“Don’t you go backsliding on us and start identifying with the Arm,” Wini said. Her former mentor’s charisma was piss poor, but she was a crackerjack parlor psychologist and knew Tonya’s mind nearly as well as Tonya did. “I know she’s hurting, but Tonya, the Arm is a serial killer of tagged Transforms. You have no reason to feel guilty.”
Tonya had no safe answer, so she didn’t. Wini kept barreling along.
“You’re saving the lives of countless Transforms by what you’re doing with this Arm. Arms will never, ever poach tagged Transforms from Focus households once this gets out! And when she sings, we’re going to learn all we’ll ever need to know about keeping the damned Arms in line.”
Wini might be gleeful at the prospect at the Arm singing, but Tonya knew the risks. Wini viewed the Hancock exercise as a way to threaten Keaton and get a lever over her: do what we want, gratis, or we’ll do this to you. Foolish. If Tonya couldn’t talk Keaton down, Keaton would declare war on the Focuses over such treatment. But getting back in charge of Keaton was a problem for another day. First, Tonya had to succeed at her current task…and survive the political aftermath.
“It’s hard to imagine the Arm was so dangerous once,” Tonya said. “She doesn’t appear capable of hurting a fly. Even when she does those appalling exercises, she looks like she’s holding her mind together with scotch tape and frayed string.”
“Tell me more,” Wini said.
“The exercises? She’s fighting her juice cravings by exercising,” Tonya said. “Her exercises are so vigorous I’m surprised she doesn’t injure herself. Several of the doctors wanted to stop her, to save her from herself, but that wasn’t part of the plan.”
Wini snorted. “I would bet money her exercise drills didn’t even come close to her real capabilities. Pardon my interruption – please continue, Tonya.”
Tonya took a deep breath and wiped the sweat from her brow. Too long talking on the phone with Wini. Much longer, and she would start shivering. “The Arm exercised for three solid hours. She worked her muscles so hard she collapsed to the floor. Twice. Despite her reactions, each time she picked herself up and kept going.
Tonya searched her mind for something to distract Wini from her sadistic voyeurism and remembered a conversation with Agent Patrelle from earlier today.
“You know, Wini, I ran into something strange today. The FBI Agent in charge here doesn’t have the remotest clue how Focus households work.”
“Discipline, you mean?”
“Yes. It was the oddest thing. He couldn’t believe I had any experience in extreme discipline.” Neither did any of the other men here. Only Patrelle had enough nerve to ask her.
“Extreme for you, that is.” Wini couldn’t resist. Wini had killed people in her house with her discipline. She considered the power of life and death a prerogative of being a Focus. As Wini would say, there are always more Transforms.
“Patrelle, the FBI agent, had no idea. Here he is, in charge of the FBI’s Transform department, and he had no idea we’re stuck taking whatever Transforms we get from the doctors. Murderers, rapists, the works. The idea we might need to discipline recalcitrant Transforms never even crossed his mind. He had a vision of Focus households as little islands of peace and tranquility, where meek Transforms coddle some gentle Focus mother figure. It doesn’t even occur to him that women might wield real power. It doesn’t occur to any of them. I had to tell him the story of that child molester I got in my household about two years ago. You remember the one. I had to take him down to the edge of withdrawal several times before he quit with the little girls.” Sometimes Tonya suspected the doctors worked to make sure the Focuses got stuck with the worst of the dregs.
“Ah, yes,” Wini said. “I liked that story, too.” Yes, Wini would.
“You know what Patrelle said?”
Wini laughed. “He told you to take them to court. That’s what the straight-arrows always say. Can you imagine going to court, when your proof is based off your metasense and what you’ve read on his face?”
“I would have been laughed out of court so fast I would have gotten a speeding ticket on my way through the door.”
“Exactly,” Wini said. “So, have you figured out how to get the Arm out of the Detention Center? We wouldn’t want the doctors to use her as a lab rat forever or let the Feds send her into withdrawal and waste her wonderful potential.”
