Nat and the Telepath
{{#ifeq: | | {{#ifeq: Trismegistus Shandy | |
{{#ifeq: Trismegistus Shandy | ||
Author: Trismegistus Shandy
}} |
{{#ifeq: Trismegistus Shandy | |
Author: Trismegistus Shandy |
Author: Trismegistus Shandy
}}
}} |
{{#ifeq: Trismegistus Shandy | |
{{#ifeq: Trismegistus Shandy | | Authors: ' |
Authors: Trismegistus Shandy
}} |
{{#ifeq: Trismegistus Shandy | |
Authors: Trismegistus Shandy |
Author: Trismegistus Shandy
}}
}}
}} {{#if:| — see also [[:Category:{{{category}}}|other works by this author]]}}
Sequel to Unpresentable Heroes; followed by Nat and the Haemophiliacs
Every six months or so, depending on how his budget is looking, Nat Holcomb places a personal ad in anywhere from a dozen to three dozen newspapers, mostly in the southeastern U.S. plus a few larger ones elsewhere. His paycheck from the Georgia State Patrol Auxiliary, which is usually just enough to cover textbooks and gasoline, included a large hazardous duty bonus this week, so he goes all out, sending the ad to every paper he's ever placed the ad in and a few more.
"Vincent, I've figured out how I did it and how to reverse it. Call me at 404-555-0135. Natalie."
The phone number in the ad doesn't go directly to his cellphone; it goes to a voicemail maze a friend helped him set up. Anyone who calls it will be asked a series of questions, some multiple-choice (Press one if your family was Baptist, two if they were Methodist, three if Catholic, four if of some other religion, four if no particular religion...), some asking for an answer to a numerical question (Enter the number of the grade we've known each other since, use a 0 if we met in kindergarten). The last question asks for the caller's birthdate, year-month-day. The latest revision of this questionnaire has filtered out all the crank calls Nat used to get when he first started placing the ad; if the caller answers all the questions right, identifying themselves as the Vincent the ad is meant for, the call will be transferred to Nat's main cellphone number. (If at least two-thirds of the answers are right, it goes to another voice mailbox, one Nat checks every day or two in the weeks after the ad runs; maybe Vincent has forgotten some of those things. So far there's been nothing in that mailbox, either.)
He doesn't really expect an answer anymore; it's been four years with no sign that Vincent, if still alive, is reading the personals section (or googling his birth name; that string still turns up a cryptic message on Nat's homepage in the first page of results, or as the number one result if combined with "Natalie", "Holcomb" or both). Probably after this insertion he'll cut back to running the ads once a year for two or three years, and then give up.
It's a good thing he's at home when the call finally comes. The shock is so bad that he's intensely glad he's not in the student center or some other public place, or, worse, driving. (He has a hands-free headset, but talking to Vincent hands-free while driving would be as dangerous as talking to most other people with one hand on the phone and one on the wheel.)
"Hello?"
"Nat?" A woman's voice he's heard only once in his life; he doesn't recognize it at first. "This is Nat Holcomb I'm talking to, right, not another damned voicemail menu?"
His heart speeds up. "Vincent?"
"You made it kind of hard for me to introduce myself that way without people looking at me funny, but yeah, that's what my parents named me." There's hostility dripping from every word; not surprising, really.
"Vincent, I'm glad you finally got my message. I've been placing those ads every few months ever since it happened..."
"So what do I have to do?"
"Just come to Atlanta. I'll meet you somewhere convenient, in a public place like a park or a mall if you want. I can change you there, or we could talk first and then go someplace more private."
"I'll have to quit my job to come to Atlanta with less than a week's notice. But if you're serious about changing me back, I'll do it."
"You don't have to do that," Nat says, "I don't have any travel plans anytime soon. Wait and get approval for your vacation if you need to."
"I want to come." Less hostile now, but still maybe a bit suspicious. "I'd want to quit my job and find a new one anyway, once you change me. Anyway, it's almost three days to Atlanta by Greyhound from here. I'll call you when I get in town, OK? Give me your direct phone number so I don't have to crawl through that maze again."
Nat recites the number. "Listen," he says, "I'll meet you at the bus station. And... I'll change, try to look as much as I can how I looked when you saw me last."
"That's big of you. I'll call you from the last stop we make before Atlanta. How's that? If I can't reach you then, I'll call again when I get into town and check into a hotel. It might take me a day or two to wind things up here and book a Greyhound ticket -- I'm going to Milledgeville after I meet you, and won't be coming back here for a while, if ever." No explanation of where "here" is, but three days on Greyhound suggests somewhere in the Northwest. Seattle, Portland, maybe Vancouver? This is the first time he's placed the ad in the free alternative papers in those cities.
"All right," Nat says. "Talk to you then."
His hands are trembling as he hangs up.
The next day after his last class, Nat goes home and changes. Then she goes shopping. She's looking for a dress that looks like the one she wore one night four years ago, running several blocks, panicked and disheveled, not realizing what had happened and that she was no longer in any danger of rape. She visits three stores before she finds a reasonably close match.
As soon as she gets home she changes back, before eating supper and going to bed.
Three days later Nat's phone vibrates in his pocket while he's studying at the library. He checks the caller ID; not recognized. But Vincent might be calling about now, so he grabs up his books and papers and hastily walks outside to answer it.
Sure enough, it's Vincent.
"I'm calling from Nashville -- the bus is supposed to arrive in Atlanta about 5:35."
"That's fine -- I should be able to get to the station in time to meet you when you arrive."
"See you then."
"See you in a little while," Nat says, but the line is already dead.
After Nat puts away his phone, he does some figuring. If he's going to meet Vincent at the Greyhound station at 5:35, he needs to leave early, skipping at least one class -- and if he's going to change, he needs to leave especially early, to go home before returning downtown to the Greyhound station. So right after his World History class he leaves the school, goes to the MARTA station and heads to East Point, where he parks his car every morning, and then home to his apartment in Jonesboro. He fixes a sandwich and eats, dreading the meeting to come in a very few hours.
After undressing, he stares at the dress hanging in the closet for a long, tense moment before changing. She takes her time getting dressed again; it's been a while since she's been out in public as a woman and part of her wonders why she offered to change into this more recognizable form and clothing to meet Vincent. She could have just carried a big cardboard sign with Vincent's name on it. She uses less makeup than she used to use in high school -- less than she was wearing the last time she saw Vincent. She doesn't want to impress her -- doesn't need to impress her; she just needs to be recognizable. And, looking in the mirror, she thinks that, aside from her shorter hair, she does look enough like her sixteen-year-old self to be recognized.
She still has plenty of time, but she's too fidgety to sit around her apartment now that she's ready to go, so she puts _The Bridge at Andau_ in a purse that's collected a lot of dust since she last used it -- it doesn't quite match the dress but she gave away or threw away most of her other purses a couple of years ago -- and gets in the car, heading back to the East Point MARTA station. She's off the train at Garnett station a few minutes later, and walking the short distance to the Greyhound station.
