Hancock and this doctor were at least worrying about her safety. She wasn’t sure whether this made her feel better or worse. Nor was she happy about the implied danger of these experiments.
She also noticed the easy way he referred to Teacher.
“What kind of tests?”
Smith smiled. His smile was reassuring, competent, and appropriately doctorly. Her theory about the hack doctor started to fray, and she didn’t have another alternative.
“Any kind of test we can think of,” he said. “We’ll take your physical measurements, measure blood pressure, pulse, heart rate, juice count. We’ll do a few other…”
“Juice count?” Gail said, interrupting.
He raised his eyebrows. “Juice count is a rather basic measurement for any Transform.”
Gail folded her arms and glared at him. “You’re equipped to measure juice count?”
“Certainly, Focus.” His irritating self-contained confidence finally triggered something.
“You’ve dealt with Focuses before,” she said. He was too damned good at this for any other explanation to be true.
“Yes, Focus.”
“And Arms.”
“Yes, Focus,” he said, this time with a slight smile.
“Hmm,” she said, and thought. Things clicked.
“Out,” she said, to Melanie and John, and to the nurse who had followed them into the room. The receptionist was long gone. “You can wait in the waiting room. I’m safe here.”
John and Melanie eyed Smith suspiciously, but they left. The nurse followed. Smith raised his eyebrows at her.
“You’re part of the Network, aren’t you?” If Dr. Smith was part of the Focus Network, the non-Transform friends and underground dealers with all things Transform, then Focuses far more senior than her had cleared him.
Dr. Smith shrugged, a wicked grin playing at the edge of his mouth. “You could say that.”
“All right, I suppose I should have figured this out earlier. The Commander does have contacts with Tonya, after all.”
“So may I conduct the tests now?”
“Right. Of course. Just tell me what you’re doing.” Tell me what you’re doing while I search my memories for where I’ve run into you before, Gail didn’t say.
“Certainly, Focus. Now, if you would disrobe…”
“Dr. Smith?”
“Yes, Focus,” Smith said, as he measured the diameter of her right biceps.
“Have you been working with Her for very long?” Gail sat on the examining table in her underwear, as Smith measured and tested.
“Hmm? A few years.” He wrote down the measurement in her rapidly expanding chart and moved to her forearm.
“What’s she like?”
Smith stopped his measuring and raised his eyebrows at her, generating wrinkles all the way up his forehead. “She’s a predator. She’s hard, she’s smart, and she can be appallingly cruel. But of anyone in the world, she’s the one I’d most want to have on my side.”
Gail looked away.
“You’re having a little bit of trouble with her, aren’t you?” Smith said, reading her far too accurately.
“Well, yes,” Gail said. “She doesn’t seem to think much of me.”
Smith backed up a step and looked her over carefully. “She’s been pushing your buttons pretty hard, hasn’t she?”
Gail glared, and then threw up her hands. “She doesn’t have to insult me every time I breathe. I mean, would it kill her to be polite? I can’t even move, and she tells me I’m incompetent. What the hell is she doing with this?”
“Hmm, well, she’s trying to save the world. Here, hold out your arm.” He wrapped the measuring tape around her forearm and noted the measurement in the chart.
Gail froze at his words. “What?”
“You know. Save the world.”
“What does this experiment of hers have anything to do with saving the world?”
Smith looked at her appraisingly again. “How much have you thought about the future, and what Transform Sickness is going to do to the world?”
“A hell of a lot, actually.”
“And what is your analysis?”
“All the news is bad news,” Gail said. Her current science group – Helen and Roger Grimm, Sylvie, and Van – always kept her abreast of the latest. With this new training, she realized she would need to up the science team’s numbers again. “More people transform every year, every year the normals feel more threatened, and some of them attack Transforms and their reactions are getting worse. Since Nixon came in, the government’s stopped supporting Transforms. Despite the Cause Tonya and her political allies push, none of the Major Transforms can work with each other. Hell, the Focuses can’t even work among themselves.”
