“They want to ruin you as a Focus,” Occum said. “I’m not surprised; all the senior Major Transforms are moral monsters. My superiors did the same to me once. Someday, they’re going to pay for what they did. They claim authority where none is given to them.”
“Gurgling poo!” Lori said, making connections she shouldn’t have. “They punished you for cooperating with me as a young Focus, didn’t they?”
Occum sighed. “I told them you were different, a true believer in the Crow way of helping others who need help. They changed me, body and mind, into someone no Focus would ever want to be near.”
She squeezed his hand, then. Occum inhaled sharply, and began to shake. “I know when: the three months back in late ’62,” Lori said. The time when she and Occum had lost contact with each other. “Your pain is my fault. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Because of what they did, I found a different way to live as a Crow, and got help from a most unexpected source. I found a way to manipulate dross no other Crows expected to exist. I learned of their treachery and evil, and survived. Now, I know to be on watch, and to wait.”
This sounded familiar to Lori. “There’s a Focus, the Madonna of Montreal, who told me to be on watch, and to wait, as well.”
“That’s her. She told me the time wasn’t right to fix the problem, and when I asked her during the Julius rebellion whether the time was right, she said no, that following the false Commander would destroy me. She said I would know it in my heart when the time was right.”
“She said the same to me. I’m waiting for this crazy myth to appear, too.” Lori tried to chuckle, but her laugh came out as a moan. “I’m not the Commander. I’m someone, something else. I don’t know what.” She paused, trying again to understand the Madonna of Montreal’s oracular nonsense words: the American Major Transforms wanted the Commander so much, they would make him or her. Well, nobody wanted her, that was certain, and nobody loved her – well, except now for Occum – but she would someday be important, if she survived. Big if, she snorted to herself. “But if I don’t get this bad juice out of me, the only thing I’m going to be is failed Focus Rizzari.”
“I think I’ve got a way,” Occum said. “You’re going to have to promise to keep your eyes closed, your metasense down, and not to fight me. You’re going to have to trust me, and trust your own incredible Focus regeneration abilities.”
Oh. Of course. Why hadn’t she thought of that? Had the darned Focuses who did this to her done something to her mind as well, to keep her from thinking of such things? Almost certainly; the thoughts slipped away from her nearly as fast as she thought them. “You’re going to cut this poo out of me. How much will you have to take?”
“How small a body part can you localize this Monster juice of yours?”
“I think I can sequester it into a kidney, for at least a few moments. Don’t worry about cutting into me. I’ll just eat the pain.” The Council used pain for at least three things: punishment, teaching, and sorting the wheat from the chaff. When she realized, she resolved to become wheat, and worked night and day until she found a way to master the pain.
“Turn over and lie on your stomach,” Occum said. “‘Oh, how I hate this, the agony of being a Crow, of being a Major Transform. The salt spray of Transform life corrodes my eyes as cast iron on a boat. Soon I will morally sink, wormy hull and all.’” He paused. “Sorry. Climax stress, the bane of all Crows.” His hands stopped shaking, and the tip of a knife touched her back.
She concentrated and forced the bad juice into her right kidney. And ate the pain.
When she awoke, she found herself in the great room of the Inferno household, on a bier, in the construction area where her people had been re-laying electrical conduits so they could continue their great room expansion project. Her Transforms sobbed and knelt by the bier. Her metasense was back, and she felt normal, save for being famished. She remembered Occum’s kiss on her forehead, and little else.
They thought she was lost to them, mind gone. Heh! And heh!
She chuckled and sat up. “Food. Now! You want a functional Focus, the Focus needs to eat, folks!”
Those who didn’t scream and faint rushed toward the kitchen, to obey her uncharacteristically strong charismatic demand. She probably shouldn’t have played that prank, but something about being back with her household practically invited her action. As if her household had become, itself, alive.
“Someday I’m going to rebel, and when I do so I’m going to do it right and take down the entire Transform establishment,” Lori said, a low mutter. She marked down in her mental list the names of the people who had fainted. They were out of the household as soon as she could arrange. “Those old Crows and Focuses are never going to know what hit them. They made a serious mistake letting Occum and me live.”
Tonya (talking to Polly on the phone)
The phone rang at two in the morning, startling Tonya awake. She blearily raised her head from the pile of papers and realized she had fallen asleep at her desk. She couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. Too many long commutes to Virginia. They took a toll even on her Focus vigor. She picked up the phone.
“Tonya?”
“Hello, Polly.”
“I hear you’re making progress.”
“You have good ears.” Pause. “Yes, we’re sweating Hancock but good. Tomorrow, we’ll hit her hard enough to break her. Sorry. Today. Later this morning. She’ll be singing by Sunday evening.”
