No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) (9 page)

“Zielinski,” I said.

“Bingo.  It took work to get him to help me: threats, sex, more threats, and dangling myself in front of him as a research subject.  I’d never run into anyone like him before; everyone else either folded when I confronted them or shot at me.  He bargained with me; hell, he’s never
stopped
bargaining with me.  He taught me how to read a juice meter and why I ended up so stupid and angry most of the time – I’d been keeping my juice count way too low, afraid of going Monster if it got too high.”

She sighed.  “He was the first normal who survived meeting with me.  With my juice high I could think again.  I figured out how to properly hunt, beat the muscle problems, and keep myself in money.”

This must be where she spent time as a Mafioso, something I had heard her reference once or twice beforehand.  This also had to be the period when she figured out how to control normals and build up a personal organization.

“Not too much later I blundered into a piece of hard-case Focus politics termed the Mary Beth Julius Rebellion.  I was sniffing around the edges of a Transform Clinic, one of my standard haunts back then, when a group of assassins left the Clinic with an unclaimed Transform as baggage.  I followed the assassins, their unclaimed Transform became
mine
, and they led me to their target, a Focus and her entourage.  I’d been looking for a way to make contact with the Focuses, as many of the established ones had Clinic contacts and some of the Focuses wanted me dead because of my Clinic kills.  I just wanted access to the unclaimed male Transforms left to die in withdrawal.

“So I decided to intercept the assassination squad.  Unfortunately, they were prepared to take out a Focus, which meant large caliber weapons, and I got shot up real bad.  Worse, the Focus’s bodyguards killed the unclaimed male Transform in the melee, so I got irate and took one of the Focus’s Transforms in recompense.  The Focus was Biggioni.  She and I had a little talk while I recovered, then a little fight that left her tied up in knots.”

There was a whole hell of a lot she didn’t say about this episode.  I didn’t ask.

“Biggioni and I eventually worked out a deal.  I’d quit taking tagged Transforms, join the Focus Network and listen to various offers for work.  In return I got oodles of information and the chance to bargain for easy kill Transforms.  Biggioni, already a celebrity Focus and a token member of the Focus Council, earned a lot of her political power from the work she had me do helping the Council deal with the Julius Rebellion.  I got a lot of free unclaimed Clinic Transforms and a load of eye-opening personal grief.  One of the rebel Focuses, by the name of Martine DeYoung, rebelled because she had been swatted down for experimenting with juice tricks the older Focuses didn’t like; she was also in cahoots with a Crow, though I didn’t find out about this until later.  I helped Biggioni capture DeYoung, when the rebel Focus was on the run, in Indiana, and DeYoung claimed the first Focuses and first Crows deliberately sat on a lot of useful Transform tricks, and kept the younger Focuses and Crows ignorant on purpose.”

“That’s where you had the hostile encounter with a Crow, ma’am?” Gilgamesh said.

“Yes.  The Julius Rebellion wanted to replace the Council and the Network with a top-down dictatorship, one which would treat the lesser Focuses as underlings, as powerless ignorant sheep.  Oh, and kill off any other Major Transforms who weren’t Focuses and their allied Crows, just because they were too dangerous.  Although Julius’s effort failed she succeeded with her goals, as the ruling Focuses reacted by setting themselves up as hidden dictators who treat the other Focuses as ignorant underlings.  I got hired to guard the group escorting DeYoung to Pittsburgh.  In Pittsburgh Focus Patterson’s people grabbed me, subjected me to illusions that made me think I was in a literal hell, and I managed to break free only because they made a mistake and didn’t disable my sense of smell.  I still don’t understand why Patterson turned on me.  Worse, when I confronted Biggioni about the betrayal, later, she claimed the betrayal never happened.  In addition, Biggioni’s description of Patterson’s place didn’t match what I saw at all.”

I had never before sensed real fear in Keaton.  Now I did.  Far more went on with Focus Patterson than she, or I, or any of the Focuses knew.

