A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander)

by Farmer, Randall

  My faux breakdown didn’t even merit a response from my captors.

  I lost track of time after my temper tantrum, alone in the dark with my thoughts and nothing else. Food turned out to be an endless supply of military rations, recent vintage MCI rations, edible but otherwise indistinguishable from their wrappings. The guards pushed them under the door in loads of twenty, at random intervals so I couldn’t tell the time from the visits. The cell’s darkness was total. The bastards also tried to harass me with repetitive soft music, but they didn’t know ignoring audible distractions was one of my strengths. I tuned out their music before the second repeat finished.

  Funny, I never did tune out the never-ending ‘murderer’ whispering, though.

  I ached for juice. Not a bad ache, just the juice monkey ache from thinking about the juice for too long a time. Four or five days remained before I would start suffering from debilitating low-juice effects. That’s when they would break me, if they were going to break me before I went right to the edge of withdrawal. They would need a trick, though; otherwise I would hold out right to the edge of withdrawal. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction otherwise.

  Of course, I could end up dead from my stubbornness. I didn’t care. I worked through all the options of what they might do with me and most ended up with me spilling my guts and later dying in withdrawal or by firing squad. My welfare wasn’t in their interest. They kept me in a locked room with absolutely no chance of escape. If they were going to get real information out of me, which seemed inevitable, I wanted them to pay - with juice - to get the information.

  Phooey. I didn’t believe a word of my thoughts. Instead, I expected the person behind this would use some sort of psychological trick to break me early, and my stubbornness wouldn’t be tested. Hell, after a couple days of this sort of treatment even Focus Teas would have been able to come in and break me with her half-assed charisma. Of course, if as I suspected a Focus was behind my current torment, she might not realize how devastating low juice was to an Arm’s willpower.

  My darkest fears, that either Officer Canon or Teas’ boss Patterson was now the Focus in charge, I banished to the depths of my mind.

  Speaking of Teas, I spent a long time in the dark thinking through the last six months of my life, looking for information to exploit and memories to keep me sane. Teas said Focuses could tag everything. Well, I had never heard of Arms tagging anything, but I was willing to try anything by then. I tried tagging the unseen guards (useless; it didn’t work), the air (something moved, juicewise yet impermanent, so I flagged the trick for later investigation), my own body parts (an advanced trick my instincts told me I wasn’t ready for), and objects. After I successfully tagged a twenty-pound dumbbell from the remains of my workout equipment, I recognized what I had done.

  This object tag had nearly the same feel as when Bobby and I did our ‘I’m yours’ ‘you’re mine’ games. The juice trick I did with Bobby had been a tag!

  I got excited, and stayed excited, for I have no idea how many hours on end. Many. Perhaps over a day. I investigated what I did, tried every imaginable variation and examined what I created in every possible way with my metasense.

  The bad news? My discovery wouldn’t get me out of my cell. The good news, muted by my incarceration problems, was I had figured out Arm tagging. Arm tagging declared something yours and meant it, establishing dominance over the tagged object. Tagging made something mine. This is what Keaton should have done to me the instant I escaped from the St. Louis Transform Detention Center.

  I now understood why I experienced those memory dreams a few nights ago. They were all about Arm tags, or, in particular, the lack of one on me. My subconscious had been trying to tell me something.

  Arm tags sucked when used on inanimate objects, fading away after a few minutes. If the object tags did anything in the real world, I couldn’t tell, but I doubted they did. Most of what I learned came from tagging myself, which I figured out might be a dangerous thing to be doing as an experiment, alone, in a dark room, with nobody to save me if (and when) I fucked up. Lost in the excitement and knowing my general worth to the universe now, about zero, I took the risk anyway.

  An Arm tagging herself gives her dominance over herself, a level of control I easily recognized as the end-state of an hour or two of meditation and visualization, Zielinski-style. After thinking about what my discovery meant for a few minutes, everything else just fell into place.

