She gave up her offended dignity. “Yes, it is,” she said.
“Those who fall must find other ways,” the Earl said. “I am the oldest and first Noble, yet I no longer lead my kind. The Focus Council once led the entire Transform community, but no longer. The appearance of the Eskimo Spear shattered both the Transform community and the tacit power of the Focus Council by showing too much truth. We are all wondering what, if anything, will take its place. I believe the later generations of Focuses are different than the first Focuses, and are worth allying with. Without help from the younger Focuses I would either be dead, or a Hunter. I’ve stated my case many times, the need for this alliance, and we are here now to see if I’m correct.”
“I thank you, then, and hope I can meet your expectations,” Tonya said, moved by the wisdom and kindness of the oldest Noble. This one was far more than a mere beast. “Unfortunately, this will only matter if I, and my peers among the younger Focuses, survive the coming conflict with any power left to use.”
“You speak of the threat from Arm Keaton,” Shadow said. “I would hate to see Keaton attempt to take control of the Crows, and I would much rather the Arms return to being Crow allies. To aid in these goals, we might even be willing to help you.”
“Help? What sort of help?”
“Crow help.” Shadow smiled, and his eyes crinkled. Tonya found his smile exceptionally pleasant. “So, how do you plan to prove yourself? Doing so may be more difficult than you think. I think your instincts urge you otherwise.”
“Desperate Focuses do desperate things, and hard decisions make the next hard decision easier,” Tonya said. “However, doing ‘whatever it takes’ is a trap leading straight to hell. Focus Adkins and Focus Schrum have repeatedly attempted to escape that trap, only to eventually give up and fall farther into their own darkness.” She paused and caught a mild glare from Occum. She turned slightly and spoke to him. “So tell me, Crow Master Occum, do you think the Focuses deserve to be enslaved by the Arms?” If these two non-politicians needed to prove their mettle against her, she should cooperate and play her role for them.
“Enslaved by Keaton? No one deserves to be enslaved by Keaton,” Occum said. Interesting answer. “Don’t lose hope. The Commander hasn’t yet been fully defeated.”
Tonya smiled at yet another Hancock fan. She had far too many of them in her household and among her corporate Focus allies. “Hope is optional. I won’t stop fighting, though, until they push my kicking, screaming corpse through the incinerator door.”
Occum nodded and actually smiled. His teeth needed work. “I know the feeling.” Occum lost his reserve for a moment when he realized that, against his expectations, he liked her.
“I’ll send you a box of brochures,” Shadow said. “Talk to some other Focuses. I left you my contact information. Contact me if you find any trusted Focuses interested in our services.” Shadow smiled his half smile. “A word of warning: Keaton recently took a first Focus by the name of Denise Pitre. Took completely. The Focus wears Keaton’s tag and she’s spilling everything.” He stood to leave, and Occum and the Earl did as well. “Good day.”
Tonya shivered, as her speculations turned to facts. They were in a pit so deep they would never get out, and every time she looked, they just seemed to have fallen deeper.
“Shadow, I…,” she said, to thank him, but there was no one to talk to. She glanced down at the beautiful brochures and wanted to weep.
He was right, though. She shouldn’t lose hope. It was good to know she wasn’t quite so alone in the world. She let herself smile and gather up the brochures. Crow art! Another failure in the account of the first Focuses, that they had made enemies of the Crows so long ago.
“Let’s go,” she said to Danny and Ben.
As she walked out of the restaurant, she heard their voices again, with her hearing that was exceptional even for a Focus. Many blocks away, the Crows’ voices were faint and indecipherable, but she heard the Earl’s voice clearly.
“Now there’s a woman in serious need of a good lay,” he said.
Tonya’s jaw dropped again and she drew herself up in shock. The nerve of that man. Didn’t he have any respect at all for a Focus?
Of course he didn’t. Or at least no more respect than he gave any other senior Major Transform.
