Dreams and Desires (25 page)

Cathy Marjoram, Dolores's stepdaughter, who had boycotted the nuptials, had been convinced to pay them a visit when he had met her at a stockholders meeting for Marjoram Industries about a month after the wedding. Jonathan had voted all of Dolores’ shares by proxy, and placed himself on the Board. He didn't need to elect himself Chairman. It was too soon for that anyway. From his vantage point as a Board member and representative of the majority shareholder he would be able to quickly assert authority over the direction of investments.

Cathy was a sweet, thin wisp of a girl with big brown eyes. She was shapely, but not voluptuous. She had looked lost in her prim business suit. Her hair was a light brown, long, almost to her waist. She had delicate hands that he remarked upon when they were introduced. Her handshake was soft, almost tender. She had earnestly expressed her hope she and her “father's former wife,” as she put it, could live in relative peace. She had no real interest in the money. She merely wanted to be assured an adequate income so she could pursue aspirations as a concert pianist. She was slated to begin study in Paris in a few weeks. When Jonathan invited her to visit at the estate, holding her hand gently in his, the girl seemed dazed for a moment and then agreed. Two weeks later, she cancelled the Paris trip, signed an irrevocable power of attorney in favor of Jonathan and came to live with him and his dutiful wife permanently.

Jonathan had taken care of the servants right away. He had let go the butler who had served the Marjoram family for fifteen years and brought in and converted a 40ish, attractive and efficient former hospitality manager from one of the downtown hotels. She had weeded out ‘unacceptable’ staff immediately, and the Blackthornes were now served by pretty, compliant, mostly illegal Latina girls. The renegade had adapted them to his use one by one. They had been recruited from a business agent who operated out of San Antonio and had been brought directly there. No one would ever miss them, no one who counted that is.

In fact, he had developed a very helpful tool for his future endeavors when one of the nervous maids had been escorted into his presence in the large, well appointed library on the main floor for her ‘interview'. Jonathan had begun learning Spanish a few days before and was not yet well versed, but he understood the girl's horrified, whispered ejaculation when she first felt the tendrils of his control wending through her mind. She had fallen to her knees and crossed herself and said, “Mi Dios, el Diablo!” in a soft, desperate voice before crawling naked between his thighs and receiving the essence that would bind her to his will. When he realized how useful the concept would be, Jonathan had immediately adopted it.

All the Hispanic girls who worked for them now believed they had been captured by a demonic power. And, for all practical purposes, they had. Jonathan had had a special design based on a pentagram made for him. He had mounted it on the wall of the library and a larger one in the servant's dorm. All of the servants now carried a tattoo of the pentagram on their bellies, just above their now hairless sexes, marking them, in their horrified minds, as the property of the devil. All of the other women now wore it too. It was to be the signifier of his control over them and all his future female servants.

The alien rebel had now achieved his second goal: comfort and luxury. He now needed economic power. He needed access to world class laboratories and high tech manufacturing facilities where he could conduct research and make prototypes with no questions asked. It had taken the equivalent of seven years of Earth time for the technicians to isolate the emotional emanations of his familiar over the dimensional barrier. It was not like fishing where you just put your hook in and hope for the best. The emotional emissions of billions of people crash against the barrier daily and tens of millions of them break through. He calculated that, even under emergency conditions, it would take the technicians of the Whole at least three earth years to isolate the lusty needs of another female sufficiently bright and passionate to cast her emotions across the divide strongly enough to facilitate a pursuer.

Three years was a blink of an eye when you considered that he needed to make what would be revolutionary discoveries in the sciences of this dimension in order to fully accomplish his ultimate goal: to either free himself of the restrictions of dependence on the Whole or to find new ways of access to it that would liberate him from the necessity of maintaining his familiar. She would be a stone around his neck as long as his existence was dependant on her. And she would eventually wither and die. With his abilities to manage and rejuvenate his own flesh, he had estimated he could live 300 years or more before his physical powers diminished in any appreciable way. He could, conceivably, live in this dimension until he was 500 years old. By then, he might be able to find a way to develop and occupy a new male, human body. If he did, he could theoretically live forever.

