The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (4 page)

Worries ran through my mind.  How successful did Haggerty’s ‘heroic’ quest need to be for Lori to label the success ‘beyond 10’ on a 1 to 10 scale?  Haggerty had been off attempting to suss out the secrets of the so-called Progenitors, the long-dead previous efflorescence of Transforms, if one believed the hypothesis that Transform Sickness had showed itself before.  Had she found something esoteric and hand-wavy enough for me to deny the success of her discovery with regard to our wager?  I hoped so.

My gut, though, said I was screwed.  Lori’s bounce and metasensed exultation seconded my gut.

The hallway contingent came in and they all took their seats, except for Haggerty.  She looked like shit, a badly used Arm, and I metasensed that she had been living off Monster juice for far too long.  Her mood, though, was triumph.  The Focus I didn’t recognize was dark-haired, waif-like and beautiful, with metasense protections radiating ‘pay no attention to me, I am a generic Focus’.  She sat next to Polly, who pointed out people in the crowd and named them for her.

Haggerty stood in front and took a deep breath.  “North we were called, into the unknown, by the dreams of the Madonna of Montreal and Crow Nameless.”  God.  I was about to be subjected to yet another of Haggerty’s ‘heroic tales’.  In language straight out of some B-grade movie.  Haggerty named her quest companions in a similar heroic fashion and gave their various fates; none attended, even Haggerty’s Crow companion Midgard, due to wounds, mental horrors, psychological breakdowns, or juice problems.  I sat up straighter, in shock; the unknown Focus was the Madonna of Montreal, someone I occasionally thought of as nothing more than a myth.  She supposedly owned my dreams and had, in the past, supposedly saved my mind from domination by Focus Shirley Patterson of Pittsburgh.

She never left Montreal, at least as far as I knew.  Yet, here she was.

Haggerty described her heroic quest as I slipped farther into mental shock.  This couldn’t be happening.  The Progenitors were a myth, a tall tale, right up there with Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.  Anything and everything about the so-called Progenitors reeked of magic and unreality. I had turned my back on the ‘myth hypothesis’ years ago after my two brushes with ‘magical thinking’.  I no longer believed Transform Sickness had showed itself in the past, nor did I believe that we remembered these ancient Transforms and Major Transforms as legends of superhuman and divine events.

Haggerty’s team, co-led by the Noble Chimera known of as Sir Kevin of the North Wind Noble household, had gone north, following Crow Nameless’s dreams.  Soon they all had dreams, contradictory dreams.  Guided by the aurora (which I found difficult to believe) they found location after location that tested them, minds and bodies, to prove their worth.  Their judge?  The surviving minds of the Progenitors themselves, according to Haggerty.  A primitive intellect, a collective ghost, something rarely roused to conscious awareness.

Pins and needles covered my arms and legs, and I sat stock still in complete disbelief.  Haggerty didn’t lie, though.  Centuries old ghosts?  This couldn’t be happening, couldn’t be real, not in my world.

Haggerty’s questers passed the preliminary tests and, after yet more adventures, found a stone cairn, what she called an ‘inukshuk’, near the northwest coast of Hudson Bay.  Inside the cairn they found a spear, and the spear
tested
them, individually and collectively.

Were they worthy to wield the spear, a great sacred object of the Progenitors?  In the end, they failed the test and the spear became invisible to them by messing with their minds.  They borrowed a CB radio and called in Lori and Lori’s household, Inferno.  Lori and her best Inferno team came, as quickly as possible (given we’re talking about winter in the Canadian arctic, this hadn’t been easy), and Lori found a way to convince the spear she and the Cause were worthy.

I shook and my breathing hissed.  This wasn’t my world; I had no place in a world of myths and quests.  I wasn’t heroic, or noble, or adventurous.  I was
military
, a bloody-minded Arm whose best skill was preparing a small army for battle.  I shrank in my seat, daunted.

“Though this was our quest and calling, the physical fruit of this quest is not ours,” Haggerty said.  “I now present the Eskimo Spear to Focus Lorraine Rizzari, to keep and guard, and to use to show us the way forward.”  Those words weren’t Amy’s style of speech.  Someone had written these lines for her, possibly Lori herself, or Lori’s friend and confidant Ann Chiron.

