The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Four (4 page)

Gilgamesh Collates Crow Research

Gilgamesh sat at his kitchen table and wrote.  He filled
page after page of the yellow legal pad, putting together the notes collected
from Shadow.  Notes and potential articles written by Wire, Sinclair, Ezekiel
and Tolstoy.  Gilgamesh missed the camaraderie of the time he had spent in
Philadelphia.  No Crows lived in Chicago with him.  He missed them so much,
especially Wire and Tolstoy, because they were dead and gone, never to speak to
him again.  Killed by a pair of Beast Men named Enkidu and Grendel.

After letting his project sit for weeks, he had started
to type.  His project was a synthesis of everything his Crow friends, living
and dead, had produced on the subject of Transforms.  Many weeks of typing
later, he finished.

He wasn’t impressed with his writing.

When Sinclair wrote, his work was lyrical and engaging.  He
wrote stories and short vignettes, allowing you to feel the lives of those
Focuses and normal men and women with Transform Sickness.  He could even make a
reader see into the heart of an Arm.  Ezekiel wrote philosophy.  Thought
provoking, insightful, at times inspiring.  Gilgamesh had incorporated as much
of their styles as he had the talent to copy into his work.

Tolstoy had been able to pick a single question and
delve into it until the question answered itself.  Tolstoy had been the one
responsible for the terminology to describe what the Crows saw with their metasense. 
Wire had critiqued.  He had been able to look at the work everyone else did and
spot the holes and rough spots.  Then he would either add to their work, or
make constructive suggestions that led the writer to new insights and
understanding.  Gilgamesh thought that might be the best skill of all. 
Gilgamesh tried to incorporate both Tolstoy’s technical fireworks and Wire’s
critiques into his magnum opus.  He failed.  He wasn’t good enough.  Everything
Gilgamesh touched of theirs turned into Gilgamesh’s own style, the
engineering
manual
.  Not at all the glorious artistry of the other Crows.  Dry,
cerebral, and far too practical.

Gilgamesh dedicated his book, ‘On Transforms’, to
Tolstoy and Wire.  He looked it over again, and sighed.  Too long.  Meandering. 
Too dry.  Too
real world
.  On the other hand, he had produced what he
had wished for when he just started out as a Crow – an engineering manual on
how to live as a Transform.

To ease the pain of his long daunting book, Gilgamesh
had produced a summary précis.  He looked it over, and smiled.

On Transforms

1.0
          
Gender-based
differentiation of Major Transforms

Metacampus
functionality falls along gender lines.

Male - Crows, Beast
Men

Absorb dross and
convert it to juice internally.  Beast Men may be able to absorb juice
directly, as well.

Range – both Crows and
Beast Men can sense juice to a distance of 5 miles

Sensitivity – male Major
Transforms are able to sense both juice and dross, as well as the details of
juice allocation (fundamental and supplemental juice), and Focus tagging. 
Cannot sense others of their own kind very well.

Speed – slow
manipulation of juice and dross.

Manipulation – Crows
can physically manipulate dross, a byproduct of their absorption capabilities. 
This manipulation has several uses, including the creation of artwork.  Beast
Men manipulate juice internally, powering their slow changes of shape.  Whether
this is under their conscious control or not is an open question.

Female - Focuses, Arms

Absorb juice
directly.  Focuses create supplemental juice (as do woman Transforms) in small
quantities.

Range – a quarter mile
for Arms and three hundred feet for Focuses

Sensitivity – unable
to sense Major Transforms save at very short range.  Unable to sense some
details of juice allocation.  Unable to sense dross.

Speed – much faster
juice manipulation than either Crows or Beast Men.  Arms and the best Focuses
are able to transfer juice in an instant.

Manipulation – the
Focus is capable of extensive manipulation of juice, a capability found in no
other Transform.  Clearly, the Focus metacampus is entirely directed to this
capability, at the expense of all juice use.  Arms manipulate juice internally,
powering their combat capabilities.  The Arm metacampus appears to be vastly
under-utilized.  They likely have additional juice manipulation capabilities
they have not yet identified.

2.0
          
Juice
Differentiation among Major Transforms

Juice Differentiation
divides the Major Transforms into two groups, the constant juice users (Crows
and Focuses) and the inconstant juice users (Beast Men and Arms).

