by M F Sullivan
There was more to man than his flesh.
The Lamb could not explain it, but could show Dominia what he saw when, as usual, humans were put to weekly slaughter at the altar, dragged screaming and pleading in handcuffs and those very same electric collars devised to keep martyrs under control. The General saw through the Lamb’s eyes the quivering overlap of an energy, hot and rosy. What was it? Fear? Sorrow? Souls? All of the above: emotion-despoiled electromagnetic energy. Those same fields that bonded the self to thoughtforms and guided the way in the Void—that was what martyrs truly devoured.
As always, the Lamb submitted his own throat to be cut by El Sacerdote, his blood added to the dish as the holiest and most significant portion of the sacrament. That blood was the reason for the Lamb’s perpetual travel from church to church and back again, for that blood kept the martyrs who consumed it from requiring human flesh for another week. In this blood, Dominia could see and feel (for she was in the blood, part of the blood, a droplet now trickling out of the Lamb and into the great trough of herself) a substance that rendered martyrs submissive, that altered their brain and addicted them to the Church and burdened their bodies with guilt and shame and sorrow so they could not imagine anything beyond the material world. Heaven, to them, was but a shallow pair of pearly gates sitting on a bunch of stagnant clouds. God was a meaningless word, a faceless old man who kept them manacled like the blood of the false Lamb.
Was it that wretched stuff, not just hatred and shame, that kept thoughts of martyrs bound to flesh—focused on petty things like money and faith, rather than liberation into Truth? That was the nature of the Ergosphere, after all. Dominia had nearly forgotten! The Truth. The Truth, into which she dissolved as all the blood evaporated and there, in the distance, sat the Hierophant’s study. Of course, the Truth seemed so impossible to verify she could not trust she existed within it even with perception of herself relative to another object! She shivered as she set out on her own dream-feet toward that distant box that glowed like the two trails of lights leading from it.
What had she and her men spent the last year trying to do but prove all this—yet how could even the greatest researcher prove anything when his instruments did not reliably enter the Void with him? What did technology mean when electric crafts on Earth were powered by imagination in this place? Measuring all this in any meaningful way seemed a process that would take years, if not centuries, from the material perspective. It was stunning the Hunters had cobbled together a formula to figure out how far in the future the exit teleporter needed to be activated for anything to go from point A to point B. Amazing they’d figured out how to make a mobile variant of that technology function even 25 percent of the time. In the time frame with which the Hunters had been working under Dominia, there had been no way to make meaningful progress in this strange new science of dreamtime travel. Asking for some sense of self so soon after seeing through the Lamb’s eyes…that was just too much.
The door of the Hierophant’s office stood before her, the automation of her feet through the dark leaving her to question whether she had existed until this moment. As if under remote control, her hand extended in a fist that rapped against the office’s eastern door. Teddy could be heard shrieking, “A man was shot in front of me! My soul, condemned unjustly! And now I’m being kept in ignorance!”
The Hierophant, who had hastened to respond to the knock, cracked open the door (which she now saw was carved with an elaborate rendering of the birth of Adonis, bursting forth from the arrow impaled in his incestuous myrrh-tree mother) and made a sound of delight. He threw the portal wide as, in increasing pitch, Theodore carried on, “After all that I’ve been through, the least—the very least you ‘people’ could do for me is tell me what is going on!”
“We can’t,” answered Dominia, studying her own self with that one eye wide as hers had been. “We don’t understand it all, ourselves.”
Pleased as punch, as he himself would put it, the Hierophant looked between his duplicate daughters, then considered the cue in his hand. “Care to close out our dear friend’s game, my girl?”
“With pleasure,” said the real Dominia, that present Dominia, that most-real-yet self of herself, who watched the Hierophant turn back to study the best position to place the white ball. Theodore looked the way the past shade of Dominia felt: confused and nauseous. Though no doubt he couldn’t comprehend the fascinating feedback loop of making unbroken eye contact with oneself, the feeling of being the output of a camera that filmed its own output. But on what screen?
