“No. Only a few Crows are convinced the Arms are strong enough to defend them…and they don’t trust Kali.” Gail gave him a quiet blank look. “Keaton. Whoever wins this contest between Keaton and the first Focuses, I think the Crows will be hiding for a long time.”
Depressing thoughts. Gail sank back down on the bed and frowned.
“Can you tell me about what you teach?”
Gilgamesh turned away. “Oh, a little this, a little that.” Gail, remembering advice from Lori, waited patiently.
He shrugged. “I specialize in Crow weaponry, household dross removal, and Arms.”
“What sort of weaponry?”
Gilgamesh frowned. “I suppose weaponry isn’t quite the word for what I teach. Mostly, I work in the area of long-term dross effects attached to objects. Sometimes this means weaponry, but not always. I also investigate unexplored Crow capabilities, such as the dross housecleaning skills, and I teach young Crows how to live near an Arm.”
“And other Crows come to learn from you?”
He nodded, and then turned away. “I’ve been doing some of my advanced dross tricks in an attempt to help the household.”
Gail stiffened. Despite their mutual tags, the idea of this being Gilgamesh’s household as well still bothered her. “What sort of dross tricks?”
“You know how when you move into a new place, it usually takes a couple of months for the juice to start flowing properly.”
“Yeah. Usually at first the flow isn’t smooth, and there are holes where it’s tough to move the juice, and others where it moves too fast, and a bunch of other problems involving metasense interference. Then after a couple of months the juice settles out, and then you get just a few more months after that before the household starts going bad. No trouble this time, though.”
Gilgamesh just looked at her.
“You arranged this?” Gail asked.
He nodded. “For best juice flow, you need a layering of dross in the walls, floors and ceilings, but not too much. I did a dross construct to spread the layering all over the household and set it in, so you didn’t have an adjustment period. I made the dross construct layer slippery, allowing me to pick up the excess dross with ease. I should be able to keep your household at optimum without a lot of trouble.”
Gail’s eyes opened wide. “You can’t even imagine how wonderful this is.” Never again to suffer through those miserable bad-house headaches, never needing to move just because part of the household went bad. She had a looser relationship years ago with Crow Whisper, before he went off to be a Crow Master of Nobles, but although he had cleaned out her dross she still needed to move her household when things got bad. Some places in the household just went bad, even if the entire household didn’t.
“Also,” Gilgamesh said, “I have a few other ideas. The Branton is far too vulnerable and I would like to upgrade our defenses with tripwires, booby traps and other things. I want to put illusions on our windows, so no one on the outside can see in. Also, we need to protect at least some of the house from metasensing.”
“You can do all this?”
“I can do a lot. Give me a couple of days to work with Sky and come up with a defense plan, and then we can show it to you and Connie. If you like, we can start construction.”
Gail nodded, thinking of their many potential enemies. “This sounds like a good idea,” she said.
“You think so?” he said. Gail realized he shared her nervousness, much to her surprise. She kissed him, and then kissed him harder.
“Yes, I think so.”
He smiled again, and this time the smile didn’t flicker away. “Let me show you something,” he whispered, and held her close. “Open yourself. Share my metasense.”
Gail nodded, beyond pleased, as Gilgamesh had never offered to share metasenses with her before. She did the mental shift. “Oh! Wow! This is really far out.” Very far out, as an entire new world opened up to her. He could metasense for miles.
“Sense around,” he said. “See our own household? Just upstairs, you can sense Sky’s defenses, but defenses aren’t his specialty, and I can do better.” She and Gilgamesh metasensed right through Sky’s defenses. Sky and Lori argued.
He pointed his hand over toward the window. “Now, metasense out a little further. See over to the west? That’s Linda Cooley’s household.”
“Who’s that?” Gail said, pointing to the northeast, over by Northwestern. “Carol? What’s she…” Gail cut her question short and turned just slightly red as she realized exactly what Carol did.
“Van’s the person with her,” Gilgamesh said.
