She was teacher to all the new Patternists as they came through. For over a year now, seconds had used her learning blocks to give their charges quick, complete knowledge of the section’s rules and regulations. Other learning blocks offered them choices, showed them the opportunities available to them for making their own place within the section.
Abruptly, Jan reached Mary’s memories. They jarred her with their raw intensity, overwhelmed her as other people’s memories rarely did any more. They were good material, but Jan knew she would have to modify them. Left as they were they would dominate everything else Jan was trying to record.
Sighing, Jan put her block aside. Of course it would be Mary’s thoughts that gave trouble. Mary was trouble. That small body of hers was deceptive. Yet it had been Mary who saw possible use for Jan’s psychometry. A few months after Mary had begun drawing in latents, she had decided to learn as much as she could about the special abilities of the rest of the First Family. In investigating Jan’s psychometry, she had discovered that she could read some objects herself in a fragmented, blurred way, but that she could read much more clearly anything that Jan had handled.
“You read impressions from the things you touch,” she had said to Jan. “But I think you put impressions into things, too.”
“Of course I do,” Jan had said impatiently. “Everyone does every time they touch something.”
“No, I mean … you kind of amplify what’s already there.”
“Not deliberately.”
“Nobody ever noticed it before?”
“No one pays any attention to my psychometry. It’s just something I do to amuse myself.”
Mary was silent for a long moment, thinking. Then, “Have you ever liked the impressions that you got from something enough to keep them? Not just keep them in your memory but in the thing, the object itself—like keeping a film or a tape recording.”
“I have some very old things that I’ve kept. They have ancient memories stored in them.”
“Get them.”
“Please get them,” mimicked Jan. “May I see them, please?” Mary had taken to her new power too easily. She loved to order people around.
“The hell with you,” said Mary. “Get them.”
“They’re my property!”
“Your property.” The green eyes glittered. “I’ll trade you last night for them.”
Jan froze, staring at her. The night before, Jan had been with Karl. It was not the first time, but Mary had never mentioned it before. Jan had tried to convince herself that Mary did not know. Now, confronted with proof that she was wrong, she managed to control her fear. She wanted to ask what Mary traded Vivian for all the mute woman’s nights with Karl, but she said nothing. She got up and went to get her collection of ancient artifacts stolen from various museums.
Mary handled one piece after another, first frowning, then slowly taking on a look of amazement. “This is fantastic,” she said. She was holding just a fragment of what had been an intricately painted jar. A jar that held the story of the woman whose hands shaped it 6,500 years ago. A woman of a Neolithic village that had existed somewhere in what was now Iran. “Why is it so pure?” asked Mary. “God knows how many people have touched it since this woman owned it. But she’s all I can sense.”
“She was all I ever wanted to sense,” said Jan. “The fragment has been buried for most of the time between our lives and hers. That’s the only reason there was any of her left in it at all.”
“Now there’s nothing but her. How did you get rid of the others?”
Jan frowned. “There were archaeologists and some other people at first, but I didn’t want them. I just didn’t want them.”
Mary handed her the fragment. “Am I in it now?”
“No, it’s set. I had to learn to freeze them so that I didn’t disturb them myself every time I handled them. I never tried letting another telepath handle them, but you haven’t disturbed this one.”
“Or the others, most likely. You like seconding, Jan?”
Jan looked at her through narrowed eyes. “You know I hate it. But what does that have to do with my artifacts?”
“Your artifacts just might stop you from ever having to second anybody else. If you can get to know your own abilities a little better and use them for more than your own amusement they can open another way for you to contribute to the Pattern.”
“What way?”
“A new art. A new form of education and entertainment—better than the movies, because you really live it, and you absorb it quicker and more completely than you do books. Maybe.” She snatched up the jar fragment and a small Sumerian clay tablet and ran out to try them on someone. Minutes later she was back, grinning.
“I tried them on Seth and Ada. All I told them to do was hold these things and unshield. They picked up everything. Look, you show me you can use what you’ve got for more than a toy and you’re off seconding for good.” The rush of words stopped for a moment, and when Mary spoke again, her tone had changed. “And, Jan, guess what else you’re off of for good.”
Jan had wanted to kill her. Instead, she had thrown her energy into refining her talent and finding uses for it. Instead, she had begun to create a new art.
Ada
Ada Dragan waited patiently in the principal’s office of what was finally her school. A mute guardian who was programmed to notice such things had reported that one of her latent foster children—a fifteen-year-old girl—was having serious pretransition difficulties.
From the office, Ada looked out at the walled grounds of the school. It had been a private school, situated right there in the Palo Verde neighborhood. A school where people who were dissatisfied with the Forsyth Unified School District, and who could afford an alternative, sent their children. Now those people had been persuaded to send their children elsewhere.