This was a mistake, she's already thinking. I should have asked Vincent to meet me somewhere else. Because of her paranormal power Nat isn't objectively in any danger of rape, but a knife or gun can still kill her just as dead; and though this isn't one of the highest-crime neighborhoods in Atlanta, she still feels out of place and vulnerable, both because she's white and because of the way she's dressed. She feels slightly better after she's inside the Greyhound station waiting area, checking the arrivals board -- the 1123 bus from Nashville is on schedule -- but not much better. She takes the book from her purse and tries to read about the Hungarian revolution, but can't focus on it for long. She feels like half of the other people in the waiting area are staring at her, and though she knows it's mostly her imagination, she can't ignore the feeling long enough to read two paragraphs.
Hours creep by, and Nat reads a whopping three pages of this book she has to finish and write a paper on by next Friday. Finally, the arrival of the bus from Nashville is announced. Nat gets up and approaches the door where the people getting off the bus will come in.
She hasn't seen Vincent in four years, and only once after she changed her, so she doesn't know what to expect. A crowd of people get off, most reclaiming baggage from the bus's storage compartment, and most of them immediately enter the station. Nat flinches a couple of times as some of those disembarking brush her in passing, just barely managing to avoid using her power on them; there's a good reason she doesn't go out in public as a woman anymore. She's too paranoid in this form.
Finally, when most of the crowd off the bus has gone, a woman several inches taller than Nat, in grungy, ill-fitting clothes that don't fit her any better for having been slept in, approaches pulling a smallish wheeled suitcase. "Nat Holcomb?"
"Yes. Vincent Carnes?"
"That name sounds familiar. I think it used to be on my birth certificate. The real one."
"Well." Nat hesitates. "I guess this isn't a good place, is it...? We could go somewhere else and I could change you there...
"Where else?"
"Maybe you would want a change of clothes too? Maybe we could go to a thrift store and use their changing room?"
Vincent shrugs. "The stuff I'm wearing is loose enough that I should be fine if you change me right now. Yeah, I'll want new clothes soon, but it doesn't have to be tonight. Do you not want to change me in the middle of the Greyhound station, for some strange reason?"
"We're -- at least I'm -- attracting plenty of attention as it is. No, I'm not going to change you here in the station. Let's go."
"Where are we going?" Vincent asks as she follows Nat out of the station onto Forsyth Street.
"I'm not sure; I should have thought this through more clearly... On second thought I don't want to change you in a thrift store changing room. Too good a chance somebody might notice the oddity of a man and woman walking out the room when two woman walked into it -- and I think you can figure out why I might not want to be alone in such a small room with you when you're a man again, too. And any other public place I can think of might be even worse..."
"So we need somewhere private. You're keeping your power secret?"
"More or less. The Georgia State Patrol Auxiliary know about it, but my name's been kept out of the news in the few cases I've helped them -- or the World Guardians -- with. You know that alien invasion last month?"
"Which alien invasion do you mean? The flying saucers that knocked down the Washington Monument or the ones that landed in rural areas and sent rover craft heading toward the cities...? Of course I know that alien invasion last month. Do you mean you had something to do with it?"
"I started a civil war on their mother ship by changing a bunch of their workers and warriors into queens. Never mind that for now; I think our options are basically two. I can call a friend of mine who lives in Atlanta and maybe we can go to his apartment and I can change you there, and then you leave and go wherever you want to go next. Or we can go out to my apartment and I change you there. In that case I'll be changing myself as well, because for reasons I don't need to point out to you I don't want to be alone with you when we're of opposite sexes." Nat has been leading Vincent toward the MARTA station; wherever they're ultimately going, she wants to get out of this neighborhood in one direction or another.
"This friend already knows about your power?"
"He's the one who got me up to that alien mother ship and back again... But on second thought I don't want to get him involved in this if it's not necessary. What are your plans?"
"After you change me? Buy new clothes, ditch the clothes that don't fit me any more. Call my parents once I have my proper voice back, and ask them when it would be convenient for them to come to Macon to meet me at the Greyhound station there."
"So you'll need to stay in Atlanta tonight...?"
"Probably so. There's a bus for Macon leaving at 7:15, and another one a little later, but I don't want to press my parents to drive to Macon at nine or ten at night on such short notice."
"Well," Nat says, knowing she might regret it, "if you don't mind not changing back until tomorrow, you could sleep on my sofa tonight."
Vincent stops walking and stares at Nat. "I get it," she says after a long pause. "You got me to quit my job in Seattle, give all my girl things to Goodwill, and take a three day bus trip to Atlanta so you could string me along with a promise you can't or don't want to keep."
"That's not true! I said I would and I will. Only..."
"You don't want to be a girl in the same room with guy-me. I heard you the first time. Okay, I don't know how much money you've earned fighting off alien invasions for the State Patrol, but I haven't earned so much being a waitress that I can afford to turn down a free place to crash. Lead on."
The MARTA train is crowded both with commuters on their way home from downtown and people heading to the airport to catch evening flights; they talk little more until they reach East Point station and Nat leads the way to her car. Even then, the tension is too much at first.
"So where have you been all this time? I started placing those ads just a few months after it happened, when I first got my power under control. My brother Will talked to your parents for me and found out that you'd never gone home..."
"After you brushed me off and wouldn't change me back the day after you changed me --"
"I couldn't, yet. I didn't know how it worked and I didn't have conscious control over it."
"Whatever. I was scared. I got in my car and drove all the way to Chattanooga. I would have driven farther but I got stopped for driving with a broken headlight, and then almost arrested for driving without a license. Didn't match my driver's license, thanks to you... I got away, but lost the car, and got pretty hungry for a while before I found a job I could do without legal ID. Kept working my way farther from home, and saved up some money I eventually used to have some fake ID made up. Then got an apartment, shared with two other girls, and a more respectable job. Don't ask me what the earlier jobs were."
"I won't..."
"What about you? What have you been doing when you weren't fighting aliens?"
Nat summarizes the painful history of the first few days after her power manifested, and how she joined the GSPA.
"Superhero work. That thing you did to me, is that your only power?"
"Yes. I can change myself, or other people, or animals, or apparently aliens, I just found out. But nothing else. I'm not super fast or strong or tough."
"So why did they take you on?"
"I'm a reservist -- they call me in when they think my power would be useful and they ignore me most of the time. Once they experimented with having me trap and change a rapist, but then our lawyer advised us to not do it again. And another time..."
"Yes?"
Nat hesitates. She hasn't told this whole story to anybody who wasn't involved, not even her brother Will. But it seems like just the thing to break down Vincent's hostility and resentment at the loss of control in her life due to Nat's power.
"There was this telepath from Alabama..."
