“Occum has grown uncommunicative. We fear he may have been enslaved by his Beasts.”
“Hmm,” Sky said, searching back through his memories. Sky had been close enough to Occum’s home to get a good look at him and his Beasts several times since he came to Boston. “No. I think he’s just too busy. I’m positive he’s made progress on his Beast Man project and I doubt he wants to be bothered until he’s perfected his techniques.”
“Did you talk to him?” Sinclair said. Wary.
“Actually, Sinclair, I picked that up with my metasense.”
“Impossible,” Vizul said.
“Quite possible,” Shadow said. “Sky is my age. Although he’s never fully trained the talents we judge to be important in a Guru, he’s well known for having the best metasense of any known Crow. There is a distinct chance Sky’s talents represent a third path for Crow development. Perhaps someday Sky will even learn to teach others…”
Sky spread his hands wide, and bowed. “Thank you for your kind words, Shadow, but I find myself too involved with my adventures to settle down and teach.” At the word ‘adventure’, Vizul and Sinclair took several steps back. Vizul’s dogs growled.
“There’s more to being a Guru than teaching,” Shadow said. They had been through this before, in their letters. Many times. Shadow had been leaning on him for well over a year to become a Guru and teach others his tricks. Sky had resisted just as adamantly.
“So you say.”
“Well,” Shadow said. Snorted. “Now I have you here where I can show you some examples of what a Guru of my persuasion can do, perhaps I can make a better case.” Shadow dropped his tactical metasense protections.
Sky goggled as he examined the dozens of dross constructs surrounding Shadow. Shadow’s complex dross constructs were far more potent than any of Sky’s. “Good case,” Sky said, embarrassed again at being little more than a small fish in a big pond.
“In any event,” Shadow said, “The real reason I came up here from New York was to inform my friends about a very disturbing attack on a Crow.”
The others had heard the story, but not Sky. “Tell me, kind Shadow. This sounds most disquieting, coming so soon on the heels of the Philadelphia Massacre. Do you have any ideas regarding these umtee attackers?”
“Umtees?” Shadow said. He laughed. “I haven’t heard that Crow slang since the fifties.” Unidentified Major Transforms. Sky sighed.
Shadow pushed on, nevertheless. “One of the two Kansas City Crows, Orange, vanished from the metasense of his companion, Tumbleweed, two weeks and a day ago,” Shadow said. “After a suitable amount of time to quell panic, Tumbleweed went to investigate. He found signs of a struggle in Orange’s home, but nothing else.”
“Was there dross?” Sky asked. Sinclair and Vizul shuddered. Midgard took several steps farther back.
“Yes, a substantial amount, but not enough to signify a death. Orange was either sorely wounded in the fight and carried off, or killed and partly drained of juice, then carried off,” Shadow said.
Sky let his juice artwork fail above, no longer interested in showing off his minute talents. He paused, and thought for a minute. Why hadn’t Orange run? Someone must have snuck up on him. It was nearly impossible to sneak up on a mature Crow. “That wasn’t a normal Beast Man attack,” Sky said.
“Correct,” Shadow said. “We have no idea what sort of Transform was responsible, and we’ve never seen any Transform with the ability to sneak up on a Crow and take him unaware. I’ve come up with a list of precautions I’ve been suggesting Crows might take.” Shadow then went on to list a long and rather detailed list of precautions, which Sky mentally summarized as ‘trust nobody’, ‘work only with your friends’, and ‘watch your friends’. Sky was disgusted but didn’t interrupt.
When Shadow finished, the air was ominous and dark with the miasma of Crow fear. Newton shook on his feet and looked ready to curl up into a ball again. Sky didn’t say anything, wondering how impolitic his words on the subject might be.
