No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Seven) Read online

  “I volunteered,” Gail said.

  “Yah, right,” Sylvie said. She knelt down on the floor to help Gail scrub. “You put your name on the list and, let me guess, one of our wonderful normal men volunteered our Focus to scrub floors.”

  Gail nodded. Her Focus enhancements improved her memory, and she was sure Virgil Conte was the one who had volunteered her. “I had been working with Betha, on the cooking, and noticed that nobody was managing the purchase of household supplies. Except for the large food purchases, people are buying things individually, whenever the need shows up. So I started to organize the purchasing, just an outline of how we might do it better, and, boom, scrubbing floors.” Sylvie was talking to her almost like the old friend she had always been, and Gail felt a happy warmth she almost translated into a juice bounce for Sylvie, except she wondered how much was Sylvie the friend and how much was Sylvie the Transform doing the Focus suck up routine. The Focus suck up routine would be a first for Sylvie, though. Of all Gail’s Transforms, Sylvie always seemed to be the one willing to argue with her.

  “You got too near the money.”

  Gail wiped a stray hair out of her eyes – she, truthfully, wasn’t good at this bandanna stuff. “I got too near the money.” She also hadn’t had the intestinal fortitude necessary to push the issue. She spent most of her time and attention these days practicing the management of her Transforms’ juice counts. The work was tiring and exhausting, and difficult to manage around her own juice issues, the headaches and the depression. Her practice did seem to go better after she spent some time scrubbing floors, though, or when she had been working on organizing the supply purchases. Some was the benefits of distraction, she suspected. She also suspected hard physical labor helped as well. Anything was better than lying around on her cot.

  “You should be doing something like the supply purchasing,” Sylvie said. “You’ve always been good at organization.” Gail shrugged. She didn’t think of herself as good at organizing. The problem was that other people just didn’t seem to understand how to organize.

  “They don’t like it when I do,” she said. “Have you noticed how not only women but also the male Transforms have been shut out of the household leadership?”

  “Uh huh.” Sylvie wrung out her washcloth in the rinse bucket, grabbed the scrub brush, and went after a nasty section of floor, the corner nearest the sink. “I don’t like it at all.”

  Gail grunted and scrubbed, wondering what she could do about it. That is, this side of using the juice weapon to take over the household. “Can we stage a revolution?” Sylvie said, her eyes angry narrow. “Now?” Gail could practically see an image in Sylvie’s head, of Bart on his hands and knees, in an apron, scrubbing the kitchen floor.

  Gail shook her head. “I don’t see how to do that without me ending up as Fuehrer Rickenbach.” That would lead her right into Focus Adkins’ shoes. “We need to be more subtle.” She smiled at Sylvie. “I need your help, though, in addition to the research biz.”

  “I can do subtle,” Sylvie said. “What do you want?”

  “More eyes and ears,” she said. “Information is power.” Spoken like a true revolutionary, or, at least, what she thought a revolutionary might say.

  “You want me to be a spy? No problem,” Sylvie said.

  Gail smiled.

  “…and the vote carries,” Bart said. His expression soured, as if he had just swallowed a lemon. Virgil’s face was beet red, but he didn’t say anything. He just stared at a silk screen picture of birches in winter on the far wall.

  The vote had been over Gail’s bulk purchase proposal. The household had decided that everyone would contribute a little more money to the household account for bulk purchases. Bart and his cronies would still control the money, but Gail and Helen would be in charge of figuring out how many supplies the household needed, and arranging the purchases. Sylvie’s spying had given Gail the information she needed; Sylvie had learned that other people shared their concerns, and that the votes were there for this change in household organization.

  Helen had provided the money numbers; she had found that pooling the purchasing would save money, leaving the household account with a little more coming in every week.

  Gail wasn’t happy with the vote. Sylvie’s head count indicated they would get about 60% of the vote, but they had won almost unanimously. She had the uncomfortable sensation that many people voted for her plan just because it was her plan.

  After the meeting ended, Gail waited until Virgil finished his grousing with Bart and his cronies, and then as he started to leave the living room with Tricia, she corralled him.

