Mind of My Mind

“She could, very easily. Ordinary people have no defense against what she does—the way she feeds. If she took too much from her crowds, she’d begin killing the very old, the very young, the weak, even the sick that she intended to heal.”

“I see.”

“See, too, that while you can take from her, she can’t take from you.”

“Because I can shield her out.”

“You don’t have to shield her out. Let her in if you like.”

“What do you mean?” She looked at him in horror.

“Exactly what you think I mean.”

She frowned. “Are you telling me it’s all right for me to kill now when, just a few hours ago, you said—”

“I know what I said. And I still don’t want anyone killed. But I’m gambling on you, Mary. If you survive among these people, I have a chance of winning.”

“Winning your empire. Is there anybody whose life you wouldn’t risk for your Goddamn empire?”

“No.”

For a moment, she glared at him angrily. Then the anger faded as though she didn’t have the energy to sustain it. Doro was accustomed to the look. All his people faced him with it at one time or another. It was a look of submission.

“What I’ve decided to do,” said Doro, “is give you the life of one of the actives if you need it. If you have to make an example of someone, I’ll let it pass as long as you keep control of yourself and don’t go beyond that one.”

She thought about that for a long moment. “Permission to kill,” she said finally. “I don’t know how I feel about that.”

“I hope you won’t have to use it. But I don’t want you totally handicapped.”

“Thanks. I think. God, I hope I’m like Rachel. I hope I don’t have to kill.”

“You won’t find out until you get started on someone.”

She sighed. “Since this is all your fault, will you stay around for a while? I won’t have Karl. I’ll need somebody.”

“That’s another thing.”

“What?”

“Stop telling the actives that the one show of power you’ve given them, the one thing you’ve done that they can’t resist or undo, is my fault.”

“But it is …”

“Of course it is. And the moment they realize I’m here, they’ll know it is. They don’t have to be told. Especially when your telling them sounds like whining for pity. There’s no pity in them, girl. They’re going to feel about as sorry for you as you do for Vivian, or for Rina.”

That seemed to sober her.

“You’re going to have to grow up, Mary,” he said quietly. “You’re going to have to grow up fast.”

She studied her hands, large, frankly ugly, her worst feature. They lay locked together in her lap. “Just stay with me for a while, Doro. I’ll do the best I can.”

“I had intended to stay.”

She didn’t bother hiding her relief. He got up and went to her.

MARY

There were incidents as my actives straggled in. I had pried through their minds and gotten to know all of them except Rachel before I even met them—so that none of them surprised me much.

Doro beat the holy shit out of Jan almost as soon as she arrived, because she’d done something stupid. I don’t think he would have touched her, otherwise. One of the two kids she’d had by him was dead and he wasn’t happy about it. She said it was an accident. He knew she was telling the truth. But she panicked.

He was talking to her—not very gently—and he started toward her for some reason. She ran out the front door. That, he doesn’t allow. Don’t run from him. Never run. He called her back, warned her. But she kept going. He would have gone after her if I hadn’t

stopped him.

“She’ll be back,” I said quickly. “Give her a chance. The pattern will bring her back.” I wondered why I bothered to try to help her. I shouldn’t have cared what happened to her. She had taken one look at Rachel and me and thought, Oh, God, niggers! And she was the one Doro had chosen to have kids by. Surely Rachel and Ada would have been better parents.

Anyway, Doro waited—more out of curiosity than anything else, I think. Jan came back in about thirty minutes. She came back cursing herself for the coward she was and believing that Doro would surely kill her now. Instead, he took her up to his room and beat her. Beat her for God knows how long. We could hear her screaming at first. I read the others and found what I thought I’d find. That every one of them knew from personal experience how bad Doro’s beatings could be. I knew myself, though, like the others, I hadn’t had one for a few years.

Now we just sat around not looking at each other and waiting for it to be over. After a while things were quiet. Jan was in bed for three days. Doro ordered Rachel not to help her.

Rachel had enough to do helping Jesse when he came in. He was the last to arrive, because he wasted two days trying to fight the pattern. He came in mad and tired and still pretty cut up from a fight he’d gotten into on the day I called him. I had found out about that by reading his mind. And I knew about the little town he owned in Pennsylvania, and the things he did to the people there, and the way he made them love him for it. I was all ready to hate his guts. Meeting him in person didn’t give me any reason to change my mind.

He said, “You green-eyed bitch, I don’t know how you dragged me here, but you damned well better let me go. Fast.”

I was in a bad mood. I had been hearing slightly different versions of that same song from everybody for two days. I said, “Man, if you don’t find something better to call me, I’m going to knock the rest of your teeth out.”

He stared at me as though he wasn’t quite sure he’d heard right. I guess he wasn’t very used to people talking back to him and making it stick. He started toward me. The two words he managed to get out were, “Listen, bitch—”

I picked up a heavy little stone horse statuette from the end table next to me and tried to break his jaw with it. My thoughts were shielded so that he couldn’t anticipate what I was going to do the way he did with the guy he beat up back in Donaldton. I left him lying on the floor bleeding and went up to Rachel’s room.

She answered my knock and stood in her doorway glaring down at me. “Well?”

“Come downstairs,” I said. “I have a patient for you.”

She frowned. “Someone is hurt?”

“Yeah, Jesse Bernarr. He’s the last member of our ‘family’ to come in. He came in a little madder than the rest of you.”

I could feel Rachel sweep the downstairs portion of the house with her perception. She found Jesse and focused in tight on him. “Oh, fine,” she muttered after a moment. “And me with nothing to draw on.”

But she went right down to him. I followed, because I wanted to see her heal him. I hadn’t seen anything so far but her memories.

She knelt beside him and touched his face. Suddenly she was viewing the damage

from the inside, first coming to understand it, then stimulating healing. I couldn’t find words to describe how she did it. I could see. I could understand, I thought. I could even show somebody else mentally. But I couldn’t have talked about it. I began wondering if I could do it.

Rachel was still busy over Jesse when I left. I went into the kitchen, sort of in a daze. I was mentally going over a lot of Rachel’s other healings—the ones I’d gotten from her memory. What I had learned from her just now made everything clearer. I felt as though I had just begun to understand a foreign language—as though I had been hearing it and hearing it, and suddenly a little of it was getting through to me. And that little was opening more to me.

I pulled open a drawer and took out a paring knife. I put it to my left arm, pressed down, cut quickly. Not deep. Not too deep. It hurt like hell, anyway. I made a cut about three inches long, then threw the knife into the sink. I held my arm over the sink too, because it started to bleed. I stopped the pain, just to find out whether or not I could. It was easy. Then I let it hurt again. I wanted to feel everything I did in every way I could feel it. I stopped the bleeding. I closed my eyes and let the fingers of my right hand move over the wound. Somehow that was better. I could concentrate my perception on the wound, view it from the inside, without being distracted by what my eyes were seeing. My arm began to feel warm as I began the healing, and it grew warmer, hot. It wasn’t really an uncomfortable feeling, though, and I didn’t try to shut it out. After a while it cooled, and I could feel that my arm was completely healed.

I opened my eyes and looked at it. Part of the arm was still wet with blood, where it had run down. But where the cut had been, I couldn’t see much more than a fine scar. I rinsed my arm under the faucet and looked again. Nothing. Just that little scar that nobody would even see unless they were looking for it.

“Well,” said Rachel’s voice behind me. “Doro said you were related to me.”

I turned to face her, smiling, a little prouder of myself than I should have been in the presence of a woman who could all but raise the dead. “I just wanted to see if I could do it.”

“It took you about five times longer than it should have for a little cut like that.”

“Shit, how long did it take you the first time you tried it?” Then I thought I saw a chance to make peace with her. I had been in one argument after another with the actives since they arrived. It was time to stop. It really was. “Never mind,” I said. “You’re right. I did take a long time, compared to you. Maybe you could help me learn to speed it up. Maybe you could teach me a little more about healing, too.”

“Either you learn on your own or you don’t learn,” she said. “No one taught me.”

“Was there anybody around who could have?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Look, you’d be a good teacher, and I’d like to learn.”

“Good luck.”

“The hell with you, then.” I turned away from her, disgusted, and went to the refrigerator to make myself a ham-and-cheese sandwich. I was skinny at least partly because I didn’t usually snack on things like that, but I felt hungry now. I figured Rachel would leave, but she didn’t.

“Where’s the cook?” she asked.

“In her room watching soap operas, I guess. That’s usually where she is when she isn’t

in here.”

“Would you call her down?”

“Why?”

“I made Jesse sleep when I finished with him, but I could feel then how hungry he was.”

I froze with my sandwich halfway to my mouth. “Is he? And how do you feel?” I didn’t have to ask. I could read it from her faster than she could say it.

“Fine. Not drained at all. I—” She looked at me, suddenly accusing. “You know how I should be feeling, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

I was surprised to realize how much I didn’t want to tell her. None of them knew that I could read them through their shields, that nothing they could do would keep me out. They hated me enough already. But I had already decided not to hide my ability. Not to act as though I were ashamed of it or afraid of them. “I read it in your mind,” I said.

“When?” She was beginning to look outraged.

“That doesn’t matter. Hell, I don’t even remember exactly when.”

“I’ve been shielded most of the time. Unless you read it just now while I was healing … you were reading me then, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You watched what I did, then came in here to try it on yourself.”

“That’s right. Doesn’t it seem strange to you that you don’t feel drained?”

“We’ll get back to that. I want to find out more about your snooping. I didn’t feel you reading me just now.”

I took a deep breath. “I could say that was because you were so busy with Jesse, but I won’t bother. Rachel, you’ll never feel me reading you unless I want you to.”

She looked at me silently for several seconds. “It’s part of your special ability, then. You can read people without their being aware of it. And … you can read people without thinning your shield enough to have them read you. Because you weren’t open just now. I would have noticed.” She stopped as though waiting for me to say something. I didn’t. She went on, “And you can read people right through their shields. Can’t you!” It was a demand or an accusation. Like she was daring me to admit it.

“Yes,” I said. “I can.”

“So you’ve taken our mental privacy as well as our freedom.”

“It looks like I’ve given you something, too.”

“Given me what?”

“Freedom from the parasitic need you feel so guilty about sometimes.”

“If you weren’t hiding behind Doro, I’d show you how much I appreciate your gift.”

“No doubt you’d try. But since Doro is on my side, shouldn’t we at least try to get along?”

She turned and walked away from me.

Nothing was settled and I had one more strike against me. But at least I was starting to learn to heal. I had a feeling I should learn as much as I could about that as quickly as I could. In case Rachel tried something desperate.

Nobody tried anything for a while, though. There was only the usual arguing. Jesse promised me he was going to “get” me. He was a big, dumb, stocky guy, blond, good

looking, mean—a troublemaker. But, somehow, he was the one active that I was never afraid of. And he was wary of me. He told himself I was crazy, and he kept away from me in spite of his threat.

People began to get together in the house to do something besides argue.

Seth started sleeping in Ada’s room, and Ada, our mouse, started to look a little more alive.

Jesse went to Rachel’s room one night to thank her for healing him. His gratitude must have pleased her. He went back the next night to thank her again.

Karl said “Good morning” to me once. I think it just slipped out.

Rachel told Doro—not me—that I had been right. That she could heal now without taking strength from a crowd. In fact, she said she wasn’t sure she still could draw strength from crowds. She said the pattern had changed her, limited her somehow. Now she seemed to be using her patients’ own strength to heal them—which sounded as though it would be dangerous if her patient was in bad shape to start with. Jesse had merely eaten a couple of steaks when she let him wake up. Steaks, a lot of fries, salad, and about a quart of milk. But Jesse was such a big guy that I suspected that was the way he usually ate. I found out later that I was right. So, evidently, the healing hadn’t weakened him that much.

I kept to myself during those first days. I watched everybody—read everybody, that is. I found that Rachel had spread the word about my abilities and everybody figured I was watching them. They didn’t like it. They thought a lot of shit at me when I was in a room with them. But I almost never read them steadily when I was with them, talking to them. I had to keep my attention on what they were saying. So it took me a while to realize that I was being cursed out on two levels.

I was settling in, though. I was learning not to be afraid of any of them. Not even Karl. They were all older than I was and they were all physically bigger. For a while, I had to keep telling myself I couldn’t afford to let that matter. If I went on letting them scare me, I’d never be able to handle them. After a while, I started to convince myself. Maybe I was influenced by the kind of thoughts I picked up from them when they were off guard. Sometimes, even while they were complaining or arguing or cursing at me, they were aware of being very comfortable within the pattern. Jesse wasn’t getting any of the mental static that had used to prevent him from driving a car, and Jan didn’t have to always be careful what she touched—bothered by the latent mental images she had used to absorb from everything. And, of course, Rachel didn’t need her crowds. And Clay Dana didn’t need as much help from Seth as he had before he came to us. Clay seemed to be getting some benefit from the pattern even though he wasn’t a member of it. And that left Seth with more time for Ada.

Everybody was settling in. But the others didn’t like it. It scared them that they were not only getting used to their leashes but starting to see benefits in them. It scared hell out of them that maybe they were giving in the way ordinary people gave in to them. That they were getting to be happy slaves like Karl’s servants. Their fear made them fight harder than ever against me. I could understand their feelings, but that wasn’t enough. I had to do something about them. I was fed up with hearing about them. I thought for a while, then went to talk to Doro.

I had come to depend on Doro more now than I ever had before. He was the only person in the house that I could talk to without getting blamed, cursed, or threatened. I

had all but moved into his room. So, one night, about two weeks after my transition, I walked into his room, fell across his bed, and said, “Well, I guess this has gone on long enough.”

“What?” he asked. He was at his desk scribbling something that looked like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics in a notebook.

“Everybody sitting around waiting for something that isn’t going to happen,” I said. “Waiting for the pattern to just disappear.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Get them all together and make them face a few facts. And then, after they stop screaming, get them thinking about what they can do with themselves in spite of the pattern.” I sat up and looked at him. “Hell, they’re all telepaths. They don’t have to be able to go miles from home to get work done. And God knows they need something to do!”

“Work?”

“Right. Jobs, interests, goals.” I had been thinking about it for days now. “They can make their own jobs. It will give them less time to bitch at me. Rachel can have a church if she wants one. The others can look around, find out what they want.”

“If they’re reasonable. They might not be, you know.”

“Yeah.”

“They might not stop screaming, as you put it, until they’ve tried to lynch you.”

“Yeah,” I repeated. I took a deep breath. “Want to sit in and see the blood?”

He smiled. “There might not be any blood if I’m there.”

“Then, by all means, sit in.”

“Oh, I will. But it will only be to let them know I’m acknowledging your authority over them. I’m going to turn them loose, Mary.”

I swallowed. “Already, huh?”

“They’re yours. It’s time you jumped in among them.”

“I guess so.” I really wasn’t surprised. I had seen him working up to this. He couldn’t read my mind, but he watched me as closely as I watched everybody else. He questioned me. I didn’t mind. He let the others complain to him about me, but he didn’t question them about me or make them promises. That, I appreciated. So now it was time for me to be kicked out of the nest.

“You’ll be leaving if this works, won’t you?” I asked.

“For a while. I’ll be back. I have a suggestion that might help you both before and after I leave, though.”

“What?”

“Let Karl in on what you’re going to do before you do it. Let him get over some of his anger with you and see the sense in what you’re saying. Then, if I understand him as well as I think I do, he’ll stand with you if any of the others threaten you.”

“Isn’t that just trading one protector for another? I’m supposed to be able to protect myself.”

“Oh, you can. But, chances are, you’ll have to do it by killing someone. I was trying to help you avoid that.”

I nodded. I knew he was still worried that my killing might be a chain-reaction thing. That if I took one of the actives, then, sooner or later, I’d have to take another. And another. I had a feeling that, when he left, he wouldn’t go any farther than Emma’s house. And from there, he’d keep whatever special senses he had trained on me.

“Is Karl alone now?” he asked.

I checked. “Yes, for a change.” Karl had been screwing around with Jan, of all people. He couldn’t have found a better way to disgust me.

“Then, go to him now. Talk to him.”

I gave Doro a dirty look. It was late, and I was in no mood to hear the things Karl would probably say to me. I just wanted to go to bed. But I got up and went to see Karl.

He was lying on his back interfering with the thoughts of some sleeping local politician. I hesitated for a moment to find out what he was doing. He was just making sure that a company he and Doro controlled got a zone variance it needed to erect a building. He had a job, anyway. I knocked at his door.

He listened silently to what I had to tell him, his face expressionless.

“So we’re here, we belong to you, and that’s that,” he said quietly.

“That wasn’t my point.”

“Yes it was. Along with the fact that we might as well find some way to live our lives this way and make the best of it.”

“All I want us to do is settle down and start acting like human beings again.”

“If that’s still what we are. What do you want from me?”

“Help, if you can give it. If you will.”

“Me, help you?”

“You’re my husband.”

“That wasn’t my idea.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. This wasn’t the time to fight with him.

“Doro will back you up,” he said. “He’s all you need.”

“He’s putting me on my own. He’s putting us on our own.”

“Why? What have you done?”

“Nothing, so far. It’s not punishment. He just thinks it’s time we found out whether we can survive without him—as a group.”

“Whether you can survive.”

“No, us, really. Because, if things go bad, I’m not about to let the others get me without taking as many of them as I can with me.” I took a deep breath. “That’s why I want your help. I’d like to get through this without killing anybody.”

He looked a little surprised. “Are you so sure you can kill?”

“Positive.”

“How can you know? You’ve never tried.”

“You don’t want to hear how I know, believe me.”

“Don’t be stupid. If you want my help at all, you’d better tell me everything.”

I looked at him. I made myself just look at him until I could answer quietly. “I know the same way you know how to eat when you’re hungry. I’m that kind of parasite, Karl. I suppose you and the others might as well face it the way I have.”

“You … you’re saying you’re a female Doro?”

“Not exactly, but that’s close enough.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Oh yes you do.”

He stared at me silently for a moment. “I didn’t want to believe you could read me through my shield either.”

“I can. That’s part of my ability, too.”

“You have enough abilities not to need my help.”

“I told you why I need you.”

“Yes. You don’t want to kill.”

“Not unless somebody is stupid enough to attack me.”

“But if hunger is what you feel, how can you avoid doing something about it eventually? You’ll have to kill.”

“It’s more like having an appetite—like being able to eat but not really being hungry.”

“But you will get hungry. It seems to me that’s why we’re here. We’re your food supply. You’re gathering people the way Doro does. It just isn’t as much work for you as it is for him.”

“Yeah,” I said softly. “I’ve been thinking things like that myself. They might be all wrong. But even if they aren’t, I don’t know what to do about it.”

He turned his head, stared at a bookcase. “Short of committing suicide, there’s not much you can do.”

“And I’m not about to do that. But I’ll tell you, as mad as these people make me sometimes, it would be almost as hard for me to kill one of them as it would be for me to commit suicide. I don’t want their lives.”

“For now.”

