The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (27 page)

Smith nodded again, this time with a small smile.  “That’s the idea, once you learn to read the symbology and equate the symbols with specific chemical release.”

“So what if the juice pattern came from some other Focus?  Could I duplicate their juice pattern just by reading the sheet?”

“Almost.  There are some specific adjustments that you need to make in order to replace the other Focus’s personal identifiers with your own, but that should be straightforward.”

“All juice patterns.”

“This
is
still under development, and I expect I haven’t found all the components, but yes.  All juice patterns.”  Smith appeared ever so slightly pleased with himself.

Gail shook her head.  This was nuts.  And huge.  No-account doctors in office park ghettos didn’t come up with advances of this nature.  This was the sort of thing teams of researchers working in major research centers dreamt up.  Projects like this got published in academic journals and the researchers won prizes and awards.  This wasn’t the sort of thing hack doctors did in their personal laboratories.

If he really came up with some method of allowing Focuses to trade juice patterns, he would change the entire dynamic of how Focuses operated.  Learning and skills would spread like wildfire.  All the Focuses would become tremendously more powerful, and they would do so quickly.  This was also a political nuclear bomb.  The bitch patrol would die of apoplexy, before racing each other to assassinate everyone who knew this existed.

Such as Dr. Smith.  She was surprised he was still alive.

“You’re serious,” Gail said, her voice a rough whisper.

“Yes, Focus.”

“This is insanely dangerous!”

“As you have likely deduced, I do already have a price on my head,” Dr. Smith said.  “They can only kill me once.”

Gail closed her eyes and shivered.  If she mastered this before the bitch patrol killed them all off, she might be able to use these new skills to protect her household.  If he offered.  “They can kill me far more times than that,” she said, whispering.  She opened her eyes to see Dr. Smith nod in agreement.

“As part of your training effort with Arm Hancock, I’d like you to work on learning to read and duplicate juice patterns.  The method you’ll be using to pass juice to an Arm will involve codified juice patterns.  Arm Hancock and I are betting that by combining the two projects, we can achieve the critical synergy necessary to get around our previous failures.”

Critical synergy?  Now he sounded like a competent professor, not a hack doctor stuck in a junk office with a leaky roof.  “If you’re offering to teach me juice patterns, then I accept,” she said.  One of the big secrets of the most powerful Focuses looked like it was about to fall into her lap for free.

“Yes, Focus.  That’s the idea.”

Except for his ability to resist her charisma, Smith seemed perfectly ordinary.  A little more confident and competent than she expected, but still ordinary.  Then she looked at this huge juice pattern project, with all its implications, and she couldn’t make her mind attach it to this ordinary hack doctor in front of her.

“You need better security,” she said.  On the other hand, maybe Smith was just a talented bullshit artist, or a nut with delusions of grandeur.  Except all these complex sheets filled with indecipherable annotation looked much more meaningful than some half-crazed doctor’s odd delusions.

“The Arms see to my security.”

Arms.  Plural.  Hell.  Arm Keaton and Arm Haggerty, Teacher’s current bosses, were involved as well.  Perhaps even some of the younger Arms.

“Are the other senior Arms going to be teaching me as well?”

Dr. Smith smiled.  “There may be other Arms involved, as well as some Focuses and Crows.  At some point we’re going to need your old pal Crow Gilgamesh and his fancy metasense to help us figure a way around some problems I’ve already anticipated.”

Gilgamesh?  If Dr. Smith had the ability to teach her juice patterns, she wanted it, even if this led her into the hottest political explosion she could imagine.  But this didn’t make sense.  Who was this guy, anyway?  She had never heard of any Dr. Smith in any of the myriad professional articles she had read on the subject.

This mystery would not go unsolved.

