Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2)

by Randall Farmer

  None of us Major Transforms sees the Dreaming in the same way. The way I experienced the Dreaming certainly didn’t match anyone else’s descriptions of the place.

  I tuned myself to the emotions pressing in on me, felt them humming along in my juice structure. Misery, fury, despair. They carried with them a flavor I recognized, something familiar.

  A tag. Webberly’s tag. I didn’t used to be able to parse Arm tags unless the taggee sat in front of me, but Lori had come up with a meditative training focus about twenty months ago to allow me to train up my metasense acuity. We not only discovered that my ability to sense juice traces was giving me a rudimentary ability to sense élan, but also that there was much more I could pick up from an Arm tag. These days, not only could I sense Arm tags anywhere within my metasense range, but I could use them to get a read on the physical wellbeing of the taggee. I was shocked to find I could do this in the Dreaming, but much less shocked to find that I only picked up a fraction of the information I normally did.

  What had happened to Webberly?

  I recognized her now, but I couldn’t understand her situation. She was livid, miserable, and in pain, astonishing in its intensity. I tried to figure out where she was, but there was no sense of place under the weight of all her emotions.

  I let my metasense range out further, diving into the chaos of the Dreaming. I saw snippets of reality, none believable: Lori and Gail in an Arm-style dominance fight, an unknown urban area overrun by Monsters, an absurd polar-bear style Chimera on an arctic hilltop. I heard sounds and voices, things foreign to the dreaming. Gunfire. Ambulance brigades. A quiet voice saying: “For hope, fall farther. Fall farther.” I barricaded my mind against the nonsense and finally managed to find a sense of place, but not for Webberly. I sensed my own territory, Detroit, calling me home. I extended my metasense farther out and spotted other territories. Los Angeles was Keaton’s, New York was Haggerty’s.

  Ah, there was the problem. Haggerty just took New York back from Webberly. The emotions from Webberly were the horrible misery and pain of lost territory. Webberly was out alone, beaten, injured, low on juice, with no home at all, and suffering the aching loss of her former home. I hurt for her, as I felt the misery through her tag and remembered the hell of losing my own territories. This was an Arm thing. There is no greater love than one’s territory. Losing a territory was as bad as losing a spouse or a child.

  Damn it, how could Haggerty do this? How could my crazy boss take time out, in a crisis, to do a territory grab? This asininity would tear our organization apart.

  Except, when I sensed New York in my meditations, the territory was thoroughly Haggerty’s and always had been. Webberly’s claim was a thin and dying thing, dissipating already. Much as Webberly might want New York, Haggerty possessed the stronger claim.

  Still, though, we needed to find a better way to resolve territorial disputes than for one Arm to beat the tar out of another. This tied into our tagging problems and organizational hierarchy problems, not that my gut feel would convince either of my bosses.

  I didn’t stop my examination.

  I sensed Chicago around me. The city was still my territory, and more of a real territory for me than Detroit. Chicago called to me, plaintively asking me to come back, claim the place, and stay. I suspect I cried, but as an Arm, I would never admit to such a thing.

  I Dream-sensed other things. Pittsburgh was a cesspool of corruption, and I pulled back in disgust. Atlanta was stronger than I expected. Boston was a beacon of light, save for Lori’s annoyance about her Crow-instigated day job issues as a Professor at Boston College. Detroit was all yin-yang on me, Gail the light part and Adkins the dark. Adkins’ darkness loomed larger.

  Then there was Enkidu’s territory. No, that wasn’t quite right. The territory of Enkidu and all his Hunters together, the Hunter civilization, in opposition to everything and everyone around them. The heart of the Hunters was in Wyoming, but their territory extended east into Colorado and Utah and Montana and Idaho before fading out around the edges. And west, to the sea, and north, into Canada a short distance. Bigger than I expected, though I sensed they still hurt from the Clearing of Chicago. At least the bastards weren’t encroaching on the Midwest again.

  I let myself drift back to Chicago. So beautiful. My true home took my breath away.