“Out with it,” Shadow said. “You’re itching to give us your advice, Sky, and I for one am exquisitely interested in it, as I know your vastly different perspective on Crow life.” Other Crows didn’t do things like take jobs in the Calgary area ski resorts as a snowcat operator in the search and rescue service. Nor had any others engaged in activities like his ancient romps with Arm, Focus, Beast and the rest of the old crew. The frontier life still appealed to Sky and he came back to the quiet of the frozen tundra of northern Ontario and the northern Rocky Mountains quite often when he meditated.
“The attack wasn’t random and it wasn’t the work of a single individual,” Sky said. “The attack was a message. A political statement. Some group is saying ‘we can kill all the Crows whenever we choose to.’ Don’t discount the possibility that what they’re trying to do is to manipulate the Crows to take exactly the sort of precautions you’re suggesting. They’ll kill again and keep manipulating. Perhaps what they’re trying to stop is cooperation among the Crows.”
“Occum will be glad to know someone else sees this attack in the same light he does. Unfortunately,” Shadow said, “you’re a minority of two. Most of us are afraid it’s one of the Arms, perhaps the new one, gone Monster.”
Sky sighed. “The group party is probably a mixed group led by some older Major Transforms, not some half-assed newbie Arm,” he said, exasperated. “An old Crow and an old Focus with a well-trained household cadre would be capable of an attack like this. There are many other possible combinations.”
“Hogwash,” Shadow said. “I can’t see that level of cooperation happening between any of the old Major Transforms.”
Right, Sky said to himself, quieting the next obvious response. Go and explain to them how Focus Rizzari, Inferno and yourself might be able to do such an attack. Or how you’re in the process of training with a tac team to do something nearly as spectacular. That would be just too brilliant, eh, Sky? “I will defer to your judgment, then, Shadow. I will pass along this information to the younger Crows in Canada.” All six of them, if I can talk them out from under the floorboards of whatever Focus households they’re hiding near this week, Sky thought. This was stupid beyond reason, but he didn’t have any good ideas of what to do about the problem.
---
Sky planted himself in Lori’s office, waiting for her return late Friday afternoon. His list of exception requests had grown to eleven, though he wasn’t sure how serious the one from the thirteen year old was. Amy struck him as the sort of kid who would proposition him simply to yank her parent’s chain. In Amy’s case, foster parent, as her birth family had tossed her out for the sin of being a Transform. The little tease had told him the story about being eleven and a homeless Transform, snivel, snivel, just before she tried to seduce him. Thank God she hadn’t been sixteen and used a story like that! No Crow would have been able to resist.
Lori arrived and the still household waited breathlessly for whatever mystery occurred on Friday nights. He hadn’t managed to squeeze that bit of information out of anyone. Five minutes later Lori marched into her office, gave him a false smile, and evicted him from her desk chair.
“Well, it appears you’ve left Inferno in one piece, Sky.”
“I did my best, most gracious lady.” He handed the list of exception requests to Lori. She flipped through them and impaled them with repressed glee on the metal spike that held her notes.
“Let me guess. You didn’t initiate a single one of these.”
“But of course. Consider that one of them is Ann’s.”
“I did. She is persuasive.” Lori leaned forward toward Sky, ice in her eyes. “Not persuasive enough, though. If anyone is going to grab you, Crow, it’s going to be me.”
Oh, damn. His heart melted into Lori’s eyes. Ah, mademoiselle Foyer, you have claimed me again.
“Note I’m not offering anything, Sky. Just stating a fact.” Lori leaned back.
Right. Remember, Sky, you have p
ut yourself in the hands of a Foyer capable of snuffing your life in an instant, twisting your body into a pretzel, or charismatically rendering you a burbling imbecile. She’s perfectly capable of doing a cock-tease routine on you that will have your balls bursting before you can find a private corner, Sky. Calm down, Sky. “So,” Sky said. “Aren’t you going to fix your Transforms’ juice problems? They’re all out of whack from your absence this week.”
“Later,” Lori said. “After dinner. Since you’re here and not cowering in panic in the attic, why don’t you tell me about your week in my household?”
Sky sighed, then told Lori, at great length, everything that had gone on in Lori’s household while she had been gone. He didn’t mention his meeting with the Boston Crows.
