Sky recognized Focus Biggioni from long ago. She had been the American Focus representative to the little conference in Ottawa when they hashed out the legal problems regarding the Lost Tribe’s return to civilization (save Beast, who never returned). He remembered her soft American accent and her chilling words, that officially neither he, nor Arm, nor Beast existed from the point of view of the Focuses in the States.
He stayed starchily polite to both of the politically important Focuses and kept his dross construct of ‘I’m just a male Transform in Focus Russell’s household’ up tight and locked down hard. Neither of the two Focuses had Focus Rizzari style bodyguards and he barely noticed their existence.
The name that Inferno had chosen for him was Sam. Samuel Horatio Illison, or, as Tina said, Sam H Ill. He couldn’t figure out which of the householders thought that one up. No one would admit to it. To Lori, Sky exhibited some old world charm by bowing to her and kissing her hand; when she bubbled up to him to hug him, he whispered “I’ve missed you, Lori my love,” in her ear. Her control held tight, but he suspected the twinkle in her eye when she answered with a cheery ‘good to have you here again’ would lead to grief, later.
Sky had met Gong and Molson before, the two Sports he would be returning to Canada. Gong was a woman with a minimal metasense and with anomalously thick nerves running down her arms. Like a Crow she was a dross sucker and she had a spectacular sense of touch, something like 300 dots per centimeter or some such insane measurement. Molson was a guy – obvious, with a name like that – a variant on the standard male Transform, save that it took five women Transforms to support him. Molson could eat anything, and if you fed him rich fatty foods, he peed a substance that rivaled whale oil for its usefulness. Sky’s suspected Molson was in for a short lifespan, but every Focus who ran into Molson got big dollar signs in her eyes and took Molson on anyway. At least for a while; he ate as much as a Beast.
Luckily both looked human, which turned out not to be the case for all the Sports. Eyeless Fred was the worst of the bunch. The combination of no eyes, the fishy smell and the electro sensitive strip down his side gave him a rather appalling sense of inhumanity. No normal passenger airline would ever allow Eyeless Fred onboard.
Sky tried to avoid the political undercurrents, but picked up that Ackermann and Biggioni were trying to talk Lori down, about something she had done yesterday. After the huge dinner, Focus Ackermann and Focus Biggioni left, to Sky’s profound relief, taking several of the Sports with them. The airline tickets he held were for tomorrow afternoon and Sky decided to make himself scarce.
Disquieting Proof
Annie waited in one of Parc Nationale d’Oka’s picnic areas under the remaining late March drizzle, admiring the now distant cloud top lightning and occasional rumble of thunder. Arm refused to meet in Montreal; she even still had a hard time entering her home city of Calgary after spending any time outside it.
Something was up, perhaps something bad. Arm’s dream presence had been blurry for nine days, barely solid enough to communicate the desire for an urgent meeting. They had met here before, four times, and Arm would be able to find her.
Annie froze, suddenly registering something distant in her metasense. She concentrated, but the unknown would not resolve into anything more than a distant point source. She stood and paced back and forth, worried. Her instincts said the unknown was kilometers distant, and approaching rapidly, perhaps a hundred kilometers an hour.
Impossible. Annie’s metasense range was the standard Focus hundred meters. She continued to pace, back and forth, back and forth, as the cool north breeze blew bits of an old newspaper through the picnic area and the gray sky spitted a light rain. The unknown had to be in a vehicle; the metasense source followed the terrain and weaved along the path of a road.
She hoped this was Arm, or something Arm carried with her. If not, then Annie faced something unknown, and most likely an attack. Annie kept her faith, sat back down on the picnic bench and again attempted to examine the ‘something’. Every time she focused her metasense on it, the unknown twisted away.
Stars began to flicker above, as the light rain stopped and the cloud deck started to break up. Headlights rounded a wooded curve in the road almost a kilometer away, a vehicle with a rough engine, carrying the unknown.
The vehicle, an oversized pickup truck of the kind Arm favored because of her current height, turned into the parking lot where Annie’s crew had parked. Her bodyguards stirred, wary and cautious, as the pickup parked a couple of hundred meters away. Two people exited the vehicle, Arm and another, a standard height man.