“And I don’t want anybody forcing me to change my mind. Because, if I do, I’m not sure I’ll be able to control myself. I might kill more of you than I mean to.” I got up to leave. “Karl, I’m not asking you to make up your mind now, or promise me anything. I just wanted you to know there was a choice to make.” I started for the door.

“Wait a minute.”

I stopped, waited.

“You’re closed, shielded all the time,” he said. “I don’t think you’ve unshielded once since you did it for me after your transition.”

“Would you if you were living with people who wanted to kill you?”

“What if I asked you to open for me? Just for me. Now.”

“Why?”

“Because you need me. And because I need to see the truth of what you’re telling me.”

“I thought that was settled.”

“I’ve got to see it for myself, Mary. I’ve got to be certain. I can’t … do what you’re asking until I’ve seen for myself that it’s necessary.”

I read him, saw that he was telling the truth. He was angry and bitter and he didn’t like himself much for even thinking about siding with me. But he knew it was his best chance for survival—for a while, at least.

I opened. I was more worried about accidentally taking him than I was about what he might find out. I was a little touchier about his rummaging through my memories than I had been before, but I put up with it. He didn’t go after anything more than verification of what I had told him. That was all he cared about.

“All right,” he said after a moment.

I shielded, looked at him.

“I’ll do what I can to help you,” he said. “And heaven help both of us.”

Chapter Seven

MARY

Winning Karl over gave me the courage to get right to work on the others. I called everybody together in the living room at around ten the next morning. Karl came in with Vivian, and Seth Dana came with Ada and Clay. Vivian and Clay didn’t really have to be there, of course, but it didn’t matter to me that they were.

Karl had to go and get Jan. She said she wasn’t about to take orders from me. I figured we’d have this meeting and then, if she still felt that way, I’d show her how gentle Doro had been with her.

And Doro had to get Jesse and Rachel. They were shacked up in Jesse’s room now, like they meant to stay together for a while. They were sure as hell together in their opinion of me. In fact, they were so close together and they hated me so much that I knew if I had to take anybody, it would probably be one of them. And the way they had been acting for the past few days, I didn’t see how I could get away with taking just one. Neither of them was going to sit by and watch the other killed.

That bothered me. I realized that their feelings for each other could be used against them—that, for a while at least, I could control one by threatening the other. But, somehow, I didn’t want to do that. I’d try it if I had to, rather than kill them both and make myself a liability to Doro, but I hoped they wouldn’t push me that far.

Once they were all in the room, with Doro sitting by himself off to one side, I made my speech. Doro told me later that I was too blunt, too eager to threaten and challenge. He was probably right.

I told everybody that the pattern was a permanent fixture binding them to me. It wasn’t going anywhere, I wasn’t going anywhere, and they weren’t going to do anything to me. I told them I could kill them, would kill them if they pushed me, but that I didn’t want to kill them if I could avoid it. I told them to follow the feelings I knew they were suppressing and accept the pattern. Get themselves some new interests or revive some old ones, get jobs if they wanted them, stop sitting around bitching like kids. I spoke quietly to them. I didn’t rant and rave. But they still didn’t like what I had to say.

And, of course, except for Karl, they didn’t want to believe me. I had to open to them. I had thought that might be necessary. I hadn’t been looking forward to it but I was ready to do it. First, though, I did what I could to throw a scare into them.

“Look,” I said quietly. “You all know me. You know I’ll do whatever I have to to defend myself. Try anything more than reading me now, and you’ve had it. That’s all.”

I opened. I could see that they were moving cautiously, trying to find out whether I had the power I claimed before they made any move against me—which was intelligent of them.

I had never opened my mind to anyone but Karl before. I had only the memories of the others to tell me what it was like to open to more than one person at a time. They had never done it deliberately. It was just that they couldn’t stay shielded all the time, the way I could. Their shields cut off their mental perception totally. In a way, for them, shielding

was like wandering around wearing a gag, a blindfold, and earplugs. None of them could put up with it for long. So sometimes they picked up things from each other. Sometimes two or three of them picked up something from one. They didn’t like it, but they were learning to live with it. Doro had said that in itself was more than he had dared to hope for. Actives had never been able to live with it before. He said it seemed much easier for my actives to keep out of each other’s minds than it had been for earlier generations. He gave my pattern the credit for that. Maybe my pattern deserved the credit for the way I was able to accept them all into my mind, too. Like them, I didn’t enjoy it. But I wasn’t nervous or afraid, because I knew I could defend myself if I had to, and I knew none of them meant to try anything—yet. I was just uncomfortable. Like I’d suddenly found myself stark naked in front of a lot of strangers, all of whom were taking a good look.

At least it was easy to keep track of them and know who was getting what. I hadn’t been sure it would be with so many. But I spotted Jesse the moment he decided to do a little snooping into matters other than the truth of what I had told them.

I reached out and contracted the muscle of his lower leg into a tight, hard knot.

I had taken Rachel’s advice and been working on my own to develop whatever healing ability I had. I was still a long way from being ready to call myself a healer, but I had learned a few things from viewing my body and other people’s bodies from the inside.

And I had read medical books and I had read Rachel. I found that I learned best, though, by watching people who had things wrong with them—seeing how their bodies healed, understanding what had gone wrong in the first place. If I could understand it, I could make it happen.

A few days before, I had gotten a bad cramp in my leg.

So now Jesse had a bad cramp in his leg. He yelled, more surprised than hurt— although it did hurt. And, of course, he snapped his attention away from me like a released rubber band.

It was a very quick, very easy thing, to cause a cramp. By the time the others realized I had done it, I was finished and paying attention to them again. They dropped away from me almost all at once. Almost. Rachel hung on, shaped her thoughts into words for me.

Don’t think you can ever handle me that way!

Of course not, I sent back. Unfortunately for you, the only way 1 can handle you is by killing you.

She dropped away from me mad and scared and ashamed of herself for being scared.

As she broke contact, Jesse stood up. His cramp had faded away normally, since I hadn’t done anything to prolong it or make it worse. I could have used his own muscle to break his leg. He didn’t seem to realize that. He started toward me.

Karl got up quickly, stepped in front of Jesse. A distance runner facing a football player. They made a contrast. Karl spoke just as Jesse was about to knock him out of the way.

“A question, Jess,” he said quietly. “Only a question. What do you imagine you’ll do when you reach her—aside from letting her make an example of you, I mean.” And he stepped out of Jesse’s path and sat down again. Jesse stayed where he was, glaring first at Karl, then at me.

“One woman,” he said bitterly. “A woman, for Godsake! The biggest damn thing about her is her mouth! And you’re all going to let her tell you you’re serving a life

sentence in this place.” He looked around the room, his eyes accusing. “She couldn’t kill more than one or two of us if we all hit her at once. Don’t you see? Her only hold on us is that the rest of you are so afraid of being the one she gets that you’d rather stay on her Goddamn leash than stand up to her!”

He looked around the room again, this time challengingly. “I’m willing to take a chance. Who’ll stand with me? Who’s as sick of being in jail as I am?”

I was watching Rachel. She looked at me and I glanced from her to Jesse, then back to her. The threat was delivered that simply, for what it was worth. Rachel understood. She kept quiet. Jesse was turning toward her when Seth spoke up.

“Jess, it seems to me you’re forgetting about Doro.”

Jesse looked over at Doro. Doro looked back expressionlessly. “I’m not forgetting.” Jesse spoke to Seth, but kept his eyes on Doro. “I may have read a little more from Mary than you did—than any of the rest of you did. Maybe nobody but me noticed that Doro was about to dump her—put her on her own with us and let her sink or swim as best she could.”

Nobody said anything.

“Well?” said Jesse to Doro. “Weren’t you?”

“I was,” said Doro. “But I hadn’t done it yet.”

“As long as you were going to, what difference does it make?”

Doro leaned back in his chair. “You tell me.”

“You didn’t say anything,” said Jesse, frowning. “You weren’t going to stop me.”

“No.”

“What were you going to do? Let me go through with it, and then kill me if she hadn’t managed to?”

“Yes.”

Jesse stared at him as though he was finally realizing that it was Doro he was talking to, not one of us. Without another word, he turned and went back to his chair.

Doro got up, came closer in to join the group. He sat down beside me, spoke to me softly.

“I warned you.”

“I know,” I said.

He looked around at the others. “You’re all powerful people,” he said. “I wish you weren’t in such a hurry to kill yourselves. Alive, you could grow into something impressive and worthwhile.”

“All seven of us,” said Rachel bitterly.

“If you survive as a group, you won’t be only seven long. Your numbers are small because I’ve deliberately kept them small. If you can work together now, you can begin to grow slowly through your own children and through the latents scattered around the country who are capable of producing telepathically active children. Latents who need only the right mates to produce actives. The seven of you can be the founders and the leaders of a new race.” He paused, glanced at Jesse. “For any of you who don’t realize it, that’s what I want. That’s what I’ve been trying to achieve for thousands of years. It’s what I’ll be on my way to achieving if the seven of you can stay together on your own without killing each other. I think you can. I think that, in spite of the way you’ve been acting, your own lives are still of some importance to you. Of course, if they aren’t, I want to know that, too. So I’m withdrawing my protection from Mary. And, incidentally, I’m

releasing her from the restriction I put on her.” He glanced at me. “The rest of you don’t know about that. You don’t have to. You’re free now to behave as intelligently or as stupidly as you like.”

“You want us to spend the rest of our lives here?” demanded Rachel.

“If that’s what turns out to be necessary,” said Doro. “I doubt that it will be, though. You’re a very young group. If you survive to grow older, I think you’ll work out a comfortable arrangement.”

“What arrangement!”

“I don’t know, Rae. You’re also a new kind of group. You’ll have to find your own way. Perhaps pairs of you will take over other houses in this neighborhood. Perhaps, in time, you’ll even find a way to travel long distances from Mary without discomfort.”

“I wish I could show you what it feels like to go just a few miles from her,” muttered Jesse. “Compare it to straining against a choke chain.”

Doro looked over at him. “It’s easier to take now, though, than it was when you first got here, isn’t it?” He knew it was. I had read Jesse and told him so days before.

Jesse opened his mouth, probably to lie. But he knew he had about as much chance of getting a lie past Doro as he did of getting one past me. He closed his mouth for a moment, then said, “Easier or not, I don’t like it any more now than I ever did. None of us do!”

“That’s at least partly because all of you are trying so hard not to.”

“I’m not trying,” said Jan. “I’m just slowly going out of my mind from being cooped up in this place. I can’t stand it!”

“You’ll find a way to stand it,” said Doro coldly.

“But why should I? Why should any of us? Why should we all suffer because of her?”

There was loud agreement all around.

“You needn’t suffer at all,” he said. “You know better than I do how easily you could slip into your new roles here if you wanted to.” That was something else I had told him— how they were fighting not only me but their own inclinations. He took a deep breath. “But you’re on your own. It would be wise of you to look for ways to live with your new situation, but if you choose not to, go ahead and kill each other.”

“What if we just kill Mary?” said Rachel. She was looking at me as she spoke.

Doro gave her a look of disgust. Then he got up and left me sitting alone, went back to his place. Rachel looked at Jesse. Jesse picked it right up.

“Who’s with us?” he said. “Who wants out of this jail now? Jan?”

“You want to … to kill her?” asked Jan.

“You know any other way out?”

“No. All right. I’m with you.”

“Seth?”

“How many people you figure you need to kill one woman, Jess?”

“As many as I can get, man, and you’re a damned fool if you can’t see why. You’ve read her. You’ve seen what kind of parasite she is. We either get together and kill her, or we wait, and maybe she kills us off one by one.”

I sat there watching, listening to all this, wondering why I was waiting. Jesse was getting people together to kill me and I was waiting. The only intelligent thing I was doing was keeping part of my attention on Rachel. She was the only one of them who

might try something on her own. She could damage my body, and she could do it very quickly, I knew. But she couldn’t do it without thinking about it first, deciding to do it. She was dead when she made that decision.

Seth turned to face me, stared at me for several seconds. “You know,” he said, “in the two weeks I’ve been here, I don’t think you and I have done much more than pop off at each other a couple of times. I don’t know you.”

“You’ve been busy,” I said. I glanced at Ada, who sat close to him, looking scared.

“You’re not afraid,” said Seth.

I shrugged.

“Or, if you are, you hide it pretty good.”

And Jesse. “Are you in or out, Dana?”

“Out,” said Seth quietly.

“You’re with her?” Jesse gestured sharply at me. “You like being a Goddamn slave?”

“No, not with her. Not against her, either. She hasn’t done anything to me, man. At least, not anything that was her fault.”

“What the hell does ‘fault’ have to do with it? You’re going to be stuck with her for the rest of your life unless we get rid of her now.”

Seth looked at Ada, then at Clay on his other side. I knew already that Ada wanted no part of this. Jesse, Jan, and Rachel were confirming Ada’s worst fears; were, in her opinion, acting like people who deserved to be quarantined. Clay had been bitter about being dragged away from the fresh start he was going to make in Arizona. And when he heard I was the one who had done the dragging, he decided I was the one to hate. Then, like Seth, he had started to see me as just another of Doro’s creations, no more to blame for what I was than anyone else in the house. Ironically, he felt sorry for me. He didn’t want Seth involved in killing me.

“Well?” demanded Jesse. He glared at Seth.

“I’ve said what I had to say,” said Seth.

Jesse turned away from him in disgust. “Well, Karl, I don’t suppose you want to change sides.”

Karl smiled a little. “I would if you had a chance, Jess. You don’t, you know.”

“Karl, please.” Jan. Sweet Jan. Maybe I could get her, too. “Karl, with you helping us, we would have a chance.”

Karl ignored her, glanced at me. “You are going to try to talk them out of this, aren’t you?”

I nodded, turned to face Jesse. “Man, with three people insisting that they’re going to attack me, I won’t have time to be gentle. No more little cramps. You jump me, and you and Rachel are dead. I might not be able to get Jan, but you two don’t have a chance.”

“Let’s make it even stronger than that,” said Karl. “I don’t want fighting. There’s a possibility that Mary might lose control and do a lot more damage than she intends to do. I’ve read her more thoroughly than you have. I think there’s a real danger that, once she got started, she might take us all. If the three of you are foolish enough to attack her in spite of that possibility, you’d better attack me too.”

The words were goads to Jesse. Abruptly, he dove at me through his strand of the pattern. I had no warning. He acted on impulse, without thinking. And using the pattern that way … Until now, nobody had really used the pattern except me. His strand of the pattern struck at me snakelike. Fast. Blindingly fast.

I didn’t have time to think about reacting. What happened, happened automatically. And it happened even faster than Jesse had moved.

He was mine. His strength was mine. His body was worthless to me, but the force that animated it was literally my ambrosia—power, sustenance, life itself.

By the time Jesse realized what was happening and tried to twist away, there was almost nothing left of him. His strand of the pattern thrashed feebly, uselessly.

I realized that I could leave him that way. I watched him with a kind of detached interest, and it occurred to me that if I let him go he would grow strong again. He was terrified now, and weak, but he wasn’t getting any weaker on his own. He could live, if I let him, if I wasn’t too greedy. He could live and grow strong and feed me again.

I opened my eyes, wondering when I had shut them. I felt higher than I ever had before. I held out my hand and looked at it. It was shaking. I was shaking all over, but, God, I felt good.

Everybody was looking at Jesse slumped in his chair. The surprise they were all radiating told me that he had just lost consciousness. They were not quite aware yet of what had happened. Rachel began to realize it first. She began turning toward me—in slow motion, it seemed—meaning to get her revenge. She thought Jesse was dead. She, a healer, thought he was dead, but I knew he was alive.

She finished turning. She was going to rupture a good-sized blood vessel in my brain.

I took her.

She didn’t hand herself to me the way Jesse had. She fought me briefly. But somehow her struggles only helped me drain her strength. I was more conscious of what I was doing with her. I could see how my mental image of her shrank in proportion to the amount of strength I took. I took less from her than I had from Jesse. I didn’t need anything at all from her—except peace. I wanted her to stop her useless struggling. I wanted her not to be able to do what she wanted to do to me. That was all. I let her know it.

Jesse! Her thought was full of bitterness and anger and grief. I tried to soothe her wordlessly the way I might have handled a frightened child. She struggled harder, terrified, hysterical, giving me more of her strength by her struggles.

Finally, she stopped, exhausted. Jesse. Grief now. Only grief.

He’s alive, I sent.

He’s dead! 1 saw him die.

1 tell you he’s alive. You took too quick a look. I pressed through her grief so that she could see that I was giving her truth. He is alive. 1 didn’t want his life. 1 don’t want yours. Will you make me take yours anyway?

You aren’t going to kill me?

Not unless you make me.

Then, let me go. Let me see Jesse.

I let her go, opened my eyes again. Evidently, closing them was some kind of reflex. Now the others were looking at Rachel, were turning to look at me. I felt better than ever. But steadier now. No more shaking. I felt in control. Before, I’d felt ready to take off and fly across the room. Everybody was staring at me.

“They’re both all right,” I said. “Weak, I guess. Put them to bed. They’ll regain their strength.” Like Rachel’s crowds going away to regain their strength. I remembered Jan suddenly and looked at her.

She stared back, round-eyed.

“How about you?” I said.

“No!” I thought she was going to get up and run out the door again. “No.”

I laughed at her. I don’t think I would have done that if I hadn’t been so high. I might have had a lot more to say to her, but I wouldn’t have laughed.

“What did you do?” asked Karl.

I looked at him, and I could have hugged him for no reason at all. No. There was a reason. A big one. “I found out something,” I said. “I just found out that I don’t have to kill.”

“But what did you do to them?”

Abruptly I was annoyed, almost angry at him for wanting details now, when it was all so new, when I just wanted to sit back and savor what I was feeling. Doro came up behind me, put his hands on my shoulders, and massaged gently.

“Calm down a little,” he said. “I know you feel good, but calm down.”

“High,” I said. I grinned at him. “I feel high. You know.”

“Yes. See if you can rein yourself in enough to tell us what you did.”

“You know.”

“Tell us anyway.”

“Took some of their strength.” I leaned back, relaxed against the couch, pulling my thoughts together. “Only some. I’m not a monster. At least not the kind you made me think I was.” Then, as an afterthought. “I took more from Jesse. I didn’t know what I was doing when he jumped me.”

“Seth, check Jesse,” Doro ordered.

Apparently Seth did. I didn’t pay any attention. “He’s still breathing,” Seth said after a moment.

“Rae,” Doro said, “how do you feel?” Rachel was conscious then. But she didn’t say anything. Curiosity reached me through my private haze. I looked at her.

She was crying. She wasn’t making any noise at all, but her whole body shook. She made a sound of pain as we all turned to look at her, and hid her face in her hands. She was shielded to the others. But to me she radiated shame and defeat. Humiliation.

That reached me and cleared the nonsense out of my head. I stood up, half expecting to find myself staggering. I was steady enough, though. Good.