Fundamental juice
levels – Focuses and Crows have a fundamental juice level about 65.  Arms and
Beast Men have a fundamental juice level about 90.

Usage Rates – Male Transforms
use about 3 juice points a week. This seems to be almost entirely utilized to
support their fundamental juice, with only negligible amounts left for physical
enhancements.  A Crow or Focus will use about 5 juice points a week, of which
an estimated 80% is utilized to support their fundamental juice, leaving the
remaining for physical enhancements.  An Arm or Beast Man uses about 15 juice
points a week, of which less than half is utilized to support their fundamental
juice, leaving the majority for physical enhancements.

Usage Patterns – Crows
and Focuses tend toward constant juice levels.  Crows absorb dross slowly, and
function best on small quantities of dross every day.  Focuses, despite
handling large quantities of juice, only absorb minute quantities of what they
handle and also tend toward a constant juice level.  Arms and Beast Men tend to
extreme variability.  Note the psychological effects of this!  The variability
induces addictive behaviors and intense mood swings.

Transformation – Crows
and Focuses transformations seem to require little or no external juice supply.
 A Crow makes his transformation with no support, and a Focus makes use of the
excess juice of a small number of women.  An Arm takes more, killing the women
in the process, while a Beast Man seems to awake before his transformation is
complete, requiring a large quantity of dross from some external source in
order to complete his transformation.

3.0
          
The
Transforms

The differentiation
factors between Transforms lie in gender and support needs.  The Goldilocks
variations are as rare as Arms and Beast Men.  The reason for their rarity is
not known, but is statistically tied to the number of Induced (non-disease)
Transformations occurring in society.

Male Transforms – Male
Transforms run a fundamental juice level of 15.5, and use about 0.4 points of
supplemental juice per day.  When this is exhausted, they go into withdrawal. 
Male Transforms require Focus support to survive.

Female Transforms – Female
Transforms run a fundamental juice level of 15.5, and produce about 0.4 points
of extra supplemental juice per day.  When this reaches a level of 27.8, they
become Monsters.  Female Transforms require Focus support to survive.  The
requirement of two female Transforms to support one male Transform is due to
inefficiency in the transfer process.

Male Goldilocks – Male
Goldilocks run a fundamental juice level of 22.2.  They produce about 0.4
points of supplemental juice per day, and use around the same amount.  They
need no support to survive.

Female Goldilocks –
Female Goldilocks run a fundamental juice level of 22.2.  They produce about 0.4
points of supplemental juice per day, and use around the same amount.  They
need no support to survive.

4.0
          
Sports

Sports are variants on
the Major Transforms.  Sports do not appear to duplicate each other, meaning
they appear to be unique flawed (or variant) versions of the Major Transforms. 
The mortality rate among Sports is excessive.

His précis was quite succinct, the book an in-depth
treatment regarding the capabilities of Transforms, something he had never encountered
in any of the technical or popular literature.  Yet, he had written nothing new
or creative, just a synthesis of many different sources, Crow and normal.  As
dry and dull as an old dishrag.  With one big flaw – the Philadelphians hadn’t
produced anything on the subject of Monsters.

He couldn’t send his book off to Shadow written like
this.  Nobody would be able to get past the first chapter!  He had to redo it. 
Make it real.  Somehow.

Gilgamesh shrugged.  If he ever finished his book, he
would collect his thoughts about the organization of Focus households.  He had
avoided tackling the household organization subject to start with, because of
the complexities involved.  The subject interested him, though.  He had thought
Focuses would end up with an infinite number of household organizations, but his
observations and those of the other Philadelphians showed only nine
organization types.

His second book would probably be just as dry and soporific. 

He gathered his available small bills and coins, and
totaled them up.  Yes, he had enough to get his précis copied.  Once.  Chicago
wasn’t being good on his finances.

Why was the nature of Transform Sickness so complex?  It
didn’t seem logical to him Transform Sickness could be a sudden evolutionary
mutation, or a biological experiment gone wrong. 

The only thing he knew was the Transform community had
only started to plumb the complexities of their transformations.

