The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (20 page)

“What?” Hank said, and then shook his head.  Arms!  Why did they always have to hit him with things like this when he was half-asleep?  Rickenbach, finally, though.  Back when Keaton held Detroit, she had told Carol that Focus Rickenbach was her turf and that she would feed Carol her own ass in filleted strips if she dared lay a hand on Keaton’s territory.  Which had been too bad, since Hank wanted to start training the promising young Focus immediately.  “Why do you want to merge the juice moving project with the juice pattern project?”

“Because, although you haven’t told me the good news, I know you’re making lots of progress,” Carol said.  “Since Focus Rickenbach isn’t an old style witch, perhaps we can train her faster on juice patterns using your new approach.”

“Well, that will teach me not to try and surprise you with good news,” Hank said.  “I’ve fully identified several dozen juice patterns, both their chemical components and the order in which they occur.  If a Focus can learn them, she should be able to learn her juice patterns just by reading the pattern description.  Understand, though, the project is by no means finished.  There’s still a lot of work to be done.”

“And now you’ll have a Focus to experiment with.”

Hank felt himself waking up.  This was his big baby, the project that would count as his first real breakthrough as a researcher, at least from his point of view.  Or as an inventor, from another point of view.  He refused to mentally capitalize ‘Inventor’, despite Lori’s chatter about juice-powered archetypes.  “You do have a point, as an established witch may have issues with my new methods.  In addition, I’ve identified fewer than fifty patterns, and I suspect the Focuses possess thousands of them.  I’d been thinking of requesting a month in Boston to work with Lori and her latest students, but this will do.”

Carol nodded.  “I’ll talk to Lori and see if she can free up some time to visit you here.”

“Good, good.  Uh, there’s something else, too.  I believe you’ll need to take some precautions this time.”

“Oh, no.  I know what precaution you’re thinking of, and I’m not interested.”

“Carol, I’m serious.  If you suddenly start taking juice from a Focus juice buffer and disable the Focus in the process, you run the risk of taking down the entire buffer.  You’d either go Monster or, if the juice just falls out, subject yourself and the Focus to a nasty élan explosion.”

“The last time you tried to interrupt an Arm’s draw, the Arm died.  I’m not interested.”

“She was a baby Arm less than four months past her transformation, with no control, and no idea what she was doing.  Your situation is vastly different.”

“We did without before.”

Hank decided to wait Carol out, and didn’t say a thing.  “Okay, I nearly killed both Frasier and Cooley, offed several Transforms, and messed myself up several times as well.  I’m still not sure the benefits are worth the risk.”

“Carol, you’ll be working with the one Focus who proved she can move juice to an Arm.  She’s a lot older as a Focus now, and likely a lot more dangerous when stressed.”

Carol grimaced and looked away.  “I’ll give this some thought,” Carol said.

---

Betsy Wet…no,
Arm Whetstone
was a young Arm with thick black hair cropped short to her head, pale skin, and bright green eyes, about five foot five or so.  Hank looked her over carefully, and shoved the unfortunate name far back into his mind.  Arm Whetstone wasn’t as lean as was normal for an Arm, and carried enough fat on her body to look almost human.  She would be heroically strong once her body stopped changing out from under her.  She dressed as a man, and little beads of sweat marked the back of her shirt.

“Ma’am,” she said as she hit the floor in a full grovel in front of Carol.  He hadn’t seen an Arm this terrified since Haggerty invaded Carol’s turf in Houston and nearly killed him in the process.  He backed off a bit, wary, to watch the two Arms joust, all the way to the other side of the room.

Carol leaned back against the wall of the examining room with her arms crossed, and lifted Arm Whetstone’s chin with the tip of her foot.

“I’m not going to have any trouble with you, am I?” Carol asked.  Ever since her wooing of Arm Bass failed, Carol had been hell on all the younger Arms.

“No, ma’am.  None at all.”

“Get up.”

Arm Whetstone stood, eyes down, extremely deferential.

“The Good Doctor here is going to examine you,” Carol said.  “You will do everything he says.”

“Yes, ma’am.”  Arm Whetstone turned to eye Hank uneasily.

