The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) (9 page)

“Yeehah!” Zielinski said, and hopped to his feet.  “We got it!”

“What’s next?”  Gail said.

“Perfect this,” Carol said.  Her smile was so broad that she almost glowed.

“Pass the pattern on to Lori,” Gilgamesh said.  “I think we can all agree she needs something to distract her right now.”  Gail looked at Dr. Zielinski and Carol, who both nodded, and didn’t say a thing.

---

Two in the morning and Gail was up on the roof of the Branton.  What she wanted was to drop into the Dreaming.  For all her talents in the Dreaming, though, she could rarely reach it unless she was in her box, and her box was unavailable.  Kurt and John still hadn’t managed to find a secure location for her darkroom since the move to the Branton. Zielinski’s old rental was now gone, and Littleside was too far away.  The best she had been able to come up with was the Branton roof, up against one of the large metal contraptions connected to the Branton’s heating and cooling system.  The electrical interference from the machinery drowned out most of her metasense and pushed away her household, a necessary prerequisite.  Unfortunately, it also interfered with her ability to Dream.

To make it worse, the sky spat sleet pellets on her.

“You need to talk?”

Gail turned her head from where she was staring morosely into the lights of the damp city.  Gilgamesh, of course.  No one else could approach her undetected.  His wet hair stuck to his temples, and his clothes were rapidly becoming soaked through.  He didn’t seem to care.

“Yes, but…” She interrupted herself before she said something crude and cruel.  She didn’t want to talk to Gilgamesh.  He was one of her problems, as was Carol.

He smiled and leaned his elbows against the low wall that rimmed the roof, right beside her.  “I could go kidnap Beth for you,” Gilgamesh said.

“Okay, I’m sorry, yes, some of it’s girl talk stuff.”  Gail hadn’t been able to resist Carol’s advances tonight.  She wasn’t sure what she thought of herself.  “Some of it isn’t.”

Gilgamesh nodded and waited.  The sleet dripped, and Gail pushed a damp lock of hair out of her eyes.  “It’s the juice buffer access,” she said, willing to gab about one of her two big problems to Gilgamesh.  “I knew I blew the pattern once tonight, but that was just the stress of the project and being next to Carol.  Most of the time, these days, I can just sort of whistle that tune in my head and get at the buffer whenever I want to.  The buffer access is doing something to me.”

“I understand the moral dangers,” Gilgamesh said.  “Several years ago, when Lori first got access to her juice buffer, she got…strange…for about six, nine months.  Tied herself in knots.  She wouldn’t talk about what she was going through, and neither Sky nor I could stand to be with her.  I managed to squeeze out of Connie that Lori kept volunteering for the worst Inferno punishment jobs, saying she deserved them.”

Typical Lori.  “Uh huh.  Juice buffer access isn’t fair.  I took nearly two years to get comfortable with the Focus basics, holding the lives of all my household Transforms in my hands.  Then my damned charisma came in, along with a whole new set of moral problems, because all of a sudden I could spin nearly any normal around whenever I wanted.  I didn’t make peace with myself about charisma use until last year, and for a while I swung the other way, using the charisma as a crutch against thinking.  Now this.  This damned juice buffer access is much more seductive than anything else I’ve ever played with, and sometime down the road, we’re going to have some big problems when some young undisciplined Focus gets access to it.”

Gilgamesh put his left arm around Gail’s shoulder and gave her a hug.  His warmth was a pleasant contrast to the cold sleet.  “You can pump yourself into mindless pleasure all the time if you want.  That wouldn’t be good for any Focus.”

Gail nodded.  “Gail the junkie.”  She had seen junkie Focuses before.  Linda Cooley had been one, once, until the Commander fixed Linda’s junkie habits…and when the stress hit, Linda still backslid.  “The temptation scares the crap out of me.  Abusing this can cost lives, Gilgamesh, by reducing the number of Transforms I can support.  And even if it doesn’t cost lives…”  Her pleasure took away from the pleasure of the people in her house.  The numbers didn’t lie.  Worse, she could trivially lose herself in mindless hedonism.

