I took a deep breath and fought those urges. She was right – my torture chamber imagery in the Dreaming represented my beast. Nearly three weeks away from my home base and the strife and wars, and all it took to rouse the beast was word of an attack on one of my tagged Focuses. I forced myself to relax, to let loose the beast. Slowly, ever so slowly, the torture chamber image vanished around me, and the rumpled bed returned.
Well, if I couldn’t rescue Cathy personally, that’s what I owned an entire organization for, wasn’t it?
“What’s your current project, Mary?” I signed. I could still be devious, even while Dreaming.
“Once I recovered from the Pittsburgh battle, Amy assigned me to be liaison between herself and the other Arms.”
Crap crap crap! “That’s supposed to be Gail’s job.” Amy Haggerty was the number three Arm, after Keaton and me, and she was the first Arm I ever tagged. She was a tactical wizard, but people skills were not her forte.
“Gail isn’t up to the job, Ma’am. She’s overwhelmed by her Cause and Network responsibilities.”
I glared, and the torture chamber started to appear around me.
“Ma’am. I’ll make sure Amy understands your firmness on the subject,” Mary said. Her rock star image practically wilted in front of me. This wasn’t the effect I wanted, as she was just the messenger, not the miscreant. I needed to do something.
“Mary. I’m formally giving you permission to visit Gail in Chicago and do your magic.”
“Ma’am, Christine Naylor’s taken Chicago as her territory, saying she’s naturally subordinate to you and thus not taking your territory, but she’s somehow strong enough to balk even Amy.”
I sighed, or tried to, which didn’t work well in the Dreaming. “Think of her as me and you’ll be able to win an audience.” Christine should have been a Crow. Personality wise, not ability-wise, that is. Ability-wise, she was unique and slippery. It’s hard to explain. Oh, and she didn’t particularly appreciate Focuses, though I bet if any Focus could deal with Christine, it would be Gail. Taking Chicago from me would be an attack by any other Arm. From Christine? She wanted something from me, and held Chicago as a favor.
My guess is that she wanted my help rising from line-manager to middle manager at IBM. No. Please. Don’t ask.
“Talk to Gail and tell her what I said. Find out how you can best help her manage the Arms. I want you and the other Arms to follow Gail’s orders, and I don’t want to hear any grousing about any of the orders she gives you or the other Arms unless they’re suicidal or for no purpose.” I figured I could yank on Amy’s tag in the Dreaming and impress her with the same orders. That would work on someone as dense as Amy. She might still fight the order, but…
Ah. I knew exactly how to work this.
“What’s Amy up to, these days?”
“She’s gotten some Transforms together as a small army, to probe the Hunters and see what’s up.”
Perfect. “Good. I’m going to assign her the task of figuring out what’s going on with Cathy, and rescue her if possible. Tell her I ordered this.” The way to lead Haggerty was to give her orders she would be more interested in carrying out than anyone else. Rescuing a captive Focus and their poor abused captive household? Haggerty wouldn’t be able to resist the heroic challenge.
“How’s your relationship with Coriolis going, Mary?” I signed. Coriolis was her personal Crow. Most Arms had them. The Crow lived off the dross that the Arm left after she killed for juice.
Rumor snickered. Actually snickered. Mary blushed, a good trick in the Dreaming. More evidence that I needed more practice at this nonsense.
“He still refuses to meet with me in person,” Mary said.
Like Hank, Mary needed to be distracted, or she would end up trying to do everyone else’s job for them. While they were still doing it. “I want you to put some real effort into winning Coriolis over.”
“Ma’am? I have been, but…”
“No ‘buts’. Coriolis isn’t a senior Crow with delusions of godhood. He’s your age, and quite malleable. Forge him! Sucker him into your orbit. Hell, sing to him. Fuck him ‘til he bleeds out his nose. Do whatever it takes. When I return, I want to see the two of you, together. Understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
There. That would keep Mary occupied.
Friggen Polaris took notes.
“Okay, Polaris, Elspeth’s next.”
