All Beasts Together (The Commander)

by Farmer, Randall

  “What does it want?”

  Sky looked at Lori with his metasense. Normally blinding, she had become almost overwhelming. Even so, the patterns within her were obvious. Once he found his answer, he turned his metasense outward again, always on guard. “I can hazard a guess, if you’re bold enough to hear what I can metasense, most gracious lady.”

  “Fire away, master Crow.”

  “Your juice wants you to reproduce.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Lori said. “It makes too much sense. Especially since I’m intellectually open to the idea.” Lori’s voice dripped ire.

  “Not today, I presume.”

  “Not if you want a sane partner. Even I’m not icy enough to do something like that simply by the cold calculus of logic. Don’t worry. I just need time to come to grips with what my body is doing. I want you back in Boston next Saturday, Sky.”

  “Do you need me to stay in Boston in the interim?”

  The waves crashed as Lori thought.

  “I broke some unwritten rule or something, didn’t I?” Lori said. Sky tensed. With each passing hour he stayed with Lori, she saw deeper and deeper into him. Between that and her charisma, his free will would soon disappear completely.

  “It’s nothing. You are what you are, mademoiselle Foyer. I sought you out, knowing full well that I stepped into the whirlwind. You shall test my resilience as I test your patience.”

  Lori laughed. “I’m a control freak,” she said. “As a young Focus, I practically had my Transforms’ days planned out to the nearest five minutes. I took two long years to learn what I was doing wrong and it turned out to be a difficult habit to break. Fate giving me a lover is a bottle of wine given to an alcoholic. I must take this one day at a time.

  “So. I can arrange for my weekends to be free,” Lori said. “Would you like to come visit me some weekend soon, Sky?”

  “I’ll be here next Saturday.”

  “Why haven’t you run away, Sky?” Lori asked. Faneuil Hall meant nothing special to Sky, but it resonated with Lori strongly. “It’s more than me. I’m no prize, I should warn you.”

  He almost answered without thinking, back down the romantic road he had trodden so often today, but the look in Lori’s eyes had one message: she wasn’t fishing for complements, but openness. “Are you asking me as a Crow or as a man?”

  “Can you separate the two?” She was being polite, and didn’t say ‘Aren’t you the one who said the juice and your desires were one in the same?’ He couldn’t deny his inconsistency.

  “Emotionally, no. Intellectually, yes,” Sky said.

  “As a man, then.”

  “Ah, phooey,” Sky said, gamely trying to match his speech patterns to Lori’s. “I don’t have an answer as a man. As a Crow, the Cause is more than enough of a lure, despite how I’d like to wring a few necks among your Transforms.”

  Lori didn’t rise to the bait. “Older men hate crazy pushy young women like me.” She referred to some of her Transforms.

  “I’m newborn,” Sky said. How stern was the gracious lady now holding his hand, anyway? “About the time you were introducing yourself to Focus politics, I went through a low juice event bad enough I lost consciousness for about two weeks. That changes someone.”

  “Withdrawal?” She didn’t seem spooked.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t lose all my old memories but I do know I once looked at the world as a different person. It was after that episode I went back to my childhood Buddhism, as a way of retaining my sanity.”

  “Well, that removes a negative, but what’s the positive?” Lori asked.

  Sky shrugged.

  They sat quietly, lost in their own thoughts.

  “Can you tell me about these Canadian Focuses you’re working with?” Lori asked.

  “Yup,” Sky said. They weren’t any big secret. “You know about Henni – Focus Russell, in Toronto. There’s Focus Gwen Larson, also of Toronto, whose household goes itinerant whenever necessary, and Fayme Jeanlouis, a more standard Focus living in Quebec City, Quebec. All three of these Focuses know I clean dross from their households. Then there’s Tania Eskowitz, a young Focus in London, Ontario. I clean her place but she doesn’t know about me. Lastly, there’s Annie, in Montreal. We don’t have a dross…”

  At the last, Lori’s juice flared brightly and her eyes opened wide. Sky stopped. He had seen this reaction from Lori once before.

