No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Seven) (11 page)

Gail enjoyed having Van hold her and rub her back.  She laid her head on his shoulder and relaxed, knowing that at least one person loved her.

“Uh huh.  It’s just so hard.  Everyone here has something they think I should be doing differently.  No matter what I do, everyone always disapproves.  I can’t
fix
things.  I’m trying to do things right, but things keep getting worse.  I give everyone lots of space.  I put a lot of work into not using my tricks on people.  I’m practically their slave and they still hate me!”

The tears came, and she held tight to Van as she cried.

“I don’t mean to be yanking around people’s juice, I just can’t help it.  I’m trying to move the juice the right way.  I’m trying as hard as I can.”

“Shh, shh, I know you are,” Van said, holding her close.  “You
’re doing fine.  Give it a little more time.”

Gail didn
’t answer, and clung tighter to Van as her tears dampened his shoulder.  After a long time, her tears faded away.

“I love you, did you know that?”

“Mmm-hmm,” Van said.  He kept rubbing, and slowly his hands wandered to other places, stroking and gently rubbing.  After long moments, he slipped his hands under her shirt and stroked along her sides and back.

Gail pulled away.

At her response, Van also pulled away, and a several foot gap now yawned between them.  He didn’t say anything at all, staring at her.

“I
’m sorry.  I’m, uh, not in the mood right now.”  Gail shivered with the loss of his touch.

“You haven
’t been in the mood for weeks,” he said.  His voice was gentle, but there was a hard edge to it.

“I
’m sorry.  I’m really sorry.”  Her tears welled up in her eyes again.

“You
’re not in the mood,” Van said.  He usually took rejection moderately well, but she noticed an angry edge to his frown this time.

“I
’m sorry.  It’s, well, been a bad day.  I’ll probably be more in the mood tomorrow.”  Gail glanced down as she lied, and had a hard time making her words sound convincing.

“Tomorrow,” Van said, cold.  “It
’s been ‘tomorrow’ for the last six weeks.”

“I
’m sorry.  I really am.  I just haven’t been in the mood.”  Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes again, and she wasn’t sure whether her emotions came because of Van, for pushing her, or because of her fears.

“Listen to yourself.  You haven
’t been in the mood for anything for weeks.  I’ve been doing what you want, I give you support, I give you room.  When does it get to be my turn?”  Van stood tall in the center of the tent, the angled ceiling pressing his brown hair almost into a point.

Gail
glanced up at Van’s angry face and realized this wasn’t some sudden anger.  Van didn’t do ‘sudden’.  This was something he had been thinking about for days, waiting for the right time.  He was serious, and possibly angry enough to leave her.

Her anger leached away and left Gail only with the fear.  She couldn
’t cope without Van.  Against the awfulness of her life, he was her only remaining support.

“I
’m sorry.  Please, I’m sorry,” she said, the tears finally coming again.

“Yes, you
’re sorry.  You’ve said that before, too.  It doesn’t seem to make any difference.  You keep doing what you’ve been doing, and apologize some more.  Why don’t you try thinking about someone other than yourself for a change?  When’s the last time you thought about me?  I used to have a career path before you transformed.  Now, I’m going to be stuck in Detroit with a history PhD.  There are people who’ll hire a history PhD, but they aren’t in Detroit.  What about that?  Have you ever thought about that?”  Van stood up taller in his anger, and his head rattled the plywood.

Gail found herself taking another step back, until her calves butted into the cot behind her.  More mud oozed through the cracks in the floor, as Gail
’s weight shifted the plywood sheets.  She tried to come up with something to say besides more apologies.

“What do you want me to do?” she
said.  Was this ‘it’?  She had feared this moment ever since she realized she would never be interested in sex again because of her low juice problems.  The fear of losing Van gnawed at her heart.  Rationally, he shouldn’t stay.  She would never bear his children.  She couldn’t provide sex.  Her moods swung from bad to worse.

She always thought
her irrational fears were the worst, but a rational fear you couldn’t do anything about…

“I don
’t know.”  Van waved his hands into the tent ceiling.  “Anything.  Except whine.  And sulk.”

