All Beasts Together (The Commander)

by Farmer, Randall

  “Yes,” Lori said. “All of us.”

  “Thank you. Thank them for thinking of me.” He had won over the leaders of Inferno, save for Sadie. After the inauspicious start at the tourney, he would never have believed it possible. The allure of the Cause was irresistible, save for one issue. “What about the two of us, though? We won’t help the Inferno Cause if the two of us can’t find a way to get along.”

  “I know. I messed up our relationship as bad as I feared I would,” Lori said, voice quiet, demure and unwilling to meet his gaze. The foot made slow circles again. “I want us to start over. Please? Perhaps we can get things right the second time. I’ve had some hard lessons recently about the difficulty of interacting with other forms of Major Transforms, and I’m sure I can do better.”

  Sky had been afraid Lori would say something like that. He wouldn’t be able to refuse her. He loved her; he couldn’t escape it. He had a strong suspicion he hated her guts, too.

  “Lori dearest, I love you,” Sky said. Lori turned to him, startled, open. He had never so boldly spoken to her from his heart. “I love you with all my being. When I’m in Toronto, I think of you every minute, afraid you will never deign to let me see you again. I miss your presence, your laugh, your wit and your wisdom. I miss your household, your greatest creation – it’s a wonder to behold. Yet I can’t afford to stand too close. All I ask is for you to accept me as I am, accept me as a Crow. I can’t be anything else.”

  Lori sighed, both touched and exasperated with him. “What ever happened to stepping into the whirlwind and testing your resilience?” She wagged a finger at him and tilted her head to the side.

  Sky let his guard down. He stood up from where he was meditating and stretched, fingers touching the low sloping ceiling. Let her see me as I am, Sky decided. An old Crow who spent his time writing letters, meditating, watching the Maple Leafs on television, scratching his belly and drinking beer. Well, the latter was only for show, of course, since as a Major Transform the vices of the world no longer touched him.

  He didn’t feel worthy of either Lori’s interest or Inferno’s interest. “I failed the test.”

  “I told you I was inexperienced.”

  “You are very experienced, Lori, at being a Focus.” Sky spread his hands wide and stepped from his nest of blankets down to the wooden floor. “You think you protect your household by forbidding me to sleep with them, that my insignificant charisma could ever be a threat to either them or you. You think far too much of me, my dear. Not a single Crow follows my ways or examples. They laugh at me behind my back, calling me the adventurous Crow, simply because I’ll talk to Focuses and Transforms. I’m nothing, except for one small thing: by accident or design, I’ve discovered that a Crow may defeat one of the most heinous byproducts of Transform Sickness, the loss of fertility. I’m not very fertile. Still, this tiny discovery and the three children I’ve fathered as a Crow are the only things holding me in the world when I grow depressed. Yet they are not even my children in a mundane sense, for their mothers can’t acknowledge my presence or existence to the authorities as the father of their children, and in one case, even to their Focus!

  “Yet this trifle, in your world of high politics and great causes, is something you will deny your own women Transforms, what few of your own who may actually desire me for such a reason. You know full well that by doing so you are depriving them of the only source of fertility available. You protect them by destroying their future. Didn’t we rescue a bunch of Sports from a Focus who followed a similar philosophy?”

  “Bad analogies and rationalizations, Sky,” Lori said. “We’re people, not walking reproductive desires. I simply don’t want to share you.”

  “I don’t think that’s how relationships work for Major Transforms,” Sky said. This part drove him to clench his teeth, made him want to flee to Toronto and never look back. Her attitude made him want to go on a low juice binge and destroy his memories of the recent events and the allure of Inferno.

  “It had better,” Lori said, leaning forward and wagging an index finger under his nose. “Love like this is too difficult to share.”

  “What love?”

  “My love for you, Sky,” she said, shifting back and crossing her arms.

  “What, wrap-me-up-like-a-mummy-and-throw-me-in-the-closet love?” He snorted. “That’s not love. That’s ownership. If I’d wanted ownership, I would have kept doing the Crow and Arm routine.”

