All Beasts Together (The Commander) (27 page)

“We call these Friday nights orgy time.”

From what Sky knew about Focuses, Lori could have taken all her household Transforms to this optimum stimulation point instantly.  However, rapid juice flow was a fleeting pleasure, he had learned years ago, from Focus.  This slow crawl toward the optimum was delicious foreplay, a juice movement so slow only Lori and he sensed it.

“The illusion of normality is maintained, eh? 
Your Transforms do function better than other Transforms when they’re not near their optimums.”

“Juice is an addictive substance, Sky.”

Sky nodded.  “You bet.”  Oh yah, oh yah.  Try living for two years on virtually no dross or juice, my lady.  Low juice was an incredible unending agony, and you never lose the addiction.

“The functional optimum is especially addictive.  A Transform maintained at the functional optimum for a month has a monkey on their back as bad as a mainlining heroin addict.  Fast moving juice is both painful and pleasurable and significantly more addictive even than juice held at the optimum point.  Working the juice the way I do gets me nine of the extra Transforms I can support in my household.”

“Why isn’t this known?”

“If I publish, the first Focuses will grab my Transforms and torture them to death.  What they
would do to me would be worse.  I’ve been told so in person and experienced a small taste of their medicine,” Lori said.

“They’re evil, then.”

“They’re pragmatic and I don’t necessarily disagree with their judgment.  If the normals who live outside of Transform households, the politicians and the clergy in particular, learned how addictive normal juice movement is to Transforms, or learned of what I do and the morality it fosters, the Transform community would be fighting for its life.  I think the fight would be worth it because of the number of lives we’d save.  But their opinion isn’t logically incorrect.”

Sky watched as over the next half hour, the juice imperceptibly rose to the stimulation optimum.  The lights dimmed and the standing and milling settled to the floor.  The buzz of conversation muted and the amount of physical contact increased.  So did the dross.  It wasn’t the sweet dross of rapid juice movement, though, and Sky realized with horror that the Focus-produced sweet dross was actually an incredible waste.  His pleasure and the pleasure of Crows like him who stayed near Focuses was based on the consumption of lives.

Yes, a younger Crow would be panicked by seeing all of this and understanding the consequences.  The guilt was overwhelming, even for him.

Sky, however, also found it arousing.  He understood the allure
and the danger.  No wonder Lori’s household was so virulently anti-drug, why they had such strict rules about even the mildest of stimulants, why they forbade alcohol.  Their one vice, the juice, was more than enough.

“At first I tried to enforce normal morality and ethics on the situation, but it didn’t work,” Lori said.  Her clinical calm chilled him.

“Shh, my lovely,” he said, putting a finger on her lips to interrupt her.  Normal morality and ethics had no place here.  He saw men with men, and women with women, groups of three or four or even five.  Normals as well as Transforms, and teens barely past puberty.  He was shocked, and yet his instinctive Crow-ish panic around Transforms in number seemed to have taken a vacation and he longed to join in.  He had found another version of Crow heaven, assuming that no one minded the number of pregnancies likely to result if he participated regularly.

Lori leaned against him, now holding his hand in both of hers.  Sky sense
d the effort she was expending by the dross pouring out of her.  Her personal juice supply had to be taking a beating.  He wouldn’t need to hunt for dross after this, and the unnamed variety of dross produced here was simply amazing.

“What about you?” Sky asked.  Let me warm your heart, dearest Lori!  Let me in!  She let him hold her and snuggled against him, drawn into the mood by the actions of her Transforms.

“Me?” Lori said, voice a bit frosty.  “There’s a big problem with orgy time.  I can’t participate.  Maintaining the juice at the optimum stimulation point for this many Transforms is incredibly draining.  You’ll see.  No Transform is sexually receptive when their juice count is low and I’m no exception.”

Ah.  Just another sacrifice.

“Can I help?” Sky asked.

“I can’t take your juice, Sky, without growing scales and feathers.  You know that,” Lori said.  “A little non-sexual affection would be nice though, like holding me tight.  In another half hour, this is going to get painful for me.”

