Go Gaily In The Dark

Table of Contents

Go Gaily In The Dark (The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts Three and Four)

Part Three That Which Came Before, During and Immediately After San Jose

Part Four That Which Came After San Jose (April 1, 1973 to June 16, 1973)

Fiction By This Author

Author’s Afterword

Go Gaily In The Dark

(The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts Three and Four)

Pertaining to events before, during and after the two novels No Small Dreams and An Age Without a Name, but before the events of Blood’s Shadow (the 6th Novel of The Cause) and that which follows.

Randall Allen Farmer

Copyright © 2018 by Randall Allen Farmer

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work, in whole or in part, in any form. This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations and products depicted herein are either a product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

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Go Gaily In The Dark

(The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts Three and Four)

"The men of the East may spell the stars,

And times and triumphs mark,

But the men signed of the cross of Christ

Go gaily in the dark."

G.K.Chesterson The Ballad of the White Horse

Part Three

That Which Came Before, During and Immediately After San Jose

Chronicle VII

Carol Versus The Cave

Visit One (reprise) (1/25/73)

Here is the truth, Beast signed, after he put me down. I couldn’t walk, and I didn’t understand what in the hell he wanted from me, short or long term. We hadn’t gone far, perhaps five miles, into an area where the mountains turned into a high plateau four thousand feet above our heads. I remembered this from our maps, the Ram Plateau, a former centerpiece of a long abandoned Canadian National Park, back from before the days of the Monsters. Beast stopped us in front of the opening to a cave, barely wide enough for him to squeeze through. The decidedly warmer air flowing from the cave meant the place housed one of the area’s hot springs. Family, I guard this place. Beast had already regained his grammar.

"You want us to go in there?" Sky said. He radiated young Crow terror all of a sudden.

As I signed, here you will understand the truth.

None of us could resist Beast’s demand, least of all me, as I remained broken-leg baggage. Beast picked me up, gently, and on three legs walked us into the cave. Sky and Lori followed, Sky complaining all the way, Lori quiet and concentrating on her metasense.

I didn’t understand Lori’s concentration until I entered the cave, or what was likely the entry-room of a large cave complex. To my eyes, the place remained dark. To my metasense, it glittered. The entry room was warmer and damper, but I smelled the warmer and damper sections beyond and below. They didn’t possess the metasense glow, though.

Only here.

A dozen old columns, once living cave formations but no longer, divided the large room, perhaps two hundred feet wide, six hundred feet long, and forty feet high, into sections. Every surface in the front room glowed in my metasense, intricate, complex and ever-changing patterns both mesmerizing and daunting.

Just the sort of fucked up place you should expect to find if some bastard drags you out on a goddamned quest. I hated mystical mumbo-jumbo even worse than I hated quests, and this appeared to be mystical mumbo-jumbo central.

Wow, Sky said.

Lori stayed quiet.

This is the home of the aurora, Beast signed. As he did, the aurora sprang up around us, emanating from the walls. Not a real aurora, but a dross illusion of one. This was like being inside something like my Monster amulet, or the Eskimo Spear. But this place was fucking huge! I took out my Monster amulet and it, too, echoed the aurora of the room. This is where we all come from. He led us to the side of the room, a collection of cut surfaces and carvings a mere sixty feet to the left of the entryway. One drew my attention, a roughly rectangular slab that some ancient Crow had incised with the same sort of gold, silver and copper ‘wires’ decorating the Eskimo Spear.

On the yard wide slab were about two dozen offerings. Spear points, arrowheads, scrapers, the marks of the warrior and hunter. The last one froze my aching body, as it was a Lee-Enfield rifle.

Tell me this isn’t what I think it is, I said, turning my head so I could see Lori, or at least the part of her not blocked by Beast’s shoulder.

I can’t, Lori said. If what Patient Zero told me is at all correct, this is where he contracted Transform Sickness and became whatever he is. This is it, Carol. The heart of the Predecessors.

The Lee-Enfield had been standard British issue from 1895 to 1957. At some point in that time interval, or later, our Patient Zero placed this rifle here. I couldn’t tell anything more than that, save that the rifle appeared to be undisturbed and new. As did the primitive weapons and tools, and I was sure they had been here for centuries.

