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

by Randall Farmer

  “Major Transforms are always being blind-sided by the unknown. Are you familiar with my little problem that showed up after I learned to use my juice buffer?” Lori asked, as she put on a sweater, covering her nearly glowing baby-bulging belly.

  “The one you wouldn’t talk about?” Carol said. “Here you were, no more low juice problems, and because of that you’re now much more intelligent than everyone, including me. So you wanted to complain about how you didn’t have anyone to talk to on your level anymore, because of the juice’s games, but didn’t because you were being too polite.”

  Lori blushed. “Well, yes. You weren’t supposed to notice how bad…” Here we go again, Sky thought. Lori Rizzari, the guilt-powered Focus.

  “Give me a break,” Carol said.

  Arms. Carol especially. Sky had never known a person who encountered the world so completely as Carol did. Sky pitied the Transforms who assumed that if Carol didn’t comment on something, it meant she hadn’t noticed it. Fatal mistake.

  “My point is that we need to take advantage of those moments after being blindsided. For instance, the change gave me a few good years of research, and in them, I cracked a publishable mystery,” Lori said. “The Monster varieties are actually fourteen varieties of Major Transforms. Each of the Monster varieties, when they mature, possess a slightly different metacampus and metamygdala, each with a slightly different set of capabilities. The ape-form Monster, for instance, is the Arm precursor – they can take juice from any Transform they eat, giving them extra juice to work with. The perissodactyl-form Monster – the horsies, as I believe you Arms call them – can share juice with each other. They’re the Focus precursors. What sets the Monsters apart from the existing Major Transforms is their general inability to do anything with the juice save to heal and increase their metabolic vigor.” Yet another misnomer Sky expected to cure, and soon.

  “So you expect to find more varieties of Major Transforms?” Carol said.

  “No – the other varieties we’ve noted are more likely to be a result of secondary transformations or Chimera forms,” Lori said. “Sky disagrees.”

  Carol started to take down the tent, but looked at Sky, as did Lori. Sky sighed. Did they actually expect him to argue this point rationally? Like he was some form of white-lab-coat biologist or something.

  Almost worth creating the illusion of a white lab coat on himself.

  But not quite.

  “Then why are there three Subaru female forms, not two?” Sky asked.

  “Subaru? I didn’t think cars had sex,” Carol said.

  “The Subaru is the Japanese media term for the Japanese Major Transform varieties,” Lori said. “Subaru is just ‘Pleiades’ in Japanese. Seven stars. Seven Major Transform forms.”

  “Ah.”

  “What are the Satsujin?” Sky asked. He and Lori and Ann had argued this for hours, always a source of fertile squabbling since they always found ways to sweep up new information on the subject. “The Chushin are the Focuses and the Tamashii Suru must be the Arms.”

  “My best guess is that the Satsujin are Chimeras who’ve taken female human forms. They must channel their shapeshifting capabilities into the crafting of the élan weapons they make from their arm bones,” Lori said.

  Carol’s eyes bugged. “Arm bone weapons?” Sky could almost hear the profane invective echoing through the Arm’s mind.

  “The Satsujin grow an extra bone in their lower arms that they force through their skin when it’s fully grown,” Lori said, hefting her backpack. “This dagger bone, what they call a kogatana, is so choked with élan that when the Satsujin sticks it into a victim and detonates it – if detonate is the right word – it causes élan poisoning. Young Satsujin can kill with the kogatana, while mature Satsujin can use it to enslave people as well.”

  “I just can’t see a Beast-Man changing his gender,” Sky said. “Changing genders sounds positively unnatural.”

  “I can,” Lori said. He suspected she wanted to be male. Not that he would say any such thing, of course. “There’s such a huge cultural component to the Major Transforms that it even affects the physical forms we can take. Could you have predicted Nobles? Who knows what survival needs lay behind the development of the Satsujin? And, yes, I suspect it’s a development, not a natural form.”

  Nora walked up to Sky and rubbed herself against him. Again. He was sure the Monster Arm was making passes at him, as he was the only available man in the vicinity, and he wasn’t sure about the proper etiquette. Especially since he would need to refuse. Carol and Lori were difficult enough to deal with.