I went to her and took her arm. I knew she wanted to be away from us. Tears, especially tears of defeat, were private things. She looked up, saw that it was me, and tried to pull her arm away.

“Stop acting stupid,” I told her. “Get up and come on.”

She stared at me. I still had hold of her arm. She started to get up, then realized how weak she was. She was glad enough to lean on me then.

She swallowed, whispered, “What about Jesse?”

What in the name of heaven did she see in him? “The others will see that he gets upstairs,” I said. I glanced back at Doro. “She’ll be okay.”

He nodded, went over and draped Jesse’s big body over one shoulder, then followed Rachel and me upstairs.

Chapter Eight

MARY

The meeting just dissolved. Nobody made me any promises. Nobody bowed or scraped. Nobody even looked scared—or felt scared. I checked. Once they got over their surprise, they were even reassured. They could see that Jesse and Rachel were going to be all right. They could see that all I wanted from them was a little cooperation. And now they knew they would be better off if they cooperated. The atmosphere of the house was more relaxed than it had been since the day of my transition.

Seth Dana came up and grinned at me. “Don’t you get the feeling you should have done this two weeks ago?”

I smiled back and shook my head. “I don’t think so. Two weeks ago, I would have had to kill somebody.”

He frowned. “I don’t see why.”

“Everything was too new. You were all on short fuses. You and Ada hadn’t gotten together and mellowed each other, so one or both of you would have been against me. If you had, Karl probably would have, too. He was about ready to strangle me anyway, then.” I shrugged. “This is better. People have had time to cool off.”

He gave me an odd look. “What do you think might have happened if you’d waited a little longer than two weeks, then, let Jesse and Rachel do some mellowing?”

“Jesse and Rachel weren’t mellowing. They were feeding on each other’s hatred, building each other up to jump me.”

“You know,” he said, “I got the impression at first that you just threw this meeting together on the spur of the moment.”

“I did.”

“Yeah. After two weeks of watching everybody and making sure your timing was as right as you could make it.”

Clay Dana came over to where Seth and I were talking. Close up, he looked sort of gray and sick. I thought he must have just had a bad bout of mental interference. “Congratulations,” he said to me. “Now that we all know the new pecking order, do either of you have any aspirins?”

Seth looked at him with concern. “Another headache?”

“Another, hell. It’s the same one I’ve had for three days.”

“From mental interference?” I asked.

“What else?”

“I thought you weren’t getting as much of that now as you used to.”

“I wasn’t,” he said. “It stopped altogether for a few days. That never happened in the middle of a city before. Then, three days ago, it started to come back worse than ever.”

That bothered me. I hadn’t paid much attention to Clay since he arrived, but I knew that anything new and different that went wrong with him, with his out-of-control mental ability, would eventually get blamed on me, on my pattern.

Seth spoke up as though on cue. “Look, Mary, I’ve been meaning to ask you if you

could figure out what was happening to Clay. He’s been in really bad shape, and it just

about has to have something to do with the pattern.”

“First the aspirins,” said Clay. “Find out what you want after—Hey!”

That “Hey!” was almost a shout. I had gotten rid of his headache for him fast—like switching off a light.

“Okay?” I asked, knowing it was.

“Sure.” He looked at me as though he suddenly wanted to get away from me.

I stayed with him mentally for a few moments longer, trying to find out just what was wrong with him. I didn’t really know what to look for. I just assumed that it had something to do with the pattern. I took a quick look through his memories, thinking that that uncontrolled ability of his might have tuned in on the pattern somehow. But it hadn’t in any way that I could see.

I scanned all the way back to the day he and Seth had arrived at the house. It was quick work but frustrating. I couldn’t find a damned thing. Nothing. I switched my attention to the pattern. I had no idea at all of what to look for there and I was getting mad. I checked the pattern strand that stretched from Seth to me. Seth was in mental contact with Clay sometimes to protect him. Maybe, without realizing it, he had done something more than protect.

He hadn’t.

I had nowhere else to go. There was something especially galling about suffering a defeat now, just minutes after I had won my biggest victory. But what could I do?

I shifted my attention back to Clay. There was a glimmer of something just as I shifted—like the glimmer of a fine spider web that catches the light just for a second and then seems to vanish again. I froze. I shifted back to the pattern, bringing it into focus very slowly. At first there was nothing. Then, just before I would have had a strong, clear focus on the pattern strands of my six actives, there was that glimmer again. I managed to keep it, this time, by not trying to sharpen my focus on it. Like looking at something out of the corner of your eye.

It was a pattern strand. A slender, fragile-seeming thread, like a shadow of one of the comparatively substantial strands of my actives. But it was a pattern strand. Somehow, Clay had become a member of the pattern. How?

I could think of only one answer. The pattern was made up of actives. Just actives, no latents until now. No latents period. Clay was on his way to transition.

The moment the thought hit me, I knew it was right. After a ten-year delay, Clay was going to make it. I tried to tell myself that I wasn’t sure. After all, I had never seen anyone who was about to go into transition before. But I couldn’t even make myself doubt. Clay was going to come through. He would belong to me, like the others. I knew it.

I brought my attention back to Seth and Clay, who stood waiting.

“That took long enough,” said Seth. “What did you find out?”

“That your brother’s not a latent any more,” I said. “That he’s headed toward transition.”

There was a moment of complete silence. Then came quick, bitter disappointment radiating from both men. They didn’t believe me.

Seth spoke quietly. “Mary, Doro himself gave up on Clay years ago, said he wouldn’t ever reach transition.”

“I know it. But there was no pattern back then.”

“But Doro explained that—”

“Dammit, Seth, I’m explaining that Doro was wrong. He might know a hell of a lot, but he can’t foretell the future. And he can’t use my pattern to see what I can see!”

Karl came up as I was talking. When I finished, he asked, “What are you shouting about now?”

I told him and he just shrugged.

“Doro wants to see us both in the library,” he said. “Now.”

“Wait a minute,” said Seth. “She can’t leave now.” He looked at me. “You’ve got to tell us how you know … how after all these years this could happen.” So they were beginning to believe me.

“I’ll have to talk to you after I see what Doro wants,” I said. “It probably won’t take long.”

I followed Karl away from them, hoping I could get back to them soon. I wanted to learn more about what was happening to Clay myself. I was excited about it. But now, Doro and the Dana brothers aside, there was something else I had to do.

“Karl.”

We had almost reached the library door. He stopped, looked at me.

“Thanks for your help.”

“You didn’t need it.”

“Yes I did. I might not have been able to stop myself from killing if they had pushed me harder.”

Karl nodded disinterestedly, turned to go into the library.

“Wait a minute.”

He gave me a look of annoyance.

“I have a feeling that, even though you sided with me, you’re the only one in the house that I haven’t really won over.”

“You didn’t win anyone over,” he said. “You bludgeoned the others into submission. I had already submitted.”

“The hell with that,” I said. I lowered my gaze a little, stared at his chest instead of his face. He was wearing a blue shirt open at the neck so that a little of his mat of brown chest hair showed. “I did what I had to do,” I said. “What I was evidently born to do. I’m not fighting it any more, for the same reason Jesse and Rachel probably won’t fight me any more. It doesn’t do any good.”

“Don’t you think I understand that?”

“If you understand it, why are you still holding it against me?”

“Because Jesse was right about one thing. It doesn’t really matter whether what you’re doing to us is your fault or not. You’re doing it. I’m not fighting you, but you shouldn’t expect me to thank you, either.”

“I don’t.”

He looked a little wary. “Just what do you want from me?”

“You know damn well what I want.”

“Do I?” He stared at me for a long moment. “I suppose I do. Doro must be leaving.” He turned and walked away.

I let him go this time. I felt like throwing something at him, but I let him go. The son of a bitch had Jan and Vivian both, and he had the nerve to talk about Doro and me. Or,

rather, he had the nerve to use Doro to try to hurt me. If he couldn’t get away from me, he’d hurt me. He shouldn’t have been able to hurt me. But he was.

In the library, Doro was sitting at the reading table leafing through a book, and probably reading it. He read fast. Karl and I sat opposite him with an empty chair between us.

“I’ll be leaving tomorrow,” said Doro.

I felt rather than saw Karl’s glance at me. I ignored him. Doro went on.

“Mary, it looks as though you’ve established yourself fairly well. I don’t think anyone will bother you again.”

“No.”

“You’re just going to leave?” said Karl. “Don’t you have any plans for us now that Mary has become what you seemed to want her to become?”

“Mary’s plan sounded all right to me,” said Doro. “It might be harder for the group of you to organize your lives, held together as you are. But I’d rather give you a chance to try it. Let you find out whether you can build something of your own.”

“Or at least of Mary’s own,” said Karl bitterly.

Doro looked from one of us to the other.

“He’s still holding the pattern against me,” I said. “But he might be right, anyway. I might have something we can start working on together.” I told him about Clay Dana. He sat there listening, and looking more and more as though he didn’t believe me.

“Clay lost any chance he had for becoming an active over ten years ago,” he said.

“Ten years ago he didn’t have the pattern to help him along.”

“I find it hard to believe the pattern is helping him now. How could it? What did you do?”

“I don’t know, exactly. But it must be the pattern. What other new thing has there been in his life in the past two weeks? He was a latent before he came here. And if I can push one latent toward transition, why can’t I push others?”

“Oh, my God,” muttered Karl. I ignored him.

“Look,” I said, “we actives were all latents once. We moved up. Why can’t others?”

“The others weren’t bred for it. Clay was, and I can see now that you were right about him. But that doesn’t mean—”

“You can see?”

“Of course. How could I have raised generations of actives if I wasn’t able to judge my people’s potential?”

“Oh, yeah.” The ones who tasted good, yes. “Doro, I want to try bringing other latents to transition.”

“How?”

“By doing to them the only thing I’d ever done to Clay before today. By reading them. Just reading them.”

Doro shook his head. “Go ahead. It won’t work.”

Yes, it would. I felt sure that it would. And I could try it without even leaving the room. I thought of two of my cousins, a brother and sister—Jamie and Christine Hanson. We used to get into trouble together when we were little. As we grew older and started to receive mental interference, we got more antisocial. We abandoned each other and started to get into trouble separately. Doro didn’t pay any attention to Jamie and Christine, and their parents had given up on them years ago. No transition was supposed to come along

and put them back in control of their lives, so, let alone, they’d probably wind up in prison or in the morgue before they were a lot older. But I wasn’t going to let them alone.

I reached out to the old neighborhood, got a bird’s-eye view of it all at once. Dell Street and Forsyth Avenue. Emma’s house. I could have focused in tight and read Rina or Emma. Instead, I followed Forsyth Avenue south past Piedras Altas, where heaven knew how many of my relatives lived, and on to Cooper Street, where I had even more family. On Cooper I recognized the Hanson house and focused in on it.

Christine was inside screaming at her mother. I noticed that she had shaved her head—probably more to get on her mother’s nerves than for any other reason. I didn’t pay any attention to what they were fighting about. I read her the way you skim pages of a phone book looking for a number. Only, I wasn’t looking for anything. I noticed that she’d been pregnant three times—one miscarriage and two abortions. And she was only nineteen. And she’d been with some idiot friends when they decided to rob a liquor store. Some other things. I didn’t care. I just read her. Then I went after Jamie.

I found him sitting on an old sofa in the garage, fooling around with a guitar. I read him and learned, among other things, that he had just gotten out of jail a few days before. He had been driving drunk, smashed into a parked car, backed up, drove away. But somebody got his license number. Ninety days.

Now that he was out, he couldn’t take the running battle that was usually going on inside the house. So he was living in the garage until some money came his way and he could get his own place.

I shifted my attention to the pattern. I knew what to look for now. My experience with Clay had taught me. Slender threads, fragile, tentative, soon to grow into the real thing. I found them stretching between me and both Hansons. Both of them. They were mine.

I snapped back to the library, excited, elated. “I did it!”

I’m not quite sure what expression I was wearing, but Doro frowned and drew back from me a little.

“I did it! I got two more! You’re going to have your damn empire sooner than you thought.”

“Which two?” He spoke very quietly.

“Hanson. Christine and Jamie. They live over on Cooper Street. You used to see them around Emma’s house sometimes when I was little.”

“I remember.” He stared down at the table for several seconds, still frowning. I assumed he was doing his own checking.

Karl reached over and touched my arm. “Show me,” he said.

Not tell him, show him. Just like that. And just minutes after our little conversation in the hall. If he had caught me in any other mood I would have told him to go to hell. But I felt good. I opened to him.

He looked at the way I had brought the Hansons in, and he looked at my memories on Clay. That was all.

“You want to build an empire, all right,” he said when he was finished. “But Doro isn’t the one you want to build it for.”

“Does it matter?” I asked.

And Doro answered. “No, it doesn’t. All that matters is that you obey me.” There was something frightening, something too intense about the way he was looking at me.

It was my turn to draw back a little. “I’ve always obeyed you.”

“More or less. It could get harder now, though. Sometimes it’s harder for a leader to obey. And sometimes it’s harder to be lenient with a disobedient leader.”

“I understand.”

“No you don’t. Not yet. But I think you’re capable of understanding. That’s why I’m willing to let you go ahead with what you’re planning.”

“It isn’t exactly a plan yet,” I said. “I haven’t had time to think … I just want to start bringing in latents, letting the pattern push them through transition—you were satisfied that the Hansons were on their way, I guess.”

“Yes.”

“Good. The houses in this neighborhood have room for a lot more people. All our neighbors can be persuaded to take in house guests.”

“All of them?” said Karl sarcastically. “How many latents are you planning to enslave?”

“None,” I said. “But I mean to have as many of them brought through transition as I can.”

“Why?” Doro asked. “I mean aside from the fact that you’ve suddenly discovered you enjoy power.”

“You should talk.”

“Is there a reason?”

I thought about it. I needed a few hours of solitude to think and nose around other people’s heads and decide what I was doing myself. “They’re latents,” I said. “And if Rina and the Hanson family and just about all the rest of my relatives are any indication, latents live like dogs. They spend most of their lives sharing other people’s pain and slowly going crazy. Why should they have to go through that if I can give them a better way?”

“Are you so sure it is better?” asked Karl.

“You’re damn right I am. How many latents do you imagine burn the hands off their kids like your mother did—or worse? And you know Doro doesn’t pay attention to those kids. How could he? God knows how many thousands of them there are. So they get shitted on, and if they live to grow up, they shit on their own kids.”

“And you’re going to save them all.” Karl radiated sarcasm.

I turned to look at him.

“You’re not exactly vicious, Mary,” he said. “But you’re not altruistic, either. Why pretend to be?”

“Wait a minute, Karl,” said Doro. And then to me, “Mary, as angry as he’s just made you, I think he’s right. I think there’s a reason for what you want to do that you haven’t faced yet. Think about it.”

I had been just about to explode at Karl. Somehow, though, when Doro said the same thing in different words, it didn’t bother me as much. Well, why did I want to see as many latents as possible brought through transition? So I could be an empress? I wouldn’t even say that out loud. It sounded too stupid. But, whatever I called myself, I was definitely going to wind up with a lot of people taking orders from me, and that really didn’t sound like such a bad thing. And as for altruism, whether it was my real motive or not, every latent we brought into the pattern would benefit from being there. He would regain control of his life and be able to use his energy for something besides fighting to stay sane. But, honestly, as bad as it sounds, I had known that latents were suffering for most

of my life. I grew up watching one of them suffer. Rina. Of course I couldn’t have done anything about it until now, but I hadn’t really wanted to do anything. I hadn’t cared. Not even during the time, just before my transition, when I found out just how much latents suffered. After all, I knew I wasn’t going to be one much longer.

Altruism, ambition—what else was there?

Need?

Did I need those latents, somehow? Was that why I was so enthusiastic, so happy that I was going to get them? I knew I wanted them in the pattern. They belonged to me and I wanted them. The only way to find out for sure whether or not I needed them was to leave them alone and see how I fared without them. I didn’t want to do that.

“I’m not sure what you want me to say,” I told him. “You’re right. I want to bring latents through for my own satisfaction. I admit that. I want them here around me. But as for why…” I shook my head.

“You don’t have to kill,” said Doro quietly. “But you do have to feed. And six people aren’t enough.”

Karl looked startled. “Wait a minute, are you saying she’s going to have to keep doing what she did to Jesse and Rachel? That she’ll have to choose one or two of us regularly and—”

“I don’t know,” said Doro. “It’s possible, of course. And if it turns out to be true, I would think you’d want her to fill the neighborhood with other actives. But, on the other hand, she didn’t take Rachel and Jesse because she wanted them. She took them in self-defense.” He looked at me. “You haven’t been an active long enough for this to mean much, but in the two weeks since your transition, have you felt any need, any inclination to take anyone?”

“No,” I said. “Never. The idea disgusted me until I did it. Then I felt … well, you probably know.”

“He might know,” said Karl. “But I don’t.”

I opened and projected the sensation.

He jumped, whispered, “Jesus Christ.” From him it sounded more like praying than cursing. “If that’s what you felt, I’m surprised you didn’t go ahead and take the rest of us.”

“It’s possible that she was only saving the rest of you for another time,” said Doro. “But I don’t think so. Somehow, her ability reminds me more of Rachel’s. Rachel could have left her congregations unconscious or dead, but she never did. Never felt inclined to. It was easy for her to be careful, easy for her not to really take anyone. But, to a lesser degree, she took everyone. She gained what she needed, and her congregations lost nothing more than they could afford. Nothing that they couldn’t easily replace. Nothing that they even noticed was gone.”

Karl sat frowning at Doro for several seconds after Doro had finished. Then he turned to look at me. “Open to me again.”

I sighed and did it. He would be easier to live with if he knew whether Doro was right or wrong—or at least knew he couldn’t find out. I watched him, not really caring what he found. I stopped him just as he was about to break contact.

You and 1 are going to have to talk later.

About what?

About making some kind of truce before you manage to goad me into hitting back at you.

He changed the subject. Do you realize you’re exactly the kind of parasite he’s described? Except, of course, you prey on actives instead of ordinary people.

1 can see what you’ve found. 1 do seem to be taking a tiny amount of strength from you and from the others. But it’s so small it’s not bothering any of you.

That’s not the point.

The point is, you don’t want me taking anything. Do you have to be told that 1 don’t know how to stop it any more than 1 know how it got started?

1 know. The thought carried overtones of weary frustration. He broke contact, spoke to Doro. “You’re right about her. She’s like Rachel.”

Doro nodded. “That’s best for all of you. Are you going to help her with her cousins?”

“Help her?”

“I’ve never seen a person born to be a latent suddenly pushed into transition. I’m assuming they’ll have their problems and need help.”

Karl looked at me. “Do you want my help again?”

“Of course I do.”

“You’ll need at least one other person.”

“Seth.”

“Yes.” He looked at Doro. “Are you finished with us?”

Doro nodded.

“All right.” He got up. “Come on, Mary. We may as well have that talk before you get back to Seth and Clay.”

DORO

Doro did not leave the Larkin house, as he had planned. Suddenly there was too much going on. Suddenly things were getting out of hand—or at least out of his hands.

