Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2)

by Randall Farmer

  “Did Lori’s people tell you how they work sex in their household?” I said. Poor Van. He already appeared a bit slack-jawed and wild-eyed. I hadn’t been rough, but I had been intense, and he was no athlete.

  “It seems to work well for them,” he said, uneasy. Fear and curiosity warred in his emotions for control, and I enjoyed them both.

  “They think the standard sexual mores won’t stand up to Transform Sickness.”

  Van shrugged. “They aren’t standing up even without Transform Sickness. Do you believe what they’re saying?” His deep and thoughtful blue eyes radiated unease and the edge of madness.

  “I think they came up with one approach, but I bet there’s a lot of others.” I rolled backwards next to him and stared at the ceiling with my fingers interlocked behind my head. “I doubt standard marriage will hold up, and the big dividing line is going to be the household. Sex inside the household is good, sex outside the household is infidelity.” Not just my guess. Dr. Van Reijn had figured this out, independently, working backwards from something he had found in his Transform test subjects, traces of something termed deme-level selection. Transform households functioning as evolutionary individuals. Crazy stuff.

  “That’ll certainly get the normals in an uproar. Consider what they did to the Mormons a hundred years ago.”

  “Huh.” I clearly hadn’t broken his mind yet. “We’ve got a lot more than polygamy going against us.”

  Van nodded, the conversation relaxing him. “Right now, we’re few enough that people don’t pay attention to how we live. They worry about catching TS, but people don’t know anything about Transform day to day life save the lies the Focus Council tells them. Once there are enough Transforms the information won’t matter, but there’ll be a gap where we’re too numerous to ignore and not numerous enough to defend ourselves. That’s going to be a bad time, and if Inferno’s data is correct, the time is coming far faster than any of us are prepared for.”

  I turned to him, startled. Except for Tom, I didn’t have a lover able to make me think. My beast crept up from the depths and I eyed the walls of my room, mentally picking out which pieces of sexual torture equipment I would use to break him and make him mine. I wanted to hear Van scream and beg. I wanted his PhD in History, his two books and his ongoing series of long articles on new Focuses, their households and their adaptations. I wanted to make him mine and take him deep down, so when he saw me the first thing his subconscious did was think of how to obey me better. I wanted to take him to the edge of death, then a little beyond, then bring him back and become his personal savior.

  Gail would never forgive me. Van was intelligent and thoughtful, with more insight than I expected. Gail had good taste. I liked him.

  The beast had no room for like. The beast owned, the beast dominated, the beast considered anyone or anything unhumbled as a threat, and Arms destroyed threats. The beast wanted me to take Van and destroy him because he was intelligent and wise, and thus a threat far too dangerous to own. I could just tell Gail his heart gave out during sex. It happened. I could make it happen. It was an accident, Gail. I would lean on her tag, and…

  I bit him.

  “What?” He jumped, startled. I smiled and bit my own tongue.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. I licked the place on his shoulder where I bit him, pushing my tag into him via the blood.

  “You’re mine,” I said.

  He shivered. “I thought I belonged to Gail.”

  I laughed softly. “Gail hasn’t figured out how to tag a normal yet. You may be hers eventually, but you’re mine first.”

  “What does that mean?”

  I pointed to the instruments on my walls and said some nasty naked truths. “You’re too smart, and people who are too smart are a threat.” Well, he did want to learn about Arms. “I know several ways to tag people, and my darker urges wanted me to take you that way. To tag you by making you beg for your life.” I flipped over on to my stomach and rested my chin on my hand. With the other, I traced the now-healed scar on his shoulder and felt him shiver. I wouldn’t harm him now, though. No need to torture him to make him mine. He was mine already.

  “Your beast.”

  “Uh huh. The blood tag gets around my need to break you.” He wanted to flee in terror, but I steadied him through the tag. I needed to toughen up his nerve and his courage. Take a talented man and make him exceptional. I had done this to Tom, and I could improve Van similarly. Make him one of my men, able to be mine and work on my projects without my direct supervision. He would become mine because he believed in me.

