had not dared to drive since his last accident, in which he had nearly killed three people. But obviously he had not been thinking about that. Seth spoke again, softly this time. “Man, you know you’re going to have to go into town sooner or later.”

“I’d rather hitch in with somebody who lives around here,” muttered Clay. “I could go to that place we passed—the one with the windmill.”

“Clay, you need somebody. You know you do.”

“Another Goddamn baby sitter.”

“How about a wife? Or at least a woman.”

Now Clay looked outraged. “You want to find me a woman?”

“Hell no. Find your own woman. But I’m not leaving until you do.”

Clay looked around the shack, looked out the open door. “No woman in her right mind would want to come out here and share this place with me.”

“This place isn’t bad. Hell, tell her what you’re going to do with it. Tell her about the house you’re going to build her. Tell her how good you’re going to take care of her.”

Clay stared at him.

“Well?”

“She’s going to have to be some woman to look at these God-forsaken rocks and bushes and listen to me daydreaming.”

“You’ll do all right. I never knew you to have trouble finding a woman when you wanted one.”

“Hell, that was different.”

“I know. But you’ll do all right.” Seth would see that he did all right. When Clay found a woman he liked, Seth would fix things for him. Clay would never have to know. The woman would “fall in love” faster and harder and more permanently than she ever had before. Seth didn’t usually manipulate Clay that way, but Clay really needed somebody around. What if something caught his mind while he was fixing food, and he fell across the stove? What if a lot of things! Best to get him a good woman and tie her to him tight. Best to tie Clay to her a little, too. Otherwise Clay might get mean enough to kick her out over nothing.

And it would be a good idea to see that a couple of Clay’s nearest neighbors were friendly. Clay tended to make friends easily, then lose them just as easily because his violent “epileptic seizures” scared people. People decided that he was either crazy or going crazy, and they backed away. Seth would see that the neighbors here didn’t back away.

“I think I’ll go back to Adamsville and make one of the store owners open up,” he told Clay. “You want to go along and start your hunt?” He could feel Clay cringe mentally at the thought.

“No thanks. I’m not in any hurry. Besides, I need a chance to look the place over

myself before I think about bringing somebody else out here.”

“Okay.” Seth managed not to smile. He looked around the shack. There was an ancient electric refrigerator in one corner waiting for the electricity to be turned on. And in the storage room, he could see an old-fashioned icebox—the kind you had to put ice in. He decided to bring back some ice for it. The electricity couldn’t be turned on until late tomorrow at the soonest, and he wanted to buy some food.

“Anything special you want me to bring back, Clay?”

Clay wiped his forehead on his sleeve and looked out into the bright sunlight. “Couple of six-packs.”

Seth grunted. “Yeah. You didn’t have to tell me that.” He went out to the van and got in. The van was a big oven. He almost blistered his hand on the steering wheel. And he was getting a headache.

He hadn’t had a headache since his transition. In fact, this one felt like the ones he used to get when he was approaching transition. But you only went through that once. The sun must have been affecting him. Best to get moving and let the wind cool him off.

He started down the winding dirt path that led to the edge of his property. The path crossed railroad tracks and met a gravel road. That road led to the main highway. The place was isolated, all right. It was a bad place to get sick. And Seth was getting sick. It wasn’t the heat—or, if it was, the wind blowing through the van window wasn’t helping. He felt worse than ever. He was just reaching the railroad tracks when he lost control of the van.

Something slammed into his thoughts as though his mental shield didn’t exist. It was an explosion of mental static that blotted out everything else, left him able to do nothing other than endure it, and endure the fierce residue of pain and shock that followed it.

By some miracle, he did not wreck the van. He ran it into the sign that identified his property as the something-or-other ranch. But the dry wooden signpost snapped easily against the bumper and fell without damaging the van.

Seth lost consciousness for a moment. When he came to, he saw that he had managed to stop the van and that he had fallen across the horn. He sat up wondering whether he had made enough noise to alert Clay, back at the shack.

Several seconds later, he heard someone—it must have been Clay—running toward the van. Then all real sound was drowned by the “sound” within his head. Mental static welling up again agonizingly. It was not like transition. He received no individual violent incidents that he could distinguish. Instead he felt himself seized, held, and somehow divided against himself. When he tried to shield himself from whatever was attacking him, it was as though he had tried to close a door while his leg or arm was still in the doorway. He was being used against himself somehow.

He was vaguely aware of the van door opening, of Clay asking what had happened. He did not even try to answer. If he had opened his mouth, he would have screamed.

When he finally found the strength to try again to defend himself against whatever had attacked him, his defense was thrown back in his face. With it, he received his only comprehensible communication from his attacker. A one-word command that left him no opportunity for argument or disobedience.

Come.

He was being drawn westward, toward California, toward Los Angeles, toward Forsyth, one of the many suburbs of Los Angeles, toward …

He could see the house he was to go to, a white stucco mansion. But he could not see who called him there, or why he had been called, or how his caller was able to exert such influence over him. Because he would definitely go to Forsyth. He had no choice. The pull was too strong.

The intensity of the call lessened to a bearable din and the shock of the attack passed.

He and Clay would go to California. He couldn’t leave Clay here alone in the desert. And he couldn’t stay to see Clay settled in. He couldn’t stay for anything at all. Clay’s independence would have to wait. Everything would have to wait.

RACHEL DAVIDSON

Rachel had made herself sick by following Eli’s suggestion. Thus it seemed only reasonable that Eli take her place and preach the sermon today. And it was only reasonable that she stay at the hotel, relaxed, semiconscious, so that her body did not shake from this one illness that she was helpless against.

And since everything was so reasonable, she thought, why had she brought herself to full consciousness despite her shaking? Why was she now in a cab on her way to the church, hastily dressed, her hair barely combed, without a prepared sermon? Returning, Eli would say, like an addict to her heroin.

Well, let Eli say whatever he wanted to. Let him do whatever he wanted to. But when she reached the church, let him not stand in that pulpit one minute longer than it took him to introduce her. But he would know that. He would take one look at her face and get out of her way.