“Ah, yes,” Zielinski said.  “Arm Whetstone, if you would allow me to take some measurements?”  Hank could practically watch Whetstone try to work out the Arm dominance issues in her head.  Whetstone had no idea who he was, save for Carol’s granting him status.  Unless Whetstone was exceptional, she shouldn’t be able to read Zielinski’s tags at such a young age.  Arms natively read tags in a Transform’s juice structure, but Zielinski was a normal, and a young Arm should need to taste his blood to know he wore the Commander’s tag.  And Keaton’s tag.  And Erica Eissler’s tag.  Amy Haggerty’s too, for that matter.  Even a tag from Armenigar herself, but it had been over two years since Armenigar had refreshed her tag, and Hank doubted the tag was still functional.

Zielinski had been working closely with Arms for a long time.

Hank ran Arm Whetstone through a duplicate of Carol’s two hour exam.  As Hank worked, he chattered on, describing exactly what he did and why, today portraying a meek mild normal.  He could come on strong to an Arm and, with a young Arm, spin her mind around so much he managed an effective domination, but he didn’t need the trick today.  Besides, whenever Arm Whetstone put out any strong dominance signals, Carol snarled at her and she backed down.

When he finished the examination, Arm Whetstone hurriedly put her clothes back on, still struggling to maintain her self-control.

“Ma’am, Arm Whetstone,” Hank said.  “I’ve found several abnormalities.  The most significant are your fingernails, Arm Whetstone.”  He had her show Carol her fingernails, which were hard and narrow and curled in past the end of Whetstone’s fingers to form something that looked suspiciously like claws.  “In addition, Arm Whetstone, the hair on your head is unusually thick, and resembles animal fur more than human hair.  This applies only to the hair on your head.  The hair on the rest of your body is entirely normal.”

She nodded.

“Also,” Zielinski continued, “you show significant adaptation to cold temperatures.  This is normal among all Arms, but your level of adaptation is unusual.  In summary, you show considerably more deviation from the normal than the other Arms I’ve examined, and it might be wise if you monitored any deviations carefully.”

Zielinski closed the chart.  “Finished?” Carol asked.

“Yes,” Hank said.  He would talk to Carol later, after Whetstone was gone, about any further arrangements to monitor the young Arm.

“You’re done.  Get out.  I want you out of my territory immediately,” Carol said.

“Yes, ma’am.”  Arm Whetstone then sank down onto her knees in front of Carol and bowed her head.  Hank blinked in surprise and backed off, wary.

“Ma’am, I would like your permission to make a request of you.”

Carol’s eyes narrowed.  “You can ask.”

“Ma’am, I would like to request to become yours.  If you will claim me, I would like to serve you.”

Carol leaned forward, intently studying Arm Whetstone.  Carol had been wooing Whetstone ever since Whetstone’s graduation, but he hadn’t thought she had made any progress.  Hank had never seen an Arm-Arm tag negotiation session in person.  He extracted his rumpled emergency notepad from his pocket, and took notes in shorthand.

“What exactly are you offering?”

“I’m offering my personal service.  I have three people I own, and I claim the territory of Cincinnati.  I’ll work for you.  I’ll be a test subject as you require, and do other tasks at your order.  I’ll give you the information I know, and I offer my loyalty.”

“And what do you expect?”

Arm Whetstone took a breath, nervous, but less nervous than she had been.  “I ask that you use me with some measure of care.  I ask for medical care, and for the opportunity to earn training.  I ask that you share some knowledge with me, and give me the opportunity to earn more.  I ask for protection.”

“Why now?”

Another nervous breath.  “Ma’am, the research projects you and Arm Haggerty are doing are the right things to be doing, especially considering the Major Transforms who are opposing them.  This is where I belong, ma’am.”

Carol thought and Hank watched very closely.  Why Carol and not Haggerty?  Had Amy refused Whetstone’s tag offer?

“For the gift of my claim on you, I expect that you’ll spend six months as a test subject.  You’ll receive medical care during any period you’re acting as a test subject.  I’ll take care with your safety when I use you, but I’ll expect a basic level of competence on your part.  I’ll give you the opportunity to earn training, knowledge, and protection.”