  “Gail’s told me about what you call your beast. It’s seducing her, and if your beast can seduce Gail, I think it can seduce any Major Transform,” Van said. He worried about Gail, as well as my reaction to his comments.

  “Yes. I’m afraid you’re right. Not just Major Transforms, but Transforms and normals as well.”

  Van nodded. “I think the results might be worse than the anarchy Gail and Gilgamesh are worried about. Western and East Asian civilizations are tremendously resistant to anarchy. I think you’ll end up with totalitarian dictatorships far beyond the most horrible we’ve seen in the twentieth century, after a nightmarish set of wars. Think of it as the final victory of romanticism over the enlightenment, everyone enslaved to a few surviving strong Major Transforms who will be myth-draped God or Goddess Kings.”

  I understood what he was saying. I remembered my dreams, my old almost nightmares about speaking to the milling throngs, all waiting on my every word. I didn’t want to understand what Van was saying, but I did. I nodded at him and smiled. “I know those urges. Life would just be so much simpler if I took The Commander to its obvious end.” I had resisted so far, likely a major part of the reason why both Keaton and Haggerty considered me less than a top-notch Arm these days.

  “May I have permission to speak freely, then, Carol.”

  I smiled, as I knew every verse of this song. All my tagged men, the real ones, wanted to push me. This was part of my selection criteria. “Say ‘ma’am’.”

  “Ma’am, may I speak freely?”

  “Go ahead.” Van didn’t know how to pull on my tag, yet. He would learn, and quickly.

  “Ma’am, Gail told me about your reaction when you found the juice-moving juice pattern.” She hadn’t deserved my reaction, but damn, interrupted draws were hell. Usually I tried to stay out of polite company afterwards, for just that reason.

  I nodded, expecting something along the lines of ‘being nasty to people who succeed degrades the efficiency of your organization’. He knew what he planned to say was dangerous, but I didn’t read anything with his ‘I love Gail’ emotions attached. Strange. More along the lines of something from his Schuber Arm groupie emotions. I waited in anticipation, as something along these lines might actually be interesting and unique.

  “I remember the two tagging ceremonies, and your exuberance and glee after both.” No, I didn’t know where he went with this. “When Gail finishes learning the ‘move juice’ pattern, and tests it, you’re going to have a similar reaction, aren’t you, ma’am?”

  “If not more exuberant.”

  “A strong enough emotion to echo up and down your tag network?”

  I nodded…and then I smiled.

  “Yes, yes, that’s a brilliant idea!” I said, taking his face in my hands and giving him a big kiss. I leapt out of my bed. “Get dressed. Change of plans. I’m going to challenge Haggerty tomorrow night.” I had the impossible success I needed, even though I got only a tenth of a point of juice from Gail. The rest was just implementation. And, as Van pointed out, I hadn’t announced ‘here I come, you bitch’ to Haggerty. I could challenge her by surprise, giving me a significantly better chance of success.

  “Ma’am, wait!” Van said, his face happy but his inner emotions in turmoil. “We’ve gotten farther on the project, and you might need what we’ve learned.”

  “Talk while you get dressed and I gather my gea
r.” Weapons. Backup weapons. Dark clothing. My hunting gear, because I needed to grab some juice, a kill, just before I reached New York. Thank God prey Transforms were a hell of a lot more common now than back when I transformed.

  He talked. He, Kurt and Daisy had been collating the results of Gail’s household’s latest information grab, this time from one Dr. Anthony Butler, United Toxicol’s Denver special projects director circa 1969, currently working in a low-stress junior executive position at Neopharma in St. Louis. “We’ve filled in the missing days after Bass’s transformation. Our two unknown Focuses, Ajax and Cassandra, paid her a visit in her holding cell in Dr. Littleside’s lab,” Van said as he pulled on his pants. “Both of them. In person.”

  I picked Van up like baggage and ran him down to my car. Focuses? Last time they had given me a report, they listed Ajax and Cassandra as ‘unknowns, most likely Major Transforms’. “They used their charisma on Bass to direct Bass to kill Dr. Littleside,” I said, filling in the Major Transform politics without needing him to tell me more. “When she finished the job, Chrysanthemum made off with Bass and sold her to United Toxicol to pay off some of their debts for previous work orders.”