The Holy Man once left a worn pistol here, Beast signed. He replaced it while I guarded this place.

You met him? Lori said. Why didn’t you kill him?

He was Holy. Beyond my reach. He told me to stay here. Guard this holy place. So I have, and so I shall remain. Beast paused. And now, so shall you. You are a gift to me from the auroras.

Bullshit. I took off my Monster amulet and tossed it on the slab, next to a spear point. I could practically see Beast’s wants and desires in the auroral illusions flowing across the walls. We were the Progenitors’ promised family reborn, Lori and I replacing the Madonna and Arm. I am no gift, I said. I am…

Beast did something to me to quiet my words. No words. You are my wife. You all are my harem. My family. You will learn.

With his free hand he grabbed the Monster amulet and gently placed it over my neck. I couldn’t stop him. Wife, you will learn to please me.

Well, fuck.

This time, I was going to change my fucking name to DeepDeepShit.

Visit Two (2/13/73)

Permission is a wondrous thing, especially when earned. So said my Arm instincts, my permission to hunt earned by Mizar’s appreciation of my lecture on how I, as an Arm, controlled my people. I couldn’t deny that we were making progress with Beast, now self-named Mizar. I only wished it didn’t remind me of the bad old days as Keaton’s student Arm.

The early days.

Such as when I had to earn permission to cook one of my more fancy meals, itself a favor to my old sadistic boss Arm.

Uh huh, still in the ol’ deep shit.

The real reason I wanted to hunt was to come back to this place. I stood in front of the Cave of the Progenitors, all senses open. The rocks were just rocks to me; I knew nothing of geology. Plant growth? Not fucking likely, here in the Canadian winter. Four snowshoe hares and a pair of spruce grouse were the only living and recently dead things within my metasense range, although something small scurried through the evergreens a couple of hundred yards away, too small to accurately identify. Didn’t the mice and rats know they were supposed to be hibernating or something?

No distractions, no other people. Just me and my hunting haul. The non-snow covered rocks around the cave entrance had an orange cast to them, difficult to see even with my enhanced Arm eyes. The air wafting from the cave was, as before, warmer than it should be, and wetter, enough to leave a few extra icicles dripping from the nearest spruce and fir trees. It carried a faint current of dross with it, a minor amount, less than you would find on a park bench or bus stop back in Chicago. Much less than in Mizar’s cave. It stank of unfamiliar chemicals, though I was able to identify several scents, that of rust and sulphur.

I went in. The damned place had been haunting my dreams in the three weeks since my first visit. It wanted me to return, I guessed. To get a better look at the fresh meat. Me, I wanted to bargain, if I could find anyone or anything to bargain with. I was feeling very Focus these days. If I had Transforms depending on me for their lives, I would be making them bargain for their juice. Or finding time to stab my best friends in the back.

Nothing had changed inside the cave. Dark, of course. I had visited caves with phosphorescent glows, at least glows visible to us Arms. This cave didn’t glow. To my metasense, though, the place was a fully lit cathedral. Nobody home. Just me.

Okay, here I am, I said. I expected a response, or at least an echo, but I sensed nothing but the faint sulphur smell hiding under the more standard stench of water on rock. The dross lining of the place didn’t react. I raised my Monster amulet and concentrated my metasense through it. Nothing. Not even an aurora? The cave ate my words again, no echo. I guess what the amulet did last time I visited was in response to Mizar, not myself. That was worth a sigh or three.

Time to try other things. I strolled through the metasense cathedral, marking everything in my mind, looking for patterns. My footsteps echoed from the darkness, tok-ta, tok-ta, tok-ta-ta-ta. Nothing showed itself except for the obvious-in-retrospect realization that the objects in the Progenitors’ cave guided the changes in the dross I metasensed as I moved through the place.

I stayed away from the metal-incised yard-wide slab that served as the altar of the Progenitors’ cathedral. It wasn’t the only dross object in the place, and it didn’t sing to me. It felt off, contaminated or something. Corrupted. However, fifteen feet to the right of the altar, among the figures cut and carved into the flowstone of the cave, something did sing to me.