Sky held Lori tight and carefully pulled up a dross construct to monitor Lori’s juice levels.  Low, but not horrible.  Lori no longer spoke.  Her supplemental juice sank lower and lower until it approached withdrawal.  Her hands clenched his, painfully tight.  Her eyes narrowed to slits then closed in tight concentration.  Soon, he felt her body temperature plummet and her body start to shiver as she bent her considerable willpower to the process.  Still, she kept the juice levels of her people at the stimulation optimum.

Lori was able to keep control for another hour after that.  Right at the withdrawal line, minute after minute, controlling the juice more by force of will than by actual juice workings.  If Lori did this every week, no wonder she had developed such an indomitable will and such an incredible control over the moving of juice.  He
had wondered how she had trained her juice moving capabilities to such an incredible degree.

Now he knew.

Nobody in the household but Sky paid attention to Lori, lost as they were in their own worlds of pleasure.  Lori was in agony and in no shape to use her juice to ignore pain in the standard mature Focus way.  Instead, she embraced the pain as catharsis, accepted it as did Sky, as part of the immanence of the world.  Sky’s Toronto Zen master would have approved.  Sky wasn’t sure he did.

Later, too much later
, Lori expired, passed out in Sky’s arms.  Now, Sky understood the purpose of the juice patterns Lori had set up ahead of time, for now they began their work, unhooking Lori from her people, setting up the blocks that prevented her juice buffer from sucking up juice from her Transforms.  Lori would recover, the world would continue turning.  Around Sky the orgy continued unabated, as it would be hours before the natural state of the juice crept away from the stimulation optimum.  Sky guessed that later, perhaps tonight, Lori would fix her Transforms back at the weekly starting set point and the cycle would start again.

All those Transforms
were enjoying the grip of ecstasy, easily echoed by the normals, but their pleasure left no one but him to care for Lori.  How many weeks, months, perhaps years, had this gone on?  Every Friday night, the orgy of pleasure continuing, oblivious to Lori’s unconscious form, wracked by pain out of mind, slumped on the floor.

At least they were still human enough to provide the down comforter.

Sky realized he wasn’t happy with Lori’s Transform household.  The allure of Inferno receded, at least for the moment.

No household should
treat their Focus this way.  No Focus should allow her household to treat her this way.  Even if she invited it, planned it, and did it to herself.  High on the exquisite dross produced by Lori’s once-a-week juice moving, he bundled the Focus up in her comforter, and with more than a little anger, carried her upstairs to her pathetically tiny bedroom.  No.  He refused.

He kept going, up to his attic, where he made a nest for Lori, crawled in next to her, and wept himself to sleep.  In his dreams, dozens of Beasts hunted Arm and himself, the most horrid dream of the world that Sky had ever had.  In the end, Arm fought and killed the Beast master and took Crow for a pet, nothing at all like what had really happened.

When he awoke, Lori was gone.

Carol Hancock: December 21, 1967

Joey Tien brought me another plate of almond chicken from the buffet and three more egg rolls.
His real name was Xiwei, but he never used it.  He was a cute kid, twelve years old, with black hair and brown eyes, and sharp as a tack.

He took my used plate away and replaced it with the new plate filled with food, on top of the little paper place mat list
ing all the years and the animals associated with them.

“The almond chicken is good,” he said, anxiously.
“And the egg rolls are fresh.  You’ll like them.”

I tasted the food and nodded in approval
, my face carefully blank.

He let out his breath and glowed
, relieved.

“See, I knew you’d like it, Mr. Beacon.  Do you want some more egg rolls?  Daddy made a whole batch.”

Joey’s nerves didn’t come from any fear of me.  They came because he wanted my approval.

He didn’t even have the dubious benefit of knowing I was a kill-crazy Arm.

To him, I was strong, rich, male, and American.  Joey had a bad case of hero worship, a far more pleasant issue than my other ongoing problems.  Dealing with the Tiens gave me a renewed interest in normal humans and their lives.

“I’ll tell you when I need something.  Why don’t you tell your father I’m ready to talk to him?” I said.

“You bet!” he said, and he ran for the kitchen.  If I hadn’t been here, his daddy would have yelled at him for running in the restaurant, but he wouldn’t in my hearing.

