No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Seven) (6 page)

Even Van had nearly lost patience with her.

Her headache pounded in her temples.  The constant pain wore on her, draining her of what little energy remained.  A month as a Focus, and the headache never let up.  She hadn’t worried about anything beyond simply enduring the day for three solid weeks.

Nothing the brochures or doctors said had been true, except that Focuses with small households had low juice.  The juice wouldn
’t move in a proper fashion.  Even when the juice did move, it seeped back into Gail’s juice buffer like water into a sponge as soon as she stopped concentrating.  All her people were in agony because of her and she couldn’t do anything to stop their pain.  Every night she could barely sleep, plagued by terrifying nightmares she remembered far too easily when awake.

The bustle came to a sudden stop as the orderly wheeled Gail down the Clinic corridor.  Heads turned in the crowded hallway, as
everyone turned to look at Gail.  A Transform woman Gail knew only by the shape of her juice flinched away from Gail, and tears began streaming down her face.  Across the hall from her, a normal woman escorting her Transform husband clutched her two children to her, protectively.  All along the hall, people pulled backwards and away from her, faces pale.

Gail covered her face, unable to take the opprobrium.  Hiding her eyes didn
’t help, because as she passed her people, she heard them gasping, or sniffling, or hissing.  Or stepping back.  The silence surrounded Gail as they led her down the hall and to the elevator.  She peeked through her fingers at the large entrance lobby, with its cracked tile floor and masonry walls needing repainting.  No sound now.  Everyone on the staff who wasn’t helping waited, quiet, in the lobby.  Looking at her.  Wondering.

The omnipresent ill eased up the farther she got from her room
.  When Gail left the clinic, she found she could take her hand from over her eyes, her light sensitivity gone.

Outside, a leaden sky threatened a cold spring rain it would likely never deliver.  Cars filled the parking lot out front, in a haphazard u-shape with no respect for the designated parking spots.  At the head of the line was a flatbed trailer attached to the back of Gail
’s father’s Ford.

“I see they
’ve got my place reserved for me,” Gail said, seeing the flatbed trailer.  She was luggage, excess baggage, nothing more than an ineffective juice-moving device.  Enslaving her would be best for everyone.  Her father would find a way to manage…and make a profit doing so.

Gail
’s father stood in the bed of the trailer, loading suitcases and random boxes.  Another man Gail didn’t recognize stood at the foot of the trailer, handing boxes up.  Van stood over to the left, loading a laundry basket full of clothes into his old junker, once red but now so rusted you couldn’t tell the color by looking.  All over the parking lot, people were loading and carrying and hurrying in and out.

Everyone stopped moving when the orderly wheeled Gail out of the building.  Every head turned and all conversation ceased; they just stared at her.  None of the faces held love or affection.  Even the faces of Sylvie and Kurt were cold as they stood by their car.  The Transforms were the worst, their faces gray with a kind of sick fear at the very sight of her.  Sylvie grimaced at her, an expression of bleak sadness and despair, before she turned away.

So this is my household, Gail thought.  She sighed, looking them over.  They are who they are, and they have no more control over this than I do.

She
glanced over to Van for help, wishing desperately that he would say something to pull her out of this terrible moment in the spotlight of despite.  However, he stood as quiet as the others, caught in the sudden silence.  She wished Van would speak up, take charge.  Van never would in a situation that sprung up with no warning, though; these sorts of situations flustered him.  He dealt with things slowly, after long thought.  He would fight for her, even with her father, but not without thinking about it and planning every detail and word first.

Her father
whistled.  “Put her up in the lead car,” he said to the orderlies, pointing to the Ford attached to the flatbed trailer.

“What, not tied to the trailer, father?” Gail said, a whisper.  She closed her eyes, not wanting to see her fate.  The bustle resumed around her, all the people carefully ignoring her as she came close
, and staring at her after she passed.  It was a long way across the full length of the parking lot to the lead car.  Gail didn’t want to be going there.  She wanted to be going with Van, but she didn’t have the energy to fight her father.

As the orderly wheeled Gail across that parking lot, though, her terrible never-ending headache began to fade.  At first Gail couldn
’t believe it, and remained seated, edgy, waiting for the pain to return.  Halfway across the parking lot Gail lost her patience.  She leapt out of the wheelchair and stumbled out of the embrace of the orderly who tried to corral her.

