by M F Sullivan
“You look tired.”
“Only four more nights.” The words felt miserable aloud. “Pretty easy for you, showing up where and when you please. Otherwise, you’re safe at home.”
“It’s as though you never should have left.”
While she tried not to snort, she focused on the spot where awaited the new-sprung, green-felted pool table. Arguing with him was pointless. He was too adept, and too annoying. Better to keep focused on topics in line with his one use: as an echo chamber for frustrations she otherwise locked within herself. If nothing else, her Father gave half answers, as opposed to the nonanswers of Valentinian and Lazarus.
“This place is so creepy. Why is it so dark? Where’s the moon?”
“It is all around us, in a way. All things are, in this place.” The Hierophant’s gaze fixed upon his fireplace. He crossed to stoke it with the poker above its mantle. “Yet, all things are not.”
For some reason, the thought of the absent moon evoked Miki’s thousand-named goddess. Ishtar, Amaterasu, who knew what else. Those words were taboo, along with all Her other names, among self-respecting martyrs. “Couldn’t there be a moon in this sky, if somebody thought of it? At least, over your study?”
“Anything might be made here. You might recreate every star in the sky.” His tone was too approving for her comfort.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? What would those thoughtforms do?”
“Only light up the night, and make it a more palatable time to travel. You might arrive at Cairo faster; perhaps your friends would thank you.”
“Don’t treat me like I’m stupid.” As he batted innocent eyes, she turned toward the thing wearing Cassandra’s face. Tonight it sat using her wife’s hands to numbly manipulate a book through which it gazed as though pretending to read. Fear to foment it turned Dominia away, back to the nauseating dark. “I’m not sure of the harm, but I’m sure there would be some. I know they wouldn’t be happy with me.”
“Perhaps. But if they are unhappy, the root of their unhappiness will lie in displeasure at knowing you’ve nurtured your powers. You, Dominia, have a grand capacity for so-called magic. It is a capacity of which you have been kept ignorant. I admit I’ve had a hand in this, but with the secret out, I feel responsible for helping hone your abilities. These forces can cause harm when allowed to go untempered. Powerful as you are, the world might be at stake.”
While rubbing her forehead, she laughed without joy. “Funny you should say that. I’ve been tasked, according to them, with ending the war, and seeing the martyr race off to Acetia.”
“They said that?” asked her Father in near-incredulous tone, the corner of his mouth giving a twitch.
“Sort of. Why?”
“I’m only surprised. They’re not often so forthright.” Without batting an eye at his daughter’s questioning, the Hierophant replaced the poker and began to use his pool table as if hoping she would join. She would not. “What a terrific burden to lay upon your tired mind! Have they no idea what I’ve put you through over the past few weeks?”
“Nice that you’re honest seventy percent of the time.”
He racked up the colored balls in a series of clacks that flashed her to times in barracks and bars, earning the respect of her soldiers and impressing far more than a handful of beautiful women. Cassandra, of course, had been the last—oh, teaching her to play it properly! The deerlike bend of her body! The smell of her neck—
Dominia gripped the chair to refocus her thoughts from dangerous sorrow. What had they been speaking of? Yes—her obligations to humanity and martyrdom. “It’s pretty exhausting.”
“Then I’m glad I need not point out that your companions intend to bring the apocalypse for our people. They would jettison us into space without so much as a return address!” After whisking away the triangular frame, he circled the rectangular table, brows lifted high in significance. She was not sure when the cue stick had gotten into his hand, and she had watched him the whole time. “I, my girl, strive only to prevent the horrors of entropy.”
At the crack of his cue, the balls thundered apart, and both a stripe and a solid wheeled into opposites corners. As the rest arranged themselves, the Hierophant adjusted his tie, loosed the buttons of his jacket, then resumed his prowl around the table.