At
2:00 in the afternoon, I was the only person in the China Garden restaurant.  Unfortunately, the place didn’t get much busier during the lunch hour.  The China Garden wasn’t doing well.  Located too far to the west of downtown Chicago, few people came out this way for their mediocre Chinese food.

The almond chicken was
so bland as to be tasteless and the undercooked egg rolls were greasy, but I didn’t mind.  I wasn’t exactly discriminating about what I ate these days.  I almost finished my meal before Papa Tien came out of the kitchen carrying his two sets of books.

“I hope Xiwei wasn’t bother you,” he
said to me, in his accented and fractured English.  He wanted me to say Joey was a problem, so he would have an excuse to keep him away from me.  He thought I was a bad influence and he really didn’t like the way Joey worshiped the ground I walked on.

“No,” I said
.  He wouldn’t dare tell Joey to stay away.  Two weeks ago, Papa Tien had taken money from me to keep his failing restaurant afloat.  A few days later, there had been a nasty little scene when he tried to refuse something I wanted.

If he
had been smart he would have known what he had gotten into when he agreed to take money from some suspicious stranger for ‘unspecified favors’, but his desperation got the better of him.  Luckily, he only needed to be taught once.  He didn’t try to oppose me anymore.

“Let’s see the books,” I said, and so Tien sat down in the chair opposite me, and spread out the two books.  On the left
he placed the official set, all legal and legitimate.  To the right he laid the real set.

He opened the one on the right, slowly and carefully, and turned to the correct page.

“Income from China Garden for month of November, $4,232.07.  Income from other sources, $2,518.88.  Expenses for China Garden, $3,945.75.  Payment to First Federal Bank, $416.36.  Expenses to other sources, $2,518.88.”

He looked up at me.  “Shortfall is $130.04.”

He didn’t ask.  He never asked.  The shortfall meant no money at all for the family to live on.  They had nothing but this restaurant.  They had exhausted their life savings long ago.

“I have details,” he said, going back to his books.

He looked up again as he heard the rustle of papers.  I opened the roll of bills and carefully peeled off $100 bills.  One at a time.  He eyed them with care, a starving dog watching a steak, as I peeled off ten of them and stopped.

The thousand dollars
would cover the shortfall and supply enough for the family to live on, if careful.  I put my roll of bills back in my pocket and carefully looked away, to where one of the Tien’s standard Chinese horoscope placemats caught my eye.  I had been born in the year of the sheep, I noted.  When I looked back, the bills had vanished.  Tien made no mention of them.

I suspected it
would be like this every month, as I contributed the little bit extra to allow them to survive.  Tien had been panicked, terrified of me and what I might do, the first time I had given them some extra money.  Now, he was nervous, but I hadn’t done anything terrible yet and he was starting to adjust to the new order, as I intended.  I wanted him to rely on me and build his new financial security around my money.  His family knew how bad things could get.  Soon they would never dream of doing anything that might disrupt my support.

“There were two calls this morning on the new phone,” he said.  “Ying answered both.  She said this
is Farland’s lumberyard, and that Henry Curchew worked here four years, and he made $613 per month.  She also took message from some man says name is Moose, ‘car is gone’, he said.”

I nodded.  “Good.  Keep answering as Farland’s lumberyard for the next few days, until I have something new for you.  You shouldn’t get any more calls, but just in case.”  Henry Curchew was a
new identity of mine, and I was building a financial history for him.  Complex, but banks will believe things if you set it up right.  Gerald Darlington, nicknamed Moose for all the obvious reasons, was another one of my people.  Moose ran a low-end appliance repair shop, but the shop was only a front.  His real money came from fencing stolen goods.  I had taken him with few difficulties.  Moose’s message meant the car of my second to last Chicago kill was now somewhere in Mexico, far from any local police.  “Leave the books.  I’ll return them tomorrow,” I said.  “Send out Ying when I’ve finished eating.”  His mouth set in a frown, but he didn’t say anything.  The scene at the beginning had been over Ying.  As much as he didn’t like the arrangement, he would send out Ying.