Bobby’s Illness (early December ‘67)
[Carol Hancock POV]

I arrived home just before midnight, home being the
perfect spot to be one day post-kill.  I had hunted Indianapolis this time, and
successfully.  I slammed the door of the Buick with that little extra edge of
anticipation and glided past the stacks of old newspapers Bobby kept ignoring.  I
swore when I noticed them, my good mood gone, and then swore again when I
realized I had left my coat in the car.  I turned back and fished it out.

It was a man’s coat, because I had been Mr. Beacon
today, a dark brown coat made of heavy wool.  I was tempted to carry the coat
and not wear the thing, but I knew better.  The cold didn’t bother me, but the
walk from the garage to the house was long enough and cold enough that a normal
would have wanted the coat.  I sighed and shrugged into the coat, slamming the
car door again with my foot.

A mouse rustled in the stacks of newspapers, burrowing
underneath for warmth.  In a brief fit of aggravation and kill lust, I grabbed
the ragged broom from the corner and jabbed it down with a snap, butt end
first, into the little rustle under the papers.  The mouse died with a crackle
of small bones, giving me a brief surge of satisfaction.

A bit of disgust with myself followed my satisfaction.  Carol
Hancock, the dangerous Arm, kills a mouse in her own garage!  Next, I would be
chasing the cockroaches.

Damn.  I couldn’t even manage my own reactions.  Somewhere
along the line, I had lost the connection between my juice count and my
emotional state.  Thinking back, I realized I lost my sense of correlation after
my encounter with Enkidu.  Probably the little bit of Monster juice I took from
him, I guessed.  I also had more trouble with my juice monkey, at ever-higher
juice counts.  The overwhelming hunger for juice started to creep in even when
I was immediately post-kill, and became nearly intolerable when I was low.

I stalked across the driveway and back to the house, and
stopped cold when I opened the kitchen door.  There, as I stood in the kitchen
doorway, dripping on the worn tile, the smell hit me, a sick, putrid smell, the
smell of death and disease, overpowering in its intensity.  The odor hit me
like a club and made me gag.  The stench was like a thick reeking cloud,
poisoning the air of the entire house.  I knew of only one thing in my house
big enough to make a stink like this.  The panic hit me with the same club the
smell used and I ran.

Bobby lay on the bare mattress that lay on the floor of
my room, wrapped tight in a blanket and shivering.  His breathing sounded like
a train engine and his skin burned hot to my touch.  He didn’t respond to me.  I
rolled him over and he didn’t even wake up.  He just lay there with his mouth
slack and the fever burning in him and his breath wheezing in his chest.

Hell.

I looked at him.  His condition hit me like a lump of
lead in my stomach when I realized how sick he was.  I might lose him.  The
blood drained out of my face and real fear settled in my gut.

I couldn’t lose Bobby.  My hands shook and I got dizzy.  I
thought I could do anything I wanted to with him, with never a cost to pay.  I
never thought about how much a threat to Bobby might hurt
me
.  Bobby was
my safe prey.  Losing him would turn my whole world upside down.  I depended on
him to be there to assuage my loneliness.  I needed him.  He was
mine
.

I had let him in under my defenses.  I had let myself
care for him.  Now he slipped away, pulling my heart out by the roots.  He was
weak.  He was helpless.  He held my heart in a grip like iron.

He wouldn’t die if I found a way to save him.

I bent down and scooped him up, blanket and all,
grateful for my enhanced strength.  His head lolled against me, dirty locks of
hair falling against my coat.  I cradled him tenderly against my chest.  He
shivered harder when I picked him up, but he didn’t wake up.  The heat from him
hit me the same way an open hot oven would.

He needed a hospital.  I didn’t know what he had or how
bad the illness was, but I needed a doctor to fix it.  They would make him well
or I would carve their intestines out with a spoon.  I would break their every
bone one by one and crush them until they were dust.  Bobby was
mine
.

I jogged back through the house with Bobby in my arms,
careful not to bump his head.  He whimpered when I got him outside to the
driveway and the rain hit him.  His shivering grew so strong I thought I might lose
him right here.  I took the driveway at a run, held him with one hand for the
brief moment I needed to open the garage door, and slammed the garage door open. 
The garage door slammed all the way up from the force I used to open it,
bounced, and tried to come back down again.  I caught the door, pushed it back,
opened the back door of that old Buick and laid Bobby carefully inside my still
warm car.

