The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (19 page)

“I will accept you as mine,” I said.  “Duval, here.”  Yet one more Arm in our shattered organization swept back into the fold.

Chrissie Duval, well broken and compliant, stepped forward.  Her broken bones hadn’t healed yet but she had already healed the rest of the damage.

Webberly looked Duval over and asked her a few questions.  Duval answered, meekly and truthfully.  Then Webberly turned and nodded to me.  We both turned to Duval, and gave her a double dose of predator effect.  Afterwards, Duval was convinced she had seen God and she let Webberly tag her.

“Here’s Zielinski’s address and phone number in Chicago,” I said, to Webberly.  “You have as much consulting time with him as you need to get Duval’s muscle problems fixed.”

“Yes, Commander,” she said.

“When we get this all settled, I’ll set up a ceremony for us,” I said, referring to my agreed tagging of Webberly, “and we’ll do this right.”

Webberly nodded, and she headed off with her people, with Duval in tow.

Henry Zielinski: July 8, 1972

Henry Zielinski didn’t get back from the Littleside construction site until late afternoon.  He made a point of going out there almost every day, to check on the construction crews and make sure they were getting everything right, even if it ate into his research time.

Littleside Transform Research Center.  He still hardly believed the recent progress.  After two years of planning and slow construction, a real research center rose out of a cow pasture, and in less than a month he would move.  Haggerty’s orders to push the Cause had finally pulled Littleside out of the low priority ditch.  In the last six months Carol had supplied him a truly stupendous amount of money, all to turn his dream into a reality, the money funneled through Stacy to keep the FBI off their tails.  No more working on the sly out of private offices and surreptitiously arranging borrowed time at research facilities.  Now he would be going legit, staffing up, and moving up with the big boys.

Zielinski wanted this to work so badly he distrusted his own judgment, and he lay awake at night thinking of all the ways things might go wrong.  A real research institution, fully equipped and with almost unlimited funding.  All his.  Sidney Crighton, another of Carol’s people, would be the official director.  Unofficially, Zielinski was the boss, all arranged by Carol.

Before he had lost his medical license and been forced into the shadows, years and years ago, he had been one of the premier researchers into Transform Sickness.  These days, researchers passed his findings to each other in whispers, and his doings were only a rumor to the larger research community.  Unfair, but life had never been fair.  These days, the things he lost his license over were standard practice.

Zielinski parked his car in the small, mostly empty lot outside his current office, located in a small professional building in a poorer section of Chicago.  He thought about going home, joining everyone else in the professional building on their evening commutes, but with the breakthrough in juice pattern research, hidden away from him in United Toxicol until Carol stole it back, he always had more to do.  He wished again for more hours in the day.  To think, once, five years ago, when he lost his medical license, he had thought his career was over.

Zielinski hung his hat up on its hook and cursed the age that made him stiff after the not-so-long drive in the car.

“You want to tell me what the hell’s going on with me?”

He inadvertently skipped forward several steps, and then took a deep breath to let his heart settle down.  Carol waited for him in his office, and as usual these days, he didn’t notice her until she spoke.

“Ma’am?”  Her comment had been one hell of a predatory snarl.  He walked to his desk, littered with lab results, but didn’t sit down.  A huge swath of manila folders spread out over a nearby credenza, most with papers leaking out.  Biochemical formulae and twenty-syllable names and numbers labeled each, all associated with the juice pattern project, and all far beyond Carol’s interest level.  She wanted the results, not the intermediate details.

“I’ve tortured three people in the last week.  Three!  That’s ludicrous,” Carol said.

“I thought you were trying to stay away from your darker urges.”

“I
am
.  Which is why I want to know what the hell is going on.  The last one was even an Arm, if you use the term loosely, and there was a good reason for every one of them.  But still…”

Hank frowned.  “This does seem a little much for coincidence.  Would you be willing to tell me the reasons?”

“No.”  Ah.  One of those visits.  Carol and chaos didn’t get along very well, unless Carol caused the chaos.  She stopped pacing.

They had hashed over the problem several times before.  “Very well.  As I’m sure you’ve heard too much about recently” as several of Amy’s crazy research ideas dealt with this issue “the immaturity of Major Transform society is colliding with our lack of understanding of how Major Transforms work.  I suspect things will have to get worse before they can get better.  Consider how much pressure we needed before tags appeared.”

“Just great.”  Carol shook her head and ran her hand through her close-cropped hair.  “I’ll let you know if I come up with some great inspiration.  What a royally fucked up mess.”  She glared at his bare office wall, clenched her jaw tight, and didn’t say any more.

“I, um, have something for you,” Hank said, after Carol had given the previous problems enough time for thought.  He held up a manila envelope, thick with notes and analysis.  “I was going to send it to the warehouse, but…” the FBI now owned Carol’s backup Chicago residence.

“Give it here,” Carol said.  Hank passed over the envelope, which Carol opened.  The document was his paper on the Apocalypse scenarios Haggerty had demanded, one he, Lori and Ann Chiron of Inferno had been working on for the last four months.  The information inside wasn’t pretty, and the new numbers were grim.  As long predicted, the number of induced transformations would pass disease-caused transformations in the US in 1977, at about thirty-four thousand each, and then keep rising exponentially.  They now expected the peak to occur in 1983, at around thirteen million transformations that year, 90% of whom would die for lack of a Focus.  Society would collapse and civilization would end.  The US population would crash, and would stabilize around the turn of the century at about three million, confined to a few widely separated pre-industrial pockets, the rest of the country Monster territory.  Things would slowly get worse, as only a tiny fraction of the surviving women would be able to birth children.  Add in usual human foolishness – nuclear weapons, for one – and the question became: would the species itself survive?

