All Beasts Together (The Commander)

by Farmer, Randall

  No sound came from the other end of the phone for several long moments. I waited. “Thank you for the information on Moose Darlington.” The voice whispered. My Crow, again. Hot damn.

  I waved my crooks out of the room and shut the pair of doors behind them.

  “Did everything work out with him?”

  “Yes. I think he’s a fence, though.”

  I repressed a laugh. Moose was my fence. “Not many legit people are willing to deal with Transforms.”

  “He doesn’t know you’re a Transform, Carol.”

  “He knows I’m not legit myself, and that’s good enough.” I paused. “Your suggestion on what I should use as a graveyard has worked out very well. Thank you.” I still couldn’t convince the Crow to cough up any real information on what juice variant he actually utilized, but I had decided not to let that bother me. In our last talk, I mentioned my criteria for the sort of place I used for dumping dead Transforms, and the Crow had told me of a place nearby where normals never went: the back part of a wood treatment plant, where they dumped the wood treatment chemical wastes. The sticky mess reeked to high heaven. The ground was so saturated with creosote and other chemical wastes that bodies didn’t bloat and decay, but instead were preserved, mummified. No dead body smell.

  “No problem.”

  “Say, I’ve been meaning to ask you, what sort of name do you go by? I’d like to think of you as a person, not just as ‘the Crow’.”

  The Crow paused for a long while. “Gilgamesh.”

  “Gilgamesh.” Interesting, especially with his connection to the Chimera, Enkidu. I wondered how the male Major Transforms decided on names.

  I had gotten somewhere in my thinking on Transform ecology, starting with Arms. I knew we couldn’t be ‘good’, by human definitions. For a while, I had tried to be evil, again by human definitions. I had fallen into the trap of trying to fit what I did into the normal human definitions. Humans are tribal omnivores. The Major Transforms aren’t the same. Arms are primarily predators. The behaviors that worked for Arms are different than normal human behaviors.

  What were Crows? Scavengers? They were no more pure scavengers than Arms were pure predators. We were both thinking, speaking creatures. The predator and scavenger stuff applied only to the animal parts of us.

  Most of what humans consider ‘right’ is tied to survival. ‘Right’ is usually what helps the tribe, doing good to your neighbor. ‘Evil’ things hurt the tribe’s survival: murder, theft, adultery and the like. However, killing becomes acceptable when it’s against the tribe’s enemies. It’s called war, then, and not wrong at all.

  What did this mean for Arms? Arms are predators. There’s nothing wrong with being a predator. The world contains many predators and they serve a function. It’s just different than being a normal human, and the rules of survival, and of good and evil, are different. A ‘good’ tiger does different things than a ‘good’ rabbit or a ‘good’ monkey.

  So, then, what are the rules for Arms? If I could figure out the rules for Arms, the rules would illuminate where we fit in with the other Transforms and I would also be figuring out what sort of things are good for the long term survival of Arms. I had a few rules figured out. First, Arms are predators. Second, our natural prey is the Transform, in specific, the untagged Transforms not supported by Focuses. Everyone else – children, adult non-Transforms, tagged Transforms, Focuses, Chimeras, most likely Crows, are not our prey, unless they got in our way. Third, it was a mistake to hurt our own people, the ones we recruited to serve us. I had learned that from my dealings with Bobby. The third lesson, from my third mistake. I fervently hoped for no more.

  This Crow was not my prey.

  “I’ve been trying to come up with a way we can more easily warn each other about Beast Men.” I preferred the name ‘Chimera’, but I decided to follow the Crow’s naming convention, at least for now. No. Gilgamesh, not ‘the Crow’. “Do you have a telephone in your residence?”

  “Not safe,” he said. “Pardon.”

  He still didn’t trust me. Understandable, given the grief we had both been through in our short careers as Transforms.

  “An office? A workshop?”

  “Sorry.” Gilgamesh paused again, and I heard traffic noises. “The Sunoco at the corner of Dempster and LeClaire has a phone booth around back that isn’t used very often. If you call that number, I can hear the phone ring from where I live.”