Gail took a deep breath.  “I can try,” she said.

Van grunted, not satisfied.

“What about your career?  What do you want to do about that?”

Van thought for a long time, shrugged, and relaxed a little.  “I’m stumped.  I haven’t managed to come up with any viable ideas.”

Gail nodded.  “I
’ll support you.  Whatever we come up with.”

Van nodded, and relaxed a little further.

“So would it help if I tried to be more positive?” Gail said, making a decision, one she couldn’t believe she made.  “And concentrate on you more?  I really do apologize, even though I know you don’t want to listen to another apology, but I’ll try to do better.  Would that help?”

“Yeah,” Van said.  “I think it would.”

Gail smiled a suggestive smile.  “You know, I’m not really interested now, but maybe with a little time and effort…”

Van actually smiled then, and opened his arms, and Gail flowed back into his warm embrace.

The Rickenbach Temper

(14)

Gail lay in her cot and wished the cool of the evening would penetrate into the stifling interior of the tent.  Van had gone hours ago and Gail had gone herself to get dinner, but
she came back to the tent after she finished.  She couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.

She had never faked an orgasm with Van before.  She wondered if Van knew.  It would be like Van
not to say anything.  Buried in the back of one of the brochures on being a Focus had been an ominous statement that still haunted her, long after she lost the brochure.  “One of the side effects of being a Transform with low juice is low libido.  The Focus should correct this whenever necessary.”  Back while stuck in the Clinic Van had figured out that Gail’s light sensitivity and short temper were due to low juice, a side effect of not having enough Transforms in her household.  If he had seen the statement about low libido, he hadn’t commented on it.

Gail
’s household approached full size and her personal juice remained low.  She would have low juice problems for the rest of her life.  She would never be interested in sex again.  When she figured this out, she had cried for hours.  Gail had been searching for a way to tell Van in some polite fashion, but she had failed.  What man wouldn’t think of leaving a frigid woman?  Now this.  Telling Van now became much harder, if not impossible.

Outside, people began to exit their tents and head up to the house.  Tuesday night, time for the household
’s sixth weekly meeting, the ones Bart had started after he took over as household leader.  She had never been to one.

Not having to worry about accidentally enslaving her household
had started out as a blessed relief, but recently she had developed a little problem – her hearing had improved and now she heard every word said in the meetings.  With her metasense allowing her to view the meetings as they happened, she might as well be there.

She hated
it.  Before her hearing improved, she had not only been cut out of the household decision making process, she no longer knew the issues.  Now, better informed, she realized her people spent more time bitching about her than even Van, in his disgust, had said.

By the time the sun set, they were gathered and bitching again.  Bart, still the household leader, always allocated the beginning of the meeting for people to bring up problems, and whatever problems they started with, they always wound around to complaining about Gail.  How she interfered, how she mismanag
ed the juice supply, how she was the ultimate source of problems she didn’t even know existed.  They even blamed her for the household’s residence out in a field.

She was, however, damned tired of listening to people sniping at her behind her back.  Passively enslaved was one thing, demeaning slavery another.  She did her best and nobody gave a damn.  Everything was always her fault.

Screw this, she decided.  She didn’t understand what had triggered her decision, the annoyance of having to cope with the goddamned minister the Clinic forced on her, or stooping to fake an orgasm, or the new thought creeping into the edges of her mind that she would be better off totally alone, without Van, but she was over the edge.

If her Transforms had wanted an easily enslaved Focus, they had chosen the wrong one.  She hoped she could keep at least some control over her temper.

She put her filthy feet back into the muddy sneakers and marched up to the house.  She was surprised she had lasted this long.  If anything, she missed the head-butting in her life – she had always butted heads with her father, and at U of M, made friends with people not afraid to butt heads with her, or run away disgusted when a bit of her Rickenbach temper slipped out.

The silence when she entered the cramped living room was deafening.

