Mind of My Mind

“We build ourselves!”

“You will build yourselves more slowly now.”

I knew that tone of voice. I used it myself from time to time. I knew he was letting me argue so that I’d have time to get used to the idea, not because there was any chance of changing his mind. But twenty years!

“Doro, do you know what kind of work I’ve had Rachel doing for most of the past two years?”

“I know.”

“Have you seen the people she brings in—walking corpses most of them? That is if they can even walk.”

“Yes.”

“My people, so far gone they look like they’ve been through Dachau!”

“Mary—”

“They turn out to be my best telepaths when they’re like that, you know? That’s why they’re in such bad shape as latents. They’re so sensitive, they pick up everything.”

“Mary, listen.”

“How many of those people do you imagine will die, probably in agony, in twenty years?”

“It doesn’t matter, Mary. It doesn’t matter at all.”

End of conversation. At least as far as he was concerned. But I just couldn’t let go.

“You’ve been watching them die for thousands of years,” I said. “You’ve learned not to care. I’ve just been saving them for two years, but I’ve already learned the opposite lesson. I care.”

“I was afraid you would.”

“Is it such a bad thing?”

“It’s going to hurt you. It’s already started to hurt you.”

“You could let me go after just the worst ones. Just the ones who would die without me.”

“No.”

“Goddamnit, Doro, they’d die anyway. What could you lose?”

He looked at me silently for a long moment. “Do you remember what I told you on the day, two years ago, when you discovered Clay Dana’s potential?”

The crap about obeying. I remembered, all right. “I wondered when you’d get to that.”

“You know I meant it.”

I slumped back in the seat, wondering what I was going to do. I took his hand almost absently. “What a pity we had to become competitors!”

“We haven’t. There’s enough for both of us.”

I looked down at his hand, calloused, with fingers that were too long. It hit me how much like my own, big, ugly hands it was, and I took another look at the body he was wearing—green-eyed, blackhaired … “Who is this you’re wearing?” I asked.

He raised an eyebrow. “A relative of your father—as you’ve probably already guessed.”

“What relation?”

His expression hardened. “A son. Your older half brother.” He wasn’t just giving me information. He was challenging me with it.

“Right,” I said. “Just the kind of person I would be looking for. A close relative, a potentially good Patternist, and a likely victim to ease your hunger. You know damn well we’re competitors, Doro.”

I had never spoken that bluntly to him before. He stared at me as though I’d surprised him—which was what I had set out to do.

“Hey,” I said softly. “You know what I am. You made me what I am. Don’t cut me off from the thing I was born to do. Just let me have the worst of the latents. Rachel’s kind. Okay that, and I won’t touch any of the others.”

He shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry, Mary.”

“But why?” I yelled. “Why?”

“Let’s get back to the house. You can start calling your people in.”

I got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked around to the sidewalk. I couldn’t stay sitting there beside him for a minute longer. I would have done something stupid and useless—and probably suicidal. He called to me a couple of times, but, thank God, he had the sense not to come after me.

I walked home. Palo Alto wasn’t far. I needed to burn off some of my anger before I got home, anyway.

Chapter Eleven

MARY

Karl was settling some kind of dispute when I got home. He was standing between two Patternist men who were trying to glare each other to death. Their communication was all mental and easy for me to ignore as I walked through the living room. I went to the library and began to call in my searchers. As usual, they were scattered around the country—around the continent. Doro had begun planting the best of his families from Africa, Europe, and Asia in various parts of North America hundreds of years before. He had decided then that the North American continent was big enough to give them room to avoid each other and that it would be racially diverse enough to absorb them all. Now I had people in three countries demanding to know why they should stop their searches before they had found all the latents they sensed—why they should abandon potential Patternists. I didn’t blame them for being mad, but I wasn’t about to tell them, one by one, what the problem was. I pulled a “Do it because I said so!” on them and broke contact before they could argue more.

Karl came into the library as I was finishing and said, “What are you doing sitting in here in the dark?”

I was in contact with a Patternist in Chicago who was crying in anger and frustration at my “stupid, arbitrary, dictatorial orders …” On and on.

Just get your ass on the next plane to L.A., I told her. I broke contact with her and blinked as Karl turned on the light. I hadn’t realized it was so late.

“Uh-oh,” he said, looking at me. “I’ll listen if you want to talk about it.”

I just opened and gave it all to him.

“Twenty years,” he said, frowning. “But why? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Doro doesn’t have to make sense,” I said. “Although in this case I think he has his reasons. I think it’s interesting that he first denied that he and I were competitors.”

Karl looked hard at me. “I don’t think that’s a point you should emphasize to him.”

“I wasn’t emphasizing it. I was letting him know I understood it, and that because I understood it I was willing to accept a reasonable limitation—willing to settle for just the worst of the latents.”

“But it didn’t do any good.”

“No.”

“I wonder why. It sounds fairly harmless, and he would be able to check on you just by questioning you now and then.”

“Maybe it was something I said—although he knew it already.”

“What?”

“That the really bad latents turn out to be my best Patternists. They’re probably the victims that give him the most pleasure too, when he can catch them before they kill themselves or get themselves locked up. I’ll bet that half brother of mine was a mess before Doro took him.”

“Competition again,” said Karl. “Possible.” He looked at me curiously. “Does it

bother you that the body he’s wearing was your brother?”

“No. I never knew the man. Doro’s appetite in general bothers me. He warned me that it would. But I can keep quiet about it as long as he isn’t taking my Patternists.”

“For all we know, that could be next.”

“God! No, he wouldn’t do that while I’m still alive. The only Patternist he’s likely to take right now is me.” Something occurred to me suddenly. “Wait a minute! he may have left me more clues to whatever the hell he’s doing than I thought.”

“What?”

“I’ll get back to you in a minute.” I reached out to the old neighborhood, to Emma. I could reach her fast now, because she belonged to me. I had a kind of link with her that would let me know the minute some other Patternist touched her, and at the same time let the Patternist know she was mine. I had that kind of connection with Rina too, since she was too old for me to risk her life by trying to push her into transition.

I read Emma, saw that Doro had been to see her just a few hours before. And he’d talked a lot. Now since he knew Emma was mine, knew that anything he said to her I would eventually pick up, I assumed that he had been talking at least partly to me. Perhaps more to me than about me. I looked at Karl. “This morning, Doro told Emma he was afraid I’d disobey him in this and make him kill me.”