All Beasts Together (The Commander) (24 page)

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“Okay.  Why did you pull me inside the gym?”  Sky asked.  The gym was a cold place, filled with weights and mats and acrobatic equipment, and empty of other exercise enthusiasts.

“The doctor
’s about to start his afternoon session with the young Transforms.”

“Does he have a name?”

“Not to you he doesn’t,” Ann said, adjusting the tension on the Nautilus machine.  “Here.  Pull like this.”  Curls.  Sky tried and barely moved the steel handle.  He tried harder and moved himself, not the device.

Ann covered a giggle.  “How do you hang on walls if you can’t do this?”

“Not with these muscles.”  Crows were like that.  If the muscle didn’t aid flight, it shrank.  Sky leaned back to rest.  He liked to take frequent rests, and there wasn’t much either Tim or Ann could do about it.  Of course, he had his reasons, like recharging his overused muscles with dross constructs.  He would need to go hunting for dross at this rate, difficult in a town with as many Crows as Boston seemed to boast.  Gads, the place was a zoo at night, especially with Occum and his beastly menagerie running around.  None of the Crows had come by to say hello, either.  Impolite cusses.

“So, if you don’t mind me asking, what’s with Focus Rizzari, anyway?  I can’t understand how she runs the household, or how she can get away with spending so much time away from here, or what’s with the touching business?”  Sky looked first at Tim, then at Ann.  Both of them did a good job with the blank expressions, not revealing anything. 
They looked at each other and, of all the impossible things, signaled each other with the juice.  Shouldn’t that need a Focus?

Tim shook his head.  “This is idiotic.  We can’t say anything about any of that.  You may be our friend today, but what about tomorrow?”

“I disagree,” Ann said.  “This is exactly what Lori wants us to do.”

“We’re making a mistake.”

“Don’t tell me, then,” Sky said.  He let the useless bar go.  It fell to the mat with a thump.  “I understand paranoia.  Nevertheless, the more you say, the more I’m bound to you. Can’t you sense the more I tell you, the more you’re bound to me?”

They both nodded, slowly.  Tim turned away slightly before he spoke.  “I don’t like it, Sky.  It’s, well, only the Focus can do things with juice.  Having someone else around who can do things with juice, consciously or unconsciously, is real disturbing.”

“Lori understands,” Ann said.  She called Lori by name, not just ‘The Focus’.  Ann’s tie to Lori was different from Lori’s tie to the rest of the household.  He wondered what it meant.

“She didn’t clear it with any of us ahead of time, though,” Tim said.  “That’s not like her.”

“If it’s going to bother you, Tim, I can fill Sky in.”

“I’d rather we cleared it with Connie, first.”

“No, no, no.  Connie isn’t going on this mission.  It’s our call, since Sky’s going to be our companion,” Ann said.

Sky
sat on a bench and buried his head in his hands, giving up on trying to make sense of Inferno.  The urge to go hide in the attic almost overwhelmed him.  He closed his ears to their argument and blanked his metasense to everything going on near him, concentrated on the outside world.

That’s strange, Sky realized.  One of the local Crows was sitting in his home, next to his typewriter, talking to no one at all.  That Crow was practically wedded to his typewriter.  He
had never talked to himself before, so Sky’s interest was piqued.  Sky cursed his inability, no matter what tricks he tried, to get his sense of hearing integrated into his metasense so he could hear conversations at range.

Ann tapped him on the shoulder.  “Anyone home?”

Sky returned to the present and immediate.  Tim was back inside the house, jawboning with Connie.  Inside a hundred meters, Sky’s metasense integrated with his hearing just fine and he heard every word of Tim’s conversation.

“Tim’s running perilously close to being taken off the mission,” Sky said.  “Connie thinks Tim’s being a prick.  She wants the both of you to learn as much about me as possible, even if
you have to tell me some of your household secrets.”  Sky decided to shut up, then, as Connie brought up bargaining chits Tim might offer, such as money.  Sky hadn’t thought of that.  He wondered if he should reveal his secrets for cash.  If he played this right, he could come back with over a year’s spending money for all of the households he worked with.

