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

  “Although not common knowledge, Focuses have been around since the early ‘50s,” Dr. Mendell said. “Today, there are over two hundred Focuses in the United States. Each of them supports somewhere between 4 and 9 triads of Transforms, depending on the strength of the Focus.”

  “Triad?” her father said.

  “A group of two women and one male Transform,” Dr. Mendell said. “Once under the care of a Focus, Transforms are perfectly safe, and rarely become Monsters or Psychos.”

  “Rarely,” her father said. “What’s to protect my daughter from this?”

  “Her own skills and fortitude,” Dr. Mendell said.

  Her father rolled his eyes and took an overly large breath. Gail turned away from her father’s sneer at her expected lack of competence. She had known about Transforms all her life, but her first real memories of them dated from while she was stuck in Junior High, in braces and trainer bras. The Focuses and their Transforms had made the news when they escaped their government-run quarantine. For a few months, she had idolized them and made up stories in her head about their heroic escape from evil government doctors and bureaucrats.

  She only wised up when she connected the escape to the other Transform issue – the Monsters and Psychos. Monsters were dangerous! They killed people!

  Dr. Mendell droned on and on and on. Useless. He continued to talk about things she already knew, to her father, who didn’t need to know anything. Her body hurt, her head hurt, she was hungry, and she still had a hunger inside of her that wasn’t for food. A hunger that wouldn’t ever be fully satisfied for the rest of her life, at least according to Dr. Mendell. A hunger for juice, the supposed lifeblood of Transforms. Focuses never had enough juice of their own, the first new thing Dr. Mendell mentioned. She did learn she wasn’t an Arm; apparently, Arm attendants died during the Arm’s transformation. The reason Gail didn’t look like a movie star was time; a Focus’s beauty came in slowly.

  Two hours of explaining the obvious later, a by now droopy-eyebrowed Dr. Mendell finally gave Gail a stack of government pamphlets, all stamped with a worn ‘Detroit Transform Clinic’ stamp, and bid her a good day. Her parents walked back with her to her room, where, finally, she found some food waiting for her, and, Gail noticed surreptitiously, clean sheets on the bed. Still no Van, though.

  Her father told her how he would organize things and how she needed to do what he told her ‘for the good of everyone’. She ignored him and sped through the dinner. Her mother told her, “Don’t worry, we still love you anyway. You might not want to get too close to those other Transforms. They’re not very clean.” Right. There will be twenty to thirty of us crammed into a two hundred square foot mobile home because we will be poor as church mice because your generation has this idiotic ‘thing’ about Transforms and I’m not going to get too close to them? Gail just smiled and kept her thoughts to herself.

  Her parents finally left, far past the time she wanted rid of them. At least she held her temper and didn’t start any fights, though she had been tempted. Gail gazed out the hospital window into the darkness of night. She had been out for five days and her whole world had changed.

  The worst thing was, she had missed five days of news, and no idea how she would get those five days of newspapers to read!

  (4)

  “Okay, listen, and I’ll tell you what I know,” Gail said. It was almost midnight before Gail got a chance to talk to Van and Kurt. The doctor had given her aspirin for her headache, but he said he didn’t think the aspirin would work. It hadn’t. Down the hall, Sylvie, Melanie, and the witch bitch had all fallen into an exhausted slumber, but she was fully awake. She had finally managed to corral Kurt and Van, but she wasn’t sure how much they had left in them. Kurt perched on a folding metal chair borrowed from the nurse’s station, thoroughly worn out from his frolics with Sylvie. Van, with a hollow look around his eyes, must not have slept in days. He sat on the cushioned chair and Gail sat cross-legged on the bed. She had cranked up the head of the bed as high as possible and sat with her back resting against it, eating yet another meal, her second in three hours.

  Both men were worried. The wait hadn’t been an easy time for either of them, five days of not knowing if any of the women would survive their transformations. One in seven didn’t.

