by M F Sullivan
“No one is forced to be here,” Tenchi blurted, his voice a defensive pitch. “If she is here, it’s because she wants to be.”
“Yet this place is supposed to be a black hole encompassing everything?”
“All space, General, all time. All things are here—all planets, all stars. Ours is not the mere black hole of an ordinary galaxy; when one is upon its event horizon, one understands all black holes are the same black hole, for they will eventually all submit to their own dismissal. Like a slate wiped clean.”
So where was the McLintock boy? She couldn’t stand to go into the marketplace and ask Carol in person. Not after she had shot the child in front of the harried mother, whether Dominia had a reason or no. The General dared not contemplate what would happen then, what had happened after the boy died, no more than she could contemplate what had happened before the boy, before she, before anyone, was born. She had tried to conceptualize that state while on her journey and found it almost impossible. How could something emerge from nothing? Consciousness from unconsciousness, matter from space? How did the magician create something from nothing? The Higgs fields responsible for giving particles mass was a fine explanation, but what was that field? What, really? God? Then what had Dominia to do with the oscillations of reality? She could not think on it too much. Could not think that all things happened in patterns, that she eternally put a bullet into the head of Mrs. McLintock’s son, just as Cassandra had done to herself. That was surely why, when Tenchi said, “Maybe I can introduce you, and you can see she’s happy,” Dominia forced a polite smile.
“I don’t think that we’ll have time today. Soon. But what about the innkeeper? Or—hotel clerk.” It was hard to think of this place having a hotel rather than an inn, but she tried to erase the preconceived notions of language. “Who sent you to pay Mrs. McLintock?”
An important question, because sending this courier at this time to that woman was not anything close to coincidence. Perhaps it was the synchronistic nature of the City, but this smelled deliberate. Gethsemane all but confirmed this when, in response to Tenchi’s exclamation that, “She’s a great lady,” the nymph corrected, “the Lady.”
Was it rude to snort? She couldn’t help it. “Your goddess is an inn—a hotel clerk here?”
“My goddess’s avatar…or, rather, the spirit of the woman displaced when the goddess possessed her body. This old soul of the vessel does good works in the City to pay for her stay, like everyone else; she is responsible for managing the refugees.”
“This was Lazarus’s girlfriend?” asked the General.
“Not for many cycles, not since she first birthed the magician. But the magician has since become a self-created man with no need for a mother, so his mother is liberated to achieve her true potential as an individual.”
“Sounds like she’s anything but an individual. She submitted her body to an alien consciousness.”
“No. She discovered the divine within.”
Any further questions were silenced by the ringing of the crystal clock tower towering above the busy market. Startled, Tenchi looked at a watch he didn’t have, patted his head as if in search of a hat, and said with an apologetic bow, “Is that the time? I should go, Dominia, but I’m happy to see you! Please come to stay soon.”
“Okay.” Off he dashed, at a pretty brisk pace for his size. “Bye for now, Tenchi.”
As he disappeared around a corner, Dominia realized Gethsemane had stopped before a building whose anachronistic facade was still rather disorienting to behold. It resembled an historic San Valentino high-rise, built of that same ultrafine substance (a kind of post-white stone that glowed like marble, resembled sandstone, and felt like silk) the rest of the City had used. But, compared to the split-level roads rolling past quaint shops and spiraling in all directions to reveal more lovely white buildings, the yawning hotel resembled an invasive species. Even its gargoyles, hanging animatedly from their pedestals in the midst of acrobatic tricks, were a design feature apparently unique to this neighborhood.
Yet no matter how interesting its exterior, Tenchi was right: little compared to its insides. If a tall building without, within it was infinite, and made no effort at disguise. Upon entrance to the gilded lobby, the General spent so long with her head craned in search of a miles-distant ceiling that she almost bumped into one of an immaculate pair of chiseled lions that, flanking the entrance, lifted their paws in greeting from the fronds of sumptuous ferns. The sprays of orchids, a perfect aqua like none she’d seen, startled her with the revelation that she had seen the color before: woven into a crown in the hands of the tulpa, and sprinkled around the pond of the Bearers. She was then drawn to examine the quartet of gold-and-marble columns disappearing into the distant heights of that infinite ceiling. Everywhere she looked, another stunning objet d’art awaited, and that included the woman at the counter: she looked from her paperwork with a brusque sigh, which blew from her lips a flaming lock of hair.
“Another new guest.” She spoke more to herself than to them as she turned to consult a wall of keys stretching beyond reach, or reason. “And staying how long?”
Gethsemane folded her hands upon the edge of the pearl counter. “Only one night, and with me.”
“You have a room here?” asked Dominia of the nymph, who nodded.
“I am a creature of water, but also of land, and when I come to land, I must have a place to stay here in the City… It would not be right of me to keep a house if I did not use it every day.”