Haggerty reached down, opened a container, and brought out a short stone-tipped spear covered by inset copper, silver and gold wires, all in an intricate pattern.  Once outside of the container the spear slapped my mind, hard, and shrieked in my metasense.  My heart sank to the nether depths of my soul, staggered to see and metasense true physical evidence of the Progenitors.  Because of my extensive work with the Crows, I suspected I was the only Arm able to instantly metasense the chilling truth: the spear was an objectified dross construct, and as far ahead of Gilgamesh’s objectified dross constructs as a modern computer is to an abacus.

Every Crow on the planet would be able to metasense this as well.  I slunk farther down in my chair, wanting to be anywhere else but here.  I wanted
science
, not mystical mumbo-jumbo storytelling crap told around campfires to a background of out of tune flutes and animal-hide drums.

Lori took the spear and bowed.  “Thank you, Arm Haggerty.  The Cause thanks you as well, and thanks your companions, who risked mind and limb to prove the Progenitors real.”

Prove.  Proof.  Real.

My horror deepened when Lori raised the spear above her head and said “The minds of the Progenitors imprinted a picture in the spear, a picture visible to all Crows and those of us familiar with the ways of the Crows.  This I will show you, now.”

She did, breaking the last crumbs of my self-confidence and denial.  The scene, built by her exquisitely trained illusion-projection capabilities, but guided by the spear, showed an Eskimo tribe.  Of Transforms.  Over two hundred of them.  And just three Focuses and four Crows.  No Arms, Chimeras or Monsters.  No non-Transformed normals except for the multitude of children.  An equal number of men and women.

All these years we had hoped we would find a way to solve the Transform survival problem by allowing the Focuses to support more than a couple dozen Transforms, and support as many male Transforms as woman Transforms.  Here was proof that such a way existed.  We had also hoped we would find a way around the intractable Transform infertility problem.  Here also was proof.

The audience cried for joy, save for a few of us stony types.

I felt loss as well as joy.  Joy that we finally had the proof, loss and horror over the means: heroism and adventure instead of good, hard, science.

“They killed their Arms and Chimeras,” Bass said.  I had no idea how she picked up on this, but I read truth in her words.  “Ma’am, let’s go.  These people, who are going to follow this path, are our
enemies
.”

I shook my head.  “This way lies survival.”

“Not for me.  Not for us.”  Bass stood and stalked away, radiating anger and disgust.

So much for my tag seduction.

---

“Congratulations,” I said, to Lori and Amy, after I corralled them in the Arm corner of Room D.  I lied; I felt no such emotion.  I had gone numb inside, as robotic as Webberly, the most closed off Arm.  “Do you have any idea how so few Focuses were able to support so many Transforms?”

“None at all,” Lori said.  “The only thing I know for certain is that these Focuses and Crows worked differently than we do.  No juice patterns, for one.”  She paused.  “I believe you two have something to discuss; I’ll leave you to it.”

I still hadn’t seen or metasensed Sky.  Was he as messed up about this as I was?

Haggerty’s eyes shifted around.  “Not here,” she said.  She led me out into the now deserted back hallway.  I knew what was coming.  “I won the wager.  Acknowledge me as your superior.”

Our stupid wager.  She had pledged to follow my orders and cease her heroic nonsense for five years if her quest came up empty.

“Bullshit,” I said, my anger growing.  “All I’m willing to acknowledge is your right to continue your crazy heroic crap.  You’ve proven something here, I’m not sure what.”  This was the term of our wager.  The wager said nothing about who would be boss.

“No way,” Haggerty said.  “Acknowledge my…”

She didn’t get to finish her insulting demand, because my anger peaked and I attacked.  She attempted to sweep my legs out from underneath me and failed.  We both went invisible, and backed off from each other.