  Van Schuber was a tall man without enough meat on his bones, who had a tendency to hunch. He had a long, narrow face, and light brown hair he wore back in a ponytail. He was working on his PhD in History and Gail had been living with him for a year and a half. She liked the arrangement and didn’t have any intention of changing things. However, this was before the Focus thing. She wasn’t sure how well he would deal with her transformation.

  Kurt was Sylvie’s husband. He was shorter than Van, but only barely, with dark brown hair and darker eyes, and a scruffy beard that never seemed to have enough hair. He had an easy smile and a friendly way with people, and a way of never taking life too seriously.

  He appeared serious now, though, and leaned forward attentively when Gail spoke.

  “You’ve probably guessed I’ve been going through a few changes,” Gail said. Both men smiled.

  “I cancelled our apartment lease already,” Kurt said. The practical one.

  “So much for that. Down to business. How much do you know about Transform Sickness?” she said, echoing Dr. Mendell’s condescending question of hours earlier.

  Kurt and Van answered “Lots” in unison, and then glanced at each other wryly. They had all been friends for years. Van wasn’t much into speaking when he didn’t see a need, but he read the newspapers almost as passionately as Gail.

  “Sylvie, Melanie and the Witch Bitch are my Transforms and I’m a Focus. They’re special, what they call Focus Attendants. They caught the Shakes from me. The rest is exactly what you suspect.”

  Van and Kurt nodded. Gail leaned back on the bed and ran her fingers through her lank and stringy hair. She still hadn’t found time for a shower. Kurt leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, nothing on his face but a cold, businesslike concentration. She had expected recriminations or forgiveness, not his unfamiliar intensity. Van sat back in the room’s single real chair, his face closed and thoughtful.

  “Give me the rest,” Kurt said. “What’s wrong with Sylvie now?”

  “Right now? Right now, she’s pumped because she just became a Transform. She produced a bunch of extra juice because she became a Transform due to an induced transformation. She used up lots of her extra juice powering up my transformation, but she still has a bunch extra. Juice count affects mood, remember, and the higher the better, up to a point. Her juice count’s large enough to make her high as a kite, and a high juice count makes her, uh, interested in, you know.”

  “So she’ll get over, um, this.”

  “Yes,” Gail said, and nodded. “Over the long haul, she’ll get some physical benefits. She’ll be healthier. She’ll probably lose a little weight. She’ll probably have less trouble with her allergies.”

  “Fine,” Kurt said. “All common knowledge. All the sweetness and light shit. Tell me the secret stuff they don’t print in the newspapers.”

  “Over time I’m going to be assigned more Transforms to care for. As soon as they assign me some male Transforms, I’ll move the juice over to them, and lower Sylvie down to normal. I think, actually, by hanging around me, her juice count will naturally be reduced, going into some strange thing they refer to as a juice buffer.”

  “Never heard of a juice buffer before,” Kurt said. “The rest makes sense.” Kurt thought for a minute, and studied his hands.

  “Uh, one thing, uh, I don’t get any choice in who’s assigned to me,” Gail said, recalling another uncommon bit of information. “But taking care of Transforms is my new job.”

  “Responsibility,” Van said. Gail nodded.

  “And the ability to meddle,” Kurt said. He glanced up again, and his gentle brown eyes were hard. “You can change Sylvie’s juice level any time you want
to. ‘Pump her’, and make her happy and horny, and out of her fucking mind, or ‘strip her’, reduce her juice to almost nothing, and put her in agony. Or give her too much and turn her into a Monster.”

  It was impossible not to have learned a lot of the slang, such as ‘stripping’ and ‘pumping’ and ‘moving juice’. Transforms used their own language, of course. The daily lives of Transforms, although taboo on television and in high school textbooks, filled the Sunday supplements, the women’s magazines and the Readers Digest, and far too many hours of casual college bull sessions. This hadn’t stopped Dr. Mendell from going over everything, though, slowly and carefully and repetitively.

  “I think it’s hard to do something like that,” Gail said. “I don’t understand what I’m doing yet.”

  “It damned well better be hard to do,” Kurt said. “Too much and she’s a Monster – worse than dead. You sure as hell better figure out what you’re doing before something bad happens.”

