Koradonda: Chapter 8, The Pattern: Part 1

Jones tries to find the root cause that is interfering with is plans.

Jones hadn’t exaggerated just how busy he was. Except for the one-hour lunch he had with Fords at noon, he appeared to mortals to be sitting motionless in a chair blocking the entrance, doing nothing. But his own people could see how busy he was and took pains not to disturb him.

The lesser thing, and the thing he would not have done had there been a viable option to it, was monitor his entire estate plus some distance beyond it. He listened with the ears and watched with the eyes of every single animal within that area all that occurred.

He knew the exact placement, as well as detonation codes, for each of the atomic bombs.

The humans out there had reason to worry concerning those. While they really could not be called missiles, they popped up to a distance of 100 meters before detonating. In the time it took them to reach that height, he, and every Beast Lord here, could watch them from a safe distance away, though using that kind of speed had consequences none of his people willingly courted if it wasn’t a survival situation.

A drawback to watching everything this way was that everything every animal saw, every animal heard, and the thought of every animal in the time he was watching this way would forever be a part of his memory. While his memory was virtually unlimited, it was weighty, and committing this much information to memory was added noticeably to it. Unlike humans, he could never forget what he committed to memory.

His primary focus wasn’t that, though. It was examining the pattern, and tracing why the things that had happened, had.

He found Dolly and followed threads of the pattern back through time from her. A massive mess in the pattern that should not have been around her, existed right up until he killed everyone in that field. It was not human compassion, simply not taking the time out to tell Dolly’s slaves that they had completely lost all of their family in the ambush on him. Dolly’s slaves were mother and daughter. Jones traced to where a different daughter had become jealous when her sister was introduced to the thing in the garden and not her. She informed their father of it. It was the father that found and brought in that group to kill Dolly. She, her father, and both brothers had been in the group attacking when Jones killed them all.

The mess prevented Dolly from seeing her hate and the action she had taken. That disturbed him on a deep level. It should not have happened. No one had a better understanding of the pattern than he, yet he hadn’t known it was even possible for the pattern to do that.

He could see the pressure that built, causing the hate in those people, twisting them helplessly. Just before it would have broken on Dolly, he surfaced and it appeared to shift to him. But that was a lie. The pattern showed him it wasn’t a coincidence that the hate group that planned to take out Dolly also had an assassination plan for someone that could be shifted to Ann. He and Ann had been the true target of the pattern, even before he had himself arrested and met her. That pattern, not him, had chosen where and when he would act to expose himself and his people. It had put Ann in with Sara. That meant that the cause of all this was even further back than he thought.

With hard work, he found those threads leading further back. That the threads from Ann led to the breaking of his vows and the creation of his Pet Sara was no surprise. That was when Ann became entangled in them. But it completely took him off guard when he untangled enough treads around that event to find that it didn’t originate there. They had caused him to take the vows in the first place!

Not until that very instant that the complete unlikelihood of any Koradonda making such vows occurred to him. If getting to there had been difficult, then the tangles in the pattern beyond that point were of a vastly different class.

He brought even more of his focus on to a section of the highly difficult, nearly impossible to read tangles.

For this reason, although on a level he was aware of Ann walking past him, his focus never shifted there, and he didn’t stop her. It was only later that he would see a thread making him focus enough of his attention there that he would not break from what he was doing to intercept her from going out.

**

Ann took a deep breath and let out a sigh. Four days trap inside this room was enough.

Standing up, she found that though still far from recovered, she was strong enough to stand and walk just fine.