Gail startled, and then sat up in bed. “Oh, hell. That’s what I thought. Is he all right?”
“Relax,” he said. “Van’s fine. I’ve been watching them, and Carol’s being good. She just tagged him, and that means he’ll be okay.”
Gail wasn’t so sure she liked this at all. Arranging for Melanie to trip up Van was one thing, Carol sleeping with him and tagging him was another.
“You don’t need to worry,” Gilgamesh said. “He’s fine, and there’s nothing you can do about it in any case. Metasense your household and examine their tags.”
Gail watched Carol with Van for a few moments longer before reluctantly pulling her attention away. Carol wasn’t who she had pointed at Van, but under the circumstances, she couldn’t exactly complain. An Arm would certainly be, well, entertaining.
She turned her attention to her household, where almost forty Transforms and nearly as many normals ate and slept and talked and worked. “I sense them,” she said, enjoying the beauty of metasensing them both Focus-fashion and Crow-fashion.
“Metasense the tags on the Transforms, and how they interact with their juice structures.”
Gail nodded. “They appear different than I’m used to.”
“This is what Sky’s document means when he talks about full juice structure analysis, and why full juice structure analysis uses a different terminology. Working in this mode should allow us to tune their juice structures both faster and safer”
“Yeah. I can metasense the details so much easier now.” No wonder she had messed up during the first tuning pass. She wanted to slap Sky for not requiring the Focus and Crow pair to do all their tuning work with shared metasenses. His document definitely needed another revision before it went out to the general Focus and Crow population.
“Look at Jeff Casson and your other new people,” he said. “Can you sense how your tags on them are different than the tags on the rest of your people?”
“Uh huh. The new tags are sharper, somehow.”
Gilgamesh nodded. “Yes. You did the other tags when you were younger and less experienced. The newer tags are much better. I think if you simply refresh the older tags you’ll get a little more efficiency, maybe a couple of people’s worth, but I think we can do better. I think we can get you to do an even cleaner tag if you practice a little and if I’m there to give you feedback.”
“That’s wonderful! This is almost too easy.”
“The tuning isn’t the hard part, but understanding what tuning you need to do. Also, examine the tags again. You see how everyone has three tags, and how the tags subtly interfere with each other?”
Gail frowned. “Interference? I’m not metasensing any interference.”
“Well, I’ve been a Crow for six years now. I possess a little more experience with my capabilities than you have,” Gilgamesh said, gently.
“Oh. Uh, right.”
“Well, the tags definitely interfere with each other. We can assume we won’t get Tiamat in here to adjust hers, so we need to adjust ours around hers. I’ve already adjusted mine, but you need to tune yours also. Move the tag up-frequency a bit.”
“Up-frequency? I think you’ll need to show me what that means.”
He nodded. “Uh huh. The adjustments will be different for each person. Everybody’s different, plus Tiamat was getting tired by the time she finished tagging everyone, and som
e of her later tags aren’t as tight as the earlier ones, so we’ll need to handle those differently. I can tighten them up for her, if she gives me permission.”
“Wow. This is complicated.”
Gilgamesh flashed his quick smile. “A little. I think we can do the entire household in just a few days, and I bet doing so will buy you another three triads.”
Three triads. “That’s a lot,” Gail said slowly. “This can’t be what Sky and Lori did. There’s so much more to their document I still can’t understand.”
“This is just a start. Before we can do any tuning, though, we need to heal your people who have juice structure damage. Any idea why Sylvie’s messed up so badly?”
Gail reddened. “She’s been my test subject ever since I transformed. She…I…I made a few mistakes with her, and did some nasty tests.”
“We’ll start with her, first.” He paused. “Also, I have a few ideas about individual tuning, and I think there’s a few things you can do to your own juice structure. We’ll need to do a lot of work to get to a hundred, but I bet we can get you up to twenty three triads or so pretty quick.”
Gail boggled. “You think I can support a household of sixty nine Transforms?”