  “Virgil, I think it’s time I get a look at the books,” Gail said. “It’s going to be very hard for either Helen or I to plan…”

  “No,” Virgil said. Tricia backed away, grimacing in pain. Gail didn’t bother to fix Tricia’s juice, unhappy both with Virgil and with Tricia. “That’s my business, household business, not yours. He glared at her, an angry furrow deepening between his eyebrows. “You need to do some thinking yourself, Gail. Your meddling isn’t winning you any friends among the people who count, and if you aren’t careful, you might come to learn that there are much worse things than scrubbing floors. Much worse.” Virgil twirled, took Tricia’s shaking arm, and stalked off through the kitchen.

  Gail fixed Tricia’s juice count as she shivered and backed away, her knees wobbly, her breathing ragged. Virgil had threatened her! Not directly, but a threat nevertheless. The man was a fungus, nasty enough to make her skin crawl.

  She didn’t know what to do, other than not give in to his veiled threats. The idea she might back down never entered her mind.

  “Van, what do you think of Virgil Conte?” she asked. They were lying together on Van’s cot. Gail had just faked another orgasm and so they were lying in a puddle of sweat in the late evening heat. Gail felt a little bad about the fake orgasm and the preceding pretense of desire, but if her white lies kept Van from getting more distant, they were a small price to pay. She did enjoy the comfort of lying entwined with him afterwards, and she needed to do something to reduce the cold wind blowing through their relationship.

  “Virgil? He’s a little weasel, but otherwise okay,” Van said.

  “Hmm.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve been trying to get a look at the accounting books, and he won’t let me.”

  “So you think he’s trying to hide something?”

  Gail nestled closer.

  “That’s what I want to find out.”

  Van pulled back from her. “It’s too hot,” he said.

  “It wasn’t too hot a few minutes ago,” she said with a smile.

  “That’s different,” he said, exasperation creeping into his voice. “So what are you going to do about it?”

  “About the heat? I guess I’m responsible for a lot of things, but the heat is a little beyond me.” Gail didn’t want to say anything, but these days she thought anything over 70 too warm, and over 80 just plain disgusting. She chalked it up to yet another screwy transformation change she wasn’t pleased about.

  Van waited, unmoving. Today, he didn’t appreciate her humor.

  “Ohhhh, you mean Virgil,” she said. “Push the issue, I guess. I’ll go get Bart, and if we go see him together, he’ll have to show us the books.”

  “You think Bart will help you? He doesn’t like you, and besides that, every time you do something like this, you’re eating away at his position.” More exasperation. She knew not to ask. She already knew he thought she should just ‘do something’, likely harsh, that would fix the situation.

  Gail twisted to her back and stared up at the flimsy plywood ceiling supporting their leaky tent canvas. “Too true, but I think I’m winning him over with what I am doing.” Bart hadn’t liked the bulk purchase program or the vote, because he didn’t like other people taking the initiative. After the vote, and after he had a chance to think over the benefits of bulk purchasing, he had come
around. “Besides, he now knows that if any issues come down to a vote, I’ll win. Too many of the Transforms are going to vote for me if I push any issue.”

  Gail hadn’t ever stated the situation so baldly before, and really, she hadn’t even thought about the household politics in those terms, but it was true.

  Van turned to her.

  “How do you feel about that?” he said, a few minutes later.

  “I hate it!”

  Gail turned on her side again to face Van. “I hate it. They’ll vote for me because they’re afraid of me, or because they want to suck up, not because they think I’m right. I get to have my way just because I’m the Focus. Not because I’m better, or more experienced, or anything! They just hand me all this power and I can’t get rid of it. I’m not even sure it’s wrong to have this power!”

  Van didn’t say anything, and Gail turned on her back again.

  “Logically, I should back off, avoid interfering, stay politically neutral, and don’t throw my weight around at all. Except when I did that before, it didn’t work. Now I throw my weight around and everyone tries to keep me happy. If I’m happy, they’re happy. Except now I’m some sort of superior being, where my opinion counts and theirs doesn’t, and that makes everything just wrong.”