“Good,” Lori said, after he finished. “You’re fitting in well so far. Perhaps tomorrow you can show me your impressive jumping abilities. I hadn’t expected that from a Crow.” She stood and led Sky out of her office.
Dinner was a quiet affair. They ate as a group, as many household members as possible squeezed into the household great room. Sky half expected Lori to eat by herself in her office, but instead she mingled with everyone else, snacking as she wandered, not actually eating a formal sit down dinner. The normals and younger Transforms couldn’t seem to let Lori go by without a hug or some other physical contact. The muted dinner conversation was much less lively than during Lori’s workweek absence. A palpable anticipation filled the room.
Sky kept his mouth shut and concentrated on his metasense. There was information in the ambient juice and dross, as well as information leaking from the actions of the household members. Flaws abounded. The ununified household had factions. The Cause had no focus, blessed irony, but a thousand scattershot ideas. Two and a half years wasn’t a long time, even in the society of Transforms. Inferno was still becoming and a long way from being. It intrigued, Inferno did: its huge size, its overall goal, its sheer complexity, their potential. His thoughts turned to the second floor combo theater and sleeping room, where the more artistic members of the household performed, to Mrs. Ardoin and her home decorating service, to Terry Bishop and her fashion design firm, and to Dr. Bob Masterson and his engineering lab. Mysteries abounded: the unnamed doctor, Monster hunting, the basement freezer room with the Monster corpses, and the ammo dump in a ‘hidden’ basement section. They all called to him.
How long could he stay here before the baby duckling syndrome all Crows suffered from seduced him? He would find himself enslaved by Inferno if he slipped down that path. He had been enslaved once – by Arm – and he wasn’t interested in repeating that sorry set of events.
He knew he was confused, conflicted and uncertain. So he watched.
After dinner, once all the dishes were cleared away, the household didn’t break up but continued to mingle. After a while, one of the youngsters, Einstein, Ann’s son, came by and formally presented Lori with a large down comforter. Noting the pointed ritual and shiver it caused in the household juice, Sky wandered over to Lori. Lori shushed him with a finger to his mouth. “I’ll explain the formalism later,” she said, in a Crow whisper. “If you can repress your panic, stay with me.”
Sky nodded. Lori walked over to a table in the far corner of the great room and stood on it, the down comforter in her arms.
“Another week!” she called out. All eyes in the room turned toward her.
“Another week!” they answered in unison. Lori nodded at them, stepped off the table, and draped the comforter around her shoulders. A puzzle. What could possibly make Lori cold, especially in a hot room like this? Lori took Sky’s hand and sat down in the corner, huddled up in the comforter. Sky sat down with her, next to her.
“Here we go,” she said. The juice around Lori started to organize, growing ever more complex, until Sky lost track of the pattern created. It arranged itself in wonder, beautiful beyond compare. Then, ever so slowly, the juice began to move among the Transforms, enchanting and artistic.
“I’m sure you’ve noticed I don’t do as much juice manipulation as most Focuses do, Sky,” Lori said. Her voice had grown husky and soft, again a Crow-like whisper. “Mostly it’s because I’m stuck away from home doing my teaching and my research. Another reason is because constant juice manipulation lowers my juice.”
“Ah. Now I understand,” Sky said. Low juice made any Transform stupider, especially the Major Transforms. He had ample experience with that. Not something an Assistant Professor could afford.
“I save up the juice moving until these Friday night parties. Then I cut loose. Every Transform has an optimum point for juice stimulation. Too much and you get the jitters, the feeling of impending doom. Too little, and you get angry, you suffer physical pain. There’s also a point for optimum functioning, a lower point.”
“I’ve heard Focuses talk about this before, but it doesn’t work the same way for Crows. We aren’t so delicately balanced as that.”