This was too much for Tonya. Was there an emergency she could invent? “The Feds have assured me they can supply an unclaimed Transform when the time comes. Once the law enforcement men are done here and leave the Arm to the doctors, I figure I can just convince them to move the Arm into my custody.”
“Oh, that’s just too rich for me,” Wini said, and laughed. “They’re going to take good care of the Arm for us.”
Gilgamesh: March 19, 1968
After two days of preparation, Gilgamesh tried his first experiment. He hid himself in the brush a mile away from his apartment building and took in the ambience of the area. Carefully, oh so carefully, Gilgamesh let fly a small sick-up. A special sick-up: it was tuned.
Gilgamesh had been re-reading his old Crow letters, the ones talking about all the wonders of dross art. Some Crows claimed to be able to include actual emotional triggers within their dross art. Gilgamesh had missed the significance of their boasts the first couple of times through. Not until after the Skinner humiliated him and he decided to do something about his many weaknesses did he realize the capability might be a useful tool. If dross could trigger emotional effects, why should its use be limited to art?
Gilgamesh badly needed a weapon.
He tuned this particular sick-up to fear. Following the instructions in the letters about tuning, he had practiced focusing his metasense on his own sick-up store until he could sense the emotions. The fear came from him; the tuning hadn’t worked well back in the apartment, though, because his fear was fake. Now, at three in the morning, out in the open, he knew he would be able to find his fear.
So, sick-up, and into the air went the dross, while Gilgamesh shivered and worried about secret predators lurking in the dark.
The sick-up fell flat. No emotional trigger, no nothing. Just a small mass of undifferentiated dross.
Gilgamesh kicked at a leafless bush in frustration and recoiled back, appalled by his loss of control. He didn’t lack fear; nor had he gone too far into panic. He examined his results and groaned. He had produced the fear dross, but only a miniscule amount, enough to scare off a mouse. A small mouse. Whatever tricks the other Crows used to produce tuned dross in quantities, he didn’t have them.
He had some other ideas to try, both on the dross fear effect and on other matters, but not tonight. He was too frustrated and, well, too afraid.
Henry Zielinski: March 20, 1968
Zielinski waved good night to Tommy Bates, opened the door to his cheap motel room and slunk in. Tonya was scarily good at breaking people; Carol had spent an hour this afternoon screaming obscenities over the intercom and showing the CDC and the other Feds the darker side of the Arms. Dr. Jeffers, still following Tonya’s sick plan, judged Carol’s display ended phase one. He started up phase two, turning off the lights on Hancock and piping in soft, soothing and repetitive music over the intercom. Carol didn’t react well. She found a way to start a fire with her reading materials, but the CDC crew turned on the cell’s sprinkler system, leaving Carol wet, cold and miserable.
Hancock trashed her cell after the sprinklers turned on, or so he surmised, based on what he heard over the intercom. He couldn’t blame her one bit.
Three steps into the room a strong hand covered his face and yanked him back to the hotel room’s bathroom. The door shut, the lights went on and the shower started.
Keaton. Thank God.
“Talk softly,” she said, the totally demanding predator. He nodded and she took her hand off his face. “We don’t have time for personal stuff, so be quick.”
Zielinski didn’t attempt
to fight off Keaton’s control. “I called your answering lady because I wasn’t sure you knew Tonya had taken over,” Zielinski said. “She’s got a plan I guarantee will break Carol. When Carol breaks, she will be nearing withdrawal and I suspect problems.”
He hadn’t seen Keaton in over six months. He couldn’t see much of her now because she wore head to toe black loose fitting clothing, including a black hood over her face only showing her eyes. Ninja clothing? Always something new from Keaton. An outfit like this would be good at sneaking around the outsides of the CDC’s Transform Detention Center.
“I figured as much,” Keaton said, voice muffled behind the cloth. “I tried twice to get into the place, but the place is locked down tighter than a nun’s pussy. I’m going to keep probing, but it looks like they’ve learned far too much about Arms for this to be easy. How goes your attempt to gain access?”