A good lay, he said. Tonya shook her head. It had been over fifteen years since she had what he so quaintly called a ‘good lay.’ Not since her husband left her after she made her transformation. Who knew, maybe with all the other changes, she would at least get some sex out of it. All this hell ought to cough up something useful.
A good lay, he said. A good lay.
Gail Rickenbach: November 12, 1972 – November 14, 1972
“See the fiber, that’s the problem one. Just inch it over a hair, no more, and hook the fiber to the third lateral there, the shortened one that – no, no, the other one. Stop, no, stop! Unhook the connection, please!” Gilgamesh’s normally even voice broke in fear and Helen Grimm screamed.
“Gail, please! There’s fundamental juice backflowing into a supplemental reserve! Unhook it!”
“I’m trying!” Gail said, and she did try, but Helen thrashed and screamed, and the chair fell over with a crash with her in it.
Gilgamesh jumped on top of Helen and held her. Then he did something Gail couldn’t sense and Helen Grimm collapsed into unconsciousness. Finally, with Helen still, Gail grabbed the offending fiber and switched it back.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said. All the little issues associated with the move to Chicago and the endless training, her unending twenty-hour days, and now the finicky little juice work of the household tuning, had made her tired, weary down to her bones. Tears leaked down her cheeks and the world swam. “I thought you meant the shorter one. How badly is she hurt?”
“Badly.” Gilgamesh ran his hands over Helen’s unconscious body, doing some other indecipherable Crow thing. Helen’s skin turned pale and beaded with sweat, and her heart beat way too fast. Dangerous in a woman as old as Helen, battleaxe though she might be most of the time. “The strand you connected to wasn’t shortened, it was rotated,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. How did she miss the rotation? She knelt beside Helen and attempted to hold her, to offer some kind of comfort for her mistake.
Gilgamesh held up his hand to stop her. “Please, Gail,” Gilgamesh said. “You’re interfering with my ability to fix the problem.” Gail jumped back, surprised at and a little angry at the Arm-like cadence to Gilgamesh’s voice. “You need to listen to me, Gail, when I metasense something you missed. What we’re doing is dangerous. Next time, you might kill someone.”
“I didn’t mean to mess up, dammit!” She wished she didn’t find him so attractive. Even when she was so tired her vision blurred, she responded to him. Ever since she started cycling juice with Carol, though, she didn’t seem to be able to avoid thinking of him in those terms.
Gilgamesh didn’t answer. After several minutes, he laid Helen gently on the floor and stood.
“I’ve cleaned her up as much as I could for now. To fully fix the damage will take several days, and until then she’s going to suffer headaches and irritability.”
Gail nodded.
Gilgamesh stood, just looking at her, for a long time, and didn’t say a word. Gail stared back at him for a short minute, but then guilt pulled her eyes away. She hadn’t meant to hurt Helen!
“Focus Rickenbach,” Gilgamesh said. He always got formal when he got stressed. “About what just happened here…”
“I don’t wish to discuss the issue at this time, Guru Gilgamesh,” she said, similarly formal. Two could play the formality game, and she barely retained enough self-control to keep hold of her temper. “If you will excuse me, I think we’re done here. I expect I’ll be better able to appreciate your expertise on another occasion.”
Cold, clipped and reserved. Very Focus.
“I’ll let you…” she started, and then stopped.
No Gilgamesh. Gone.
Hell. She sank down the floor to hold Helen, who just woke up. Gail wanted to throw something.
“Gail?” Sylvie said, and peered in through the door. Gail still held Helen in her arms. Unnecessary, but Helen enjoyed it, and Gail’s guilt wouldn’t let her do otherwise.
“What’s the problem, Sylvie?” Gail said, though she knew the answer. She had metasensed the man, and the flicker of Carol, when they appeared a half-hour ago.
Sylvie came all the way in, and gaped in awe at Gail’s recently unpacked suite. “I can’t believe we’re going to live like this.”
“Hey, your suite’s just as big.”
“Yeah, but I can’t believe that either. Isn’t there a law or something? You know, Transforms need to live like sardines or the world will explode?”
