The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Four (11 page)

Disquieting Proof

Annie waited in one of Parc Nationale d’Oka’s picnic
areas under the remaining late March drizzle, admiring the now distant cloud
top lightning and occasional rumble of thunder.  Arm refused to meet in
Montreal; she even still had a hard time entering her home city of Calgary
after spending any time outside it.

Something was up, perhaps something bad.  Arm’s dream
presence had been blurry for nine days, barely solid enough to communicate the
desire for an urgent meeting.  They had met here before, four times, and Arm
would be able to find her.

Annie froze, suddenly registering something distant in
her metasense.  She concentrated, but the unknown would not resolve into
anything more than a distant point source.  She stood and paced back and forth,
worried.  Her instincts said the unknown was kilometers distant, and
approaching rapidly, perhaps a hundred kilometers an hour. 

Impossible.  Annie’s metasense range was the standard
Focus hundred meters.  She continued to pace, back and forth, back and forth,
as the cool north breeze blew bits of an old newspaper through the picnic area
and the gray sky spitted a light rain.  The unknown had to be in a vehicle; the
metasense source followed the terrain and weaved along the path of a road.

She hoped this was Arm, or something Arm carried with
her.  If not, then Annie faced something unknown, and most likely an attack. 
Annie kept her faith, sat back down on the picnic bench and again attempted to
examine the ‘something’.  Every time she focused her metasense on it, the
unknown twisted away.

Stars began to flicker above, as the light rain stopped
and the cloud deck started to break up.  Headlights rounded a wooded curve in
the road almost a kilometer away, a vehicle with a rough engine, carrying the
unknown.

The vehicle, an oversized pickup truck of the kind Arm
favored because of her current height, turned into the parking lot where
Annie’s crew had parked.  Her bodyguards stirred, wary and cautious, as the
pickup parked a couple of hundred meters away.  Two people exited the vehicle,
Arm and another, a standard height man.

The man carried the unknown with him, this impossible
metasense source, in his briefcase.  “Quiet,” Annie said, reassuring her
guards.  When Arm and her companion reached Annie’s normal hundred meter
metasense range, the unknown flared in her metasight, knocking out her ability
to locate even her Transform bodyguards.

The man stopped.  Arm turned.  “Come along, it’s just
Annie.”

“This
thing
knows her,” the man said, in a Crow
whisper.  Annie bit her lower lip, more disquieted by the Crow’s comment than
his appearance here.  The Crow had to be Windsong, Arm’s Crow companion of
several years, and a source of many disagreements between her and Arm. 
Windsong was, supposedly, apolitical, and not the least bit interested in Annie
and Arm’s crazy causes.

Arm appeared healthy, but without her metasense, Annie
could tell little else.  These days Arm stood nearly two and a half meters
tall, an imposing presence, heavily muscled, her head shaved bald.  Unless one
knew what to look for, casual observers would believe Arm to be a giant of a
man.

“Come on over,” Annie said, answering in a Crow whisper,
modulating her charisma to the Crow comfort bands.  “What are you carrying?”

“Therein lies the tale,” Arm said, in her boisterous
non-whisper.  She sounded exultant.  Arm relieved Windsong of the briefcase –
with a painful wince – strode over and sat across from Annie on the picnic
bench, her weight causing the picnic table’s steel tubes to groan.  “You were
right all along, Focus.”  Arm wasn’t much on pleasantries, hugs or kisses. 
From Arm’s perspective, Annie was her Focus; these days, one of the many
Focuses she owned.  Arm described this ownership as a strong platonic love. 
Annie thought of this more like a loving set of hemorrhoids.  “Now we have the
proof of their existence.” 

Good God!  “The predecessors?  You found proof of the
predecessors?”  Annie hadn’t expected anything of the sort.  She, and the rest
of them, had given up on their self-created theory years ago.  Whatever tale
lay behind Arm’s revelation didn’t involve death-defying adventures; Arm, up
close, was indeed fully healthy and uninjured, a rare if not unique
circumstance for one of their meetings.

Arm nodded, unlocked the briefcase, opened it, and
brought out a small heavy box.  Lead, of all things.  For shielding.  Annie
repressed a sigh; Arm had probably experimented in her rough manner and put the
unknown in the best shielding she could find, without thinking the problem
through.  To shield the unknown would take a Faraday cage, Anne suspected.

“Unfortunately, this beast is as loud as Niagara Falls,
and has been ever since I followed my gut and turned the bloody thing on,” Arm
said.  Her breath smelled foul from the raw meat she favored when she spent any
time outside of Calgary.  “Can you do anything with this damned thing? 
Windsong can’t; he says it’s Focus work.  Not that I know of any Focus tricks
associated with putting crazy juice shit into objects.”  She opened the lead
box, revealing a skull, a baby walrus skull, if Annie guessed correctly.  The
skull had a metal filigree enameled on it – no, incised into the skull.  Copper
and gold, in an intricate pattern showing many minute variations at the
millimeter level.  The eye sockets were solid plated gold, tiny gold cups.

“You dropped your blood into the eyes,” Annie said, more
of a prediction than a question.  She understood Arm quite well, and loved her
in her own distant Focus fashion.