He and his ideas of how a healing should be performed! He had never performed one in his life. Never dared to try, because he knew that, even if he managed to succeed a time or two with great help from the sick person’s own suggestibility, he would never equal Rachel. He could never perform one tenth of the healings she performed, because she never failed. What he would strain to do, what he would sweat over and call for divine assistance with, she could do easily. Easily, but not without cost. The power, the energy she used in a healing service had to come from somewhere. Eli had called her a parasite, a second Doro. He had talked her into forgoing her usual “price.” She had tried, and that was why she was sick now. That was why the taxi driver, who was black too and who knew the church at the address she gave, asked her sympathetically whether she was going to see “that traveling faith healer.”

“I’m going to see her, all right,” said Rachel through her teeth. Her grimness must have surprised him. He asked no more questions. A few moments later, when he pulled up at the church, she threw him a few bills and ran in without waiting for her change.

She managed to remember her robe because wearing it had become such a habit with her. Eli, as much a showman as a minister, had insisted on it through all the six years that they had worked together. A flowing white robe.

The congregation was singing when she walked into the auditorium. Watery, pallid, uninspired singing. They were making uncoordinated noises with their throats. And their number! In her tours, Rachel was used to people sitting in the aisles, pushing in from outside when there was no more room for them. She had filled circus-type tents when she appeared in them. But there were empty seats out there now.

Had her last performance been so bad? Had following Eli’s stupid advice hurt her so much?

She needed more people. She took a deep breath and walked into view from one of the choir doors. Today, of all days, she needed more people.

“Sister Davidson! Praise the Lord, she’s here!” The cry went up in the middle of the song, and the song would have died away had she not joined in and kept it going. Her voice was a strong, full contralto that her audiences loved. She could have moved them with her singing even if she had nothing else. But she had a great deal more to offer than singing. If only there were more of them!

Eli Torrey gave her a long, bitter look. She knew the expression on her own face as she looked back at him. She could see it as he saw it. She could see it through his eyes. The hungry, drawn look that so many mistook for religious fervor.

Eli started to step away from the pulpit as the song ended.

She stopped him with a thought. Introduce me!

Why? She had to pluck his thoughts from his mind. He was only a latent. He could not project in any controlled way. You think there’s one person out there who doesn’t know who you are?

Introduce me, Eli, or I’ll control you and do it myself. I’ll run you like a puppet! She did not bother to take his reply.

Furious as he was, he was too much of a showman not to give her the best introduction he could.

The service.

She could have preached to her people in Chinese and it literally would not have mattered. All that mattered was that she was there and she had them. From that first song, they were hers. Not one of them could have gotten up and walked out of the church. Not one of them would have wanted to. Her control of them was not usually so rigid, but, then, she was not usually so desperate in her need of them. Their minds were full of her. Their voices, the very swaying, hand-clapping movements of their bodies were for her. When their mouths said, “Yes, Jesus!” and “Preach it!” and “Amen!” they really meant “Rachel, Rachel, Rachel!” She drank it in and loved them for it. She demanded more and more.

By the time the service was half over, they would have cut their own throats for her. They fed her, strengthened her, drove out her sickness, which was, after all, no more than a need for them, for their adoration.

Eli said she was playing God, perverting religion, turning good, Christian people into pagans who worshiped only her. Eli was right, of course. He should have been. He was one of her first and oldest worshipers. But his conscience bothered him, and, from time to time, he managed to infect her with some of his guilt.

Behind her was a childhood spent in a home that was Christian before it was anything else. Eli’s home. Eli was a distant cousin of hers. Doro had had her adopted by Eli’s minister parents. Both his father and his mother were ministers. But in spite of the pressure they had put on Rachel she had rejected much of their religious teaching. All she retained was enough to make her nervous sometimes. Nervous and vulnerable to Eli. But not now.

Now she drew all she dared from the small crowd, forcing herself to stop before she was satisfied, to avoid doing them any real harm.

Then she prepared to repay them. The candidates for healing had already formed a line in the main aisle.

And the healing began.

Eyes closed, she would mouth a prayer and lay her hands on the candidate. Sometimes she shouted, imploring God to hear and answer her. Sometimes she seemed to have trouble and have to try a second time.

Showmanship! Eli and his parents had taught her some of it. The rest she had learned from watching real faith healers. It meant nothing, as far as the actual healing was concerned.

In her years of healing, she had learned enough to diagnose quickly just by allowing her perception to travel over the candidate’s body once. That was useful in that many of the people who came to her did not really know what was wrong with them. Even some who came with doctors’ diagnoses were mistaken. Thus she saved a few seconds of looking for a nonexistent problem and went right to work on whatever was really wrong. The work?

Stimulating the growth of new tissues—even brain and nerve tissues that were not supposed to regenerate. Destroying tissue that was useless and dangerous—cancer, for instance. Strengthening weak organs, “reprogramming” organs that malfunctioned. More. Much more. Psychological problems, injuries, birth defects, etc. Rachel could have been even more spectacular than she was. The totally deaf child gained hearing, but the one-armed man—he had come to get help in his fight against alcoholism—did not grow a new arm. He could have. It would have taken weeks, but Rachel could have handled it. To do so, though, she would have had to show herself to be more than a faith healer. She was afraid of what people might decide she was. Whether or not she accepted the story of Christ as fact, she realized that anyone with abilities like his—and hers—would get into trouble if he really put them to work.

Eli knew what she could do. And he knew all that she could make him understand about how she did it. Because she had to tell someone. Eli was her family now that his parents were dead. And he filled other functions. Doro had said he would. Cousin, business manager, lover, slave. She was a little ashamed of that last sometimes, but never ashamed enough to let him go.

Now, though, she was almost content. She had fed. It was not enough, but it would hold her until the next night, when, no doubt, a bigger crowd would gather. Soon she would send this small crowd home tired, weak, spent, but eager to return and feed her again. And eager to bring their friends and families out to see her.

She accepted only a limited number of candidates—again as a matter of self-protection—and that number was almost exhausted when the interruption came. Interruption …

It was a mental explosion that, for uncounted seconds, blotted out her every other sense. She had been standing, one hand on a woman in a wheelchair, the other raised in apparent supplication. Now she froze there, blind, deaf, mute with shock. The only thing that kept her on her feet was her habit of strictness with herself. Minor theatrics she had always used. They were part of her show. Uncontrolled hysterics—especially of the kind that she could have—were absolutely forbidden.

