You are an utter imbecile, Sky. I don’t appreciate being stalked. You had your chance, and you blew it. Live with it. P.S. one of my bodyguards is a cross-dresser and spotted you immediately. He’s going to beat the crap out of you after you read this note.
He felt himself boosted off the floor and dragged out of Rizzari’s classroom by two strong Transforms just as he read the last line of the note. They briskly dragged him around to the back of the building, out of sight of peering eyes. He didn’t recognize either bodyguard, and, indeed, one of them, a slender Transform man, wore women’s clothes.
Rizzari had managed to frown at him during her lecture so he wouldn’t metasense her bodyguards’ approach. In all his years as a mature Crow he had never been caught by a Focus’s charisma until he ran into Focus Rizzari. He hadn’t thought it possible. It shouldn’t have been if he had been paying attention. This time he thought he had paid attention. How in the heck did a Focus get good enough with her charisma to work it into a lecture on cell organelles?
The smaller Transform bodyguard threw Sky against the brick wall and cocked his arm to swing at him. Sky shook his head, rolled to the side, and left a stock dross construct meant for situations just like this, one he called ‘jumped by two assailants’. His little trick worked and the two thugs started to fight each other. They fell to the ground with a crash and rolled across the narrow walkway into the boxwoods on the other side, where they proceeded to pound each other enthusiastically.
Rizzari didn’t know squat about Crows, despite her reputation. Did she think he had only one weapon in his arsenal, the skunking? Skunking was such an overkill weapon, and such an utter waste of dross, only young and panicky Crows made common use of it. Nearly all Crows learned to modify the skunking attack after a few years and use it to less lethal effect. Sky had quite a few little dross construct tricks, thousands of them, actually, and the high juice supported memory to remember every single one of them. Crow Gurus wielded even more tricks; many of them could vanish from sight in the bright sun.
After a couple of minutes the two Transforms stopped fighting and turned to glare at him. With his metasense he picked up Lori on her way to join them. She had read his note and hopefully was starting to think instead of react. The cross-dresser bodyguard, still angry and now covered with bruises and bloody scratches, stepped forward to grab Sky again. Sky sighed, froze the Transform’s legs and loosened the Transform’s bladder sphincter. “You two seem to have never considered the possibility that all the Major Transforms have ways of defending themselves,” Sky said. “You might want to surrender before things start to get real ugly.”
“Name’s Bill,” the bodyguard dressed as a man said as he levered himself up and out of the bushes. “We were just going to rough you up a bit to give you a little incentive to stop bothering the household. If we wanted to stoop to your level we’d take out our weapons. Shelly, behind you, already has.”
Shelly, behind him, had also unloaded her weapon. Sky decided not to mention the fact he had taken care of that problem while the two men had held him by the arms. Lori’s fourth bodyguard, Eileen, stuck close to Lori. He decided to leave her alone for now.
“Don’t worry about me,” Sky said. “I’m not interested in fighting at all. In fact, given your household is a hotbed of militant Transforms, you might want to consider hiring me to train your people how to defend yourselves against the gentler Crow arts of combat. Your bodyguard cadre seems frightfully open to even the simplest Crow tricks. There’s a lot I can teach you. It is indeed possible for a prepared Transform to fight off my low end capabilities, and…”
“Anyone ever tell you that you have a habit of using ten words where one would suffice?” Lori said, as she stalked out the door and around the now much flatter bushes.
“Frequently. It’s not that I find the sound of my own voice pleasing, as many have falsely claimed upon occasion, but that oneness with the immanence of the world requires one to be more relaxed when dealing with other people. As we are still human despite our transformations, human society…”
Lori shook her head and skewered him with her gaze. “How real is the information in this note, anyway?”
Ah, the good ol’ Focus lie detector trick. He didn’t try to fight it off. “Every word of my note is as true as I know it to be.”
Lori studied him, her face blank, a study in self-control. “My office. Now. This is nothing to discuss in public.”
