A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (36 page)

He worked on this, off and on, until he could canvas an entire block before hitting the edge of panic.  Of course, he never sold anything.  In between attempts, he played with meditation, trying different tricks to use meditation to reduce his panic.

What he found disturbed him.  The first meditative state he found, the metasense kaleidoscope, didn’t at all help reduce his panic.  The metasense kaleidoscope actually made his panic worse.  Four or five hours of the kaleidoscope meditation left him jumpy and unable to deal with other humans at all.  It felt like a preparatory step for a fight, or at least a Crow’s fight, which meant run, run, run.

The more he did the kaleidoscope
meditation, the easier it became.  He didn’t know if this was a general Crow property or something specific to him.  In fact, kaleidoscope meditation sounded exactly like the sort of thing he shouldn’t write about in his letters.

The third time he meditated kaleidoscopically, he started to
pick up on locations a little, big map dots.  The fifth time he meditated kaleidoscopically he managed to spot a third Arm.  He placed her somewhere in Canada, around Calgary or Edmonton.

For his next trick
, he paid far too much money and attended a transcendental meditation seminar.  Although he hid in the back of the room, he learned enough from the lesson to realize that their trick, to meditate upon a mantra, did reduce his panic.  He meditated the rest of the night and found he had reduced his panic enough to, for instance, sit through a movie in a crowded movie theater without panicking.

His discovery
was nothing to sneer at.  One of the most common complaints among Crows, in the letters he received, was their inability to see movies save at odd hours, just before the movies finished their movie theater runs.  All the art they were missing!  A tragedy.

Also, nearly always a prelude to another attempt to deconstruct some other Crow’s manifesto on Marxist-Leninist critiques of imperialism and colonialism.

After a trip to the Skinner’s graveyard to draw dross, he realized what Crow panic was.  Crow panic wasn’t fear of the unknown or fear of a specific external unknown or external threat.  Crow panic was an internal conflict between his conscious self and his subconscious self.  The animal part of him, trumped as a normal human, had come crawling out from under its subconscious rock using the power of juice and taken over.  Fight or flight in a Crow trumped rationality.  Any enemy within sick-up range got the dross attack (fight), any enemy outside of sick-up range got the fleet feet response.  In response, rationality fled to the uppermost reaches of the conscious mind, where the Crow mind would endlessly digress upon such things as whether photography should be considered a coequal branch of the creative arts with painting and drawing, or why cosmologists from the Western cultures couldn’t come up with any basic theories that did not ape Judeo-Christian biblical sources.

Gilgamesh concluded
, at least for him, meditation upon a mantra subordinated the biochemical and instinctive aspects of the brain to the wishes of the ego, and tamed, or at least worked to tame, his animal part.  The animal part should be subordinate to his conscious responses, else he lose all claim to being at all human, conscious and self-aware.

Meditation tricks wouldn’t be a
quick fix, though.  In a young Crow such as himself, the animal part dominated everything.

Just as with the Arms.

“Have you
learned anything?” Gilgamesh said into the phone, whispering despite the fact that he remained safe within his apartment.  He had rented a tiny apartment in a rundown building, inhabited by drifters and the down-and-out, four miles from the Skinner’s lair.  The stress of waiting for the Skinner to return with Tiamat was getting to him.  The Skinner, the Housebound Rizzari, Sky and the rest of their entourage had left Boston, but as of just over a day ago, according to Sinclair, they hadn’t yet made any attempts on the CDC.  Worse, Sinclair said Tiamat had fallen into a coma and neared withdrawal.

He missed Tiamat.  He hadn’t thought he
would be so lonely without her.  It was funny and sad.  He expected to feel more vulnerable without her.  He never expected to miss her as a person.

“I haven’t
learned anything new,” Shadow said, his voice thin with distance through the old black telephone.

“The Skinner made her real solo attempt
four days ago, and as we predicted, she failed.” Gilgamesh huddled in a corner of the sparsely furnished single room that was the whole apartment, which he found to be a good place to meditate.  “Nothing since.”  The dim light in the ceiling cast shadows everywhere, but he found the dimness comforting.  Headlights shone through the dusty window to sweep the room like a strobe light with every passing car.  “They need to be quicker!  Tiamat’s going to go into withdrawal and it doesn’t look like the authorities will be providing her any more juice.”