“Hey!  The headache
’s gone!” she said.  The people closest to her stepped back as if she was a loon.

Without warning, the juice moved, bam! 
The way the juice was supposed to move.  Without the least effort Gail took some juice from her juice buffer and gave it to Sylvie.  Then to another Transform woman.  Then to another Transform, a man.  Whoosh!  Gail set them at their optimum points, the way the brochures said she should be slowly teaching herself to do.  All three turned to Gail with expressions of stunned amazement on their faces.

Sylvie collapsed to the ground
a moment later, laughing and crying helplessly with the sudden release of the long torment.  Gail found herself crying, tears of happiness and relief.  In a sudden enthusiasm, Gail climbed up on the hood of her father’s Ford.

“Gail, get down from there!  Get in my car!” her father shouted at her.

She ignored him, turning her attention to the other Transforms, the ones who remained inside the building.  Six of her Transforms, still suffering from low juice.  She tried to move their juice, but she couldn’t, awakening the old headache.  When she closed her eyes in frustration, she metasensed a black cloud around the building, malevolent and brooding.  Dammit!

“
‘It’s bad’,” Gail said to herself, her reporter’s curiosity returning for the first time since Focus Adkins’ visit.  “The Focus bitch said the building was bad.”  Now, outside, Gail metasensed the badness.  The foul crap tasted like spoiled milk.

Cool.

All she had needed to do was take a walk outside with her Transforms and they wouldn’t have had to spent weeks in pain.  How stupid.  How unbelievably, futilely stupid.

“Get everyone outside
!”  The people in the parking lot just looked at her, still uncomprehending.  “Kurt, Van, don’t you understand?  The building is bad!  It was screwing up the juice, keeping me from being able to move juice out of my juice buffer.  Get those people out of the clinic and I can fix them!”

One by one, the other six Transforms in her household escaped the oppressive interference of the clinic, and as each one did, Gail set them to their optimum points.  It was comical, almost, as each face echoed the relief, amazement and delight of the last when their turn came.  Gail laughed for the joy of her juice moving.

With her burst of giddy laughter, the move turned into a party.  Even the normals caught the mood, smiling uncontrollably.  One Transform man shouted for joy, and Gail spotted the witch bitch Grimm laughing and crying at the same time, huddled over by her husband’s pickup.  They all started to dance, caught up in Gail’s mood, and Gail danced with them, and even the normals joined in.  She didn’t need her eyes.  They were all there in her head and she echoed their every emotion.  Melanie, still distraught because her boyfriend left her because she transformed.  Sylvie, curiosity outweighing all other emotions.  Grimm, resigned and hurting.  Ed Zarzemski, an older man with a weathered face and salt-and-pepper hair.  Anita Bartusch, a woman in her thirties, whose hair was the most astonishing shade of red.  John Guynes, the Transform who had shouted for joy, a young man with dark brown hair and a twinkle in his eyes, as if he laughed inwardly at the whole world.  Betha Ebener, who like Helen Grimm looked too old to have gotten Transform Sickness, grandmotherly, with black hair salted by grey.  Tricia Bluen, Gail’s age, wearing a short skirt and waving her peroxide blonde hair in the breeze as she walked up to Gail to give her a hug.  Vera Bracken, a woman in her forties, dressed in a conservative dress and understated makeup, a severe hairdo and a generous smile.  Husbands and wives.  Children.  A baby who couldn’t be more than a few weeks old.  Gail couldn’t believe it.  She had children.  These were her people, her responsibility, always in her head, always anchored by her metasense.

They didn
’t hate her.

“It was the building,” she
said, looking around at the eager faces, all watching her.  Except her father, who sat in the car, steaming.  Gail felt awkward to be the center of all this attention.  “Something was wrong with the building.  I don’t know what.  But something in the building kept me from moving the juice out of the household juice buffer.  That’s why we were all so miserable.  All we have to do is stay away from the building.”

They looked at her, and looked at each other.

“So what happens now?” Ed said.

“Now?  Now, I guess we move.  I
’ll keep the juice moving.  We figure out how to all live together.”  Gail laughed, still giddy with relief about the end of her terrible headache.  Memories returned, of tests, term papers and student life, and even the cruel Focus, with her lectures about punishment and fear and control.  She would never take that path.  Never.  She didn’t need to.  They would be a family, a commune, together, and everything would all work out naturally.  She wouldn’t need to be their slave – and they wouldn’t need to be hers.