  “You know her well, don’t you?”

  Lori nodded. Yes, those were goosebumps on her arms. “She visits me in my dreams. In some strange fashion she’s become my teacher.” A pause. “So, Sky, do you like what you’re doing with your life? What are your big plans?”

  Sky shrugged. “I’m a Crow. I remove dross and help Focuses. I get involved in silly activities like my current mission that other Crows sneer at as ‘adventures’.” He shook his head. “Big plans, like big dreams, are too dangerous to even think about. I know better now.”

  Lori smiled knowingly and nodded her head in agreement.

  “I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed chasing around Boston with you, Sky,” Lori said. “How much your presence in Inferno brightens up the place.” She leaned up against him and took his hand in hers. “You were right to push.”

  Sky smiled, but didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to ruin the moment. He would be happy sitting here next to Lori like this forever.

  “I enjoy your stories. If you wouldn’t mind, would you tell me more about your life as a Crow, Sky?” None of Lori’s ferocious charisma infused her question. Sky’s smile grew wider. She wanted him to talk about himself. That wouldn’t be a problem.

  “Well, before I transformed, over ten years ago, I was a truck driver…”

  A nightclub wasn’t a place Sky would normally visit. Not as a Crow. After dinner, he had the sudden urge to dance and Lori pointed out a place. Veiled Tears. A couple miles north of downtown Boston, a trendy place enforcing a rigid dress code.

  The bouncers didn’t stand a chance against Lori. Sky and Lori spun together on the dance floor, or gyrated to rock, or did the twist when the old rock and roll songs came up. Sky gazed at little else except Lori’s eyes but still had enough presence left to note the revelers who came close to them on the dance floor and found themselves in corners shortly thereafter, pawing each other and tossing clothes with abandon.

  “You dance like an artist!” Sky exclaimed. Lori was inhumanly graceful, her gymnast background showing.

  “Hey, watch it! That means something different around here,” Lori said. “You, Sky, are so incredibly light on your feet. Whee!”

  Sky rolled his eyes.

  “Let’s sit and talk.”

  Lori let him lead her to a table. “This is fun.” With Major Transform hearing, they had no need to holler over the raucous music.

  “You act like you’ve had too much to drink,” Sky said.

  “Giddy with love,” Lori said, followed by: “Oops. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t say that word.” She turned red.

  “I’ll pretend you said ‘dance’,” Sky twinkled. “I think you over-stimulated yourself.” He had done it to himself many times, seen it in other Major Transforms as well. Especially Arms. All the Major Transforms lived life as if their funerals were next week, belying their ever-youthful features.

  “Betrayed by my body again,” Lori said, and leaned forward with her chin balanced on her steepled fingers. “Did I ever tell you how much I hated being turned into a Focus?”

  “I’ve heard the story.”

  Lori let a pout chase across her face. “How about the times I had my lunch handed to me by the Focus Council?”

  “When they chewed you up about whether people like me existed?”

  The pout got larger. “Or how about the story about how my household is full of gossips?”

  “I’ve experienced that.”

  Lori laughed. “Take me home and nail me to a bed, Sky.”

  When Lori relaxed her reserve, she lo
st everything. “You’d never forgive me.”

  “Make me pregnant.”

  He remembered a certain Foyer emptying a silenced handgun at him. “You’d have everyone in Inferno hunting me down to try and kill me,”

  “You don’t think I’m acting um, being willing er… Rational. Something?”

  “No.”

  “Well, let’s get out of here, then. If you’re turning me down, I must have caught the goofies, even though I floored and awaiting can’t tell.”

  Floored and awaiting? “Yes.” He wondered if the nightclub was too much like the stimulation of her Friday nights, but without the spiral down into exhaustion caused by the lowering of her juice. Sky led her outside, into the fresh air, away from what Sky feared was true: an entire nightclub of people Lori had filled with lust.

  At least her instincts and her traitorous Focus body had kept her from dragging a normal or a Transform through this. He wouldn’t have been able to cope.

