Gail’s father stood in the bed of the trailer, loading suitcases and random boxes. Another man Gail didn’t recognize stood at the foot of the trailer, handing boxes up. Van stood over to the left, loading a laundry basket full of clothes into his old junker, once red but now so rusted you couldn’t tell the color by looking. All over the parking lot, people were loading and carrying and hurrying in and out.
Everyone stopped moving when the orderly wheeled Gail out of the building. Every head turned and all conversation ceased; they just stared at her. None of the faces held love or affection. Even the faces of Sylvie and Kurt were cold as they stood by their car. The Transforms were the worst, their faces gray with a kind of sick fear at the very sight of her. Sylvie grimaced at her, an expression of bleak sadness and despair, before she turned away.
So this is my household, Gail thought. She sighed, looking them over. They are who they are, and they have no more control over this than I do.
She glanced over to Van for help, wishing desperately that he would say something to pull her out of this terrible moment in the spotlight of despite. However, he stood as quiet as the others, caught in the sudden silence. She wished Van would speak up, take charge. Van never would in a situation that sprung up with no warning, though; these sorts of situations flustered him. He dealt with things slowly, after long thought. He would fight for her, even with her father, but not without thinking about it and planning every detail and word first.
Her father whistled. “Put her up in the lead car,” he said to the orderlies, pointing to the Ford attached to the flatbed trailer.
“What, not tied to the trailer, father?” Gail said, a whisper. She closed her eyes, not wanting to see her fate. The bustle resumed around her, all the people carefully ignoring her as she came close, and staring at her after she passed. It was a long way across the full length of the parking lot to the lead car. Gail didn’t want to be going there. She wanted to be going with Van, but she didn’t have the energy to fight her father.
As the orderly wheeled Gail across that parking lot, though, her terrible never-ending headache began to fade. At first Gail couldn’t believe it, and remained seated, edgy, waiting for the pain to return. Halfway across the parking lot Gail lost her patience. She leapt out of the wheelchair and stumbled out of the embrace of the orderly who tried to corral her.
“Hey! The headache’s gone!” she said. The people closest to her stepped back as if she was a loon.
Without warning, the juice moved, bam! The way the juice was supposed to move. Without the least effort Gail took some juice from her juice buffer and gave it to Sylvie. Then to another Transform woman. Then to another Transform, a man. Whoosh! Gail set them at their optimum points, the way the brochures said she should be slowly teaching herself to do. All three turned to Gail with expressions of stunned amazement on their faces.
Sylvie collapsed to the ground a moment later, laughing and crying helplessly with the sudden release of the long torment. Gail found herself crying, tears of happiness and relief. In a sudden enthusiasm, Gail climbed up on the hood of her father’s Ford.
“Gail, get down from there! Get in my car!” her father shouted at her.
She ignored him, turning her attention to the other Transforms, the ones who remained inside the building. Six of her Transforms, still suffering from low juice. She tried to move their juice, but she couldn’t, awakening the old headache. When she closed her eyes in frustration, she metasensed a black cloud around the building, malevolent and brooding. Dammit!
“‘It’s bad’,” Gail said to herself, her reporter’s curiosity returning for the first time since Focus Adkins’ visit. “The Focus bitch said the building was bad.” Now, outside, Gail metasensed the badness. The foul crap tasted like spoiled milk.
Cool.
All she had needed to do was take a walk outside with her Transforms and they wouldn’t have had to spent weeks in pain. How stupid. How unbelievably, futilely stupid.
“Get everyone outside!” The people in the parking lot just looked at her, still uncomprehending. “Kurt, Van, don’t you understand? The building is bad! It was screwing up the juice, keeping me from being able to move juice out of my juice buffer. Get those people out of the clinic and I can fix them!”
One by one, the other six Transforms in her household escaped the oppressive interference of the clinic, and as each one did, Gail set them to their optimum points. It was comical, almost, as each face echoed the relief, amazement and delight of the last when their turn came. Gail laughed for the joy of her juice moving.