“Less than a month after Pittsburgh I was trailing a Transform in Ohio, unable to decide if she was tagged or not.  That had never happened, before.  Real strange.  It could have been a trap, but I got curious.  Maybe she was another Arm.  Maybe she was something else I’d never run into before.  I let her go cross-country and trailed her by car.  Eventually, she got to some factory complex in Detroit, went in through the back way, and then of all things, started going down.  Underground, literally, well out of my range.  I later found out she had gone into a salt mine, not the sort of place women tend to go.

“Those two incidents made me far more paranoid and less than enthusiastic about the Focus community.  There’s something rotten going on there.  I’ve come to believe DeYoung’s claims, that the first Focuses and first Crows really are sitting on a large amount of important technology.”

Keaton took a deep breath and cracked her knuckles.  “This is just the background.  Soon after I ran into Focus Biggioni I started to have crazy chaotic dreams, reoccurring nightmares, dreams I swore weren’t random.  In early ’66, three years and four months after I transformed, the chaos settled down and when I dreamed I found myself in a consistent dream world that to me appeared as a swamp.  There were others in the swamp, all fantastic creatures with a swamp theme to their appearance save one: the Madonna and child.”

“Oh my God!” I said.

Gilgamesh went from holding my hand to holding my body like a shield, between me and Keaton.  “Then she’s real,” he said.

I gritted my teeth.

Keaton turned to face us.  “So you get this too, Gilgamesh?”

He nodded.  “In one of my meditation forms.  It’s still chaotic.”

“Damn.”

Keaton met my gaze.  “Mine are chaotic as well, although they’ve recently changed form due to something I did by accident while incarcerated,” I said.

“I’ve known you’ve had these chaotic dreams ever since you joined me in Philadelphia.  What’s this about a change?”

“After Biggioni revealed the untagged Transform in peri-withdrawal to me, I went a little nuts.  One of my dream people, the evil princess in white, had taken over my dreams and locked out the Madonna.  I burned juice to let the Madonna back in.  Ever since then my dreams have been of, um, ma’am…your bed.”

“Those must be good dreams, then, as you always did like your sex.”  Sardonic smile.

“Yes, ma’am.  My earlier dreamscape was a pinball machine, where pinballs chased me around.”

“Interesting.  The fantastic creatures in my swamp represent real people.  The Madonna is the best known; in the real world she’s the Focus called the Madonna of Montreal, who was once named ‘Focus’, one of the members of a legendary group of Canadian Transforms, the Lost Tribe, along with a Crow known of as ‘Crow’, who we all know by the name of Sky.”

“They’re our friends,” I said.

“Perhaps,” Keaton said.  “They’ve certainly helped
you
.  The Madonna’s the one who told me you had transformed, for instance.  Told not in words.  It’s hard to explain.”

I nodded.  A lot of things became clearer.  “The evil princess in white I think is Focus Patterson.”

“That make sense.  She appears to me as a swamp will-o-the-wisp, always trying to lead me into danger,” Keaton said.  “I’ve only been able to pin a name on one other, the frog in a fancy waistcoat: Focus Keistermann, the ditz Focus who’s President of the Focus Council.  Only the ‘ditz’ is just a disguise.  She’s a hell of a sharp Focus, perhaps the only Focus with enough spine to spar with Patterson.”

“The Madonna’s the only one who appears to me as anything other than a glowing dot,” Gilgamesh said.  “I’m not very poetic, I’m afraid.”

“The point I’m making is that none of us should get cocky about what wondrous things we can do as Major Transforms,” Keaton said.  “We’re small fry, pawns in the games of beings far more powerful than we are.  Being paranoid is necessary.  It really is us against the world.”

On this cheery note Keaton, now feeling much more proper as our leader and boss, dismissed us for the evening.  Gilgamesh and I had our teary goodbye; he promised to catch up to me once he completed his mission and I secured myself a new territory.

I had to stick a knife in my hand to keep from having a total breakdown as he walked off into the dark dark night.

Gilgamesh: April 18, 1968

Gilgamesh cleaned out his apartment, tossing everything that didn’t fit into his car.  Then he had to repair his car, as the battery cables had corroded from disuse while the car sat dormant during Tiamat’s recovery.  He failed to get his money back for his paid-in-advance flophouse room; staying the extra four days he had paid for wasn’t worth it.

