Brain Child.

by John Saul.

PROLOGUE.

The late-August sun blazed down on the parched hills with an intensity that was usually felt only much farther south, and south, the sixteen-year-old boy thought as he moved stealthily through the scrub-oak underbrush of his father's vast rancho rancho, was where he and his family should have gone long before now.

But his father had insisted on staying.

All year, since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had been signed, his parents had been quietly arguing about what to do.

"They will drive us away," his mother had said over and over. She had said it again only this morning, her tall figure held firmly erect as she sat on a ladderback chair in the shade of the eastern wall of the hacienda, dressed, as always, in black, despite the heat of the morning. Her hands, their long slender fingers betraying nothing of what she might be feeling, worked steadily at the needlepoint with which she occupied herself during the few moments of each day that the pressures of the hacienda allowed her. But his father, as he had every other day, only shook his head.

"In Los Angeles they are honoring the Spanish grants. They will honor them here, too."

Dona Maria's eyes had flashed with impatience, and her mouth had tightened, though when she spoke it was with the respect she always paid her husband, and had taught her daughters to pay to both their father and their brother. "They have not found gold in Los Angeles. There, the land is worthless. Why not honor the grants? But here, even if there is no gold, they will take the land. In San Francisco the ships arrive every day, and the city is full. Where will they go?"

"To the goldfields," Don Roberto de Melendez y Ruiz had insisted, but Dona Maria had only shaken her head.

"Most of them will go to the goldfields. But not all of them, Roberto. Some will see into the future, and want the land. And those men will come here. Who will defend us?"

"The presidio at Monterey-"

"The presidio is theirs now. The war is over, and we have lost. Our troops have gone back to Mexico, and we should follow them."

"No!" Don Roberto had replied. "We are not Mexicans. We are Californios, and this is our home. We built this hacienda, and we have a right to stay here! And stay here we shall!"

"Then we shall stay," Dona Maria had said, her voice suddenly placid. "But the hacienda will not be ours. The rancho rancho will be taken from us. New people are coming, Roberto, and there is nothing we can do." will be taken from us. New people are coming, Roberto, and there is nothing we can do."

And now, this afternoon, they had come.

From a hilltop two hundred yards away, the boy saw a squadron of United States cavalry appear in the distance, making its leisurely way up the trail toward the whitewashed walls of the hacienda. Nothing in their manner indicated a threat, and yet the boy could feel danger. But instead of mounting his horse and riding home, he tied the animal to a tree beyond the crest of the hill, then crouched down into the brush.

He saw his father waiting at the open gates, and could almost hear him offering the men the hospitality of his home. But the riders did not go inside. The squadron waited while one of the stable boys brought his father's horse. Don Roberto mounted, and the squadron, with his father in its midst, started back down the trail toward the mission village a mile away.

The boy moved as swiftly as he could, but it was slow going. There was only the one trail, and all his instincts told him to stay off it, so he made his way through the tangle of dry brush, hiding himself as best he could in the clumps of oak.

He watched as the squad drew close to the mission, and for a moment his fear eased. Perhaps they were only taking his father to a meeting with the American commandant.

No.

The squadron pa.s.sed the mission, and continued another hundred yards down the trail to the enormous oak tree around which the village had originally been built. Under its mighty branches, Indians had camped for untold centuries before even the Franciscan padres padres had arrived. had arrived.

Suddenly the boy knew what the squadron was going to do, and knew there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

Nor could he leave. He had to stay, to watch.

As his father sat straight in the saddle, one of the men threw a rope over the lowest branch of the tree, while another tied Don Roberto's hands behind his back. Then they led the black stallion under the tree and tied the free end of the rope around Don Roberto's neck.

From his hiding place in the brush, the boy tried to see his father's face, but he was too far away, and the shade of the oak was impenetrable.

Then one of the cavalrymen lashed the black stallions flanks with a riding crop; the horse reared, snorting, and came stamping back to earth. A second later it was over.

The black horse was galloping up the trail toward the hacienda, and Don Roberto de Melendez y Ruiz's body was swinging under the embracing branches of the oak tree.