  Van nodded. I peeled rubber. “That’s our guess as well. It makes sense for both the foreign Focus hypothesis and first Focus hypothesis, as this is typical behavior when anyone prunes the Focus Network. Carol, ma’am, Dr. Littleside was investigating an attack on Dr. Zielinski in 1967 when he was assassinated. Dr. Zielinski won’t talk about it, but Inferno calls it ‘the Monster juice attack’. Dr. Littleside’s working notes didn’t survive, so we don’t know what about the situation he was investigating.”

  “Shitfuck.” I swear this hairy armpit got more disgusting and complicated every time we took another step further into the morass. Had the FBI gotten its Monster juice weapon from United Toxicol, and had Dr. Littleside figured too much out? I had too many questions.

  “Dr. Butler,” one of Daisy’s old U of M contacts, a young and sex-pliable postdoc, “was also able to translate some of Dr. Julian’s notes into something comprehensible: according to Dr. Julian’s notes Bass came to the Clinic before she fell into her Transformation coma, and she didn’t behave the way an Arm or a Focus does in her coma. Nobody died and nobody transformed.”

  “What?” I almost sideswiped a cab. This was insane. “More!” I would never be able to ditch Gail’s household. They were far too good at investigating Transform mysteries for me to ever let go. And to think Keaton sneered at Gail for being a political Focus. She didn’t understand the power of politics in all its many forms.

  “We’ve come up with four hypotheses, but no way to test them as of yet. One possibility is that Ajax and Cassandra got to Bass before she got to the clinic, and she faked her transformation coma and was already an Arm. Second idea is that Ajax and Cassandra fed her Transforms in the Clinic to hide her Arm nature and set up a ‘Bass is a Sport’ scenario, as Dr. Littleside wasn’t interested in Arms, but Sports. Third idea is that Bass is a Sport. Our fourth idea, the least likely one, is that Bass is an older foreign Arm masquerading as a younger Arm, matching our hypothesis that Ajax and Cassandra are foreign Focuses and that the Judges lied when they implied Focus Fingleman was one of the two. We consider the last idea is the one that puts you in the most danger.”

  “No shit,” I said. I screeched to a halt in front of the Branton. He had more to say, but I was running short on time. “Go. Thanks! I’ve got a lot to think about, and I’m not going to ignore your warnings. Keep trying to figure out who Ajax and Cassandra really are.” If Fingleman was one of the two, then who was her partner?

  Keaton was in over her head on this, and I didn’t have enough information to warn her.

  We were all in deep, deep shit.

  Gail Rickenbach: December 4, 1972

  Gail stretched languidly and gazed up at Gilgamesh’s warm brown eyes. He was attractive, with beautiful juice and a beautiful body, lean and strong, a good chin and a mop of dark brown hair that never seemed to stay neat.

  Gail hadn’t known sex would be so good when the juice got involved. Everything was so good now. Ever since she started drawing from her buffer and running a high juice count, she had come alive with energy and enthusiasm. And lust.

  Especially lust, and she had been sharing her lust with Van, but sex with Van wasn’t like sex with Gilgamesh. In the back of her mind, she feared she had permanently ruined her relationship with Van. Why couldn’t sex with Van be this good?

  “Do you hate me very much?” she said, in her small voice.

  Gilgamesh gently stroked his hand along her cheek. His touch was gentle and graceful, beside which a normal’s touch seemed impossibly clumsy.

  “Why would I hate you?”

  “I’ve been such a bitch, not knowing how to behave toward Crows, when I’ve known you forever.” Of all the Crows she had known he had always been the most interesting, and if she hadn’t been married and Gilgamesh hadn’t been attached to Lori she would have made the moves on him long before.

  “I’m almost sorry I missed Lori’s talk with you about Crows. It’s difficult to see oneself from the outside.”

  “Yes, it is.” Lori had told Gail about how she had switched sides. Gail could empathize with a Focus throwing in with the Arms…until Lori put on Lady Death and started talking about culling evil from society and trying to convince Gail to read those revolting Ayn Rand books. Then Lori quoted ‘It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own’ from Ayn Rand and Lori’s ideas started to appeal to something deep inside of her. Gail found this troubling.

