The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  “What do you mean?” Even before her question, the General felt the magician’s presence behind her—or smelled his aromatic drugs, more like.

  “She’s the protein’s. And not the true sacred protein…the false, deformed protein held sacred by the HMC. When Lavinia was in poor Cassandra’s womb, and Cassandra was martyred rather than receiving the proper genetic treatments—because the Front decided long ago that health care is only a ‘right’ for martyrs, if rights even exist anymore—the protein went to work on the developing fetus.” As the people of the Kingdom resumed their business, Dominia turned, Cassandra still in her arm, to watch the magician. “Your courtship was incredibly fast.”

  The General averted her eye. “I’ve criticized myself, but if it weren’t for that, I don’t think we would have had all those years together.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably true. But I’m not bringing it up to throw stones. Trust me, I know how it goes! You meet an amazing woman—your dream woman—and move right in with her because, hey, you’re waking up together all the time, anyway, so you’d might as well! Then some crazy shit happens and it’s too late to turn back because your books are mixed on the shelves and you can’t sneak all that out while she’s sleeping, now can you?” As the women laughed, Valentinian summarized, “Emotions are never a perfect science.”

  Cassandra leaned that long-lost head against Dominia’s shoulder, and the General struggled to focus as the magician went on, “But, like I was saying, Lavinia’s DNA was edited even as her body and brain and tiny organs put the finishing touches on something resembling a fetal form. About twenty weeks in…that’s why pregnant women and their fetus never survived this before you. Too early and the protein would just edit the fetus out of existence like it was an error. Too late and the changes would be minimal, but brutal enough to cause any infant’s death. Between those two extremes, there’s a sweet spot that nobody’s been lucky enough to hit; and if they did hit it, they didn’t have the medical care to maintain the condition. But in that sweet spot? The protein can alter not just a child’s genetic and physical structure, but the genetic and physical structure of her descendants. The eggs in her ovaries are the world’s only viable eggs containing martyr DNA. She may have technically died in the womb just like everybody else died in life, but she died twice—the first time, the baby died because her mother died. The second time the baby died, she died because that was when the protein began to truly afflict her. It picked a certain point—after it finished stripping out her father’s DNA for its own, no doubt—to take her offline until she reached her full development. ‘Full development’ also includes puberty, and all the finishing cognitive touches of a young adult. Her situation was so prolonged because it was a two-step process of complete transformation. If Lavinia can be said to have a father—or any parents, at this point—it’s the malformed protein.”

  Chilled, the General asked, “Then how can she be saved?” Or, better question: How could the world be saved from her? The magician, looking earnest, stared into her face.

  “Lavinia is a deeply troubled girl, but she has a pure heart. Superficially, she is corrupted, because she has no way to comprehend the truth. But if she were to know the truth—if she were on the right side—can you imagine how powerful she would be? Can you fathom what would happen if you were able to convert her to the Lazarene faith, as pious a girl as she is for your evil Father’s teachings? Most importantly, the true sacred protein is a hop, a skip, and a jump away from the malformed protein, and she is that malformed protein walking upon Earth. If her body and blood could be set right—healed by a great miracle such as that which gave me a body—consumption of her substance would have the same effect as that of Lazarus.”

  “How could such a miracle be possible again? No, forget that—the real miracle is getting her on our side. You think she can be turned against him, after what he’s convinced her to do? After I betrayed her from the start, before she was even born?”

  “Lavinia just wants to be treated like an adult. She wants people to tell her the truth, and she wants to be alive. However badly she’s hurt by the reality of the situation, sometimes a little hurt is necessary to wake the fuck up.” At the slight scowl of the Noctisdomin school teacher, the magician waved his hand. “Pardon my French. Here: you can’t heal from an illness you don’t even know you have. Better?”

  With a steadying exhalation, Dominia glanced between Cassandra and Benedict. “I think being in this place and having the perspective you do is giving you all an overly optimistic perception of what’s possible. But…I’ll try.”

