Jamie went into transition first, about a month after he moved to Larkin House. He was young, strong, and surprisingly healthy in spite of having tried every pill or powder he could get his hands on.
He came through. He had sprained his wrist, blackened one of Seth’s eyes, and broken the bed he was lying on, but he came through. He became an active. Seth was as proud as though he had just become a father.
Clay, who should have been first, was next. He came through in a short, intense transition that almost killed him. He actually suffered heart failure, but Mary got his heart started again and kept it going until Rachel arrived. Clay’s transition was over in only five hours. It left him with none of the usual bruises and strains, because Mary did not try to restrain him with her own body or tie him down. She simply paralyzed his voluntary muscles and he lay motionless while his mind writhed through chaos.
Clay became an active, but not a telepathic active. His budding telepathic ability vanished with the end of his transition. But he was compensated for it, as he soon learned.
When his transition ended and he was at peace, he saw that a tray of food had been left beside his bed. He could just see it out of the corner of his eye. He was still paralyzed and could not reach it, but in his confusion and hunger, he did not realize this. He reached for it anyway.
In particular, he reached for the bowl of soup that he could see steaming so near him. It was not until he lifted the soup and drew it to him that he realized that he was not using his hands. The soup hovered without visible support a few inches above his chest.
Startled, Clay let it fall. At the same instant, he moved to get away from it. He shot about three feet to one side and into the air. And stayed suspended there, terrified.
Slowly, the terror in his eyes was replaced by understanding. He looked around his bedroom at Rachel, at Doro, and, finally, at Mary. Mary apparently released him then from his paralysis, because he began to move his arms and legs now like a human spider hanging in mid-air from an invisible web. Slowly, deliberately, Clay lowered himself to the bed. Then he drifted upward again, apparently finding it an easy thing to do. He looked at Mary, spoke apparently in answer to some thought she had projected to him.
“Are you kidding? I can fly! This is good enough for me.”
“You’re not a member of the pattern any more,” she said. She seemed saddened, subdued.
“That means I’m free to go, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. If you want to.”
“And I won’t be getting any more mental interference?”
“No. You can’t pull it in any more. You’re not even an out-of-control telepath. You’re not a telepath at all.”
“Lady, you read my mind. You’ll see that’s no tragedy to me. All that so-called power ever brought me was grief. Now that I’m free of it, I think I’ll go back to Arizona?raise myself a few cows, maybe a few kids.”
“Good luck,” said Mary softly.
He drifted close to her, grinned at her. “You wouldn’t believe how easy this is.” He lifted her clear of the floor, brought her up to eye level with him. She gazed at him, unafraid. “What I’ve got is better than what you’ve got,” he joked.
She smiled at him finally. “No it isn’t, man. But I’m glad you think it is. Put me down.”
He lowered both her and himself to the floor as though he had been doing it all his life. Then he looked at Doro. “Is this something brand-new, or have you seen it before?”
“Psychokinesis,” said Doro. “I’ve seen it before. Seen it several times in your father’s family, in fact, although I’ve never seen it come about this smoothly before.”
“You call that transition smooth?” said Mary.
“Well, with the heart problem, no, I guess not. But it could have been worse. Believe me, this room could be a shambles, with everyone in it injured or dead. I’ve seen it happen.”
“My kind throw things,” guessed Clay.
“They throw everything,” said Doro. “Including some things that are nailed down securely. Instead of doing that, I think you might have turned your ability inward a little and caused your own heart to stop.”
Clay shook himself. “I could have. I didn’t know what I was doing, most of the time.”
“A psychokinetic always has a good chance of killing himself before he learns to control his ability.”
“That may be the way it was,” said Mary. “But it won’t be that way any more.”
Doro heard the determination in her voice and sighed to himself. She had just shared a good portion of Clay’s agony as she worked to keep him alive, and immediately she was committing herself to do it again. She had found her work. She was some sort of mental queen bee, gathering her workers to her instead of giving birth to them. She would be totally dedicated, and difficult to reason with or limit. Difficult, or perhaps impossible.
Christine Hanson came through in an ordinary transition, perhaps a little easier than most. She made more noise than either of the men because pain, even slight pain, terrified her. She had had a harder time than the others during the pretransition period, too. Finally, hoarse but otherwise unhurt, Christine completed her transition. She remained a telepath, like her brother. It was possible that one or both of them might learn to heal, and it was possible that they, Rachel, and Mary might be very long-lived.
Whatever potential Jamie and Christine had, they accepted their places in the pattern easily. They were Mary’s first grateful pattern members. And their membership brought an unexpected benefit that Jesse accidentally discovered. Now all the members could move farther from Mary without discomfort. Suddenly, more people meant more freedom.
Doro watched and worried silently. The day after Christine’s transition, Mary began pulling in more of her cousins. And Ada, who knew a few of her relatives, began trying to reach them in Washington. Doro could have helped. He knew the locations of all his important latent families. But as far as he was concerned, things were moving too quickly even without his help. He said nothing.
He had decided to give Mary two years to make what she could of her people. That was enough time for her to begin building the society she envisioned?what she was already calling a Patternist society. But two years should still
