“Yes. You need to get comfortable working with them. We’ll need your Crow metasense range on the actual mission. You also need some training. My people don’t have any patience with laggards.”
“Training? As in self-defense and the like?” He was appalled.
“You’re a Major Transform, Sky. There’s no reason why my Transforms should be able to toss you around like a sack of flour. The respect of all Major Transforms is on the line here.”
What a waste of time. He was a Crow, not an Arm or Beast. Sack of flour was his middle name. “Yes, my lady, it shall be as you desire.”
Lori rolled her eyes, stood, and started to leave the attic. “I’ll be gone until Friday dinner doing the Professor thing,” Lori said, calling behind her. “While I’m gone, Connie is in charge. Your training session starts Monday morning at 7:30. Don’t be late. If you get hungry, you know where the kitchen is.” Lori went down the stairs, leaving Sky alone in the attic.
What, Sky, you thought all Focuses would be as easy to handle as Hennie? You thought you would never fall for a Foyer? You utter fool. Falling for this Foyer is going to be the death of you.
Chapter 6
A Focus may have the shortest range metasense of all the Major Transforms, but she also has the most detail. Some Focuses can metasense not only when a Transform ate their last meal, but also what he or she ate.
“Inventing the Future”
Sky: December 18, 1967
Sky nodded. “Tim, Ann.” The two Transforms nodded back. They were two of Lori’s brain trust, he noted, people he was supposed to be able to speak with about Major Transform politics. “I hadn’t expected Transforms of your importance to the household to be tasked with teaching remedial tomfoolery to the neighborhood Crow.” He had expected ordinary household members, people who wouldn’t mind any mistakes he made in his efforts to master the American idiom and accent. He had spent his time watching sports shows and news broadcasts the past several days to help him.
“Connie picked the two of us for the mission,” Tim said. “Since we’re going to work with you, Connie thought we’d best get started now.” His mild hostility lay barely buried. Ann was unreadable.
“May I ask what might be an impertinent question?” Sky said. They stood in a small circle out by the obstacle course, in the shadow of the climbing wall. The two Transforms dressed warmly, befitting the frosty December morning. He wore a robe he had found in the attic, over swimming trunks and bare feet. He hoped the robe didn’t belong to either of them.
“I can’t see how we’re going to stop you,” Tim said. Ann glared at Tim and smiled a false smile at Sky.
“Ah, there are so many things I don’t understand. Why you want me to exercise with you. Train, as the Focus said. Why Connie is choosing who goes on this mission, and not your Focus.”
“First,” Tim said, “why don’t we warm up?” He settled into a runner’s stretch, and Ann did the same.
Well, Tim never said he would answer my questions, Sky realized. He decided to play along, do some stretching, meditating while he did so on restraining himself. Walking Zazen. The enigma of Inferno was almost as paradoxical and doubt inducing as the more difficult Zen koans. Doubt was good. To understand the true world, one must doubt the message of one’s senses.
To aid himself, he dialed up eleven different dross constructs dealing with muscle preparation, stretching, and metabolic optimization for exercise.
“Are those supposed to be stretches?” Ann asked. “Perhaps I need to instruct…” She stopped and stared as Sky took off his robe, being careful not to disturb the muscle and tendon stretcher dross construct. “How in heaven’s name are you doing that?” To the uninitiated, his tricks would appear to be stretching the muscles and tendons without his otherwise having to move or exert any effort.
“I am Crow,” said Sky. “Once I was more human.” And less pissy, he reminded himself. A sudden sharp pain cut his hissy pissy short. “Oh, oh, dammit,” he said, his voice a half octave higher as he stopped one of his dross construct stretchers. That hurt! He must have pulled something in his lower back sometime recently. Sky twisted around his body to check his lower back, brought up a dross construct to outline his muscles, then brought up a healing dross construct (visualized as an electric steam iron) and ironed out the slight tears in the offended muscles. This was not a quick process.
“That’s not physically possible,” Tim said. “The human spine doesn’t contort itself that way. Are you spinning an illusion to fool us, Sky?”