The Quest

“British Columbia Crows report anomalous dross accumulations near Lake Okanagan and speculate this is due to Ogopogo, the mythical sea monster long reported to live in the lake (earliest known reports are by the First Nations peoples in the 1800s, and their name for Ogopogo is ‘the lake demon’).  Is this true?” – from Arm Haggerty’s Speculative Projects List

Carol Hancock: July 18, 1972 – July 22, 1972

Cooper’s Seafood sat just a few hundred yards from Lori’s Boston household, and around back was a delivery alley no one used during the day.  I could spend hours in the alley, just metasensing.  Sometimes, I thought there wasn’t anything in the world as beautiful as the never-ending weave of the juice.  The household danced, endlessly revolving around itself as they played and worked and loved and fought.  I understood the Crows, then, and why they spent such effort to make art out of juice.  Nothing else compared.

I worried about Gilgamesh.  Of the Cause’s known and hidden enemies, our Crow enemies seemed the worst, and yet there he went, charging right into the attack.  The Arm in me understood his logic, and I would even approve such actions in another Arm, but Gilgamesh wasn’t another Arm.  He was my Crow, my lover, my companion of many years, and the knowledge of the danger he faced twisted in my stomach.  Even more, I hated that he faced the danger alone, without me to protect him.

I knew no way to help him.  I worried anyway, for another ten useless minutes before I pulled my thoughts away from the worry and watched Lori.  She worked, hard, and I let my tensions relax at her glow in my metasense.  She hunched over a desk, reading papers and making occasional notes.  Her juice glowed with an intensity that made the rest of her household pale by comparison.  Brilliant, vibrant, her juice sang with energy and a myriad complex patterns.  I could watch the juice song endlessly, losing myself in the echoes reflected in the juice signatures of her people.

So beautiful, so perfect, so fragile.  Every time I encountered Lori’s metapresence I ached, and I wondered what cruel world had put her in Boston instead of Chicago.  If I could have anything in the world that I wanted, it would be to make this precious beauty my own, but I didn’t know any safe way to do so.  Maybe someday, if I solved the puzzle I worked on with Gail, I would understand how to build a tie to Lori that didn’t eat both of us alive or tear us apart irrevocably.  Until then, I survived on rare visits, and watched from the alley behind Cooper’s Seafood.

I had watched long enough, though.  Time to visit and my stomach knotted with useless juvenile terror.  What if this time, finally, she really understood my flaws, and refused to have anything to do with me?  What if my clumsy Arm manners made her mad at me?

What if I slipped and hurt one of her people?

I shook the worries away as long discarded childish insecurities.  If Lori hadn’t rejected me so far, nothing I did now would likely cause her to change her mind.

I recognized the guard who answered the door to my knock, Autumn Maybray, but she didn’t recognize me.  I wasn’t surprised.  The pressures of the FBI’s recent Arm hunts forced me to extreme efforts with my disguise.  I shifted my position minutely and let the air of predator show through.

The light went on.  Autumn smiled and nodded.

“Come in, come in.  You know where the Focus is.”  I did, and headed up the stairs.  No one escorted me, and I marveled at the trust and confidence that let them accept an Arm in their house so easily.

Lori met me halfway down the hall, big black circles under her eyes.  She had been pushing herself too much again.

“Come on, we can talk in the library.”  Ah, Lori, not willing to have me so close as I would be in her cramped bedroom.  She smiled at me, honestly glad to see me.  The touch of wonder in her eyes echoed my own.

You would think, after all these years, we would have figured out a way past our own natures to be happy, but no.  We still lived hundreds of miles away from each other, and contented ourselves with phone calls and the occasional visit.  The welcoming glow of her household stroked my metasense, luring me in and attempting to persuade me to stay forever.  Right.  I would live here the way a fox would live in a chicken-coop: fun for the fox, bad for the chickens.

“Einstein,” she said, snagging a scraggly-looking older adolescent as he slammed out of a bedroom at a run with a load of records in his arms.

“What?”  He looked around as if he hadn’t realized we were there.

“Ask Gracie if she’ll send some food to the library.  Meat.”

