A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (24 page)

They didn’t care.

The herd stayed quiescent, oblivious, chewing on their food.

The pack roared, scattering their prey.  Without having to talk, they picked out a choice morsel and gave chase.

Not much of a chase.  No matter how loud they roared their terror roars, their prey would only amble away at a trot.  A panicked trot, but still a trot.  They ran down the prey two, three, four times before they decided to simply pace behind the prey and keep it moving.  Past the fences, and into a nearby copse of forest, left standing by the road builders when they ripped the latest interstate through the Illinois farmland.

“Shit, this is pathetic,” Enkidu said.

“You’re telling me,” Cleo said. “You want to do the honors?”

“Honors!  Bah!”  With one swipe of his claws he ripped the throat out of the cow.  The cow fell, and the
pack fed.

At least
the cow provided them enough food to gorge on.  Enkidu always got insanely hungry after he changed into his full beast form, the quadruped wolf.  It was good to bloody his muzzle in prey of any kind.  He was happy to be back in his wolf form.  Wandering Shade had ordered him into this form, just in case the damned talking Arm got away from the Feds and returned to the area.  Enkidu had been through this, before – beast form, ready to fight – then nothing, and he would go back to his normal half-beast form.

“You’re beautiful, Cleo,” he said, as his pack alpha leaned up against him, digesting her dinner.  The cold rain had let up, but there was no hint of the sun and no cracks in the clouds.

“Beautiful?  You addled or something?  I’m not even a full Monster, dammit.  I’m what, half woman, half what, snake?  Lizard?  Dinosaur?  You and your damned Master have remade me so many times I don’t have a clue what I am anymore.”

“Beautiful.  Hush,” he said, rubbing his hands across her scales.  Across the strange bone that ran from
immediately above her flat nostrils down to the middle of her back, with tufts of feathery down on the ridge top.  Across her iridescent line of amber scales surrounding her eyes, past her ear holes, and across her shoulders.  “Hunters observe things differently than normals.”

“You’re at least all one thing.  All wolfman.”

Enkidu laughed.  “I’m no pure wolf.  My legs are too long, my muscles are all wrong, my ears are all wrong.  No canid ever looked like this.  I’m sure I’ve got some housecat in this mess as well.”

“
You’re still beautiful.  The Beast Man morphospace has such incredible
variation
.  Like poor old Torma, with his insectoid carapace, his eight legs, and his mammalian innards?  Or Odin, with his incongruous saurian armored plates on a hairy mammal body?”

“You’re still beautiful, Cleo.  I love you, you know that?  I thought I’d left love behind, when I transformed.  I was wrong”

“Oh, love, eh?  I thought that was just the juice talking.  Or so you said, last time.”

“Last time, I was a fool.  Last time around the real me wasn’t exactly fully emergent, as far as our adult personalities were concerned.  We could still annihilate an IQ test, but emotionally, we were little more than infants.  This new set of changes is spectacular.  I’ve never
experienced anything like them.”

Cleo nodded.  “Yes.  The Shade’s hit the jackpot this time.  It’s one thing to be able to digest a dictionary and know all the words, and another to be able to use them properly.  Now, I can even understand the technical papers he passe
s on to us.  You think he’s going to let us keep these enhancements?”

“I’m sure
he will.  Can’t you see it in the clouds?  In the breeze from the southwest, echoing the pain of our enemies, their loss and confusion?  In the low rumbles you can only sense with your feet, our Master’s love for us, for our new ways of thinking and understanding?”

“Of course not, silly. 
Sensing such things would take a Beast Man metacampus.  I sense other things.”

“What do you sense?”  As far as he could ascertain, Cleo
possessed nothing analogous to his metasense.

“Through you, into you, when I touch you.  Into myself.  For instance, if I wanted, I could get pregnant.”

“You’re kidding.  What sort of baby would you produce?”

“Human.  Fully human.”

“You’re shitting me, Cleo.  Fully human?”

“Yes.  The transformation didn’t touch your testicles or my ovaries. 
This is easy to sense.”

