An Age Without A Name

by Randall Farmer

  Last, and certainly not least, was the fact that even with our best Transform capabilities, we still managed only a thirty percent survival rate from Transform Sickness. The Cause remained unfulfilled. We needed to increase the survival rate, and to support the research on the subject, I needed to get Littleside back in business. My career wasn’t over, just the Madonna’s nameless age.

  I healed, I cadged juice, and I healed some more.

  It took me four hours to realize Mizar had vanished from my metasense.

  ---

  A day and a half later, I found Mizar in the hills above the Stone Point Winery. He curled up underneath a young bush, in an area that still bore scars from some wildfire, a year or two ago. He pretended to be asleep, but not very successfully. In his mind he thought dark thoughts, still wondering if civilization deserved saving. I settled down on the ground about five feet away from him.

  He was an attractive man. The threads of gray in his pale hair made him look distinguished, and I liked the line of green that he managed to retain. Sky had walked him through to his current form, the same way Sky carefully led me to mine.

  Sky had good taste.

  Mizar gave up on the pretensions of sleep and glared at me through slitted eyes. I felt a sudden, driving urge to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. I was miserable, restless, achingly sad, and terribly out of place. I didn’t know whether I wanted to cry, or to kill someone, but what I wanted most was to run, just run and never come back.

  Mizar wanted to get rid of me. The responsibility of being the boss Hunter and Emperor of all Chimeras weighed heavily upon him, and he remained as self-centered a savage beast as his responsibilities would allow. At best, he tolerated me and our Transform society. At worst, he would rather enslave me and sit back and watch as the world burned from the Transform Apocalypse.

  We had made a start at figuring out how to live with each other. A good start, but no more. I suspected that working out our remaining issues with each other would be at least as difficult as all the work we had done so far, and wondered if we would ever succeed. I still struggled to forgive him for what he had done to me up in the Yukon. I guessed he nurtured corresponding issues about me.

  So, diplomacy.

  “Steak?” I said, pulling a brown paper bag out of my canvas sack, and then pulling a piece of raw deer meat out of the bag. The meat was fresh enough to still be warm, and more, the piece was large. Mizar’s stomach rumbled. He snarled, but he took the steak. I fished another one just like it out of the sack, and started cutting small bites off it with my knife. Popped them into my mouth.

  Mizar didn’t bother with the knife. He tore chunks out with his teeth. Or fangs, really. He kept a good set of tearing teeth, even in his human form.

  We ate in companionable silence, and listened to the birds chirp in the early evening coolness. It would be April in a couple of days. This hill would be beautiful with new growth soon. As we ate, I felt the misery and driving desire to flee fade away from me.

  “You know, I was thinking,” I said, licking up a runnel of blood trailing down my forearm. “You’ve got this new responsibility for all the former Hunters, which means there are a bunch of former Hunters still wearing the Law that we’re going to have to track down. The last thing we need is to let them sit out there waiting for the next Crow or Chimera crazy enough to reactivate the empire-building parts of the Law and cause us grief.” We had lucked out with Emperor Caveworm and hopefully learned our lesson from our failure to hunt down Enkidu after the Detroit fight so long ago. The Law needed to be eradicated, down to the last addled Gal. “I figure they’re probably scattered all over the mountain west. It’s going to take us weeks, hiking all over the mountains tracking them down.” I would have to take occasional breaks, to see to Chicago and my other business, but that was a detail, and eminently solvable. Other responsibilities called to me: the rebel Focuses, Bass, and the Man. I would assign the problem to Tonya, Haggerty and Gail, in that order, and give them all the resources they needed. The Law, though? We needed to wipe that out now.

  Mizar sighed, as the call of responsibility took hold. It was a comfortable sigh, accepting an old, familiar weight.

  “I hear the mountains are beautiful this time of year,” I said.

  Mizar looked at me and frowned, as he considered my words, then raised an eyebrow. “Weeks, you think?”

  I nodded. “Almost certainly. And it will work a lot better if we have Lori and Sky and our pack with us, too.”

  He nodded thoughtfully, and then looked me over carefully. I felt a warm rising of lust tingling along my skin.

  I cocked an eyebrow at him and leaned backwards on my elbows, extending one long leg out, and throwing my chest forward. It wasn’t a bad chest these days, still full and round from nursing baby Doran. I licked the blood from my lips, long and slow, and smiled.

