Chapter #82The Many Faces of Lenke Whosits by: Seuzz   Maybe it's just weakness of the will on your part. But with Joe's offer to give you Rob and Paige, your powers of resistance crumble. "I thought you'd go for that," he says with a sly grin when you acquiesce with a sigh.
* * * * *
The next morning Mr. Nizamani knocks you up early to say that three of his tenants, including the two fat girls, have given notice and are in the process of moving out. "I think more will go," he tells you with a pained whisper. "All the noise. If I don't get new tenants, I won't have anything for the cadre, or even for me!"
"Leave it to me, comrade," you tell him, and squeeze his arm. "The people are united with you, and I've got prospects lining up to move in." He sighs with relief and gratitude.
But all of that happened after the second underground lightning storm ...
* * * * *
You clear away Lenke and lay Joe out on the operating table. His anima—your anima, with Joe Durras's knowledge and personality—is lodged in a band. Then, one mask and bottle at a time, his accumulated faces and essentia are drawn out—except for Eric Kim's, which remains in the resulting golem. You leave it with a remote sigil, though, as well as the chameleon skins that let it wear multiple faces and essentia.
That done, you lug Lenke back onto the table. You cannot put a remote sigil onto her, nor can you put any chameleon skins on her. Joe is going undercover as Lenke, and will be taking nothing but his essentia with him, so that there is no risk of anything detectable being placed on him. (You doubt that Fane has found a way of identifying the essentia of a Stellae.) From a metal band to her leaps his anima in a blazing bolt, and from a bottle leaps his essentia.
For a moment she doesn't move, and you have to lean over her face to see that her eyes are open. There is something reptilian about the glare she returns you. "I feel like I've been struck all over with hot hammers," she hisses.
It must have been that glowing fire that left her nerves ragged, and it has left even the usually sunny-tempered Joe in a snippy mood. "Lord, not that I hold you responsible," he says as he sits up with a groan, "but one does want to smack somebody." You help him up, and she totters over to the bed, where Paige shrinks back.
For being in her forties, as you suppose, Lenke Varga is in very good shape, which she is showing off with a short skirt and high-heel shoes, and a tight jacket that falls just to the bottom of her rib cage over a tummy- and bosom-hugging blouse. Her legs are strong and shapely, and her hourglass figure does not look like it's being held in by a girdle. But her eyes are hard and her skin is going to leather, and the bowl-like cut of her jet-black hair puts you in mind of medieval mail helmet. "So who is this woman?" you ask after she has settled in.
"Lenke Varga," she says. "Or Carol Staunton. Pick your poison." She grimaces as she pulls off a shoe and rubs her foot.
"Which is it?"
"She was born Carol Staunton," Joe in a pinched voice, "and she's old enough to have remembered the Blitz."
"She's well-preserved," Jacob says into the silence that follows.
"Which is her misfortune. It seemed like a lovely idea at the time. Now she has doubts."
"Start making sense, Joe," says Jacob.
"Perpetual youth," you exclaim with a snap of your fingers. "Full body tattoo giving the old girl a younger body!"
Lenke snaps her fingers back at you and nods.
"There were a pool of them, bright young things recruited by Fane in 'fifties," she says, and leans back in the manner of one about to deliver a story. "Mostly girls in that generation of recruits, first time Fane thought it a good idea to bring in some of the fairer sex. Not that they treated them any better for it." She makes a face. "It was still just a lot of secretarial work, only they were typing up reports about things with tentacles and fogs of darkness and the occasional SOS from another dimension. Though I suppose it was better for them in the long run. It was the boys that ran all the risks, and there's not a lot of them that lived to see the other side of fifty.
"And one day," she says with a sigh, "Fane looked around and realized that we girls were the only really good institutional memory they had."
* * * * *
It was a matter of basic record-keeping, she went on to explain. Most of the stuff that the researchers wrote down is so elliptical (so as not to alarm outsiders who accidentally stumbled onto the reports) that it wound up being useless to anyone who didn't do the writing or who wasn't present when the thing to be written about went lolloping down a corridor with the lead experimenter's head in its mouth.
