The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (26 page)

No other patients waited in the office, which confirmed Gail’s theory about this doctor being a bottom-feeding hack.  She wondered about his real name, as she found no signs of his identity, not even medical diplomas on the walls, and she specifically looked for those.

The receptionist tried to lead her back to an examining room, but Gail balked.  She hadn’t trusted a single damned doctor since she became a Focus, and she wasn’t about to start now.  She stopped and looked through every doorway they passed.  The first, a small office, with a desk and a couple of worn chairs, still had no diplomas on the wall.  The file room on the other side showed no labels on the files.  Next she found a small kitchen, of all things, with a sink, a full sized refrigerator and a tiny table.  The receptionist attempted to lead her into the next room, the examining room, but Gail passed by.  The next room was a different sort of room, with a big heavy table in the center, equipped with thick metal rings, and counters to the sides holding an immense variety of medical instruments, all of which reminded Gail of the outpatient treatment room in the large Detroit Transform Clinic.  The room chilled and unnerved her, but after a moment, Gail identified the odd odor as the smell of old blood, not quite perfectly washed away.  Enough Transforms used the place for Gail to metasense faint juice currents and less dross than a place like this should have.

The last door on the hall led to a laboratory, but Gail didn’t get to see much of the lab because Doctor Smith opened the door from the other side just seconds before Gail did.  He stopped in the doorway when he saw her, and the nurse behind him almost ran into him.  He was an older man, sixty or so, almost bald, with a patrician face and the weathered look of hard years on him.

Gail drew herself up, all her accumulated irritation feeding an air of haughty superiority and disapproval.  She knew what kind of effect she had when she did
the
Focus
, and didn’t use
the Focus
often because of the ick factor, but this situation demanded she play the Focus.  She expected the quack doctor in front of her to go into tailspins of agitated worry and concern.

Instead, he merely blinked.

“Focus Rickenbach, I presume?” he said, all self-contained and manifestly unflustered.  She recognized his voice, but she couldn’t place where.  Had he looked different when she met him before?  She decided she had met him, at least once, and perhaps a second or third time in various disguises.  Clearly one of the many parasites hovering around to take advantage of Transforms.

“Yes,” she said, a bit discommoded by his lack of response to her Focus presence.

“Good,” the doctor said. “I’ve been looking forward to properly meeting you.  If you’ll come to the examining room, we can get started.”

He led the way and Gail followed, watching him carefully.

By the time they got to the examining room, Gail recovered her composure.

“I want to know exactly what you plan on doing before we start, Dr. Smith,” she said.

“Certainly, Focus,” he said.  Gail found his reserved composure irritating.

“I have quite a variety of tests I would like to run,” Smith said.  “I expect this to take about two hours.  Today, we’re establishing a baseline, so we know if anything that you and Arm Hancock are doing has an effect on you.  This is a safety measure among other things, to allow us to identify any problems before they become significant.”

Hancock and this doctor were at least worrying about her safety.  She wasn’t sure whether this made her feel better or worse.  Nor was she happy about the implied danger of these experiments.

She also noticed the easy way he referred to Teacher.

“What kind of tests?”

Smith smiled.  His smile was reassuring, competent, and appropriately doctorly.  Her theory about the hack doctor started to fray, and she didn’t have another alternative.

“Any kind of test we can think of,” he said.  “We’ll take your physical measurements, measure blood pressure, pulse, heart rate, juice count.  We’ll do a few other…”

“Juice count?” Gail said, interrupting.

He raised his eyebrows.  “Juice count is a rather basic measurement for any Transform.”

Gail folded her arms and glared at him.  “You’re equipped to measure juice count?”

“Certainly, Focus.”  His irritating self-contained confidence finally triggered something.

“You’ve dealt with Focuses before,” she said.  He was too damned good at this for any other explanation to be true.

“Yes, Focus.”

“And Arms.”

“Yes, Focus,” he said, this time with a slight smile.

“Hmm,” she said, and thought.  Things clicked.

“Out,” she said, to Melanie and John, and to the nurse who had followed them into the room.  The receptionist was long gone.  “You can wait in the waiting room.  I’m safe here.”

John and Melanie eyed Smith suspiciously, but they left.  The nurse followed.  Smith raised his eyebrows at her.

“You’re part of the Network, aren’t you?”  If Dr. Smith was part of the Focus Network, the non-Transform friends and underground dealers with all things Transform, then Focuses far more senior than her had cleared him.

Dr. Smith shrugged, a wicked grin playing at the edge of his mouth.  “You could say that.”

“All right, I suppose I should have figured this out earlier.  The Commander does have contacts with Tonya, after all.”

“So may I conduct the tests now?”

“Right.  Of course.  Just tell me what you’re doing.”  Tell me what you’re doing while I search my memories for where I’ve run into you before, Gail didn’t say.

“Certainly, Focus.  Now, if you would disrobe…”

“Dr. Smith?”

“Yes, Focus,” Smith said, as he measured the diameter of her right biceps.

“Have you been working with Her for very long?”  Gail sat on the examining table in her underwear, as Smith measured and tested.

“Hmm? A few years.”  He wrote down the measurement in her rapidly expanding chart and moved to her forearm.

“What’s she like?”

Smith stopped his measuring and raised his eyebrows at her, generating wrinkles all the way up his forehead.  “She’s a predator.  She’s hard, she’s smart, and she can be appallingly cruel.  But of anyone in the world, she’s the one I’d most want to have on my side.”

Gail looked away.

“You’re having a little bit of trouble with her, aren’t you?” Smith said, reading her far too accurately.

“Well, yes,” Gail said.  “She doesn’t seem to think much of me.”

