An Age Without A Name Read online

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  “So, how’d it go?” I said. My family met in a hotel room in Kalamazoo. Gail and Gilgamesh weren’t tremendously happy about leaving Chicago, but for the moment, I didn’t want any of the rest of the Chicago Transform community knowing anything but baseless rumors about our reappearance. One day. One day was all I got in Chicago, but too many Major Transforms I didn’t control watched Chicago, and if I stayed longer, I risked giving some basis to those baseless rumors.

  I wasn’t feeling real tolerant of Gail’s foibles just now. Dear as she was to me, she made several decisions while I was gone that would have unfortunate long-term effects. At the head of the list was the idea of having the Transform Network run by appointed representatives of each of the four types of Major Transforms, including the Crows, who overall I still didn’t trust in the slightest. Though if one of the Crows was going to nose his way into the tent, Shadow wasn’t half bad a choice.

  No, while she made plenty of decisions that I considered iffy, I acknowledged, she hadn’t created a single undoable disaster. The Madonna had been right. Gail made messes and had grown immeasurably. Hell, she even attracted a title from the Crows and others – the Director – which said something very important. As with the rest of my Family, I was glad to have her on my team.

  “If Tonya said things were bad, she was underestimating,” Lori said. I had sent Lori and Sky out to do some fact-finding while I dealt with Chicago. “Morale is at rock bottom, there are defections right and left, and a significant movement among the rank and file Focuses towards independence and local cooperation only. It wouldn’t surprise me if we don’t end up with a different Focus organization in each major metropolitan area.”

  “Sky?”

  “The Crows are terrified, but…”

  “But what?”

  Sky smiled, and gave me a strange half bow from on top of the crappy hotel television, where he perched himself. I suspected the fact that the table under the television hadn’t collapsed was from another of Sky’s undocumented Crow tricks. “I found that more than a few established older Crows have gone up to Focuses, at least in the Midwest and East, and said ‘Greetings, ma’am, I’m a Crow. Can we help each other?’ A few of them are even helping panic-age Crows get together with young Focuses.”

  “You’re kidding,” Gilgamesh said.

  “Side effects of taking down the first Focuses. Our brochures and books on household maintenance are everywhere now,” Sky said. “I haven’t seen any full blown households yet, but there’s been far more progress in the past three months than I would have predicted, and all among the Crows and Focuses we’d written off.”

  “Eh?” Gail said. She rested on the bed with her head in my lap, Gilgamesh was being cuddly with Lori, of all things, and Mizar quietly paced. Figurative steam rose from his head, anger at regional Major Transform politics I normally considered too petty to deal with.

  Sky cracked his knuckles and grinned. “Apolitical Focuses, Focuses with strong minds, little charisma and an abiding interest in their households; Crows who’ve been living in storm sewer pipes for too long, Crows who’ve been masquerading as normals, Crows who think Crow faction politics is for the birds.”

  “The unreachables, then,” Gilgamesh said. I studied him and Lori, alert for trouble. I didn’t see it, despite their cuddling. Lori had never lost her attraction for Gilgamesh, though she tried to deny it and had stayed away from him during the past year. Part of the stress that brought out her beast. With her beast devoured by Mizar, she returned to Gilgamesh’s arms. Sex? A big question, and one that I wasn’t sure how to handle if they started down that path.

  What was Lori’s status in things Transform, now that she had given up Inferno? She refused to hold any sort of Focus leadership post. Her public career as a teaching professor at a major college went up in flames during the Keaton/Patterson conflict last fall, and after much pressing, she admitted she didn’t want another tilt at that windmill. However, she and Sky no longer fought at all. Not a peep. I couldn’t see them breaking up, not ever. Nor could I see any way to force Gilgamesh and Lori apart. They were juice linked in the family, and if Lori’s theories on household organization were correct, the households within the family and their Focus/Crow leaders were all going to be tagging each other anyway. Likely soon. Despite their love for each other, I didn’t get any sex vibes from Lori and Gilgamesh at all. Was this another benefit of having Mizar around? I wasn’t sure if I should celebrate or get aggravated. I really hated it when the scales tipped too far in favor of the unknown over the known.