  Unlike the Focus tags that functioned as thunderbolts from heaven, allowing the Focus to miraculously move juice from one Transform to another, an Arm tag served as a goddamned shortcut. But what a shortcut, if the tag allowed an Arm to establish dominance over another Arm without the dominant Arm having to beat the snot out of the lesser Arm every time they came back in contact with each other. The same timesaving benefit appeared to be true for all the Arm tag effects I figured out in my cell.

  Keaton took four long and bloody months to do to me, and my rebellious mind, what she would have been able to do in an instant with the Arm tag. Oh, there still would have been blood and pain, and I would have had my rebellious moments, but the tag would have cut down the sheer number of my problems with accepting my place, which caused many of the problems Keaton had with me.

  The Arm tag also neatly solved the mission Lori had given me. So how do you keep the Arms in line? You only deal with Arms in a dominance arrangement; you negotiate with the most dominant Arm and the rest have to follow.

  Eventually the excitement wore off and the grinding annoyance of low juice crept back in. I had solved the greatest mystery I knew of about Transforms, how Arms got along with each other, and my findings were stuck with me in my damned no-hope cell of doom.

  Enkidu: March 21, 1968

  The pack found a farm with likely prey after an hour of running searching. Low clouds spat rain, cold rain, on the melting snow pack. The fields were ankle deep in mud, and they left huge Monsterish footprints behind them.

  They didn’t care.

  The herd stayed quiescent, oblivious, chewing on their food.

  The pack roared, scattering their prey. Without having to talk, they picked out a choice morsel and gave chase.

  Not much of a chase. No matter how loud they roared their terror roars, their prey would only amble away at a trot. A panicked trot, but still a trot. They ran down the prey two, three, four times before they decided to simply pace behind the prey and keep it moving. Past the fences, and into a nearby copse of forest, left standing by the road builders when they ripped the latest interstate through the Illinois farmland.

  “Shit, this is pathetic,” Enkidu said.

  “You’re telling me,” Cleo said. “You want to do the honors?”

  “Honors! Bah!” With one swipe of his claws he ripped the throat out of the cow. The cow fell, and the pack fed.

  At least the cow provided them enough food to gorge on. Enkidu always got insanely hungry after he changed into his full beast form, the quadruped wolf. It was good to bloody his muzzle in prey of any kind. He was happy to be back in his wolf form. Wandering Shade had ordered him into this form, just in case the damned talking Arm got away from the Feds and returned to the area. Enkidu had been through this, before – beast form, ready to fight – then nothing, and he would go back to his normal half-beast form.

  “You’re beautiful, Cleo,” he said, as his pack alpha leaned up against him, digesting her dinner. The cold rain had let up, but there was no hint of the sun and no cracks in the clouds.

  “Beautiful? You addled or something? I’m not even a full Monster, dammit. I’m what, half woman, half what, snake? Lizard? Dinosaur? You and your damned Master have remade me so many times I don’t have a clue what I am anymore.”

  “Beautiful. Hush,” he said, rubbing his hands across her scales. Across the strange bone that ran from immediately above her flat nostrils down to the middle of her back, with tufts of feathery down on the ridge top. Across her iridescent line of amber scales surr
ounding her eyes, past her ear holes, and across her shoulders. “Hunters observe things differently than normals.”

  “You’re at least all one thing. All wolfman.”

  Enkidu laughed. “I’m no pure wolf. My legs are too long, my muscles are all wrong, my ears are all wrong. No canid ever looked like this. I’m sure I’ve got some housecat in this mess as well.”

  “You’re still beautiful. The Beast Man morphospace has such incredible variation. Like poor old Torma, with his insectoid carapace, his eight legs, and his mammalian innards? Or Odin, with his incongruous saurian armored plates on a hairy mammal body?”

  “You’re still beautiful, Cleo. I love you, you know that? I thought I’d left love behind, when I transformed. I was wrong”

  “Oh, love, eh? I thought that was just the juice talking. Or so you said, last time.”

  “Last time, I was a fool. Last time around the real me wasn’t exactly fully emergent, as far as our adult personalities were concerned. We could still annihilate an IQ test, but emotionally, we were little more than infants. This new set of changes is spectacular. I’ve never experienced anything like them.”