Keaton’s one request to him so far, left through the message lady.
“Tonya’s sitting on it,” he said. “She thinks I’m up to something, but she’s not sure what. When she’s been around she’s made sure she knows what I’m doing. One piece of luck, though: Tonya has to go back to Philly to handle some household business and won’t be back until Sunday.”
“Four days. Hell, if I can’t do it in four days, we’re going to need to write off Carol.”
“I’m not prepared to do that,” Zielinski said.
“You’re going to need to come up with a hell of a lot better intel than you’ve come up with so far if we’re going to do this. A few good ideas wouldn’t hurt either.” She paused. “Write down everything you’ve learned and leave it behind the hotel’s newspaper box. Maybe I can come up with something. Keep working on finding a way into the Detention Center. Don’t worry about being legal.”
Zielinski nodded and nodded and nodded. “We need to talk, Stacy. I have several complicated ideas I would like a chance to pass along to you.”
“Huh. The whole CDC complex is a trap for me and the FBI’s got everyone involved under full time surveillance, including you. From the FBI’s perspective, Hancock’s nothing but bait. Otherwise she would already be dead. The CDC people don’t realize this and you’re not to tell them. Hell, the only reason you’re still alive is the fact they’re using you as bait, too. Whatever you want to talk to me about, write it down and leave it with whatever else you’re passing along to me.”
Keaton vanished, the only sign she physically had moved when she left the room was a muted whoosh of air as the bathroom door opened and closed faster than he could see.
Gilgamesh: March 20, 1968 – March 22, 1968
“Hello, Enid? How do you do? I’m a Crow.”
The telephone pole didn’t respond.
Gilgamesh was getting better. The first time he first attempted to converse with a telephone pole, he practically panicked himself out of his shoes. How much of the past year or two had he forgotten because of utter embarrassment?
Enid Gladchuck, a Bay Area focus, lived in the sleepy bedroom community of Cupertino, a suburb of San Jose. As far as Gilgamesh could figure out, based on his metasense work and his time at the library reading old newspapers, Enid was an average Focus, not involved in Focus politics or mundane local politics, with about six years of Focusing under her belt. She wasn’t a monster, just a fastidious mover of juice who kept a well-run household filled with eminently sane and well-adjusted Transforms. He should be able to handle Enid. Right?
Some days his panic reactions drove him to tears…such as today. Phone poles!
Dross. Before this experiment, he stocked up on some spicy dross from Keaton’s place. The more dross he took, the better he felt, and the more he could control the panic. He added this observation to his journal, next to some old comments about being smarter when juiced up.
“Focus Enid Gladchuck here,” the voice on the phone said.
“Hello, Enid Housebound. I’m a Crow by the…”
The phone went dead. She had hung up on him before he finished his canned introduction. Gilgamesh buried his head in his hands and wept.
In his preparations, he had memorized Enid Gladchuck’s daily routines. Her sleep cycle put her in bed, asleep, from 1:00 in the morning to about 4:30 in the morning. The San Francisco Chronicle’s morning edition arrived at 5:00 in the morning, and Enid, being the only one Gilgamesh metasensed as awake, went and snatched the paper nearly every morning.
Gilgamesh decided to try his luck at a direct approach. He rehearsed his lines many times. What a greeting that would be! She would surely believe he was a Crow after this!
He waited, out of sight, by her morning newspaper. When she came out of her house to get the newspaper, he strode up with confidence and exclaimed: “Focus Enid Gladchuck. I’m glad we could meet in person, because I have an offer…”
Two normals sprinted out of nowhere and gang-tackled him. Gilgamesh gritted his teeth and didn’t sick-up on them. He looked up and saw two Transform bodyguards standing between him and Enid, now being hustled back to her house. “Enid,” he said, forgetting his lines in panic and embarrassment. “I’m a Crow and I can prove it with my special Crow senses. Under your robe and nightshirt, you’re wearing a Playtex brassiere and Hanes panties. These are things only a Crow would be able to know.”
