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

by Randall Farmer

  How did everything end up so hard? She missed Gilgamesh and wished he would come home, but he was out protecting them all. Not something she could interrupt just because she felt a little down. More than Gilgamesh, she missed Carol, missed her tough competence, missed the way Carol would hold her and let the juice cycle between them. She shivered again, this time with longing for those moments of ecstasy. How frustrating, that she would be with Carol long enough to get hooked on the vicarious pleasure of the Arm kill. Her body wanted that wondrous ecstasy the same way she wanted air, wanted juice, but no, without her Arm, all that remained were the memories.

  Now Ellen left, too.

  ---

  It was past ten when Anita knocked on her office door to let Gail know she had a phone call. “It’s Focus Biggioni,” Anita said.

  “I’ll take it,” Gail said. “Transfer the call in here.” She paced in front of the magic corkboard. The sighting markers were getting closer and closer to Chicago. Peoria. Rockford. Lake Geneva, up in Wisconsin. No real action closer than Nebraska, though.

  “Tonya!” Gail said, after Anita made the transfer. “I heard about your new house. I hear congratulations are in order.”

  Tonya chuckled at Gail’s constant habit of jumping into conversations. “You’re going to need to come up with an excuse to come visit me in Philadelphia,” Tonya said, and Gail could hear a smile in the older Focus’s voice. “You should see the place. It’s an old private school, one of those places for the less-than-brilliant scions of the filthy rich, almost a hundred years old, well maintained until the last decade, done in by bad management and scandals. There’s fifty acres of grounds surrounding the place, and dormitories for hundreds of kids. Classrooms, stables, you name it.”

  “Oh, wow, it sounds fabulous.”

  “The benefit of Keaton finally becoming functional again. I swear, everything the Arms do, they do to extreme. You’ve never seen anyone as aggressively non-functional as Stacy was right after Pittsburgh. Did you know, there was a period where she wouldn’t let me out of her sight? She even slept in my bed every night for almost a week.”

  “You told me.” Keaton’s short captivity in Pittsburgh damaged her so much that she was barely herself anymore. Gail had heard quite a bit from Tonya in early January, back when Keaton drove her absolutely nuts.

  “I suppose I did, didn’t I? Well, last week she turned functional, all of a sudden, and the first thing she did was buy me this immense new home. There’s room for me, and Claunch, and Teas, and Shadow and his students, and Stacy and her students, and Great Grandma Myrtle and her seventy-five children.” Claunch and Teas were first Focuses. Teas was a prisoner, but Claunch had enough sense to switch sides before the war. She had made a deal with the Commander to save her neck, but part of the deal required Claunch to get mind scraped by the Commander, and the Commander left for the Yukon before she did the mind scrape. So now Claunch hid under Tonya’s protection, because of Arm Webberly’s renewal of the first Focus takedown brigade. A lot of people would like to carve a few pieces out of Claunch, not exactly anyone’s favorite first Focus.

  What a mess. Gail considered it heartening that Tonya was up to her eyeballs in problems, too. Misery loves company and all. Although Tonya did seem to handle her issues with a lot more equanimity.

  So Tonya told Gail all the details of her new household and the move, and Tonya wanted to know about how Gail held up after the split with Inferno. After her moral support, Tonya got down to the real business, politics.

  “I need to talk to you again about the upcoming Council meeting,” Tonya said.

  “Okay.”

  “The regional meetings are two weeks away, and the election of the Region Presidents and Council reps is first on the agenda,” Tonya said. “I’m sure you know why I called.”

  “Uh huh.” Tonya had called Linda Cooley and gotten her to lead the Midwest Focus revolt against Hocutt and Weiczokowski.

  “I need you, Gail,” Tonya said. “I’m begging you to reconsider.”

  Gail sighed. After having to deal with Esther’s games with the unteachable students, her resistance was way down. “I’m reconsidering,” Gail said. “It isn’t as if I don’t already have lots of people who want me dead. The big problem is still the time issue, though.”

