The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Nine Read online

  “I believe so,” Hank said. “I can tell you what I learned, if you want.” Which he did.

  ---

  Hank made a lousy woman. No matter how they tried, Inferno couldn’t disguise him as a Focus, so they made him look like a passable female in her fifties. Between the disguise as a woman, the makeup, and his plastic surgery, even his estranged wife wouldn’t recognize him. The program listed him as a witness, a Dr. Wilma Orza. He came in as one of Focus Keistermann’s people, and she vouched for ‘her’ bona fides.

  His disguise was a long step up from Sky’s. The stocky-framed Crow wore a disguise as one of Keistermann’s Transform bodyguards, and they had gone whole hog. Shaved head, fake tattoos, fake beer belly, the ill-fitting caterer’s uniform, the works. Made the Crow look like he just deserted from the French Foreign Legion.

  Outside the German Alehouse and VFW meeting center in Plattsburg, Focus Rizzari ran security, coordinating with the bodyguard teams of Focuses Biggioni, Keistermann, Webb and Bentlow. As far as the other Focuses were aware, Lori was just another Transform bodyguard. Hank had been surprised to learn Focus security was one of Inferno’s side businesses, and they had been providing bodyguards for nearby impromptu Focus gatherings for years. The Council would pay Inferno quite a bit more than normal for this one. He knew not to mention that to Keaton.

  Lori had been checking up on the hunt for Gilgamesh, or making the attempt. Attempts. Carol and the rescue team were on their way from Memphis to Dallas, where Carol planned to use one of her Dallas know-nothing merc teams and flatten Guru Arpeggio’s place if he didn’t cooperate. Hank thought the idea suicidal, given what he understood about the capabilities of the upper-end Crows, but he also knew he couldn’t talk Carol down when her blood was up.

  No talking to Lori, either, on the subject. She had a hard time concentrating on the task at hand, security, and she needed to. Given the timing on the Gilgamesh grab, this meeting was likely a death trap.

  He also had problems concentrating. Gilgamesh’s kidnapping left Hank sick with worry, enough to make his hands shake when he didn’t pay attention.

  He ate a Mercury Catering provided breakfast muffin and walked into the VFW hall, trying to shake off lack of sleep. He had managed to catch only a few short catnaps in the car ride from Boston, sleep he badly needed. Although this particular New York tourist town in the Lake Champlain region was a busy place in summer, this was the off-season and hotel rates were affordable. It used to be the Focuses could get university meeting rooms for these impromptu gatherings, especially during summer and holidays, but with the constant student protests, those opportunities had all dried up. Last week’s ‘turn in your draft card day’ soured his stomach.

  Getting plane tickets to Plattsburg had been another problem, and even though the Focuses weren’t traveling with their full entourages, it strained all their budgets. Focus Bentlow had tried to beg off, unable to afford the tickets for herself and her guards, so anonymous donations from various sources, including his own lab account, covered the shortfall.

  Anyone who saw this shindig and recognized that four of the Focus Council members were meeting without the other three might have become suspicious. They would have been right, because Council President Focus Keistermann was pulling a fast one. Officially, this was an emergency meeting of the budget committee of the UFA, the United Focus Association. It wasn’t. Focuses Webb and Bentlow were in for a big surprise.

  The first thing on the agenda were the presentations, the second an actual meeting. Unfortunately, the VFW hall meeting rooms weren’t set up for presentations, so they held the presentation for the tiny group in the huge dining hall, rich with the lingering odors of beer and sauerkraut. Hank had the primitive AV equipment set up by the podium, his slides and overheads ready, and no notes. For this, he didn’t need notes. When he finished his presentation, Focus Rizzari would ensure his overheads and slides didn’t survive.

  He hated being so exposed. Facing four Council Focuses, all with killer charisma, also gave him ulcers. They could tie him into knots if they wanted, no matter what precautions he took.

