Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2)

by Randall Farmer

  “May I?” Daisy asked Gail, and Gail nodded. Daisy stood and held out her hand, which Rose didn’t take. “I’m Daisy Schuber, Van’s sister. I’m living here and commuting to U of M, where I’m studying Transform biophysics and biomechanics.”

  Daisy, at least as brilliant as her brother, which was saying something, had graduated from Cal Tech in two and a half years. Earlier this summer, she squeaked her way into a PhD program under Professor Hugh Mazoo, partly by bribe, in the form of a two hour visit by Gail to Professor Mazoo’s lab.

  In late July, Daisy had gone missing, and Gale’s entire household spent most of a night searching for her, only to find her stoned out of her mind in a dumpster near Gallup Park. After that miserable evening, Van convinced Daisy to crash here, and Daisy moved in for real last week, unable to resist Gail and her household. “I’m also helping the household with some interesting projects.” Rose studied Daisy for a moment or two, likely attempting to size up her threat level. Daisy was a tall young woman, five eleven, well-padded and well stacked, but otherwise on the uglier side of plain, and not at all sedentary. She currently wore her hair black, cut uniformly eight inches long, with enough hair product so it stood straight out from her head. She also carried a handgun in her purse, knives on the insides of her boots, and probably some other weapons Gail didn’t know about hidden in other cunning places.

  “You need to complete your bodyguard training,” Rose said. Rose had picked up on that without having to be told; nighttime bodyguard duty was how Daisy paid for her room and board. U of M’s research grant was barely enough to cover Daisy’s tuition, and Daisy wasn’t much on nighttime sleeping.

  Daisy nodded. “I know.” Gail waited, wondering what Rose would make of a bisexual Major Transform groupie making a pass at her, which Gail expected any moment now. Daisy, amazingly, continued to behave. “I’ve got another session scheduled for tomorrow night.” The incongruous Daisy turned her black-maned head to Gail. “Do you want to sit up and see what I found? Or do we need to wait until later?”

  “Help me up,” Gail said. Daisy did, twinkling at Gail. Anyone under thirty in Gail’s household knew about Daisy’s crush on her. Fortunately, she didn’t seem bothered that Gail didn’t return the interest. “Let’s see what you found.” Gail slid herself out of her puddle of sweat into the chair beside the couch and looked at Daisy’s documents. As usual, they were all immaculately typed and formatted, without a single grammar or spelling error. One of the few things the Perfessor, Daisy and Van’s Art History teaching father, required of his children was correct spelling and grammar.

  “Focus?” Rose said. “Isn’t this confidential information?” Meaning: how much do you trust this druggie not-really-household-member not to pass along your secrets?

  “It’s covered,” Gail said, broadcasting the truth any Arm would be able to read in her thoughts. Gail quite capably took care of such things with her charisma, in the form of regular sessions with Daisy. One treacherous normal within her household had taught Gail a lesson she still didn’t forget, and she didn’t plan to endure the problem again. Daisy didn’t mind those sessions either, even when Gail subtly snuck in the ‘don’t do hard drugs’ commands. Gail could do without Daisy’s commentary afterwards, though, comparing the effects of one of Gail’s charismatic mind-scrapes to the effects of various recreational drugs.

  “So, I guess we need to figure out what’s with this Chrysanthemum person or company,” Gail said, after speed-reading Daisy’s report. Sylvie, Kurt and Van had been the principle investigators, and they used a variety of techniques to gather their information, including clandestine interviews, other investigators as fronts to gain them access to police departments and the local FBI office, as well as hours of tedious library research and far too much general legwork.

  “I can tell you that,” Rose said. She had been reading the document upside down while fiddling with one of her boots Gail oops-stomped during their sparring. “We once thought Chrysanthemum was a Wandering Shade front, but we’re pretty sure now he just hijacked part of the company for his own devices. The real owners remain unknown, but we suspect they’re Major Transforms, and given Chrysanthemum’s reach, possibly foreign. You’re implicating them in the recent baby Arm abductions?”