“Got it.  Meat to the library.”  Whoosh and he was gone.  I wondered if he would still remember by the time he made it down the stairs.  Lori just rolled her eyes and shook her head.

We passed the apocalypse clock on the way, stationed prominently on a narrow table in the main hallway and counting down its endless count.  I checked the latest date.  June 27, 1977, the day the number of induced transformations passed the number of disease-caused transformations and the transformation of humanity became unstoppable.

I nurtured more pessimism than the clock, as I considered the transformation unstoppable now.  Under no circumstances I could imagine would humanity manage to kill every Transform of every variety in the world, which was the only way to halt the slow accumulation of ambient juice in the atmosphere. That would require killing every Monster hiding out in the Himalayas, not to mention the Rockies, the Alps, the Andes, or the bottom of the damned ocean.  Oh, and every Transform, every Major Transform, and me.  Unlike the enthusiastic intentions of some of the more murderous normals, the death of large numbers of the most conveniently accessible Transforms would only slow the process down, not stop it, and then no experienced Transforms would be available to support the transforming multitudes.  The death rate would be even higher.

Eventually, 86% of humanity would transform, 90% of those would die, a few would become Monsters and eat the survivors, and the few who survived their transformations would not be replaced when they died because Transform women weren’t fertile.  The Apocalypse.  The end of the world.

The only solution I knew was to make the Cause succeed.

Haggerty did the right thing by pushing the Cause, no matter the cost.  With the lever of the Eskimo Spear, she had done what I couldn’t and got the Cause moving again.  She won our dominance fight honestly, by proving herself the more worthy leader, and I couldn’t argue.  With all her faults, we needed her.  I wouldn’t win a dominance fight against her until the world I cared about needed me more than they needed her.

Sky waited for us at the doorway to the library, dressed in his normal casuals, a checked shirt and corduroy pants.  Despite the sweltering August heat.  “Mademoiselle Arm,” he said, formally.  Then he bowed to me, did some sort of Crow prestidigitation, and made a single red rose appear out of nowhere.  As usual with the extremely talented Sky, I couldn’t tell if he made the rose visible out of invisibility, or whether the rose was a dross-based illusion.  “I have the report you requested.  I’m afraid your Arm Duval is going to need a little work down in the basement.”

Basement work meant a different thing to Sky than to Keaton, but I still winced.  Duval had been foolish enough to take Monster juice sometime in her past, along with all her other mistakes.  I had suspected as much.  The confirmation came through Newt from Rain, the Crow who followed Duval.  I didn’t expect I would ever meet Rain.  He was a young Crow, scared shitless of me, especially since he metasensed me break Duval.  Negotiations continued among the six of us, including Sky and Webberly, as both Duval and Rain would do better if they talked to each other, but Rain remained terrified of all of us.

“Will you be able to handle the procedure?”

“Yes, Arm Hancock, but we should delay the process until Rain can cope.  I’d like to teach him how to do the work himself.  If he can catch the dross before it congeals into tarry gristle, even a young Crow like him could keep her clean.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.  The Crow – Arm symbiosis was both easier and harder than the Arm – Focus symbiosis.  Instead of ‘one big thing’, we accumulated a large number of little things.  They added up.  “I’ll have to tell Webberly.”  The Crow who followed her, aptly named Mouse, had Gilgamesh’s training but remained hesitant to talk to Webberly save over the telephone or in letters.

Sky smiled and looked away, coy, fetching, and far past the panic afflicting young Crows.  About a year ago, Sky had figured out that if he was going to win Lori’s hand for good, he would need to make nice with me as well.  I was the Arm in Lori’s life, which meant I would end up being the Arm in his life.  Thus the crap with the red rose.  Sky was an incurable romantic, unless it was hockey season.  Then he turned into an absolutely normal beer-guzzling Canadian.

His eyes were hollow and purpled again, matching Lori’s.  “You’re killing yourself, Sky, with this damned tag attunement project of yours.”