“You
’re about the most dangerous Transform I’ve ever run into,” Ann said, grinning, taking mental notes.  Okay, Sky asked himself.  What did he reveal this time?

Come to think of it, there was another, more catty, way of taking Ann’s statement.  She hadn’t meant it as a compliment, had she?

“Ah, mademoiselle Transform, I find myself humbled by your expertise and by the capabilities of your Focus, who is the most dangerous Transform I’ve ever run into.  There is beauty here, almost beyond intense, and I am smitten by it.  Yet, I must say, little here in this household matches my knowledge of how Focuses work.”  Sky had figured out, during one of his previous rests, he might be having one of those big fish in a small pond problems.  To him, with so few Canadian Focuses to deal with, Focuses weren’t particularly special or powerful.  Here, charisma ruled.  Lori’s charisma was the best he had ever seen.  Yet, Lori wasn’t a national political leader among the Focuses.  She was well down the food chain.  What did that say about the Focuses on the Council?  Gad.  What a joke his supposed top-end capabilities turned out to be.

“I wasn’t here,” Ann said, “but I’ve heard stories from Connie, who was here in the household back when the Cause started.  Lori was pretty rough when she started out.”

“Rough doesn’t do it half measure,” Tim said, coming through the door into the gym.  “I was the Focus’s second male Transform, back in ‘61, long before Connie joined.  I’ll tell you, God goofed when he allowed seventeen year olds to become Focuses.”

“Lori’s only 24?  She’s an Assistant Professor already?  That’s not possible!  I pegged her as about 30.”  Gong, went Sky’s newest dross construct,
silent to all but him.  Sky repeated his comment in English.

“She was something of a child prodigy and started college when she turned 14.”  Tim made a bag of pretzels appear from behind his back.  “Want some?”

Everybody dug in.  “Focus Rizzari didn’t want to be a Focus, much less a Transform,” Tim said.  “She took it out on her household; a tin pot dictator, but a perfectionist instead of a player of favorites.”

“Hellfire and brimstone Focus,” Sky said.  “I’ve heard of the type.  Group punishment and rewards?”

“Yes,” Ann said.  “She still works the same way, except I’m not sure what it would take these days to merit a group punishment.  Anyway…”

“Anyway, she graduated a year behind her self-appointed schedule in 62
and went to MIT for her PhD.  She finished in 65.  By then, she’d changed completely,” Tim said.

“How so?”

“Well, after she finished her Baccalaureate she spent the summer in the Radcliff chemistry and biology libraries.  Typical for her, she was working on her dissertation topic before she even started grad school.  Anyway, the Focus figured out some of what was going on as far as Transforms were concerned in ’63 and decided to get involved in Focus politics.  She was the life of the party, being so young and cute and naïve.  However, she was laying groundwork, because the next year, she got herself a position of responsibility.  Then, already deep into her research, she dropped some scientific proof on them of the existence of male Major Transforms.  The other Focuses swatted our Focus down like a bug.”

Hmm.  ‘63, eh?  Nearly five years later and they still don’t recognize us.  Sounds like a plot to me, Sky decided.

“After that, the Focus began to change the household.  I remember the night she came to us in October of ‘63, after three days of meditation and soul searching, and apologized for treating us so badly.  I’m still not certain why I was able to forgive her for what she’d done to me, but I did anyway.”

Sky didn’t have to ask.  He
had seen the tricks from other Focuses.  Given the darkness he had sensed in Lori, he believed them.  Juice torture as punishment for the entire group, withholding juice and keeping everyone stripped down to the edge of withdrawal.  Or, if she felt even nastier, pumping her entire household up to the edge of Monster and threatening to untag them all.  A few weeks of that sort of treatment and the household would literally kill any fellow household members who stepped even slightly out of line.

“How many died, Tim?” Sky asked, surprised to find his voice a low Crow whisper.

“The Focus killed one herself, a man who snapped because he couldn’t take the pressure and went after her with an axe.  The household drove a woman to suicide and sentenced another man to death after he messed up too many times: tied him up and dropped him in a vacant apartment to go into withdrawal.

