I smiled the death smile. Lori blanched and nodded. So far, I hadn’t heard anyone defend Wandering Shade and say he didn’t have to die. Lori looked at me, opened her eyes a little wider than normal, dilated her pupils slightly, tensed the muscles in her right arm, and then tensed the muscles around her mouth. Ah. She thought I was edging into things too dangerous to talk about, even here. Given what I had already revealed, her implications troubled me. The first Focuses might have her place bugged, she couldn’t do anything about the fact, and nothing I was likely to casually say would give these first Focuses any more information about the Arms because they knew so much about us already.
Based on her comments over the phone, I decided she was worried about the Feds.
“Anyway, I never told you why I’m here,” I said. “I have a problem. A medical problem.”
“Normally, I would refer you to a Henry Zielinski, but he seems to have dropped out of sight following a jailbreak. I’ve heard rumors he perished attempting to escape.”
Her comment was worth a sardonic grin, save I possessed better control than that. Lori and Zielinski had been in near constant communication since I let Sky go. She kept this information to herself. She did some eyebrow wiggling, indicating surprise about Zielinski’s inability to fix my problems. No stop sign, though.
“Are you familiar with bad juice?” She nodded. I stopped, and tried to signal to her about my personal problems with this juice. Perhaps a little complicated a message to send non-verbally. She relaxed her face slightly, which indicated to me the subject was safe.
“I have some that I can’t seem to get rid of.” I wasn’t about to say what problems the bad juice caused.
“Have some how?” she said, worried. The problem was familiar to her.
“The damned stuff is masquerading as fundamental juice. There’s an obvious way for me to deal with the problem, but I’m real skittish about using that method. I can take my numbers right down to where the floor should be, but I can’t force myself to take them any lower.”
She nodded. “I might be able to help you, but…” Lori didn’t ask what problems the bad juice caused, which indicated to me the problems weren’t something the first Focuses already knew about. At least as far as Lori knew.
She winced, though, just a bit. Something about this procedure of hers bothered her. “Go ahead,” I said. “I won’t get angry, whatever it is.”
She glanced away. The books on the shelves hadn’t moved. “You know Sky.”
“Uh huh.”
“And what triggered his little panic attack.”
“Yes.” First Focus Patterson, former haunter of my dreams, had haunted Sky in a big way when he helped rescue me from the CDC. Oh, and my raping him hadn’t helped, either.
Lori didn’t want to mention the name ‘Patterson’. She’s one of the people Lori feared had the place bugged. Damn.
“Intellectually he knows you’re an ally, but his gut won’t let him believe it. Once a Crow gets skittish, it takes a lot to un-skittish them.”
Same as Gilgamesh’s problem with me and bed-fun, then. “So he can’t help?”
“He can help, but only if you’re tied down.”
I took a deep breath. “Let me think about it some more, but at least preliminarily, I can agree.” I wanted the right to back out if I got skittish myself. I started visualizing what experiencing captivity again would be like. I didn’t like the concept. I wasn’t sure I would be able to control myself, allow myself to be shackled. I didn’t bother covering up my skittishness, either. I was sure Lori would understand.
She nodded.
“There’s one other thing you need to know about, but I want you to promise not to laugh around any of the participants.”
“No problem.”
Lori nerved herself up, which left her metapresence shrunk to a dot and glowing like a blinding star. “Sky and I sort of broke up which is awkward because I’m pregnant and he’s the father but he’s still here living in the attic not because of me but because of the Inferno Transforms who don’t want to let him go and I’ve somehow gotten myself linked to Gilgamesh the same way I’m linked to you and some of the Inferno members think that’s a wonderful idea for their Focus to have two Crows and there are others who think Major Transforms ought to set an example and be monogamous and I’m newer at the intricacies of romance than you are as an Arm and I can’t predict where my emotions are going to lead me in the next hour not to mention the next week or month and the whole idea I’m becoming a one Focus soap opera is eating into my confidence which isn’t the right thing to be doing right now in the middle of a rebellion I’m leading and although it’s going to hurt would you please make sure Gilgamesh goes with you when you leave?”