“And what are you doing about the problem?”
“I’m working on Transform civil rights. We’ve got to move past this prejudice thing, or we’re going to have an explosion like you can’t even imagine when the number of Transforms gets too large.”
Smith nodded. “Carol is working on building the links between the Major Transforms. At the juice level.”
Gail raised an eyebrow. “And this little experiment of hers is part of that?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call this little,” Smith said. “She’s looking for reasons for Major Transforms to need each other. If a Focus can give juice to an Arm, that’s a big one.”
“The juice linkage thing is what I don’t understand. If the Major Transforms just worked together like civilized human beings, we wouldn’t need to go hunting for any dangerous juice-level linkages.”
“You think it’s easy for Major Transforms to get along?”
“Well, why shouldn’t it be easy?”
“So, why don’t you work with the Arm?”
“Because she’s obnoxious as shit, that’s why!”
Smith looked at her. Gail ran her words through her mind and winced. Smith was good.
“You know,” Smith said, gently, “all the Arms are as obnoxious as shit.” She nodded. “And all the Crows are flat out impossible.” Another nod. Even the best of the Crows she dealt with she wanted to strangle at times. “And the Chimeras are downright disgusting.” She shrugged; the Nobles she had met had been quite polite, but she hadn’t ever met one outside of the public spotlight. “The Focuses, of course, are backstabbing and treacherous.”
“All right, all right, you’ve made your point,” Gail said. Smith here had way too much experience with Major Transforms. “None of the Major Transforms want to work together save at arm’s length. Pardon the pun. Hancock thinks she can get around the problem with this project?”
“If a Focus can give juice to an Arm, that will build a juice-level link between Focuses and Arms, and both will be stronger. Immensely stronger, perhaps to the point where some Focus Households will have Arms living with them and protecting them, either physically or by intimidation. With luck, an Arm slash Focus community would be strong enough to deal with the more recalcitrant Crows and Chimeras, or the problems caused by Transform Sickness itself when it grows out of control.”
“So I suppose you’re telling me not to expect Hancock to be reasonable to deal with.”
“Carol is a very reasonable Arm.”
“Right.”
“If you can find that connection point between you, I think you’ll find the two of you won’t have any trouble with each other. Until then, I think things may be a bit rough. For both of you.”
“Wonderful. Saving the world.”
“Yes.”
“Shit.”
“Let’s talk about juice patterns, Focus,” Dr. Smith said, after he finished his examination. Gail lifted her head from her clothes, startled. Juice patterns were a big secret of the older Focuses, kept secret from youngsters like herself, but she heard rumors. A mystery. Gail forgot her irritation with Hancock immediately at the scent of a mystery.
“What about juice patterns?” she said, as she finished buttonin
g her blouse.
“If you will come this way?” Smith led her back to the laboratory, where the tables were piled high with papers filled with odd notations. Gail picked up a couple of sheets and attempted to make sense out of them, but had no luck.
“Juice patterns are chemical structures a Focus uses whenever she manipulates juice. When you move juice to a member of your household, you use a juice pattern. When you tag someone, you use another juice pattern. When you tune your charisma to a specific effect, you use a different juice pattern.”
Gail frowned. Based on what she had learned, juice patterns were only mental shortcuts and mnemonic devices to give a Focus leverage over the juice, allowing high-level juice manipulation. Then again, common wisdom among Focuses tended to be utter crap, from her experience. This doctor here seemed to be on to something, if he talked chemistry. She started to take mental notes to pass along to her science people.
“These chemical structures can be found in a Focus’s blood. I’ve been developing a mechanism for representing these chemical structures.”
“This looks like music,” Gail said. The style was the same, even if the details differed.