  “You’re going to need to delegate,” Tonya said, a hint of relief echoing through the phone. “You take on the leadership responsibilities personally and delegate from there. If you take this on, I’ll show you my tricks, how I keep myself sane. We need you on the Council, Gail. If we let Esther stay on the Council, she’s going to keep doing what she’s always been doing. As you’ve recently learned. To save her, if she’s worth salvaging, we need to take away all of her power first.”

  Gail sighed. “All right, all right. I hope I don’t make a complete mess out of all of this.”

  “Well, if you do, you can feel confident that anyone else would have made a worse mess.”

  “Real comfort there, Tonya.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. But thank you.”

  “I’m going to regret this.”

  “Yes. Sometimes. But sometimes you’ll think it’s the best thing you ever did. I promise. Are you ready to tackle another subject?”

  “There’s more?” Good ol’ Tonya.

  “Oh, there’s always more. This one might be a load off you if you look at it right, though. A few days ago, Shadow told me that he doesn’t like the idea of the Focuses having exclusive control of the Transform Network. He thinks that the Transform Network should be run by a council of one of each of the types of Major Transforms.”

  Gail sat up straight, startled into sudden alertness. “The Transform Network belongs to the Commander. I can’t give permission to some council devised by Shadow.”

  “I know. And there isn’t anyone interested in fighting the Commander’s claim to the Transform Network, including Shadow. But the Commander can’t run the Network at a day-to-day level, even when she comes back, so somebody’s going to need to take responsibility for that. Right now, that’s you, but he wants one of each of the other forms of Major Transforms involved. This council will still be under the Commander’s ultimate authority, and if the Commander wants to change the arrangement when she comes back, she can, but he doesn’t think she will, especially if the Network council is already in place and working.”

  Gail shook her head. “I can’t agree to this. He needs to talk to the Commander when she comes back.”

  Tonya sighed. “Gail, would you mind if I gave you some political advice?”

  “Advice? Sure.”

  “About Shadow’s request. It sounds like a request, and he’s being polite, but sometimes, someone will make a request, and it’s not really a request.”

  Gail could feel her head throbbing with an oncoming headache. “What do you mean?”

  “Shadow’s our ally among the Crows. He contributed forces to the Pittsburgh fight, he’s one of the Commander’s major allies, he’s arranging for the Crows to cooperate with building Focus-Crow households, and he’s doing a hundred other things to help us out. The Crows are willing to work with Focuses for the first time since the first Focuses betrayed them fifteen years ago, all because of Shadow. Up until now, he hasn’t asked for anything. Now he makes a request. We can’t afford to say no.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry. I think you’re stuck with this one. I think even the Commander would be stuck with this one if she were here.”

  “I don’t want to dump a big collection of problems on Carol when she gets back.” If she gets back, Gail thought with an acid churn in her stomach. She didn’t like what she had been learning in the Dreaming about Carol’s enslavement by Beast.

  “It’s the lesser of two evils,” Tonya said. “Better a fait accompli that she might even approve of than damage to her relationship with a major ally.”

  Gail shook her head. “I hope so.”

  ---

  Gail stood by the serving li
ne with a tray in her hands, looking out into the dining room for a table. At 5:30 in the morning. She had suffered through as much paperwork as she could stand. The kitchen, fortunately, already served breakfast. She spotted pancakes and bacon, toast, juice, cereal, and all the other usual breakfast food. Good hot food. The oatmeal and bacon made the Branton smell like home again.

  The dining room was a busy place. There were the usual early risers – Gordon Armelin and Warren Pickering did shift work at US Steel’s South Works mill. Warren was a cast house operator and had been for years, and he had gotten Gordon a job as a chipper so Gordon could do something besides bodyguard. Lydia Guinto was an ICU nurse at Bernard Mitchell Hospital. Tammy Rochelle did quality control at Rexam Can. Marsha Miller, a teen Gail recruited from Focus O’Donnell’s leftovers and one of a half dozen new Abyss members Gail had added since the Commander went north, walked in to the cafeteria, bleary, got a cup of coffee and sat with the Commander’s crew. Marsha, set to graduate high school in May, wanted to join the Arm’s criminals and be a proper thug. They ate and talked with a sleepy murmur, amid the subdued clanking of silverware. Faintly, in the distance, Gail could hear the shuffling of protesters, now camped outside the Branton every day and night.