“It won’t help anyone if they act too quickly and get themselves captured.  You’re just going to have to be more patient, Gilgamesh.”

“Yes, Shadow.  Thank you, Shadow.”  Gilgamesh hung up the phone, crossed his legs, and meditated.  Anything to calm himself.

Tonya Biggioni: March 26, 1968

Tonya sat on her tiny balcony stroking Stalker and stared out into the blustery March morning.
Her house was an old turn of the century estate, converted into apartments, and she had an apartment on the second floor.  They had lived here for nearly two years, a long pleasant time to enjoy the peace and to accumulate money for the next move.  They should have been able to enjoy their home for a little while longer before they needed to move.

Not
going to happen.  A big part of the reason she sat on her balcony was to try to relax enough to allow her nagging, low-key headache to go away.  Her nagging, low-key headache meant the entire place was starting to go bad.

It had been so good for so long.

The first few months had been good, and normal.  The place had gotten steadily worse at the expected rate.  For over a year, the building didn’t seem to get worse at all.  In the last six months, the place got worse by the day.

No reason.  No explanation.  There never was.
Places got worse, or not, at whatever rate fate decided, and the Focus and her household just had to live with it.  Moving too often drove some households into bankruptcy.  The doctors and researchers barely even believed the problem existed.  The only difference Tonya had ever sensed was Keaton’s bloody juice and blood mess, after the Philadelphia Massacre.  Keaton’s exudations made the problem worse.

Philadelphia Massacre. 
A Crow term, dammit.  Tonya couldn’t even use the term with any other Focus besides Rizzari.

Tonya
ached with worry and responsibility.  She had been a Focus for nine long years.  Nine long years of unending responsibility, trying to keep the household solvent, trying to keep her people happy, resolving disputes, passing judgments, and managing the day-to-day life of a household of more than fifty people.

The responsibility
never stopped. Never enough money. The endless fights and disputes among her people, forced to live too close, in too much stress.  Her projects, the men and occasional women beyond the capabilities of their own Focuses to handle.

Day by day, year after year.

There ought to be more than this.  Nine long years and she craved more than this.  A terrible emptiness grew inside her, as if she was going through the motions, that she had missed something somewhere, left standing on the dock when the boat of life departed.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had laughed.

She was so tired.

When she thought of Hancock
, now her responsibility, she became even more tired.  What a futile effort this turned out to be!  Tonya had followed her orders, and followed them well.  She broke Hancock. She gave everyone exactly what they wanted.  If Tonya managed to find a way to get Hancock out of the CDC, Hancock would be the Council’s first full-time dedicated Arm.

Tonya’s soul
ached, to do this to another Major Transform.

Her phone
didn’t ring with Network issues any more.

S
omething still nagged at her about how this turned out.  She had waited for Keaton near the CDC for a half day, but Keaton never showed.  Lori had vanished off the face of the planet days ago, but no escapes from the CDC occurred.  The end of the world, as predicted by the Crow, did not occur, either.  Shunned by the other Focuses?  Well, that would be just one more story about the Wicked Witch of the East.  She shouldn’t feel guilty.  Hancock was a criminal, a murderer who did terrible things.  She killed non-Transforms for fun!

And yet…

And yet, Tonya knew the Focuses had possessed flaws of their own when they started out.  They had been locked up in Clinics and Detention Centers, quarantined to prevent the spread of Transform Sickness, and to keep the victims of Transform Sickness safely locked away, out of the public eye, and where they couldn’t hurt anyone.  People did crazy things in those days.  No one knew how to make a household work or how Focuses should behave.  The doctors never liked what the Focuses figured out, when they started to make progress.  Focuses disobeyed orders, conspired, and finally flagrantly broke laws to get their households out of those Clinics and Detention Centers.

T
he early Focuses hadn’t killed anyone, except by accident and in self-defense.  They may have been hard on their people, but they hadn’t been murderers.  She didn’t think.  The first Focuses morality became ‘whatever it takes’ in those days, a phrase that still sent shivers through Tonya’s juice.  If they had needed to, they would have murdered.

The
normals hadn’t understood the first Focuses.  They called them criminals, and worse.  Now they didn’t understand Arms.  Called them criminals.  And worse.

Tonya shook her head.  She read too much into this.  Th
e Arm was a murderous predator.  Tonya did the right thing by working with the normals to bring her down.  Some other Major Transform had done the real dirty work, setting up the Arm for capture.  Tonya just followed the recently established precedent.