“Are you coming?” Valentinian’s words snapped her back to her own present and out of the single-eyed gaze of that less whole other self who wheeled around, saw the magician at the start of a new path blazing with healthy red torches, and hurried to meet him. As the door (this the tragic hunting Death of Adonis) swung shut, its slam caused the Hierophant to miss his own stubborn fourteen ball. This left the white cue glowing with a shot made just for Dominia to take out Valentinian’s missed three.
“Please, somebody”—Teddy sank into one of the seats by the fire—“is there any more of that drug you gave me before the flights?”
“Not here,” said Dominia. The crimson ball, a spinning comet, cracked beneath her hand into the gold-striped nine and sent them into respective side and corner pockets. “But we can talk about it back in reality.”
To her credit, the General realized she’d abandoned Tenchi in the darkness of the still-deactivated airship sometime before she’d closed out the game of pool. Her human friends assured her that the torches had left the craft in visible condition, therefore protecting the Ichigawa cousin from dissipation. But after her own experiences wandering the nighttime Void in the form of a tiger, she finished that game in three shots (one of which seemed physically impossible even as she watched it) and thrust the cue into the hand of her Father. Even he, to his credit, appeared impressed, and tucked the stick into the crook of his elbow for a golf clap.
“Brava, my girl. Another round? A glass of wine?”
“Wine,” Theodore began, even as his sister dropped a hand upon his shoulder.
“We’ll pass.” She nodded in the direction of Gethsemane and Farhad. “They don’t imbibe.”
“Such a shame. Spiritual reasons?” As the humans stood, frigid and silent except for the occasional sound of Cassandra’s laughter or humming as it jittered from the area of Gethsemane’s heart, the Holy Father waggled the cue along with his brow. “Convert to the Holy Martyr Church, my children, and you may imbibe all you please.”
“Leave them alone,” said the General. “You’ve done enough damage to Teddy. Speaking of—are you ready to go?”
“But I have questions,” the shrill little man said, trying (and failing) to twist out of his sister’s grip. “Why would you do that to me?”
“Have to keep Dominia on her toes somehow, don’t I?”
“What the— I’m a person. Father, I—” With a pained furrow of his brow, Teddy scowled between the two martyrs, then asked the Hierophant the same question Dominia had asked an infinite number of times over the course of not just her journey but her life. “Why did you martyr me at all if you’re just going to try to disappear me? If you’re not going to rescue me from them? Why did you martyr me just to put me through all this?”
“Oh, Theo. Your beloved Father wishes you no harm! No death can come here. I’m only playing a game with a few people who don’t concern you, and sadly you’re in the middle of it. Don’t worry. Since you’ve made it this far, I’ll swoop in and rescue you soon enough.”
“Okay,” said Dominia, repressing a gag, “we’re leaving now.”
“No! I want to know!” Now, Theodore was successful in jerking out of her grip, and he stormed up to the Hierophant in a terrific imitation of a more menacing man’s rage. “Why are you letting this happen to me? Why bring me this far, then try to kill me?”
How the Hierophant’s face changed in a moment like this, when it was time for t
he truth to come out! She’d seen that ice-cold expression at the same party that had sent her packing to Canada for two sweet decades of no contact with her evil, dysfunctional Family, but there was no memory that could recreate it nor no description that could do justice to that flip of a switch within his offended mind. “Because you’re just not that important, Theodore,” was his razor-blade answer, which left the man visibly shocked, hands spread as if defending a physical assault. “To Lavinia, you are. But not to me. Do you realize, lad, that if I killed you at this very instant, you would awaken back on Earth, floating in the ice-cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean? Do you know how terrible it is for a martyr to drown?”
“What’s wrong with you?” Teddy fell back one step, then several when the Holy Father remained immobile. “Are you—are you feeling okay, Father? Don’t you know it’s me?”
