Butler, Octavia - Mind of My Mind

There was a moment of complete silence. Then came quick, bitter disappointment radiating from both men. They didn’t believe me.

Seth spoke quietly. “Mary, Doro himself gave up on Clay years ago, said he wouldn’t ever reach transition.”

“I know it. But there was no pattern back then.”

“But Doro explained that—”

“Dammit, Seth, I’m explaining that Doro was wrong. He might know a hell of a lot, but he can’t foretell the future. And he can’t use my pattern to see what I can see!”

Karl came up as I was talking. When I finished, he asked, “What are you shouting about now?”

I told him and he just shrugged.

“Doro wants to see us both in the library,” he said. “Now.”

“Wait a minute,” said Seth. “She can’t leave now.” He looked at me. “You’ve got to tell us how you know … how after all these years this could happen.” So they were beginning to believe me.

“I’ll have to talk to you after I see what Doro wants,” I said. “It probably won’t take long.”

I followed Karl away from them, hoping I could get back to them soon. I wanted to learn more about what was happening to Clay myself. I was excited about it. But now, Doro and the Dana brothers aside, there was something else I had to do.

“Karl.”

We had almost reached the library door. He stopped, looked at me.

“Thanks for your help.”

“You didn’t need it.”

“Yes I did. I might not have been able to stop myself from killing if they had pushed me harder.”

Karl nodded disinterestedly, turned to go into the library.

“Wait a minute.”

He gave me a look of annoyance.

“I have a feeling that, even though you sided with me, you’re the only one in the house that I haven’t really won over.”

“You didn’t win anyone over,” he said. “You bludgeoned the others into submission. I had already submitted.”

“The hell with that,” I said. I lowered my gaze a little, stared at his chest instead of his face. He was wearing a blue shirt open at the neck so that a little of his mat of brown chest hair showed. “I did what I had to do,” I said. “What I was evidently born to do. I’m not fighting it any more, for the same reason Jesse and Rachel probably won’t fight me any more. It doesn’t do any good.”

“Don’t you think I understand that?”

“If you understand it, why are you still holding it against me?”

“Because Jesse was right about one thing. It doesn’t really matter whether what you’re doing to us is your fault or not. You’re doing it. I’m not fighting you, but you shouldn’t expect me to thank you, either.”

“I don’t.”

He looked a little wary. “Just what do you want from me?”

“You know damn well what I want.”

“Do I?” He stared at me for a long moment. “I suppose I do. Doro must be leaving.” He turned and walked away.

I let him go this time. I felt like throwing something at him, but I let him go. The son of a bitch had Jan and Vivian both, and he had the nerve to talk about Doro and me. Or,

rather, he had the nerve to use Doro to try to hurt me. If he couldn’t get away from me, he’d hurt me. He shouldn’t have been able to hurt me. But he was.

In the library, Doro was sitting at the reading table leafing through a book, and probably reading it. He read fast. Karl and I sat opposite him with an empty chair between us.

“I’ll be leaving tomorrow,” said Doro.

I felt rather than saw Karl’s glance at me. I ignored him. Doro went on.

“Mary, it looks as though you’ve established yourself fairly well. I don’t think anyone will bother you again.”

“No.”

“You’re just going to leave?” said Karl. “Don’t you have any plans for us now that Mary has become what you seemed to want her to become?”

“Mary’s plan sounded all right to me,” said Doro. “It might be harder for the group of you to organize your lives, held together as you are. But I’d rather give you a chance to try it. Let you find out whether you can build something of your own.”

“Or at least of Mary’s own,” said Karl bitterly.

Doro looked from one of us to the other.

“He’s still holding the pattern against me,” I said. “But he might be right, anyway. I might have something we can start working on together.” I told him about Clay Dana. He sat there listening, and looking more and more as though he didn’t believe me.

“Clay lost any chance he had for becoming an active over ten years ago,” he said.

“Ten years ago he didn’t have the pattern to help him along.”

“I find it hard to believe the pattern is helping him now. How could it? What did you do?”

“I don’t know, exactly. But it must be the pattern. What other new thing has there been in his life in the past two weeks? He was a latent before he came here. And if I can push one latent toward transition, why can’t I push others?”

“Oh, my God,” muttered Karl. I ignored him.

“Look,” I said, “we actives were all latents once. We moved up. Why can’t others?”

“The others weren’t bred for it. Clay was, and I can see now that you were right about him. But that doesn’t mean—”

“You can see?”

“Of course. How could I have raised generations of actives if I wasn’t able to judge my people’s potential?”

“Oh, yeah.” The ones who tasted good, yes. “Doro, I want to try bringing other latents to transition.”

“How?”

“By doing to them the only thing I’d ever done to Clay before today. By reading them. Just reading them.”

Doro shook his head. “Go ahead. It won’t work.”

Yes, it would. I felt sure that it would. And I could try it without even leaving the room. I thought of two of my cousins, a brother and sister—Jamie and Christine Hanson. We used to get into trouble together when we were little. As we grew older and started to receive mental interference, we got more antisocial. We abandoned each other and started to get into trouble separately. Doro didn’t pay any attention to Jamie and Christine, and their parents had given up on them years ago. No transition was supposed to come along

and put them back in control of their lives, so, let alone, they’d probably wind up in prison or in the morgue before they were a lot older. But I wasn’t going to let them alone.

I reached out to the old neighborhood, got a bird’s-eye view of it all at once. Dell Street and Forsyth Avenue. Emma’s house. I could have focused in tight and read Rina or Emma. Instead, I followed Forsyth Avenue south past Piedras Altas, where heaven knew how many of my relatives lived, and on to Cooper Street, where I had even more family. On Cooper I recognized the Hanson house and focused in on it.

Christine was inside screaming at her mother. I noticed that she had shaved her head—probably more to get on her mother’s nerves than for any other reason. I didn’t pay any attention to what they were fighting about. I read her the way you skim pages of a phone book looking for a number. Only, I wasn’t looking for anything. I noticed that she’d been pregnant three times—one miscarriage and two abortions. And she was only nineteen. And she’d been with some idiot friends when they decided to rob a liquor store. Some other things. I didn’t care. I just read her. Then I went after Jamie.

I found him sitting on an old sofa in the garage, fooling around with a guitar. I read him and learned, among other things, that he had just gotten out of jail a few days before. He had been driving drunk, smashed into a parked car, backed up, drove away. But somebody got his license number. Ninety days.

Now that he was out, he couldn’t take the running battle that was usually going on inside the house. So he was living in the garage until some money came his way and he could get his own place.