Sky kept ironing. “Feel free to touch. I don’t bite.” Save with irony, sarcasm, and witty repartee I promised not to carry to too much excess. Tim took two steps back, declining the offer, but Ann availed herself of opportunity to grab a feel. Her hands lingered muchly.
Hmm, Sky noted. A potential problem. Ann had become interested in him without his even trying. He hadn’t even spent a full day in Inferno! Not fair!
“You’re healing yourself, aren’t you?” Ann asked, ever the anthropologist. She smiled at him prettily, although Sky thought her face too wide for her body. She was pleasant looking in a plump sort of way. Okay, not that plump. Muscular. Well fed. Rather normal looking, actually.
Life had warped his perspectives. Canadian Transforms just didn’t get enough food.
Sky nodded to Ann and finished. “Crows are the worst of the Major Transforms at healing. Even with advanced tricks such as this we can’t keep up with any of the other Major Transforms.”
“Can you heal anyone else but yourself?” Ann asked. She gave up on her stretches, now focused on a far more interesting topic. “We have a major lack there.”
“Sure,” Sky said. “Cuts, bruises, small muscle pulls, no problem. Bullet wounds, big problem.”
“That trick with twisting the spine implies your bones are significantly more loosely connected than normal.”
He nodded. “Except for the legs.” He offered one up to Ann, who examined it.
“Your leg muscles and tendons are very tight. Why?”
“For this,” Sky said, and took off. Two steps and a hop put him twelve feet up, on top of the obstacle course wall. He could hop higher, but there was nothing…wait. Over there. That tree, and the garage roof, and then the house…
On the house roof he flattened out instinctively. Strange. Someone outside the compound watched the house. He skittered around on the roof about thirty feet to his left and peered over. Slaving his sight to his metasense he picked out two normals about 400 meters away, barely in line of sight of the house. The spies had two pairs of binoculars on tripods, one with a piggyback telephoto camera attached. They hadn’t seen him, based on their emotions. Sky clambered down the side of the house spider-style. Bricks were easy to climb and he didn’t want to upset anyone in the house by jumping the ten meters to the ground.
Both Ann and Tim stood with their hands on their hips, glaring at him.
“What?” How had he disturbed them, this time? He was just doing what mature Crows did. “That’s why my legs are so tight…so I can jump.”
Tim was not amused.
“I’d like to examine your legs, again,” Ann said. She had Sky stand with one leg next to hers. Even Sky saw the differences in muscle attachment points and muscle shape. He had never thought much about muscle shapes, but he knew his body had changed in shape since his transformation, slowly over the years. Ann paid close attention to the ankle structure, the width and shape of the Achilles tendon, and a large bulge on the top left of his right foot and ankle, mirrored on the other side. She examined the calluses on the bottoms of his feet. “You’ve spent years in the countryside, haven’t you, Sky.”
“Yes.” There. A legitimate one word answer. Just to prove he could do it.
“How much do you weigh?”
“About 55 kg. I know, I look like I should weigh about 90 kg. Then again, everyone’s always considered me somewhat of a lightweight.”
“That’s impossible,” Ann said.
<
br /> “What’s 55 kg. in pounds?” Tim said.
“About 120.”
“Damn.” Tim shook his head.
“Hollow bones,” Sky said. “Air filled. I broke a leg once and it took forever to heal. The place of the break turned into powder. Of course, that was long before I learned to use dross constructs to heal.”
“Can you fight?” Ann asked.
“Don’t know. Never tried,” Sky said. “Wouldn’t running away be easier? I mean, in a fight, I’d just be spending my time trying to repress my panic.” He remembered a game of toss the Crow over the tree between Beast and Arm. Fight them? You’ve got to be kidding. He remembered the words he repeated over and over again, as they tossed him: Don’t. Drop. Me!
Tim sat down on the ground and laughed hysterically. “You were right, Ann,” Tim said, eventually. “This is a legitimate first contact situation after all.”
They figured out how to exercise Sky anyway. Sky didn’t mind. His arm strength had deteriorated over the years, as had his endurance. He tired out after only a half dozen decent jumps. They worked on bodyguard skills as well. Anyone with the Focus had to be able to help guard her body.
