“Be good to Margaret for me, Lea. I might not be able to come to see her again.”
She walked out, leaving Lea staring after her.
California.
Was it Doro calling her somehow with this thing in her mind? She knew he had other telepathsbetter telepaths. He might be using one of them to reach her. It was possible that he had somehow learned of his son’s death and struck at her through someone else. If he had, his efforts were paying off. She was going to California.
She felt all the terror that the controlled Lea must have known. She couldn’t help herself. She had to go to Forsyth. And if Doro was there, she would be going to her death.
Chapter Five
MARY
When Karl left my room, I lay in bed thinking, remembering. Karl and I had sort of accepted each other over the past two weeks. He had gotten a lot easier to talk to-and I suppose I had too. He had stopped trying to pretend I wasn’t there, and I had stopped resenting him. In fact, I had probably come to depend on him more than I should have. And he really had just worked damned hard to keep me alive. Yet, only a few hours later, he had done enough emotional backsliding to sit by and let me almost kill myself-all because of this pattern thing. I wondered how big a mental leap it would be for him to go from a willingness to let me be killed to a willingness to kill me himself.
Or maybe I was overreacting. Maybe I was just disappointed because I had expected my transition to bring me closer to him. I had expected just what I knew Vivian was afraid of: that, after my transition, she would become excess baggage. If I had to be Karl’s wife, I meant to be his only wife.
But now… I had never felt anyone’s hostility the way I felt Karl’s just before he went out. That was part of what it meant to be in full control of my telepathic ability. Not a very comfortable part. I knew he had gone to see Doro-had gone to roust Doro out of bed and ask him what the hell had gone wrong. I wondered if anything really had gone wrong.
Doro wanted an empire. He didn’t call it that, but that was what he meant. Maybe I was just one more tool he was using to get it. He needed tools, because an empire of ordinary people wasn’t quite what he had in mind. That, to him, would be like an ordinary person making himself emperor over a lot of cattle. Doro thought a lot of himself, all right. But he didn’t think much of the families of half-crazy latents he had scattered across the country. They were just his breeders-if they were lucky. He didn’t want an empire of them either. He and I had talked about it off and on since I was thirteen. That first conversation said most of it, though.
He had taken me to Disneyland. He did things like that for me now and then while I was growing up. They helped me survive Rina and Emma.
We were sitting at an outdoor table of a cafe having lunch when I asked the key question.
“What are we for, Doro?”
He looked at me through deep blue eyes. He was wearing the body of a tall, thin white man. I knew he knew what I meant, but still he said, “For?”
“Yeah, for. You have so many of us. Rina said your newest wife just had a kid.” He laughed for some reason. I went on. “Are you just keeping us for a hobby-so you’ll have something to do, or what?”
“No doubt that’s part of it.”
“What’s the other part?”
“I’m not sure you’d understand.”
“I’m mixed up in it. I want to know about it whether I understand or not. And I want to know about you.”
He was still smiling. “What about me?”
“Enough about you so that I’ll have a chance to understand why you want us.”
“Why does anyone want a family?”
“Oh, come on, Doro. Families! Dozens of them. Tell me, really. You can start by telling me about your name. How come you only have one, and one I never heard of at that.”
“It’s the name my parents gave me. It’s the only thing they gave me that I still have.”
“Who were your parents?”
“Farmers. They lived in a village along the Nile.”
“Egypt!”
He shook his head. “No, not quite. A little farther south. The Egyptians were our enemies when I was born. They were our former rulers, seeking to become our rulers again.”
“Who were your people?”
“They had another name then, but you would call them Nubians.”
“Black people!”
“Yes.”
“God! You’re white so much of the time, I never thought you might have been born black.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“What do you mean, ‘It doesn’t matter’? It matters to me.”
“It doesn’t matter because I haven’t been any color at all for about four thousand years. Or you could say I’ve been every color. But either way, I don’t have anything more in common with black people-Nubian or otherwise-than I do with whites or Asians.”
“You mean you don’t want to admit you have anything in common with us. But if you were born black, you are black. Still black, no matter what color you take on.”
He crooked his mouth a little in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “You can believe that if it makes you feel better.”
“It’s true!”
He shrugged.
“Well, what race do you think you are?”
“None that I have a name for.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It does when you think about it. I’m not black or white or yellow, because I’m not human, Mary.”
That stopped me cold. He was serious. He couldn’t have been more serious. I stared at him, chilled, scared, believing him even though I didn’t want to believe. I looked down at my plate, slowly finished my hamburger. Then, finally, I asked my question. “If you’re not human, what are you?”
And his seriousness broke. “A ghost?”
“That’s not funny!”
“No. It may even be true. I’m the closest thing to a ghost that I’ve run into in all my years. But that’s not important. What are you looking so frightened for? I’m no more likely to hurt you now than I ever was.”
“What are you?”
“A mutation. A kind of parasite. A god. A devil. You’d be surprised at some of the things people have decided I was.”
I didn’t say anything.
He reached over and took my hand for a moment. “Relax. There’s nothing for you to be afraid of.”
“Am I human?”
He laughed. “Of course you are. Different, but certainly human.”
I wondered whether that was good or bad. Would he have loved me more if I had been more like him? “Am I descended from your … from the Nubians, too?”
“No. Emma was an Ibo woman.” He ate a piece of french fry and watched a couple with about seven yelling little kids troop by. “I don’t know of any of my people who are descended from Nubians. Certainly none of them were descended from my parents.”
“You were an only child?”
“I was one of twelve. I survived, the others didn’t. They all died in infancy or early childhood. I was the youngest and I only survived until I was your age-thirteen.”
“And they were too old to have more kids.”
“Not only that. I died while I was going through something a lot like transition. I had flashes of telepathy, got caught in other people’s thoughts. But of course I didn’t know what it was. I was afraid, hurt. I thrashed around on the ground and made a lot of noise. Unfortunately, both my mother and my father came running. I died then for the first time, and I took them. First my mother, then my father. I didn’t know what I was doing. I took a lot of other people too, all in panic. Finally I ran away from the village, wearing the body of one of my cousins-a young girl. I ran straight into the arms of some Egyptians on a slave raid. They were just about to attack the village. I assume they did attack.”
“You don’t know?”
“Not for sure, but there was no reason for them not to. I couldn’t hurt them-or at least not deliberately. I was already half out of my mind over what I had done. I snapped. After that I don’t know what happened. Not then, not for about fifty years after. I figured out much later that the span I didn’t remember, still don’t remember, was about fifty years. I never saw any of the people of my village again.” He paused for a moment. “I came to, wearing the body of a middle-aged man. I was lying on a pallet of filthy, vermin-infested straw in a prison. I was in Egypt, but I didn’t know it. I didn’t know anything. I was a thirteen-year-old boy who had suddenly come awake in someone else’s forty-five-yearold body. I almost snapped again.