“You think I am bad. Think of them! My efforts at culling human populations are for their own good, the good of the planet—most of all, for the good of our religion. For God, my girl!” Crack! A solid whirled into a side pocket. “Fair Earth cannot sustain the human race when it balloons to such extents as the past would have encouraged. At one point, it was necessary to spread one’s genes through as many heirs as possible; now we must think of the Earth, for the humans do not. Why else would the Lord have put us on her face, were we not to control her population? Martyrs manage the human population, and I manage the martyr population.”
“And who manages you, again?”
“The divine wisdom of the Lord. You should know that by now.” Crack!
He was a fine one to talk of his God-given responsibility toward the environment. Much of the technology responsible for wrecking the planet had been pushed into development by him, even before his public appearance alongside Cicero and Elijah in 2045 CE, otherwise known as AL 1. He alternately reveled in destroying and rebuilding—perhaps because when something was rebuilt by him, he did so in his own image. That was what he did with people, after all. Still, she did not want to waste time arguing tangents. Another ball cracked off into a pocket’s void. In the corner of her good eye, the doppelgänger sat in her Father’s chair, rapt as they spoke. “I don’t know.” She glanced from the ugly sight. “They have a point. I think the humans were better off managing themselves.”
“This guilt over your own existence is unhealthy. Martyrs are necessary. You are necessary. But what is not necessary is the end of the world. Not at this point in time.”
Annoyed he mixed a valid point about her emotional state into an unrelated one about the conflict at hand, she nonetheless decided to play the Hierophant’s advocate enough to extricate his opinion. “I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind about any of this. They’ve hardly told me anything, aside from my responsibility. I mean, what happens if we stay on Earth? We’ll colonize space eventually no matter what. Humans continue to perfect and spread the terraformed state of Mars, and with technology you paid to develop.”
“But your friends would see every martyr wiped from Earth’s surface. It is not a matter of colonizing other worlds; it is a matter of exiling an entire species before it is ready.”
“Why not bring them here?”
“I admit: one reason I have encouraged population growth for the past several years is the vain hope we will find another mutation like Lazarus.”
“A Lazarus you can control.” At his mild smile, she pressed, “You teach his blood is the damnation of martyrs.”
“It always is. I have never met a martyr who does not taste of his blood and wish to overthrow me straightaway. This is the real story of Regulus. But perhaps, if the Family had a child with blood as extraordinary as that of Lazarus who remained loyal to the cause, I might guide the initiation of my more educated children. This is fruitless, but one never does know.”
“So you really have lived through all this before? Lived through this war, then gone on to colonize Acetia just to come back and start it again?”
“Yes.”
“How many times?”
“Once.” Crack!
He scratched. The white ball bounced around, twirled into the corner pocket, and took nothing with it. Dominia smirked as her Father offered the stick. “Care for a turn?”
With a glance for the too-close doppelgänger, the General made her way to the table. The Hierophant’s smile as she accepted hovered between mocking and paternal even more than usual, and she strove to ignore it as she turned her attention to the game. Eight balls left—no, six. Every time she looked, the number changed: t
he order, the colors. She tried to focus her wandering eye and force her muscle memory to work.
As she arranged herself, her Father said, “Your abilities are far vaster in scope and possibility than merely bringing about the end of the martyr world. I told you I could give you anything you liked, but the fact is I would only be showing you how to get it, yourself.”
“I know how to get what I want on my own.” She pocketed two balls at once, in side and corner pockets. As she worked her way around, she refused to look at him, lest the order change again. “I don’t need your help.”
“You do if you’re to keep yourself from being corrupted. From devouring lies. They hide so much from you! Why, they have even forbidden you to take advantage of your own, holy body! They have encouraged you to think it would be some crime against your wife to make love to her shadow—”
“Corner pocket,” she interrupted, waving the cue to indicate the four ball and her target.
“—when in fact it would honor her. Bring fair Cassandra closer to reunion with you.”
The announced ball propelled home with a gunshot’s crack. “It wouldn’t be the real Cassandra.”