Mary was doing very well. She was driven by her own need to enlarge the pattern and aided not only by Doro’s advice but by the experience of the six other actives. From the probing Doro had made her do and the snooping she had done on her own, she now had detailed mental outlines of the other actives’ lives. Knowing what they had done in the past helped her decide what she could reasonably ask them to do now. Knowing Seth, for instance, made her decide to take Clay from him, take charge of Clay herself.

“How necessary is the pain of transition?” she asked Doro before making her decision. “Karl said you told him to hold off helping me until I was desperate. Why?”

“Because, in earlier generations of actives, the more help the person in transition received, the longer it took him to form his own shield.” Doro grimaced remembering. “Before I understood that, I had several potentially good people die of injuries that wouldn’t have happened if their transitions had ended when they should have. And I had others who died of sheer exhaustion.”

Mary shuddered. “Sounds like it would be best to leave them alone completely.” She glanced at Doro. “Which is probably why I’m the only one out of the seven of us who had any help.”

“You were also the only one of the seven to have a seventeen-hour transition. Ten to twelve hours is more normal. Seventeen isn’t that bad, though, and since your predecessors died whenever I left them alone in transition, I decided that you needed

someone. Actually, Karl did a good job.”

“I think I’ll pass on the favor,” she said, “by doing a good job for Clay Dana before his brother helps him to death.” She went to Seth, told him what Doro had just told her, then told him that she, not Seth, would attend Clay at Clay’s transition. Later she repeated the conversation to Doro.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Seth had said. “No. No way.”

“You’re too close to Clay,” she had told him. “You’ve spent more than ten years shielding him from pain.”

“That doesn’t make any difference.”

“The hell it doesn’t! What’s your judgment going to be like when you have to hold off shielding him—when you have to decide whether he’s in enough trouble for you to risk helping him? How objective do you think you’re going to be when he’s lying in front of you screaming?”

“Objective … !”

“His life is going to depend on what you decide to do, man—or decide not to do.” She looked at Clay. “How objective do you think he can be? It’s your life.”

Clay looked uncomfortable, spoke to his brother. “Could she be right, Seth? Could this be something you should leave to somebody else?”

“No!” said Seth instantly. And then again, with a little less certainty, “No.”

“Seth?”

“Look, I can handle it. Have I ever let you down?”

And Mary broke in. “You probably never have, Seth, and I’m not going to give you a chance to ruin your record.”

Seth turned to look at her. “Are you saying you’re going to force me to stand aside?” His tone made the words more a challenge than a question.

“Yes,” said Mary.

Seth stared at her in surprise. Then, slowly, he relaxed. “You could do it,” he said quietly. “You could knock me cold when the time came. But, Mary, if anything happens to my brother, you’d better not let me come to.”

“Clay will be all right,” she said. “I plan to see to it. And I’m really not interested in knocking you out. I hope you won’t make me do it.”

“Then, tell me why. Make me understand why you’re interfering in something that shouldn’t even be any of your business.”

“I started it, man. I’m the reason for it. If it’s anybody’s business, it’s mine. Now, Clay has a better chance with me than he has with you because I can see what’s happening to him both mentally and physically. I’m going to know if he really needs help. I’m not going to have to guess.”

“What can you do but guess? You’re barely out of transition yourself.”

“I’ve got seven transition experiences to draw on. And you can believe I’ve studied all of them. Now it’s settled, Seth.”

Seth took it. Doro watched him with interest after Mary reported the conversation. And Doro caught Seth watching Mary. Seth did not seem angry or vindictive. It was more as though he was waiting for something to happen. He had accepted Mary’s authority as, years before, he had accepted Doro’s. Now he watched to see how she handled it. He seemed surprised when, days later, she gave him charge of her cousin Jamie, but he accepted the responsibility. After that, he seemed to relax a little.

Rachel was on her feet again two days after her attack on Mary. Jesse, more severely weakened, was in bed a day longer. Both became quieter, more cautious people. They, too, watched Mary—warily.

Mary sent Rachel to kidnap the Hansons. Forsyth was a small city; Rachel could go across town without much discomfort. She wouldn’t be staying long, anyway.

“Make their parents believe they’ve left home for good,” Mary told her. “Because, one way or another, they have. You shouldn’t have much tampering to do, though. The parents aren’t going to be sorry to lose them.”

Rachel frowned. “Even so, it seems wrong to just go in and take them—people’s children …”

“They’re not children. Hell, Jamie’s a year older than I am. And if we don’t take them, they probably won’t make it through transition. If they don’t manage to kill themselves by losing control at a bad time, somebody else will kill them by taking them to a hospital. You can imagine what it would be like to be a mental sponge picking up everything in a hospital.”

Rachel shuddered, nodded, turned to go. Then she stopped and faced Mary again. “I was talking to Karl about what you’re trying to do—the community of actives that you want to put together.”

“Yes?”

“Well, if I have to stay here, I’d rather live in a community of actives—if such a thing is possible. I’d like us to stop hiding so much and start finding out what we’re really capable of.”

“You’ve been thinking about it,” said Mary.

“I had time,” said Rachel dryly. “What I’m working up to is that I’m willing to help you. Help more than just going after these kids, I mean.”

Mary smiled, looked pleased but not surprised. “I would have asked you,” she said. “I’m glad I didn’t have to. I didn’t ask you to help anybody through transition because I wanted you standing by for all three transitions in case some medical problem comes up. Jan broke her arm during her transition and you probably know Jesse did some kind of damage to his back that could have been serious. It will be best if you’re sort of on call.”

“I will be,” said Rachel. She left to get the Hansons.

Mary looked after her for a moment, then walked over to the sofa nearest to the fireplace, where Doro was sitting with a closed book on his lap.

“You’re always around,” she said. “My shadow.”

“You don’t mind.”

“No. I’m used to you. In fact, I’m really going to miss you when you leave. But, then, you won’t be leaving soon. You’re hooked. You’ve got to see what happens here.”

She couldn’t have been more right. And it wasn’t just the three coming transitions that he wanted to see. They were important, but Mary herself was more important. Her people were submitting now, all but Karl. And she would overcome Karl’s resistance slowly.

Doro had wondered what Mary would do with her people once she had subdued them. Before she discovered Clay’s potential, she had probably wondered herself. Now, though … Doro had reworded Karl’s question. How many latents did she think she wanted to bring through? “All of them, of course,” she had said.

Now Doro was waiting. He didn’t want to put limits on her, yet. He was hoping that

she would not like the responsibility she was creating for herself. He was hoping that, before too long, she would begin to limit herself. If she didn’t, he would have to step in. Success his and hers—was coming too quickly. Worse, all of it depended on her. If anything happened to her, the pattern would die with her. It was possible that her actives, new and old, would revert to their old, deadly incompatibility without it. Doro would lose a large percentage of his best breeding stock. This quick success could set him back several hundred years.

Mary gave Karl charge of her bald girl cousin, Christine, and then probably wished she hadn’t. Surprisingly, Christine’s shaved head did not make her ugly. And, unfortunately, her inferior position in the house did not make her cautious. Fortunately, Karl wasn’t interested. Christine just didn’t have the judgment yet to realize how totally vulnerable she was. Mary had a private talk with her.

Mary gave Christine and Jamie a single, intensive session of telepathic indoctrination. They learned what they were, learned their history, learned about Doro, who had neglected their branch of Emma’s family for two generations. They learned what was going to happen to them, what they were becoming part of. They learned that every other active in the house had gone through what they were facing and that, while it wasn’t pleasant, they could stand it. The double rewards of peace of mind and power made it worthwhile.

The Hansons learned, and they believed. It wouldn’t have been easy for them to disbelieve information force-fed directly into their minds. Once the indoctrination was over, though, they were let alone mentally. They became part of the house, accepting Mary’s authority and their own pain with uncharacteristic docility.

Jamie went into transition first, about a month after he moved to Larkin House. He was young, strong, and surprisingly healthy in spite of having tried every pill or powder he could get his hands on.

He came through. He had sprained his wrist, blackened one of Seth’s eyes, and broken the bed he was lying on, but he came through. He became an active. Seth was as proud as though he had just become a father.

Clay, who should have been first, was next. He came through in a short, intense transition that almost killed him. He actually suffered heart failure, but Mary got his heart started again and kept it going until Rachel arrived. Clay’s transition was over in only five hours. It left him with none of the usual bruises and strains, because Mary did not try to restrain him with her own body or tie him down. She simply paralyzed his voluntary muscles and he lay motionless while his mind writhed through chaos.

Clay became an active, but not a telepathic active. His budding telepathic ability vanished with the end of his transition. But he was compensated for it, as he soon learned.

When his transition ended and he was at peace, he saw that a tray of food had been left beside his bed. He could just see it out of the corner of his eye. He was still paralyzed and could not reach it, but in his confusion and hunger, he did not realize this. He reached for it anyway.

In particular, he reached for the bowl of soup that he could see steaming so near him. It was not until he lifted the soup and drew it to him that he realized that he was not using his hands. The soup hovered without visible support a few inches above his chest.

Startled, Clay let it fall. At the same instant, he moved to get away from it. He shot about three feet to one side and into the air. And stayed suspended there, terrified.

Slowly, the terror in his eyes was replaced by understanding. He looked around his bedroom at Rachel, at Doro, and, finally, at Mary. Mary apparently released him then from his paralysis, because he began to move his arms and legs now like a human spider hanging in mid-air from an invisible web. Slowly, deliberately, Clay lowered himself to the bed. Then he drifted upward again, apparently finding it an easy thing to do. He looked at Mary, spoke apparently in answer to some thought she had projected to him.

“Are you kidding? I can fly! This is good enough for me.”

“You’re not a member of the pattern any more,” she said. She seemed saddened, subdued.

“That means I’m free to go, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. If you want to.”

“And I won’t be getting any more mental interference?”

“No. You can’t pull it in any more. You’re not even an out-of-control telepath. You’re not a telepath at all.”

“Lady, you read my mind. You’ll see that’s no tragedy to me. All that so-called power ever brought me was grief. Now that I’m free of it, I think I’ll go back to Arizona—raise myself a few cows, maybe a few kids.”

“Good luck,” said Mary softly.

He drifted close to her, grinned at her. “You wouldn’t believe how easy this is.” He lifted her clear of the floor, brought her up to eye level with him. She gazed at him, unafraid. “What I’ve got is better than what you’ve got,” he joked.

She smiled at him finally. “No it isn’t, man. But I’m glad you think it is. Put me down.”

He lowered both her and himself to the floor as though he had been doing it all his life. Then he looked at Doro. “Is this something brand-new, or have you seen it before?”

“Psychokinesis,” said Doro. “I’ve seen it before. Seen it several times in your father’s family, in fact, although I’ve never seen it come about this smoothly before.”

“You call that transition smooth?” said Mary.

“Well, with the heart problem, no, I guess not. But it could have been worse. Believe me, this room could be a shambles, with everyone in it injured or dead. I’ve seen it happen.”

“My kind throw things,” guessed Clay.

“They throw everything,” said Doro. “Including some things that are nailed down securely. Instead of doing that, I think you might have turned your ability inward a little and caused your own heart to stop.”

Clay shook himself. “I could have. I didn’t know what I was doing, most of the time.”

“A psychokinetic always has a good chance of killing himself before he learns to control his ability.”

“That may be the way it was,” said Mary. “But it won’t be that way any more.”

Doro heard the determination in her voice and sighed to himself. She had just shared a good portion of Clay’s agony as she worked to keep him alive, and immediately she was committing herself to do it again. She had found her work. She was some sort of mental queen bee, gathering her workers to her instead of giving birth to them. She would be totally dedicated, and difficult to reason with or limit. Difficult, or perhaps impossible.

Christine Hanson came through in an ordinary transition, perhaps a little easier than most. She made more noise than either of the men because pain, even slight pain, terrified her. She had had a harder time than the others during the pretransition period, too. Finally, hoarse but otherwise unhurt, Christine completed her transition. She remained a telepath, like her brother. It was possible that one or both of them might learn to heal, and it was possible that they, Rachel, and Mary might be very long-lived.

Whatever potential Jamie and Christine had, they accepted their places in the pattern easily. They were Mary’s first grateful pattern members. And their membership brought an unexpected benefit that Jesse accidentally discovered. Now all the members could move farther from Mary without discomfort. Suddenly, more people meant more freedom.

Doro watched and worried silently. The day after Christine’s transition, Mary began pulling in more of her cousins. And Ada, who knew a few of her relatives, began trying to reach them in Washington. Doro could have helped. He knew the locations of all his important latent families. But as far as he was concerned, things were moving too quickly even without his help. He said nothing.

He had decided to give Mary two years to make what she could of her people. That was enough time for her to begin building the society she envisioned—what she was already calling a Patternist society. But two years should still leave Doro time to cut his losses—if it became necessary—without sacrificing too large a percentage of his breeding stock.

He had admitted to himself that he didn’t want to kill Mary. She was easily controllable in most matters, because she loved him; and she was a success. Or a partial success. She was giving him a united people, a group finally recognizable as the seeds of the race he had been working to create. They were a people who belonged to him, since Mary belonged to him. But they were not a people he could be part of. As Mary’s pattern brought them together, it shut him out. Together, the “Patternists” were growing into something that he could observe, hamper, or destroy but not something he could join. They were his goal, half accomplished. He watched them with carefully concealed emotions of suspicion and envy.

PART THREE

Chapter Nine

EMMA

Emma was at the typewriter in her dining room when Doro arrived. He had not called to say he was coming, but at least when he walked in without knocking, he was wearing a body she had seen him in before: the body of a small man, blackhaired, green-eyed, like Mary. But the hair was straight and this body was white. He threw himself down on Emma’s sofa and waited silently until she finished the page that she was working on.

“What is it?” he asked her when she got up. “Another book?”

She nodded. She was young. She was young most of the time now, because he was around so much. “I’ve discovered that I like writing,” she said. “I should have tried it years earlier than I did.” She sat down in a chair, because he was sprawled over the length of the sofa. He lay there frowning.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“Mary’s the matter.”

Emma grimaced. “I’m not surprised. What’s she done?”

“Nothing yet. It’s what she’s going to do after I talk to her. I’m going to put on the brakes, Em. The Patternist section of Forsyth is as big as a small town already. She has enough people.”

“If you ask me, she had enough two years ago. But now that you’re ready to stop her, what are you going to do with all those actives—all those Patternists—when she’s not around any more to maintain the Pattern?”

“I’m not out to kill Mary, Em. The Pattern will still be there.”

“Will it?”

He hesitated. “You think she’ll make me kill her?”

“Yes. And if you’re realistic about it, you’ll think so too.”

He sighed, sat up. “Yes. I don’t expect to salvage many of her people, either. Most of them were animals before she found them. Without her, they’ll revert.”

“Animals … with such power, though.”

“I’ll have to destroy the worst of them.”

Emma winced.

“I thought you’d be more concerned about Mary.”

“I was concerned about her. But it’s too late for her now. You helped her turn herself into something too dangerous to live.”

He stared at her.

“She’s got too much power, Doro. She terrifies me. She’s doing exactly what you always said you wanted to do. But she’s doing it, not you. All those people, those fifteen hundred people in the section, are hers, not yours.”

“But she’s mine.”

“You wouldn’t be thinking about killing her if you believed that was enough.”

“Em… .” He got up and went to sit on the arm of her chair. “What are you afraid of?”

“Your Mary.” She leaned against him. “Your ruthless, egotistical, power-hungry little Mary.”

“Your grandchild.”

“Your creation! Fifteen hundred actives in two years. They bring each other through on an assembly line. And how many conscripted servants—ordinary people unfortunate enough to be taken over by those actives. People forced now to be servants in their own houses. Servants and worse!”

Her outburst seemed to startle him. He looked down at her silently.

“You’re not in control,” she said more softly. “You’ve let them run wild. How many years do you think it will take at this rate for them to take over the city? How long before they begin tampering with the state and federal government?”

“They’re very provincial people, Em. They honestly don’t care what’s happening in Washington or Sacramento or anywhere else as long as they can prevent it from hurting them. They pay attention to what’s going on, but they don’t influence it very often.”

“I wonder how long that will last.”

“Quite a while, even if the Pattern survives. They honestly don’t want the burden of running a whole country full of people. Not when those people can run themselves reasonably well and the Patternists can reap the benefits of their labor.”

“That, they have to have learned from you.”

“Of course.”

“You mentioned Washington and Sacramento. What about here in Forsyth?”

“This is their home territory, Em. They’re interfering too much here to avoid being noticed by Forsyth city government, half asleep as it is. To avoid trouble, they took over the city about a year and a half ago.”

Emma stared at him, aghast.

“They’ve completely taken over the best section of town. They did it quietly, but still Mary thought it safest for them to control key mutes in city hall, in the police department, in—”

“Mutes!”

He looked annoyed, probably with himself. “It’s a convenient term. People without telepathic voices. Ordinary people.”

“I know what it means, Doro. I knew the first time I heard Mary use it. It means nigger!”

“Em—”

“I tell you, you’re out of control, Doro. You’re not one of them. You’re not a telepath. And if you don’t think they look down on us nontelepaths, us niggers, the whole rest of humanity, you’re not paying attention.”

“They don’t look down on me.”

“They don’t look up to you, either. They used to. They used to respect you. Dammit, they used to love you, the originals. The ‘First Family.’ ” Her tone ridiculed the name that the original seven actives had adopted.

“Obviously this has been bothering you for a long time,” said Doro. “Why haven’t you said anything about it before?”

“It wasn’t necessary.”

He frowned.

“You knew.” Her tone became accusing. “I haven’t told you a single thing that you haven’t been aware of for at least as long as I have.”

He moved uncomfortably. “Sometimes I wonder if you aren’t a little telepathic yourself.”

“I don’t have to be. I know you. And I knew you’d reach a point when no matter how fascinated you were with what Mary was doing, no matter how much you loved the girl, she’d have to go. I just wish you’d made up your mind sooner.”

“Back when she brought her first latents through, I decided to give her two years. I’d like to give her a good many more if she’ll cooperate.”

“She won’t. How willing would you be to give up all that power?”

“I’m not asking her to give up anything but this recruitment drive of hers. She’s got a good many of my best latents now. I don’t dare let her go on as she has been.”

“You want the section to grow now by births only?”

“By births, and through the five hundred or so children they’ve collected. Children who’ll eventually go through transition. Have you seen the private school they’ve taken over for the children?”

“No. I keep away from the section as much as I can. I assume Mary knows how I feel about her already. I don’t want to keep reminding her until she decides to change my mind for me.”

Doro started to say something, then stopped.

“What is it?” asked Emma.

For a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then, “I mentioned you to her once. I said I didn’t want you bothered by any of her people. She gave me a strange look and said she’d already taken care of that. She said, ‘Don’t worry about her. Bitchy old woman that she is, she’s wearing my brand. If anybody even tries to read her, the first thing they’ll see is that she’s my private property.’ ”

“Her what!”

