No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5)

by Randall Farmer

  He panicked and found himself on the roof of Bob’s barn. He refused to move until Lori hunted him down.

  “Sky? Would you mind telling me what in the bloody blue blazes you’re doing here and what you did to my household? Why did I need to retag them and why can I suddenly support an extra triad?”

  He curled tighter into a fetal ball.

  Lori sat beside him and touched him. Recoiled.

  “It’s gone,” she said, surprised, instantly going from angry to sad.

  He didn’t answer. He knew full well what was gone.

  “Sky, please. I need to know what’s going on. With this crazy rebellion of mine eating all my attention, I don’t have time to play twenty questions with a Crow.”

  “Tell me about the rebellion, what’s going on,” Sky said, an archetypical Crow whisper. “Help me, please, for I’ve seen too much.” He stayed curled up, fetal.

  Lori leaned back on the roof and studied the clouds. “The rebellion’s become a game of shadows and spite,” she said, resigned. “I’m under investigation at Boston College for supply theft and taking bribes to change grades. Complete drivel. The IRS is auditing Inferno and Charade, Flo’s household. I’ve got a total of twelve votes pledged in my attempt to unseat Biggioni, only every one of them is getting hinted at that if they do vote for me, the same thing will happen to them that’s happening to me. Or worse. I put together a whispering campaign against Biggioni, based on what I know she did; although everything is all true, the tales are so fantastic my whispering campaign sounds like a smear campaign. I know, Focuses. And, yes, you’re right, they’re responding even better to what I’m saying because it sounds like a smear campaign, and poor old Tonya’s phone’s no longer ringing with Focus issues or Network problems. I’ve shut her down, properly shunned. Three of my people have been contacted with bribery offers if they’ll turn on me. One of the offers came in person, to Steve; he fought the person, got arrested, I got him out, what a mess.” Lori’s anger rose with each word she spoke, though this time the anger wasn’t aimed at him. “Half the time I’m afraid Flo’s going to crack under the pressure and desert the rebellion, the rest of the time I’m afraid I’m going to crack and start killing people.”

  She paused and breathed deeply. “Thank you for listening. Keeping all of that bottled up inside makes me want to scream, sometimes.”

  They listened to the night sounds together for a quarter hour.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, when his instincts told him to speak. “A peace seeps in after all my major low juice episodes. A tiny rebirth. A reattachment to the immanence of the world. All the lies stripped away, the naked truth revealed. Over time, all my old flaws will reappear, some sooner, some later. Mademoiselle Focus, I spent three weeks bouncing on the edge of withdrawal. The world is a snowflake, a different snowflake every time.”

  “You took my household away from me!”

  “Hold your household looser, love them more, and they will always come back.”

  Lori pounded her tiny fist on the Bob’s Barn roof. “I took my household back, but I had to retag half my Transforms to do so.” Pause. “Do it again. I don’t care how much this hurts. Whatever insanity you did just saved three lives.”

  “I didn’t do anything. Big. A little trash cleanup, the lot of all Crows. I just found different trash this time,” Sky said. He uncurled and sat up, shifting so he wouldn’t slide down the shingles on the pitched barn roof. Lori looked and metasensed unhinged. As she should be. “I danced with Annie in my mind. Sadie’s dross leak lost you that triad of yours you once could support. The leak’s fixed now. The rest probably doesn’t matter.”

  Lori blinked. “Oh. The timing’s a little off, but a four month delay from Sadie’s Monster wound and the loss of the triad isn’t outside of the realm of possibility.” She didn’t fully believe him; she didn’t trust his analysis and thought more was going on. He didn’t care.

  “You should find life easier around your own Transforms as well,” Sky said. “Sadie’s dross leak probably affected you like a splinter on the bottom of your foot.”

  “I’m better than that,” Lori said, stone faced. “A trivial annoyance at worst.”

  Sky snorted. “You don’t believe you have a sub-conscious mind, do you?”