  They walked down the boulevard while Lori giggled and told old jokes, years of bad jokes she had overheard and remembered. Eventually, Lori grew silent, contemplative.

  “That was weird, Sky. I can’t be that powerful. Can I?”

  “I’m afraid you are. What did Ann call it? The pheromone wind? Something like that. You’re a walking love potion.”

  “Pheromone flow. That’s Occum’s term for the Dreaming,” she said. The explanation made little sense to him. The Dreaming was the Dreaming. Of course, everything he knew about the Dreaming he had learned from Anne-Marie. “Are you sure it’s me, Sky?”

  “Who else could it be?”

  “You.”

  “Me?” Sky thought, trying to remember anything in his past remotely similar. “You might be right, because, amazingly enough, the situation is new to me as well. None of the Focuses I’ve dealt with ever felt right to me.”

  “This feeling right. What is it?” Lori said. Pushing. Sky smiled.

  “You just said you didn’t want to use that word, tonight. I agree.”

  “Gurgling poo,” Lori said. “We could just get this over with.”

  Gurgling poo? No, Sky decided, he didn’t want to know. “Nope. Not going to happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, when a woman is in the mood you’re in, gracious lady, what they want to ‘get over’ is the man, as well as their frustration. I haven’t won your heart, I’ve charmed your juice. Even a half hour from now you’ll feel different and judge me by what I did and didn’t do. Despite your immediate desires.”

  Lori turned away from Sky and rested her back on his side as they stood. She wrapped his right arm around her and held on tight. “Do normal men and women go through this nonsense? Back and forth, push and shove…”

  “…up and down, in and out,” Sky completed. Lori giggled. “Yes, but you have it worse than a normal. So do I. I’ve, well, been through a lot of messes like this before, my gracious lady.” Sky recalled trying to figure out what to do when Beast – with a prick as long as his forearm – decided he was close enough to female to count and made a pass at him. Situations like that will make you grow up fast. Especially when you’re a Crow and don’t heal worth beans from that sort of abuse.

  “Okay, then, what can we do to burn off this juice charge? Run home through Southie?” Southie? Oh, yes, the bad part of Boston, Sky remembered.

  “Remember, Lori. I’m a Crow. Besides, the bodyguard detail attempting to discreetly follow us a half kilometer back would just pick you up if you ran into trouble, and if I let you do anything idiotic they’d run me over on the way by.”

  “Oh, you noticed them? I was hoping…” Lori giggled again. “Forget what I just said. I keep forgetting about your metasense. Metasentences. God, where did I get all this juice from? I ran myself down to nothing last night, and I’d swear I’m…” Lori blushed.

  “Isn’t your lab around here somewhere? Maybe you can figure out what’s going on with you.” She needed something to distract her.

  “Yes,” she said. “I like labs. So do some of my more sexually experimental housemates. They use the lab when they want to really go to town, if I’m not working there all night. I guess they don’t want to shock the household. I found their box of supplies when I did an inventory. Two person dildos. Ball gags. Whips. Strap on dildos. Shackles. A lot of things I didn’t recognize at all.” Lori paused. Sky winced. “I’m babbling again.”

  “Why don’t you give me your car keys?”

  “Sure,” Lori said. “What’s my car doing here, anyway?”

  “The obstacle course isn’t safe now, Sky. The doctor is awake, and he’s very observ…”

  “I thought you didn’t plan everything down to the last five minutes anymore?”

  “I don’t, silly. I delegate that these days.”

  “Have you ever wondered why your household has gone, eh, what do you call it, libertarian?”

  “Surely there isn’t a connection. Hey, where’d you go?”

  “Up here,” Sky said. Using the Crow whisper. He stood on top of the climbing wall in the mini obstacle course. Terrible waste of a tennis court, Sky decided. “Jump up here with me!”

  Lori walked to the bottom of the wall, and leapt up. Probably a full meter, pretty good for someone of her size. Not even close to high enough to join Sky. “Well, that suddenly didn’t get any better,” Lori said, muttering something about having to work on her vertical leap because of the competition. Sky blinked and Lori was standing next to him on top of the wall.