The cavalry squadron turned and at the same leisurely pace started back up the trail toward the hacienda.

The boy waited until the soldiers were out of sight before he picked his way the last fifty yards to the floor of the valley. He stared up into his father's face for a long time, trying to read in the eyes of the corpse what might now be expected of him. But there was nothing in the twisted grimace of pain, or the bulging, empty eyes. It was as if, even as he died, Don Roberto still hadn't understood what was happening to him.

But the boy understood.

He turned, and faded away back into the brush.

It was late in the afternoon, and as the sun dropped toward the western horizon, long shadows began their march across the hilltops. Far away, the boy could see the beginnings of a fogbank forming over the ocean.

Below him, the last of his family's servants were drifting out of the open gates of the hacienda, their meager belongings tied up in worn serapes serapes, their eyes fixed on the brown earth, as if they, too, might be in danger if they so much as glanced up at the guards who flanked the courtyard gates.

Against the inside of the western wall, still protecting herself from the fading heat, his mother sat calmly on her chair, her daughters flanking her, her fingers still occupied with her needlework. Every now and then, he could see her lips move as she offered words of farewell to the departing peones peones, but none of them replied; only one or two even had the courage to nod toward her.

Finally the last of the servants was gone, and at a signal from their leader, the guards slowly swung the heavy gates closed. The officer turned to face Dona Maria. His words carried clearly up the hillside.

"Where is your son?"

"Gone," his mother replied. "We sent him away last week."

"Do not lie, Dona Maria. He was seen yesterday."

His mother's voice rose then, and the boy knew her words were for him, as well as for the man she faced. "He is not here, senor. He is gone to Sonora, where he will be safe with our people."

"We'll find him, Dona Maria."

"No. You will never find him. But he will find you. We are not afraid to die. But you will not gain by killing us. We will not leave our land, senor. My husband said we will stay, and so we shall. And you will kill us. But it will do you no good. My son will come back, and he will find you."

"Will he?" the squadron leader asked. "Get up, Dona Maria."

As the boy watched from the hillside, his mother rose to her feet. Drawing their courage from their mother, his sisters, too, rose.

"My son will find you," he heard his mother say. "My son will find you, and he will kill you."

The squadron leader jerked his thumb toward the south wall. "Over there." He stepped forward, the bayonet fixed to the barrel of his rifle jabbing menacingly at Dona Maria and her daughters.

Dona Maria stood firm. "We are not afraid to die, but we will not be prodded like cattle." She turned and carefully set her needlework on the chair, then took her daughters' hands in her own. She started across the courtyard, her step firm, her back as rigidly erect as ever.

She reached the south wall, still bathed in the afternoon sunlight, then turned and began to pray. As her lips began to move, the boy on the hillside closed his eyes and silently mouthed the words he knew his mother was speaking.

The first shot jerked his eyes open, and he blinked twice before he could focus on the scene in the courtyard.

His mother still stood, her head up and her eyes open, but her right hand was clutching at her breast. A moment later, blood began to seep from between her fingers, and a crimson stain spread across the bosom of her dress.

Then the quiet of the afternoon was shattered as his sisters' terrified screams mixed with the angry rattle of gunfire, and a cacophony of sound echoed off the hacienda walls to roll over the countryside beyond.

His younger sister was the first to fall. Her knees buckled beneath her, and the motion itself seemed to concentrate the gunfire, on her. Her body twitched violently for a moment as the bullets slammed home, then she lay still in the dust.

His older sister screamed and her arms reached out as if to help the fallen child, but she only pitched forward, falling facedown into the dirt as the rifles spoke again.

Dona Maria stood against the wall alone now. She faced the squadron with open eyes, gazing down the barrels of their rifles with a calm serenity. "It will do you no good," she said again. "My son will find you, and he will kill you. We will never leave our land." Then she, too, sank slowly to the ground. A few seconds later the squad emptied its rifles into her lifeless body.