“Oh, your news is such a load off my mind. You don’t understand how much I’ve feared one of my people getting taken by either one of those fiends. Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Polly paused, and continued on, breathlessly. “You’ve been so brave in this, so brave for all of us.”
Tonya winced. Polly thought her phone bugged, and so she played the ditz. Polly had been doing this act whenever prying ears were about ever since she grabbed the Council presidency. She had the first Focuses convinced there was little more to her than the beaten suck-up she portrayed. “Susan sends her regards,” Polly continued.
“Thanks.” Thanks for delivering the message so I didn’t have to talk to Suzie in person, she mentally thanked Polly. Susan – Suzie Schrum – was a flaming asshole bitch as well as being one of the first Focuses. If not for the fact Tonya worked for her, she would never talk to the bitch again in her life. What Suzie did to her Transforms was unconscionable. Suzie, despite the fact she had appointed Tonya to her Council seat, disliked Tonya as a person about as much as Tonya disliked her. Suzie, however, held all the cards. She knew exactly where Tonya buried her mistakes, enough information to send Tonya to prison for life. Good ol’ Suzie.
“Oh, no problem. None at all. Whee!” Polly said, sounding giddy. “I can’t wait to tell everyone that our Arm problems are over!”
The Experimentalist
After she asked Faber and Lisa to make sure nobody bothered her, Annie retreated to her small bedroom for the evening, to meditate. Late yesterday night, after a week of cautious experimentation with the walrus skull Arm had retrieved for her, she had broken down and tagged the skull. An object tag, a weak one, the weakest tag she knew. She hadn’t expected noticeable effects, but she found she had established a mental link to the object.
Tonight, Annie would see if she would be able to use the walrus skull to enhance her night-time meditations. Sitting on her bed with her back to the wooden headboard, she cautiously picked up the walrus skull and looked it over, yet again. This artifact of the First Peoples, or at least a Transform efflorescence from them, was tiny, a skull from a baby walrus. Arm had retrieved the artifact for her, part of Arm’s never ending soul-nagging mission to find evidence of the imagined Predecessors, the Transforms who came before them.
An intricate geometric pattern of copper and gold was incised into the baby walrus skull; whoever had made this had found a way to make copper and gold wire by first carving a tiny wire shaped groove into the skull, then pressin
g the malleable native metals into the groove. Or so Annie thought; she needed to visit the public library and find out if copper was that malleable. She was sure gold was. In any event, she had dusted off an ancient magnifying glass of Lisa’s and now used it to inspect the skull. She found that in the few places where the wires crossed, they didn’t touch, a different material, likely pine resin, lay between them. The incised wires did connect in four places to the solid gold plating of the skull’s tiny eye sockets. The filigree extended to the insides of the skull, and in the skull interior, a small part of the filigree was a different metal other than gold and copper.
The more Annie examined the tiny skull, the more she began to think of it as an electronic device. An electronic device of the juice? Terrifying. Insane.
Impossible.
She had determined the device was the work of one or more Crows working with one or more Focuses. Beyond that, the baby walrus skull remained a mystery.
Annie sat cross-legged in her bed, cupped her hands, the tiny skull in one. She let loose her conscious thoughts, brought her breathing into a rhythm, and gently extended herself through the tag link, to the skull.
Nothing.
She gave her test some time, and when satisfied she had found nothing, arranged her mind in a different configuration. From years of practice and experimentation, she knew the Focus mind possessed many different thought modes, associated with various meditative states. She tried one after the other, slowly and carefully.
Sometime later, while in a thought mode that damped all her senses, including her normal-range metasense, she caught a flash in her mind. A familiar flash. She had it, and then lost it.
She got up, splashed water on her face, and did a quick metasense scan of the people in her household. Nothing abnormal. She wouldn’t let her experimentation endanger them.
She sat down on her bed and shifted her mind to the thought mode in question. Another flash. She replayed the flash in her memory until she understood.
The flash had been of the Dreaming.
She normally reached the Dreaming at night, and while asleep, but some of her self-experimentation in previous years had proved to her that a piece of her subconscious mind lived in the Dreaming, night and day. She had no idea what use this was to her, whether this was a ‘how things were supposed to work’, or another annoying juice structure flaw she would need to get Sky to look at. This feature/flaw wasn’t high on her list of priorities. It might have just jumped up a few positions in her mental list, as this appeared to be where her weak object tag and mental link with the skull connected.
The obvious way to extend the flash beyond the purely momentary was by strengthening the object tag. She wished she knew more about object tags; they too were well down her list of things to investigate. They appeared to be pointless outside of a multi-Focus household, and she knew of only one multi-Focus household, and the place was an utter abomination of Hell.
Was the skull a bit of Transform technology tuned to the evils of her enemy? If it was, her duty to the Transform community was clear. She had to destroy it.
Not yet, though.
