The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Four (9 page)

Lucky for me, I already owned this someone: Mr. Tien.  I
hauled him in and dumped him on Greg.  Mr. Tien couldn’t run a successful
business, but at least ran a failing one, one step up from Greg and me.

My brilliant earthshattering idea bought me a completely
new set of problems.  Mr. Tien didn’t approve of Greg, because of Ying, and he
certainly didn’t think much of Greg’s competence after looking at the state of
the gym.  Besides, he lectured.  He would stand in front of Greg, and in short,
sharp sentences in his fractured English, he would list every mistake Greg made
in excruciating detail, while the veins in Greg’s temples stood out farther and
farther.  When Greg tried to explain his side of the story, Mr. Tien would turn
his back.  When Greg shouted at him for his behavior, Mr. Tien ignored him. 
Needless to say, they came to me and complained about the other.  Repeatedly.

I wanted to smack them both, tell them to quit acting
like children and work it out.  However, ignoring problems in favor of laying
down the law got me
into
this situation.  So, I tried to mediate.  Even
burning juice into my predator effect didn’t solve the problem.  I gave up on
being nice, put Mr. Tien in charge and told Greg to follow orders.

Greg got pissed as hell.  He would do what Mr. Tien told
him, but no more.  Mr. Tien took off at a gallop toward what would have ended
up looking more like a Chinese restaurant than a gym.  He conserved money on
the equipment and the locker rooms.  He wouldn’t allow Greg to put up posters
of half-dressed muscle-men because he thought they were tasteless.  Instead, up
went the Great Wall wallpaper.  Mr. Tien did hire some staff to run the gym, but
they turned out just like his waitresses: genteel, soft-spoken and had never
exercised a day in their lives.

I checked up on everything a week later.  My gym might
open eventually, but when the gym opened, it would be a lousy gym.  I had a
good idea of what a gym ought to look like, and this wasn’t right.  Even forgetting
the business justification, I wanted something better than this place for
myself.

Exasperated, I gave Greg back some authority and put him
in charge of equipment and hiring.  Greg and Mr. Tien started squabbling again.

I didn’t kill them.  I wanted to, but I didn’t. 
Instead, I put off the opening date of the gym for a month.

I needed better recruits.

Hope

“Hello?”

“Hello.  Is this Deborah?”  Tonya sat at her office desk
and stroked her old gray mongrel cat, Stalker III, for comfort.

“Yes, this is Debbie.  Who’s calling?”

“This is Tonya.  Tonya Biggioni.  Your mother.”  Tonya’s
stomach fluttered worse than during a Council meeting.

“What?  What the heck do you think you’re doing, calling
after all this time?”

Tonya took a breath.  Deborah hadn’t hung up yet.  A
good sign.

“I wanted to tell you congratulations.  I understand you’re
expecting.”

“You’ve been talking to Paul,” Deborah said.  Paul was
Deborah’s brother and the single one of Tonya’s children Tonya remained on
speaking terms with.  Stalker hissed in protest and leapt out of Tonya’s lap. 
Tonya realized she had let a little too much of her nervousness through.

“Yes.  I was so glad to hear it.  Are you doing well?”

“Well, he should keep his big mouth shut.  You stayed
away this long, you can keep staying away.”

“Deborah, sweetheart, I…”

“Don’t call me
sweetheart
,” Deborah said,
interrupting.

“Deborah.  You’re about to have a child.  A child should
have a chance to know his grandmother.”

“He’s already got two grandmothers and they aren’t you.”

Tonya took a breath and tried to steady her nerves. 
“I’d like to be one of them.”

“You can like all you want.”  Click.  Dial tone.

Tonya gently put the phone down.  Really, she told
herself, after all these years, this counted as a positive response.  Her
daughter had actually spoken to her for a few sentences before she hung up. 
Tonya would be able to work with that.  A few more phone calls.  Letters. 
Kindness.  With any luck, her daughter would open to her eventually.

Her children had long ago found their own paths, without
her.  She missed them.  If she found a way to heal a little bit of the breach
with her daughter, she might be able to hold her first grandchild in her arms
one day.

Tonya turned her attention back to the papers on her
desk and found her hands shaking.  She put her hands firmly on the desk and
took several deep breaths before she attempted to review the papers again.

Business papers this time, not politics.  Her household
had come into a considerable amount of money as a byproduct of Keaton’s
bleeding-bad-juice visit, and Tonya had used the windfall to start a
construction company.  Expensive suburban homes, individually constructed, with
all the custom touches.  Over the years her people had accumulated an extensive
amount of construction experience as they refurbished the household’s steady
stream of residences and they were convinced they would be able to turn their
construction skills into a business.  Tonya hoped they were right, because they
had sunk a heck of a lot of money into the project.

