Mind of My Mind p-2

by Butler, Octavia

  “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.”