Seed to Harvest: Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, and Patternmaster (Patternist) (42 page)

“You were supposed to get married,” she said.

“I did. Today.”

She frowned. “Where’s your husband?”

“I don’t know. Or care.”

She sort of half smiled in her know-it-all way that I had always resented before. Now I didn’t care. She could throw all the sarcasm she wanted to at me if she just let me sit there for a while.

“Stay here for a while,” she said.

I looked at her, surprised.

“Stay until someone comes to get you.”

“They might not even know I’ve gone anywhere. I didn’t say anything. I just left.”

“Honey, you’re talking about Doro and an active telepath. They know, believe me.”

“I guess so. I came here on the bus, though. I don’t mind going back that way.” I never liked depending on other people and their cars, anyway. When I rode the bus, I went when I wanted, where I wanted.

“Stay put. Doro might not have heard you yet.”

“What?”

“You’ve said something by coming here. Now the way to make sure that Doro’s heard you is to inconvenience him a little. Just stay where you are. Are you hungry?”

“Yeah.”

She brought me cold chicken, potato salad, and a Coke. Brought it to me like I was a guest. She’d never brought me anything she could send me after before in her life.

“Emma.”

She had gone back to whatever she was doing at her desk in the dining room. The desk was half covered with official-looking papers. She looked around.

“Thanks,” I said quietly.

She just nodded.

Karl came after me that night. I answered the door, saw him, and turned to say good-bye to Emma, but she was right there looking at Karl.

“You’re too high, Karl,” she said quietly. “You’ve forgotten where you came from.”

He looked at her, then looked away. His expression didn’t change, but his voice, when he spoke, was softer than normal. “That isn’t it.”

“It doesn’t really matter. If you’ve got a problem, you know who to complain to about it—or who to take it out on.”

He drew a deep breath, met her eyes again, smiled his thin smile. “I hear, Em.”

I didn’t say anything to him until we were in the car together. Then, “Is she one of the two?”

He gave me a kind of puzzled glance, then seemed to remember. He nodded.

“Where do you know her from?”

“She took care of me once when I was between foster homes. That was before Doro found a permanent home for me. She took care of me again when I was approaching transition. My adoptive parents couldn’t handle me.” He smiled again.

“What happened to your real parents—real mother, I mean?”

“She … died.”

I turned to look at him. His expression had gone grim. “By herself,” I asked, “or with help?”

“It’s an ugly story.”

I shrugged. “Okay.” I looked out the window.

“But, then, you’re no stranger to ugly stories.” He paused. “She was an alcoholic, my mother. And she wasn’t exactly normal—sane—during those rare times when she was sober. Doro says she was too sensitive. Anyway, when I was about three, I did something that made her mad. I don’t remember what. But I remember very clearly what happened afterward. For punishment, she held my hand over the flame of our gas range. She held it there until it was completely charred. But I was lucky. Doro came to see her later that same day. I wasn’t even aware of when he killed her. I remember, I wasn’t aware of anything but alternating pain and exhaustion between the time she burned me and the time Doro’s healer arrived. You might know the healer. She’s one of Emma’s granddaughters. Over a period of weeks, she regenerated the stump that I had left into a new hand. Even now, ten years after my transition, I don’t understand how she did it. She does for other people the things Emma can only do for herself. When she had finished, Doro placed me with saner people.”

I whistled. “So that’s what Emma meant.”

“Yes.”

I moved uncomfortably in the seat. “As for the rest of what she said, Karl. …”

“She was right.”

“I don’t want anything from you.”

He shrugged.

He didn’t say much more to me that night. Doro was still at the house, paying a lot of attention to Vivian. I had dinner with them all, then went to bed. I could put up with them until my transition, surely. Then maybe for a change I’d be one of the owners instead of one of the owned.

I was almost asleep when Karl came up to my room. Neither of us put a light on but there was light enough from one of the windows for me to see him. He took off his robe, threw it into a chair and climbed into bed with me.

I didn’t say anything. I had plenty to say and all of it was pretty caustic. I didn’t doubt that I could have gotten rid of him if I had wanted to. But I didn’t bother. I didn’t want him but I was stuck with him. Why play games?

