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 mewhich 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 anythingyet. 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 themseeing 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 heraside 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 didthan any of the rest of you did. Maybe nobody but me noticed that Doro was about to dump herput 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 ambrosiapower, 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 mein slow motion, it seemedmeaning 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 herexcept 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. S
he 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.
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