An Age Without A Name

by Randall Farmer

  Van clearly didn’t agree, but he didn’t rant, rave or react much at all. Instead, he thought. “Consider,” he said, pointing to the remains of his breakfast. “The coffee beans needed to make the coffee come from Central America. The honey is from the Imperial Valley, to the east and northeast of here. The flour for these pancakes comes from the Midwest. I’m not sure about the bacon, but that’s from pigs, and isn’t local, either. All of these require transport and people to process the materials. All depend on obvious things we take for granted, such as roads, electricity, gasoline and telephones, as well as non-obvious things we also take for granted and depend on, such as a legal system to protect a business’s investments and inventory from seizure, a lack of banditry on the roads, easy access to working cars and trucks, and so on and so forth. Civilization.” He waved his hands at his breakfast. “And that’s just one meal.”

  Inviting Mizar to think about the myriad other small pieces of civilization he encountered every day. The argument was annoying, but powerful because of its truth. “What is my place, here, then?” Mizar asked. That’s what had been bothering him ever since they hit Calgary. There seemed to be no place for someone like him in this ‘civilized’ world.

  “You don’t remember anything from before your transformation?” Van asked.

  Mizar shook his head.

  “I’ve talked to other Chimeras. The Nobles. Most don’t remember anything of their past, but that can’t be fully true. They don’t need to relearn everything. I think there are pieces of your former life hidden in your mind.” Van paused, but Mizar didn’t respond. He motioned for the strange and strangely fearless man to continue. Even his family didn’t talk to him this way. “Take some time and just wander around some cities. Downtown San Francisco is a good place to wander. There are things that are going to be familiar that you never expected. Things of beauty you’ve never imagined before.”

  “Perhaps,” Mizar said. Beauty, to him, was snow blowing off distant mountain peaks. The aurora overhead on a clear night. Not this dank cesspool.

  He did have at least some responsibility to learn, though.

  Henry Zielinski (3/16/73 – 3/17/73)

  He awoke to find a warm female body beside him. Wait a moment. Warm, female and furry?

  “Yikes!”

  “Calm down, dammit. You’ll wake half the house. So the Madonna’s found a way to tap into your head as well?” Carol. The voice was Carol’s sensual soprano, but the body wasn’t. In the dim light, she actually looked beautiful.

  “I’ll pretend you never thought that,” Carol said, gently putting her right leg over his body. He had been sleeping on his back. “Mmmm, it is nice to cuddle up next to you. Where did you get that tag from, anyway? You’re adorable, especially now with your hair all turned white…”

  Shit shit shit! And an erection!

  “Uh, Carol, Stacy designed the tag. Think before acting,” Hank said, as sternly as he could, borrowing charisma from three Focuses and two Arms, including the one in front of him. He knew exactly where this was about to go, and he didn’t want it to go there. Despite what his body was urging. Carol would never think of him in the same way again. Never treat him the same way again.

  “Keaton, eh?” She slipped her hand inside his pajamas, and ran her warm hand along his chest. Slowly licked the curve of his ear. Hell, he had hit her with enough charisma to freeze a powerful Focus in place, and Carol didn’t even react. Unbelievably, she was stronger than before she left.

  “Commander, this was supposed to be a tag of a trusted Transform subordinate leader. Not a trusted Transform subordinate leader who sleeps with his boss.” Somewhere, Keaton had to be howling in laughter…

  “Oh, I’ll bet,” Carol said. “Keaton still likes to put her own twist on things, and she rarely makes mistakes. So you’re a Transform leader now, eh? Lead me…”

  “You regrew your fur?” Hank asked. Carol’s last comment had to be a joke. How did he get out of this one alive? Of all the stupid idiotic crazy chaotic things…

  “The fur seemed appropriate at the time,” Carol said, in a killer bedroom voice. “So what’s this big discovery you have for me?”

  “I was going to present it to you and Lori at the same time, because I know you’re both interested…”

  “I’ll say she’s interested. She’s off making babies with Mizar, and it’s very distract…”

  “Who?”

  “Mizar. Beast.”