“There
’s more,” she said.  “Once we get to…” she waved her hands around vaguely “to wherever it is we’re going, we’ll have to figure out how to live as a household.  I’m not going to try to impose my will on all of you.  We’ll figure it out together.  Everybody here gets a vote, and we’ll work things out based on what’s best for everyone.”

Everyone was still smiling, this time with a different kind of relief.  Gail looked at those faces, and knew she made the right decision.  Her way, treating people with respect, rather than heavy-handed authoritarianism, would be better.

Every few minutes she caught herself accidentally moving juice, always from her Transforms and back to her.  Then she would fix it, but as soon as she relaxed, the juice started moving on its own again.  Over and over again this happened.  Soon moving the juice became work.

So much for the party and the Transform utopia.  “Hey!” she said, waving her arms around towards the waiting cars.  “We
’ve got a home to go to.  I’m handling the juice.  Let’s go!”  Her parents remained in their car, glowering and tight lipped.  She rapped on the car window next to her mother.  “I’m riding with Van!  See you at this new place!”

Gail watched as people scattered, back to the cars and to the building, to finish packing and loading.  Sylvie looked back at her as she left, and she wasn
’t the only one.  A worn, tired look flickered across her friendly face.  Gail’s stomach sank.  Those people depended on her and she had a terrible nagging suspicion this responsibility would be a lot harder to live up to than she had ever dreamed.  Moving juice was work, hard work, hard work that would never end.  Never.

Adjustments

(9)

“I like the idea, Ed,” Gail said, looking around the tiny room with a happy glow.  The Ebeners had most recently used the room as a storage closet, but originally the room served as an infant’s room, accessible from the master bedroom and the hallway.  Dusty floor and peeling wallpaper, but abundant with possibilities. “It’s certainly less excessive than sticking us in the master bedroom.”  Which is what the household had initially suggested.

Ed Zarzemski, an older, almost grandfatherly man with salt and pepper black hair, wobbled.  “Focus,” he said, a whisper.

“Oh, sorry.”  She had goofed again.  An instant of personal happiness, and every Transform in the house was high on juice.  Being a Focus was harder than she ever thought it would be, and not because of the difficulties predicted by the pamphlets.  The miniscule juice flow recommended in the pamphlets wasn’t the problem; she never needed the bolded ‘don’t forget to move the juice’ pamphlet warnings.  Instead, the juice reacted intensely to her every emotion.  Every day she grew more tired, whether she worked around the house with the others, moving furnishings, cooking, going to bring a new Transform into her household, or just sitting around and shooting the breeze with people.

Four hours later, near dinner, Van pulled up in his junker, from his daily commute to U of M.  Gail rushed out to meet him.  He
was frazzled and stressed, and Gail knew why.  The life they constructed here wasn’t his dream, and he was having a hard time adjusting to the necessary daily commute.  “We came up with a usable compromise on where they’re going to stick us,” Gail said, hugging Van.

“Great!  Uh, Gail, the Transforms are all wobbly.”

Damn.  She had pumped them again, this time way past what she guessed was the stimulation optimum, all the way to whatever strange limit she reached when she pumped up the Transforms too much.  She didn’t think the juice level she hit was close to the make-them-into-Monsters point, but it was high enough to hurt them.  She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and carefully moved their juice levels back to normal.  “You want to take a look?” Gail said.

Gail led Van through the kitchen, setting off Gail
’s now growling stomach.  Leaving the Clinic that had ‘gone bad’ had awakened her appetite something fierce.  She had thought she had been hungry in the clinic, but her constant hunger now was insane.  She already ate twice as much as even the larger men, enough to draw a few ‘huh’ reactions, and she had started to worry that if she didn’t find a way to stop her food binge, she would end up fat.

“It
’s a closet!” Van said, unhappy, after Gail introduced them to their new room.  Gail winced.  “I can’t live in a closet.  Where am I going to work?”  The time he had taken off from working on his dissertation, to care for Gail right after she had transformed, had put him way behind schedule, and his advisor had told him they wouldn’t be extending the contracted teaching hours that paid for his degree.  It left him cranky.

