No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Seven)

by Randall Farmer

  “I can do that.” Gail looked over at Daisy, who hadn’t lost her come-hither eyes. However, Gail caught something more.

  “So – your turn, Daisy,” she said. This was definitely fun. Her memories said Daisy was the enemy, someone who would use anything she revealed to cut her down behind her back. Her gut said they played on the same team now.

  A most disquieting revelation. Last Gail knew, she didn’t do things like have illegal underaged affairs with a forty-something, then extract college money from him by threatening to go to the police. Daisy wasn’t someone Gail would ever use as a role model. At least, not before Gail became a Focus.

  Bad. This was bad. Very bad.

  “My turn?”

  “You’re sitting on something you want to ask me about,” Gail said.

  Daisy frowned, her first frown of the late afternoon. “Freaky. Can you read minds?”

  Gail shrugged. “Not in the classical sense, but, yes, sort of.” She sighed. Yet another embarrassing thing the pamphlets didn’t mention. She had only hinted to Van about this, afraid of his reaction about her reading him. “I have no idea what I can do, how I’m doing it, or anything of the sort. It’s something, though.”

  “Where’s journalist Gail? Why aren’t you after this like a hound after a rabbit?”

  Gail shrugged again.

  “You really are strung out,” Daisy said. Concerned. “You’ve got to find a way to work around the shit in your system or the world’s going to eat you alive. I’ve seen it happen far too many times.” Daisy meant hard drug users, but Gail had a bad feeling she now fit the description. Even thinking about her problem amplified her need for more juice, and made her head pound like a snare drum.

  “Sitting on something?” Gail said. She did have a little journalist left in her.

  Daisy stubbed out another cigarette butt and added it to the substantial pile beside her. She lit another. “I’ve got a problem. It’s almost analogous to yours, but I’m hoping it’ll stay far less portentous and life threatening.”

  “I didn’t think you had problems, just life experiences that made you stronger.”

  That earned Gail a stuck-out tongue. “It’s… Hell. The ultimate image-breaker,” Daisy said. “You see, I’m competitive.”

  “Never would have guessed.”

  Glare. “On tests. Specifically, on SAT tests.”

  Van had mentioned that Daisy beat his SAT scores, which Gail found hard to believe, given Van’s 1560. “Tell me.”

  “Double 800s.” Daisy rolled her eyeballs. “It was an accident. I just got caught up in the competition of the thing.” Pause. “…and there it was, dammit.”

  Gail sighed. She had worked her tail off, hitting the test prep strategy books and reading all those crazy vocabulary enhancement books and math prep books to get her 1420. Well, she already knew everyone in Van’s family was flat out brilliant. With her help, Van had learned some practicality, far beyond where his parents and siblings strayed. “Most of us wouldn’t consider those scores a problem.”

  “They ruined my cred with my people,” Daisy said. “Not to mention the damned science fair project.”

  Daisy had started the project in 8th grade. For years, her project had been a running joke in her family and in her school, until she found a way to finish the crazy thing as a senior, not long before Gail transformed. “I heard you got to State with it.”

  Daisy nodded. “It’s patented and sold to a top secret defense contractor, of all things. So much for needing my elaborate money-making schemes for college,” she said. “Defense contractor! Talk about selling out! Hell, I just wanted to come up with a better way to find double stars.” Daisy had put together an elaborate four-curved-mirror telescope that instead of blocking a star’s light with a diffraction-inducing round metal plate did it with holes and shadows. Gail didn’t comprehend, or want to. “How was I to know my little contraption would have a defense application? Just a side effect, messing up the phases of the incoming light.”

  Gail didn’t understand the details, and Van’s comment about ‘making it easy to defend against lasers’ didn’t help her, either. “So, what’s the real problem?” She knew Daisy wouldn’t be going off to college in the fall. Completing a university application form took organizational skills.

  “This isn’t me!” Daisy took an extra-deep lung-killing drag. “I eventually gave Harvard and Harvey Mudd enough hints to chase them off, but Cal Tech refuses to stop recruiting me,” she said. “Cal Tech! Boys with no social skills I can take, but the alpha no-social-skill boys who go there are impossible; they do the no-social-skill shtick by being aggressively nasty and unpleasant and aggressively anti-social. It’s like testosterone fueled fisticuffs, which I can handle” and likely win at least a few, Gail suspected “but instead, they’re dueling with arcane bits of irrelevant nonsense knowledge as their weapons.”

