No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) (15 page)

He didn’t mean to blurt that out.  Right after Thomas the Dreamer told him to be secretive.  Had he fallen for the tiny Focus’s charisma?  That was easy to believe.  He found her quite likeable.  Her personality was as magnetic as her glow.

“Hold on,” Focus Rizzari said, more forceful.  “When did this killing start?”

“After the Philadelphia Massacre.  I think the mastermind behind it is the Beast Master of the Beast Men, who Carol knows as Officer Canon.  I also think Officer Canon and those Beast Men are behind the tagged Transform kidnappings you Focuses are so worried about.  Stacy Keaton shares my views on the subject, but neither of us has any real data to back it up.”

The Focus bit her lip.  “So they can sneak up on Crows as well.  I didn’t think anyone could sneak up on a Crow.”

“Neither did the Crows,” Gilgamesh said.  “Wait.  As well?  The Transform kidnappers are using Transform stealth tricks?”

“Yes.  In several cases the Transforms were kidnapped from within a Focus’s metasense and eyesight range.”

Gilgamesh tried to contain his glee.  A real, obviously relevant piece of information!  Maybe this questioning business would work, despite his doubts.

---

The Focus led him up the stairs.  The crowded second floor averaged more than two beds a room.  Whole families lived in rooms set up for a single child.  Still, crowded rooms beat camping out in the hallways and back yards, as some Transforms did in some Focus households.  “This isn’t what I expected.”

“The crowding, or the lack of crowding?” Lori said.

“The lack of crowding.”  He looked around.  “Four bathrooms?”  They had carved two from a single bathroom, the others likely linen closets before their conversion. They were all tiny.  He stuck his head into one and marveled at the architecture.

“Fold down sinks?”  They did amazing work in this household.

Gymnast sighed.  “They leak.  As an invention they work, but I don’t think we’re going to be selling them on the open market any time soon.  The rubber pipes need replacing every four months from all the use.”

“I could probably design you a folding commode able to fit in a shower, if you’re interested.  Save you some more space,” Gilgamesh said.  The Focus put her hands on her hips and glared at him.

“That isn’t funny,” she said.  Her glow now colored with annoyance; she thought he mocked her house’s problems.

“I hadn’t thought of this before, but there’s a huge opportunity waiting for someone interested in re-engineering American houses to fit the needs of Transform households,” Gilgamesh said.  “In my former life I was an industrial engineer; these days” he sighed “I’ve been reduced to repairing appliances for a living.”

Gymnast froze for a moment and cocked her head.  “I only know two Crows who aren’t artists, and you’re both considered adventuring Crows.  This can’t be a coincidence.”

“Plenty of Crows aren’t artists,” Gilgamesh said.  “Most are street bums or living off the land.  All Crows start as bums, because of the panic.  We learn to live off the land, or, well, we don’t.  Many get used to living off the land and never go back.  I once considered a restaurant’s dumpster as my territory because of their high quality garbage.  Early on I considered a reasonably clean and dry culvert to be my home.”

The Focus turned away, not answering.  Gilgamesh thought he heard a surreptitious sniff.  “I’ve done it again, haven’t I,” she said, after a couple minutes.  “I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to avoid sticking my foot in my mouth when Crows are around.”

“No need to apologize.”  He realized Focuses must have as much difficulty dealing with Crows as the Crows had with them.

She stalked off down the hall, waving for him to follow.  “Yes, there is.  I keep forgetting that no matter how bad off Focuses and Transforms are, you Crows have everything worse.”  The hall ended in a tiny room, immaculate, richly appointed, but still miniscule.  Gymnast entered the room and folded down a child sized Murphy bed.  She sat down on it and let her emotions roil inside her while keeping a pleasant smile on her face.  “This is my room.”

The room itself wasn’t a converted closet, as Gilgamesh first thought, but a converted end of a hallway.  Take a hallway that ended with a window, and block off the end and convert the space to a room.  Add a Murphy bed, a fold out desk, a folding chair, stick storage up high where someone as short as Lori couldn’t reach without standing on a chair, and this was what you got.

His heart ached for her, and some Crow instinct surfaced from the depths and longed to comfort her, bring beautiful order back to her currently roiled glow.  Gilgamesh sat down beside her on the tiny bed and patted her shoulders.  She turned to him and her emotional roil went crazy, chaotic, beyond Gilgamesh’s understanding.  The false smile on her face broke and a couple of tears seeped out of her left eye, but he didn’t see sadness, just mixed hope and joy.  She took his hands in hers; when he didn’t flinch or back off, she moved over next to him and hugged him tightly.

