The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Five

by Randall Farmer

  I now understood why I experienced those memory dreams a few nights ago. They were all about Arm tags, or, in particular, the lack of one on me. My subconscious had been trying to tell me something.

  Arm tags sucked when used on inanimate objects, fading away after a few minutes. If the object tags did anything in the real world, I couldn’t tell, but I doubted they did. Most of what I learned came from tagging myself, which I figured out might be a dangerous thing to be doing as an experiment, alone, in a dark room, with nobody to save me if (and when) I fucked up. Lost in the excitement and knowing my general worth to the universe now, about zero, I took the risk anyway.

  An Arm tagging herself gives her dominance over herself, a level of control I easily recognized as the end-state of an hour or two of meditation and visualization, Zielinski-style. After thinking about what my discovery meant for a few minutes, everything else just fell into place.

  Unlike the Focus tags that functioned as thunderbolts from heaven, allowing the Focus to miraculously move juice from one Transform to another, an Arm tag served as a goddamned shortcut. But what a shortcut, if the tag allowed an Arm to establish dominance over another Arm without the dominant Arm having to beat the snot out of the lesser Arm every time they came back in contact with each other. The same timesaving benefit appeared to be true for all the Arm tag effects I figured out in my cell.

  Keaton took four long and bloody months to do to me, and my rebellious mind, what she would have been able to do in an instant with the Arm tag. Oh, there still would have been blood and pain, and I would have had my rebellious moments, but the tag would have cut down the sheer number of my problems with accepting my place, which caused many of the problems Keaton had with me.

  The Arm tag also neatly solved the mission Lori had given me. So how do you keep the Arms in line? You only deal with Arms in a dominance arrangement; you negotiate with the most dominant Arm and the rest have to follow.

  Eventually the excitement wore off and the grinding annoyance of low juice crept back in. I had solved the greatest mystery I knew of about Transforms, how Arms got along with each other, and my findings were stuck with me in my damned no-hope cell of doom.

  I hoped Keaton liked my tag discovery. If I ever managed to get out of this place, the first thing I would do would be to patch things up with Keaton, in person. I wanted her to tag me. With the tag, I would be able to set up a relationship with her preserving some part of my free will, and, better, a relationship protecting me from her own dark beast. I understood the parameters – with Bobby tagged, when I hurt him I hurt myself. I suspected the tags would be good enough to stop even a Keaton psycho attack. Unless I deserved punishment, I would be safe. Big if, yes, but I hoped.

  Everything I had experienced since my graduation and everyone I had talked to reinforced the idea that Arms couldn’t survive on their own…and despite her psychotic breaks Keaton was still the person I trusted the most.

  What a mess. Almost a year ago, Zielinski had told me Arms were social creatures, and should be able to get along better, but I hadn’t understood his point. I thought keeping Keaton on the other end of a phone would suffice, but it hadn’t. We still argued and couldn’t get along. Worse, we still felt compelled to stay in contact, or at least I did. The Arms, like the Focuses, were indeed instinctively social. I doubted I would be able to convince Keaton she needed me, but I sure as hell needed her.

  The tag discovery would give me something to offer her besides myself. I remembered Mary Fouke, the baby Arm from way back when Keaton trained me. I had hated her from the moment I first saw her. I thought I had legitimate reasons at the time, but looking back, I realized my hatred was simply an excuse for my immediate visceral reaction. Keaton should have had her tagged…and perhaps I should have had her tagged as well. The problem was simple: Fouke was an Arm, a competitor.

  My analysis was emotionally correct. Nature had equipped us Arms to be instinctive competitors with each other, and had supplied us with instinctive needs to socialize with each other. The Arm tag was a necessity.

  How to get the information out, though? I had nothing to write on or with. I did, however, have myself. A long shot, yes, but when you’re cornered and there’s no way out, you fight, despite the impossible odds. I should be able to burn the information into my memories, a gift for whoever ended up owning me. They might pass the information along to Keaton or Lori. I did a little experimentation until I proved to myself my idea would work, and I burned in those memories. This trick cost me a couple tenths of a point, juice I didn’t have to use. I managed. I succeeded. Someday, somehow, these memories would surface.

  After my little burn, my rashes returned. My sense of my own juice count went haywire. Low juice, now for real. Hour by hour, minute by minute, I slowly fell apart.

