Beasts Ascendant: The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts One and Two

by Randall Farmer

  “Try being an Arm. It’s worse.”

  I thought about Betsy Wetsy and her lack of control. “A high school friend spent his junior summer working with a circus as a shit shoveler. He said he learned things he didn’t want to. I pushed a little, and he basically coughed up that the equivalent of tapping a puppy on the backside during potty training, for large circus animals, involves immense violence because elephants and whatnot are so huge. If, um, the first name starts with a B and the last with a W and my instincts say that it would be impolite for me to say, that Arm…”

  Haggerty sighed. “It’s okay, Dan. Go ahead and say her name. Everyone else calls her Betsy Wetsy, you might as well, too.”

  “Uh, but only Arms have used that name, so far.”

  “Damn,” Haggerty said. She stopped and thought. “You’re picking up on our group identity politics by instinct?” She smiled a lusty smile, and I had to grip the steering wheel hard to keep from reacting incorrectly. “Oh, I’m going to get a reward from Focus Rizzari that even I’m not going to believe…” Lusty sigh from Haggerty. Tightly gripped steering wheel from me. “Perhaps enough so she’ll tell me what I need to do next on this crazy quest.”

  Forget the Goldilocks name. We’re Courtiers. We weren’t pointless nulls, but extra-special types with near-unique abilities. I wondered how I would ever get the name changed, though.

  “May I ask a touchy question, ma’am?” I fought the draft of one giant truck while creeping past it on the tail of another. I still nurtured hope that I would break through this extended cluster of trucks into clear freeway, but the hope was fading fast.

  Haggerty rolled her eyes. “Go ahead, Private Freeman.”

  Now she was making me all warm and cuddly. Great. Transforms were instinct driven. I could just watch these damned things taking me over and moving me around like a chess piece. How long did it take to be able to react in some way other than by instinct? Later. “I’m curious, and I would like to understand what was going on with Focus Rickenbach and Focus Mann. I had no idea that the Focuses worked with the Arms, and Ma’am Keaton’s relationship with Focus Rickenbach was about the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.” My instincts told me that you obeyed Focuses, but were they reacting to Focus Rickenbach as a person or Focuses in general? And what’s with the fact that Gail was married? Or the hidden Crow?

  I dialed back the explosive mind chatter by sheer willpower. A little.

  “Focus Mann is, or was, a close companion of Keaton. Keaton thinks of all the Focuses in her city as ‘her Focuses’, but Focus Mann really is hers. I was still a student Arm when that dance started. Keaton’s in control of the relationship, but Focus Mann also possesses a legitimate claim on Keaton, and as far as I can tell they’re deeply tied to each other at the juice level.

  “Focus Rickenbach has an entirely different relationship with Keaton, one Carol and I share with her. Focus Rickenbach’s the future; she possesses the intelligence, raw juice strength, immense charisma and appalling political skills to be a leading Focus someday, if not the top Focus. We’re helping her because we want to be on good terms with her, long term. We’re also giving her enough help to keep her and her household from turning themselves into twisted sadistic monsters, of which there are far too many among the Focuses and their households – but not so much help that she doesn’t develop her own strengths.

  “Focus Mann’s troubles started last summer, when a bunch of young Focuses started sneering at any Focus who got monetary help from the Arms as ‘Arm pets’. It was a very strange movement; it started in Denver after some unknowns stripped Focus Pinky Rone’s assets from her and Arm Naylor, her new friend, stepped in to help. After the Denver Focuses turned on her, Pinky got political help from her real Focus friends and staged a big political fight in the West Region…and you have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “Sorry, no.” Amy explained how Focus politics worked, with their national council, the four regions – East, Midwest, South and West – the regional councils and regional presidents, and how a secretive group of old retired Focuses, called the ‘ruling first Focuses’, ran everything from behind the scenes. In the meantime, I finally broke free of this pack of trucks and enjoyed an entire 200 yards of clear freeway before encountering the next clump of traffic. I wondered why the government here even bothered with speed limit signs.