  Lori had mentioned the name, hadn’t she. “Help!” He pulled on her tag, just as he would if he were under attack.

  Carol rubbed his bald spot, just as Dowling had. “You win,” she said, then after a pause. “This time. I kind of like you sexy, so I think I’ll leave the tag just like it is.”

  Then there was nobody in the bed next to him.

  Yes, Carol was back, no doubt about that.

  ---

  “So do normal mortals get to understand this, or is it reserved for the high priesthood of science?” Sky said. Now Hank had all four of them in the lab with him, five if you counted the immensely beautiful Monster who answered to the name of Nora.

  Mizar laughed. Hank was sure the Chimera’s voice would bring the fire brigade, but even at Mizar’s volume, whatever Carol’s family was using to shield from snoops right now held just fine. Carol and crew had succeeded in bringing Mizar back to humanity, though Hank wondered about Mizar’s intellect. For a Chimera, Mizar seemed mild and old.

  “I thought it was perfectly understandable,” Hank said. “Even for someone of your education level, Sky.”

  More laughter from Mizar, from his spot seated on top of Hank’s laboratory table. “He’s almost as good as Van,” he said, and turned to Lori, who was seated at Hank’s desk and flipping through the report. “So, can we take this medical wizard with us? I sort of understand why we can’t take Van, but this Transform here already smells like family, he’s not married to any Focuses, and he’s one of these screwy advanced Transforms who can borrow our tricks.”

  “You’re right. Hank is one of ours,” Carol said with a smile, and elbowed Hank in the ribs. Lightly. “We’ll collect him later when we don’t have a war on. Right now, he’s about as safe as is possible for him to be, stuck in the middle of Inferno.”

  He had already told them about the Madonna’s warning, but not about Madame Sophia, and he certainly hadn’t told them about the Magician tarot card she used to represent him. Medical wizard sounded too close for comfort.

  Of Mizar, there was no doubt that his card was The Emperor.

  “Let me try again,” Sky said. “What does this gobbledygook actually mean? Besides luring our most gracious lady into a corner of the room to pour over your paper that’s on its way to being published in the Journal of Unpronounceable Chemistry.”

  Hank smiled, and tried to ignore the churning in his stomach. Too much power haunted the room, and he hadn’t had nearly enough time to learn to cope.

  “About a year ago, an unknown someone dropped me a hint that I should look into Arm Billington’s racial alterations. I did so, and after considerable work, I figured out what’s going on, how all Transforms alter their shapes.”

  “Yawn,” Sky said. “Old knowledge. I’ll bet you even have, somewhere in that mess, the obvious. The maximum rate of change is proportional to one’s juice count, save for Chimeras.”

  Worth strangling, Sky was. Hank had used most of his free time from the juice music project last fall to figure out that bit of data. “The how is what’s important. As I’m sure you already know, Chimeras use anything they can get their hands on when they change, including external genetic sources, and Monsters and the other Major Transforms can activate so-called ‘junk DNA’ that lies dormant in their genetic code in the presence of élan. The rest of us Transforms are limited to use of our normal genes, but what I’ve discovered is that juice, by itself, can reactivate genes that are normally only active during the ontogenetic…”

  “Translate, please?” Sk
y said.

  “Active when one is growing from a fertilized egg into an adult.”

  “Finally.” Sky rubbed his chin. “What controls this?”

  “Absent training, one’s subconscious and the environment one is interacting with. I believe there may even be a normal human analog to this; you’ve heard my commentary about Aleut kayak rowers and differential upper body bone mass.” He paused. “It is, Carol, as you feared, a potential weapon. A juice-using enemy skilled at manipulating the subconscious, such as a Crow shaman, could use this on a captive to make a person quite a bit physically different. If they had access to élan, they could make the alterations very quickly.”

  Carol leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “Edge-of-Monster imprinting, then, the opposite of withdrawal imprinting. We were using that on ourselves up north, and this is the theory behind it.”

  “And because it’s using only normal genes,” Mizar said, “that’s why we found that edge-of-Monster imprinting has access to a more limited subset of the Transform morphospace than Monsters and Chimeras can use.”