He was all right, though. Gentle and, thank God, silent. I didn’t know whether he had come to me out of charity, or curiosity, and I didn’t want to know. I knew he still resented me—at least resented me. Maybe that was why, when we were finished, he got up and went to get his robe. He was going back to his own room.

“Karl.”

I could see him turn to look in my direction.

“Stay the night.”

“You want me to?” I didn’t blame him for sounding surprised. I was surprised.

“Yes. Come on back.” I didn’t want to be alone. I couldn’t have put into words how much I suddenly didn’t want to be alone, couldn’t stand to be alone, how much it scared me. I found myself remembering how Rina would pace the floor at night sometimes. I would see her crying and pacing and holding her head. After a while, she would go out and come back with some bum who usually looked a little like her—like us. She’d keep him with her the rest of the night even if he didn’t have a dime in his pocket, even if he was too drunk to do anything. And sometimes even if he knocked her around and called her names that trash like him didn’t have the right to call anybody. I used to wonder how Rina could live with herself. Now, apparently, I was going to find out.

Karl came back to my bed without another word. I didn’t know what he was thinking, but he could have really hurt me with just a few words. He didn’t. I tried to thank him for that.

The warehouse was enormous. Whitten Coleman Service Building, serving thirty-three department stores over three states. Doro had begun the chain seventy years before, when he bought a store for a small, stable family of his people. The job of the family was simply to grow and prosper and eventually become one of Doro’s sources of money. Descendants of the original family still held a controlling interest in the company. They were obedient and self-sufficient, and, for the most part, Doro let them alone. Through the years, their calls to him for help had become fewer. As they grew in size and experience, they became more able to handle their own problems. Doro still visited them from time to time, though. Sometimes he asked favors of them. Sometimes they asked favors of him. This was one of the latter times. Karl, Doro, the warehouse manager, and the chief of security walked through the warehouse toward the loading docks. Karl had never been inside the warehouse before, but now he led the way through the maze of dusty stock areas and busy marking rooms. In turn, he was led by the thoughts of several workers who were efficiently preparing to steal several thousand dollars’ worth of Whitten Coleman merchandise. They had gotten away with several earlier thefts in spite of the security people who watched them, and the cameras trained on them.

Quietly, Karl pointed out the thieves—including two security men—and explained their methods to the security chief. And he told the chief where the group had hidden what they had left of the merchandise they had already stolen. He had almost finished when he realized that something was wrong with Mary.

He maintained a mental link with the girl now that he was married to her. And now that Doro had made clear what would happen to him if Mary died in transition.

Karl broke off what he was saying to the security chief. Suddenly he was caught up in the experience Mary was having. She was running, screaming. …

No. No, it wasn’t Mary who was running. It was another woman—the woman Mary was receiving from. The two were one. One woman running down stark white corridors. A woman fleeing from men who were also dressed in white. She gibbered and babbled and wept. Suddenly she realized that her own body was covered with slimy yellow worms. She tore at the worms frantically to get them off. They changed their coloring from yellow to yellow streaked with red. They began to burrow into her flesh. The woman fell to the floor tearing at herself, vomiting, urinating.

She hardly felt the restraining hands of her pursuers, or the prick of the needle. She did not have even enough awareness of the world outside her own mind to be grateful for the eventual oblivion.

Karl snapped back to the reality of the warehouse with a jolt. He found himself holding on to the steel support of some overhead shelving. His hands hurt from grasping it so tightly. He shook his head, saw Doro and the two warehousemen staring at him. The warehousemen looked concerned. Doro looked expectant. Karl spoke to Doro. “I’ve got to get home. Now.”

Doro nodded. “I’ll drive you. Come on.”

Karl followed him out of the building, then blindly, mechanically got in on the driver’s side. Doro spoke to him sharply. Karl jumped, frowned, moved over. Doro was right. Karl was in no shape to drive. Karl was in no shape to do anything. It was as though he were plunging into his own transition again.

“You’re too close to her,” said Doro. “Pull back a little. See if you can sense what’s happening to her without being caught up in it.”