  “Pinky ended up moving to Houston, and she and her biggest ally, another successful Focus named Thelma Laswell, beat the tar out of the young Focuses who tried to shun Pinky. Politically, that is. By then, the ‘arm Pet’ shunning movement had gone national and rabid, tarring any Focus who even chatted with an Arm on a regular basis as an ‘arm Pet’, and had garnered some Focus Council support, even from some Focuses who should know better. Focus Mann got hit the worst, as she was on Keaton’s payroll. Keaton wasn’t donating money, she was hiring Focus Mann for guard duty and help in training student Arms, but Mann still got hit.”

  I did wonder how anyone other than an Arm could help train an uncontrolled student Arm. Then I thought about Gail and what she had done to Nancy, and didn’t bother with my question.

  “Several Focuses won the respect and hearts of the Arms by defending the afflicted Focuses. In the East Region the Focus Council President herself, Focus Keistermann, took the lead on this. In the Midwest Region Focus Rickenbach, despite her junior status, took up the cause. Then Arm Hancock pulled the rug out from under all the Focuses by starting up the ‘Lucy Peoples Fund’, to help all young indigent Focuses. She announced it at the Focus Council meeting last August, and that, we thought, was that.”

  “The baddies turned it into a whispering campaign,” I said. Amy nodded. Some idiot in a Camaro decided to ride my bumper, as if that might persuade me to go faster. He was probably just as frustrated with the traffic as me, but taking his frustrations out on me wouldn’t help any. I slowed down, enough to annoy him but not enough to give him room to pass me. Idiot.

  “I don’t want to be in their shoes now,” Amy said. “They messed with an Arm’s possession, and Arm Keaton isn’t one to take such things lightly.”

  “You don’t like Arm Keaton,” I said, dialing back on my real observation. ‘Don’t like’ was too mild a phrase, by far.

  She smiled at me, catching what I wasn’t saying. “She’s the seniormost Arm. What’s not to like?” Amy and I eyed each other. “Okay, she’s too violent for my tastes. She’s not the worst – someday, I’ll tell you what I’ve learned about Arm Bass, one of the ones you didn’t meet. The real problem, though, is that when Keaton’s around, I get all the shit jobs.”

  I bit my lip, took a deep breath, and hit the brakes to avoid running into a gear-grinding behemoth having trouble going up a hill. There was a part of me exhilarated by all this talk with an Arm, a beautiful Arm at that. There was another that wanted to run and hide. Logically, this run and hide stuff was bullshit. In for a penny, in for a pound, and all that. I’ll bet new Transforms of all stripes came equipped with the shiver and quiver reflexes and instincts. Good survival stuff.

  Not worth beans on the goddamned 401. According to the road sign, only 35 kilometers to London. I wondered if I would hold out that far.

  “But why did you think I might be a problem? I mean, couldn’t you tell I wasn’t a Major Transform?”

  “Let me tell you a secret,” she said, cuddling up to me and breathing in my ear like a talented professional. I figured it out. She was going to cock-tease me to death, since she had made a deal with herself to avoid the more intimate – and rough – stuff. She would save the physical roughness until after this Focus Rizzari checked me out. There was a tickle of memory about that name, something about a big fight in Illinois and Minnesota six months or so ago. Lady Death was one of the combatants, and if I remembered correctly her real name was Rizzari. Supposedly, she was the most terrifying Focus on the planet.

  Great. The Arms were giving me to Lady Death to be an experimental subject. I would withhold judgm
ent until I met Rizzari, considering absolutely nothing I understood about Transforms from the useless media had proven correct, yet.

  “Some Major Transforms can disguise themselves as other Transforms,” Amy said. “For all I know, you could still be a Major Transform in disguise. Metasense identification isn’t my strength. Hancock and our Crow friends, though, vouched for you, and that’s good enough for me.” She planted a hot kiss on my cheek and slid back far away.

  “You have a Crow friend yourself,” I said, the words just slipping out as I read between her words.

  “Tiamat was right. You should have given him to the Clumsy Angel. Permanently. Those two deserve each other.”

  The voice came from the back seat. A Crow. Mid-south black, tall, but what man wasn’t taller than I was? I glanced again and saw nothing, though I could place him by the way Nancy’s legs curled. The Crow masked his comment from me, but I heard it anyway. Daaamn.

  “If you’re interested,” Amy said, her voice changed again, now like a female radio personality news-reader. “What you feel like to me is a woman Transform stripped down as low as she can go.”