Arm Whetstone paled.  “During the period I would be acting as a test subject, how much of my time would this occupy?”

“I expect you to be present and available for tests for five days every month, my choice as to which days.”

Whetstone nodded.  “Yes, ma’am.  These terms are acceptable to me.  Under these terms, I ask that you make me yours.”

“I’ll consider it.”

Teaching Peanut Butter to Dance

“Rumors abound of Sports able to do what can only be explained as magic, such as capturing ghosts, raising the dead, casting fire, etc., but if you track such rumors down you find nothing.  Is there anything behind this?” – from Arm Haggerty’s Speculative Projects List

Gail Rickenbach: July 8, 1972

“The protest will be at 10:00 AM on Friday, and we need everyone there who can possibly attend,” Gail said.  She sat in her small office, talking on the telephone.  “How many from your household do you think you can scrape together?”

“I don’t see why everyone’s going to all this effort for Fanny’s Transform.  When one of mine lost her job three months ago, nobody cared at all.”  The woman on the other end was Allison Silvey, and her rich, full voice contrasted oddly with the carping words.

“We’re fighting this one because it’s a fight we can win.  We need a win to work with, if we’re going to move forward.” Gail had more to say, but the other woman cut her off.

“All I see is everyone rallying around Fanny, and no one helped me when I needed help.”

Gail shook her head, frustrated with Allison’s stubborn selfishness.  “The situations aren’t the same.  We’re fighting this one because we think we can win.  Look, Cass Ezell fills potholes for the city, he’s got a stellar work history, and a wife and three kids.  He’s a normal working class guy, and he’s not a threat.”

“It’s not fair!”  Gail winced and wondered what Allison’s shout did to her household’s juice supply.  “Lydia did just as good a job, and she shouldn’t have been fired.  You should be standing up for everyone; don’t pick and choose.”

“We have to win the easy ones first,” Gail said.  She stood, dodging the chair leg above her, and leaned over her messy desk, rearranging paperwork as she spoke.  “If we can win Cass, maybe people will think, ‘Okay, so you can’t fire a Transform all the time.’ Then we start working on the tougher ones.  Right now, anybody can fire a Transform just because he’s a Transform.  We’ve got to change that.  We have to say, ‘here, here’s one place that you can’t fire a Transform just for being a Transform.’ We have to get the normals to agree with us, just give us anything, any limit.  Once we get a limit, of any kind, we can work the precedent.  We go for the next step, more limits, bigger limits.  Maybe someday you won’t be able to fire someone just because they’re a Transform, and then your teacher will be safe, but we have to start small.  Look, I’m not asking you to have anyone take off work.  Just bring the people that are home.  Bring the kids, bring everyone.  We’re looking for numbers.  Bring as many people as you can.”

“All right, all right,” Allison said, reluctance evident in her voice.  “I can have about twenty people there, maybe thirty or forty if you count the kids.

“Wonderful! Thanks so much.  It will really make a difference to have your help.  You won’t regret helping.”

Gail hung up the phone after the obligatory five minutes of chitchat that followed and rubbed her hands in her hair.  Small-minded, backbiting, selfish little bitch, she fumed, as she checked Silvey’s name off the long list in front of her.  There were too many Focuses like Silvey.

Unfortunately, the world wasn’t getting any younger.  She sat back down and picked up the phone again.

---

Gail sighed and looked at the time.  Past ten, and she had been on the phone almost continuously since three, when the word came in about Cass Ezell’s dismissal.  She was tired, her head ached, and after so long a day her juice flow now skipped and slipped.  She sighed and closed her eyes.  Why was everything so hard?

Nobody answered her mental plea.  She stood up and groaned, automatically holding her hair out of the way.  She shared the space in her large office, the bedroom of a one-bedroom apartment, with boxes and furniture and other odds and ends that they hadn’t had room for after the last move but didn’t want to throw out.  Piled up furniture and boxes loomed over her head in her tiny cramped corner.

Her stomach rumbling, she decided to head down to the kitchen for some food.