The potential for a big long-term payoff was huge.  A successful
home construction business would supply enough money to keep the household
afloat indefinitely.  More than enough money.

Biggioni Homes looked good so far.  Chas had come up
with a second family who wanted a house.  The household did their first two homes
below cost, as examples.  The families, both distant relations of people in her
household, got the houses they wanted at a reduced price in exchange for
agreeing to let potential customers come through and inspect.  With a couple of
houses in the works, the budding construction company would have some
legitimacy.  Hopefully, the business would take off from there.

This was a lot of hope for one day.  A business, a
grandchild.  Tonya wasn’t used to hope.  She shook her head and smiled.  Maybe
she would buy a gift for her prospective grandchild.  A crib.  Her spies said
her daughter lived with her husband in a small duplex in Queens and didn’t have
money in abundance.  They wouldn’t turn down gifts, wherever they came from.  Just
a little something to crack the ice.

Who knew?  Maybe a miracle would occur.  Maybe she would
get to hold her grandchild after all.

Anecdotes from the Inferno Stay

(1)

The sun barely peeked over the neighboring houses when,
after a sleepless night working on the Chimera autopsy, Hank, Lori and Tina
cadged breakfast from the morning kitchen crew.  “So, ma’am, would you be
willing to explain your sudden change in demeanor?” Zielinski asked, formally. 
The Focus had been so distracted for so long the sudden re-emergence of her hyper-competent
and scary self was quite the shock.

“I hear through the rumor mill you’re creaming my
engineers at poker in Bob’s Barn,” Lori said, spooning up Shredded Wheat and ignoring
his question as if he hadn’t spoken.  ‘Rumor mill’ being Zielinski’s own
earlier side comment.  “I think I need to stop by and take in this marvel of
poker playing.  Perhaps even join the game.”

Right.  With the way the Focus acted tonight, they would
be lucky if the cards didn’t end up as illusions.  He had called her on her
charisma, asking why she didn’t do mind control directly, instead of the
charisma-the-senses games.  As an answer, she ordered him to go dig through her
purse and find two tampons to stick up his nostrils.  He managed to fight off her
charismatic order only after unwrapping the first tampon.  Her example left him
with shaking hands and a splitting headache.  Lori explained her illusions
didn’t leave as nasty a set of residual effects as direct charismatic control.

Afterwards, he watched his questions carefully.  No
ill-considered questions about which bullets had more stopping power.  In her
current mood, she would probably demonstrate by using him as a target.

“You do need to join us on Friday night,” Lori said.  A
little charisma in her voice, not much.  Just enough to get him a little more
open to the subject.  Subtlety.  He hadn’t realized she even knew the word
‘subtlety’.  “I’m sure Ann will be the perfect chaperone.  You two can take
notes, together.”

Mee-ow!

(2)

“Torture,” Jim said to Tina.  The trainees ate lunch in
Bob’s Barn along with the engineering crew.  Too many people eating sandwiches
and soup around an old folding church table.  “To use juice in training you
have to be tortured.”

“Congratulations, Doc,” Tina said, with a laugh as the
big woman grabbed a second sandwich from the plate at the center of the table. 
“You’ve just made a bunch of tin pot dictator Focuses happy.  You’ve given them
another excuse to torture their own people.”

“Most of them won’t like the results,” Zielinski said. 
“They tend to be a little leery of the mild benefits even normal training can
give their Transforms.”

“Figures something like this would come up with our
Focus in the mood she’s in,” Tina said. 

The Focus had been on an unending rampage since the
start of February, the illusion tricks she did to him during the Chimera
autopsy just the start.  The conga line she arranged last Sunday had been the
worst, an impressive but utterly innocuous way of showing who was boss in the
household.  All arranged with her charisma, with the Focus herself leading the
way by clapping out a beat and reinforcing it with castanets.  Connie had been
livid, but what could she do?  Everyone involved claimed it was their own idea
to make themselves part of the conga line.

Twice, Lori had almost talked him into one of her Friday
night extravaganzas.  Lori refused to let go of her idea to fix him up with
Ann.  Insane.

Then there was the first bodyguard show, where he showed
off how much the first set of bodyguards had improved their unarmed combat
skills.  Lori, instead of being supportive about the improvements, had cleaned her
bodyguard’s clocks using physical skills he thought only Arms possessed.  Where
did she learn them, anyway, if not from sparring with her own people?  She wouldn’t
say.  The bodyguards had never seen Lori do anything like she did then, either
emotionally or physically.

