She was an active. She had power. And all her power did, most of the time, was cut her off from other people, make it impossible for her ever to be one of them. Her power was more like a disease than a gift. Like a mental illness.
She had gone to a doctor once, secretly. A psychiatrist a few miles away, in Seattle. She had given him a false name and told him only a little. She had stopped when she realized that he was about to suggest a period of hospitalization …
Now she wondered bitterly whether the doctor had been right. It was her “illness,” after all, that had caused her to descend to this screaming. She said things to Kenneth that she had not thought herself capable of saying to anyone. He did not realize the degradation and despair this signified in her. Only one thought saved her from complete loss of control. The man was her husband.
She had married him out of desperation, not love. But he was her husband nonetheless, and he had served a purpose. If she had not married him, she might be
saying these things to her parents?her stepparents?the only people besides Doro whom she could ever remember loving. It had been very important once?that she protect her parents from what she had become. She wondered if it was still important. If she still cared what she said, even to them.
Abruptly she was tired of the argument. Tired of the man’s fury pounding at her mind and her ears. Tired of her own pointless anger. She turned and walked away.
Kenneth caught her shoulder and spun her around so quickly that she had no time to think. He slapped her hard, throwing all the weight of his big body against her. She fell back against the wall, then slipped silently to the floor to lie stunned, while, above her, he demanded that she learn to listen when he spoke. At that moment, violence, chaos convulsed her treacherous mind.
Ada was quick. She did not need time to wonder what was happening or to realize that there would finally be an end to her aloneness. She reacted immediately. She screamed.
Kenneth had hurt her, but suddenly the physical pain lost all meaning in the face of this new thing. This thing that brought her the pain of a hope roughly torn away.
Since her change, that terrible night three years before, when all the world had come flooding into her mind, she had treated her condition as a temporary thing. Something that would someday end and let her be as she had been. This was a belief that Doro had tried to talk her out of. But she had been able to convince herself that he was lying. He had refused to introduce her to others who were like her, though he claimed there were others. He had said that it would be painful to her to meet them, that her kind tolerated each other badly. But she had looked for herself, had sifted through thousands of minds without finding even one like her own. Thus she had decided that Doro was lying. She had believed what she wanted to believe. She was good at that; it kept her alive. She had decided that Doro had told only part of the truth. That there had been others like her. It was unthinkable that she had been the only person to undergo this change. And that the others had recovered, changed back.
This hope had sustained her, given her a reason to go on living. Now she had to see it for the fallacy it was.
She lay on the floor crying, as she rarely did, in noisy, gasping sobs. Others. How had she searched for so long without finding them? It seemed that they had no trouble finding her. And the strength of the first attack, and even of the call that now pulled at her insistently, was far greater than anything she felt herself able to generate. Such power gave the unknown caller a terrible air of permanence.
Unexpectedly, Kenneth was lifting her to her feet, reassuring her that she was all right.
Steadying herself enough to sample his thoughts, she learned that he was a little frightened by her screaming. He had hit her before and gotten no reaction other than quiet tears.
The selfishness of his thoughts stabilized her. He was wondering what would happen to him if he had hurt her. He had long before ceased worrying about her for her own sake. And she had never forced him to do anything more than stay with her. She pulled away from him tiredly and went into the bedroom.
She would never be well again, never be able to go among people without being bombarded by their thoughts. And facing this, she could not possibly continue her present
living arrangement. She could no longer force Kenneth to stay with her when he hated her as he did. Nor would she exert more control over him, to force an obscene, artificial love.
She would follow the call. Even if it had been less insistent, she would have followed it. Because it was all she had.
She would quarantine herself with others who were afflicted as she was. If she was alone with them, she would be less likely to hurt people who were well. How would it be, though? How much worse than anything she had yet known? A life among outcasts.
JAN SHOLTO
The neighborhood had changed little in the three years since Jan had seen it. New cars, new children. Two small boys ran past her; one of them was black. That was new too. She was glad her mind had not been open and vulnerable when the boy ran past. She had problems enough without that alienness. She looked back at the boy with distaste, then shrugged. She planned only a short visit. She didn’t have to live there.
It occurred to her, not for the first time, that even visiting was foolish, pointless. She had placed her own children in a comfortable home where they would be well cared for, have better lives than she had had. There was nothing more that she could do for them. Nothing she could accomplish by visiting them. Yet for days she had felt a need to make this visit. Need, urge, premonition?
Thinking about it made her uncomfortable. She deliberately turned her attention to the street around her instead. The newness of it disgusted her. The unimaginative modern houses, the sapling trees. Even if the complexion of the neighborhood had not been changing, Jan could never have lived there. The place had no depth in time. She could touch things, a fence, a light standard, a signpost. Nothing went back further than a decade. Nothing carried real historical memory. Everything was sterile and perilously unanchored to the past.
A little girl of no more than seven was standing in one of the yards watching Jan walk toward her. Jan examined the child curiously. Small, fine-boned and fair-haired, like Jan. Her eyes were blue, but not the pale, faded blue of Jan’s eyes. The girl’s eyes had the same deep, startling blue that had been one of her father’s best featuresor one of the best features of the body her father had been wearing.
Jan turned to walk down the pathway to the child’s house.
As she came even with the girl, some sentimentality about the eyes made her stop and hold out her hand. “Will