  “What do you think of replacing the name ‘Goldilocks’ with ‘Courtier’?” I asked. “I would swear all the extra stuff I’m learning I can do is better suited for being a diplomacy specialist.”

  Haggerty laughed. “Anything is better than Goldilocks. Calling yourselves Dog Pies would be better than Goldilocks.” I sensed something change in her, some sort of internal state change. Except Hancock said it wasn’t a sense, but something else. “Ambassadors! Damn, if there were enough of you Courtiers, you would solve a ton of problems we Arms have with the other Major Transforms. We need ambassadors. There should be dozens of Transforms like you, going around and spreading your good cheer, looking utterly defenseless and talking.”

  “There’s only me. The rest of the Goldilocks supposedly don’t get any of these skills.”

  “At least not right after they Transform. And save for my hypothesized ultrapowerful unknown enemy, who can do what you can do plus a few tricks beyond what any Major Transform can do.”

  “Unless you’re facing more than one ultrapowerful unknown enemy.”

  “Smart, too,” she said.

  “Tell that to my high school teachers, Amy,” I said. Though the Army had graded me out as smarter than I imagined.

  “Lack of education can be fixed.” She paused and then turned to me with yet another voice and personality. “Stop the car! Now! Onto the shoulder!”

  I did so with a cheery “Yes, ma’am.”

  She turned to me, all paranoid like, and dragged me out of the car on her side, facing the traffic, looking back the way we came. I breathed thick diesel exhaust and heard the Crow crunching gravel behind us. Nancy stopped snoring, muttered a ‘fuck’, a ‘damn’, and a ‘motherfucking beasts’.

  A couple of hitchhikers were jogging up to us along the shoulder, from about a thousand feet away. Amy put me behind her, and diminished. Or something. She had the appearance or feel of a normal, now. Or at least an utterly wimpy Arm, as bad as Betsy Wetsy.

  The two hitchhikers were a man and a woman, both moving like professional athletes. The man had the heft of a professional football player, some sort of lineman or linebacker. He was built. Man, was he built. The woman looked rather normal, until I noticed her musculature. Another Arm? She didn’t radiate Arm aggressiveness. What was she? I couldn’t tell.

  “Stay calm,” Haggerty said. That’s funny. I was calm. I guessed Haggerty and her Crow weren’t.

  “Hello,” the man said. What a voice. Eighty feet away and you could hear him over the grinding gears of the eighteen wheelers. “I’m Sir Kevin of the North Wind household.” He was a Chimera! One of the Nobles, or else I would be in the middle of a fight. “Arm Haggerty, it’s nice to meet you again.”

  “We’ve met?” she said. “Oh. You. You were a gorilla, then.”

  Sir Kevin did have a rather caveman aura. His nose needed resetting or something. Broken too many times. He had about the blondest hair I had seen in years.

  “Uh huh, that’s me in my fighting form.” He paused. “Hey there, Midgard! Still following around Arms instead of learning a real trade and becoming a Crow Master?”

  “Your grace,” the Crow said. I glanced behind me at, still, absolutely nothing.

  “If I may ask, Sir Kevin, why were you hitchhiking?” Amy asked.

  “We were waiting for you. The quest, you know.” I winced and balled my fists in annoyance. My reaction didn’t stop Lord Kevin from continuing with “Master Icestorm found out while he was meditating that he needed to send me or you would have driven by.” Pause. “Oh, hi there, Nancy! Given what you said to Crow Nameless, I’m surprised you’re here.”

  Nancy came up from the car and leaned on the invisible Crow, blinking and still woozy from sleep. “I’m apparently enough of a target to get one Focus’s place burnt down around me, captured by another Focus and terrorized by a pack of Arms. So, how’s your day going?” With Nancy leaning up against the Crow, I could almost see him, but not quite.

  Arm Haggerty turned to the woman. “Cindy.”

  “Ma’am.”

  “You’re here voluntarily?”

  “More or less.”

  “The voices in your head? They told you you needed to go on a quest with us?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Where?”

  “North, ma’am,” Cindy said, in a grating nasal voice. Cindy did have Arm musculature and grace of movement, but she also, up close, radiated a duplicate of the skittish nature of Arm Haggerty’s Crow companion. Another Sport. Strange quest we were on.