  Shit! That was almost on top of me, less than a mile and a half from where I lived. “Give me the number,” I said. Gilgamesh did. I memorized it. “You know where I live, don’t you? You’re metasense range is longer than mine is, I’ll bet.”

  “Yes.”

  His metapresence was hard to pick up. I had only noticed Gilgamesh when I had looked at him. “Feel free to drop messages in my mailbox or leave a message with the normal man who lives with me.”

  “Crows often use drop points,” he said. “Messages tied to rocks.”

  “I was thinking of something you told me in our last conversation, about all Crows being loners. How do Crows communicate with each other if they’re such loners?”

  Gilgamesh chuckled. “Same as we’re doing. Phone calls. Letters. Messages tied to rocks. Sometimes we even meet in person.” He paused. “There used to be other Crows in Chicago, but they left when you showed up.”

  “They vacated all of Chicago just because I moved in?” I was appalled. I had never hurt any Crows and still they left town when I arrived?

  “They fear Arms attract too much attention. I, however, prefer Arms to Focuses. Focuses are dumb callous twits in my opinion.”

  I didn’t follow him. Neither Keaton or I attracted attention. If we did, we would be dead. Nor about the Focuses, but if Rizzari was the exception and the locals the norm, I think I followed his reasoning, there. “There’s a Focus in Boston, Dr. Lorraine Rizzari, you probably need to meet someday. Not all Focuses are twits. However, I don’t understand your comment about Arms attracting attention.”

  “Philadelphia.”

  “Philadelphia? My teacher and I had a couple of run-ins with Beast Men. It wasn’t a big deal.”

  Gilgamesh paused. I could hear his breathing rate increase. Stressed. “You don’t know? I can’t speak about it,” he said. “I’ll send you a letter.”

  ---

  The letter was chilling. The two Chimeras had captured Gilgamesh, and attacked and killed two Crows, before their attack on Keaton, and Gilgamesh had ‘sicked up’ something akin to Monster juice on Keaton when she surprised him as a captive. He had cleaned the crap off her and she had freed him, but he ran away before Keaton returned. Smart Crow. Keaton had told me none of this, the bitch.

  I bet ‘Officer Canon’ was involved in this mess. Somehow. Perhaps Canon was the ‘master’ Gilgamesh mentioned as a possibly non-delusional boss the Chimeras – Enkidu in particular – referred to when he held Gilgamesh captive. We had organized enemies, better organized than I realized. My gut said they were gunning for me here in Chicago and they were behind all my feelings of impending doom.

  For the first time, I wondered if I might have been safer if I had stayed with Keaton.

  Sky: February 3, 1968

  Sky rolled into Boston around ten in the morning the next Saturday, a bouquet of roses in hand, wearing his best clothes and with tickets to a play in Boston concealed in his wallet.

  Jay manned the door. “Sorry, Sky. You just missed her. She’s out with an entourage doing something. I think she expected you here earlier.”

  Well, God gave Crows a ten kilometer metasense for a reason. Ah, yes, he spotted her. Shopping, perhaps? If so, he had better make himself comfortable here instead of gallivanting off after her. “So, where should I go, who should I avoid?” Sky asked.

  Jay laughed. “You can win me a bunch of brownie points. I’ve got someone who’s been dying to talk to you for weeks.”

  “Keep me away from the doctor, Jay.”

  “Nope. Another k
id. Ann’s brat, Einstein.”

  The kid, Einstein, turned out to be depressed. A normal adolescent in a household of Transforms. Sky joined him in a corner of the big great room, in a conversation area of a couch, two easy chairs, and a low table. The rattle of pots and dishes drifted in from the kitchen as the breakfast crew finished their morning cleaning, but the great room itself was silent and empty. In a moment, Sky decided Einstein’s problem came from feeling ultimately left out. After the expected introductions, then awkward silences, Einstein asked “What’s it like being a Crow?”

  “Well, you start off scared of everything. You need to learn every single thing not to be scared of. I spent my early years so low on juice I was almost into withdrawal most of the time. That’s where I got these squint lines from,” Sky said, pointing to his face. “You couldn’t find dross anywhere back then. I think a few Canadian Crows transformed earlier than I did, but they all died of lack of juice.”

