“May I stay here, then?” Tonya asked. She wanted to serve Gloriana, and she could do so best here.
“No, though you have earned it, twice over,” Shirley said. “You must return to the unholy and secular world, the hellish world of rebellious Focuses and knife-in-the-back politics, as always the leader of my own choosing among the faithless. Don’t worry, though. In time, you shall return to the glory, and serve at my right hand. When in the rapture they fall, you shall not fall with them, but ascend to the truth and the good.”
Tonya’s heart fell. The outside world was such a horrid evil place, and it hurt her to think of returning. “Thank you for your kind words.” She and Shirley hugged, again. Tonya got into the car, wondering if she was forgetting something. No, of course she wasn’t.
Wrapped in holy warmth, Tonya reluctantly drove the Olds out of Hilltop, and back into the secular world. Save for the feeling of success and praise, her Hilltop experiences faded back into the nether regions of her mind.
Keaton stood in the road in front of her, a quiet suburban street lined with red oak trees. Strange. How had the Arm gotten out here? Tonya thought. Hadn’t she been in the back seat of the car a moment ago?
Tonya rolled down her window. “What’s going on?” Tonya said.
“I was going to ask you that, myself. What the fuck! That damned bitch Focus had me roasting in hell! I’ve got burns over half my fucking body! It was only a miracle that I found a way to escape.” And my hidden tricks, Tonya read. Strange. As far as Tonya knew, the Arm didn’t have any hidden tricks.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tonya said. “I just handed over DeYoung and got told to keep my mouth shut about what just happened.” She shrugged. Strange things often happened in and around Hilltop. “Climb in. Let’s go home.”
“No fucking way,” Keaton said. Her clothing showed no signs of fire damage, but her face and hands were red. “I’m beginning to think that some of DeYoung’s ravings were right. Go on. I’ll talk to you later. I’ve got a lot of shit to think about.”
“Suit yourself,” Tonya said. She rolled up her window and drove off down the quiet street, to meet up with the rest of her people, and caravan back to Philadelphia.
Success buoyed her, surrounding her with happiness and wonder. She had tamed Keaton, brought the Arm into the Focus Network, and showed everyone the benefits of having an Arm as an ally. She had stopped the rebellion in its tracks, and solidified her position on the Council.
They would all respect her now.
She had earned it.
During the Latter Stages of the Mind Scrape (2)
“So, what do you think you’re joining when you’re changing sides?” Carol said.
“A rebellion,” Tonya said. “A rebellion against the first Focuses.”
Carol shook her head. “That’s your game, not ours. What you’re joining is the Inferno household cause of inter-Major Transform cooperation, leading to enhanced survival of Transforms and the preservation of civilization during the demographic bubble.”
Tonya shivered. The Arm had taken a trip to Lori-land. “The first Focuses won’t let you succeed.”
“Then you’ll get your wish about rebellion. Don’t think about it in those terms, though. It’s not healthy.”
Right. Doublethink. Carol was right – openly opposing the first Focuses wasn’t at all healthy. They weren’t opposing the first Focuses, they were supporting the Inferno Cause. A whole different thing. The fact that the Cause worked against the goals of the first Focuses, well, there was no need to look too deeply into that. Besides, who knew? Maybe the first Focuses would change direction. Decide to support the Cause. Then they could all live happily in peace and harmony.
Uh huh, right about when Tonya learned how to flap her wings and fly.
The Cause was a laudable goal. Tonya could accept the idea that all the varieties of Major Transforms needed to work together and find a way to defuse the inevitable demographic bomb caused by too many transformations. From the day she had found Delia and witnessed an induced transformation, she had known that big trouble was inevitable, and that she would someday have to make a stand. They might even make progress, with people involved who could help Lori through the inevitable rough spots and manic fits.
Tonya nodded.
“So, the first Focuses are dumb enough to think anyone can coerce an Arm?” Carol asked, referring back to Suzie Schrum’s orders to Tonya to reel Carol in using ‘whatever it takes’.