I found a dross object, a hacked up outline of a human face on a cave wall. Homey and familiar. This, I opened myself to, and when it didn’t bite, I touched it.

She was striking, goddess-like and beautiful in a way only an Arm could appreciate. Like Eissler, and now myself, she was covered with fur, in her case black fur. The fur was thinner than you would find on a bear or wolf, or a chimp, but it was still fur. The apparition in my mind – no, this wasn’t something I saw, but a metasense vision – reacted to my unstated question and the vision changed to show her in what I interpreted as her winter fur – thicker, grayer, and sticking out away from her body. She was an Eskimo, of course, from one of the First Peoples tribes of northern Canada. She would have towered over me, almost Armenigar tall. Everything about her shouted ‘goddess’; her, you worshipped. Naked except for her fur, a primitive belt across her waist and one over her shoulder, for supplies and weapons. Black hair, black eyes, muscles hewn from the mountains themselves, and a confidence that dwarfed Mizar’s.

My hand yanked itself away from the carving before I realized what I did.

I was not worthy, even to worship her.

I laughed at the cheap juice trick and gave the carving the middle finger.

If this was why the Cave wanted me here, then it was wasting my time. The last thing I needed in my life now was another oversized boss to worship.

Visit Three (2/18/73)

Okay, Sky, what’s your great idea? I said. Phooey. He could have just told me, but he was more interested in some shared solace time with me than any actual purpose. As if I did solace? Hell, given the deep deep shit I swam in, perhaps I should learn.

The Cave of the Progenitors hadn’t changed. Mizar’s bête noir, the never-encountered Mountain with Eyes, hadn’t eaten the place, either. Too bad.

Sky didn’t reply, drawn to the crudely hacked face in the wall that gave me the Arm Goddess vision. Mesmerized. Typical Sky, though – awe didn’t fill his mind when he saw the vision, only lust. Sky! I said, with enough Arm sergeant charisma in my bark to wake a hibernating grizzly bear.

Sky yelped and vanished. Carol, please, he said, in a Crow whisper. Heh. I had gotten to him. Perhaps I was regaining some of my Arm nature, despite Mizar’s best efforts.

I waited him out while studying the altar with my metasense. Yes, something was off about this place, and the ‘off-ness’ came from here. Someone had fucked up, big time, not here but out there in the real world, and their failure was reflected here. Was this ‘off-ness’ what lay behind the split between the Progenitors and Predecessors?

Blood, Sky whispered. Whenever Arm wanted to make things happen with the various do-dads she found on her quests, she used her own blood.

The juice in the blood, that is. Quests and do-dads, though? Implying a fair number of them. There was a hell of a lot more history I didn’t know about the Canadian Major Transforms than I realized. Of course, Sky was a master of burying the real story amid a hundred other non-germane stories. He might have told me everything and I missed it on the way by.

Blood made sense, though, to an Arm. Consider the Arm and Chimera mythic antecedents from the myth hypothesis – vampires and werewolves – and how important blood was to both of them in their myths. Hell, one of Wandering Shade’s early crew of mind-addled flunky Hunters was a legitimate blood-sucking vampire.

Until we killed his ass.

I can see that, I said. Any suggestions as to where? My instincts told me not to put blood on the yard-wide slab of an altar.

"Her face."

Did Sky want to conjure up a ghostly long-dead Arm as a spirit guide? Fuck. Of course he did. I wouldn’t mind getting my ass reamed by her, either. An Arm challenge might help me break me out of my Mizar funk. Instead of commenting, I simply walked over to the face on the wall, cut the palm of my hand, and laid my palm on the face.

The touch made me tingle all over, a not unpleasant reaction. Nothing else, though. I turned to where I thought Sky was, about to chew his ass for his useless suggestion, when my metasense dimmed and the cave interior began to glow to my eyes.

The glow localized itself at the altar and coalesced into that of a bewhiskered middle-aged and extremely weather-beaten man.