“She means you’re under her protection, Em. It might not sound like much, but, with it, none of the others are going to touch you. And, apparently, she isn’t interested in controlling you herself.”

Emma shuddered. “How generous of her! She must feel awfully secure in her power. You trained her too well. She’s too much like you.”

“Yes,” said Doro. “I know.”

She looked at him sharply. “Did I hear pride in your voice?”

Doro smiled faintly. “She’s shown me a lot, Em. She’s shown me something I’ve been trying to find out for most of my life.”

“All I can see that she’s shown you is what you’d be like as a young woman. I recall warning you about underestimating young women.”

“Not what I’d be like as a woman. I already know that. I’ve been a woman I-don’tknow-how-many times. No. What I’d be like as a complete entity. What I’d be like if I hadn’t died that first time—died before I was fully formed.”

“Before you were …” Emma frowned. “I don’t understand. How do you know you weren’t fully formed when you died?”

“I know. I’ve seen enough almost-Doros, enough near successes to know. I should be telepathic, like Mary. If I were, I would have created a pattern and fed off live hosts

instead of killing. As it is, the only time I can feel mind-to-mind contact with another person is when I kill. She and I kill in very much the same way.”

“That’s it?” said Emma. “That’s all you’ve been reaching for, for so long—someone who kills in the same way you do?”

“All?” There was bitterness in his voice. “Does it seem such a small thing, Em, for me to want to know what I am—what I should have been?”

“Not a small thing, no. Not a wise thing, either. Your curiosity—and your loneliness, I think—have driven you to make a mistake.”

“Perhaps. I’ve made mistakes before.”

“And survived them. I hope you survive this one. I can see now why you kept your purpose secret for so long.”

“Yes.”

“Does Mary know?”

“Yes. I never told her, but she knows. She saw it herself after a while.”

“No wonder you love her. No wonder she’s still alive. She’s you—the closest thing you’ve ever had to a true daughter.”

“I never told her any of that, either.”

“She knows. You can depend on it.” She paused for a moment. “Doro, is there any way she could … I mean, if she’s complete and you’re not, she might be able to …”

“To take me?”

Emma nodded.

“No. If she could, she would never have lived past the morning of her transition. She tried to read me then. If she hadn’t, I would have ordered her to try as soon as I saw her. I wanted to look at her in the only way that would tell me whether she could possibly become a danger to me. I looked, and what I saw told me she couldn’t. She’s like a scaled-down model of me. I could have taken her then, and I can now.”

“It’s been a long time since you’ve seen someone you thought could be dangerous. I hope your judgment is still as good as you think it is.”

“It is. In my life, I’ve met only five people I considered potentially dangerous.”

“And they all died young.”

Doro shrugged.

“I assume you’re not forgetting that Mary can increase her strength by robbing her people.”

“No. It doesn’t make any difference. I watched her very carefully back when she took Rachel and Jess. I could have taken her then. In fact, the extra strength she had acquired made her seem a more attractive victim. Strength alone isn’t enough to beat me. And she has a weakness I don’t have. She doesn’t move. She has just that one body, and when it dies, she dies.” He thought about that and shook his head sadly. “And she will almost certainly die.”

“When?”

“When she—If she disobeys me. I’m going to tell her my decision when I go there today. No more latents. She’ll decide what she wants to do after that.”

SETH

Seth Dana came out the back door of Larkin House thinking about the assignment Mary had just given him. The same old thing. Recruit more seconds—more people to help latents through transition. Patternists liked the way their numbers were increasing. Expansion was exciting. It was their own kind growing up, coming of age at last. But seconding was hard work. You were mother, father, friend, and, if your charge needed it, lover to an erratic, frightened, dependent person. People volunteered to be seconds when they were shamed into it. They accepted it as their duty, but they evaded that duty as long as they could. It was Seth’s job to prompt them and then present them with sullen, frightened charges.

He was a kind of matchmaker, sensing easily and accurately which seconds would be compatible with which latents. His worst mistake had been his first, his decision to second Clay. Mary had stopped him then. She had not had to stop him again. He had no more close relatives to warp his judgment.

He got into his car, preoccupied, deciding which Patternists to draft this time. He started the car automatically, then froze, his hand poised halfway to the emergency brake. Someone had shoved the cold steel barrel of a gun against the base of his skull.

Startled from his thoughts, Seth knew a moment of fear.

“Turn off the ignition, Dana?” said a man’s voice.

Reacting finally, Seth read the man. Then he turned off the ignition. With equal ease, he turned off the gunman. He gave the man a mental command, then reached back and took the gun from his suddenly limp hand. He shut the gun in the glove compartment and looked around at the intruder. The man was a mute and a stranger, but Seth had seen him before, in the thoughts of a woman Seth had seconded. A woman named Barbara Landry, who had once been this man’s wife.

“Palmer Landry,” said Seth quietly. “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble for nothing.”

The man stared at Seth, then at his own, empty hand. “Why did I give you …? How could you make me …? What’s going on here?”

Seth shrugged. “Nothing now.”

“How do you know who I am? Why did I hand you …?”

“You’re a man who deserted his wife nearly a year ago,” said Seth. “Then suddenly decided he wanted her back. The gun wasn’t necessary.”

“Where is she? Where’s Barbara?”

“Probably at her house.” Seth had personally brought Barbara Landry from New York two months before. A month and a half later, she had come through transition. Almost immediately, she had discovered that Bartholomew House—and Caleb Bartholomew— suited her perfectly. Seth hadn’t bothered to erase her from the memories of the people she knew in New York. None of them had been friends. None of them had really cared what happened to her. But, apparently, she had told a couple of them where she was going, and with whom. And when Landry came back looking for her, he had found the information waiting. Seth had been careless. And Palmer Landry had been lucky. No one had noticed him watching Larkin House, and the person he had asked to point out Seth Dana had been an unsuspecting mute.

“You mean to tell me you’ve gotten rid of Barbara already?” Landry demanded.

“I never had her,” said Seth. “Never wanted her, for that matter, nor she me. I just helped her when she happened to need help.”

“Sure. You’re Santa Claus. Just tell me where she’s living.”

“I’ll take you there if you want.” He had intended to draft Bartholomew into some seconding anyway. But later. Bartholomew House was right across the street.

“Who’s she living with?” asked Landry.

“Her family,” said Seth. “She found a house she fit into quicker than most of us do.”

“House?” The man frowned. “Whorehouse?”

“Hell no!” Seth looked around at him. Landry had a justifiably low opinion of his wife. Latents were hard people to live with. But Seth had not realized that it was that low. “We live communally here, several of us to a house. So when we say house, we don’t just mean the building. We mean household. We mean people.”

“What the hell are you? Some kind of religious nuts or something?”

Seth was about to answer him when Barbara Landry herself came out the back door of Larkin House.

The sound of her footsteps caused Landry to turn. He saw her, shouted her name once, then was out of the car, running toward her. Barbara Landry was weak, as Patternists went, and she was inexperienced at handling her new abilities. That last made her a possible danger to her husband. Seth reached out to warn her, but he was a second too late.

Recoiling in surprise from Landry’s sudden rush, Barbara instinctively used her new defenses. Instead of controlling him gently, she stopped him solidly, suddenly, as though she had hit him, as though she had clubbed him down. He fell, unconscious, without ever having touched her.

“My God,” Barbara whispered horrified. “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I had come to see you. Then I sensed him out here threatening you. I came to ask you not to hurt him.”

“He’ll be all right,” said Seth. “No thanks to you. You’re going to kill somebody if you don’t learn to be careful.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

He lectured her as though she were still his charge. “I’ve warned you. No matter how weak you are as a Patternist, you’re a powerhouse as far as any ordinary mute is concerned.”

She nodded solemnly. “I’ll be careful. But, Seth, would you help him for me? I mean, after he comes to. He probably needs money, and I know he needs even more to forget about me. I don’t even like to think about what I put him through when we were together.”

“He wants to be with you.”

“No!”

“He could be programmed to live very comfortably here, Barbara. Matter of fact, he’d be happier here than anywhere else.”

“I don’t want him enslaved! I’ve done enough to him. Seth, please. Help him and let him go.”

Seth smiled finally. “All right, honey, in exchange for a promise from you.”

“What?”

“That you’ll go back to Bart and make him give you a few more lessons on how to handle mutes without killing them.”

She nodded, embarrassed.

“Oh, yeah, and tell him he’s going to second a couple of people for me. I’m bringing the first one over tomorrow.”

“Oh, but—”

“No excuses. Save me the trouble of arguing with him and I’ll do a good job for you here.” He gestured toward Landry.

She smiled at him. “You would anyway. But, all right. I’ll do your dirty work for you.” She turned and went down the driveway. She was a rare Patternist. Like Seth, she cared what happened to the people she had left behind in the mute world. Seth had always liked her. Now he would see that her husband got as good a start as Clay had gotten.

RACHEL

Rachel’s newest assignment had bothered her from the moment Mary gave it to her. It was still bothering her now, as she stood at the entrance of a long communal driveway that led back into a court of dilapidated, dirty, green stucco houses. The houses were small—no more than three or four rooms each. The yards were littered with beer cans and wine bottles, and they were overgrown with weeds and shrubs gone wild. The look of the place seemed to confirm Rachel’s suspicions.

Farther up the driveway, a group of teenage boys tossed around a pair of dice and a surprisingly large amount of money. Intent on their game, they paid no attention to Rachel. She let her perception sweep over them and found three that she would have to come back for. Three latents who lived in the court, but who were not as bad off as those Mary had sent Rachel after.

This was a pocket of Emma’s descendants hidden away in a corner of Los Angeles, suffering without knowing why, without knowing who they were. The women in three of the houses were sisters. They hated each other, usually spoke only to trade obscenities. Yet they continued to live near each other, satisfying a need they did not realize they had. One of them still had a husband. All three had children. Rachel had come for the youngest sister—the one whose husband was still with her. This one lived in the third house back, with her husband and their two young children. Rachel looked at the house and realized that she had been unconsciously refraining from probing it. She was going entirely on what Mary had told her. That meant that there were surely things inside that she would not want to see. Mary swept the areas she checked so quickly that she received nothing more than a momentary feeling of anxiety from the latents who were in serious trouble. She was like a machine, sweeping, detecting latents here and there mixed in with the mute population. And the worst ones, she gave to Rachel.

“Come on, Rae,” she would say. “You know they’re going to die if I send anybody else.”

And she was right. Only Rachel could handle the most pathetic of Doro’s discards. Or only she had been able to until now. Now her students were beginning to come into their own. The one she had with her now was just about ready to work alone. Miguela Daniels. Her father had married a Mexican woman, a mute. But he traced his own lineage back to Emma through both his parents. And Miguela was turning out to be a very good healer. Miguela came up beside her.

“What are you waiting for?” she asked.

“You,” Rachel told her. “All right, let’s go in. You won’t like it, though.”

“I can already feel that.”

As they went to the door, Rachel finally swept the house with her perception and moaned to herself. She did not knock. The door was locked, but the people inside were beyond answering her knock.

The top portion of the door had once been a window, but the glass had long ago been broken. The hole had been covered by an oversized piece of plywood.

“Keep your attention on the boys in the back,” Rachel told Miguela. “They can’t see us from here, but this might be noisy.”

“You could get one of them to break in.”

“No, I can do it. Just watch.”

Miguela nodded.

Rachel took hold of the overhanging edge of plywood, braced herself, and pulled. The wood was dry and old and thin. Rachel had hardly begun to put pressure on it when it gave along its line of nails and part of it came away in her hands. She broke off more of it until she could push the rest in and unlock the door. The smell that greeted them made Rachel hold her breath for a few seconds. Miguela breathed it and gagged.

“What’s that Goddamn stink!”

Rachel said nothing. She pushed the door open and went in. Miguela grimaced and followed.

Just inside the door lay a young man, the husband, half propped up against the wall. Around him were the many bottles he had already managed to empty. In his hand was one he had not quite emptied yet. He tried to get up as the two women came in, but he was too drunk or too sick or too weak from hunger. Probably all three. “Hey,” he said, his voice slurred and low. “What you think you’re doing? Get out of my house.”

Rachel scanned him quickly while Miguela went through the kitchen, into the bedroom. The man was a latent, like his wife. That was why the two of them had so much trouble. They had not only the usual mental interference to contend with, but they unwittingly interfered with each other. They were both of Emma’s family and they would make good Patternists, but, as latents, they were killing each other. The man on the floor was of no use to himself or anyone else as he was now.

He was filthy—not only unwashed but incontinent. He wallowed in his own feces and vomit, contributing his share to the strong evil smell of the place.

From the bedroom, Miguela cried out, “Mother of God! Rachel, come in here quickly.”

Rachel turned from the man, intending to go to her. But, as she turned, there was a sound, a weak, thin cry from the sofa. Rachel realized abruptly that what she had thought were only bundles of rags were actually the two children she had sensed in the house. She went to them quickly.

They were skin and bones, both breathing shallowly, unevenly, making small sounds from time to time. Malnourished, dehydrated, bruised, beaten, and filthy, they lay unconscious. Mercifully unconscious.

“Rachel—” Miguela seemed to choke. “Rachel, come here. Please!”

Rachel left the children reluctantly, went to the bedroom. In the bedroom there was another child, an infant who was beyond even Rachel’s ability. It had been dead for at least a few days. Neither Rachel nor Mary had sensed it before, because both had scanned for life, touching the living minds in the house and skimming over everything else.

The baby’s starved body was crawling with maggots, but it still showed the marks of its parents’ abuse. The head was a ruin. It had been hit with something or slammed into something. The legs were twisted as no infant’s legs would have twisted normally. The child had been tortured to death. The man and the woman had fed on each other’s insanity until they murdered one child and left the others dying. Rachel had stolen enough latents from prisons and insane asylums to know how often such things happened. Sometimes the best a latent could do was realize that the mental interference, the madness, was not going to stop, and then end their own lives before they killed others.

Staring down at the dead child in its ancient, peeling crib, Rachel wondered how even Doro had managed to keep so many latents alive for so long. How had he done it, and how had he been able to stand himself for doing it? But, then, Doro had nothing even faintly resembling a conscience.

The crib was at the foot of an old, steel-frame bed. On the bed lay the mother, semiconscious, muttering drunkenly from time to time. “Johnny, the baby’s crying again.” And then, “Johnny, make the baby stop crying! I can’t stand to hear him crying all the time.” She wept a little herself now, her eyes open, unseeing.

Miguela and Rachel looked at each other, Miguela in horror, Rachel in weariness and disgust.

“You were right,” said Miguela. “I don’t like this one damn bit. And this is the kind of thing you want me to handle?”

“There are too many of them for me,” said Rachel. “The more help I get, the fewer of these bad ones will die.”

“They deserve to die for what they did to that baby—” She choked again and Rachel saw that she was holding back tears.

“You’re the last person I’d expect to hold latents responsible for what they do,” Rachel told her. “Do I have to remind you what you did?” Miguela, unstable and violent, had set fire to the house of a woman whose testimony had caused her to spend some time in Juvenile Hall. The woman had burned to death.

Miguela closed her eyes, not crying but not casting any more stones, either. “You know,” she said after a moment, “I was glad I turned out to be a healer, because I thought I could make up for that, somehow. And here I am bitching.”

“Bitch all you want to,” said Rachel. “As long as you do your work. You’re going to handle these people.”

“All of them? By myself?”

“I’ll be standing by—not that you’ll need me. You’re ready. Why don’t you back the van in and I’ll draft a couple of the boys out back to help us carry bodies.”

Miguela started to go, then stopped. “You know, sometimes I wish we could make Doro pay for scenes like this. He’s the one who deserves all the blame.”

“He’s also the one who’ll never pay. Only his victims pay.”

Miguela shook her head and went out after the van.

JESSE

Jesse pulled his car up sharply in front of a handsome, red-brick, Georgian mansion. He got out, strode down the pathway and through the front door without bothering to

knock. He went straight to the stairs and up them to the second floor. There, in a back bedroom, he found Stephen Gilroy, the Patternist owner of the house, sitting beside the bed of a young mute woman. The woman’s face was covered with blood. It had been slashed and hacked to pieces. She was unconscious.

“My God,” muttered Jesse as he crossed the room to the bed. “Did you send for a healer?”

Gilroy nodded. “Rachel wasn’t around, so I—”

“I know. She’s on an assignment.”

“I called one of her kids. I just wish he’d get here.”

One of her students, he meant. Even Jesse found himself referring to Rachel’s students as “her kids.”

There was the sound of the front door opening and slamming again. Someone else ran up the bare, wooden stairs, and, a moment later, a breathless young man hurried into the room. He was one of Rachel’s relatives, of course, and as Rachel would have in a healing situation, he took over immediately.

“You’ll have to leave me alone with her,” he said. “I can handle the injuries, but I work best when I’m alone with my patient.”

“Her eyes are hurt, too, I think,” said Gilroy. “Are you sure you—”

The healer unshielded to show them that his self-confidence was real and based on experience. “Don’t worry about her. She’ll be all right.”

Jesse and Stephen Gilroy left the room, went down to Gilroy’s study.

Jesse spoke with quiet fury. “The main reason I got here so fast was so I could see the damage through my own eyes instead of somebody’s memory. I want to remember it when I go after Hannibal.”

“I should go after him,” said Gilroy softly, bitterly. He was a slender, dark-haired man with very pale skin. “I would go after him if he hadn’t already proved to me how little good that does.” His voice was full of self-disgust.

“People who abuse mutes are my responsibility,” said Jesse. “Because mutes are my responsibility. Hannibal is even a relative of mine. I’ll take care of him.”

Gilroy shrugged. “You gave her to me; he took her from me. You ordered him to send her back; he sent her back in pieces. Now you’ll punish him. What will that inspire him to do to her?”

“Nothing,” said Jesse. “I promise you. I’ve talked to Mary and Karl about him. This isn’t the first time he’s sliced somebody up. He’s still the animal he was when he was a latent.”

“That’s what’s bothering me. He’d think nothing of killing Arlene when you’re finished with him. I’m surprised he hasn’t killed her already. He knows I can’t stop him.”

“There’s no sense beating yourself with that, Gil. Except for the members of the First Family, nobody can stop him. He’s the strongest telepath we’ve ever brought through transition. And the first thing he did, once he was through, was to smash his way through the shielding of his second and nearly kill her. For no reason. He just discovered that he could do it, so he did it.”

“Somebody should have smashed him then and there.”

“That’s what Doro said. He claims he used to cull out people like Hannibal as soon as he spotted them.”

“Well, I hate to find myself agreeing with Doro, but—”

“So do I. But he made us. He knows just how far wrong we can go. Hannibal is too strong for Rachel or her kids to help him. Especially since he doesn’t really want help. And he’s too dangerous for us to tolerate any longer.”

Gilroy’s eyes widened. “You are going to kill him, then?”

