All Beasts Together (The Commander)

by Farmer, Randall

  “Tonya Biggioni,” I said, a guess. I repressed a grin when I saw her response. Lori was good but not perfect. Like normals with good self-control, she concentrated on controlling her face, torso and arms; as a Transform, she also controlled her breathing, body temperature and heart rate. However, Lori’s legs below the knees and her feet showed extra muscle tension when I mentioned Biggioni’s name. The two Focuses weren’t on the best of terms. I bet Biggioni could tie Lori in knots and Lori didn’t like it one little bit. She knew she wasn’t top bitch in the old dog’s network, and it pissed her off no end. I recognized a lever when it slapped me in the gut and put it lovingly away for use, later.

  Lori nodded at my guess and waited on my response.

  “Yes, I agree,” I said.

  “No reports to Keaton or Zielinski.”

  “I’ll do my best, ma’am.” I remembered the proper term of respect Keaton mentioned once. “Focus Rizzari.”

  She nodded and locked eyes with me, her gaze firm and her control steel. “I’d like to hear your side of the story. This is very important, as the information you give to me, if valuable enough, may serve as payment against your misdeeds.”

  The formality disturbed me. It implied this sort of shakedown happened often between the Focuses. Or, should I say, the Focus mafia?

  “It started when I was hunting a Transform,” I said. I had to start somewhere. I tried to conceal my embarrassment. “You are of course familiar with how Arms must procure juice?” She nodded. “Well, there I was…”

  I went on to describe the fight with Enkidu, showed them Enkidu’s hand, and described my car trip as best as I remembered. Ann interrupted.

  “How well have you healed, Arm Hancock? Would it be too impertinent of me to ask to examine you? I don’t doubt your word, but since physical fights between Major Transforms are so rare, we’re working with too many unknowns.” I glanced at Lori, trying to figure out if she considered Ann a subordinate or a peer, but Lori stared off into space, oblivious. Possibly Lori had crossed the line and actually made friends with a subordinate, a lesser Transform. I found the idea disturbing.

  I unbuttoned my shirt and pants, and fought down a flush of embarrassment when I remembered I had been dressing like a man and talking with a man’s voice. No wonder the two of them had been so distant.

  “Jesus Christ!” Ann said, when I exposed my chest. Lori shrugged and looked over at the autopsy table, non-verbally indicating I should climb up.

  “Forget it. Save your autopsy work for the dead.”

  Ann laughed. Lori’s face stayed blank, her emotions tightly shuttered. She got some equipment from the metal table against the wall, knelt down beside me, and started taking samples. Minute samples.

  “Lori, how much damage can an Arm survive, anyway?” Ann asked. “More than a Focus?”

  “Fully trained Arms? God only knows,” Focus Rizzari said. “Zielinski told me about Carol’s last torture session with Arm Keaton. Trust me when I say what Keaton did to her was much worse.”

  Zielinski needed to learn to keep his yap shut about certain things.

  “Still bleeding a little from your vagina?” Ann said. She had spotted what I had hoped to be one of my big surprises. I sighed, took the plastic bag out of my pocket, the one containing the little red pea. I dropped it in Ann’s hand.

  “So much for that big surprise,” I said.

  Lori looked at me, looked at Ann, looked back at me. “Well, Carol, you’ve got me.”

  “Lori, remember a certain prediction I made to you regarding Evan’s and Stanley’s rebuttal to ‘Transform Reproduction Implies Evolution’?” Ann said.

  “Gurgling poo!” Lori said. ‘Gurgling poo?’ Whatever happened to expressive, simple four letter words? “I wasn’t thinking. Two Major Transforms in a juice transfer situation, engaging in sex afterwards. Pregnancy.”

  “And, due to the damage to my innards and my regeneration, instant period as well, and spontaneous abortion of whatever appalling Monster this thing of hate was trying to become,” I said. Definitely some sort of Monster on the way. Baby Little Red Nugget was far too large to be a normal baby in the making. Normal babies weren’t so large as to be visible just two days past conception. “First period I’ve had since becoming a Transform, by the way. Given all the ‘Focuses can’t become pregnant’ crap I’ve heard, I was hoping at least to get something out of the information.” Yes, yes, I had figured out why I bled for so long from my vagina. It had only been a year since my last period. I hadn’t forgotten the basics.