He stroked her back and held her, and found tears streaking down his own face.  Her emotions quieted, as did her glow, now echoing his compassion.  It was comforting to hold her like this, to be able to give comfort to someone else.  So many of his Crow instincts were so selfish; he was pleased to discover that he had instincts urging him to help someone else.  Caring for her made him feel warm inside.  He had been so lonely for so long.

“I’m not sure where that came from,” she said, in a whisper.  “I’m not living up to my reputation as a hard case Focus.  In fact, if you divide Focuses into nasty Focuses and nice Focuses, I’m one of the nastier of the sorry lot.  Most of the time, when I look at myself in the mirror, I see a monster.”

“All Transforms do, Focus Rizzari,” he said.

“Please, call me Lori.”  She gave his right hand a quick squeeze.

“Lori,” he said.  “I think all the Major Transforms hate themselves.  We rely too much on our instincts and our reliance reflects badly in the mirror of civilization.”

She nodded against his chest and snuggled closer.  She seemed almost to purr with pleasure from his comfort.  “Our instincts can save us when things get dangerous,” she said. “But we aren’t primitive humans any more.  We can choose to ignore our instincts and act in a civilized manner.”

“Not many Major Transforms have learned how.”

She took her head from his chest and looked up into his eyes.  “I’m lost, Gilgamesh.”  Her warm brown eyes drew him in.  He nodded, not understanding, but sympathetic all the same.

“I used to have everything under control, my head, my heart, my emotions, the juice.  I knew what I was doing.  I had this Focus thing down cold.  Then Sky came along and tore my life apart.”

Before he transformed, Gilgamesh had been married.  He knew the proper answer to Lori’s statement was a grunt of encouragement.

“Now the responsibilities I’d juggled so easily before are starting to crush me.  My Professorship has turned into a political nightmare.  For the first time since I started the Cause I’m actually driving more people away from Inferno than I’m attracting.  I’ve long been the aloof Focus, watching from a distance as my people dealt with their relationships, but I find I can’t stay aloof any longer and I’m having trouble coping.”

Gilgamesh understood.  Major Transforms were the ultimate voyeurs.

“Lori, you do know you’re pregnant, don’t you?”

She nodded.  “My problems started before I got pregnant.  You could say I got pregnant because of them.”

Uh oh.  Gilgamesh realized he had walked into a morass.  Those weren’t the words of a woman missing the father of her unborn child, those were the words of a woman who had decided to break up with her man.  Now he remembered where he had seen Lori’s vacant stare before.  He had seen the stare on Carol whenever someone mentioned Focus Rizzari.

Oh, hell, the Focus had fallen for him.  Sky was going to kill him!

His realization should have had him panicky and fleeing, but something about Lori’s arms around him quelled his panic.  Had he fallen for her, too?

“We both see a bit of Carol in each other, don’t we,” Gilgamesh said.  His separation from Carol created an unfillable hunger, along with an aching sadness and an occasional urge to find a safe place and scream in agony at the unfairness of the universe.  He had just gotten his Tiamat back, dammit!  He wanted to be with her.

So, he guessed, did Lori.

Lori wiggled around and looked into his eyes.  Held the look for a long moment, and looked away, her face flushed, her breathing ragged.  “When I met Carol for the second time, after Sky did to me whatever he did, I was entranced.  I’d never met another Major Transform who had the same spark I have inside me, the unnamed thing which makes me different.  You have the same spark, as well.  It’s irresistible, this need to associate with others like yourself.”

“When I metasensed Carol’s glow for the first time I thought she was a goddess.  Much of the time I still do.”

Lori rearranged herself back to her original position, with her head no longer on his chest.  She didn’t attempt to wiggle free of his arm.  “We’re all being messed up by the juice.  Like that never happens.”  She slapped his knee.  “Okay.  Tell you what.  I apologize for my bad behavior.  I’ll be a good girl from now on.  Really.  I promise.  I’m glad you held me, though.”  She turned and smiled at him with her hypnotic eyes aglow, stood and took him by the hand.  Her masks settled back into place, his ability to sense her emotions gone again.  “You want to see some more of Inferno, Gilgamesh?”

“Yes, of course.”

Lori continued the tour of her household, introducing him to her Transforms one at a time.

He recognized the third, which led to a humorous exchange.

“You?” she, Sadie Tucker, said, echoing his “You?” at her.

