Mind of My Mind

by Octavia E. Butler

  “Do you want us here?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I want to.”

  “And you can’t?”

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

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

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

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

  Rachel said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Are you shielded?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

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

  “No one is,” she said.

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

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

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

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

  “You’re afraid of Rachel?”

  “I sure as hell am.”

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

  “I don’t know.”

  “You should know.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “What else did you find out about Rachel?”

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

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

  “What?”

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

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

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

  She swallowed, nodded.

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

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

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

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

  “She could, very easily. Ordinarily 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 ho
rror.

  “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 catlike 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?”