Pull back. How? How had he gotten so close, anyway? He had never been caught up in Mary’s pretransition experiences.

“You know what to expect,” Doro told him. “At this point she’s going to be reaching for the worst possible stuff. That’s what’s familiar to her. That’s what’s going to attract her attention. She’ll get an avalanche of it—violence, pain, fear, whatever. I don’t want you caught up in it unless she obviously needs help.”

Karl said nothing. He was already trying to separate himself from Mary. The mental link he had established with her had grown into something more than he had intended it to be. If two minds could be tangled together, his and Mary’s were.

Then he realized that she had become aware of him, was watching him as he tried to untangle himself. He had never permitted her to be aware of his mental probing before. He stopped what he was doing now, concerned that he had frightened her. She would have enough fear to contend with within the next twelve hours without his adding to it.

But she was not afraid. She was glad to have him with her. She was relieved to discover that she was not facing the worst hours of her life alone.

Karl relaxed for a few minutes, less eager to leave her now. He could still remember how glad he had been to have Emma with him during his transition. Emma couldn’t help mentally, but she was a human presence with him, drawing him back to sanity, reality. He could do at least that much for Mary.

“How is she?” Doro asked.

“All right. She understands what’s happening.”

“Something is liable to snatch her away again any minute.”

“I know.”

“When it happens, let it happen. Watch, but stay out of it. If you see a way to help her, don’t.”

“I thought that’s what I was for. To help.”

“You are, later, when she can’t help herself. When she’s ready to give up.”

Karl glanced at Doro while keeping most of his attention on Mary. “Do you lose a lot of her kind?”

Doro smiled grimly. “She doesn’t have a ‘kind.’ She’s unique. So are you, though you aren’t as unusual as I hope she’ll be. I’ve been working toward both of you for a good many generations. But yes.” The smile vanished. “Several of her unsuccessful predecessors have died in transition.”

Karl nodded. “And I’ll bet most of them took somebody with them. Somebody who was trying to help them.”

Doro said nothing.

“I thought so,” said Karl. “And I already know from Mary’s thoughts that you killed the ones who managed to survive transition.”

“If you know, why bring it up?”

Karl sighed. “I guess because it still surprises me that you can do things like that. Or maybe I’m just wondering whether she or I will still be alive this time tomorrow—even if we both survive her transition.”

“Bring her through for me, Karl, and you’ll be all right.”

“And her?”

“She’s a dangerous kind of experiment. Believe me, if she turns out to be another failure, you’ll want her dead more than I will.”

“I wish I knew what the hell you were doing. Aside from playing God, I mean.”

“You know enough.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“You know what I want of you. That’s enough.”

It never did any good to argue with Doro. Karl leaned back and finished disentangling himself from Mary. He would be with her in person soon. And even without Doro’s warning he would not have wanted to go through much more of her transition with her. Before he broke the connection, he let her know that he was on his way to her, that she wouldn’t be alone long. It had been two weeks since their marriage, two weeks since she had called him back to her bed, he hadn’t gone out of his way to hurt her since then.

He watched Doro maneuver the car into the right lane so that they could get on the Forsyth Freeway. Doro cut across the lanes, wove through the light traffic carelessly, speeding as usual. He had no more regard for traffic laws than he did for any other laws. Karl wondered how many accidents Doro had caused or been involved in. Not that it mattered to Doro. Had human life ever mattered to Doro beyond his interest in human husbandry? Could a creature who had to look upon ordinary people literally as food and shelter ever understand how strongly those people valued life? But yes, of course he could. He understood it well enough to use it to keep his people in line. He probably even understood it well enough to know how Karl and Mary both felt now. It just didn’t make any difference. He didn’t care.

Fifteen minutes later, Doro pulled into Karl’s driveway. Karl was out of the car and heading for the house before Doro brought the car to a full stop. Karl knew that Mary was in the midst of another experience. He had felt it begin. He had kept her under carefully distant observation even after he had severed the link between them. Now, though, even without a deliberately established link, he was having trouble preventing himself from merging into her experience. Mary was trapped in the mind of a man who had to eventually burn to death. The man was trapped inside a burning house. Mary was experiencing his every sensation.