  “That’s hard,” Einstein said. “You’re sort of exotic looking. That from being a Crow?”

  “Nope. My mother was Thai, my father was half Algerian half French. I got shipped out of Algeria in ’39 after France fell to the Nazis, to a second cousin of my father in Quebec.”

  “So that’s howcum you sometimes talk like a Canadian, sometimes like a Quebecer, and sometimes like a French teacher. Want to hear me do a Quebecer?”

  Sky shrugged and listened to Einstein imitate Quebecers badly. “…and mange de la poutine. Neat, eh?” He paused. “So what did you do once you survived being a young Crow? Move to a city? Find a Focus?”

  “Nope. I started to follow an Arm around.”

  “Secret secret secret, yes?”

  “Yup. Dangerous, too, because I was a real sucky Crow and she captured me. She made a pet out of me.”

  “Sounds nasty. So you got tortured for years and years until a princess warrior came and rescued you?” Einstein couldn’t sit in one place or one position for more than thirty seconds. He fidgeted, grimaced, crossed his legs, uncrossed them, put them on the couch, sat with his feet where his head should be, and so on and so forth. He never stopped.

  Sky laughed. “Different Arm. Not all Arms are sadistic maniacs like Stacy Keaton.”

  “I noticed you didn’t say ‘not serial killers’.”

  “Uh huh,” Sky said. “After that, we found out about a group of Transforms being held captive by some mobsters in Quebec City and decided to do something about it.”

  “So you’ve rescued enslaved Transforms before?”

  “But of course. I swear it’s one of my callings in life. I didn’t get to do any of the killing; at the time I was still a young Crow, worthless in a fight. Now, because of my Buddhism, I don’t do any killing at all.”

  “Could you do the trick in the water then?”

  “Trick in the water?”

  “Yah, like how you can float in water with the water level right about your bellybutton, when normal people float down to about the top of their shoulders,” Einstein said. “Hollow bones or something?”

  “No, not back then,” Sky said, impressed at the kid’s mind and powers of observation. “After freeing the enslaved Transforms, we fled civilization. We called ourselves Focus, Arm, Crow, Man, Woman, Wife, Friend, Mother, Father. Three Major Transforms, six Transforms. We even found ourselves a Beast Man right after his transformation, helped him hunt, and got him to like us. We called him Beast.”

  “You’re kidding. That was what, ‘61 or so? I didn’t think there were any Beast Men alive back then.”

  Sky laughed. The kid’s name fit. Or nickname, he wasn’t sure which. “Yes. A few. Most died within their first month or two after transforming from lack of élan.” Sky had picked up the term recently, from listening in on various Inferno conversations.

  “Élan? What’s that?”

  “Monster juice.”

  “Oh. Yah. I’ll bet that’s what you did. You went out into the frozen tundra of the north and hunted Monsters.”

  Sky nodded. “Well, not so far north, right about the permafrost line. Yes, we hunted Monsters, as well as chasing after rumors and putting too much credence in our dreams. Every one of us spent the time low on juice and we all nearly lost our humanity.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, eventually, one of our Transform men snapped and tried to kill the rest of us. By the time he got, well, killed, only Mother was left alive of the Transforms. We had to go back to civilization. The Focuses took pity on us and they did some big legal, political and medical shenanigans to fix up our situation and our heads, though the Focuses did sort of lose track of Beast after a while. I’ve heard him once or twice since, howling at the moon, but he’s too wary of me to allow me to approach him anymore. He lost the ability to talk about six months after he transformed and he’s all animal, now.”

  “What about the rest of you?”

  “We split up.”

  “You’re not talking.”

  “Ayup.”

  “Oh, well.” Einstein said, and finally got to his real worry. “I’m legal for the Shakes, now, you know.”

  “It happens to us all.”

  “Yah, but the odds aren’t good for any of us here in the household. Household normals are twice as likely to transform as random normals of the same age. ‘Course they don’t publish that or they’d hunt us all down and kill us, the usual.”

  “You transform now, you’d have a household.”