Somehow when the din inside her head lessened she finished with the woman in the wheelchair, sent her away walking slowly, pushing her own chair, and crying.

Then, without explanation, Rachel handed the service back to Eli and walked away from her bewildered congregation. She shut herself in an empty Sunday-school classroom to be alone to fight the thing that was happening to her.

Sometime later, she heard Eli in the hall calling her. By then the battle was ended, lost. By then Rachel knew she had to go to Forsyth. Someone had called her in a way that she could not ignore. Someone had made a puppet of her. There was justice in that, she supposed. She reached out to Eli, called him to her to tell him that she was leaving.

JESSE BERNARR

Jesse and the girl, this one’s name was Tara, slept late, then got up and drove into Donaldton. It was Sunday and Jesse’s twenty-sixth birthday. He was feeling generous enough to ask the girl what she wanted to do instead of telling her.

She wanted to get a lunch and go to the park lake. There, though she did not say it, she wanted to show Jesse off. She would be the envy of the female population of Donaldton and she knew it. Best to show him off while she had him. She knew she could only have him until someone else caught his eye. When that happened, he would send her home to her husband and her turn might not come again for months—might not ever come again.

Jesse smiled to himself as he read her thoughts. Donaldton girls, even shy, undemanding ones like Tara, thought that way when they were with him. They worked as hard as they could to keep him and flaunt him—which was understandable and all right as far as Jesse was concerned. But sometimes Jesse went after girls from the surrounding towns. Girls who didn’t know him even by reputation, and who weren’t quite so eager.

He and Tara went to a little cafe and had a lunch prepared. There was only one waitress on duty and there were two other customers waiting to be served when Jesse arrived. But they didn’t mind waiting a little longer. They wished him a happy birthday.

Jesse wasn’t carrying any cash. He rarely did. He never needed it in Donaldton. The waitress smiled at him as he and Tara took the lunch and went back to the car.

Tara drove to the lake as she had driven into Donaldton. Jesse had wrecked three cars and nearly killed himself before he gave up driving. There was just no future in it for someone who might at any time be hit by mental disturbances from other drivers, pedestrians, whatever. It wasn’t as bad as it had been during his transition, but it still happened. Doro said his mental shielding was defective. Jesse didn’t worry about it. The advantages of his sensitivity outweighed the disadvantages. And Tara was a good driver. All his girls were.

There were other Sunday picnickers in the park—old people sunning themselves and families with young children. And there was a scattering of young couples and teenagers. Donaldton, Pennsylvania, was small and didn’t offer much in the way of entertainment or recreation. People who would have preferred something more exciting wound up in the park.

The people were well spread out, though. There was plenty of room. There was so much room, in fact, that Tara was silently annoyed when Jesse chose a place only a few yards from another couple.

Jesse pretended not to notice her annoyance. “Want to go for a swim before we eat?”

“Oh, but … we don’t have suits. I didn’t know we were coming here when we left the house …”

Jesse glanced around, seemingly casually. “That girl over there has a new one that will fit you,” he said, nodding toward the female half of the nearby fully clothed couple.

“Oh.” He was in one of his moods again, she was thinking. She was going to be humiliated. This wasn’t like taking food from the cafe. That had been more like a gift. But this girl had brought her bathing suit for her own use.

Jesse smiled, reading her every thought. “Go on. Go get it. And while you’re at it, get the guy’s trunks for me.”

She cringed inside but got up to do as he said. He watched her walk toward the couple.

The distance was too great for him to hear what she said to them clearly, so he picked up the conversation mentally.

“Could I borrow … I mean … Jesse wants your bathing suits.” She could not have felt more completely foolish, but she expected nothing more than that the couple would hand her the suits and let her escape back to Jesse.

The girl took one look at Tara and at the watching Jesse and started to get her suit out. The man didn’t move. It was his reaction that Jesse was waiting for. He didn’t have to wait long.

“You want to borrow our what?”

“Bathing suits.” Tara looked at the girl. “You’re from town, aren’t you? Tell him.”

“You tell him.” The girl didn’t particularly resent the loss of the suit. Donaldton people never resented giving Jesse what he wanted. The girl resented Tara.

Tara didn’t want to be there. She didn’t even want the damned suits. If the girl couldn’t realize that … “Never mind. I’ll have Jesse come over and tell him.” She started away.

“All right, wait. Wait!” When Tara turned back to face the girl, the girl was holding out her own suit and the man’s trunks. But before Tara could take them, the man snatched them away.

“What the hell are you doing?”

The girl was angry now, and the man was the only one she could take her anger out on safely. “He’s Jesse Bernarr and he wants to borrow our suits. Will you please let me give them to him?”

“No! Why the hell should I?” He glanced at Tara. “Look, you go back and tell Jesse Bernarr, whoever he is …” He stopped as Jesse’s shadow fell across him. He looked up, confused, and by now angry. He was a big man, Jesse noticed. He would be tall when he stood up. Massive shoulders and chest. He looked a little bigger than Jesse, in fact. And he did not like not knowing what was going on.

“You’ve got to be Jesse Bernarr,” he said. He paused as though he expected confirmation from Jesse. He got only silence. “Look, I don’t know what the joke is, mister, but it’s not funny. Now, why don’t you take your girl and go play your kid games somewhere else.”

“I could.” Jesse plucked the man’s name from his mind. It was Tom. “I don’t feel like swimming any more. But there are a couple of things I think you ought to learn.”

And there was a simple, effortless way of teaching them to him. But sometimes Jesse liked to expend a little effort. Especially with characters like this Tom who took so much inner pride in their physical prowess. Sometimes Jesse liked to reassure himself that even

without his extra abilities he would still be better than Tom’s kind.

He said, “You visit a place for the first time, Tom, you ought to be more willing to listen when the natives try to warn you about local customs.” He smiled at Tom’s girl. She smiled back a little uncertainly. “It could save you a lot of trouble.”

Tom got up, watching Jesse. “Man, you sure want to fight bad. I’d give a lot to know why.” They faced each other, Tom looking down at Jesse from his slightly superior height.

