by M F Sullivan
What Yoriko didn’t know was that Miki’s actions were a compromise. Oh, yes, Miki did whatever she wanted to do; but she did whatever she wanted to do with respect to the wishes of the Lady. She worked hard—very hard—and, after receiving basic training as a lowly assistant priestess, became recognized as one of most valued (and valuable) members of the Red Market Kyoto branch when she was—well, an age older than twenty-six. Do we have to use numbers? Such constraining things…genetic engineering and martyrs in general meant that age only got relevant when it was advanced, anyway.
As her demand increased, another Market privilege revealed itself: travel. Meanwhile, her bank account grew as men literally paid her to take vacations outside of her claustrophobic island. Yoriko, of course, didn’t approve, and was nervous her daughter would get swooped up and devoured by a martyr as soon as she set foot on foreign soil. But Miki knew she had nothing to worry about—the Lady was a martyr! How could a martyr be allowed to hurt her? Her fate was sealed. She knew she would be okay. Too bad Yoriko hadn’t traveled some, herself! It might have done her good. But, no. The old crow believed she’d heard enough about the world from her clientele. She didn’t even want to visit Europa! And she idolized that place, damn seiyō kabure that she was. No skin-care product could cure that Western rash of hers, but travel might have.
To the isolated nation of oppressive China; to the techno paradise of India; to the perfect restaurants of Unified Korea and; and, of course, to the glorious historical sites of the Middle States—Miki went everywhere, did everything, and met everyone she could. She always sent her mother a postcard, and would always later see that postcard hanging up in the kitchen. Things were fun and it was good to have her mother’s tacit support, but then Yoriko began to express concern about her daughter’s well-being again, and Miki sensed this was out of Yoriko’s own fear of age. After a bit of soul-searching, Miki made the decision to reduce those trips, and intended to settle back down in Japan. Not to quit working, mind—just to stay in one place.
But, then, she got an invitation to a seminar. That was a pretty big deal. As a Red Market priestess (or priest, for there were plenty) moved through the tiers by donating time for various organizational efforts, more information would gradually be revealed about the nature of the religion. Like any good cult, of course. Miki, much like her former roommate, didn’t really get into the religious aspect. She had her own personal connection to the Lady and was happy to help unburden the men who came to see her for spiritual reasons, but she couldn’t help but look at structured religion with a skeptical eye. Who was anybody to tell her about the Lady, and who was she to tell anybody, in turn?
Still…the Asian Retreat, as that seminar was called, was in Hokkaido. How could anybody say no to that crab? (Or that glint of intuition that pushed her for it, but more importantly—the crab!) So, promising to bring her mother something tasty, Miki packed a bag for a week and took the Red Market’s offered economy LRT pass to the meeting.
And, oh, boy, was it as predicted. The touchy-feely-let’s-get-to-know-each-other New Age shit started the second her toe breached the threshold of the private grounds, and it didn’t stop until she was ready to burn the place down. Playing games like “What color is your name” and “Attracting your spirit animal” were, to Miki, pointless corporate icebreakers rather than spiritual exercises. She was miserable. They even had classrooms, with syllabi for the various “classes” she was forced to attend. The best was the yoga thing, and even that was pretty tedious when they tried to work spirituality into it.
But the worst by far was the one on the fifth day, where all the people in her group sat around in a circle, closed their eyes, and were told to visualize the Lady.
Miki almost laughed. Almost. Somewhere, the Lady laughed for her.
When it came time for the women to go around the circle and share their own inner visions of the Lady, she couldn’t handle it anymore. Slumped in her seat, hand cradling her forehead, Miki listened to woman after woman drone on about imaginary versions of the Lady that made her want to puke. Inevitably, She was described as having no clothes, or blonde hair, or no hair, or She was Asian, or She had cat ears (that was one Miki actually did laugh at, which earned her a few unpleasant glances), or had pixie wings, or She was made out of flowers, or, or, or…urgh! Finally, it was as another ditz described the entity as a Barbie doll with a cotton-candy-pink aura or something equally ridiculous that the opinionated woman could no longer contain herself, and into her shielding hand, muttered, “Martyr desu.”