  “Nope. I’d go into the general pool like everyone else. Unless I made a major transformation. I might, you know. Crows are all dorks, and I’m a dork, too. If I don’t make a major transformation, I’ve got over a fifty percent chance of dying.” Poor kid. Poor everyone.

  “I don’t think talking to me will make it any more likely.” Sky sighed. “If you moved out of the household your chance of survival would go way down, because male Transforms often don’t get sick enough during their transformation to realize anything’s happened to them.”

  “Yah, but by then they might have portable juice meters or something. Idunno.” Einstein’s face brightened up. “Hey, gotta go bother ol’ Doc Pain. See yah.” Einstein disappeared, taking his boundless energy somewhere else.

  Sky greeted Lori in the spacious Inferno foyer, bowed and presented the roses, hugged her, got hugged back in return. Lori bubbled at him for almost a minute, her words and her emotions flying hundreds of different ways at once, overwhelmed by all the distractions in her life, before stopping cold. She dragged him off to her office and slammed the door shut.

  “Care to explain?” she said, voice frosty. Her office reflected her, organized, immaculate, with no clutter on any surface. A single window behind the desk looked out over the obstacle course. Two wooden chairs sat in front of the desk, and two chairs of a more comfortable variety sat off to the side with a low table between them. Two bookcases filled with technical tomes sat against the wall to the left, and Lori’s framed diploma from her PhD hung on the wall to the right, the only decoration in the room.

  “Explain what,” Sky asked.

  Lori turned red. “You know. Dammit!”

  Sky didn’t think he had ever heard Lori swear before. “Sorry,” he said, shaking his head.

  “You’ve been sleeping with Transforms.”

  “Not a single Transform in your household, Lori.”

  “No, I know that. I mean in Toronto.”

  “You did chase me back to Toronto.”

  “I did no such thing.” Lori paused. “Besides…”

  “Besides what?” Sky said. “I’m a Crow. I’m the male repository for Transform fertility. Ann told me so. I’m supposed to be sleeping with Transform women.”

  “Ann’s idea is an unproven hypothesis.”

  “Even I can figure out the Van Reijn model doesn’t hold together without Crow fertility. It’s got to be right, and I’ve got the babies to prove it.”

  “I didn’t expect you to go back there and sleep with them again!” Lo
ri shouted. Ah, the mademoiselle is a jealous sort.

  “I don’t remember you telling me not to. Remember how much work it is for me to make a baby…”

  “Skyyyyy.” Lori glared at him. “I didn’t tell you not to go shoot up Faneuil Hall, either. Use common sense.”

  “I haven’t involved myself with anyone new.”

  “Yes. I know. Not even me.”

  Eh, now what? “You said ‘yes’, but you meant ‘no’, so I followed your wishes.”

  “You should have tried harder.”

  “What!” Lori had told him she would be difficult. She lied. She was impossible.

  “Well, all right, there’s no time like the present.” Sky made a grab at Lori, but she skipped back behind the cushioned chairs. A mere Focus shouldn’t be as fast as he was.

  “You’re going to have to work harder than that, philanderer.”

  “Merde. You can’t philander a virgin.”

  “What! You bucket of scum! Go watch a hockey game.”

  “Now you’re getting personal,” Sky said.

  Ann walked in bearing a large tray of food and two plates, placed it on the table between Sky and Lori. Ann gave Sky a sickly smile and backed out, trying to leave a running battery-powered tape recorder by the door without his noticing.

  “You bet I’m getting personal, you two timing weasel!”

  Wait a second. Sky walked to the door and turned off the tape recorder. He went back and knelt at Lori’s feet.

  “Sky?” she said, suddenly worried.

  “I had an argument like this with Focus Russell about a, um, different subject.” The argument had been about pirating cabbages from the household garden. Sky thought he deserved some payment for sweeping out the dross. “When we finished arguing and patched things up, we realized we’d flattened absolutely every last Transform within Focus Russell’s range.”

  “And?” Lori’s ire was back. She was jealous of Focus Russell too.

  “I just checked your household juice levels. They haven’t varied an iota, not a single one of them.” He paused, and bowed his head, still kneeling. “I am not worthy. I am not worthy.”