And yet…

Sky: March 26, 1968

“We could just go in the daytime,” Eileen said.  “Like right now.”

Someone opportunistically smart
would be able to figure out the three Major Transforms comforted the three non-Major Transforms.  Each pair claimed a tent in a separate campsite in the campground.

First off, Keaton was busy with Tina, working off her post-kill lusts. 
Busy with Tina all day; as far as Sky could tell Tina was having the time of her life.  Sex as fun, not simply release.  Before she started in on Tina, Keaton had told Lori to go procure the damned ATF uniforms since this was Lori’s idea.  Lori wasn’t about to leave Keaton alone with Tina, so she sent Sky and Eileen out to do the procurement.  They would leave on their next attempt on the CDC facility as soon as the sun set. “How the crap are we supposed to pull this off without revealing my capabilities?” Sky had whispered to Eileen when the Arm was thoroughly distracted.

“How the crap are we supposed to pull this off
without your capabilities
?” Eileen had answered.  Neither of them possessed the skills to do the job cleanly and maintain Sky’s disguise.  So they would use Sky’s Crow tricks and hoped not to be called on the subject.

Lori counsel
ed Tim.  This involved a lot of physical contact, hugs, staring into each other’s eyes, chaste cheek kisses and long backrubs.  Tim was having a hard time with Keaton.  He wanted to go berserko and gun Keaton down.  Lori messed with Tim’s mind; he needed, and asked for, a mental boost to his Arm tolerance.  Sky tried not to listen when the topic of conversation turned to their respective interests in men, what they liked in a man.  He didn’t meet either of their criteria.

Eileen wanted to make babies. 
In their small tent, fifty feet from her Focus, she wanted to seduce Sky for the simple reason that she might catch.  “First off,” Sky said, in a quiet whisper, “Keaton’s ears are as nearly as good as mine.  If we get involved, even if she’s otherwise occupied, she’ll notice.  Second, an Arm’s sense of smell is good enough to pick up on, well, intimate bodily fluids.  So, we can’t cover it up.  What possible reason can you come up with to explain to Keaton what we are up to?”

“Why would she object?” Eileen said.

“Object?  Not hardly.  Consider us fair game for her bed, yes.”

“Oh,” Eileen said.  “You said ‘first’.  You have more
objections?”

“Yes.  Lori would have my privates stuffed and mounted.  She misses nothing about her Transforms.”  Like all the Focuses Sky knew, Lori lived much of her life through her Transforms, despite the amount of time they spent apart.

“But I asked her before Keaton showed up.”

“And she said…” Sky said.  Gazed into Eileen’s
beautiful eyes.  What the hell, the Arm was going to notice, anyway.  No, Sky, no!

Eileen’s face fell.  “Oh, all right.  I guess
the Focus implied ‘but only if I’m otherwise occupied’ in her statement.  Calming Tim down doesn’t count, not really.”  She sighed.  “I guess.”

“Eileen, please don’t slap me for saying this,” Sky said, “but the odds for catching are not good, which means relationships, not one night stands.”

Eileen grimaced and turned away for a moment, to stare at the pair of rolled-up sleeping bags and duffles of clothes and gear.

“Lie down,” Eileen said.  She turned back and tossed Sky down on the
canvas floor of the tent, face down.  Despite Inferno’s training, he was still a sack of spuds.  She started to rub his back.  “I figured that out.  I also figured out you probably won’t be interested in having too many of these relationships, no matter how many of us are interested.  You being a chaste Buddhist and all that.”  She giggled softly.  “I just wanted to get in a claim before one of the more aggressive women started after you.”

“More aggressive?” he said.  “Than you?”

Eileen poked him.

“Sorry,” Sky said.  “The only time I’ve actually seen you around Inferno is when you’ve joined us on these little missions.  Not counting Friday nights.”  She did give a good backrub.

“That’s because I’m going to college.  I’m tired of just being a soldier.  Believe it or not, that’s all I was until last year.  A shooter.  Woman soldier in the Inferno army.”

“So,” Sky said.  As usual, appalled.  How did they get the money to send Eileen to college?  He
didn’t remember a single Canadian Transform who had been through college as a Transform.  “What are you studying?”