The instructor may not have heard her, but the woman beside her did—and, oh, boy, did the look on her face change. Miki couldn’t have been assed to learn a name at that retreat if they paid her to do it, which was why it was extra infuriating when this person who she didn’t even know tapped her brusquely on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” the stranger said, eliciting a groan from Miki along with the attention of the instructor. “What was that?”
What was that? “That” was it! Her whole—something-something-year career was about to be blown up because she was surrounded by idiots. A lifelong secret about her vision of the Lady, spilled now because of her own lack of self-control. Maybe her mother was right about her mouth.
“Nothing,” Miki lied. The girl’s tone grew all the hotter.
“You did! I heard you—you said the Lady is a martyr!”
Gasps! Theatrical, melodramatic gasps! Miki tried not to roll her eyes and wondered if they were going to start hissing her out of the room. Above the clamor, the instructor snapped to full attention and took a step that rattled her many beaded necklaces.
“Is it true?” demanded the instructor of Miki, staring her dead in the eyes like Yoriko finding drugs in a sock drawer. With a blasé glance for the women around, Miki crossed her arms and shrugged.
“Yeah, it’s true. I did say that.”
“How dare you,” began to puff the tattletale. Thankfully, the instructor stopped her with a well-manicured hand.
“I think you should go to the Welcome Center, please.” As another, softer set of gasps from the girls who liked Miki filled half the room, the instructor slid her digital glasses from her nose, regarded the younger woman, then nodded. “Yes. I think that’s for the best. The Welcome Center’s check-in quadrant, please.”
She slipped the glasses back on and blinked their screens into operation—no doubt to give admin a heads-up that Miki was being ejected for having an opinion. The younger woman sighed, shrugged, and slid out of her chair. “I wasn’t any good in school, either. Later!”
Outside the bungalow classroom, one of seventeen scattered across the grassy “campus,” Miki’s bold steps slowed to a pensive pace. This was why she chose that name—“Soto”! Even once she was herself, pretty, and popular, she was still an outsider. Her thoughts: they were what made her an outsider. Her thoughts, and her damn connection to the Lady. What was She? That vision…a kami, or an oni? Had the spirit guided her through all this, led her to this point, just to see her ejected from her career and sent with no professional training into the humdrum world of—ugh—the Japanese salaryman? No fucking thanks! Somebody just shoot her.
The Orwellian Welcome Center was divided into four quadrants, each with its own color flooring. She needed proceed no farther than the one in which she was deposited on her entry. The cheerful evergreen carpet made her feel like a kid waiting for the principal, and her foot’s wiggling was so incessant that it had clearly begun to bother the secretary by the time the ominous office door opened. Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise that the looming figure behind the frosted glass was revealed to be one of the most jaw-droppingly beautiful women Miki had ever seen: her head heavy with light-colored and elaborately beaded dreads, the mixed-race Amazon spared no time scanning the waiting area before locking eyes with the hapless Japanese priestess.
“Please come inside, Soto-san,” implored the woman in fluent Japanese. “Shut the door after you.”
Yes, that was
it. So sad! She never thought this day would come. Miki had been fired from a restaurant job her mother made her work after catching her with “the dope” (dastardly cannabis! What a drug fiend, Miki) and had hoped she’d never have to repeat the experience, because the truth was it sucked. There were a billion ways to play it off and laugh about it, but at the time of her firing, she felt as small as she did while across the teak desk of a woman who introduced herself as Gethsemane. Or the desk at which she sat, anyway. The name of the person who belonged there was written in kanji on a plaque, and was nothing close to “Gethsemane.”
“I’d like to talk a little about what you said today,” began the fragrant manager, whose specific position remained unidentified for now.
