“So, little Minor Transform, what is it exactly that makes a Goldilocks a Goldilocks, anyway? Besides not automatically dying.”
I took a deep breath, attempting to keep somewhat calm. We were in his car. “A male Goldilocks is like a standard woman Transform, save that instead of overproducing juice and going Monster, I just produce enough for my own use.”
“Uh, Dan, uh, you’re kidding. That’s it?”
Uh oh. Matt wasn’t a college boy because he was dumb. No sense, anyone would tell you that. Especially round the girls. None of his relationships lasted more than three months. Funny thing, they all dropped him. His fault? No, never.
“That’s what the brochure said. In fact, that’s all the brochure said about male Goldilocks. Most of the brochure is about how dangerous being a one of a kind is. Making sure your loved ones are kept at a distance, sign over your worldly belongings to friends or family, make a will, memorize the addresses of the big US Transform Research Centers, so on and so forth. Why?”
Okay. Perhaps I laid it on a bit too thick, there.
“I read a thing or two on the subject. That book ‘Monsters in the Night’, about that horrible intra-Transform fight in Detroit a few years ago, for one. Juice use isn’t constant. Depends on what you’re doing, even for a Transform. That’s why doctors need to measure juice levels instead of just winging it. You slack off and veg in front of the tube, you could still eventually go Monster, Dan.”
Know it all. “I expect the people who wrote the brochure know what they’re talking about.”
“Just like they know everything else about TS.”
“Don’t they?” I had always assumed the authorities did. I mean, the disease has been around since before I was born, and this was the goddamned Space Age! Any nation that could put men on the moon and all that.
“They don’t know squat, Danny boy. They don’t know why it appeared out of nowhere, no idea how it keeps spreading, no idea why it’s so selective, no idea what the real vector is…”
“Huh? It’s bacterial meningitis. Says so right here in the brochure.”
“Bacterial meningitis is a symptom, dingo. Like ‘headache’, or ‘tummy ache’. It means that you have an infection in your spinal cord. There’s who-knows-how-many different bacteria that can cause it. The authorities blame a variety of the listeria bacteria for TS, but I don’t believe them because there’s shitloads of non-listeria TS cases these days.”
“Oh.” I paused. “How are Mom and Dad taking what’s happened to me?” Neither one had been willing to come visit me in the Army hospital or the South Bend Transform Clinic. Their absence worried me.
“They’re coping. I’m under strict orders to get you home to visit with them as soon as this Focus nonsense is taken care of.”
I nodded. Sounded like them. Before they decided to cast me out for being a Transform, they would need to inspect me for demon horns and animal claws. Of course, they couldn’t kick me out, as they had thrown me out of the house long before. I mean, how many parents kick their kids out and tell them to support themselves while they are juniors in high school, anyway? I managed, at least until I got drafted. Just a little philosophical difference about all-night partying.
A philosophical difference now fully cured by being a Goldilocks. The change had been how the Army figured out my problem – I couldn’t get drunk any more. Hell, I had been drinking like a fish and only feeling it a little. Strangest thing. Time for a blood sample. Oh, you’re a Transform, variety ‘Goldilocks’. Here’s a medical discharge. Scat!
Unlike a Major Transform, I’m not alcohol proof. However, my juice metabolism or whatever ‘they’ called it was now so cranked up that getting me drunk, or high, was going to be expensive.
As a Freeman, a born cheapskate, that wasn’t going to happen anymore, now was it?
“What if the Focus won’t let me go? You know the Focuses’ reputation.”
“Exaggerated in the media, I’m sure,” Matt said. “They can’t all be manipulative bitches with delusions of godhood. People don’t work that way.”
“What do you mean, not work that way?”
“I mean do the same thing under the same stimulus. Some Focuses will follow the stereotype, others will do it differently.”
“Still, I could get one that won’t let me go.”
“Then I’ll just have to cart that shit back to the parents and disappoint them again, now won’t I.” Matt clearly felt the stress, today. Glad his current squeeze wasn’t with us. One look at Matt under stress, and well, sayonara. Happened every time.