  Endless time passed after I prepared my memory gift, alone and cold in the wet dark. I feared any more experiments with tagging; I couldn’t risk using any more juice. Nothing remained to distract me. My juice cravings got worse.

  The craving would defeat me eventually and the results would be much better if I gave in now, while I still had some remnant of intelligence left to deflect them from Bobby. I needed them now. I had to surrender now.

  So I did. I said I would give them what they wanted. I said I would answer their questions and do all their tests. As long as they gave me juice, I would give them what they wanted.

  They didn’t respond.

  I offered examples. I told them I knew where Keaton lived. I told them I knew about multiple murders and dozens of missing persons cases that I would resolve for them.

  No one came.

  Finally, I acknowledged what my gut had recognized long ago. They didn’t want my information, they wanted me broken. Broken so far that I would do whatever they wanted, forever. They wanted me pliant, weak, desperate, and willing to bind myself to them, forever. Some damned Focus waited on the other end of this, a Focus with a tag with my name on it. I would be her slave forever and ever and ever.

  I wanted to say I would rather be dead. My juice monkey wouldn’t let me even think such things. Even ending my own life was no longer in my hands. Such is the lot of the mature Arm.

  I decided to try to convince them they had broken me. I acted, I faked hallucinations, I begged and pleaded, I spoke nonsense. In the end, I let my mind go, so far I swear other voices spoke through my mouth.

  I needed juice. I had to get juice. I would do whatever they wanted for juice.

  My best acting, with far too much reality invested in the process, and still no one came.

  They didn’t want to break me, I realized. Dr. Jeffers’ so-called offer had lapsed when I trashed the place. No one ever would come. I was trapped here and helpless, and my only remaining option was death. The horrible claw of withdrawal reached into me, unstoppable, inexorable.

  They left me here to die. Agonizing death, at their hands, was now their purpose.

  Panic replaced my fear, the horrible dehumanizing panic that consumes reason. I screamed and begged. I offered everything I could think of. I told them how horrible my craving was and I pleaded with those cameras to have mercy on me. I would do anything, everything. Just get me juice. I must have juice.

  No one came.

  No one came the next day, either. No one came as my need consumed me, as my need ate me and destroyed me. Consumed, devoured and shattered. Carol Hancock, Keaton’s former student, Bobby’s master, owner of Chicago, slayer of Beasts, Mr. Beacon, Mr. McIngle, all gone.

  I became endurance, and little else.

  Hammered

  (1965)

  Lori vomited again, head still spinning. Flushed the toilet. Again. Only bile remained inside her, foul and laden with bad juice. If she could vomit out everything her unknown enemies had done to her, whoever they were, whatever they had done, she would end of all her problems.

  She wouldn’t live that long.

  She shivered, and couldn’t stop shivering. She shook, and could
n’t stop shaking. Call Flo and Tonya, she told her people as they watched her, terrified, from the doorway of the bathroom. They might be able to save some of you. Then she fled, leaving her household behind, before she lost her mind and accidentally destroyed them all. In her current state, the destruction called to her, the un-Focus-like urge to maim and kill, to punish the world for what the world had done to her. She understood her urges were wrong, now – but in a day, or two days? At least with her household out of range, when she died, she wouldn’t take them with her.

  She huddled, knees to her chest, in some ditch in a park. Cool fall air wafted around her, carrying with it the odors of distant wood-fires, blue-cloud belching automobiles, and plants dead from the last frost. Lori didn’t even know which park she had fled to, save that she was far enough from home to be out of range of her repeaters. She wasn’t a real Focus witch; she hadn’t mastered the juice patterns as the other witches had, and her repeaters only went hundreds of yards, not miles.

  Still, she had run a long way, mind half gone.

  “Focus. What happened to you?”

  The whisper again. A rough, aged voice, not a native English speaker. She didn’t place the accent, but the voice reminded her of her Aunt Marcine, who had immigrated from Yugoslavia between the wars. Only this voice was male.

  A hallucination. Her mind was falling apart. Her worst fear. She would rather die than lose her mind. Life wasn’t worth living with an addled mind.