“Tuning, not attunement.  Affinity tuning as well, Lori’s and my bond with each other,” Sky said.  “Both ways, Major Transforms to each other, Transforms to each other, and all to the Major Transforms.  Progress, my dear Arm, is being made.”

I shook my head.  I would figure this out when he and Lori finished; their damned project had different terms for the same things every time I talked to them after Amy dragged this insanity public.  I didn’t like the idea of throwing Affinity into the mix, ‘Affinity’ being the strange juice-level love Lori and I possessed.  Nobody understood what allowed the Affinity trick to work.  Or how to make Affinity stick.  At times Affinity worked instantly, at other times, slow and growing.  Sometimes we wielded Affinity, yet at others Affinity wielded us, working automatically.

Sky handed me his report on Duval.  “I shall bid you fine ladies farewell,” he said, and sauntered off.  Lori and I looked at each other and grinned.  None of us, not a single one of us, knew what it would take to actually bind a Crow to a Focus for real.  Sky and Lori had a partial Affinity bond to each other, but so did Gilgamesh and Lori, and Gilgamesh’s and Lori’s Affinity bond was stronger.  Children were in the mix as well, children by both of them, though supposedly Focuses, like all Transform women, were infertile.  What a painful mess.

Lori and I went into the library, hand in hand, for some necessary bonding time of our own.

Einstein did remember, and I feasted on cold pork chops as we sat at the table in Lori’s library.  A feast for the stomach and a feast for the eyes.  Lori was beautiful, even for a Focus, though in the old days, she had tried for severe, not beautiful.  Short and cute and a bundle of energy in a gymnast’s build.  Black hair and brown eyes and small pointy face.  I could watch her endlessly.  She sat across from me at the table, with the Eskimo Spear mounted on the wall just above her head.  I sighed, disgusted.

“You know, for something so difficult to acquire, you’d think the Eskimo Spear would actually be useful for something besides making my world miserable,” I said, waving my hand at the Spear.

Lori turned around to look back at the Spear and then shrugged.  “We’re working on it.  Still.  Ann has another idea she thinks might work out, multi-Transform meditation.”

As I stared at the Spear, I felt a tingling in my metasense.  I frowned and concentrated, finally locating the tingle coming from the little Monster carving on my chest.

Fuck!

I barely sensed it, emanating on the Crow bands, at the very edge of my ability to detect, and very faint.  Presumably, the little Monster was responding to the presence of the Eskimo Spear.  What it meant, I had no idea.

“Carol?” Lori asked.

I sighed and explained, knowing what was coming next.

Lori’s eyes lit up.  “So what happens when you move closer?  Does the metapresence get stronger?”  Yup, she wanted to experiment.

I wanted nothing to do with this.  I hated strange juice effects, especially strange juice effects that edged over into magic, and the potentially hostile Progenitors and their mysteries didn’t make me happy either.  The whole situation made my skin crawl, and right then I would have willingly given up on my whole visit with Lori just to escape this.

Unfortunately, I knew very well that if I backed away from this particular mystery, Haggerty would filet my ass into hamburger.  This was exactly the sort of thing she wanted people to investigate, and I would piss the hell out of her if I didn’t follow through.  Not something I wanted to be on the wrong end of.  In addition, I did actually support her overall goals.

So, no choices.  I moved closer.  The little Monster carving didn’t do anything different as far as I could tell, but the emanation was so faint I might have missed a subtle change.

Lori and I spent the next hour experimenting.  We found nothing at all useful.  If I left the room, a couple of minutes later the emanation faded away.  Otherwise, nothing we did made any difference.  The Eskimo Spear never reacted to the carving in any way.  Sky, hauled in from some kind of juice tuning work I didn’t understand, didn’t sense anything that made any sense to him. 

Finally, we, meaning Lori, decided we should keep the carving here in the room with the Spear for a while and see if the passage of time made a difference.  I expected this experiment to be as productive as the others.  At least this one let me get back to the pork chops.