  Gilgamesh shrugged. “We’ll figure things out.”

  Gail wrapped her arms around her torso. Crows, like Arms, were too different to understand. Hell, Focuses were likely as difficult to understand, but after all these years as a Focus her changes and talents seemed natural to her. But Crows? Betha had found Gilgamesh three mornings ago in the laundry room, sleeping on a pile of warm laundry fresh out of the dryers. He said he couldn’t resist warm laundry. Oh, and no matter where Gilgamesh went, so did several of her household’s pet cats. Throw in Lori’s comment about Crows being instinctively hard wired for something other than two-valued logic, and her supposed understanding of Crows vanished into the mist.

  “So is Van going to be a problem?” she said. She slept with Gilgamesh because Lori and Dr. Zielinski convinced her she needed to, and because Van grudgingly approved, but even for the fate of the world she didn’t think she could give up Van.

  Gilgamesh shook his head.

  “This isn’t the way we should have done this, you know,” he said.

  “What are you thinking?”

  Gilgamesh laid his head down on the pillow beside her and watched her with those warm, quiet eyes. He was a little like Van, she decided, the same thoughtful silence living behind his eyes.

  “We went from distant friendship to close intimates far too quickly. We broke our established boundaries in just a few weeks,” Gilgamesh said. “We may spend the rest of our lives together, and we decided to commit to each other on the basis of one single conversation where you agreed out of a sense of responsibility and I was on the rebound. We’re like a man and a woman in an arranged marriage.”

  The analogy seemed depressingly accurate. “People can make arranged marriages work, though.”

  Gilgamesh nodded. “We need to. You’re beautiful. Did you know that?”

  “You think so?”

  He nodded. “I’ve always thought so. Your juice structure is a work of art. You’re doing things as a Focus, with your household, I’ve never seen before. Wonderful things. And your hair is magnificent.” He slid his hand under the cascade of hair and lifted an arm’s length of it. Rich rippling brown, with highlights of red and gold. Since her transformation, her hair
was her best feature.

  Gilgamesh smiled briefly, a small flickering thing that vanished almost immediately. “Tiamat must think so, too. Five months of training and she hasn’t yet made you cut your hair.”

  “Why do you call her Tiamat?” She had always wondered.

  That brief smile appeared again. “We were both just weeks past our transformation when I found her and I didn’t know who or what she was. I found her engrossing and mesmerizing, and terrifying, so I called her Tiamat.”

  “The Babylonian goddess of chaos and death. It fits.”

  He didn’t answer, but merely ran his fingers through her hair, arranging it like a cloak around her shoulders. Gail rested, comfortably content.

  “So do you think we’ve discovered something important? Are Focuses and Crows supposed to live together?” She grinned. “Are a bunch of Crows and Focuses going to be following in our footsteps?”

  Gilgamesh found the end of a lock of hair, and teased her nipple gently. “I think Crows and Focuses should live together, but I don’t think many Crows will be following in our path, not any time soon. Crows don’t trust Focuses.”

  Gail lifted herself up on her elbows. “Oh? Why not?”

  “Many years ago, the first Focuses betrayed…”

  “Oh, hell,” Gail said. “Figures.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to interrupt anymore,”

  “Whoops. Sorry.” Item number three on the Crow courtesy list, right after ‘don’t shout’, and ‘don’t make threats.’ “I’ve been talking over people my entire life. It’s a hard habit to break.”

  “Don’t worry too much; your enthusiasm for life is part of your appeal and your strength. Anyway, many years ago, the first Focuses betrayed and killed two of the early Crows, and the Crows never forgot. Even my students, the ones willing to take their dross from an Arm, even Newton, who’s willing to love Focus Hargrove, find the thought of living with a Focus to be terrifying.”

  Gail shook her head at the idea that the Crows found Focuses as terrifying as Arms. “Wait a minute. Carol is supposed to protect you from me. So what about if some Arm’s protecting the Crow? Does that work?”