“Good answer,” Sinclair said. “I just hope you understand what you’re getting into by doing this.”
Gilgamesh grunted. Sinclair understood his biggest worry. He had no idea where his new path would lead, save for one thing.
Right here, right now, his path led him to the Skinner.
The Cost of Giving Up Monsters
(1964)
Lake Pigeon State Park, just off exit 8A on the New Jersey turnpike, was literally half way between Tonya’s household and Polly’s household. Not just symbolism, but a necessary compromise to allow Polly to agree to meet with Tonya. Considering what Tonya was going to be offering, she would be damned if she would beg, and the negotiations on where to meet had gotten testy. The necessary excuse they finally came up with was a Saturday picnic, allowing the households to socialize together, just like in the good old days.
The meet would also give Tonya a little time alone with Polly, in hopes she might be able to patch things up between them.
Thus, the touch football game between the men of each household.
“So, who’s your new quarterback?” Polly said, between mouthfuls of a sandwich. They sat together on an old flannel blanket, carefully left alone by both households.
“Him? Danny Seymore?” Tonya said, and pointed. Polly nodded. “He’s new. The government bureaucrats in the Transform placement office got cooperative after our Bronx hunt. I asked them for a couple of young athletic Transforms, and they actually hit all the Transform Detention Centers this side of the Mississippi for me. I ended up having to go to Cleveland for him, but I think he’s going to be worth the trip.” Not only young and athletic, and with a portable skill (car repair) but he had a wonderful personality and was more than willing to dive into bodyguard training.
“I was meaning to talk to you about your little episode,” Polly said. “I thought your news conference afterwards was a bit too public. I know you’re our region’s official Focus celebrity, but holding up a severed Monster head struck me as a tad showy.”
Tonya allowed herself to blush. “If I’d been in my right mind, I would have never held the news conference. Unfortunately, my people woke me up from my healing trance and told me they couldn’t cope with the reporters, and asked me to do something about them. I’m afraid I don’t even remember what I said to the press.” She repressed a grin. “I can definitely say I don’t recommend talking to a gaggle of reporters when you’re half-zombie from a healing trance.”
“I understand,” Polly said. She turned away, sympathy token at best. “I’m sure this will enhance your position with the Council regarding the Council President position, though. I’m not sure what I can offer the Council to match your escapade.”
Much to Tonya’s surprise, Polly was about to concede defeat before Tonya made her offer. For a bare moment, Tonya considered changing her plan.
“If you don’t mind me saying so, this topic is why I wanted to talk to you today,” Tonya said.
“I understand. I’m willing to drop my bid, but there’s a favor I would like to ask of you in return,” Polly said. Her former close friend sounded like she was chewing on ashes. “President Adkins’ ‘successful Focus tax’ has become a bit too onerous over the last year. Her tax is close to killing off my business.”
Interesting. “So you would support me as Council President if I would drop this piece of nonsense or reduce it to a more reasonable level?”
Polly nodded. Tonya sensed how difficult this was for Polly – her former friend’s iron self-control wasn’t enough to keep her hands from shaking as she snacked and watched the touch football game.
Oh, the offer was tempting – but it went against all the decisions Tonya had made over the past week. Not anywhere near tempting enough.
“So,” Tonya said, “What would you say if I told you I was going to drop Monster hunting?”
Polly frowned, and stole a moment to think through an answer by grabbing a napkin and daubing at some invisible crumbs. “Your Monster hunting is the basis of your celebrityhood – our other Monster-hunting Focuses aren’t nearly as successful,” Polly said, after a half minute of thought. “Most of them are lucky to bag a single Monster a year. The hunting is also the main source of your household’s income, if I read the numbers correctly. Tonya, I don’t think you can hold the Council Presidency without your Monster hunting. Or are you thinking about using a different lever, once you get the Presidency? Wini is taking her lever with her, when she retires.”
