Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2) (20 page)

“She’s not the sweet kind Focus she used to be.”

“Damned straight.”

“Carol, she was the only one besides you who didn’t fall apart in the Adkins encounter.”

“This is
not
a bad thing.”

“She’s tougher than Arm Whetstone, an Arm graduate of Keaton’s school!  She had Arm Whetstone ‘ma’am’ing her!  Besides that, how am I going to protect myself from her charisma?  Dammit, Carol, she got
you
yesterday during whatever insane practice session you had going.”

Tiamat sighed.  “She did, but only because she needed a break.”  She paused.  “I guess I could have objected…”  Another pause.  “What we’re working on is legitimately dangerous, and I needed a break as well.  I’m teaching her to manipulate her juice buffer via force of will, so she can learn how to access it with her juice patterns.  One wrong move and…”  Tiamat made a throat slitting motion.  “Okay.  Her charisma is a problem.  I understand.”

Gilgamesh shook his head, profoundly unconvinced.

Tiamat put one foot up on a garbage can and leaned forward on her knee.  “Gail is mine.  She wears my tag, she does what I tell her, and she’s not going to betray you because I won’t let her.  I’ll be able to tell if she rolls you – I’m the charisma expert, remember?  You’ll be safe, you’ll be under my personal protection, and you’ll be able to clean up the dross.  Think of how much this will benefit the Cause!  A win all the way around.”

Gilgamesh glowered.  Charisma specialist or not, today Tiamat didn’t convince.

“Besides, how are you going to be able to build the Affinity bond you need to build with her and her household unless the two of you live under the same roof?”

He growled to himself, as he had come up with the same argument right after the Adkins fight.  “Okay.  I’ll move in.  Just don’t let her turn me into a house Crow.”

“You’re a Crow Guru.  You’ll do fine.”

He remained unconvinced.

---

“…and meditation to help my self-control,” Gail said.  They sat in Gail’s office, he in the chair nearest the door, and she in the other guest chair.  The room smelled of under-spiced spaghetti from Gail’s dinner earlier in the evening, working at her desk, plus musty stored furniture and clothes, and faintly, the odor of decay from many years wear on a foundation of cheap construction.

He and Gail had been meeting once a day to help him integrate himself into her household.  With her training from Carol, her juice pattern practice and her other Focus responsibilities, the meetings were shorter than they needed to be.  Gilgamesh still hadn’t been able to convince himself this was now his home; instead, his stay here remained nothing more than a long visit.

“I work a lot with meditation,” Gilgamesh said.  Gail smiled.  She smiled a lot when he was around, which worried him.  They had always been attracted to each other, two Major Transform freaks against the world, but after Tiamat convinced him to join Gail’s household, their attraction began to move to a different and more intimate level.  If Gail hadn’t already been married, and after his experiences with Lori, he knew where this growing attraction would end up.  Ann Chiron of Inferno’s speculations, that Focuses and Crows were made to be mated pairs, appeared to be correct.

Gail, unfortunately, was already married to Van.  Worse, she and Van were more than in love, they were a strong team, one of the few working Major Transform and normal human teams he knew of.  Breaking them up would not only be a disgusting personal failure on his part, it would be a criminal disservice to the Transform community.

“Tell me,” Gail said.

He told Gail the story of how, four and a half years ago, he had made the decision to become an active Crow.  He had tried many things to allow him to go out in the world, and do things without panicking, and the only thing he found to work was meditation.  In his experimentation, he found three different meditation modes, each with their own benefits.

“The best thing is to show you,” Gilgamesh said.  “Show me your meditation and I’ll follow along and see if it’s one of my three.”

Gail pulled her legs up underneath her to sit cross-legged on the chair, and closed her eyes.  “What I do is let myself go and defocus my metasense.”  She did so.  “Then I visualize someone I know and put myself in their place.  Live their life as if I were them.  On a different level of my mind, I’m focusing on wishing them well.  ‘Be happy.  Don’t suffer.  Understand what makes you happy, so you can seek such things out.  Understand what makes you suffer, so you can avoid them.’  After a while I lose the sense of individuality and I begin to visualize people as a concept.  My household.  The household superorganism, according to Lori.”

