No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Seven) (16 page)

Gail hadn
’t ever stated the situation so baldly before, and really, she hadn’t even thought about the household politics in those terms, but it was true.

Van
turned to her.

“How do you feel about that?” he
said, a few minutes later.

“I hate it!”

Gail turned on her side again to face Van.  “I hate it.  They’ll vote for me because they’re afraid of me, or because they want to suck up, not because they think I’m right.  I get to have my way just because I’m the Focus.  Not because I’m better, or more experienced, or anything!  They just hand me all this power and I can’t get rid of it.  I’m not even sure it’s wrong to have this power!”

Van didn
’t say anything, and Gail turned on her back again.

“
Logically, I should back off, avoid interfering, stay politically neutral, and don’t throw my weight around at all.  Except when I did that before, it didn’t work.  Now I throw my weight around and everyone tries to keep me happy.  If I’m happy, they’re happy.  Except now I’m some sort of superior being, where my opinion counts and theirs doesn’t, and that makes everything just wrong.”

Gail looked up at the ceiling again.  A tiny spider laired over in the corner, just starting to spin a web. 
She saw one single star twinkling in the crack between two of the pieces of plywood.

“What are you going to do?” Van said
, with a curious and calculating tone she knew far too well.  The tone that often crept into his voice before he verbally laid someone out for being stupid.  “Are you going to back down?”

“
Me?” she said, softly. “No way.  I’m going to keep throwing my weight around.  I know it’s wrong, but at least this way I’m helping people.  And I can’t come up with any other solution.”  She didn’t want to talk about her hidden fears, that Virgil might be able to convince the rest of the leadership team to confine her, somehow.  To lock her away, to restrain her physically, to make sure no more votes happened.

Gail was desperately afraid
she had forced things too soon.  Virgil was going to do something.  He would have to; she had backed him into a corner.  She just didn’t know what he would do.  Her next step was obvious and terrifying – she would have to bring up the issue of the books in the next household meeting.  Perhaps the threat of a vote on the subject would get Virgil to back down.

Van didn
’t say anything.  He reached his hand over, and traced the line of her jaw with his fingers.

“Do you hate me very much?”
  Gail said.

“No
.”

“But I
’ve turned into such a bitch.”

“Shh,” he said.  “Shh.”

A month ago, when she said something like that, he would have held her, stroked her, told her he loved her.  This time, he held her.  He stroked her jaw.

But he said nothing of love.

Pain

(18)

“Hey, Syl,” Gail said, taking
a plate from the drying rack, drying it and putting it away.  “How’re you doing?”

Sylvie gave Gail a sidelong glance.  “Really?  When you
’re this friendly, Gail, you want something, so why don’t you go ahead and tell me what you want,” she said.  Gail didn’t answer, so Sylvie continued on as she washed the dishes.  “You didn’t used to pull this trick so much, before you became a Focus.”

Gail shrugged, able to read Syl
’s mind and finish her unfinished statement with a ‘and now you’re always doing this damned trick’.  She dried another plate and put it away, carefully nonchalant.

“Nor were you able to shrug off pokes and prods like I just made,” Sylvie said.

What did Van say, a few days ago?  Right.  ‘If something isn’t hard, it isn’t worth doing.’  She had wanted to smack him one, but after thinking about the philosophy behind his comment, she decided he might have a point.  “Before I was a Focus, I didn’t need to deal with people like Bart.”  Gail dried a soup bowl and put it away.  Once upon a time, this sort of manipulation might have bothered her, but now?  If the manipulation didn’t involve her Focus capabilities, her verbal tricks didn’t bother her at all.

“So, what do you want?”

Wasn’t I supposed to be the one taking the lead in this conversation, Gail wondered?  Well, this was why she wanted to rope in Sylvie.  “I’d like to talk to you in private.”  She had been studying how Van and Kurt managed to still get along with each other, despite the obvious problems.  Gail had decided their male knuckle-browed forthrightness, in normal circumstances pukingly offputting, might be beneficial in Gail’s current situation.  For one, her instincts said forthrightness wasn’t very ‘Focus’ at all, a major plus.

“Keep on wiping, Focus, and you have a deal.”

Sylvie wasn’t much into small talk these days, either.  Gail knew why.  Becoming a Transform had destroyed Sylvie’s life plans.  She had become harder and years older in the few months since she transformed.  Gail’s juice fumbling didn’t help, either.

“Wow. 
The tent.
  I’ve never been invited in here, before,” Sylvie said, trying for an artistic mixture of irony and sarcasm.  She looked around and sniffed.  “This place smells like Van’s old sweaty clothes.”  Gail noticed some of Van’s underwear hanging on the back of their ancient hand-me-down cedar chest, and furtively glided over to grab the offending briefs and toss them in their dirty laundry garbage bag.  They did need to do laundry again.  Sylvie smiled and looked away, almost knowingly.