Nat had been just past her eighteenth birthday when the GSPA loaned her to the Atlanta Police Department to help them bait and trap a serial rapist in a neighborhood not far from the Greyhound station where she would later meet Vincent. That operation went reasonably well, in that the rapist was no longer capable of rape, but not quite as planned, since she got away and was never heard from again. Nat expected this job to be followed by similar ones, but it was several months before the GSPA called on her again. By then she had just started her first semester of classes at UGA.
"We got a tip from a low-powered telepath in Columbus," Captain Rapid told her at the briefing. "He manages a restaurant. He was out front talking to a new waitress he was training when a woman came up to them and asked where the restroom was. He says that signs of tampering were all over her mind, too obvious for him to miss. He probed a bit and saw that her affections had recently been diverted to a man she'd just met. He watched for her when she came out of the restroom; she went to a table where a man and two other women were sitting. He noted what they looked like, and asked a waiter to take his cigarette break just when they left and note down their license plate. He spent the next hour back in the kitchen, well away from the man, whom he was pretty sure was a telepath far stronger than himself. A little later he called us with the descriptions and the license number."
"So he's using mind control powers to collect a harem?"
"It looks like it. We traced the Alabama tag and found the car had been bought at a dealership in Tuskegee just a couple of days earlier at way below sticker price. The salesperson who sold it got fired; the boss thought she had cut a deal for a friend and wasn't even smart enough to hide it. We suspect the woman who sold the car had her mind tampered with, too; we're sending someone to check."
"So why do you want me for this one? Don't you fight telepaths with telepaths?"
"We're sending in the best telepath in Georgia to take this guy down. But we think you would be useful too. The evidence we have so far suggests his power might be more effective on women, or maybe it only works on women. So..."
"You think if I change his victims they might rebel against him and distract him, making it easier for your telepath to get at him?"
"That might help. But mainly we want you to help protect our telepath against him. I think you've met Officer Habersham before?" he said, turning to the woman seated at his right.
"Yes... once or twice." Janice Habersham smiled uncomfortably at Nat. They had met a couple of times while Nat was living at the GSPA training camp in Toccoa during her last year and a half of high school.
"I guess they've told you about my power?" Nat asked her.
"Yes," she said. "I'm not convinced this is necessary or useful. I won't know how powerful this rascal is until I meet him, but so far as I know there are only six telepaths in the U.S. more powerful than me, and of those probably only two could beat me in a mental fight; I've got more experience and skill than most. The chances that this kid from Alabama who's just discovered his power can do anything to me is very slim."
"I want you to have every protection," Captain Rapid said firmly.
"Being a man would distract me and throw me off balance," she argued. "If he's never met another telepath before and has no shields, as I expect, it might not matter, but if he's powerful enough to put up any fight, I need to be able to focus."
"And if his power only works on women -- and we have no evidence yet that it works on men -- he'll be completely vulnerable to you if you're a man."
"Why should it work only on women? There are a few telepaths I know of whose power only works on persons of the same sex; that's similar to the phenomenon of autistic telepaths who can only talk to other autistics, but..."
"Can you rule it out? Haven't there been cases of telepaths who control people of the opposite sex, not around here or very often, but somewhere?"
Officer Habersham paused. "No, it's not impossible. There was a case in Colombia ten or twelve years ago, now that I think of it -- a case kind of like this one. The man was shot by a jealous husband before his power could be scientifically analyzed, but the ITC's tentative conclusion was that he had a telepathic power that only worked on women, or worked a lot more powerfully on women than on men. Some of the commissioners thought his power was pheremonal, though, not true telepathy..."
"Then I'm ordering you to let Officer Holcomb change you, to give you an extra possible protection against this suspect." Captain Rapid turned to Nat again. "We sent an APB to all police and sheriff's departments in Georgia and Alabama, warning them not to approach but to contact us instead. A couple of hours ago we heard that the car is parked at a motel in Mableton, near Six Flags. We're sending you two, in plainclothes in an unmarked car, with some other officers at a little distance for backup. You'll stake out the motel and ambush the suspect when he and his mind-tampered girlfriends come out of their room, or enter the room, depending on Officer Habersham's judgment of the situation. She'll be in charge; don't approach unless she -- he -- tells you to. Be ready to change the man's victims or the man himself when and if Officer Habersham gives you the signal. Understood?"
"Understood, Captain."
"Good. Now both of you go change."
"I'd never changed Janice before -- she wasn't around the training camp when they had me testing my powers and practicing to get them under control -- but she adapted to it a lot faster than any other woman I'd ever changed." Nat is nearing her apartment; Vincent, in the passenger seat, has been listening quietly. "I think it's because she'd been in such deep telepathic contact with men before that she knew what it would feel like in advance. She didn't like it much, though."
"I wonder why," Vincent says.
"So we went to this motel, both of us men. I did the driving so Janice would be free to concentrate on scanning the minds of the people around us, looking for the telepath and his victims. I found the car we were looking for and parked right near it, so we were facing the outside of the motel and probably the room where the guy and his victims were staying, assuming they'd parked near their room. I asked if we should go ask the clerk to tell us what room the people driving that car were in, but Janice told me -- silently, telepathically, you know -- that we should stay put, she would find the guy quick enough just sitting there.
"That was when things started going wrong, though I didn't realize it at the time."
Nat sat in the driver's seat of the unmarked Crown Victoria as the sun set and it got gradually as dark as it was ever going to get, this close to the city lights of Atlanta. Janice sat next to him, his eyes closed in telepathic concentration. Nat wondered fleetingly, if Janice fell asleep, how could he tell? -- but his head was erect, and would of course lean back (or forward) if he dropped off to sleep. Tension gradually gave way to boredom, and then to other disturbing thoughts. What evidence did they really have that this guy had coerced those women? They might be travelling with him entirely voluntarily... the telepath they met in Columbus might have been mistaken thinking their minds had been tampered with. He wasn't near as powerful a telepath as Janice, or he wouldn't be working as a restaurant manager.
Nat glanced at his watch. They'd been sitting there for over an hour. Shouldn't Janice have found the telepath by now? There couldn't be more than forty or fifty people in this little motel on a Tuesday night. He didn't want to disturb Janice's concentration, but after another ten minutes he finally asked, quietly, "Have you found him yet?"
{I found his companions,} Janice replied silently. {I won't say victims. I think we were wrong about him. He healed them of various neuroses and compulsions and they naturally fell in love with him out of gratitude... I think he altered them just a slight bit more to keep them from being jealous of each other, but other than that there was no real tampering with them. He didn't force them to come with him, like that amateur in Columbus thought.}
A long silence. {So we just go?} Nat asked silently, hoping Janice was listening to his surface thoughts.
{No... I want to talk to him too.} Silence again.
