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

by Randall Farmer

  “Tell me. You talk to God. Just tell me what he thinks I’m supposed to do.”

  He responded, gently, “God didn’t make me a Focus either, any more than he made Bart a Focus.”

  The welling tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks. “I can’t do this! Nothing I try works!” The sobs came harder, then, and she folded up on the ground and cried.

  Narbanor stood there, stiff and straight as she fell. Gail recognized his reaction, and checked his juice count. As she expected, his count was low, almost as low as she took his count when he preached, and he clenched his fists to endure the pain. She tried to force the juice back into him, but she could barely do so past her own distress. She tried to control her tears and bring herself back under control.

  She wasn’t even allowed to cry, it seemed.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  To her surprise, Narbanor stopped her.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said. His voice was tight, but he meant what he said. “I’ll be all right.” Then he knelt down beside her on the ground, slowly, as if every joint hurt, and offered her his handkerchief.

  Gail cried again, giant, wrenching sobs, as all the pain and hurt came out. She lost control of the juice and hurt him, but she cried her heart out anyway, while Narbanor knelt silently and waited.

  After a long time, the sobs subsided to sniffles. She found she could move the juice again. She was so glad for his support that she had to stop herself from giving him too much, rather than too little. She carefully restored his juice count to normal, and he took a deep breath and slowly relaxed his clenched muscles.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so very sorry.”

  “Do you feel better now?”

  She nodded. “But I still don’t understand what I need to do.”

  Narbanor sat back on his heels in the grass. “You know,” he said, “we talk all the time about how God loves the poor and the weak, because most of our congregations are poor and weak. However, God also loves the strong and powerful. King David served God and was loved by God, and he was a strong king of a powerful country. But he did terrible, terrible things in his life.”

  “I don’t understand,” Gail said.

  “God asks a man to be a good man, and a woman to be a good woman. He also asks a king to be a good king. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t also ask a Focus to be a good Focus.”

  Narbanor stopped, and didn’t finish what he was about to say.

  “But how do I become a good Focus?”

  Narbanor stared off into the trees and didn’t say a word.

  “I’ll be careful,” Gail said, a promise, carefully watching his juice count. “Please, tell me.”

  He took a breath, and then said, finally, “David had responsibilities as a king. Would he have been a good king if he had abdicated those responsibilities to others?”

  “Huh?” Gail said, more of a surprised grunt than a question, astonished at Narbanor’s words.

  Narbanor continued on, more confident. “What responsibilities do you have as a Focus that you’ve been trying to abdicate? What is going wrong in your kingdom because you let other people handle your responsibility?”

  Gail sat up on the grass. The damp ground had soaked through the seat of her blue jeans. “What do you mean?” she said. “You mean you think I should be the household Fuhrer? I’ve been trying to leave people alone so that I wouldn’t hurt them.”

  The failure of her approach was obvious, however.

  “I can’t tell you what you should do, any more than I could tell King David how to rule,” Rev. Narbanor said, gently. “All I can suggest is that there are responsibilities out there that you should be taking on.”

  Gail squinched her eyebrows together, puzzled.

  “There was a rich man who had to leave his country for a long time,” Rev. Narbanor said. “The man had three servants, and so he gave some of his money to each of his servants, to take care of while he was gone. To the first, he gave ten talents, to the second, he gave five, and to the third he gave one. The first servant bought a field, and saw that it was planted, and when his master came back, he returned twenty talents. The second invested his talents, and when his master came back, he returned ten talents. The third buried his one talent in the ground, and when his master came back, he returned just that one talent to his master.”

  Gail remembered the story. She almost understood the point, but it was so foreign to her current situation that she had trouble wrapping her mind around the lesson.

  “Are you the third servant?”

  She metasensed he had more, more he had to say.

  “You should hate me,” she said, in a small voice. “I’ve been so horrible to you.”

  Narbanor sighed, and looked away. “God gives us all hard tasks,” he said, and his voice was low. “I’ve made my own mistakes. God has hard lessons for me, as well.”

  “Hard lessons?”

  He nodded. “You have probably heard about some ministers who preach that Transform Sickness is God’s just punishment for the wicked and immoral.”

  Gail nodded, almost afraid to say anything.

  “I didn’t preach that very often, but I preached the lesson sometimes. I believed so, once. Not so many months ago I thought Transform Sickness, a medical disease, was little more than a moral contagion. What an arrogant fool I was.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He turned back to her, with his haggard, care-worn face. “I sinned badly, once upon a time, and so every Sunday I suffer my penance for my sin. I am a Transform, now. I earned my suffering.” He shrugged and turned away again. “Hate is the Devil’s work, not God’s, and I refuse to do the Devil’s work any further.”

  Gail didn’t have the heart to ask more questions after Rev. Narbanor’s chilling confession. They walked silently back to the house while Gail thought, trying to understand what he had said. He let her think, and said nothing until they were almost back at the house.

  “You’re welcome to attend church next Sunday,” he said.

  “I am?” Even after the long conversation, Gail’s heart didn’t expect a welcome.