“With pleasure, Focus Rizzari. To see the office of an actual Transform Professor will be…”
“Shut up,” Lori said.
Yes, indeed, time for a little quiet. Ah, seeing Lori in action melted his heart, made him want to sweep her into his arms, despite his vow to keep their encounter strictly professional. He followed Lori down the walkway for several steps before he remembered his little ballistic precaution. He undid it.
“God dammit!” Shelly said, trailing the group a good hundred and twenty feet back. “The little cocksucker tricked me into unloading my weapon! Boss, you don’t want anything to do with this creep. He’s way too dangerous.”
“So am I,” Lori said, voice emotionless. She turned to Sky as they entered the building to the east of the classroom building. “Starting now, you keep your grubby meathooks off my people. No more Crow tricks or you can kiss your mission goodbye. Understand?”
He nodded. At least until the next time they pulled a weapon on him or tried to paste him one.
Lori led him down a stairway and into the basement, where her office nestled right next to her lab. Of all things, he smelled copious months-old Arm blood. No dross, though. Some Crow had cleaned the place out. Not surprising, given the number of Crows in Boston.
“Ah,” he said when they reached her office, “you deal in Arms as well. Did you host Hancock or Keaton? What did you do to her anyway, torture her? Your lab reeks of Arm blood.”
Lori paled and motioned to all four of her now unhappy bodyguards to get out of her office. They got. She took a big deep breath.
“Pleaseacceptmyapologyformisconstruingyourapproachtomypeopleaththetourney.” That had to hurt.
“Accepted,” Sky said.
“After what I and my people have done to you, you still want to work with me?” Rizzari said. Sky nodded. “You’re nothing like what I expected out of a Crow.”
“There are Crows, and then there are Crows.” Sky paused, editing out his usual continuation of ‘and then there is me’. “The mistake is easy to make, given we Crows rarely directly speak of our personal capabilities in our letters. Talking of sports, politics, religion and of course artwork is often only a cover for an implied discussion of the tricks I used on your people.”
Lori’s office was rather Spartan for Sky’s tastes. Computer printouts and pictures of cell parts decorated the walls. A late model IBM Selectric with an actual clean dust cover dominated her desk. The floor smelled of mold in the corners. Not a picture of a human being in the place.
“I see,” Lori said. “The relations between Focuses, at least in the United States, are far more formal. Even the chatter and small talk is formalized.”
“Crows aim for politeness over formality, but, alas, I often fail at both,” Sky said. “Sadie surprised me with her forwardness. I hadn’t been mentally prepared to face you, an unknown Focus of known great talents and power. I came to study you, to become comfortable with your glow, so I could speak to you over the phone later.”
“I don’t understand. Why couldn’t you just come up and speak to me? You’re far bolder than the other Crows I’ve dealt with.”
“That in itself is a long story,” Sky said. He wondered how he appeared to the Focus. He was dressed as a woman and hiding his Transform nature from her metasense with dross constructs. He made little effort to hide his exotic and not particularly feminine features, though his Crow lack of facial hair was always a good prop for this sort of disguise. Nor could he hide what his transformation had done to his weight. His stocky frame was ne
arly a hundred pounds lighter than it had once been.
Rizzari herself looked rather ordinary to Sky, save for the inevitable Focus beauty. Toronto was an immigrant city and lithe young Italian women weren’t at all uncommon. What set Lori off from the normal, he decided, were her movements, which were precise and measured. Was she an athlete? It must be so. “As you must realize, gracious lady, I am a rogue. My pretensions that life isn’t serious have often gotten me into trouble. Yet with adequate preparation and extensive meditation, I can act in a quite professional manner.”
Lori chewed on her lower lip, thinking, studying him. Judging him. Perhaps his day’s activities did include a little too much of his own unique stylistic flair. He could have bound the cross-dressing bodyguard without the bladder release, for instance.
Ah, but it was just so appropriate!
“If we are to work together professionally, there are several things I am going to require of you,” Lori said.
“I’m at your service with my spirit humbled, gracious lady.”