Nat thought about that. A telepathic healer! All right, a polyamorous telepathic healer who didn't have a psychiatrist's ethic of professional detachment from his patients. But, still, overall a good thing, right? Maybe this guy could fix Nat's paranoid fear of rape; it didn't make sense given his power, but he still felt it whenever she was female and in a public place with strange men around... or his tendency to procrastinate on his homework, or...
The door of one of the ground floor rooms opened. A man came out. Nat's heart leaped. That was him, he was sure! He'd done a lot of good so far and would do a lot more good if he wasn't thrown in jail on trumped-up charges... Nat and Janice silently agreed to get out of the car and go meet him.
Halfway across the parking lot Nat realized that they didn't need to be male. It was such an awkward shape. A moment later they were in their natural forms again, not breaking stride. Their clothes didn't fit, but they could fix that later.
"Welcome, ladies," said the young man standing in the doorway. "Would you like to come in?"
"Yes, thank you," Nat said. He was about her age, and really cute.
There were two other women sitting on one of the beds, fully dressed, and sounds from the bathroom suggested the other woman was inside. Nat and Janice sat down on the other bed and the man, having closed the door, sat on the further bed next to the two women.
"We have much to discuss," the man said, "but first, introductions. My name is Timothy Baines. This is Carla Wyatt, here," nodding to the woman on his right, "and Mary Linton. Sarah Leigh is in yonder, powdering her nose. Carla, Mary, this is Natalie Holcomb and Janice Habersham, of the Georgia State Patrol."
"Auxiliary," Janice added.
"Excuse me. Yes, they're from the auxiliary wing, the police with paranormal powers like mine. But are they here to recruit me?"
Janice frowned. "That is not why we were sent here, although..."
"No. Their suspicious superior officers thought that I had enslaved you! How silly!"
Mary and Carla laughed. It sounded like genuine amusement. Nat couldn't help grinning, too; their suspicion seemed so absurd in retrospect!
"Of course, in a few minutes they will call their colleagues on the police radio and tell them they were mistaken. And a few minutes after that we will leave. One day at Six Flags is enough, I think, with forty-eight other states and well over a hundred other countries to explore?"
Mary and Carla agreed enthusiastically. Suddenly Nat picked up on their wanderlust, and wondered why she'd spent her whole life in Georgia when there were so many other places to see.
"In any case, my healing talents are not well suited to law enforcement, I think. Perhaps someday I will settle down somewhere and work in criminal rehabilitation. But for now... nineteen years in Rock Springs, Alabama is long enough to spend in once place!"
"Too long," said Mary with a look of disgust. "Way too long."
"We'll keep travelling, and I'll heal people to pay our way, like that poor workaholic woman at the Chevy dealership in Tuskegee, or the nicotine-addicted clerk at the motel here. Miss Holcomb, Ms. Habersham, you ladies are welcome to accompany us if you wish."
Of course they wished to!
"At the time, nothing about it seemed weird. His control over us was so sudden and so complete that we didn't notice anything unusual about the way were were thinking. We just liked him, and were suddenly bored with Atlanta, and wanted to go with him and see the world. The car was crowded with six people in it, driving all night to Nashville, but we all liked each other so well we didn't mind being squushed. (Mary and Sarah took turns driving; Baines sat in the back seat between me and Janice.)"
They've arrived at Nat's apartment. Nat parks, and they get out, Vincent retrieving her small suitcase from the back seat.
"In Nashville we traded the car for a minivan. Baines told us he'd healed the salesman of an Internet addiction. Then we drove around for a while, seemingly at random, until Baines told us to stop at a particular house -- a minimansion in a newish subdivision. He told Mary and Carla to go up and knock on the door. I asked him where we were, and he said there was a ladies' poker game in the house. With a few distant nudges from him, the rich ladies at the party would invite Mary and Carla to join the game, and with a few hints from him about what the other players were holding, they would win enough to keep us in gasoline and food for a few hundred more miles. Meanwhile he would see what psychological problems the ladies at the party might have that he could fix. He leaned back and closed his eyes, to concentrate on the ladies in the house, and told us and Sarah we could go for a walk. We walked around the neighborhood, and came back a while later. When Mary and Carla came out of the house and got in the van, we drove off and found a motel to stay in."
Nat lets them into the apartment, and interrupts her story to say, "Look, I'm going to go change into something more comfortable. Feel free to look around the kitchen and see if there's something you want for supper, or we could order out."
As Carla parked the minivan outside the motel office, Timothy asked them, "How many rooms do you reckon we want?"
The women looked at one another. "We've got the money for two or three rooms," Mary said, looking over her poker winnings. "But we don't really need that many, do we?"
"Natalie, Janice -- y'all don't mind sharing a bed, do you?" Sarah asked.
"No, of course not," Nat said. She was a little nervous, but pleasantly excited too -- sharing a bed with who? And how? She hardly dared hope that Timothy liked *her* well enough to...
Carla went in to register, then came back a few minutes later and drove them around to the back of the motel. Another ground-floor room. Three per bed? Nat wondered.
"...I won't go into details," Nat says, as she and Vincent sit down to bowls of microwaved canned soup. "He shared a bed with Mary and Carla that night, and Janice and I slept with Sarah in the other bed. We fell asleep surprisingly fast and slept quite soundly, so we didn't hear what, if anything, was going on in the other bed. I think he thought he was exercising restraint, going slow... But I went to bed that night vaguely partial to him, maybe just starting to develop a crush on him, and woke up the next morning passionately in love with him. He'd been working on me in my sleep. With Janice, who was still fighting him on some level, it took him another couple of days to get to that point."
"Could you pass the parmesan cheese?" Vincent asks.
"Here you go. -- So the next day, we drove around Nashville, seeing the Parthenon and so forth, and buying feminine clothes for me and Janice, and we went to the Grand Ole Opry in the evening. I sat next to Baines and we held hands for a while; then he slipped a hand under my blouse, and I let him. I was so happy, it was disgusting."
"My condolences," Vincent says. There's sarcasm in her voice, but not as much as there was earlier.
"And later on, back at the motel... Well. The whole point of my having this power is to protect me from rape, you know? I mean, the paranormal doctors tell me that if you hadn't... done what you did, it would have manifested later, in some other form. Probably healing people from sickness or injuries. That would have been a lot more useful, I reckon... But it didn't do me a bit of good against a man who could make me not want to use it against him."
Vincent has stopped eating. "I'm sorry," she says. "I'm sorry I tried to push you that night, and I'm sorry this telepath treated you the way he did... if it makes you feel any better, something like that happened to me, more than once, within a few days after I left Milledgeville. I was hitching a ride out of Chattanooga, and this guy... I'd been planning to accept rides only from women but I was getting cold and tired, and he looked so respectable..." She halts, unable to go on, shuddering.
After a moment's hesitation, Nat reaches a hand across the small table and lays it on Vincent's. "It's over now," she says. "It was horrible but it's over, and we're still alive."
