Unexpected Stories (8 page)

Away from the organization. As far away as I could get. 855 South Madison. An unfurnished three-room house for $60 a month. Rain through the roof in the winter, insects through the walls in the summer. Most of the electrical outlets not working. Most of the faucets working all the time whether they were turned off or not. Tenant pays utilities. My house. And there were seven more just like it. All set in a straggly row and called a court.

Not that I minded the place really. I’d lived in worse. And I killed every damn rat and roach on the premises before I moved in. Besides, there was this kid next door. Young, educable, with the beginnings of a talent she was presently using for shoplifting. A pre-telepath.

Saturday.

She came over at 10 a.m., banging on the door as though she intended to come through it whether I opened it or not. Considering her background and the condition of the door, she might have.

I let her in. Ten years old, dirty, filthy even at this hour of the morning. Which meant she had probably gone to bed that way. Her mother worked at night and her older sister knew better than to try to make her do anything she didn’t want to do. Like bathe. Most of her hair was pulled back in a linty pony tail. The kind that advertised the fact that she had just started “combing” it herself.

“Come on in. What do you want?” I knew what she wanted. I’d been waiting for her all morning. But it made her suspicious when I was too nice or too understanding.

“Here’s your book.” She wasn’t comfortable handing it to me.

“What happened to the cover?”

“Larry played with it and tore it off.”

“Valerie, what’d you let a two-year-old play with a book for?”

“Mama said share it with him.”

I took the book from her, keeping my expression just short of disgust. People don’t like you breaking up their things. She knew it and she didn’t expect me to be happy. Actually I didn’t care. There was only one thing I cared about.

“Did you read it?”

“Yeah.”

“Like it?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you like about it?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.” Beginning of battle. You drag words out of her, one by painful one. You prove to her that she can do a lot more thinking than she’s used to … if she wants to. Then you make her want to. And all the time you push her, guide her thinking just a little. Partly to get her used to mental communication—like letting a baby hear speech so it can learn to talk. And partly to shock her into thinking along new and not always pleasant lines. That last is ugly. Not something I like to do to kids. The adults I do it to usually can’t be reached any other way. Most of the time they’re not salvageable anyway. All the kids like Valerie have is ten years or so of failure conditioning. Not quite enough to be fatal.

Valerie said, “I liked the parts where Harriet helped those slaves to get away.”

“She could have been killed every time she helped them.”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you think she kept doing it?”

Again the bored shrug. “I don’t know. Wanted them to get free, I guess.”

Off-the-top-of-her-head stuff. She had liked the book all right, at least while she was reading it. It was a juvenile biography of Harriet Tubman, well written, fast moving, and exciting. There were a lot of reasons for Valerie to get more than a couple of evenings of entertainment out of it. Reasons beyond the ones usually given for making a black kid read that kind of book. Right now, though, her mind had wandered outside, where the rest of the court kids were screaming and chasing each other up and down the driveway.

I hit her with a scene from the book. Herself in Harriet’s place. Seven or eight people following her north. Night. North star. White people nearby. Danger. Close call. Fear. One
of her followers wanting to turn back, and another, and another. Fear like a barrier you could reach out and touch. Gun in her hand, telling them they would go on with her or be shot

Push.

Reading it and living it are two different things. Valerie got the whole scene in a few seconds like a really vivid dream. Not the kind of dream someone her age ought to be having, but she was going to have to grow up pretty fast.

She shook herself and muttered something like, “Long-haired motherfucker!” It was one of the kinder names that people in our court called each other from time to time
.
But at that moment Valerie was applying it to the rest of Harriet’s would-be deserters.

She looked at me, frowning. “They always got halfway up north and then somebody would get scared and want to go back. How come they were so scared to just go ahead and be free?”

Breakthrough. The kids outside were forgotten for the moment. She had asked a question she wanted the answer to.

I worked with Valerie until her brother—an older one, not Larry—banged on the door and yelled, “Valerie, Mama say come do these dishes.”

She left, taking another book with her, a step closer to being ready. I became aware of somebody else as Valerie left.

A woman coming down the driveway to my house. She spoke to Valerie in the kind of first-grade language that the ten-year-old had come to know and dislike years ago.

“My, that’s a big book you have there. Are you going to read all that?”

Valerie muttered something that might have been either “yes” or “no,” leaped the distance between her porch and mine and disappeared into her house. She had left my door open, and the woman walked in like she owned the place. Organization woman. White, of course. White people came to the court to turn off the utilities, evict tenants, sell overpriced junk and take care of other equally savory kinds of business. This would be one of those other kinds. For once, I was glad of Valerie’s youth and ignorance. She didn’t know anything the organization could lift out of her thoughts and use against me.

I said, “Eve, if you don’t know how to talk to kids why don’t you just pass by without saying anything?”

“I was only trying to be pleasant to her because she’s one of yours.” She sat down uninvited and smoothed first her dress, then her hair. Her hair was long and when she was nervous she liked to fool with it. Now she was starting to twist a piece of it around her fingers.

“Did she think you were pleasant?”

Eve changed the subject. “We’ve missed you. We
want you to come to a meeting today … if you have time.”

“I don’t.” A lot of things I wouldn’t like could happen to me at one of their meetings.

“Barbara, come. Really, if you don’t there’s going to be trouble.”

“There’ll be trouble no matter what. But I didn’t know it was so close. Thanks for the warning.” So they were finally getting worried enough about what I was doing to think about forcing me back to the fold.

She looked around at my so-called house and listened to the kids screaming outside. “What is it you’re so willing to fight for? What do you have here that you couldn’t have more of with us?”

“Valeries.”

“I’ve told you before, Barbara, bring the children. We want them too.”