The trim thirty five year old woman bounded up to Gilgamesh, twirled him in the air and set him down before he could react.  Last time they had met, eighteen months ago, she had been eighty pounds heavier.  She had changed in many ways, all for the better.  “Focus!  Gilgamesh is the young Crow I met during the Rover capture,” Sadie said.  She smiled at him, not letting go.  “I apologize, but because of my dross leak I’d forgotten your name by the time I got home.  Which put me in quite a bit of hot water.”

“No need to apologize,” Gilgamesh said.  “You helped keep me sane in an impossible situation.”

“So you were knee deep in problems even back then,” Lori said.  “Nice to know this quirk runs in the family, Gilgamesh.”  Which didn’t quite make sense to him.

Lori continued on, now with Sadie leading the way to introduce him to the household.  He got to meet a few of the other people who lived in Inferno.  They seemed pleasant.  A little strange, especially the two women Transforms dressed up like apprentice knights, battering each other with rattan swords wrapped in duct tape.  But nice.  While they wandered, they exchanged vignettes from their life stories.  Both Lori’s and Sadie’s were amazing.  They both thought his was, as well.  Of all things the Good Doctor, Tiamat’s researcher friend Zielinski, had lived in Inferno for a while and had discovered a way for Transforms to improve their abilities a significant amount by specialized training.  “Doc Pain’s training tricks also make for a wonderful weight loss program,” Sadie said.  “If I could just convince the rest of Inferno that I don’t want to use my meager physical skills to hit people, things would be even better.”  Gilgamesh easily sympathized.

When he left that night, after they fed him an impossibly huge meal, Lori cornered him on the way out of her estate.  “Don’t forget to write.  Or call,” she said.  “Think wizard.  Or shaman.  Or mystical wise man.  The Crow archetypes in our mythology all point that way.”

“The myth hypothesis,” Gilgamesh said, recognizing it from discussions with the Skinner.  “If this is true, then I chose the wrong name for myself.”  Luckily he hadn’t met the scary anthropologist Ann Chiron, who he was more afraid of than the Focuses he knew of.  Sky had written Chiron was a master of disguise.

“Oh, I’m not so sure about that.”  The look in her eyes was quite explicit.  She liked him, more than just from a crazy juice effect.  “You’re not just a Crow adventurer.  You are a true Crow hero.”

Lori gave him a quick hug and a kiss on his cheek as she sent him on his way.  He strode off into the night with a whistle on his lips and an unexpected bounce in his step.

Part 2
Regeneration

Withered is the grass

he used to tread,

and frost is laid upon the path,

erasing all his tracks.

– #1335 of the Shin Kokinshu

Chapter 5

Gunfire in Cornfield Mystifies Neighbors

For the last week sporadic gunfire has been heard near Fox River Grove (a small village northwest of Chicago).  Residents report that at times it sounded like a target range in use, yet the area where the gunfire came from is a cornfield bordering an unused often flooded wooded river bottom area.

“Hunter Activity Near Chicago and Media Responses”

The Letters: May 1968

Dear Focus {}

I am Arm Keaton.  I currently live in California, in the Bay Area.  With the tacit support of my Network contact Focus Lupe Rodriguez I am passing along to you the phone number of a message service you can use to get into contact with me, as well as a post office box number if you wish a more confidential form of communication.  I cannot guarantee I will respond to all missives, as I am just one person with limited resources.  However, I am willing to offer my services to those of like minds and goals.  I am aware that Focus Households possess limited resources, and so I am offering my services at a discount relative to what I charge non-Focuses.  Do be aware the national authorities consider me a criminal, so contacting me is not without risk.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Stacy Keaton

Dear Gilgamesh,

Thank you for your letter.  Instead of having SK read it to me, I went and recruited someone for the job.  Her name is Frances, a skittish young woman of the night with a Crow-like personality.  She’s a hippie, or was; she was a drug addict on the big spiral down until I fixed her.

Hi.  Boss said I should put some of my own story in here as well.  I was bad off when she found me and saved me, hooked on the hard stuff.  Now my needle tracks are healing and Boss thoughts are filling in the gaps in my head.  I got to meet the Boss’s boss to talk about some acquaintances who had some incorrect ideas about Arms.  She’s very scary.  Boss is having me go to night school and learn accounting.