Nashville, Memphis, St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Montreal... They rarely spent more than two days in one place. Every few days they would find a poker game or sell their last vehicle for more than it was worth and buy a new one. In St. Louis, they cleaned up at a riverfront casino; in Cleveland, Timothy had Nat use her power to make Mary and Carla into men, so they could come with him to join a men's poker game. None of them won suspiciously much by themselves, and they had all come in separately and pretended they didn't know each other. Timothy was getting more confident with his powers, and gave Sarah and Nat, waiting in the van parked two blocks away, full sensory linkage to the players. Janice could listen in on her own, but preferred to listen to the radio.
After that, he started having Nat use her powers for other purposes as well. The night after that game, he had the six of them pair off; and early in the morning, he had Nat change them all, and tried being female himself for a few hours. They didn't leave Cleveland for Philadelphia until four the next afternoon. After using her power so much in the last day, Nat was exhausted, and slept during most of the day's drive.
In Lynn, Massachusetts, the women waited around in the car dealership's waiting room while Timothy negotiated a deal on a new minivan; their previous used one had developed engine problems on the way into Boston. Suddenly his voice sounded in Nat's mind.
{How many other people are there in the U.S. with your kind of power?}
{I don't know of any others.}
{Then I guess I'd better heal this poor salesman with my power instead... I was thinking we might go round to his apartment tonight while he's asleep and let you change him, but if you're the only person who can do that, it would give our position away. In another half-hour of haggling I can make him happy being male, anyway.}
Something about that bothered Nat. She knew Timothy had been using his power to make clerks and salespeople record their names and sales details wrong, so police searching the records wouldn't find them that way. They were cautious, suspecting that the authorities might not understand their relationship. But why not use her power on this transsexual car salesman, instead of rearranging his mind so deep down...? Why would it be so bad if people found out where she was? Suddenly she realized she hadn't told Will, or the GSPA, or the registrar at UGA, or anybody, about her impulsive decision to go travelling all over the world with Timothy and his friends.
"Baines was busy with that ticklish job on the car salesman, so he let me get away with that train of thought for a while. But somehow the plan I formed then to find a pay phone or buy a disposable cell phone and call Will to tell him I was OK just slipped my mind, a little while after we drove out of there. It didn't come back to me for several days, until another occasion when Baines was distracted."
They've finished their soup now, and moved to the living room. Vincent is sitting at one end of the sofa with one knee drawn up to her chin, her arms clasped around it, and the other leg tucked under her; as feminine as anybody who was born that way, when she's not being self-conscious about it. You can get used to anything, given enough time, and Vincent has had four years to get used to this. How long will it take her to get used to being male again?
"Getting into Canada was easier then than it is now for anybody, but with Baines it was trivial. He could show someone a blank index card and make them think it was a passport or birth certificate or whatever they wanted to see. Just in case somebody ever looked into the records, though, he had me change us all into men at a rest stop in Vermont, and then change him, Sarah, and Carla into women at our first stop in Quebec."
"Why would Baines want you to do that?" Vincent asks, morbidly curious. "Was he, she, whatever, a transsexual like the car salesman?"
"I'm not a telepath or a psychiatrist, so I can't be absolutely sure, but I don't think so. Think about it; with his power, if he wanted to, he could have made people perceive him as a woman, and he could have changed his friends and relatives' memories of him so they would think he had always been female. And then he would have had me change him as soon as he met me, not several days later, I reckon. When I finally saw a photo of him, a long time afterward in a magazine article, it didn't look much like I remembered him; he'd been changing our perceptions to make himself look older and better-looking.
"And then there's his behavior with the car salesman: I'm sure a transsexual wouldn't have approved of him altering the man's mind instead of having me alter his body. If he'd thought about it and been willing to go to a little extra trouble there are various ways he could have done that without giving away our position -- bring her with us, or put her on a bus to another city with no memory of how she was changed or how she got there, so she would be missing for a few days and by the time she was found, or went home, we would have been long gone from Boston.
"Anyway, there we were, three of us male and three female, just inside Quebec. We tooled on up the road toward Montreal..."
Timothy had already picked up French from some people they'd met in Vermont, though she spoke with a strong American accent, and she and Janice, who had learned the language years earlier, were working on telepathically teaching the others enough to get by. He had been a woman at night in their motel room several times since Cleveland, but had decided she wanted to try it in public as well. They stopped at some clothing stores in the suburbs of Montreal and bought better-fitting feminine clothes for Timothy and masculine clothes for Janice, Sarah and Nat. They were pretending to be three couples touristing together; Nat was paired with Carla, Timothy with Janice, and Mary with Sarah.
They parked the van in a downtown parking deck and walked around the city. Timothy was a bit awkward as a woman, as was Janice as a man, but Mary, with a little telepathic help from Timothy, had adjusted perfectly. Nat had had plenty of practice being male in the two years since her power first appeared; she had sometimes thought about being a man all the time, not because she felt more like a man than a woman, but because she still had nightmares about that date with Vincent, and still had an irrational fear of being raped. That fear had mostly gone away since she'd met Timothy. Now, he just felt awkward pretending to be Carla's boyfriend. Somehow he felt he ought to be jealous of Janice, but he wasn't.
They came to a used bookstore, and Carla wanted to browse a while and probably buy some things. Nat was hardly averse. Timothy had other plans, though. "Let's meet back at the van in a few hours," she said. She and Janice walked on down the street, holding hands, followed a few moments later by Mary and Sarah; Nat looked at Timothy's receding form for a long moment, and then followed Carla into the bookstore.
After looking through the small section of English-language architecture books for a while, Nat suddenly remembered that he had never gotten around to calling Will, as he'd meant to. When they had checked out, Carla with a small stack of French mystery paperbacks and Nat with Lewis Mumford's _Sticks and Stones_, Nat said he wanted to find someplace that sold prepaid cellphones.
"That was the beginning of the end, there," Nat says. It's gotten dark outside. "I called Will, just to let him know I was all right, that I didn't know when I'd be coming back to Georgia but not to worry... I was really puzzled when he still seemed in a panic about me even after I told him where I was and what was going on. He tried to get me to promise not to meet Baines and the others back at the van, to go to the police and ask them to get the Protecteurs de Quebec to go after Baines, and I just couldn't understand why. 'Timothy's not a criminal,' I kept telling him. 'He's a nice guy. He heals people of addictions and depression and so forth.' But Will just didn't seem to understand... Finally I told him I would talk to him again in a few days, and hung up."
"You were still that much under his control, even separated from him?"
"Yeah. I loved him, the sick bastard."
Nat and Carla ate lunch at a bistro before heading back to the van. They got there first, and didn't have the keys, so they stood around in the parking deck, making small talk for a few minutes, then reading their recent purchases. Nat was absorbed enough in the Mumford that he didn't notice Timothy, Janice, Mary and Sarah until they were almost upon them.
