by M F Sullivan
She wasn’t eager after that conversation, and glanced at her Father with a mind that whirred from thought to thought in a useless effort to evade questions. “Run along, my girl,” said the clairvoyant Hierophant. “We can resume our conversation tomorrow night.”
“Unfortunately, he’s right.” The magician waved. “Come on.”
The General had anticipated Valentinian would try to take her hand, as usual; but this time, he went to the door, cementing his obtrusive study of her inner thoughts as obvious fact. Suppressing her irritation to the fullest extent possible (not much, in truth), she strode through the door, then winced as the thing in the study called, “Goodbye, Dominia.”
“Why the fuck are you telling me goodbye?” She paused on the threshold to narrow her eye in the profane thing’s cringing direction. “You’re going to stalk us all day, aren’t you?”
“Actually, I will be keeping her behind. We have some lessons, I think.”
“That’s great.” Valentinian attempted to guide Dominia out by the shoulder and was left rolling his eyes when she stormed down the path of the Hierophant’s torches. “People get so touchy.”
“I’d be less touchy if you’d stay out of my head.”
A certifiable statement of the mentally ill, considering she might be speaking to her imaginary perception of a border collie—specifically, her projection of the patron saint of death upon said border collie, assuming Valentinian even had anything to do with Basil in the first place. Could be he was just a smart dog, and she’d made a false connection. Or, if it was true Valentinian was a disembodied spirit from the first iteration of the world, had Valentinian’s martyr spirit attached to the dog’s material body specifically to direct the course of events? She tumbled through an infinity of paranoid thoughts and considered his mention of previous incarnations during even this cycle of reality. What else had he been in her life? A tiger at the zoo that led to Cassandra’s job teaching Noctisdomin school? The job that gave her wife a reason to live as long as she did in the wake of a series of unfortunate choices leading to undesirable immortality?
It was almost more logical Valentinian should be a thoughtform, though short of serious mental gymnastics, it was nigh unimaginable she could have ever created him. But it might make sense if things happened again and again, and thoughtforms got more power with every interaction. In that case, it was possible Valentinian was a thoughtform created—summoned, manifested, whatever—in a repetition long ago. From that point on, he could have existed in linear fashion from the start of many other universes, each time perpetuating some bullshit claims even Lazarus couldn’t remember about a life he probably didn’t live as a researcher alongside the mystic, the Lamb, and Cicero. With all this talk of lies becoming real, it was impossible to tell what might have been truth: and when everyone’s truth was so incomplete, she wondered if they weren’t petitioning her with their versions of reality, rather than trying to deceive her.
“Which place is more real”—she decided to ask of the magician—“this place? Or reality?”
“Consensus, material reality is real by definition. As close to ‘real’ as you’re going to get. But you have to real-ize—ha-ha—after you reach a certain point of understanding that one is untenable without the other. Both this place and reality are the same amount of real.” Dominia could have screamed for such nebulous answers piling around her, and he knew it. “It’s not helpful. I’m sorry. Think back on our film analogy. Is the series of static images making up the reel of film more real than the movie projected? More appropriately, which is more real when you’re reading a novel? The individual words your brain decodes into experience? Or that experience of the story, undergone by your consciousness?”
There again were the books in the study, “TÆ CΦDVUKΘP” somehow unstable in its own existence but nonetheless emblazoned gold upon the side of a lapis-blue tome. She had since seen the Odyssey upon his shelves twice, and neither time had the title resembled its prior arrangement; yet, each time she registered the meaning of the text as if it were spelled the expected way. The most recent appearance was in nonsense-full Greek, and still she comprehended it; but it seemed a falser representation of the word than the variant before. This, she recounted to the nodding magician.