“Hey, she can shred me physically,” Sky said. “Why don’t you have her guard me? I’m the Crow.”
“If the Focus dies, Sky, she takes down the household. Not the same for you.” Ann kept grabbing at him any chance she got and giving him big goofy grins, at least when Tim wasn’t looking. Sky wasn’t sure but he suspected Tim was doing the same when neither of them was looking at him. Sky wasn’t sure what to do about that. Tim had a legitimate monogamous relationship with some normal named Donald. As far as Sky knew, Ann didn’t have anybody. It broke his heart that Ann didn’t have somebody.
“How about if I die there are four Focus households in Canada who are going to be drowning in dross in six months. Given their combined yearly household income is about the same as your weekly household income, les problèm might actually be fatal.” Sky paused and turned red. “Oh, right. Forget I said anything. The gracious ladies did ask me to not bandy that sort of information about to their brother and sister Transforms in the States.”
Ann and Tim looked at each other. “We might be able to spare one bodyguard for him,” Ann said.
“You get to tell Connie,” Tim said, to Ann.
---
“Okay. Why did you pull me inside the gym?” Sky asked. The gym was a cold place, filled with weights and mats and acrobatic equipment, and empty of other exercise enthusiasts.
“The doctor’s about to start his afternoon session with the young Transforms.”
“Does he have a name?”
“Not to you he doesn’t,” Ann said, adjusting the tension on the Nautilus machine. “Here. Pull like this.” Curls. Sky tried and barely moved the steel handle. He tried harder and moved himself, not the device.
Ann covered a giggle. “How do you hang on walls if you can’t do this?”
“Not with these muscles.” Crows were like that. If the muscle didn’t aid flight, it shrank. Sky leaned back to rest. He liked to take frequent rests, and there wasn’t much either Tim or Ann could do about it. Of course, he had his reasons, like recharging his overused muscles with dross constructs. He would need to go hunting for dross at this rate, difficult in a town with as many Crows as Boston seemed to boast. Gads, the place was a zoo at night, especially with Occum and his beastly menagerie running around. None of the Crows had come by to say hello, either. Impolite cusses.
“So, if you don’t mind me asking, what’s with Focus Rizzari, anyway? I can’t understand how she runs the household, or how she can get away with spending so much time away from here, or what’s with the touching business?” Sky looked first at Tim, then at Ann. Both of them did a good job with the blank expressions, not revealing anything. They looked at each other and, of all the impossible things, signaled each other with the juice. Shouldn’t that need a Focus?
Tim shook his head. “This is idiotic. We can’t say anything about any of that. You may be our friend today, but what about tomorrow?”
“I disagree,” Ann said. “This is exactly what Lori wants us to do.”
“We’re making a mistake.”
“Don’t tell me, then,” Sky said. He let the useless bar go. It fell to the mat with a thump. “I understand paranoia. Nevertheless, the more you say, the more I’m bound to you. Can’t you sense the more I tell you, the more you’re bound to me?”
They both nodded, slowly. Tim turned away slightly before he spoke. “I don’t like it, Sky. It’s, well, only the Focus can do things with juice. Having someone else around who can do things with juice, consciously or unconsciously, is real disturbing.”
“Lori understands,” Ann said. She called Lori by name, not just ‘The Focus’. Ann’s tie to Lori was different from Lori’s tie to the rest of the household. He wondered what it meant.
“She didn’t clear it with any of us ahead of time, though,” Tim said. “That’s not like her.”
“If it’s going to bother you, Tim, I can fill Sky in.”
“I’d rather we cleared it with Connie, first.”
“No, no, no. Connie isn’t going on this mission. It’s our call, since Sky’s going to be our companion,” Ann said.
Sky sat on a bench and buried his head in his hands, giving up on trying to make sense of Inferno. The urge to go hide in the attic almost overwhelmed him. He closed his ears to their argument and blanked his metasense to everything going on near him, concentrated on the outside world.