So his love did have a metasense, of sorts.  Of bodies, organs and cells.  “Damn.”

“What?”

“This is no disease, Cleo.”
  He lifted his lupine head and stared down at her.

“What are you talking about?”

“Transform Sickness can’t be a disease.”  Not if it could produce a Transform such as Cleo, through all her changes and intermediate forms.  Transform Sickness, from a food poisoning bacteria with delusions of godhood?  No way in hell.

Cleo’s belly rumbled, and she reached over with her clawed hands, and ripped herself another small bit of kidney.  A spot of liver.  Chased it down with a gobbet of meat.

“I don’t like to think about such things,” Cleo said.  “Too many mysteries make me nervous.”

Enkidu nodded.  “I know.  What are we made to hunt?  Where is our prey? 
Not Transforms.  With our pack, I have more than enough élan.  What do we lack for real?”

“Food,” Cleo said.  “Our pack eats too much.  You eat, what, nearly ten times as much as a normal.  Without farms, without supermarkets, we would denude any territory in a few months.”

Errr.  She was correct.  “Did you read the old book the Shade dropped on us last week, the one titled ‘Pleistocene Megafauna of North America’?”  She grunted ‘no’.  “There used to be enough food, long long ago.  That would have been the life.”  Visions of horses, buffalo and oversized antlered deer filled Enkidu’s mind.  Too bad they had vanished so long ago, and so suddenly, though…

“
I know of another source of food, Enkidu.”  Cleo pointed, at the lines of headlights visible from the edge of the forest, in the road that passed by less than a mile distant.

Enkidu nodded.  “I try not to think about
them
.”  Or anything similarly against the Law.  “The Wandering Shade mentioned, once, a different solution to the food problem.”

“Oh, did he?”  Cleo said
, and hissed.  She was never happy when his Master passed information to him and not to her.

“Old Monsters in the wild don’t eat as much.  They rest
most of the time.  He calls this aestivation, though the term isn’t exactly appropriate.  He thinks old Beast Men will be able to rest the same way.  We can’t, now, because we’re essentially adolescents.”

“Speaking of which,” Cleo said, rubbing up against him.  “Isn’t it about time to act like horny adolescents again?”

“What, again?” Enkidu said with a grin.  He traced a line of élan fire around Cleo’s nipples.  She hissed in pleasure, and grabbed his member, her claws barely sheathed.  He echoed her hiss with a roar of lust.

They ignored the cold rain that began to spit down on them a few moments later.

Gilgamesh: March 22, 1968

“You’re going to become active, eh?” Sky said.  As soon as the authorities released Gilgamesh from jail, he called Shadow and found out Sky had been in contact with Shadow, looking for Gilgamesh’s new phone number.

This
would be a perfect excuse for him to make a necessary phone call.  If any Crow might be able to advise him on what he planned to do, it was Sky.  He made the call, expensive and international, to Toronto.

“Yes.  I’m out and doing things,” Gilgamesh said
, pacing the width of living room of his cheap apartment as he talked.  “Some successes, some failures.  I’m not meant for discussions on literary symbolism.”

Sky laughed, his voice loud and un-Crow-like.  “Good, good.  There are so few of us Crows willing to actually do
anything
.  Hopefully, you don’t believe the rumors that I’m an actual Crow adventurer.  I’m sure you noticed when we met – I’m just an average Crow.”

“I suspect the truth is somewhere in between.”  He paused, not sure where to go after his polite shading of the truth.  “So why did you want to contact me?”

“A Foyer friend of mine suggested I should.”

“Your Professor Rizzari?”

Silence on the other and of the phone.  “Actually, someone wiser and more dangerous.”  Sky paused.  “May I ask how you learned of my connection to our most gracious lady of Boston?  I specifically asked the Boston Crows not to speak or write of her.”