“There’s more,” Gilgamesh said.  “For instance, there’s the Focus – Arm juice support problem.  Carol uses a lot of juice.  If you give her all the juice she needs, you won’t be able to support all the men in your household.”

“Shit,” Gail said, and stuck her tongue out at Gilgamesh.  “I don’t want to think about that.  I know Carol can find me some more women for the household, but there’s only so many total Transforms you and I can support.  We’re going to end up trading men’s lives for woman’s lives again.”

Gilgamesh nodded.  “Yes, and there’s also the fact that when you gave Carol juice, you produced the most amazing mound of dross I’ve ever seen.  Hot and spicy and sweet, all at the same time.  Arm-produced dross by itself is addictive enough to have changed my life, and this new stuff is going to be much more addictive.  I’m afraid this is going to ruin the lives of many Crows, especially since I think you’ll be producing more than even I need.  There might even be enough here to partly support a Chimera.”

“This juice music score is just the beginning,” Gail said.  “We need more Focuses willing to help us perfect it and up the efficiency.  More Crows and Arms.  Perhaps even a Noble or two, to see if we can attach them to a household.  Élan is just juice and dross mixed together; the two of us, working together, should be able to make élan for Nobles without much of a problem at all.”

Gilgamesh smiled.  “With this and the household tuning and fatherhood, there ought to be a few interested Crows out there.  You’re right, though.  We’re not done figuring everything out, not by any stretch of the imagination.  Our two enhanced households are churning out far too much dross, even before we added in Arm support to the equation.  We’re still missing many necessary tricks.”

“We’ll need to keep working,” Gail said, and leaned into Gilgamesh’s embrace.

Carol Hancock: December 14, 1972

Gail had given me juice!  I was on a plane to Keaton’s house, and it was all I could think about.  Gail gave me juice!  The thought made my nerves sing.  I wanted to laugh, or dance, or shout for joy.  Success!

Oh, it had been so beautiful.  Such a small amount, only five points or so, but just as good as five points from a kill.  Delicious, ecstatic, orgasmic.  Heaven, and all from my beautiful, precious Gail.

I found my face stretching into a smile yet again.  Haggerty, across the aisle where we sat in first class, looked at me oddly, and then frowned as she shifted the metal contraption on her leg.  McIntyre, safely on the other side of her, didn’t look at me at all.

Lori sat beside me, studying Zielinski diagrams, practicing tiny juice music scores and combating her jealousy with a tightly clenched jaw.

Gail and I would need to try it again as soon as I got back home.  I couldn’t imagine the transfer would be as good as I remembered, and I knew it would be even better, as Gail mastered the skill.  Oh, there would be failures and mistakes, but she would steadily improve.  She would give me more than five points soon, probably more than ten not long after that.  As much as a real kill?  Almost certainly, eventually.  More?  Even that was possible.

She was so beautiful.  So earnest, so idealistic, so stubborn.  I smiled again just to think of her.  Her bouncing step, her determined frown, her acres of shining chestnut hair.  Her juice structure, winding, complex, perfect.  I could sit for hours, lost in the beauty of her juice structure.

I ached when I considered how precious she was to me.  With that one act, that one juice pattern, with the passage of those few points of juice, she was now my most precious possession.  More than my people, even more than Chicago.  Leaving her alone terrified me.  What if Adkins attacked?  Or some other power-mad Transform?  The thoughts made me sick.  I wanted to be there standing guard over her every minute of the day, and I could do no such thing.

I loved her too much.

How much?  Would I sacrifice even myself to save her, if that’s what it took?  I shivered when I thought of her death, and I suspected I would.

So foolish.  Yet, I couldn’t help myself.  How could I not care for her?  So beautiful, so precious, so much mine, and she gave me juice besides.

Foolish me.  She gave me juice the same way my territory gave me juice.  She was my Focus and my territory, both at once.  I was doomed.  How could I resist a double dose of Arm instincts?  Why would I want to?

I loved her.

Beside me, Lori continued to practice the juice music.  She needed to unlearn a decade of bad habits doing seat-of-the-pants witchery, and she progressed slower than she desired.  My, though, could Lori turn juice music terminology into four letter words…

Gail and I had indeed provided Lori with a whole shit load of motivation on the subject of juice music, though.