Smith backed up a step and looked her over carefully.  “She’s been pushing your buttons pretty hard, hasn’t she?”

Gail glared, and then threw up her hands.  “She doesn’t have to insult me every time I breathe.  I mean, would it kill her to be polite?  I can’t even move, and she tells me I’m incompetent.  What the hell is she doing with this?”

“Hmm, well, she’s trying to save the world.  Here, hold out your arm.”  He wrapped the measuring tape around her forearm and noted the measurement in the chart.

Gail froze at his words.  “What?”

“You know.  Save the world.”

“What does this experiment of hers have anything to do with saving the world?”

Smith looked at her appraisingly again.  “How much have you thought about the future, and what Transform Sickness is going to do to the world?”

“A hell of a lot, actually.”

“And what is your analysis?”

“All the news is bad news,” Gail said.  Her current science group – Helen and Roger Grimm, Sylvie, and Van – always kept her abreast of the latest.  With this new training, she realized she would need to up the science team’s numbers again.  “More people transform every year, every year the normals feel more threatened, and some of them attack Transforms and their reactions are getting worse.  Since Nixon came in, the government’s stopped supporting Transforms.  Despite the Cause Tonya and her political allies push, none of the Major Transforms can work with each other.  Hell, the Focuses can’t even work among themselves.”

“And what are you doing about the problem?”

“I’m working on Transform civil rights.  We’ve got to move past this prejudice thing, or we’re going to have an explosion like you can’t even imagine when the number of Transforms gets too large.”

Smith nodded.  “Carol is working on building the links between the Major Transforms.  At the juice level.”

Gail raised an eyebrow.  “And this little experiment of hers is part of that?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call this little,” Smith said.  “She’s looking for reasons for Major Transforms to need each other.  If a Focus can give juice to an Arm, that’s a big one.”

“The juice linkage thing is what I don’t understand.  If the Major Transforms just worked together like civilized human beings, we wouldn’t need to go hunting for any dangerous juice-level linkages.”

“You think it’s easy for Major Transforms to get along?”

“Well, why shouldn’t it be easy?”

“So, why don’t you work with the Arm?”

“Because she’s obnoxious as shit, that’s why!”

Smith looked at her.  Gail ran her words through her mind and winced.  Smith was good.

“You know,” Smith said, gently, “all the Arms are as obnoxious as shit.”  She nodded.  “And all the Crows are flat out impossible.”  Another nod.  Even the best of the Crows she dealt with she wanted to strangle at times.  “And the Chimeras are downright disgusting.”  She shrugged; the Nobles she had met had been quite polite, but she hadn’t ever met one outside of the public spotlight.  “The Focuses, of course, are backstabbing and treacherous.”

“All right, all right, you’ve made your point,” Gail said.  Smith here had
way
too much experience with Major Transforms.  “None of the Major Transforms want to work together save at arm’s length.  Pardon the pun.  Hancock thinks she can get around the problem with this project?”

“If a Focus can give juice to an Arm, that will build a juice-level link between Focuses and Arms, and both will be stronger.  Immensely stronger, perhaps to the point where some Focus Households will have Arms living with them and protecting them, either physically or by intimidation.  With luck, an Arm slash Focus community would be strong enough to deal with the more recalcitrant Crows and Chimeras, or the problems caused by Transform Sickness itself when it grows out of control.”

“So I suppose you’re telling me not to expect Hancock to be reasonable to deal with.”

“Carol is a very reasonable Arm.”

“Right.”

“If you can find that connection point between you, I think you’ll find the two of you won’t have any trouble with each other.  Until then, I think things may be a bit rough.  For both of you.”

“Wonderful.  Saving the world.”

“Yes.”

“Shit.”

“Let’s talk about juice patterns, Focus,” Dr. Smith said, after he finished his examination.  Gail lifted her head from her clothes, startled.  Juice patterns were a big secret of the older Focuses, kept secret from youngsters like herself, but she heard rumors.  A mystery.  Gail forgot her irritation with Hancock immediately at the scent of a mystery.

“What about juice patterns?” she said, as she finished buttoning her blouse.

“If you will come this way?”  Smith led her back to the laboratory, where the tables were piled high with papers filled with odd notations.  Gail picked up a couple of sheets and attempted to make sense out of them, but had no luck.

“Juice patterns are chemical structures a Focus uses whenever she manipulates juice.  When you move juice to a member of your household, you use a juice pattern.  When you tag someone, you use another juice pattern.  When you tune your charisma to a specific effect, you use a different juice pattern.”

Gail frowned.  Based on what she had learned, juice patterns were only mental shortcuts and mnemonic devices to give a Focus leverage over the juice, allowing high-level juice manipulation.  Then again, common wisdom among Focuses tended to be utter crap, from her experience.  This doctor here seemed to be on to something, if he talked chemistry.  She started to take mental notes to pass along to her science people.

“These chemical structures can be found in a Focus’s blood.  I’ve been developing a mechanism for representing these chemical structures.”

“This looks like music,” Gail said.  The style was the same, even if the details differed.

Smith looked at her quizzically.  “I suppose it does, a little bit.  Each of these symbols and positions represents a single component to a juice pattern.  I’ve found, so far, nineteen components involved in juice patterns.  The specific arrangement is significant, as well as time, sequence, intensity, and several other factors that I’ve had to make up names for.”

“So you’re telling me you can take a blood sample of me when I’m doing something, say, a tag, and turn it into pseudo sheet music?”

Smith nodded.  “This isn’t fully developed, but yes.  I can.”

“So does it work the other way?  Am I supposed to be able to look at this and create a specific juice pattern from it?”