This fall semester, only a month old, was the beginning of the first all-Patternist year. Ada welcomed it with relief. She had been working gradually toward the takeover, feeling her way for almost two years. Finally it was done. She had learned the needs of the children and overcome her own shyness enough to meet those needs. On paper, mutes still owned the school. But Ada and her Patternist assistants owned the mutes. And Ada herself was in full charge, responsible only to Mary.
It was a responsibility that had chosen Ada more than she had chosen it. She had discovered that she worked easily with children, enjoyed them, while most Patternists could not work with them at all. Only some of her relatives were able to assist her. Other Patternists found the emotional noise of children’s minds intolerable. Children’s emotional noise penetrated not only the general protection of the Pattern but the individual mental shields of the Patternists. It frayed their nerves, chipped away their tempers, and put the children in real danger. It made Patternists potentially even worse parents than latents.
Thus, no matter how much Patternists wanted to insure their future as a race—and they did want it now—they could not care for the children who were that future. They had to draft mutes to do it for them. First Doro, and now Mary, was creating a race that could not tolerate its own young.
Ada turned away from the window just as the mute guardian brought the girl in. The mute was Helen Dietrich, an elementary-school teacher who, with her husband, also cared for four latent children. Jan had moved the Dietrichs and several other teachers into the section, where they could do both jobs.
This girl, Ada recalled, had been a particularly unfortunate case—one of Rachel’s assignments. Her life with the pair of latents who were her parents had left both her body and her mind a mass of scar tissue. Rachel had worked hard to right the damage. Now Ada wondered just how good a job she had done.
“Page,” said Helen Dietrich nervously, “this is Ada Dragan. She’s here to help you.”
The girl stared at Ada through dark, sullen eyes. “I’ve already seen the school psychologist,” she volunteered. “It didn’t do any good.”
Ada nodded. T
he school psychologist was a kind of experiment. He was completely ignorant of the fact that the Patternists now owned him. He was being allowed to learn as much as he could on his own. Nothing was hidden from him. But, on the other hand, nothing was handed to him. He, and a few others like him scattered around the section, were being used to calculate just how much information ordinary mutes needed to come to understand their situation.
“I’m not a psychologist,” said Ada. “Nor a psychiatrist.”
“Why not?” asked the girl. She extended her arms, which she had been holding behind her. Both wrists were bandaged. “I’m crazy, aren’t I?”
Ada only glanced at the bandages. Helen Dietrich had told her about the suicide attempt. Ada spoke to the mute. “Helen, it might be easier on you if you left now.”
The woman met Ada’s eyes and realized that she was really being offered a choice. “I’d rather stay,” she said. “I’ll have to handle this again.”
“All right.” Ada faced the girl again. Very carefully, she read her. It was difficult here at the school, where so many other child minds intruded. This was one time when they became a nuisance. But, in spite of the nuisance, Ada had to handle the girl gently. At fifteen, Page was not too young to be nearing transition. Children who lived in the section, surrounded by Patternists and thus by the Pattern, did not need direct contact with Mary to push them into transition. The Pattern pushed them as soon as their bodies and minds could tolerate the shock. And this girl seemed ready—unless Rachel had just missed some mental problem and the girl was suffering needlessly. That was what Ada had to find out. She maintained contact with Page as she questioned her.
“Why did you try to kill yourself?”
The young mind made an effort to hold itself emotionless, but failed. The thought broke through, To keep from killing others. Aloud, the girl spoke harshly. “Because I wanted to die! It’s my life. If I want to end it, it’s my business.”
She had not been told what she was. Children were told when they were about her age. They spent a few days with Ada or more likely, with one of Ada’s assistants, and they learned a little of their history and got some idea what their future would be like. Ada had dubbed these sessions “orientation classes.” Page was scheduled for one next month, but apparently, nature had decided to rush things.
“You won’t be allowed to kill yourself, Page. You realize that, don’t you?” Deftly, Ada planted the mental command as she spoke so that even as the girl opened her mouth to insist that she would try again, she realized that she could not—or, rather, realized that she no longer wanted to. That she had changed her mind.
Page stood still for a moment, her mouth open, then backed away from Ada in horror. “You did that! I felt it. It was you!”
Ada stared at her in surprise. No nontelepath, no latent should have known—
“You’re one of them,” the girl accused shrilly.
Mrs. Dietrich stood frowning at her. “I don’t understand. What’s wrong with the girl?”
Page faced her. “Nothing!” Then, more softly, “Oh, God, everything. Everything.” She looked down at her arms. “I’m not sick. I’m not crazy, either. But if I tell you what … what she is,” she gestured sharply toward Ada, “you’d let me be locked up. You wouldn’t believe—”
“Tell her what I am, Page,” said Ada quietly. She could feel the girl’s terror bleating against her mind.
“You read people’s minds! You make them do things they don’t want to do. You’re not human!” She raised a hand to her mouth, muffling her next words slightly. “Oh, God, you’re not human … and neither am I!” She was crying now, working herself into hysterics. “Now go ahead and lock me up,” she said. “At least then I won’t be able to hurt anyone.”