Focuses, it appears, didn’t have to breathe to speak.
“No laughter here,” I said. I for one fully understood the power of the juice over the deeper emotions. I had my own Gilgamesh problems. It would have been so easy to give up on what Arm edge I had left and succumb to the grief caused by his absence. I hadn’t, so far. “I’ll tell you what. How about I give you the story about my discovery satisfying the mission you gave me last year and you can tell me about my rescue from your point of view.” I was curious about the subject, as the one participant I knew, Keaton, was her usual terse self on the subject. Virtually useless.
Lori smiled. “Yes, let’s.”
---
Lori managed to conjure a full sit down dinner for seven in the recently rebuilt cabana. Her household put the dinner together while Lori and I mesmerized each other. Mesmerization has a lot to recommend it. A whole hour of nice happy glow, just staring at each other. Theoretically, we were trying to wear out the effect. Theory was good; I would be willing to experiment with this theory for a long time. Didn’t work, though. If anything, the attraction deepened. I found myself thinking bedroom thoughts and wanting to add to the soap opera Lori legend.
For the dinner, I requested Tim, Tina and Eileen, the three Transforms who had been in on the rescue with Lori, Sky and Keaton. I requested Sky as well but he turned me down. Lori added Ann Chiron (the anthropologist) and another woman Transform by the name of Connie Yerizarian. Connie, one of Lori’s young and energetic Transforms, was the actual head of the Inferno household. Betty Friedan would have approved.
We sat down to dinner just as the sun was setting, and a couple of Inferno Transforms served us a clear seafood chowder to start the meal. I gathered the eyes of the diners to me. “I wanted to formally thank your household, Connie and Lori, and especially you three, Tim, Tina and Eileen, for your part in the rescue,” I said, as humble as possible for an Arm. “You took some insane risks freeing me.”
Eileen blushed, Tim smiled, and Tina glowered. Interesting reactions. Tina, for one, looked like she had picked up a natural Keaton tag out of the mess. I would have to mention this to Keaton someday, so she could formalize the tag. I highly suspected Tina and I didn’t have compatible personalities. Eileen was, well, not someone I would have picked to be part of a rescue team. Too weak. Tim was complex, and beyond my ability to judge. I suspected he was at about the top end of the Transform spectrum, probably as talented in his own way as Zielinski.
“Thanks,” Tim said. “You’ve already repaid us non-Major Transform types by taking Sky down a few pegs. He needed it, badly, and because of what you did he’s taking life seriously for once.”
“Were you really able to tie him up?” Connie said. She and Ann were both, like Tim, top of the line people. Lori sure knew how to pick them. No mention of the ‘r’ word, though. Sky must have been covering for me, which I hadn’t expected. “None of us here can lay a hand on him when we’re sparring. Including the Focus.”
The Focus? I had thought that terminology was a Hank special. Hmm, Lori, perhaps you’ve let your people get a little too independent.
“I didn’t think it was anything special at the time. Watch.” I grabbed Lori’s arm, held her wondrous arm for a few moments, and
then let it go. “I’m rather fast these days.”
They were all suitably impressed, including Lori.
“So,” Lori said, twinkling. “Is all this enough to get you to reveal your solution to the Arm problem as opposed to just talk about it?” Awwh, how cute. She was trying to use her charisma on me.
“Is this something you want out in the open?” I said.
“Sure. No bugs here, save the insect kind. Everyone here is involved,” Lori said.
Both Eileen and Tina’s eyes widened. Lori had just promoted them, apparently.
“Focus?” Eileen said. “You sure?”
Lori nodded. “I’ve been doing too much decision making recently based on my instincts. I’m using my head this time.” Hmm. Sounded like Zielinski had spent as much time on Lori’s case about instinctive responses and alternatives as he had spent on mine.
