Free No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Seven) by Randall Farmer Page A

new place!”
    Gail watched as people scattered, back to the cars and to the building, to finish packing and loading.  Sylvie looked back at her as she left, and she wasn ’t the only one.  A worn, tired look flickered across her friendly face.  Gail’s stomach sank.  Those people depended on her and she had a terrible nagging suspicion this responsibility would be a lot harder to live up to than she had ever dreamed.  Moving juice was work, hard work, hard work that would never end.  Never.
     

Adjustments
    (9)
    “I like the idea, Ed,” Gail said, looking around the tiny room with a happy glow.  The Ebeners had most recently used the room as a storage closet, but originally the room served as an infant’s room, accessible from the master bedroom and the hallway.  Dusty floor and peeling wallpaper, but abundant with possibilities. “It’s certainly less excessive than sticking us in the master bedroom.”  Which is what the household had initially suggested.
    Ed Zarzemski, an older, almost grandfatherly man with salt and pepper black hair, wobbled.  “Focus,” he said, a whisper.
    “Oh, sorry.”  She had goofed again.  An instant of personal happiness, and every Transform in the house was high on juice.  Being a Focus was harder than she ever thought it would be, and not because of the difficulties predicted by the pamphlets.  The miniscule juice flow recommended in the pamphlets wasn’t the problem; she never needed the bolded ‘don’t forget to move the juice’ pamphlet warnings.  Instead, the juice reacted intensely to her every emotion.  Every day she grew more tired, whether she worked around the house with the others, moving furnishings, cooking, going to bring a new Transform into her household, or just sitting around and shooting the breeze with people.
    Four hours later, near dinner, Van pulled up in his junker, from his daily commute to U of M.  Gail rushed out to meet him.  He was frazzled and stressed, and Gail knew why.  The life they constructed here wasn’t his dream, and he was having a hard time adjusting to the necessary daily commute.  “We came up with a usable compromise on where they’re going to stick us,” Gail said, hugging Van.
    “Great!  Uh, Gail, the Transforms are all wobbly.”
    Damn.  She had pumped them again, this time way past what she guessed was the stimulation optimum, all the way to whatever strange limit she reached when she pumped up the Transforms too much.  She didn’t think the juice level she hit was close to the make-them-into-Monsters point, but it was high enough to hurt them.  She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and carefully moved their juice levels back to normal.  “You want to take a look?” Gail said.
    Gail led Van through the kitchen, setting off Gail ’s now growling stomach.  Leaving the Clinic that had ‘gone bad’ had awakened her appetite something fierce.  She had thought she had been hungry in the clinic, but her constant hunger now was insane.  She already ate twice as much as even the larger men, enough to draw a few ‘huh’ reactions, and she had started to worry that if she didn’t find a way to stop her food binge, she would end up fat.
    “It ’s a closet!” Van said, unhappy, after Gail introduced them to their new room.  Gail winced.  “I can’t live in a closet.  Where am I going to work?”  The time he had taken off from working on his dissertation, to care for Gail right after she had transformed, had put him way behind schedule, and his advisor had told him they wouldn’t be extending the contracted teaching hours that paid for his degree.  It left him cranky.
    She had been so worked up over the wonderful compromise, between household queen in the largest room in an old farmhouse with tiny rooms to start with, and on the other end, sharing a bunk bed with Van in a room with six other adults , that she had forgotten about Van’s issues.
    Thump, thumpity thump.  Gail turned to the