He shook his head. “You recall that I don’t have the people or resources to do the component analysis myself,” he said. “I farmed out nearly all of the analysis, to nine different labs, and as a check I sent out duplicate analysis requests on about a third of the compounds. Taken all together, the results were gibberish. Now, with this correction, they’re no longer gibberish.”
I remained unconvinced. “Would you be saying the same thing if one of the other labs falsified their results?”
“Yes.”
“But what about the duplications?”
“They didn’t falsify the duplicated samples I gave them, just the rest.”
Oh. “So, there is a problem, but the problem’s different than I thought. Someone, somehow, knew which samples to falsify and which ones not to falsify.”
“You’re undoubtedly correct,” Hank said. He went back to re-reading the report. “I’ll leave that for you to figure out. How much liberty am I going to get to focus on this?” I sighed at his accuracy. I had counted eight different projects in Amy’s list that required his input, and if he got distracted by those, he wouldn’t make progress on the juice pattern codification. None of them looked worth his time, and we probably wouldn’t even have the data for the inheritance project for another five years.
“Work on this and let me deal with Amy.” I already knew I would be spending a great deal of my political capital with Amy sorting and filtering the portion of her project list aimed at me and my people. Amy did inject some much needed energy into the Cause, but I suspected about half the projects on her list would do us no good, and about a tenth would be actively detrimental. Worse, if I didn’t put some limits on how many different things my people were working on, they would never complete anything.
Hank nodded without looking up. A moment later he had a file cabinet open and started tossing reports on his desk. Lost to the world.
“Thanks,” I said, and walked out. He didn’t hear me.
---
“Glen Deadman Markham.” I got in Glen Markham’s face and snarled. “Betty’s cleaning is none of your business. I know it. You know it. So why do I hear you giving her grief about it?”
Glen, a standardly unemployed Transform in Gloria Frasier’s household, paled. “Yes, ma’am. Of course, ma’am.”
I stroked my hand gently down his cheek. “I always need more juice. If you can’t get along in Gloria’s household, you’ll do just fine.” One of the first lessons a baby Arm learned was the danger and stupidity of juice-sucking tagged Transforms, so my spiel was pure bullshit, but I certainly scared Glen. “Go.”
He got. Once he turned his back, I smiled. I actually enjoyed being Gloria’s enforcer, one of the main things she got out of our agreement.
“Got it,” Gilgamesh said, from Gloria’s room. I followed his voice, walking down the back hallway of Gloria’s absurd late-40s era suburban ranch house, trying not to trip over the Transforms and normals sleeping day shift. Many of her people lived in the six smallish house-trailers parked in the backyard of the house, but they never had enough room for people to sleep, and the few people in her place with jobs all worked nights, restaurant and factory work, the best work a Transform or Transform-spouse could get.
Gloria lay on her bed in what had once probably been a small child’s bedroom, eyes closed. We were into day three of our off-and-on tag experiments. Three days. I had given up on the juice-moving project months ago because we knew the next step involved a true Arm-Focus tag, one that didn’t expire the first time my back was turned or I sneezed. Focuses worked too much juice, and every time they worked juice they weakened the tag. I currently had her tagged, and Gilgamesh did metasense analysis of my tagging attempts to figure out why these tags never stuck.
I stared down at the meditating Focus, sunk deep in her pile of blankets. “What did you find out?”
“There’s a piece of this tag that isn’t degrading,” Gilgamesh said. Of all the many Crows I associated with, he was mine, and I loved him dearly for it. He was a lean man, with rich brown hair that never would lay flat, and silent brown eyes hiding a thoughtful mind. “I believe it’s in her subconscious.”
I frowned. Shouldn’t the subconscious part of the tag degrade first? “Okay.” So what, I didn’t say.
“I believe if you tag her in a ceremonial fashion, something to engage her subconscious, the tag will stick until Gloria consciously removes it, because the tag will reside in her subconscious.”
Oh. Just like with a non-Transform. “We can do a ceremony.”
