A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (23 page)

Some days
his panic reactions drove him to tears…such as today.  Phone poles!

Dross. 
Before this experiment, he stocked up on some spicy dross from Keaton’s place.  The more dross he took, the better he felt, and the more he could control the panic.  He added this observation to his journal, next to some old comments about being smarter when juiced up.

“Focus Enid Gladchuck here,” the voice on the phone said.

“Hello, Enid Housebound.  I’m a Crow by the…”

The phone went dead.  She had hung up on him before he finished his canned introduction.  Gilgamesh buried his head in his hands and wept.

In his preparations, he had memorized Enid Gladchuck’s daily routines.  Her sleep cycle put her in bed, asleep, from 1:00 in the morning to about 4:30 in the morning.  The San Francisco Chronicle’s morning edition arrived at 5:00 in the morning, and Enid, being the only one Gilgamesh metasensed as awake, went and snatched the paper nearly every morning.

Gilgamesh decided to try his luck at a direct approach.  He rehearsed his lines many times.  What a greeting that would be!  She would surely believe he was a Crow after this!

He waited, out of sight, by her morning newspaper.  When she came out of her house to get the newspaper, he strode up with confidence and exclaimed: “Focus Enid Gladchuck.  I’m glad we could meet in person, because I have an offer…”

Two normals sprinted out of nowhere and gang-tackled him. 
Gilgamesh gritted his teeth and didn’t sick-up on them.  He looked up and saw two Transform bodyguards standing between him and Enid, now being hustled back to her house.  “Enid,” he said, forgetting his lines in panic and embarrassment.  “I’m a Crow and I can prove it with my special Crow senses.  Under your robe and nightshirt, you’re wearing a Playtex brassiere and Hanes panties.  These are things only a Crow would be able to know.”

When the police arrived ten minutes later and dragged him away, they arrested him not only for vagrancy, disturbing the peace, and trespassing, but also for some variety of public lewdness associated with mentioning woman’s undergarments.

Jail wasn’t bad. 
He liked the relative quiet, and nobody hassled him.  He didn’t understand why until one of the inmates clued him in.  Of all things, Gilgamesh now carried an ‘aura of nasty’ with him wherever he went.  He wasn’t a senior Crow.  Why on Earth did he have any sort of nasty aura, anyway?

The
relative quiet gave him time to meditate.  He also cleaned up some old dross (musty but piquant with the tang of existential angst, a fine vintage) from a containment cellblock for wayward Transforms in the basement, easily within his range.

The
authorities didn’t know he was a Transform.  Crows don’t exist.  The usual.

Boredom finally got to
Gilgamesh, and he gave in and spent some time fooling with dross art.  The art itself, rather than weapon implementations of those same effects.  He found dross a lot easier to work with when he thought of his work as art.  He decided there was something stressful about working with weapons just by their very nature.

His dross art looked like blueprints. 
They made him smile.

He
even found ways to stabilize the little artistic constructs of sicked-up dross.  He made patterns within the dross, embedded messages conveying emotional content, scents, things seen, and the glow of Transforms.  For a few hours he had some fun, until he tired of these artistic tricks.  It appalled him to no end that some Crows turned this into their life’s calling.  Simply amazing.

He did make a little bit of progress at generating weapons-grade dross effects. 
With steady and persistent practice, plus regular meditation to reduce his level of stress, he might be able to create offensive dross effects in an actual combat situation in say, three years or so.

Three years wasn’t exactly the time frame he
wanted.

Progress on real problems: zero.

Better ideas for next time: zero.

His time in jail
did make him wonder what he wanted to do with his life, though.  He dealt with the Arms.  Would that be his only task in life?  Such a choice didn’t seem right.  Following around the Arms was another dead end; gorging himself with spicy Arm dross wouldn’t help anybody but himself.

But then what?  He had a responsibility as a Major Transform to help
Transforms in need.  He worried about arrogance, about putting too much significance in the word ‘Major’, but his responsibility echoed around inside him enough to convince him of its reality.  Focus responsibilities were obvious: keep Transforms alive.  What, however, mirrored the Focus responsibilities among the nearly-as-common Crows?

His question daunted him, perhaps
too big a question for a young Crow to contemplate.  On the other hand, he did note an obvious corollary to his current task: cooperation between different types of Major Transforms.  Expand what he did with the Tiamat rescue, to all aspects of Transform life.  He thought back over those letters and realized exactly whom he needed to talk to.

A day later, when he was brought up for arraignment, the misdemeanor court judge broke down in laughter when he read the charges and tossed the entire set after making Gilgamesh promise to stay away from Focus Gladchuck.  They escorted him out of the county jail without his personal effects, leaving him to walk back on foot to his apartment.

Did the other Crows have his problems?  Or was it just him?

Chapter 8

In 1967 there were an estimated 60 newly transformed male and female “Goldilocks” Transforms (that did not need Focus support to survive).  Of these an estimated 55 survived.  Note that only 3 were registered by Transform Clinics in 1967, meaning that most remained an unseen part of the general population.

“Understanding Transform Sickness as a Disease”

Carol Hancock: March 20, 1968 – March 23, 1968

The real Arm broke through my façade Wednesday afternoon after a full day of isolation.  I roared, cursed, tried to break through the doors and walls, started a fire when they turned off the lights,
and utterly lost my temper when they turned on a set of fire sprinklers cleverly recessed into the ceiling.  By the time I finished the cell was trashed, half my exercise equipment useless and the water fountain dribbled water endlessly to the floor and into the nearby drain.