He did have the urge to check out all the dojos near
Boston College, though.

“How come the Focus didn’t come up with this before?” Tina
said, speaking with her mouth full of ham sandwich. 

Connie and Ann thought Lori wasted herself doing
research, and they were right.  Lori’s strength was as a Focus.  Until someone
found a solution to the low juice problems every Focus suffered, she would
never again be the intellectual powerhouse she had been as a teen.

He couldn’t help but defend the Focus, though. 
“Microbiology is a different subject than what I’m working on here,” Zielinski
said.  “I’ve gone a long way over the years with my one little idea: try
things, watch the juice.”  Watch the psychology as well, he didn’t say.  Always
increase the stress.  “Any idea why the Focus has been acting so atypically
recently?”

An entire table of Transforms studied their lunch and
didn’t say a thing.  “Transform politics,” Tina said, quietly.  Tina wasn’t one
of the Focus’s inner circle, but she was close, closer than anyone else in the
engineer crew.  “What do you know about Sports, doc?”

“I used to play tennis,” he said.  Before Keaton wrecked
his legs.  His response drew a glower from Tina.  She meant the Transform
variant, not athletics.  He carefully didn’t smile.  “Sports are variant Major
Transforms, less common than Focuses but more common than Arms, with obscure
talents standardly less useful than a Focus or Arm possesses.  No two Sports
are exactly alike in their capabilities.”  He went into lecture mode, spending
the rest of the lunch explaining the technical differences and giving
examples.  Tina was all ears.  Usually she zoned out when he talked technical.

Quite curious.

(3)

Tim sat down beside him on the weight bench and sighed. 
“I don’t know how you’ve managed to do it, Doc, but you’ve managed to piss off
Ann, Connie, Sadie and the Focus at once.  That takes work, you know.  I even
had to scotch one of Sadie’s poems she wanted to send out, referring to you as
Doc Pain.  What did you do, anyway?”

Zielinski winced.  “I don’t know if you were aware of it
or not, but Lori has been leaning on me for weeks to attend orgy night,” he
said, leaning over to rest his elbows on his knees.  “I kept begging off and
Lori kept leaning.  She’d been trying to set me up with Ann.”

“What did Ann think of this?” Tim asked.

“Ann thought the Focus’s game was a crude bit of payback
for something Ann did.  Neither of them would say what.  I think her ire had
something to do with who Ann partnered with on Friday nights, but that wasn’t a
subject I was, ah, interested in discussing.”

Tim carefully looked away.  Tim was, well, a
homosexual.  Zielinski had quite a difficult time acting normal around him, all
hypersensitive about saying the wrong thing.  Zielinski wondered if Tim was
having the same problems with him.

“You don’t buy the post-human morality business?”  Tim
asked.

“Post-human morality is just fine for Transforms,” Zielinski
said.  “I’m leery of allowing any of the normals to get involved.  Having been
the object of interest of an amorous Arm on several occasions, I know how
chewed up a normal can get in such a relationship.”

Tim frowned.  “You’re interested in the Focus, though.”

“A little.”  Zielinski watched Amy walk on her hands
across the practice area, immense pride in his heart.  “Part of my interest is
normal Focus allure, which I thought I was used to, but Lori got to me during
the Monster juice assassination episode.  The other is the intellectual allure
of a relationship with someone close to my academic specialty, which is also
nearly irresistible.  In my time here, my improper interest has waned.  I wasn’t
obvious, was I?”

“No, you weren’t.  I’m sure the Focus picked up on it,
though,” Tim said.  “She picks up on everything.”  Normally, Tim seemed closed
off and distant, but he had been in an effusive mood for the past week.  He had
sold a screenplay to a small filmmaker, a heart-wrencher about a Hispanic woman
torn between her family duties and the needs of a child she bore because of
rape.

“Anyway, the Focus came up with the bright idea I could
take notes with Ann during a Friday night session,” Zielinski said.  “Let
nature take its course.  No pressure on us at all.  Ann wasn’t happy with the
idea to start with, but I think the Focus may have done more than just talk to
Ann, if you catch my drift.”

“She’s not supposed to,” Tim said.  “Not that we could
stop the Focus if she used her charisma with subtlety.  She plays a game with
us, trying to portray her charisma as this big hammer no one can miss if she
uses it, when everyone knows she can do all sorts of devious and subtle crap
with it when the mood strikes her.  Which is rather often, ever since…”  Whatever
‘it’ was, Tim wasn’t saying.  He let his comment trail off into nothing.