---
The juice flashed in my mind and vanished. I smiled in pleasure, but Glen, our test subject, screamed. “You snagged his juice!” Gloria said, twitching in my arms and echoing Glen’s scream. Glen thrashed to the edge of Gloria’s single bed and huddled against the wall in a fetal position.
The seconds ticked by as I leaned against the wall on the other side of the room, lost in the ecstasy of the juice draw. “It wasn’t a full drain,” Gilgamesh said. From metasense invisibility. From the next room over. I had never seen him move so quickly. Crows never dealt well with surprises. “He’s three points into withdrawal. Give his juice back to him and he’ll recover.”
“His tag’s gone!” Gloria said.
I moaned in pleasure and attempted to clear my head. Yes, I hadn’t taken all his juice, despite the fact that from my point of view, I drained him dry. I didn’t feel good enough to have taken all his juice. Nor had I been touching him. Was this the answer? Partial draining, done at range, using the Transform’s Focus as a conduit?
Arms normally can’t grab juice at range, but I had been holding Gloria. I apparently used her range.
Glen continued to scream. Gloria had chosen him for disciplinary reasons, reasons I concurred with. I felt her re-tag Glen and restore his juice. Glen stopped screaming and fell unconscious. He didn’t feel right to my metasense.
“Status,” I said, finally able to overcome the pleasure of the juice draw.
“You mangled his juice structure,” Gilgamesh said, still in the next room. “You got too much of his fundamental juice.”
Well, duh, that’s because us Arms can’t tell the difference between supplemental and fundamental juice.
“Is this what you wanted?” Gloria said between her tears, horribly confused. “I thought we were working on you duplicating the way I move juice to a male Transform?”
“We were.” With Gloria tagged and sharing her metasense, I still couldn’t sense the difference between fundamental and supplemental juice. Or metasense a Focus’s household juice buffer as anything more than an undifferentiated blob. “I was attempting to will my way into the juice buffer and doing my best not to drain you.”
The tag prevented the latter, giving me a mental hotfoot every time I touched her personal juice supply. When we had tried this before we figured out the stable tag procedure, I had drained her, killing her. Luckily, after I opened myself up to her, she had done the Focus-juice-magnet trick, even while clinically dead, and gotten her juice back. Focuses are severely tough and difficult to kill, even the ones who moan about hangnails and stubbed toes.
Gloria hugged Glen and started bawling. “How bad off is he?” I asked Gilgamesh.
“He’ll recover, but he’s going to have brain damage.”
Damn.
I sensed Gilgamesh approach, and I hugged him. Right now I wanted comfort, and sex, and I had comfort to give. I feared Haggerty was right, and I did need to work with more powerful Focuses, Focuses stout enough to keep me from sucking down one of their Transforms by accident. We all expected mistakes like these.
Gloria wasn’t strong enough for this test. I had several more tests to do, after Gloria recovered, but I was beginning to doubt Gloria was a strong enough Focus to move juice to an Arm.
---
Visualize. Locate. There! Finally! A dross-encrusted rubber washer, tricked up to radiate juice to the metasense.
Metasense exercises. Bah. I
stood, stretched, and took a deep breath. My bedroom overlooked a courtyard, surrounded on all sides by my house. In the spring my people would plant and tend flowers. Right now, the dark Chicago sky rained on old snow.
Honing my metasense fulfilled my current work quota on the juice moving project. I couldn’t do the next test until Gloria recovered, and the other item on my practice list, learning to interrupt my juice draw mid-draw, disgusted me too much to even contemplate.
Somewhere in the house Gilgamesh shrieked. My adrenaline shot up, I covered myself with my best defenses, and I ran toward him; my house was supposed to be his safe haven. My scrumptious Crow had been driving himself batty with overwork, so much so that he had become nearly worthless in bed. Doing dross construct training exercises. Teaching Crows, in particular Newton, how to teach other Crows the intricacies of how to clean ancient dross from a Focus household. He wouldn’t say, but his overwork craze kept him from thinking about what Lori and Sky were doing with the no-longer-secret tag tuning project. He had been attempting to woo Lori, and we all knew if the project succeeded, our ever-indecisive Focus would finally settle on Sky.