Gail’s current home, theirs as of about a year ago, was an old apartment building, a bit of condemned and abandoned student housing they picked up for three years of back taxes.  The building had two two-story wings, six apartments each, joined by a central hallway.  Twenty-four one-bedroom apartments to work with, at least after they patched the roof, plus an office and a laundry room in the central corridor.  Gail and Van occupied two of the apartments, much to Gail’s consternation, but the household wouldn’t hear of giving her less.  The best she had been able to do was to share some of her office for storage space.  The rest of her household, thirty-three Transforms, eighteen spouses, and twenty one kids, lived in eighteen of the apartments, with the remaining four held aside as common area.  For a Focus household, spacious.

Two years ago they lost their Crow, Whisper, when he became a Crow Master of Nobles and moved away.  Their previous place had gone bad almost overnight.  Gail learned, then, a sad truth: Crows never moved into a town where Arm Keaton lived.  She had left messages and bait, but no Crows had shown themselves to her before Stacy left Detroit.  After?  The best she got had been a nameless itinerant Crow who left a note apologizing for not staying in town for more than a few weeks.  If not for Gilgamesh and his too-infrequent visits, they would already be looking for a new place to move.  Dross cleaning was difficult and expensive, and Gail’s household was nowhere near flush enough to pay for Crow housecleaning.  Worse, her own meager abilities to push dross around didn’t help at all.

Gail noticed that her fatigue and her worries skittered her household’s juice count, and adjusted everyone back to normal.  She couldn’t afford to dwell on the negative.  They would be all right.  They had survived for months living in tents in an open field back when she first made her transformation.  They would survive this.

As she passed by apartment 1D, she heard shouting from inside, and winced.  The Attendales and the Guynes’s shared an apartment, and they were fighting again.  She wasn’t surprised.  The Attendales always fought with whomever they lived with.  Their fighting made her headache pound worse, but she didn’t know what to do about their strife.  She passed by as quickly as possible.

She found Isabella Wheelhouse down in their faux kitchen.  They had taken one apartment and put tables in the living room.  The kitchen itself was nothing more than a tiny railroad kitchen, but they used the bedroom to extend it, setting up food storage and refrigerators and tables for food preparation.  Not great, but they ate.

Gail metasensed Isabella cleaning in the area in the back, slamming drawers and wiping counters with an angry vehemence.  She was a thin, dark-haired woman, just shy of fifty.

“What are you doing back here,” Gail said as she made her way to the back.  “I though Trisha had clean up duty tonight?”

“Ma’am,” Isabella gasped, startled by the sudden appearance of her Focus.  “I didn’t see you.”  Then her voice grew sharp.  “Trisha did have clean up duty.  Unfortunately, she had to work late.  Somebody had to clean up this mess, so I did.”

Gail raised Isabella’s juice count when she heard the words, both to make her feel better, and to reward her for doing more than her share of the work.

“Well, Trisha does bring in quite a bit of money for the household,” Gail said.  “If she needs to work late, it’s because she has a paying client.”

“She
always
has to work late,” Isabella said.  “If she can’t make cleanup duty, she shouldn’t sign up to clean.  She does this on purpose.  She signs up for something she knows she won’t make, she cancels, and so she never does any of her share of the load at home.”

This did sound like Trisha, unfortunately.

“I’ll help,” Gail said.  “You’re almost done, and with two of us, you’ll be out of here in just a few minutes.”

“Ma’am,” Isabella said, horrified, and Gail sighed.  She thought Isabella’s overawed respect for her importance was a little much.

“Nope, no protests,” Gail said.  “I can clean a kitchen with the best.”

“Ma’am, I didn’t mean to imply that you couldn’t, I just…”

“Shhh.  Where’s the washcloth?”

They were nearly done when Bart Wheelhouse, Isabella’s husband and one of the perennial members of the house’s leadership committee, came looking for her.  At least, he was looking for Isabella until he saw Gail back there with her.

“Gail,” he said, as he stopped in the doorway from the kitchen.  Gail put down the towel she was using to dry the last of the dishes and turned to him.  He always made her a little uneasy.  Old enough to be her father, he was the person the household had chosen as leader just after she transformed, back when she hadn’t known enough to assert her authority.  He was competent, down to earth and sensible, but he rarely agreed with the direction she wanted to take the household.  He especially didn’t like her husband Van’s leadership style, and Van was, at the moment, the household president.  Her household rotated the position often, after figuring out Gail wanted as many people as possible with leadership experience.