“That’s not going to be easy, Tiamat,” Polaris signed. “Elspeth’s good in the Dreaming, one of the best. She spent years shielding herself from the White Witch” the late and unlamented Focus Shirley Patterson “while maintaining contact with other dreamers, on her terms. Like the Madonna, she comes to you, not vice versa.”
“Okay. Now that we’re alone again, can you tell me what was going on, back there? How was I able to hear them? Why are you signing now, not talking?”
“Being able to hear Rumor is an intermediate stage between signing and talking, and he was using a trick to allow you to hear the Singer. You didn’t think you had this mastered, did you, oh great goddess Tiamat?”
Sigh. “How are we going to handle Elspeth?”
“I think we’re going to need to talk about it another time.”
Polaris vanished.
I got the hint, and woke myself up.
“I’m not sure I like the smug expression on your face, Lori,” I said.
No, we couldn’t actually argue while the juice cycled. It still didn’t excuse her behavior in the Dreaming.
“Sorry,” she said, not the least bit sorry. “I had to stay in character. There are quite a few dreamers good enough to eavesdrop on what might appear to be private conversations in the Dreaming. Regarding Cathy, I think we need to advertise. Lure her out to talk to you. If you spend more time with the Madame Butterfly routine, and less time doing the meat-cleaver-wielding Tiamat, that will help.”
“Uh, I’m confused,” I said. “When I pulled on Gail’s tag, I was in my image of myself as,” wince and double wince, “Madame Butterfly.”
“For a moment there, when you used juice, you were Tiamat, at least to me.”
“I need to remember that.” I sighed. “There are times like these when I wish I stayed a subservient Arm, not bothering with anything more obscure than hunting juice and selling cars, you know…”
Lori nodded. “I miss my lab benches and autopsy tables, too.”
She understood.
---
Four days of heavy snow, and we still weren’t going anywhere. Two hours in, Lori and I got a bright idea and decided to treat this as our delayed honeymoon. We had never before found any real time to ourselves as true personal time. No more than a spare day or two.
We talked a lot about the inconsequential, the glue that holds any pair together. We also, occasionally, nerved ourselves up to talk about a few things we never had the nerve to talk about before.
“So, based on what you said a few hours ago, you do want more kids?” she asked. When she asked about children, I had added in a ‘so far’, before getting into the painful but necessary digression about Sarah, my daughter. Sarah had been old enough for an induced transformation into an Arm attendant when I transformed, and the disease did the same thing to her that it did to all Arm attendants – they turned into juice fodder for the transforming Arm. Her death at my hands was part of my, um, issues.
“Yes,” I said. Lori and I were currently huddled on top of the blankets, letting ourselves cool off. “I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to, but I want. Balance those damned scales a little more.” Trading lives for lives.
“Yah,” she said. She patted her tummy in understanding. “Junior here’s getting close. You and Nora are going to need to hunt, insane winter weather or not. I can get by on nearly nothing for a long time, but not when I’m nursing.”
I nodded. “Or I’m nursing.” Major Transform tricks, at least one of mine. “I do have a question, though. I sort of expected you to have low
juice problems once you dropped Inferno. Isn’t a Focus’s juice production tied to the Focus’s household size?”
“Tricks of the trade,” Lori said, and then sighed. “What you said is true for baby Focuses, but for a trained witch, Focus juice production is a much more complicated subject. A Focus’s excess juice goes, by default, into her juice buffer. A Focus, by herself, produces about enough to keep one man alive. Barely. If she only gives him juice when he’s in periwithdrawal. It takes juice to move juice around, of course, though nowhere near as much as it takes to give juice to an Arm using our current juice music score. The fact it takes a Focus’s juice to move juice around is why you need three triads of Transforms to create enough slack in the system to avoid having your Transforms sitting near withdrawal and oversupply. In my current state, I’m functioning similar to one of the Adkins’ trained attack Focuses.”
I tensed at her words. “Using juice patterns, I disabled the puny one-Focus juice buffer I naturally created after I dropped the old Inferno juice buffer. Now, all the juice I produce stays in me, in my own supplemental juice supply.”
“So, as long as you aren’t using juice patterns, you won’t end up with low juice.”