  I realized I could tag Chicago, the whole city, if it would make itself mine. The thought was dizzying. Nothing in the juice would prevent it. All I needed to do was reach out and make the metropolis mine. All Chicago needed to do was agree. Mine. Truly mine.

  I extended out farther. I sensed Armenigar’s territory in Calgary, and another Arm in Montreal. I had a good feeling about the Arm in Montreal, and wondered who had trained her. I sensed an Arm in Mexico City, and another in Buenos Aires, and several others scattered across Central and South America. Save for the Arm in Montreal, none felt trained, even minimally. Beastly Arms, training themselves the hard way. Many would die.

  In Europe, I found Eissler’s territory and cursed. Stuttgart wore her tag, and jealousy gripped my heart like a strangler. Her city tag was how my subconscious understood I could tag Chicago. I wanted to know how she had done it, but could never ask. She was too old, too strong. She had been ahead of us for years, and we never seemed to catch up.

  I pulled my senses back again, and found Webberly. I couldn’t place her location, because she owned no territory of her own. Such misery. I attempted to send emotions back down the link to her, reassurance and support. I couldn’t tell if my support helped or even worked.

  In a brief moment of honest sympathy, I decided I owed her one, on general principle, and I knew just the way to pay it off. She was going to be my sparring partner for my new secret combat methodology. By the time I mastered the technique, she would have a big leg up on the other Arms.

  ---

  I arrived in Detroit just after the morning rush hour. Amy showed up in my home and fished me out of the shower to give her my progress report. At least she let me dry off and dress. I told her about my meeting with Keaton, which elicited an ‘I told you so’ about Bass and little interest in the political dangers of having Keaton and Bass working together beyond a snide ‘Oh, evil working with evil might produce something evil’ comment. My immediate boss’s research monomania was starting to get on my nerves.

  I escaped Amy after lunch and headed over to Gail’s apartment complex. Her first reaction to my window-entrance surprised me – she bounded up and gave me a big hug, twirling me around like a rag doll and radiating love. No more mousy fake-housewife Focus disguise for her.

  “I was so worried about you!” she said, after I disentangled myself from her strong arms. “You got attacked! In New Orleans and Los Angeles! There’s…”

  “You’re watching over me in the Dreaming.” She projected very little ‘student’, save that she had picked up on my approach far enough out to gather up her hair in her huge training bun. She expected me to work her hard.

  “Of course. Poor Rose, chased out of New York City,” Gail said. She grabbed me by the shoulder and led me off toward her household’s day kitchen. To my surprise, she had actual proper Arm food ready for my return. Some was Arm-leftovers, which really surprised me. “I don’t understand the Arm territory thing, and why it hurts so much.”

  The damned Dreaming witch had realized I was coming when I got on I-94, just outside of Chicago. I swore she had become significantly stronger in all things in the three weeks since I had last seen her. “Why are you on a first name basis with Webberly?”

  Gail blinked at me, fetchingly, her charisma tuned to pride and success, not attempting to pull something on her teacher. “Because of her training,” Gail said. “I never realized tags were so intricate, or had so many possibilities. Did you know that Arms use 75% less juice per tag manipulation than a Focus? When I told Hank it freaked him out.”

  “Hold on a second. Calm down.” Freaking Hank out? What had I loosed on the world? “My three
tagged Arms were here to guard you, just in case. Not teach.”

  Gail pulled up a chair and juice signaled to her cook of the moment to bring out the spiced, marinated and properly uncooked hamburger. From the smell, she had followed one of my suggestions and found a butcher shop dealing with low-grade beef instead of the artificially fattened supermarket beef her place normally served. Where in the hell did she learn juice signaling, though? Oh, crap, this was Sibrian’s tag singing trick, and she had found a way to modify it to allow her to bellow one-way communication to her Transforms. “Three?” Gail frowned. “Well, if Arm Whetstone was around, I never metasensed her.”

  Damn. She had identified Webberly and Sibrian somehow, likely using one of her many extended metasense tricks she didn’t like to advertise, flirted her juice at them and drew them in with her charisma. A story of my mother’s came to my mind, about how her father turned people-adverse barn cats into loving lap cats – he bribed them with bowls of canned cat food. Dry cat food was never enough, the food not any better than what they got while hunting.

