The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  After reflecting on the notion that the magician would not have set her friend to a task that might endanger her life, the General nonetheless felt obliged to warn the human of the perils of thoughtforms. “Sometimes, imagining things in this place can be dangerous.”

  “That’s only if the thing you’re imagining is bad! Or if you don’t know what you’re imagining. The magician told me that much…but he doesn’t have to tell me that the souls of ships are always good.” The craft gave another rumble, and to Dominia’s surprise, the needle of some dial twitched to life. Tenchi, beaming brighter than the martyr’s light, said, “This must be how he wants me to fix the ship! By paying attention to her. Of course, it’s so simple… How could she work if nobody knows she’s living?”

  Interesting question. What was the sound of one hand clapping? If a tree fell in the forest without somebody to hear it, did it make a sound? She got those old Zen koans now. Miki would be proud. “I guess that’s a good point… Still, I don’t understand.”

  “The ship needs electricity to function on Earth, but here, things function by thought, so I guess…call it a thought-powered ship?”

  “Plane,” said Farhad, leaning into the doorway. “I do not wish to alarm or interrupt you, Mahdi.”

  “Carry on.”

  “There are lights, Mahdi.”

  “Maybe it’s an airship,” Tenchi muttered, while Dominia patted his shoulder and continued, to Farhad, “What do you mean, lights?”

  “Blue torches,” the pilot said, to the drop of the General’s stomach.

  “Those aren’t for us.” Leaning past Farhad, she glanced out of the E4 and tried to maintain a neutral expression for the path of torches unfurling, as ever, north according to the ethereal guide of her just-hinted compass. She had no desire to follow them, and tried to turn back to Tenchi.

  Undaunted, the pilot went on—his tone cautious and respectful, but all the more aggravating for it. “If I may say, Mahdi—” She whirled on him with a dark look that squeezed out of the human man a nervous laugh, even in a place where there was no such thing as death.

  “It is just—how do I say—the night in this place is very long, Mahdi, and—”

  “And we will make our own fire to rest, away from these. Real fire.”

  “Ah, but it is just that—perhaps these are gifts from Allah, yes? In place for weary travelers…”

  After a helpless assessment of Dominia’s stony expression, Farhad turned toward Gethsemane, whose glittering features in this place apparently resembled Cassandra’s more than ever when she wanted something. (Purposeful? Hard to say.) These sweet eyes reflected from the diamond said with Gethsemane’s voice, “We are all very tired, I think, General. Do you know these lights? Know them to be foul? Perhaps they are of the magician.”

  This, for whatever reason, lit the hot fire of nauseous offense in Dominia’s cheeks and gut, and she snapped despite herself. “The magician’s lights are real fire. Fire spoken with words like mine. Not lights like…these.”

  “Whose lights are these, Mahdi,” tried Farhad, delicately. The General cursed herself for having hidden this issue from her friends rather than warning them ahead of time.

  For one long year, she had been training select men and women in the use of the Ergosphere, and at no point in time had she either revealed or admitted any knowledge of the fairy fire torches that were said to appear in her presence during the nighttime Void-state. All the more reason she preferred the daytime manifestation. Then her Father was only likely to appear when she was alone. In this place, he liked to lure her to him. Her method of avoiding the lure had been a refusal to acknowledge its existence, but that clearly wouldn’t work now. Not with all her friends (and Teddy) right here. Gethsemane, who had given up encouraging Dominia to share her worries, watched her now. The martyr tried to indicate with her eye that they were better off not discussing this in front of Theodore, but, of course, all parties only waited for her to speak. Irritated, she cleared her throat and stepped down past Farhad to make a grab for her brother. When Teddy ducked out of her grip, she admitted in a half mutter, “The lights are my— Father’s.”

  “What!” The Governor all but shrieked the word before he was off at a sprint in the direction of the torches, giving Dominia only a second to turn her accusatory look on the humans and tell Tenchi, “Stay here and fix the plane,” before she needed bolt after pathetic Theodore.