She nodded. “The real solution requires getting Sky back. I’ll just steal whatever I need from you.”
“That juice is mine.” I only put mock-predator in my voice. When a Focus tags you, she owns your juice. I wouldn’t have been able to handle this annoying detail as a yearling Arm. The solution was obvious, though; we needed to acclimate the student Arms to having their juice owned by Focuses first thing, or end up waiting several years before introducing Focuses into their lives.
“Right. Sure,” she said. “So, have you ever run into anything where you found you were prejudiced against yourself?”
“Well, killing, for one.” I snorted. “The list grows ever longer each day, I swear.” Pause. “You’re thinking of this” I waved my hands at the tent with us two naked women in it “and yourself, aren’t you?”
She nodded. “Carol, on the day I transformed I thought homosexuality of any variety was evil and perverted, and thought ‘they’ needed to be locked away or worse. I thought African-Americans were genetically inferior. I thought Transforms were a moral disease, and God punished them for their sins. I thought men were better at everything than women, and that to be a researcher and properly use the brains God gave me, I would need to give up on the idea of having a husband and a family. Which didn’t bother me much, as I wasn’t at all boy-crazy.”
“The perfect Catholic schoolgirl.”
“I didn’t doubt a thing.”
“Then you figured yourself out, and thanked the low juice for keeping you from sinning…and then Sky happened.”
“Uh huh. For a few days it started off as ‘oh my God he’s messing with me and going to rape me’, then it became ‘oh, I’m cured!’, and then I spent far too much time taking nasty samples from my own reproductive organs, figuring out what was going on, and realizing the juice doesn’t give a crap about such things as human interests and love.”
“That’s your raw nerve, your hot button, isn’t it?” I asked. “Rape. When we were hunting Chicago you did get more worked up over the rapists than, well, the murderers.”
“Bad sample size,” Lori said, and chuckled. “It’s the victim who’s important to me, not the act. Thugs raping thugs bothers me just as little as thugs killing thugs. Only, well…”
“You would rather certain people didn’t have that in their arsenal.” I could rape someone with the best of them. I made a wonderful thug.
“Yah. It isn’t as if I can complain, though, not with what’s in my arsenal. I kill people, Carol.” I smelled tears.
“Yes?”
Lori didn’t speak for almost five minutes. “I don’t want to go to Hell,” she said, Crow quiet.
I held her tight and rocked her. “Me neither.”
I just didn’t see any way out.
If you find a way out, tell me, she sent, using her juice signaling tricks. This hurt her so much she couldn’t even say it out loud.
I nodded.
After our faux honeymoon, if we didn’t tear ourselves apart, I suspected nothing could ever come between us.
Beast (1/18/73 – 1/22/73)
For a day, Beast wondered why Crow didn’t talk to him. Then he realized – all those noises Crow made weren’t singing or random vocalizations, but actual talking. He, Beast had forgotten the meaning of words! How could that be? Beast thought he thought in words in his own mind. Oh. He had forgotten how to listen for words. Probably unconscious desires acting out his anger at Arm, in her last visit, making sure she could never bother him again.
Annoying.
Because of this, he couldn’t figure out why Crow was out here.
Poor Crow was cold, as well. When Beast grabbed him, he hadn’t been wearing enough clothes for the weather. This was a problem, because the air was cold enough even for Beast to feel. Crow spent his time burrowed into Beast’s fur, in Beast’s shelter. Crow didn’t used to have problems with the cold, but when they came north for the first time, he did. Well, that meant that they fixed it, somehow. Beast spent a bunch of time with his eyes closed, thinking, walking through his memories.
Those were old memories, difficult to walk to, in his mind. The walking was difficult, as well, and so he walked to the part of his mind where he could figure that out.
He needed more stuff.
But how? He normally rested all winter, as did the Monsters. No one made enough stuff in winter. If he started taking their stuff now, there wouldn’t be enough when spring came. However, he knew of more stuff three days walk to the northeast, down near the big river. New Monsters moved out of the lowlands all the time.
Three days? He could do three days. He grabbed Crow, stuck him on his back, and loped off.