  Jeff Casson sat at a table by himself, absorbed in the Wall Street Journal. Gail remembered the argument about the cost of his suits when Carol first brought him in. Helen Grimm couldn’t believe that he needed to spend hundreds of dollars for a suit. She had taken a lot of convincing before she would accept the idea that an expensive corporate lawyer needed expensive suits if he was going to keep bringing in the money.

  Gail worried about Jeff. He didn’t seem to have any real friends among the household, and worked an obscene number of hours. He left before dawn, came back well after dark, and went in to work on the weekends. He never seemed to be in the household except for eating and sleeping, and the eating was optional.

  His wife left him when he transformed, and took his two children with her. This was no big shock to Gail. Love transformed with the people only very rarely.

  Gail worried about more than Jeff. Abyss needed the money, always, but she didn’t at all like the idea of her people going out to work, undefended, vulnerable targets for the Hunters and their inevitable attack. Abyss had discussed the problem several days ago. After a great deal of argument, they decided the household needed those jobs too badly, and they had invested too much time and effort into getting them to be willing to give them up now. They hoped single individuals wouldn’t be worth the Hunters’ effort, especially since Hunters generally couldn’t read tags well enough to know that the Transforms belonged to Abyss. They understood that their choice was a risk, but they decided to take it. Now, these people here in the dining room waiting to go to work, and the more that would appear over the next couple of hours, were all at risk. They would go anyway.

  Gail spared a moment of awe at her household’s stubborn nobility. She had gotten far luckier than she deserved with her household.

  One table held a few of Gerry’s people. Most of her people were still looking for work and didn’t need to be awake this early. There were two tables of Gail’s senior people, one male, one female, awake early, as they always seemed to be these days. Gail saw the division and grinned. The split didn’t usually work that way in her household, but recently, all the pregnancies did have an effect on the topics of discussion among the women. The men tended to flee those discussions as if they had angry Arms on their tail.

  She was the only Major Transform in the room. With Ellen off to San Francisco, Gerry doing a few days back in Philly, and Gilgamesh off with Courtier Freeman on the project to stop ‘the man’, Gail realized she didn’t have any Major Transforms to sit with.

  Then she realized where her thoughts wandered and mentally kicked herself. This was exactly the kind of attitude that would get her in trouble with her household. She had been getting used to dealing exclusively with Major Transforms, and where did that leave Abyss?

  Well, she didn’t need to follow the routine this morning. Gretchen, Sylvie, Helen, and Laura were all people she would be delighted to spend time with. She stepped over to the women’s table and sat down.

  “This is so much better than pregnancy as a normal,” Gretchen Carlow said. She was in her early forties, and a sensible, down-to-earth woman. She had three boys already, in their late teens and early twenties. No husband, of course – he left her soon after she transformed. Gretchen was Gail’s head of operations.

  “Hmm?” Sylvie said. Sylvie was Gail’s household president. Sylvie, Gail swore, could talk about pregnancy endlessly, interrupted only by the time she spent talking about babies. She and her husband Kurt once planned on six kids. Then Sylvie transformed and became infertile, devastating them. Gail was still sometimes amazed that Kurt stayed with her through it all. Then they discovered Transform women needed a male Major Transform to father any babies, and Sylvie immediately planted herself in Gilgamesh’s bedroom. Now she was two months pregnant and so happy she glowed, and Kurt looked damned near as happy.

  “Oh, absolutely,” Gretchen said. She got pregnant back in early November. “I remember the first trimester back when I was pregnant with Roger, and I swear, I threw up every day. Just like clockwork. I’d wake up in the morning feeling queasy, so I’d eat a few crackers. Then I’d feel better enough to eat breakfast, and everything would be fine until about ten. Then, ten o’clock, there I’d go, running for the bathroom. Kenny and Mark were four and two then, and they would just watch with these big, wide eyes. Ten o’clock, there goes mommy!”