Had Sylvie slept with Van before Sylvie found a way to introduce h
im to Gail?  Neither would say.  They did often give each other the eye, as if sharing secrets, and they also avoided body contact religiously.  Gail knew she had no reason to complain; she and Kurt had gotten to third base several times before they decided they weren’t romantically compatible, before Gail had met Sylvie and introduced her to Kurt.  Curiosity, though.  She was always a slave to curiosity.  She almost had to know, despite how dangerous such knowledge might be to their barely existent relationship.

“Save
the observations,” Gail said.  “I’ve got a problem.”

“Just one?”  Sylvie
’s attitude answered one of Gail’s worries, that Gail’s Focus-abuse of Syl had eroded Syl’s edge.  No, Sylvie was still Sylvie, thank God.

“Okay, I
’ve got an entire household of problems,” Gail said, giving Sylvie the eye.  Sylvie didn’t bat an eyelash at the implied insult.  “However, right this instant, I need some advice.”

“Ask away.  I
’m sure I won’t be able to help.”

Gail made a moue.  “I need a target for some experimentation.  Someone, a Transform, willing to sit still for some serious abuse, to help me understand what I
’m doing with the juice.  I think, if I did my research correctly, that I should be able to improve with practice and understanding, at least in some areas, in how I’m doing as a Focus.”  She pulled out a legal pad with almost twenty pages of notes, gleaned from Van’s research, the copies of the research made these days using Kurt’s secret petty cash supply, which Van had talked him out of, and which neither Kurt nor Van would say anything about.  Men.  Of which Gail had two, and wanted more.

Gail handed the legal pad to Sylvie.  Sylvie
sat on Van’s cot and read the first page slowly, the second page quicker, and just skimmed the next three before giving up.

“So, you
’re starting to make sense of the crap Kurt and I have been finding?” Sylvie said.  Van made ample use of Sylvie for his research, though he had made a few short choice Van-isms regarding Sylvie’s lack of resistance to distraction.

“Uh huh.”

Sylvie scanned the next half dozen pages.  “Damn.  Based on what Kurt and I found, I suspected we didn’t know shit about this shit, but now I think you’ve proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that we don’t know shit about this shit about this shit.”

Gail laughed at Sylvie
’s absurd statement and sat next to her on the cot.  “I’m beginning to think nobody does.  Which scares the crap out of me.  You should read the Philadelphia Daily News article Van found, about some Focus who managed to use her Focus tricks to somehow stop a riot in its tracks, like some crazy comic book superheroine.  I can’t do anything like that.  Hell, I can’t even convince Bart to let me go to the U of M library.”  Gail kept trying to fight off the overwhelming doubts, the tsunami of self-doubt about her worth, abilities and even potential as a Focus.  Some days she could barely force herself to get off her cot in the morning.

“I want to read this article,” Sylvie said.  “So, there are real shit-kicker Focuses?  Glad to know it
’s possible.”  Gail rolled her eyes at Sylvie’s obvious over-the-top insult.  “So, what are you looking for?  Volunteers?”

Gail nodded
and leaned forward intently.  “Ordering someone to be a guinea pig for my experimentation and practice would be wrong, and, well, given my track record as far as handling juice is concerned, potentially suicidal.  For them.  I mean, who am I to have the nerve to actually ask anyone at all to possibly…”

Sylvie frowned.  Hard.

Gail shrugged.  “I promise I’ll cry at their funeral, but I’m not even sure what else I could even offer.”

Sylvie frowned harder.

“Oh, right.  What I’m looking for is, well, um,” Gail said.  She had to look away.  “I’m looking for ideas about who I can hint at to volunteer.  Or get someone else to hint at to volunteer.  I don’t think I should flat-out ask for a volunteer.”  What she feared, if she asked, was an entire room full of Transforms volunteering, just because she was
the Focus
.  Ick and super ick.

“So, why are you asking me?” Sylvie said.  “I
’m a Transform, too, if by some strange chance you’ve forgotten.”

“Because you
’ve been, well, stern with me recently, so I trust you’re not going to fall for the ‘I must please the Focus’ routine.”  ‘Stern’ didn’t come close to describing Sylvie’s recent attitude toward Gail.  She seemed to have appointed herself to the job of getting in Gail’s face, regardless of what Gail did to Sylvie’s juice.

“I guess that makes some sense,” Sylvie said.  “Look no further.  I volunteer.”

The damned juice wiggled and did its thing, unbidden, ending with Sylvie pumped without Gail having to exert herself.  “Sylvie?”

“In fact, I
refuse
to let you even mention this to anyone else besides me, without my approval,” Sylvie said.  She got a look in her eye, a Sylvie look Gail had never seen aimed at her: the ‘cross me and I’ll punch out your lights’ look.  “I’m your volunteer.  Period.  End of question.”  Pause.  “The others aren’t even close to strong enough for what you want.”

Gail frowned, not sure she understood her old friend.  Even Sylvie
’s second statement shivered Gail’s juice.  Strange.  Unexpected.  “This is going to be painful, difficult and likely dangerous.  If what I’ve read is correct, I might find some way of slipping up and killing you.  For real.  No joke.”