I recognized him from my one encounter with him, from back when I was a young and stupid Arm. The Man. This I didn’t need. Fuck, I said to him. So, can you even talk, or are you here to gloat? I was puzzled, though. Had he died? I thought these crazy juice apparitions were only of dead people. Not that I had met more than one, but I had heard far too many stories from Sky and Lori about this sort of thing. They all sounded like magic to me, which made them most suspect.

The Man being dead, though, gladdened my heart.

I can talk, he said. I’m not what you think I am. I’m the Holy Man as the Holy Man had been when he became the Holy Man…and you are one hell of a specimen for an Arm, aren’t you? His gaze went up and down my body, pausing at my crotch and boobs. So much for The Man being dead, though. It appeared that remaking was enough to allow one to be a ghost of the Progenitors. Or Predecessors. I didn’t know which ones sent him, though.

Good. Then talk. I need guidance.

I felt Sky come up behind me and cower behind my back.

Guidance? A tall drink a water as purty as you don’t need no guidance, The Man said. He might look like The Man, but he didn’t have the voice, the presence, or the ability to induce the fear that you were sparring with someone of intense brilliance and education. He also talked with a backwoods Canadian accent. A roll in the hay, though, might do the trick. His apparition sauntered up to me, leering. Licking his ghostly lips. His apparition wore a fur coat over an old-fashioned army uniform, foreign, as well as mud-caked boots, a crude knapsack, and a rolled up tent on his back. He carried a revolver in his right hand. A small miner’s pickaxe hung from his belt.

This wasn’t The Man as the Transform community knew him. No brilliant spider in the center of a web of deceit here, only an average intellect-challenged prospector. When he found this place, and transformed, my guess back around the turn of the century, he hadn’t been much of a man at all. Just the usual fungus on the rot of life.

I’m looking for a bit of help with the Chimera who serves as this place’s guard dog, I said.

With Beast? The Man said. He stopped, eighteen inches away, and cupped his hands suggestively, about tit high. Beast is Boss. He’s got more than a few loose screws in his Beastly brain, though, hun. Air Oh Gance, that is. He paused. Show me a good time, and I’ll gets you a lot more of Beast’s secrets.

Fuck you.

That would be the whole point, sweetie.

I growled. The apparition laughed.

You’re of the old ones, the ones we call the Progenitors? Sky asked, from behind me.

Uh hun, scaredy Crow.

You aren’t an appropriate guide for us, Sky said. Gracious Progenitors, send us a better guide. Send us someone we knew who at least didn’t despise us.

No can do, scaredy Crow, The Man said. Not today, anyhoo. If you be willing to offer the blood, too, then perhaps you can parley with someone with more import.

The goddamned apparition’s cupped hands slipped over my breasts, and I flinched from the unexpected physical touch. This was one hell of an illusion. Get the fuck away from me, I said, putting as much of my diminished charisma into my voice as possible.

Too bad, the apparition of The Man said, as he vanished, dimming, his image vanishing before his voice. Now you’ll never know what a good lay I…

I turned to Sky. He still wasn’t there. I’m going to go punch some trees, I said. Care to join me? I was beginning to think the Cave and I did not get along.

Visit Four (2/28/73)

So, what’s the Crow equivalent of the crude Arm face? I asked. Back again in the Cave of the Progenitors, yes, but this time I felt much better about myself. Mizar had taken responsibility for the rest of our extended family. I was almost out from under, but not quite. The only thing holding him back was this, his responsibility for the Cave. I hadn’t told anyone yet, but my fallback solution for the problem of the damned cave involved a case of dynamite and a long lit fuse. That would satisfy the responsibility issue.

Oh, and one other thing: Mizar still refused to take my tag or Sky’s tag. The look he gave Sky and me when we mentioned that part of the deal still froze my soul.

I’m fairly sure it’s this set of petroglyphs over here, he said. I looked. To me, these ‘petroglyphs’ were just random scratches on a rock wall.

If you think so, I said. Give it a try.

He smeared blood, as did I.

Today, the response we got drove me to my knees. The Cave vanished around us, replaced by a cold conifer forest glade, with the stars shining above. To me and my Monster amulet, it felt as if we had been bodily drop-kicked into the Dreaming…or, more likely, the pheromone flow.

