Crows were men who acted like women, but they hadn’t made peace with the change. Truthfully, watching Hancock, he didn’t think the Arms had come to terms with their essential maleness, either.
Of course, Crows were more than just men acting like women. They were Crows, something new and different. Yes, they were more emotional, more emotion driven, more nurturing, but was that bad? Or weak? Not to his observations. Sky had gone in on the rescue of Hancock, survived Keaton in a foul mood, and performed like a soldier. He had been the physically weakest person in the crew, and Lori the lightest, so light normals could bat her around. Neither Sky nor Rizzari had quit the first time they broke a fingernail. What did that say about his gut feeling that normal women couldn’t fight, and that Lori’s female bodyguards were nothing but a waste of space and a political statement?
His gut feelings were stupid prejudices. What mattered was training, not the base state. One of the reasons Sky said he dealt with Rizzari was her Transform-oriented bodyguard training, open to both men and women Transforms. Ann and Tim had found a way to convince Sky to take the bodyguard training, and he said he had benefitted well beyond his expectations. The only innate physical abnormality of the standard Crow, according to Sky, was the ability to run away from danger for a long time. The easiest improvement for any Crow was leaping, which Sky mastered years ago, when he became, in his words, an adventurous Crow. Sky hadn’t lost the amplified strengths of a woman by being so – nurturing, empathic and oh so verbal. Now, personality wise, Zielinski assumed he hadn’t met any of the Crows who had picked up the amplified weaknesses of a woman. Somewhere out there would be dependent and passive Crows. This wasn’t bad, just different.
The world had tossed his assumptions violently back in his face, and he felt like a fool.
The Debt
[Carol’s POV]
Keaton looked up from the dinner table and smiled. “Carol, let’s talk debt.”
Better with a smile than with a dental pick, any day. My Keaton tag did its work, turning what should have been a piss-inducing statement into normal dinner conversation. I put down my fork, giving Keaton my full attention. “You’ve saved my life twice,” I said. So she said. “I’m working for you.” I had just finished handling Focus Gladchuck. I had never met a Major Transform so organized. She also had a temper, which tested my newly reborn patience.
“You need to be out there, independent, in your own territory. The difference is that this time you need to be doing useful things for me.” The same but not quite the same. Since I was hers now, I would have someone to go to when things slipped out of control.
“Do you mean tasks you assign?”
Keaton shook her head. “Not like what you’ve been doing for me while you’re recovering. I’m thinking in generalities, as I’ve said before. Information. Knowledge about Arms. Crazy Hancock theories we can test. You’re good at ideas. Come up with some long term things to work on.”
“Yes, ma’am.” This would be difficult now. All the ideas I thought up these days I picked up from my boss.
“What’s the first thing you’ll start doing, after you recover and establish a territory?” she said.
I had thought about this while I had been stuffing her freezers with frozen food. I had thought about many things. It was just so hard to make my ideas coherent.
“Make money. On the QT.”
“How many normals do you plan to recruit this time around for your personal entourage?”
The thought of Bobby went through me, and that terrible knife twisted in my heart.
“I wanted to stay away from that,” I said. “Recruiting for the army you want is more than enough to satisfy my urges in that direction. I plan on keeping as low a profile as an Arm possibly can.” The last thing I wanted was attention.
Keaton’s grimaced. “You have no sense for the short term, do you?”
I bowed my head and studied the tablecloth. Plain white linen, hand-woven. “Ma’am?”
“The last thing you want to do is hide. Arms that lay low get lazy, end up getting shot at. It happened to me, it happened to you. Thus, it’s a law.” Hell. Keaton cracked a joke. “Recruiting normals is your specialty. If you stopped your recruiting, it would be like cutting your hands off. You’re overreacting.”
I thought for a moment. “Ma’am, you’re right. I’m trying to avoid pain and complications. From your reactions that must be wrong.” Magical thinking again. Cause and effect remained nebulous to me.