“I cheated,” Gilgamesh said.  “I looked up well known Focuses with the initial L in their names, since you mentioned in your letters you
had been contacting a politically powerful Focus.  There aren’t any in Toronto.  The closest I found lived in Boston, Professor Lorraine Rizzari, who just happened to be the name of a Focus Tiamat referred me to in case of, ah, emergencies.  And Boston is, well, where we first met in person.  This sounded like a lot of coincidences to me.”  Coincidences of personality, Gilgamesh suspected.

“Ah, a detective.”  Sky chuckled.  “So, again may I ask, why did you wish to speak to me?”

“I think that once my current problems end, I’m going to continue to work on the problem of bettering inter-Major Transform cooperation.  However, I’m having trouble with panic.  Half the time when I’m out doing things in the world, I panic and mess up, and I’m not going to be able to contribute anything to the Transform community if I can’t get past the panic issue.  What’s the secret?  How do I fight the panic?”

“Secret?  As the Americans say, the same way you get to Carnegie Hall.  Practice.  Throw yourself into hazards – well, hazards from a Crow perspective,
understand.  Go out.  Do things.  Learn from your responses.  The more you repeat something, the less it induces panic.  The panic is there to remind you to pay attention when the world around you is doing something different.  Do anything enough, even what the other Crows call adventuring, and the panic will go away.”

“You’re kidding.  That’s
all?”

“Completely.”

“Well, I guess I’m well on my way, then, because that’s what I’ve been doing,” Gilgamesh said.  Only: what sort of Crow would repeatedly attempt a panic-inducing situation enough times to learn this trick?  Gilgamesh had been trying to find a way to
avoid
that scenario.  “Thank you.  Is there anything else a Crow needs to do to officially sign up for a Guru?  Some registry of Guru students I need to fill out?”  Gilgamesh hoped nothing in the informal Crow rules prevented one from learning from multiple Gurus.

“What?  Me, a
Guru?” Sky said, and laughed.  “One student does not a Guru make.  Not that I won’t give you advice.  A mutual acquaintance of ours, Shadow, has been twisting my eminently twistable arm to teach my tricks to others, but few Crows will admit they even have ears when I fatuously attempt to pass on my lessons.  I’ll tell you a secret: if you’re only panicking half the time you’re trying things, you’re doing a superb job for a Crow your age.  Another secret?  The urge to panic never goes away.”

Gilgamesh
groaned in frustration.  The revelation didn’t surprise him, though.

“So, Sky,
did you receive my most recent letters about my current problem?”

“
The one about being upset because you lost your Tiamat again?  I can sympathize.  However, I’m not sure I can help.  I don’t have any political connections within the American government.”

“I learned from, um, well, Sinclair, Midgard and Shadow
, the place she’s being held is a veritable fortress.  I, um, directed a certain Arm, um, the Skinner to the place after a terrifying discussion, and it’s their opinion she won’t be able to succeed at breaking Tiamat out on her own.  I know…”

“You talked to the Skinner in person?” Sky said, nearly a shriek.  He followed
his shriek with something quick and incomprehensible in French.  “Perhaps I should be learning from you.”

Gilgamesh winced.  Shadow’s reaction had been quite similar.  “There’s something you need to know,” Gilgamesh said.  “Tiamat and the Rizzari Housebound were in regular contact when Tiamat
lived in Chicago, enough so I was able to learn of their connection in my short chats with her.  And I…”

“Short chats
!” Sky’s rejoinder almost sounded like a squeak. “Sorry again.”

“Tiamat and the Skinner were also still exchanging information.”

“You’re trying to tell me something, aren’t you,” Sky said.  “Accouché!  This is why my Canadian Foyer acquaintance wanted me to talk to you.  She saw something, dammit.”  Pause.  “So, tell me already.”

“Can I ask a question, first, about your interest in the Rizzari Housebound?”
Gilgamesh said.  “I read about your mutie-mill mission, but I can’t imagine the mission was the only reason you visited her.”  The exploit that stuck most in Gilgamesh’s mind was the incident with the frozen swimming pool.

Silence.

“The way you wrote about the frozen swimming pool incident makes me wonder if the reason you’re visiting includes romance.”