  “You have the brainpower, but you don’t have the encyclopedic background,” Gail said. She would never do this, but… “So play dumb.”

  “I…” Daisy stopped. “Oh.”

  “Playing dumb, in your old crowd, would have just gotten you violated,” Gail said. Raped. How did she know this stuff? It just leapt into her mind, as if she had gained some extra smarts or wisdom from her transformation. She found that hard to believe; much the opposite, instead. “Not in this new crowd.”

  “I can’t play it dumb dumb, though,” Daisy said. She ground out another cigarette butt and lit another. “I need something to be smart about.”

  “Drugs. I’m sure there’s a drug crowd there.” Drugs were Daisy’s thing. Gail was sure Daisy had tried them all, including a bunch Gail didn’t even know the names of.

  “I made nice with the drug crowd during my visit,” Daisy said. “They’re, uh, too urban. Different tastes than I have.”

  “You’re still into the hallucinogens?”

  Daisy nodded.

  Gail sighed. “You’re right. The people I knew at U of M into that stuff were more of the artsy crowd, not your hard core science freaks.” The hard-core science freaks were mostly into weed and speed. “I think you can cope, though. You’ll have to watch out for the sexual pressure, though. It’s counter-intuitive, what happens in situations with lots of men and few women. You’ll get objectified.”

  “Used to that,” Daisy said. “I can dyke with the best of them. It’s not even fully a lie, and I don’t mind wearing men’s clothes.” She shook her head, gave Gail an amorous once-over, and took another deep drag. “How do you know about this, though? How did I know you were a good person to ask? You know, there’s some freaky Focus shit going on around you, Gail.”

  “I’m sure there is,” Gail said. Talking to someone like Daisy was what she needed. The worst thing about being a Focus was not having any peers. “I don’t even know where to start thinking about this crazy crap, though.” For a moment, she overheard the Perfesser jawing with some of the household men about farming techniques he only thought he knew about. Her mind flashed back to the pre-dinner dance, where each of the Schuber family found a way to be unready for dinner, serially, until Gail grabbed Van by the collar, led him to the table, and ordered him to sit and eat, forgetting the niceties. Powder my nose? Finish the funny papers? I need to finish this chapter, Ma.

  “I know what you need to start thinking about, though, Gail,” Daisy said. “I think you’ve gone too far in accommodating these Transforms of yours. I mean, I’m a Schuber, and if there’s anything I know it’s the competitive ‘after you, Gaston’, ‘no, after you, Alphonse’ routine. They’re leaving you behind. That never ends well.”

  Coming from one of the members of the overly permissive Schuber family, past masters of barely controlled chaos, Daisy’s criticism meant a lot. Perhaps Gail had gone too far in being accommodating.

  “Besides, as they say, never trust anyone over thirty,” Daisy said, ruining the moment.

  Lucille stalked out of the Ebener farmhouse, a multi-hour expression of sulky
hurt on her face, distracting Gail’s chain of thought. Damn, someone must have hit one of Lucille’s delicate issues. She wondered if it was Franklin Roosevelt (love), hippies (hate), social security (love), war protestors (hate), unions (love), blacks (hate), Jews (love), Nixon (hate)…

  “Damn,” Daisy said, as did Gail. They looked at each other and smiled.

  ---

  There it was again. She hadn’t believed her metasense last week when this thing showed up. This, well, metasense ghost. Diffuse, nothing like a Transform or Focus.

  She thought back, and, yes, the metasense ghost had appeared last week Thursday at 3:30 a.m., and stayed for almost two hours. Well, it was Thursday morning again, and, if Van’s bulky watch was correct, 3:30 a.m. again.

  Freaky. Was she seeing things, or was this real? Was this an actual Transform? She sat up, looked in the direction she metasensed the ghost, and waved.