“There’s a perfect example of my solution sitting at this table,” I said. “Tina wears a natural version of Keaton’s tag.” I gave the rest of them the same spiel about Arm tags I had given Lori. “For grins, I found I can tag weapons, dogs and horses, but not kitchen utensils, cats or gerbils. Not sure why, though.” I was actually rather pissed about the fact I couldn’t tag kitchen utensils. God got quite a chewing out for arranging this little bit of annoyance.
Ann took notes between sips of soup. She knew the answer to my question, something I would dig out of her later.
“Carol,” Lori said. “There’s a problem. I can’t sense this tag on Tina.”
“Probably because it’s not a very tight tag – Keaton tagged Tina naturally, without any formality involved,” I said.
“Could you tag one of my other Transforms?” Lori said. “With their permission, of course. I can probably metasense an Arm tag if you create the thing in front of me.”
Lori was being damned cavalier about these tags. Either that or damned cavalier about her people. Tags weren’t minor little juice effects. Her call though, about her people. I closed my eyes and tried to figure out how many I would be able to tag before I screwed myself, and ended up tied too tightly to Inferno. I visualized the tag network I would be creating and concluded I would be able to tag no more than a third of the Transforms in the place, max, before getting irrevocably tied into their household. Thus, tagging one or two shouldn’t be a problem.
“Yes, if they’re willing,” I said.
I looked at the Transforms in front of me. Tim was very willing, emotionally and intellectually. Damned if I didn’t think he was trolling for new opportunities or something. Ann was willing intellectually, but her emotions were warring inside her. I made the decision for her: if she was going to study me like she needed to, she needed the tag. “Tim and Ann seem set up for it.”
They both nodded, and Lori frowned. “You can sense this psychological compatibility, can’t you?” she said. “I can’t see it at all.”
“It has to be an Arm capability,” I said. “Focuses don’t get all the goodies.”
Everyone laughed, including Lori. “I know, I know. Arms aren’t just fighting machines. Ann and Sky keep beating me over the head with that.”
I slurped up the rest of my soup and then had Tim and Ann touch my skin and gaze into my eyes and say the magic words. Lori’s eyes went as wide as saucers. This time, she saw everything, possibly a lot more than I did, with her metasense and the juice pattern things she set up. “You figured this out all on your own, didn’t you?” Lori said. I nodded, my loins tightening because of her praise. “It’s incredible.”
We continued to talk until full night surrounded us, the incandescent lights inside the cabana keeping the darkness at bay. Crickets chirruped happily and Inferno murmured with the sounds of a household settling in for the night.
“You were different, physically, when you met us before, Arm Hancock,” Ann said. Now that I had her tagged, I realized she was one of Sky’s lovers.
Dessert was a fruit salad. A large fruit salad. I ate half of it.
I nodded. “Keaton and the gang seem to think I remade myself in Lori’s image.”
Lori stopped cold, her fork half way to her mouth. The grape balanced on the end of it wobbled and fell off. “We’d only met twice,” she said, in a whisper. Like it wasn’t her fault?
“Looks like there are psychological aspects to Arm development,” I said. Both Keaton and Zielinski were convinced of it. “When I first transformed, I hated being an Arm, and hated myself for being an Arm, and the thing I hated most was the damned muscles. Lo and behold, I became the most muscular Arm of all. After I met you, well, I admired your physical and intellectual capabilities as a Focus. The rest is history.”
Lori and Ann looked at each other like they had seen a ghost. “What?” I said. Lori turned away.
“The Focus disliked being a Focus after she transformed,” Ann said, quiet. “Disliked being a Focus with a passion. The mirror of the Arm physical development would appear to be the household structure of the Focus.”
Lori refused to meet any of our eyes. Knowing my own pain from my own post-transformation agonies, I knew it had to be bad, whatever she had done.
“So,” I said, forcing a change in the mood, “What exactly is ‘the Cause’? I know the basics, but what about the details? If I’m going to help you with your rebellion, I’d better learn all about it.”