“Please.” Miki sighed so deeply her body sagged forward in her seat. “If I’m going to be fired, or disciplined, or whatever—”
“That’s not what this is about, Soto-san.” At the smaller woman’s visible surprise, Gethsemane lowered her voice. Her professional tone now carried a reassuring, almost sisterly edge. “I’d just like to ask you about your thoughts. How you came to this conclusion.”
Panic started to rise upon Miki. They’d think she was crazy. If nothing else, this was not a subject to be discussed lightly. Of those few times (before her journey with the General) where Miki experienced true fear, none were as palpable as that moment of being pressured into giving up the secret of the kami who had saved her. Was this what the Lady wanted? It wasn’t a mistake she could make. She leaned back in her seat. “I don’t know if I should really…talk about this.”
“I understand.” From the black cup beside the holo-screen computer, Gethsemane removed a pair of pens. Then, tearing apart a sheet of paper, she said, “Do you believe the Lady to be a specific martyr, or just ‘a martyr’?”
“I—” At the woman’s glance, Miki felt compelled to admit, “Specific.”
“I’d like you to write the name of the individual on this sheet of paper.” Sliding the scrap across the desk to Miki along with a pen, Gethsemane said, “I will also write the name of the martyr with whom I identify the Lady. Then, we can trade. Okay?”
The smaller woman’s heart fluttered. “You think—”
But Gethsemane already wrote. With a trembling hand, Miki scribbled in English the words “Dominia di Mephitoli,” then folded the scrap and exchanged it for Gethsemane’s. As she opened it to read the katakana characters for “The Bitch of Europa,” Miki’s eyes filled with tears.
“What…” She looked up at Gethsemane, who glanced at Miki’s paper before putting it through the shredder in the corner of the office. “Is this—is this real?”
“You write in English, Miss Soto,” said Gethsemane in the language.
“Yes, my mother—but—”
“That’s good. I prefer it.” From the hands of the baffled Japanese woman, the foreigner lifted the scrap of confirmation and destroyed it, too, before returning to her seat. “I would like you to tell me how you came to know this information, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Forget me!” Thrilled, now—validated in a way she hadn’t been since her mother first realized her gender identity—Miki leaned forward and begged, “How do you know? Do other people know? Does your secretary out there know?”
“No. Twenty-five women within the Red Market organization understand the true nature of the Lady, and all of them are scattered across the seminars this month; none but my eight sisters and I know who exactly She is. Therefore, I would greatly appreciate it if you would tell me how you came upon this information.”
Gladly. Miki spilled her guts right there in the office, confident that this was meant to be. Her heart sang with the release of a long-held beatific vision, and Gethsemane just listened. Listened patiently to every word of Miki’s rambling tale, from her life’s start in the wrong body and the suicide attempt that had revealed the truth, to the recognition of the Lady’s face in the holo-corner, to the bursts of intuition that she sometimes received and that had ultimately led her right to that very office. As her long story wrapped up, she pressed the woman, “So, do you think it’s real? What do you think all this means?”
“I think it means,” said Gethsemane, “that you’re the next avatar of the Lady.”
What? She seemed to have lost her English comprehension for a few seconds there. But then Gethsemane said it again, and flipped open a hitherto unnoticed file with a petulant sniff. “Oh—wow, you’re not in management? Then you don’t understand.”
Briefly, Gethsemane explained the true belief of the Red Market, which was hidden from all but the highest priestesses: that the Lady was not some metaphor or some dream consigned to a distant sphere but an entity responsible for maintaining the physical integrity of Earth—and that Her presence upon the planet, though required, was also unstable. For this reason, the Lady needed a body to inhabit.
For this reason, Miki was stilled.
“You want to take my body?”
“The Lady will, yes.”
That was a startling notion. “Like, possession?”
“Like the divine descending upon you, emerging from within you. Your entire mind and body will be given up to the Lady. You can refuse, but—”
“No, I’m not—” Miki frowned in search of the words. Had she ever considered the point to her life? She’d just been living minute to minute for most of it, helping herself, and sometimes other people. She loved other people. For a long time now, she’d felt her only real point for existing was communicating with other people and obeying the whims of the Lady. If the whim of the Lady was that she should relinquish her body to this goddess, well…especially after getting a confirmation like this, she couldn’t reject the request outright.