An unseen blow sent me flying.  Then another.  I complained about her lack of political acumen, not inviting Keaton or Rayburn, or any Transforms or normals.  She countered with her own psychological ploy: “It’s time for you to dedicate yourself to the Cause for real, instead of dicking around with Keaton’s self-serving shit.”

I had no hope of winning this, not with my own damn traitorous subconscious agreeing with her arguments.  She wanted to force the Cause on the Transforms and research our way to victory.  Our political enemies would see this as a declaration of war.  Haggerty didn’t care, and she was right.  The simple exposure of the Eskimo Spear was in itself a declaration of war.  Half of my arguments against Haggerty fell away in my mind before I stated them.

I fought anyway.

I had to.

I’m an Arm.

I’ll spare you the rest of my sorry humiliation.

“Don’t worry,” Haggerty said.  My cheek lay on her right boot-top.  Ever since she went to Europe to fight in the takedown of Europe’s baddie Crow, and learned Eissler’s tricks, she had been the best fighter of all of us.  Fighting wasn’t everything, though.  “I learned from the rookie mistakes I made the last time I was in charge of you.  We need to keep being friends, and I won’t try to micromanage you and your people.”

Friends!  Aargh.  Arms can’t be friends.  She deluded herself into thinking we were friends, or had ever been friends.

There was something wrong with Arm dominance contests, and this was good proof of the problem.  We did them wrong nearly every time.  Only I had no idea what we needed to do to improve them.

“You’re going to back-burner Keaton’s top projects,” Haggerty said.  “You’re working for me, now, of course, not her.”  Keaton’s top projects were ‘re-establish the Arm hierarchy’ and ‘get Hank to figure out why I (Keaton) popped my cork and how to fix it so it doesn’t happen again’.  Hank made slow but steady progress on his end, and I made some progress on mine.

Keaton was going to ream me for this, but if she wanted me to give those projects a higher priority, she would need to beat Haggerty and tag her.  Fat chance of that.  We all knew Keaton would win if Haggerty challenged her, and Haggerty would win if Keaton challenged Haggerty.  As I said, the Arm challenge system didn’t work.  “To start with, though, I want you to use your charisma and get everyone who attended today’s meeting back together.  I’m going to be getting them to help push the Cause.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.  “May I stand now, ma’am?”

Amy helped me to my feet and put her arm around my shoulder, giving me a hug.  “We’re going to win this, Carol,” she said.  “We’re going to change the world!”

Both Hank and I thought heroism was addictive for Major Transforms, and Haggerty was our number one addict.  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.  What else could I say?

---

“Okay, now that I’ve got you here, we need to talk about where we’re going with this,” Haggerty said, back in Room D.  I stood behind her, the dutiful lieutenant.  I doubt anyone missed the livid bruises on my face and arms.  I had managed to corral all the attendants to the presentation except the Madonna of Montreal.  To balance my failure I managed to find Sky, who hadn’t attended the presentation, instead ministering to the fallen from the quest.  “I see two possibilities.  On one hand, we can force the Cause, do the research and development we’ve all been putting off, and convince the Transform community our way is not just the right way, but the only way.  On the other hand, we can declare victory in the Cause and slink off into the corners to do our own preparations for the Transform Apocalypse.”

Lori stood.  “Who put you in charge, Arm Haggerty?”  Boss of the Cause was her position.  She liked Amy as a peer and follower, but she hadn’t liked Amy the last time Amy thought dominance over me gave her the right to order Lori around, and, well, she still didn’t.

“This did,” Amy said.  She picked up the Eskimo Spear and went into a stalk, threatening to shove the pig-sticker into Lori.  Lori settled into a defensive combat stance, met Amy’s eyes, and dueled, Arm dominance style.  After twenty seconds of non-verbal dueling, Lori relaxed out of her combat stance.

“Fine.  Good point,” Lori said, humbled.

I wanted to shake the two of them.  ‘That’s my Focus you’re messing with’, I wanted to say to Haggerty.  ‘Lori, you’re a Focus, why are you acting like an Arm?’ I wanted to say to Lori.  This was severely screwy, even on a day filled with the severely screwy.

Lori sat down, ever so much the junior Arm humbled by a dominant superior.