“Don’t patronize me, Theodore. Of course I know it’s you. Your ability to whine is impossible to imitate. You asked; I but answer. You speak as if all I have ever done was an act of cruelty when you asked for this life. Begged me for it. I generously rewarded you with the Family bloodline and the platonic company of my most beautiful, purehearted daughter, and you act as if it has all been some burden. I am ‘allowing’ this to happen to you because you are not as important as the events in which you are involved—and I tried to ‘disappear you’ just now, as you put it, because Dominia is at this moment responsible for your life. Your death while in her custody would cause her tremendous pain—pain to such extent it might annihilate the remains of her spirit.” Now those eyes, obsidian daggers, flicked in the General’s direction. She watched with her own blue orb shadowed in hatred. “Never fear, though, Teddy.” His attention returned to his shell-shocked youngest child, and his tone of voice lightened just enough to emphasize how black it had been but seconds before. “Soon enough, you’ll be returned to safety. And once you’re in my custody, you will be safe again.”
The look on Teddy’s face as he glanced toward Dominia indicated he wasn’t so sure.
IV
Assume the Port of Mars
An encounter with the Holy Father’s true persona had a way of changing his children, as Dominia could have told Theodore. But any warning to such effect would have been lost on a Family member still enthralled by that perfect mask of the jolly old trickster—Lavinia would be crushed by exposure to those treacherous turns of mood, taken with him as she’d always been. Teddy was a close second place for the intensity of his delusions when it came to the Hierophant, and the frightful experience’s effect on his mind showed in the hunch of his shoulders and the twist of his silent mouth on the way back to the airship.
For some strange reason, the black sun hadn’t risen in the sky. Knowing what she did of time in that place, she suspected some event had yet to unfold. The notion would make no sense to her waking brain, but there it seemed somehow natural that anyone or anything that wanted to interact with her could hold time’s march through its day/night cycles. Especially if that thing was the Lady.
Slowing her pace to match Gethsemane’s, the martyr investigated her scattered human friend and carefully took her hand. This action seemed, however briefly, to solidify the woman into the state she was on Earth—that beautiful, dreadlocked creature whose heritage was such a combination of countries and cultures that she seemed alien enough without the added aspects of the naiad. “We’ll get you home,” said Dominia. This was the wrong thing to say; the girl didn’t speak, but her throat made a noise like Cassandra’s nastiest laughter. “You don’t think so? If I can’t protect you, surely your Lady will, and She’s all this space.”
“My Lady will use me as She sees fit,” the Bearer answered in a resigned tone. “After your Father’s words in the study, I am concerned that you feel responsible for my condition as much as you do for Theodore’s.”
“Of course I feel responsible. I let you—”
“It is not up to you to ‘let’ me come or go anywhere,” the human said, not unkindly. “I came with you because such a thing was demanded of me—and because I could not have rested with the thought of our last meeting being a sorrowful one where one or both was lost to war.”
After a glance over his shoulder for the women, Farhad hurried his pace to increase their privacy while the General said, “I don’t see why you have to think about our last meeting at all.”
“Our paths are about to diverge, Dominia.” The human used the martyr’s name so seldom that the latter listened all the harder to her friend’s words. “I have thought on the matter some since we came ashore with the Ichigawas last week… You remember the Lady, and how She insisted to you that I come?”
Who could forget? That had been at that meeting in the library basement after Jerusalem’s twelfth drone bombing. Sixty-three civilians had been wounded and twenty-two were already among the dead. Teddy’s kidnapping, suggested by the Lady a mere two nights before this incident, sounded better to Dominia all the time.
Lazarus, however, had disagreed. In their makeshift war room, the old mystic had sat across from her and defied the Lady’s anticipation that he would agree with whatever the General proposed. “We don’t need Theo,” he said. “There are safer ways to start a war if that’s what you want—and if it’s really information you’re after on a personal level, well…we know everything we need to know about Lavinia. What we don’t know can be extrapolated.”
“Maybe you know about Lavinia.” The General stared him down across a veritable ocean of charts, atlases, time tables, flight paths, and one or two example electrodart guns. “Have something you’d like to share with me? With the rest of the group?”
“I don’t know.” Lazarus returned her stare as coldly as she delivered it. “Do you?”