The man carried the unknown with him, this impossible metasense source, in his briefcase. “Quiet,” Annie said, reassuring her guards. When Arm and her companion reached Annie’s normal hundred meter metasense range, the unknown flared in her metasight, knocking out her ability to locate even her Transform bodyguards.
The man stopped. Arm turned. “Come along, it’s just Annie.”
“This thing knows her,” the man said, in a Crow whisper. Annie bit her lower lip, more disquieted by the Crow’s comment than his appearance here. The Crow had to be Windsong, Arm’s Crow companion of several years, and a source of many disagreements between her and Arm. Windsong was, supposedly, apolitical, and not the least bit interested in Annie and Arm’s crazy causes.
Arm appeared healthy, but without her metasense, Annie could tell little else. These days Arm stood nearly two and a half meters tall, an imposing presence, heavily muscled, her head shaved bald. Unless one knew what to look for, casual observers would believe Arm to be a giant of a man.
“Come on over,” Annie said, answering in a Crow whisper, modulating her charisma to the Crow comfort bands. “What are you carrying?”
“Therein lies the tale,” Arm said, in her boisterous non-whisper. She sounded exultant. Arm relieved Windsong of the briefcase – with a painful wince – strode over and sat across from Annie on the picnic bench, her weight causing the picnic table’s steel tubes to groan. “You were right all along, Focus.” Arm wasn’t much on pleasantries, hugs or kisses. From Arm’s perspective, Annie was her Focus; these days, one of the many Focuses she owned. Arm described this ownership as a strong platonic love. Annie thought of this more like a loving set of hemorrhoids. “Now we have the proof of their existence.”
Good God! “The predecessors? You found proof of the predecessors?” Annie hadn’t expected anything of the sort. She, and the rest of them, had given up on their self-created theory years ago. Whatever tale lay behind Arm’s revelation didn’t involve death-defying adventures; Arm, up close, was indeed fully healthy and uninjured, a rare if not unique circumstance for one of their meetings.
Arm nodded, unlocked the briefcase, opened it, and brought out a small heavy box. Lead, of all things. For shielding. Annie repressed a sigh; Arm had probably experimented in her rough manner and put the unknown in the best shielding she could find, without thinking the problem through. To shield the unknown would take a Faraday cage, Anne suspected.
“Unfortunately, this beast is as loud as Niagara Falls, and has been ever since I followed my gut and turned the bloody thing on,” Arm said. Her breath smelled foul from the raw meat she favored when she spent any time outside of Calgary. “Can you do anything with this damned thing? Windsong can’t; he says it’s Focus work. Not that I know of any Focus tricks associated with putting crazy juice shit into objects.” She opened the lead box, revealing a skull, a baby walrus skull, if Annie guessed correctly. The skull had a metal filigree enameled on it – no, incised into the skull. Copper and gold, in an intricate pattern showing many minute variations at the millimeter level. The eye sockets were solid plated gold, tiny gold cups.
“You dropped your blood into the eyes,” Annie said, more of a prediction than a question. She understood Arm quite well, and loved her in her own distant Focus fashion.
Arm looked at the heavens, embarrassed. “It seemed to be the right thing to do at the ti
me.”
Annie chuckled at this bit of classic Arm behavior. She picked up the skull, and let herself become one with the artifact, at the juice level. A simple twist of juice and the skull glowed, visibly but dimly, from the eye sockets, an eerie green glow Annie recognized. Its metapresence faded to that of a sleeping Transform. Annie didn’t relax; this unknown still felt extremely dangerous to her.
“This is a myth symbol,” Annie said. She held up the skull for Arm and the still hundred meter away Windsong to see. “In some Inuit legends, the northern lights represent the spirits of the dead playing ball with a walrus skull.” The light the skull now gave off was a perfect color match to a green-glowing aurora.
“I think this thing is more than that,” Windsong said, as he flattened to the ground. “Look up.”
