Butler, Octavia - Mind of My Mind

“You ought to trust me,” I said. “By now you ought to trust me.”

“I’m not sure trust is an issue here.”

“It is.” I reached up and touched his face. “A very basic issue. You know it.”

He began to look harassed, as though I was really getting on his nerves. Or maybe as though I was really getting to him in another way. I slipped my arms around him hopefully. It had been a long time. Too long.

“Come on, Karl, humor me. What’s it going to cost you?” Plenty. And he knew it.

We stood together for a long moment, my head against his chest.

Finally he sighed and steered us back to the sofa. We lay down together, just touching, holding each other.

“Will you unshield?” he asked.

I was surprised but I didn’t mind. I unshielded. And he lowered his shield so that there were no mental barriers between us. We seemed to flow together—frighteningly at first. I felt as though I were losing myself, combining so thoroughly with him that I wouldn’t be able to free myself again. If he hadn’t been so calm, I would have tried to reshield after the first couple of seconds. But I could see that he wasn’t afraid, that he wanted me to stay as I was, that nothing irreversible was happening. I realized that he had done this with Jan. I could see the experience in his memory. It was something like the blending that he did naturally with the shieldless, mute women he had had. Jan hadn’t liked it. She didn’t much like any kind of direct mind-to-mind contact. But she had been so lonely among us, and so without purpose, that she had endured this mental blending just to keep Karl interested in her. But the blending wasn’t an act that one person could enjoy while the other grimly endured.

I closed my eyes and explored the thing that Karl and I had become. A unit. I was aware of the sensations of his body and my own. I could feel my own desire for him exciting him and his excitement circling back to me.

We lost control. The spiral of our own emotions got out of hand. We hurt each other a little. I wound up with bruises and he had nail marks and bites. Later I took one look at what was left of the dress I had been wearing and threw it away.

But, my God, it was worth it.

“We’re going to have to be more careful when we do that again,” he said, examining some of his scratches.

I laughed and moved his hands away. The wounds were small. I healed them quickly. I found others and healed them too. He watched me with interest.

“Very efficient,” he said. He met my eyes. “It seems you’ve won.”

“All by myself?”

He smiled. “What, then? We’ve won?”

“Sure. Want to go take a shower together?”

At the end of the Pattern’s first year of existence, we all knew we had something that was working. Something new. We were learning to do everything as we went along. Soon after Karl and I got together, we found latents with latent children. That could have turned out really bad. We discovered we were “allergic” to children of our own kind. We were more dangerous to them than their latent parents were. That was when Ada discovered her specialty. She was the only one of us who could tolerate children and care for them. She began using mutes as foster parents, and she began to take over the small private school not far from us. And she and Seth moved back to Larkin House.

They had been the last to leave, and now they were the first to return. They had only

left, they said, because the others were leaving. Not because they wanted to be out of Larkin House. They didn’t. They were as comfortable with us as our new Patternists were with each other in their groups, their “families” of unrelated adults. We Patternists seemed to be more-social creatures than mutes were. Not one of our new Patternists chose to live alone. Even those who wanted to go out on their own waited until they could find at least one other person to join them. Then, slowly, the pair collected others. Their house grew.

Rachel and Jesse came back to us a few days after Seth and Ada. They were a little shamefaced, ready to admit that they wanted back into the comfort they had not realized they had found until they walked away from it.

Jan just reappeared. I read her. She had been lonely as hell in the house she had chosen, but she didn’t say anything to us. She wanted to live with us, and she wanted to use her ability. She thought she would be content if she could do those two things. She was learning to paint, and even the worst of her paintings lived. You touched them and they catapulted you into another world. A world of her imagination. Some of the new Patternists who were related to her began coming to her to learn to use whatever psychometric ability they had. She taught them, took lovers from among them, and worked to improve her art. And she was happier than she had ever been before.

The seven of us became the First Family. It was a joke at first. Karl made some comparison between our position in the section and the position of the President’s family in the nation. The name stuck. I think we all thought it was a little silly at first, but we got used to it. Karl did his bit to help me get used to it.

“We could do something about making it more of a family,” he said. “We’d be the first ones to try it, too. That would give some validity to our title.”

The Pattern was just over a year old then. I looked at him uncertainly, not quite sure he was saying what I thought he was saying.

“Try that again?”

“We could have a baby.”

“Could we?”

“Seriously, Mary. I’d like us to have a child.”

“Why?”

He gave me a look of disgust.

“I mean … we wouldn’t be able to keep it with us.”

“I know that.”

I thought about it, surprised that I hadn’t really thought about it before. But, then, I had never wanted children. With Doro around, though, I had assumed that sooner or later I would be ordered to produce some. Ordered. Somehow, being asked was better.

“We can have a child if you want,” I said.

He thought for a moment. “I don’t imagine you could arrange for it to be a boy?”

I arranged for it to be a boy. I was a healer by then. I could not only choose the child’s sex but insure his good health and my own good health while I was pregnant. So being pregnant was no excuse for me to slow our expansion.

I was pulling in latents from all over the country. I could pick them out of the surrounding mute population without trouble. It didn’t matter any more that I had never met them or that they were three thousand miles away when I focused in on them. My range, like the distance the Patternists could travel from me, had increased as the Pattern

had grown. Now I located latents by their bursts of telepathic activity and gave a general picture of their location to one of my Patternists. The Patternist could pinpoint them more closely when he was within a few miles of them.

So the Pattern grew. Karl and I had a son: Karl August Larkin. The name of the man whose body Doro had used to father me was Gerold August. I had never made any gesture in his memory before, and I probably never would again. But having the baby had made me sentimental.

Doro wasn’t around to watch us much as we grew. He checked on us every few months, probably to remind us—remind me—where the final authority still rested. He showed up twice while I was pregnant. Then we didn’t see him again until August was two months old. He showed up at a time when we weren’t having any big problems. I was kind of glad to see him. Kind of proud that I was running things so smoothly. I didn’t realize he’d come to put an end to that.

He came in and looked at my flat stomach and said, “Boy or girl?” I hadn’t bothered to tell him I’d deliberately conceived a boy.