“A good metaphor. Ultimately, the arrangement of letters underlying the words you see don’t matter as much as the overall meaning. The less observed something is, the more abstract and true to itself it is, because it contains a wide swath of possibilities. Infinite. But, the more you observe something, the tighter it becomes. The more crystalized. You understand it in a comprehensible way—maybe you’re even able to take it into the real world with you. But the thing is then less true to its highest self because your observation has tuned its frequency to the band necessary to render the experience of it static. The Greeks had a three-faced goddess, Hekate—one of the ways Ishtar manifests, or vice versa, if you’d like. Her name means ‘far-darting one,’ and the arrangement of Her body and faces mean the most men can hope is to see two at a time. We can never see all three, like a Heisenberg uncertainty principle of metaphysics and creativity. There is always some information lost in translation from abstract to concrete: yet the abstract cannot be wholly comprehended by the three-dimensional perspective, so, to the human and martyr mind, the abstract is less real, even though it contains a perhaps higher truth.”
“And to your mind?”
He shrugged. “I’ve spent a long time here. It’s all the same to me. But I pine—oh, how much!—to walk with my own body through the world.”
“Have you, ever?”
“In this world, this time? No. But many times, I have, and after all this… Your Father is a liar.” He punctuated his abrupt turn by tossing his finished cigarette in the direction of the black sun, which had hefted most of its body above the horizon. “I keep telling you, yet you keep listening. It’s always this way. Why? What can I do to get you to listen to me like that?”
“Try telling me the truth. Who you really are and what this is, and why you want to jettison my people into space.” When Valentinian offered no response, she scoffed. “You can’t even admit that. Even after Lazarus told me before, you still can’t bring yourself to talk about it! What is it with you?” The blister of her fury swollen sufficiently to burst, Dominia grabbed his shirt.
“Why am I here? Why all of this, why me? Why won’t you tell me the truth about my eye?”
“Because if you take off your eye patch one second before I tell you to, everything we’ve worked for is lost.”
“But why?”
“If I’m not back to myself in the world before your eye here opens—and especially if the Lady isn’t restored—there’s no way for me to help you, and I have to move on to the next Dominia.”
“Sounds like more bullshit to me.”
“It’s the truth. Your Father claimed sending martyrs into space sooner rather than later would be like giving premature birth to a world; real premature birth is removing your eye patch.” While she was baffled by this, he blew right on without explanation. “You know what happens when you open your eye? You wake up. You really wake up. You wake up so hard, in a way beyond waking, that the truth itself creates a new world. You can’t open a portal to a new world if you aren’t ready to move through it. Rifts like that only have the energy to sustain the movement of one body through their substance, and even that is dependent on there being an empty space for the body to go. If they don’t have an empty space, they’ll have to make one, or risk destroying the whole system. Guess who’s ready to jump through a universal rift and happy to make himself an empty space?” The agitated magician waved his hand in the direction of her Father’s study, a path empty of doppelgängers for the first, blissful morning. She could not appreciate that absence with the magician mad at her, because she couldn’t follow his babbling. “You don’t understand how any of this works, do you?”
“Of course not! You won’t explain it to me!”
“Because every time I have, you’ve fucked it up!” The normally composed magician raised his voice, and Dominia was so surprised she released him. While he straightened himself out, he continued, “You fuck it up again, and again, and again. Well over forty times, a hundred times I remember, you have fucked it up! I hate to break it to you, kid, but you fuck up a lot. Big, unfixable fuckups. And each time one happens, guess what else happens? Everything! Every-fucking-thing happens over, and over, and over again. And you know why? Because you take off your eye patch too early, or because you manifest Cassandra’s tulpa, or because you decide to go along with your shitty dad, or because of forty-something other reasons I don’t even want to remember! You fuck up repeatedly. Because of that, Lazarus and I have lived an eternity and you have to keep doing this again, and again. Have to keep living your miserable life again.”
At the pain that crossed her face, Valentinian’s tone and expression softened, but he was not deterred from saying, “You have to watch her die again.”
“Why would you say something like that?”
“It’s true.”
She slapped away the hand that tried to comfort her. Briskly, she turned toward the study of the Hierophant. The sun did not sink with her, perhaps because Valentinian did not pursue. He merely called with a sigh, “Kiddo, come on, come back. We should go.”