  Her hands flew wide with exasperation. “Don’t you understand? I don’t care!”

  “That why I have to leave.”

  “No, no, no!” Lori said. She clenched her hands into fists, closed her eyes tight and shook her head. The wave of her hair around her head almost broke Sky’s heart all by itself. Lori’s voice lowered dramatically, now husky and intense. “I don’t care if you sleep with other Transform women who want to have babies, even if it takes years and years. That’s not what’s important.”

  Sky tried to steady himself, taking several deep breaths. Perhaps there was something positive to be said about being owned, he muttered in his own mind. Then he wouldn’t have to deal with tangles like this.

  Lori struggled so hard to express what she held in her heart. She couldn’t come out and say whatever she wanted to say. What she tried and failed to say in her letters and phone calls to him over the past month. Circling and circling but never reaching the words. “I don’t understand what you’re objecting to, then. What are you saying?”

  “I want your love, Sky, not…” Lori stopped, took a deep breath, and readied herself. “Not just your body.” Eh? Just? If Sky remembered correctly, this was the first time Lori ever admitted to physically desiring him, at least when thinking rationally. “I don’t want to be replaceable. I need to be more than merely the first stop you make when you visit Boston. I want more.”

  “What you propose isn’t good for your household.”

  “That’s my household, Sky. Not yours. Not your decision.”

  His heart sank. No matter what, everything revolved around Lori’s protection of her household. “Your decision? Shall I ask the leaders of your household what they think? Tell them what I’m offering?”

  “That’s dirty, Sky.”

  “Yes. However, your household overwhelms me. Unless I’m in some way part of your household, I can’t stay here.”

  “Not at all?” Lori said. Her eyes had grown sad.

  He perched on an old nightstand across the aisle from Lori’s chair. “As a guest, I can visit on special occasions,” Sky said. “I have no place here, no meaning, no station. I’m just the Crow who comes by and visits and hears how he’s messed up the Focus so bad she’s nearly unlivable. I can’t keep on doing that. This is driving me mad.”

  Lori winced and bowed her head for a moment in furious thought. She looked up, sad. “Who would you die for, Sky? Me? Your people in Toronto? My household?” Ah. Lori had been stewing on this. She looked like a stewer to him.

  “You,” Sky said. Didn’t Lori understand what it took a Crow to do what he had been doing, visiting her household for days on end? These visits were nearly as hard on him as risking his life.

  “Then you don’t love them, these others. All these others.” She waved her left hand, palm open.

  “This feels like love. It’s what I feel for you, most gracious lady, which feels like something else.”

  Lori barked out a few caustic laughs and cupped her head in her hands. “We’re a cheap adolescent soap opera, Sky. I mean, ‘it feels like something else’ sounds so adolescent,” Lori said, the sorrow gone from her voice. She had made a decision, one way or another, though Sky had no idea what her decision might be.

  “Hey, that’s progress,” Sky said. “What did Ann say? ‘The task before us as Transforms is to re-create, in a generation or less, the entirety of human culture, ethics and morality all the way from the Paleolithic to the Space Age.’ No other pair of Major Transforms I know of has tried for a stable relationship
like the one we seem to be stumbling towards. We’ve found ourselves living the adolescent nightmare of actually being the world’s first two lovers. Of course we’re making fools of ourselves.”

  “Well, I concur,” Lori said, and giggled. An actual giggle. Sky almost panicked. “As long as you don’t something else your other lovers, I won’t be jealous. No. I won’t act on my jealousy. I promise I won’t even think about it. No. I won’t think about it too much. How about: I’ll only think about it during specifically regulated thinking jealous thoughts periods. Afterwards, I’ll do some sort of penance. Figure out how to get the pool’s water heater working again. Something.”

  Ah, a perfect example of why one shouldn’t fall in love with a Focus, or at least this Focus. Yet, the fury of the moment was spent, they were entering new territory, unknown territory. His cross annoyance at Lori evaporated.

  Lori paused for a bare moment. “Stay and be a part of my household. Make ‘my household’ into ‘our household’.”