Smith looked at her quizzically. “I suppose it does, a little bit. Each of these symbols and positions represents a single component to a juice pattern. I’ve found, so far, nineteen components involved in juice patterns. The specific arrangement is significant, as well as time, sequence, intensity, and several other factors that I’ve had to make up names for.”
“So you’re telling me you can take a blood sample of me when I’m doing something, say, a tag, and turn it into pseudo sheet music?”
Smith nodded. “This isn’t fully developed, but yes. I can.”
“So does it work the other way? Am I supposed to be able to look at this and create a specific juice pattern from it?”
Smith nodded again, this time with a small smile. “That’s the idea, once you learn to read the symbology and equate the symbols with specific chemical release.”
“So what if the juice pattern came from some other Focus? Could I duplicate their juice pattern just by reading the sheet?”
“Almost. There are some specific adjustments that you need to make in order to replace the other Focus’s personal identifiers with your own, but that should be straightforward.”
“All juice patterns.”
“This is still under development, and I expect I haven’t found all the components, but yes. All juice patterns.” Smith appeared ever so slightly pleased with himself.
Gail shook her head. This was nuts. And huge. No-account doctors in office park ghettos didn’t come up with advances of this nature. This was the sort of thing teams of researchers working in major research centers dreamt up. Projects like this got published in academic journals and the researchers won prizes and awards. This wasn’t the sort of thing hack doctors did in their personal laboratories.
If he really came up with some method of allowing Focuses to trade juice patterns, he would change the entire dynamic of how Focuses operated. Learning and skills would spread like wildfire. All the Focuses would become tremendously more powerful, and they would do so quickly. This was also a political nuclear bomb. The bitch patrol would die of apoplexy, before racing each other to assassinate everyone who knew this existed.
Such as Dr. Smith. She was surprised he was still alive.
“You’re serious,” Gail said, her voice a rough whisper.
“Yes, Focus.”
“This is insanely dangerous!”
“As you have likely deduced, I do already have a price on my head,” Dr. Smith said. “They can only kill me once.”
Gail closed her eyes and shivered. If she mastered this before the bitch patrol killed them all off, she might be able to use these new skills to protect her household. If he offered. “They can kill me far more times than that,” she said, whispering. She opened her eyes to see Dr. Smith nod in agreement.
“As part of your training effort with Arm Hancock, I’d like you to work on learning to read and duplicate juice patterns. The method you’ll be using to pass juice to an Arm will involve codified juice patterns. Arm Hancock and I are betting that by combining the two projects, we can achieve the critical synergy necessary to get around our previous failures.”
Critical synergy? Now he sounded like a competent professor, not a hack doctor stuck in a junk office with a leaky roof. “If you’re offering to teach me juice patterns, then I accept,” she said. One of the big secrets of the most powerful Focuses looked like it was about to fall into her lap for free.
“Yes, Focus. That’s the idea.”
Except for his ability to resist her charisma, Smith seemed perfectly ordinary. A little more confident and competent than she expected, but still ordinary. Then she looked at this huge juice pattern project, with all its implications, and she couldn’t make her mind attach it to this ordinary hack doctor in front of her.
“You need better security,” she said. On the other hand, maybe Smith was just a talented bullshit artist, or a nut with delusions of grandeur. Except all these complex sheets filled with indecipherable annotation looked much more meaningful than some half-crazed doctor’s odd delusions.
“The Arms see to my security.”
Arms. Plural. Hell. Arm Keaton and Arm Haggerty, Teacher’s current bosses, were involved as well. Perhaps even some of the younger Arms.
“Are the other senior Arms going to be teaching me as well?”
Dr. Smith smiled. “There may be other Arms involved, as well as some Focuses and Crows. At some point we’re going to need your old pal Crow Gilgamesh and his fancy metasense to help us figure a way around some problems I’ve already anticipated.”
Gilgamesh? If Dr. Smith had the ability to teach her juice patterns, she wanted it, even if this led her into the hottest political explosion she could imagine. But this didn’t make sense. Who was this guy, anyway? She had never heard of any Dr. Smith in any of the myriad professional articles she had read on the subject.