“Do you? Are you sure? These are the same kids you wouldn’t even consider before I left. You took one look into them and you couldn’t get out fast enough.”

“All right, we were wrong. You’re the childfinder and we should have listened. Come back now and we will listen.”

“I don’t need you any more.” The way they hadn’t needed me before I started finding pre-psi kids. I know a lot about them, about the way they feel. The kind of things normal people can only guess about each other.

Silence for a moment. As silent as my court gets, anyway.

“So the others are right. You’re forming an opposing organization.”

“We won’t oppose you unless we have to.”

“A segregated black-only group … Don’t you see, you’re setting yourself up for the same troubles that plague the normals.”

“No. Until you get another childfinder, I don’t think they’ll be quite the same. More like reversed.” I almost said, “How does it feel to be on the downside for a change.” Almost. And to one of the new people—the next step for mankind.

Honest to God, that’s the way they talked when I was with them. They had everything they needed then. Somebody to pull them all together—all the ones who had managed to mature on their own. The ones who had been solitary misfits, human trash, until they got together. I was one of them. I know just how low they were before someone with the talent to reach out and call them together matured. That led to the organization and the organization led me to find out that I hadn’t been as mature as I thought. Led me to discover that I was the other thing they needed. Somebody who could recognize normal-appearing kids who had psi potential before they got too old and the potential in them died from lack of use. Originally the organization was a group of exceptions. Most pre-psi kids don’t mature without help. That’s why the organization had stayed the same size since the day I left it.

Eve was saying, “Sooner or later we’re bound to get another childfinder.”

That was true. Except that I was likely to see their childfinder before they did. I’d seen two white potential ones so far. I hate to hurt kids. I mean it. My specialty is helping them. But I crippled those two for good. The best they can hope for now—if they knew enough to hope—is to be normal with traces of psionic ability.

“Barbara.” There was a change in Eve’s voice that made me look at her. “I didn’t want to say this, but … well, you can’t watch
all
the kids you’ve collected
all
the time. Especially since you’re still out looking for new ones. We would hate to do anything,
but …”

They wouldn’t hate it. And they wouldn’t be careful. Where I’d cripple kids painlessly, they would kill them. After all that build-up about the organization wanting them.

“Don’t come after my kids, Eve.”

“Do you think I’d want to? Do you think it was my idea? You’re the one who won’t listen to reason. …”

“Don’t come after my kids! You’ll lose a lot more than you bargain for if you do. You’d be surprised how fast some of them are growing up, and they know a lot more about you than you know about them.”

She got mad then and tried one of her organization tricks. Swiping at me. Trying to grab what I knew out of my thoughts before I could realize what she was doing and stop her. But who’s likely to know more about that kind of thing? Someone who spends months teaching it to kids, or someone who’s had to be polite most of the time and pretend it doesn’t exist? She didn’t get a thing. Not even the satisfaction of taking me by surprise. So she left. Just like that. She got up and walked out.

I didn’t reach after her until she was outside in the driveway. I meant to catch her just as she started to give way to her anger and let her guard down a little. I meant to show her how that little trick worked!

I never got to do it.

There were three organization men waiting in her car. She stood in the driveway and called them to her. Then she started back toward my house with them surrounding her. Her protection.

Three. And they weren’t teachers. They were the world’s first psionic brawlers. They fought among themselves mostly. Sparring, jockeying for position in the organization, fooling around. It kept them alert and in shape.

I never even thought of running. They were set to have too much fun as it was. Something like this had been bound to happen sooner or later anyway. I had known that for a long time.

The four of them came in and faced me silently. They didn’t have to say anything.

I shrugged. “Do you mind if I get my things?”

They took long enough answering to have been doing some silent arguing about it. I wouldn’t know for sure because I had shut myself up as tight as I could in my own head. Anything I let slip now, they would grab. I’d been bragging about how much my kids knew about the organization. Now, one slip and the organization would know all about my kids.

Eve. “I’ll bring what you need, Barbara.” She evidently spoke for all of them.

As they herded me toward the door, one of the men said, “How long did you think we’d let you get away with this shit anyway?”

I was making things too easy for him. He wanted to make me mad enough to do something stupid. Like dropping my guard.

I never had time to get mad. Just as the man finished speaking, one of the other two yelled. It would have taken me a little longer to realize what was going on without that yell. Not that the realization helped me.

The men and Eve fell to the floor unconscious before they could even spot their attacker. It happened so fast they appeared to fall in unison.

I stared down at them for a moment muttering, “Oh God!” Then I started to feel the anger that the organization man’s question had not had time to bring. I had to force myself calm before I could come out of my mental shell.

The first thing I got when I did come out was an identity. Not a “my name is.” Just a mental impression that I recognized like the sound of a familiar voice. I reached out.

Jordan
.

Hey.
His thought was easy, like his voice.
Why don’t you let somebody know you in trouble? If we hadn’t felt you closing yourself off a minute ago they would have had you and gone before we could do anything.

Confusion. I didn’t know what to feel. I was let down rather than relieved. And the fear that I had managed to conceal from my organization captors now had to be concealed from Jordan, because he wouldn’t understand it any more than they would have. The only safe emotion was anger, and he didn’t deserve that. He’d only been trying to help.

Jordan again.
You better get out of there now. The organization must know what we did to their pigs. They’ll be sending twenty people after you instead of four!

No doubt
. He was seventeen. One of the first kids I’d found after leaving the organization. Not too long ago a college student from Kenya had told him he looked like a Watusi man. His head was still pretty big over that.

Jordan, let them come to.
I sent the thought, knowing beforehand what his answer would be. He replied true to form.

What? Shit, they almost got you once! What you want to …?