  “We’ve got evidence of their involvement in at least three cases we’re now sure involved recently transformed Arms,” Gail said. “Payoffs to clinic guards and doctors. The way their scam works is that they’re paying Clinics to falsify their records in cases where Arms are brought in before they awaken from their transformation comas. The Clinics record them as woman Transforms who go Monster before a Focus can take them, bundle them up and hand them over to Chrysanthemum agents.”

  “This is amazing work,” Rose said. She now squatted down beside Gail and radiated tight Webberly-style intensity; no, Gail hadn’t seen the Arm move. Daisy practically swooned at this bit of Arm chicanery. “I know this isn’t complete, but would you mind if I pass this along to the Commander and the Hero?”

  “No problem.” Gail attempted to metasense-parse Rose’s new emotional state, and decided to translate it as ‘how did this crazy Focus’s people find this out when I couldn’t’. Gail hid her smile. Even Teacher didn’t understand what her household could do when they were working in their area of expertise.

  “You do need to look further into Chrysanthemum,” Rose said. “Be careful, though.”

  Gail didn’t need convincing. “Always.” Anyone able to kidnap baby Arms was guaranteed to be dangerous.

  But dangerous was where the good stories lived.

  ---

  “As you see, even though you move the third purple section it remains your tag, but if you move any of the yellow sections, it doesn’t.”

  They still gathered in Gail’s living room. Daisy had gone for dinner, Isabella in the kitchen sent up dinner for both Gail and Rose, and Sylvie came by to check if Gail and her Arm guest needed anything. Now Sylvie, Gail’s regular test subject, frowned at the visible tag illustration flowing above the coffee table in front of her. “You know, Gail, this isn’t at all pleasant.”

  “The tag manipulation?” Gail had never imagined Rose’s juice-writing-in-the-air trick and if asked, would have declared such a thing impossible. Well, not only did it exist, Rose had uses for it, such as illustrating juice structures. To keep Rose from having to redo it after it wore out, Gail found a way to support it with a modified tag juice pattern. As with Rose’s other tricks, the air writing used up almost no juice. Gail swore Rose got more nervous around her as time went on, which was ridiculous, as Rose was an Arm and Gail nothing more than a Focus student.

  “Of course the tag manipulation, you ninny. What did you think I was talking about, standing? You need to get Van in here to see this.”

  “Sure,” Gail said. She wiggled Vera Bracken’s juice to get her attention and let her know to bring Van. The two of them were out reading in the late afternoon sunlight in the U-shaped yard between the wings of the apartment complex. “So tags aren’t fixed, then.” There went one of the household science team’s dictums: tag variations are caused by mistakes and need to be corrected before they mess up the Transform involved.

  “Not fixed at all, Focus,” Rose said. She sat in the chair nearest the door and patiently explained what were obviously basic concepts to her. “They’re variable in strength, content and complexity. Our project” that is, Teacher’s Arm subordinates’ project “is to codify these differences and figure out their proper uses. We’ve already made one major discovery, which I can show you if, with your permission, I place a temporary tag on Mrs. Dejung.”

  Gail turned to Sylvie, who nodded ‘okay’. “No problem.”

  “Say ‘I am yours’,” Rose said, and Sylvie complied. Rose laid her hand on Sylvie’s upper arm and Gail sensed the change in her juice. Rose altered her juice-writing diagram to show the changes her tag made in Sylvie’s juice structure. “I’m going to alter the third purple section in my ta
g. Note how little juice I use compared to when you did the same with your tag.”

  “Wow. Yes,” Gail said, after doing a little mental interpolation of the readings on her juice meter juice patterns. “You used almost no juice at all.” She studied the tag changes, wondering what they would do. The idea that a tag wasn’t a unified thing, and could be altered, was strange. She suspected she was seeing the secret behind what Inferno termed ‘tag tuning’, which had puzzled her since she learned of it. While she thought about the potential benefits of tag alteration, Van came in, and she reintroduced him to Rose, and reintroduced Rose to him. He sat on the couch next to Sylvie.

  Rose continued, “Up until recently, Arms thought the juice moved itself when we tagged people. It only seemed that way, though. Tagging is just efficient for us Arms. With practice and work, it turns out Arms are good at tag modification, limited mostly by the lack of acuity in our metasense.”

  “It’s like me and juice moving, then,” Gail said. “To control it I needed to slow it down.”