“In any event,” Zielinski said, “Ann cornered me and
told me she wasn’t making any commitment to me or anything.  She wouldn’t let the
Focus talk her into this if I thought I was entitled to sleep with her.  I told
her I was going into the situation with the idea I wouldn’t get physically
involved with anyone.  Ann thought I was a fool, as she knew of at least three
women who had set their eyes on me, and because it’s nearly impossible to
control yourself in such a situation.  She admitted she normally let her body
do her thinking for her on Friday nights, and she might end up with me anyway. 
The ‘letting one’s body do their thinking for them’ was the part Ann thought I
needed to experience, how the various pairings and combinations set up.  She
seems to think there’s something screwy going on with your household
superorganism.”

Tim frowned at the word ‘superorganism’, an Ann term
either he didn’t recognize or didn’t believe.  “I don’t know if the Focus does
it on purpose or not, but there’s a tendency for people who’ve been fighting
with each other to end up intimate on Friday nights.  She swears she doesn’t do
a thing and I tend to believe her, because those pairings don’t seem to happen
between the non-Transforms.  Whatever is going on, it’s part of the household
juice dynamics, happening on its own.”

“Interesting,” Zielinski said.  More evidence undercutting
the Focus’s doubts about the household superorganism ideas he and Ann were working
on formalizing.  He made a mental note to pass it on to Ann; this bit of
evidence was something she was better equipped to further examine and document.

“Anyway, Ann and I went into orgy time with the idea we would
take notes on what was going on.”

“Right,” Tim said.  “I saw her sitting on your lap once
things got started.  Taking notes, eh?”

Zielinski blushed.  “The lap trick was Ann’s idea.  She
said there was no way for her to avoid giving in to the sensuality of the
situation.  Human contact is important.  I agreed.”

“All well and good,” Tim said.  “What did you do to
cause the problem?”

“You’re not going to let me off the hook, here, are
you?” Zielinski said.

“Nope.”

“I treated orgy time as a training exercise.  Took the
‘we’re going to take notes’ idea seriously, as opposed to an excuse for the
Focus to get me involved in something I’m too old and staid to really enjoy.”

“Doc,
what did you do?
”  Tim glared at him with
exquisite exasperation.  Hank had to admit, he was being more than a little difficult.

“Let’s say I used the fact that Ann has been doing a
little work with the enhanced training methods.  She already had the training keys. 
We started at intensity one and kept going from there.  The induced pain worked,
taking Ann’s mind off the proceedings.  We took good notes.”

Tim blanched.  “Cute trick,” he said, with a shiver.  “I
still don’t understand the problem.  Ann wouldn’t have let you torture her if
she didn’t agree with the idea.”

“At the time Ann thought it was a brilliant plan, a good
way of getting back at the Focus.  She didn’t get pissed at me until
afterwards.  She hadn’t realized how much she needed the stress release she got
out of orgy night.  I think I invalidated nearly every idea she had come up
with to understand and justify what happens on Friday nights.  Same for the
Focus.  She had bought into the idea her Friday night practice was completely
good for Inferno; by moving the juice that way she avoided the addiction
problems she rightly associates with juice.”

Zielinski paused and lowered his voice.  “Unfortunately,
there’s no escaping the juice.”  Six years of working with Arms had convinced
him of that, beyond any of his earlier doubts.

“So in the end we’re all just a bunch of goddamned juice
junkies,” Tim said.  He turned away from Zielinski and sighed.  “Now I understand
why they’re pissed: a ‘thanks Doc, we took you in and protected you, and in return
you’ve just destroyed our household’s most cherished illusion’.”  Tim shook his
head.  “Remind me to never get you angry at me, Doc Pain.  You’re way too
dangerous for your own good.”

“I truly meant no harm,” Zielinski said.  Save perhaps
to the Focus.

(4)

Hank leaned back on the ancient Bob’s Barn break room
couch, a cold wet washcloth over his eyes.  Headaches had plagued him on and
off ever since he sprung the plan to help Carol on the Focus, and having to
watch the Inferno bodyguards train with his techniques, with him no longer
holding the training triggers, hadn’t helped.  He had a bad feeling that
holding the juice triggers for the training had somehow interacted with his
chronic juice poisoning issues.  He hoped he would get over these headaches
soon.

In the distance, he heard Einstein chatting with
someone, heading toward the break room.  Someone female; probably Autumn
Idoux.  Einstein had a hopeless crush on her, and she was interested enough in
Einstein’s regurgitated Zielinski lessons she hadn’t chased him off for good. 
Yet.