Ada looked over at Helen Dietrich. “That’s it, really. She knows just enough about what’s happening to her to be frightened by it. She thinks she’s becoming something that will hurt you or your husband or one of the other children.”
“Oh, Page.” The mute woman tried to put her arms around the girl, but Page twisted away.
“You already knew! You brought me to her even though you knew what she was!”
“Be still, Page,” said Ada quietly. And the girl lapsed into terrified silence. To the mute, Ada said, “Leave now, Helen. She’ll be all right.” This time, no choice was offered and Helen Dietrich left obediently. The girl, attempting to flee with her found herself seemingly rooted to the floor. Realizing that she was trapped, she collapsed, crying in helpless panic. Ada went to her, knelt beside her.
“Page …” She laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder and felt the shoulder trembling. “Listen to me.”
The girl continued to cry.
“You’re not going to be hurt. You’re certainly not going to be locked up. Now, listen.”
After a moment the words seemed to penetrate. Page looked up at her. Clearly still frightened, she allowed Ada to help her from the floor onto one of the chairs. Her tears slowed, stopped, and she wiped her face with tissue from a box on the principal’s desk.
“You should ask questions,” said Ada softly. “You could have saved yourself a lot of needless worrying.”
Page breathed deeply, trying to still her trembling. “I don’t even know what to ask. Except … what’s going to happen to me?”
“You’re going to grow up. You’re going to become the kind of adult your parents should have been but couldn’t become alone.”
“My parents,” said Page with quiet loathing. “I hope you locked them up. They’re animals.”
“They were. They aren’t now, though. We were able to help them—just as we’ve helped you, as we’ll go on helping you.” The girl should not have remembered enough about her parents to hate them. Rachel was always especially careful about that. But there was no mistaking the emotion behind the girl’s words.
“You should have killed them,” she said. “You should have cut their filthy throats!” She fell silent and stared down at her left arm. She touched the arm with her right hand, frowned at it. Ada knew then that the conditioning Rachel had imposed on the girl was still breaking down. From Page’s mind Ada took the memory of a twisted, useless left arm permanently bent at the elbow, the hand hanging from it rag-limp, dead. The whole arm had been dead, thanks to an early violent beating that Page had received from her father. A beating and no medical attention. But Rachel had repaired the damage. Page’s arm was normal now, but she was just remembering that it should not have been. And she was remembering more about her parents. Ada had to try to ease the knowledge.
“Our healers were able to do as much for your parents’ minds as they were for your body,” she said. “Your parents are different people now, living different lives. They’re … sane people now. They aren’t responsible for what they did when you knew them.”
“You’re afraid I’ll try to get even.”
“We can’t let you do that.”
“You can’t make me forgive them, either.” She stopped, frightened, suddenly realizing that Ada could probably do just that. “I hate them! I’d … I’d kill them myself if you sent me back to them.” But she spoke without conviction.
“You won’t be sent back to them,” said Ada. “And I think, once you find out for yourself what made them the way they were, you’ll know why we helped them instead of punishing them.”
“They’re … like you now?”
“They’re both telepaths, yes.” At thirty-seven, they were the oldest people to come through transition successfully. They had almost died in spite of everything Rachel could do. And they and three others who did die made Mary realize that most latents who hadn’t been brought through by the time they were thirty-five shouldn’t be brought through at all. To make their lives more comfortable, Mary had worked out a way of destroying their uncontrollable ability without harming them otherwise. At least then they could live the rest of their lives as normal mutes. But Page’s parents had made it. They were strong Patternists, as
Page would be strong.
“I’ll be like you, too, then, won’t I?” the girl asked.
“You will, yes. Soon.”
“What will I be then to the Dietrichs?”
“You’ll be the first of their foster children to grow up. They’ll remember you.”
“But … they’re not like you. I can tell that much. I can feel a difference.”
“They’re not telepaths.”
“They’re slaves!” Her tone was accusing.
“Yes.”
Page was silent for a moment, startled by Ada’s willingness to admit such a thing. “Just like that? Yes, you make slaves of people? I’m going to be part of a group that makes slaves of people?”
“Page—”
“Why do you think I tried to die?”
“Because you didn’t understand. You still don’t.”
“I know about being a slave! My parents taught me. My father used to strip me naked, tie me to the bed, and beat me, and then—”
“I know about that, Page.”
“And I know about being a slave.” The girl’s voice was leaden. “I don’t want to be a part of anything that makes people slaves.”
“You have no choice. Neither do we.”
“You could stop doing it.”
“You’d still be with your parents if we didn’t do it. We couldn’t have cared for you.” She took a deep breath. “We don’t harm people like the Dietrichs in any way. In fact they’re healthier and more comfortable now than they were before we found them. And the work they’re doing for us is work they enjoy.”
“If they didn’t enjoy it, you’d change their minds for them.”
“We might, but they wouldn’t be aware of it. They would be content.”