  “Of course I believe… Oh. But conquering…”

  “Worthless. As worthless as taking a picture of me, setting it on your desk, and calling it love.”

  Lori turned away. “I’m sorry, Sky.” Pause. “The spark is gone.” The spark of love. The gift of the juice that had given them love. The loss had been what panicked him. “The spark’s been gone since the Hancock Rescue, but I hoped the loss was just temporary, that once you were back here the love would come back. That horrid place did something to me and when I fixed myself and you, you, dammit!” Her voice tailed off.

  “I became just another Transform to you.” The love between them had come from the juice. Then they had walked into corruption and been corrupted and now the little spark of love from the juice was gone. All that was left was real love, and it wasn’t enough.

  She nodded. A brother, not a lover.

  “I understand. We can work through this. Start over. If the spark never returns, so be it.”

  “There’s another problem,” Lori said. “You, uh, I met Gilgamesh and, uh, this happened again. The spark.”

  Sky leapt to his feet, asphalt shingle crumbs skittering down the roof from his motion. “Gilgamesh? Gilgamesh!”

  This was beyond insane. This was insulting. He took a five step running leap and practically flew over to the estate’s pool, where he dove in and curled up, fetal, on the bottom.

  ---

  “I’m surprised you’re not leaving,” Connie said. Lori was still asleep, in her own tiny room, sleeping off her Friday night juice binge.

  Sky sat on the back patio, nurturing an iced tea with a lemon stuck on a parasol. Connie, Tim, Sadie and Ann had joined him. Both Tim and Connie were practically bouncing out of their flip-flops over the change in his and Sadie’s relationship.

  “I have a proposal,” Sky said, serious, actively exuding fierceness. Losing Lori to a poser like Gilgamesh had, once he worked through the heartache, let him find his spine again. “Your household needs a Focus. I can’t move juice, but I can be the on-site Major Transform you need to help you with your dainty stealth missions and dirty trick squads. You’re in a war, my friends, and this is my type of war. I think it’s time to get Focus Schrum cited for violating zoning restrictions and for animal cruelty. If you catch my drift.”

  “Why are you talking to us?” Ann said. “You did draw us over here on purpose.”

  “I’m talking to you because you’re the ones I’m making the offer to. The, um, Rizzari rebellion will not succeed without Inferno’s help.”

  Connie nodded. “You can’t work this way,” Tim said. “The Focus will kill you for even thinking about this little takeover attempt of yours.”

  Sky smiled. “That’s true. That’s why you’re going to propose it to me, I’m going to refuse, you’re going to continue proposing, often with non-leader Transforms around. Only after a few days of this browbeating will I reluctantly agree.”

  That drew a big smile from all four Transforms. Sky lowered his eyebrows and continued to glower, fierce.

  “I think I like the new Sky,” Ann said. Hinting, flirty. Ah, tonight’s bed partner. Sky repressed a smile and continued to glower.

  “I think I do as well,” Sky said.

  Marde-sucking Gilgamesh might have won over Lori, but he hadn’t conquered Inferno, as had Sky.

  Let the best Crow win.

  Carol Hancock: June 6, 1968 – June 14, 1968

  “Hank, how are you doing so far?” I had moved my operation from Oklahoma City to Austin after finding far too many Chimera traces outside the Houston city limits. We were living out of a hotel room on South Congress, a funky part of Austin with enough hippies and freaks for me to blend in easil
y. I found the ‘blending in’ easier now, because of my less inhuman weight and muscles.

  “I’ve put together the disguises you asked for,” he said. He spread papers across the tiny hotel table. “The ones for me, as well.” He remained grumpy about the need for a disguise, but he slowly acquiesced to the necessity. He also remained a little edgy over his recent personal session with Keaton, but high as a kite over the research project. Keaton had sworn him to secrecy on the technical details of his little session with her, but I knew if I pressed, he wouldn’t be able to refuse me. I had enough sense not to force him.

  I had made a mental bet with myself that Keaton would fuck Zielinski silly. She never passed up an opportunity to needle me. She hadn’t hammed it up or anything, nor harmed him, which took work for an Arm.