Tom’s girl stood up quickly and stepped between them, her back to Tom. “He’ll listen to me, Jess. Let me talk to him.”

Jesse pushed her out of the way gently, casually. If he hadn’t, Tom would have. But Tom resented Jesse doing it for him. Resented it enough to take the first swing. Jesse, anticipating him, dodged easily.

A stray child saw them, yelled, and people began to take notice and gather around.

Only people from outside Donaldton who didn’t know the odds against Tom came to watch a fight. Donaldton people came to see Jesse Bernarr having himself some fun. And they didn’t mind. Even Tom’s girl didn’t mind Jesse having a little fun with Tom. What frightened her was that Tom didn’t know what he was up against. He was liable to make Jesse angry enough to really hurt him. If she had been out with a Donaldton man, she wouldn’t have worried.

As the two men fought, though, it was Tom whose anger grew, silently encouraged by Jesse. Jesse mentally goaded Tom to fight as though his life were at stake. Then an explosion went off in Jesse’s head and Tom got his chance.

Jesse was only vaguely aware of the beating his body was taking as he struggled to close out the mental blast. But there was no way to close it out. No way to dull it as it screamed through him. Tom had a field day.

When the “noise” finally lessened, when it didn’t fill every part of Jesse’s mind, he realized that he was on the ground. He started groggily to get up, and the man whose anger he had mentally encouraged kicked him in the face.

His head snapped back—not as far as Tom would have liked—and he lost consciousness.

He didn’t come to all at once. First he was aware only of the call drawing him, destroying any mental peace he might have had before he became aware of the condition of his body. He didn’t seem to be hurt seriously, but he could feel a dozen or two places where his flesh was split and bruised. His face was lumpy and already swollen. Some of his teeth had been kicked in. And he hurt. He hurt all over. He spat out blood and broken teeth.

Damn that out-of-town bastard to hell!

The thought of Tom roused him to look around. Somebody from Donaldton was standing over him, thinking about moving him back into town to a bed.

Not far away, Tom struggled between two more Donaldton men and cursed steadily.

Jesse staggered to his feet. The crowd was still there. Probably some out-of-towner had gone for the police. Not that it mattered. The police were old friends of Jesse’s.

Jesse refused to mute his own pain. It came as near as anything could to blocking out the call to Forsyth. And, although Jesse had not yet analyzed what had happened to him, the message of the call was clear—and clearly something he wanted no part of. Besides, he wanted to hurt. He wanted to look at Tom and hurt. He started to smile, had to spit

more blood, then spoke softly. “Let him go.”

Jesse moved in, anticipating Tom’s swings, avoiding them. Tom couldn’t surprise him. And as angry as Jesse was now, that meant Tom couldn’t touch him. Slowly, methodically, he cut the bigger man to pieces.

Now Tom’s strength betrayed him. It kept him on his feet when he should have fallen, kept him fighting, well after he was beaten. When he finally did collapse to the ground, it kept him conscious and aware—aware solely of pain.

Jesse walked away and left him lying there. Let his girl take care of him.

The townspeople drifted away, too. They had had a much better show than they had bargained for. To the out-of-towners, Tom seemed to have gotten no more than he deserved. They resumed their Sunday outing.

A few minutes later, Tara was shaking her head and wiping blood from Jesse’s face with a cold, wet paper napkin. “Jess, why’d you let him beat you up like that? How are you going to go to your birthday party tonight, now?”

He glanced at her in annoyance and she fell silent. Party, hell! If he could just get rid of this damned buzzing in his head, he would be all right.

So, somewhere in California, there was a town called Forsyth, and there were other actives there—more of Doro’s people. So what! Why should he run to them, come when they called? Nobody on the other end of that buzz could have anything to offer him that was better than what he had.

ADA DRAGAN

They were screaming at each other over some small thing—a party Ada would not attend. Yesterday the screaming had been over the neighbors whom Ada had interfered with. She had sensed them beating their six-year-old brutally, and she had stopped them. For once, she had accomplished something good with her ability. Foolish pride had made her tell Kenneth. Kenneth had decided that her interference had been wrong.

She could not tolerate large groups of people, and she could not tolerate child abuse. Kenneth called the first immature and the second none of her business. Everything she did either angered or humiliated him. Everything. Yet she stayed with him. Without him she would be totally alone.

She was an active. She had power. And all her power did, most of the time, was cut her off from other people, make it impossible for her ever to be one of them. Her power was more like a disease than a gift. Like a mental illness.

She had gone to a doctor once, secretly. A psychiatrist a few miles away, in Seattle. She had given him a false name and told him only a little. She had stopped when she realized that he was about to suggest a period of hospitalization …

Now she wondered bitterly whether the doctor had been right. It was her “illness,” after all, that had caused her to descend to this screaming. She said things to Kenneth that she had not thought herself capable of saying to anyone. He did not realize the degradation and despair this signified in her. Only one thought saved her from complete loss of control. The man was her husband.

She had married him out of desperation, not love. But he was her husband nonetheless, and he had served a purpose. If she had not married him, she might be

saying these things to her parents—her stepparents—the only people besides Doro whom she could ever remember loving. It had been very important once—that she protect her parents from what she had become. She wondered if it was still important. If she still cared what she said, even to them.

Abruptly she was tired of the argument. Tired of the man’s fury pounding at her mind and her ears. Tired of her own pointless anger. She turned and walked away.

Kenneth caught her shoulder and spun her around so quickly that she had no time to think. He slapped her hard, throwing all the weight of his big body against her. She fell back against the wall, then slipped silently to the floor to lie stunned, while, above her, he demanded that she learn to listen when he spoke. At that moment, violence, chaos convulsed her treacherous mind.

Ada was quick. She did not need time to wonder what was happening or to realize that there would finally be an end to her aloneness. She reacted immediately. She screamed.

Kenneth had hurt her, but suddenly the physical pain lost all meaning in the face of this new thing. This thing that brought her the pain of a hope roughly torn away.