It wasn’t that the General and Lazarus hadn’t gotten along over the past year. However, it was undeniable that, as time went on, tensions rose, and Dominia had begun to sense that, day by day, they reached a point for which the many-lived man spent each life waiting.
In service to those tensions, she was careful with her words. Then again, Dominia was always careful when discussing her younger sister. “I know more about Lavinia than the public, but I don’t know as much about her as Theodore, and I don’t know with any degree of certainty why my Father has kept her locked up. All this time he could have been teaching her how to control her emotions and use her powers responsibly. Akachi was right. It’s more than obsession. My Father doesn’t do anything without good reason, and he doesn’t get attached to anyone on a personal level. That indicates he’s keeping her locked up for some purpose, but what?”
“Maybe to lure you back home now,” Lazarus posited. The General scoffed and waved the thought away before looking at the Lady, who studied the room with Her unmoving face. The still body, kneeling upon a slightly raised platform against the northern wall, reverberated with the same symphony as Dominia’s skeleton.
There are worse things than that the General should face her fear.
“Yeah,” Lazarus came back, his expression tight. “Worse things, like what we’ll have to do to get her back after she’s trapped. We can’t risk it. You know better than anybody here all the resources required if we allow her capture.”
The same number of resources as will be utilized, anyway. We are already at war.
“And you think kidnapping the Governor of the United Front is going to soothe that war?”
It was a fight nobody wanted to get in the middle of. As the room hovered in uneasy silence, the goddess calmly responded, Theodore is a weak-willed and sycophantic individual. To rally him to Our cause shall be next to nothing, with rich long-term rewards.
“Yeah, but he’s made out of paper. It’s just as easy for him to blow back his Father’s way the second we let him. The second—”
This all assumes the plan will go wrong, and the General will be captured. Is that what you anticipate?
The annoyed old man studied Dominia’s face (for its own part, arranged in displea
sure) and concluded, “I suppose we don’t have any better ideas.”
With the gates of Elsinore tightly barred and traffic in and out of the city controlled, consider how low the odds of anyone slipping in and out to deliver information, establish a teleporter—or, in a dream, free Lavinia with any measure of success.
“I’ve already agreed to it, haven’t I?”
Looking satisfied for as little emotion as the unmoving face that had once belonged to Miki Soto now expressed, the Lady turned her attention to Dominia. To soothe the fears of Lazarus, bring Gethsemane with you.
“She doesn’t need to come,” Dominia said while the Bearer stood at attention and showed no signs of opinion. “She’d be risking her life for nothing— I’ve already expressed tonight how wary I am about your suggestion of letting First Mate Ichigawa be responsible for our physical passage to the Front.”
Perhaps you would prefer to walk through the Ergosphere?
“That’s what I’m saying. Gethsemane can’t. I’ve seen her.” The General had bristled, nearing the point of dropping the last pretense of respect. “If something goes wrong with the E4 and Gethsemane is there—”
Then it must be Our will that this is so. Would you, mortal, contest Our will? The will of Our Void? We, who gave you sight? Who taught you to speak? Who crafted the world in which you live?
Oh, Dominina hated this. Hated the impotence, hated the genuflecting, hated the service. She was absolutely through with this life of submission to those in power. And it wasn’t so much that Dominia wanted power, herself. It was just that she didn’t want to watch people in power hurt those she loved anymore. Gethsemane had done much for her in the past year in terms of showing her that she could still bond, at least in a guilty way, with another being. The human had, despite Theodore’s judgement, relieved the burden of Cassandra in a tangible way. Dominia knew that Cassandra’s remains were cared for, adored, polished, and worn in a way that honored them—a silly thing, perhaps, but it was important to her. It made her feel like her wife was alive and…maybe on vacation, somewhere. They had tried that once, about fourteen years in, when Dominia was afraid it wasn’t working out. Her wife had gone off somewhere for a year, just to see what it was like to be alone. The Governess had been miserable, sick as a dog. Oh, Cassandra…what a beautiful thing it was, coming home after work one morning and seeing her bags in the foyer. Smelling the edges of her perfume in the air. Dominia still couldn’t even remember climbing the stairs.