  Gail nodded.

  “Anything else?” Kurt said, a demanding expression in his voice and on his face.

  “Um, the juice flow is going to be real unstable for the first month or so. The doctors are going to be finding more Transforms for me. Things are supposed to stabilize when I get about ten people in my household. Before I do, I got warned I’ll be having some big mood swings. They’re going to keep us here in the clinic until we have enough people in the household for the juice count to stabilize and we find another place to live.”

  “Yes?”

  Gail searched her mind again, trying to find something else besides the big one. She felt like she was on trial, under Kurt’s intense grilling, for the crime of becoming a Focus.

  No. For the crime of transforming Sylvie.

  And, oh, hell, she didn’t see any way around it any more. The one little critical tidbit Mendell let drop, casually, as if the information didn’t matter. One you wouldn’t find in a prim and proper Readers Digest article.

  “Uh, yeah,” Gail said, unsure of what to say, a hint of wetness gathering in the corners of her eyes. “Kurt, I’m not going to hurt Sylvie. You know I wouldn’t.”

  She chewed her lip over a hurt she had no power over. Kurt and Van waited.

  “Kurt…” she said, her voice growing soft. Kurt glanced up at her gentle tone. She had to say this. “One of the things Transform Sickness does to a woman, one that doesn’t show up in the media, is the Shakes makes them infertile.” Kurt’s face fell. “I’m sorry, Kurt. I’m really, really sorry.” No six kids. Not any kids at all.

  Kurt’s hard, businesslike edge collapsed into cold shock. He stood up, stumbling and unsteady, his feet fighting to hold him. He didn’t say anything, and walked slowly and unsteadily toward the door.

  “Kurt,” Gail said, soft. Van stood and started to follow.

  Kurt turned. “Stay away from me. Just stay the fuck away from me,” he said, his voice so tight it hurt.

  Van stopped. Gail watched, helpless, as Kurt stumbled out the door. The tears came, trailing down her cheek.

  “Oh, damn,” she said. Van sat down on the bed beside her and held her.

  ---

  Two in the morning and she couldn’t sleep. Van lay beside her in the bed, cycling in and out of bad dream filled sleep. She had only woken up in the late afternoon, and this was still the longest day of her life. Van had held her, she had cried on his shoulder, and they had gone on to other things, even despite her headache. Gail was glad he could accept her despite her transformation. She had been afraid he would pull away, not want her any more. She should have known better. Van was better than that. Well, at least if she found a way to ignore the feeling he thought of this as a grand historic adventure into terra incognita.

  Now he lay beside her in the darkness, awake again, and traced a line up between her ribs.

  “So what happens to you, now?” he said, as quiet as the darkness.

  She turned to him, licked his nose, and smiled. He didn’t respond, watching, solemn, as he so often was.

  “They find people for me. I set up a household.”

  “What kind of people?”

  Gail shrugged. “Dunno. Could be anybody. Whoever comes down with Transform Sickness next.”

  “That could be a problem. We have to live with these people.” We. She wondered if he understood how happy she was to hear him say we, so casually assuming he would be staying with her.

  Why couldn’t this be easier? This Focus thing was going to be hard enough as it was. She wanted to be arranging things with Van. Not with her parents.

  “Yah. We’re going to have to figure out how to deal with a Transform household. I guess we’ll live in some kind of commune. A big family. I guess you never get to pick your family, do you?” She thought of her father, big and blustering and domineering. She had been stuck with him all her life.

  “What about you?” Van said. “What happens to you?”

  “Well, I think we’ll be seeing some changes in my body. I think the changes get pretty dramatic for a Focus.”

  “Like what, dramatic?”

  “Well, like faster and stronger. I’ll heal better. The doctor said I’ll eat more and need less sleep.” The changes scared her. Dr. Mendell tried to make the changes sound like they were all good, but Gail didn’t like the idea of changes to her body, strange things she couldn’t control making her into something no longer a standard-issue human.