Jesse nodded. “That’s why I had to talk to Karl and Mary. We don’t like to give up on one of our own, but Hannibal is a Goddamn cancer.”

“You’re going to do it yourself?”

“As soon as I leave here.”

“With his strength … are you sure you can?”

“I’m First Family, Gil.”

“But still—”

“Nobody who needed the Pattern to push him into transition can stand against one of us—not when we mean to kill.” Jesse shrugged. “Doro had to breed us to be strong enough to come through without being prodded. After all, when the time came for us, there was nobody who could prod us without killing us.” He stood up. “Look, contact me when that healer finishes with Arlene, will you? I just want to be sure she’s all right.”

Gilroy nodded, stood up. They walked to the door together and Jesse noticed that there were three Patternists in the living room. Two women and a man.

“Your house is growing,” he said to Gilroy. “How many now?”

“Five. Five Patternists.”

“The best of the people you’ve seconded, I’ll bet.”

Gilroy smiled, said nothing.

“You know,” said Jesse as they reached the door. “That Hannibal … he even looks like me. Reminds me a little of myself a couple of years ago. There, but for the grace of Doro, go I. Shit.”

JAN

Holding a smooth, rectangular block of wood between her hands, Jan Sholto closed her eyes and reached back in her disorderly memory. She reached back two years, to the creation of the Pattern. She had not only her own memories of that event but the memories of each of the original Patternists. They had unshielded and let her read them— not that they could have stopped her by refusing to open. Mary wasn’t the only one who could read people through their shields. No one except Doro could come into physical contact with Jan without showing her some portion of his thoughts and memories. In this case, though, physical contact hadn’t been necessary. The others had shown their approval of what she was doing by cooperating with her. She was creating another learning block—assembling their memories into a work that would not only tell the new Patternists of their beginnings but show them.

She was teacher to all the new Patternists as they came through. For over a year now, seconds had used her learning blocks to give their charges quick, complete knowledge of the section’s rules and regulations. Other learning blocks offered them choices, showed them the opportunities available to them for making their own place within the section.

Abruptly, Jan reached Mary’s memories. They jarred her with their raw intensity, overwhelmed her as other people’s memories rarely did any more. They were good

material, but Jan knew she would have to modify them. Left as they were, they would dominate everything else Jan was trying to record.

Sighing, Jan put her block aside. Of course it would be Mary’s thoughts that gave trouble. Mary was trouble. That small body of hers was deceptive. Yet it had been Mary who saw possible use for Jan’s psychometry. A few months after Mary had begun drawing in latents, she had decided to learn as much as she could about the special abilities of the rest of the First Family. In investigating Jan’s psychometry, she had discovered that she could read some objects herself in a fragmented, blurred way, but that she could read much more clearly anything that Jan had handled.

“You read impressions from the things you touch,” she had said to Jan. “But I think you put impressions into things, too.”

“Of course I do,” Jan had said impatiently. “Everyone does, every time they touch something.”

“No, I mean … you kind of amplify what’s already there.”

“Not deliberately.”

“Nobody ever noticed it before?”

“No one pays any attention to my psychometry. It’s just something I do to amuse myself.”

Mary was silent for a long moment, thinking. Then, “Have you ever liked the impressions that you got from something enough to keep them? Not just keep them in your memory but in the thing, the object itself—like keeping a film or a tape recording.”

“I have some very old things that I’ve kept. They have ancient memories stored in them.”

“Get them.”

“Please get them,” mimicked Jan. “May I see them, please?” Mary had taken to her new power too easily. She loved to order people around.

“The hell with you,” said Mary. “Get them.”

“They’re my property!”

“Your property.” The green eyes glittered. “I’ll trade you last night for them.”

Jan froze, staring at her. The night before, Jan had been with Karl. It was not the first time, but Mary had never mentioned it before. Jan had tried to convince herself that Mary did not know. Now, confronted with proof that she was wrong, she managed to control her fear. She wanted to ask what Mary traded Vivian for all the mute woman’s nights with Karl, but she said nothing. She got up and went to get her collection of ancient artifacts stolen from various museums.

Mary handled one piece after another, first frowning, then slowly taking on a look of amazement. “This is fantastic,” she said. She was holding just a fragment of what had been an intricately painted jar. A jar that held the story of the woman whose hands shaped it 6,500 years ago. A woman of a Neolithic village that had existed somewhere in what was now Iran. “Why is it so pure?” asked Mary. “God knows how many people have touched it since this woman owned it. But she’s all I can sense.”

“She was all I ever wanted to sense,” said Jan. “The fragment has been buried for most of the time between our lives and hers. That’s the only reason there was any of her left in it at all.”

“Now there’s nothing but her. How did you get rid of the others?”

Jan frowned. “There were archaeologists and some other people at first, but I didn’t

want them. I just didn’t want them.”

Mary handed her the fragment. “Am I in it now?”

“No, it’s set. I had to learn to freeze them so that I didn’t disturb them myself every time I handled them. I never tried letting another telepath handle them, but you haven’t disturbed this one.”

“Or the others, most likely. You like seconding, Jan?”

Jan looked at her through narrowed eyes. “You know I hate it. But what does that have to do with my artifacts?”

“Your artifacts just might stop you from ever having to second anybody else. If you can get to know your own abilities a little better and use them for more than your own amusement, they can open another way for you to contribute to the Pattern.”

“What way?”

“A new art. A new form of education and entertainment—better than the movies, because you really live it, and you absorb it quicker and more completely than you do books. Maybe.” She snatched up the jar fragment and a small Sumerian clay tablet and ran out to try them on someone. Minutes later, she was back, grinning.

“I tried them on Seth and Ada. All I told them to do was hold these things and unshield. They picked up everything. Look, you show me you can use what you’ve got for more than a toy and you’re off seconding for good.” The rush of words stopped for a moment, and when Mary spoke again, her tone had changed. “And, Jan, guess what else you’re off of for good.”

Jan had wanted to kill her. Instead, she had thrown her energy into refining her talent and finding uses for it. Instead, she had begun to create a new art.

ADA

Ada Dragan waited patiently in the principal’s office of what was finally her school. A mute guardian who was programmed to notice such things had reported that one of her latent foster children—a fifteen-year-old girl—was having serious pretransition difficulties.

From the office, Ada looked out at the walled grounds of the school. It had been a private school, situated right there in the Palo Verde neighborhood. A school where people who were dissatisfied with the Forsyth Unified School District, and who could afford an alternative, sent their children. Now those people had been persuaded to send their children elsewhere.

This fall semester, only a month old, was the beginning of the first all-Patternist year. Ada welcomed it with relief. She had been working gradually toward the takeover, feeling her way for almost two years. Finally it was done. She had learned the needs of the children and overcome her own shyness enough to meet those needs. On paper, mutes still owned the school. But Ada and her Patternist assistants owned the mutes. And Ada herself was in full charge, responsible only to Mary.

It was a responsibility that had chosen Ada more than she had chosen it. She had discovered that she worked easily with children, enjoyed them, while most Patternists could not work with them at all. Only some of her relatives were able to assist her. Other Patternists found the emotional noise of children’s minds intolerable. Children’s

emotional noise penetrated not only the general protection of the Pattern but the individual mental shields of the Patternists. It frayed their nerves, chipped away their tempers, and put the children in real danger. It made Patternists potentially even worse parents than latents.

Thus, no matter how much Patternists wanted to insure their future as a race—and they did want it now—they could not care for the children who were that future. They had to draft mutes to do it for them. First Doro, and now Mary, was creating a race that could not tolerate its own young.

Ada turned away from the window just as the mute guardian brought the girl in. The mute was Helen Dietrich, an elementary-school teacher who, with her husband, also cared for four latent children. Jan had moved the Dietrichs and several other teachers into the section, where they could do both jobs.

This girl, Ada recalled, had been a particularly unfortunate case—one of Rachel’s assignments. Her life with the pair of latents who were her parents had left both her body and her mind a mass of scar tissue. Rachel had worked hard to right the damage. Now Ada wondered just how good a job she had done.

“Page,” said Helen Dietrich nervously, “this is Ada Dragan. She’s here to help you.”

The girl stared at Ada through dark, sullen eyes. “I’ve already seen the school psychologist,” she volunteered. “It didn’t do any good.”

Ada nodded. The school psychologist was a kind of experiment. He was completely ignorant of the fact that the Patternists now owned him. He was being allowed to learn as much as he could on his own. Nothing was hidden from him. But, on the other hand, nothing was handed to him. He, and a few others like him scattered around the section, were being used to calculate just how much information ordinary mutes needed to come to understand their situation.

“I’m not a psychologist,” said Ada. “Nor a psychiatrist.”

“Why not?” asked the girl. She extended her arms, which she had been holding behind her. Both wrists were bandaged. “I’m crazy, aren’t I?”

Ada only glanced at the bandages. Helen Dietrich had told her about the suicide attempt. Ada spoke to the mute. “Helen, it might be easier on you if you left now.”

The woman met Ada’s eyes and realized that she was really being offered a choice. “I’d rather stay,” she said. “I’ll have to handle this again.”

“All right.” Ada faced the girl again. Very carefully, she read her. It was difficult here at the school, where so many other child minds intruded. This was one time when they became a nuisance. But, in spite of the nuisance, Ada had to handle the girl gently. At fifteen, Page was not too young to be nearing transition. Children who lived in the section, surrounded by Patternists and thus by the Pattern, did not need direct contact with Mary to push them into transition. The Pattern pushed them as soon as their bodies and minds could tolerate the shock. And this girl seemed ready—unless Rachel had just missed some mental problem and the girl was suffering needlessly. That was what Ada had to find out. She maintained contact with Page as she questioned her.

“Why did you try to kill yourself?”

The young mind made an effort to hold itself emotionless, but failed. The thought broke through, To keep from killing others. Aloud, the girl spoke harshly. “Because I wanted to die! It’s my life. If I want to end it, it’s my business.”

She had not been told what she was. Children were told when they were about her

age. They spent a few days with Ada or, more likely, with one of Ada’s assistants, and they learned a little of their history and got some idea what their future would be like. Ada had dubbed these sessions “orientation classes.” Page was scheduled for one next month, but apparently, nature had decided to rush things.

“You won’t be allowed to kill yourself, Page. You realize that, don’t you?” Deftly, Ada planted the mental command as she spoke so that even as the girl opened her mouth to insist that she would try again, she realized that she could not—or, rather, realized that she no longer wanted to. That she had changed her mind.

Page stood still for a moment, her mouth open, then backed away from Ada in horror. “You did that! I felt it. It was you!”

Ada stared at her in surprise. No nontelepath, no latent should have known—

“You’re one of them,” the girl accused shrilly.

Mrs. Dietrich stood frowning at her. “I don’t understand. What’s wrong with the girl?”

Page faced her. “Nothing!” Then, more softly, “Oh, God, everything. Everything.” She looked down at her arms. “I’m not sick. I’m not crazy, either. But if I tell you what … what she is,” she gestured sharply toward Ada, “you’d let me be locked up. You wouldn’t believe—”

“Tell her what I am, Page,” said Ada quietly. She could feel the girl’s terror bleating against her mind.

“You read people’s minds! You make them do things they don’t want to do. You’re not human!” She raised a hand to her mouth, muffling her next words slightly. “Oh, God, you’re not human … and neither am I!” She was crying now, working herself into hysterics. “Now go ahead and lock me up,” she said. “At least then I won’t be able to hurt anyone.”

Ada looked over at Helen Dietrich. “That’s it, really. She knows just enough about what’s happening to her to be frightened by it. She thinks she’s becoming something that will hurt you or your husband or one of the other children.”

“Oh, Page.” The mute woman tried to put her arms around the girl, but Page twisted away.

“You already knew! You brought me to her even though you knew what she was!”

“Be still, Page,” said Ada quietly. And the girl lapsed into terrified silence. To the mute, Ada said, “Leave now, Helen. She’ll be all right.” This time, no choice was offered and Helen Dietrich left obediently. The girl, attempting to flee with her, found herself seemingly rooted to the floor. Realizing that she was trapped, she collapsed, crying in helpless panic. Ada went to her, knelt beside her.

“Page …” She laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder and felt the shoulder trembling. “Listen to me.”

The girl continued to cry.

“You’re not going to be hurt. You’re certainly not going to be locked up. Now, listen.”

After a moment the words seemed to penetrate. Page looked up at her. Clearly still frightened, she allowed Ada to help her from the floor onto one of the chairs. Her tears slowed, stopped, and she wiped her face with tissue from a box on the principal’s desk.

“You should ask questions,” said Ada softly. “You could have saved yourself a lot of needless worrying.”

Page breathed deeply, trying to still her trembling. “I don’t even know what to ask. Except … what’s going to happen to me?”

“You’re going to grow up. You’re going to become the kind of adult your parents should have been but couldn’t become alone.”

“My parents,” said Page with quiet loathing. “I hope you locked them up. They’re animals.”

“They were. They aren’t now, though. We were able to help them—just as we’ve helped you, as we’ll go on helping you.” The girl should not have remembered enough about her parents to hate them. Rachel was always especially careful about that. But there was no mistaking the emotion behind the girl’s words.

“You should have killed them,” she said. “You should have cut their filthy throats!” She fell silent and stared down at her left arm. She touched the arm with her right hand, frowned at it. Ada knew then that the conditioning Rachel had imposed on the girl was still breaking down. From Page’s mind Ada took the memory of a twisted, useless left arm permanently bent at the elbow, the hand hanging from it rag-limp, dead. The whole arm had been dead, thanks to an early violent beating that Page had received from her father. A beating and no medical attention. But Rachel had repaired the damage. Page’s arm was normal now, but she was just remembering that it should not have been. And she was remembering more about her parents. Ada had to try to ease the knowledge.

“Our healers were able to do as much for your parents’ minds as they were for your body,” she said. “Your parents are different people now, living different lives. They’re … sane people now. They aren’t responsible for what they did when you knew them.”

“You’re afraid I’ll try to get even.”

“We can’t let you do that.”

“You can’t make me forgive them, either.” She stopped, frightened, suddenly realizing that Ada could probably do just that. “I hate them! I’d … I’d kill them myself if you sent me back to them.” But she spoke without conviction.

“You won’t be sent back to them,” said Ada. “And I think, once you find out for yourself what made them the way they were, you’ll know why we helped them instead of punishing them.”

“They’re … like you now?”

“They’re both telepaths, yes.” At thirty-seven, they were the oldest people to come through transition successfully. They had almost died in spite of everything Rachel could do. And they and three others who did die made Mary realize that most latents who hadn’t been brought through by the time they were thirty-five shouldn’t be brought through at all. To make their lives more comfortable, Mary had worked out a way of destroying their uncontrollable ability without harming them otherwise. At least then they could live the rest of their lives as normal mutes. But Page’s parents had made it. They were strong Patternists, as Page would be strong.

“I’ll be like you, too, then, won’t I?” the girl asked.

“You will, yes. Soon.”

“What will I be then to the Dietrichs?”

“You’ll be the first of their foster children to grow up. They’ll remember you.”

“But … they’re not like you. I can tell that much. I can feel a difference.”

“They’re not telepaths.”

“They’re slaves!” Her tone was accusing.

“Yes.”

Page was silent for a moment, startled by Ada’s willingness to admit such a thing.

“Just like that? Yes, you make slaves of people? I’m going to be part of a group that

makes slaves of people?”

“Page—”

“Why do you think 1 tried to die?”

“Because you didn’t understand. You still don’t.”

“I know about being a slave! My parents taught me. My father used to strip me naked, tie me to the bed, and beat me, and then—”

“I know about that, Page.”

“And I know about being a slave.” The girl’s voice was leaden. “I don’t want to be a part of anything that makes people slaves.”

“You have no choice. Neither do we.”

“You could stop doing it.”

“You’d still be with your parents if we didn’t do it. We couldn’t have cared for you.” She took a deep breath. “We don’t harm people like the Dietrichs in any way. In fact they’re healthier and more comfortable now than they were before we found them. And the work they’re doing for us is work they enjoy.”

“If they didn’t enjoy it, you’d change their minds for them.”

“We might, but they wouldn’t be aware of it. They would be content.”

The girl stared at her. “Do you think that makes it better?”

“Not better. Kinder, in a frightening sort of way, I know. I’m not pretending that theirs is the best possible way of life, Page—although they think it is. They’re slaves and I wouldn’t trade places with them. But we, our kind, couldn’t exist long without them.”

“Then maybe we shouldn’t exist! If our way is to enslave good people like the Dietrichs and let animals like my parents go free, the world would be better without us.”

Ada looked away from her for a moment, then faced her sadly. “You haven’t understood me. Perhaps you don’t want to; I wouldn’t blame you. The Dietrichs, Page, those good people who took you in, cared for you, loved you. Why, do you imagine, they did all that?”

And abruptly, Page understood. “No!” she shouted. “No. They wanted me. They told me so.”

Ada said nothing.

“They might have been taking in foster children, anyway.”

“You know better.”

“No.” The girl glared at Ada furiously, still trying to make herself believe the lie. Then something in her expression crumbled. How did it feel, after all, to learn that the foster parents you adored, the only parents who had ever shown you love, loved you only because they had been programmed to?

Ada watched her, fully aware of what she was going through, but choosing for a moment to ignore it. “We call ourselves Patternists,” she said quietly. “This is our school. You and the others here are our children. We want the best for you even though we’re not capable of giving it to you personally. It isn’t possible for us to take you into our homes and give you the care you need. It just isn’t possible. You’ll understand why soon. So we make other arrangements.”

The girl was crying silently, her head bowed, her face wet with tears and twisted with pain. Now Ada went to her, put an arm around her. She continued to speak, now offering comfort in her words. The girl was going to be too strong to be soothed with lies or

partial amnesia. She had already proved that. Nothing would do for her but the truth. But that truth was not entirely disillusioning.

“The Dietrichs deserve the love and respect you feel for them, Page, because you’re right about them. They are good people. They love children naturally. All we did was focus that love on you, on the others. In your case we didn’t even have to focus it much. I didn’t think we would. That’s why I chose them for you—and you for them”

Finally Page looked up. “You did? You?”

“Yes.”

She thought about that, then leaned her head to one side, against Ada’s arm. “Then I guess it’s only right that you be the one to take me away from them.”

Ada said nothing.

Page lifted her head, met Ada’s eyes. “You are going to take me away, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“I know. But it’s time.”

Page nodded, lowered her head again to rest it against Ada’s arm.

Chapter Ten

MARY

A few months into our first year, the original group of actives broke up. Rachel and Jesse moved out first—moved down the street to a house almost as big as ours. Then Jan moved alone. I had had a talk with her about using her psychometry as a kind of educational tool, or even as an art. At the same time, I told her to keep her hands off Karl. I didn’t have that good a grip on him myself at the time, but I had already decided that, whether I got him or not, she wasn’t going to. She left the next day.

Our new Patternists had been leaving us right along, taking over nearby houses, with Jesse preparing the way for them with the mutes who already lived there. They all had to learn to handle mutes—learn not to smash them and not to make robots of them. That was something Jesse had been able to do easily since his transition.