Gilgamesh, also covered in his best defenses, passed me in the hallway going the other direction. We were so well defended we didn’t even noticed each other until we passed, which would have been damned stupid in a fight, and was also, unfortunately, typical. He radiated terror and anger, and I couldn’t tell which would win in the end. I turned around, as did he.
“Read this! This is crap! Insane!”
Anger.
He handed me a letter.
Gilgamesh,
You have exceeded your position and authority as a Crow. You have not earned the right to teach, and you spread forbidden knowledge and misguided information that endangers all Crows.
You will cease instructing other Crows, you will cease all aid to The Cause, and you will cease all contact with any of the other Major Transforms, or you will suffer the consequences.
The letter wasn’t signed. “Someone’s cruis’n for a bruise’n,” I said, speaking Chitown Mobster. Nobody messed with my Crow.
“Although the letter isn’t signed, it’s from Guru Chevalier and his cronies,” Gilgamesh said. “I’ve gotten warning letters many times, from many other Crows, but never an ultimatum of this nature.”
“What can they do to you?”
Gilgamesh didn’t roll his eyes, not wanting to disrespect me, but I metasensed the truth behind the non-eye roll. “They could ruin me in dozens of ways. The most obvious would be to grab me, take me to San Francisco, and enslave me. Chevalier already has one enslaved Crow working for him, Hoptoad, and all Hoptoad did was, well, marry a Focus.”
“All.”
“All. Whatever happened to the idea of freedom?”
Gilgamesh knew better. He was just angry. “Chevalier could just say he was keeping Hoptoad from being killed by the first Focuses,” I said. True, as well. “What could Guru Chevalier do to you? Is there any way around this?”
“Carol,” he said. “There’s only one way around this. I need to become a Guru.” Gain the rank to qualify him for what he was already doing. Gurus earned the right to make such strategic decisions. “This won’t be easy. I’ll be gone for months, perhaps a full year, depending on how the training goes. Shadow offered this to me at the North Tonawanda meeting. I told him at the time I couldn’t desert you.”
“Well, he did predict the discovery and presentation of the Eskimo Spear was going to cause a firestorm,” I said. “I guess he was right. Go. Think of the Cause, Gilgamesh. The more Crow Gurus we have on board, the better for all of us.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” Gilgamesh said. “Now wouldn’t be a good time for any of our old personal problems to resurface.” He had gone off against my wishes once before. I had nearly permanently disowned him for doing so. Arms don’t appreciate disloyalty or betrayal, and I was especially prickly on the subject.
“You have to. I’ll have to cope. Given what Haggerty’s dumped on my plate, I’m not going to be getting much free time, anyway.” After doing a bunch of thinking, and after Keaton’s move to California, Amy re-upped the priority of my ‘rebuild the Arm tag hierarchy’ project. She, too, was starting to get nervous about the boulder she had started rolling down our great big hill. In typical Amy style, she didn’t lower the priority of anything else to make room.
We said our goodbyes, and Gilgamesh was off.
Months of work stared down at us, and had won, taking dominance over us both.
Dark Clouds, Big Storms
“Where do self-sustaining dross ‘clouds’ come from, why are they never seen near urban areas, how long do they last, and why and how do they vanish?” – from Arm Haggerty’s Speculative Projects List
(Five months later)
Sinclair: June 6, 1972 – June 9, 1972
“Squire Chet on the phone for you, Master Sinclair,” Callie said. Crow Master Sinclair looked up from his bill-strewn desk, bleary eyed. He would cover the month’s electric bill with money conjured from nowhere, again, but as often was the case the food would be a little lean. He ran his hands through his wavy butterscotch hair, stood, and stretched.
“Ahh.” He sighed, as his stiff back cracked. “On my way.”
“Great!” Callie said, then stopped and put her clawed hands on her hips. “What was I doing before I answered the phone?”