This mystery would not go unsolved.
The Quest
“British Columbia Crows report anomalous dross accumulations near Lake Okanagan and speculate this is due to Ogopogo, the mythical sea monster long reported to live in the lake (earliest known reports are by the First Nations peoples in the 1800s, and their name for Ogopogo is ‘the lake demon’). Is this true?” – from Arm Haggerty’s Speculative Projects List
Carol Hancock: July 18, 1972 – July 22, 1972
Cooper’s Seafood sat just a few hundred yards from Lori’s Boston household, and around back was a delivery alley no one used during the day. I could spend hours in the alley, just metasensing. Sometimes, I thought there wasn’t anything in the world as beautiful as the never-ending weave of the juice. The household danced, endlessly revolving around itself as they played and worked and loved and fought. I understood the Crows, then, and why they spent such effort to make art out of juice. Nothing else compared.
I worried about Gilgamesh. Of the Cause’s known and hidden enemies, our Crow enemies seemed the worst, and yet there he went, charging right into the attack. The Arm in me understood his logic, and I would even approve such actions in another Arm, but Gilgamesh wasn’t another Arm. He was my Crow, my lover, my companion of many years, and the knowledge of the danger he faced twisted in my stomach. Even more, I hated that he faced the danger alone, without me to protect him.
I knew no way to help him. I worried anyway, for another ten useless minutes before I pulled my thoughts away from the worry and watched Lori. She worked, hard, and I let my tensions relax at her glow in my metasense. She hunched over a desk, reading papers and making occasional notes. Her juice glowed with an intensity that made the rest of her household pale by comparison. Brilliant, vibrant, her juice sang with energy and a myriad complex patterns. I could watch the juice song endlessly, losing myself in the echoes reflected in the juice signatures of her people.
So beautiful, so per
fect, so fragile. Every time I encountered Lori’s metapresence I ached, and I wondered what cruel world had put her in Boston instead of Chicago. If I could have anything in the world that I wanted, it would be to make this precious beauty my own, but I didn’t know any safe way to do so. Maybe someday, if I solved the puzzle I worked on with Gail, I would understand how to build a tie to Lori that didn’t eat both of us alive or tear us apart irrevocably. Until then, I survived on rare visits, and watched from the alley behind Cooper’s Seafood.
I had watched long enough, though. Time to visit and my stomach knotted with useless juvenile terror. What if this time, finally, she really understood my flaws, and refused to have anything to do with me? What if my clumsy Arm manners made her mad at me?
What if I slipped and hurt one of her people?
I shook the worries away as long discarded childish insecurities. If Lori hadn’t rejected me so far, nothing I did now would likely cause her to change her mind.
I recognized the guard who answered the door to my knock, Autumn Maybray, but she didn’t recognize me. I wasn’t surprised. The pressures of the FBI’s recent Arm hunts forced me to extreme efforts with my disguise. I shifted my position minutely and let the air of predator show through.
The light went on. Autumn smiled and nodded.
“Come in, come in. You know where the Focus is.” I did, and headed up the stairs. No one escorted me, and I marveled at the trust and confidence that let them accept an Arm in their house so easily.
Lori met me halfway down the hall, big black circles under her eyes. She had been pushing herself too much again.
“Come on, we can talk in the library.” Ah, Lori, not willing to have me so close as I would be in her cramped bedroom. She smiled at me, honestly glad to see me. The touch of wonder in her eyes echoed my own.
You would think, after all these years, we would have figured out a way past our own natures to be happy, but no. We still lived hundreds of miles away from each other, and contented ourselves with phone calls and the occasional visit. The welcoming glow of her household stroked my metasense, luring me in and attempting to persuade me to stay forever. Right. I would live here the way a fox would live in a chicken-coop: fun for the fox, bad for the chickens.
The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) Page 21