  My dearest student Focus had rolled two perfectly good Arms of mine, using herself as the equivalent of wet cat food.

  I studied her while I ate, looking for any tells associated with threats, rebellion, and improper dominance displays. Nothing. She expected hard and painful training, later, with a mixture of fear and pride. She expected hard and painful questions, with much less fear and a lot more pride.

  “Tell me what Webberly and Sibrian were teaching you. Also, I need to know what Focus Rizzari’s doing with you.”

  “Sure!”

  I listened to Gail with half an ear, concentrating on reading her tells and scanning her with my metasense. I expected problems, given my last month of issues, and found the opposite. Gail was now fully committed to the Cause, as was her now clockwork-commune household.

  Only…she had used the tag of mine she wore, and her goddamned charisma, to dominate my tagged Arms and infect them with her household’s volunteerism bug. She had participated in an Arm’s juice hunt, and hadn’t gone apeshit crazy. Heh. She was becoming the weapon I always expected her to be. And she was my weapon. Double heh.

  However, where in the hell was Gilgamesh? And why was her husband, Van, drilling holes in the back of my head with his gaze?

  Gail Rickenbach: September 10, 1972

  “Hold!” Teacher said. Gail, arms and legs shaking, froze in place, and let the bar settle back on its frame. She had only twitched up the right side of the bar a mere fraction of a second before the left, but Teacher caught the form error immediately. “I can smell the juice. Let’s not run you out of juice before we get to the juice pattern tests.”

  “Fine,” Gail said. She liked the weight work, mostly because her capabilities appalled everyone. “So, how’d I do?”

  “Gail, I don’t press 540,” Teacher said. “You shouldn’t, either, because you can’t do even one with correct form.” She sighed. “You’re showing off.”

  Well, rats! “Sorry, ma’am,” Gail said. Switching back to proper respect took but a single step into her household’s basement weight room. Something in the juice, in Gail’s perception and understanding, turned Teacher into her fully dominant boss, in that one instant, far more dominant than Gail’s visiting Arm teachers. The change seemed appropriate. “I was.”

  “Do you understand the difference between the two of us, as far as the weight work is concerned? There’s more going on here than just the difference between Arms and Focuses.”

  “No. Wait.” Gail focused her mind as she sat up and rubbed her still shaking arms. As she sat up she gooshed, leaving behind a cup of foul dross-laden sweat on the weight bench. “You and Rose possess about the same muscle mass, about 15% more than I do.” She had bulked up recently, first under Teacher’s training and later under Rose’s. She didn’t think of herself as Arm bulky, because when she visualized Arm bulky she visualized Stacy Keaton. If she thought in terms of the rest of the Arms, though, she was Arm bulky, although she likely would always carry more fat than any of the Arms. Isabella was already complaining about Gail’s ‘figure’ changing again. “Rose can outlift me. Rose is also faster than I am, but not absurdly faster. However, you are absurdly faster, ma’am.” She paused, giving Teacher a moment to interject. When she didn’t, Gail continued. “In conclusion, the Arm combat benefits don’t come from strength. They come from speed. If you factor in muscle mass, body size and training, Focuses are just as strong as Arms. The same isn’t true about speed and quickness.”

  “Huh,” Teacher said. She bounded to the top of a set of mattresses piled six high, leaning precariously against the two armoires holding the Spack family’s clothing, the Spack family being the ones who used the basement weight room as their sleeping area. “Write this up, with the numbers, and give it to Hank. He hypothesized this several years ago, but never got enough data to go any farther with his idea.”

  Gail tried to stand, but the world swam around her as she did, and she sank to the floor and puddled. Her head throbbed with the start of a low juice headache. She checked her automatics, but her juice patterns worked and the household’s juice moving held steady. To ward off the headache getting the better of her, she focused on her breathing. Life was just so much better when you breathed.