She began to experiment again, slowly increasing the object tag’s strength. After each tiny increase, she meditated and got the flash, but nothing else. After each, she stopped, examined her household and herself with her metasense, and found no problems.
The top end of the object tag spectrum she found mildly disgusting. She could hold only one of the top-end object tags at a time, and the object she tagged had the property of making her Transforms think the tagged object was Annie, their Focus. They would even hold intelligent conversations with the object, and receive reasonable answers. The tag didn’t eat juice, but amplified juice use somehow, and over time warped the existing tags on her Transforms. Sky thought the trick the Focus equivalent of his Method Truly Sublime, and analogously dangerous, and he had convinced Annie to never again experiment with it when he wasn’t around to identify the problems the top end object tag caused.
Annie had a long way to go with this experiment before she reached the danger level. She continued to ratchet up the tag power, one minute step after the other, maintaining her wariness. Seven steps below one of the power thresholds, the one where the object tag had enough substance in it to allow other Focuses to sense the object tag without doing a metasense analysis, and sense that the tagged object belonged to some other Focus (but not which one), Annie noticed the flash length double.
On her next test, Annie jumped directly to the ‘the object is mine’ level, now deducing its importance and relative safety.
She found herself in the Dreaming.
While awake and fully conscious.
I can teach myself to reach this state, she realized. She licked her lips – this mental state possessed an interesting duality, where she would be able to access her mundane senses as well as her Dreaming senses – but not both at the same time.
Useful. She could use the skull to learn things, by examining how the skull worked. Good or evil, the baby walrus skull was a tool. She would have to call Arm and tell her her quest (though Arm would never use such a term) hadn’t been pointless.
This wasn’t the Dreaming Annie knew. Yes, she still visualized her dreamscape as the LeClerc Vinyards, a place she had spent innumerable hours in her youth, years before she had transformed. But the vineyard was off. The tone of the light was different. The place smelled, well, like a real rural vineyard. She found it much harder to pick out the usual Major Transforms she watched, and couldn’t pick out any of the several normals she had normal-tagged.
She examined her Dream vineyard carefully, and found a large visual flaw. Off to the side of the vineyard, where there should be five boulders piled in a rough pyramid, there was a hole.
The hole led to a different place.
Annie spent an hour peering into the hole, cautious and a little afraid. Inside the hole was a slowly moving scene, and a person, walking. A young woman, a Caucasian, walking across a monotonous sparsely vegetated plain, dotted with ponds and streams. At night, in the dark. Forty minutes into her examination, Annie realized the night sky above this scene in the hole told her something: Polaris, instead of being half way up the sky as it was in Montreal, was almost two thirds of the way up the sky. This was the far north!
Slowly, gingerly, Annie probed the hole with her body, sticking first a pinkie finger, then a hand, then an arm, all the while making sure she could yank them back before trying another body part. Frustrated, and out of useless appendages, she dream-walked halfway into the opening. She turned around, while most of the way in, and found the hole existed on this side as well, revealing her vineyard and a path of escape.
The exit continued to exist when she had all but her arm through the hole. And a finger. And with nothing. Satisfied she wouldn’t be Dream-trapped in this new place, Annie turned her attention to the woman.
Her metasense revealed the woman to be a Sport, a Focus variant. Annie had long been able to use her metasense in the Dreaming, but never with this acuity. Normally, she had a hard time telling a non-Dreaming Focus from a woman Transform.
“Who are you?” Annie said, whispering to herself.
The woman stopped and looked around. Had she heard Annie? She certainly didn’t see Annie. The Dreaming didn’t transmit sound.
Or, at least, the Dreaming never had, before.
“Who’s there?” the woman said, in English. Annie paused, the fear of the Transform unknown coming over her stronger than it had in years. The woman kept looking around, but her feet shuffled her forward.
Something compelled her forward. Something unpleasant, perhaps evil. Definitely dangerous.
“I know that was a real voice,” the woman said. “I’m a Major Transform, and I know these things.” She paused, looked down at her feet, and cursed. “Help me! Something’s got me and is making me walk north.”
“Can you understand what I’m saying?” Annie said, this time in English.
The woman stumbled and fell, letting out a shriek. She leapt back to her feet and backed away, north. “Yes,” she said. “What’s going on? How am I hearing you? You’re not here.”
“I’m not here, that is true,” Annie said. “I’m as lost as you are, I suspect. I was playing with, well, something strange a friend gave to me, and with it I found you.”
“This is like hearing, but it’s not,” the woman said. “I just turned off my ears and your voice didn’t go away. Can you help me?”
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been walking for days and days. I drove my car up to Labrador City, and this thing, this compulsion, that forced me to drive to Labrador City made me get out of the car and start walking. I’m out of food, but, but, something is keeping me fed, anyway. I’m not sleeping, either. It’s like I don’t have to, anymore.”
The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Five Page 9