“What defines the real Cassandra? What is real here? You said yourself, you might well create the stars. Your body, too, is a thoughtform, as is mine. Here, you are as real as Cassandra.”
“I’m always as real as Cassandra.” She didn’t bother calling the next and pocketed it while saying, “That thing’s not Cassandra.”
“By that logic, Valentinian has little to do with his canine counterpart.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“My dear girl”—he put heavy emphasis on his next words—“everything here is a thoughtform. What has a dog to do with a man? Nothing. But a dog might be imagined to have the spirit of a man, and be reflected as a man.”
Now, it was her turn to scratch, though rather more dramatically than had her Father. Her cue ball, propelled by too much force, leapt from the table to bounce across that nice chessboard floor. While the General grimaced, the false-Cassandra-thing hurried after it with a laugh and the disgusting chide “Dominia!” from a hostage voice.
She shoved the cue stick to her Father. “What are you babbling about?”
“Only what I have tried to tell you for some nights.” The doppelgänger returned the ball, smiling dumbly as it did, and her Father set it on the table. “You are being deceived, lest you should realize the truth and see what fool you’ve been for listening to their lies. They will not even tell you the truth about your eye, will not let you lift your patch!” She had forgotten about her missing eye in this place where she barely felt the body parts she had. Her left hand tightened. The eye had not mattered as she played pool, but, now reminded of it, the weight of the elastic band dominated her consciousness. Her depth perception, as though remembering it was supposed to falter, did. As with all strange things here, she fought to ignore it.
“So, then: What’s the truth?”
“Valentinian is as much, or more, a thoughtform as your dear Cassandra here—and equally created by you.”
Crack!
The General did not see if the ball had sunk; she did not care. A strangeness overcame her. She insisted, “That’s stupid, of course he’s not,” even as his words evoked the first night Valentinian had collected her from the Hierophant. When he’d asked her, on touching her, if she had touched the doppelgänger. As she recalled all those times in which he’d laid on her a comforting hand or she’d gripped his arm for support, her Father continued speaking, continued shooting on a table whose number of balls returned to eight when the cue was passed between players.
“It makes less sense that a man should be turned into a dog. I told you Valentinian was trapped here for the sake of a wish gone awry, did I not?”
“Yes. I’ve also heard Valentinian is trapped here because you tricked him.”
The Hierophant turned so she might see his dubious expression. “You mean to say I turned a man into a dog? My girl”—he laughed, and her face burned as, with relish, he resumed shooting—“we have talked from time to time of magic, but let’s not be absurd. The amount of energy required alone would be cataclysmic. Nuclear. It is as vain a hope as the hope your Cassandra could rise from the dead. Yet how easily one talented in magic might accidentally imagine a dog as a man, lest they be alone with a mad old mystic!”
“Lazarus is supposed to be his father, though, or something. Originally. Right? Didn’t they work with Cicero and Elijah the first time you came to them?”
“Mere fantasy. I have never seen Saint Valentinian in the waking world, not in all my many nights. Not in this world, or any other. When an imaginary being cannot reveal it is imaginary, it must concoct an elaborate backstory to earn its host’s support.”
“If he’s imaginary, and from my imagination, then why have you put him into paintings all these years?”
With a pitiful look, the Hierophant leaned his hip against the table. “He has done such a number on your mind you cannot see you have it backward. Saint Valentinian is a symbol of death to the martyr. He is a fictional saint, a false star crafted to fill a hole in our culture’s spiritual constellation. This place is a place of death, and your soul knows it. Therefore, though you may not be physically dead, to be here is to accept a visionary experience that shares many of death’s qualities. It is only logical a thoughtform in the shape of Death should greet and guide you.”