  “You’ll succeed,” said Cassandra, leaning up to kiss her wife. “I know you will.”

  “And after I succeed,” asked Dominia of that beautiful face, “where will I find you?”

  Valentinian, from somewhere in the distance, said, “I’ll take care of it,” but that wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. Nothing was worth this moment, this slight weight of her body, this perfume of her flesh. It was real: so real!

  “Couldn’t I just stay here? I mean, since in eternity, she’s already been saved by the best version of me.” She asked it only half joking, and Cassandra smiled at her jest while, irritated, the magician said, “There are universes where you’ve done that, and it absolutely—pardonnez-moi—fucks me. That means I have to spend another two thousand Earth years tooling around, waiting for the next ‘you’ who will hopefully be less of a lazy deadbeat. And a reset isn’t a party for you, either.”

  “I wish you could stay.” Cassandra squeezed her hand. “But you are the best version of you.”

  “That’s a horrible thing to say!” The General laughed, and her wife smiled.

  “You’re so much better than you know. Stronger. And someday, you’ll be happy, too. But you have to keep fighting. Keep fighting for me. Keep fighting for Lavinia. I know you can save her. You can save us. Somebody has to do it, after all, since we’re here.”

  With a glance for Benedict, Dominia brushed the hair from her wife’s face. “I guess you were never really mine. Not my version of you…not the one meant for me, if I’m the Dominia to survive this.”

  “But how I love you, even so.” As Cassandra turned her closed eyes against the General’s palm and those soft lips brushed its heel, Dominia strove to maintain her composure. “Even if I’m only the Cassandra you save—only the Cassandra who sets you up for the Cassandra who gets to be yours—everything you did for me…everything we endured and enjoyed together…I’ll treasure it forever.”

  Tearfully, but not painedly, the nodding General bent her head to kiss, one last time, the wife she’d loved and wronged so much that the thought of it had been enough to drive her around the world. To destroy that world. To remake that world. With tears of her own, a hand that patted Dominia’s lips, and a mouth that strove to say anything but came up mute before relenting into that familiar smile of resignation, Cassandra took Benedict’s hand. After one last look over her shoulder for that particular General, she disappeared into the crowd as if she had never been there at all. But she had. Oh, she had.

  “Was it everything you’d hoped it would be?” asked the magician while Dominia covered her watering eye.

  “I hoped I’d get to keep her when I finally saw her again. That I wouldn’t have to watch her go, ever.”

  “Someday, you won’t anymore.” His hand landed upon her shoulder, and she turned to look at him as he swore, “I promise you.”

  “Why are you so intent on helping me, Valentinian? Why have you come here, if you’re a wanderer through the universes? The bodiless man isn’t obligated to be anywhere. You’re liberated. You told me before that you were born into this world as the son of the man now called Lazarus, and his wife, Trisha—that your family, along with Cicero and Elijah, discovered the protein together, but that they stole the credit and power in that first universe. Usually people want to get back at somebody like that because of money, or a sense of obligation of setting things right, but yo
u’re the most slothfully amoral saint I’ve ever met.” While he laughed, she emphasized, “I just don’t understand why you’re helping me. You even have your body, and you’re still helping me.”

  “I’m especially helping you because I have my body! Christ, you’re so used to constant betrayal that you just don’t even understand what loyalty is anymore…poor dude. We’ll get you fixed up when this is all over.” As he began to navigate through the crowd and back to the hotel, she followed only because she had no choice. “If it would satisfy you to know I have other motives than helping you, then rest assured. You’re right when you call me a universal wanderer. I go everywhere, and, unbounded by time as I am in this condition, I see my many future conditions in other universes—see those other universes, and what lies above and below them. When you’re like me, you realize how big the big picture is: and the irony is that it’s bigger than you could ever possibly realize.”

