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

by Randall Farmer

  Metasense wardings on footprints, a hell of a good trick.

  Lori turned and vomited. Then dry heaved.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “My juice buffer’s gone bad,” she said, and heaved again. “Guess Sky had been stabilizing it, somehow.”

  I backed off from the messy blot of dross that accumulated around Lori’s hunched form. No, élan. Definitely élan, as Nora went over and began to draw some of it in. At least someone would be able to use this crap. I certainly couldn’t.

  “I severed all my remaining ties to Inferno and dropped all the tags,” Lori said, about an hour later. We had packed up and moved out, heading toward Beast’s last known lair. The snow continued to fall, and I didn’t doubt the coincidental timing of the storm and Sky’s snatch. All the mature Chimeras were ‘weather wise’, and Beast timed his attack almost perfectly. We couldn’t track him in this mess. “Tonight, we’ll talk to Gail in the Dreaming and tell her what’s happened.”

  “We’re screwed, Lori,” I said. “Without Sky, we can’t find Beast, hunting’s going to be a problem, and juice will soon be an even worse problem. I can’t draw élan from a Monster without Sky around to clean me up afterwards.” I would turn into a Monster Arm like Nora. We couldn’t try the hibernation trick either. Without him here to give instruction, any attempts along those lines would most likely end up as a disaster.

  “How long do you have?”

  Juice. I wasn’t even close to low, and I felt the damned juice hunger like an idiot baby Arm. “About three weeks, assuming I keep my juice usage to a minimum,” I said. I remained nearly full up, and I had picked up many juice use efficiencies over the years.

  “Subtracting out what I use for myself, I produce about a half point a day extra,” Lori said.

  “That’s enough to keep me going in a low juice state.” I hadn’t realized Focuses produced that much extra.

  “Unfortunately, there’s a problem,” Lori said. I didn’t answer, and waited her out. Of course there was a problem. There’s always a problem. “Setting up a draw takes a point and a half, and the juice draw wastes about sixty percent of the juice.”

  “Fuck,” I said. “I thought we had this worked out!”

  “I’m sorry,” Lori said. “Gail’s score for a Focus juice draw works, but she put it together by randomly composing juice music. We’re going to need years of refinement to make this properly efficient.”

  I should have known. That’s what I get for being too wrapped up in a war for my soul and the fate of the nation’s Transforms when Gail’s development went by. I gave Lori a hug, which surprised her out of her sudden defensiveness. “I’m not blaming either you or Gail. That either of you can do this at all is a miracle. We’ll just need to make do.”

  We walked for a while longer, fighting the cold and thinking our own grim thoughts. Sky’s blasé comment about me being able to trivially find Beast by scent once I got close wasn’t close to accurate. Not if Beast could mask his scent well enough to hide his footprints. Dammit.

  Twenty minutes after sunset, that is, in mid-afternoon, we passed a huge élan marking, a full quarter mile wide. The edge of Beast’s territory. Nora whimpered when we reached Beast’s mark, but I tugged on her tag and steadied her as we walked through. The mark didn’t make me happy, either.

  A few minutes later, the wind turned and started howling the expected arctic cold from the north. All hope of scent tracking vanished.

  Goddamned Chimeras.

  We set up the tent in a deep hollow, under a rocky overhang, sheltered from the wind and the fine pellet snow. I sniffed out Beast’s marks here, as this was one of his many resting points.

  After Lori taught me signing (which cost me two tenths of a point of juice), we cuddled up and went into the Dreaming together. Next, she taught me how to sign in the Dreaming, which turned out to be harder. I needed to train myself to think about the Dreaming not as an aberrant mental state, but as an actual place, real in and of itself. I hated the mental lie, but if the only way to use the Dreaming for communication was to lie to myself, I would do so. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t done the mental lie trick before, thank you very much.

  “Lose the overconfidence,” Lori signed. “You’re an Arm, not a goddess. Think you can perhaps remember that?”

  No. Not Lori. Polaris. In the Dreaming, she was a Crow, man-shaped and dressed as a medieval court astrologer. Snarky and nasty, as well. I needed to think of her as Polaris, or I would strangle her as she cuddled beside me.