“After the Focus apologized she appointed Dave Bile the household boss, gave him a six month term, and said the next household boss would be elected without her interference.  She also said she
wouldn’t use the juice as punishment anymore, and a Focus should never be the household head in any circumstances.”

“The Focus’s second household lasted only three months,” Ann said.  “Then she discovered the demographic catastrophe and Dr. Robert Masterson, who she recruited, as a normal, into the household.  After that, the Cause was born and her Transform trading days started.  Connie was Lori’s second Cause recruit, in 64,
right after Focus bitch Biggioni stuck us with Monster hunting duties to keep Lori occupied.  We didn’t finish putting the household together until Lori got her PhD in June of 65.”  A mere two and a half years ago.  Yes, thus the raw sense of newness to this household, despite Lori’s many years of experience as a Focus.

“We’re not sure, but
we think maybe the ice queen had an affair with Dr. Masterson,” Tim said.

“If they did,
they didn’t consummate it sexually,” Sky said.

“How in the
hell
do…” Ann stopped and quivered, getting a little less interested in jumping into bed with Sky tonight and causing Lori to blow a gasket.  “Our personal lives are open to you, Sky, aren’t they?”

“Only if I’m interested,” Sky said.  “Lori is more than a little intriguing.”

“Go after Lori if you can, Sky,” Ann said.  “She needs a little humanizing.  Tenderizing?  Hell, I’ve gone after her with the tenderizing mallet many times to no effect.”  The intimacy shocked him from a Transform about her Focus, but Sky heard in her voice the many times this conversation had been held, these lines spoken.  Things clicked.  It was the exasperation of an older family member for a wayward younger sibling.

“There’s little love in the Focus,” Tim said.  “Abstract, perhaps.  You’ll have to see one of our Friday nights to understand.  She’s a Focus bitch, but of course, she’s our Focus bitch.” 
There was little love in
him
for the Focus.  Respect, yes, but no love, all the result of his early years in the Rizzari Transform household.

“Mostly, we just tolerate her,” Ann said.  “We admire her, distantly, for what she’
s doing as a researcher, but despite how smart she is she’s wasting her life with her research.  The best thing the Focus has done for the world is to get our household together and let us run with the Cause.  We’re the ones who try to work with Crows, Arms, Chimeras and, the most dangerous of all, other Focuses.  Our Focus prefers cold dead Monster corpses.”  Ann paused.  “And she
still
has five hours left on her last bathroom cleaning assignment, and I refuse to cover for her again just because she has too much academic correspondence to deal with.”

Sky
turned away.  This was painful to listen to, almost too painful.  He knew of households who had enslaved their Focuses.  But why?  How?  In all the cases Sky knew, the households needed to restrain, physically, their enslaved Focuses.  Was her household blackmailing her?  Wielding some emotional club?

He couldn’t believe either answer.  Not for Lori.

No, Lori
let
her household enslave her.  Sky had no doubt if Lori wanted to, she could take over in but a few seconds.  With her charisma, she wouldn’t take more than a week
smiling at them
, to use the Canadian term for positive uses of Focus charisma, to have them loving her, kissing her feet, and following her every whim.  Instead, she let them hate her.

Did she need to be hated?
  Or was this an illusion, the same as the way she let her household believe they were the ones in charge of Major Transform politics?

Except
Ann’s tie to Lori had to be love, and with love, you opened up so many other possibilities for strong emotion: dependency, jealousy and sexual tension, to name a few.  Sky couldn’t get a feel for which of those strong emotions lay behind Ann’s comments.  Worth some study, though. “Perhaps,” Sky said, wincing in advance for the reaction he was certain to create.  “Perhaps you could just love her despite her rough edges.  Win her over.”

“We’ve tried,” Tim said.  “It doesn’t work.  There is no love, nor any tears, in the Focus.”  Ann nodded at Tim’s words, though Ann, unlike Tim, still had hope. 
She had seen some glimmers of love.