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.”