  “Uh, right,” Hank said. Mizar? Mizar followed his presentation? Hot damn. He caught himself staring at Mizar, and Mizar, of all things, winked at him. Uh huh, Mizar was one of the good ones. No need to worry about Mizar not being able to keep up with the rest of the Commander’s quadrature. Yes, Hank wanted to befriend Mizar, talk to him, learn from him if Mizar was willing to teach. He made a mental note to himself to introduce Mizar to Dr. Bob Masterson and the rest of the Bob’s Barn crew as quickly as possible. He would be a perfect fit with them.

  His woolgathering was interrupted when he saw the Monster, Nora, pad over to Lori and start reading his paper over Lori’s shoulder. After she took in a few lines, she flashed him a look of mild annoyance that he recognized as Arm predator.

  “She’s an Arm?” Hank said.

  “Monster Arm,” Sky said. “Too much élan. She was thinking perhaps you might have some insight into…”

  Hank shook his head. “Not any time soon. Arm plus real Monster is something else entirely, I’m afraid.”

  ---

  “What I want to know, sir, is how you did it,” Mizar said. The imposing Chimera had gotten permission from Carol to talk to Hank alone, in Hank’s lab. Mizar carefully perched himself on one of Hank’s two lab stools. It creaked ominously under Mizar’s weight. Hank sat on the other one. “Juice music, that is.”

  Hank remained unclear about what Mizar wanted, so he started the story with the assassination attempt on Lori, and Lori’s giddy interactions with him during her recovery. How she, temporarily less guarded than normal, had helped him find the core idea behind juice music, that juice patterns involved modulated pulses of juice fractions, and that an investigator should be able to identify them, then figure out how a Focus used them in her juice patterns. He detailed his early work on the subject and the validation of his idea with the discovery of the first five active juice fractions in juice patterns, following on the work of Dr. Harvey Littleside, the discoverer of active juice fractions.

  “There,” Mizar said. “Him.”

  Hank stopped his story and turned to Mizar. “You recognize the name from your days as Beast?”

  “No. It shivers my juice and my memories, though.” Mizar rumbled, something accompanied with a juice or élan activity. Hank found himself rolling away, involuntarily. “This Dr. Littleside, was he assassinated?”

  “Yes. At the orders of the ruling cadre of the first Focuses, using the recently transformed Arm Bass as their weapon of choice. Or so we thought. Were we mistaken?”

  “I don’t know,” Mizar said. “Let me think and remember. My memories of those days aren’t exactly verbal.” Mizar closed his eyes for but a moment. “Oh. Yes. A darker aspect of the Aurora, who Lori refers to as the ‘Predecessors’, thought Dr. Littleside was a threat to them, and pushed the Guardian – uh, The Man – into passing the threat on to his primary contact among the first Focuses, the one who used to live in the American northwest.”

  “Fingleman. His contact was Focus Fingleman?” Hank closed his eyes in response, as this information hurt him at the juice level. “Do you have any idea why he was a threat, sir?”

  “Yes, Dr. Zielinski.” Mizar chuckled. “You, of all people, have no need to call me ‘sir’. You rank me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You rank me in all three of the axes of interpersonal Transform linkages I have not yet acquired names for.” Hank grabbed his closest notebook and began writing down Mizar’s words as he spoke them. “They are beyond tags, the superorganism and affinity, but exist at a level of subtlety that the ones you know about do not share. As best as I can state it, the local Major Transforms hold you dear in their hearts. It’s why you can hold that strange dream-thing in your mind.”

  Hank froze. “You can detect the corpse pile image? I thought the Madonna put it there.”

  “She exploited something that was already present, always her best trick,” Mizar said, and smiled. “Dr. Littleside discovered something about élan that terrified him. Unfortunately, the information he discovered didn’t die with him. Or someone else has discovered it independently. And others have discovered how to exploit it to harm others, causing the darker aspects of the Aurora to exult and the lighter aspects to worry.”