Since her change, that terrible night three years before, when all the world had come flooding into her mind, she had treated her condition as a temporary thing. Something that would someday end and let her be as she had been. This was a belief that Doro had tried to talk her out of. But she had been able to convince herself that he was lying. He had refused to introduce her to others who were like her, though he claimed there were others. He had said that it would be painful to her to meet them, that her kind tolerated each other badly. But she had looked for herself, had sifted through thousands of minds without finding even one like her own. Thus she had decided that Doro was lying. She had believed what she wanted to believe. She was good at that; it kept her alive. She had decided that Doro had told only part of the truth. That there had been others like her. It was unthinkable that she had been the only person to undergo this change. And that the others had recovered, changed back.

This hope had sustained her, given her a reason to go on living. Now she had to see it for the fallacy it was.

She lay on the floor crying, as she rarely did, in noisy, gasping sobs. Others. How had she searched for so long without finding them? It seemed that they had no trouble finding her. And the strength of the first attack, and even of the call that now pulled at her insistently, was far greater than anything she felt herself able to generate. Such power gave the unknown caller a terrible air of permanence.

Unexpectedly, Kenneth was lifting her to her feet, reassuring her that she was all right.

Steadying herself enough to sample his thoughts, she learned that he was a little frightened by her screaming. He had hit her before and gotten no reaction other than quiet tears.

The selfishness of his thoughts stabilized her. He was wondering what would happen to him if he had hurt her. He had long before ceased worrying about her for her own sake. And she had never forced him to do anything more than stay with her. She pulled away from him tiredly and went into the bedroom.

She would never be well again, never be able to go among people without being bombarded by their thoughts. And facing this, she could not possibly continue her present

living arrangement. She could no longer force Kenneth to stay with her when he hated her as he did. Nor would she exert more control over him, to force an obscene, artificial love.

She would follow the call. Even if it had been less insistent, she would have followed it. Because it was all she had.

She would quarantine herself with others who were afflicted as she was. If she was alone with them, she would be less likely to hurt people who were well. How would it be, though? How much worse than anything she had yet known? A life among outcasts.

JAN SHOLTO

The neighborhood had changed little in the three years since Jan had seen it. New cars, new children. Two small boys ran past her; one of them was black. That was new too. She was glad her mind had not been open and vulnerable when the boy ran past. She had problems enough without that alienness. She looked back at the boy with distaste, then shrugged. She planned only a short visit. She didn’t have to live there.

It occurred to her, not for the first time, that even visiting was foolish, pointless. She had placed her own children in a comfortable home where they would be well cared for, have better lives than she had had. There was nothing more that she could do for them. Nothing she could accomplish by visiting them. Yet for days she had felt a need to make this visit. Need, urge, premonition?

Thinking about it made her uncomfortable. She deliberately turned her attention to the street around her instead. The newness of it disgusted her. The unimaginative modern houses, the sapling trees. Even if the complexion of the neighborhood had not been changing, Jan could never have lived there. The place had no depth in time. She could touch things, a fence, a light standard, a signpost. Nothing went back further than a decade. Nothing carried real historical memory. Everything was sterile and perilously unanchored to the past.

A little girl of no more than seven was standing in one of the yards watching Jan walk toward her. Jan examined the child curiously. Small, fine-boned and fair-haired, like Jan. Her eyes were blue, but not the pale, faded blue of Jan’s eyes. The girl’s eyes had the same deep, startling blue that had been one of her father’s best featuresor one of the best features of the body her father had been wearing.

Jan turned to walk down the pathway to the child’s house.

As she came even with the girl, some sentimentality about the eyes made her stop and hold out her hand. “Will you walk to the house with me, Margaret?”

The child took the offered hand and walked solemnly beside Jan.

Jan automatically blocked any mental contact with her. She had learned, painfully that children not only had no depth but that their unstable little animal minds could deliver one emotional outburst after another.

Margaret spoke as Jan opened the door. “Did you come to take me away?”

“No.”

The child smiled at Jan in relief, then ran away, calling, “Mommy, Jan is here.” Jan raised an eyebrow at the irony of her daughter’s words. Jan had once tried to condition the family here, the Westleys, to believe that they were the natural parents of

Jan’s children. She had had the power to do it, but she had not been skillful enough in her use of that power. She had failed. But time, combined with the simpler command that she had managed to instill in the Westleys—to care for the children and protect them—had turned her failure into success. Margaret knew that Jan was actually her mother. But it made no difference. Not to her; not to the Westleys.

In fact, the children were such a permanent part of the Westley household that Margaret’s question seemed out of character. The question revived the feeling of foreboding that Jan had been trying to ignore.

Even the feel of the house was wrong. So wrong that she found herself being careful not to touch anything. Just being inside was uncomfortable.

The woman, Lea Westley, came in slowly, hesitantly, without Margaret or the boy, Vaughn. Jan resisted the temptation to reach into her thoughts and learn at once what was wrong. That part of her ability was still underdeveloped, because she did not like to use it. She enjoyed touching inanimate objects and winding back through the pasts of the people who had handled them before her. But she had never learned to enjoy direct mind-to-mind contact. Most people had vile minds anyway.

“I thought you might be coming, Jan.” Lea Westley fumbled with her hands. “I was even afraid you might take Margaret.”

Verbal confirmation of Jan’s fears. Now she had to have the rest. “I don’t know what’s happened, Lea. Tell me.”

Lea looked away for a moment, then spoke softly. “There was an accident. Vaughn is dead.” Her voice broke on the last word and Jan had to wait until she could compose herself and go on.

“It was a hit-and-run. Vaughn was out with Hugh,” her husband, “and someone ran a red light … It happened last week. Hugh is still in the hospital.”

The woman was genuinely upset. Even through layers of shielding, Jan could feel her suffering. But, more than anything else, Lea Westley was afraid. She was afraid of Jan, of what Jan might decide to do to the people who had failed in the responsibility she had given them.

Jan understood that fear, because she was feeling a slightly different version of it herself. Someday Doro would come back and ask to see his children. He had promised her he would, and he kept the few promises he made. He had also promised her what he would do to her if she was unable to produce two healthy children.

She shook her head thinking about it. “Oh, God.”

Lea was instantly at her side, holding her, weeping over her, saying again and again, “I’m so sorry, Jan. So sorry.”

