Doro sighed, started to speak, then shrugged.
“I can’t help it,” she said. “Something is wrong with me. I can’t help it.”
“I know.”
“You made me what I am. I ought to hate your guts for what you made me.”
“You don’t hate me. And you don’t have to defend yourself to me. I don’t condemn you.” He caressed her, wondering idly how she could want life badly enough to fight as hard as she had to fight to keep it. In producing her daughter, she had performed the function she had been born to perform. Doro had demanded that much of her as he had demanded it of others, her ancestors long before her. There had been a time when he disposed of people like her as soon as they had produced the number of offspring he desired. They were inevitably poor parents and their children grew up more comfortably with adoptive parents. Now, though, if such people wanted to live after having served him, he let them. He treated them kindly, as servants who had been faithful. Their gratitude often made them his best servants in spite of their seeming weakness. And the weakness didn’t bother him. Rina was right. It was his faulta result of his breeding program. Rina, in fact, was a minor favorite with him when she was sober.
“I’ll be careful,” she said. “No one will hurt Mary again. Will you stay with me for a while?”
“Only for a few days. Long enough to help you move out of here.”
She looked alarmed. “I don’t want to move. I can’t stand it out there where I was, by myself.”
“I’m not going to send you back to our old house. I’m just going to take you a few blocks over to Dell Street where one of your relatives lives. She has a duplex and you’re going to live in one side of it.”
“I don’t have any relatives left alive around here.”
He smiled. “Rina, this part of Forsyth is full of your relatives. Actually, that’s why you came back to it. You don’t know them, and you wouldn’t like most of them if you met them, but you need to be close to them.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just say, so you won’t be by yourself.”
She shrugged, neither understanding nor really caring. “If people around here are my relatives, are they your people too?”
“Of course.”
“And … this woman I’m going to live next door to-what is she to me?”
“Your grandmother several times removed.”
Rina’s terror returned full force. “You mean she’s like you? Immortal?”
“No. Not like me. She doesn’t killat least not the way I do. She’s still wearing the same body she was born into. And she won’t hurt you. But she might be able to help with Mary.”
“All for Mary. She must be important, poor kid.”
“She’s very important.”
Rina was suddenly the concerned mother, frowning at him worriedly. “She won’t just be like me? Sick? Crazy?”
“She’ll be like you at first, but she’ll grow out of it. It isn’t really a disease, you know.”
“It is to me. But I’ll keep her, and move, like you said, to this grandmother’s house. What’s the woman’s name?”
“Emma. She started to call herself Emma about one hundred fifty years ago as a joke. It means grandmother or ancestress.”
“It means she’s somebody you can trust to watch me and see that I don’t hurt Mary.”
“Yes.”
“I won’t. I’ll learn to be her mother at least … a little more. I can do that muchraise a child who’ll be important to you.”
He kissed her, believing her. If the child had not been such an important part of his breeding program, he would not have put a watch on her at all. After a while he got up and went to call one of his people to come and get his former body out of the apartment.
EMMA
Emma was in the kitchen fixing her breakfast when she heard someone at her front door. She hobbled through the dining room toward the door, but before she could reach it, it opened and a slight young man stepped in.
Emma stopped where she was, straightened her usually bent body, and stared a question at the young man. She was not afraid. A couple of boys had broken in to rob her recently and she had given them quite a surprise.
“It’s me, Em,” said the young man, smiling.
Emma relaxed, smiled herself, but she did not let her body sink back into its stoop. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in New York.”
“I suddenly realized that it had been too long since I checked on one of my people.”
“You don’t mean me.”
“A relative of yoursa little girl.”
Emma raised an eyebrow at him, then drew a deep breath. “Let’s sit down, Doro. Ask me the favor you’re going to ask me from a comfortable chair.”
He actually looked a little sheepish. They sat down in the living room.
“Well?” said Emma.
“I see you have someone living in your other apartment,” he said.
“Family,” said Emma. “A great-grandson whose wife just died. He works and I keep an eye on the kids when they get home from school.”
“How soon can you move him out?”
Emma stared at him expressionlessly. “The question is, will I move him out at all?
Why should I?”
“I have a youngster who’s going to be too much for her mother in a few years. Right now, though, her mother is too much for her.”
“Doro, the kids next door really need my help. Even with guidance, you know they’re going to have a hard time.”
“But almost anyone could help those children, Em. On the other hand, you’re just about the only one I’d trust to help the child I’m talking about.”
Emma frowned. “Her mother abuses her?”
“So far, she only lets other people abuse her.”
“Sounds as though the child would be better off adopted into another family.”
“I don’t want to do that if I can avoid it. She’s probably going to have a strong need to be among her relatives. And you’re the only relative she has that I’d care to trust her with. She’s part of an experiment that’s important to me, Em.”
“Important to you. To you! And what shall I do with my great-grandson and his children?”
“Surely one of your apartment complexes has a vacancy. And you can pay a baby sitter for the kids. You’re already providing for God knows how many indigent relatives. This should be fairly easy.”
“That’s not the point.”
He leaned back and sat looking at her. “Are you going to turn me down?”
“How old is the child?”
“Three.”
“And just what is she going to grow up into?”
“A telepath. One with more control of her ability than any I’ve produced so far, I hope. And from the body I used to father her, I hope she’ll have inherited a few other abilities.”
“What other abilities?”
“Em, I can’t tell you all of it. If I do, in a few years she’ll read it in your mind.”
“What difference would that make? Why shouldn’t she know what she is?”
“Because she’s an experiment. It will be better for her to learn the nature of her abilities slowly, from experience. If she’s anything like her predecessors, the more slowly she learns the better it will be for the people around her.”
“Who were her predecessors?”
“Failures. Dangerous failures.”
Emma sighed. “Dead failures.” She wondered what he would say if she refused to help. She didn’t like having anything to do with his projects when she could help it. They always involved children, always had to do with his breeding programs. For all but the first few centuries of his four-thousand-year life, he had been struggling to build a race around himself. He existed apparently as a result of a mutation millennia past. His people existed as a result of less wildly divergent mutations and as a result of nearly four thousand years of controlled breeding. He now had several strong mutant strains, which he combined or kept separate, as he wished. And behind him he had an untold number of failures, dangerous or only pathetic, which he had destroyed as casually as other people slaughtered cattle.