Seth and Ada moved to a house around the corner and across the street from us. Suddenly Karl and I were the only Patternists in Larkin House. We weren’t back where we’d started or anything. Doro had finally left us, and we had a pair of latents with us. Everybody except Jan and Rachel was seconding somebody then. New Patternists too, as soon as they could be trusted to handle it. But Karl and I were more alone together than we had ever been before. Even Vivian didn’t matter much any more. She should have left Karl when he gave her the chance. Now she was a placid, bovine little pet. Karl controlled her without even thinking about it.

I was a predator and, frankly, not a very good one. But that was all right, because Karl wasn’t as sure as he had once been that he minded being the prey. He was a little wary, a little amused. He had never really hated me, though. Hell, he and I would have gotten along fine together from back when he first climbed into my bed if it hadn’t been for the Pattern and what the Pattern represented. It represented power. Power that I had and that he would never have.

And while that wasn’t something I threw at him, ever, it wasn’t something I denied either.

The Pattern was growing because I searched out latents, had them brought in, and gave them their push toward transition. It was growing because of me. And nobody was better equipped to run it than I was. I hoped Karl could accept that and be comfortable enough with it to accept me. If he couldn’t … well, I wanted him, but I wanted the thing I was building too. If I couldn’t have both, Karl could go his way. I’d move out like the others and let him have his house back. Maybe he knew that.

“You know,” he said one night, “for a while I thought you’d leave, like the others. There isn’t really anything holding you here.” We were in the study listening to the rain outside and not looking at a variety show on the television. Neither of us liked television. I don’t know why we had bothered to turn it on that night.

“I didn’t want to go,” I said. “And since you weren’t absolutely sure you wanted me to, I thought I’d hang around at least a while longer.”

“I thought you might be afraid to leave—afraid that when Doro found out, he’d just

order us back together.”

“He might. But I doubt it. He’s already gotten more than he bargained for from us.”

“From you.”

I shrugged.

“Why did you stay?”

“You know why. I wanted to be with you.”

“The husband he chose for you.”

“Yeah.” I turned to face him. “Stupid me, falling in love with my own husband.”

He didn’t look away from me, didn’t even change expression.

After a moment I grinned at him. “Not so stupid. We’re a match.”

He smiled thinly, almost grimly. “You’re changing. I’ve been watching you change, wondering how far you would go.”

“Changing how?”

“Growing up perhaps. I can remember when it was easier to intimidate you.”

“Oh.” I glanced at the television for a moment, listened as some woman tortured a song. “I’m a lot easier to get along with when I don’t feel intimidated.”

“So am I.”

“Yeah.” I listened to a few more bars of the woman’s screaming, then shook my head. “You aren’t paying any attention to this noise, are you?”

“No.”

I got up and turned off the television. Now there was only the soft, rustling sound of the rain outside. “So, what are we going to do?” I asked him.

“We don’t really have to do anything,” he said. “Just let things progress as they have been.”

I stared at him in silent frustration. That “silent” part was an effort. He laughed and moved over next to me.

“You don’t read me very much any more, do you?”

“I don’t want to read you all the time,” I said. “Talk to me.”

He winced and drew back, muttering something I didn’t quite catch.

“What?” I asked.

“I said how generous of you.”

I frowned. “Generous, hell. You can say whatever you’ve got to say to me.”

“I suppose so. After all, if you read me all the time, I’ll begin to bore you very quickly.”

So that was it! He was afraid he was going to get paid for some of the things he’d done to his women. He was afraid I was going to try to make a male Vivian of him. Not likely. “Keep that up,” I said, “and I won’t have to read you to be bored. You’re not pitiful, Karl, so, coming from you, self-pity is kind of disgusting.”

I thought he would hit me. I’m sure he thought about it. After a moment, though, he just sort of froze over. He stood up. “Find yourself a place tomorrow and get out of here.”

“Better,” I said. “There’s nothing boring about you when you get mad.”

He started to walk away from me in disgust. I got up quickly and caught him by the hand. He could have pulled away easily, but he didn’t. I took that to be significant and moved closer to him.

“You ought to trust me,” I said. “By now you ought to trust me.”

“I’m not sure trust is an issue here.”

“It is.” I reached up and touched his face. “A very basic issue. You know it.”

He began to look harassed, as though I was really getting on his nerves. Or maybe as though I was really getting to him in another way. I slipped my arms around him hopefully. It had been a long time. Too long.

“Come on, Karl, humor me. What’s it going to cost you?” Plenty. And he knew it.

We stood together for a long moment, my head against his chest.

Finally he sighed and steered us back to the sofa. We lay down together, just touching, holding each other.

“Will you unshield?” he asked.

I was surprised but I didn’t mind. I unshielded. And he lowered his shield so that there were no mental barriers between us. We seemed to flow together—frighteningly at first. I felt as though I were losing myself, combining so thoroughly with him that I wouldn’t be able to free myself again. If he hadn’t been so calm, I would have tried to reshield after the first couple of seconds. But I could see that he wasn’t afraid, that he wanted me to stay as I was, that nothing irreversible was happening. I realized that he had done this with Jan. I could see the experience in his memory. It was something like the blending that he did naturally with the shieldless, mute women he had had. Jan hadn’t liked it. She didn’t much like any kind of direct mind-to-mind contact. But she had been so lonely among us, and so without purpose, that she had endured this mental blending just to keep Karl interested in her. But the blending wasn’t an act that one person could enjoy while the other grimly endured.

I closed my eyes and explored the thing that Karl and I had become. A unit. I was aware of the sensations of his body and my own. I could feel my own desire for him exciting him and his excitement circling back to me.

We lost control. The spiral of our own emotions got out of hand. We hurt each other a little. I wound up with bruises and he had nail marks and bites. Later I took one look at what was left of the dress I had been wearing and threw it away.

But, my God, it was worth it.

“We’re going to have to be more careful when we do that again,” he said, examining some of his scratches.

I laughed and moved his hands away. The wounds were small. I healed them quickly. I found others and healed them too. He watched me with interest.

“Very efficient,” he said. He met my eyes. “It seems you’ve won.”

“All by myself?”

He smiled. “What, then? We’ve won?”

“Sure. Want to go take a shower together?”

At the end of the Pattern’s first year of existence, we all knew we had something that was working. Something new. We were learning to do everything as we went along. Soon after Karl and I got together, we found latents with latent children. That could have turned out really bad. We discovered we were “allergic” to children of our own kind. We were more dangerous to them than their latent parents were. That was when Ada discovered her specialty. She was the only one of us who could tolerate children and care for them. She began using mutes as foster parents, and she began to take over the small private school not far from us. And she and Seth moved back to Larkin House.

They had been the last to leave, and now they were the first to return. They had only

left, they said, because the others were leaving. Not because they wanted to be out of Larkin House. They didn’t. They were as comfortable with us as our new Patternists were with each other in their groups, their “families” of unrelated adults. We Patternists seemed to be more-social creatures than mutes were. Not one of our new Patternists chose to live alone. Even those who wanted to go out on their own waited until they could find at least one other person to join them. Then, slowly, the pair collected others. Their house grew.

Rachel and Jesse came back to us a few days after Seth and Ada. They were a little shamefaced, ready to admit that they wanted back into the comfort they had not realized they had found until they walked away from it.

Jan just reappeared. I read her. She had been lonely as hell in the house she had chosen, but she didn’t say anything to us. She wanted to live with us, and she wanted to use her ability. She thought she would be content if she could do those two things. She was learning to paint, and even the worst of her paintings lived. You touched them and they catapulted you into another world. A world of her imagination. Some of the new Patternists who were related to her began coming to her to learn to use whatever psychometric ability they had. She taught them, took lovers from among them, and worked to improve her art. And she was happier than she had ever been before.

The seven of us became the First Family. It was a joke at first. Karl made some comparison between our position in the section and the position of the President’s family in the nation. The name stuck. I think we all thought it was a little silly at first, but we got used to it. Karl did his bit to help me get used to it.

“We could do something about making it more of a family,” he said. “We’d be the first ones to try it, too. That would give some validity to our title.”

The Pattern was just over a year old then. I looked at him uncertainly, not quite sure he was saying what I thought he was saying.

“Try that again?”

“We could have a baby.”

“Could we?”

“Seriously, Mary. I’d like us to have a child.”

“Why?”

He gave me a look of disgust.

“I mean … we wouldn’t be able to keep it with us.”

“I know that.”

I thought about it, surprised that I hadn’t really thought about it before. But, then, I had never wanted children. With Doro around, though, I had assumed that sooner or later I would be ordered to produce some. Ordered. Somehow, being asked was better.

“We can have a child if you want,” I said.

He thought for a moment. “I don’t imagine you could arrange for it to be a boy?”

I arranged for it to be a boy. I was a healer by then. I could not only choose the child’s sex but insure his good health and my own good health while I was pregnant. So being pregnant was no excuse for me to slow our expansion.

I was pulling in latents from all over the country. I could pick them out of the surrounding mute population without trouble. It didn’t matter any more that I had never met them or that they were three thousand miles away when I focused in on them. My range, like the distance the Patternists could travel from me, had increased as the Pattern

had grown. Now I located latents by their bursts of telepathic activity and gave a general picture of their location to one of my Patternists. The Patternist could pinpoint them more closely when he was within a few miles of them.

So the Pattern grew. Karl and I had a son: Karl August Larkin. The name of the man whose body Doro had used to father me was Gerold August. I had never made any gesture in his memory before, and I probably never would again. But having the baby had made me sentimental.

Doro wasn’t around to watch us much as we grew. He checked on us every few months, probably to remind us—remind me—where the final authority still rested. He showed up twice while I was pregnant. Then we didn’t see him again until August was two months old. He showed up at a time when we weren’t having any big problems. I was kind of glad to see him. Kind of proud that I was running things so smoothly. I didn’t realize he’d come to put an end to that.

He came in and looked at my flat stomach and said, “Boy or girl?” I hadn’t bothered to tell him I’d deliberately conceived a boy.

So Karl and I sat around and probably bored him with talk about the baby. I was surprised when he said he wanted to see it.

“Why?” I asked. “Babies his age all look pretty much alike. What is there to see?”

Both men frowned at me.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Let’s go see the baby. Come on.”

Doro got up, but Karl stayed where he was. “You two go ahead,” he said. “I was out to see him this morning. My head won’t take it again for a while.”

No wonder he could afford to be indignant at my attitude! He was setting me up. I wished Ada was around to take Doro in. August wasn’t at the school itself, but he was at one of the buffer houses surrounding the school. That was almost as bad. The static from the school and from children in general didn’t hit me as hard as it did most of the others, but it still wasn’t very pleasant.

We went in. Doro stared at August, and August stared back from the arms of Evelyn Winthrop, the mute woman who took care of him. Then we left.

“Drive somewhere far enough from the school for you to be comfortable, and park,” said Doro when we got back to the car. “I want to talk to you.”

“About the baby?”

“No. Something else. Although I suppose I should compliment you on your son.”

I shrugged.

“You don’t give a damn about him, do you?”

I turned onto a quiet, tree-lined street and parked. “He’s got all his parts,” I said. “Healthy mentally and physically. I saw to that. Watched him very carefully before he was born. Now I keep an eye on Evelyn and her husband to be sure they’re giving him the care he needs. Beyond that, you’re right.”

“Jan all over again.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m not criticizing you. Telepaths are always the worst possible parents. I thought the Pattern might change that, but it hasn’t. Most actives have to be bulldozed into even having children. You and Karl surprised me.”

“Karl wanted a child.”

“And you wanted Karl.”

“I already had him by then. But the idea of having a child wasn’t that repulsive. It still isn’t. I’d do it again. Now, what did you want to talk to me about?”

“Your doing it again.”

“What?”

“Or at least having your people do it. Because that’s the only way I’m going to allow the Pattern to grow for a while.”

I turned to look at him. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m suspending your latent-gathering as of today. You’re to call your people in from their searches, and recruit no more new Patternists.”

“But—But why? What have we done, Doro?”

“Nothing. Nothing but grow. And that’s the problem. I’m not punishing you; I’m slowing you down a little. I’m being cautious.”

“For what? Why should you be cautious about our growth? The mutes don’t know anything about us, and they’d have a hard time hurting us if they did. We aren’t hurting each other. I’m in control. There’s been no unusual trouble.”

“Mary … fifteen hundred adults and five hundred children in only two years! It’s time you stopped devoting all your energy to growth and started figuring out just what it is you’re growing. You’re one woman holding everything together. Your only possible successor at this point is about two months old. There’d be a blood bath if anything happened to you. If you were hit by a car tomorrow, your people would disintegrate—all over each other.”

“If I were hit by a car and there were anything at all of me left alive, I’d survive. If I couldn’t put myself together again, Rachel would do it.”

“Mary, what I’m saying is that you’re irreplaceable. You’re all your people have got. Now, you can go on playing the part of their savior if you do as I’ve told you. Or you can destroy them by plunging on headlong as you are now.”

“Are you saying I have to stop recruiting until August is old enough to replace me if anything happens to me?”

“Yes. And for safety’s sake, I suggest that you not make August an only child.”

“Wait twenty years?”

“It only sounds like a long time, Mary, believe me.” He smiled a little. “Besides, not only are you a potential immortal as a descendant of Emma, but you have your own and Rachel’s healing ability to keep you young if your potential for longevity doesn’t work out.”

“Twenty Goddamn years … !”

“You would have something firm and well established to bring your people into by then, too. You wouldn’t be just spreading haphazardly over the city.”

“We aren’t doing that now! You know we aren’t. We’re growing deliberately into Santa Elena, because that’s where the living room we need is. Jesse is working right now to prepare a new section of Santa Elena for us. We’ve got the school in the most protected part of our Palo Alto district. We didn’t manage that by accident! The people don’t just move wherever they want to. They go to Jesse and he shows them what’s available.”

“And all that’s available is what you take from mutes. You don’t build anything of your own.”

“We build ourselves!”

“You will build yourselves more slowly now.”

I knew that tone of voice. I used it myself from time to time. I knew he was letting me argue so that I’d have time to get used to the idea, not because there was any chance of changing his mind. But twenty years!

“Doro, do you know what kind of work I’ve had Rachel doing for most of the past two years?”

“I know.”

“Have you seen the people she brings in—walking corpses most of them? That is if they can even walk.”

“Yes.”

“My people, so far gone they look like they’ve been through Dachau!”

“Mary—”

“They turn out to be my best telepaths when they’re like that, you know? That’s why they’re in such bad shape as latents. They’re so sensitive, they pick up everything.”

“Mary, listen.”

“How many of those people do you imagine will die, probably in agony, in twenty years?”

“It doesn’t matter, Mary. It doesn’t matter at all.”

End of conversation. At least as far as he was concerned. But I just couldn’t let go.

“You’ve been watching them die for thousands of years,” I said. “You’ve learned not to care. I’ve just been saving them for two years, but I’ve already learned the opposite lesson. I care.”

“I was afraid you would.”

“Is it such a bad thing?”

“It’s going to hurt you. It’s already started to hurt you.”

“You could let me go after just the worst ones. Just the ones who would die without me.”

“No.”

“Goddamnit, Doro, they’d die anyway. What could you lose?”

He looked at me silently for a long moment. “Do you remember what I told you on the day, two years ago, when you discovered Clay Dana’s potential?”

The crap about obeying. I remembered, all right. “I wondered when you’d get to that.”

“You know I meant it.”

I slumped back in the seat, wondering what I was going to do. I took his hand almost absently. “What a pity we had to become competitors!”

“We haven’t. There’s enough for both of us.”

I looked down at his hand, calloused, with fingers that were too long. It hit me how much like my own, big, ugly hands it was, and I took another look at the body he was wearing—green-eyed, blackhaired … “Who is this you’re wearing?” I asked.

He raised an eyebrow. “A relative of your father—as you’ve probably already guessed.”

“What relation?”

His expression hardened. “A son. Your older half brother.” He wasn’t just giving me information. He was challenging me with it.

“Right,” I said. “Just the kind of person I would be looking for. A close relative, a potentially good Patternist, and a likely victim to ease your hunger. You know damn well we’re competitors, Doro.”

I had never spoken that bluntly to him before. He stared at me as though I’d surprised him—which was what I had set out to do.

“Hey,” I said softly. “You know what I am. You made me what I am. Don’t cut me off from the thing I was born to do. Just let me have the worst of the latents. Rachel’s kind. Okay that, and I won’t touch any of the others.”

He shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry, Mary.”

“But why?” I yelled. “Why?”

“Let’s get back to the house. You can start calling your people in.”

I got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked around to the sidewalk. I couldn’t stay sitting there beside him for a minute longer. I would have done something stupid and useless—and probably suicidal. He called to me a couple of times, but, thank God, he had the sense not to come after me.

I walked home. Palo Alto wasn’t far. I needed to burn off some of my anger before I got home, anyway.

Chapter Eleven

MARY

Karl was settling some kind of dispute when I got home. He was standing between two Patternist men who were trying to glare each other to death. Their communication was all mental and easy for me to ignore as I walked through the living room. I went to the library and began to call in my searchers. As usual, they were scattered around the country—around the continent. Doro had begun planting the best of his families from Africa, Europe, and Asia in various parts of North America hundreds of years before. He had decided then that the North American continent was big enough to give them room to avoid each other and that it would be racially diverse enough to absorb them all. Now I had people in three countries demanding to know why they should stop their searches before they had found all the latents they sensed—why they should abandon potential Patternists. I didn’t blame them for being mad, but I wasn’t about to tell them, one by one, what the problem was. I pulled a “Do it because I said so!” on them and broke contact before they could argue more.

Karl came into the library as I was finishing and said, “What are you doing sitting in here in the dark?”

I was in contact with a Patternist in Chicago who was crying in anger and frustration at my “stupid, arbitrary, dictatorial orders …” On and on.

Just get your ass on the next plane to L.A., I told her. I broke contact with her and blinked as Karl turned on the light. I hadn’t realized it was so late.

“Uh-oh,” he said, looking at me. “I’ll listen if you want to talk about it.”

I just opened and gave it all to him.

“Twenty years,” he said, frowning. “But why? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Doro doesn’t have to make sense,” I said. “Although in this case I think he has his reasons. I think it’s interesting that he first denied that he and I were competitors.”

Karl looked hard at me. “I don’t think that’s a point you should emphasize to him.”

“I wasn’t emphasizing it. I was letting him know I understood it, and that because I understood it I was willing to accept a reasonable limitation—willing to settle for just the worst of the latents.”

“But it didn’t do any good.”

“No.”

“I wonder why. It sounds fairly harmless, and he would be able to check on you just by questioning you now and then.”

“Maybe it was something I said—although he knew it already.”

“What?”

“That the really bad latents turn out to be my best Patternists. They’re probably the victims that give him the most pleasure too, when he can catch them before they kill themselves or get themselves locked up. I’ll bet that half brother of mine was a mess before Doro took him.”