  “I likely won’t be able to stay here forever.”

  “I understand. Promise you’ll come back when you leave,” Lori said.

  “You should take other lovers if I’m gone too long,” Sky said. “It would only be fair.”

  “If you’re gone too long, I won’t want any other lovers. Remember? I live in frozen agony. Only you spark my interest.” Lori’s eyes went all gooey at the edges, like the eyes of a fourteen-year-old.

  “You missed me,” Sky said.

  “You bet I missed you,” Lori said, her voice low and Crow-whispery. “Especially last Saturday morning.”

  He held her eyes with his, open and inviting. “What are you doing over there, then,” Sky asked. He held out his hand to Lori. She took his hand, and let him pull her close, then into his warm nest. “Is this better?”

  “Oh yes, much better.” Lori closed her eyes and grabbed Sky. She kissed him, slowly rubbing her body against him. “Much much better.”

  Ah, mademoiselle Foyer, we have won your heart, eh, Sky? But for how long?

  The whole household heard the announcement of love not too many minutes later. Soon, they heard it again. Much later, many times later, they would remember that all the varieties of Major Transforms had quite potent healing and regeneration capabilities.

  Part 4

  The Lonely Road (Continued)

  Early March, 1968

  How you have fallen from heaven,

  O morning star, son of the dawn!

  You have been cast down to the earth,

  you who once laid low the nations!

  You said in your heart,

  "I will ascend to heaven;

  I will raise my throne

  above the stars of God;

  I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly,

  on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain.

  I will ascend above the tops of the clouds;

  I will make myself like the Most High."

  But you are brought down to the grave,

  to the depths of the pit.

  - Isaiah 14: 12 – 15 (NIV)

  Chapter 13

  There are at least four small African regions (with a low incidence of Transform Sickness) that produce male Focuses and female Crows. Two others produce no Arms but a substantially larger proportion of Chimeras. The reasons for either are not yet known.

  “Inventing Our Future”

  Carol Hancock

  “We need to be thinking in terms of offense,” Keaton said. She had deigned to call me, for the first time in over a month, to brag about her part in the Chimera fight. She had ambushed Enkidu and his pack, just outside my Chicago territory, killing three of them and scaring off the rest. She hadn’t had so much fun in months. After she was done talking I got to brag about my own adventure, including my meeting with Rizzari.

  I paced in the bedroom, now a civilized place with a king-sized bed with a headboard, two nightstands, one dresser and a comfortable cushioned chair. And a phone. “Offense?” I asked.

  “I think we can hunt these Chimeras down and kill them,” Keaton said. “End their threat before they figure out how to fight properly.”

  “That’ll take more than two Arms,” I said. Bobby came in to bring me a sandwich and I waved him away.

  Keaton laughed. “If they’re all as inept as Enkidu and his pack, not many more, perhaps a couple dozen well-armed normals.”

  I told her about Focus Rizzari’s talented Transforms and she nixed the idea. “The Focuses won’t fight because they don’t believe the Chimeras are real, or a threat. We need to do the recruiting and training ourselves.”

  “Okay, let’s work on this,” I said.

  “Do it fast,” Keaton said. “We need to catch them before they can create too many of those old Monster-style pack women.” She hung up, leaving me annoyed. She sounded like she expected me to do all the recruiting. Typical Keaton.

  I did like the idea about going on offense, though.

  Gilgamesh

  “You’re sleeping in the boiler?” Gilgamesh asked.

  “Uh huh,” Tiamat said. “It’s huge, round, Beast Man proof and makes a great bedroom.”

  He was calling from a phone booth beside the Woolworth’s. He had caught her at her office, and apologized for running out on her during the fight.

  “So,” Tiamat said, “Are you up for a fight? I’m in the early stages of planning one, taking the fight to the Beast Men”

  “I don’t think any Crow can handle a fight,” he said. Wind whistled down the street and around the booth. The sun had set two hours ago.

  “I met one who does. Rumor, in Pittsburgh.”

