Seed to Harvest: Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, and Patternmaster (Patternist) (58 page)

Miguela closed her eyes, not crying but not casting any more stones, either. “You know,” she said after a moment, “I was glad I turned out to be a healer, because I thought I could make up for that, somehow. And here I am bitching.”

“Bitch all you want to,” said Rachel. “As long as you do your work. You’re going to handle these people.”

“All of them? By myself?”

“I’ll be standing by—not that you’ll need me. You’re ready. Why don’t you back the van in and I’ll draft a couple of the boys out back to help us carry bodies.”

Miguela started to go, then stopped. “You know, sometimes I wish we could make Doro pay for scenes like this. He’s the one who deserves all the blame.”

“He’s also the one who’ll never pay. Only his victims pay.” Miguela shook her head and went out after the van.

Jesse pulled his car up sharply in front of a handsome, redbrick, Georgian mansion. He got out, strode down the pathway and through the front door without bothering to knock. He went straight to the stairs and up them to the second floor. There, in a back bedroom, he found Stephen Gilroy, the Patternist owner of the house, sitting beside the bed of a young mute woman. The woman’s face was covered with blood. It had been slashed and hacked to pieces. She was unconscious.

“My God,” muttered Jesse as he crossed the room to the bed. “Did you send for a healer?”

Gilroy nodded. “Rachel wasn’t around, so I—”

“I know. She’s on an assignment.”

“I called one of her kids. I just wish he’d get here.”

One of her students, he meant. Even Jesse found himself referring to Rachel’s students as “her kids.”

There was the sound of the front door opening and slamming again. Someone else ran up the bare, wooden stairs, and, a moment later, a breathless young man hurried into the room. He was one of Rachel’s relatives, of course, and as Rachel would have in a healing situation, he took over immediately.

“You’ll have to leave me alone with her,” he said. “I can handle the injuries, but I work best when I’m alone with my patient.”

“Her eyes are hurt, too, I think,” said Gilroy. “Are you sure you—”

The healer unshielded to show them that his self-confidence was real and based on experience. “Don’t worry about her. She’ll be all right.”

Jesse and Stephen Gilroy left the room, went down to Gilroy’s study.

Jesse spoke with quiet fury. “The main reason I got here so fast was so I could see the damage through my own eyes instead of somebody’s memory. I want to remember it when I go after Hannibal.”

“I should go after him,” said Gilroy softly, bitterly. He was a slender, dark-haired man with very pale skin. “I would go after him if he hadn’t already proved to me how little good that does.” His voice was full of self-disgust.

“People who abuse mutes are my responsibility,” said Jesse. “Because mutes are my responsibility. Hannibal is even a relative of mine. I’ll take care of him.”

Gilroy shrugged. “You gave her to me; he took her from me. You ordered him to send her back; he sent her back in pieces. Now you’ll punish him. What will that inspire him to do to her?”

“Nothing,” said Jesse. “I promise you. I’ve talked to Mary and Karl about him. This isn’t the first time he’s sliced somebody up. He’s still the animal he was when he was a latent.”

“That’s what’s bothering me. He’d think nothing of killing Arlene when you’re finished with him. I’m surprised he hasn’t killed her already. He knows I can’t stop him.”

“There’s no sense beating yourself with that, Gil. Except for the members of the First Family, nobody can stop him. He’s the strongest telepath we’ve ever brought through transition. And the first thing he did, once he was through, was to smash his way through the shielding of his second and nearly kill her. For no reason. He just discovered that he could do it, so he did it.”

“Somebody should have smashed him then and there.”

“That’s what Doro said. He claims he used to cull out people like Hannibal as soon as he spotted them.”

“Well, I hate to find myself agreeing with Doro but—”

“So do I. But he made us. He knows just how far wrong we can go. Hannibal is too strong for Rachel or her kids to help him. Especially since he doesn’t really want help. And he’s too dangerous for us to tolerate any longer.”

Gilroy’s eyes widened. “You are going to kill him, then?”

Jesse nodded. “That’s why I had to talk to Karl and Mary. We don’t like to give up on one of our own, but Hannibal is a Goddamn cancer.”

“You’re going to do it yourself?”

“As soon as I leave here.”

“With his strength … are you sure you can?”

“I’m First Family, Gil.”

“But still—”

“Nobody who needed the Pattern to push him into transition can stand against one of us—not when we mean to kill.” Jesse shrugged. “Doro had to breed us to be strong enough to come through without being prodded. After all, when the time came for us, there was nobody who could prod us without killing us.” He stood up. “Look, contact me when that healer finishes with Arlene, will you? I just want to be sure she’s all right.”

Gilroy nodded, stood up. They walked to the door together and Jesse noticed that there were three Patternists in the living room. Two women and a man.

“Your house is growing,” he said to Gilroy. “How many now?”

“Five. Five Patternists.”

“The best of the people you’ve seconded, I’ll bet.”

Gilroy smiled, said nothing.

“You know,” said Jesse as they reached the door. “That Hannibal … he even looks like me. Reminds me a little of myself a couple of years ago. There, but for the grace of Doro, go I. Shit.”

Holding a smooth, rectangular block of wood between her hands, Jan Sholto closed her eyes and reached back in her disorderly memory. She reached back two years, to the creation of the Pattern. She had not only her own memories of that event but the memories of each of the original Patternists. They had unshielded and let her read them—not that they could have stopped her by refusing to open. Mary wasn’t the only one who could read people through their shields. No one except Doro could come into physical contact with Jan without showing her some portion of his thoughts and memories. In this case, though, physical contact hadn’t been necessary. The others had shown their approval of what she was doing by co-operating with her. She was creating another learning block—assembling their memories into a work that would not only tell the new Patternists of their beginnings but show them.

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 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.