All Beasts Together (The Commander) (13 page)

“That’s where Enkidu was born.  My own personal nemesis.  It’s the last place on Earth I want to live.”

“I’d pick Pittsburgh, myself, as the last place I’d want to live,” Sky said.

“I don’t even let myself think about Pittsburgh,” Gilgamesh said.

“Well,” Sky said, walking over and clapping Gilgamesh on the shoulder.  “It’s been nice meeting you, but I’ve got plans to make and things to do.  I’m on a mission and I’ve got far too few days to prepare for a medievalist tournament.  See yah in the funny papers.”

Then Sky was gone, and gone from Gilgamesh’s metasense as well.

Damn the old Crows.  They did things like this to him every time he met one, Gilgamesh thought, as he shook.  Mission?  Crows didn’t have missions.  Sky was either pulling his leg, or certifiably insane.

Gilgamesh was envious, though.  He couldn’t wait to get old.

Part 2
Inferno

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,

Who put darkness for light and light for darkness,

Who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.

Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes

And clever in their own sight.

Isaiah 5:20-21 (NIV)

Chapter
4

A Focus says ‘I move the juice, making everything better’.  A Transform says ‘just move the goddamned juice!’

“Inventing Our Future”

Henry Zielinski: October 18, 1967

“Well, look who’s here!” Tina Williams said.  Tina, a tall woman with a muscular build, was reading out gas chromatograph specs from the manual
while they put the chromatograph back together.  Henry Zielinski banged his knee on the autopsy table as he extracted himself from where he and Jim huddled with their heads together in the bowels of the delicate machine.  Tina, a woman in a man’s field – mechanical engineering – had been helping Hank with the earlier repairs, until Jim wanted a turn inside the machine.  Both Tina and Jim were Transforms.

The woman walk
ing into the basement lab appeared to be a stunning nineteen year old.  The average man would guess her to be an obviously well made-up movie star.  Eyes followed her as she passed.  Grown men stammered in her presence, and took off their coats to lay them in front of her so she wouldn’t step in a puddle.

“Good afternoon, Professor Rizzari,” Zielinski said,
smiling.

“Lori, please,” Focus Rizzari said.  They hadn’t seen each other in person for several months.
  She hadn’t changed as far as he could see, dressed in a halter top and shorts, the clothing she preferred at home.  The nation’s only Focus Professor (microbiology, at Boston College) didn’t depend on her clothes for beauty.  Or her make-up, which Zielinski had never seen her wear.  She stood less than five feet tall in her stocking feet, a gymnast in both appearance and talent.

Lori
turned her heart-melting brown eyes at Zielinski and smiled.  Like Zielinski, she had a narrow face, but the shape of her face and slightly olive skin tone were pure Mediterranean in ancestry. She was a talented top-end Focus, and this was her household, self-named Inferno.  Or, considering the strange politics of Inferno, she was their Focus, as Connie Yerizarian, the household president and the person who welcomed in Zielinski, ran the day to day operation of the household.

“You figure out what’s wrong with that dog?” Lori said, with an airy wave.  Zielinski
extended his grimy hand to greet the Focus, but she gave him a quick hug instead.

“Take a look,” Zielinski said.
  Connie hadn’t known what to do with him after he showed up out of the blue, so she directed him toward Dr. Robert Masterson’s Inferno engineering works.  After Zielinski requested an inventory of the household lab equipment, Tina mentioned the non-working HP gas chromatograph.  Everyone thought the electronics were fried, but Zielinski wanted to check it out for himself.  Tina had corralled another of the engineering crew to help, one Jim Simpson.  Jim, booted from college after his transformation, was one of the many self-taught and locally tutored Transforms in Inferno.  Tina, Jim and Zielinski had been working on the chromatograph for hours.

“Cool,” Lori said, squatting and peering around the innards of the
machine.

“The doc managed to find three problems, all fixable.  I think we can actually get this puppy working again,” Jim said.  Everyone
in Inferno wanted to call him ‘doc’ or ‘the doctor’, grating given he had lost his medical license.  Connie had been firm about her feelings on the matter, and he thought he might possibly be able to get used to it.  ‘We don’t recognize the right of the government to take away medical licenses on such specious grounds,’ she had said.  Her words warmed his heart.

“I’m still worried the bum thermostat may have gummed up the works more than we realize,” Zielinski said.  “One of the problems was condensate in one of the fraction collection lead-in tubes, caused by the oven firing at too low a temperature.”

Lori raised her eyebrows at him and Zielinski became conscious of his appearance.  He still wore his trucker’s disguise, which didn’t fit in too badly with the grubby clothes of the engineering crew.  She covered her mouth with her hand, trying to repress a giggle.

“I thought you were born in a suit,” she said, poking at his clothes.  “So you’re someone who gets in and mucks with the lab equipment?”

Zielinski nodded, and smiled.  “I’ve always liked to get my hands dirty, whenever I can find the time.”

Lori nodded,
now more serious.  “We need to talk,” she said, grabbed his elbow and led him off.  He couldn’t resist, as her suggestion had been backed by Lori’s ample Focus charisma.

“So, what are you doing here, Henry?” Lori asked.  She had taken him all the way back to Inferno’s home, a mansion well beyond the means of most Focus households, where she led them to the Inferno library and chased everyone else away.

“You invited me,” he said.

She frowned.  “That was before you vanished in Europe.  Connie says you showed up today, out of nowhere.  Out of a taxi.”  She leaned toward him, sparking feelings both inappropriate and unwanted.  Her powerful presence was nearly as intimidating as an Arm in a bad mood.  “Where did you come from?  How did you get here?”