  “I’ve met him as well. He keeps Crows from falling into traps set by a local nasty old Focus.”

  Tiamat laughed. “He also saves real stupid young Arms like me from the same fate. The Focus’s troops were out after me. He fought by my side.”

  Gilgamesh stopped breathing, fought panic brought on by empathizing with Rumor. Customers came in and out of the Woolworth’s, shivering in the harsh wind, but they did not notice him. “I find that heartening,” Gilgamesh said. “Perhaps one day I’ll be able to fight my panic so well. Not yet.”

  “Uh huh, all young Major Transforms suck,” Tiamat said. “Say, Gilgamesh, are you going to move anywhere near me? You’d be safer if you did.”

  “Yes, though for the moment, I’m going to live out of doors.” Actually, he was going to try living in the basement of a fifteen-story office building, just outside of Tiamat’s metasense range from her new lair. He had found an area in the back used for storage, where no one ever came. The hidden cubby was so small only the smallest Beast Man would be able to crawl into it. Both he and Tiamat were convinced the Beast Men’s greatest weakness was their penchant for hugeness.

  “You don’t need to live outdoors. I can help you find a place.”

  “Crows don’t mind the cold, even ones my age.” Gilgamesh would face some big money problems soon, though. With all the Beast Man activity in the area, his appliance repair business was falling apart. “We should leave Chicago. Go somewhere safer.”

  Of all things, Tiamat snarled. “I’m not leaving Chicago until my enemies drag my cold dead corpse out of this town.”

  Now that was an interesting and unexpected response. Gilgamesh sighed. Young Arms were just as messed up as young Crows. “I guess I’ll be staying here as well, then.”

  Enkidu

  “Both Joshua and Odin lived, though Odin lost his trainees and Joshua lost half of his pack,” Wandering Shade said. He had found Enkidu south of Chicago, huddled with his pack in Stearns quarry. The quarry was dark and empty, and the high sloping sides of the quarry towered above them. His Master was so furious his glow echoed in the clouds above, in Enkidu’s weather sense. “You Hunters have failed. You’ve shown me even three of you can’t take on the Talking Arm and win. She out-organized you!”

  “We could retreat west, into the Rocky Mountains,” Enkidu said. “We�
�”

  “No,” his Master said. “You mean well, but you can’t. I have another group of Beasts I support out west, and they’re far more territorially aggressive than even you Hunters.”

  Enkidu bowed his head. He had failed again, and these failures ate at him. Since Odin and Joshua had also failed he hadn’t lost status, but he ached in shame anyway.

  “You’re going to do your trick, Master, aren’t you?” Enkidu said. He had already picked up on that with his weather-sense. His Master’s plan carried with it the scent of doom.

  He wished he knew why.

  “My plan is already in motion,” his Master said.

  “Can you tell me what your plan is?”

  “I could, but I won’t,” Wandering Shade said. “As I said before, I fear the consequences of my actions. No other Transform leader has ever dared what I do; once this is done it cannot be undone, and will likely be used against us in the future.” His Master clenched his fists in anger. “I might make the case that the Talking Arm has already crossed that line with what she did to Odin…but it’s not a good case. The police she used thought they fought Monsters.”

  Enkidu realized what his Master’s plans entailed. “Master! You can’t! This is far too dangerous!” If his Master enlisted the authorities in their fight, he would break an important tacit agreement the Transforms had with each other, and start a war with the Transform community Enkidu knew Wandering Shade and the Hunters were far too weak to wage.

  “I shall not stop what I’ve already started, and damn the consequences!” Wandering Shade shook his fist at Enkidu. “As punishment, you three Hunters are required to come, to be witnesses, to the fall of the Talking Arm. Tonight.”

  Enkidu’s breath caught in his throat, fearful and unable to speak. He had long wondered what price would come from his Master taking the Law inside himself.

  Now he knew.

  Tonya Biggioni

  The phone rang and Tonya answered. She personally handled the late-night phone duties. She had been reviewing the household books, and ledgers covered her desk. An adding machine spilled paper over the side almost to the floor.