  “It appears we’re going north.” Arm Haggerty paused. “So, is Dan here going with us, Cindy, or do you think something else is involved?”

  Cindy walked toward us, then specifically toward me. “Boo!” she said, using the Arm’s projective emotion trick. I twitched.

  “A Goldilocks,” Cindy said. “With tricks. But not ‘the old man’.” She poked me, quickly, in several places, the last a poke in the privates. She smiled at me. “Definitely a young man. He’s going with.” She had brown eyes and blonde hair, but up close I could tell her hair was a wig. Her straight black eyebrows attracted my attention. They were quills.

  “I’m not even two months past my transformation,” I said. “I should be in basic Transform training, not out on a quest with a bunch of mature Major Transforms.” I backed away from Cindy and turned to Amy. “This makes no sense to me at all, ma’am.”

  “Let me help, kindly Goldilocks,” Lord Kevin said. I winced. “Mistress Cindy Lederer suffered an induced transformation during a violent event last year.” The Kent State Massacre. I remembered the news articles blaming the National Guard for her induced transformation. “Mistress Cindy shares many of the skills of the Crows and the Arms, as well as unique abilities that make her the one and only Sensitive. She lives in hiding in the Burg of Fog, a Noble household in northwest Pennsylvania. One day last summer a mystic Crow by the name of Nameless stumbled into the Burg of Fog and proclaimed that only Mistress Cindy and the leader of the Borealis Stonehold, Count Mensik, could save civilization by questing to find something that’s been calling Nancy for a few years. Mistress Cindy journeyed to the Borealis Stonehold, but Count Mensik refused the quest, saying he didn’t want anything to do with those ‘ancient idiots’, his words. Instead, he got in contact with me, in my nearby home in the North Wind Noble household. ‘Lord Kevin’, he said. ‘Take on this quest and succeed and you’ll earn the right to a higher Noble rank.’ I agreed, and Crow Master Icestorm said that the senior Major Transform leader of the quest was on the way, and, well …”

  I began to understand Amy’s comment about needing ambassadors. Lord Kevin and Amy were from entirely different political worlds.

  “Well, here we are,” Arm Haggerty said. She shook her head. “Crow Nameless said he would help me with my quest, but I hadn’t expected this.”


  “So I’m a ‘this’, now,” Cindy said. I finally placed her accent as Long Island, muted by too many years in the Midwest. “I guess it’s better than being a ‘that’ or ‘some other thing’. The only reason Lord Kevin is here is he thinks we’re going to end up fighting impossible things. He likes to fight.”

  She turned to me. “Pay attention, you. I know what you’re thinking, but I hate fights.” I offered my hand to her, friendly like, young Transform to young Sport. “Back off or I’ll punch your lights out,” she said.

  I backed off.

  Arm Haggerty shook her head. “So, where’s Crow Nameless? Is he waiting for us in Boston?”

  “No, he’s in Thunder Bay, gathering supplies,” Lord Kevin said. “That’s where we’re supposed to go, not Boston.”

  “Where the fuck’s Thunder Bay?” Arm Haggerty asked.

  I made the bold prediction that I would be spending a whole bunch of time cold in the next few weeks, if not months.

  Gail Rickenbach (October 12, 1971 – November 4, 1971)

  Gail took a moment to search her Dreaming garden for Arm Keaton, flitting from bush to tree to flower in her hummingbird Dreaming form. There, among a clump of dogwoods beside an ornate fountain. Keaton’s spiky hawthorn. Nine full live branches, two dead ones, and one tiny branch budding out. Gail poked her hummingbird beak into the flowers representing the Arm’s tagged underlings, and the hawthorn morphed into Keaton’s more realistic Dreaming form, the 8-armed Kali figure.

  “You graduated Betsy,” Gail signed, a tiny motion of tiny hummingbird claws.

  “That’s Arm Whetstone to you, now,” Keaton signed back, four arms moving at once, with two simultaneous conversations. “Land, dammit.”

  Oh, right. Gail landed, and by doing so her mental self-image changed to that of her real, or realer, Dreaming self. The world fuzzed in around her; her two legged self-image in the Dreaming tended to be more than a little myopic. “Better?” She didn’t want to know how Keaton perceived her in the Dreaming. What the senior Arm had taught her about the Arm perception of the Dreaming was terrifying enough.