Eighteen of her nineteen Transforms had gathered in the room, and eleven other adults, sitting on chairs and on the floor and stuffed in corners. Van had curled his long body into the far corner, buried behind rows of other people.  Sylvie and Kurt sat next to each other on the floor with their backs to the couch.  No children or adolescents attended.  Bart’s orders.

Bart stood on the hearth, presiding, with Virgil Conte and John Bracken beside him.  Bart was about forty-five, with sandy blond hair and blue eyes
, a big beefy man who worked as a shift super at GM’s Clark Street Assembly.  He frowned at her when she entered the room, as did Virgil Conte, the household’s treasurer, and John Bracken, in charge of household maintenance.

“Gail,”
Bart said, unwelcoming.  “Is there anything we can help you with, before we get back to our meeting?”

“Oh, don
’t mind me,” Gail said, cheerful for the first time in weeks.  “I just decided to join you tonight.”

Bart
turned to his wife, Isabella, checking to make sure that Gail hadn’t clipped her.  Gail, in a good mood, hadn’t.  Bart worried his lower lip, knowing that if he made Gail angry, he would be hurting his own wife.  Gail took a moment to glance around at the faces around her, pleasantly surprised to find they weren’t all as hostile as she had feared.  Many of them didn’t appear unhappy, and Melanie and Betha Ebener looked positively pleased to see her.  Melanie even stood up.

“Take my seat, Gail,” Melanie said.  Today her plain pastel blue dress was accented by a white scalloped collar and costume jewelry beads.  Gail
didn’t think she had ever seen Melanie wear jewelry before.

Gail almost said no, but then she figured, what the hell.  She was tired of spending so much effort to be considerate of everyone else at her own expense.

“Thank you.”  She nodded to Melanie as she sat, and Melanie beamed.

“Brown-noser,” she heard Ed Zarzemski
’s wife, Phyllis murmur.  Gail noticed that she had pumped Melanie just a bit in her pleasure at the friendliness.  She hurriedly fixed the inadvertent juice addition.

The room settled down, but Bart didn
’t speak.  Gail studied him out of the corner of her eyes and noted the angry set of his jaw.  Probably at a loss, thinking of a way to get rid of her without getting Isabella hurt.  Gail knew she should feel guilty for the blatant manipulation, but she didn’t.  Not right now.

“Don
’t you have some meeting business to conduct?” she said.  “Isn’t this the time for people to bring up problems?”

She smiled sweetly
, wondering if anyone would have the nerve to snipe about her handling of the juice to her face.  She was half-ready to jump down the throat of anyone who dared to complain about her, and give them all a taste of a real Rickenbach temper tantrum.  She had no idea what the juice would do if she let loose.

No
one brought up any problems, about her or anything else.  Bart took a relieved breath and acquiesced to her will.  “Yes, well.  I think we’re done dealing with all the problems.  Why don’t we go on to the Treasurer’s Report?  Virgil?”

Bart stepped down from the hearth, and Virgil stepped up.  Virgil was
Tricia Bluen’s live-in boyfriend, a thirtyish man of medium height, with medium brown hair and a little bit of a paunch.  He wore a business suit, the very picture of an accountant.

“Well,
um,” he said, reading from a paper, “balance last week was $42,697.22. Income was $3,241.65.  Expenses were $3,066.89, giving a net gain of $174.76.  The new balance is $42,871.98.”

The large numbers reassured Gail.  Many of the household had contributed from their life savings, so the household would be able to afford some kind of real ho
using before winter.  Gail hoped the money would suffice.  At only $174 in a week, they weren’t gaining ground quickly.

There was a long pause, and then Gail realized that everyone wait
ed for her response to those numbers.  She was startled when she noticed it, and then nodded.

Everyone had waited on her, including
a now-irritated-with-himself Bart. “Thank you, Virgil,” he said, taking control again and stepping up, onto the hearth. “The next item on the agenda is the septic system.  We have a lot of people living here, and as you know, the septic system isn’t built to handle it.  We’ve come up with some steps to improve…”

The meeting went on for another hour and Gail stayed through all of it.  When she left, she doubted anyone liked her any better.  Except for one person.  Herself.