"Most of us had good memories, though," she says, "and we'd seen so much that we'd put things together and made connections that even the johnnies in charge didn't make. We were in our seventies by then, and they didn't dare let us retire and they were starting to panic about what we'd take with us when we shuffled off this mortal coil.
"So they decided they wouldn't let us."
Carol Staunton wasn't privy to all the ways that Fane tried to keep their "institutional memory" alive, though she heard rumors of surgical decapitations and of wiggly bits kept in jars. But FAne finally hit on "perpetual youth" when one of their research stations made a breakthrough. She and the girls that were left were sold on the idea of a "makeover".
"It was like a tattooing machine," she says, "and it took bloody days to do its job and you were like to go crazy inside the tube with it, the way it was buzzing and burning you all over. And I was like to go sixes and sevens when I came out the other end and found myself like this. Not that it wasn't an improvement on what I had before."
"How long since the operation?" you ask.
"Nigh on two years, I suppose. What is this, November? December?" She puts her head back. "Yes somewhere on twenty months now."
"Do you know a Lenke Crayson?"
"Was that her name? The one they copied for us? They didn't tell us about her, just showed her to us before they started in."
"You don't have the original woman's memories?"
"No, just her physical imago. I've no idea if they can get the other."
You talk some more, and learn that there are at least twenty-two girls named "Lenke," running from "Lenke Albemarle" through "Lenke Wilberforce," scattered across the UK, United States, and other points within Fane's global reach, which doesn't settle the question whether "Lenke Crayson" is the original.
And will there be more, now that Fane has learned how to extend lifespans by giving people new bodies? "Who knows?" she shrugs. "We were only told afterward it's a delaying thing. They can't put any more of those tattoos on us, so when this one gives out that's it for us. I suppose they're trying to figure out how to fix that, but progress comes slow."
You don't question her long on that side of things: there will time to learn more. Concerning Professor Jameson Hyde-White: Yes, he is a leading occult researcher, and Lenke Varga is more than just his financial assistant. "He's got his eye on this one," she says as she looks over at Paige. "Liked her tests, but didn't much like her looks. Worried what they portended. Lenke stoked his worries."
"Why does she hate Paige?"
"Look at the girl," Joe says. "And remember that when Lenke was her age it was only 1950 and girls wanted nothing more than a good dress, nylons, and something other than fish paste to eat."
* * * * *
Whatever the operation did to Lenke's body, the pain has mostly worn away by the time Joe has finished explaining all about Lenke, and he's in a more cheerful mood as he and Frank gather about you to finish the night's exchanges. That consists of two more moves. The first is to give you Rob Oliver's imago and to insert Eric Kim's essentia into you, which will give you control of the Paige Knotts golem—a prospect that has been smoldering in the back of your head like a hot match. The second is to put another copy of Rob's imago onto Joe's old substantia, which gives you a golem of Rob that you can control, both with orders and by inserting yourself into it via the remote sigil.
"You're not keeping the girl here with you tonight?" Lenke asks with mild irony when, after Rob is dressed again, you direct all your company to the door. "Ah," she says when you reply that you don't have to keep her in order to be with her.
And so, early the next afternoon, after moving to keep to keep your promise to Mr. Nizamani: "Aren't you looking radiant this morning, Miss Knotts," Lenke Varga says with a beaming smile when you go in to see her.
"Yes, it was a good night. And a good morning. My boyfriend and I tied the knot unofficially. Got a new place upstairs from a friend of mine. These people were moving out, and we liked the building, so we grabbed it."
"It's a big step, moving in together, isn't it?"
"Oh, but we know we're compatible. Like two peas in a pod, like they say," you reply with a laugh. "We got my big stuff moved over before lunch, then broke it in. Almost broke each other." You lean forward to whisper. "Three times, second time with me on top."
Lenke's eyebrows shoot up, and she turns pink even as she dimples a girlish smile at you.
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