Later, well after midnight, Lori showed me around Inferno some more, letting me take in the sights. In the basement was the bed she suggested we use for the operation. The damn thing was not what I would call a bed. It was another goddamn Monster autopsy table: huge, nine feet long, and stronger than the slab of metal the FBI had used. Why had they built the thing so strong? “Too many answers and you won’t be able to leave,” Lori said. I understood her warning. The best way to hold a Major Transform against their will was psychological, the way Keaton had captured Gilgamesh. Too many more Lilliputian threads tying me to her household and the Cause and it would suck me in and consume me. I already wanted Inferno to be mine.
The Cause, as they defined it, was to remake the Transform community from top to bottom so humanity would be able to survive the coming Transform Sickness ramp-up. They foresaw a future where Transform Sickness would sweep the globe, millions transforming every month, putting the survival of civilization itself at risk. All unless we found a way to increase the survival rate. In the end, they wanted to unite the Transforms into one group so we would be able to help each other – all the Transforms on the side of right and justice, coming up with Transform definitions of all those terms in the process. All the Transforms, including the Chimeras. Lori said she had sensed I was already working on this when we first met.
Lori had filled her household with fanatics devoted to this Cause. I had expected a Focus led cult, but here, in metasense range, I realized they followed what Zielinski called the ‘weak Focus’ model. Usually, this meant the Focus was little more than a slave to the household Transforms. Not Lori. She controlled things indirectly by picking and choosing which Transforms she took into her house and which got to leave; as a fellow control freak I knew perfectly well how much power the choosing gave her. Lori’s main responsibility was directed to the outside of the household: politics with other Focuses, as well as managing her Crow contacts, which sounded big until you realized Lori had only ever met six Crows in person. Her work did involve a lot of letter writing.
Oh. Couldn’t forget Lori’s research and teaching responsibilities. She was a full time professor and researcher, often putting in eighteen-hour days outside of the household. This didn’t match what Hank had told me about how Focuses worked, and Lori just laughed. “I could come in one day a week, move juice for a few hours, and vanish. No one would even notice the difference. The whole idea of needing to move juice constantly is a myth, perpetuated by insecure Focuses who have a psychological addiction to moving juice. Focuses want their Transforms to need them. All those Focuses who are dysfunctional because of low juice problems? Well, that’s because
they move the juice too often.”
I said she sounded years ahead of the other Focuses, and she just laughed. “That, my dear Carol, is one of the big reasons I’m rebelling,” she said, sotto voice.
This scenario left open the question of how Lori pulled off all the trading, which Connie later answered. “We’re just a bunch of troublemakers, freaks and weirdoes, unwanted by our former Focuses. The rest of the Focus community considers Lori’s penchant for taking Transform freaks a public service. As long as Lori isn’t flaunting her capabilities or preaching the Cause, they love her to death for taking people like me off their hands.” Lori supported forty-two Transforms now, one of the largest households in the nation. Race, color, creed, nationality and profession didn’t matter. Only brains and devotion to the Cause mattered.
The place was a big hippie commune, save that the prevailing philosophy inside the household seemed more Ayn Rand or William Buckley than Jerry Rubin or Dr. Timothy Leary. For instance, the household was extremely anti-drug. They weren’t all anti-violence, despite the number of Buddhists in the place. They had the best gym I had ever seen, a decent armory (I smelled it) and a small obstacle course, as well. Physical exercise was mandatory for all Transforms, bodyguard training for everyone physically able. Buddhist meditation and worship was optional; there were atheists and Catholics in abundance. Very few Protestants; the mystical nature of Inferno drove many dedicated Protestants away screaming.
“Let’s get this over with,” I said. Lori promised to let her people tie her up with me, so I could hold her and sooth my absolute stark panic and help steady Sky.
I looked around at the cold echoing basement, with medical instruments and autopsy instruments lining the walls like Keaton’s instruments of torture. The cinderblock walls reminded me far too much of the walls in the CDC. Why is Hell lined with cinderblock walls?
“It’s also a gift. Our metasense will synch up. You won’t believe how good that is.”
No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) Page 27