All Beasts Together (The Commander) (34 page)

Bill whirled past Parker, dribbling around him, and went to the hole.  Two points. 
Zielinski fidgeted restlessly with his camera as he watched, worried that his inexperience with training was still his biggest obstacle.  He had picked up some practical training techniques from watching Keaton at work with Hancock in St. Louis and from his time in the army, but all his other expertise came from what he had learned here, in Inferno.  He set the focus and aperture and snapped a few pictures for his albums.  He always tried to collect pictures of the people he worked with, and they did help his research.

Parker Maybray snagged the ball, dribbling like the fiend he was.  Parker was 16, not yet fully grown, a student being home-taught in the household as well as a bodyguard trainee.  Parker was extremely well muscled for a kid his age and his development hadn’t been constant over the
last three months.  He improved, though.  Something in the way Parker improved held the secret.  Zielinski just couldn’t find it.

He
picked up his paperwork from atop the vaulting horse and tried to make the numbers make sense.  Something in the data from the younger Transforms didn’t match what he measured with the older Transforms.  He got out his ruler and lined up points.  Yes!  The curve showed a time dependence here, but what sort of time dependence?  He tried alternatives until he ran out of ideas, but the only consistent shape followed the days of the week.  Bah.  Nonsense.  He might as well be doing astrology.

He went back to another graph, for Amy, and lined the ruler up. 
Of all things, it had the same approximate slope.

The juice versus weekday slopes
differed from Transform to Transform, though.  That’s why he hadn’t seen it before.  He snagged three graphs in the process of falling off the vaulting horse, checked his other records against Parker’s and Amy’s, and saw something: the older the Transform, the flatter the slope, masking the time dependence correlation.  Older Transforms used juice at a slightly smaller rate than younger Transforms.  If he factored in Transform age and sex as dependent variables, what fell out was a funny bend in the curve right around Tuesday, a bend that shouldn’t be present at all.

His hands
tingled with excitement.  Somewhere in that funny bend in the curve lay the connection between his hypothesis and statistics to the real world of training.

“Amy,” he called out.  Amy came over from where she was working on a complicated dance routine with Einstein.  Amy was cute, lost, bright, and too young for
full-bore weight training, only thirteen.  She was a foster child of Forrest and Shelly Darcie, a Transform abandoned by her family after she transformed.  Amy had instantly acquired the reputation as a
bad girl
and skipped from household to household until she arrived at Tonya’s place in Philadelphia for some hard-ass juice conditioning.  Tonya showed some sense for once and refused to subject a twelve year old girl with suicidal tendencies to the same juice conditioning Tonya used to break twenty and thirty something hard-case male Transforms.  Instead, Tonya called Lori, and Lori dropped everything to hurry down and interview Amy.  They had gotten along well, as Lori wasn’t at all thrown by the brilliant young Transform girl.  Amy had been a part of Inferno ever since.

“Yes,
Doc?”

“
I need a blood sample, then some juggling practice.  I’m going to try something; I hope you don’t mind too much.”

Amy frowned.  “You know I’m terrible at juggling.  What are you thinking of trying?”

“Stress.”  It had to be both stress and juice levels.  “This isn’t going to be pleasant.”

She tousled his
ever-thinning hair.  “Go ahead, Doc.  Juggling practice drives me to tears, anyway.”

They
claimed the tumbling area and everyone stopped to watch.  Zielinski critiqued her nastily, paced around her, gave her instructions in the middle of her tosses and clapped his hands to distract her.  He even stuck his hands in front of her eyes to make her drop the bean bags.  Within minutes, tears leaked down her face and she was giving lip to Zielinski as good as she got from him.  Jim frowned, unhappy at his abuse of the young girl, and Parker’s hands twitched as if he wanted to throttle Zielinski, but neither interfered.  “Half hour.  I just need a half hour,” he said, when she started muttering words inappropriate for a young girl and threw one of the bean bags at his stack of papers on the vaulting horse.  The cold January air circulating through the gym only made her efforts worse.

When he finally called a stop to the procedure, Amy collapsed in tears with her head in her hands
and Parker walked over and sat by her with a glare at Zielinski.  At one point about three quarters of the way through he thought she almost got it for a brief moment, even with his harassment, but she lost it again.  Zielinski took another blood sample and ran both through the juice sampler.  Right down through the Tuesday levels.  He wrote down the results and asked Einstein, the normal kid on clerk duty for him, to go get the Focus.  This was important.

Lori normally spent early Sunday afternoons in seclusion and woe to anyone who interrupted her thinking and meditation.  Einstein would be okay; if Lori didn’t consider
the interruption sufficiently important she would take her anger out on Zielinski, hopefully by assigning him more work.  Neither Lori nor Connie understood how much they underutilized him.  Working only as hard as the rest of Inferno was a vacation for him; whatever criteria Lori used for cherry picking her household Transforms, far-end workaholic wasn’t one of them.

Watching the faces of the Transform trainees as they tried to figure out what the crazy doc was up to this time, he was able to pick out when Lori came into the gym without
turning.  He timed it perfectly, assuming she would be peeved and long striding just about to…

“Breakthrough,” he said, and turned to Lori.  “Transforms have a training optimum and
I know how we’re going to find it.”

Lori stopped cold, only a few feet away.
  “Tell me what to do,” she said.  She seemed bleary, distracted, her mind not at all engaged.  Her presence reminded him of a lesser Focus, one whose household wheeled out of her closet to move the juice once a day, touching one triad at a time.

“How exactly can you control someone’s juice levels?”
he asked.

She rubbed her temples for a moment
to gather her thoughts.  “I can sense down to four one thousandths of a point, if I use feedback juice pattern 52.”