“Damn straight that’s wrong. I expect you to push yourself.” Keaton dug in to dessert, an angel food cake I had cut in half and stuffed with a coffeecake style filling. “I want complete reports on what you’re doing, and I expect you to clear any major actions you’re thinking of taking with me, first. However, I expect actions, not contemplations and laying low. We have enemies and they aren’t going to be laying low, now are they?” The Chimeras. I nodded, meeting her gaze.
Keaton smiled. I smiled back, inwardly, keeping my face blank and appreciating the tag. Before the tag, meeting her gaze this way would have moved that invisible dial a quarter turn toward the next torture session. I no longer challenged her simply by sitting there and agreeing with her. There was a lot of juice in these tags, and I liked it.
Keaton left the kitchen and went to sit on her easy chair. She tapped the arm of the chair, motioning me over to kneel at her feet.
I came over and knelt. This was my place, and I felt good. Secure.
Did I want to keep this tag? Hell yes, and yes again! I know, submission hadn’t been part of my Arm nature before. However, here, nestled safely in my juice structure, was a prize beyond measure, the way to work with another Arm. The tag represented survival, safety from torture as long as I didn’t screw up, and preserved more of my free will than having my aggression beaten out of me. For what I gained, all I had to pay were my obedience and a willingness to serve in the small things as well as the large. The tag forced down my aggressive Arm emotions and reactions here, where I didn’t need them.
The tag was the real, honest to God answer of how Arms related. Tags wouldn’t be unique to me and Keaton; we accumulated and trained some other Arms, there would be more tags. The Arm tags solved much more than the project Rizzari had given me about how to control Arms. By allowing the Arms to work together, it made the Arms potentially as powerful as the Focuses. As Zielinski and Focus Rizzari had said, Arms were social predators. We had the ‘predator’ part down from day one. Now we had the ‘social’ part as well.
We needed more Arms. In my current mental state, finding newly transformed Arms appeared impossible. I pledged to myself to give the problem some thought as soon as I had enough brainpower to do so.
My time in Chicago and my captivity in the CDC had turned into far more of a success than I could have ever imagined. I had paid a heavy price, but I had come out if it alive and with the tagging technology. I truly had turned lemons into lemonade.
Now I just needed to finish my recovery.
The War Protester Mission
[Carol’s POV]
I walked down the narrow winding road away from Keaton’s house, cursing fate.
The world was new to me again, as it always was when I left my boss’s territory. Again, I went on her orders, still under the protection of the Arm tag.
I cursed fate because of my current situation. I still owned nothing save the clothes on my back. I still couldn’t read, and I had gotten so annoyed with the problem I had recruited a local hippie drug addict, Frances, to read for me, but Stacy had forbidden me to take Frances on my new mission. Without any minds to leech off, I had a tough time with even the simplest logic. I had no vehicle. I had no money.
Worst, I had no Major Transform partner. My Crow, Gilgamesh, was out on his own mission, and his absence weighed heavily on my soul.
The mid-morning sun shone down on my pasty skin and short hair, providing light but little warmth. I oriented myself with the sunrise and followed my instinc
ts north. I knew a city rose from the countryside not too far this way, a large city.
Many minutes later, when I came to a clear spot in the road, the view was gorgeous. I could see the clear blue of the ocean to my left, and the faint white of long breakers curling. North of me, a huge city crouched on hills, overlooking the water. A long bridge that I had seen and walked along distant months ago crossed the opening to the bay. San Francisco.
I had killed many normals here, once, if I trusted my spotty memory. The bay area teemed with people by the millions, life, people about their business. There would be money, juice, prey for the predator. In this case, prey for Keaton.
I had a hard time absorbing my situation. So much of me remained numb, stunned and wounded from all my many ordeals, and my recent memories hit me much harder because I was alone. Nobody, not even the most sadistic serial killers, should be forced to go through juice withdrawal. A simple death would have been preferable. My rebirth was a thing of wonder, as well. I wasn’t the person I had been before I went through withdrawal, neither physically nor mentally. The biggest change, between my logic-sapped ears, was that I no longer resented being an Arm. If I trusted my memories, I had once been so angry at my Arm transformation I had taken out my anger and frustrations on the world. Not now. Now, I liked being an Arm.
