No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) Page 10

  Keaton didn’t like my reaction. The knife appeared from nowhere and she plunged it into my arm. Twisted. “I do this just for fun, remember?” she said. Snarled.

  I looked at her and said nothing. Let the pain show on my face.

  “Tell me why this hurts me more than it hurts you, Hancock,” she said. Her own face was pale under the stone mask.

  “Ma’am. I have no idea.”

  “Think.”

  I thought. It took a while, but eventually I understood.

  “I’m yours,” I said. “I’m an extension of you, ma’am. When you hurt me it’s the same as hurting yourself.” The juice doing things, not me. The juice always won.

  The knife vanished. I lapped up the blood to keep it from dripping on her beautiful pale carpet.

  “Disobey me, Hancock. Something small.”

  The obvious next test. Intelligent, tool using, sapient predators definitely have different methods of settling things than tigers, lions and bears. I smiled at her. “I refuse.”

  Keaton frowned for a moment at my response, and smiled back. “For refusing my order, I punish you to walk around the room on your hands five times,” she said.

  I did so. This was proper punishment. Even in a dress, I didn’t hesitate.

  I finished and returned to my seat.

  “Huh,” Keaton said. She still puzzled through the implications of our little exercise. So did I. If I disobeyed Keaton’s orders, I would be inviting Keaton to torture me.

  “I have another test. I’m going to stay right here. I want you to walk, slowly, down the road for a distance of a mile. Pay careful attention to your emotions. Then come back.”

  “Yes, ma’am. May I ask a question first?”

  “Ask.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Ma’am, what do you see when you see me? How do I seem different to you?”

  She rolled her eyes and sighed. “You’re cute, all right? You’re obedient, you’re submissive, you’re mine. And you’re cute. Now go down the road like I told you.”

  Cute. Not bad at all. I got.

  I didn’t find much within a mile of Keaton’s house, just a narrow winding road progressing down a steep slope, with a few large houses hidden well back from the road. The fresh air was a delight to my nose.

  About a hundred yards away, the mental effects of the tag began to fade. The tag itself remained, but the active juice link faded with distance. My free will came back to me. No more enforced obedience. No more enforced subservience. I kept walking, probing at my mind.

  The tag itself was easy for me to wrap my mind around. I knew I could get rid of the tag with no more than an effort of will. My instincts said many things might knock the tag off. Betrayal, for instance. Turning on Keaton. Anything, I suspected, that made me think in my own mind I was no longer hers.

  Here, beyond her direct control, any effects from the tag were minor at most. I could disobey if I chose to, subject, I suspected, to any penalties she chose to extract when I next came back to her presence. Before, I obeyed her orders reflexively, eagerly looked for opportunities to serve her, took whatever punishments she assigned for my misdeeds, and submitted in all circumstances. Now, outside her range, if I didn’t like the arrangement, I could get rid of her tag and go my own way.

  The non-tag effects were more evident. Late lunch was past, so this was late afternoon. So was the sun, over there above the not-so-distant ocean, setting or rising? I burned a tiny bit of juice to logic out the sun was setting. So, where would it rise?

  My mind drew a blank. I had never been outside near Keaton’s estate at dawn and didn’t have any memories to pull on.

  This wasn’t good. Not at all. My instincts said my mental problems would be a major issue.

  I walked for a mile, because Keaton said walk, and I didn’t need the tag leaning on my free will to know enough to obey. On the way back, though, I ran.

  “Where are you going to live?” she asked me. We sat at the kitchen table, polishing off the remnants of the chicken cordon blue and the squash casserole.

  “I hadn’t decided.” I wanted Chicago.

  “You stay out of Chicago. I forbid you to live there or near there. You may not hunt Chicago at all for the next year,” Keaton said, wiping up the last of the sauce with a piece of bread. “Consider it the price for failure.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She thought I was too stupid to make my own decisions and so she was making them for me. I couldn’t argue with her logic. Literally.