Despite being a Crow Master for nearly eighteen months, the mental problems of his commoners never ceased to sadden him.
“I believe you were knitting,” Sinclair said. He patted Callie on the shoulder, and went to pick up the phone.
“Long Island Barony. Is there a problem?” Sinclair said. He wasn’t yet used to the household’s new name, or the ‘barony’ term, or even the term ‘commoner’ for the household Transforms. The term changes were the Nobles’ response to Arm Haggerty’s call to ‘force the Cause’, in this case regularizing the Noble’s terminology.
Sinclair heard yelling in the background over the bad connection. “Master Sinclair,” Chet said, his deep voice cutting through the yelling. “I have a problem. She’s very distraught.”
“Who’s distraught?” Sinclair asked. “What have you gotten yourself into this time, my lord?” Sinclair hastily appended the ‘my lord’ on at the end, to soften his ire-tinged comment. Squire Chet was a never-ending source of trouble. He was supposed to be on a proving mission to prove he could pass himself off as human. Success would give him the Noble rank of Knight, at which point Sinclair would ship him off to Watchmaker’s Diamond Barony in the Ozarks.
He had failed his last ‘proving mission’, nearly destroying a gas station.
“Master Sinclair, it’s this lonely lost nearly-oversupplied Transform woman. I don’t know what to do with her,” Squire Chet said. “She doesn’t have a Focus.” Interesting. The burr of distress in the Noble’s voice meant Squire Chet had taken responsibility for the woman. As Sinclair was fully aware, neither hell nor high water would keep a Noble from carrying out his responsibility.
Squire Chet Davis’s proving mission had been to purchase some bulk staples for the Barony from a Transform-friendly grocery supply firm in Centereach and pass as human. Not to go hunting for Transforms. However, saving women Transforms who didn’t have Focuses always took precedence. Without Major Transform support from a Focus or a Noble household, unattached women Transforms always transformed into Monsters, and mindless newly transformed Monsters were a threat to any innocents nearby.
“I’ll come get you myself,” Sinclair said. “Where are you?”
---
Sinclair ended up stuck driving the van on the way back to the Barony, as his Noble bodyguard, Sir Randolph McGee, couldn’t pass as human nor drive at the moment, and Squire Chet needed to drive the pickup truck. The last Noble member of his household, Duke Hoskins, was off on a mission and unavailable.
The Transform woman beside him dried her eyes. She was a small woman with a light b
uild and dark hair. Mildly attractive, but not exceptional. Mid-twenties. As a Crow Master and now wise in the ways of Transforms, he calmed the woman Transform with his presence.
“Audrie,” she said. “Audrie Mich…”
“No. No last names,” Sinclair said.
“Why?”
“Your former life is done.” Her jitters made him doubt this one, and her survival chances.
“Oh. Oh. Okay,” she said. “I’m really a Transform?”
He nodded.
“I’ve heard of Nobles, but I didn’t know they could save Transforms. Don’t I need a Focus?”
“We do the best we can, Audrie,” Sinclair said. “You need to know that we can’t save everyone. Not every Transform can make it in a Noble household. Also, far more people transform than exist places for Transforms with Focuses, even women Transforms. I don’t know if we can find a place for you on such short notice.”
“Short notice?”
“You feel so bad because you’re about to go over into Monster.” Tonight or early tomorrow morning. Transform women produced juice – para-procorticotrophin, for the scientific. Transform men consumed juice, and Focuses moved the juice between them. This was the axiom of Transform life. When Audrie built up too much juice she would suffer the dramatic physical and mental changes people called ‘going Monster’.
“Oh,” Audrie said. She sniffled. “I might die.”
Sinclair nodded.
“Can I live in a Noble household?”
Sinclair looked her over and took in her wet eyes. Brains, yes. The raw willpower needed to exist around the always-rough Nobles? Not clear. “I don’t know, yet, Audrie. When we get back to the Barony, I have some tests I’m going to run.”
“Tests? Medical tests?”
Sinclair shook his head. “No. Just some questions.” Psychological tests.
The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) Page 6