So, he would need to replace his familiar many times. Although she was in the prime of health, his devoted female acolytes took good care of her in that respect, and he had planned to add a highly skilled female physician to his coterie of servants as soon as he could, Diane's body would eventually burn out from its state of continuous stress, especially with the intensity of his use of her. It might take two years, three, five or ten, but her usefulness as a conduit to the other side would diminish, slowly at first, and then rapidly until she finally lost the ability to draw energies from the Whole. At that point, he would be finished. And if it happened, it happened. The years he would enjoy as a virtual god on this planet, wallowing in its sensual delights, would be well worth it. If there was a chance he could live many hundreds of years, he would go for it.

So, Jonathan needed to be able to do more than just influence policy. He needed to be able to run Marjoram Industries as a virtual fiefdom, allocating millions of dollars to research, first on how to detect the dimensional barrier with the primitive skills and technologies of this world and then how to exploit it. He was familiar, of course, with the principals that had led to the discovery and overcoming of the dimensional barrier on his side. You could not compare earthly science with the manner that the Whole absorbed and stored knowledge. Everything was different; the laws of science did not translate between universes. On this side he was dealing with whole new concepts. If you made a watch in London and brought it to the deepest darkest forests of Africa, it would still be a watch. It would tell time. If you brought that watch over the dimensional divide, it would, if you were lucky, be no more than a lumpish, unrecognizable object, assuming it didn't just break down into its constituents and vaporize into dust in your hands, if you had hands.

Jonathan patiently built up his influence in the corporate structure of Marjoram Industries. It was a challenge because most of the decision makers in the company were men and he although could influence them with his mind, he could not control them. Not like he could with females.

A few weeks after his assumption of his duties as a Board member, he invited Charles Conway, who had taken over from Philip Marjoram as CEO a year before his death. Conway, a 43 year old, athletically built, up and comer, had believed he could easily deal with Mrs. Marjoram after Philip's death and saw himself with a bright future managing a Fortune 500 corporation. Now that Jonathan was on the scene, he saw the handwriting on the wall. He was on his way out. Jonathan was already on the Board and Conway expected that by the time next year's stockholders meeting rolled around, Blackthorne would be ready to take the helm. He had the strange man with a seemingly mesmerizing hold over Dolores Marjoram investigated. His people came up blank. And it was really a blank. They could find out nothing about him. It was if he had appeared out of thin air. If Conway had been able to get dirt on the suave, good looking interloper, he might have been able to push him off of the Board, even get Mrs. Marjoram, who was now known as Mrs. Blackthorne, to dump him and take back his control of her shares. Having failed in his efforts, Conway already had feelers out for a new position elsewhere.

Blackthorne had invited Conway and his lovely wife, Anna, to Sunday lunch at the vast Marjoram Estate. They had eaten on the southern veranda, at a table covered with a large, multicolored umbrella to keep off the worst of the sun's heat and served by the fawning and obsequious
Latina
servants dressed in pleasing, little, short skirted servant's uniforms. It was a pleasant, early summer day, slightly warmer than seasonal. Anna Conway, a sociable, well educated woman, about 32, looked appealing in her light, flowery sun dress. She had jet black hair down to just above her shoulders, a thin, long nose, and a narrow face. She was just short of what you would call beautiful, but her face was alert, and her intelligence and attentiveness to Dolores and her cheery disposition, conveyed an attractiveness all its own.

After lunch, Dolores and Anna adjourned to the garden and “Chuck', as Conway insisted Jonathan call him, went into the east rec room to watch the baseball game and finish their beers. The Dodgers were in town and it was potentially a good game. The Rockies were two games back and the Dodgers had lost three in a row. Jonathan had learned to appreciate the sometimes absurd game and he often used the company box at Coors Field. The game was a timeless, almost sensual experience in itself. And being in large, anonymous crowds was always of interest to Jonathan, who would scan the minds of the attractive women he found there, recording information he found, name, address, profession, passion, he could retrieve later.