  “I have a new task for you, more information and ideas,” she said. “You have a new trick: you went into an office and convinced someone you hadn’t met before, a Transform on the edge of withdrawal, to take you to lunch. I want you to find a way to explain to me what you’re doing with this trick and I want you to be able to teach me how to do it. Also, your recruiting success has been strangely inconsistent in the past, everything from amazing successes, such as the Tiens” who had managed to survive my fall “to abject failures, such as Sanchek. Figure out how to do the recruiting right. Then come back to me and report everything you’ve learned on the subject.” According to Keaton, she had only one style of recruit, the emotionally leashed partly broken kind, such as Dick Svetsrichen, my Chicago mailman and Carl Oldman, my moneybags machine shop owner. “You can also keep me updated on this predator ecology thing you’re been prattling about at the same time.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” My number one goal, given to me by Keaton, was to get myself fixed up. I wouldn’t be able to even start on any of these tasks until I got myself fixed up.

  Keaton stood. “Time for some exercise,” Keaton said. “Tomorrow you start work on Gladchuck.”

  I stood and followed my boss, happy as a baby in a candy factory.

  Gilgamesh: April 22, 1968

  422 East Hampshire Rd., two blocks east of US 2, in Orono, Maine, a tad northeast of Bangor. So close by the Penobscot that Gilgamesh saw the cold clear water. The north woods were beautiful, but cold, with small mounds of snow still lingering where the plows had pushed their loads. The house was an old New England farmhouse, a hundred years old, big and red and almost indistinguishable from the nearby barn. Houses were simple and rectangular up here, where the most important thing a house did was hold heat.

  The house didn’t sense as a Crow’s home. Gilgamesh checked the place out anyway. No Crows lived there. Not in the attic, basement or garage. He checked the address again, and the house. Still nothing. He chewed on his cheek, trying to figure out what he missed.

  Oh, of course. The barn. He stared right at the barn and it still tried to slip away from his notice. He stalked over toward the barn and after the right number of steps found himself back in the street. After a few muttered curses, he walked toward the barn with his gaze glued. Hell, even with his eyes fixed on the barn, every time his concentration wavered for an instant the massive, completely forgettable barn would pry itself free from his mind.

  But he got to the barn, anyway.

  “Come in, Gilgamesh,” a soft voice said from the inside when he knocked. Gilgamesh let out a sigh, pushed the big barn door open, and stepped inside.

  And stopped cold.

  He wasn’t inside at all. He was still outside, but a different outside. A forest of huge old pines towered above him. The ground below him was a soft carpet of pine needles, the sky above so clear and sharp it made his heart ache. The wild smell of pine filled his nose, with a hint of wood smoke. It was evening here instead of full night. Songbirds chirped in the trees. Overhead, a flock of geese honked their way north. Twenty feet away, Thomas the Dreamer sat on the back porch of his cabin, waiting. Gilgamesh leapt backwards through the still-open door he sensed but couldn’t see, and found himself in the familiar yard, staring at the open door to the barn. When he peered inside, it seemed filled with the usual dusty clutter of yard equipment and workshop gear.

  Illusion. Dammit. Gilgamesh took several quick breaths and told his racing heart to calm down. He was a mature Crow now, not some f
earful fledgling a few months past his transformation.

  Thomas the Dreamer didn’t say anything, waiting for Gilgamesh to gather his courage. Gilgamesh liked to think he didn’t take more than a few seconds before he stepped through the barn door again and let it close behind him.

  “Welcome to my home,” Thomas the Dreamer said. “Come join me.”

  Gilgamesh walked through the towering pines and tried not to think of how much power surrounded him. He had never in his life imagined illusions like this, which made his cartoon Enkidu illusion look like a kindergartener’s drawing. He could make out every pine needle of the soft carpet, every rough fiber of the bark on the trees, even the drops of sap that occasionally seeped out from the bark. Indian pipes hid behind one tree, white and delicate. Furry green moss coated a rock that peeked up from the ground. Ferns gathered at the bases of trees. A faint breeze touched his skin, and the trees rustled in time with it. A pair of robins, with their eyes delicately ringed in black, landed a few feet away. They chirped, and turned up pine straw, looking for their dinners. In a matter of seconds, he found himself gripped by the peace of the place, and wondered if that, too, was an illusion.