  Cleo nodded. “Yes. The Shade’s hit the jackpot this time. It’s one thing to be able to digest a dictionary and know all the words, and another to be able to use them properly. Now, I can even understand the technical papers he passes on to us. You think he’s going to let us keep these enhancements?”

  “I’m sure he will. Can’t you see it in the clouds? In the breeze from the southwest, echoing the pain of our enemies, their loss and confusion? In the low rumbles you can only sense with your feet, our Master’s love for us, for our new ways of thinking and understanding?”

  “Of course not, silly. Sensing such things would take a Beast Man metacampus. I sense other things.”

  “What do you sense?” As far as he could ascertain, Cleo possessed nothing analogous to his metasense.

  “Through you, into you, when I touch you. Into myself. For instance, if I wanted, I could get pregnant.”

  “You’re kidding. What sort of baby would you produce?”

  “Human. Fully human.”

  “You’re shitting me, Cleo. Fully human?”

  “Yes. The transformation didn’t touch your testicles or my ovaries. This is easy to sense.”

  So his love did have a metasense, of sorts. Of bodies, organs and cells. “Damn.”

  “What?”

  “This is no disease, Cleo.” He lifted his lupine head and stared down at her.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Transform Sickness can’t be a disease.” Not if it could produce a Transform such as Cleo, through all her changes and intermediate forms. Transform Sickness, from a food poisoning bacteria with delusions of godhood? No way in hell.

  Cleo’s belly rumbled, and she reached over with her clawed hands, and ripped herself another small bit of kidney. A spot of liver. Chased it down with a gobbet of meat.

  “I don’t like to think about such things,” Cleo said. “Too many mysteries make me nervous.”

  Enkidu nodded. “I know. What are we made to hunt? Where is our prey? Not Transforms. With our pack, I have more than enough élan. What do we lack for real?”

  “Food,” Cleo said. “Our pack eats too much. You eat, what, nearly ten times as much as a normal. Without farms, without supermarkets, we would denude any territory in a few months.”

  Errr. She was correct. “Did you read the old book the Shade dropped on us last week, the one titled ‘Pleistocene Megafauna of North America’?” She grunted ‘no’. “There used to be enough food, long long ago. That would have been the life.” Visions of horses, buffalo and oversized antlered deer filled Enkidu’s mind. Too bad they had vanished so long ago, and so suddenly, though…

  “I know of another source of food, Enkidu.” Cleo pointed, at the lines of headlights visible from the edge of the forest, in the road that passed by less than a mile distant.

  Enkidu nodded. “I try not to think about them.” Or anything similarly against the Law. “The Wandering Shade mentioned, once, a different solution to the food problem.”

  “Oh, did he?” Cleo said, and hissed. She was never happy when his Master passed information to him and not to her.

  “Old Monsters in the wild don’t eat as much. They rest most of the time. He calls this aestivation, though the term isn’t exactly appropriate. He thinks old Beast Men will be able to rest the same way. We can’t, now, because we’re essentially adolescents.”

  “Speaking of which,” Cleo said, rubbing up against him. “Isn’t it about time to act like horny adolescents again?”

  “What, again?” Enkidu said with a grin. He traced a line of élan fire around Cleo’s nipples. She hissed in pleasure, and grabbed his member, her claws barely sheathed. He echoed her hiss with a roar of lust.

  They ignored the cold rain that began to spit down on them a few moments later.

  Gilgamesh: March 22, 1968

  “You’re going to become active, eh?” Sky said. As soon as the authorities released Gilgamesh from jail, he called Shadow and found out Sky had been in contact with Shadow, looking for Gilgamesh’s new phone number.

  This would be a perfect excuse for him to make a necessary phone call. If any Crow might be able to advise him on what he planned to do, it was Sky. He made the call, expensive and international, to Toronto.

  “Yes. I’m out and doing things,” Gilgamesh said, pacing the width of living room of his cheap apartment as he talked. “Some successes, some failures. I’m not meant for discussions on literary symbolism.”