Birds chirped in the brush. I heard cars and people in the distance, but the road remained an empty place, a narrow winding access to the few houses perched on this hill. I would have appreciated the solitude, except for the nagging uneasiness that came of knowing I would soon leave Keaton’s territory.
I wore a loose dress I had taken from Keaton’s closet, the damned dress too thin for the weather. The temperature barely hovered above freezing. No shoes – somewhere in the chaos of leaving Keaton’s house on my new mission, I had lost them. No underwear. The cold didn’t bother me, of course, but the instinct in me, to be inconspicuous, screamed in offense.
I walked along the winding road for about fifteen minutes more, listening to the birds sing, and trying to ignore the yammering in my head. I wasn’t fully healed.
I still attempted to understand the meaning of my rebirth. Before my resurrection – what else to call it? – I had been someone else. Sure, you never step in the same stream twice and other philosophical crap, but this was more than just waking up from a night’s sleep. I once felt guilty for killing normals? Absurd. I once thought being free of Keaton’s control to be important? Foolish. I once thought myself queen of the world? What a silly idea. I could barely keep my shoes tied, at least from an Arm’s perspective. I had no business doing anything but following Keaton’s lead.
My resurrection had also healed my old post-Arm transformation muscle problems. Perhaps fixed would be a better word. I doubted I would ever have to worry again about muscle nodules in my joints, or about endless hours of exercise just trying to keep my muscles from stiffening up to where they ripped my body apart. I was an Arm built on Focus Rizzari’s gymnast standards rather than Keaton’s lady mud wrestler standards. Faster than I used to be, weaker than I used to be. I had no idea what these changes meant, or where they would lead me.
I walked in sadness and wonder, despair and hope.
I had lost Chicago, my greatest sadness. I had failed as an independent Arm, which shamed me. My partner, Gilgamesh, was gone, which hobbled me. I had lost Bobby, which hurt me. Only Bobby had told me he was mine and meant it.
I had also discovered the Arm tag. My discovery made up for a lot.
After a while, a rough chugging sound came up behind me. This was the first car I had seen on this road, and this vehicle announced loudly to the entire world that its muffler was dying. I drifted listlessly to the side of the road as the vehicle approached, leaving room for the noisy mess to pass.
Instead, the car pulled up slowly next to me and slowed with a squealing of brakes far out of proportion to its rate of slowing, to stop with the vehicle swaying backwards and forwards for no apparent reason at all. Enslaved by my magical thinking, even the mundane happenings of cars confused me.
The car was brown, or at least appeared to have once been brown. I didn’t recognize the model, but it had a Chevy hood ornament, and the vehicle smelled about ten years old. Paint chips danced off the rusted body of the car as it passed, and a smell of burning oil followed the vehicle like a shroud. An odd symbol dangled from a chain on the rearview mirror that I recognized after a moment of thought as a peace sign. I found another one painted in bright pink on the passenger side door, surrounded by bright yellow flowers and happy faces. Bright streamers flowed from the antenna.
There was something surreal about the sight of the car. The situation became more surreal when the longhaired man driving the vehicle leaned over to roll down the passenger side window.
“Need a lift?”
People never offered to help me. Some instinct in them recognized the predator and shied away. Always. Even when I had been just a month or two beyond my Arm transformation.
I didn’t understand. What had happened to my predator effect? Had I lost it?
On the other hand, this was a sign, an omen. Keaton had sent me out to infiltrate the leadership of the student protest movement and find out why they had decided to revere us Arms. There was no way I would turn down a representative of the counterculture trying to give me a lift.
The man’s hair was long and straggly, and came almost to the middle of his back. He wore a beard, and beads, and little round glasses, with another one of those peace signs hanging around his neck. He should have discarded his old and torn clothes long ago.