“Coerce, or kill.” Tonya sighed. “The first Focuses control Transform society from top to bottom. Whether we like it or not, they’re the ones who call the tunes we dance to. Matriarchs. To me, it looks like Rogue Crow is attempting to remake Transform society into a proper patriarchal society. With him as king.”
“In boxing terms, we’re fighting Rogue Crow to see which of us gets to challenge the first Focuses for the heavyweight championship of the world,” Gilgamesh said. Lori, and Carol turned to him and gave him a strange look; likely echoing Tonya’s mild annoyance at the unwanted too-male interruption. “Okay, I confess. Most Crows are sports fans. That probably says a bunch about our psychology, but I’m not sure what.”
Lori rolled her eyes. “You can’t get anything useful out of Sky if there’s a hockey game on television.” Tonya let a smile creep across her face, while Carol laughed and Gilgamesh looked positively embarrassed.
“You need to tell them about your history,” Hank said, to Tonya. Carol gave him a dirty look, but after three days of questioning, she appeared to be open to a little screwy Zielinski behavior, and waved him on. “You’re early interactions with Keaton are very much a part of the Cause.”
Tonya nodded. “Before I transformed, I was a rather normal housewife,” she said. “I was never good enough for my husband, though. No matter how good a job I did at anything, he always found something to criticize. Or, if I was trying something new, he’d sneer at me and predict failure. Love was conditional. Support was conditional. And, when as we all do, I pulled a real boneheaded mistake, he was all over me like I was the verbal equivalent of a punching bag. He’d go on and on about how stupid I was, what a waste of a life I was, how I was nothing or less than nothing.
“Then I became a Focus. The doctors, my husband and my household turned me into a juice appliance. Eventually, my household elbowed my husband out of the way and the bastard left me. After the breakout, Wini Adkins taught me how to take control of my household with a little juice manipulation. After that, I got real mean. For a time, I tried to emulate the Adkins household – I thought a cult-like atmosphere produced the most stable household imaginable. There was a difference, though, between arriving at that sort of household out of necessity and arriving at it out of choice. I found I just didn’t have the heart to break and twist people as much as Wini had. Still, it wasn’t until after I met Hank and Keaton and they put me through the ringer that I started acting like a human being again.”
Carol abruptly stood, and started to pace. Tonya had surprised the Arm. “I thought it was you two who civilized Keaton,” Carol said, after a moment.
Tonya looked at Hank, who sat in the overstuffed chair by the front door. He had the grace to be embarrassed.
“It was more complicated than that,” Hank said. “For an example, let me tell you a story, one that happened just before Tonya’s earlier tale about the Julius rebellion…”
Not a Virtue (1964)
Dr. Zielinski rolled his wheelchair up to the dining room table amid the bustle of Focus Tonya Biggioni’s large and, for Focuses, prosperous household. This was his first sit-down public meal with the household; Tonya and her Network doctors had previously kept him in a bedroom while he healed from his Keaton-caused injuries.
Tonya, one table away, said grace, and her people sat and dug in. Each table held eight to ten people, and her cooking staff served a complete dinner to each table, standard American fare. The older woman on his right he knew from previous introdu
ctions as Honey Landis, Tonya’s Number Two. Given how he got here, and how Tonya was keeping him out of any hospitals, the fact he wasn’t shoved into a corner and kept out of public view surprised him.
“So, what do you think?” Honey said over the buzz of dinnertime conversation.
That one of Tonya’s leading Transforms, in fact the only Transform in the household with an official title, deigned to chat with him got him blinking. His assumptions of Biggioni’s Focus household organizational style continued to take a beating. “The food? Flavorful...and meaty. Most Focus households aren’t successful enough to feed everyone food like this.” Truthfully, he thought the onion-y meatloaf overcooked, the mashed potatoes over-whipped, and the gravy a tad burnt. No lack of quantity, though.