The young Monster was barely old enough to survive the stuff removal, and Beast carefully left the snake woman in a rock shelter, so she could sleep it off. Flush with his stuff, he concentrated on Crow’s singing, until he forced words out of the noise. He listened to Crow’s inconsequential chattering while they returned to his territory, until he understood enough words to communicate. Crow complained about being hit by overhanging tree branches. Beast slung Crow off his back, and pantomimed ducking.
“You understood me?”
Beast nodded.
“You understand words again?” Another nod.
Crow went into something too complicated for Beast to understand, and he shrugged. Crow licked his lips, and shook his fur. Crow grew fur after he, Beast, took the stuff from the snake woman. Guess Crow took some stuff, as well.
“Guess we’re going to need to start small,” Crow said. “I go by the name Sky these days. You’re Beast.”
Beast nodded.
“I have two friends with me, an Arm named Carol Hancock and a Focus named Lori Rizzari. We need to help them.”
Beast shook his head.
“Why not?”
Crow, now calling himself Sky, was as dim as ever. Did he expect Beast to start talking?
“Beast, we need to. At least I need to. Without my help, Hancock is going to run out of juice soon.”
Beast shrugged, and pointed southeast, towards human inhabitations. The sooner the aurora-marked Arm and the Focus not-Focus left his territory, the better.
“We’re on a mission, Beast. To help you.”
He didn’t need help.
“Things have changed over the years. Crows like me know how to bring Beast Men back into human form. With their help, I can do the same for you.”
Beast growled at Crow, enough to force him to take a step back. He didn’t appreciate being lied to. Although not all lies, just a devious incomplete truth.
“Sorry,” Sky said. “Their help is indirect.” Sky then launched into something long and technical that Beast couldn’t follow. He boiled Sky’s long diatribe into something far simpler – the three of them
were a family, and they wanted a mate, as they now believed that Transform families needed to be made up of all the four types of Major Transforms.
He liked being wanted. He thought it impossible to go back to being human again, though.
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
Beast nodded.
“There’s been a lot of improvements. Watch this.”
Sky did something and vanished. Beast looked, and sniffed, and used the stuff sense. Sky remained gone.
Then Sky reappeared. He hadn’t moved.
Hmmm. An impressive new trick. Sky could flee at any time. Beast thought he held Sky as a captive and made him part of his pack. Perhaps not. Perhaps Sky didn’t lie about his family needs.
“Focuses and Arms can do a lot more with the juice than they could, before. We now understand what’s different about what Crows and Beast Men do with juice. What Crows take we now call dross, and what you take is now called élan, for instance. We now call our main extra sense a ‘metasense’.”
Dross. Élan. Metasense. Three new interesting words.
“It’s not like the old days, when we didn’t understand anything more than ‘Focuses move juice and we don’t understand what the rest of us are doing’. We know so much more, now.”
Too much for now. Beast stopped listening. Eventually, Sky talked himself out. Beast motioned to his back, and Sky climbed on.
“They aren’t doing as well as before,” Sky said, after Beast wandered to a place where they could metasense the three interlopers.
They did appear to be hungry, especially the Focus not-Focus, who turned out to be pregnant and nearly ready to birth her child. Only a little of their preserved moose meat remained. The aurora-marked Arm sensed as testy, and getting low on juice.
Beast sighed. The problem was the Focus not-Focus. He could just sit and metasense her for hours. A raging thunderstorm, wild and untamed, just like himself. Oh, he wanted her. Really wanted.
The Arm, this Carol Hancock person, not so much, though. Dangerous. The KittyCat’s juice echoed that of the Arm, a side effect of whatever the aurora-marked Arm did to tame her. The KittyCat, though, spent all day and night asleep, flush with a filled belly and with an incredible amount of élan. That’s what he would rather being doing, too. Sky loved both the Arm and the Focus. His family. Beast respected that and the aurora markings on all three of them. The Arm held the deepest markings, making her special. Perhaps he should make them all part of his family. That would suit, given his own ties to the aurora.
Beasts Ascendant: The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts One and Two Page 36