Wini’s lever was all the dirty details of Focus life of all the Focuses. Where the bodies were buried, figuratively and literally. Being a Focus, with all the problems society heaped on the Transforms, was nearly impossible without cutting more than a few legal corners. Wini helped Focuses cut the corners, and was rather blunt about what she wanted in return. Tonya had long ago decided that whoever won the Council Presidency would end up as a puppet of Wini and the other First Focuses. Tonya bet the whole lot of them would still be directing traffic from behind the scene.
Tonya took a deep breath. “Actually, Polly, I wanted to talk to you today about dropping my bid for the Council Presidency.”
“Oh?” Polly said, her face sudden stone.
“I also believe I can’t hold the Council Presidency position without my Monster hunting. However, the Bronx hunt was my last. I’ve lost too many people over the years, and I find I’m not happy about some of the effects I’m seeing in myself.”
“Such as?”
“Well, for one thing, the hunting has worsened the problems between the two of us. Every time I lose another housemember to a Monster hunt, the look in your eyes gets more severe.”
“I’ve never said anything on that subject,” Polly said. Eyes very severe.
“You’re too polite and civilized to say anything,” Tonya said. “Nevertheless, you can’t help but think ‘what sort of Monster is Tonya becoming, willing to sacrifice yet another of her people for a Monster bounty and another chance to preen in front of the cameras?’ Then there’s the name the other Focuses pinned on me, the one they don’t think I know about – Tonya, the ‘wicked witch of the east’.”
“There are other issues between us, but I admit, the Monster hunting is one of them,” Polly said. Grudgingly. “You now agree with my assessment?”
“Yes. I’m too much of a Monster myself, and I can’t live with myself any more. I want out.”
“You’ll lose your Council seat,” Polly said. “Unless you take on something equally noxious. Noxious from the point of view of the other Council Focuses, of course.” She turned away and watched her touch football team rack up another score.
“You think my position is shaky?” Tonya said. She had Polly going down just the avenue of thoughts she wanted. Come on, Polly, make the obvious suggestion!
“Yes,” Polly said. She twisted her hands together, and thought. “I won’t turn down your offer of support for the Council Presidency. I have my own ideas about where the Council and the Focuses need to be going, and I need a strong hammer to go with my more subtle means of persuasion. I believe I can turn the Council Presidency into my hammer, even without Wini’s little tricks.”
Come on, Polly. Say it. Tonya knew her charisma was useless against Polly – Polly’s charisma was her equal, or better. Polly would just have to think of the idea herself. If Tonya brought up the idea, Polly would never agree to such a thing as recompense.
Polly sat and thought, while Tonya’s men took the kickoff and on the next play, tossed an interception. Tonya groaned with the rest of her people and waited Polly out.
“Oh, of course,” Polly said, her face even more stony than before. “I hope you don’t think of this as more of the same, but you’re the only one of us who’s had any sort of successful contact with Focus Monster Keaton, the one they’re now calling an Arm. If the Council assigned you the job of reeling in Keaton…”
“Oh, that’s horrible, Polly. She’s an animal. You don’t know how impossible a job that wou
ld be.” Tonya kept her face blank as possible, though inwardly, she grinned – this was exactly what she hoped Polly would offer. “This is not an improvement.”
Polly turned to her and gave her an iron glare. “I think you’d better wise up, Tonya. I don’t think you’re going to be able to keep a Council seat without an onerous job on your plate. Accepting such a task would be in your best interest.” Polly accompanied her iron glare with a nearly unstoppable wave of charisma.
“Oh, all right,” Tonya said, giving in to exactly what she had been angling for. Tonya thanked God this was what she wanted, because Polly and her tidal wave of charisma weren’t giving her any say in this at all. “I guess I can give the job a try.”
“Great!” Polly said, with one of her fake twittery smiles. “I hope this satisfies the other Council members. I’m sure they will try and pin some other tasks on you in recompense for dropping Monster hunting, but I’ll make sure none of them are as bad as Arm liaison.”
“Thank you,” Tonya said. “One impossible job is enough.”