Sylvie blew out a snarly breath of exasperation.  “As if.  I
’d throttle you first.”  She paused, reveling in the truth that she was indeed the proper person.  “So, do I get to see ahead of time what sort of abuse I’m signing up for, or are you just going to wing it?”

“Got it,” Gail said.  “Both the functional optimum at 22.2 and the normal point at 20.7 are sticky, at least somewhat.  I know where they are, now, and how to keep someone at these numbers, if I’m concentrating.”  If she set Sylvie’s juice to either, they stayed at these points for minutes on end, unlike any of the other juice settings.  Unless Gail’s emotions got in the way.  Despite all her practice, she couldn’t change in the slightest what her emotions did to her control over the juice.  “If these two numbers are real and not media disinformation, I can use them to calibrate the rest of the scale.”

“Gaah,” Sylvie said.  She held her head in her hands.  “Write this down.  If you haven
’t moved my juice for hours, the first time you yank it around quickly, if the juice is in this area, it’s actually pleasurable.  The second time it’s neutral.  Anything after the second time becomes unpleasant.  Like bad post-sex play.”  Pause, then quiet: “Get your hand away from there, I’ve already come three times, dammit.”

“I didn
’t need to hear that,” Gail said, muttering as she wrote down notes.  Sylvie’s explanation did carry an awful lot of emotional weight, giving Gail an empathic desire to avoid doing what Sylvie described with the juice.  “I’ll try and move the juice slower.”  Why did juice moving mirror sex so much?  Why hadn’t she been able to find word one about this in any of the crap articles she had read?  “Think calm thoughts.  It helps.”

Sylvie lay back on
Van’s cot and stared at the ceiling.  “Calm thoughts, she says.  You’re pulling my puppet strings and you want me to think calm thoughts?”

“You did volunteer.”

“I never said I wouldn’t grouse.”

Gail would have never asked.  Why ask for the impossible?  “Well, okay, my next calibration is going to be much worse.  I need to know where you end up when I do my thing, get emotional, and yank everyone
’s juice into the juice buffer.”

“You need help?”

“Help?”

“Getting you in the right mood.”

“Huh?”

Sylvie sighed.  “Gail, you
’ve got to be the most incompetent Focus this planet has ever produced.  I know tame rats who could do a better…”  Sylvie’s voice cut off.  “Owwwh!”

Well, if Sylvie wanted to get her in the right mood, she succeeded, Gail thought.  She concentrated, and visualized the thermometer scale she built in her mind.  “I
’ll be.  17.5”

“Which means,” Sylvie said, slowly and painfully.

“If my information is correct, 17.5 means ‘low juice’.  Withdrawal happens, for a Transform, at 15.5.  There’s an intermediate state they call ‘peri-withdrawal’ that starts at 15.9.  I think anything below 15.9 actually does damage to the Transform, so we won’t try that.  17.5 is the official boundary of what is called low juice, supposedly lying between 15.9 and 17.5.  Let’s see what lies below 17.5.  Ready?”

“We…”  Sylvie
’s voice cut out, replaced by an aching gasp.  She found her voice a moment later.  “Gail, you’re…oh, fuck.  Owwwwwwwh!”

Gail slowly lowered Sylvie
’s juice, searching for the 15.9 mark.  Something that caused real damage should be visible to her metasense…and it was.

“Holy mother of Hell,” Sylvie said, panting as if someone had broken her arm.  Gail agreed with Syl
’s comment.  She shared Sylvie’s pain, an unfortunately familiar feeling.  As well as another emotion that wasn’t a Sylvie echo, a scary feeling Gail, embarrassed, kept quiet about.

“Focus Adkins said I was supposed to take my people down
below
15.9, stripping them down to just above withdrawal, so they would know who’s boss.”

“You
’re boss!  You’re boss!  No arguments!  Just make this stop!” Sylvie said.

Sylvie
’s emotions got to Gail; before Gail could even think about moving the juice, the juice moved itself, taking Sylvie back to some random point above 17.5.  Gail marked the point in her mind, wondering why she automatically put Syl at this point.

“That
’s bad,” Sylvie said, after a minute of sobbing and clutching herself.  Gail tried to put her hand on Sylvie’s arm, instinctively knowing the body contact would help, but Sylvie batted her hand away with a strong slap.  “I take back everything bad I’ve said about you and your juice moving.  You could be doing much worse to us when you accidentally strip us.  You could put us below 17.5”

“I can
’t.  Not by accident,” Gail said.  “When I strip people accidentally, I strip until it hurts me.”

“Huh?” Sylvie said, her voice squeaking with surprise. 
“You feel what your crazy juice moving does to us?”

“Uh huh,” Gail said.  Needless to say, this sharing of her Transform
’s pain wasn’t something written up in any of the literature her research crew had found.  “I have enough low juice problems myself that I don’t need to be adding to them.  I feel something akin to a static shock when you hit 17.5, and then I stop.”