“Assuming I don’t end up Hostess Arm Food or Purina Chimera Chow, sure.”
Matt stamped on the brakes, skidding his rusted out Pontiac to a gravelly halt on the shoulder of the good ol’ East West Toll Road. With names like that, you’ve gotta know you are in the ever so creative State of Indiana.
“What the fuck did you just say?”
“What I said. Whadda yah mean, College Boy, you didn’t figure this out? Untagged Transform, out by his own lonesome self. I’m prey, man. Prey. Dinner for one.”
“But you aren’t supposed to go into withdrawal or Monster, right?”
“So? What the rent-a-doc in the dinko South Bend Transform Clinic said was, I quote, ‘You had better get your rear to this Focus pronto, because for some reason she’s not coming here. To the Arms and Chimeras you’re an untagged Transform. Juice on the hoof.’ When I asked him about protection and transportation, he said ‘Those programs didn’t last the first year of the Nixon administration. Got removed as part of Nixon’s ‘refusal to kowtow to Transform special interests and give them special privileges the silent majority of Americans do not possess’.” I didn’t mention the rent-a-doc’s ‘and tell your Republican parents to write that on your gravestone’ comment the asshole threw in as a gratuitous insult.
The car door slammed, and I looked over. Matt wasn’t in the car. Nope, he was stalking around, kicking the tires, and screaming about something. Yup, that’s my brother. I waited until he calmed down enough to bang on the car roof before I got out to patch things up.
“Hey, it’s okay. Just drive me to this Focus Wendy Mann person in Detroit and everything will be taken care of.”
His face was a bit red. “It. Is. Not. Okay.”
“What, if you knew I was dinner bait you wouldn’t have agreed to drive me to Detroit? You think I would have been safer on a bus?” I stalked around behind my big brother as he banged his hand on the car roof. “Or driven myself? That is, if the police at the Transform Clinic hadn’t confiscated my driver’s license and my car.”
“How the fuck should I know the right way to handle this?” Matt said. “They don’t cover Transform logistics in the stuff I’ve read.”
As if books and articles ever told the truth. My brother the idolater, worshiping the printer’s ink calf. I grunted a space-filling answer.
“Did you perchance call the Focus?” he asked, starting to get pompous.
“You are such a dipshit, Matt.” His pompous moods always pissed me off. Never stopped him, though. He never gave a rat’s ass about how what he said would affect other people. “That’s the first thing I tried. Guess what happened.”
“Huh?”
“Guess.” Asshole. Pretends to be a know-it-all and falls on his face every time someone calls him on it. I made sure I was close to the car door.
“Why should I guess?”
“Because you’re being a pompous asshole, that’s why.”
“Fuck this.” He got back in the car, what I waited for. If I wasn’t close enough to the car door to get in when he did, he would leave me behind and head home. Matt, the fink-out king.
“I’m going back home,” he said. Predictable. “You’re welcome to stay in the car.”
“Right. Mom and Dad will be so overjoyed to have an unclaimed Transform living in their house, not only endangering their lives, but violating how many laws?”
“You just need to be
impossible, don’t you?” Matt said. He started the car and continued to drive east. No, he would never admit he had given in, but he had. He always lost confrontations like this, and I’m not sure he ever realized it.
“When I called Focus Mann’s place, I got a ‘phone service disconnected’ message,” I said, finally answering the question I had wanted him to guess. “Shouldn’t be too surprised. The Transform Rights people are always saying how poor and downtrodden the Focuses and their households are.”
Matt laughed. “They’re just pissed because they lost their welfare privileges when Nixon became president. Of which I say: join the club, stand in line. Nixon’s pissed off a lot of Americans.”
Right. Not Matt, though, unless or until they yanked his draft deferment.
Ah, well. Back to Matt driving in silence.
Gail Rickenbach: October 8, 1971
Screaming woke Gail, and when Gail sat up in bed, she woke Van as well. “Nightmare? Again? Wait, you’re not the one screaming,” he said.
