All Beasts Together (The Commander)

by Farmer, Randall

  “Me?” Lori said, voice a bit frosty. “There’s a big problem with orgy time. I can’t participate. Maintaining the juice at the optimum stimulation point for this many Transforms is incredibly draining. You’ll see. No Transform is sexually receptive when their juice count is low and I’m no exception.”

  Ah. Just another sacrifice.

  “Can I help?” Sky asked.

  “I can’t take your juice, Sky, without growing scales and feathers. You know that,” Lori said. “A little non-sexual affection would be nice though, like holding me tight. In another half hour, this is going to get painful for me.”

  Sky held Lori tight and carefully pulled up a dross construct to monitor Lori’s juice levels. Low, but not horrible. Lori no longer spoke. Her supplemental juice sank lower and lower until it approached withdrawal. Her hands clenched his, painfully tight. Her eyes narrowed to slits then closed in tight concentration. Soon, he felt her body temperature plummet and her body start to shiver as she bent her considerable willpower to the process. Still, she kept the juice levels of her people at the stimulation optimum.

  Lori was able to keep control for another hour after that. Right at the withdrawal line, minute after minute, controlling the juice more by force of will than by actual juice workings. If Lori did this every week, no wonder she had developed such an indomitable will and such an incredible control over the moving of juice. He had wondered how she had trained her juice moving capabilities to such an incredible degree.

  Now he knew.

  Nobody in the household but Sky paid attention to Lori, lost as they were in their own worlds of pleasure. Lori was in agony and in no shape to use her juice to ignore pain in the standard mature Focus way. Instead, she embraced the pain as catharsis, accepted it as did Sky, as part of the immanence of the world. Sky’s Toronto Zen master would have approved. Sky wasn’t sure he did.

  Later, too much later, Lori expired, passed out in Sky’s arms. Now, Sky understood the purpose of the juice patterns Lori had set up ahead of time, for now they began their work, unhooking Lori from her people, setting up the blocks that prevented her juice buffer from sucking up juice from her Transforms. Lori would recover, the world would continue turning. Around Sky the orgy continued unabated, as it would be hours before the natural state of the juice crept away from the stimulation optimum. Sky guessed that later, perhaps tonight, Lori would fix her Transforms back at the weekly starting set point and the cycle would start again.

  All those Transforms were enjoying the grip of ecstasy, easily echoed by the normals, but their pleasure left no one but him to care for Lori. How many weeks, months, perhaps years, had this gone on? Every Friday night, the orgy of pleasure continuing, oblivious to Lori’s unconscious form, wracked by pain out of mind, slumped on the floor.

  At least they were still human enough to provide the down comforter.

  Sky realized he wasn’t happy with Lori’s Transform household. The allure of Inferno receded, at least for the moment.

  No household should treat their Focus this way. No Focus should allow her household to treat her this way. Even if she invited it, planned it, and did it to herself. High on the exquisite dross produced by Lori’s once-a-week juice moving, he bundled the Focus up in her comforter, and with more than a little anger, carried her upstairs to her pathetically tiny bedroom. No. He refused.

  He kept going, up to his attic, where he made a nest for Lori, crawled in next to her, and wept himself to sleep. In his dreams, dozens of Beasts hunted Arm and himself, the most horrid dream of the world that Sky had ever had. In the end, Arm fought and killed the Beast master and took Crow for a pet, nothing at all like what had really happened.

  When he awoke, Lori was gone.

  Carol Hancock: December 21, 1967

  Joey Tien brought me another plate of almond chicken from the buffet and three more egg rolls. His real name was Xiwei, but he never used it. He was a cute kid, twelve years old, with black hair and brown eyes, and sharp as a tack.

  He took my used plate away and replaced it with the new plate filled with food, on top of the little paper place mat listing all the years and the animals associated with them.

  “The almond chicken is good,” he said, anxiously. “And the egg rolls are fresh. You’ll like them.”

  I tasted the food and nodded in approval, my face carefully blank.

  He let out his breath and glowed, relieved.