  Thomas the Dreamer’s cabin was a rustic place, made of heavy rough boards darkened with age. A single crow sat on the roof and cawed at Gilgamesh as he approached. He climbed the four stairs up to the porch and found a cheery room behind the glass door, with a bright fire burning happily in the fireplace. Thomas the Dreamer now sat by the fire, in a wooden rocker with a high back, his legs under a coarse-woven Indian blanket. He indicated the chair next to him. Gilgamesh gathered his courage again, and went inside and sat.

  “Sir,” he said, “I was hoping you might give me some help with this.” Gilgamesh took the mission letter from his wallet and unfolded the letter before handing it over. Thomas the Dreamer glanced at the letter and nodded.

  “I’m sure you’ll handle it well,” Thomas the Dreamer said, putting the letter on the low table between them. “You seem to be a quite capable young Crow.” Even when Gilgamesh stared at Thomas the Dreamer, he couldn’t catch the man’s appearance. He seemed ordinary enough, but no details of his appearance stuck in Gilgamesh’s mind. Hair color, height, skin tone, nothing.

  Senior Crow tricks were always disconcerting.

  “Thank you very much, sir,” Gilgamesh said, trying to get all the courtesies right. “I’m having a problem and would appreciate your advice. I don’t know where to start.” Every time he thought about starting work on the task, his stomach clenched up and he had to push down his Crow panic.

  Thomas the Dreamer nodded and a smile flickered across his solemn face, surprisingly warm and sympathetic. “I would be most happy to give you advice,” he said, “especially since you’ve come so far to visit me. I believe you have indeed started.”

  Gilgamesh forced himself to relax.

  “Have you come up with any ideas about what else you might do?” Thomas asked.

  “Ah, well, I might try some detective work, I guess.”

  Thomas motioned for Gilgamesh to continue.

  “I could go investigate the sites of the disappearances. See what evidence I might find. Study the newspapers and police records. Talk to some of the normals who were in the vicinity to find out what they witnessed. That sort of thing.”

  “That is certainly an approach,” Thomas said. “However, might I suggest your approach might be a little more dangerous than might be wise?”

  Something un-knotted inside Gilgamesh as he recognized that Thomas, who according to Chevalier had thought up this suicidal task, had a sane, sensible definition of danger. “Yes, sir,” he said, with a sigh of relief. “I would much prefer a less dangerous approach.”

  “As Crow Killer is a creature who kills or kidnaps Crows, a first priority might be to avoid attracting attention to yourself. I would suggest misdirection. You are an author as well as a Crow adventurer, and many Crows know of your wonderful book. Perhaps you might do some research on another one.”

  Gilgamesh nodded. “I do have one in mind, a book on Crow life.” He would save his previous idea, about Focus households, for some point in time when he felt more charitable toward them.

  “That would be excellent,” Thomas said. “Such a book would provide you the cover you need to ask questions to all sorts of people.”

  “That would be safer,” Gilgamesh said. Safer would be much better. “Do you think this will do any good, though?”

  “Ask questions, get lots of little bits of information. Who knows what you might put together? You seem to be good at putting information together.”

  Gilgamesh nodded. “I can do that.” The fear he had been carrying with him since he read the letter began to abate. “I really can.”

  Thomas the Dreamer tapped a finger on the arm of his chair. “I can give you some letters of introduction. Your Guru Shadow can give you more if you ask for them. If I might suggest, I think it would be wise of you to ask.”

  Out one window of the cabin a snow-white rabbit hopped into view, and raced off fast as the wind, chased by something that whipped quickly through the air. A hawk. “Certainly, sir.” Gilgamesh would of course do what this odd Guru so politely suggested.

  “Also, be more careful in your letters. Remember, indirection. Come up with some other name for your task. Say, ah, ‘three Crow tune’. Reference to us terrible older Crows who assigned you the task.” He frowned, and the tapping finger quieted. “I’m still concerned about the danger. We’re looking to solve the disappearances, not lose still more Crows. Make sure you keep me up to date about where you are and what you’re doing.”