“You looking for Isabella?” she asked, just a little stiff.

“I hear that you’re planning to go down to Cleveland on Friday,” he said.

“You heard right.”

“Are you sure that’s such a good idea?” he asked, like a father trying to point the obvious out to a not-so-bright child.

“Yes.”

Bart took a sharp breath and then let it out with a sigh.  He ran his hand through his graying hair.  “Gail, why are you doing this? It’s been barely two weeks since the last trip, and you have a household to run.  Those marches aren’t safe, not with the way people are reacting to Transforms these days.  You’ve got a responsibility to your household first.  Let someone else worry about Transform rights.”

Gail’s voice turned tight and angry.  “That’s what all those small-minded, selfish Focuses say.  ‘It’s not my problem’, ‘let someone else cope with it’.  I could be another useless Focus, willing to let someone else cope.  Except whose job is it, then? Somebody needs to lead, and I’m not going to sit on my ass and wait for ‘somebody’ to come along, because if I won’t lead, I sure as hell don’t have a right to expect someone else to.”

Bart artfully sighed and backed down; she knew from experience he would go behind her back and pester Van.  Van, bless his heart, would assign Bart a paper on the subject, his favorite way of giving himself time to muster his own arguments.

Whatever worked.

Halfway back to her apartment with a plate of hot dogs, still irritated and carefully watching the juice flow, Gail heard the household phone ring.  She stopped and frowned for just a moment before continuing.  Betha would catch the phone, but the call would almost certainly be for Gail.  Only another Focus would call at this hour of the night.  Focuses needed little sleep, and so considered any time before midnight to be fair game for phone calls.

Gail timed the call in her mind as she quickly gobbled a hotdog.  Two rings before Betha picked up the phone, fifteen seconds for Betha to realize the caller was a Focus, twenty seconds while Betha ran from the office down the hall, up the stairs, and…

“Ma’am, Focus!” Betha said, from the head of the stairs.  Gail had already turned around and waited for her.  “Focus Biggioni wants to talk to you.”

Gail nodded, cynical at the predictability of late-night phone calls.

“Transfer the call up to my office.”

“Tonya, it’s great to hear from you,” Gail said.  “Do you have news about Van’s book?”  The household had chosen Van as boss because he wasn’t currently writing.  When he wrote, he didn’t have the brain cells to keep track of other people’s details.

“It’s great to talk to you, too.  How’s the weather up there?” Tonya said.  “Any new babies in the house? Any new gossip from Detroit?”

“Sorry,” Gail said.  “I never do manage the small talk very well, do I?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that’s one of your strong points, no,” Tonya said.  Gail heard the smile in her voice.

“Okay, well let’s see, the weather’s hot, but probably not as hot as Philadelphia.  No new babies, but Elaine is pregnant again with her third.  As far as gossip, I think there’s something going on between Wini Adkins and Grace Johnson, but I’m not sure what.  All I know is that Grace is real bad tempered these days, and pissed at Wini besides.  I suspect Wini is trying to get her to do something she doesn’t want to, but like I said, I don’t know what.”

“Hmm,” Tonya said.  “How long ago did this start?”

“A couple of weeks ago.”

“But you don’t know anything about the issue?  Do any of the other Focuses up there?”

“I don’t think so.  I know Beth doesn’t, and if any of the others do, they haven’t bothered to tell me.”

“Maybe I can make a few phone calls…” Tonya’s voice drifted off.

“Okay.” Gail snorted. “I’ve covered the weather, the babies, and the local gossip.  Can I ask about Van’s book now?”

Tonya sighed.  “Well, you can ask.  The book’s on the agenda for the next Council meeting.”

“Tonya, it’s been on the agenda for the last two already, from before his final draft, and they keep putting it off.  Van’s invested his soul in the book and the Council is just stringing him along.  The book needs to be out there, putting a human face on Transform Sickness.”