  The metasensed ghost froze for a second, and started running, fast, now significantly harder to metasense. Strange. In a moment the ghost passed beyond her metasense range. She kept metasensing for the ghost for an hour, but the ghost never returned.

  Turning the Sunny Day Dark

  (12)

  4:30 a.m., and Gail lay awake on her cot, listening to Van breathe. All around her, the presence of her household thrummed through her metasense. So peaceful, unlike the rest of the time. Of all the unexpected things, she missed her parents, who no longer returned her phone calls.

  Her household contained nineteen Transforms now, and fourteen spouses, and eleven kids, although many of the spouses and kids didn’t sleep out here in the Ebener’s yard. She hardly blamed them. The Ebener campground was a depressing place.

  Someone, she had no idea who, had managed to find a brochure on Transform Sickness she had never seen before and stick it under her pillow. Entitled “Effect of Harm to Focuses,” the brochure went into gory details about how Focuses often sent female Transforms into Monster and turned male Transforms into withdrawal Psychos if a Focus got severely injured or killed within the Focus juice manipulation range. The bastard who stuck the brochure under her pillow had underlined a section on Focus suicide effects, which Gail couldn’t even bear to read. Someone wanted to make sure Gail understood that killing herself would take down the rest of the household Transforms. Someone who had seen the hollow grief growing in Gail’s eyes, and in the gauntness of her body.

  She had metasensed her ghost again two nights ago. This time she didn’t move, keeping track of the ghost’s activities. It came near her tent, no more than fifty feet away, and the other tents, and the Ebener house. The ghost moved, stopped, did something Gail almost picked up with her metasense, but not quite. After ten minutes or so, it would move on. Gail managed to restrain herself until the ghost came back near her tent, at the end of the two-hour period. She didn’t move her body, but she did smile and gently wave. When she did, the ghost again froze for a second, before speeding off.

  Off in the distance, the phone rang in the Ebener’s house. Rang again, and again. Seven times before someone answered. A long moment after that the quiet night noises gave way to the sound of running feet. Betha Ebener, she metasensed.

  “Gail!” Betha said, in a loud whisper. Gail closed her eyes and didn’t move. “Ma’am!”

  Betha pulled back the sheet that covered the entryway of her and Van’s tent. “Gail!” she said. Van rolled over and groaned.

  Gail sighed and opened her eyes. “Shh. I’m awake.”

  “Gail,” Betha said, still in her same loud whisper, “we got a call from the Transform Clinic in Lansing and…”

  “Shit,” Van said, voice filled with sleep-fogged irritability. “Can’t you do this outside and let a man sleep?”

  Betha blanched. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to…”

  “Shh,” Gail said, trying to get Betha to quit with her loud whisper so Van could sleep. Betha appeared terrified, afraid of Gail’s temper. Gail wondered why Betha hadn’t sent her husband down with the message instead of coming herself, but Betha never turned down a chance to come get Gail. Many of her Transforms were like that. Gail didn’t understand. She expected them to avoid her. Bart and his sycophants had actually told the Transforms to avoid Gail whenever possible, but they never did. They disliked her, they resented her, and still they came.

  Gail dragged herself out of the cot while Betha stood at the door with wide eyes and her hand over her mouth. Gail wiggled dirty feet into her tennis shoes and tried to avoid the mud oozing up between the plywood boards that formed the floor of their tent, while Van rolled over with a grunt and went back to sleep.

  Outside, Gail found no hint of dawn. The old moon provided scant light, which Gail appreciated. Her household’s ramshackle collection of tents and shacks looked almost decent in the near dark, the dim light hiding mud, decay, and despair. A few yards away Elaine’s baby started to cry. Nothing hid the presence of Gail’s people from her. Their juice was constantly in her mind.

  She thought living out in the country in a tent or homemade shack was fun, once, but that had been many weeks ago. Now, she would be willing to give almost anything for a real bed and the chance for a shower every night.

  “What did the Lansing Clinic have to say?” she asked Betha, as the old canvas tent flap shut on its own.

  Betha glanced around, wondering if it was safe to talk. Van groaned again, so Gail nodded her head to the house and started walking. Betha followed her.