  The full force of Mizar’s lust came washing over me, and I was suddenly so hot I burned. Oh, but not as hot as I wanted to be. Mizar merely passed back his own lust, but I wanted more. I stalked him with my best predatory seduction, loose-limbed and fluid. I carefully licked the blood from his face, and from where it had dribbled on his chest.

  Then the real heat came, a burning hot enough to warm the world.

  That evening, as we lay under the silent stars, I did something new. The third time, in a night that included many, when the rushing white fluid filled me and I screamed in ecstasy that was the next best thing to killing, I let that tiny wave of life through.

  It was a funny thing, that life could come from such avatars of death. But, though I remained a predator, I also remained a woman, and so could bear life. Though he remained a beast, he also remained a man and could plant the seed. However murderous, however beastly, however predatory we became, there was only so far we could change. When everything was all said and done, we remained human, and we could make a human child, a new responsibility for the both of us. A human child to teach, as Van would say, about the myriad tiny things that make up civilization.

  It was a silly thing to do, deciding to make a baby, but then, hope always is. I laughed as I held Mizar’s warm body in my arms. He looked at me, wondering, but I just shook my head. Later, I would tell him. Not now. Now, there had only been three times, and that wasn’t nearly enough.

  There was room for hope. Amid all the war, and death, and madness, there was good sex, people to love, and new life to create. Who can ask for more than that?

  Afterward

  It is not magic, or it is all that magic is and ever was. Don’t discount the Transform Tarot because you don’t understand how everyone’s dreams can end up in the shuffling of a deck of cards.

  “The Transform Tarot”

  (Madame Sophia, Countess Leoni, San Jose Barony, Stone Point Principality, 1976, UFA Internal Resources Document 717)

  Congratulations! I hope you’re enjoying my memoirs so far. The ‘end of the beginning’, indeed. Sort of appalling, isn’t it?

  (Carol Hancock, In Deep Deep Shit As Always, Nowhere I’m Going To Be Telling You, 19xx)

  To be continued in

  Go Gaily In The Dark

  (The Second Chronicles of the Cause)

  Fiction By This Author

  Transforms Universe:

  The Commander Series Novels

  Once We Were Human

  Now We Are Monsters

  All Beasts Together

  A Method Truly Sublime

  No Sorrow Like Separation

  In This Night We Own

  All That We Are

  The supplementary Commander Series Stories:

  The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio One

  All Conscience Fled (The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Two)

  The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Three

  The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Four

  The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Five

  The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Six

  No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Seve
n)

  The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Eight

  The Good Doctor’s Tales Folio Nine

  Focus

  The Cause Series Novels

  The Shadow of the Progenitors

  Love and Darkness

  The Forgefires of God

  Beasts Ascendant (The First Chronicle of the Cause)

  No Small Dreams

  An Age Without A Name

  Go Gaily In The Dark (The Second Chronicle of the Cause) (coming in early 2018)

  Indigo Universe:

  Storybook Crazy

  99 Gods Trilogy Novels

  War

  Betrayer

  Odysseia

  99 Gods Trilogy Supplementary Stories

  Tales From The Anime Café (Part One)

  Tales From The Anime Café (Part Two)

  Author’s Afterword

  Thanks to Randy and Margaret Scheers, Michelle and Karl Stembol, Gary and Judy Williams, Alex Farmer, and as always my wife, Marjorie Farmer. Without their help this novel would have never been made.

  The cover shows us Arm Delores Sokolnik and Crow Guru Arête marked by the Law. Credit for the aurora goes to Joshua Strang via Wikimedia Commons, and the Brooklyn Museum via Wikimedia Commons for the spear. Corkscrew and infinity sign from Wikimedia Commons (Nadina Wiórkiewicz and Murielle Robert, respectively). The rest is from Shutterstock.

  If you enjoyed this book, you can find out further information about the Cause series, the background mythos of the Transforms universe, and about other fiction, on http://majortransform.com. Try the Author’s Facebook page for news and comments (www.facebook.com/pages/Randall-Allen-Farmer/106603522801212). Interesting and helpful comments are encouraged. Tell your friends. Post reviews.

  Provisional future publishing schedule:

  Go Gaily In The Dark (the Second Chronicle of the Cause) (early 2018)

  Blood’s Shadow (Book 6 of the Cause) (late 2018)

  …and 2 more Cause novels to come, later

  Randall Allen Farmer