Disgusted, Jan pushed her away. Sympathy and tears were the last things Jan needed. The boy was dead. That was that. He had been a burden to her before she placed him with the Westleys. Now, dead, he was again a burden in spite of all her efforts to see that he was safe. If only Doro had not insisted that she have children. She had been looking forward to his return for so long. Now, instead of waiting for it, she would have to flee from it. Another town, another state, another name—and the likelihood that none of it would do any good. Doro was a specialist at finding people who ran from him.

“Jan, please understand … It wasn’t our fault.”

Stupid woman! Lea became an outlet for Jan’s frustration. Jan seized control of her, spun her around, and propelled her puppetlike out of the living room.

Lea Westley’s scream of terror when Jan finally released her was the last thing Jan was physically aware of for several minutes.

A mental explosion rocked her. Then came the forced mind-to-mind contact that she fought savagely and uselessly. Then the splitting away of part of herself, the call to Forsyth.

Jan regained consciousness on Lea Westley’s sofa, with Lea herself sitting nearby, crying. The woman had come back despite Jan’s heavy-handed treatment. She knew how foolish it would be to run from Jan even if she had known positively that Jan meant her harm. Perhaps, in that knowledge of her own limitations, she was more sensible than Jan herself. Lying still now with the call drawing her, Jan felt unusual pity for Lea.

“I don’t care that he’s dead, Lea.” The words came out in a whisper even though Jan had intended to speak normally.

“Jan!” Lea was on her feet at once, probably not understanding, probably realizing only that Jan was again conscious.

“You don’t have to worry, Lea. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Lea heard this time, and she collapsed weeping with relief. Jan tried standing, and found herself weak but able to manage.

“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 hurt 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-yearold 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 the 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 well 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?”

“That’s the question I want an answer to. That’s what I’m curious about. More than curious. Your predecessors never trapped more than one active at a time. Their first was always the one who had helped them through transition. They always needed help to get through transition. If I didn’t provide it, they died. On the other hand, if I did provide it, sooner or later they killed the person who had helped them. They never wanted to kill, and especially they didn’t want to kill that person. But they couldn’t help themselves. They got … hungry, and they killed. Then they latched onto another active, drew him to them, and went through the feeding process again. Unfortunately, they always killed other actives. I can’t afford that.”

“Did they … trade bodies the way you do?”

“No. They took what they needed and left the husk.”

I winced.

“And their patterns gave them an access to their victims that their victims couldn’t close off—as you already know.”

“Oh.” I felt almost guilty—as though he were telling me about things that I had already done. As though I had already killed the people in my pattern. People who hadn’t done anything to me.

“So you can see why I’m worried,” he said.

“Yes. But I can’t see why you’d want somebody like me around at all—why you’d breed somebody like me if all my kind can do is feed on other actives.”

“Not your kind, Mary. Your predecessors.”

“Right. They killed one at a time. I kill several at once. Progress.”

“But do you kill several at once?”

“I hope I don’t kill any at all—at least not unintentionally. But you don’t give me much to base that hope on. What am I for, Doro? What are you progressing toward?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“Your race, your empire, yes, but what place is there in it for me?”

“I’ll be able to tell you that after I’ve watched you for a while.”

“But—”

“The thing for you to do now is rest so that you’ll have a better chance of handling your people when they get here. Your transition was several hours longer than normal, so you’re probably still tired.”

I was tired. I had gotten only a couple of hours’ sleep. I wanted answers, though, more than I wanted rest. But he’d made it pretty clear that I wasn’t going to get them. Then I realized what he had just said. “My people?”

“Both you and Karl say you feel as though they’re yours.”

“And both Karl and I know that, if they really belong to anybody other than themselves, it’s you.”

“You belong to me,” he said. “So I’m not giving up anything when I give you charge of them. They’re yours as long as you can handle them without killing them.”

I stared at him in surprise. “One of the owners,” I muttered, remembering the bitter thoughts I’d had two weeks before. “How did I suddenly become one of the owners?”

“By surviving your transition. What you have to do now is to survive your new authority.”

I leaned back in my chair. “Thanks. Any pointers?”

“A few.”

“Speak up, then. I have the feeling I’m going to need all the help I can get.”

“Very likely. First you should realize that I’m delegating authority to you only because you’ll need it if you’re to have any chance at all of staying alive among these people. You’re going to have to accept your own proprietary feelings as legitimate and demand that your people accept you on your terms.” He paused, looked hard at me. “Keep them out of your mind as much as you can. Use your advantage. Always know more about them than they know about you. Intimidate them quietly.”

“The way you do?”

“If you can.”

“I have a feeling you’re rooting for me.”

“I am.”

“Well … I wouldn’t ask why, on a bet. I’d rather think it was because you really gave a damn about me.”

He just smiled.

KARL

Karl had never wanted quite as much as he did now to hurt something, to kill something, someone. He looked at Vivian sitting next to him, her mind ablaze with fear, her face carefully expressionless.

The blast of a horn behind him let him know that he was sitting through a green light. He restrained an impulse to lash back at the impatient driver. He could kill with his ability. He had, twice, accidentally, not long after his transition. He wondered why he refrained from doing it again. What difference would it make?

“Are we going back home?” Vivian asked.

Karl glanced at her, then looked around. He realized that he was heading back toward Palo Verde. He had left home heading nowhere in particular except away from Mary and Doro. Now he had made a large U and was heading back to them. And it wasn’t just an ordinary unconscious impulse driving him. It was Mary’s pattern.

He pulled over to the curb, stopped under a NO PARKING sign. He leaned back in the seat, his eyes closed.

“Will you tell me what’s the matter with you?” Vivian asked.

“No.”

She was doing all she could to keep calm. It was his silence that frightened her. His silence and his obvious anger.

He wondered why he had brought her with him. Then he remembered. “You’re not leaving me,” he said.

“But if Mary came through transition all right—”

“I said you’re not leaving!”

“All right.” She was almost crying with fear. “What are you going to do with me?”

He turned to glare at her in disgust.

“Karl, for heaven’s sake! Tell me what’s wrong.” Now she was crying.

“Be quiet.” Had he ever loved her, really? Had she ever been more than a pet—like all the rest of his women? “How was Doro last night?” he asked.

She looked startled. By mutual agreement, they did not discuss her nights with Doro. Or they hadn’t until now. “Doro?” she said.