---

Her overflowing annoyance at the world also included the damned metasense ghost.  The ghost now showed every
Thursday morning, stayed for hours, and every time she tried to communicate, the ghost ran away.  Several times the ghost had pantomimed something, and when it did she could almost metasense a shape, a human shape, and always at the same location.  Annoying.

This time she would see.  She worked it out in her mind, how to move slowly and carefully, keeping her body mostly the same shape
she kept it when she slept.

She started the move when the ghost showed, at 2
a.m.  Moving about an inch a minute, she crept off the cot and down to the floor.  By the time she reached the tent opening, the ghost had progressed to its third stop.  If the ghost followed the normal pattern, it should be in position for her to see at its next stop, about fifty feet away.

She slowly crept forward until she maneuvered her eye to the bottom tent flap opening.  With her metasense she tracked the ghost until it reached a spot about fifty feet away.  There.  It was human shaped, in her Focus-enhanced-night vision, a short human of indeterminate sex.

The instant she
saw
the ghost, the ghost turned and ran.

(15)

I come to the garden alone

While the dew is still on the roses

And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,

The son of God discloses.

And he walks with me

And he talks with me.

And he tells me I am his own.

And the joy we share as we tarry there

None other has ever known.

The strains of the hymn came wafting over the field from the Ebener farmhouse, as they had every Sunday morning for the last three weeks, ever since the Reverend Matthew Robert Narbanor had come into her life.

Gail hated
the hymn.  Too sappy, too sweet, too
religious
. She had aggressively given up religion three years ago, during her freshman year in college, when she discovered that there was more to life than the small-minded conformism of her parent’s conservative church.  Now, she had a minister in her household.  He was exactly as much trouble as she expected.

Her dislike didn
’t matter.  Every single Sunday he was up there conducting a worship service. With every word and every hymn, she heard the voice of her childhood pastor, preaching hellfire and brimstone, and how a woman’s role was to obey her husband.  The nasty whispered gossip of the women.  The chilly cliques in Sunday School as a teen, where anyone who wouldn’t fit in was cut dead.  The universal disapproval of any spark of creativity or individuality.

She remembered Sundays after church, when her father would lecture her about a woman
’s role in life, and her mother would try to persuade her that she, Gail, would really be happier if she just did what her father wanted.  The last time she attended, Pastor Thompson had preached the evils of fornication, and the hells awaiting those who lived in sin before they married.

Gail had promised herself she
would never return to that church, no matter how much her mother pleaded.

So here she was,
finally out on her own, out from under the thumb of her family, though it took a Focus transformation and a household revolt to free her.  Now this, metaphorically thrusting her back in her family’s clutches.  Church every Sunday, whether she wanted it or not.  With a minister in her household, she couldn’t even escape anymore.  Dammit!  Why couldn’t they leave her alone?

But no, there he was, every Sunday morning, stubbornly accusing.  He wasn
’t going to stop, not for anything a mere Focus could do.

She knew this, because, though she didn
’t like to think about it, she didn’t react well to Narbanor’s services.  The minute the service started, her anger took charge and she lost control of the juice.  The low juice was hard on all the Transforms in the service, but her juice anger was worst on the minister.  She stripped him down to where it hurt
her
, and yet, he still kept preaching.  All but the hardiest Transforms gave up after the first Sunday, but Narbanor still preached.  Sometimes he could barely talk, because of the low juice, and still he kept going.

Gail hated herself for
hurting him, and the guilt only made things worse.  She didn’t understand why he didn’t give up.  However, he wouldn’t quit, and so he was up there again, accusing just by his stubborn presence.  Disapproval washed down in waves on her from the Ebener farmhouse.  Disapproval of her relationship with Van, disapproval of her refusal to be an obedient housewife, disapproval of all the choices she made in her life.  The whole scene was an accusation of her failures with her household, her failures as a Focus.  The pain in her people, her selfishness, her inability to control the juice.