When the police arrived ten minutes later and dragged him away, they arrested him not only for vagrancy, disturbing the peace, and trespassing, but also for some variety of public lewdness associated with mentioning woman’s undergarments.
Jail wasn’t bad. He liked the relative quiet, and nobody hassled him. He didn’t understand why until one of the inmates clued him in. Of all things, Gilgamesh now carried an ‘aura of nasty’ with him wherever he went. He wasn’t a senior Crow. Why on Earth did he have any sort of nasty aura, anyway?
The relative quiet gave him time to meditate. He also cleaned up some old dross (musty but piquant with the tang of existential angst, a fine vintage) from a containment cellblock for wayward Transforms in the basement, easily within his range.
The authorities didn’t know he was a Transform. Crows don’t exist. The usual.
Boredom finally got to Gilgamesh, and he gave in and spent some time fooling with dross art. The art itself, rather than weapon implementations of those same effects. He found dross a lot easier to work with when he thought of his work as art. He decided there was something stressful about working with weapons just by their very nature.
His dross art looked like blueprints. They made him smile.
He even found ways to stabilize the little artistic constructs of sicked-up dross. He made patterns within the dross, embedded messages conveying emotional content, scents, things seen, and the glow of Transforms. For a few hours he had some fun, until he tired of these artistic tricks. It appalled him to no end that some Crows turned this into their life’s calling. Simply amazing.
He did make a little bit of progress at generating weapons-grade dross effects. With steady and persistent practice, plus regular meditation to reduce his level of stress, he might be able to create offensive dross effects in an actual combat situation in say, three years or so.
Three years wasn’t exactly the time frame he wanted.
Progress on real problems: zero.
Better ideas for next time: zero.
His time in jail did make him wonder what he wanted to do with his life, though. He dealt with the Arms. Would that be his only task in life? Such a choice didn’t seem right. Following around the Arms was another dead end; gorging himself with spicy Arm dross wouldn’t help anybody but himself.
But then what? He had a responsibility as a Major Transform to help Transforms in need. He worried about arrogance, about putting too much significance in the word ‘Major’, but his responsibility echoed around inside him enough to convince him of its reality. Focus responsibilities were obvious: keep Transforms alive. What, however, mirrored the Focus responsibilities among the nearly-as-common Crows?
His question daunte
d him, perhaps too big a question for a young Crow to contemplate. On the other hand, he did note an obvious corollary to his current task: cooperation between different types of Major Transforms. Expand what he did with the Tiamat rescue, to all aspects of Transform life. He thought back over those letters and realized exactly whom he needed to talk to.
A day later, when he was brought up for arraignment, the misdemeanor court judge broke down in laughter when he read the charges and tossed the entire set after making Gilgamesh promise to stay away from Focus Gladchuck. They escorted him out of the county jail without his personal effects, leaving him to walk back on foot to his apartment.
Did the other Crows have his problems? Or was it just him?
Chapter 8
In 1967 there were an estimated 60 newly transformed male and female “Goldilocks” Transforms (that did not need Focus support to survive). Of these an estimated 55 survived. Note that only 3 were registered by Transform Clinics in 1967, meaning that most remained an unseen part of the general population.
“Understanding Transform Sickness as a Disease”
Carol Hancock: March 20, 1968 – March 23, 1968
The real Arm broke through my façade Wednesday afternoon after a full day of isolation. I roared, cursed, tried to break through the doors and walls, started a fire when they turned off the lights, and utterly lost my temper when they turned on a set of fire sprinklers cleverly recessed into the ceiling. By the time I finished the cell was trashed, half my exercise equipment useless and the water fountain dribbled water endlessly to the floor and into the nearby drain.
Okay, I knew my temper tantrum was childish. I knew it as I trashed the place, but I needed to do something to quiet the beast inside and fight off the damned whispers. About an hour afterwards I faked a total breakdown, complete with tears, sobs, pleas about juice and the once magic words of “I’ll do anything!”
A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) Page 16