  As Nora rubbed her rear flanks against his side, Carol turned and snarled, bursting with Arm predator. Nora whimpered and cringed backwards, then lay on the ground and exposed her neck. Sky jumped. He hated when Carol turned on her predator effect without warning him.

  “He’s mine,” Carol said.

  Nora whimpered again and dipped her huge white head. Carol nodded. Well, that decided the etiquette issue, now didn’t it? He knew that Arms didn’t share Focuses with other Arms. It appeared Crows were in the same category of possessions. Arms! Nora understood, though. She walked off and stood guard as if everything was normal.

  “Lead on, Sky,” Carol said, as if the incident with Nora never occurred.

  “Eh? Should we? Even though Beast’s found a way to hide himself in the Flow?”

  Both Carol and Lori looked at him as if he had fallen off the moon. “You didn’t notice?” Sky said.

  “Skyyyyy,” they both said. Inevitable.

  “So, you think you can locate his lair, even though he’s hiding?” Lori said. Three days since Carol had hunted down the moose put them in the heart of the Mackenzies. They weren’t making anywhere near as good a time as when they followed the Mackenzie River. Yesterday, they spent the entire day going downhill. Beast lived in the heights to the northwest, on the other side of this valley, perhaps thirty kilometers away. Sky damned the U-shaped glacially carved valleys for the umpteenth time. Couldn’t the glaciers have carved something with a little less vertical in them?

  “Trust me,” Sky said. “Once we get close, even you’ll be able to smell his markings. Carol’s going to be able to pick up the stench from kilometers off. It should be another three days before we get that close, though.”

  They walked, quiet, for hours. Sky did walking zazen. Was Anne-Marie right? Was his Buddhism wrong for him, as a Crow? As a Major Transform? It had certainly caused him no small number of problems trying to fit in with Inferno. For one thing, it led him into thinking there was only one way for Transform households to work. Stupid, especially for someone who knew to doubt everything. Yet, he made the mistake anyway. Was his unwillingness to eat meat similar? Or, how about his unwillingness to kill? He wasn’t a normal human. Certainly, a Buddhist Arm would need to adjust her worldview if she was to survive. Did a Buddhist Crow? He hadn’t thought so, up until now. Yet, out here, away from urban stress, it seemed right for him to consider the question. To think on it and meditate.

  And to think on another topic: was he really a Buddhist at all? He wasn’t celibate, he didn’t spend enough time meditating, and he was the perpetual butt of virtually all the Zen koans involving arrogance. His ancestors remained unknown to him, he ignored peace as too boring, and he sought out adventure like a heroin addict. He could go on like this for hours, which irked him.

  “Gail’s not coping at all well with being the head of the Cause,” Lori said, when they slowed their pace for lunch. Lori visited the Dreaming every night.

  “Well, that wasn’t predictable,” Carol said, with a laugh. “Gee. A stubborn Focus. Never met any of those, before.”

  Lori growled. “It’s too bad we’re not there to help guide her.”

  “That’s exactly what she doesn’t need,” Sky said. “Anne-Marie’s right. Gail needs to develop her own way. Give us another viewpoint, another way of doing things. I’ll bet she’s not going to be good at taking our suggestions after w
e get back. If we get back.”

  “She wasn’t that good at taking suggestions to start with,” Carol said. “My worry is Keaton.” Stacy Keaton was the first US Arm, mean, smart, and crazy sadistic. Carol still suffered from nightmares from Keaton’s training.

  “Why?” Sky said, and chewed. Pine tree bark. Yum. His favorite. Chew it long enough and it even turned nutritious. He had Nora’s attention, as the Monster Arm couldn’t believe he could eat such things and survive. He wasn’t too sure about it, himself, actually, despite the fact he had done so before, back when. Right now, his jaw muscles ached.

  “She’s in Tonya’s hands. Tonya’s going to ruin her.”

  “Turn her into an imperious evil back-stabbing ice queen?” Sky said. “You won’t be able to tell the difference. Although, in the Flow, her imperial Kali-ness seems to have vanished.”

  “What do you see her as, now?” Lori asked.