A ghostly image of a Crow appeared out of the nothingness, on the other side of Sky. Sky didn’t notice, as he faced me. The blond Crow, tall and good looking, mouthed ‘shhh’ to me, then tapped on Sky’s left shoulder. Sky turned, startled, but the Crow had already circled around him to the right. I laughed.

Wire, Sky said, after twirling around twice. I knew the name. Dead Crow, killed by Enkidu and a baby Hunter going by the name of Grendel, way back in the Philadelphia Massacre.

That’s me, Wire said. He seemed far more animated than the apparition of The Man and the others I had heard about. You requested a better spirit guide. Who better than me?

Nearly anyone else, Sky said, with a sigh. He glared at the ghostly Crow.

We want…

Help, Wire said, interrupting me. I know. Here’s the best I can do.

The forest around us changed and became urban daylight, a flash that brought a predatory growl to my lips. I now stood on a city street, along with Sky and the Wire apparition, only the street moved as I stood still. I crouched, unnerved and ready to fight, when three blocks away a creature slithered into view, an insanely oversized dragon-snake, covered with moss and seaweed. I shot out my right hand to stop myself as the street moved me toward a parked car…and my hand went through the car without a tingle. Oh. This was a dross-powered illusion, the best I had ever encountered. I examined the illusion as the scene moved us closer to the dragon-snake. My metasense worked, but not at my usual range, and as if I was a standard Arm and not me, with my ability to pick up juice traces. I put my hand on my Monster amulet, which worked as normal, and my metasense penetrated the dragon-snake’s metasense protections to reveal it to be a Monster. Or, perhaps, a MONSTER, as I had never metasensed anything of its kind before. I think its juice count, or what passed for it, was in the six digit range. It radiated age the way a tree trunk showed age, rings and rings of complex concentric internal juice structure. The MONSTER seemed familiar, and I realized this was the Lake Erie Monster, who I had missed seeing by about a half hour. Only this time it was out of the lake, slithering on land and laying waste to someone’s downtown. It really was a creature from the time of the Progenitors, alive and still slithering. The Monster grabbed a delivery truck in its mouth, picked it up, shook it, and then with a flick of its body tossed it through the second story wall of a brownstone. No people, though. The city streets stood alone, deserted, though I could faintly hear police sirens in the distance. I wondered how I had missed hearing about an incident like this.

Oh. This wasn’t a vision from the past, but a prediction of the future.

At my realization the world flickered. The gritty Cleveland (it had to be) streets vanished, replaced by the image of a quiet well-wooded city neighborhood. With a Disney fairy-tale castle looming over it. An itchy sandpaper feeling came over me, motion sickness-like. I recognized the locale immediately – Hilltop, the late Focus Shirley Patterson’s lair. From the bright leaves on the trees and the appearance of the cars, this had to be a vision of the past. This time the scene moved faster, quickly moving us toward a loose ring of bodyguards around an area a couple of hundred yards distant, a shaded park area. There stood The Man and the late Focus Patterson, and he was teaching her something. How to manipulate élan! As I metasensed and watched, she scooped up a mass of dross, using a juice pattern, and imbued it with juice. Which turned it into élan.

The Man had a hell of a lot to answer for.

My realization didn’t change the vision this time. We stayed in this vision long past the moment where we passed by The Man and Patterson and the far end of her ring of bodyguards. There, watching from a very safe distance of three hundred yards, stood a Focus with a crouching man wearing a dog collar, on a leash. I didn’t recognize the Focus, with hair so ash blonde it was almost white, but I did recognize the crouching man from Gilgamesh’s descriptions – Crow Echo. What was he doing there, way back when? How did he ever escape Patterson?

Who was to say he ever did?

The world flickered into a new vision, and the world whizzed by much more rapidly. This was another outdoor scene, a park with playing children and mothers and the usual. Out in the open, with no bodyguards no troops no nothing, I spotted the Hunter General, Loess. I would know that ugly walking cadaver anywhere. He and a striking woman with black leather skin sat on the ground, enjoying a picnic. They looked up from their eating – raw dog, my guess – and love filled their eyes, or so I interpreted with my metasense. Then they raised their hands to each other, fingers open wide, and began to manipulate some élan, the élan balanced between the two of them. As the scene approached I heard instrumental music – the two of them were somehow using the élan as a musical instrument. Amazing! Around a set of trees I saw water in the distance and a slap-your-face landmark, the Space Needle. Seattle.