  “See, I knew you’d like it, Mr. Beacon. Do you want some more egg rolls? Daddy made a whole batch.”

  Joey’s nerves didn’t come from any fear of me. They came because he wanted my approval.

  He didn’t even have the dubious benefit of knowing I was a kill-crazy Arm.

  To him, I was strong, rich, male, and American. Joey had a bad case of hero worship, a far more pleasant issue than my other ongoing problems. Dealing with the Tiens gave me a renewed interest in normal humans and their lives.

  “I’ll tell you when I need something. Why don’t you tell your father I’m ready to talk to him?” I said.

  “You bet!” he said, and he ran for the kitchen. If I hadn’t been here, his daddy would have yelled at him for running in the restaurant, but he wouldn’t in my hearing.

  At 2:00 in the afternoon, I was the only person in the China Garden restaurant. Unfortunately, the place didn’t get much busier during the lunch hour. The China Garden wasn’t doing well. Located too far to the west of downtown Chicago, few people came out this way for their mediocre Chinese food.

  The almond chicken was so bland as to be tasteless and the undercooked egg rolls were greasy, but I didn’t mind. I wasn’t exactly discriminating about what I ate these days. I almost finished my meal before Papa Tien came out of the kitchen carrying his two sets of books.

  “I hope Xiwei wasn’t bother you,” he said to me, in his accented and fractured English. He wanted me to say Joey was a problem, so he would have an excuse to keep him away from me. He thought I was a bad influence and he really didn’t like the way Joey worshiped the ground I walked on.

  “No,” I said. He wouldn’t dare tell Joey to stay away. Two weeks ago, Papa Tien had taken money from me to keep his failing restaurant afloat. A few days later, there had been a nasty little scene when he tried to refuse something I wanted.

  If he had been smart he would have known what he had gotten into when he agreed to take money from some suspicious stranger for ‘unspecified favors’, but his desperation got the better of him. Luckily, he only needed to be taught once. He didn’t try to oppose me anymore.

  “Let’s see the books,” I said, and so Tien sat down in the chair opposite me, and spread out the two books. On the left he placed the official set, all legal and legitimate. To the right he laid the real set.

  He opened the one on the right, slowly and carefully, and turned to the correct page.

  “Income from China Garden for month of November, $4,232.07. Income from other sources, $2,518.88. Expenses for China Garden, $3,945.75. Payment to First Federal Bank, $416.36. Expenses to other sources, $2,518.88.”

  He looked up at me. “Shortfall is $130.04.”

  He didn’t ask. He never asked. The shortfall meant no money at all for the family to live on. They had nothing but this restaurant. They had exhausted their life savings long ago.

  “I have details,” he said, going back to his books.

  He looked up again as he heard the rustle of papers. I opened the roll of bills and carefully peeled off $100 bills. One at a time. He eyed them with care, a starving dog watching a steak, as I peeled off ten of them and stopped.

  The thousand dollars would cover the shortfall and supply enough for the family to live on, if careful. I put my roll of bills back in my pocket and carefully looked away, to where one of the Tien’s standard Chinese horoscope placemats caught my eye. I had been born in the year of the sheep, I noted. When I looked back, the bills had vanished. Tien made no mention of them.

  I suspected it would be like this every mon
th, as I contributed the little bit extra to allow them to survive. Tien had been panicked, terrified of me and what I might do, the first time I had given them some extra money. Now, he was nervous, but I hadn’t done anything terrible yet and he was starting to adjust to the new order, as I intended. I wanted him to rely on me and build his new financial security around my money. His family knew how bad things could get. Soon they would never dream of doing anything that might disrupt my support.

  “There were two calls this morning on the new phone,” he said. “Ying answered both. She said this is Farland’s lumberyard, and that Henry Curchew worked here four years, and he made $613 per month. She also took message from some man says name is Moose, ‘car is gone’, he said.”