  All of the attending Focuses gossiped and madly compared notes, though not on the subject at hand. This was Focus Keistermann’s event, and the Council president would brook no spoilers to her show. They were more worried about media inquiries to the Focus Council about the salt mine Focuses. Apparently, CBS had the best scoop on the story, and the other media outlets were scrambling like mad. The Focuses would be keeping the information quiet until the full Council met at the end of March, and acted on it.

  He had been shocked when Lori called him last week and asked him to call, from a local phone booth, a particular Long Island number he recognized as Focus Keistermann’s. He didn’t have a good relationship with the Council President, who considered him nothing more than a meddling Doctor and worthless researcher, but by the end of the conversation, she called him Hank and he called her Polly. Focus Keistermann, normally a stabilizing influence on the Council and among the most reluctant to make waves, had finally gone on the warpath over Rogue Crow. The tipping point, it seemed, was Hank’s own discovery that Focus Hargrove was in trouble, precipitated by Rogue Crow personally.

  The Council was about to come to its senses, and he had been dragooned into being a part of it. If only he didn’t have to face a roomful of Council Focuses to make this work. He had done so only once, and he had so far managed to keep his vow never to do so again.

  “I’m going to keep it short and sweet,” Polly said, as she began the Plattsburg meeting. “We have just three presentations, and everything here falls in the category of dangerous information we need to keep private. You first, Tonya.”

  ---

  “We’re all in big trouble, aren’t we?” Amy said, after Hank finished telling them about the three Plattsburg presentations.

  “I’m not going to tell you otherwise, but there is one bit of hope,” Hank said. “The Council meeting is only three days away. The first Focuses don’t have enough time for anything elaborate. If we can manage to keep our heads down, we might just be able to get through this.”

  On The Couch

  “So, Gilgamesh, Hank’s worried he’s wasting time doing administration,” Lori said. He hadn’t said anything out loud, but she knew anyway. She clearly didn’t want to think about the war against the first Focuses they now fought. “What do you think?”

  “How is he wasting himself?” Gilgamesh said.

  “On his Arm research and management duties,” Lori said. She turned her head to face him. “I’m not trying to cut you down or anything, Hank, but any half-competent researcher could be doing what you’ve been doing recently. You’ve got to delegate more.”

  He shifted a little, settling into a comfortable position. It felt odd to be holding a woman again. It had been years, since well before Glory left him, and his encounters with Keaton didn’t count. Hank smiled, and enjoyed the feeling. Except for the feverish heat from her body, she felt comfortable against his side.

  Of all the women he thought he might find himself cuddling, Lori was the least likely, but she had changed since he lived here. Overriding her Focus instincts, becoming more civilized, more open to other people. Her change had to be conscious on her part, but it was still nice to see. And snuggle next to.

  She was being unpredictable, though. Open warmth like this one minute, testy temper the next. Hesitations, sometimes, where she used to be confident. Hank had seen this sort of odd edginess in other Focuses. Internal conflict. She was fighting herself. He wondered why, and then wondered if she even knew. He guessed not, and suspected it would be a while before she figured it out.

  “As far as paperwork and research goes, you’re right, I should delegate more,” Hank said. “What I can’t delegate is getting the Arms to actually listen. Carol routinely ignores anything any of her other researchers say unless I back him up.”

  “That’s not my real fear,” Lori said. Hank shot her a puzzled expr
ession. “You need to be working on something more useful. Our window of opportunity is ticking away and we’re not anywhere near as far along as we need to be.” The Transform apocalypse was coming, the demographic disaster behind the Cause, the thing that moved him to take the risks he took. The attack had turned Lori’s lab into an arson crime scene, cratering her ongoing work. Thankfully, Lori had already finished her amygdala transformation paper and sent it out for review, and the evidence backing her findings was here, in Inferno, not in her Boston College lab.

  “You should be asleep, Focus,” Hank said.

  Lori and Gilgamesh both nodded. “I don’t know why, but my body won’t let me. I guess my subconscious must be convinced the emergency isn’t over.”