“Economics.  Statistics.  Eventually, I want to get an MBA and an executive position.  Run a company.”  She paused, and ran her hands through his hair.  “You have interesting hair, Sk—Sam. 
Uh, strange hair.”

“The barbules?  Cold weather adaptation.  I spent too much time in the Territories when I was a young you know what.”  Sky thought.  “Pardon me if I’m misreading a situation, but aren’t the businesses in the States a little leery of hiring women managers, executives and the like?  Not to mention Transforms?”

“Oh, that?  I’m not talking normal businesses, I’m talking other households.  One of the necessary parts of the Cause involves inter-Focus cooperation.  Multi-Focus households.  We don’t have any yet, but Focus households in an area should cooperate economically.  In preparation.  More Focuses transform all the time, you know; one new Focus a week this year.  This is how people in immigrant communities cooperate, by patronizing each other’s businesses.  Besides, I’m planning ahead.  The apocalypse is not far off.”

Apocalypse.  Nine years in the future, or was it eight? 
The apocalypse marked the point where Transform Sickness became unstoppable and started its rapid climb to near its maximum societal numbers.  To be planning for the apocalypse, nine years in the future, was scary.  Scary and smart.

“Well, besides shoot at Monsters, what else do you do with your life?  Where did you get your start?”

She bent down and stuck her mouth right up against Sky’s ear.  “If you promise me you’ll take me out to walk in the park next time the Focus is stuck working late in her lab and tell me some of your story, I’ll tell you mine.”  Eileen made things clear about what she wanted, oh yes, Sky.  Very clear.  She understood as well the right way to entice him into a relationship.  Being smart enough to figure out his alien psychology this far in advance did make her more desirable as a partner.  Even at his most roguishly outrageous Crow behavior, he had never before juggled more than four lovers at any one time.  Most of the time, he tried not to juggle more than two.

Sky nodded.  “You have a deal, mademoiselle.”

Eileen whispered “My turn” and indicated he should rub her back.  Interesting ritual.  She unrolled one of the sleeping bags and lay down, less comfortable on the lumpy canvas floor than he.  He started rubbing Eileen’s back.  Interesting muscles.  Woman Transforms with muscles as Eileen’s did seem strange to Sky.  For one thing, his mind kept incorrectly thinking of women shaped like this as fat.  However, the more he thought about Transform Sickness, and how the members of Inferno looked at the Transform benefits as an unlimited cookie jar of possibilities rather than a horrid curse, the more he got used to absurdities, such as muscular women.  Eileen was tense, too.  Too much Arm, which he sympathized with.  He barely made a dent in her muscles.

“I transformed three, no, dammit, four years ago,” Eileen said.  “I made an utter disaster of it.  I still don’t know if
my disaster happened because I was too pushy or not pushy enough.”  Sky didn’t say a thing about his opinion.  Besides, her pushiness was what made Eileen interesting.  “I suspect if I hadn’t been pushy enough, I’d be dead.”  Sky stopped.  He hadn’t expected her comment.

“Oh, keep rubbing.  It’s not that big a sob story.  When we do our ‘my transformation was worse than yours’ conversations, mine doesn’t even make the top ten in the household.

“The disease got me just before my thirtieth birthday.  Steve, my husband, had a big bash planned, a huge surprise party.  A few of my relatives, my friends, our friends, even a few of his friends from the tire plant.  I had just tested positive for my third pregnancy, about two months along.  Wham, there I went.”

Oh, crap, Sky thought.  Second month of a pregnancy.  He
had been around too many Focuses and their households not to know what transforming during a pregnancy meant: about a fifty fifty chance of losing the baby and about a one in four chance of having a Monster baby.  Hard on the prospective mother.  Women Transforms regularly died from this.  From his Canadian Focus friends he knew few problems happened if the transformation occurred later in the pregnancy.

“Steve
couldn’t cope with my transformation.  He had spent too much time sneering at Transforms not to.  Freeloaders.  Slackers.  Professional victims.  He was a nice man, but not exactly, um, college educated, if you catch my drift.  The nearest Focus with an opening lived in Columbus, and there I went.  Steve refused to quit his job in Akron and commuted.  To start with, I kept the kids, but once Steve got a look at Focus Mergenthaler he went nuts.  Sarah Mergenthaler was – gasp – a Jew.  He twisted my arm and convinced me, until things got straightened out, to let my sister in Akron take the kids.  ‘Straightened out’ was getting me moved back to Akron.  Nothing else would count.  Steve didn’t understand I didn’t have a say in
anything
.

