Mind of My Mind p-2 Page 9

  A little girl of no more than seven was standing in one of the yards watching Jan walk toward her. Jan examined the child curiously. Small, fine-boned and fair-haired, like Jan. Her eyes were blue, but not the pale, faded blue of Jan’s eyes. The girl’s eyes had the same deep, startling blue that had been one of her father’s best featuresor one of the best features of the body her father had been wearing.

  Jan turned to walk down the pathway to the child’s house.

  As she came even with the girl, some sentimentality about the eyes made her stop and hold out her hand. “Will you walk to the house with me, Margaret?”

  The child took the offered hand and walked solemnly beside Jan.

  Jan automatically blocked any mental contact with her. She had learned, painfully that children not only had no depth but that their unstable little animal minds could deliver one emotional outburst after another.

  Margaret spoke as Jan opened the door. “Did you come to take me away?”

  “No.”

  The child smiled at Jan in relief, then ran away, calling, “Mommy, Jan is here.” Jan raised an eyebrow at the irony of her daughter’s words. Jan had once tried to condition the family here, the Westleys, to believe that they were the natural parents of

  Jan’s children. She had had the power to do it, but she had not been skillful enough in her use of that power. She had failed. But time, combined with the simpler command that she had managed to instill in the Westleys—to care for the children and protect them—had turned her failure into success. Margaret knew that Jan was actually her mother. But it made no difference. Not to her; not to the Westleys.

  In fact, the children were such a permanent part of the Westley household that Margaret’s question seemed out of character. The question revived the feeling of foreboding that Jan had been trying to ignore.

  Even the feel of the house was wrong. So wrong that she found herself being careful not to touch anything. Just being inside was uncomfortable.

  The woman, Lea Westley, came in slowly, hesitantly, without Margaret or the boy, Vaughn. Jan resisted the temptation to reach into her thoughts and learn at once what was wrong. That part of her ability was still underdeveloped, because she did not like to use it. She enjoyed touching inanimate objects and winding back through the pasts of the people who had handled them before her. But she had never learned to enjoy direct mind-to-mind contact. Most people had vile minds anyway.

  “I thought you might be coming, Jan.” Lea Westley fumbled with her hands. “I was even afraid you might take Margaret.”

  Verbal confirmation of Jan’s fears. Now she had to have the rest. “I don’t know what’s happened, Lea. Tell me.”

  Lea looked away for a moment, then spoke softly. “There was an accident. Vaughn is dead.” Her voice broke on the last word and Jan had to wait until she could compose herself and go on.

  “It was a hit-and-run. Vaughn was out with Hugh,” her husband, “and someone ran a red light … It happened last week. Hugh is still in the hospital.”

  The woman was genuinely upset. Even through layers of shielding, Jan could feel her suffering. But, more than anything else, Lea Westley was afraid. She was afraid of Jan, of what Jan might decide to do to the people who had failed in the responsibility she had given them.

  Jan understood that fear, because she was feeling a slightly different version of it herself. Someday Doro would come back and ask to see his children. He had promised her he would, and he kept the few promises he made. He had also promised her what he would do to her if she was unable to produce two healthy children.

  She shook her head thinking about it. “Oh, God.”

  Lea was instantly at her side, holding her, weeping over her, saying again and again, “I’m so sorry, Jan. So sorry.”

  Disgusted, Jan pushed her away. Sympathy and tears were the last things Jan needed. The boy was dead. That was that. He had been a burden to her before she placed him with the Westleys. Now, dead, he was again a burden in spite of all her efforts to see that he was safe. If only Doro had not insisted that she have children. She had been looking forward to his return for so long. Now, instead of waiting for it, she would have to flee from it. Another town, another state, another name—and the likelihood that none of it would do any good. Doro was a specialist at finding people who ran from him.

  “Jan, please understand … It wasn’t our fault.”

  Stupid woman! Lea became an outlet for Jan’s frustration. Jan seized control of her, spun her around, and propelled her puppetlike out of the living room.