  I nodded. “Good. Keep answering as Farland’s lumberyard for the next few days, until I have something new for you. You shouldn’t get any more calls, but just in case.” Henry Curchew was a new identity of mine, and I was building a financial history for him. Complex, but banks will believe things if you set it up right. Gerald Darlington, nicknamed Moose for all the obvious reasons, was another one of my people. Moose ran a low-end appliance repair shop, but the shop was only a front. His real money came from fencing stolen goods. I had taken him with few difficulties. Moose’s message meant the car of my second to last Chicago kill was now somewhere in Mexico, far from any local police. “Leave the books. I’ll return them tomorrow,” I said. “Send out Ying when I’ve finished eating.” His mouth set in a frown, but he didn’t say anything. The scene at the beginning had been over Ying. As much as he didn’t like the arrangement, he would send out Ying.

  “Sir,” he said formally, and left for the kitchen, his back angrily straight.

  Bobby would go over the books. He learned fast, and I had become paranoid after the near disaster with Pete. Pete, it turned out, had indeed been trolling around my mobster identity in front of the cops, but I put a stop to that. I checked all the records of the enterprises I directly controlled these days, no matter how innocuous or how well controlled my operative. The $2,518.88 from ‘other sources’ was mine. The China Garden wasn’t the only way I cleaned my money, just one of the better ones.

  Joey came by with more plates of food. I had to smile at his enthusiasm. He hated China, Chinese ways, and poverty, and the steady despair of his family’s failing restaurant. I was everything his family wasn’t and my criminal background didn’t matter at all. I was strong and he wanted to be just like me.

  Just like me, I thought. I shook my head. No one in his right mind wanted to be like me.

  “Tell your daddy to throw out the shrimp with snow peas,” I said. “The shrimp has gone bad.” The last thing they needed was to irritate some of their few remaining customers with another round of bad food.

  I craved legitimacy in the business community. I didn’t have a business background, but I had observed my traitorous former husband making deals for years. I learned. Taxes, accounting, banking, loans, getting a business to turn a profit. Difficult, yes, but for an Arm with enough juice in her to keep from making idiot mistakes, not impossible to learn, either. My ability to read and control people allowed me to make advantageous deals. I had come up with a medium-term goal: ownership of a chain of car dealerships. I hoped to make a lot of money dealing cars; I could make nearly as much money as a car salesman as with my low end robberies. I had spent three weeks selling cars to learn the industry and sold dozens of cars in the process. Once I established the Curchew identity I planned to purchase a small used car lot in his name. Go from there. Not long from now, I envisioned myself with a large financial empire started with stolen money, invested in businesses I ran from behind the scenes, all turning a nice profit without me having to do much work. I would be on my way to true wealth.

  To make money legitimately, though, you have to have money. It isn’t realistic to think you can invest a few thousand dollars and expect to churn out millions in profit. Nor were the standard methods of raising money open to me: I couldn’t go to a bank and take out a business loan. I couldn’t form a corporation and issue stock. At least not yet, on either of those issues, though later, once I established my false business identities, I suspected I would be able to. That was why I recruited Mr. Oldman.

  One of the big problems I had come to realize was that Arms had expenses, large expenses. Guns, ammo, bribes and even body disposal ate money, large amounts of money, and that didn’t even cover normal living expenses. The issue of security proved to be a nasty tightrope because openly spending money itself breached my security. Another issue was time. Being an Arm had given me a skewed sense of how fast things should work and needed to work. I thought in terms of days and weeks, while the business world thought in terms of quarters and years. The fact I amassed wealth at a prodigious rate from a normal’s perspective didn’t stop me from worrying about it as an Arm, because from my perspective my money raising took forever.

  So now I faced one of the oldest problems in the world for budding business empire builders: once I factored in my various expenses, I lived day to day on virtually no money at all, because my real money was tied up in my investments.

  Ying was the key to one of my plans: Greg and the gym. I had paired her up with Greg so I could funnel money into my gym, which also involved teaching Ying how to cope with Greg. I also taught Ying how to interact in moneyed society.

  I wanted her tonight to take her shopping for some appropriately fancy clothing.

  I might be a death-obsessed Arm, but that didn’t mean I didn’t like to shop.

  Chapter 7

  The average Focus can’t resist a fad. The top Focuses can’t resist starting fads.