  “They have a new Transform. It’s a man,” she said. “They found him this evening and they say he’s going to go over in six hours. You’re the only Focus with an opening, ma’am, and they want you to come up immediately.”

  Gail nodded with the expected news. One more in her household. She sighed. When the poor man realized how he was going to live, he would probably wish he had died in peace.

  She shook a clump of mud off her shoe. He would adjust; all the Transforms did. Tents in a farm field were all she had to offer.

  They hit Lansing at 7:00 a.m., on a clear Michigan late spring day. Kurt drove, and Buddy Attendale sat beside her in the back seat as a bodyguard. Her household was crazy paranoid about her safety, and they wouldn’t let her go anywhere without at least two bodyguards. To Gail, they were more like jailers.

  The message had said that the man was due to go over in a matter of hours, so he would need juice. Gail carried a large quantity of juice with her and felt a little light-headed from the extra load. She would have liked to offload some of the juice to one of her men, but neither Kurt nor Buddy were Transforms. According to the brochures, she wouldn’t get any benefit from the large supply she carried in her juice buffer. She wasn’t sure she agreed, but the positive effects, if they existed, were subtle.

  She couldn’t do anything about the juice now, and so Gail sat in the back of the car and counted billboards. Bunny Bread. Dino Supreme Motor Oil. She would have liked to sleep, but though she was always tired, she seldom slept.

  They said the new man’s name was Narbanor. Gail wondered what sort of person she had picked up for her household this time.

  “Focus Rickenbach, we’re so glad you could make it,” the doctor said, as they got out of the car at the small Lansing clinic. The doctor, a young man cursed with early balding and a florid face, had been standing in the doorway waiting for them. “Hurry, he’s in bad shape, and won’t last much longer.”

  Gail nodded and strode over to the clinic, leaving Kurt and Buddy to trail after her. The doctor ran ahead, leading her in the right direction, his white coat flapping as he moved. He was fresh, unlike Gail and her people, awakened in a rush, to pick up a Transform.

  Once she came near the clinic she didn’t need the doctor. The Transform showed bright in her metasense, down in the basement of the one story building. She metasensed his overwhelming agony, and his appalling lack of juice, lower than she had ever metasensed in anyone before. His arms wrapped around his shaking body, and Gail realized they had already p
ut him in the straitjacket and padded room in the basement. He had to be in what the pamphlets termed peri-withdrawal, the extreme low juice level just above where a Transform would go into withdrawal, and juice-induced psychosis.

  The clinic had green linoleum floors, an antiseptic smell, and only parts of the place had gone bad, if she trusted her ability to metasense the shadowy stuff. The doctor led her down a long corridor and through a waiting room. A woman with a drawn face waited there, holding five children. She caught a breath of hope as Gail passed, but the doctor never slowed down. He took Gail down the stairs to a second guarded door of three, made of thick steel, and the doctor waved his hand at the guard to open it. Gail entered the room and knelt by the wretched figure inside.

  Wretched indeed. The Transform was a man in his forties, not quite lean any more, with medium-brown hair, and a face that showed nothing but misery. Gail leaned forward and touched his face, following the pamphlet’s ridiculous rule about needing to touch to tag. These visits bothered her. It didn’t seem right, somehow, for some mature adult man to be so reduced in front of a twenty-two year-old girl.

  He shivered under her touch, violently. Tears and mucus ran from his eyes and nose and mouth. She focused her metasense and tagged him, instantly making the small shift bringing his juice structure in alignment with hers. Another instant later she bumped him up to where he no longer radiated pain, as much extra juice into him as he could take so quickly and still function.

  His eyes opened wide with shock, and he took a big gasping breath. Gail knew what would happen next.

  “Out!” she said, to the men behind her.

  Buddy shook his head. “It’s not safe,” he said.

  “God damn it! Get out of here!” Gail said to Kurt and Buddy as she held this new man in her arms.

  Buddy remained stubborn and unmoving, but Kurt spoke. “Hey, man, we don’t belong here,” he said to Buddy. “Let’s give the guy some privacy.”

  Buddy listened to Kurt, the way he wouldn’t listen to her. “Leave the door open, though,” Buddy said. “We want to be able to hear if there’s anything funny going on.”