  I did wonder what had happened to my diaphragm, though. I had a bad feeling it was lodged somewhere in my intestinal cavity. Without Dr. Zielinski’s help, that’s where it would stay.

  I went on and gave the rest of my story. I didn’t mention the Arm juice burning trick. I expected the two of them would know exactly what lurked in Pittsburgh and they did. I had prepped myself well. With my Arm-enhanced memory, I relived the story as I spoke, traumatic. Low juice took care of the real traumatic parts because I had already forgotten them. I needed the preparation. I didn’t want to become hysterical in front of a Focus, or freeze up, or turn violent, or start talking about voices in my head, or pinball game dreams or some other low juice hallucinatory nonsense. Not in this situation. Not with my life on the line.

  In the end, I plopped Enkidu’s hand down on the autopsy table. Damn, I didn’t want to give up that hand. I hoped they valued the trophy as much as I did.

  “Hand of Chimera, still alive. Sort of. I formally offer this as the death price for my failure of control over the juice.” I slid Enkidu’s hand over toward Lori, almost like giving away a piece of my soul. She gave it an ‘ick’ look and a fish-eyed half-smile. I could have done without Ann’s mental comparison of my activities to those of her pet cat.

  “Thank you.” Lori steepled her fingers, unhappy. “The offer of the hand is ingenious, but I’m not sure those whom I represent would accept it as payment in full. Unfortunately, I can’t judge other than you were the one at fault, Carol.”

  So this was it? The decision hadn’t taken long. I could go quietly, or decide to take Lori to hell on the way by. “So. What now?”

  “I’m going to recommend nothing more than probation, a black mark on your record, for not being able to stand up to your own urges. In my opinion, there were extenuating circumstances involved: you were dead on your feet due to a Chimera attack that should have never occurred. In a place as civilized as the Quad Cities no proper Transforms should have to fear Chimera attacks.”

  Well, what an interesting way of saying the Focuses weren’t able to protect their people. I sensed deep political undercurrents here and I found them disturbing. The Focus Network was cavalier about human life. Transform life, too.

  “So the equation nets your Network down one perfectly fine male Transform and your benefit is you get to keep me alive and learn of the Chimera Enkidu.” I paused. “You know, I don’t think I want your job, Lori.”

  “I don’t want your job, either. You did kill a tagged Transform and public acknowledgement of your misdeeds must occur. Your punishment is thus: the Network has given you the job of figuring out how Arms can be kept in line and worked with as true partners. We don’t expect it to be finished by next Tuesday.” A false grin flashed over her face. “We don’t care what method you come up with, as long as it doesn’t end up with dead Focuses and tagged Transforms strewn across the countryside, or attract the attention of the nether regions of the FBI.”

  I made a show of inspecting the room to see if she was, perhaps, talking to someone else. “You’ve got to be kidding. You heard my story. I’ll be lucky to get home alive.”

  “I didn’t say the job was possible. You took a life you shouldn’t have. This is a ‘succeed or die’ task, or, shall I say, many tasks.”

  Clearly, ‘black marks’ meant something different to the Focuses than they meant to me. They showed a lot of brass, to be handing out jobs like leashing Arms as punishme
nt.

  Ann interrupted.

  “From the look on her face, Arm Hancock doesn’t know about the demographics, Lori.” Oops. Slipping on the control there if a normal could read me.

  The growing rapport between Lori and me broke. A part of me wanted to be the Focus’s prisoner. Another part of me wanted the Focus as my prisoner. Another just wanted out of here before my control fell apart into shreds. Behind all her icy masks, I was positive Lori approved of me in some way. “One set of projections ends up with virtually no non-Transforms left in the world in 75 years, Arm Hancock,” Ann said. “All the humans left would either be Focuses, Monsters, tagged Transforms, or Crows.”

  “Huh.”

  “Where would that leave the Arms, Carol?” Lori asked. “Where would you get your juice?”