  She had sent Zielinski off with her old juice meter, specifically to give to me as a present. I found, carved on the juice meter, an ‘SK’, thus another possession she now trusted me to keep and protect. The juice meter and the Zielinski sex sent me a message: ‘if you mess up Zielinski, I will have your guts for garters; you’re an Arm again, you’re mine and you will be judged accordingly’. I could live with her requirement. The payment, the incredible amount of money Keaton poured into this research project, was quite welcome, and another message. What I did was important to her, she wanted results from her investment, and she had her dormant money making organization going again.

  Zielinski continued down his checklist with the stubby hotel pencil while I watched him from my position seated on the edge of the near bed. “I’ve got the bank accounts set up, the personal ones and the transit accounts, to hold the money on its way in from offshore. I’ve located the plastic surgeon you wanted for me,” grimace, “and gotten the locations of the Texas and Louisiana Transform Clinics. I’ve also hired the private detectives you wanted to look into Haggerty’s background. Everything should be squared away within a week,” he said. “I’ve also got leads on the volunteer Transforms you need for Haggerty.” The private detectives wouldn’t be his long term responsibility, but until I started my recruiting, we would all be doing double and triple duty. We both realized that for a long time we would be depending on his Transform community contacts for things like volunteer Transforms for the baby Arms.

  “What about a Houston Network contact?” I said. I had also dropped that one on Hank’s lap.

  “I talked to Lori and got the list of local Houston Focuses, plus Lori’s evaluation of the ones she’s had contact with,” Hank said. “I’ve put my recommendations on the list, as well.” He handed me the list, and I read it over. Both he and Lori had recommended a Focus Laswell, who they described as a steel-spined Focus bitch with enough brains to run a positive cash flow.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll work that one immediately.” I still had to suppress the urge to go into a stalk around Transforms. I needed to fix that, given Keaton’s plans. I needed to be capable of doing anything with Transforms, up to and including making love to them.

  Establishing a new territory in such a cautious and thoughtful manner half bothered me. I had made one pass through Houston to get a sense for the place. It was larger than I expected, and my instincts said to expect Transform problems, but compared to Chicago or Pittsburgh they appeared to be small.

  I had been in many new towns, but this one would be mine, this town of oil and space and heat. I had never been to Houston before. When I thought of Texas, I thought of the dry West Texas desert and the somewhat greener Dallas.

  Houston was hot and wet, a reclaimed swamp, an extension of the swamps of Louisiana. A place of incredible green. Hibiscus, azaleas, mold, vines, and ancient live oaks covered with Spanish moss. And bugs. Lots of bugs. I didn’t know roaches got to be two inches long.

  My soon to be new territory was a vibrant, chaotic place. No zoning in the city, and the city itself was as wild a growth as the local vegetation. A place of big dreams, from the Texas oilmen, to the Ship Channel which made a city 50 miles from the ocean into a major port, to the impossible dream of space itself.

  A good place to forget past failures and start again. After seeing the skyscrapers and the freeways and the signs pointing to NASA I decided this city might be a good place for me, despite all my worries. I felt obscurely unfaithful to Chicago by my decision, but Chicago was gone from me for now.

  ---

  For my next project, I needed to improve my control around tagged Transforms and make contact with Focus Laswell, before I officially moved to Houston. Right now I suffered through a bad case of Keatonic paranoia. Caution became my middle name. My incarceration memories kept me on high alert.

  I also wanted to be able to visit Focus Rizzari’s household; from what Hank said on the subject, her household was the most interesting Transform tourist attraction on the planet. Plus, I wanted to prove to myself I could still learn new things and improve myself.

  My desires didn’t have anything to do with any need on my part to see Lori Rizzari again and lose myself in her beautiful glow. No, not at all.

  To start with, I found a tagged Transform in Austin, a truck driver delivering supplies to a restaurant on 6th Street, and followed him around until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I found a different Transform, this time a librarian at a library out by Town Lake, and did it again. I repeated this until I could deal with a tagged Transform at the edge of my range.