  “Yes,” Sky said. “Them. Crows who forget their names, Focuses who can’t convince a state trooper to tear up a traffic ticket. I think they’re going to be the salvation of the Cause, if we can just keep them alive.”

  “Should we write off the witches and senior political Crows, then?” I said.

  “No,” Mizar said, back to the real world from whatever maelstrom consumed him. “The pattern is wrong.” He didn’t stop his pacing, though he did pause for long enough to remove a screened print of a generic forest from the hotel wall, turn it around, and drop it on the floor. Brute and chauvinistic he might be, but his subconscious, at least, was cultured.

  “Do you think it’s temporary? These Crows and Focuses getting together?” Sky asked the resident Chimera.

  “Actually, I’m speaking about this war and the actions of the leading Major Transforms,” Mizar said, his eyes glued to infinity. “We either have the wrong information, or the information we have is woefully incomplete. The pattern of leading Major Transform interactions is inconsistent with what I know. Too many unknown powers are working against us.”

  Gail sat up, suddenly, her eyes afire. “Mizar, I know someone you absolutely need to talk to.”

  “Yes, Gail,” he said. “Who?”

  “Van, my husband. He’s off with Inferno, in California.”

  “Of course, Gail,” Mizar said, and gave Gail a wary glance. I carefully didn’t grin.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you, Mizar,” Gail said, not the least bit intimidated by Mizar. “Are you going to become a Noble, or – well, I hope you don’t take this wrong – or stay, dunno, a Beast Man, I guess.”

  That brought a chuckle to Mizar’s lips. “I’m already a Prince,” he said, bringing a groan from Sky and Lori at the triple entendre. We had already agreed that one of his jobs would be to take over the spotty leadership of our Noble Chimeras. “Sky’s found us a new way for us Beasts to stabilize our shapes through the dynamic of a four Major Transform family,” Mizar said. “I have no interest whatsoever in becoming a Noble. Whether any other Chimeras take my path, or even whether any other Chimeras can take my path, is for the future to decide.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what had gone on between Mizar, Gilgamesh and Gail, but he wasn’t being a male chauvinist pig now. With Gail, at least. Perhaps the Madonna was right. Perhaps I did need to be more patient.

  Speaking of which… “Mizar, I think Anne-Marie said the same thing to me about something being wrong.”

  “What did Annie say?” Mizar said, suddenly focused entirely on me. Watching Mizar and the Madonna interact in person, I realized that they didn’t particularly like each other, but that they respected each other tremendously.

  “She said to watch out for cracks in the pond ice we’re skating on,” I said, relaying a bit of utterly baffling Annie-speak. “We might like to take a swim, but it’s too early in the year for that.”

  “What she means is that our immediate problems and our long term problems have deeply hidden aspects to them – the water under the pond ice – and we don’t want to open up the long term problems early – watch out for cracks – but we do have to get at some of them to solve our immediate problems anyway – taking a swim.”

  “You understand that sort of oracular stuff, Mizar?” Gail said.

  “Of course,” Mizar said. “She learned it from me, I think, though all I was doing was watching the weath
er and growling. Remember me from our earlier Dreaming interactions? I didn’t have words back then.”

  Gail and Gilgamesh looked at each other, and held each other’s eyes for long seconds. Now, finally, they knew what the three of us had been up against in the Yukon.

  “Well, then, what does it mean?” Lori said.

  “My gut feeling is that this is associated with the traitorous Arm, Bass, and the machinations of the Guardian,” Mizar said.

  “The Guardian?” Gilgamesh asked.

  “The Man,” Gail said, making one of her intuitive leaps. Mizar nodded. Gilgamesh groaned. The Man had been meddling in their lives in Chicago, and they had tried and failed to stop him on multiple occasions. It wasn’t as if anyone else had been able to stop the meddling fool either, though.