That’s strange, Sky realized. One of the local Crows was sitting in his home, next to his typewriter, talking to no one at all. That Crow was practically wedded to his typewriter. He had never talked to himself before, so Sky’s interest was piqued. Sky cursed his inability, no matter what tricks he tried, to get his sense of hearing integrated into his metasense so he could hear conversations at range.
Ann tapped him on the shoulder. “Anyone home?”
Sky returned to the present and immediate. Tim was back inside the house, jawboning with Connie. Inside a hundred meters, Sky’s metasense integrated with his hearing just fine and he heard every word of Tim’s conversation.
“Tim’s running perilously close to being taken off the mission,” Sky said. “Connie thinks Tim’s being a prick. She wants the both of you to learn as much about me as possible, even if you have to tell me some of your household secrets.” Sky decided to shut up, then, as Connie brought up bargaining chits Tim might offer, such as money. Sky hadn’t thought of that. He wondered if he should reveal his secrets for cash. If he played this right, he could come back with over a year’s spending money for all of the households he worked with.
“You’re about the most dangerous Transform I’ve ever run into,” Ann said, grinning, taking mental notes. Okay, Sky asked himself. What did he reveal this time?
Come to think of it, there was another, more catty, way of taking Ann’s statement. She hadn’t meant it as a compliment, had she?
“Ah, mademoiselle Transform, I find myself humbled by your expertise and by the capabilities of your Focus, who is the most dangerous Transform I’ve ever run into. There is beauty here, almost beyond intense, and I am smitten by it. Yet, I must say, little here in this household matches my knowledge of how Focuses work.” Sky had figured out, during one of his previous rests, he might be having one of those big fish in a small pond problems. To him, with so few Canadian Focuses to deal with, Focuses weren’t particularly special or powerful. Here, charisma ruled. Lori’s charisma was the best he had ever seen. Yet, Lori wasn’t a national political leader among the Focuses. She was well down the food chain. What did that say about the Focuses on the Council? Gad. What a joke his supposed top-end capabilities turned out to be.
“I wasn’t here,” Ann said, “but I’ve heard stories from Connie, who was here in the household back when the Cause started. Lori was pretty rough when she started out.”
“Rough doesn’t d
o it half measure,” Tim said, coming through the door into the gym. “I was the Focus’s second male Transform, back in ‘61, long before Connie joined. I’ll tell you, God goofed when he allowed seventeen year olds to become Focuses.”
“Lori’s only 24? She’s an Assistant Professor already? That’s not possible! I pegged her as about 30.” Gong, went Sky’s newest dross construct, silent to all but him. Sky repeated his comment in English.
“She was something of a child prodigy and started college when she turned 14.” Tim made a bag of pretzels appear from behind his back. “Want some?”
Everybody dug in. “Focus Rizzari didn’t want to be a Focus, much less a Transform,” Tim said. “She took it out on her household; a tin pot dictator, but a perfectionist instead of a player of favorites.”
“Hellfire and brimstone Focus,” Sky said. “I’ve heard of the type. Group punishment and rewards?”
“Yes,” Ann said. “She still works the same way, except I’m not sure what it would take these days to merit a group punishment. Anyway…”
“Anyway, she graduated a year behind her self-appointed schedule in 62 and went to MIT for her PhD. She finished in 65. By then, she’d changed completely,” Tim said.
“How so?”
“Well, after she finished her Baccalaureate she spent the summer in the Radcliff chemistry and biology libraries. Typical for her, she was working on her dissertation topic before she even started grad school. Anyway, the Focus figured out some of what was going on as far as Transforms were concerned in ’63 and decided to get involved in Focus politics. She was the life of the party, being so young and cute and naïve. However, she was laying groundwork, because the next year, she got herself a position of responsibility. Then, already deep into her research, she dropped some scientific proof on them of the existence of male Major Transforms. The other Focuses swatted our Focus down like a bug.”
Hmm. ‘63, eh? Nearly five years later and they still don’t recognize us. Sounds like a plot to me, Sky decided.
All Beasts Together (The Commander) Page 17