  “Go cuddle up with your favorite women Transforms,” Hank said. “Other Focuses…”

  Lori’s glare was mightily impressive. Hank gave up on his advice, sighed and decided now might not be the best time to butt heads with Lori on that subject. She was as reticent to discuss personal issues as he was, being a fellow old school Yankee. Better to go back to their original discussion.

  “I’m still getting my feet on the ground, trying to figure out the current state of the research,” Hank said. “I still haven’t caught up on my reading.” Carol had hit the roof when he presented her the bill for his journal subscriptions. She had even threatened to steal the journals for him.

  “Carol hasn’t figured out how to duplicate Eissler’s memory and intelligence enhancement trick?” Lori said.

  “Not yet.”

  “The Arm research is difficult because there aren’t enough Arms,” Gilgamesh said. “However, your reputation includes extensive work on Focuses, who are quite plentiful. Perhaps you could intermix some work on Focuses into your ongoing work on Arms.”

  True. Keaton had asked him not to forget about his work with Focuses. She wanted things to trade to the Focuses so she could get their feet off her neck, but still. He had no reason not to do Focus research.

  “Anything to keep him from looking more into Crows, eh, Gilgamesh?” Lori said.

  Gilgamesh nodded, sheepishly.

  “I have an idea,” Lori said. “I know a way we can all think on this, together. You’ll have to cooperate, Gilgamesh.”

  “Another nasty Housebound trick?” Yes, Gilgamesh was more shaken by Lori’s wounds than he was letting on.

  “Charismatic illusions,” Lori said. “One of my specialties. Hardly uses any juice at all.”

  Gilgamesh shrugged, as did Hank.

  The world swam in illusion for a moment.

  Hank found himself floating in mid-air, hand in hand with Lori and Gilgamesh, like something out of a bad Peter Pan movie. Below them lay dozens of abstracts, research papers, jotted notes, and snippets of conversations. Or so Hank knew, without knowing how he knew.

  “This is made from my memory. Think of this as walking around inside my mind. You always wanted to see the inside of my mind, didn’t you?” A hint of a giggle colored her voice. “Only it’s not complete, because it’s just an illusion, and you’re only walking around in the technical section of my memories.”

  “What are we doing here?” Hank said.

  “Inspiration!” She laughed and waved her illusory hands. “Trying to help you come up with the right thing to work on without having to logic through every last…” Lori stopped, as Gilgamesh had flown them forward and down, to titles and summary paragraphs of the abstracts.

  “So,” Gilgamesh said, “Focus memory is as good as Crow memory. I thought with low juice, you would have problems with this.”

  “I do,” Lori said. “I have ways of juice moving that conserves it, and I’ve also done a bunch of training to work up a large suite of memory tricks. It could be better, though.”

  “What’s this?” Hank said, gazing at a group of images he found floating in a circle around an image of him. He identified several easily: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Hewlett and Packard, Eli Whitney. Watson and Crick.

  “You weren’t supposed to notice them. They are your signifier.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” he said. “I’m not one of those…wait.” This was worse. “You’re saying I’m one of those dreamt-up Transform archetypes, like The Commander? I’m not even a Transform.”

  Lori giggled. “A small part of you already is. I think someday the rest of you will follow.”

  He glowered at the Focus. Perhaps he needed to have the surgery Carol wanted and have his transformed adrenal gland removed. Tomorrow.

  “What’s the Good Doctor’s title?” Gilgamesh said.

  “The Inventor, of course,” the Focus said. She had known this ever since she met him, he realized. This explained her incessant interest in having him join Inferno.

  Her attitude invited nosy questions about this crazy title business, but he decided the best way to handle the situation was ignore it and move on.

  Gilgamesh started to read abstracts. Most he tossed as useless. Hank, along with Lori, looked through those he left behind.

  “You start tossing the ones you also think are inappropriate,” Hank said, to Lori. “I’ll look at the things you both pass.”

  A small pile of ideas started to grow around Hank, the papers and abstracts he thought had promise. A few minutes later, when Gilgamesh was about three quarters of the way through the entire mess, Hank said “Wait.”