With her burst of giddy laughter, the move turned into a party. Even the normals caught the mood, smiling uncontrollably. One Transform man shouted for joy, and Gail spotted the witch bitch Grimm laughing and crying at the same time, huddled over by her husband’s pickup. They all started to dance, caught up in Gail’s mood, and Gail danced with them, and even the normals joined in. She didn’t need her eyes. They were all there in her head and she echoed their every emotion. Melanie, still distraught because her boyfriend left her because she transformed. Sylvie, curiosity outweighing all other emotions. Grimm, resigned and hurting. Ed Zarzemski, an older man with a weathered face and salt-and-pepper hair. Anita Bartusch, a woman in her thirties, whose hair was the most astonishing shade of red. John Guynes, the Transform who had shouted for joy, a young man with dark brown hair and a twinkle in his eyes, as if he laughed inwardly at the whole world. Betha Ebener, who like Helen Grimm looked too old to have gotten Transform Sickness, grandmotherly, with black hair salted by grey. Tricia Bluen, Gail’s age, wearing a short skirt and waving her peroxide blonde hair in the breeze as she walked up to Gail to give her a hug. Vera Bracken, a woman in her forties, dressed in a conservative dress and understated makeup, a severe hairdo and a generous smile. Husbands and wives. Children. A baby who couldn’t be more than a few weeks old. Gail couldn’t believe it. She had children. These were her people, her responsibility, always in her head, always anchored by her metasense.
They didn’t hate her.
“It was the building,” she said, looking around at the eager faces, all watching her. Except her father, who sat in the car, steaming. Gail felt awkward to be the center of all this attention. “Something was wrong with the building. I don’t know what. But something in the building kept me from moving the juice out of the household juice buffer. That’s why we were all so miserable. All we have to do is stay away from the building.”
They looked at her, and looked at each other.
“So what happens now?” Ed said.
“Now? Now, I guess we move. I’ll keep the juice moving. We figure out how to all live together.” Gail laughed, still giddy with relief about the end of her terrible headache. Memories returned, of tests, term papers and student life, and even the cruel Focus, with her lectures about punishment and fear and control. She would never take that path. Never. She didn’t need to. They would be a family, a commune, together, and everything would all work out naturally. She wouldn’t need to be their slave – and they wouldn’t need to be hers.
“There’s more,” she said. “Once we get to…” she waved her hands around vaguely “to wherever it is we’re going, we’ll have to figure out how to live as a household. I’m not going to try to impose my will on all of you. We’ll figure it out together. Everybody here gets a vote, and we’ll work things out based on what’s best for everyone.”
Everyone was still smiling, this time with a different kind of relief. Gail looked at those faces, and knew she made the right decision. Her way, treating people with respect, rather than heavy-handed authoritarianism, would be better.
Every few minutes she caught herself accidentally moving juice, always from her Transforms and back to her. Then she would fix it, but as soon as she relaxed, the juice started moving on its own again. Over and over again this happened. Soon moving the juice became work.
So much for the party and the Transform utopia. “Hey!” she said, waving her arms a
round towards the waiting cars. “We’ve got a home to go to. I’m handling the juice. Let’s go!” Her parents remained in their car, glowering and tight lipped. She rapped on the car window next to her mother. “I’m riding with Van! See you at this new place!”
Gail watched as people scattered, back to the cars and to the building, to finish packing and loading. Sylvie looked back at her as she left, and she wasn’t the only one. A worn, tired look flickered across her friendly face. Gail’s stomach sank. Those people depended on her and she had a terrible nagging suspicion this responsibility would be a lot harder to live up to than she had ever dreamed. Moving juice was work, hard work, hard work that would never end. Never.
Adjustments
(9)
“I like the idea, Ed,” Gail said, looking around the tiny room with a happy glow. The Ebeners had most recently used the room as a storage closet, but originally the room served as an infant’s room, accessible from the master bedroom and the hallway. Dusty floor and peeling wallpaper, but abundant with possibilities. “It’s certainly less excessive than sticking us in the master bedroom.” Which is what the household had initially suggested.