  I had no right to be upset at Lori for this particular trick. My own kinks and foibles were far worse than being snarky and nasty and pretending to own a Y chromosome.

  Once I learned to ‘look at myself’ and convince myself the Dreaming was real, my visualization of the place radically changed. The Dreaming became the big bed of my deepest dreams, strewn with pillows, rumpled covers and sex toys. A bed as big as the universe, or so it seemed, with me about twice the size of a condom. I walked around until I figured out some of my personal symbolism. Blankets and bedspreads marked territories. Rumpled sheets were cities, conglomerations of Transforms. Instead of mapping to physical reality, location on the bed was based on social and juice ties. The symbolism of the sex toys escaped me, and I saved them for later.

  Thus, there was no big surprise when I found Gail and Gilgamesh right on my own bedspread, one blanket down. They humped like rabbits. I frowned at my own subconscious, until I figured out that the coitus symbolism meant that the two of them were in the same household. Gail, as expected, appeared as a celestial angel, wings and halo and the like. Gilgamesh unexpectedly appeared as a barbarian hero, as ripped as Keaton, and wearing a dirty lion skin. Watching their two images fuck was more than a little disconcerting.

  “Okay, now what?” I signed.

  “She’s awake, not in the Dreaming. Can’t you tell?”

  “No. How am I supposed to tell that?”

  “Use your mind. I can’t see what you’re seeing.” I wanted to strangle Lori. I didn’t like Polaris, not at all.

  I tried things. I could touch the blankets, bedspreads and sex toys, but I couldn’t touch either Gail or Gilgamesh, as my illusory hand went right through the both of them. I couldn’t talk, or hear, anything. My sense of smell didn’t work, either. I used a tiny bit of juice. Nothing.

  Next, I tugged on Gail’s tag.

  “Hey! Careful when you do that, Tiamat!” Polaris signed. “I thought you were old enough to be beyond the bull-in-a-china-shop routine.”

  “Tiamat?” Hell. “I tried pulling on Gail’s tag. What did that do to you?”

  “You completely trashed my laboratory,” Polaris signed. “There’s broken glassware everywhere.”

  I didn’t roll my eyes. I did frown.

  “Pardon me,” Polaris signed. “I’ve got some cleanup to do.” Polaris’s image stopped moving, then reappeared next to me, static and draped suggestively on mine.

  I counted to fifty, backwards. Slowly. I knew I shouldn’t let this bother me. All the things I experienced were in my own head. My Dreaming world was my own fault, and Lori said signing was notoriously inexact.

  Gail stood and faced me.

  “Whoa! Back off, lady!” she signed.

  “Gail. It’s me, Carol.”

  “Carol? Your image’s changed. I didn’t recognize you. Hey! You’re signing! Neat!”

  “I’m new at this,” I signed.

  Gail adjusted her halo and smoothed her rumpled dress. Gilgamesh leaned on her leg suggestively, as Polaris leaned on mine. “You’ll learn. I’m glad to see you, too.” What, she wanted small talk? “Perhaps you can give me a hand with some problems.” I wondered if I could change my Dreaming imagery. This one already bored the crap out of me. I saw something out of the corner of my eye, and glared at the interloper. A bedbug. My goddamn mental illusion had bedbugs.

  I shook my head. Gail didn’t respond, and I decided head-shaking and non-verbal communication didn’t work well.r />
  Well, then, how the hell did signing work?

  Oh, that was a bunny trail that could keep me thinking for days. This was nearly as bad as being stuck on a goddamned quest.

  “You need to find your own way, Gail.”

  “Fine. I’ll just ship Zielinski over to Tonya for a little Transform adjustment, then.”

  Uh oh. “So Hank is giving you trouble? I’m willing to give advice on that subject.” So much for my good intentions.

  I could swear I heard Gail growl. “He’s impossible,” she signed. “He won’t do what I want him to do, and every time I slap him down, I just end up with a different problem to deal with.”

  That sounded like Hank. Slap him down, though? Hank might be contrary and independent minded, but output and performance weren’t one of his many problems. “What do you want him to do?”

  “I need him to finish the juice music project.”