He sat, not at all happy, unable to entice himself away from his metasense and the two Arms.  They were exercising again.  Oh, look, now they were sparring.  Some more Arm dross would be good, and…

He was stalling and he knew it.  He didn’t have the remotest idea how to start his mission.  He meditated on the question, giving the mission a lot of thought…oh, hell, there went Tiamat flying across the Skinner’s gym with the Skinner in her face.  They better do the tagging thing soon or Tiamat would be wearing Skinner scars again.

Dammit.

He needed to get out of here.  Perhaps he would go visit Thomas the Dreamer.  He had met Thomas once, back as a baby Crow, less than a couple of months after he had gotten his name.  Thomas had impressed him, the most honorable senior Crow he had met.  Why then had Thomas signed the letter?  Why would…

If Tiamat kept cooking those incredible meals the Skinner was going to get fat.

Gilgamesh’s stomach rumbled.

Okay, okay.  Time to get moving.

There was something else he needed to do, a bit of curiosity to satisfy, likely nothing to do with his mission at all.  Some half-assed senior Crow still haunted the San Francisco area, one with lousy enough metasense shielding that Gilgamesh could pick him up on a regular basis when he worked downtown.  Said Crow only appeared between the hours of 1 PM and 10 PM.  The timing gave Gilgamesh about a half hour to kill.

Oh, the Skinner had to be lecturing again.  She always paced when she lectured…

---

The location turned out to be, of all things, a fancy art gallery cheekily named ‘Birds of a Feather’.  Gilgamesh thanked the Skinner for forcing him to buy a new suit, and although his suit needed dry cleaning, it still looked good enough for a place this fancy.  Gilgamesh felt a little trepidation over his actions, a little panicked, and realized he hadn’t thought meeting this Crow merited his panic-reducing meditations.

Hmm.

Gilgamesh walked in, determined yet skittish.  He found the art on display confusing (when abstract), silly (when pieces of found art) and garish (when said artist was attempting to make a political statement, such as the Lyndon Johnson trash can).  This gallery displayed the works of over a dozen artists, and if there was a theme in the collection, it was far beyond Gilgamesh’s meager comprehension.

The Crow, who hadn’t yet greeted Gilgamesh, was a tall thin young man with a narrow nose and slick black hair.  Close, Gilgamesh sensed enough of his glow to realize he was far more talented and potent than his lousy metasense shielding implied.

None of the art here had any dross on it.  On the other hand, he metasensed quite a few pieces of dross artwork in a back room of the gallery, an area not open to the public.

Gilgamesh waited, not particularly enjoying himself.  Finished with his chat with some customers, the senior Crow finally wandered over about twenty minutes later.  “Greetings, Gilgamesh,” the Crow said, the cadences of his speech gentle and courteous.  “I am glad to find you so well.  I had feared, when you eventually showed up in Birds of a Feather, you would be a mess.  We haven’t met before, alas.  My name is Chevalier.”

Chevalier.  The senior Crow who backed Echo.  Gilgamesh eased back a step, wondering if his lengthy mission was about to turn into a very short failure.  “I’m glad to make your acquaintance,” Gilgamesh said.  “You’re the only Crow I’ve found who’s been willing to share a city with an Arm since the Philadelphia Massacre, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk to you.”

“You’re on the run, then?” Chevalier said.  He motioned toward the back room, the one with the dross art, and led Gilgamesh there.  When Gilgamesh entered the room he realized the place had impressive metasense shields as well as many other dross-works beyond his understanding.  The room also served as a storage room for normal art not on display.  “This will be safe.  I’m most glad to see you have finally realized the danger of the Arms and escaped their horror.”

Yes, this was indeed Chevalier.  He probably still thought Arms couldn’t talk.  “Actually, sir, I’m not on the run from the Arms, but on a mission given to me by three of your peers.”

“A mission?”  Chevalier went behind a counter, took out a feather duster, and started to dust the stored artwork.  “I find this interesting and unexpected.  Am I mentioned?  Surely not.”