My first mission for SK, after I got tagged, was to deliver some legal documents to your old friend Focus Gladwrap.  Because of my difficulties around Transforms we had to meet at a neutral location, a commandeered park.  I almost messed up and got Arm angry when this Focus demanded I submit to a strip search and body cavity search.  I pulled it off, I’m not sure how.  Diplomacy is difficult for me.  Anyway, I got to bring back more legal problems to SK than I went with, all due to the Focus, not me.  It’s my opinion Focus Gladwrap is being willfully obnoxious about these legal issues as a way to make life difficult for us Arms and get us to move.  However, if more of the junior Focuses had her stubborn personality I doubt we’d be having the problems we’re having now.

Anyway, I’m off to be a hippie, my next mission for SK.

Love,

Carol

Dear Shadow,

Regarding a certain three Crow tune I was asked to look into, and upon the advice of Thomas the Dreamer, I decided to travel the country gathering information about the lives of Crows, so I can write a book about how we can live better.

I beseech you to spread the word among the Crows that I am traveling the country to ask their opinions and advice on this subject, and that I mean no harm to them at all.  A few more addresses and locations of Crows who might be willing to talk to me would also be appreciated, if you don’t mind.

My path so far has taken me west from New England, through upstate New York, western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin, which is where I pen this letter.  I find establishing contact to be quite difficult and the locations of Crows quite extraordinary.  Cleveland, for instance, has no Crows, while Detroit has many.  I had expected to find Crows only in the large cities, but some smaller towns, like Akron and Lafayette Indiana, have several.

The most surprising thing I discovered is the number of Crows who have little or no contact with other Crows.  Many say they have no names and live in conditions I might charitably describe as deplorable.  I expected to find these Crows were all skittish, and was surprised when I found not all of them were.  One Crow vaguely recalled he had been skittish after transforming, but after three years, had mostly forgotten he had ever been skittish.  This particular Crow did not know of Beast Men or Arms, as he procured his dross only from Focuses.  “I have no name.  I live through Transforms who know not of my existence,” he said, referring to the Focus household.  I asked him why he did not introduce himself to them, and he just looked at me in a bewildered fashion, and said “Look at me!  My clothes are rags from the town dump.  I eat garbage.  I can’t remember the last time I washed.  It would break my heart if they knew I existed.”

It breaks
my
heart to meet Crows like this.

There is a dreary sameness about the Crows I meet.  They eat, they sleep, they take dross.  Most own pets, most commonly large dogs.  Few write letters.  The ones who write letters often refuse to speak to me in person, almost as if they used up their entire desire to socialize through their letter writing.  To them, I am dangerous.  Watchmaker, in Detroit, actually pulled a gun on me and told me he would kill me unless I left his turf.  His turf!  As if he was an Arm or something.  He had been so sociable in his letters, yet to my face, he said I was the greatest danger he knew of.  “Let what is, be.  Crows’ lives are their own to live, no one else’s.”  He hides in plain sight, living next door to a Focus household, and taking dross from the nearby Focus as well as the senior Detroit Focus.  The Focus he lives near, Hargrove, is doing something to herself to make herself ignorant of his existence.  All to protect herself from the senior Focuses.

In South Bend, Indiana, I found a Crow named John Kincaid, who kept as his identity his birth name.  He works at a factory and found a way to keep his twenty years of factory seniority, despite his transformation.  During his transformation, he got himself put on extended sick leave and concealed the fact he was a Transform.  Later, he passed himself off as a type of Transform called a Goldilocks, which does not need the support of a Focus.  I’d never heard of them before but a pleasant phone call to Focus Rizzari convinced me they are real.  He lives in a Focus household (a legal requirement) and he cleans up their dross.  He says the household is so bad he cannot keep it clean, even from the inside, but at least they aren’t forced to move as often as the other Focuses.  His Focus, Focus Richie, is a walking disaster who spends all her life second-guessing herself and meddling disastrously in the lives of her people.  She has no idea he’s a Crow.  She thinks he’s a ‘worthless good for nothing Goldilocks’.  His paycheck goes to Focus Richie, and when he gets home, he does chores.  Chores!  I can see why this masquerade is not popular among Crows.  Kincaid fears the Crow Killer and also the Arms, who he still believes are behind the Transform killings also occurring in the past several months.

I picked up no news of Beast Men among those I talked to.  However, no Crows live in Chicago, and the stench of Beast Men in the Chicago area is immense.  I fear the Beast Master and his Beasts use Chicago as their personal territory and have chased all the Crows away.  A Crow I met in Milwaukee named Ten Dog (named for the pack of dogs he leads) thought the Beast Men all lived to the far west, on the high plains and in the Rocky Mountains.  I couldn’t bear to tell him about Chicago.