“Easily. We’ll do even more later, just as soon as we can figure out how to implement Sky’s multi-Transform tuning tricks. Don’t forget, I’ve never done this, either. Oh, and whoever came up with a hundred was just guessing. My instincts tell me we can go beyond a hundred. We also need to find some way to lean on Lori and Sky to tag each other. The tag would buy them another four triads. Maybe more.” Gilgamesh smiled. “A tag would cut down on their constant arguing, as well.”
“Gilgamesh,” Gail said. “You know what this means?”
He raised an eyebrow.
“All the Crows and Focuses must do this. Forty extra people is only a drop in the ocean compared to the number of people who are dying. If all the Focuses and Crows did this, we’d be saving thousands.”
“Ah,” Gilgamesh said, “that’s harder. Crows and Focuses? A lot harder.”
She metasensed Carol’s emotions leap from seductive to agitated. After less than a minute of agitation and scurrying around her house, she grabbed Van, ran down to her car, and drove off toward the Branton. “Gilgamesh? What’s going on with Carol and Van?”
“Something interesting,” Gilgamesh said. “Carol’s emotional state is one I recognize: her mental preparations for a dominance fight.”
“Shit!” Gail said. “What did I do? Why’s she going to challenge me?”
“I don’t think she is,” Gilgamesh said. “Take a closer look at Van.”
She did. He wasn’t terrified, just nervous, about what one would expect for being an Arm’s baggage. However… “He just dropped one of his zingers on Carol. My God! He talked her into challenging Haggerty! She can’t! She’s still under the Dreaming attack, and I still haven’t been able to find her and chase away her attacker.”
“Van did a good thing,” Gilgamesh said. “Forward momentum is good for an Arm, and Tiamat has it now for the first time since her disastrous trip to Los Angeles. If you want to worry, worry about Haggerty.” No question about who he supported, now was there?
They waited, entwined, as Carol sped over to the Branton, dropped Van off, and sped away again. Van jogged to the elevator and took it to their floor.
“We’d better get presentable,” Gilgamesh said. “He’s got a million ideas flowing through his head, and I think we’re about to get a visit.”
---
“…and he told you to rape me?” Gail couldn’t believe Gilgamesh even deigned to talk to that monster.
Van had somehow deduced Gilgamesh’s conversation with Enkidu while talking to Carol. Gilgamesh hesitated before admitting the meeting, but once he got over his embarrassment, he told them the story.
“The Hunter civilization isn’t ours,” Gilgamesh said. “It’s rougher, stronger, anti-empathic and goal driven. What they think of as evil isn’t what we think of as evil, and vice versa. Oh, and they’re hopelessly misogynistic.”
“I woulda never guessed.”
Van paced around Gilgamesh’s room, dodging boxes and furniture and a big stack of old blankets, seemingly oblivious about, well, the sex. “He’s not an oracle, then,” Van said. “He could be wrong about everything, including his comment about Bass being under some hidden Focus’s thumb.”
“I wouldn’t trust anything he said to me,” Gilgamesh said, and paused. “I’m not going anywhere. His offer is a trap. I can see what the Law’s done to him, and what it would do to any Crow who had the brass to take him up on his offer and take control of the Law. The Law’s too powerful, connected to too many Transforms and Major Transforms. I do not want to be run around by the juice.”
“That still doesn’t negate the fact that Carol’s going into her challenge with Haggerty ignorant of the real problem: that she’s got something in her head,” Van said. He had told Carol twice about Gail’s inability to find Carol in the Dreaming and her fears of Patterson, and both times she acted as if she hadn’t heard him, matching Gail’s experience with the issue. “What are we going to do? What can we do?”
Gail licked her lips, amused to see Van so protective of Carol. “I’m going to go into the Dreaming and get a posse together. We’re going to find Carol by finding Patterson and see if we can figure out what’s going on.”
Both Van and Gilgamesh blanched. Gail gave them a turned up smile and a bit of charismatic spine stiffening. “It’s time for the world to see what I’ve become.”