“Competition again,” said Karl. “Possible.” He looked at me curiously. “Does it

bother you that the body he’s wearing was your brother?”

“No. I never knew the man. Doro’s appetite in general bothers me. He warned me that it would. But I can keep quiet about it as long as he isn’t taking my Patternists.”

“For all we know, that could be next.”

“God! No, he wouldn’t do that while I’m still alive. The only Patternist he’s likely to take right now is me.” Something occurred to me suddenly. “Wait a minute! he may have left me more clues to whatever the hell he’s doing than I thought.”

“What?”

“I’ll get back to you in a minute.” I reached out to the old neighborhood, to Emma. I could reach her fast now, because she belonged to me. I had a kind of link with her that would let me know the minute some other Patternist touched her, and at the same time let the Patternist know she was mine. I had that kind of connection with Rina too, since she was too old for me to risk her life by trying to push her into transition.

I read Emma, saw that Doro had been to see her just a few hours before. And he’d talked a lot. Now since he knew Emma was mine, knew that anything he said to her I would eventually pick up, I assumed that he had been talking at least partly to me. Perhaps more to me than about me. I looked at Karl. “This morning, Doro told Emma he was afraid I’d disobey him in this and make him kill me.”

“Obviously he was wrong,” said Karl.

“But he seemed so sure about it—and Emma seemed so sure. I can discount Emma, I guess. She’s frightened enough of me—and jealous enough of me—to want me dead. But Doro …”

“Do you have any intention of defying him?”

“None … now.” I stared down at the table. “I wouldn’t risk the people, the Pattern, even if I were willing to risk myself. I’m wondering, though …”

“Wondering what?”

“Well, remember when we started this—when I pulled in Christine and Jamie Hanson?”

“Yes.”

“And you and Doro and I tried to figure out why I was so eager to bring in more people. Doro finally decided that I needed them for the same reasons he needed them. For sustenance.”

Karl smiled faintly, which had to be a mark of how much he had relaxed and accepted his place in the Pattern. “Don’t you think fifteen hundred people might be enough to sustain you?”

I looked at him. “You don’t know how much I’d like to say yes to that.”

His smile vanished. “For the sake of the fifteen hundred, you’d better say yes to it.”

“Yeah. I just wish I could be sure that saying yes was enough.”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“I might be too much like Doro.” I sighed. “I’m supposed to be like him. He finally admitted that to Emma this morning. Have you ever seen him when he needs a change really badly?”

“No. But I know that’s not a safe time to be near him.”

“Right. If he’s really in trouble, he’s liable to lose control—just take whoever’s closest to him. Usually, though, he prevents himself from getting into that situation by changing often and keeping to healthy, young bodies. I seem to prefer young minds—not

necessarily healthy.”

“But with so many young minds already here, there’s no reason for you to defy Doro and go after more.”

“There’s more of them out there, Karl. I’m afraid that might be reason enough. Now that I’m thinking about it …” I glanced at him. “You’ve felt how eager I am when I go after new people—the first ones two years ago, and the last ones this morning. I don’t like thinking about what my life will be like now that I can’t go after any more of them.”

He put one elbow on the table and rested his chin on his hand. “You know, in his way, I think Doro does love you.”

I stared at him in surprise. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Am I right?”

“He loves me. What passes for love with him.”

“Don’t belittle it. I think it’s the only lever you have that might move him—make him change his mind.”

“I’ve never in my life been able to change his mind once he’s made it up. His love … it lasts as long as I do what he tells me.”

“All right, then; you may not have any influence. But you’ll find out for sure, won’t you. You’ll try.”

I took a deep breath, nodded. “I’ll try anything within reason. But I don’t think anything less than my complete obedience will satisfy him. I’ve made him wary and uncomfortable. I’ve been moving too fast, and letting him see me too clearly.”

“It sounds as though you’re saying he’s afraid of you. And if you believe that, you’re deluding yourself. Dangerously.”

“No, not afraid. Cautious. He’s alive because he’s cautious. And I’m too powerful. Fifteen hundred people aren’t giving me any trouble at all. Whatever the Pattern is, I’m not likely to overload it soon. Doro isn’t worried that I can’t handle the thing I’m building. He’s worried that I can.”

Karl thought about that for a long moment. “If you’re right, if he is worried, it might not only be because you’re competing with him and taking his people.”

I looked at him questioningly.

“It might be because you could use those people against him. You can’t hurt him alone, but if you took strength from some of us—or all of us …”

“He made a point of telling Emma that wouldn’t work.”

“Did he convince you?”

“He didn’t have to. I already knew better than to try anything like that with him.”

“You had no reason to risk trying it before now. Now … you might have to try something. Or let us try. There should be enough Patternists now for us to overwhelm him without your help.”

“No way.”

“It’s never been tried. You don’t know—”

“I know. You couldn’t do it. Not even all fifteen hundred of you together, because, as far as he’s concerned, you wouldn’t really be together. He’d take you one at a time, but so fast you’d fall like dominoes. I know. Because that’s something I could do myself.”

He frowned. “That’s out, then. But I don’t understand why he’s so convinced that you couldn’t defeat him using our strength.”

“He said, ‘Strength alone isn’t enough to defeat me.’ And part of the reason he gave is

that I can’t change bodies. But that doesn’t hold up. I can kill his body with a thought, and

that same thought will force him to attack me on a mental level. My territory.”

“That sounds promising.”

“Yes, but he knows it as well as I do. That means he has some other reason for his confidence. The only thing I can think of is my own ignorance. I just don’t know how to take him. He’s not a Patternist, he’s not a mute—he’s bound to have some surprises for me. If I go after him, the chances are I’ll be dead before I can figure out how to kill him. He knows so much more than I do.”

“But he’s never faced anyone like you before. You’d be as new to him as he is to you.”

“But killing is a way of life to him, Karl. He’s damned good at it. And he has killed people who he thought were dangerous to him before. He claims I don’t even have the potential to be dangerous to him personally.”

“Do you imagine he’s never made a mistake?”

“He’s still alive.”

“No wonder. Look how good he is at scaring the hell out of his opponents before he faces them. If you accept him as all-knowing and invulnerable, you’d better be able to live without recruiting for as long as he says. Because you’ll be in no shape to face him. You’ll have already beaten yourself!”

We stared at each other for a long moment, and I could see that he was as worried as he sounded. “You know I’m not going to give him my life,” I said quietly. “Or the lives of my Patternists. If I have to fight him, it will be a battle, not a rout.”

“You’ll take strength from us.”

I winced, looked away. “Some of you at least.”

“The strongest of us. Beginning with me.”

I nodded. To protect them, I had to risk them. They could be killed even if I wasn’t. If I was desperate and rushed, as I probably would be, I might take too much of their strength. And I would be killing them. Not Doro. They were my people, and I would be killing them.

Doro stayed at Larkin House that night. We still kept his room ready for him though he didn’t use it much any more. He didn’t intend to use it that night. Instead he came across the hall to my room. I was sitting in the middle of my bed in the dark, thinking. He walked in without knocking.

He and I hadn’t made love for over a year, but he walked in as though there had been no break at all. Knowing him, I wasn’t surprised. He sat on the side of my bed, took off his shoes, and lay down beside me fully clothed. I was stark naked myself.

“I checked on a few of your searchers,” he said. “I see they’re starting for home.”

I didn’t say anything. I had mixed emotions about his just being there. I had promised Karl that I’d use my “lever,” try to change Doro’s mind. Now looked like a good time for that. But, since he was Doro, I wouldn’t get anything past him that I didn’t mean. If I was going to be able to reach him at all, it had to be with truth.

“I’m glad you’re cooperating,” he said. “I was afraid you might not.”

“I got the message you left with Emma,” I said. “Although I think you laid it on kind of thick.”

“I wasn’t acting. I wasn’t trying to scare you, either. I was honestly worried about you.”

“Why make impossible demands of me and then worry about me?”

“Impossible?”

“Hard, then. Too hard.”

He just looked at me—at what he could see of me in the light from the window.

“Hard on the others, too.”

He shrugged.

“You’ve stayed away from us too long,” I said. “It’s easy for you to hurt us, because you don’t really know us any more.”

“Oh, I know you, girl.”

That didn’t sound too good. “I mean you used to be one of us. You could be again, you know.”

“Your people don’t need me. Neither do you.”

“You’re our founder,” I said. “Our father. We teach the new Patternists about you, but that isn’t enough. They should get to know you.”

“And me them.”

“Yes.”

“It won’t work, Mary.”

I frowned down at him. He was lying flat on his back now, looking up at the ceiling. “If you get to know us as we are now, Doro, you might find that we really are the people, the race, that you’ve been working for so long to build. We already belong to you, and you can be one of us. We haven’t shut you out.”

“It’s surprising how eloquent you can become when you want something.”

I hung on to my temper. “You know I’m not just talking. I mean what I’m saying.”

“It doesn’t matter. Because it’s not going to change anything. The order I gave you is final. I’m not going to be talked out of it. Not by getting to know your people better. Not by renewing my relationship with you.”

“What are you doing here, then?”

“Oh, I intend to renew our relationship. I just don’t intend to let you charge me for it.”

I kicked him out of the bed. We were positioned perfectly for it. I just let him have it in the side with both feet. He fell, cursing, and got up holding his side.

“What the hell was that supposed to prove?” he demanded. “I thought you had outgrown that kind of behavior.”

“I have. I only give it to you because it’s what you want.”

He ignored that, sat down on the bed. “That was a stupid, dangerous thing to do.”

“No it wasn’t. You have some control. You can control your mouth too when you want to.”

He sighed. “Well, at least you’re back to normal.”

“Shit!” I muttered and turned away from him. “Pleading for my people isn’t normal. Acting like a latent is normal. Stay with us, Doro. Get to know us again, whether you think you’ll change your mind or not.”

“What is it you want me to see that you think I’ve missed?”

“The fact that your kids really have grown up, man. I know actives and latents didn’t use to be able to do that. They had too many problems just surviving. Surviving alone. We weren’t meant for solitude. But the Pattern has let us grow up.”

“What makes you think I haven’t noticed that?”

I looked at him sharply. Something really ugly had come into his voice just then.

Something I would have expected to hear in Emma’s voice but not his. “Yeah,” I said softly. “Of course you know. You even said it yourself a couple of minutes ago. It must have come as kind of a shock to you that after four thousand years, your work, your children, were suddenly as finished as you could make them. That they … didn’t need you any more.”

He gave me a look of pure hatred. I think he was as close to taking me at that moment as he had ever been. I touched his hand.

“Join us, Doro. If you destroy us, you’ll be destroying part of yourself. All the time you spent creating us will be wasted. Your long life, wasted. Join us.”

The hatred that had flared in his eyes was concealed again. I suspected it was more envy than hatred. If he had hated me, I would already have been dead. Envy was bad enough. He envied me for doing what he had bred me to do—because he was incomplete, and he would never be able to do it himself. He got up and walked out of my room.

KARL

In only ten days Karl knew without doubt that Mary’s suspicions had been justified. She wasn’t going to be able to obey Doro. She had begun sensing latents again without intending to, without searching for them. Sooner or later she was going to have to begin pulling them in again. And the day she did that would very likely be the day she died.

She and how many others?

Karl watched her with growing concern. She was like a latent now, trying to hold herself together, and no one knew it but she and Karl. She kept shielded, and she was actress enough to conceal it from the others—except possibly Doro. And Doro didn’t care.

Mary had already talked to him and been refused. That tenth night, Karl went in to talk to him. He pleaded. Mary was in trouble. If she could even be given a small quota of the latents that Doro valued least—

“I’m sorry,” said Doro. “I can’t afford her unless she can obey me.”

It was a dismissal. The subject was closed. Karl got up wearily and went to Mary’s room.

She was lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling. Just staring. She did not move as he came to sit beside her, except to take his hand and hold it.

“What did he say?” she asked.

“You’ve been reading me,” he said mildly.

“If I had, I’d know what he said. I was coming upstairs a few minutes ago. I saw you go into his room.” She sat up and looked at him intently. “What did he say, Karl?”

“He said no.”

“Oh.” She lay down again. “I knew damned well he would. I just keep hoping.”

“You’re going to have to fight.”

“I know.”

“And you’re going to win. You’re going to kill him. You’re going to do whatever you have to do to kill him!”

Like a latent, she turned onto her side, clutched her head between her hands, and curled her body into a tight knot.

The next day, Karl called the family together. Mary had gone to see August, and Karl wanted to talk to the others before she returned. She would find out what had been said. He planned to tell her himself, in fact. But he wanted to talk to them first without her.

They already knew why Mary had called in her searchers. They didn’t like it. Mary’s enthusiasm over the Pattern’s growth had infected them long ago. Now Karl told them that Mary’s submission could not last. That Mary’s own needs would force her to disobey, and that when she disobeyed, Doro would kill her. Or try to.

“It’s possible that with our numbers we can help her defeat him,” Karl said. “I don’t know how she’ll handle things when the time comes, but I have a feeling she’ll want to get as many of the people away from the section as she can. Doro has told us that actives couldn’t handle themselves in groups before the Pattern. I know Mary’s afraid of the chaos that might happen here if she’s killed while we’re all together. So I think she’ll try to give the people some warning to get out of Forsyth, scatter. If any of you want to scatter with them, she’ll almost certainly let you go. The idea of other Patternists dying either because she dies or because she takes too much strength from them is bothering her more than the thought of her own death.”

“Sounds like you’re telling us to cut and run,” said Jesse.

“I’m offering you a choice,” said Karl.

“Only because you know we won’t take it,” said Jesse.

Karl looked from him to the others, let his gaze pass over them slowly.

“He speaks for all of us,” said Seth. “I didn’t know Mary was in trouble. She hides things too well sometimes. But now that I do know, I’m not going to walk out on her.”

“And how could I leave the school?” said Ada. “All the children …”

“I think Doro has made a mistake,” said Rachel. “I think he’s waited too long to do this. I don’t see how any one person could resist so many of us. I don’t even see why we have to risk Mary, since she’s the only one of us who’s irreplaceable. If the rest of us got together and—”

“Mary says that wouldn’t work,” said Karl. “She says it wouldn’t even work against her.”

“Then, we’ll all have to give her our strength.”

“To be honest, she’s not sure that will work either. Doro says strength alone isn’t enough to beat him. I suspect he’s lying. But the only way to find out for sure is for her to tackle him. So she will gather strength from some or all of us when the time comes. We’re the only weapons she has.”

“If she’s not careful,” said Jesse, “she won’t have time to try it—or time to warn the people to scatter. Doro knows she’s in trouble, doesn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“He might decide there’s no point in waiting for her to break.”

“I’ve thought about that,” said Karl. “I don’t think she’ll let him surprise her. But, to be sure, I’m going to start work on her tonight—talk her into going after him. Preparing herself, and going after him.”

“Are you sure you can talk her into it?” asked Jan.

“Yes.” Karl looked at her. “You haven’t said anything. Are you with us?”

Jan looked offended. “I’m a member of this family, aren’t I?”

Karl smiled. Jan had changed. Her art had given her the strength that she had always lacked. And it had given her a contentment with her life. She might even be a live woman

now, instead of a corpse, in bed. Karl wondered briefly but not seriously. Mary was woman enough for him if he could find some way of keeping her alive.

“I think Doro has made more than one mistake,” said Jan. “I think he’s wrong to believe that Mary still belongs to him. With the responsibility she’s taken on for all that she’s built here, she belongs to us, the people. To all of us.”

“I suspect she thinks it’s the other way around,” said Rachel. “But it wouldn’t hurt if we went to some of the heads of houses and said it Jan’s way. They’re our best, our strongest. Mary will need them.”

“I don’t know whether I’ll be able to get her to take them,” said Karl. “I intend to try, though.”

“When Doro starts chewing at her, she’ll take anybody she can get,” said Jesse.

“If she has time, as you said,” said Karl. “I don’t want it to come to that. That’s why I’m going to work on her. And, look, don’t say anything to the heads of houses. Word will spread too quickly. It might spread to Doro. God knows what he’d do if he realized his cattle had finally gotten the nerve to plot against him.”

Chapter Twelve

MARY

When I woke up on the morning after Karl had talked to Doro, I found that my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I felt the way I had a few days before my transition. With Karl, I didn’t even bother to hide it.

He said, “Open to me. Maybe I can help.”

“You can’t help,” I muttered. “Not this time.”

“Let me try.”

I looked at him, saw the concern in his eyes, and felt almost guilty about doing as he asked. I opened to him not because I thought he could help me but because I wanted him to realize that he couldn’t.

He stayed with me for several seconds, sharing my need, my hunger, my starvation. Sharing it but not diminishing it in any way. Finally he withdrew and stood staring at me bleakly. I went to him for the kind of comfort he could give, and he held me.

“You could take strength from me,” he said. “It might ease your—”

“No!” I rested my head against his chest. “No, no, no. You think I haven’t thought of that?”

“But you wouldn’t have to take much. You could—”

“I said no, Karl. It’s like you said last night. I’m going to have to fight him. I’ll take from you then, and from the others. But not until then. I’m not the vampire he is. I give in return for my taking.” I pulled away from him, looked at him. “God, I’ve got ethics all of a sudden.”

“You’ve had them for some time, now, whether you were willing to admit to them or not.”

I smiled. “I remember Doro wondering before my transition whether I would ever develop a conscience.”

Karl made a sound of disgust. “I just wish Doro had developed one. Are you going out?”

“Yes. To see August.”

He didn’t say anything to that, and I wondered whether he realized this might be my last visit to our son. I finished dressing and left.

I saw August and spent some time strengthening Evelyn’s programming, seeing to it that she would go on being a good mother to him even if Karl and I weren’t around. And I planted some instructions that she wouldn’t need or remember until August showed signs of approaching transition. I didn’t want her panicking then, and taking him to a doctor or a hospital. Maybe I needn’t have worried. Maybe Doro would see that he was taken care of. And maybe not.

I went home and managed to get through a fairly ordinary day. I passed a man and a woman to become heads of houses. They had been Patternists for over a year, and I read just about everything they had done during that year. Karl and I checked all prospective heads of houses. Back when we hadn’t checked them, we’d gotten some bad ones. Some

who had been too warped by their latent years to turn human again. We still got those kind, but they didn’t become heads of houses any more. If we couldn’t straighten them out, or heal them—if healing was what they needed—we killed them. We had no prison, needed none. A rogue Patternist was too dangerous to be left alive.

That was probably the way Doro felt about me. It went with what he had told Karl. “I can’t afford her unless she can obey me.” We were too much alike, Doro and I. What ever gave him the idea that someone bred to be so similar to him would consent—could consent—to being controlled by him all her life?

I passed my two new heads of houses, but I told them not to do anything toward beginning their houses for a week. They didn’t like that much, but they were so happy to be passed that they didn’t argue. They were bright and capable. If, by some miracle, the Pattern still existed in a week, they would be a credit to it in their new positions.