She sighed and leaned back against Van, who had skootched up and put his arms around her. “It’s Nancy.” Nancy, who, in her day and a half in her household, had proven to be more disruptive than Gail thought humanly possible. She wouldn’t talk, she wouldn’t eat their food, she didn’t work or show any inclination of wanting to help the household, and she freaked most of them out by eating gnarled pods stripped from one of the three trees on their apartment property, a honey locust. Pods several of her household members thought deadly poisonous. “I think I need to deal with this.”
Van groaned and fell back on his pillow. Gail put on her robe and padded over to the apartment across the hall, shared by Anita, Trisha, and Valerie. A moment before she knocked, a terrified Trisha ripped the door open and sprinted down the hall, letting out a low keening noise. Anita, the soft-spoken woman Gail’s household had dragooned into taking a turn as household president, would kill Gail over this.
Gail crept into the crazy-lit room, filled with what appeared to be an auroral display, what she realized was a mixed juice and dross illusion. Nancy screamed, alone in her bed, the sheet and blanket twisted in her clenched fists, her eyes open but seeing nothing. Anita and Valerie, in the bunk bed across the room, were both awake, sitting up, huddled under their blankets and petrified in fear.
“It’s a juice effect?” Van said, padding into the room behind her. His robe gapped open and gave Anita and Valerie a show, if they bothered to look his way.
“Apparently.” At times Van saw juice-based illusions as translucent white curtains instead of the way they appeared to other people. His anomalous reaction to juice illusions sat on the household’s list of Transform strangenesses they needed to investigate, right next to Helen Grimm’s assertion that juice made a crackling noise when it moved.
“Hit it with your charisma,” Van said. “All of it. Don’t hold back.”
That is, attempt to ‘talk’ to the juice. This idea, one Van and Sylvie came up with while overly mellow one evening earlier this summer, had actually worked a couple of times. She didn’t really ‘talk to the juice’, it was more like merging her senses with the juice and picturing what she were doing as a mental conversation.
Gail loosed her Focus charisma, which dropped Van (slobbering on her slippers), Anita (praying to her) and Valerie (writhing sexually, lost to the world) and roiled the aurora.
About five seconds after Gail opened up her charisma, another world appeared around Gail. In this new illusory reality Gail saw a cartoon of herself locked in a cage. Instead of attempting to escape, the cartoon Gail conjured up bars and reinforced the cage.
Offended, Gail waved her hand and shattered the illusory cage. The cartoon Gail grew wings and flew off, giving her a jaunty wave. Nancy stopped screaming. A moment later, all the illusions vanished. Gail realized her eyes were shut tight.
The thematic echo from her nightmare two days ago bothered her more than a little. Gail had a bad feeling she had just made a bargain with something, a powerful unknown something.
“Ma’am, how may I serve you?” Nancy said. Gail’s eyes flicked open, to see Nancy on her knees, next to Van, slobbering at Gail’s feet. Oh, I should probably tone down the charisma, Gail decided.
“…and after several weeks of walking I reached the spot that had been calling me. Then I went to sleep or something,” Nancy said. She had been willing to talk to Gail after Gail banished the nightmare. Why did Nancy change her mind? What she said was ‘they have accepted you’. Gail still waited on Nancy to tell her who ‘they’ were.
Gail and Nancy sat in Gail’s tiny office in their nighties. Gail snacked on cold leftover garlic bread from dinner and tried to ignore the strips of pine bark Nancy chewed on. Van had gone back to bed, grumbling about god damned Transform issues that always showed up at god damned four in the morning, and could she please do something useful with her charisma and make him able to go back to god damned sleep. Gail kept a straight face for Nancy, but she grinned inside at the memory.
Nancy’s story was of her first ‘call’. She hadn’t been able to stop the first one, and neither had the Madonna of Montreal, who had appeared to Nancy as an apparition during her long walk north from Labrador City, in Canada. The Focus-Sport, as she called herself, had subsisted on tree bark, acorns, grass and other inedible vegetation on her trip…and in the process lost the ability to eat normal food.