Ed Zarzemski, an older, almost grandfatherly man with salt and pepper black hair, wobbled. “Focus,” he said, a whisper.
“Oh, sorry.” She had goofed again. An instant of personal happiness, and every Transform in the house was high on juice. Being a Focus was harder than she ever thought it would be, and not because of the difficulties predicted by the pamphlets. The miniscule juice flow recommended in the pamphlets wasn’t the problem; she never needed the bolded ‘don’t forget to move the juice’ pamphlet warnings. Instead, the juice reacted intensely to her every emotion. Every day she grew more tired, whether she worked around the house with the others, moving furnishings, cooking, going to bring a new Transform into her household, or just sitting around and shooting the breeze with people.
Four hours later, near dinner, Van pulled up in his junker, from his daily commute to U of M. Gail rushed out to meet him. He was frazzled and stressed, and Gail knew why. The life they constructed here wasn’t his dream, and he was having a hard time adjusting to the necessary daily commute. “We came up with a usable compromise on where they’re going to stick us,” Gail said, hugging Van.
“Great! Uh, Gail, the Transforms are all wobbly.”
Damn. She had pumped them again, this time way past what she guessed was the stimulation optimum, all the way to whatever strange limit she reached when she pumped up the Transforms too much. She didn’t think the juice level she hit was close to the make-them-into-Monsters point, but it was high enough to hurt them. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and carefully moved their juice levels back to normal. “You want to take a look?” Gail said.
Gail led Van through the kitchen, setting off Gail’s now growling stomach. Leaving the Clinic that had ‘gone bad’ had awakened her appetite something fierce. She had thought she had been hungry in the clinic, but her constant hunger now was insane. She already ate twice as much as even the larger men, enough to draw a few ‘huh’ reactions, and she had started to worry that if she didn’t find a way to stop her food binge, she would end up fat.
“It’s a closet!” Van said, unhappy, after Gail introduced them to their new room. Gail winced. “I can’t live in a closet. Where am I going to work?” The time he had taken off from working on his dissertation, to care for Gail right after she had transformed, had put him way behind schedule, and his advisor had told him they wouldn’t be extending the contracted teaching hours that paid for his degree. It left him cranky.
She had been so worked up over the wonderful compromise, between household queen in the largest room in an old farmhouse with tiny rooms to start with, and on the other end, sharing a bunk bed with Van in a room with six other adults, that she had forgotten about Van’s issues.
Thump, thumpity thump. Gail turned to the noise and backed away from the still muttering and unhappy Van. Vera Bracken lay at the bottom of the stairs, moaning. She had fallen down the stairs! Gail rushed down the hall to find out how badly Vera was hurt.
“Focus, juice,” Vera said, a breathy whisper.
Gail gasped in horror, knowing exactly what she had done. Van’s unhappiness over the small infant’s room had destroyed Gail’s good mood, and she had unconsciously stripped juice from every Transform in the household. All the way down to the funny lower juice level point where Gail herself felt pain. She put everyone’s juice back. “Sorry, sorry,” Gail said. “Are you hurt?” Gail helped Vera sit up; the always immaculately dressed business-woman looked mussed, but save for a scrape or bruise, she wasn’t hurt at all.
As she helped Vera, Gail couldn’t help but pick up the emotion Vera radiated – annoyance at Gail.
She picked up a lot of that recently.
---
“I’m sorry, Gail, but we think it’s for the best,” Kurt said. Ed moaned; Gail had shorted his juice, enough to notice, as they stood nearly a hundred yards from the Ebener farmhouse, near the tiny three-tree orchard of pear trees. “It’s temporary, only until you get enough control over the juice so you aren’t pumping and stripping people by accident.”