Honey smiled and held her head up proudly. “Tonya’s a wonder,” she said. He guessed Honey was his age, and her name a nickname derived from her younger hair color. These days her hair color came out of a bottle, more mustard than honey. “When we visit other Focuses, their households mostly give me the willies.”
Hank nodded and took another bite of meatloaf. “Your household is full of pleasant surprises.”
“Oh?” Honey said. “As a Focus Network doctor, you’ve probably seen enough for a good comparison.” He nodded, and she smiled. “Tell me another.”
He had seen one a few minutes earlier. While he composed the most politic way of making his comment, he took a bite of the creamed peas and pearl onions. He repressed a pucker – too salty for his taste. “When Focus Biggioni said grace, she meant what she said, and she stuck some real Focus charisma in her words.”
“Oh, you didn’t know? Tonya’s a firm Catholic. She attends Mass twice a week when she isn’t busy.”
“Interesting,” he said. He passed the gravy to the woman on his left. “Which church?”
“She prefers St. John the Evangelist, downtown, but St. Johns is too far from our current residence,” Honey said. “These days, we normally attend St. Georges.”
We, huh? “So she’s grabbed a bunch of her people to attend, as well,” Hank said. “Good for her.”
“It’s not like we have any choice,” Honey said. Hank winced. He knew Biggioni ran a strict household, but based on what he had seen, he hadn’t expected her to be strong-arming her people into going to Mass with her.
She must have noted his muted wince. “You didn’t know? Transforms aren’t normally welcome in any Church.”
“No, I didn’t know, but I should have guessed, given the level of anti-Transform prejudice,” he said, his earlier fear dispelled. Tonya was using her clout as a Focus, and her charisma, to let her people attend her church. He went on to chat about his own lapsed Catholic faith, which had evaporated in the Korean War, his more recent disgust at Pope Pius XII’s eight-year-old declaration of Transforms as the hand of Satan on Earth, and his current sparse attendance at his wife Glory’s Episcopalian church.
His conversation with Honey produced the desired result, an invitation to Tonya’s office in the row house next door, late the next day.
He rolled himself up to Biggioni’s office at the appointed time, after getting help up the porch stairs and the front stairs from Tonya’s bodyguard crew. She looked up from her paperwork with a “Hank, good,” and motioned for him to roll his wheelchair into her office.
The room was small and he barely avoided bumping the undersized desk as he carefully maneuvered the wheelchair into place in front of it. He took a few moments to study his surroundings while they made mindless small talk. Tonya had decorated in a homey style, with pictures of family, friends, and household members, and only a few pictures of the Monsters she and her people had bagged. Knickknacks and needlepoint, nothing executive-y.
“You’re not at all what I expected,” Tonya said, when she got down to business.
“How so?”
“When you’re in ‘doctor mode’, you’re exceedingly severe and off-putting.” Her chair squeaked as she leaned back.
He smiled. “Don’t forget arrogant.” Tonya chuckled. “I came up in the ranks as a surgeon, not a GP or Internist. I never developed a good bedside manner.” A common complaint about him. His many years spent terrorizing grad students and the doctors he taught didn’t help, either.
“I do wonder, though, about some of the contents of the box you had sent here from Harvard,” Tonya said.
They had looked through his stuff. After some thought, he decided not to blame Tonya. A household as successful as hers, unlike most Focus households, actually had something to lose. Security here, despite its relative invisibility, had to be tight. “Which bothered you the most?” Hank asked.
“The concealed-carry licenses from every New England and mid-Atlantic state,” she said. “How did you acquire those?”
“With the help of our mutual Network friends in the FBI.” Said licenses were in one of his secret compartments on his secondary medical valise, along with some far more troubling documents. Such as his passport collection, some under quite false IDs.
“May I ask why?” Tonya said. She hadn’t started in with the charisma yet, instead sitting back and reading him, Focus lie-detector style.
“My work is often hazardous. I’m often called upon to defend myself from psychos” male Transforms in the early withdrawal period “and newly gone-over Monsters.” He had killed five of the former and three of the latter.