I pulled the car out of the garage and raced for the
hospital.

I didn’t get home again until nearly twelve hours later.
 Bobby never woke up.  Pneumonia, the doctors said.  They promised to do ‘the
best they could’.  Reading them hurt me – they thought Bobby would most likely die.
 I stayed for hours anyway, terrifying the doctors and nurses, waiting
helplessly by Bobby’s bed.  I only left when my aching body started to
complain, forcing me to spend some time at Pete’s gym.

I came in through the kitchen door from the garage and
looked over the usual mess.  Bobby and I were slobs.  It was a good thing that
the house was so cold, or the bugs would rule.  Bobby was supposed to keep
everything clean, his job, but I couldn’t exactly be irritated with Bobby now.  Not
when he was in the process of dying.

Such a cold, cheerless place.  It reminded me of
Keaton’s warehouse, last winter.

Cold.

Frigid, in fact.

“It’s a good thing that the house is so cold, or the bugs
would rule,” I muttered to myself.

I didn’t notice the cold unless I was on the low end of
low juice.  My enhanced body adapted to the cold and the cold didn’t bother me.
 I had lived for almost a year in an unheated warehouse with Keaton and I
scarcely paid attention to the cold any more.  The house had a gas heater, but
I had never bothered to have the damned thing lit.  Too much of a hassle, too
large of a chance of an accident.

Hmm.  I scraped some ancient paint off the old round
thermostat in the back hall and winced.  Mid thirties, the same as outside.

Crap.  Bobby had been living in a house with no heat, too
beaten down to mention the problem to me.

He must have thought I did this to him on purpose.  I
couldn’t say I hadn’t done things to him equally as noxious.

Bobby had been sporting a runny nose ever since early
October, but I thought nothing about it.  After Thanksgiving he began to hack
and cough.  I…hell, I had enjoyed his misery.  I liked his pain and the power I
had over him.

This was my fault.  Bobby was going to die because of my
own sadistic stupidity.

I sank down against the wall and I rocked back and forth,
a horrible keening noise coming out of me.  How could Bobby hurt me like this? 
I was a monster.  Monsters don’t care for people.  Nothing should hurt like
this.  Bobby would die, and I figuratively died with him, my soul trapped in
his gentle hands as he slipped away.

I recognized this crazy Arm crap emotion, though.  I
remembered feeling this way once before, when Keaton trashed my storeroom home
after I had fixed it up.

Bobby had, somehow, in an impossible illogical manner,
become
territory
.

I had never imagined people might become territory.  How
the hell was I supposed to deal with possessions as complex as human beings?

Not the way I had been dealing so far, obviously.  I had
gone so far into ‘Arm’ that I left most of my humanity behind, clinging to
those last few remnants like the coat in winter only so I didn’t stand out. 
The lack of heat in the house was so obvious and so screwed up I flinched with
embarrassment, but the desolate emptiness of the house declared a callous
inhumanity as well.  Whether I lost Bobby or not, I had already lost something
of me. 

I screwed up.  So, screw-ups happen.  When you screw up,
you admit the problem, then deal.  Keaton taught me that.

I would fix the problem I had created.

Somehow.

---

Dr. Johnson signed the papers, unhappy.  Bobby was ready
to come home from the hospital, at least according to me and my Arm instincts. 
He wasn’t healthy, but he wasn’t dying, either.  Ten days.  Ten horrible
hurt-filled days.

I winterized the house, of course.  I even cleaned the
kitchen and living room.  I fought my memories and emotions as I cleaned; I
once did this sort of thing for Keaton, and after I graduated I decided I would
never clean again.  I was an Arm, dammit, and cleaning was beneath me.

What stupid pride.

My pride wasn’t worth spit in a hurricane.  Keaton had taught
me that lesson long ago.

Such an ordinary little house we lived in.  Over on the
wall by the fireplace, I hung one of Bobby’s poems.  I copied the poem to parchment,
in a surprisingly elegant hand, and had it framed.  It was good to use my
enhanced physical capabilities on something besides murder and mayhem.  Supernatural
coordination made for a nice hand with a pen.