  After some meditation, I followed a Transform, this time a clerk at the JC Penney off I 35, closer, until the following bothered me so much I backed off. Damn but this was easier when these Transforms had a Focus around. I pushed myself to where I got to just outside of touching range of the tagged Transform without edging toward a stalk, but then my progress plateaued out.

  While money gathering in New Orleans the next day (a simple robbery of a successful heroin dealer) I found some prey, hunted her down, and got her just minutes before her Monster conversion. Yum. When I went back to my training the next day, with the juice monkey off my back, I found my problems with tagged Transforms mostly gone. I even struck up a conversation with the one I followed, a twenty-three year old bartender with an overbite, and the idiot hit on me. I decided to skip the sex test for now. Nevertheless, I didn’t fall into a stalk.

  Next I snuck myself into Houston with Hank and Frances, his acting secretary now. During the day I occupied them working on a huge list of information we needed, while I got a part time job. We commuted back to Austin every evening. Sleep wasn’t on my schedule save for once or twice a week, which burned through juice like you wouldn’t believe.

  The next step of learning to deal with tagged Transforms involved one Rosenda Renya, one of Focus Laswell’s Transforms, a gym manager. I hired myself out to her as a part time trainer at the gym, and spent a week with a bunch of Texas matrons with teased steel hair, teaching them to exercise without sweating. Now that is a specialized skill. In any case, I spent hours on end in close contact with Rosenda. Torture, utter torture. I only slipped once. I was low on juice and Rosenda was cranky because of some problem with her kids. She crowded me, verbally and physically, and I let the predator show. Only for an instant, and then I told her I was sick and needed to go home. Instead, I spent the rest of the day hunting in Houston, and at night in the Clear Lake area. I found an oil refinery worker, about to take his family down with him on his way to hell, and I saved their bacon as only an Arm could. As far as anyone would be able to tell, he died, at night, in one of those freak refinery accidents that only served to drive up refinery insurance rates.

  ---

  “So, is it possible? That the bad juice you found in me is causing this level of head problems? This gristle dross stuff?”

  Zielinski, sad frown on his face, closed the little journal of activities I had put together. Midnight was long past and the hotel was quiet, except for the low buzz of Frances snoring on the far bed. Zielinski nodded. “I can’t imagine the gristle dross isn’t causing some form of problem, ma’am. I believe we need to
find out what those problems are.”

  Hell. He only called me ma’am in private when he got formal and did what he termed ‘pulling on his tag’. Being Zielinski, he had of course figured out how to use the tag for his advantage. “Let me guess. No one knows how this works on normals, not to mention Transforms. Or Arms.”

  “Correct, ma’am.”

  My journal covered the time from when Zielinski ‘cured’ me to the present. He had done an in-depth analysis of my activities. His results showed me to be human: days off doing nothing, repetitively doing the same thing I should have been able to do once, and decisions put off until later.

  I wasn’t working on Arm time. I just thought I had been. I had to go without sleep just to keep up with a lazy Arm’s workload.

  The idea of facing withdrawal again to cure myself didn’t appeal. Zielinski thought his trick would work, and I wasn’t willing to ask him why. “It isn’t real withdrawal. It will just feel like withdrawal,” he said.

  Great. Just what I wanted to hear. I paced the small space at the foot of the beds, along the wall, and dresser, and old television. A couple of pictures of stylized flowers stared down at me, garishly colorful in the dim room.

  “Okay. I think I’m willing to try plan B.” Plan B was to see Lori, the expert on Crows, and arrange something similar to what Hank went through after his assassination experience. “Before you go, send Keaton one of your letters,” I said, pacing back to him and putting my foot on the second chair. I leaned my forearms on my knee. “Tell her what we’ve discovered and what we’re doing about the problem.” I invited Zielinski to plan for bad contingencies, of which far too many were possible. To insure his survival. I didn’t bother explaining. Zielinski could figure this one out for himself.