  She balled her fists, bit her tongue, and pushed again. She had helped three of her women through labor, and her efforts reminded her of those terrifying moments, when the recently transformed women, who no other Focus would touch, fell into her care and into labor. Only Lori wasn’t trying to give birth to a child, but to a mass of bad juice she had sequestered in her abdomen area.

  She knew of no way to give birth to her own intestines, though. She would push and push and push until either she succeeded, or she died.

  “Let it go, Focus. I’ll clean you off, afterwards.”

  The whisper again.

  “Go away. You’re a darned hallucination,” Lori said. This she didn’t need. Predictable, though. Whenever the juice got strange, and the stress of life got intense, sanity always went first. She had seen this in herself, and in her household, many times before.

  She certainly didn’t trust a hallucination to ‘clean it off of her’ if she let the bad juice take her. Was this the bad juice talking? Seducing her into the end she wanted to refuse, but would now accept? Or seducing her into something worse, a Focus Monster?

  “Hallucination? Oh, that’s the reason you’re ignoring me like two week old milk. Hell and damnation and halitosis! Dammit, Focus Rizzari, I’ve never seen anything like what you did to yourself this time.”

  Hell and damnation and halitosis? “Occum?” They had never met or even talked on the phone before, but she recognized the unique phrase from his letters.

  “What other Crow would be willing to get his nose out of his navel and help someone, especially a Focus?”

  Definitely Occum. “Thank God,” Lori said. Occum, as a Crow, might even be able to help her. “I didn’t do this to myself.”

  “This was done to you?” Something scurried away. Tears leaked out from the corners of Lori’s eyes. She had scared Occum away.

  Friggen Crows.

  Now she would either die or find a way to remove this crazy bad juice. Alone. As it should be. As always, a test, always tests, life always gave her tests and she either passed or failed and…

  “Who the fuck did this to you?”

  Occum again. He must have scurried back. He was as offputting in person as she had feared from his letters. He was as socially inept as she was, if not worse. “I…I’m not sure. Focuses, definitely. They took me into a dark room, for some chastisement, or so I thought, and the world went dark and I woke up with this crazy bad juice inside me and my people wouldn’t come near me and this stuff was ripping into my mind and trying to eat my thoughts and I found a way to sequester it but even though I’ve sequestered it I can’t do anything with it and the bad juice is gnawing at my intellect and…”

  “Wordy, aren’t you. ‘Her mouth fills with an ocean of words and vomit, a nighttime mirror of the Monster juice inside her.’”

  Right. Occum was a poet. He called her his muse. Right now, she didn’t find this a-musing. “Monster juice? No wonder I can’t do anything with this stuff but sequester it and this bad juice is eating at my mind and if I just accept it if I don’t become a Monster Focus I’ll become just another Focus, one of the failed Focuses who needs to be spoon-fed oatmeal to be kept alive and moving the juice and I’ll never ever be…”

  A rough hand covered her mouth. “Shhh.”

  She was being touched by a Crow! She had the urge to panic, but worn down by the Monster juice, she feared that if she moved, she would lose control and lose the sequester.

  She relaxed into the touch, and Occum’s touch moved, across her face, down her left arm, and to her juice-bloated abdomen. He did something to her, a rustling of juice, a splay of emotions echoing inside her. Love. Comfort. Family.

  “Brother,” she said. That’s what Occum felt like, to her. Brother. Family. She had never loved anyone before the way she now loved Occum. Not even her real family.

  “Sister in arms,” he said, answering the unasked question. “The two shunned Boston crazy Major Transforms, alone against the hideous world.”

  “Why couldn’t we meet before?” she said, her voice a juice-laden whisper. Did all Crows talk this way in person, with juice in their calm voices? She loved his voice; she could listen to it forever and ever and…

  “You’re terrifying, sister,” Occum said. “So inconstant, so powerful.” She heard the love in his whisper. She understood. He was like her, beaten down and twisted. “I can help now because your fearsome metasense is down. I couldn’t not help.”