  “Father,” he cried, “Father! Oh, Daddy”—she could have vomited and actually stumbled a step, giving him slightly more headway and further annoying her—“you’ve come for me! Even in this place, you came for me, O Heavenly Father—”

  “He didn’t send those torches for you, you twerp.” Dominia’s limbs pumped at double time, but the General was amazed to find how fast Theodore was in this place. Perhaps out of terror. “He wants you to follow the torches, but not so he can save you.”

  In the distance, she could see it. Now more than a door and a disembodied office, her Father’s thoughtform study resembled a box. A whole room, as if torn out of a building. The exterior, artfully covered in floral wallpaper, still appeared to float in space. But for that path cleaved through the thick darkness by those wretched torches, it would appear unnervingly unanchored. “Why else would he send them if not to save me?” On shrieking this, Theodore slowed sufficiently for the General to snatch the back of his rumpled coat.

  “So he can attract me here,” she told her brother, giving him an irritated mother-cat shake.

  “It’s all about you, isn’t it?” he began—but with his next breath to speak, his nose wrinkled, and his words succumbed to a cough. “What is that stench?”

  It had trickled into her nose in like time and zipped her back through her journey across the world, and earlier. To the military, to parties as a teenager, to the cloying scent of her human father’s clothing. Most of all, it brought her to this place, the Ergosphere. To her Father’s study and its most regular unwelcome guest, the prospect of whom made Dominia release Theodore’s collar and sprint for that door, herself.

  “Tobacco smoke.”

  As she drew closer, the air grew denser—not just with the scent of cigarettes but the sound of music, wholly unfamiliar and not her Father’s classical preference. Perhaps that was why this night, for the first time, she entered the study without knocking and without thought for the fact that she had managed to stay away one year straight. Inside, she found beside the pool table not just her Father but also that bastard, chain-smoking magician, Valentinian.

  “Hell,” he said in time with the Hierophant, a second before he was pinned to the bookshelves by his jacket’s lapels while capping on the belated, “O!”

  “Give me a reason I shouldn’t shatter your imaginary skull with my fist and send you back in time so far that you’re stuck as a dog again.”

  “Missed you, too, buddy,” wheezed Valentinian, almost laughing, while the Hierophant smiled with those inappropriately blithesome fuligin eyes.

  “There is my little tiger, at last! A bit late for most of the holidays, but we still have New Year’s. I knew if I kept extending invitations, you would eventually come.”

  “Where have you been?” Dominia continued, oblivious, to the magician. “I gave up Cassandra for you, and now I find you here? With him? And dragging Tenchi into this?”

  “Strictly speaking, you delayed Cassandra for me.” Valentinian continued speaking in a casual tone, either unwilling or unable to disappear with the General’s fists clutching the cherry velvet of a jacket she slowly recognized to be new. “We’re just taking the long way. The right way.”

  Dominia jerked her head toward His Holiness. “How am I supposed to trust you, finding you with him?”

  Beyond her shoulder, Theodore stood in the doorway and cried with cartoonish relief, “Father!”

  “Tut, tut, Theodore.” The Hierophant’s guileless expression brimmed with self-aware amusement. “I am disappointed in you, lad.”

  Domin
ia turned to regard both her Family members, specifically Theodore, and the way his face fell as he asked, “Disappointed in me?”

  The Hierophant offered precious more gesture than a solemn shake of his head. “You and all my other children have been warned, time and again, of the horrors wrought by the consumption of the blood of Lazarus. No martyr who has tasted it may be saved.”

  “But—”

  “You have committed the one unforgivable sin, my boy. I’m afraid you are damned for eternity.”

  Horror filled Theodore’s face, and his slightly aged hands clasped one another before tightening like a noose around his embroidered silk collar. “What? What do you mean? Surely you can’t be serious.”