  Van froze in place. “Ma’am. Gail. Sylvie? You’re all looking at something in front of Sylvie, aren’t you.”

  “You can’t see it?” Gail asked.

  “No, not at all. What can’t I see? Is this some kind of juice illusion, Gail?”

  Gail explained the Arm’s juice-writing trick. She turned to Rose. “I thought you said non-Transforms could see this?”

  “Most can. A few can’t,” Rose said. “We still don’t know what it means. It’s an avenue for further study.”

  Gail continued to study her Sylvie tag with her metasense, while Sylvie got more uncomfortable as Gail poked and prodded. You could mess up a Transform with a bad tag, or a bad tag modification, she decided. Perhaps fatally. This wasn’t something she wanted to play with by trial and error.

  Van used Gail’s inattention to ask Rose if she had spotted any differences in Gail. He had mentioned several times to Gail that he thought something was wrong with the effects of Gail’s training on her, but he couldn’t put his finger on what. Whatever Van spotted was too subtle for Rose, but she promised to keep an eye on Gail for unexpected changes.

  Gail managed to stifle a laugh when she realized Van was as much of a Major Transform groupie as his sister, Daisy. It had to be a Schuber family thing, or at least on the Perfesser’s side of the family, as neither Lucille or Van’s other sister, Abby, showed signs. The Perfesser certainly did, always inventing reasons to visit them and help.

  An hour later she found an excuse to see if Daisy saw Rose’s juice writing. She didn’t. None of them could figure out what this meant.

  Gilgamesh: August 26, 1972 – September 4th, 1972

  “Okay, push!” Gilgamesh said, craning his head out the driver’s side window of Sumeria. As the two bruising Nobles, Duke Jeremy Hoskins and Count Frederick Dowling, put their shoulders against Sumeria’s rear, Gilgamesh gently pressed on the gas. The rear tires whirred, gravel clattered against the inside of the wheel well, and the Nobles howled as they pushed.

  Sumeria didn’t move.

  The Nobles rocked the RV forward before letting it fall back, while Gilgamesh kept his foot lightly on the gas until the top of the forward rock. On the fifth rock forward, when he punched the gas the wheels caught and spun themselves and the rest of Sumeria out of the muddy rut. The Nobles howled louder, awakening the backwoods New Hampshire countryside with their glee at solving the problem caused by their roughhousing while driving at night.

  Dowling, the blonde giant Thor-like Noble, haw-hawed his way through Sumeria’s entry door, dripping gravel and mud as he stomped in. “Good job, Guru Gilgamesh!” Dowling said, slapping Gilgamesh on the shoulder as he passed, his comradely cuff hard enough to leave a bruise. “Let’s do this again tomorrow!”

  If they try to claim getting my RV out of a ditch was a successful quest, I’m going to have words with Occum, Gilgamesh promised himself. He swiveled his head around to see if his passengers were all set, and winced at yet another layer of mud caking the floor of Sumeria.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Boss Man Sir,” Trainee Crow Master Zero said, from the front passenger seat, next to Gilgamesh. “I’m sure we can convince the Barony’s Noble women to clean up your mobile home. It’ll at least keep them out of the kitchen and from ruining another meal or three.” Trainee Crow Master Zero was meek, small, and nerdy. Gilgamesh suspected he hadn’t lost his virginity until he started his Crow Master training.

  “Thanks, I think,” Gilgamesh said.

  As far as Gilgamesh could tell, life as a Crow Guru was the same crazy chaotic mess as his life before his Guruhood, only messier.

  Gilgamesh parked Sumeria in a not-quite-a-parking-space at the far edge of the beaten down meadow serving as the Barony’s parking lot, his tires ruining dozens of wildflowers. He recognized Sinclair’s well used baby blue service van two ‘spots’ down, the painted on sign still proclaiming itself Albany Electrical Repair, though the phone number had long ago been scraped off.

  The home of the White Mountains Barony was a mountain lodge, rustic and comfortable, a hand built and rebuilt log home crafted during three summers of volunteer Noble labor. The large place stank of the rough edges of predators – death, pain, and conflict – belied by the immense crowd of commoner women, of several Baronies, who exited the giant lodge home in a massive wave.