  Gail looked up at the ceiling again. A tiny spider laired over in the corner, just starting to spin a web. She saw one single star twinkling in the crack between two of the pieces of plywood.

  “What are you going to do?” Van said, with a curious and calculating tone she knew far too well. The tone that often crept into his voice before he verbally laid someone out for being stupid. “Are you going to back down?”

  “Me?” she said, softly. “No way. I’m going to keep throwing my weight around. I know it’s wrong, but at least this way I’m helping people. And I can’t come up with any other solution.” She didn’t want to talk about her hidden fears, that Virgil might be able to convince the rest of the leadership team to confine her, somehow. To lock her away, to restrain her physically, to make sure no more votes happened.

  Gail was desperately afraid she had forced things too soon. Virgil was going to do something. He would have to; she had backed him into a corner. She just didn’t know what he would do. Her next step was obvious and terrifying – she would have to bring up the issue of the books in the next household meeting. Perhaps the threat of a vote on the subject would get Virgil to back down.

  Van didn’t say anything. He reached his hand over, and traced the line of her jaw with his fingers.

  “Do you hate me very much?” Gail said.

  “No.”

  “But I’ve turned into such a bitch.”

  “Shh,” he said. “Shh.”

  A month ago, when she said something like that, he would have held her, stroked her, told her he loved her. This time, he held her. He stroked her jaw.

  But he said nothing of love.

  Pain

  (18)

  “Hey, Syl,” Gail said, taking a plate from the drying rack, drying it and putting it away. “How’re you doing?”

  Sylvie gave Gail a sidelong glance. “Really? When you’re this friendly, Gail, you want something, so why don’t you go ahead and tell me what you want,” she said. Gail didn’t answer, so Sylvie continued on as she washed the dishes. “You didn’t used to pull this trick so much, before you became a Focus.”

  Gail shrugged, able to read Syl’s mind and finish her unfinished statement with a ‘and now you’re always doing this damned trick’. She dried another plate and put it away, carefully nonchalant.

  “Nor were you able to shrug off pokes and prods like I just made,” Sylvie said.

  What did Van say, a few days ago? Right. ‘If something isn’t hard, it isn’t worth doing.’ She had wanted to smack him one, but after thinking about the philosophy behind his comment, she decided he might have a point. “Before I was a Focus, I didn’t need to deal with people like Bart.” Gail dried a soup bowl and put it away. Once upon a time, this sort of manipulation might have bothered her, but now? If the manipulation didn’t involve her Focus capabilities, her verbal tricks didn’t bother her at all.

  “So, what do you want?”

  Wasn’t I supposed to be the one taking the lead in this conversation, Gail wondered? Well, this was why she wanted to rope in Sylvie. “I’d like to talk to you in private.” She had been studying how Van and Kurt managed to still get along with each other, despite the obvious problems. Gail had decided their male knuckle-browed forthrightness, in normal circumstances pukingly offputting, might be beneficial in Gail’s current situation. For one, her instincts said forthrightness wasn’t very ‘Focus’ at all, a major plus.

  “Keep on wiping, Focus, and you have a deal.”

  Sylvie wasn’t much into small talk these days, either. Gail knew why. Becoming a Transform had destroyed Sylvie’s life plans. She had become harder and years older in the few months since she transformed. Gail’s juice fumbling didn’t help, either.

  “Wow. The tent. I’ve never been invited in here, before,” Sylvie said, trying for an artistic mixture of irony and sarcasm. She looked around and sniffed. “This place smells like Van’s old sweaty clothes.” Gail noticed some of Van’s underwear hanging on the back of their ancient hand-me-down cedar chest, and furtively glided over to grab the offending briefs and toss them in their dirty laundry garbage bag. They did need to do laundry again. Sylvie smiled and looked away, almost knowingly.

