Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2)

by Randall Farmer

  Before she let me talk to her about Gilgamesh and Gail’s proposal she first quizzed me on all my other projects. The one she was most pleased about was Hank’s work on the juice pattern codification, followed closely by the progress on, but not the content of, the missing baby Arms. When she finished listening, she assigned me three hours in Inferno to meditate while touching the Eskimo Spear, a new task I wasn’t happy to receive. Her research monomania was, if anything, growing worse.

  “The mutual tagging idea bothers me,” I said. “I don’t know why, though. When Gail and Gilgamesh called me on it, I searched my feelings and still couldn’t come up with a rational answer or a reason why I’m so bothered. So I wanted to pass their proposal by you first, to see what you think.” Gilgamesh blamed my aversion on natural Arm tag reactions and a desire to bond with Lori and Inferno instead. I was willing to grant him both points, but I didn’t consider them sufficient.

  Amy snacked on a fresh rib roast, extra rare, freshly plucked from the oven five minutes before she showed. This was, as was usual for nearly all my Arm guests, a kitchen meeting. An almost-no-pasta spinach lasagna still baked in the oven as a treat for later. As a show of, well, with Amy there’s no telling the real reason, she had gifted me a dartboard bullseye picture of Special Agent Patrick McIntyre, a recent one she had secretly taken. He appeared more haggard, worn, and older. I was pleased.

  “There’s a high likelihood this will blow up in your face,” Amy said, licking her lips, as messy as always when she ate. Wanting to be especially polite for what might be a tough discussion, I had eaten beforehand and only picked at a small portion now. “Some of the disasters Rose, Mary and Elisabeth are running into with their tag experimentations have been chilling. We’ve been needing far too much outside help to fix messed up tags, and spending far too much time doing metasense scans of each other to check for missed messes.”

  “You’re working with them, now?” I asked. I swore the tag codification project ate up more time every time I heard anything about it.

  “Only as a metasense analyst.” She paused and eyed ceiling. “Don’t you dare say a word.” Such as any comments about ‘the blind leading the blind’. Amy’s metasense range was extraordinary, but notorious for its lack of detail outside of the radio spectrum. And, no, I didn’t want another theoretical discussion about why she could pick up AM radio and listen to it with her metasense, but not FM radio.

  “Who else is checking out our experimenters?”

  “Lori, Sky, Shadow and, um, Focus Keistermann.” The latter I knew was a more tense relationship these days, now with Polly’s influence mostly cleaned out of Amy’s mind. Polly was all ‘these things happen’ and ‘let’s get down to business’ and cutting more reasonable deals, but the tension still remained.

  “Then I want Lori’s opinion about the mutual tags.” I called and had some brave soul gently wake Lori and Sky from their rest.

  After she expressed her lasagna envy and annoyance at how little sleep Arms needed, Lori got down to business. “Compared to Rose’s experiments, mutual tags are as safe as houses. You’ll need to use your ceremonial procedures to make them stick, of course. Understand, they aren’t a panacea for all the problems a Crow’s going to have joining a household” she wouldn’t say Gilgamesh’s name any longer “but they will save time. Just don’t try and tag the Progenitor doodad you wear around your neck. When I tried to tag the Eskimo Spear it nearly bit my head off. I don’t think the Progenitors did tags the way we do, and I don’t think they’re comfortable about our modern tags.”

  “I wasn’t even contemplating tagging the thing,” I said. Lori was as inconsistent about caution as she was about intimacy.

  After more chitchat with Lori, and after Amy used the call as an excuse to extract a progress report from Lori on the projects Amy had assigned her, we hung up. I couldn’t believe Amy had found a way to talk Lori and Sky into a joint Dreaming-pheromone flow mapping project of potential Progenitor artifact sites. Their ‘self-tagging the metamygdala to better understand its properties project’ sounded even more insane.

  “Verdict?” I asked Amy.

  She took a last bite of lasagna and put her fork down. “I still have the emotional ick reaction, but mutually tagging your way into a Focus-Crow household fits with what we’re doing. It’s a logical extension of the household redefinition project.