Okay, I kn
ew my temper tantrum was childish.  I knew it as I trashed the place, but I needed to do something to quiet the beast inside and fight off the damned whispers.  About an hour afterwards I faked a total breakdown, complete with tears, sobs, pleas about juice and the once magic words of “I’ll do anything!”

My faux breakdown didn’t even merit a response from my captors.

I lost track of time
after my temper tantrum, alone in the dark with my thoughts and nothing else.  Food turned out to be an endless supply of military rations, recent vintage MCI rations, edible but otherwise indistinguishable from their wrappings.  The guards pushed them under the door in loads of twenty, at random intervals so I couldn’t tell the time from the visits.  The cell’s darkness was total.  The bastards also tried to harass me with repetitive soft music, but they didn’t know ignoring audible distractions was one of my strengths.  I tuned out their music before the second repeat finished.

Funny, I never
did tune out the never-ending ‘murderer’ whispering, though.

I ached for juice.  Not a bad ache, just the juice monkey ache from thinking about the juice for too long a time.  Four or five days remained before I would start suffering from debilitating low-juice effects.  That’s when they would break me, if they were going to break me before I went right to the edge of withdrawal.  They would need a trick, though; otherwise I would hold out right to the edge of withdrawal.  I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction otherwise.

Of course
, I could end up dead from my stubbornness.  I didn’t care.  I worked through all the options of what they might do with me and most ended up with me spilling my guts and later dying in withdrawal or by firing squad.  My welfare wasn’t in their interest.  They kept me in a locked room with absolutely no chance of escape.  If they were going to get real information out of me, which seemed inevitable, I wanted them to pay - with juice - to get the information.

Phooey. 
I didn’t believe a word of my thoughts.  Instead, I expected the person behind this would use some sort of psychological trick to break me early, and my stubbornness wouldn’t be tested.  Hell, after a couple days of this sort of treatment even Focus Teas would have been able to come in and break me with her half-assed charisma.  Of course, if as I suspected a Focus was behind my current torment, she might not realize how devastating low juice was to an Arm’s willpower.

My darkest fears, that either Officer Canon or Teas’ boss Patterson was now the Focus in charge, I banished to the depths of my mind.

Speaking of Teas, I spent a long time in the dark thinking through the last six
months of my life, looking for information to exploit and memories to keep me sane.  Teas said Focuses could tag everything.  Well, I had never heard of Arms tagging anything, but I was willing to try anything by then.  I tried tagging the unseen guards (useless; it didn’t work), the air (something moved, juicewise yet impermanent, so I flagged the trick for later investigation), my own body parts (an advanced trick my instincts told me I wasn’t ready for), and objects.  After I successfully tagged a twenty-pound dumbbell from the remains of my workout equipment, I recognized what I had done.

This object tag had nearly the same feel as when Bobby and I
did our ‘I’m yours’ ‘you’re mine’ games. 
The juice trick I did with Bobby had been a tag!

I got excited, and stayed excited,
for I have no idea how many hours on end.  Many.  Perhaps over a day.  I investigated what I did, tried every imaginable variation and examined what I created in every possible way with my metasense.

The bad news
?  My discovery wouldn’t get me out of my cell.  The good news, muted by my incarceration problems, was I had figured out Arm tagging.  Arm tagging declared something yours and
meant
it, establishing dominance over the tagged object.  Tagging made something
mine
.  This is what Keaton should have done to me the instant I escaped from the St. Louis Transform Detention Center.

I now understood why I
experienced those memory dreams a few nights ago.  They were all about Arm tags, or, in particular, the lack of one on me.  My subconscious had been trying to tell me something.

Arm tags sucked when used on inanimate objects, fading away after a few minutes.  If the
object tags did anything in the real world, I couldn’t tell, but I doubted they did.  Most of what I learned came from tagging myself, which I figured out might be a dangerous thing to be doing as an experiment, alone, in a dark room, with nobody to save me if (and when) I fucked up.  Lost in the excitement and knowing my general worth to the universe now, about zero, I took the risk anyway.

An Arm tagging herself gives her dominance over herself, a level of control I easily recognized as the end-state of an hour or two of meditation and visualization, Zielinski-style.  After thinking about what
my discovery meant for a few minutes, everything else just fell into place.

Unlike the Focus tags that functioned as thunderbolts from heaven, allowing the Focus to miraculously move juice from one Transform to another, an Arm tag
served as a goddamned shortcut.  But what a shortcut, if the tag allowed an Arm to establish dominance over another Arm without the dominant Arm having to beat the snot out of the lesser Arm every time they came back in contact with each other.  The same timesaving benefit appeared to be true for all the Arm tag effects I figured out in my cell.

Keaton
took four long and bloody months to do to me, and my rebellious mind, what she would have been able to do in an instant with the Arm tag.  Oh, there still would have been blood and pain, and I would have had my rebellious moments, but the tag would have cut down the sheer number of my problems with accepting my place, which caused many of the problems Keaton had with me.

The Arm tag also neatly solved the mission Lori had given me.  So how do you keep the Arms in line?  You only deal with Arms in a dominance arrangement; you negotiate with the most dominant Arm and the rest have to follow.

Eventually the excitement wore off and the grinding annoyance of low juice crept back in.  I had solved the greatest mystery I knew of about Transforms, how Arms got along with each other, and my findings were stuck with me in my damned no-hope cell of doom.

Enkidu: March 21, 1968

The pack found a farm with likely prey after an hour of running search
ing.  Low clouds spat rain, cold rain, on the melting snow pack.  The fields were ankle deep in mud, and they left huge Monsterish footprints behind them.