  Had Sylvie slept with Van before Sylvie found a way to introduce him to Gail? Neither would say. They did often give each other the eye, as if sharing secrets, and they also avoided body contact religiously. Gail knew she had no reason to complain; she and Kurt had gotten to third base several times before they decided they weren’t romantically compatible, before Gail had met Sylvie and introduced her to Kurt. Curiosity, though. She was always a slave to curiosity. She almost had to know, despite how dangerous such knowledge might be to their barely existent relationship.

  “Save the observations,” Gail said. “I’ve got a problem.”

  “Just one?” Sylvie’s attitude answered one of Gail’s worries, that Gail’s Focus-abuse of Syl had eroded Syl’s edge. No, Sylvie was still Sylvie, thank God.

  “Okay, I’ve got an entire household of problems,” Gail said, giving Sylvie the eye. Sylvie didn’t bat an eyelash at the implied insult. “However, right this instant, I need some advice.”

  “Ask away. I’m sure I won’t be able to help.”

  Gail made a moue. “I need a target for some experimentation. Someone, a Transform, willing to sit still for some serious abuse, to help me understand what I’m doing with the juice. I think, if I did my research correctly, that I should be able to improve with practice and understanding, at least in some areas, in how I’m doing as a Focus.” She pulled out a legal pad with almost twenty pages of notes, gleaned from Van’s research, the copies of the research made these days using Kurt’s secret petty cash supply, which Van had talked him out of, and which neither Kurt nor Van would say anything about. Men. Of which Gail had two, and wanted more.

  Gail handed the legal pad to Sylvie. Sylvie sat on Van’s cot and read the first page slowly, the second page quicker, and just skimmed the next three before giving up.

  “So, you’re starting to make sense of the crap Kurt and I have been finding?” Sylvie said. Van made ample use of Sylvie for his research, though he had made a few short choice Van-isms regarding Sylvie’s lack of resistance to distraction.

  “Uh huh.”

  Sylvie scanned the next half dozen pages. “Damn. Based on what Kurt and I found, I suspected we didn’t know shit about this shit, but now I think you’ve proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that we don’t know shit about this shit about this shit.”

  Gail laughed at Sylvie’s absurd statement and sat next to her on the cot. “I’m beginning to think nobody does. Which scares the crap out of me. You should read the Philadelphia Daily News article Van found, ab
out some Focus who managed to use her Focus tricks to somehow stop a riot in its tracks, like some crazy comic book superheroine. I can’t do anything like that. Hell, I can’t even convince Bart to let me go to the U of M library.” Gail kept trying to fight off the overwhelming doubts, the tsunami of self-doubt about her worth, abilities and even potential as a Focus. Some days she could barely force herself to get off her cot in the morning.

  “I want to read this article,” Sylvie said. “So, there are real shit-kicker Focuses? Glad to know it’s possible.” Gail rolled her eyes at Sylvie’s obvious over-the-top insult. “So, what are you looking for? Volunteers?”

  Gail nodded and leaned forward intently. “Ordering someone to be a guinea pig for my experimentation and practice would be wrong, and, well, given my track record as far as handling juice is concerned, potentially suicidal. For them. I mean, who am I to have the nerve to actually ask anyone at all to possibly…”

  Sylvie frowned. Hard.

  Gail shrugged. “I promise I’ll cry at their funeral, but I’m not even sure what else I could even offer.”

  Sylvie frowned harder.

  “Oh, right. What I’m looking for is, well, um,” Gail said. She had to look away. “I’m looking for ideas about who I can hint at to volunteer. Or get someone else to hint at to volunteer. I don’t think I should flat-out ask for a volunteer.” What she feared, if she asked, was an entire room full of Transforms volunteering, just because she was the Focus. Ick and super ick.

  “So, why are you asking me?” Sylvie said. “I’m a Transform, too, if by some strange chance you’ve forgotten.”

  “Because you’ve been, well, stern with me recently, so I trust you’re not going to fall for the ‘I must please the Focus’ routine.” ‘Stern’ didn’t come close to describing Sylvie’s recent attitude toward Gail. She seemed to have appointed herself to the job of getting in Gail’s face, regardless of what Gail did to Sylvie’s juice.