Mary unlocked the van and let them in. As he did, Timothy spoke silently to Nat.
{That was foolish, telling your brother where we are. I wanted to spend a few days seeing more of Montreal; now we'll have to leave town right away.}
{I'm sorry,} Nat thought, as he got into the back seat next to Carla. {It seemed like a good idea at the time. I thought he wouldn't be worried anymore once he heard from me and knew I was OK.}
{The State Patrol probably poisoned his mind against me. Don't call him again, OK?} Aloud, Timothy said, "Let's go see what there is to see in Ottawa, shall we?" She was met by enthusiastic agreement.
They were hardly out of town yet when Janice and Timothy, sitting in the middle seat behind Mary and Sarah, suddenly went pale and started shivering.
"What's wrong?" Carla asked, leaning forward.
"Please... quiet. Busy," Timothy said.
Mary, driving, turned his head briefly. "What's wrong?" he asked. Sarah twisted around and looked back at the two telepaths.
"I don't know," Nat said. "But she said please be quiet..."
Mary stopped at the next gas station and parked away from the pumps. Janice and Timothy had their eyes shut tight, and though they were mostly still, they twitched and shivered once in a while. The others could get no response from either of them for a long while.
Finally Timothy opened her eyes briefly, and looked around. "Keep driving!" she said urgently. "Not to Ottawa. Due north. As fast as you can." Mary started the van and got back on the road, then looked for a major road going north.
They kept driving after sunset, passing through small towns less and less often. When the tank was nearly empty Mary stopped for gas; he pumped while Sarah went in to pay and use the restroom. Nat watched the telepaths while Carla went to use the restroom as well.
Mary was having trouble with the pump, for some reason. He kept fumbling with the buttons, but couldn't get it to select a grade. After a few minutes of this he went into a fugue, just staring listlessly at the pump controls. Eventually Nat wondered what was taking him so long and got out, finding him standing next to the pump with the gas tank cap in his hand, staring at nothing.
Neither Carla nor Sarah had come back from the restroom. Nat was getting a bad feeling about all this. "Mary? What's wrong?" Mary turned his head slowly toward Nat, blinked uncomprehendingly, then turned and looked out into the night beyond the gas station lights.
Nat waved his hand in front of Mary's face, to no effect. Then he changed him, to see if that would startle her out of the fugue. She looked down at herself, then off into space again.
Nat was about to change himself and go look in the ladies' room for Sarah and Carla, when he heard the sound of a helicopter. He stepped out from under the canopy over the pumps and looked up. Within a couple of minutes a helicopter landed in the parking lot, blocking the exit. Nat had been panicked when he first heard the sound of the helicopter, but by the time it landed he was wondering why it had frightened him, and by the time the rotors stopped turning he was losing interest in it entirely. His mind drifted to the stuff Lewis Mumford had been saying about architecture as the pilot of the copter got out and started walking towards the van. There were several other people in the copter who weren't getting out, he noticed vaguely; it was hard to tell how many, in the dim light.
"Back away from the van," the copter pilot said. He was tall, and wore a uniform Nat didn't recognize, with a dark red mask. Mary looked briefly at him, then off into the night. Nat stared at the man, wondering whether it was worth the trouble to do as he said.
He got closer. "Back away," he said. Then, "Damn, they've got you so fugued out you can't do anything I tell you... I guess I can just ignore you."
That seemed like a safe assumption, Nat thought on some level, while vaguely wondering, with no particular urgency, who "they" were. The man slipped past him and Mary and looked into the van at Timothy and Janice.
He raised a gun.
Something in Nat rebelled against the listlessness, and he jumped the man, knocking the gun from his hand. He was too small to have much impact other than that on the big man, but a moment later Mary was attacking the man from the other side, whacking him on the head with the gas tank cap. The man shrugged them off easily. As Nat fell backward he felt the fugue state coming on again. Just before he hit the concrete, he exercised his power.
"I woke up the next morning in a hospital in Montreal," Nat says. "I had a mild concussion from falling on the concrete, and some minor scrapes. Didn't feel too bad, physically. But I was frantic with worry about Baines and the others, and it took a while for anybody to tell me what was going on. Then someone from the Protecteurs de Montreal -- Guillaume Legault, their telepath, who had been one of the passengers in the copter -- came and told me everyone was fine, that we were safe from the man who kidnapped us. I kept insisting we weren't kidnapped, we were travelling with Baines voluntarily, and why did they attack us like that?"
"So you were still obsessed with him even then?"
"For a long time afterward. They discharged me and Mary from that hospital to a psychiatric hospital in western Oregon, where Janice and Carla and Sarah had already been taken. Baines was being kept under constant sedation at the Protecteurs' base north of Quebec City, I found out later -- they couldn't afford to let her wake up when they didn't have an overwhelming number of telepaths on hand to keep her under control. They had three telepathic psychiatrists working on the five of us, for five months to two years -- Sarah was the first one they discharged, then Mary, Carla and me over the next few months. Janice is still there, last I heard. Baines had worked her over deep down -- I guess he was more afraid of her than of the rest of us -- and then her mind was a battleground between Baines and the telepaths chasing us for several hours. They had me change her back into a woman once they trusted me enough to leave my room, but it didn't help. And they had Endymion come there for me to change her back, at about the same time -- she was the helicopter pilot, and was about to shoot Janice and Baines with tranquilizer darts when Mary and I jumped him."
"So why were you and Mary going into a fugue?" asks Vincent.
"The telepaths in the copter -- the Quebecois I met at the hospital, and two others from Portland and Ottawa who were rushed to Montreal in a hurry after Will called the GSPA and told them where I was -- had been attacking Baines ever since they located her, but couldn't do much at long range. Baines was using Janice to provide shielding to the rest of us, especially Mary, who was driving, while she focused her efforts on fighting off the police telepaths.
"Once we stopped for gas they narrowed the distance between us even faster. Soon they were able to break through Janice's shields and confuse Mary so he couldn't think straight to pump the gas, and then they had Sarah and Carla forget what they were doing so they wouldn't come back to the car. The idea was to keep us from leaving the gas station before they got there, though of course chasing us in a copter they would have caught up with us on the road sooner or later. Then once they arrived, they started working on me too. But Baines's implanted compulsions in me and Mary were strong enough to break through the fugue when we saw her being threatened."
"And then what did they do with Baines? They haven't been keeping him... her, under sedation for the last two years, have they?
"No... They had several powerful telepaths work on her while she was sedated, putting in mental blocks against using her powers. Then they finally let her wake up and extradited her to the U.S. Three of her five kidnappings were in Alabama, so she was jailed and tried there. But before the trial was over she worked through the blocks and used her power to escape -- just briefly. When they caught her again, they kept her drugged all through the trial. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity --"
"What the hell?"
"That was the only legal pretext they could find to lobotomize her. There was no way to keep her in prison otherwise. Sooner or later she would work through whatever psychological blocks they used and make the guards fall in love with her and help her escape, like she did the first time."