Arm looked at the heavens, embarrassed.  “It seemed to
be the right thing to do at the time.”

Annie chuckled at this bit of classic Arm behavior.  She
picked up the skull, and let herself become one with the artifact, at the juice
level.  A simple twist of juice and the skull glowed, visibly but dimly, from
the eye sockets, an eerie green glow Annie recognized.  Its metapresence faded to
that of a sleeping Transform.  Annie didn’t relax; this unknown still felt
extremely dangerous to her.

“This is a myth symbol,” Annie said.  She held up the
skull for Arm and the still hundred meter away Windsong to see.  “In some Inuit
legends, the northern lights represent the spirits of the dead playing ball
with a walrus skull.”  The light the skull now gave off was a perfect color
match to a green-glowing aurora.

“I think this thing is more than that,” Windsong said,
as he flattened to the ground.  “Look up.”

Annie did, and almost dropped the skull.  An aurora
played above them, where none had been before, a streamer of green appearing to
point at them.  In sudden panic Annie twisted the juice in the skull again,
attempting to further quiet this dangerous artifact of the past.  The aurora
above them faded, as did the light given off by the skull.

Holy mother of God, what had she fallen into this time! 
“Where did you find this, Arm?” Annie said.

“At about 2000 meters elevation, in a cave in the
Ogilvie Mountains, just on the Alaska side of the border,” Arm said.  “At that
elevation, this has to be post-ice age.  The cave was difficult to approach –
like I was being warned away by some unseen mumbo-jumbo, or, more likely,
something akin to Focus charisma, but old and worn out.  The cave showed no
signs of recent animal or human inhabitation, but I did find an old fire-pit,
buried under several centimeters of dirt.  The skull was in a niche in the
north wall of the cave.”

“Then this is relatively recent,” Annie said.  She held
the walrus skull in her hands, reverent and wary, attempting not to think about
the forces necessary to cause a temporary apparition of the aurora.  The skull
did not have the energy to have caused that.  Something else did.  Another
unknown or unknowns, something distant, something far more terrifying.  “I had
thought the dream of the predecessors, the thing that drew us and the rest of
the Lost Tribe to the north, to be something truly ancient, ten thousand years
old, associated with the first coming of humanity to North America.”  It
couldn’t be, not with the ‘several centimeters of dirt’, the location Arm found
the skull, the skull’s near pristine condition, and the skull’s association
with an Inuit myth recent enough for her to recognize.  “No, Arm, the
progenitors must be recent, no more than a thousand or two years old.  This also
proves our supposition, that we are not the first Transforms to have walked the
Earth.”

“What are we doing messed up with this crap?” Arm said,
grumbling, echoing Annie’s thoughts.  She rubbed her thick hands together and
slitted her eyes, looking for enemies to fight.  She found none, but didn’t
relax.  “Yah, I know, if I didn’t want to be messed up in these greater things,
than why am I still occasionally going out and searching?”

Given where she was searching, Annie guessed she had
also, likely, been searching for Beast.  He laired within several hundred
kilometers of where Arm had found the skull.  Well, when Beast was ready to be
found, he would be found.  Nothing either of them could do about that.

“And I don’t like the way that damned thing pointed at
us, either,” Arm said, eyes flickering skyward.

“This is to be expected.”  Something, or somethings, had
been haunting the edges of her dreams since before she escaped the Purifier and
fled France.  The ‘whatever it was’ wanted her involvement.  Something
unthinking, something mechanical (if one looked upon the activities of juice as
a machine), something patient and persistent.  Nobody knew the proper names for
such things yet.

“Can you protect us from this?” Windsong said.  The Crow
remained huddled on the cold wet ground a hundred meters away.  Sky had once
been like Windsong, oh so many years ago.  He eventually got over his fears,
but doing so took years.  She wondered why Crows were attracted to Arm, and
what in Arm almost forced her to take them and make them hers.  From his
metapresence, Annie decided Arm treated Windsong far better than she had
treated any of her earlier Crows.  Commenting either way on the subject,
though, would just invite a typical blustery Arm argument.

“I can take the skull, and keep it quiet,” Annie said. 
“But something out there is watching us.  Finding this wasn’t the last step,
Windsong, but our first.”

Arm laughed.  “Now
that
sounds like an
adventure.”

Windsong moaned and Annie smiled.

Author’s Afterward

Thanks to Randy and Margaret Scheers, Michelle and Karl
Stembol, Gary and Judy Williams, Maurice Gehin, and as always my wife, Marjorie
Farmer.  Without their help this document would have never been made.

As stated earlier, Folio 4 of The Good Doctor’s Tales is
a companion piece to my novel “All Beasts Together.”  Some of the pieces in
here are here for completeness, others for fun, and they all serve to flesh out
the story.  The flashback sections and the Rover sections, unrelated to the
action in “All Beasts Together” will continue in further Folios of The Good
Doctor’s Tales.

You can find out more information about the world of the
Transforms and other stories published by this author on
http://majortransform.com.

Cover credits to Chris Willis for Odin (the gorilla) and
dalliedee for Enkidu (the wolf).

The Commander series continues with Book Four, “A Method
Truly Sublime”, and “The Good Doctor’s Tale’s Folio Five”.

Randall Allen Farmer