While I attempted to work out whether this was a scene from the past, present or imagined future, I got a case of the need-to-recruit hots for the woman. She, Loess’ pack alpha, possessed the indefinable whatever-it-takes qualities to be a top member of my organization. As far as when the scene occurred, I couldn’t come up with a better approximation than ‘within the last two years’.

The vision ended faster than I wanted. The pack alpha I think was originally of Middle Eastern origin, and she had maintained a human shape. Her skin was black leather, rough and dimpled, and thick enough to stop a poorly thrust knife. She didn’t wear clothes, although everything that needed to be covered was so by her altered skin. Under her skin her musculature was almost Arm-like. Her eyes didn’t miss anything. I lusted.

The next vision was of a narrow street of three and four story tenements, altered by the additions of walkways and elevated hallways across the road and alleys. Behind the altered tenements smoke billowed and the occasional flame flickered, as if in the not too far distance a city burned. This was some Focus’s household, or a multi-Focus household, and this was a prediction of the future. The density of juice and dross in the area slapped me like a fish to my face, and everyone I metasensed was terrified and agitated. In the vision, a pack of thirty or so real juice zombies – stabilized male withdrawal victims – trotted into view as the scene zipped by, down the street, at about thirty miles an hour. The scene, not the juice zombies. A woman Transform ran from one of the tenements, screamed, and then sprinted in terror. The pack of juice zombies not only gave chase, they caught her, dragged her down, and began to eat her. As the scene flickered away, I belatedly realized that nobody controlled the juice zombies – they controlled themselves and worked together. Worrisome.

Flicker. Wandering Shade stood in a fallow field, somewhere in the Midwest, and old crusty snow spotted the ground. A half mile away lay a large rural village, surrounded by trees. Guru Snow – visible only as an indistinct shape in a personal snowstorm – stood next to him. Watch this, my pacifist friend, Wandering Shade said, and directed about two thirds of his ambient dross supply into what I metasensed as a twirling cigar-shaped torpedo. Then he launched it, and as it moved it started to dissipate, but when it got to the village it caused metasense flickers. People transforming, and far too many of them dying instantly of their induced transformations. And by transforming and dying, they gave power to the dross cloud. Terrifying.

Flicker. A pack of perhaps eighty Monsters, led by a Monster, raced across a ruler-flat farm. I think it was in western Texas, as the field was dryland cotton.

Flicker. A bunch of Crows talked together, one of whom was Chevalier and another, Shadow. Shadow wore an expensive looking fedora. I guessed this was years ago. They were doing something with the dross, but the scene moved by too fast for me to figure out with my metasense what they were doing.

Flicker. A Crow with his arms raised to an aurora lit sky called down the auroras. The called auroras turned to fire, which he directed at a distant group of a couple dozen well-spread-out normal soldiers and set them ablaze. Magic!

Too quickly, a flicker, a scene, and another flicker. The scenes now appeared and vanished faster than I could track. At least twenty more scenes flickered by before Sky yelled Stop! The only two I managed to understand at all were a scene of two huge Transform households battling with dross and juice weapons from over a hundred yards apart and a vision of a male Arm manipulating a piece of electronic lab equipment with what had to be Arm Shaman-style skills.

This isn’t what we want, Sky said, after the cave of the Progenitors reappeared around us. Nor why we’re here. I bent over and nearly puked from motion sickness. I growled at the unfairness of the universe – I still wasn’t my former world-beating self.

How much of what you just showed us was real and how much fairy tales? I asked as I crouched. I would not puke. I refused to puke.

In the visions lie everything you need to defeat the Hunters, Wire said. That is your worry, the reason you seek to lure Beast away from his responsibility to protect this place, isn’t it?