“I think we’re covering the explosion part pretty well, so we might as well take the decent living space. The only problem is this little deal about paying.”
“Well, paying is going to be a hell of a littler deal with this new guy. You wouldn’t believe what She’s given us this time. The guy’s a corporate lawyer. We’re not talking little fish corporate lawyer, either, he’s one of these big guns that big corporations hire when they want to sue other big corporations. Last year, he brought in over two hundred thousand dollars.”
“Two hundred thousand!”
In her arms, Helen wiggled awake. She was the household’s Finance Officer, and, yes, tougher than bricks. “Before we moved here, we could have supported the entire household with his salary,” she said.
“Yeah, and not only that,” Sylvie said. “Arm Hancock spotted him before he even knew he caught TS, so there’s no reason in the world why he can’t keep his job. If she keeps giving us people like this, we’re not just going to be able to afford this place, we’ll be positively rich. How many people is she going to give us, anyway?” He was the third in two days. Carol gave Gail a triad, her first two gifts being women. The women had both been respectable, middle class women with their own incomes. One was a teacher, and the other owned her own seamstress shop. The seamstress had been black. Carol, it seemed, disregarded the custom of placing Transforms in households by race.
“Oh, I think I’ll enjoy tagging this one,” Gail said. “Unless you’ve found a way to move the juice and can tag him for me.”
“Gail!” Sylvie said, in mock horror. It was a tease, but a pointed one. Gail felt a little sensitive about everything today. She needed some sleep. She turned away, embarrassed by her minor harassment.
“She seems to think that a Focus ought to be able to support a hundred Transforms.”
“A hundred?”
“There’s just this one little problem,” Gail said with a low voice. “I can’t, unless I crack this juice tuning thing with Gilgamesh, I’m going to max out my capabilities before we hit fifty. Then we’re going to need to turn these people away.”
“Gilgamesh!” Gail said, and shook the knob again, but his door remained locked. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, but can we try again? It’s important.”
She didn’t even know if he was in his room. He had done something to the walls of his suite, blocking her metasense.
“Gilgamesh! Please!” She banged on the door. “Gilgamesh!”
No answer. He was probably gone. Again.
“Gilgamesh,” she called, hopeless, as she sank down to the floor with her back against his door. “Dammit. This is important.”
“Gail,” Sylvie said. “I don’t want to bother you again, but…”
Gail glanced up from her work. After a half-hour nap, she went back and forth between practicing the compartmentalization meditation exercises and practicing juice patterns. As usual, she had driven her juice so low her head throbbed and her muscles ached. Whenever she stopped to rest, she imagined all the people who would die because she personally had failed to solve the juice pattern puzzle, and she would go back to her practice. Lori and Dr. Zielinski worked late themselves, over at Littleside, trying to parse out the note sequence involved in the juice buffer access. Gail had left when they started snapping at each other like bickering spouses because they had blown out the terminology again. Gail and Dr. Zielinski’s terminology couldn’t handle the sheer complexity of the juice buffer access pattern.
“Bother me. I need a break.” Gail stood, stretched, and went over to the small weight machine Carol had suggested Gail keep in her suite. She started to do some shoulder exercises. Sylvie squirmed, uncomfortable. Years ago, during the awful time back when they both transformed, she and Sylvie had sorted out the bounds of their relationship, and how they could still remain friends when one of them was a Focus and the other a Transform dependent on her for juice. Now, history repeated itself, their lives and friendship shattered again by changes just as nasty. Gail wondered if Sylvie would ever get over Gail’s personal and physical changes. Carol had been correct; exercise helped immensely, forcing her body to flush all sorts of waste products as well as increasing her recovery rate and her juice count.
Unfortunately, her exercise work did mean many conversations amid the creaking and clacking of weights, or swimming, or…
Gilgamesh, in one of his more talkative moments, said he could have lived indefinitely on just the dross Gail produced during her exercises, back as a young Crow.
“I’ve been working on trying to coordinate household jobs and purchases with Inferno, and it’s driving me nuts.”