  Hank looked up from his writing, kicking himself, mentally. He should have expected Mizar to come with mental libraries of confounding mysteries. Annie certainly did, as did Sky and Armenigar. “If you want, I can continue with my story. There’s more, and…”

  “Later,” Mizar said. “Do you have samples of the juice fractions involved in juice music hanging around here? Something I could metasense?”

  He shook his head. “I lost possession of them when Gail took Littleside – my former research establishment – from me. I have no idea if they survived the destruction of Littleside.”

  Mizar growled and gripped the edge of the table in front of him, hard. The table creaked. “Buried in one of the overly long reports Carol ordered me to read was a comment that the Hunters spent a bunch of effort finding where the Littleside researchers stashed their research materials after they took Chicago. After the Cause retook Chicago, the researchers found their, uh, how did they put it. Oh, yes. They found that one of their ‘rented storage spaces’ had been vandalized, their machines of research destroyed, and their paper materials and other accoutrements stolen.”

  “Stolen?” Hank said. “That’s strange. Hunters are more into wanton destruction than theft. I would have expected them to torch any storage facilities they found.”

  “I doubt any Hunter Chimeras were involved,” Mizar said. “That piece of the report sounded far too much like another report Carol made me read, about Arm Bass’s looting spree after Focus Patterson took Arm Keaton captive. I suspect she’s the one behind this.”

  Hank nodded. “What’s she after?”

  “Planned destruction,” Mizar said. “Chaos and calamity. There’s more going on in this Hunter war what we realize. Perhaps we can figure out what it is, Dr. Zielinski, and find a way to put it into words. I need more words. I need more of your ‘science’.”

  “If we’re going to be working together, you should call me ‘Hank’,” Hank said. He shivered, remembering Madame Sophia’s prediction of him as the Emperor’s Magician.

  Mizar nodded. “Yes. Hank. I do expect we’re going to be spending a lot of time together. There’s a lot we can teach each other. For instance, many of the aspects of the Auroras appear to be supernatural in origin. I now believe they’re not, and I would love to get a scientific explanation for them. In addition, you don’t appear to know about some of the other rarer forms of Transforms, such as the more ancient Monsters.”

  “We have heard rumors of hundreds of year old Monsters,” Hank said. “Just rumors, though.”

  “They’re much more than rumors,” Mizar said. “And very important. I believe that in them lies the darkness of the
aspect of the Auroras you know of as the Predecessors.”

  “Interesting,” Hank said. “Would you mind if I told you a slightly long story? It relates to what you’ve just told me.”

  “Not at all, not at all.”

  Hank told Mizar about what happened in Focus Webb’s household, ending with the suicide of the ‘Predecessors’ faction, including the normals. He segued from that into his and Ann’s discovery of instinctive superorganism uses, and how Focus Fingleman’s household gained them.

  “No, no, no. That isn’t a path any of us want to follow, not if there’s another way,” Mizar said.

  Hank’s eyebrows shot up. “Even dealing in such a way with the Progenitor ‘faction’?”

  “Yes, but not because of their dark nature, but because Transform Sickness itself has changed,” Mizar said. “Modern Transforms aren’t the same as the ancient ones.” Hank frowned, surprised. “You didn’t know this? Interesting. Consider, as one example, your Focus Fingleman.”

  “She’s not mine, thank the Lord,” Hank said. Mizar laughed and clapped him on the shoulder, nearly sending him flying off his stool.

  “The idea that the ancient northern First Peoples Focuses would tend toward fat feels right. Consider their lives,” Mizar said. “Those long winters. No real agriculture. It really was feast or famine for them, and big fat Focuses would be a good thing, and the ones best suited for survival would be the biggest and fattest of them. What I’m saying is that I think she got infected by the ways of the juice of the Predecessors.”

  Hank nodded. “Their ways are not our ways. They’re good as examples, but emulating them would be as wrong as us attempting to emulate the Kalahari Bushmen.”

  “Exactly,” Mizar said.

  Hank nodded again. A little red flag went off in his mind, the ‘you are being influenced by Major Transform charisma’ flag. Mizar was just as bad as all the others.