  Sky laughed, his voice loud and un-Crow-like. “Good, good. There are so few of us Crows willing to actually do anything. Hopefully, you don’t believe the rumors that I’m an actual Crow adventurer. I’m sure you noticed when we met – I’m just an average Crow.”

  “I suspect the truth is somewhere in between.” He paused, not sure where to go after his polite shading of the truth. “So why did you want to contact me?”

  “A Foyer friend of mine suggested I should.”

  “Your Professor Rizzari?”

  Silence on the other and of the phone. “Actually, someone wiser and more dangerous.” Sky paused. “May I ask how you learned of my connection to our most gracious lady of Boston? I specifically asked the Boston Crows not to speak or write of her.”

  “I cheated,” Gilgamesh said. “I looked up well known Focuses with the initial L in their names, since you mentioned in your letters you had been contacting a politically powerful Focus. There aren’t any in Toronto. The closest I found lived in Boston, Professor Lorraine Rizzari, who just happened to be the name of a Focus Tiamat referred me to in case of, ah, emergencies. And Boston is, well, where we first met in person. This sounded like a lot of coincidences to me.” Coincidences of personality, Gilgamesh suspected.

  “Ah, a detective.” Sky chuckled. “So, again may I ask, why did you wish to speak to me?”

  “I think that once my current problems end, I’m going to continue to work on the problem of bettering inter-Major Transform cooperation. However, I’m having trouble with panic. Half the time when I’m out doing things in the world, I panic and mess up, and I’m not going to be able to contribute anything to the Transform community if I can’t get past the panic issue. What’s the secret? How do I fight the panic?”

  “Secret? As the Americans say, the same way you get to Carnegie Hall. Practice. Throw yourself into hazards – well, hazards from a Crow perspective, understand. Go out. Do things. Learn from your responses. The more you repeat something, the less it induces panic. The panic is there to remind you to pay attention when the world around you is doing something different. Do anything enough, even what the other Crows call adventuring, and the panic will go away.”

  “You’re kidding. That’s all?”

  “Completely.”

  “Well, I guess I’m well on my way, then, because that’s what I’ve been doing,” Gilgamesh sai
d. Only: what sort of Crow would repeatedly attempt a panic-inducing situation enough times to learn this trick? Gilgamesh had been trying to find a way to avoid that scenario. “Thank you. Is there anything else a Crow needs to do to officially sign up for a Guru? Some registry of Guru students I need to fill out?” Gilgamesh hoped nothing in the informal Crow rules prevented one from learning from multiple Gurus.

  “What? Me, a Guru?” Sky said, and laughed. “One student does not a Guru make. Not that I won’t give you advice. A mutual acquaintance of ours, Shadow, has been twisting my eminently twistable arm to teach my tricks to others, but few Crows will admit they even have ears when I fatuously attempt to pass on my lessons. I’ll tell you a secret: if you’re only panicking half the time you’re trying things, you’re doing a superb job for a Crow your age. Another secret? The urge to panic never goes away.”

  Gilgamesh groaned in frustration. The revelation didn’t surprise him, though.

  “So, Sky, did you receive my most recent letters about my current problem?”

  “The one about being upset because you lost your Tiamat again? I can sympathize. However, I’m not sure I can help. I don’t have any political connections within the American government.”

  “I learned from, um, well, Sinclair, Midgard and Shadow, the place she’s being held is a veritable fortress. I, um, directed a certain Arm, um, the Skinner to the place after a terrifying discussion, and it’s their opinion she won’t be able to succeed at breaking Tiamat out on her own. I know…”

  “You talked to the Skinner in person?” Sky said, nearly a shriek. He followed his shriek with something quick and incomprehensible in French. “Perhaps I should be learning from you.”

  Gilgamesh winced. Shadow’s reaction had been quite similar. “There’s something you need to know,” Gilgamesh said. “Tiamat and the Rizzari Housebound were in regular contact when Tiamat lived in Chicago, enough so I was able to learn of their connection in my short chats with her. And I…”