“Right,” Lori said. She didn’t believe him? Such a reputation to have.
“I am going to require you to come to Inferno, my household, in Boston, and apologize to Ann, Tim and Sadie,” Lori said, pushing on. “Especially Ann. She and Connie Yerizarian are my brain trust, the people I trust when I deal with Transform issues outside the home. If you can’t win them over we probably won’t be able to work together. Second, you need to keep your pants on around my people. If we’re going to be working on a professional issue of this delicacy, we can’t afford any personal distractions. Especially since it’s an open question as to whether you can seduce anyone without resorting to juice tricks. Last, you need to keep your mouth buttoned up tighter. Blabbing about Hancock’s visit to my lab isn’t going to make things easier. I keep my life segmented; I don’t take my academic problems home with me. My household, save for the four people I’ve mentioned, aren’t involved in or aware of Major Transform politics.
“Then there’s the cause.”
“The cause?” Or was that ‘Cause’, capitalized. The word was a strong gust of wind, potent with juice.
“All the Transforms in my house are volunteers. I even have normals in the house who are housemembers only because of the Cause, not because they have Transform family members. The Cause is a vision of a Transform society where all the Major Transforms work together, synergizing so we can find a way for more than the current five percent of the Transform Sickness victims to survive. Everyone in the household is part of the Cause, even if all they’re doing is cutting out newspaper stories regarding Transforms.” Her eyes lit up and her voice rose as she talked about her dream.
“For the duration of this project,” she said, “while you’re working with me, you’re part of the Cause, too.”
Hers was an interesting vision. It explained some of the more puzzling things in his letters from Lori’s household. His love would benefit from a little practice with her techniques for dealing with other Major Transforms, though, if she expected to make her Cause a life mission. She seemed a little, um, hasty. “I have no objections to your goal. Helping Focus households is my bread and butter.” He had even lived her household’s goal in his earlier years, though he hoped the Cause would turn out better for the world than his little wilderness adventure into madness had turned out for him.
He had never had a Focus tell him to keep his hands off of her people so quickly, though.
“Good,” Lori said. “I don’t know if you can repair the damage caused by your escapades, but you do need to understand that your letters regarding the Buddhist interpretation of juice effects have led many in my household, including myself, into a detailed examination of Buddhism. I don’t think anyone had expected you to be a humorous Zen master. To say that meeting you in person has caused a re-examination of faith is an understatement.”
“Without humor, life is too unbearable,” Sky said. “Especially for Transforms.” Besides, the idea of a non-humorous Zen master was hard for Sky to imagine.
“Mute it, a little, please. More zazen meditation and a lot less KATZ.”
Dead words are live words. Live words are dead words. Which is true? Answer wrong, and the Zen master hits you thirty times with his Zen stick. Both are wrong, of course. KATZ!
“Little will be learned, then.”
Lori sighed. “For now, ignore the teaching. Stick to the subject, your mission. Did the ISF even attempt to go through channels? Why wasn’t I contacted?”
Ah, the meat of the problem. “For several years, one United States Focus, a Focus Adkins, has been claiming the Ontario ISF local as part of her Focus organization. Focus Russell talked to her over the phone several times and found her to be somewhat more open to discussion than the Focus leadership had been during the jurisdiction fight of several years ago.” Lori nodded. “So when we learned of the abductions and where the abductees had ended up, Focus Russell assigned Focus Larson the task of visiting with Focus Adkins on the matter. They judged this too important to deal with over the telephone. Focus Adkins agreed to a meeting, but abused Focus Larson. Focus Larson came back shipped to us in a pine box, burbling and incoherent, unwilling to say anything about what happened save a few comments about darkness. We’d been told to mind our own business. Well, Focus Russell is the Focus I live near. I clean her house, if you know the idiom.”
“You suck down the dross and remove the bad juice, as we term it, from her household.” Lori furrowed her eyebrows at him. “By the way, what you’re describing is officially impossible, according to the Focus Council.” Officially. Sky knew the Crow Occum performed a similar service for Lori’s household.