  “I understand the Guardian’s feelings, and his belief that the best way to preserve any form of human civilization is to let nature take its course and wipe out most of us in the coming transformation apocalypse,” Mizar said. Gail blanched at Mizar’s ‘understanding’. “The weaker the Hunters get, the more he’ll be going after us and our people, and the rest of the leaders of the Cause. Arm Bass? She’s not committed to the Hunter cause, she’s using them shamelessly, and I highly suspect she has some other devious long-range plans afoot.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” I said, and shook my head. “How’d you pick that out, Mizar?”

  Mizar shrugged.

  I turned away, memories of Bass’s Fort Worth playground coming to mind, memories of Bass’s pain session while I was stuck wearing a bunny suit, her betrayal of Keaton and her open admission that she was Patterson’s student. Her I wanted dead. She was with the Hunters, probably learning new ways to get her rocks off torturing her victims. While I had been up in the Yukon, the Texas authorities found Bass’s abandoned place, and to my disgust, they found one of her underground trophy rooms I had missed. The poor authorities didn’t know what to make of what they found, save that it was a scene of horror beyond anyone’s worst nightmares.

  “She’s a bully, worse than Enkidu,” I said. “The sort of person who preys on the weak and defenseless and flees the strong. She cheats. She’s not good at anything except cheating. She tried to prove herself to the Hunters in the Chicago fight and failed. She’s not an organizer and she doesn’t know shit about anything more organized than small unit tactics.” At least from an Arm’s perspective. “I’m sure she’ll stay in Enkidu’s doghouse until they either kill her in disgust or she flees, off on another of her harebrained schemes.”

  “Perhaps,” Mizar said, and rolled his shoulders uneasily. “Consider, though, what Enkidu could teach her about war. Now that she’s in his doghouse, she’s going to have plenty of time to learn.”

  That thought appalled me, and based on what I could read on the rest of my family’s faces, the thought appalled them as well.

  Sinclair (3/10/73 – 3/11/73)

  “There’s Transform women in this place!” Squire Stidman said. The former Hunter found the shift to Noble difficult, but he made progress. Usually.

  “Hey, now. Behave, Squire. They’re tagged, and belong to three of the local Focuses,” Sinclair said. Yet another trick of the Judges. After first Focus Fingleman’s fall, the Judges had grabbed a number of the local Transforms as hostages, as a way to control their Focuses. In any case, Sinclair couldn’t do anything about it. At least today.

  Arm Haggerty didn’t say a word, just continuing to lead them into the Multnomah County Jail, past oblivious cops and through heavy doors. She was a shadow in jet-black, graceful like a cat, and as beautiful.

  Stidman twitched and clenched his jaw, eyes rapidly flicking back and forth. Visible, the Squire would be a problem. While it had been easy to teach him to reach a true man-shape, the former Hunter’s man-shape was far too, um, striking. Six foot six, three hundred and eighty pounds, arms and legs like tree trunks, and a sneering mouth under bushy hooded eyebrows that reeked of contract killer. Which he was, or had been, before his transformation. Stidman had a great deal to atone for, and in Sinclair’s opinion would have never agreed to become Noble save for his trials under Enkidu. Stidman found Jesus, metaphorically, when they stripped the Hunter’s Law off of him. The Squire’s personality didn’t mesh well with the Law, and he had fought it all the way. Like Earl Sellers, the first Noble, and Count Dowling, Stidman could arrest his decline into beasthood by force of will – which meant he hadn’t depended on the Law to preserve his mind. That wasn’t to say Stidman wouldn’t have descended a great distance into beasthood; he had, before the Hunters found him. Still, he was only the third Chimera that Sinclair knew of who remembered his former life as an unsupported Beast. Instead of supporting his humanity, the Hunter’s Law enslaved him.

  In Stidman’s mind, he owed the Nobles, and Sinclair, and Amy, a debt of honor for freeing him from his enslavement. So the new Squire (as of two days ago, fresh from an unusually short stint as a Page) and likely soon-to-be Knight was all gung-ho about living up to Noble responsibility, including rescuing Transforms from captivity. However, Stidman still refused to believe that normal humans merited any consideration at all.