  “I’m afraid I am most serious,” said the Hierophant, offering an earnest lift of his brows toward the hairline that, in this place, so resembled Cicero’s they might have passed for twins. The cover story of the holy man from Acetia who adopted the appearance of the first human he martyred was the only thing that prevented the General’s rampant speculation, because with all the things she’d been exposed to since her flight from the city of San Valentino, she was more open to the idea of her Father’s extraterrestrial heritage. As to whether Valentinian’s story that he was, in the first iteration of the universe, one of the original discoverers of the sacred protein…Dominia still wasn’t sure it passed the sniff test, and somehow that made her Father’s story seem dubious, too. Never mind that nobody had explained to her just how it was the fictional saint had gotten himself stuck as a dog, or any animal. It was all so baffling, even after a year in which to absorb it.

  Imagine trying to explain all of that to Teddy in any way he’d believe or understand! Now she understood why they veiled so much knowledge from her. She also saw why it was so easy for her Father to manipulate two whole continents of people. His power meant it wasn’t some small deal to Theodore when the Holy Father sincerely said, “There is no saving you now. Your soul shall be damned to hell.”

  The UF Governor took a step forward, his wide eyes watering. “No! No, that can’t be.”

  Dominia said, “He’s full of shit,” but Theodore didn’t seem poised to believe her.

  Valentinian told her with an aggravated wave of his hand, “You want proof you can trust me? Let me go, and I can save him.”

  “Save him from what?” the General asked, but he waved again. She found the change when she followed his hand: the shimmering, wobbling panic that overcame poor Theodore’s form. It was as though the ground had quite literally dropped from beneath his feet. He had become a one-man earthquake for as much as he trembled, and as Farhad arrived on the scene along with Gethsemane, it was in time to see the Governor, his mouth a superposition of four dozen different pleas, beginning to disappear.

  As the Hierophant continued droning to Dominia (or himself), he leaned upon his pool cue like a cane. “The incredible thing about a damned soul”—his eyes followed Valentinian’s dash to Theodore—“is that one must ask oneself whether the person in question could be said to have ever existed once their spiritual substrate is diminished back to its quintessence. When unfired clay is remolded, what happens to the old figure? Does it still exist within the new object, the cup or the bowl?”

  “I exist,” insisted Theodore at high pitch while the magician grabbed what seemed to be only one of (or part of) a series of shifting fragments that came together to form an impression of a man called Teddy. If Gethsemane was a collage of three women, Governor Theodore was a single man shattered into a cubist portrait.

  “Yeah, buddy!” As he would a child waking from a tahgmahr, Valentinian soothed the victim of the Hierophant’s mind games. “You exist! Just pull yourself together and keep existing. You don’t need his permission to exist.”

  “Strictly speaking, as I created him in this martyred form—”

  Too annoyed with her Father’s lectures to suffer another word, Dominia snatched the pool cue from his hand and shattered it over the edge of the table. The Hierophant made a hennish noise of displeasure while the magician continued talking Theodore back to sustainable shape.

  “Is that any way to treat your Father after not calling for a year?”

  The General’s lip curled. “I’d do worse if I could do it in confidence that your whole study wouldn’t disappear with you and leave us floating in the night.” Now centimeters from his face, she considered the splintered stake of a cue that she’d unconsciously waved under his nose. Had she developed a temper problem? Her Father’s pale eyebrows lifted, along with the smirking corner of his lips, as if to ask her what she thought.

  Meanwhile, Theodore continued to miserably whine above the tearing vacuum sound of his own soul’s struggle to maintain its integrity. “How can I be sure that I exist?”

  “I’m talking to you. I—care that you exist.” This, from Valentinian, was not convincing. Braced, the magician reached into the holographic form of the Governor as though to hold him in place. “Come on, look, I can touch you. We’re in this together.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” argued Theodore, always poised to shoot down comfort in a time of distress. “You might not exist either, for all I know.”

  The magician rolled his eyes toward Dominia. “Trust me, pal, things would be a lot easier for me if I didn’t. I’d be the first to tell you if I didn’t exist. You, though! You’re clearly existent. Come on, Teddy, stick with me.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Oh, so it’s ‘your’ name? Who’s ‘you’ if you don’t exist? Who’s Teddy? Cogito, ergo sum, brother!”