Wicked Witch Time (1964)
“The reason I called you here, Tonya, is to tell you they’re working together,” Suzie Schrum said. The first Focus radiated agitation as she sat across from Tonya in the living room of her double-wide trailer.
Tonya had never liked her visits to the Schrum trailer park. As far as she could tell, bad juice didn’t bother Suzie. The bad juice never got so bad here that Tonya would have needed to move out because of it, implying Suzie possessed some level of control over the noxious stuff. Still, if Tonya lived in a place this bad, she wouldn’t be half the Focus she was. The level of bad juice was enough to interfere with her thinking as well as her ability to move juice.
“Who’s working together?” Tonya asked, gently, as she crossed her legs and attempted to appear calm and professional. The chair was cheap and uncomfortable.
Suzie’s agitation bothered Tonya. Normally, the first Focus was one of the more emotionally contained people Tonya knew. Brusk and undiplomatic, yes, but always under emotional control. As with several of the older leading first Focuses, such as Wini, Donna and Mary Beth Julius, Suzie used her Focus charisma only upon herself, for self-control.
“Mary Beth and Focus DeYoung,” Suzie said. “Right under our noses. This is a disaster, and more dangerous to us than any of us had realized.” She tapped her forefinger on the wooden arm of the sofa for emphasis.
“I’ve met one of Focus DeYoung’s ‘representatives’. They need to be smacked down for their absurd Transform Rights agitation. That’s Council business, not theirs. But dangerous? Focus DeYoung’s not even a good enough Focus to keep her household in line.”
Suzie barked a sneering laugh. “Their Transform rights bullshit is just the foot in the door. The biggest ‘right’ they want is to free Focuses from the edicts of the Council; they believe what a Focus does in her own household is her own business, even if she’s experimenting or allying with our male counterparts.”
Tonya winced. One of Suzie’s old hollow-eyed gap-toothed Transforms meekly shuffled up with a plate of refreshments and laid them out on the off-kilter plywood trailer table. Burnt hot dogs, stale ripple-cut chips, and store-bought chip dip. Suzie dug in, pleased. Tonya followed Suzie’s lead, at least with the chips and dip.
“With aims like that, how can they be allying with Julius?” Tonya said. She knew more about the aims of Mary Beth Julius. She, the third Focus in the United States to survive, had once led the Focuses, before Shirley Patterson came into her own power and took over. Julius believed all non-Focus Major Transforms should be shot on sight. Especially the Crows.
“Our old crazy friend Mary Beth had an epiphany: it’s possible to defeat a Crow and enslave them. Make them your dog. She still wants to kill the free Crows, and all the Sports and Arms, of course.” Suzie laughed and Tonya shivered. “Crows in dog collars! On leashes! That’s got to be a sight to see, but even those betraying monsters deserve better. Let them live in the shadows and help us from the shadows, as always, that’s what I say.”
Tonya didn’t live in the same mental world as Suzie. Being politic, she just nodded. The first Focuses’ visceral hatred of the Crows was full of exceptions and holes, she well knew, but to hear Suzie saying relatively nice things about the Crows was a shock.
“The Nuttylips rebellion will go after all the leading Focuses, not just my peers, but yours on the visible Council,” Suzie said. Nuttylips? Tonya took a moment, and then smiled at the word concoction. DeYoung’s commie idiots called themselves the New Transform International, while Mary Beth ran a group called the Lucy Peoples’ Society, named after the Focus that the first Arm, Mary Chesterson, accidentally killed. NTI plus LPS did sort of equal Nuttylips. Suzie took a swig from a can of Pepsi, covered her mouth with the back of her left hand and burped. Unlike Polly, Suzie didn’t much care for the benefits of civilization, or any civilized niceties. “We’ve got others covering the Crow and Sport angle. Both of them are going to owe us for this, which pains me not at all.” Suzie’s mouth twitched as she repressed a smile. “On the other hand, there’s the Arm and your stumbling progress toward taming her.”