Zielinski blinked in surprise
.  It took a full lab juice reader to measure so precisely.  A Focus able to control juice to that precision shocked him.  “Einstein, go wheel over the portable EKG unit,” Zielinski said.  “Amy, we’re going to wire you up again.”

She looked up at him, wiping tears from her eyes. 
“Didn’t we do this last week, Doc?”

He nodded.  “Lori,
would you set up that juice pattern, please?  Between your charisma, the EKG and the juice level, we should be able to find the optimum rather quickly, now I know what I’m looking for: minimum juice use at a constant training effort.”

They put the electrodes on Amy’s head.  “What am I going to train this time?”

Parker frowned.  “You don’t have to do this, Amy.”  She shrugged.

“Same as before,” Zielinski said. 
Now Amy frowned.

“Okay.  Let’s make this more interesting, since we have a crowd
: three person juggling exchanges between you, me and Parker.”

“You?  You juggle,
Doc?”

“You’ll see,” Zielinski said.  He tried not to smile.  He didn’t like to talk about his own talents, but surely someone besides Lori should know his original medical specialty had been surgery, a subject he
had
taught
at Harvard as recently as eighteen months ago.  Juggling was one of the standard maintenance techniques he used to keep his hands and mind on the same page.

They juggled.

Lori adjusted juice and watched Amy’s face.  Zielinski did behind the back and under the legs juggling passes, showing off and having a wonderful time doing so, all the while watching the EKG.

“There,” Lori and Zielinski said, together. 
They ran the exercise through the same point five more times, to make sure they had the right number.

“Thirty seven percent of the way between the functional optimum and the stimulation optimum,” Zielinski said.  He felt like dancing.  He
had cracked it.  He really cracked it.  Three months of work, depression and stress, but he had cracked one of the biggest discoveries since Anne-Marie learned to move juice.

“You
’re really going to be able to improve Transforms because of all that you did to me?” Amy asked.

“Yes, we really are.”

You want to train a Transform?  You have to stick their juice numbers at the training optimum or they don’t train well at all.  They trained worse than a normal if the numbers were well off the optimum, and when far off the optimum, training ate juice like an Arm ate breakfast.

Lori walked around like a zombie, shaking her head
in disbelief.  He couldn’t blame her.  He had worked hard, for three months, to crack this tidbit of Transform life.

In this time he could have trained two baby Arms to viability, if he had the Arms and the access.

“We need to make sure it’s the same for everybody.  Your turn, Jim.”  Jim walked over, gave Zielinski the fish eye.

“How yah gonna torture me,
Doc?”

“Flat footed baskets from a moving cart,” he said.  Jim winced.

---

Lori walked with Zielinski around the back of the estate.  Silent, deep in her thoughts,
she clearly wrestled with something important.  Cold drops from the morning’s rain dripped from the trees and Zielinski put his hands under his armpits to keep them warm.  The rain hadn’t quite washed away the snow and now the temperature plunged again.  They would probably get snow again tonight.

Before
the walk she had focused her mind enough to cook up an elaborate juice pattern to allow one of her leadership crew to set a Transform at the training optimum when she wasn’t present.  By setting the juice level with a juice pattern instead of in person the efficiency was terrible, which limited use to only three trainees at a time, and only six juice resets a day.  Zielinski hung on her every word as she had explained, as juice patterns were normally a top-secret talent of the Focuses, not one he had ever penetrated in depth.  He hadn’t known juice patterns could be triggered by Transforms, or by code words uttered by people like him.  These patterns weren’t a panacea.  For instance, if Lori didn’t reset the patterns weekly they would fall apart.  You couldn’t run a household without a Focus, no matter what tricks you tried.

The Focus wore her ever
-present shorts and halter top.

“What’s
bothering you, Focus?” Zielinski asked.

The Focus
didn’t answer.  Zielinski let her think, brood, and stew.

“Have you ever wanted to just kick yourself?” Lori said, about five minutes later
, as they passed the cabana for the third time.

“Many times,” Zielinski said.  “Most recently, when dealing with the Arms.”

“I didn’t think your idea would work.”

Zielinski winced.  “Why
did you let me try, then?”

“I thought
it would keep you occupied until something real came up.”

A shiver ran through him
.  “You thought you’d figured out as much as there was to figure out on the subject, didn’t you?”

Lori
nodded, picked up a wad of soggy snow, made a snowball, and launched it at a fence.  It fell short.  “Why do you keep working on the Arm problem like you have, year after year, failure after failure, when you could just sit back and rip off discovery after discovery about Focuses and Transforms?”

“You, my grad students, my wife, my dean
, half a dozen colleagues, and even Keaton have all asked me the same question: why not stay with Focuses?”  Zielinski smiled.  “My answer is always: if not me, then who?  The catty answer is that it’s too dangerous with the first Focuses suppressing research.”

“But?”

Zielinski shrugged. “You already know the real answer: your cause.  All of the Major Transforms need to get on their feet and contribute before the Apocalypse point arrives, before the number of Transforms take off.  The Arms are a huge piece of the puzzle.  What use is an Arm, anyway?  Why should Arms exist?  Nothing as improbable as an Arm should exist in nature.  If you and Van Reijn’s theories are correct, Arms evolved, or were domesticated, if you look at it a different way, long after our ancestors learned to talk and had elaborate social organizations.  Consider how tricky it is to develop an Arm to maturity.  Their worth has to be commensurate to the pain the Arms, and those helping them, go through.”

He couldn’t even put into words how much he wanted to be out helping Carol.

“Yet you failed.  The system destroyed you.”