“Compassion,” Gilgamesh said.  He followed along with Gail, dropping his metasense and visualizing Sylvie DeYoung to start with.  Gail could talk and meditate simultaneously, a trick that didn’t work for normal people and Transforms, but something he, Lori and Sky did as well.  He had enough data now to consider this to be a proven standard Major Transform capability.  “I’m doing this style of meditation a lot recently.  I need to do this before I visit any Focus household.”

“The household superorganism doesn’t think you’re part of us, yet,” Gail said.

“I know.  Do you have any ideas on how to fix this?”  He had run into the same problem in his Inferno visits, and he now suspected the problem was something in him.

“Nuh uh.”

Time passed and Gilgamesh relaxed into the compassion of the household, until his metasense woke up, detecting a powerful charismatic command from Gail.  At herself.  Dampening her attraction to him again.  He wondered how long she would need to continue doing that, or if she would at some point give up and give in to her instinctive urges.  “So, you said you did three types of these?  This is the only one I know.  What’re the others?”

He opened his eyes.  “Is there a phrase you say to yourself when things get tense?  Something that helps calm you but isn’t profanity?”

“Sure.  The chorus to ‘Yellow Submarine’.  ‘We all live…’”

Gilgamesh had to laugh.  Gail glared, but couldn’t hold it and joined in with his laughter.  “What you do is meditate on your phrase, what’s officially termed a ‘mantra’.  As you do so, you focus on your breathing and your juice, how the juice flows through you as your heart beats and you breathe, and let go of all your other thoughts.”

Gail closed her eyes again, following his suggestion.  He followed along.  “Wow,” she said, dreamily.  “Wow.  Wow.  Wow.”

“When I first did this, I didn’t know I needed to focus on my internal juice as well, but it was still useful,” Gilgamesh said.  “But only after hours and hours of meditation on my mantra.  For a Crow, this quiets the panic enough to allow him to go out in daylight and interact with people in a meaningful manner.  Even after all my years as a Crow, I still need to do this.”  He waited as Gail’s mind floated away wherever.  By focusing on his internal juice, he found the place of reduced panic quite quickly.  “What does this do for a Focus?”

“I’m looking for the words,” Gail said.  Slowly.  “I’m putting bad memories to bed, where they won’t bother me anymore.  There’s soup on the stove and it needs to cook.  Patterns of the day don’t need to be patterns in my thoughts.  Challenge Sylvie, she barks at me, I apologize, she deflects, I bark at her, we make up.  The pattern is familiar, and we do it, even if it’s hurtful, because the pattern is easy.  Here, in this meditative state, I keep finding other possibilities.  What’s this called?”

Gilgamesh smiled.  “Focused attention.  Or ‘breathing’.”

Gail opened her eyes.  “Useful and calming, but I’m not sure I need to do this often,” she said.  Gilgamesh nodded, more in understanding than agreement.  This didn’t fit with Gail’s personality.  She didn’t like to be calm, despite the benefits she would gain for herself and her dealings with her household.  “What’s the third?”

“Mindfulness.  It’s what I use, as a Crow, to prepare for battle or for dropping into the pheromone flow.”

“Tell, tell,” Gail said.  “Getting into the Dreaming is a big problem for me.  If this helps…”

“Perhaps,” Gilgamesh said.  From his work with Lori, he was convinced the pheromone flow and the Dreaming weren’t the same, at least in their outer levels.  “What you do when you start this meditation form is to become one with your senses, your normal senses and your metasense, but you need to not let them distract you or carry you away.  Instead of letting go of your thoughts, treat them as another sensory input.  This meditative form possesses many useful sub-forms I’ll tell you about later; one of these subforms is how I found my ex-wife before the Battle in Detroit.”

Gail nodded, remembering one of their earliest poignant moments together.  She closed her eyes and Gilgamesh felt Gail fall into her senses and her metasense.  He did the same…and there they were, together in the flow, the Princess and the Frog.  In this meditation mode they weren’t alone, but mindful of each other.  She signed at him – deaf signing? – and by following along with her emotions and mental state, he picked up on the signing business in seconds.  He wondered why she bothered, or how she knew deaf signing to begin with.  Why not just communicate directly, metasense to metasense.  Or was that just a Crow thing?