  She had sensed him as a young Focus, less than a month past her transformation, some strange combination of metasense and sense of smell, an ability that broke all the rules about Focuses the various doctors and Focuses had told her. When she tried to contact him, he ran. Given he always approached from the same direction and went to the same spot near the Boston Transform Clinic, she left him a note. He wrote a note back, and they had been exchanging letters ever since. He took her household’s dross when she and her household vacated the premises for just that purpose; they gave him stipends and helped him with political contacts. Eight months ago, Lori had traded for a new woman Transform, a mind-broken lesbian poet, abused for no reason by a Focus who hated poets, hated strong-willed women, and thought lesbians should die a most horrible death. In the process of bringing Sadie back to herself, and getting Sadie to answer all the curious prurient questions Lori had about lesbians (just in case she was one, which she still couldn’t decide) Lori had introduced her to Occum’s poetry. Soon Occum and Sadie were exchanging their own letters, and even meeting in person. With Lori’s tacit under-the-table approval and chaste hugs from Sadie.

  The Focus establishment forbade such contacts, but they were uneducated idiots whose advice wasn’t worth writing on toilet paper. Stupid people, and stupid people had no rights, save the right to get out of her way before she trampled them on the way to wherever she was going. Unfortunately, her instincts about stupid people not having or deserving power appeared to be mildly inaccurate.

  “Why did they do this to you? How could you let them?”

  “Don’t move,” Lori said. “Whatever you’re doing is helping.” She paused to gather her scattered thoughts. “Remember my comments about the new thing I’ve been attempting, not moving juice during the week and doing all my juice moving once a week? It’s sort of embarrassing, but my new house president, Connie Yarizarian, pointed out to me that what I was doing was, um, ‘turning on’ my Transforms. She talked me into an experiment; during the weekly juice adjustment I put my people at their juice stimulation optimums for as lon
g as I could hold. Well, not only did my Transforms really appreciate the amor, afterwards I found I had the room to support two extra triads of Transforms.”

  “Sadie mentioned something about this, what she called the juice-magical release of tension.” He paused. “It produces the most amazing dross. I’m seeing things I’ve never seen before, because of your discovery.”

  “It’s embarrassing,” Lori said. She blushed, as always uncomfortable with the Friday night discovery and what she had inadvertently created. The whole situation made her think of herself as a sordid pimp or an evil drug pusher. “I mean…anyway, if it comes down to a choice between saving lives and my old-fashioned parochial embarrassment, I choose to save the lives and eat the embarrassment.” Occum’s other hand found her left hand, and gave her hand a squeeze. She should desire him, being male and helpful, but she didn’t. Why did her desires lie frozen within her? Perhaps she was male, in a female body. Perhaps she should try cross-dressing again.

  Perhaps this wasn’t the time for her crazy thoughts. Not so close to death. A car of noisy uncivilized college boys drove past, hooting and yelling. She could smell their alcohol from her ditch.

  She and Occum did share the same obsession: saving the lives of the otherwise unsaveable. The whole world was going to hell, would transform, and in the fall of civilization everyone would die. Lori knew she couldn’t save the world herself, but her cold logic wouldn’t keep her from trying. “The problem came when I took it upon myself to report this to the Focus Council. They had liked me before, even when I mentioned various unmentionable things. They thought I was cute, and I thought they needed the truth.” She had been so darned naïve. She had believed the Council’s assertion that they believed that male Major Transorms didn’t exist. When she proved their existence to them, scientifically, she had learned, the hard way, that they knew the truth all the long, and had been lying – lying! – about reality. She would have never guessed. “Something’s changed, though. Ever since the Julius Rebellion got itself squashed, I’ve been hearing disquieting rumors from the other Focuses. The Council once used threats and persuasion to keep the peace. ‘Please don’t do X, or I’m afraid the Network won’t be able to support you anymore.’ The rumors swirled about Focuses being roughed up, blackmailed, and losing household Transforms, but I paid them no mind. I mean, the Council? The good guys? Well, I presented my story, and the Council got upset. They told me that if the public learned of what I was doing, to save those extra lives, the authorities would round up all the Transforms and shoot them. So, I said, let’s fight back. It’s our right as individuals to do as we need to do, especially given how the rest of society has turned their backs on us. The Council didn’t want a fight. They think we’re too weak. They won me over, and I agreed to keep my discoveries quiet. I thought that was that, but the next day the Council asked me to go to a room, where I would talk to a delegation of Focuses about my discovery. I went to the room, and waited…and that’s all I remember, until I woke up with this bad juice inside me, eating away at my mind.”