  Lori knew too much about how he interacted in the Flow.

  “That reminds me, Lori,” Carol said. “Why can’t I see you in the Dreaming? I’d always gotten the idea, from your comments, that you were rather visible there. That is, when you’re asleep and doing things.”

  Sky snickered. Lori blushed.

  “Okay. You’re visible, but you’re doing something so I don’t recognize you, is that it?”

  Lori nodded.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t want to be impolite,” Lori said. “You’re still working on being self-aware in the Dreaming. That’s a difficult stage to deal with.”

  Carol carved some frozen moose and started chewing. Tossed another large piece of frozen moose to Nora, who caught it and gulped it in one bite. There were benefits to being furry and having a large maw.

  “Difficult? I suppose. The gestures I see are a form of communication, aren’t they?”

  “Great! Just seeing the gestures is a big step forward. Yes, it’s communication. If you want, I can teach them to you. It’s deaf signing.”

  “How does one gesture in the Dreaming, anyway?”

  “Your image in the Dreaming is under your control.”

  “I don’t see myself. I see out,” Carol said, then thought for a half minute. “Oh, crap. I’ll bet I can turn around and see myself, and use that to get my image under my conscious control. It’s annoying to know that someone like Gail is so far ahead of me in this.”

  The Arm spoke the last sentence with a quiet mutter, and gave Sky a potent insight into how she got to be the way she was. She took competitiveness to an impressive extreme – as if there was this little pull-string talking doll inside her that said ‘you must be better than everyone at everything, so fix this’ whenever someone did something she couldn’t. There had been a time when he felt glad to be a Crow around Carol, because it cut down her competitiveness…but that was before Carol insisted on Crow training. At least, so far, she was a rather lousy Crow. Just don’t quote him on that, please!

  “Don’t feel bad,” Sky said. “All of us pick up some juice tricks easier than others. Lori didn’t master the Dreaming until Polly took her on as a witch apprentice.” Polly Keistermann had been President of the Focus Council before Shirley Patterson killed her in Pittsburgh. She became Lori’s teacher after the Detroit battle. “I thought I was hot shit with what I did in the Flow until Lori pointed out the thing about communication. I would have never figured that out, on my own.” Sky scuffed the snow. “Actually, I’m not sure I’ll ever pick up communication. My part in it. I can see and listen just fine, but I’m sort of mute in the Flow.”

  The lack was rather embarrassing. Most of the other Crows could use their dross directly to power communication. His extras, his old juice structure scars, kept him from being able to do so. “You mean there’s a place where you’re not a chatterbox?” Carol said.

  Yes. Rather embarrassing.

  “You don’t see Lori because in the Dreaming and the Flow, she’s a Crow,” Sky said.

  Carol’s eyes widened, making connections. “Polaris? The nasty Crow with the raised-middle-finger attitude?” Sky had told Lori that Polaris shared too many of her speech mannerisms, but Lori just shrugged. He had identified Lori’s Crow letter writing identity, also Polaris, in a similar fashion, many years ago. Carol must have picked up Lori’s body language on Polaris, or some other hint peculiar to the Arm senses.

  Lori stared off into infinity. “Polaris gives me a way to work out my aggression without having to take it out on my household.” And be male, he noted she didn’t say. She turned to him. “So, what have you picked up on Stacy, Sky?”

  He licked his lips. “She’s not Kali any more. The last few nights, I’ve started to see her with long flowing hair, a bow, two dogs at her feet, and with a full moon behind her.”

  “Artemis?” Carol said. Sky nodded, and Carol shook her head. “Keaton as a virgin huntress? That’s going to take some getting used to.”

  “Well, I don’t think the virgin is mandatory. I think it’s more like sex only on her terms. Her abiding dislike of men is changing from one predatory form to another, from an incarnation of death to an incarnation of fatal female mysteries. The archetypical Amazon.” Sky paused. “You didn’t by any chance think that Arm Keaton, in Focus Biggioni’s hands, was going to turn pleasant, did you?”

  Carol ignored his pot shot. “This will still take some getting used to.”