“Doro.”

“Oh, now—” She sniffed, tried to compose herself. “Now, just a minute—”

“How was he?”

She frowned at him, disbelieving. “That can’t be what’s bothering you. Not after all this time. Not as though it was my fault, either!”

“That’s a pretty good body he’s wearing,” said Karl. “And I could see from the way you were hanging on him this morning that he must have given you a pretty good—”

“That’s enough!” Outrage was fast replacing her fear.

A pet, he thought. What difference did it make what you said or did to a pet?

“I’ll defy Doro when you do,” she said icily. “The moment you refuse to do what he tells you and stick to your refusal, I’ll stand with you!”

A pet. In pets, free will was tolerated only as long as the pet owner found it amusing.

“You’ve got your nerve complaining about Doro and me,” she muttered. “You’d climb into bed with him yourself if he told you to.”

Karl hit her. He had never done such a thing before, but it was easy.

She screamed, then foolishly tried to get out of the car. He caught her arm, pulled her back, hit her again, and again.

He was panting when he stopped. She was bloody and only half conscious, crumpled down on the seat, crying. He hadn’t controlled her. He had wanted to use his hands. Just his hands. And he wasn’t satisfied. He could have hurt her more. He could have killed her.

Yes, and then what? How many of his problems would her death erase? He would have to get rid of her body, and then still go back to his master, and now, by God, his mistress. Once he was there, at least Mary’s pattern would stop pulling at him, dragging at him, subverting his will as easily as he subverted Vivian’s. Nothing would be changed, though, except that Vivian would be gone.

Only a pet?

Who was he thinking about? Vivian or himself? Now that Doro had tricked him into putting himself on a leash, it could be either, or both.

He took Vivian by the shoulders and made her sit up. He had split her lip. That was where the blood came from. He took out a handkerchief and wiped away as much of it as he could. She looked at him first, vacillating between fear and anger; then she looked away.

Without a word, he drove her to Monroe Memorial Hospital. There he parked, took out his checkbook, and wrote a check. He tore it out and put it in her hands. “Go. Get away from me while you can.”

“I don’t need a doctor.”

“All right, don’t see one. But go!”

“This is a lot of money,” she said, looking at the check. “What’s it supposed to pay me for?”

“Not pay you,” he said. “God, you know better than that.”

“I know you don’t want me to go. Whatever you’re angry about, you still need me. I didn’t think you would, but you do.”

“For your own good, Vee, go!”

“I’ll decide what’s good for me.” Calmly she tore the check into small pieces. She looked at him. “If you really wanted me to go—if you want me to go now—you know how to make it happen. You do know.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “You’re making a mistake.” “And you’re letting me make it.” “If you stay, this might be the last time you’ll have the freedom to make your own

mistakes.” “You’re wrong to try so hard to frighten me away when you want me to stay so

badly.” He said nothing. “And I am staying, as long as you let me. Will you tell me what was wrong now?” “No.” She sighed. “All right,” she said, trying not to look hurt. “All right.”

Chapter Six

DORO

It occurred to Doro when Rachel Davidson arrived that she was the most subtly dangerous of his seven actives. Mary was the most dangerous period, though he doubted that she understood this yet. But there was nothing subtle about Mary. Rachel was, as Mary had said, related to Emma. She was the daughter of Emma’s most successful granddaughter, Catherine—a woman who could easily have outlived Emma if she had had better control of her mental shielding. As it was, she had spent too much of her time and energy trying to keep the mental noise of the rest of humanity out of her mind—as though she were a latent. But a latent would have been less sensitive. Catherine Davidson had simply decided at thirty-nine that she couldn’t stand any more. She had lain down and died. Every one of Doro’s previous healers had made similar decisions. But Rachel was only twenty-five, and her shielding was much better. Doro hoped that her decision, if she made it at all, was several years away. At any rate, she was very much alive now, and she would be more trouble than Mary could be expected to handle so quickly. But Doro decided to watch for a while before he warned Rachel. Before he gave Mary the help Mary did not know she needed. He sat by the fireplace and watched the two women meet.

Rachel was a full head taller, several shades darker, and from the look on her face, very puzzled. “Whoever you are,” she said, “you’re the one I’m looking for—the one who called me here.”

“Yes.”

“Why? Who are you? What do you want?”

“My name is Mary Larkin. Come on in and sit down.” Then, when Rachel was seated, “I’m an active, like you. Or not quite like you. I’m an experiment.” She looked at Doro. “One of his experiments that got out of hand.”

Rachel and Doro found themselves staring at each other, Doro almost as surprised as Rachel. Clearly, Mary was not going to let him be the observer that he had intended to be.

“Doro?” said Rachel tentatively.

“Yes.”

“Thank goodness. If you’re here, this must make sense somehow. I just walked out in the middle of a service in New York. I was so desperate to get here that I had to steal some poor person’s place on a plane.”

“What did you do with Eli?” Doro asked.

“Left him to handle the rest of the day’s services. No one will be healed, I know, but no doubt he’ll entertain them. Doro, what’s going on?”

“An experiment, as Mary said.”

“But it obviously isn’t out of hand yet. She’s still alive. Or is that temporary?”

“If it is, it’s none of your business,” said Mary quickly.

“It wouldn’t be if you hadn’t dragged me here,” said Rachel. “But since you did—”

“Since I did, Rachel, and since I am still alive, you’d better plan on my being around for a while.”

“Either plan on it or do something about it myself,” muttered Rachel. Then she frowned. “How do you know my name? I didn’t tell you.”

“Yes you did. This morning, when this whole damn thing started. When it was supposed to be ending for me.” Suddenly, Mary seemed to sag. She looked more than tired, Doro thought. She looked a little frightened. Doro had made her rest for a few hours before Rachel’s arrival. But how much real rest could she get thinking about what was in store for her? Thinking about it but not really knowing?

“What are you talking about?” demanded Rachel.

“I finished my transition this morning,” said Mary. “And then, as if that wasn’t enough, this other thing, this pattern, just sort of snapped into existence. Suddenly I was holding six other actives in a way that I didn’t understand. Holding them, and calling them here.”