  Okay, now I understood. Here he was, a baby Transform, probably aching to dive into the nitty gritty details of how Transforms worked, and Gail expected him to do clean up on a completed project? She didn’t understand Hank at all.

  “How is he annoying you?”

  “He’s interfering in my business. Every time I try and do something, there he is, neck deep in it already.”

  Polaris reappeared, signing laughter. No sympathy, though, even though Lori never handled Hank well, either. Gail glared at Polaris and gave her two upraised middle fingers. Yup, Gail knew Polaris was Lori, and didn’t appreciate, um, him.

  A random image of Lori as Polaris, and male, making love to Gail, as a woman, in the Dreaming, chased through my mind. I wanted to grind my teeth, which I couldn’t do in the Dreaming. Lori, you’re a lesbian, dammit, act like one for once!

  “Why isn’t Hank with Cathy Elspeth?” I picked up Cathy Elspeth as mine when I helped take down the first Focuses. She was a decent Focus trapped under Shirley Patterson’s control and she pledged herself to me to escape Patterson’s control. She would be a good Focus for Hank. They had compatible personalities.

  “Uh, you don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “Shit! Carol, there’s been some big problems I need to tell you about, then. First, Cathy went back home to Salt Lake City, with Newton in tow. Second, she refused to move to Chicago while you’re gone. Third, I just got word today that something’s happened to Cathy and her household. There are five Transform stragglers in Salt Lake City who say they can’t find their Focus. According to them, their household is burned to the ground.”

  Hunters, and no shock, Hank’s luck doing its usual. Cathy probably went gypsy to avoid them. Things heated up faster than I feared. I gave the situation some thought, and realized my recent nightmare about Keaton torturing me came from Cathy, not Sky. My insight made more sense, as we all thought Beast would be rather happy to see Sky again. I didn’t like the idea of Cathy being in danger, but she was an old, experienced Focus. She should be able to handle any trouble that came her way.

  Probably.

  Well, probably not a full-scale Hunter army. That was supposed to be my job.

  “Okay. I might be able to help you with Hank, but first, I need to tell you why I sought you out.”

  “Fire away.”

  “Lori’s cutting Inferno loose. Permanently. The losses in the Pittsburgh fight were too much for her to take. Not to mention the nonsense going on out here.”

  Gail paused, glared at the silent Polaris, took down her halo and polished it. “What am I supposed to do with them, then? Everyone seems to think Inferno and their household superorganism are worth saving.” Then she stuck the halo back on her head and cocked it to the side, sort of jaunty like.

  I will admit, I hadn’t realized my mind was this screwy.

  “Inferno is quite worth saving.” No, I wasn’t going let those ‘h’ and ‘s’ words touch my fingers – let someone else deal with the damned household superorganism crap. The stuff gave me the creeps. “Unfortunately, neither Lori nor I know what to do with them, or how to save them. My suggestion is to put Hank on the problem. Is he one of your Transforms, or is he an Inferno Transform?”

  “He’s one of mine.”

  “Make him an Inferno Transform. It will do him some good to get his rocks off again every Friday night. If I don’t want Hank messing with what I’m working on, I need to distract him with a project that uses up his attention.”

  “Why doesn’t the juice music project work as a distraction, then?”

  Stubborn. Gail would keep hitting the rock until it moved, or as she would put it, make the damned peanut butter dance. “He’s a scientist, Gail. He thinks the juice music project’s done, except for the paperwork, and he hates paperwork. Let him assign one of the Littleside junior researchers to the problem and send him off to save Inferno.”

  Gail paused in angelic thought, a solar light beam illuminating her. “I can do that. Say, about Littleside, I’m having some problems with Tom, and…”

  “Nope. I’m not going to help you with that.”

  “…and the Arms are…”

  “Nope. Not with that, either.”

  “The Hunters?”

  “Gail, I’m out here in the goddamn Yukon in the middle of a hellish winter, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You did just fine, Carol. For an Arm,” Polaris signed.

  “Thanks a whole bunch, Polaris. Why’d Gail give you two middle fingers?”

  “She finds Polaris pretty much impossible to deal with.”