  They climbed several thousand feet during the afternoon, after spending the morning trudging along a snowy valley. The next day, they climbed even more, and finally climbed above the tree line. When they packed it in for the night, they went down a few hundred feet, and found a cove of trees for shelter. Nora went off to hunt for a half hour, which didn’t bother Carol, but came back empty handed. Well, empty-mouthed. Yes, their Monster Arm liked to hunt.

  Sky woke from his dreams well before the others, and he studied his two mates – if mate was the right term – sleeping quietly. Love was insane for Major Transforms. In his real life, long ago, he would have never gotten involved with either of them. Carol wasn’t his type, and no woman as fine as Lori would have ever glanced at him twice. She: upper class and, well, repressed lesbian. Him: working man and barrel randy heterosexual.

  His dreams had been disquieting, off somehow, enough to wake him up early. Like a Focus, he knew how to enter and exit the Flow while he slept, though it took juice. As with all Crows, his natural method of seeing in the pheromone flow was via meditation. He decided he needed to meditate, but first things first. His bladder was full. He gently extracted himself from Lori’s embrace and padded out of the tent. He was acclimatizing himself to the cold again, although slowly. It only bothered him a little to be out in the subzero air in his skivvies, though walking on the frozen ground in his bare feet remained a bit excessive. He had been tougher, once.

  Nora woke from her drowsy watch, two meters in front of the tent. She just gave him an eyeball, and then shut it. Good. She hadn’t bothered him since Carol snarled at her. He walked several meters away from the tent, and let loose.

  As he turned to go back to the tent, a giant paw covered his mouth, and lifted him into the air and slung him on something’s shoulder. He almost plastered his assailant with a killer skunking, but held back when he recognized the foul and gamey stench.

  Beast.

  Kidnapped by Beast!

  Sky didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. This would complicate things. As expected.

  Especially since he was now stuck out in the Yukon winter in his skivvies.

  Carol Hancock (1/18/73 – 1/23/73)

  I awoke with a yell from a bad dream, something from my apprentice days. Keaton torturing me. My yell awoke Lori, who for some reason slept on my shoulder. Something was wrong, and we didn’t take more than an instant to figure out the problem. Both of us went into battle mode, daggers out, ready to fight, the moment we realized Sky wasn’t in the tent with us nor in our metasense range. When we got out of the tent, Nora joined us as well, p
adding along silently on huge white paws, and we scouted out the area. A heavy wet snow fell into a warm south breeze, less than an inch so far but falling heavier as we searched. That meant trouble, and I expected the wind to shift to north and start howling arctic cold at any moment.

  “The footprints end here,” I said, the first words of the morning. Sky had left the tent, barefoot and in his underwear, to pee. He did so, and vanished. He had signed his name in the snow, clearly without a care in the world. How did he vanish like this?

  “There’s something messing with my mind,” Lori said.

  I nodded in agreement. I knew ‘messing with my mind’, thank you very much, due to years of fucking experience. Lori was right. I applied juice to the problem, my normal solution. There. I found another set of footprints hiding themselves.

  “If this is one of Sky’s practical jokes, I’m going to rip his arms off,” I said.

  “Practical joke?”

  “There’s a set of hidden footprints here. I got around the metasense shields by burning juice. What I found are footprints from a giant chicken and a bipedal lizard.”

  Nora bumped her head on my shoulder, and moaned.

  “You recognize the prints?” Shit. Nora nodded. “Okay, who? Or ‘what’?” She splayed out her feet, made a fierce face, and made pelvic thrusting motions.

  “It’s Beast, Carol,” Lori said.

  Now I understood. About all I knew about Beast was that he was the source of the name ‘Chimera’, a Monster of many different animals. If the world was a literal place, Beast would sport large cloven feet, which I half expected. Goat body, lion head, serpent tail. I guessed not. Chicken feet for hind legs. Damn.

  “You’re right. Beast’s got Sky, and he’s got the advanced capabilities we were afraid of.” Beast was as old as Sky. The next oldest surviving Chimera that we knew of, Enkidu, was a peer of Gilgamesh and I. He could fight either Keaton, Haggerty or myself to a draw, but save for his combat talents and his ability to hide from our metasense, none of us understood anything about Enkidu’s other juice-based capabilities.