Vincent is silent for a while, taking that in. "She deserved it, I guess," she says in a hushed voice.
"Some days I think so," Nat says, after a long pause. "And some days I wish they had killed her outright; but they don't execute people for kidnapping anymore. And sometimes I try hard to forgive her, like I did to forgive you. I don't know what else we could have done to keep her from abusing her power again, but I wish we could have found something, anything else."
Nat gets up from the easy chair and goes into her bedroom. "I'm going to get you some sheets and a pillow; be right back."
Nat was reading in his room at the Vandiver Clinic, one day in his seventh month there, when there was a knock at the door.
"Come in," he said.
Dr. Vandiver came in, accompanied by Mary.
"I have some good news for you," the doctor said, "and a request." He glanced at Mary, who grinned nervously.
"Mary is going to be discharged today," he said. "We've finally gotten rid of her obsessions and compulsions implanted by the rogue telepath, as we're almost done, I hope, getting them out of your mind as well. However, there were some changes he made that I did not feel comfortable trying to undo -- it has taken this long to correct the obviously pathological changes he made, and I hesitate to make any further changes, except at the request of the patient..."
"What do you mean?" Nat asked.
"Shortly before he was captured, the telepath" (Dr. Vandiver never used his name, since his patients had an affectionate response to it) "did some deep alteration of Ms. Linton's sexual identity. I don't know how she did it so quickly; perhaps he had been working on it for some days previously, but even so, it is much faster work, and much cleaner, than anything I could promise to do. When I discussed her progress with Ms. Linton yesterday, and the prospects for restoring her original sexual identity and orientation, she had a simpler suggestion..."
"You want me to change you back into a man?" Nat asked Mary.
"Yes," she said. "This just doesn't feel right anymore."
"All right," Nat said. "I can do that, if you're sure you want it... are you going to be comfortable wearing that?" She was in a long T-shirt and sweat pants.
"I'm not wearing any underwear or bra," she said, blushing. "Just let me kick these shoes off, since they might not fit afterward..."
So Nat changed Mary, and she left with Dr. Vandiver. Later, after lunch, the doctor came to talk to Nat again.
"I believe that Mary is not the only one the rogue made such alterations to," he said. "I don't know for sure since I never met you before the kidnapping, and the psychological records from your high school counselor's office are vague and uninformative. But weren't you living primarily as a woman before all this?"
"Yes," Nat said. "And you haven't seen me being a woman ever since I've been here, even though I could change myself back any time. I know what you're getting at."
"Well," Dr. Vandiver asked, "Obviously, with your power, you don't need anyone else to correct your physical form as Mr. Linton did. But do you want me to work on your mind, instead? Beyond removing the last traces of artificial affection for the rogue, I mean?"
"No," Nat said, "I don't think so. I just want to get out of here as soon as I can. Maybe I'll come see you, or more likely a local psychiatrist in Athens or Atlanta, later on. But... Even before Timothy messed with my mind --"
"Please, Nat: not the name."
"Even before the rogue messed with me, I mean. Even then, I wasn't totally comfortable as a woman. I was just less uncomfortable as a woman than as a man. I mean, being a man felt wrong, but as a woman, I was always afraid of being raped, whenever I was in a strange place with strange men around. Even though, with my power, that fear didn't make sense. Timothy -- the rogue, I mean -- fixed that, at least mostly, pretty soon after we met. And I guess he changed me some more, not long after that, so I would be comfortable being a man.
"I've experimented when you weren't looking, Doctor -- in the shower, for instance. Being a woman doesn't feel wrong for me, like it did for Mary. But I don't see any point in being a woman anymore if I can be of whichever sex I like. Would you want to bleed through your vagina every month, for instance?"
"Since you put it that way... no."
"So just rip out the last few traces of this stupid affection for -- that rogue telepath. The rogue got rid of those nightmares about the time I was almost raped; but in the last few days I've been having good dreams -- I mean they feel good until I wake up -- where I'm back with him again, and I think those are a lot worse. Please, make them go away.
"And then let me go home."
Nat wanted to ask if there was any more news about Timothy's trial, then proceeding in Alabama, but he knew Dr. Vandiver would refuse to answer, so he said nothing more.
"Very well," Dr. Vandiver said. "I hope we can have you going home in a few more weeks."
It turned out to be almost three months.
The next morning, Nat wakes up a few minutes before seven, needing to pee. When he comes out of the bathroom he finds Vincent awake, waiting to use the toilet as well.
"You've changed," she says drily.
"Uh, yeah. No point in sitting down if I don't have to... Are you ready? Or do you want to eat breakfast first?"
"No point in sitting down if I don't have to."
"You'll need to leave right after I change you. You probably want to shower and eat something first."
She sighs. "If you're a man I don't see why I can't be... but whatever. I've put up with this for four years, I can handle another hour of it."
Nat changes herself. "I'll change us both after breakfast," she says. "Go ahead, I'll fix us something."
After using the toilet Vincent comes out of the bathroom to get a clean change of clothes from her suitcase, baggy stuff that will fit her tolerably well after the change, and goes back in to shower. Nat is mixing waffle batter.
Over breakfast, Vincent is quiet, resentful, at first, but after getting most of her first waffle into her stomach, she softens up.
"So what all have you been doing with your power? Anything besides the superhero stuff? You're changing yourself when you need to pee so you don't have to sit down, I guess --"
"No, I'm male most of the time nowadays. After that whole episode... well, there were things the telepsychs could fix, and things they couldn't fix, not so easily. Or that we didn't want them to mess with, and told them to leave well enough alone. After I got discharged from the clinic and came home, I dropped out of UGA as Natalie Holcomb, moved to Atlanta, and got some help from the GSPA to enroll at Georgia State as Nathaniel Holcomb.
"And I've been trying to keep my power, and my police reservist status, a secret from most people. I wore a mask on some of the police jobs I've been on, like most of the GSPA do when we're not undercover in plainclothes."
"Ooh, a mask. Do you have a cool costume to go with it? Can I see it? What's your secret codename?"
The sarcasm is back. "No, you can't, and I don't have one. I haven't felt any need for one, it's so rarely I get called on police business like that..."
"And that's all you've done with your power? Just a handful of police/superhero cases?"
"If I did much else with it I couldn't keep it secret, or have any privacy."
They finish their waffles in silence. Finally:
"Are you ready to go?" Nat asks.
"Damn straight," Vincent answers. Nat changes them both.
"Time to go," he says. "Do you want a ride to the MARTA station?"
"Yes, please," Vincent says, looking himself over appreciatively. "No, wait... I want to go to a thrift store and buy some guy clothes that fit before I go to Milledgeville. Can you just drop me off at a Goodwill or something that's close to a bus stop? I'll get to the train station from there myself."