  “Inventing Our Future”

  Henry Zielinski: December 25, 1967 – December 28, 1967

  “Sorry, Doc,” Tina said. “Focus’s orders. Rise and shine.” She stripped the covers off him with a sadistic grin.

  Monday morning before the sun rose wasn’t Zielinski’s favorite time of day. Especially on Christmas day in a place that didn’t consider Christmas celebrations private. “Urrgh?” Bob and Jim were already up and gone.

  “You’ve got an appointment with a Crow and some beasts. Let’s get a move on.”

  “You’re my bodyguard?” he said with a groan as he gave in and sat up.

  “Yup.” She bundled Zielinski up, stuck a cup of coffee and a sack of doughnuts in his hands, and dragged him outside and to her vehicle, an older oversized Ford pickup. Once she started it up he could hardly hear himself think.

  “Hey, doc, why don’t you join us next Friday night?” Tina bellowed over the thunder of the truck. “You look a bit peeked. I’m sure I can find you someone to cheer you up.”

  Tina would probably volunteer, but she didn’t appeal to him at all. Tina had the femininity of a rutting moose and more muscles than he did. Zielinski covered his reactions. “No, but thanks for the offer,” he said, blandly and carefully.

  “Fine. You probably even know what you’re missing.” She turned on Boylston and drove them into an improbable traffic jam. There had been construction, and the workers were gone, but barriers still blocked most of the lanes. “Hell, it’s going to take us a half hour to get out of Brookline this morning. What’s everybody doing on the roads? Don’t they have better things to do on Christmas morning?”

  Lori had come by two weeks ago to quiz him on his still fruitless training efforts and asked whether he might be interested in consulting with the Crow, Occum, about problems he had run into with his Chimeras. She had been tense and distracted, enough to make him wonder if he was about to be sold down the river. He agreed only after he had bargained and received a bodyguard.

  The Focus’s voice had carried a dangerous undertone when they talked: she didn’t think he was earning his keep.

  The Crow, Occum, had his lair these days somewhere in the industrial morass of East Boston, near Logan International Airport. They reached the address a half hour later.

  “So, how are we going
to make contact with the Crow?” Zielinski asked.

  “The usual: a dark basement. He said the door would be unlocked.”

  “I thought Occum dealt only with Sadie.”

  “He usually does, but he specifically asked for me this time. No idea why. I’ve never met him, but I got the opinion from Sadie that he’s met me.”

  They found the address and went down into the basement of what appeared to be a light industrial plant with a faded hand-painted Allied Packaging logo on the side. The place was dark, as advertised, and smelled of salt water.

  “This place reeks,” Tina said. Her voice echoed unnervingly in the darkness.

  “What do you expect, with three Beasts and a couple of Monsters in residence,” a voice whispered. “Shit, owwh. Get off my foot, Hoskins!” The latter comment was not a whisper.

  “Yes, boss,” a second voice said. This voice boomed, a deep rumble, a voice to shout over crowds and rattle the windows.

  Something in the darkness made a tinkling noise and a dim red light turned on, the sort of light one might find in a darkroom, just enough to illuminate silhouettes. “Crap,” the first voice said. “Remember me, Doc?”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Zielinski said. He recognized the Greek accent. “You’re the Crow who helped me with my little problem last year.”

  “Occum.” In the dimness, Zielinski made out the outline of two people, one short, the other huge and wide, with extra arms. He couldn’t see the far walls of the room. Up close, the room furnishings consisted of an old couch that looked shabby even in the dim red light, and piles of filthy blankets.

  “Glad to meecha, Occum,” Tina said. “My name’s Tina. You know the Doc. What’s the big deal, anyway?”

  “She’s ugly, boss,” the second voice, Hoskins, said.

  “Hey! I didn’t ask your opinion, furball,” Tina said.

  “Fuck you, bitch,” the beast said. Zielinski realized why Occum had asked for Tina, remembering what the beast named Rover had deposited on his leg last time. Occum was trying to reduce the possibilities of ancillary trouble.