  “How’d you get up here?”

  “Climbed. Fast.” She smiled at him, and lowered her voice an octave and a half. “Defend yourself, foul rogue!” Feet, hands and arms came at him in a flurry Sky couldn’t follow. He dove back, grabbed the end of the wall with his hands, let his body arc under the wall edge, and then over – with a summersault – and back on top of the wall on the other side of Lori. Lori did a back flip and twist combination to land on top of the wall edge again, facing him. Another flurry of feet, hands and arms came after him, so he ran backwards and did a prodigious back somersault towards the swimming pool.

  Crunch.

  “Ow, ow, ow, dammit, I forgot about the ice!” Sky said. He had intended a backwards cannonball. Instead, it was, well, embarrassing. The ice might be only a scant half centimeter thick, and had bent down under his weight, but it was thick enough to hurt a lot – on his rear – where he landed. Lori clambered down the wall like a monkey and ran over to help him up.

  “Oh, let me kiss it and make it better,” Lori said, and cooed and clucked at him in quite a mock scene of sympathy. As she talked, half kneeling down and fully bent over at the waist, so she almost rubbed noses with him, the cracked ice underneath them splintered.

  Half the adults in Lori’s household were looking out the windows of the main house at them. So was the doctor, but not for long, because before he got a good look at who was causing the commotion, the ice broke beneath them and plunged them into the water.

  “So,” Sky said a half hour later, while being tended to in the kitchen by Viola Harper, the late night cook. Ann had been in and out twice to check on Lori and ignore Sky. The household had amply wrapped both Lori and Sky in towels. Lori’s giddiness was completely gone. “Did I tell you about the surveillance crew I spotted watching your house back when Tim and Ann were training me?” Sky said. He had forgotten. “Does that sort of thing happen often?”

  An hour of intricate discussion and household politics later, Sky burrowed into his attic nest alone for the remainder of the night, and was on his way back to Toronto on Sunday.

  Carol Hancock: February 1, 1968 – February 2, 1968

  Because of my nightmares and my never-ending feelings of impending doom, I gave a lot of thought to how I might improve my security arrangements. For step one I got an office outside of my residence, with a phone and a phone number for distribution, to let me stay in contact with the Crow, Greg, the Tiens, and my thugs. The office rental cost mone
y, which I didn’t have enough of, so I had to raise more.

  My office was two miles from my residence, in the north end of Skokie, the right half of an older home broken into two parts for office space. A shoe repair place occupied the other half, run by a couple of brothers who had emigrated from the Ukraine. They neared retirement age, and had dragooned one of their sons into the business to carry on the tradition. Just don’t call them Russians. Calling them Russians was fight’n words. Goddamn commies.

  “Another armored car job, boss?” Luke said. Luke Silverman, a small-time crook, disliked my larger jobs. He whined.

  “Shaddup, Silverman,” Indy said. Indy, no last name, didn’t even want to be a crook. He just had a theft problem with regard to his employers, which kept him from being able to hold a job. “Gotta be better’n ourselves, yah know.” When I first picked Indy up, he had a hard time succeeding at anything bigger than shoplifting and stealing mail from mailboxes. I was teaching him the trade. He wanted to be able to rob jewelry stores and bump off armored cars on his own someday. Not damned likely. The only thing preventing him from getting caught these days was me, breathing down his neck to keep him in line.

  “Kalamazoo,” I said. I stood over a second hand dining room table I used for my maps. Right now a well-marked Rand McNally road map of Michigan covered the table, stacked on top of maps of Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Rule number one was to avoid big heists in Chicago, especially in the northwest suburbs. The Michigan police were likely getting real annoyed at me, as I treated southwest Michigan as the happy hunting ground. “First Savings has a new head of security and I think he’s about to find out how difficult his job is.” I would do nearly anything for an edge.

  The phone on the non-matching second hand credenza rang, and I picked it up. “Yah?”