It was past midnight when the boy crept down from the hillside and slipped through the gates of the hacienda. A strange silence hung over the buildings; the night creatures themselves seemed to honor the dead. No guards patrolled the grounds, nor had anyone covered the corpses. The squadron had left long ago, searching out the families of the overseers to deal with them as they had dealt with the family of Don Roberto.

The moon hung low in the night sky, its silvery light casting strange shadows across the courtyard. The crimson stains of his family's blood were faded by the half-light to nothing more than grayish smears on the whitewashed walls. The pallor of death on his mother and sisters seemed only to be the peace of sleep. For a long time the boy stood silently praying for the souls of his parents and his sisters. And then, with his last prayer, he put his grief aside.

He was changed now, and there was much to be done.

He picked up his mother first, and carried her body out of the courtyard, then up to the top of the hill, where he buried it deep within a tangle of brush.

Beside his mother, he buried his sisters, and then sat through the rest of the night, his mind numb as he relived the horrors of the day that had just pa.s.sed.

As the first light of dawn began to bleach the darkness of the long night away, he rose to his feet and looked down once more on the hacienda that had been his home.

His memories, and his mother's words, were etched on his soul, as the blood of his family and the marks of the bullets that had killed them were etched on the walls of the hacienda.

Nothing would ever erase the images in his mind, or soften the hatred in his heart.

Nor would he ever leave the village that had been his home.

And forever after, night after endless night, he would awake from the dream, shivering.

Always it was the same. Always he was in the hills above the hacienda, watching the slaughter of his family; always he heard the words of his mother clearly, and understood what it was that he was to do.

Was it real? Had it all happened exactly as he saw it in the dream? The shots. The screams. Crimson stains on whitewashed walls.

Always the dream returned. And he knew what he must do....

PART ONE.

CHAPTER ONE.

La Paloma was the kind of town that absorbed change slowly. Tucked up in the hills above Palo Alto, it had grown slowly for more than a hundred years, yet its focus remained as it had always been, the tiny plaza of the old Spanish mission. Unlike most of the California missions, Mission La Paloma had never been converted to a museum or a historical monument, becoming, instead, the village hall, with its adjoining school now serving as a library.

Behind the mission there was a tiny cemetery, and beyond the cemetery was a collection of small rundown houses where the descendants of La Paloma's Californio founders lived, still speaking Spanish among themselves, and eking out meager livings by serving the gringos gringos who had taken over the lands of the old hacienda generations ago. who had taken over the lands of the old hacienda generations ago.

Two blocks from the plaza a smallish, roughly triangular piece of land dominated by an immense oak tree lay at the confluence of the main road through La Paloma and the side roads that wandered through the ravines into which the village had spread over the years. The patch of land had existed undisturbed because the original settlers, starting with the mission priests, had elected to leave the ma.s.sive oak in place and route the roads away from it. And so it had remained. There were no sidewalks or curbings along La Palomas haphazardly meandering streets, and though the village that had grown up around the mission had eventually spilled over into this unnamed, unpopulated area, the plaza had remained the center of town.

Now the area surrounding the oak was known as the Square. And the huge oak under which generations of La Paloma children had grown up, had climbed on, hung swings from, carved their initials into, and generally abused beyond all reasonable horticultural endurance, was neatly fenced off, surrounded by a well-manicured lawn crisscrossed by concrete walks carefully planned to appear random. Discreet signs advised people to stay off the lawns, refrain from picnicking, deposit litter in cans prettily painted in adobe brown to conform to La Paloma's Spanish heritage, and the tree itself had an ominous chain surrounding it, and a sign of its own, proclaiming it the largest and oldest oak in California, and forbidding it to be touched in any manner at all by anyone except an authorized representative of the La Paloma Parks Department. The fact that the Parks Department consisted only of two part-time gardeners was nowhere mentioned.

For now the computer people had finally discovered La Paloma.

At first, the thousands who had flocked to the area known as Silicon Valley had cl.u.s.tered on the flats around Palo Alto and Sunnyvale. But tiny, sleepy La Paloma, hidden away up in the hills, spreading out from the oak into the ravines, a beautiful retreat from the California sun, shaded by towering eucalyptus trees, and lush with undergrowth except up toward the tops of the hills where the pasturelands still remained, was too tempting to ignore for long.

