Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2)

by Randall Farmer

  “Focus, ma’am, this isn’t something you need to be involved in,” Connie said. She said it firmly, with the competent authority she always displayed. If not for Carol’s training, she would have missed the subtle undertone of discomfort. Connie wanted Gail to drop the issue and go away.

  “Well, I’m here. Deal.” Normally, Connie was cheerful, outgoing, a little wild when she was off duty, and casually competent when she was working. Not today. Today, she was stiff as iron. Stony, bureaucratic. Not at all pleased to see Gail.

  “Perhaps we’d best let this business go for now, ma’am,” Connie said.

  Interesting politics here, Gail decided. “No, we’re not. If we can’t handle this…” Gail found herself growing more than a little angry at Connie’s obstinacy, and firmly pushed her anger back down. She reached over to Connie’s telephone. “Let’s see, what’s the lab two phone number…” She started to dial, and then stopped when Connie slammed her fingers down on the phone.

  “You’re not going to bother the Focus about this, ma’am!”

  “I don’t see that it’s your call, Connie,” Gail said, staring nose to nose with Connie across Connie’s desk.

  Van cleared his throat.

  Gail took a deep breath, and ordered herself to be calm. Again. “Yes?”

  “Gail, perhaps I can explain a little about what’s going on,” Van said. He stepped forward closer to the desk and the little confrontation.

  “Fine.” Gail handed the phone to Connie, who put the handset back on the cradle and glowered at her.

  “The Inferno household’s variant on the Weak Focus model puts Connie in charge of household matters, including Focus Rizzari.”

  “Well, yes, that’s true,” Gail said. “But this is a multi-household matter. Isn’t it?”

  “Pardon me if I’m over-reaching here, Connie,” Van said. “I’m guessing Inferno doesn’t have anything set up for situations like this, where two households are working on neutral turf, without a dominance hierarchy set up between them.”

  Connie blinked, and sat back in her office chair. A smile crept over her face. “You’re working on your history of the Arms project again, aren’t you, Van?”

  Van nodded. “The situation has that feel.” He turned to Gail. “Hon, inviting Focus Rizzari to participate was an insult.”

  Gail bit her lip, and then nodded. “I’m sorry,” Gail said, to Connie. She could see the insult, now that she thought about the issue as a dominance problem. The Inferno household model didn’t make any sense to her at all. How could such a powerful Focus as Lori let her own household run her around?

  “It’s a matter of trust, ma’am,” Connie said. Gail blinked. Connie read her as easily as Carol. “The Focus has enough confidence in us to delegate the entire responsibility of running the household to me and my organization.”

  At that, Sylvie bristled, not having heard Gail’s mental question. “We tried that, once,” Sylvie said. “It didn’t work.”

  “Ma’am,” Connie said to Sylvie, “Your household structure is too different. We don’t need to bribe our Focus to get her to…”

  “Enough,” Gail said. ‘Move juice properly’, Connie almost said. She would swallow Connie’s insult for now. “Come on, Van, you should sit, too.” She waved her hand at a couple of folding chairs leaned up against the wall, where Connie kept them in case of larger meetings. Van grabbed one and set it up for himself next to Sylvie.

  Gail turned back to Connie. “Do you have any suggestions on how we can work this out, Connie, using food preparation as a test case? I’ll back off once we settle this test case, if we can work out a procedure that works below the household boss level.”

  Connie sat up straighter and took a deep breath. Gail could see her knuckles whiten as she held a death-grip on her pen. Van called this one correctly, Gail decided. Connie didn’t at all like challenges to her authority.

  “Perhaps I can be of some assistance, fine ladies and gentlemen,” a voice said, from the corner of the room. Gail started and turned, to find the Crow Sky nonchalantly leaning against a bookcase. She hadn’t seen him enter, nor did she metasense him. She glared at him long enough to pick up some piece of Crow dross thing trying to tell her metasense nothing was there.

  The expression on Connie’s face was priceless: utterly deflated, worn down by years of lost arguments.