  Stidman was also one of the few Nobles who had moved, of his own free will, into the orbit of the Arms. Put an average Noble around Focuses and Arms, and Sir Average Noble would gravitate to and salivate after the Focuses, and try to pretend the Arms didn’t exist. Or, in the case of certain leading Nobles such as Hoskins, try to find ways to dominate the Arm in all the classic male fashions. Stidman, though, handled things just like an Arm. As soon as he became a Squire, he challenged Amy, lost miserably, and accepted it as decorously as another Arm would. Instead of looking for ways around his domination, grousing, and trying for a rematch, he did the Arm thing, trying to angle his way into getting Haggerty to give him a full Arm tag. The interaction between Stidman and Sokolnik was even more interesting. They fought, of course, to establish dominance, but Sokolnik fought with her brains as much as her body, and trivially found a way to manipulate Stidman into defeating himself. Sinclair would have thought that would put the Squire off, but it hadn’t. Instead, the former hitman now took lessons from Sokolnik on sneaky Transform fighting, all the while trying to angle a full tag from the precocious young Arm.

  Haggerty stopped and signaled to Sinclair and Squire Stidman to close up ranks. Three fingers of her left hand, with the palm of right hand arching over the top, then a finger point at Sinclair.

  They were just through the main door into the prison itself. The room around them was a sort of monitoring area, where the police could watch the cells. One officer sat here, bored and eating a sandwich. Sinclair nodded in response to Amy’s command, and did the necessary symbolic dross adjustments to spread Amy’s invisibility formally over the three of them.

  He did, however, eye the cop suspiciously. Amy’s command meant a nearby abnormal occurrence; either one of the Judges’ wizards lurked nearby or had dropped a nearby dross construct sensor. Probably something Midgard caught and signaled to Amy. Midgard had refused to go into the jail with the three of them. Instead, he slunk on his own around the vicinity while covered with a wizard’s complement of dross constructs.

  Just the usual mess. Midgard’s metasense shielding and invisibility covered them all, normally enough to keep them hidden. However, though taxing for all of them, Sinclair used a trick Bruja Torres taught him that allowed him to expand Amy’s much stronger personal invisibility (juice derived, based on the Arm predator) to cover himself and Squire Stidman as well.

  They were here to rescue Sir DeWitt, who somehow got himself arrested on false charges. The trio stepped past the oblivious cop and his lunch, into the prison itself. The place reeked from some drunk who had thrown up in his cell. Sinclair did his best not to gag. No one seemed to notice as Amy led them through the lime-green cinderblock corridor, past drunks and the occasional minor thug, to Sir DeWitt’s cell.

  Their short time in the Portland area had been a bust. The
y assumed their surprise appearance here – after a non-stop driving sprint from Las Cruces to Portland – would allow them to walk through the Judges without much of a problem, but it hadn’t worked out as planned. Amy first attempted to grab three Judges who lived in a suburban Portland home. Unfortunately, the Judges turned out to be illusions, and in the minute while they searched the house for clues, five vehicles of reporters had driven up to check on a report on an ‘evil Transform attack’, followed by a caravan of local police vehicles. Embarrassing.

  That led to an inch thick pile of crazy legal charges, the cops all over their asses and Sir DeWitt captured. Then the local FBI produced bogus federal arrest warrants for all of them and tried to serve them to Sinclair’s crew while they filled out paperwork at a local police station, another Judge trick. While they sorted out the FBI problem several of their vehicles vanished, as every local burglar and car thief in the Portland area appeared to be targeting them.

  They were overmatched. The Judges, unlike any sane Crows, showed no signs of panic and no signs of any interest in leaving the area. They stayed at the edges of Sinclair, Scout and Midgard’s metasense ranges, at least those who weren’t covered by metasense shields. None of the trio of Cause Crows had managed to pin even one of the local Crows down for a quiet conversation, despite Midgard’s ability to metasense shield them.

  Sinclair wondered if they should have just stayed in Las Cruces.

  They soon reached their target, Sir DeWitt, who sat in his cell with his golden head in his hands. He looked up, and Sinclair read anguish and embarrassment. A Noble was supposed to be better than this, supposed to find a way to avoid arrest.