I didn’t know if the poem was any good.  Poetry wasn’t
my strong suit.  But Bobby’s poem was about silence, and night, and waiting for
something that never came, and his words touched something in me.  When Bobby got
healthier, I thought maybe I would have him sit for a portrait, and hang that
on the wall, too.

I decorated for Bobby’s sake, I thought, but I found I
liked those ordinary things as well.  Some remnant of humanity apparently still
lurked in my Arm soul.  I chose floral prints and landscape scenes for my wall
decorations, and harmless knick-knacks for the decorations I put on my meager
furniture.

I found I enjoyed the minutia of decorating.  Decorating
took my mind off other things.  The results made the house seem that much more
like a home, and much more mine. 

I liked
mine
.

Hmm, so maybe an inhuman Arm shared a few points in
common with normal humanity.  This was the last sort of thing I should be
abandoning and I mentally thanked Bobby for the lesson, and for being a gentler
teacher than Keaton.  Lessons involved pain, always.  I promised myself to
learn from this one, my debt to Bobby. 

I decorated the kitchen in a quaint country style, and
daisies and baby ducks covered everything.  I got a jolt sometimes when I came
into the kitchen, wondering what made me decorate the kitchen in such a way.  I
made a point of keeping the kitchen clean of all signs of my less savory
activities.

A week later, Bobby was still sick, but healing.  He had
an annoying raspy cough, but he walked and talked, and I had him under orders
not to go out in public, where he could catch a cold.  I was easy on him – no
rough sex, no rough anything.  No shorting him on sleep just to teach him
another lesson about the power of Arms.

When we talked, Bobby stayed polite with me.  Too
polite.  He had always feared me, but now there was something more, something
deeper.  When I had carried him inside to the cleaner, warm and now more homey
house, he had broken down and cried.  I had broken him.  Not too long ago, he
had been a tough aspiring amateur boxer with a crashingly large ego.  No
longer.

I took care of him.  I was unfailingly gentle with him.  He
got everything he needed.  Fear and pain haunted his eyes, but now, instead of
titillating and enticing me, his reactions hurt.  Dammit, I wanted a lover, not
a terrified sex slave.

Should I convince him to go somewhere else, like Los
Angeles or Miami?  Far away from Arms and their problems?  I couldn’t.  He was
mine
,
and once an Arm owns something, it’s nearly impossible to get rid of it, even
if you would rather see it gone.  I understood, now, about why my graduation
task from Keaton had been so hard, and why Keaton had nearly reneged when I did
graduate.

I stewed as I went through my days and dealt with my
normal Arm problems.  I was one Arm, alone.  Keaton and Zielinski remained but distant
voices on the phone and typewritten letters delivered to Milwaukee.  I thought
up the idea of a Transform clearing house – you have a problem, we have the Major
Transform with the specialty to solve it.  I worked out my idea in exquisite
detail, in every aspect.  A useful idea, but useless now.  I didn’t dare speak
of my idea to Keaton or Zielinski.  In my current condition, they would label a
wild-ass idea like mine certifiably insane and not be wrong.

I found a kill and took out my passions on a stockbroker
I found out trolling for tail at a local bar.  After I finished with him, I stuck
his wedding ring half way to his heart via his rear end for cheating on his
wife.  I found another man later, a potential recruit, and took him apart
physically and mentally to find out if he was worthy.  He wasn’t, and
afterwards, I made sure he wouldn’t be robbing any more old ladies of their
social security checks and raping them afterwards.  Doing a good deed at least
cheered me up, some.

Finished with my work, I came home.

Just before dawn, Bobby’s skin almost glowed in the
almost-darkness of the room.  He had slipped mostly out of the covers, his back
lay naked to the air.  My eyes lingered on the lean curves, and the fall of his
brown hair over his eyes and I wanted to gently run my fingered down the length
of his back and tease him awake.

Foolish me.  My breath caught at the sight of Bobby, and
the energy inside of me tightened into an ache.  I wanted to climb into bed on
top of him, breathe into his ear, and turn him on until he went crazy.  I
wanted to spend the rest of the day here, stroking my own lusts as I fed his,
until we were both sated to exhaustion.