“Focuses aren’t either; just the Transforms, as far as I know. The optimum stimulation point is a difficult balance to maintain, unlike the optimum functioning point, which lies at the bottom of an entropy curve. A Focus has enough of a juice buffer to balance a household at just about any point along the juice curve, if she puts her mind to it. Getting everyone to the optimum stimulation point is hard, though. There’s normally not enough juice to go around. By saving up the juice in my juice buffer I can take the entire household there and keep them there for hours. It’s my gift to them, a gift from the Focus to the household. A necessary reward, recompense for the hard life shared by all Transforms. So many people hate us, so many people despise us, that life itself is often unbearable. Especially for my people, who do tend to live on the fringe.
“We call these Friday nights orgy time.”
From what Sky knew about Focuses, Lori could have taken all her household Transforms to this optimum stimulation point instantly. However, rapid juice flow was a fleeting pleasure, he had learned years ago, from Focus. This slow crawl toward the optimum was delicious foreplay, a juice movement so slow only Lori and he sensed it.
“The illusion of normality is maintained, eh? Your Transforms do function better than other Transforms when they’re not near their optimums.”
“Juice is an addictive substance, Sky.”
Sky nodded. “You bet.” Oh yah, oh yah. Try living for two years on virtually no dross or juice, my lady. Low juice was an incredible unending agony, and you never lose the addiction.
“The functional optimum is especially addictive. A Transform maintained at the functional optimum for a month has a monkey on their back as bad as a mainlining heroin addict. Fast moving juice is both painful and pleasurable and significantly more addictive even than juice held at the optimum point. Working the juice the way I do gets me nine of the extra Transforms I can support in my household.”
“Why isn’t this known?”
“If I publish, the first Focuses will grab my Transforms and torture them to death. What they would do to me would be worse. I’ve been told so in person and experienced a small taste of their medicine,” Lori said.
“They’re evil, then.”
“They’re pragmatic and I don’t necessarily disagree with their judgment. If the normals who live outside of Transform households, the politicians and the clergy in particular, learned how addictive normal juice movement is to Transforms, or learned of what I do and the morality it fosters, the Transform community would be fighting for its life. I think the fight would be worth it because of the number of lives we’d save. But their opinion isn’t logically incorrect.”
Sky watched as over the next half hour, the juice imperceptibly rose to the stimulation optimum. The lights dimmed and the standing and milling settled to the floor. The buzz of conversation muted and the amount of physical contact increased. So did the dross. It wasn’t the sweet dross of rapid juice movement, though, and Sky realized with horror that the Focus-produced sweet dross was actually an incredible waste
. His pleasure and the pleasure of Crows like him who stayed near Focuses was based on the consumption of lives.
Yes, a younger Crow would be panicked by seeing all of this and understanding the consequences. The guilt was overwhelming, even for him.
Sky, however, also found it arousing. He understood the allure and the danger. No wonder Lori’s household was so virulently anti-drug, why they had such strict rules about even the mildest of stimulants, why they forbade alcohol. Their one vice, the juice, was more than enough.
“At first I tried to enforce normal morality and ethics on the situation, but it didn’t work,” Lori said. Her clinical calm chilled him.
“Shh, my lovely,” he said, putting a finger on her lips to interrupt her. Normal morality and ethics had no place here. He saw men with men, and women with women, groups of three or four or even five. Normals as well as Transforms, and teens barely past puberty. He was shocked, and yet his instinctive Crow-ish panic around Transforms in number seemed to have taken a vacation and he longed to join in. He had found another version of Crow heaven, assuming that no one minded the number of pregnancies likely to result if he participated regularly.
Lori leaned against him, now holding his hand in both of hers. Sky sensed the effort she was expending by the dross pouring out of her. Her personal juice supply had to be taking a beating. He wouldn’t need to hunt for dross after this, and the unnamed variety of dross produced here was simply amazing.
“What about you?” Sky asked. Let me warm your heart, dearest Lori! Let me in! She let him hold her and snuggled against him, drawn into the mood by the actions of her Transforms.
All Beasts Together (The Commander) Page 19