  ---

  “So, Teacher,” Gail said, “was your training as hard as what the four of you are doing to me?” Teacher had spent an hour examining Gail’s progress with juice patterns, in the process driving Gail’s juice count down into the lower areas of peri-withdrawal. She had long since given up on standing or sitting up. She barely kept her eyes open. She ignored the pain, but doing so cost her juice, so she shut down her body’s self-healing, and her movement went with it. She rested her head on Teacher’s lap, satisfying a need for body contact she knew Teacher echoed.

  Teacher put down the clipboard, thick with instructions and intermediate results. She glanced down at Gail for just a moment, and then she started to laugh, a big, vigorous belly laugh. She gasped and chortled and Gail’s head bounced up and down in her lap as the bed bounced and the Arm guffawed. “Arm training is considerably worse,” she finally managed to say.

  Her laughter faded, but the smile lingered. “Consider that after less than two months of Keaton’s training, she had me attempting to catch knives she tossed at me.” Ouch! “However, Arm training doesn’t involve any aspects of juice manipulation. At least it didn’t when Keaton trained me. Over the years, she’s added some training in juice drawing efficiencies and some of the other Arm tricks. Directed self-healing, healing of others. Things like that.”

  They rested in Gail’s bedroom. Van sat beside Teacher on the bed, absorbed in his reading, looking sleepier and sleepier as midnight approached, but keeping himself awake by force of will and the need to meet a challenge. He and Teacher had exchanged words, earlier, over his worries about what the training was doing to Gail. He had warned Gail he would do this and made her promise not to defend him. Although Teacher got into his face and forced him to back down, or at least back off on his aggressive body posture and speaking tone, she had agreed with his worries. Yes, Teacher was turning Gail into something beyond a normal Focus. Of course this would make Gail a harder and less sympathetic person. No, it wasn’t likely the best thing to be doing to a Focus, because this was the first time a Focus had been trained this way.

  Then Teacher surprised both of them by ordering Van to participate in Gail’s training, taking notes and making observations. Gail was glad Teacher waited this long in the training to recruit Van’s participation. Early on, Gail would have died of embarrassment to have Van around while she trained.

  “So what was your training like?” Gail asked. “What’s it like for an Arm?”

  Teacher’s smile faded, and stared thoughtfully at the bedroom wall for a long moment, absently rubbing Gail’s head. Then she shook her own head and spoke. “Baby Arms aren’t civilized creatures, and there’s not a lot of rational mi
nd there when they first start out. You met Duval. She’s a prime example of what happens to an Arm without adequate supervision, all snarl and spit. You need to do a lot to an Arm to get through to her.”

  Gail shivered as she remembered. Arm Duval still carried a beastly feel to her, all ‘grrr’ and glare, despite Arm Webberly’s work. If Keaton and Hancock had once been like Duval, Gail understood how the old stories about Arms being a variety of Monster started. “Can you tell me how this works?”

  Teacher leaned back against the headboard and didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then one side of her mouth tilted up in the hint of a smile. “I bet I’ve never told you about the first time I ran into Keaton. I was so young and so stupid, and she’d been hanging around for weeks in disguise. Well then, here I was, all full of myself and…”

  Stories.

  Teacher had a thousand of them. Stories from the early days of her training, stories from the days before that, when she was a lab rat at a Transform Detention Center. Stories from her later days. People she met, some dangerous, some ludicrous. Idiot fights as a young Arm with equally young Hunters, neither knowing what to do. Organized torture by the FBI. Meeting Gilgamesh, Gail’s long time Crow friend, when they were both young and ignorant. Funny stories mixed with exciting stories and horrifying stories. Gail listened, rapt, as Teacher spun her tales. Five minutes in, Van gave up taking notes, and with Teacher’s permission and caveats about what was legal to pass along in his books and in her household’s story time sessions, started up his tape recorder.

  Gail couldn’t imagine going through a transformation like that, with all its terror and pain and misery. Or dealing with someone like Keaton as a teacher. She had known the temperamental and sadistic Arm for years, and she was appalled to realize Keaton had once been worse. The stories let her understand Teacher in a whole new light, when she realized what Teacher had been through. Or having enemies like the Hunters, knowing absolutely nothing about them in those early days save that they were trying to search you down, rape you, kill you and eat you. Not necessarily in that order.