  “What was that about ‘future conditions’ in ‘other universes’? You mean, outside of this cycle of the universe where I live?”

  “I’m telling you, buddy…this thing is huge. And what I mean about ‘future conditions,’ well, that’s a little complex. To be honest, I stopped worrying about it, though future conditions of myself, as I nudge into the businesses of other universes, might.”

  “Are you talking about reincarnation?”

  “Getting hung up about your own identity is a key mistake most people make, especially when they start talking about the concept of reincarnation. Mostly because they forget that they made a choice to be a part of all this while in eternity. Of course, that’s by design. Ultimately, we’re all just the Void, imitating people. All thoughtforms, yet all truth. In the service of that truth, I am seriously committed to helping you solve the problem of this world. And, of course, when I do solve the problem of this world, it liberates me from being a part of this particular cycle of existence, thereby freeing me up to be part of a new cycle of existence. A new rung of the ladder.”

  “So reincarnation isn’t being a bunch of sea monkeys before being a smart dog and then finally turning into a man?”

  “No, no, that’s reincarnation, you’re right. I’m talking about transmigration. Different dimensional axis of soul movement, y instead of x.”

  Lamb, this shit made her head spin. As the saint stopped in an alcove to light his cigarette, the General said, “So long as I’m not responsible for sticking you as a dog.”

  “Told you, that’s your old man. You understand why, now, too.”

  “No kidding! Having two of the same person in one reality can’t be healthy.”

  He nodded. “Reality itself knows what he’s done, and doesn’t like it. Every time he shows up, it’s around the same time in 1974 CE—the year Cicero was born, years before the creation of the protein. I think I’ve told you this before—he tries to kill my parents before I’m born, standard timeline interference mistake. Instead, he finds the Lady and her cult, established from the dawn of time in preparation for his coming. This was not anticipated by the first Cicero, because nothing like this existed in the original function of reality. But the next version of him is always more prepared than the last—the output of one iteration forms the input of the next—and his presence inherently disrupts Lazarus’s whole ability to form a relationship with my mother. She gets put on a different path, instead of continuing in academia and getting into proper genetic research or dying by the Hierophant’s hand. From the first iteration and throughout each thereafter, my mother gets made into the Lady instead of being my mother. Therefore, I’m never born, and my linear-ish stream of consciousness continues working on the system from outside, intervening in small ways such as through dogs and other animals.”

  With a slightly wrinkled nose to recall the flirtatious behavior of Valentinian toward the (admittedly attractive) redheaded Lady who worked at the hotel’s front desk before Miki, Dominia asked, “Why didn’t he just turn around and kill Lazarus when he showed up to martyr the brothers?”

  “Several reasons. The most important reason, of course, is that, without Lazarus, the martyr race has absolutely zero hope of ever achieving complete universal dominance, and your old man does not dream small. Lazarus and his assistants, the brothers, discover both the sacred and malformed proteins with or without the help of Trisha; but because of the eternal nature of the sacred protein, as soon as he experimentally infects himself, he remembers everything that’s ever happened with all of this before and knows to destroy the sacred protein sample before going into hiding. The same night he did this in the first universe, Cicero was creeping around the lab, and stole the only protein which was present: the malformed one. In every iteration thereafter, he never gets that far…the Hierophant gets to him, first. They don’t even have to worry about the samples anymore, and Lazarus doesn’t worry about destroying them. He just books it into the Ergosphere. Poor old man! In these iterations, he only lives to discover the sacred protein because the Red Market was formally organized for the sole purpose of defending his totally oblivious life. Imagine…stalked by a secret conspiracy of gorgeous women without knowing!”

  Dominia sighed. “What a waste.”

  “Yeah, he was a real dork before he was infected with the protein…now he’s still a dork, he’s just too angry all the time to seem like one.” Chuckling, the magician nodded to a passing individual and stepped from the alcove to resume their stroll. “Anyway, ignorance has its fringe benefits…he also spends his whole human life being stalked by your Father, who, for a solid thirty-ish years, kept tabs on Lazarus—from 1974 until the discovery of the protein—waiting for the RM to slip up. Lucky for us, those women might be more insane than even His Holiness.”