They had watched the game for about twenty minutes, the Dodgers were ahead 3-1 in the second inning, when Jonathan brought up the subject that lay like a dead elephant on the floor between them.

"So, Chuck, are you going to stay on with us or what?"

Conway had been waiting for Blackthorne to raise the topic. “I'm not sure, Jon,” he said. “It depends a lot on you."

"How's that?” Blackthorne inquired.

"Well,” Chuck answered, his speech already outlined in his mind. The last thing he wanted Blackthorn to do was to fire him on the spot or to poison the well with other corporate boards by spreading word of his alleged incompetence or other supposed negative characteristics. “I can see Mrs. Blackthorne has a lot of faith in you,” he told his rival. “Now that you're on the Board, I just kind of figured in a year or so you'd want to take over, run the place yourself. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I'm young and at the peak of my abilities. I don't very much relish the role of a caretaker and so I've been looking around, as you probably know.” It was good strategy to assume that almost anything you did would be known to your adversaries, especially ones who controlled fabulous wealth as did the Blackthornes.

"Suppose I asked you to stay on, Chuck?” Jonathan retorted. “Suppose I told you that if you did, you would become wealthy beyond your imagination, that you could live the life of ancient Roman Senator, able to exercise unlimited control over all who surrounded you, free to use them as you wished, anytime that you liked? If I could do that for you, would you stay?"

Chuck laughed. “I guess so, Jon. But nobody lives like a Roman Senator these days. And as for wealth, I know the company's doing well, but I really don't see that in the pipeline the way it's currently configured."

"Neither do I Chuck,” Jonathan agreed. “Let's just supposed I could make it happen. What would you say then?"

Conway took a long sip of his beer. Blackthorne had always seemed strange to him. Now he knew the man was nuts. He felt like he was walking into a trap. He really didn't want to piss the man off. He just wanted to move on, that's all. He gave a conservative, reasoned response.

"I would have to say, Jon, that I'd need to be shown first, shown that you could do it, given an idea of how. And then I'd need to feel I still had the authority to pull the company in the proper direction. I don't mean any disrespect to you, Jon, or to Mrs. Blackthorne. I don't want to become known as anybody's ‘boy'. I guess I mean that I want to make a name for myself, feel that I've accomplished something. I just wasn't made up to be second fiddle."

"But,” Jonathan replied, “if I could prove I have the power of an Augustus or Tiberius or one of those other emperors who ruled absolutely for a long, long time, and that I could give you virtually anything you wanted, if I could prove that to you, then you'd do it, right?"

Chuck wanted to leave this uncomfortable subject. “Okay, okay,” he said, laughing in an attempt to diffuse the situation. “So, bring on the dancing girls, we'll roast some Christians and turn lead into gold!"

"Well, I can't turn lead into gold. Not yet anyway. The dancing girls would be no problem. And if you want to burn Christians, that's not my bag, but I can arrange it. Okay?"

Chuck laughed again. “Okay,” he said nervously. He really wanted to get out of there.

"Suppose we start with something more practical, Chuck?” the alien asked him. “You've been having some problems at home, haven't you?"

The CEO of Marjoram Industries bristled at Jonathan's inquiry. “I don't see that's any of your business, Jon,” he replied.

"Ordinarily, I'd agree, Chuck, but bear with me please. Now, I know Anna's unhappy because she caught you cheating on her a few weeks ago. That's true, isn't it?"

Chuck was startled. Nobody knew about that but him, Anna, and the cute little barmaid down at Gibson's Tavern where he stopped in every Friday night for a few.

"Never mind how I know, Chuck,” Jonathan continued. “She told you yesterday she wants a divorce because this isn't the first time, right?"

Aghast at the depth of Blackthorne's knowledge, Chuck just sat there. No one knew that either. In fact, he and Anna hadn't even talked about it. She had written him a note and he hadn't had the courage to speak to her since. No one else had read it, he was sure of it. She had always been supportive of his career, but probably came today just to get a good look at the fabled Marjoram estate for the first and last time.