I understood where this was going. Thank you, Wire, and the Progenitors, for your help. I’m not sure my attempted sincerity succeeded. I did manage to rise and look him in the eyes. Sweat collected on my forehead and lower back. But the Hunters aren’t a problem for the future. They’re warring right this instant on the Transforms under my protection. We don’t have time for quests, solving mysteries or research. We need soldiers and leaders, now, and Beast, now called Mizar, is who we need.

Wire shrugged.

A little help in gaining dominance over the ambulatory fur rug might also be helpful, I said. Mizar remained as uncooperative and undominated as ever, even if he agreed that, in theory, he did have a responsibility he needed to handle down south.

Oh, really? Wire said. He sauntered over to me, far cheekier than a Crow should be, even if he was already dead. So much for my attempted sincerity. I began to understand Gilgamesh’s insistence that if Wire had lived through the Philadelphia Massacre, he would have made, in time, a proper Crow companion for Keaton. He definitely had the ‘fuck you’ attitude down cold.

In this place, what passed as his body was as solid as mine. I gave him as good a Commander glare as I was capable of while still under Mizar’s thrall. He ignored it. You overvalue yourself, he said. The spark you hold may well burn up your tinder, but your logs will not catch. The archetype you inhabit lives in the dreams of the American Transforms, not the Progenitors, and thus has no permanence. The problem is that your fellow Americans believe, deep in their hearts, that Commanders are male. You are doomed to lose the title.

And yet, here I am.

You’re not, and never will be, a top Arm, he said. My glare grew hotter. Not as a top fighter, or military officer, or juice wielder, or even as an Arm intellect. By the time there are two hundred Arms in America, you won’t even be in the top one hundred. For every rise you make, you will fall, and farther. You don’t deserve to be…

Dominant. Words, just words, I said, interrupting his insult.

You do understand why Beast controlled you so easily, don’t you? Wire asked.

Because he’s an omnipotent prick backed by the Progenitors, I said.

Wire shook his head. You owe him a debt of the juice, a debt incurred in the Dreaming, in the episode where the Clumsy Angel battled the White Witch for your soul while you battled Amy Haggerty in the real world for dominance. It was Beast, the Clumsy Angel’s quest companion, who defeated the White Witch and allowed you to remove the Inquisitor’s parasite tag. His help linked you for all time.

Or so you say. I distinctly remembered paying for the removal of Bass’s tag with pain, not any of this magical crap. How do I know anything you have said, or shown, is real?

Wire stopped and snorted. You wish an example of your self-overestimation? I nodded with my eyes. Very well. Do you remember what you had for breakfast back on December 4th, 1968?

I blinked. What?

It should be easy, given your often-stated Arm perfect memory. Breakfast? December 4th? Houston?

I shook my head. I remembered the day, of course. It was the day Tonya offered to surrender and Gilgamesh and I set up her mind scrape. Lunch was at Thelma’s household, out on the back porch as to not disturb her Transforms. Meatloaf sandwiches, deviled eggs, peanut butter stuffed celery sticks, and crackers. I couldn’t remember breakfast, though. A sudden cold sweat covered my body.

Not even a low juice situation, Wire said. I’m sure you remember your last kill before that day, though.

I nodded. I remembered all my juice draws, who I drew, and all the hunts that preceded them. Except, as he said, when my juice was low enough to interfere. I had drawn juice two days before, on December 2nd, the day after I had given my presentation to Keaton about Tonya’s games that had gotten us at each other’s throats. In Houston, well, in my favorite hunting territory at the time, the industrial villages east of Houston. My victim lived alone in a trailer parked in the front lawn of his mother’s ramshackle home in the fourteen-thousand block of Bandera, in the east Houston burg of Cloverleaf. I never learned his name. I took him at night and burned his place down to cover up my kill, a body disposal method I used about once a year or so. He wore Ginseng cologne, which I suspected he had stolen.

Breakfast, though?

I shook my head. I couldn’t remember. Which was impossible. What’s going on here? Was he interfering with my mind?

Wire snorted again. I think he had a thing for snorting. What’s going on is that you edit the crap out of your memories. Because, well, there’s only so much crap you can remember before you get sick of keeping crap in your memories. You only think you remember everything because that’s what you tell yourself, at least twice a day.

Well, hell.

I never did remember what I had for breakfast that day.

Is that real enough for you?