“It’s going slowly because I’m doing it right,” Tonya said. Tonya always did things slowly, and she always did things right. “She’s holding to the agreement she and I made regarding poaching household Transforms, and in payment I’m helping her. At a distance. Slowly, but surely, I’m teaching her to love the Focuses and love the Focus Network. She won’t be able to avoid being seduced into our service. In six months, nine months at the latest, you’ll be able to offer her the sort of rough jobs we currently have to hire mobsters to handle, and with her love of violence, she’ll lap them up like a kitten laps up milk. Better, once I’ve finished training her, she’ll even do a better job.”
Suzie nodded. Suzie’s charisma sucked, at least for influencing anybody but herself, but as with many of the first Focuses, she was a master at lie detection. Tonya had to be on her best behavior around Suzie. Tonya’s charisma was strong, but not strong enough to lie to Suzie.
Her statements about the Arm were as true as Tonya knew.
“We don’t have six months,” Suzie said. “The Nuttylips will have killed her by then. Even if the Arm survives, nine months from now there won’t be a ‘we’ to hire this weapon you’re providing us. Things are getting desperate. These rebels are capturing too many ears, and forcing things none of us want forced. Tonya, bring her in and leash the Arm. Yesterday. Use whatever means you can think up, but we need this done. Whatever it takes.”
Tonya grew ice cold. She had heard stories of the old days, of course, from Wini and Shirley. ‘Whatever it takes’ was a phrase used in the dark days of the Transform Quarantine, from a time when the first Focuses tossed morality out the window, and life devolved down into a simple ‘us versus them’.
The founding charter of the United Focuses of America stated ‘To never again need to do whatever it takes.’ They were civilized, now. The bad days were gone for good. Slowly, over time, the first Focuses who had done too much of ‘whatever it takes’ and scarred their souls and morality, retreated into the background, retiring from everyday leadership. Wini’s resignation and Polly’s recent ascension to the Council President post was just another in a long series of civilized replacement of the old order with the new.
“I… I can’t. I’m not…” Tonya said, stammering, caught flat-footed. This wasn’t her. Dark she was, but not that dark.
The old cracked black phone beside Suzie rang. “Shirley said you would have moral qualms.” Suzie smiled. “Her timing is, as always, impeccable. Tonya, pick up the phone. Shirley wants to have a few words with you.” Suzie licked her lips, now radiating anticipation, as if she was going to witness a famous nightclub show.
Tonya, hands shaking at the unexpected turn of events, picked up the phone. How could anyone know to call? How…
“Tonya.” Shirley’s voice. “Wicked witch time.”
Tonya’s world went blank.
She didn’t remember anything from Shirley saying her name to when she got handed back into her car, by Danny, a half hour later.
Tonya was resolved and ready. The die was cast, and it was time to act, time to prove to everybody she was the strong Focus people thought she was.
Time to take down an Arm.
---
“Dr. Henry Zielinski.”
“Hank? Tonya. I’ve got an offer for you.”
“I’m listening. Does it pertain to our young troubled Major Transform?”
“Peripherally. I know you would rather not meet her again in person, but like all beginning Major Transforms, she remains young and stupid. There’s going to come a time when she needs help.”
“I was hoping the person to help her would be you. I’m not built to survive the sort of damage our young acquaintance can dish out. You are.”
“I’ll be doing my part in helping her, including in person, but I can’t help her with her medical issues, the way you can. I’ll do my part, and I’m hoping you’ll do yours.”
“Okay, I understand. I’m listening.”
“I’ve learned of a Focus in the Midwest District with a unique skill, one right up your alley.”
“Hmm? What’s her age?”
“She’s a year out. Her name’s Beth Hargrove, and she lives in Detroit. She reports she can tell the difference in her Transforms between whether they have a cold or the flu…with her metasense.”
“She can diagnose with her metasense? That shouldn’t be possible! I’m impressed.”
“Exactly. The deal I’m offering is simple: I’ll arrange for you to meet with her, and I’ll handle all the leg-work and politics to make your visit possible and safe. In return, you’ll agree to a visit with our dangerous young Major Transform friend when I ask.”
The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Five Page 5