  I licked my lips. I had actually read the article Ann referenced, in Nature, one of the few articles in the journal I actually understood. I had never thought through the ramifications, though. “Well, there are always recalcitrant Transforms. We would be the enforcers.”

  “Ever work out how few Arms would be needed?” Ann said.

  I did the math. “Shit. I’m not sure the United States, with its current population, could even support one Arm. Arms need so much juice!”

  Ann nodded. “Exactly. We need to find another solution. The most obvious one is for Arms to be able to get juice from Focuses. We don’t know how, yet, but that doesn’t mean we won’t be able to figure it out someday, somehow. Perhaps the male Major Transforms fit into this equation, too. We don’t know. For all we know, the real solution is something else entirely, but I find that unlikely. In any event, the first point about the demographics is that, in the long term, Arms need Focuses.

  “The second point is what we quaintly call the Romanian solution. Have you ever heard the term before?”

  I shook my head. “All I know is Romania claims their health care system has solved Transform Sickness and they have no Transforms in their pure and clean nation.”

  “They solved it by killing all the Transforms,” Lori said. She showed anger and disgust as she spoke. “It works, too. If you kill all the Transforms, the incidence of the Transform Sickness goes way down. On the other hand, what they do is inhumane beyond words. Whenever you get sick in Romania, you get hauled to a clinic and tested. If you test positive, you’re shot, right then and there. They don’t particularly care about false positives. To make sure no one escapes the checks, everyone informs on everyone else. Romania has become so bad they give normal communist nations a good name.”

  I kept my face stony, and I kept silent.

  “The kicker is that there are factions within the United States government, within the FBI, and within the medical community itself, proposing we enact the Romanian solution to save the nation from the Transforms,” Ann said. “It may be only a matter of time before all the non-democratic nations with Transform Sickness problems follow that path. Consider living in such a place as an Arm. If Transforms are shot before they even finish transforming, where is an Arm to get juice?”

  I thought for a moment about the point these two made. “What you’re saying is that if we get too many Arms in the US, and they all behave like Keaton – or myself – our behavior will give credence to the people proposing the Romanian solution.”

  Since I left Keaton, one of my more important projects was to figure out where Arms fit in the world, and from that, a functional system of Arm morality, because normal human morality didn’t work for an Arm. I had been too busy surviving to make much progress, but this little tidbit might be an important part of the puzzle.

  If Ann and Lori were right, their theory might shoot down any possibility of an ‘anything goes’ ethical system. I wasn’t surprised. I considered the ‘anything goes’ system suspect, much as it appealed emotionally. The authorities didn’t need to catch me and kill me if they caught all the normals as they transformed and killed them first. If I and my fellow Arms sufficiently aggravated the normals…

  I would rather be tortured to death by Keaton than die from juice withdrawal. Dying by any other means would be much better.

  No more killing sprees. Hell, in the end, I bet us Arms wouldn’t be able to kill any normals. Not a result I liked. No more killing sprees was one thing, no killing of normals at all was a whole different bowl of salad. I listened to Ann while she lectured about Transform demographics, information far too hot to publish. I understood some of these horror stories from Zielinski’s teachings. When Ann prattled over to the Van Reijn model of Transform differentiation, I indicated subtly to Lori I already knew this, but didn’t want to upset Ann.

  Lori caught the hint. She motioned to Ann to finish up. Ann complied.

  “Okay,” I said, having taken the five minutes of Ann’s lecture to think through the Network’s offer. “I agree. Everyone has to have some goal in life, I guess. There’s only one problem. I don’t trust the Network. Someone in the Network is after me.”

  “Who could possibly be after you?” Lori asked.

  I told the two of them about my encounter with Officer Canon in Philadelphia.

  Lori and Ann exchanged gazes and shrugged.

  “What, you don’t believe me?” They didn’t. Hell.

  “I believe you experienced what you experienced, Carol,” Lori said. “However, any Focus or Crow able to do that trick is powerful enough to have, um, taken you out.” Lori did something with the juice, and without warning another Lori sat in Ann’s chair and the lab held one less Ann. A moment later Ann reappeared, holding a gun on me. I glared at her and she holstered it.