That is, unless the Cause started to produce results and solve some of the many intractable problems outlined in this paper.

“So Haggerty’s instincts were right and things are significantly worse off than we feared?”

He nodded.

Carol winced.  He and Lori’s people had come up with the rough estimates on the Transform demographic bomb back when Carol was Keaton’s apprentice, but five years ago they hadn’t been able to come up with any decent numerical estimates after the exponential growth rate of the induced transformations pushed past the number of disease transformations.  All they knew, back then, was that the Transform Apocalypse would be bad.

“‘Massive predator die-off’ indeed,” Carol said, referring to a line in the document regarding predator-prey cycles.  “What about the government?”

“I assumed the standard government reaction to an ongoing crisis.  Unless they do something dramatically more intelligent than expected, such as building a high-grade cooperative alliance with some form of Major Transform, or something dramatically less intelligent than expected, like large-scale extermination of Transforms, their actions are already factored in.”

Carol stood and began to pace again.  “The Cause won’t be enough, even if Haggerty’s research ideas prove true.”

“I’m afraid you’re correct.”

“Any ideas?”

“Political action.  A strong political leader rising from the Transform community might do the trick, if you’re willing to hazard a dictator.”

To this Carol grunted, and went back to her pacing.  Carol, the Commander, had been indirectly offered the role of strong leader several times, but had declined the job as impractical, suicidal or both.

Zielinski respected Carol’s silence as she thought for several minutes, ready to break in to her thoughts to bring up his next topic, when Carol did the Arm mind reading thing and brought it up herself.

“So what else are you sweating?”

“I picked up some information on Grace Billington through the Network that I hadn’t known, before.  She’s black.  When she entered Keaton’s training, she was white.  Somehow, she changed her race during her training, not just her skin color.”  He paced now, while Carol sat down and frowning.

“Old news to me.  Why are you so worked up about this?” Carol said.  Well, he was very agitated about the subject.  These were ‘his Arms’, dammit, doing things they shouldn’t be able to do!

“This isn’t the same as muscle growth and improvement in sense acuity.  This is something completely new and different.  Can you tell me anything about what happened to Billington during her training?  What might have caused her to change race?”

“Sit down.  You’re making me nervous.”  Zielinski sat, and tapped his fingers against his leg.

“Do you remember what Webberly went through about two years ago?”

Zielinski nodded.  “I remember learning about her.  I’ve only ever met her once.  She was the first black Arm.”

“And you know how Keaton always goes for the cruelest thing she can come up with?”

Zielinski nodded again.  “That has been my experience, as well.”

“Well, with Webberly, Keaton had a field day.  Arm training is close to slavery to begin with, and in Webberly’s case, Keaton made the comparison explicit.  Shackles, floggings, the whole bit.  She made her do the happy darkie routine, down to the accent, and the ‘yes, massa’, ‘no, massa’, bad enough to turn
my
stomach.  I still can’t believe Webberly survived.  The experience turned her into the coldest Arm I’ve ever seen.”

“I see.”  Keaton could certainly be a monster when she wanted.  “How do Webberly’s experiences tie into Billington?”

“Billington transformed just a few months after Webberly graduated, and Keaton enjoyed the shit she dumped on Webberly so much she decided to continue.  She ran Billington through exactly the same routine.  She insisted Billington was black, and she ordered her other students and any other Arms who came by to back her up.  She thought the whole business hysterical.  The thing is, by the time Billington graduated, she
was
black.”

“So: psychological pressure causing physical changes, this time with the sort of alterations I’d expect to see with a Chimera.”  Very unnerving.

“I guess,” Carol said, catching his case of nerves.

Zielinski tapped his fingers restlessly against his leg.  “Do you mind if I examine you?”

Carol signaled ‘no problem’.  She didn’t want to deal with this, but she did know her duty.

He tested
everything
.  He hauled out old charts and duplicated all his old measurements.  The examination took nearly two hours.  Most of the time, he murmured happily and entered more numbers in the most recent chart.  He found only a few changes.

“Hey!  I’m five nine now,” Carol said, when he measured her height.  She had once been five eight.  Forty-one year old women didn’t grow taller.  Unless they were Arms, apparently.

He also found improvements in Carol’s hearing acuity and tactile sensitivity, thinning of her arm and leg bones, and a decline in her hepatic function back toward Arm normal.  Once upon a time she had been significantly better than Arm normal, the improvement due to a wicked set of tests done to her by the FBI when she had been a young captive Arm, tests involving repeated injections of poisons and toxins.

“Preliminarily, I’d say that the Arms have at least some of the morphic flexibility that Chimeras possess,” Hank said.  “I’d like to get every Arm you can get your hands on in here and work up some statistics on how flexible you Arms are.”

Carol nodded.  “I’ll make some calls.”

Carol cleaned out Hank’s refrigerator of emergency Arm food while they waited for Arm Elizabeth Whetstone to show.  She would be a difficult visit, for two reasons.  First, Arm Whetstone wasn’t currently tagged by anyone.  Second, Carol kept referring to her as Betsy Wetsy, a ludicrous Keatonism if Hank had ever heard one.  He would need to watch his verbal and mental commentary closely, to avoid even thinking of Arm Whetstone by that name.  Even with Carol guarding him, referring to any Arm in such an insulting fashion might easily be fatal.  Worse, as midnight approached, Hank grew more and more tired.

“Hank, you up to thinking about something else?” Carol said.

His eyes opened from his near nap, taken while working on Arm Whetstone’s chart.  “Right.  Yes.”  Carol glared at him, unconvinced.

“I’m going to be getting a new Focus for the juice moving project, Rickenbach of Detroit, and I’d like to merge this with your juice pattern project,” Carol said.