Rachel was watching her, still frowning. “I thought there were others, but this whole thing was so insane I didn’t trust my own senses. Are the others coming here, then?”

“Yes. They’re on their way now.”

“Do you want us here?”

“No!” Mary’s vehemence startled Doro. Had she already decided that being “one of the owners” was so bad?

“Then, why don’t you let us go?” said Rachel.

“I’ve tried,” said Mary. “Karl has tried. My husband. He’s been an active for ten years and he couldn’t find a way out. As far as I can see, the only person who might have any helpful ideas is Doro.”

And both women looked at him. Mary’s whole attitude had changed. Suddenly she was edging away from the chance she had all but begged for earlier. And she kept passing the buck to Doro—kept saying in one way or another, “It’s his fault, not mine!” That was true enough, but it was going to hurt her if she didn’t stop emphasizing it. Rachel had already all but dismissed her as having no real importance. She was an irritant. No more. And healers were very efficient at getting rid of irritants.

“What kind of call did you receive, Rae?” he asked. “Was it like a verbal command, or like—”

“It was like getting hit with a club at first,” she said. “And the noise … mental static like the worst moments of transition. Maybe I was picking up the last of Mary’s transition. Then I was drawn here. There may have been words. I was only aware of images that let me see where I was going. Images, and that terrible planted compulsion to go. So here I am. I had to come. I had no choice at all.”

Doro nodded. “And now that you’re here, do you think you could leave if you wanted to?”

“I do want to.”

“And you can’t?”

“I could, yes. But I wouldn’t be very comfortable. At the airport, I realized that I was only a few miles away from here. I wanted that to be enough. I wanted to get a hotel room and wait until whoever was calling me got tired and gave up. I went to a hotel and tried to register. My hand was shaking so much I couldn’t write.” She shrugged. “I had to come. Now that I’m here I have to stay—at least until someone figures out a way to make your little experiment let me go.”

“You’ll need a room here, then,” said Doro. “Mary.”

Mary looked at him, then at Rachel. “Upstairs,” she laid tonelessly. “Come on.”

They were on their way out when Doro spoke again. “Just a moment, Rae.” Both women stopped. “It’s possible that in a few days you’ll need my help more than Mary will, but right now she is just out of transition.”

Rachel said nothing.

“She’d better not even catch a cold, healer.”

“Are you going to warn the others away from her too when they get here?”

“Of course. But since you’re here now, and since you’ve already made your feelings clear, I didn’t think I should wait to speak to you.”

She smiled a little in spite of herself. “All right, Doro, I won’t hurt her. But get me out of this, please. I feel like I’m wearing a damned leash.”

Doro said nothing to that. He spoke to Mary. “Come back when you’ve got Rachel settled. I want to talk to you.”

“Okay.” She must have read something of what he wanted to say in his tone. She looked apprehensive. It didn’t matter. She was an adult now, and on the verge of being a success. The first success of her kind. He would push her. She could stand it, and right now she needed it.

She came back a few minutes later and he motioned her into a chair opposite him.

“Are you shielded?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Can you tell by your pattern whether anyone else is near here—about to arrive?” His own ability had told him that no one was.

“No one is,” she said.

“Good. We won’t be interrupted.” He looked at her silently for a long moment. “What happened?”

Her eyes slid away from his. “I don’t know. I was just nervous, I guess.”

“Of course you were. The trick is not to tell everyone about it.”

She looked at him again, frowning, her small, expressive face a mask of concern. “Doro, I saw them in my mind and they didn’t scare me. I didn’t feel a thing. I had to keep reminding myself that they were probably dangerous, that I should be careful. And even when I was reminding myself, I don’t think I really believed it. But now … just meeting one of them …”

“You’re afraid of Rachel?”

“I sure as hell am.”

It was an unusual thing for her to admit. Rachel must have thoroughly shaken her. “What is it about her that frightens you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should know.”

She thought for a moment. “It was just a feeling at first—like the feeling I ignored when I tried to read you this morning. A feeling of danger. A feeling that she could carry out those threats she kept not quite making.” She stopped, looked at Doro. He said nothing. She went on. “I guess the dangerous thing about her is the one you hinted at just before we went up. That if she can heal the sick, she can probably make people sick too.”

“I didn’t say you should guess,” said Doro. “I said you should know. You can read her every thought, every memory, without her being aware of it. Use your ability.”

“Yeah.” She took a deep breath. “I’m not used to that yet. I guess I’ll be doing it

automatically after a while.”

“You’d better. And when I’m finished with you here, I want you to read them all. Including Karl. I want you to learn their weaknesses and their strengths. I want you to know them better than they know themselves. I don’t want you to be uncertain or afraid with even one more of them.”

She looked a little surprised. “Well, I can find out about them, all right. But as for not being afraid … if a person like Rachel wants to kill me, I’m not going to be able to stop her just because I know her.” She paused for a moment. “Now I know—I just found out—that Rachel can give me a heart attack or a cerebral hemorrhage or any other deadly thing she wants to. So I know. So what?”

“What else did you find out about Rachel?”

“Junk. Nothing that does me any good. Stuff about her personal life, her work. I see she’s a kind of parasite too. It must run in my family.”

“Of course it does. But she’s got nothing like your power. And you’ve seen a thing you don’t realize you’ve seen, girl.”

“What?”

“That you’re at least as dangerous to Rachel as she is to you. Since you can read her through her shield, she won’t be able to surprise you—unless you’re just careless. And if you see her coming, you should be able to stop her.”

“I don’t see how, unless I kill her. But it doesn’t matter. I was reading her again as you spoke. She’s not about to come after me, now that you’ve ordered her not to.”

“No, she wouldn’t. But I won’t always be standing between you and her. I’m giving you time—not very much time—to learn to handle yourself among these people. You’d better use it.”

She swallowed, nodded.

“Do you understand what Rachel does? Do you see that you are to her, and to the others, what she is to her congregations?”

“A kind of mental vampire draining strength … or something from people. Strength? Life force? I don’t know what to call it.”

“It doesn’t matter what you call it. She has to take it to do her healing, and healing is the only purpose she’s found for her life. Can you see that what she sets up at each of her services is a kind of temporary pattern?”

“Yes. But at least she doesn’t kill anybody.”