The first to move to La Paloma were the upper echelons of the computer people. Determined to use their new wealth to preserve the town's simple beauty, preserve it they had, spending large sums of their high-tech money to keep La Paloma a rustic retreat from the outside world.

Whether that preservation was a blessing or not depended on whom you talked to.

For the last remnants of the Californios, the influx of newcomers meant more jobs. For the merchants of the village, it meant more money. Both these groups suddenly found themselves earning a decent income rather than struggling for survival.

But for others, the preservation of La Paloma meant a radical change in their entire life-style. Ellen Lonsdale was one of these.

Ellen had grown up in La Paloma, and when she had married, she had convinced her husband that La Paloma was the perfect place in which to settle: a small, quiet town where Marsh could set up his medical practice, and they could raise their family in the ideal environment that Ellen herself had been raised in. And Marsh, after spending many college vacations in La Paloma, had agreed.

During the first ten years after Ellen brought Marsh to La Paloma, her life had been ideal. And then the computer people began coming, and the village began to change. The changes were subtle at first; Ellen had barely noticed them until it was too late.

Now, as she steered her Volvo station wagon through the village traffic on a May afternoon, Ellen found herself reflecting on the fact that the Square and its tree seemed to symbolize all the changes both she and the town had gone through. If the truth were known, she thought, La Paloma would not seem as attractive as it looked.

There were, for example, the old houses-the large, rambling mansions built by the Californio overseers in the style of the once-grand hacienda up in the hills. These were finally being restored to their original splendor. But no one ever talked about the fact that often the splendor of the houses failed to alleviate the unhappiness within, and that, as often as not, the homes were sold almost as soon as the restorations were complete, because the families they housed were breaking up, victims of high-tech, high-tension lives.

And now, Ellen was afraid, the same thing might be about to happen to her and her family.

She pa.s.sed the Square, drove up La Paloma Drive two blocks, and pulled into the parking lot of the Medical Center.

The Medical Center, like the fence around the Square and the chain around the tree, was something Ellen had never expected to see in La Paloma.

She had been wrong.

As La Paloma grew, so had Marsh's practice, and his tiny office had finally become the La Paloma Medical Center, a small but completely equipped hospital. Ellen had long since stopped counting how many people were on staff, as she had also long since given up trying to keep books for Marsh as she had when they'd first married. Marsh, as well as being its director, owned fifty percent of its stock. The Lonsdales, like the village, had prospered. In two more weeks they would be moving out of their cottage on Santa Clara Avenue and into the big old house halfway up Hacienda Drive whose previous owners had filed for a divorce before even beginning the restorations they had planned.

Ellen half-suspected that one of the reasons she had wanted the house-and she had to admit she'd wanted it far more than Marsh or their son, Alex-was to give her something to do to keep her mind off the fact that her own marriage seemed to be failing, as so many in La Paloma seemed to be, not only among the newcomers but those of her childhood friends as well, unions that had started out with such high expectations, had seemed to flourish for a while, and now were ending for reasons that most of them didn't really understand.

Valerie Benson, who had simply thrown her husband out one day, and announced to her friends that she no longer had the energy to put up with George's bad habits, though she'd never really told anyone what those bad habits had been. Now she lived alone in the house George had helped her restore.

Martha Lewis, who still lived with her husband, even though the marriage seemed to have ended years ago. Marty's husband, who had flown high with the computer people for a while as a sales manager, had finally descended into alcoholism. For Marty, life had become a struggle to make the monthly payments on the house she could no longer really afford.

Cynthia Evans, who, like Marty, still lived with her husband, but had long ago lost him to the eighteen-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week schedule the Silicon Valley people thrived on, and got rich on. Cynthia had finally decided that if she couldn't spend time with her husband, she could at least enjoy spending his money, and had convinced him to buy the old ruin at the top of Hacienda Drive and give her free rein to restore it as she saw fit.