Seed to Harvest

by Octavia E. Butler

  “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 o
bediently. 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 I 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 ri
ght 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 anymore. 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.