  The wave swept up the Nobles as the Nobles swept up the women, a boisterous loving crowd that quickly changed direction and returned to the lodge home, leaving the Crows behind.

  “Anyone here ready to see how Master Occum is doing?” Sinclair said, shaking his head. “Come on, Guru Gilgamesh. I’m sure we can find someone or something here to put you at ease.”

  ---

  Starlight shone through the wide windows of the big common room of the lodge, a room lit only by six dim candles on handmade knotty pine tables at the edges of the room. Guru Shadow had called them together for a meeting, not just the Crows, but all the ranking Nobles, the two Wardens, and the two Inferno diplomats, Autumn and Parker Maybray. The only one missing was Earl Sellers, out hunting Monsters with two commoners and several Inferno people. The room was quiet now, after the wildness of the Barony feast, and only those few with recognized rank remained.

  “So, Occum, you’ve got yourself a Warden, now,” Sinclair said. His soft voice shivered the darkness. “Were there any problems with the Wardening?”

  “Suzanne, why don’t you tell them?” Occum said. Suzanne stared them down, aggressively uncomfortable to find herself among the Nobles and Crow Masters. She was an appallingly ugly woman, with a fierce face, short dark brown hair cut pageboy style, and bad teeth. Gilgamesh knew of her as an unpopular member of Flo Ackerman’s household, as well as Flo’s top woman bodyguard. Knowing Occum, he had picked her for her looks.

  “Jane recruited me,” Suzanne said. “I was a good soldier, so Flo didn’t want to let me go, but Earl Sellers offered a sweet young thing in trade. They decided they could cope.” She really did have a beautiful smile, Gilgamesh noted, at least when she remembered to smile. If you ignored her bad teeth, her smile lit up her entire face.

  “Congratulations on becoming a Guru, Gilgamesh,” Shadow said, turning to him. “That was a job well done.”

  “So it’s legitimate? I’m a Guru now?” Gilgamesh felt no joy and couldn’t meet Shadow’s gaze. Too many worries.

  “It’s legitimate. News of your trip, the fight with the Hunters as well as the big fight in New Orleans, is all over the Grapevine. You’re definitely rating the respect due a Guru. I’ve even gotten a couple of calls from Crows who want to study with you for a while.”

  “Really? Who?”

  “Hmph,” Occum cut in. “Let’s talk business first. Then we can worry about whatever followers come calling.”

  Shadow nodded. “We have a lot of people here who’ve made progress. I’d like to review what we’ve done. Then we can talk strategy.”

  As Gilgamesh had hoped, once Shadow rescinded
his constraints on research and joined in the push the Cause project, the progress had been rapid. Gilgamesh showed the crew his golf bombs, which everyone found most impressive. Occum reported on the rapid progress on retrieving the commoner’s lost humanity, progress only possible because of many long days utilizing Shadow’s Mentor-level analysis tricks.

  “I hate to brag,” Occum said, about twenty minutes in (and over Sinclair’s ‘oh, right’). “But I managed to see a possible trick and make it work, mostly without Shadow’s help.” Snort. Gilgamesh swore he metasensed Shadow rolling his eyes. “I can heal withdrawal scarring now.”

  The room went deadly quiet.

  “Impossible,” Sky said. “We can’t do mind work.” If Crows could do mind work, then they could have fixed Sinclair without having to go on their crazy quest.

  “It isn’t mind work,” Occum said. “It’s emulated Arm self-healing. Now, don’t you battle-boys get any wild ideas – when we’re talking muscles and broken bones, the trick’s no better than what we Crows can already do. However, for intractable problems such as adhesion scars, organ regeneration and physical brain damage – such as withdrawal scarring – it’s the boss.”

  “That’s wonderful news,” Sinclair said. “Can we fix our male commoners with it?”

  “Of course, you overgrown knot,” Occum said. “That’s what I developed it for.”

  “Can you teach Sky this trick?” Autumn Maybray said. As one of only three women in the room, and a representative of a Focus household rather than a Noble Barony, she seemed somehow wrong in this gathering of wild men, but the contrast didn’t seem to intimidate her.

  Sinclair turned to Autumn. “Whatever for?”