  “Also,” she said, changing the subject away from the more disquieting aspects of being a Focus, “he said I might have some juice problems. Focuses need juice, too.”

  “Hmm?”

  “He said I’ll handle a lot of juice, and I’ll even produce juice, lots of juice, but I don’t get to use much of what I handle. I use up my juice moving my household Transforms’ juice around. A Focus’s juice count depends on how many people she has in her household. The more people, the better off I am.”

  “So how many people do you need?”

  “Well, the doctors aren’t sure. They do know most Focuses don’t have enough juice. Dr. Mendell said all the Focuses have juice problems.”

  Van shifted position so he looked down at her. “This doesn’t sound good.”

  “Yeah,” Gail said. “He said I’m full of juice now, since I just came out of my transformation. In a few days, I’m going to use up this surplus making changes to my body. Later, I’m going to start running low because I don’t have enough people. Finally, once they get me somewhere between six to ten triads, I’ll have as much juice as I’m ever going to get. He said the low juice will be bad, like starving all the time, and that I’ll have to learn to cope.”

  “Triads?”

  “Two women and one man. The, ahem, basic unit of the household,” Gail said. Van didn’t laugh at her attempt at a joke. The tears started again, and she laughed through them, bitterly. “He said Focuses tend to have trouble with emotional stability. Guess what my father said? He wanted to know how they could tell. He said ‘of course a woman with responsibility isn’t going to be stable.’ He wanted to know what the doctors did to keep the Focuses ‘under control.’”

  Van tensed and half-hissed. He considered her father an utterly useless asshole, and undependable, about Van’s archest insult. “What did Mendell say?”

  “Oh, some garbage about ‘providing guidance’ and such. I don’t think the doctors can actually do anything for Focuses. Set them free to suffer or whatever.”

  Gail rolled over and wrapped her arms around Van. They held each other in the darkness, for many long minutes.

  Gail had almost drifted off to sleep when Van spoke again.

  “Gail?”

  “What?”

  “How much do you trust Dr. Mendell?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you trust him?” Van said. “Do you think he’s telling you the truth? All the truth?”

  Gail thought. The doctor was of her parent’s generation, the same generation responsible for the war in ‘Nam,
for pollution and overpopulation and slavery in South Africa and racial segregation and a whole list of things that angered Gail. Social injustice. How could she trust any of them?

  “No,” Gail said. “I think he edited what he told us. He doesn’t trust me. I’m just some kid. He’s only telling me what he thinks I ought to know.”

  Van nodded in the darkness. “Uh huh. Maybe I should do some independent research. I know a couple of guys over in the med school. I’ll bet I can get some information from them. I’ll double check what you’re hearing from Mendell.”

  “Yeah.” She looked over at Van, and thought about how good he really was, and the tears started trickling again. She held him tight to her.

  “I’m so scared.” Tears rolled down her cheeks and down his shoulder.

  “Hey, everything will be all right. We’ll manage,” he said, as he held her.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you, too.”

  Intrusion

  (5)

  Gail woke up just after dawn, after less than four hours sleep. Van mumbled when she crawled out of the narrow bed, but didn’t wake up. She took her long delayed shower and found some cereal in the clinic kitchen. She slurped down the cereal, drank a big glass of chocolate milk, and decided that would hold her for a few hours. Her headache hadn’t gone away. Her body ached less, but the hunger inside her grew worse. Curious and bored, she wandered from office to office, snooping.

  “Focus Rickenbach? Excuse me, Focus Rickenbach?” Gail turned her head and found the nurse who had disapproved when Van stayed overnight in her room. She glared at Gail as if she had found Gail making mud-pies in the center of the clinic hallway. “That’s me, unfortunately,” Gail said, her headache powering her voice’s razor edge. She didn’t know if she should wash her dirty dishes, and decided to leave them out on the counter. If the people here couldn’t cope, she was sure they would let her know. That’s what old farts did. “Did you want something from me? Or are you just here to give me a hard time for going into an empty office with an unlocked door?” The headache and the supercilious disapproval made her cranky.