  Gilgamesh blinked. “You think I’m going to be able to solve this?”

  Thomas stood. Two large and furry cats appeared from nowhere to rub up against his legs, then Gilgamesh’s legs. Quite real, as far as Gilgamesh could tell. Thomas led Gilgamesh out on the porch, where Thomas stretched, and sighed. “Now, young Crow, you are humble, and humility is a good trait, but someone has to be the one who will solve this. You’ll have an advantage on everyone else, as you’ll be the only Crow working on this mystery at the present time. Apply some effort and your chances will be excellent. Given your background, I’m assuming respectable courage and competence. Are you working on developing yourself?”

  “Yes, sir. Do you have some advice in that area, also?”

  “Trust your dreams.”

  “Sir?”

  “You meditate, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir. In one meditation form I see things,” Gilgamesh said.

  “Very good,” Thomas said. “We all do it different. Trust what you experience.”

  Thomas the Dreamer went on to ask quite a number of other questions and Gilgamesh told of his rotten eggs, his experiences with the Arms, his visit with Chevalier and his Enkidu illusion, which he, embarrassed, showed Thomas. Then they talked about dross constructs in general, development techniques, effects, art, meditation, more ideas for investigating the Crow disappearances, and more precautions to take.

  They moved inside again after a couple of hours and talked some more by the cheery fire. Thomas the Dreamer was a font of useful ideas and advice and Gilgamesh’s head was spinning with the new knowledge after only a few hours. He kept asking questions and listening anyway, trying to take in all the priceless information.

  By morning, their conversation had devolved to baseball, and Thomas the Dreamer chased Gilgamesh out of the older Crow’s disquieting lair. “Good luck, youngster. Remember everything I told you. And write often.”

  Sky: April 23, 1968

  “Newton!”

  “Sir, yes sir!” Newton said, leaping down from where he meditated on top of the dresser. He landed too close to Inga, who snarled and snapped at him. Newton skittered backwards in momentary panic, and Sky stroked Inga until she relaxed.

  Sky wondered what lessons of the Buddha he had ignored this time to end up with Newton. In a jail cell. In Block 3 of a minimum security prison.


  Bad karma. Terribly bad karma.

  Block 3 wasn’t what Sky thought of as a prison. The block consisted of four one-story buildings, each with a dozen single-room dorm-style apartments the inmates had the gall to refer to as cells. If not for the twenty-foot tall chain link fences topped with rolls of razor wire that turned the prison grounds into a rat maze, the buildings would have been more appropriately found in an inexpensive motel complex. The prison authorities actually ran Block 3 as a training ground. Network FBI agents came through to learn such things as Monster slaying and Transform apprehension. On the side, the prison served as a Network safe house for people like himself and for poor old former Dr. Zielinski. Oh, the rest of the Addi, as they called it, was a prison, with real prisoners, none up for anything more violent than tax evasion. Not enough of those sorts of prisoners got arrested these days in the States, apparently, to keep it filled. The men here were all supposed to be model prisoners. Sky expected to be here for the next several months, to finish recovering, to repay his debt to Shadow, and to fulfill a certain personal obligation he had recently acquired.

  Newton doted on the legends of Sky and Gilgamesh (he had just recently made the paranoid Gilgamesh’s abbreviated letter list) and had volunteered to help Sky out in the Addi. Newton, a short little fellow with curly black hair and a whippet build, had Gilgamesh’s cheekiness, but none of Gilgamesh’s seriousness. He was, well, as apt to turn a witty phrase as Sky, but he was much less verbose. Sky thought Newton was as dull as dishwater, although the younger Crow had recently made his mark in the absurd adventure department after getting himself in trouble with one Focus Bernard. Something about a practical joke played on one of Focus Bernard’s leadership team after said team-member had compared him to a rat, only smellier and with worse grooming.

  Which was how he ended up here. His attempts to befriend Focus Bernard were quite over.

  “Metasense out on access road 3 and fill me in,” Sky said. The brevity of his order – and it was an order – brought Newton up short.