“The taxi.” 
They sat in a pair of comfortable reading chairs in a corner by the fiction collection.  He wasn’t particularly interested in detailing his journey, but the Focus wasn’t giving him any choice.

Lori’s eyebrows came together.  “Before that?”  He winced at a sudden stabbing headache, brought on by Lori’s charismatic demand.

The security-minded Focus wouldn’t let him off the hook.  “I flew from Paris to Montreal, where a friend of mine arranged for me to enter the country using a false identity, as a back-up truck driver.”

Lori wrinkled her nose.  “
The Madonna of Montreal.”  She leaned back and released her charismatic hold on him.  “You’ve been climbing in the world if you’ve gotten
her
attention.”

“You know about her?”

Lori nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“Everything?”
  The Madonna of Montreal was Anne-Marie Sieurs, the world’s first Focus, a secret to all but a few.

She nodded again.  “I can sense her juice work on you; I’ve never seen anything so delicate and intricate.  She even put my juice signature into it; if anything, it
appears like I tagged you.”

“Is that what she did?”  Zielinski whistled.  Focuses couldn’t tag normals, but the Madonna of Montreal
played by her own rules.  Much of what Annie had done she did while he slept and she hadn’t explained a thing about any of it.

“
Some
of what she did,” Lori said.  She sighed.  “Okay, okay.  My instincts say not to trust you because of this, but if I start distrusting her I might as well start distrusting myself.”

“So she’s been teaching you?” Zielinski said.  That explained a lot.

Lori glowered at him.  “Henry, this is difficult for me.  Don’t make this any harder with your far too perceptive observations.”  She tensed and his headache returned.  “Why are you here?”

“Annie warned me not to chase down Carol,” he said.  With a sudden twinkle in his eye he continued: “She seemed to think an arrogant bastard like me wouldn’t fit well with an Arm of Carol’s age.
  She didn’t think I’d have any problems fitting in here and dealing with you.”

Lori tensed. 
“You’re sitting there and purposefully provoking me so you can learn to better resist my charisma!  Are you insane?”

He didn’t answer.  This time he
had
resisted Lori’s overwhelming charisma.

Provoking Lori
kept his cheating emotions at bay, the traitorous ones that thought amorous thoughts and wanted him to act on them.

Lori sighed and turned away.  “Over time I can turn you inside out.”

“I’m counting on you trying.”

Zielinski prided himself at being an expert at hiding his feelings and emotions from others, an expert at putting on false fronts, and an expert at observing other people and reading them.  Back in the Korean War, fresh out of medical school, he had developed a reputation as
a killer poker player, someone to avoid if you wanted to stay attached to your money.  Those talents hadn’t gotten worse in his years of normal medical practice.

Back then, he had been another medical doctor, but over time, he found himself involved with
Transform Sickness epidemiology, then several Transform patients, then Transform Sickness itself.  Later, he left standard practice and joined the medical research community, job-hopping from one research post to another, dealing with Transforms and Focuses.  Those Focuses called themselves the first Focuses now, and many of them had developed a rather nasty distrust of any medical professionals.  After they had noted his reluctance to sacrifice the well-being of his Transform patients in the cause of research, they had introduced him to the Network and he had picked up Network support for his research.  Over time he became an expert on Focuses.  After the first public example of Armenigar’s Syndrome in the United States manifested, he had angled his way into the more esoteric research effort of trying to understand and help Arms.  He hadn’t been nearly as successful as he wanted, but his dealings with Focuses and Arms had forced him to greatly improve his already decent abilities at covering himself and reading others.  With the Arms, it was a matter of survival.  He had cadged training from many Focuses over the years, but none in Lori’s class.

“This is how you’ve gained that most annoying
resistance to charisma, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps I’ll pick up enough new tricks
while I’m here to keep Tonya from getting to me
over the phone
,” he said.  “I’m getting real tired of that.”

Lori winced at his dig.  “I’m rather rough, you know.  Too academic
and unpolished.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Being seduced by an Arm was rough.  Being punished by an Arm was far worse.
  He suspected Lori didn’t know ‘rough’.

Of course,
as Keaton would vulgarly point out, he might be making assumptions based on arrogance.

“As to why I’m really here?  I’m not sure,” he said.  “I’d thought with my Harvard career gone I was done
with research, but
she
seemed to think I was just starting.”

“
Oh, that’s just dandy,” Lori said, still steaming.  “You want to take a gander at a Chimera hand?  I got it from Carol.”

He nodded.  “Connie told me the story and told me to keep it quiet.”

“Good.  Do so,” she said.

Zielinski winced in pain.  Nope, he couldn’t resist Lori’s charisma in any area related to household security.  He made a mental note of that.

“I had a different idea,” he said.  “Because of the first Focus’s contract on my life, working in your Boston College lab would be too much of a strain on your security.”  He knew better than to even attempt that fight.

Lori gave him a raised eyebrow.

“Instead, I’d like to work on enhancing the Transform training techniques you use.”

Ann Chiron, Lori’s aide and Inferno household anthropologist, had mentioned that the Inferno Transforms felt they were underutilized
, despite being the best-trained Transforms in the Northeast Region.  Major Transforms had all these intriguing capabilities and the Transforms did not, and that didn’t seem fair.  He agreed to look into it.  Find the limits of what Transforms could do.

This
wasn’t a question he could answer without a lot of groundbreaking work and research.  In the early years of the Transform Sickness, people thought the Transforms mildly disabled, like people with more normal chronic diseases.  Later, people figured out Transforms were healthier than normal, and also able to go without food and water for longer than normal, but with strange side effects.