  “Madame Foyer Rickenbach-Schuber, gracious lady, you are unfortunately caught up in a problem associated with conflicting house superorganisms. In particular, your house formalisms make it such that it is almost automatic that you, ma’am, become involved in intractable household disputes. You are your household’s final arbiter and judge of situations where no established precedents exist, because one of your responsibilities is teaching your people how to handle new situations. On the other hand, the Inferno formalisms emphasize a quite different process. In specific, in Inferno, those in dispute have the responsibility to solve the dispute themselves, even unprecedented disputes. Peer group consensus building is often necessary. The formalisms that aid this are actual formality. Please, thank you, yes ma’am, no ma’am, and so on and so forth. The formality separates the argument from the stress, ma’am. No insult intended.” Sky bowed to Gail, and doffed an imaginary hat. In her mind’s eye, she could almost see Sky in Elizabethan dress, a court dandy.

  “So, Sky, how do I cope with this and not end up doing my usual bull-in-the-china-shop routine?” Gail asked.

  “Mademoiselle Foyer, I have no instant solutions, only a few minor and polite suggestions. Might I suggest, ma’am, that you delegate authority regarding the resolution of the many differences between Inferno and your household to someone who can learn the politesse of Inferno?”

  Gail turned at Van and smiled. He stared back at her, in horror. “Uh, hun, you’re not serious, are you?” Van said. Oh. He was afraid she would appoint him as liaison.

  “No, silly. This is a job for an operator, not a diplomat. I was wondering if you had any ideas about who might be the best person for the position. We don’t have many, um, overly polite people in our household who can also arm twist. That I can think of.”

  Sylvie laughed, and Gail turned to her. “You know someone who might work?”

  “Well, this might mess things up a bit, but I think Manfred can fill in for her as our Financial Officer just fine,” Sylvie said. “How about Helen Grimm? Do you remember how good a job she did running us around back at U of M, and how her stony politeness used to annoy the crap out of us?”

  Van nodded agreement. Gail hadn’t thought of Helen as the witch bitch for so long she had forgotten how good Helen was at, well, aggressive negotiations.

  “Madame Foyer Rickenbach-Schuber, might I also make a tiny suggestion along those lines, myself?” Sky asked. “Although I am not a member of your fine household, due to my work with the Inferno household tuning project I have been forced to become, against my will and natural predilections, somewhat of a good seat of the pants parlor psychologist. My suggestion to you, ma’am, is that you assign your husband, Van, the position of official household diplomat. I read his book on the history of Focuses, and his book the two of you co-wrote on Focus mentoring, and these books show that Van possesses quite excellent diplomatic judgment. Also, my time with Inferno has led me to believe that the input of wise and well intentioned non-Transforms can be extremely beneficial to situations such as this. Ma’am. Besides,” Sky winked, “Van needs a good kick in the pants.”

  Gail nodded, remembering her earlier insight about Van being out of the game for too long. Sky was right, on all counts. “I’ll take your suggestion, Sky.”

  “Gail!” Van said. “I just got back to working on my book!” She glared at him and he quieted. “I’ll do my best,” he said.

  Juice Music

  “A hero is one who knows how to hang on one minute longer.” – Novals

  Gilgamesh: November 15, 1972

  “Gilgamesh!” Melanie grinned. “What are you doing he
re?” Gilgamesh couldn’t help smiling back. That night after the party hadn’t been the only occasion they had managed to spend some private time together. She had been lonely since her transformation, and out of some odd quirk, she found him interesting.

  As did several other single women in Gail’s household. He couldn’t understand the attraction, but he wasn’t inclined to question his luck. The attention was one of the nicer benefits of making the household his own, and a big reason he didn’t want to give it up.

  “I’m looking for Dr. Zielinski,” Gilgamesh said. Melanie was standing guard in Zielinski’s living room. In the bedroom, he metasensed Vic Crawford.

  “He’s sleeping,” Melanie said. “Normals do that at three in the morning.” She grinned wider. “You know, I’d really like to, but I’m on duty.”

  He kissed her lightly. She was beautiful, and as graceful as a deer. “Come see me when you get off duty, then,” he said. “Right now, I need to talk to the doctor.”

  “Just once,” Zielinski said, “couldn’t somebody concoct a crisis during the daytime?”

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Gilgamesh said.