They go to the car, Vincent carrying his small suitcase, and get in. They don't talk much more on the way to the store. Vincent takes out his cell phone and calls his parents.
"Hi... it's Vincent. Yes, it's me... I'll tell you some about it when I see you, but don't be disappointed when I don't tell you much. I'm in Atlanta now; I can take a Greyhound bus to Macon later today if you can meet me there and pick me up... OK, I'll call you again when I get to the station and let you know what the bus schedule looks like. I love you too..."
Nat pulls up in front of the Salvation Army store and lets Vincent out.
"Well," he says, hesitantly, "I'm glad I finally got in touch with you."
"Not half as glad as I am," Vincent says. "Still kind of annoyed that you put off changing me so long, but I guess it was worth the wait."
As Nat pulls away, he sees, in the rear-view mirror, Vincent emptying the feminine clothes from his suitcase into the donation bin.
Three weeks later, Nat is on the train going home from school when his cellphone rings. He answers. "Hello?"
"Mr. Holcomb," says a deep voice, "you don't know me, but I've heard about you, and I need your help."
"Who is this? Who gave you my number?"
"My name is Gerald. I promised I wouldn't tell who gave me the number... I need you to change me. I can pay however much you want."
"Look, I'm sorry, but I can't help you."
"Why not? I tell you, I can pay you more than enough to make it worth your time and effort. I'm told using your power tires you out, but wouldn't you run a mile or climb a few flights of stairs for a hundred thousand dollars?"
Nat draws a deep breath. It's tempting, but...
"See, the thing is, if I change you I'll have no reason not to change anybody that asks. And I don't really want to be a sex-change surgeon, I want to be an architect. But if I start changing people on request, even if I'm asking a heap of money, every transsexual on the planet will want a piece of my time and energy, and I haven't got that much to go around.
"And the other thing is -- Using paranormal powers on criminals in the course of law enforcement is covered by clear legislation and case law. But using these powers on people for pay is a lot murkier, at least in Georgia -- Oregon and a couple of other states have clearer laws, but I don't want to live there. I could get prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license, or I could get sued for malpractice, or any number of other bad things could happen. I actually thought about doing this for a living, when I was in high school, but... my parents' lawyer talked me out of it." Actually the GSPA's lawyer, Peter Flannery, but this guy doesn't need to know that much detail.
"We can keep it secret. You'll change me somewhere private where there are no witnesses, I'll bribe a suitable hospital to produce fake records showing I had sex-reassignment surgery there, and I'll pay you in cash."
"The answer is still no." Nat hangs up, a little regretfully; there's a lot he could do with $100,000. But where would it end?
A couple of days later he gets another such call, and gives a similar explanation, though this person is only offering twenty thousand dollars. The following week he gets six calls, and each one gets a terser explanation. The nineteen people who call the following week just get a "No" and a dead line.
But by then it isn't just phone calls. Two people have shown up at Nat's apartment, knocking on his door during supper or sitting on the doorstep waiting when he gets home from school or work. They get a longer explanation, but he doesn't let them get a foot in the door. After a while they go away.
He's so aggravated with Vincent that he wants to track him down and change him back. This is the thanks he gets, his secret identity blown, and Tachyon probably coming after him as soon as he gets out of prison? But talking to Will, he finds out that Vincent showed up in town four weeks ago, stayed with his parents for a week, visited several old friends, and then left town again, telling nobody where he was going. Tracking him down again will be a lot harder.
He's getting requests by email as well. And besides the outright requests, there are a lot of forwarded anecdotes and news clippings about transsexuals committing suicide, or being murdered.
Finally, one morning during breakfast, he's greeted by a caller saying simply "Five million dollars."
Nat feels weak in the knees. It's the most he's been offered yet, by an order of magnitude.
"Look," he says, "You probably know I've been telling everybody else 'no'. And if five million dollars for a change is all you're willing to offer, the answer is still 'no'. But for five million dollars you can probably buy some lobbyists, can't you, and pay for several years of malpractice insurance...?"
It takes a while, but by the end of the following Spring's legislative session there's a new Georgia law protecting people with paranormal powers who use them on others at their own request, given a written contract and disclaimers; Nat shouldn't be any more subject to lawsuits than the average small business owner, and doesn't need a medical license to use his power on paying customers. He changes his first few customers, beginning with the benefactor who pushed the new law through, at his apartment, but after his apartment manager serves notice that he's not supposed to run a business from home under the terms of his lease, he rents a storefront office/clinic (discreetly labeled "Alterations"; he does no advertising). He hires a secretary, changes his old cellphone number, which Vincent gave out, to go to the office, and gets a new private cellphone number.
Over the next few weeks the transsexuals, both male to female and female to male, keep coming; the office is getting over a hundred calls a week, and he's seeing twelve clients a week, four each on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. More than that would leave him too tired for school. He charges ten thousand dollars a head, but that seems ridiculously cheap to most of his clients, and his schedule is filling up months in advance. He tells his secretary to warn people that appointments more than four months away are to be considered tentative.
And then, after a while, it's not just transsexuals. He starts getting repeat customers, rich people who want to experiment, couples. Sometimes he gets parents wanting him to change their children, as often as not as part of a whole-family package deal, but even where the children seem willing enough, he sets a firm minimum age of eighteen.
Then one Friday afternoon, after he's dismissed his second to last customers of the day, a giggling couple in their early twenties wearing each other's ill-fitting clothes, he says to his secretary, "Who's next?"
"Girl named Terri Kendall."
"Send her in."
But something about this Terri Kendall -- tall, stocky, short black hair -- looks familiar. "Where have I met you?" he asks her. "Hey, you'll need to change into something looser, or you'll be all squished in the crotch. The bathroom is that way..." He looks closer at her. "You!"
"Isn't my money as good as anybody's?"
"Turn yourself in, and I'll change you back at the end of the trial, guilty or not guilty."
She sighs. "It was worth a try..." Then the sometime rapist turns and runs out. Nat jumps from his chair, rounds his desk, and follows her.
"Stop her!" he calls, but Ms. Kendall, if that's her real name, is already out the front door. Nat chases her out the door, through the parking lot and down the street, but she's in better shape than he is and has longer legs. He gives up after a couple of blocks.
"You got the photo, right?" he says to his secretary when he returns to the clinic, breathing hard. There are no special regulations yet for this unique business, but Mr. Flannery advised Nat to take digital photos of his customers before and after and be ready to turn them over to authorities on a court order, besides keeping paper records.
"Yes," she says. "What was wrong? She paid cash in advance..."
Nat has told her before about the first time he used his power for police work. "That person raped four women in southeast Atlanta before I changed him," he says. "Send the photo to the GSPA and the Atlanta Police Department, would you? And please find a rape crisis center to send that money to. I'm going home."
Next: Nat and the Haemophiliacs
(c) 2008 by Trismegistus Shandy
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