  “You see, when you get right down to it, the Arm contribution to the household redefinition project is all going to be about tags. You were right when you insisted tags are the juice-level strength of Arms, and possibly as flexible as juice patterns. Rose and crew now have proved that tags exist at multiple strength levels, and each strength level possesses its own variations and uses. Tag variations are difficult for Focuses to deal with, but with a little work an Arm can teach a Focus how to vary a tag. Sometime soon we’re going to need to sit down and find a way to incorporate all of our tag developments into the household redefinition project.”

  I read something in Amy I hadn’t expected to find. “You’ve been playing with tags, too?”

  “Not these sorts of tags,” she said. She pushed away her part-finished plate of lasagna, a happy stuffed smile on her face. “I’m working with Sinclair and Hoskins on their commoner human stabilization experiments. I proposed we try having me tag the commoners, and we found having an Arm tag a commoner does help with the stabilization.” She paused and gave me the eye. “You’re going to need to watch for mental and juice side effects, though. Tagging their commoners made me part of their barony, even though I didn’t go through any of the formal ceremonies. We suspect this happened as a side effect of my liaisons with Hoskins. Being part of their barony’s subtly changed me, including making me a bit more contemplative when I’m resting and more aggressive in battle.”

  I didn’t say anything. More contemplative in rest time? More aggressive in battle? The ideas boggled my mind, and the latter interfered with my plans. I decided I absolutely needed to follow up on my first successful test of Hank’s Arm physical flexibility findings and further thicken the thick callus pads I was ‘growing’ on my elbows and knees. In my new combat method, I was going to be the weapon.

  The mutual tagging plan had passed the ‘boss smell test’, much to my disgust. Logically, I knew I needed to do this. Nothing I came up with allowed me to dodge the logic. “I’ll get Gail and Gilgamesh to set up a ceremony,” I said. “Do you have any interest in attending?”

  Amy shook her head. “Nah. I need to head back home and put some more work in on my evaluation of Charade’s tag tuning progress. I’m afraid Sky’s been assuming the standard Crow has far more talent than he really does. We either need better Crows or Sky needs a better write-up.”

  Gilgamesh: October 8, 1972

  “…so Carol called last night,” Gail said as Gilgamesh walked in the front door. “She told me to set up a ceremony for tomorrow evening. That’s tonight.”

  Gilgamesh shook his head. He had spent the last two days writing letters to Crows about his Guru offerings, functionally hiding from Gail and Carol, but he had known when to show up, without anyone telling him. Strange and annoying.

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Wear these clothes,” Gail said, and handed him a dark suit with a starched white shirt. “Here’s the plan for the ceremony.” She dropped some typed carbons into his hands, kissed him on the cheek, and ran off.

  Gilgamesh entered his maze equipped apartment, where he read the plan and dressed. A few minutes after sunset, he headed outside to the courtyard between the wings of Gail’s household. The air was crisp and cold, and the little painted jack-o-lanterns on the windowsill of the room where the children played during the day brought a smile to his face.

  The normals and the children stood around the edges of the courtyard, with the Transforms in front of them and Gail in front of the Transforms. Tiamat and four of her people, led by Tom, entered the courtyard when Gilgamesh did, coming from the middle door of the
opposite wing, across from Gilgamesh. Tiamat wore formal clothing of her own indefinable style, an expensive dark gray-blue suit, cut to fit a woman’s body, and severe enough for a woman owner of a billion dollar company to wear while addressing the board of directors.

  His mind felt almost lighter than air, and because of the outdoor setting and the tremulous rumblings he metasensed in the juice, he sank deep into the pheromone flow. The Progenitors followed the ceremony, linked to the proceedings by the relic of theirs Tiamat wore under her blouse. Finally, finally, they sent. They had done ceremonies like this involving Focuses, Crows, Arms and Beast Men, and didn’t think of the output as tags. This ceremony made sense to them, and they approved.

  Gilgamesh went first, and he formally requested to join Gail’s household. Gail gave her consent, and held him tight as she tagged him.

  Then Gilgamesh and Gail both formally gave themselves to Tiamat. The wording was different, and they knelt at her feet when they pledged to be Tiamat’s, because Arms thought in terms of ownership. By requesting her tag, they became hers. A new commitment from Gilgamesh, and a re-affirmation from Gail. Tiamat’s tag hurt to start with, but after a moment the hurt vanished and became something else, something he visualized as the power of forward momentum. Such strength! Gail’s offer included her entire household, not just herself. Tiamat accepted, and then tagged all the household’s Transforms, as they walked up to her and knelt at her feet. Gail’s Transforms relaxed after Tiamat tagged them, and they quit looking at her as if they expected her to jump them at any minute.