She had been so worked up over the wonderful compromise, between household queen in the largest room in an old farmhouse with tiny rooms to start with, and on the other end, sharing a bunk bed with Van in a room with six other adults
, that she had forgotten about Van’s issues.

Thump, thumpity thump.  Gail turned to the noise and backed away from the still muttering and unhappy Van. 
Vera Bracken lay at the bottom of the stairs, moaning.  She had fallen down the stairs!  Gail rushed down the hall to find out how badly Vera was hurt.

“Focus, juice,”
Vera said, a breathy whisper.

Gail gasped in horror, knowing exactly what she had done.  Van
’s unhappiness over the small infant’s room had destroyed Gail’s good mood, and she had unconsciously stripped juice from every Transform in the household.  All the way down to the funny lower juice level point where Gail herself felt pain.  She put everyone’s juice back.  “Sorry, sorry,” Gail said.  “Are you hurt?”  Gail helped Vera sit up; the always immaculately dressed business-woman looked mussed, but save for a scrape or bruise, she wasn’t hurt at all.

As she helped Vera, Gail couldn’t help but pick up the emotion Vera radiated
– annoyance at Gail.

She pick
ed up a lot of that recently.

---

“I’m sorry, Gail, but we think it’s for the best,” Kurt said.  Ed moaned; Gail had shorted his juice, enough to notice, as they stood nearly a hundred yards from the Ebener farmhouse, near the tiny three-tree orchard of pear trees.  “It’s temporary, only until you get enough control over the juice so you aren’t pumping and stripping people by accident.”

Three days.  She and Van had lasted all of three days in their tiny farmhouse room, before it came to this.  The day before yesterday, Kurt and Ed had braced her on another topic, the household evening meetings.  Everyone wanted to do anything Gail would suggest, just to get
the pleasurable surge of juice Gail gave them every time the dark cloud of pain lifted.  Which happened every time a vote went her way.  Even Van thought she needed to withdraw from those meetings.  Gail hadn’t fought the exile from the meetings; she had seen the same behavior herself.

Now, this.

“Do you think this will help?”

“We
’ve noticed you don’t short people as much when they’re farther away,” Kurt said.  “We’ve got a family sized tent for you and Van.  It’s a little old and leaky, but we can fix that by putting up a plywood temp roof.  It’s just until things settle down.”

“Okay,” Gail said.  She expected Van to have a fit.  For one thing, even a family-sized tent wasn
’t tall enough for him to stand and not hit his head.

Exiled.

Dammit.  Moreover, everything was all her fault, the usual.

Gail took a deep breath and tried to relax.  “Cots?”  No room for a real bed in a tent.

“Cots.”

Gail helped as they unpacked the old musty tent and set
it up, a dozen yards from the edge of the giant vegetable garden.  The old thing was a Guynes family heirloom, and as promised, she could see through the tent roof when she looked up.

She looked down, stomping down patches of
tough Michigan grass and the bulges they created in the tent floor.  With each day, her optimistic dreams she had spun in her head during the drive from the Transform Clinic to the Ebener farm wore away more.  Not only didn’t her people come to like her, their dislike had grown, and they now lived in fear of her moods and tempers.

Dammit.

After they finished setting up the tent, she sat in it, alone, waiting for Van to come back from U of M.  This time, she would make sure she stayed outside metasense range of her Transforms when she braced Van with yet another unpleasant surprise.

---

Plink.  Plink.

A weekend, and no Van.  He
had bailed on her 30 minutes after her parents showed up, gone to U of M to work on his dissertation.

Gail looked over to the pot to make sure
the rusty old copper-bottomed piece of trash wasn’t full of rainwater again.  Three days of rain, which she didn’t like, and three days of unseasonable May cold, not unexpected for Michigan, but surprisingly pleasant for her.  The rest of the household bundled up when they went outside, but Gail didn’t bother.

Gail was bailing on her parents also, fled to
the humid closeness of her mangy tent.  Her father tried to run everything, annoying Gail and degrading her juice control.

Two weeks in the
Ebener farm, and her people still didn’t like her.  Most of her people, especially the ones who had been with her in the Clinic, continued to view her with suspicion and resentment, their emotions slowly twisting into darker things.  The newer people, especially the new Transforms, viewed her with fear and attempted to flatter her, do her little favors in order to win her approval, and win the sudden surge of extra juice she sometimes gave people when they pleased her.  The last was almost worse.