She nodded. “I take it the Network documentation on you as ‘Researcher, studying Focuses and failed Focuses’ is incomplete?” He nodded. “So, where are you keeping your firearms?”
She leaned forward an inch, and he knew better than to lie. “False compartment on the bottom of my medical bag.” Right next to his portable disguise kit and several thousand dollars of emergency cash. “Just one.”
“You’re prepared to leave here as soon as you can walk, then, whether we let you go or not.”
“You are keeping me here against my will,” he said. For reasons Tonya wouldn’t divulge. “In a manner of speaking.” He couldn’t leave on his own, yet, because of his injuries.
“I’m sorry,” Tonya said, and said no more. He suspected his enforced presence had to do with the Julius rebellion, and Keaton. He had come up with far too many scenarios, few of them good. “You’re troubled by more than your involuntary vacation here, despite your uncanny ability to blend into my household.”
“Focus Biggioni?” He sat up in his wheelchair, unable to conceal his surprise.
“Call me Tonya,” she said. She shook her head. “Most visitors disturb the feel of my household. You don’t. Most also stick out like a sore thumb, juice-wise.”
He frowned. “I carry juice?” This was new, or nothing he had ever heard a Focus talk about before.
“In my metasense, you show up as one of my household non-Transforms.”
Oh, hell. He had thought that since Tonya was a charisma maven, not a juice-pattern slinging Focus, she wasn’t one of those Focuses. He truly hoped his observation about juice pattern use being bad for a Focus’s sanity, with Focus Teas as the type example, was incorrect. “So you can do things such as see through the eyes of your Transforms, know where they all are, and identify them and your normals using your metasense?
She nodded. “This isn’t something I advertise.” She paused. “Anyway…how are you doing this?”
He repressed the urge to look around the room for an escape route. “As far as I know, I’m not doing anything,” he said. “However, I do spend a lot of time around Transforms and Major Transforms.”
Biggioni frowned. “Your Harvard lab must be a cesspit of bad juice. You might want to consider moving to a different lab every few years.”
“Bad juice?” Hank said. “Bad juice doesn’t…” Biggioni’s frown deepened to near-anger. Hank decided to take a different tack. “Given the number of Focus complaints about bad juice, I don’t doubt something exists that interferes with Focus juice moving. However, I ran tests, and they all came back negative. What you n
ame ‘bad juice’ isn’t juice. ‘Bad juice’ must be, chemically, something else entirely, and something active in quite minute quantities for me to have missed it.” Then he realized what he had done. “My apologies, Tonya, for slipping into my professional arrogance.”
Her frown turned to a smile. “Accepted. I hadn’t realized any researchers had attempted to figure out the bad juice mystery. Or, at least, any researchers worth the name.” She took a moment to open a desk drawer and pull out a nearly two year old Scientific American. The one with the Arm, Rose Desmond, in the foreground, and him in the background, with the cover title of ‘Not a Disease?’ She held up the magazine next to the framed Time Magazine cover with her picture on it that hung on the wall behind her desk. “We do make an interesting pair, don’t we?”
He noticed the bloodstain on the upper right edge of the worn Scientific American, and realized this was from the box of documents he had prepared for Keaton. A box containing all of his relevant published articles on Transform Sickness, among other things. “You might think my reputation somewhat overstated by what was in the documents I gathered for Keaton,” he said.
She put the Scientific American back on her desk. “I hadn’t realized you were the discoverer of the difference between fundamental and supplemental juice,” she said. “That by itself, for us Focuses, is worth overstating your reputation. I found several of your other articles even more interesting, including the one on the detriments of certain Focus household organizational varieties.”
Uh oh.
“I find your household a wonder to behold, Tonya,” he said. Not quite a lie, but close.
“So, tell me, what problems do you see?” she said. Now she used her charisma a little.
“It isn’t my place to say.” The urge for the escape route grew stronger. A top end Focus on a charisma tear always made for a bad day.
The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Eight Page 11