  “What’s wrong with right here? It’s my bedroom.” He wore pajamas with little blue and white checks on them, and blearily searched for his slippers.

  Gilgamesh shook his head. “This place is too open to our enemies. Your bodyguards during the day suffice, but at night you need to stay inside the Branton.”

  Vic frowned, but Melanie nodded. He would be a lot easier to protect inside the household itself.

  “In the first place, you’re over-reacting, and in the second, I haven’t been invited,” Zielinski said. He finally found his slippers, but he didn’t put them on.

  “I’m inviting you. Carol asked me to protect you, and this apartment doesn’t count. Unless you want to argue with Carol, you should start packing.”

  Zielinski sighed and put his slippers on.

  “You could have waited until morning.”

  “Also,” Gilgamesh said in a quieter voice, “maybe, while you’re there, you can talk to Gail and convince her to be easier to live with.”

  “You expect me to convince a Focus to…” he said, but then he stopped, and looked hard at Gilgamesh. “Oh.”

  Gail Rickenbach: November 16, 1972 – November 22, 1972

  “It does look like music,” Arm Sibrian said as she spread the sheets over Gail’s coffee table. A dozen sheets, all of different juice patterns. Lori had come up with the brilliant idea of inviting Arm Sibrian to consult with them, as neither she, nor Beth, nor Dr. Zielinski, nor Gail herself possessed more than a passing knowledge of music theory. Dr. Zielinski agreed with the suggestion, as he believed he needed one of the metasense wizards to crack what he termed the personal signifier problem, and Arm Sibrian certainly qualified. Lori had pointed out that Arm Sibrian was in the area, tending to a tagged Chimera Hank examined several hours a day, and that Mary understood music theory. Gail passed the request to Carol, and ‘poof’, later that day, Arm Sibrian showed up in her apartment to consult with Lori, Beth, and Gail.

  But not before a quick stop in the Branton gym, where Daisy ran several of Gail and Beth’s more athletic Transforms through some strange tests involving treadmills and breathing tubes. Daisy had been conducting these tests for the last three days after carting over a truckload of lab equipment from Littleside. If Gail’s metasense didn’t lie, Mary and Daisy would be going on a ‘date’, later.

  “It doesn’t exactly match musical notation,” Gail said. She, Lori and Beth sat in Gail’s living room, watching Arm Sibrian and hoping she came up with something to make this project easier. “The octave is twenty-four notes, and there are a bunch of steps of sharps and flats on each note. Also, vibrato and forte go from -4 to +4.”

  “You can create a juice pattern from this?” Arm Sibrian asked. Today she wore a sword down her back, and as Gail expected, the red leather scabbard matched the rest of her outfit.

  Gail nodded. “Most of these are of my specific juice patterns, but a couple of them are from other Focuses and I need to transpose them. See here,” Gail pulled out one of the sheets, “this one comes from Lori.” The aforementioned Focus grimaced harder. She hadn’t stopped grimacing all morning. “The pattern produces an illusion to make a normal think the temperature is cold. I can’t play this exact pattern because it’s specific to Lori. The difference is what Dr. Zielinski terms the personal signifier. That’s these sections, here, here, and here.” Gail pointed.

  “So you understand exactly how you change them?”

  Gail nodded. “I’ve gotten good at recognizing the personal signifiers, and I’ve got mine memorized in all its standard variations. Other things are harder. For instance, if you want to affect a household Transform, then this section here needs to change, and you can change it to make it general to apply to any Transform, or specific to a male or female Transform, or even a particular single Transform if you put in their personal signifier. The more specific you are, the more effective the juice pattern is.”

  Mary examined the sheet carefully and frowned. “How long did it take you to learn this?”

  “I started working with Dr. Zielinski back in July, and I’m just starting to get the hang of the system. It’s like learning to play the piano, only much more complicated.”

  “Okay,” she said. Mary Sibrian was a strange Arm, Gail thought. She always wore red, and as Gail had learned during Sibrian’s training, she was nearly as impervious to Gail’s charisma as Carol, and far smoother around normals than even Carol. “Show me this personal signifier of yours,” Mary said.