  A threat so blunt should have sent me through the roof with adrenaline, ready to slaughter any attacker. Instead, I merely felt edgy. I tried for an explanation and guessed Lori had calmed me with her charisma, charisma I hadn’t sensed in use. I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to get hostile. Really. Fuck.

  “So?”

  “I don’t believe that was an attack. Aggressive recruitment attempt, yes. Attack, no,” Lori said. “And no, it wasn’t me.”

  I had only thought she might have been the attacker, and only for an instant. I was profoundly glad Lori approved of me. I was severely overmatched.

  “Who might have done it? Why?”

  “There’s at least one member of the Focus Council who believes you’ve been poaching Transforms on a regular basis. Starting before you left Keaton.”

  “That’s…” I stopped myself. I had seen Lori’s elaborate security precautions. The powerful Focuses were paranoid. “You know I haven’t.”

  “I do now.”

  “Your powerful Network Focuses aren’t much into polite, are they?” Lori didn’t answer; impolite, and on purpose.

  “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Lori said, after a painfully long pause. “You reject the Network, you reject the Network. You’re on your own.”

  “I’ll deal with you.”

  Lori frowned. She didn’t believe me. “You won’t even tell me where your lair is. What your goals in life are. What you can actually do as an Arm.”

  “Would you, if you were in my position, Focus Rizzari?”

  “Lori.”

  She let down her mask and let me glimpse into her mind. Hard eyes, pain, twisted longings. Shit. The autopsy table wasn’t for donated Monsters; she went out and bagged them personally. Lori Rizzari, Monster hunter extraordinaire. She got off on the thrill. She was a virgin. She really was as fucked up in the head as Keaton and I. She was, as I suspected, far more powerful than I was as a Major Transform. I was too damn young.

  Lori’s mask came back up. Ann hadn’t seen a thing.

  I figured out why she revealed herself to me. “Lori.” She saw the real me, saw right through my supposed talents at hiding my thoughts and emotions. Hell. I had never imagined any of the motherly Focuses would possess Arm-like mental twists. Nevertheless, here was more data confirming my complete ignorance of the real Transform community.

  “You’re going to di
e, Carol.” Lori truly feared for my life. “You realize the Crow, Rumor, rolled you? He got you out of Pittsburgh by main force of his charisma. We didn’t know Crows even possessed charisma like that. The world is a dangerous place for a young Major Transform. You can’t survive alone. I was pathetic for my first two years and nearly useless the next two. Without the other Focuses, without the Network, without a household to protect me, I’d be dead.”

  Ann laughed. “Every year you say this is the first year you’ve really got your feet on the ground, Focus.”

  “Come up with another solution,” I said. There had to be another solution. I held control of my reactions by sheer blind willpower. If I let my instincts get involved, I would have knelt and given myself up to Lori. Permanently.

  Lori thought for a long minute. “There are a few Focuses who’ve rejected the Network. They might be willing to lend you a hand if you’re willing to lair in the northern part of the United States.”

  I stayed noncommittal. Ann hissed. “The Apostates?” She shook her head. “They aren’t much use as contacts.”

  “The Network is a United States organization,” Lori said. “Back a few years ago, the UFA tried to take over the rest of the Focuses in the western world and failed.”

  The UFA, the United Focuses of America, was the umbrella organization of Focuses behind the Network.

  “The US Focuses have a harsh reputation and we aren’t trusted,” Lori said. I couldn’t imagine why… “The Canadian and European Focuses rejected the UFA and put together a rival group, the International Sisterhood of Focuses. The ISF is a looser organization, more like a labor union with local groups holding the power. There are four locals in Canada and one of them, the Ontario Local of the ISF, has eight US Focuses as members. These eight US Focuses are sometimes termed the Apostates, because they rejected the UFA and the Network. One of my Network jobs is to liaison with them.”

  “I’m interested,” I said.

  “For historical reasons the Ontario Local Focuses aren’t too keen on Arms,” Lori said. “But they should be willing to talk to you over the phone. I can give you some contact numbers. You’ll officially be a member of the Network, but your contact will be through them to me.” She took out a piece of paper and wrote down some names, locations and phone numbers. She handed me the list and I scanned it. One of these Apostates lived in Milwaukee. That would do.