  Next, Tiamat gave herself to Gail. Gail’s tag involved ownership as well, but ownership from a Focus’s perspective, not an Arm’s. Gail now owned Tiamat’s juice.

  By this point, Tiamat wore a hint of a rather silly smile on her face and a glazed look in her eyes, overwhelmed by the juice movement in all the tagging.

  Finally, and fittingly, Gilgamesh took his turn. He gathered everyone to him, and took the juice and the dross and made from them a tag, using as the tag model the natural tag structure visible to him in the will of the Progenitors. His tag made them all one household together, the normals, the Transforms, Gail, and Tiamat, and in the tag Gilgamesh heard echoes of seal hunts, tribal warfare, and the terror roars of tribal Beast Men. The harsh and instinctive tag possessed nothing of science, a raw and primitive thing, but for now all Gilgamesh cared about was that his Crow tag would work. His tag didn’t deal with ownership at all. The Crow tag was all about covering each other’s backsides. All for one and one for all, the Crow wizard echo of the Crow shaman based Noble household tag. He didn’t know what his tag would do to the normals, if anything.

  They finished the ceremony by recognizing the normals and welcoming them into the new household they were creating. He wondered if anyone but him realized this was one of Daisy’s visiting days, and this turned Daisy into a household member. The tag would probably allow them, Transform and normal, to find him more easily. He would be a lure at night, someone to cuddle up next to for those looking for, as Daisy put it, ‘the wonderful safety vibes you give off’. Daisy didn’t lead a normal or safe life. Gilgamesh realized his tag covered Tiamat’s entourage as well, and they were now a part of Gail’s household as well, which he decided to keep to himself. At least for now.

  “Eissler once said the only way to prevent a war between the Arms and Focuses was to ‘own each other’. Now, finally, I knew what Eissler meant. Mutual tagging,” Carol said. “I can’t understand why I was so hesitant about this. There’s nothing wrong with this at all!” A goofy grin stuck itself on her face and she skipped away.

  Gilgamesh smiled and sauntered off, not the least bit cowed or stressed. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Gail roll her eyes at both of them, not noticing the goddess aura now surrounding her.

  Gilgamesh sat on the end of a couch in Kurt and Sylvie’s living room and stared around him in amazement. He was excited, exhausted, and giddy to realize he was in a household full of partying Transforms, and being around them relaxed him.

  They had his back.

  He could get used to this.

  The party spread over several rooms, with almost twenty people in this room alone. The Commander sat over in the corner, on the floor with her knees tucked up under her chin. She stared as she sat, with her stupid smile, full of bliss and happy as a kid at Christmas, her mind off in some other world. The entire tagging affair affected her far more than anyone else, not to his surprise. Arms always lived life more intensely than the rest of the world.

  Outside, Kurt, Daisy and three of the younger household men sampled Kurt’s wares. They hadn’t needed to sample much at all before they descended into helpless giggling, falling into a world of serious bliss.

  Not that he wasn’t a little blissed out himself. He sensed so much! Now that these people were his, he sensed every little detail about their juice structure. He hadn’t been aware a Transform’s juice structure possessed so much complexity. No wonder the household tuning document had made so little sense to him.

  He could do so much with this. So many things just cried out for him to fix, especially on Tiamat. He hadn’t realized she still carried so much damage from her trip into withdrawal. Fixing her would be a huge project. He thought about starting now, just a little touch, a pick at one of the scars and a tug to realign that tiny part of her structure, but then thought better of the manipulation. A project this big would need to wait.

  His eyes settled on Melanie, one of Gail’s Focus attendants. Focus attendants supposedly possessed a little extra, and now, for the first time, he metasensed the extra, and the extra was beautiful, reminding him of Warden Jane of Sinclair and Hoskins’ Barony. The extra remained only potential, but such beautiful potential. It helped that Melanie was both young and beautiful, with long brown hair and the athletic grace of a trained Transform. This was one of the things he liked about Gail’s household. Her people had the same tendency toward athletic competence as Inferno.