Annie did, and almost dropped the skull. An aurora played above them, where none had been before, a streamer of green appearing to point at them. In sudden panic Annie twisted the juice in the skull again, attempting to further quiet this dangerous artifact of the past. The aurora above them faded, as did the light given off by the skull.
Holy mother of God, what had she fallen into this time! “Where did you find this, Arm?” Annie said.
“At about 2000 meters elevation, in a cave in the Ogilvie Mountains, just on the Alaska side of the border,” Arm said. “At that elevation, this has to be post-ice age. The cave was difficult to approach – like I was being warned away by some unseen mumbo-jumbo, or, more likely, something akin to Focus charisma, but old and worn out. The cave showed no signs of recent animal or human inhabitation, but I did find an old fire-pit, buried under several centimeters of dirt. The skull was in a niche in the north wall of the cave.”
“Then this is relatively recent,” Annie said. She held the walrus skull in her hands, reverent and wary, attempting not to think about the forces necessary to cause a temporary apparition of the aurora. The skull did not have the energy to have caused that. Something else did. Another unknown or unknowns, something distant, something far more terrifying. “I had thought the dream of the predecessors, the thing that drew us and the rest of the Lost Tribe to the north, to be something truly ancient, ten thousand years old, associated with the first coming of humanity to North America.” It couldn’t be, not with the ‘several centimeters of dirt’, the location Arm found the skull, the skull’s near pristine condition, and the skull’s association with an Inuit myth recent enough for her to recognize. “No, Arm, the progenitors must be recent, no more than a thousand or two years old. This also proves our supposition, that we are not the first Transforms to have walked the Earth.”
“What are we doing messed up with this crap?” Arm said, grumbling, echoing Annie’s thoughts. She rubbed her thick hands together and slitted her eyes, looking for enemies to fight. She found none, but didn’t relax. “Yah, I know, if I didn’t want to be messed up in these greater things, than why am I still occasionally going out and searching?”
Given where she was searching, Annie guessed she had also, likely, been searching for Beast. He laired within several hundred kilometers of where Arm had found the skull. Well, when Beast was ready to be found, he would be found. Nothing either of them could do about that.
“And I don’t like the way that damned thing pointed at us, either,” Arm said, eyes flickering skyward.
“This is to be expected.” Something, or somethings, had been haunting the edges of her dreams since before she escaped the Purifier and fled France. The ‘whatever it was’ wanted her involvement. Something unthinking, something mechanical (if one looked upon the activities of juice as a machine), something patient and persistent. Nobody knew the proper names for such things yet.
“Can you protect us from this?” Windsong said. The Crow remained huddled on the cold wet ground a hundred meters away. Sky had once been like Windsong, oh so many years ago. He eventually got over his fears, but doing so took years. She wondered why Crows were attracted to Arm, and what in Arm almost forced her to take them and make them hers. From his metapresence, Annie decided Arm treated Windsong far better than she had treated any of her earlier Crows. Commenting either way on the subject, though, would just invite a typical blustery Arm argument.
“I can take the skull, and keep it quiet,” Annie said. “But something out there is watching us. Finding this wasn’t the last step, Windsong, but our first.”
Arm laughed. “Now that sounds like an adventure.”
Windsong moaned and Annie smiled.
Author’s Afterward
Thanks to Randy and Margaret Scheers, Michelle and Karl Stembol, Gary and Judy Williams, Maurice Gehin, and as always my wife, Marjorie Farmer. Without their help this document would have never been made.
As stated earlier, Folio 4 of The Good Doctor’s Tales is a companion piece to my novel “All Beasts Together.” Some of the pieces in here are here for completeness, others for fun, and they all serve to flesh out the story. The flashback sections and the Rover sections, unrelated to the action in “All Beasts Together” will continue in further Folios of The Good Doctor’s Tales.
You can find out more information about the world of the Transforms and other stories published by this author on http://majortransform.com.
Cover credits to Chris Willis for Odin (the gorilla) and dalliedee for Enkidu (the wolf).
The Commander series continues with Book Four, “A Method Truly Sublime”, and “The Good Doctor’s Tale’s Folio Five”.
Randall Allen Farmer
The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Four Page 11