Surreal.
“Thank you,” I said to the driver. The man opened the passenger side door with a friendly smile, and I slipped into the seat beside him. The car overflowed with the ripe smells of unwashed body and a foreign odor I eventually realized was pot. He took his foot off the brake, and the car started forward again, chugging and gasping down the hill.
“You look like hell,” he said, as we rolled forward, the car powered more by gravity than gasoline.
“Yeah.” Did he challenge me? Should I kill him for doing so? My instincts said I shouldn’t, because of Keaton’s mission. I studied him, evaluating him as I evaluated all prey. He was young, in his early twenties. He possessed nothing of the predator in him. Soft. No potential danger at all. Just a decent human being offering help to another.
“What happened to you?” he said, carefully casual, hiding his real concern.
Innocent human kindness, as surreal as the car, and nearly as unfamiliar.
“Boyfriend trouble,” I said, picking a likely story out of his expectations, my mind too preoccupied to make up anything more complicated.
He gazed at the dried blood on my dress, from a cut Keaton had given me, and took in my bare feet and lack of coat. “That looks like a boyfriend you can do without, sister.”
“I thought so, too,” I said. “That’s why I’m here on the road instead of in his car with him.”
The man nodded, buying my story with complete trust. “So where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere. Away.”
His name was Gary Cragle, and he lived down in San Francisco in an area he called Haight-Ashbury. He worked as a waiter in the evenings, at some bar featuring poets and music so modern no one had figured out how to listen to them yet. During the day, he wrote political diatribes for some local newsletter called Always Tokin’, a competitor (he said) to the late lamented but holier-than-thou newsletter The Diggers, which I vaguely recalled from my previous blood-soaked trip through the bay area. Cragle tried to get his polemics published in major newspapers, but for magically appropriate reasons, they apparently just ignored him.
He was coming home from visiting some friends this morning. A whole crew of hippies had claimed a house up the hill a ways, and he had stayed up all night with them, smoking pot and talking politics and idealistic causes. With the dawn, they had gone to sleep and he had gone home.
I to
ld him my name was Suzie Patterson, a random name bubbling up out of my subconscious. He played the radio, and I listened to the Beatles sing ‘Hey, Jude’, and Jim Morrison plead to have his fire lit. When he stopped to pick up milk and chips at a grocery store on the outskirts of the city itself, I lifted his wallet, more out of habit than anything else. He didn’t even have five dollars, which made me sad. I couldn’t summon up the energy to keep his wallet, so when he came running back from the store in a panic, I just handed over his wallet and said I had found it on his seat.
Dealing with this Cragle person made me shake my head. Once, every normal seemed dangerous to me, and I had to fight against my instincts to keep from killing them all. I must have been stressed and half-crazy from my paranoia. However, I didn’t have the slightest urge to kill Cragle. He posed no threat to me at all, physically or socially. How did I know? My instincts, whatever they were. I read him without putting effort into reading him. What did that mean?
Gary offered me breakfast, and I took him up on his offer. I hadn’t expected to infiltrate the hippies so easily, but, well, omens do happen. He lived on the second story of a two-story building, sharing the floor with three other apartments. The place had a central hallway and a central bathroom, and each of the four tiny apartments consisted of nothing more than a single room, with a refrigerator, sink, and two-burner stove in one corner. The most significant feature in the room was the double bed sticking out into the center of the room, box springs flush on the floor, mounded with rumpled blankets.
Gary turned red behind his beard at the state of his bed. I looked at him and realized he was afraid I might think he brought me here with ulterior motives.
He was afraid to offend my sensibilities. He thought he might make me nervous.
What a different world.
There was a desk, with papers and half-written diatribes scattered over it. Books lined every spare inch of wall, stacked on bookcases made of raw timber and cinderblocks. A tiny table and two non-matching chairs filled the kitchenette. Gary awkwardly offered me one, trying to draw my attention away from the bed.
The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Six Page 5