“No, that’s wrong. He’s taking me to Cairo—they both are. Lazarus wouldn’t support his story—”
“Unless Lazarus, who remembers more than even I, feels Valentinian serves his ends. What could a thoughtform of death want more than a mass sacrifice in war’s bloody climax? What could he crave more than the deaths of seven million helpless martyrs—for, my child, it seems we are many, but that is the true number of our populace, I remind you. A speck beside the bacteria colony of mankind! And what of those many servants”—de facto slaves who signed away human rights for cushy paychecks as the result of a lifetime of social brainwashing—“who depend on us for food, shelter, their entire social infrastructure? For these make up the majority of martyr-controlled towns and cities. Their livelihoods would dry up, and many would not be accepted back into human society after working with us for so long. What are they to do—follow us to the stars? Helpless women and men and children sent to uncertain fate in the vicissitudes of space? The premature birth of an entire species? Indeed, perhaps then he would have the energy to craft his physical body.”
“We could go to Mars.” Her eye glassed with tears of doubt while the Hierophant waved his hand in dismissal.
“Then when they have finished ruining the first marbled planet of which we were once custodians, they shall come to defile the new one, and chase us from that. You do not understand what humans are like, Dominia, because you have never seen them have free rein. They are violent. They are savage. They are apes, unevolved and unconscious animals hooting and shitting in the Garden of Eden.” His use of profanity always shocked her into attention. “We must not just be gardeners but zookeepers. Of course they resent us. They call us depraved and evil and insist we are better off floating among the stars because they have been ‘left behind’ with us and their sin in a Rapture not even described in the human Bible—a Protestant invention, a device with which to question our claim to the throne of the Lord. But we are the children of God, and they are larvae beside the glory of our imago. To think you have allowed yourself lured off the righteous path by some imaginary fiend.” Disgusted, her Father resumed his game. “I tried to save you from all this, you know.”
Despite knowing better, she mentally succumbed to his talent for shaming ungrateful children. Despite knowing better, she tried to explain to herself why Valentinian couldn’t be a thoughtform. “But he could have turned himself into a dog, if he’s…” She couldn’t bring herself to say the words, “a magician,” because the sentence still sounded absurd. She looked, embarrassed, at the
table. The eight ball sat alone.
What if she was wrong? What if, all this time, she had been quite literally letting her imagination run away with her, and because of that, she now found herself on the opposite side of—what? Rightness? Decency? Divinity? What was God in a place like this, in a world like this?
“Whose wish was it that trapped him here?”
“Yours.” The Hierophant took aim, savored the moment, then mis-struck and sent the white ball askew when a knock reverberated the heavy door. Dominia lacked the schadenfreude she reserved for such things. The usual semi-relief of Valentinian’s arrival was displaced by unaskable questions.
The doppelgänger shambled to get the door, and the magician stepped inside with a look of displeasure. “Ugh! It’s opening doors, now.” This, punctuated with a pointed look that expressed uncomfortable knowledge of Dominia’s thoughts.
“‘Speak of the devil and he shall appear.’” The Hierophant transmuted his displeasure for the unmoved eight ball into a wry glance at Dominia. Head bent to light a cigarette, the magician loped to the table and ignored her Father’s sniffs of puritanical disdain. “Need you do that in here?”
“What are you talking about, ‘in here’? In where? There’s no ceiling, no walls. We’re not inside anything, except the miasma of imagination. Goddamn.” He stopped by the table with his blue eyes bright, treacherous cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth as he rolled his dark sleeves to his elbows. “I love a good game of pool. About time you got something new! Something new and decent, I mean. May I?”
Forcing himself to smile, an effort evident in the quick-upturned, then relaxed corners of his still-shut lips, the Hierophant passed the cue to the magician. Valentinian rolled his shoulders, balanced his cigarette upon the edge of the table (Dominia felt her Father’s eyes upon it), and bent forward.
“The key to a good pool shot is all in the breath.” He exhaled, that exhalation guiding his stick into the cue ball into the black-eyed eight, which bounced in playful fashion against the nearest edge to spin into the opposite side pocket. “That”—he handed back the cue with a (doggish?) grin—“and the ability to ignore distractions. You ready to go, Dominia?”