“Does it matter that I haven’t always…you know.” She nodded down at herself. Gethsemane shook her head.
“No. The second historical avatar of the Lady, during a time when goddess worship was at its height, was a cisgender man—albeit a pretty one. Physical sex does not matter. Her avatar always represents the compensatory principle in a given period of society. As the dominant aspect of society is, and has been for the past two thousand years, religion, our current avatar was a woman of science.”
“And what will I represent, then?”
“If I had to guess, Miss Soto, I would suppose you represent transition in a world that struggles to maintain its dissipating status quo. And biological transition will be the reward for your valiant sacrifice. While your mortal body continues on in the world beyond even the point of a martyr’s resilience, your soul will be rewarded with its true form. Given the miracles that tend to occur during the transference of the Lady between Her avatars, I would expect your body to be altered on a biological level in reflection of your self-image.”
“So, my surgery, and all my…”
“Your body would become naturally feminine, yes.”
If a sense of spiritual duty hadn’t been enough of a stick, the carrot of two X chromosomes made her ask, “What do I have to do?”
Smiling for perhaps the first time since they’d met, Gethsemane slid another file, this one red, across the desk to Miki. She flipped its cover open to reveal several pages of information about a young Afghan man whose first name was Kahlil. “This young man, a regular customer of many Red Market women working Kabul, is in over his head with the Hunters. Of all members of that organization whose pride survives by our silences—and there are many—we believe that Kahlil is the perfect intersection of our needs. He is a man with important knowledge about the Hunters—perhaps too much, given his proclivities, and his tender heart.”
Miki’s whole expression sparkled with unbridled delight. “You want me to run, like, a honeypot operation on him? Like a spy movie? Oh, shit! Dude! This is crazy!”
“Please take this seriously, Miss Soto. This conversation has revealed you as the single most valuable member of the Red Market, which makes you the second most important woman worldwide. Third, I suppose; but the Lady�
�s highest manifestation, within her avatar, goes without saying.”
“Why is the Lady in two places at once? As the avatar, and as Dominia di Mephitoli?”
“Many mythologies throughout history chronicle the plight of the demiurge created by Sophia, or the horned man trapped by the great goddess…Demeter, bearing Typhon. The Governess of the United Front does not, cannot, understand that she has done the same with the Hierophant.”
Dazzling Amaterasu’s sunlight, bursting from her cave. “But the goddess—she’s been trapped, too.”
“Yes. She sacrificed Herself to Her own trap that we could all be saved from the same, even the Hierophant.”
Prior excitement began to fizzle. Miki wrinkled her nose. “That sounds like Christian Abrahamianism. But, like, with a feminist gloss.”
Gethsemane chuckled wryly as she rose, taking Miki’s personnel file and leaving Kahlil’s blackmail one. “That’s the greatest secret of all, Miss Soto. Something only I and my sisters know…we are all describing the same thing. Abrahamians, martyrs, Red Market, none of the above. We are describing the Word, Logos, who also arrives on Earth to lead the Lady to victory. You know—” She had looked about to leave, but paused a foot from the door, beside Miki in that cramped space.
“When I was younger, I believed Western thought and Abrahamian faiths were incompatible with belief in the Lady. But a spirit descended upon me when I was seventeen; a spirit I was not. This spirit brought me knowledge of which I had none, and this same spirit brought me to my sisters. I am no longer the self that I was. I was shown the truth—that there is a man who stands with the Lady, as the Lady, as mentor to the Lady, and as the son and servant of the Lady. The spirit ordered me to sleep and in my dreams showed me many things, including a great book: the words “the Queen of Peace” were written there. A title for Mary, but the voice of the spirit with me said, “This is also a title of Christ when He is upon the Earth.”” Gethsemane studied Miki’s face carefully.