  He smiled. “Always.”

  Negotiation Skills and Competitive Strategies

  (16)

  Gail thought for two days. She had been trying so hard to avoid taking over her household, she hadn’t thought about what she did as avoiding responsibility. Taking over would be so easy, with the juice weapon just sitting there, but just because she could take over didn’t mean she would make the right decisions. She expected she would screw up, because people always made mistakes when they were learning something new. She also suspected she would never give up the power, once taken. She understood how this would end: as Focus Adkins. Taking over would be morally wrong, not only a bad thing to do to the household, but also a bad thing to do to herself.

  She remembered the first weekly meeting she crashed. Not everyone had been angry. She now attended every week. Some people still didn’t want her there, but these days they only glared and whispered, and they had done that before anyway, and worse.

  She needed a whole new approach.

  “Van?”

  He grunted. Their relationship had deteriorated to monosyllables in the three days after her big fight with Sylvie and Kurt. She had seen this reaction before from him, when he thought she was wrong. Normally, his supercilious confidence in his superiority pissed her off, but right now, she couldn’t afford to be pissed off.

  “How busy are you with your dissertation these days?”

  “Fairly.” He sat in the sun with his back against the tool shed, two books in his lap, and three legal pads beside him, all three covered in notes. He had discovered a hole in the logic of his dissertation and frantically searched for a fix. From what Gail read of his dissertation – her lot in life appeared to be proofreading the same damned stuff over and over again, it seemed – the logic hole was too subtle for someone of her undergrad knowledge of
history and dissertation logic to understand. She suspected the problem wasn’t anywhere near as important as Van feared.

  “I have a problem, and I was wondering if you might be able to help me?”

  Van grunted again.

  She didn’t have his attention, and he hadn’t gotten over his annoyance with her behavior. She could get his attention by doing something crass, like offering him a dozen blowjobs, but she doubted he would be able to take her seriously afterwards.

  “I need to know if the other Focuses are as twisted as Focus Adkins,” she said. “I need to know how other Transform households survive. I need research, Van.”

  “Okay.” He picked up a legal pad and scribbled a sentence. Frowned. Erased it, frowning harder.

  “You’ll do it for me?”

  “Kinda busy, here,” he said. “You go do it. You’re a better researcher than I am, anyway.” A mild sore point with Van, easily balanced in her mind by the fact Van could read and speak French and Spanish, and read Italian and Latin, while all Gail read was American English.

  “Yoo hoo? Captive of Bart’s gang except on official business, here?” The whole point of what she wanted was to figure out how the other Focuses handled such insanity as Bart’s figurative slave collar without having to enslave their own damned households. If she couldn’t find anything, she suspected she would end up enslaving them out of annoyance and frustration. Despite her vows and best wishes. Soon.

  “‘Isabella, convince your husband to let me go do research at U of M,’” Van said, imitating Gail’s voice. Badly. “Low juice. Scream. Fix. Low juice. Scream. Fix. Repeat until you have what you want.” He smiled, wrote a sentence, then another. With a bigger smile.

  He always got a little macho frontiersman in him when he delved deep into the North American parts of the French and Indian wars. Such as the time he tried to explain how scalping wasn’t evil, just a method of bureaucratic cost control.

  “If I did that, I wouldn’t ever be able to stop.” Wielding the juice weapon felt instinctive as well as seductive, animalistic, primitive and wrong. “I want to find out how it’s properly done. I want to know everything public on Transforms, and as much non-public as I can.” She squatted down and rested her elbows on her knees. Sighed. “Hell, Van, I’d even like to know the medical crap. Why I’m so different from what the pamphlets said Focuses should be.”

  Van turned and met her eyes. “You are different, aren’t you,” he said. She had his attention now. “Half the things you tell me you can do I can’t even extrapolate from the pamphlets.” He paused. “Oh, and by the way, I think I know what your metasense ghost is.”

  The ghost still appeared about once a week in Gail’s metasense. At night. When she lay faking sleep in Van’s arms.

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s you, as a male.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s always bugged me that there weren’t male Major Transforms,” Van said. “Not that my biology has ever been any better than ‘Bio I for non-scientists’, but still. Female Major Transforms but not male? It’s like the lack of female dwarves in Tolkien. What did they do, hatch from eggs laid by dragons?”

  “It’s a disease, not a logic problem.” Oh, boy, Gail thought. How long has Van been sitting on this bit of nonsense? He could have hours of his dense arguments saved up! She began to plan a potty break soon.

  “Uh huh, right, like polio, cancer and pneumonia give such wonderful superpowers,” Van said. “Something’s not right in the explanation for what’s going on with Transforms and Transform Sickness, and that all by itself is worth looking into. I, for one, find myself a total skeptic regarding all the explanations for metasense, and…”

  “The ghost?” Gail said, interrupting a bit of Vannish pontification that would soon become lame and tedious. Van blinked, realized he had allowed himself to get distracted, and took a deep breath.