“What, can’t you come after me?”
“There’s no point if you don’t want me near you.”
“Why? Because a thoughtform has to be wanted?”
“Yeah, okay.” The sighing magician turned from the General with a wave of that slapped hand. “Do what you want. So this is the clichéd part of your journey where we have a falling out? I can take it. I’ve got a thick skin, to use another cliché. But if you get lost—”
“If I get lost, you’ve got more to worry about than I do.”
Dominia hastened her retreat to the Hierophant’s study and away, as far and fast as possible, from Valentinian. The rising black sun revealed a distant, shadowy river that went unappreciated, for she was as annoyed by herself—and by the magician’s refusal to follow her—as she was by his cruel points. No matter how accurate. The thought of eternally walking into their spoiled bedroom, shame in Cassandra’s eyes, a second too late, the silver barrel in her mouth, Crack! Crack! Crack! forever—it made her too sick, and her conversation with the Hierophant left her too disoriented. She felt like she had as a girl hanging upside down for an extended length of time. When she straightened, she found a new surreality, and wondered for a strange moment which way was “up.” The mere thought made her slow her steps and spare a reluctant glance in the direction of her friend, who waited to see if she would return.
Perhaps because he waited, she decided she wouldn’t, and dashed on until he was far from sight.
V
Are the Stars Out Tonight?
This childish habit of running away emerged from childish pain, and Dominia grew more aware of her own inescapably embarrassing motivation every meter her legs dragged across the dark ground. Valentinian seemed trustworthy after his actions as Basil, but now she could not be sure. She could not be sure of anything they’d told her. Oh, yes, her Father was a most notorious liar among those who were not sheep gamboling about his bloody flock. But he told the truth with pleasure when it benefited him; and Valentinian had not appeared interested in or able to refute the planted ideas, assuming he knew what was discussed. Yet she harbored a certainty, deep-rooted as a United Front redwood, that both men had told as many truths as they had lies. It would be far simpler were things clear-cut into the black-and-white lines of liars and honest beings. Instead, truth was not just veiled: the notion assumed a different shape behind those veils, depending on who did the talking.
Of course, the ambiguity of truth didn’t justify running away: so she felt with greater acuity each step farther from the magician. All the while, the sun rose. The torches of her Father had disappeared, and horror dropped a mocking hand upon her shoulder to remind her she wandered alone in an alien desert with no path to guide her back. No trail of bread crumbs or Lazarus’s stones—nothing but her lonely set of fields, claustrophobic without the cumulative space of three people. Maybe she should have been leaving playing cards behind. However, as she dug into the ammo pouch for the deck given her by the magician that first night beside the fire, the Hierophant’s office presented itself as a distant speck. Unfortunately.
Dread tightened the General’s jaw even as relief tried to loosen it, for she couldn’t bear to listen to the Hierophant pontificate for an entire day. On what, Lamb only knew; however, neither could she bear to return to Valentinian. She braced for her Father’s smug expression when she knocked upon the disembodied door. No answer came, and she opened it to find the study empty.
Not just empty: a still life. Remarkably static without his presence. As if she’d penetrated the hollow shedding of a cicada. Like that husk, the dimmed books upon unsteady shelves seemed brittle. Not only was it intensely eerie to observe the study by herself—was it not somehow worse reinforcement when she observed it independently of him? Did that make the location more concrete, as it drew upon her fields to form her perception of her Father’s thoughtform study? They vanished as she crossed that threshold, their daytime colors flexing against the invisible walls and fading into the bookshelves. Did they render her Father’s reality more, as Valentinian put it, “consensual”?
Still: with the doppelgänger also missing, and some of the comforts of home (a sense of space and the illusion of depth), she could not resist. Could not help but think if her so-called friends wanted her back so badly, well…they could come and get her.