All for now, and thanks again for the help.

Gilgamesh

SK

I am well and gathering information, although my Crow mission goes slowly.  I found one of the things on your interest list to pass along to you: a previously unknown top end Focus.  Her glow is more complex than Focus B or Focus R and is nearly Arm bright.  Only there’s a big problem: she only transformed about a month ago.  As you surmised, the Focus census I’m compiling does show that the older the Focus, the more degraded their glows.  The Focus in question just moved herself and her household to a farm near Ann Arbor, Michigan.  As this is one of your areas of interest, you might wish to check out this Focus.  Excuse my compassion.

I also checked out Detroit, as you asked.  I don’t believe the cantankerous chief Detroit Crow is behind Detroit’s twitchy feeling (which I also get).  I believe it is a Focus, one named Tar Baby by the Detroit Crows, and who the Focus registry lists as Winifred Adkins.  Her household is suffused with sludge dross and my instincts scream at me to stay away, but the feeling is ‘danger’, not ‘evil beyond compare’ (as in Pittsburgh).

Chicago is worse, enough to panic me, even after your training.  I’ll get into the Chicago details when my panic recedes, but I suspect you can likely predict what I might tell you without much work.

Helpful Crow

Gilgamesh

You are having quite an adventure, aren’t you!  I’m doing well, although SK just got a chance to correctly punish me for the first time based on what the Arm tag allows (the reason was incorrect Arm deportment; I came to her place in my hippie garb instead of proper clothing).  You remember my punishments in Philadelphia.  Frances is not happy; like nearly all of my recruits she fears for my safety.  I find this strange.

I completed three more missions for SK, two involving the youth movements.  The most interesting had me joining a band of roving anti-war protesters.  Even with my current problems I’m a much better public speaker than before I transformed.  I still can’t read, though.  The most difficult mission involved assuming the identity of a SDS member (a man) to try and figure out why the Arms are being mentioned in SDS literature.  It turns out a minority group within the SDS (of the more violent sort) decided us Arms are fellow revolutionaries and working on spreading anarchy and overthrowing the government of the United States.  I’m not sure what to make of the fact that quite a few casual SDS members became Arm supporters simply because we ‘stick it to the Man’.  SK is fine with the latter but considers the former a major threat we (actually, she; as head Arm this is personal for her) need to neutralize.  Expect violence.

Good luck with your trip out this way.  Miss you!

Love,

Carol

Carol

I hope this finds you well.  The reason I’m writing is to officially announce my candidacy for Council Representative for the Northeast Region.  Also, Focus Florence Ackermann has declared her candidacy for President for the Northeast Region.  In addition, Flo, myself and nine other local Focuses passed along to the Council a list of demands, which if not met will force us to leave the UFA (United Focuses of America) and join the ISF (International Sisterhood of Focuses).  These demands are:

Formal recognition that Male Major Transforms exist and are worthy of contact.

Formal recognition that some of the Chimeras are enemies of all other Major Transforms.

A lifting of the ban on Focus and Household research, development and dissemination in the area of improving the ability of Focuses to support more Household Transforms; and in the area of improving the lives of Household Transforms.

The establishment of a more vigorous and complete Focus mentoring program, transparent, and better suited to aid the new Focuses.

The establishment of open accounting practices regarding the collection and use of Council dues.

The use of independent outside authorities in all voting for regional offices.

An invitation to all Major Transform varieties for observer status with the Focus Council.

In my opinion these are all necessary steps crucial to the survival of Transforms in America.  Wish us luck in our endeavor.

Best regards,

Lori

CC Stacy, Gilgamesh, Shadow

Stacy,

The three boxes accompanying this letter are the information you requested on Focuses Patterson, Schrum, Trail, Keistermann, Roscoe, Crushank, Abernathy (currently missing), Untermeyer, McWill, and O’Donnell.  Thank you very much for the information you sent regarding the West Coast Focuses.

I must admit I’m having second thoughts about what others are calling the Rizzari Rebellion, not because I think it’s wrong but because, despite the near unanimous support of all my household, I can’t help but worry about the danger I’m putting all of us in.  I know – “Focuses!”  I and my people have already received several direct and indirect ‘stop or die’ warnings about my ‘rebellion’; the expected petty harassment has already started, as within a week of my announcement five people in my household lost their jobs.  I am also under investigation at Boston College, although whoever prompted this does not understand how easily a person of my talents can stall such investigations.