“What’s the problem?” Up went the weights, down went the weights.
“I’m not sure. Every time I try to coordinate anything with Connie, we end up yelling at each other.” Connie Yerizarian was the household president of Inferno, and Gail found her irritating, for reasons as yet unknown. Apparently, Sylvie had no better luck.
Gail studied her old friend, at the personal level and the juice level. There was nothing wrong with her juice level or juice structure save agitation. “There’s more, isn’t there.”
“I would rather not talk about it,” Sylvie said. She sat down on the couch with a sigh.
“Please?” Don’t make this any harder than it needs to be, Gail prayed.
“Fine. Several of us overheard some Inferno Transforms referring to us as ‘juice junkies’. When I mentioned the slurs to Connie, she said, ‘you are, ma’am’ all formal and tense-like.”
“Not by the standard definitions,” Gail said. The normal definition of a juice junkie was a Transform who wouldn’t contribute to the household unless set at or near the stimulation optimum. The Inferno Transforms were somewhat arrogant about a whole lot of things. “Let’s go talk to Connie, see if we can figure out how to get the household coordination working.” She finished her set, and headed off toward the elevators. Then inspiration struck. She changed course and went back toward her suite, where Van was hiding at work on the Arm history project in the bedroom.
“Van?”
He looked up from his desk, blinking. “Uh?”
“I need your help. You’re good at figuring out this sort of crap.”
“Huh? Sure, I guess,” Van said. He stood and shuffled over to Gail, bleary and worn from the coordination work had Gail foisted off on him during the move. Now if she could only convince her husband to exercise every day, he wouldn’t get so worn out just sitting and thinking. She could just order him, with her charisma, but that would be cheating. She didn’t like to do that. At least too often.
“What sort of crap are you talking about?” Van said, shaking his mind out of his paperwork.
“Political squabbles with Inferno.”
He sighed. “The last time you got me involved in diplomacy a Crow died. Are you sure our people are ready for more of me?”
Sylvie appeared to be a little miffed, as well. Gail wondered how getting Van involved again would strain her household structure, or, for that matter, how much strain Gail’s personal involvement would cause. She decided she had better explain.
“Inferno uses a radically differ
ent household structure, guys. I’m not trying to step on your toes, Sylvie, but our household structure doesn’t have anything set up for dealing with other households. Yet.” And it’s been four months since we had Van in any official household position. His number was up again, whether he wanted it or not.
Sylvie and Van shrugged.
“Connie? Can I have a minute of your time?” Gail said, looking into Connie’s office, up on the sixth floor. The Inferno section of the Branton already felt different to her metasense than her household’s section.
Connie glanced up from the papers that were scattered across her desk, working late and nearly as bleary eyed as Van. “Certainly. What can I do for you, ma’am?” Tall, blonde, and stunning, Connie almost had a Focus’s beauty. Today, not so much, with flyaway hair and smudged makeup.
Gail turned to Van, who shrugged. They both caught Connie’s sudden shift toward cold formality.
“Sylvie, I need an example of the problem.” Gail sat down in one of the two guest chairs in front of Connie’s desk. Sylvie took the other. Van stood awkwardly behind them, looking around at the several maps hung up on the walls.
“Sure. How about food preparation?” Sylvie was blonde, too, but she suffered by comparison to the gorgeous Inferno household president. She was short, with an honest, round face, and while intense Transform training had taken care of her weight problem, it had left her blocky and muscular, rather than svelte and elegant. “The Branton has only one kitchen, and it would make sense if we could combine our efforts with the Inferno cooks. However, we do household food preparation with rotating cooks, while Inferno has a group of people permanently assigned to the job. Their kitchen people have a budget, purchasing authority and full autonomy about what to prepare, save for a set of guidelines regarding how many meals need to be prepared with meat, without meat but with dairy products, or meals fully vegetarian. For some reason, the list gets updated all the time. Our rotating crew fixes their specialties and nothing else. For instance, when Gretchen cooks dinner, we all get chicken and dumplings.”
Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2) Page 29