“Then I started ballooning out.  Something was wrong with my pregnancy, the doctors said.  They showed me X-Rays.  When a woman transforms early in her pregnancy, sometimes the child becomes a Monster.  I looked nine months along only four months out and every new doctor they brought in practically fainted when they saw me.  Eventually, they brought in three docs who could cope, Doctors Sellstrom, Kochanek and Zielinski.”

Zielinski again?  Sky wondered what absurd level of coincidence was at play.  Perhaps the doctor was just good.

“All three of the doctors were from the Harvard Medical School and they said I needed to abort the Monster or
my baby would kill me.  No hemming or hawing.”  Sky sucked in breath.  His father had been Catholic, and Sky knew what a horrible decision this must have been.

“Th
is was the end of the line for me, one way or another.  Absolutely no one could cope.  Not Focus Mergenthaler, who couldn’t imagine the concept of a Monster baby, or paying for an abortion; my husband, who flatly refused to allow me to abort the Monster; my family, my friends…”  Eileen sighed.  “The verdict was unanimous.  They all would rather I died.”  Old story, oft repeated among Transforms.  The waggish Canadianism stated the Shakes was a 100% fatal disease – to families.

“The doctors couldn’t even do an abortion in Ohio.  At the doctors’ own expense, they took me to some place in the state of New York and did the procedure gratis, but only after I signed a bunch of waivers. 
They thought I had a good chance of dying, despite their best efforts.  Those were damned good doctors.  I lived.  Did you know Zielinski stayed at Inferno for several months, around the time you first started showing up?  Save we weren’t supposed to tell him about you, not sure why.”

Well,
how about the fact your goddamned Focus rolled me so I would demand she keep the doctor away from me.  Be interesting to find out some day why Lori didn’t want the good doctor to find out about him.  He swore he had run into this particular doctor before, years ago, but he suspected that was back in the low juice bad memory days and he was just imagining things.  His recent encounter with the doctor in his ‘Paul Langdoc’ identity was also worth a good giggle or two.

“Man,
the Monster in my womb was
ugly
, a cross between a fish and a rat.  Huge, too.  The doctors had some fancy terminology for what the thing was, but it would have been the death of me, and not much farther along.

“I was a wreck.  My previous life was so gone that I didn’t have a single person I once knew I could even talk to any more.  Focus Mergenthaler refused to have anything to do with me; she
even let my tag drop.  The doctors’ contacts were all in Boston, of course and they tried to find a place for me.  No such luck.  I got shipped to the Massachusetts Detention Center to die.

“Not many women Transforms end up in detention centers these days, normally only when the luck of the draw drops too many women Transforms into the system in an area at once.  The idea of a
formerly tagged woman Transform ending up in such a place struck everyone as absurd, something that should be illegal, but wasn’t.  Focus Mergenthaler got in hot water because of what she did, but I didn’t learn about her problems until later.  Anyway, I got a visit from Focus Rizzari about six days before I was to go over.”

Eileen turned her head to the other side and shifted, settling into a better position on the lumpy sleeping ba
g.  “We talked.  The Focus isn’t an easy person to talk to in the best of circumstances and this was about the worst of circumstances imaginable.  I was desperate, but the Focus does this combination of extreme politeness and arctic coldness.  She was so frigid I didn’t even think of doing any begging and pleading.  Instead, I told her the truth: I had given birth to one Monster and so I refused to become one myself.  I wasn’t even going to wait until the last minute, for fear I would be too incapacitated to kill myself.

“The Focus eventually laid out
the bargain.  I was a nothing.  She had a dozen volunteers begging to get into her household, all more talented than me.  The only thing in my favor was Focus Morgenthaler’s behavior; if the Focus took me on, Focus Morgenthaler would owe her.  ‘Focus Mergenthaler will accept a woman Transform of mine who burned herself out hunting Monsters for my household,’ the Focus told me, about half of what Focus Morgenthaler ended up paying.  ‘If you agree to train up some skills, so I can trade you out for one of the Transforms on my waiting list, I’ll take you on.’  How about I train to become a Monster hunter?  I asked.  The Focus told me she would accept my offer, but Monster hunting was harder than I gave it credit for.”