  “I—don’t—” Blinking eyes that came together into but one pair, his body solidifying again, Theodore jerked out of the grip of the magician and said, “Don’t condescend to me, please! I’m not a child. I know who I am but I—I can’t really be damned, can I? How can I? I didn’t do anything.”

  “You’re not damned,” began the magician. As the Hierophant opened his mouth to interrupt, Dominia pushed the cue into his chin until he shut it again. “Nobody’s damned, for Christ’s sake…you religious types, I swear. You’re too gullible, and gullibility is terrible for the soul! Souls need assurance. Confidence! They need substance.” Shaking his head, Valentinian removed his pocket watch and handed it to the more-or-less singular Theodore. “Take this.”

  “What good is a watch going to do when I’m eternally lost?” That said, no matter how miserable he was, Theodore was never too miserable to accept something free. He allowed the magician to clip the watch to his belt loop and said once it was done, “Wait, is this thing broken?”

  “It doesn’t matter that it’s broken. It’s something from outside you. It’ll keep you grounded, even if you’re not thinking about it, because I couldn’t have given you that if you didn’t exist.”

  “But what’s the point of existing if I’m to be damned?”

  Even he had his limits. The magician looked behind Theodore, to the humans who watched in quiet astonishment. “Will somebody please tell me if I exist, or if you can hear me? Because he can’t seem to. Good Lord…listen, buddy, Theo—the Hierophant’s not in charge of deciding whether you’re damned.”

  “He’s not?”

  “No! Of course not. Who’d let him be in charge? He bullied his way to the top worse than Dominia bullies you.” While the General made a noise of displeasure, the magician went on. “You’re in charge of your own affairs. Nobody can tell you that you’re damned but you. Okay?”

  “But he—”

  “Is a guy with enough money to run an earthly organization that claims to serve God. But what evidence does he have, outside of money and a bunch of followers, that he’s God’s servant? Dominia and I and anybody with the blood of Lazarus can disappear, reappear, do all the things he does. You can now, too.”

  Although he was taken aback, her baby brother was still in the mood to argue. “Well, he has the Lamb, of course.” Teddy looked over at Dominia and the Hierophant as though the magician were an idiot
and they were in on it. “The miracle-working savior of the martyr race, one of the first two transformed by the blood of the Hierophant! The intercession between Man and God, Earth and heaven!”

  “And where do you think the Lamb’s miracles come from?” Valentinian gestured around. “Right here. You’re standing in the same place where the Lamb does his supposedly holy work. Your Father just wants you to think you’ll be damned if you come here because if his secret gets out, everybody will be fighting for a way in.”

  “What?” Theodore laughed, again looking over at his Family. “No, he—”

  The Governor’s laughing face fell when he saw Dominia’s stone-serious expression and the Hierophant’s almost-smiling one, the latter’s just barely managing to contain its mirth and thus looking rather strained with or without the pool cue almost up his nose. “Father,” tried Theodore, tone delicate as possible, “that’s not true, is it?”

  “It would be most inconvenient for me to have the whole society of martyrs running in and out of this Void,” replied the Hierophant, his expression as innocent as the night he was martyred. “Strictly speaking, from the perspective of my earthly Church, you are damned, whether you accept it or not.”

  “Yeah.” The scoffing magician bent his head to light another cigarette. “And from the perspective of objective reality, nobody cares.”

  “How can you say that? You heard him, didn’t you?” Teddy began once more to fall apart until Gethsemane strode up from behind to cuff him in the back of the head. He was more himself after that than he had been once the (now laughing) magician had dealt with him, and seemed more willing to listen as the human waved her arm around.

  “How can you say that, having seen this place? What is this space, this infinite potential, and what is your so-called Protomartyr beside it? The Hierophant of what? My goodness! Do you think anything of Earth matters here? It’s the other way around.”