Where had her good intentions gone?  She didn
’t want to manipulate her people.  She refused to use the power Transform Sickness had given her.  Where had it gotten her?

Her good intentions had gone down the toilet because
her people had cut her out.  She wanted to be an equal, not socially ostracized.  Not their slave.

Gail wouldn
’t have had a physical problem with gathering all her Transforms in a room and saying “Low juice for anyone who disobeys me.”  Just thinking about the morality of laying down the law in such a fashion made her ill.  Not only were her Transforms’ lives in her hands, but she was responsible for their sanity, even their ability to go through the day without pain.  Gail wanted to let them live normal human lives, not spend their time worshipping their Focus and doing Gail’s every whim.  She wanted to be another member of the household.

They wouldn
’t let her, and everything slipped out of control.  Two days ago, there had been this big argument about tents, latrines and septic tanks.  Factions were forming.  Gail wanted to know what was going on, but they had all sworn each other to secrecy.  If the Focus knew what was going on, she would take sides, and that side would win.

Adkins was right.  Her people
were slowly enslaving her.  She invited her Transforms to enslave her.  Gail didn’t see any way around the problem.

Her people were shouting again.  Gail had kept to herself in her tent in the past week, or walked the Ebener farm.  Bored, alone, treated like a piece of machinery when anyone would deign to talk to her.  This time, she
would
find out what the fight was about, secrets or not.

Gail stalked out of her tent, a week-old newspaper over her head to keep the rain off, willing the juice flow to remain stable and keep everyone
’s juice count at least close to normal.  Just as she was about to get to the Ebener’s back porch, her mother slammed through the side door of the farmhouse, in tears.  Gail ran through muddy puddles to catch up to her mother before her father did.

What had her father done this time?  Whatever
had happened, he and her mother seemed anxious to leave.

“Get out of my way,” her father said.  He elbowed past Gail, led her mother to his car, and helped her inside.

Her father’s angry red face stifled Gail’s first question, and she waited until he was on the other side of the car before asking “What’s going on?” to her mother.  Her parents had stayed all weekend on their first visit to the farm, but it was only a little after lunchtime this Saturday.  Gail was already hungry for dinner.

“It
’s all your fault,” her mother said, sniffing and wiping away tears.

“For what?”

“Telling us to get lost!” her father said.

Good for them.  She wondered what her parents had been thinking, trying to come down and run the household on the weekends.  They actually tried to give orders to her people for what they should do during the week.  She wondered how long her household would stand for such interference.  She
had made it clear she wouldn’t defend them to her household, nor would she defend her household to her parents.  Well, they had made their decision.

“If you
’d taken control of these people like you should have, and done what I told you, this wouldn’t have happened,” her father said.  “Instead, you’re letting them run you around.”

“What happened?” Gail
said.  “What did they say to you?”

“Did you tell them to do this, Gail?” her mother
said.

“Nonsense,” her father said.  “They
don’t care what Gail thinks.  That’s clear, especially with their talk about money.  They’re just a bunch of filthy uppity Transforms.”

Gail winced.  Her parents
got anal about anything to do with money.  “Money?” she said.  How much money?

“I mean,” her father said, “asking if we could contribute to cover our weekend trips!  The nerve!  We
’re your parents, the parents of their Focus!  Where’s their respect!”

Gail
’s mother went on at length about how respecting your parents was the most important of the Ten Commandments, while Gail bit her tongue and tried to keep from laughing out loud.

“…bunch of filthy uppity Transforms…” her father said, his voice trailing off into a mutter.  He climbed inside the car and slammed the car door.

She hadn’t been prepared for her parents to do the stalk and walk over what, for them, was little more than pocket change.  They were pissed simply because the household had suggested they cover their own room and board when visiting.  Such a tiny thing, but the household had to enforce such tiny things – money was tight.  The household had been working on an agreement where everyone in the household would contribute a goodly fraction of their life’s savings to the household’s bank account.  Gail had been afraid they would hit her parents up for some of their not-inconsiderable life savings, some of which was in Gail’s name, money Gail had never counted on seeing anyway because her parents tended to go ballistic whenever the issue of her joint inheritance came up.  She expected any serious money talk would cause problems.