Carol Hancock: December 5, 1972
A thirty by eighty foot shop floor in a converted warehouse. A brownstone for an office across the alley from the warehouse, connected by an added door to the brownstone next door, hiding two artists’ studios. A second story above the shop floor, hidden from the outside, serving as the actual living area for the half dozen people associated with this operation. A hidden basement under the brownstone, larger than normal for the Bronx, to hold the armory. Several obscure European sports cars and ultra-luxury vehicles on the shop floor, all undergoing highly expensive repair. Two Harleys in a similar state of extensive repair, and two more in working order. Just another incarnation of EFCR, Inc., Haggerty’s standard front business. Expert Foreign Car Repair. Her profit margins were outrageous. She kept her front business separate from her war against the FBI, and no one here in EFCR knew about Haggerty’s merc shop, and vice versa.
As usual, the place was a madhouse. From my inexpert opinion, as someone who in her pre-Arm life found changing a light bulb to be a challenge, Hog number one would be getting a new engine. Haggerty burned out Hog engines on a regular basis, pushing them to speeds they shouldn’t ever be pushed. The place pulsed with concert-earsplitting modern rock, some crap my old ears rejected as audible mayhem. I believe they called this random noise heavy metal or something equally unharmonious. From too much time around Haggerty, I recognized the band as Deep Purple, but I didn’t recognize the song. Probably a new release. Just what the world needed.
The shop decorations were care of Haggerty’s cheese whiz, Mark Castlemont, her equivalent of Zielinski, only instead of a scientist, she had herself a sensitive emotional artist. Castlemont’s art was lunatic asylum quality, derived from too many years of Arm association, but all his pieces showed off his excellent technique. Originally, he only painted, but over the years he had hit about every art form imaginable, pushed hard by his Arm lover. I couldn’t imagine what the EFCR customers thought of his masterpiece, the bronze exploding human heart with a Harley springing from the heart’s center. The piece adorned the walkway between the office and the warehouse proper. The sculpture gave me the creeps, even after knowing the Crow artistic genius, Merlin, had draped dross art on it resonating both with the broken heart and speeding Hog themes. Merlin’s art enhancement was at Haggerty’s request, in trade for some time modeling for him. I didn’t know how she had moved the sculpture here from Atlanta w
ithout destroying the dross art.
The rest of the shop was similarly eerie and overdone, although I appreciated an only mildly abstract painting of Enkidu holding Keaton’s leg, from the Battle in Detroit, that hung to the side of the shop door leading to the semi-attached office. Haggerty derived a great deal of glee from any misery Keaton endured.
Haggerty appeared from nowhere on the other side of the shop, her back straight and a hard glare in her eyes. All in black. Her workers ignored us as if we weren’t there, our presence drowned out by the clangor of the current song on the turntable and our mature Arm predator effects.
She appeared forty feet away from me, past cars under repair and dismantled Hogs. Some machine started up with a sound like a jackhammer, a weird counterpoint to the heavy beat of the music. I didn’t flip on my predator beyond the usual use to hide from normal eyes, I didn’t charge, and I didn’t speak.
Haggerty knew, though. I hadn’t achieved tactical surprise, at least not yet, but strategic surprise? Definitely. She radiated the bleary-eyed aura of an Arm stuck doing too much paperwork not too many seconds ago.
“Carol, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Haggerty said, cracking her knuckles and eyeing the repair shop for useful weapons. “You should have waited until you had some real success. Now all you’re doing is buying yourself a beat down.”
I didn’t respond. Arms normally responded to such comments at the start of a challenge fight, or stated their case before the challenged Arm stated hers. Psychological challenge. I, for one, remembered my best, calling Keaton a poser for instinctively dressing like a man. She had shaken off my comment by responding that my point wouldn’t be valid until she grew a penis.
Instead of responding, I put an extravagantly false ‘taken by the crazy’ expression on my face as I shut down my eyes and switched over to my metasense, as if I were a lunatic Crow. The crazy jitters came natural to me now, as I carried a mere one point of juice less than the Arm maximum.
Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2) Page 37