  “Didn’t it bother them any?” Laura Case said. She had joined the household last fall, after the Commander found her on a hunt and dropped her with Abyss. She was in her early twenties, and one of those people who seemed to have an infinite supply of energy. She was already in charge of household purchasing and worked for Helen Grimm, and she did that on top of her job as organist for First Presbyterian Church of Mount Prospect. She was just a few weeks pregnant, and taking Transform physical training, too, except Melanie put a stop to that when she found out about the pregnancy.

  “No, it didn’t bother them,” Gretchen said. “I remember once just as my first trimester was almost over and the nausea finally calmed down, I was so exhausted, I just collapsed on the couch in the middle of the morning. I had a two-year-old running around the house on his own, and there I was on the couch fast asleep. It’s a good thing he didn’t burn the house down! Anyway, around ten o’clock, here comes Kenny. He lifts up one of my eyelids and says, ‘Wake up, Mommy. It’s time for you to throw up now.’” She laughed and the others joined in. “‘It’s time for you to throw up now!’”

  Sylvie shook her head. “The thing I can do without is the bathroom breaks. I can’t even make it through the night anymore! Drives Kurt crazy.”

  “Hah,” Helen Grimm said. She was a fifty some-odd year old battle-axe with bright orange hair, blue eye-shadow, and layers of pancake make-up. She wore reading glasses on a cord around her neck and terrorized hapless fools of all sorts. She was Gail’s finance officer, and the only woman at the table who wasn’t pregnant. “Just wait until you’re old. You’ll be up three times a night, then.”

  Everyone laughed again, and Kurt came over with a tray in his hands. “Kurt,” Sylvie said, a wicked half-grin on her face. “Will you still love me if I have to go to the bathroom three times a night?”

  Kurt kissed her on the top of her head and said, “I’ll love you even if you have to wear diapers.”

  Sylvie cocked her head and thought about it. “That’s a good idea. I could wear them to bed, and then I won’t have to get up in the middle of the night. And you can get in practice for the baby by changing my diaper for me. Doesn’t that sound perfect?”

  “Ah, since you all obviously have important business to discuss,” Kurt said, “I won’t interrupt you all. Why don’t I sit somewhere else, so I won’t bother you?” The women laughed as Kurt fled.
>
  He sat, Gail was pleased to notice, with Jeff Casson. After a moment, Jeff put his newspaper down and they started talking.

  Sylvie watched him and smiled. “We’ve been talking. I think maybe six kids isn’t enough. We’re thinking maybe we need to have twelve.”

  “Sylvie!” Gail said.

  Sylvie nodded. “Well, having kids as a Transform is so much easier, and I’m only twenty-eight. If I have one a year until I’m forty, I’ve got plenty of time.”

  Gail winced. “You’re pulling my leg, right?”

  “Hah. You didn’t believe me when I said I wanted six kids as a normal. Now you don’t believe me when I say I want twelve.”

  Gail took a deep breath. “Of course. You can have as many kids as you want.”

  “Hah!” Gretchen said. “You only get as many kids as Gilgamesh will give you. Leave some of him for the rest of us!”

  “You going to have more kids, Gretchen?” Laura said.

  Gretchen’s face became solemn again and she shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m a little old to be having babies.”

  The Man (1/29/73)

  “Guru Gilgamesh.” The sky lightened in the east as the gibbous moon rose, and the chilly paths down by the tree-drenched Saganashkee Slough remained empty of life. Gail barely heard the low Crow whisper even with her enhance Focus hearing. She concentrated on remaining silent.

  “Crow Haiku,” Gilgamesh said. Haiku was one of Gilgamesh’s followers, a Crow who Gilgamesh had trained in how to survive in dangerous situations without falling into panic. It wasn’t that long ago that Haiku had been too skittish to be in the same city as an Arm. No longer. “I heard you had something for me?”

  “Yes. I took a break from the Arm mob I’ve been following in the Memphis area to do some spying for you around Lake Geneva.” Haiku smiled. He stayed nearly hidden among the shadows of the trees, but he still hadn’t learned how to properly mask his metapresence, so he was less hidden than he realized.