“I awoke in the arms of Count Horace Knox, a Noble Chimera. Over a month had passed for me. He was with a group of companions: Duke Jeremy Hoskins, Earl Robert Sellers, a beastly guy named Sir Dowling who I never learned the first name of, their Crow Master, Occum, and far too many pushy part-Monster women. They had been chosen to find me and rescue me, and on the way home they nursed me back to health as best they could. I was in bad shape by the time they got me, all frostbit and such. They said I was slowly turning myself into a Monster to adapt to the climate.”
“Shit,” Gail said. She had known about the crazy Noble ‘quests’, but had never gotten a full story on one. This quest had happened in late 1968, about six months before she and Van married. “You heard the second call after you got home?”
“Not quite,” Nancy said, picking a couple of splinters from her lips. “The Nobles had rescued me to prove themselves worthy to participate in some battle here in Detroit, defending some utterly crazy Focus who of all things was getting mar…” She turned red, glanced at Gail, gagged a bit, and turned redder. “That was you, ma’am?”
“That was me.” Gail wished she hadn’t died before she got a chance to see the Nobles defending her wedding reception. It had been, apparently, a hell of a show.
“Anyway, they needed to present the story of their quest to the Arm in charge of the fight, and she didn’t believe their story, or something. Anyway, she…” Nancy’s voice trailed off into silence.
“She tortured you?” Typical Arm idiocy.
“No, she ‘mind scraped’ me, her term. It was like she peeled back all the layers of my mind and ripped out my memories, one by one, even the ones I wanted to forget.” She paused. “I don’t ever want to be ‘mind scraped’ again. I don’t ever want to deal with any Arms ever again.”
Gail didn’t laugh. Nancy was so deep into Gail’s charismatic will she didn’t realize she was being ‘mind scraped’ right this instant. Gail hoped her methods were less traumatic than an Arm’s methods. From experience, she knew Arm Stacy Keaton’s were definitely traumatic unless you cooperated at the juice level.
“The Arm, was she tall and gaunt, with paper-thin skin, muscles everywhere, and sort of a long horsy face?”
“Uh huh. You know her?”
“Perhaps a little.” Arm Hancock had saved Gail’s life in the Wedding Reception fight, essentially bringing her back from the dead. The deed had linked them, apparently for all time. Whenever she and Gail were near, they ended up attracted to each other…and they both liked to gossip. So they did. Luckily, as Gail considered Arm Hancock to be the most te
rrifying person on the planet, they weren’t near each other too often.
Unfortunately, Hancock had moved to Chicago five months ago after taking the Windy City from the Hunters. She had been waltzing in and out of Detroit on a regular basis, working on some large project with her boss, Arm Keaton. She and Gail had shared lots of gossip.
“I’m hiding from her and the other Arms. They’re messed up in this, according to Crow Nameless.”
“I’ve heard of him,” Gail said, remembering one of Crow Gilgamesh’s stories. “Is he around?” She always liked to meet new Crows. A Crow with the name of ‘Nameless’ sounded more interesting than most.
“I don’t know. I ran away from him, too, when he tried to get me to come along with him on this Progenitors quest.”
“Progenitors? I thought they were called the Predecessors.” The long vanished results of an earlier incidence of Transform Sickness, if you believed the stories.
“Crow Nameless insists their true name, and relationship to us, is ‘Progenitors’,” Nancy said. “They gave birth to us in some mystical fashion.”
Sylvie interrupted them when she opened the door to Gail’s office, plate cradled carefully in one arm. “Likely we caught TS from them, somehow,” she said. Unlike Gail and Nancy, she was fully dressed. And armed. She had been in and out ever since she woke up at dawn. “I fixed you some fresh veggies, Nancy.” Nancy smiled and replaced her pine bark with a broccoli stem. Cabbage marrows and raw turnips were her favorites, and Anita had already sent someone out to the local excuse for a vegetable market to see if they could find any.
“That’s what Nameless said,” Nancy said. “His group of crazy Transform VIPs wants to turn me into a human dowsing rod for the damned Progenitors.”
“You can’t fight the call,” Gail said. She had learned too much when she banished the aurora illusion. “You know you can’t. It will destroy you if you try.”
Beasts Ascendant: The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts One and Two Page 14