  He brushed the thought of Lori and Inferno away. She was gone for good, and he had another Focus now. He spotted a minute amount of dross embedded in Melanie’s juice structure. He imagined his projected metasense hands as delicate surgical instruments. Carefully, imagining a little suction, so small as to be almost microscopic, he sucked up the tiny amount of dross. Melanie turned to him and smiled.

  “Hello, Melanie,” Gilgamesh said.

  “Hi yourself,” she said, coming toward him. “You want a cheese puff? Isabella makes these wonderful cheese puffs.”

  Gilgamesh nodded and took the proffered cheese puff. “Thank you.” She sat down on the couch next to him.

  “So what are we supposed to call you, now? Guru Gilgamesh?”

  “How do you address your Focus?” Gilgamesh asked.

  “Oh, well, mostly we just call her Gail. Unless we’re in public, or she’s pissed off. Then we call her ma’am.”

  Gilgamesh nodded. “That sounds fine with me, too.”

  Melanie grinned. “So do you get pissed off much?”

  “I don’t think so, actually.” Melanie moved closer to him, and pressed her leg up against his. If he didn’t know better, she appeared to be interested in more than just a little conversation.

  Not too surprising, given her juice count. Gail was putting a lot of effort into juicing everyone into a good mood for the party, and Melanie definitely rode a juice high, with all the libido high juice implied.

  Well, he thought to himself, as his body responded in no uncertain terms, this certainly cast a new light on things. He wondered what Gail would think if he slept with one of her women. No, he didn’t need to wonder. Lori’s visit, with a half dozen Inferno people, had changed Gail’s world and convinced her to commit to the Cause. Knowing the lusty Inferno women, he couldn’t imagine they hadn’t told Gail and her people about all the benefits of having a Crow in the household.

  He smiled at Melanie. If he wasn’t mistaken, Melanie was now fertile, at least with him. How stra
nge. How Sky-like. He wondered if he would be able to father children, too. Besides Lori, two Transform women of Inferno had each defied the Transform infertility problem to produce a child with Sky. Certainly not enough to reverse the oncoming collapse of humanity, but enough to give hope. And he would love a child or two of his own.

  Melanie turned away from him. “Oh, no. John!” she said. Carol had just tripped up one of Gail’s bodyguards and was in a clinch, getting hotter by the moment.

  “All right, everyone, let’s find somewhere else to party,” Gilgamesh said, putting all the authority he could manage into his voice. There on the floor, clothes began to fly.

  “Will he be okay?” Melanie said.

  “He’ll be fine,” Gilgamesh said. Except for the Commander and the bodyguard, the whole room eyed Gilgamesh. “Let’s just give them some privacy. He’ll be fine. Come on. Out of the room.”

  People started to move. One white faced normal woman grabbed hold of his hand and said “That’s my husband.” Gilgamesh winced.

  “He’ll be fine,” he said, as he shooed her out the door. “Don’t blame him for this. Carol can do some things to a man that aren’t exactly natural. This isn’t his fault.”

  “Is he going to be all right?” the woman said, even more worried.

  “He’ll be fine. I promise. He’ll be fine.”

  “Come on, Ann.” The speaker was an older man, a normal, and he took Ann’s hand in his. “It’ll be all right. Come on into the kitchen. You can stay with Isabella and me.”

  Gilgamesh let her go, satisfied she was safe. He found Melanie still attached to his side.

  “I know where we can find some privacy of our own,” she said.

  Gilgamesh smiled.

  Gail Rickenbach: October 9, 1972

  “This sounds too good to be true, Gail,” Beth Hargrove said. Her green eyes lost focus momentarily as she scanned Gail’s household. She metasensed the new improvements immediately.

  “We can take the benefits even farther than this,” Gail said, bouncing on her toes in the hallway. She hadn’t taken the time to braid her hair this morning, and it flowed like a chestnut river today, a full yard behind her as she bounced. “But even with what little we’ve done, I’ve got room for at least one more triad. Possibly more, but I don’t want to push yet. These mutual tags are amazing, and there’s a Crow in the house for the first time ever. Can you feel the improvement?”