  Lea Westley’s scream of terror when Jan finally released her was the last thing Jan was physically aware of for several minutes.

  A mental explosion rocked her. Then came the forced mind-to-mind contact that she fought savagely and uselessly. Then the splitting away of part of herself, the call to Forsyth.

  Jan regained consciousness on Lea Westley’s sofa, with Lea herself sitting nearby, crying. The woman had come back despite Jan’s heavy-handed treatment. She knew how foolish it would be to run from Jan even if she had known positively that Jan meant her harm. Perhaps, in that knowledge of her own limitations, she was more sensible than Jan herself. Lying still now with the call drawing her, Jan felt unusual pity for Lea.

  “I don’t care that he’s dead, Lea.” The words came out in a whisper even though Jan had intended to speak normally.

  “Jan!” Lea was on her feet at once, probably not understanding, probably realizing only that Jan was again conscious.

  “You don’t have to worry, Lea. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Lea heard this time, and she collapsed weeping with relief. Jan tried standing, and found herself weak but able to manage.

  “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 telepaths—better 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.

  “Then the jailer came in and said something to me in a language that, as far as I knew, I had never heard before. When I just lay there staring at him, he kicked me, started to beat me with a small whip he was carrying. I took him, of course. Automatic. Then I got out of there in his body and wandered through the streets of a strange city trying to figure out what a lot of other people have been trying to figure out ever since: Just what in the name of all the gods was I?”

  “I never thought you might wonder that.”

  “I didn’t for long. I came to the conclusion that I was cursed, that I had offended the gods and was being punished. But after I had used my ability a few times deliberately and seen that I could have absolutely anything I wanted, I changed my mind. Decided that the gods had favored me by giving me power.”

  “When did you decide that it was okay for you to use that power to make people … make them …”

  “Breed them, you mean.”

  “Yeah,” I muttered. Breed didn’t sound like the kind of word that should be applied to people. The minute he said it, though, I realized it was the right word for what he was doing.

  “It took time for me to get around to that,” he said. “A century or two. I was busy first getting involved in Egyptian religion and politics, then traveling, trading with other peoples. I started to notice the way people bred animals. It stopped being just part of the background for me. I saw different breeds of dogs, of cattle, different ethnic groups of people—how they looked when they kept to themselves and were relatively pure, when there was crossbreeding.”

  “And you decided to experiment.”

  “In a way. I was able by then to recognize the people … th
e kinds of people that I would get the most pleasure from if I took them. I guess you could say, the kinds of people who tasted best.”

  I suddenly lost my appetite. “God! That’s disgusting.”

  “It’s also very basic. One kind of people gave me more pleasure than other kinds, so I tried to collect several of the kind I liked and keep them together. That way, they would breed and I would always have them available when I needed them.”

  “And that’s how we began? As food?”

  “That’s right.”

  I was surprised, but I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t think for one minute that he was going to use me or anybody I knew for food. “What kind of people taste best?” I asked.

  “People with a certain mental sensitivity. People who have the beginnings, at least, of some unusual abilities. I found them in every race I encountered, but I never found them in very large numbers.”

  I nodded. “Psis,” I said. “There’s the word you need. A word that sort of groups everybody’s abilities together. I read it in a science-fiction magazine.”

  “I know about it.”

  “You know everything. So people with some psionic ability ‘taste’ better than others. But we’re not still just food, are we?”

  “Some of my latents are. But my actives and potential actives are part of another project. They have been for some time.”

  “What project?”

  “To build a people, a race.”

  So that was it. I thought about it for a moment. “A race for you to be part of?” I asked. “Or a race for you to own?”

  He smiled. “That’s a good question.”

  “What’s the answer?”

  “Well … to get an active, I have to bring together people of two different latent families—people who repel each other so strongly that I have to take one of them to bring them together. That means all the actives of each generation are my children. So maybe the answer is … a little of both.”

  Maybe it was a lot of both. Maybe he hadn’t told me just how experimental I was—