  Gail did so, and Mary nodded. “The personal signifier is part of what Arm Webberly terms the self-tag. I think if you use your full self-tag you’ll get better control over the juice pattern creation.”

  “It’s the self-tag?” Gail said. “How’d I miss that?” She metasensed her personal signifier and then her self-tag, then flipped them back and forth in her mind. Yes, one was the subset of the other, but the self-tag metasensed so differently. “This is another of those strange places where the Arm metasense is better than the Focus metasense, then.”

  “Pattern recognition,” Lori said, with her professorial ‘this is the right and only answer’ voice. Thankfully, she only went professorial when dealing with settled questions. “The analogy is to color blindness. The Arm metasense is color-blind, but is better at pattern recognition and changes within the juice. Focuses pick up all the colors, but only pick up patterns within the juice with difficulty, and roiling juice turns everything into a blur.” Her voice went back to normal. “I always get a chuckle out of this when you consider that we’re the ones who work with juice patterns.”

  “So, what is the self-tag, anyway?” Gail asked. “Arm Webberly only said ‘it’s who you are within the juice’.”

  “Self-tags are what you alter within yourself to match your partner when you’re working with Affinity,” Mary said. “They’re also active during juice-based meditation states and when you interface with the Dreaming. They change over time as you change, which is going to make this codified juice pattern work quite difficult.”

  When Gail asked Carol about what Sibrian had been doing with her training test, she said Sibrian was a mystical Arm, but gave no clarification as to what she meant, other than ‘how the hell should I know why Sibrian decided it was time to expose you to life and death for real’. Mary didn’t give straightforward explanations. That could be part of it. After Gail thought about what Mary said for a few moments, her explanation finally made sense. When working with Affinity, you tuned yourself to match ‘something’ in another Transform. It made sense the something you matched was the personal signifier. “Whoever discovered Affinity ought to get a reward,” Gail said. “It’s nearly as ubiquitous as juice is, as far as centrality to being a Major Transform.”

  All the eyes in the room turned to Lori, who had the decency to blush. “I discovered it when Sky and I were sleeping tog
ether for the first time,” Lori said. “My subconscious wanted a baby so much that it was pressing me to get as much of Sky in me as I could, so I altered as much of my juice structure as I could to match his, and he did the same to himself. Instant baby.”

  “Uh, thanks,” Gail said, her voice quiet. “Really.”

  “Remind me not to do any such thing,” a voice said. They all turned to the voice, and found a well-worn Amy Haggerty raiding the refrigerator in Gail’s mini-kitchen. “Don’t mind me. I just needed a place to rest for a while, and I thought I’d do some checking up on our projects while I rested. This is all interesting, based on what little of it I can metasense.”

  Haggerty. She did things like this regularly, now that they were all in Chicago. “We’re trying to crack the personal signifier problem again and straighten up our juice pattern notation,” Gail said. Amy nodded and plopped herself down between Gail and Beth, a half-gallon jug of milk in her hand. Beth flinched briefly and then took a deep breath and didn’t inch away. Amy ignored the flinch, but Arm Sibrian didn’t. Gail wondered if this was the first time Beth had ever been so close to an Arm.

  Arm Sibrian did the stone face routine again, studying the three Focuses and Arm Haggerty. “I’d like to see some of these juice patterns, to see how they match your musical notation.”

  They showed, and Mary glowered more. “I need to see the, um, colors I’m missing. With your permission, I’d like to use some Focus’s metasense for this.” She glanced around the room, and shook her head. “Focus Hargrove, you aren’t comfortable with me, but it would be unwise for me to share the metasenses of your companions. Would you be willing?”

  So severe and formal today. Where did Arm Sibrian’s fun side go? Right. The same place as Carol’s, most likely. Hell, even Beth gave off a few blood and guts vibes, and she didn’t have any idea what was going on. The only one who hadn’t changed was Amy Haggerty, still the same dark blood-drenched superheroine who stalked the nighttime streets and killed the worst. ‘I don’t need to torture people’, Amy had told Gail after Carol’s latest miserable experience, when she started torturing people again and became a Keaton-style disgusto-Arm. ‘I work out my needs at night, on the streets.’