Sky nodded. “I am also amorously involved with three of her household women, though I believe you in the States would find the arrangement somewhat peculiar.” Best get that out right at the beginning.
“Yes.” Frown. “May I ask a question I’ve never had enough nerve to put in any of my letters to you?”
“Certainly, gracious lady. I shall answer your personal questions with the best of equanimity and discretion.”
Lori sighed. “You and Transform women are fertile, aren’t you?” Of all things, she blushed.
“Yes.” He paused. “You mean you in the States believe otherwise?” He thought for a moment, fidgeting with a pencil he had picked up off her desk. Lori had a hard time looking away from his hands and the worn pencil. She wanted to grab it and put it back neatly on her desk, he guessed. “Oh. Your Focuses do not deal with Crows, so of course you don’t know.”
“By the theories I follow, I’d predicted the fertility, but didn’t have any proof. How fertile are you, anyway?”
Ah, you want proof, eh? Let me sweep you off your feet, mademoiselle Foyer, and I will prove it to you personally! Many times! Sky kept his mouth shut and quieted his love-sick heart. To fall for a Focus was being such a problem. He would have to woo her, not seduce her. Her eyes, ah, he could stare forever into her eyes. “I’m significantly less fertile than a normal man. If I was a normal, the doctors would likely say I was nearly infertile.”
Her seductive complexity drew him closer to her and he leaned out over her desk.
“Okay,” Lori said, looking away. So this sort of question made her uncomfortable, eh? Time to get back to his professional business. The hard edges had such allure, but they were sharp.
“Focus Russell decided a Transform of my age and um invulnerability” cough “would be needed if these contacts were to proceed any further. The other Focuses forbade Focus Russell from going to you for fear you might react in a way similar to how Focus Adkins reacted. I, however, am rather sturdy, though diplomacy of this nature is a difficult thing for me to encompass.”
The term ‘expendable’ also came to mind.
“The original American Focuses and I are at loggerheads,” Lori said. “They have threatened, and if my contacts are correct, actually taken out an underworld contract on the life of a researcher friend
of mine. I find I trust their judgment less and less as time goes on, and my suspicions are growing that they have the Focus Council, the UFA and the Focus Network completely under their thumbs.” Rizzari sighed. Sky smiled, warm fuzzies settling in his gut at the sound of the Focus’s sigh. “I also find the idea of a Focus gathering Sports by force and imprisoning them for study to be appalling, so I’ll help you on your mission. I think we can stop it, politically, but it’ll take work. For one thing, we need real tangible proof.
“Isn’t it lucky I have a Crow volunteering to help?” Lori arched an eyebrow at him, the slightest hint of a grin at the corner of her mouth.
Great. Slice go the hard edges.
“One last thing,” Lori said. “You’re going to owe me for this. What we’re going to be doing is far more dangerous than I have any right to expose my household to. The promised help of a Crow, later, will balance things out.”
A personal debt to the Focus I have fallen for. Perfect. But only if I can live through the preliminaries, Sky thought. He gazed into Lori’s eyes and decided he didn’t even care if she was rolling him with her charisma, as they said in the States. He liked what he saw.
---
“You want me to what!” Sky said.
“Live here,” Lori said. Jay, the young tour guide who was leading Sky and his Focus around the household, chuckled.
That’s what he thought she said the first time. Accouche!
Save for Sadie the apologies had gone well. After a month, tempers had mostly cooled. Lori had also spread the good word about him, prepping her people for his appearance. Only Sadie held his previous transgression against him. While she no longer stalked out of any room he inhabited, they were not friends. Lori had explained how testy relationships worked in her household: with extreme formality. Outright hostility had no place in a Focus household. They all had to live together, share the same space, and get along with each other somehow. They solved the problem with formality: sir, ma’am, please, thank you, and all that. This would to tax Sky’s reactions; in Canada, calling someone sir or ma’am was equivalent to calling them old. Calling Sadie ma’am would be difficult.
All Beasts Together (The Commander) Page 15