  “The ghost is the male Major Transform version of the Focus,” Van said. “They should probably be helping maintain Focus households, but if too many of the Focuses are like Adkins, I understand why they’re hiding. And, since you’re not like Adkins, why one of them is trying to help you. The Male Transform version of the Arm is this ‘Male Monster’ thing the media keeps bringing up. Predators both.”

  She nodded, after taking a moment to follow Van’s well-rehearsed logic leaps. “Makes sense.” Pause. She wondered if she could find a way to make nice with the ghost creature. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll let you look into this crazy stuff that’s bothering you about Transforms if you look into the stuff that’s bothering me. I’ll even analyze it for you.” Another thing she was better at than Van.

  The reason he was doing a PhD dissertation in history was his ability to synthesize, not analyze. Gail was in awe of his ability; she always ran her news story stuff by Van to see if anything popped out to him. He had been the one to figure out how deep the U of M Regents really were in South African investment. How he managed to put together bits of information from such disparate sources was well beyond her.

  Van turned back to his legal pads, the icy distance between them returning. “I’ll do it if you get me help. Sylvie. Kurt. Melanie.”

  “Melanie?” Melanie had enough brains for Van to care?

  “Being screwed by life doesn’t mean you’re stupid, or you have to stay stupid,” Van said. He crossed out three words, flipped chapters in one of his books, and began to read.

  Ouch. Gail knew Van-rehearsed-subtle-criticism when she heard it. Van thought there was more to Melanie than met the eye. Or at least Gail’s eye. And that Gail, screwed by life, had indeed been acting stupid.

  She couldn’t disagree. As Daisy said, she had been acting like a strung-out junkie. She had to do better, or she would, as Daisy predicted, lose Van.

  Gail started asking questions. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she had been a student reporter not too long ago. Asking questions came naturally.

  She talked to Betha about the household and food supplies. She checked on the septic system and water well. She talked to Phyllis Zarzemski about the kids and their schools and how they were doing. She even talked to Grimm, and expressed sympathy over her job loss and carefully kept her juice supply up while she did so.

  Helen Grimm cried when Gail left her. Gail pretended not to notice.

  She asked some questions about the Carlow family relationship, because she metasensed things the Carlows didn’t expect anyone to see, and she didn’t think their relationship was surviving the pressures of Transform Sickness. Her conversations confirmed her guess. The Carlow family was falling apart.

  All day, she walked and talked and visited with people. Most resented and feared her, but not all. The Transforms eyed her the same way a rabbit eyed a hawk. Nevertheless, she stayed friendly and polite, they answered her questions, and she kept the juice flow steady.

  She stayed tired and irritable, as always, but even so, she found her investigation invigorating. She felt better, more in control, and less helpless, vulnerable and hated.

  She also found she moved the juice better when she had something to do.

  ---

  “They’re called Crows,” Van said. He had dropped a box of copies, notes, and checked-out periodicals on Gail’s cot. After she peeked inside the box, she gave him a hot kiss he backed away from, and dug in.

  “Crows?” Gail said, frowning. “You’re talking about the ghost?”

  “Uh huh. Shy creatures of the night. If my extrapolation is correct, they consume bad juice created by Focuses doing juice-moving.” He paused. “You’ll never guess. The authorities, and the Focuses, say that Crows don’t exist. My best source for this is, barf, the Enquirer.”

  “Meaning this could all be total hogwash,” Gail said.

  Van glared at her for a moment, before he turned away to adjust their tent roof plywood. “More of the Enquirer’s shit is realer than you’d think, especially when they’re talking about real things.” He smiled, not wan
ting to mention the UFO and fairy magic articles. “One article said these Crows are so shy they often communicate with each other by messages left under rocks.”

  Gail looked up, and at Van. “Oh, shit. Remember the pantomime location?” Their nameless Crow hadn’t done his pantomime in weeks, likely giving up on her as a lost cause. “We need to go check for a message!”

  “We?” Van said. He had already started to spread out his legal pads of dissertation notes on his own cot.

  “It’s ten at night, and someone needs to hold the flashlight for me,” Gail said, annoyed at Van’s continuing distant attitude toward her. “You’re the guy in this relationship, remember, and toting around crap is a male job.” She bit off several harsher comments she wanted to say. If she pushed too much, he would leave her, she knew.

  “I suppose,” Van said, and stood.

  He did do the dirty work, that is, going into the Ebener house and hunting up a working flashlight, involving several flashlights and several old batteries in a drawer, then mixing and matching to figure out if any of them produced a light. With the dimmish flashlight in Van’s hand, she led him to the pantomime location. To her surprise she metasensed a tiny blob of bad juice, under some old forty-pound rock crouched at the end of a row of string beans, partly propping up a board with a number tacked on it.

  “Bingo,” Gail said. She levered over the rock, to find a ratty Free Press bag, and inside the plastic bag, a small dew-damp note. “Hold that light over here.”

  Focus

  Please don’t keep scaring me off. What I’m doing will help you.

  Watchmaker

  “Interesting,” Gail said. Van was definitely going to get sexed up tonight, even if she had to interrupt his dissertation work. Back at the tent, after a bit of thinking, she wrote a note of her own.