“This isn’t the Dreaming,” she signed.

“This is the kaleidoscope, the outer edge of the pheromone flow,” Gilgamesh signed back, using Gail’s expectation for what the signs should be to guide what he signed.  The world dipped and swirled around him, hot sensations that always reminded him of tar bubbling on a summer street.  “The flow is here.”  He led her out of the kaleidoscope, as it was too personal to share with another, and into the relative calm space of the flow.

“It’s like a map, only a hallucinogenic map that’s distorted and moving and flowing and what’s Carol doing, anyway?”

“I see the flow as a collection of game boards, an affectation of Shadow’s Crows,” Gilgamesh said.  “You’ll likely see this differently.”  He hunted down Carol’s game token, crossing giant red and black squares like the layout of an oversized chess board. Today her token was a meat cleaver.  “She’s recovering from something bad,” Gilgamesh said.  “Ah, another attempt at juice draw interruption.  Makes me glad I’m here and not in Chicago.”

“It’s like she’s chopped off her arms and legs,” Gail said.  “There’s strings between everyone on the map, and little push pins, and…”  She paused.  “This isn’t real time, or just real time, as there’s
memories
here.  You’re a private investigator?  A PI?”

“Carol and I aren’t legally registered as such, but we did get extensive training in those skills, and many similar ones involving police procedures and bounty hunting from Focus Connie Webb.”  He led Gail in the flow over to Focus Webb’s home in San Diego, which appeared in the flow to him as a Chutes and Ladders game.  Gail attempted to attract Focus Webb’s attention, but Gilgamesh doubted Focus Webb even knew the flow existed.

“Who’s that, and why is he chiding us?” Gail said.  He followed Gail’s attention back to the grand chessboard and the black king, Shadow.

Teaching a Focus the flow?
Shadow sent to him.

I didn’t think she’d be so good at this,
Gilgamesh sent back to Shadow.  As always, direct flow communications ate dross in quantity.  Much more of this and he would need to snack on Gail’s office dross just to keep from passing out.

You wouldn’t be attracted to her if she wasn’t talented.  Be careful!

“You and Shadow were communicating somehow,” Gail signed.

“A communication method that uses far too much juice,” Gilgamesh signed back.  “He reminded me of the dangers someone new to the flow might face.  There are monsters here, unknown things able to drive people insane.”

Shadow didn’t leave.  Instead, he came over (as a hopping chess king) and inspected the two of them.  “Inventive.  Deaf signing in the flow,” he signed.  “Greetings, Focus Rickenbach-Schuber.  This is an extremely efficient method of communication, albeit prone to signal loss.  Slow, though.”

“So, are you my Dreaming friend, Polaris?” Gail signed.

“No, I can’t make such a claim.”  Shadow was most amused, which puzzled Gilgamesh.

Gail led them to the danger lands to the west.  “It’s bad.  The entire mountain chain from down in Mexico all the way through Canada and into Alaska is bad.”

“Yes,” Shadow signed.  “Yet sense to the northeast.  The ones who look back when you look at them.”

“The Progenitors,” Gilgamesh signed.  As he signed, the Progenitors did look back at him, and as they did they directed his flow presence back to some place in the mountainous west.  He recognized the signature and the subsidiary game board, the new children’s game, Hungry Hungry Hippos.  The Hunters.

“Oh,” Gail signed.  She waved at the Progenitors and beamed good cheer.  To Gilgamesh’s surprise, they answered with the same.  “They don’t like the Hunters, do they?”

“No, not at all,” Shadow signed.  “The fact they don’t is one of the best advertisements for the Cause I know of.”

---

“The idea is also to help my people understand the benefits of having a Crow in the household,” Gail said, twisting around to face him.  They were nearly to Dayton, where Gail, Van, Sylvie and Kurt were going to get his help at securing them an interview.  “So, when we’re done with this, make sure you tell our people everything, for instance on one of our story nights.”