Three days. She and Van had lasted all of three days in their tiny farmhouse room, before it came to this. The day before yesterday, Kurt and Ed had braced her on another topic, the household evening meetings. Everyone wanted to do anything Gail would suggest, just to get the pleasurable surge of juice Gail gave them every time the dark cloud of pain lifted. Which happened every time a vote went her way. Even Van thought she needed to withdraw from those meetings. Gail hadn’t fought the exile from the meetings; she had seen the same behavior herself.
Now, this.
“Do you think this will help?”
“We’ve noticed you don’t short people as much when they’re farther away,” Kurt said. “We’ve got a family sized tent for you and Van. It’s a little old and leaky, but we can fix that by putting up a plywood temp roof. It’s just until things settle down.”
“Okay,” Gail said. She expected Van to have a fit. For one thing, even a family-sized tent wasn’t tall enough for him to stand and not hit his head.
Exiled.
Dammit. Moreover, everything was all her fault, the usual.
Gail took a deep breath and tried to relax. “Cots?” No room for a real bed in a tent.
“Cots.”
Gail helped as they unpacked the old musty tent and set it up, a dozen yards from the edge of the giant vegetable garden. The old thing was a Guynes family heirloom, and as promised, she could see through the tent roof when she looked up.
She looked down, stomping down patches of tough Michigan grass and the bulges they created in the tent floor. With each day, her optimistic dreams she had spun in her head during the drive from the Transform Clinic to the Ebener farm wore away more. Not only didn’t her people come to like her, their dislike had grown, and they now lived in fear of her moods and tempers.
Dammit.
After they finished setting up the tent, she sat in it, alone, waiting for Van to come back from U of M. This time, she would make sure she stayed outside metasense range of her Transforms when she braced Van with yet another unpleasant surprise.
---
Plink. Plink.
A weekend, and no Van. He had bailed on her 30 minutes after her parents showed up, gone to U of M to work on his dissertation.
Gail looked over to the pot to make sure the rusty old copper-bottomed piece of trash wasn’t full of rainwater again. Three days of rain, which she didn’t like, and three days of unseasonable May cold, not unexpected for Michigan, but surprisingly pleasant for her. The rest of the household bundled up when they went outside, but Gail didn’t bother.
Gail was bailing on her parents also, fled to the humid closeness of her mangy tent. Her father tried to run everything, annoying Gail and degrading her juice control.
Two weeks in the Ebener farm, and her people still
didn’t like her. Most of her people, especially the ones who had been with her in the Clinic, continued to view her with suspicion and resentment, their emotions slowly twisting into darker things. The newer people, especially the new Transforms, viewed her with fear and attempted to flatter her, do her little favors in order to win her approval, and win the sudden surge of extra juice she sometimes gave people when they pleased her. The last was almost worse.
Where had her good intentions gone? She didn’t want to manipulate her people. She refused to use the power Transform Sickness had given her. Where had it gotten her?
Her good intentions had gone down the toilet because her people had cut her out. She wanted to be an equal, not socially ostracized. Not their slave.
Gail wouldn’t have had a physical problem with gathering all her Transforms in a room and saying “Low juice for anyone who disobeys me.” Just thinking about the morality of laying down the law in such a fashion made her ill. Not only were her Transforms’ lives in her hands, but she was responsible for their sanity, even their ability to go through the day without pain. Gail wanted to let them live normal human lives, not spend their time worshipping their Focus and doing Gail’s every whim. She wanted to be another member of the household.
They wouldn’t let her, and everything slipped out of control. Two days ago, there had been this big argument about tents, latrines and septic tanks. Factions were forming. Gail wanted to know what was going on, but they had all sworn each other to secrecy. If the Focus knew what was going on, she would take sides, and that side would win.
Adkins was right. Her people were slowly enslaving her. She invited her Transforms to enslave her. Gail didn’t see any way around the problem.
Her people were shouting again. Gail had kept to herself in her tent in the past week, or walked the Ebener farm. Bored, alone, treated like a piece of machinery when anyone would deign to talk to her. This time, she would find out what the fight was about, secrets or not.
No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Seven) Page 6