I tried to forget Gail once we got to Keaton’s house.  Unfortunately, she snuck in under my defenses when I least expected.  Every word, every twist of the juice, reminded me of her.  I pushed those thoughts away as best I could.  With Lori beside me, here in the lion’s den, any vulnerability was fatal.

Two hours of questioning left McIntyre’s shirt so soaked with sweat it stuck to his back from his neck to his waist.  Keaton had him sitting on her ottoman with a figurative ‘for sale’ sign on his forehead that even he could sense.  Keaton’s place was at its most horrible today, with someone moaning in agony in her basement even as we talked.  Fresh blood odors.  Spilled élan as well, from a recent Monster or Chimera death.  I picked up on Bass’s odor, but in this miasma of insanity today, I couldn’t metasense anything outside of Keaton’s throne room.  I had to repress the urge to lash out whenever her aura grew stronger.

Keaton sat on her throne-like easy chair and Haggerty, Lori and I got to do the full prostration thing on the floor, except that Haggerty couldn’t lay flat with all the metalwork on her leg and so she had one knee on the floor and the bad leg extended out straight, and only her chest and head managed to lay on the floor.

“Two million,” Keaton said.

“He’s mine, ma’am.  No.”  The last offer had been for a million and a half, but Haggerty showed no sign that she would be willing to sell McIntyre for any price.  With Lori and I here to support her, there was no way Keaton could just up and take McIntyre.

A shaved-head Focus came in from the kitchen and knelt to offer Keaton a tray carrying iced tea and a plate of meats and cheeses.  She wore nothing but a thin white shift that exposed numerous wounds, a jolting contrast to Lori’s healthy beauty.  I recognized Suzanne Morris, the youngest of the first Focuses involved in the organization and execution of the Quarantine breakout, a considerably more important woman than Denise Pitre.  She wore Keaton’s tag, but personally, she was weak and fragile, despite her political power among the Firsts and her years of experience shaking useful information out of lobbyists.  Keaton certainly hadn’t needed to call me in to help break this one.

In any event, Keaton had promised to get a ruling first Focus for us, for information purposes, and she had delivered.  Crazily, I wondered where Keaton got a white shift from.  No store I had ever heard of sold white shifts.  Keaton must have had it made specifically to humiliate.  A part of me responded to that, and heard the call to cruelty of my own.  The sane part of me recognized it as lunacy.

Keaton closed her eyes and thought, and when she opened her eyes, to my surprise the lust for McIntyre was gone from them.  He no longer existed for her, somehow.  That was a hell of a useful trick, one I couldn’t have done, and I damn well wanted and needed it.  Apparently, I wasn’t the only Arm doing heavy-duty research and development these days.

“Well,” Keaton said slowly as she leaned back in her chair, “it does sound like it’s about time Shirley Patterson got her comeuppance.”  Bass and Rayburn responded to Keaton’s signal and trooped upstairs to lend their weight to the discussion.  Both of them reeked of blood and ‘medical experimentation, Arm style’.  Bass hadn’t even bothered to rinse her hands.  Rayburn?  The faint madness in her eyes, her loose walking style reeking of sated lust, and Lori’s mental
squeee
told me all the story I needed to know.  Bass had done the same thing to Rayburn that she did to me, and Patterson took full advantage and completed the process.  McIntyre almost fainted when he saw the two of them.

Morris herself gasped and turned pale at Keaton’s comment.  Disgusting.  Morris was well broken. What a waste of a good Focus.  Keaton smiled at Morris.  “What, you can’t imagine that your precious leader could run into something as mean and nasty as she is?  I think that you’re all in for a big surprise.”  Keaton smiled wider.  “I think I might be able to step into Patterson’s shoes quite nicely.”

I thought of Keaton taking Patterson’s place and my mind boggled.  She might be able to defeat Patterson, but there was no way in hell that she could run the Focus organization.  Then I realized the truth: Keaton wouldn’t even try.  She would delegate the job to me.

Just what I wanted to be, a junior flunky copy of Patterson.

Keaton fixed her gaze on Lori.