She pretended the source of her bitterness was unaccountable as she sank into her seat and assessed the postmodern wine decanter arching like the neck of a lily. Two glasses, hers still empty from the prior night, waited to be filled. She squinted at them to see if they were smudged by prior activities, yet they were clean, as if some metaphysical maid had swept through the unoccupied study to make its contents fresh again. Somehow, this infuriated her. A mockery, this spurning of detail and causality.
Her frustration was not the exclusive fault of the thing walking in Cassandra’s skin. That honor lay with the burden. The sheer, unimaginable burden that her Father hastened to clarify. To decide what to do with her own people! To decide whether they should live on Earth and make others suffer, or alleviate that suffering and threaten the life of her entire species! Old friends who now thought her an enemy of the state; ex-girlfriends who’d once read her military exploits in the paper and had sometimes sent longing Halcyon account messages at one in the afternoon; children who’d never had a say and wouldn’t hurt a human being for many years. All of them, up in a rocket gunning for nowhere, deluded into believing a nubile planet awaited guiding hands.
Real or fake, wine was wine. That desperation driving consciousness to escape present circumstances was never particular in its means of evacuation. The glass of wine Dominia poured contained every glass of wine she’d ever poured herself, from tacky disposable cups imbibed at teenage parties to those many flasks of whiskey downed during her military career. Most of all, it was that first glass of wine with Cassandra, in that wonderful house on the coast where Dominia went to escape herself and what she’d done after her last military campaign. That beautiful house, where she had never expected to bring a woman so gentle, so beautiful and human. So un-self-conscious. Natural. Always laughing. Gazing at Dominia with such adoring eyes.
How that had changed after her child’s death! Cassandra’s flowerlike way of blossoming with joy hollowed through the years, no matter how she loved the children she taught. Dominia had never become conscious of that loss—not in almost a century, until she looked back in pain. Then it was all so obvious.
The Governess’s drinking had been proportionate with her wife’s unhappiness, though Dominia never blamed her for being depressed. Drinking wasn’t a problem as far as her
hyperefficient martyr liver was concerned, so Cassandra never found a decent argument against something in which she herself engaged on Noctisfreis and holy nights. Alcohol poisoning for a human meant drunkenness for the so-called master species, which was good, because most martyrs found it somewhere between desirable and necessary to be drunk as often as possible. But this drinking Dominia did in her Father’s dream-study swiftly became a bit much even for her. The decanter never emptied, though its amount fluctuated whenever she returned from her thoughts for fear of falling too deep into any memory, any fancy, any idea. Her foot tapped in the empty room to keep her from thinking too much about anything, especially Cassandra—
Obviously, she needed music.
Wine upon the end table, she knelt to flip through the assortment of albums in the nearby bookshelf. How heavy each movement was! As if she sat in a bath of tar. The square cardboard sleeves containing large vinyl pancakes were difficult to move and more difficult still to read: far more difficult than the spines of books. Perhaps just because her limbs felt heavy.
The wine sat beside her elbow. Had she put it there? She took a sip, resumed her work, and at last read “Mozart”—muddied with some Cyrillic, but legible. Instantly, she stood before the record player to find her prize the composer’s Requiem. Had it been there because she expected to find it in his collection, or had it been there because it was there? Because her Father put it there, by will or imagination? The wine sat beside the record player. She took a sip and carried it back to the chair; if it was going to follow her, she might as well consciously bring it along.
Now that she considered it, that had been her reaction to Basil, the cute dog Valentinian had been. Or the cute dog he remained, when one met him upon Earth. She lifted a hand to her patch; if only this world were more real than its counterpart. Then again, how could she be sure it wasn’t? She felt this was where she came in her dreams. Perhaps she had even glimpsed these moments in her waking, and only now experienced them in linear condition. The sound of Mozart’s Introitus rang more powerfully in her ears and chest than ever before, the force of the music flushing her face as much, or more, than the wine—as much as any lover. Her head tipped back and she fell deep into its flow, forgetting even her own body.