  “You’re not kidding,” muttered the General, glancing down, and thinking of the Lady who sent her to her doom. “I don’t have to lose my leg in all this, do I?”

  “If you did, it would eventually be restored.”

  “I don’t have to lose my leg,” she repeated with expectant emphasis, “do I?”

  “If you do as I say,” said the magician, with seriousness enough to raise alarm. “If you follow the plan.”

  “The plan I don’t know about?”

  “The plan that you will know about, as long as you follow the plan.”

  Amazing. Not a trace of humorous self-awareness in him. At least, not for this.

  In the lobby of the hotel (too soon to leave, it seemed to the General, the powder fragrance of her wife still clinging to her clothes), the magician said, “I’ve got something for you, but you’re going to want to find a place for it as soon as you’re back home.”

  “Does she have to go now?” Miki called from behind the desk. Dominia’s throat tightened while Valentinian heaved a sigh.

  “Yeah, didn’t think about that…you ladies should say goodbye.”

  Dominia, stricken, looked at her friend to see her sorrow shared. “I’m not going to see her?” asked Miki.

  “Oh, you’ll see her in no time from your perspective, Miki. This is eternity we’re talking about. But from her perspective, she won’t see you but in passing, and maybe sometimes in dreams. Not for a long time.”

  “Man.” Miki put aside the phone and rounded the counter. “You’re eating up my whole day with this phone thing…oh, Dominia! Dude”—she squeezed the General around the waist with such an iron grip that the martyr grimaced—“I miss you so much! I can’t wait until you’re here to stay for good. But you have to get your shit right before you can, okay?”

  “I’m working on it.” She laughed and inhaled once, deeply, calming herself and catching that lavender aura that followed her friend—that very same that followed a great many Red Market women all about the world. “I’ll miss you, Miki. But I’m so glad you’re happy.”

  “Thanks, man, me too! I don’t know what I’ll start doing with myself once I adjust to being here, or where I’ll go—where any of us will go—after this place, but I’m looking forward to making my
time worthwhile.”

  “I’ll try to do the same with mine on Earth.” The General patted Miki one last time before extricating herself from the girl’s grip. “Be good, now.”

  “Maybe,” said Miki, waggling her hips as she made her way back to her post. Through years of in-the-moment acting practice, the human did a good job hiding her misty eyes from all concerned. Valentinian, guiding Dominia back to that center sitting area, patted her hand.

  “General, General…you’re the bravest person I know. Just hold on a little longer: keep pushing forward. When this is all over, however it’s turned out—the situation has to be better than the one we’re in now, right?”

  “I can’t afford to stumble into a worse one,” she said with a laugh, feeling freer than she had in at least a year and a half. As the magician lifted his lighter and she retrieved her now slightly crooked cigarette to lean into the sizzling blue arc, she asked, “But what about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Will I see you again before this is all over?”

  “Before this is all over…yeah. Once before this is over—and once, at the exact moment it is finally over, because I will have one more thing to ask of you. Which reminds me: I need to borrow something, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  Without stopping to clarify her consent or tell her what he borrowed, the magician reached behind her ear as though to make a coin appear. Instead, he produced a small iridescent coil that, thinner than a hair, curled upon itself into a tiny sphere. This vanished between his fingers as he said, “I’ve got a project going on in the background here. Science fair stuff compared to my more theoretical business. Still necessary, though!”

  “Going to tell me what it is?”

  “Later. If I tell you now, your knee-jerk reaction will be ‘no.’” While she rolled her eye and puffed away at the joint, the magician took her hand. “But before you go back, I just want to thank you for all you’ve done. For all you keep doing. I know it’s not easy…but we’re almost there. Just keep fighting.”