  “I can’t imagine why.” We left Gail’s blanket and wandered around the rest of my bedspread. I led us off to check on my other Arms. Webberly, Haggerty, Whetstone and Duval didn’t make much of a presence in the Dreaming. Billington was masturbating. I wondered if that meant she didn’t want to be disturbed. Debardelaben wore a tiny little black dress and made an absent pass at me. Ah. Out hunting juice.

  After a little looking, I found Sibrian’s guitar, but she was absent. On my first pass through, I had ignored the guitar as a sex toy.

  Yup, I’m rather kinky. Bet you never guessed.

  “I can’t find Mary Sibrian,” I signed.

  “She’s off talking to Rumor.”

  Okay. How did Polaris know that? Scratch that thought, it wasn’t worth figuring out.

  “Can you take me there? Or do I need to figure out how to find them, myself?”

  “Brace yourself,” Polaris said. The world moved, and in an instant, I appeared on another part of the big bed. Standing on someone else’s bedspread.

  If Lori hadn’t told me what was going on, I would have never guessed. Rumor’s image wasn’t an image, but a collection of sounds. Voices without meaning. I knew it was Rumor anyway. Mary Sibrian was gaudy, with a painted face and skimpy clothes, and she carried a microphone in her hand. A rock star or something similar. Back in the real world, she would be dressed in red silks, with a katana on her back. Mary was a younger Arm, the seventh surviving Arm in the US, not counting Sylvia Bass. Dark hair, dark eyes, an accent that still hinted of places south of the border, and she was our mystic. She couldn’t fight particularly well, at least for an Arm, but she was a master of Arm charisma, ate fear for breakfast and went back for seconds, and when she sang, it was like the angels themselves came down to earth.

  “Polaris. Someone else, rather incongruous,” Rumor said. Yes, said. Good trick, that, making me hear him. “What can I do for you?”

  “That’s the Commander,” Mary said. I could hear her, as well. Fuck. I hated being outclassed.

  “Hello,” I tried to say. No words came out of my imaginary mouth. “Hello,” I signed. “How come I can hear you?”

  “It is considered impolite for people in the Dreaming to comment on such things,” Polaris said. Yah, yah, I’m the little dipshit, here. She didn’t need to rub it in.

  “(We’ll talk about this later)” Polaris signed, behind her back, where only I could see. Polaris might be a mindless douche, but Lori w
as still Lori. Her fucking tricks had tricks. “I found this Arm signing with the Angel,” Polaris said. “She wanted to find Arm Sibrian, and I volunteered to help. A momentary lapse of reason, I’m afraid.”

  “I can sign, if you feel more comfortable, Commander,” Mary said.

  “Speaking is fine,” I signed. “I have a question regarding Focus Elspeth. Do you know what’s happened to her?” She was probably fine, but still, I worried.

  “That’s what we were talking about,” Rumor said. “It appears the Hunters are on the march, and the first place they struck was Focus Elspeth’s household in Salt Lake City. She’s been taken captive, and…”

  I freaked out, and the world around me became my torture chamber. Cinderblock walls, blood-soaked floor. Tables, large devices, tiny, bloody instruments. Sibrian, Rumor and Polaris appeared all in shackles, and I held a bloody meat cleaver in my hand. I hissed, ready to stalk. Somewhere in the distance, I heard screams.

  “She’s mine!” I signed. “I hold her tag, and an attack on Elspeth is an attack on me.”

  “Interesting,” Rumor said. The shackles and torture chamber didn’t seem to bother him.

  “Commander, what are your orders?” Mary said. “How can we help?”

  “I’m on my…” way back.

  “No! My pardon, Commander. Please,” Mary said, her chains rattling. “Returning would be a mistake. A huge mistake.”

  Unlike Keaton, I listened when my underlings pulled stunts like this. “Continue,” I signed, cleaver held at the ready. A drop of blood ran down the blade, to fall to the concrete floor when it reached the hilt, where it spread octopus-like.

  “I understand your responsibilities, and honor them. But the Madonna’s right. You need to regain control over your beast. Look around you, in your visualization of the Dreaming. You’re in your beast, now, aren’t you? Pardon my rudeness, boss.”