  He started separating the idea pile in two. “Sky told me about some retagging he had you do, Lori, retagging that bought you an extra triad of support,” Hank said. “You thought it had fixed a problem created by Sadie’s dross leak, but the numbers aren’t right.” He had been noodling around, trying to put numbers on dross and its varieties for over a year. He hadn’t gotten as far as he wanted, but he had gone far enough to see the flaw in Sky’s logic. “I think a Crow and a Focus, working together in a recognition bond, can do far more than what you’ve done already. If you give me some…”

  “This is neat stuff, and I think you’re right. But this isn’t for you,” Lori said, looking over his illusory shoulder. “Not if you’re down in Houston and Sky and I are up here.”

  Lori was right. “Then let me think about the other pile,” he said.

  Two snippets of conversations, one with Polly Keistermann. An old note of his, regarding a similarity between a juice pattern ‘spell’ and the standard Transform tagging procedure. A note on a headache cure discovered by a Focus in California, one too young for juice pattern training. A research paper of his own, unpublished, on the power law involving the strength reduction of Focus juice manipulation at different ranges – which should have been inverse squared if space filling, but was actually to the power of 1.3, which meant Focus juice manipulation extended more like a line or narrow cone to a target than an expanding field. An abstract of a paper by a researcher at Johns Hopkins about circumstances where Focus charisma didn’t work, one of his many papers squelched by the Focus Council.

  “What do you see, Hank?” Lori said, looking over his shoulder. “I don’t see the connection.”

  He paused and tried to put it into words. The idea was there, but skittered away. He chased the idea down and held on tight. A real idea, quite strange, and vastly different from any speculations he had ever heard mentioned. Counterintuitive. It broke every rule in the book. Best thing the idea had going for it. A case of his colleagues ignoring the evidence because the evidence didn’t fit the theory. Hell, he had done it himself, until Lori had forced him into this odd form of controlled free association.

  “Juice patterns aren’t an advanced Focus trick,” Hank said. “Everything a Focus does with the juice is a juice pattern.”

  Lori boggled. Shook her head. Shook her head harder, as if being firmer about her refusal would alter the data and Hank’s inspiration.

  “Everything a Crow does is a dross construct, as well, although only the advanced Crows do what we lesser Crows normally call dross constructs,” Gilgamesh said. Now, Lori understood Hank’s inspiration. />
  “You think juice patterns are physically real, not just a metasense analogy?” Lori said. The Focuses who discovered juice patterns thought the ‘pattern’ part of the juice pattern had no reality, just mental symbology. Juice patterns were ‘tagging air’ or ‘tagging nothing’ and only the Focus’s willpower mattered.

  “Yes. They’re real, I know it. Figuring out at what level of biochemistry they’re real, though, will be a huge project all in itself. Think about it: if the juice patterns are nothing more than a mental analogy, there’s no pattern to crack. However, if they’re real, we should be able to crack the code. Find the biochemical mirror to each juice pattern.” He even knew where to start – by finally buckling down and identifying the biological use of all the extra hormone and hormone-mimicking juice components.

  “Now that’s a project worthy of the name,” Lori said, with a laugh. “If you can figure out the chemistry behind juice patterns, you’ll have Focuses kissing your feet for years. Except for the ones shooting at you, of course. I’ll expect a finished report next month.”

  Hank snorted. “Don’t expect a report this year. Or next year, for that matter. This isn’t going to be easy, even assuming it’s doable.” His mind wandered off into strategies for approaching the project, as well as the extensive equipment he would need, and which labs he could fob off the analysis work that was beyond his abilities. Carol and Keaton would shit bricks, but he suspected he would be able to sell it to them as a way of purchasing cooperation from the Focus community. Putting the Focuses in the Arm’s debt. After a little thought, he decided he might be able to trade equipment time with some unsuspecting researchers who didn’t have access to some of the crazy things Carol had purchased or stolen for him.

  Eventually, he fell asleep.

  Morality