While Dominia’s brain tried to work out the amphibious nature of her companion, the hotel clerk lifted her scarlet cap to tuck that obtrusive hair, only a few shades less red, beneath. “That’s good,” she said with a relieved glance at the General. “I was getting tired just looking at you. You’re a perfectly fine woman, Dominia, but you wouldn’t believe the paperwork required when somebody needs a new room.”
“I’m sure,” she said, not surprised that the woman whose name tag read “Trisha” knew her name. “I don’t know you, right?”
“Do you know anyone, anymore?”
With a small smirk, the General tried, “Will I ever know you?”
“Not as you are, and not in a personal way. But maybe in a Biblical way.” She winked at the blushing General and added, “If you play your cards right.”
“Aha.” Dominia laughed and coughed, her brain whirring for focus. “Well…what’s our—uh, our room number? Gethsemane?”
“606,” answered the nymph, who accepted their key from Trisha. Free, the chuckling clerk merrily tapped her fingers along what Dominia recognized as an invisible keyboard of the sort popular when she was young, when the “in” thing was to have a computer so unobtrusive you could easily forget where it was and wind up knocking it from your desk.
“Breakfast is at five in the morning and runs for four hours.” While she explained the rules, Trisha sometimes raised a delicate finger to tap the almost extra-dimensionally thin screen only visible from her side of the desk. “Leave your dirty towels on the bathroom floor and, please, try to keep it down after eight in the evening. We have a lot of older guests, and a lot of unwell guests who need their rest.”
“We’ll be good,” answered Gethsemane, which may have been the first not-serious thing Dominia had ever heard her say. The laughing porter wiggled her fingers as the nymph made her way to the elevator.
“Aren’t you always.” Then, noting the General hesitated to leave her desk: “Is there something else you needed?”
The name “Carol McLintock” sat on the tip of her tongue, but for whatever reason, she could not make herself say it. Not that, or anything else about Tenchi. But, Tenchi did bring to mind his work; so, forced to come up with something to say, she asked, “Do I need some sort of job?” When that elicited a blank look, she pressed, “To stay here? People need to work, right?”
“Oh!” With a glance at Gethsemane’s back, then at the General, she said again, “Oh!” and laughed. “You don’t kno
w! Goodness, I remember those days…kept like a mushroom, as my grandfather used to say. ‘In the dark and covered in horseshit.’” Trisha waved her away. “No, darling, you don’t need to work. You already have a job! It’s perfectly fine.”
“Is that job ‘ending the martyr world’?” she asked grimly. The woman smiled in a way that flattered its host more than its recipient.
“It’s rather more complicated than that, dear, but yes. Will you be needing the workout room’s location?”
“No,” grumbled the General, who made her way over as Gethsemane hit the brass elevator call button. “I think we’ll be fine.”
Only once the polished doors closed to sweep them to their sixth-floor room did Dominia think on her own hesitance to so much as speak of the McLintocks. She had killed many people, and Tenchi’s presence positioned that thought in the forefront of her mind even before considerations of the boy. But this child’s death sat poorly with Dominia. Children had been killed by her before, indirectly. The Black Night had been about 20 percent children in the final statistical reckoning. She had decimated whole cities in Japan and Mexico until the Hunter cells they sought could be called “eliminated.” But, like most cancerous cells, they only receded, mutated, and awaited a day they blossomed again. Akachi was their tumor. But, Akachi was also human.
“You know”—the elevator opened to their floor with a joyous chime—“I would like to make Tobias Akachi the last human being I ever kill.”
The nymph held the door for Dominia. “That is a very nice idea.”
“Do you think it’s possible?”
“For you, General, anything is possible; but, please, don’t be disappointed if things do not work out that way.”
In a room less modern than the lobby (or even the plushly carpeted hallway down which they’d moved in silence), Dominia’s attention remained tuned elsewhere. For instance: What had Carol McLintock looked like? As she wandered into the nymph’s room, the General tried so hard to remember that she barely noticed the thin deerskin upholstery of the chair into which she slipped, or the dark-wooded interior which matched the “rustic” frame of the shabby-if-large bed across the room. At the time of the tragedy in the outskirts of the almost Jurisdiction-wide San Valentino, the General had been rather distracted; but she almost pieced together those aspects she’d failed to absorb. There was that tired beauty glimpsed as it fled through the house to please the Hierophant like a bird bashing against the bars of its cage. There was the edge of a plump lip, the glint of a mossy eye; but there was no whole, which, for some reason, filled the General with regret.
The nymph, having sparked a light in the glass lamp by the bed, drew her from her thoughts by resting upon the arm of her chair. “You are in most intense mourning, General.”
“How do you commune with your goddess here”—her voice was hoarse as she unbuckled the Bearer’s curious bark boots—“if the woman downstairs is the woman She inhabits, and She’s supposed to be the substance of everything?”
“You know her.” The milky curve of a perfect calf left the General shuddering while she worked free the next boot. “The Lady is found in every woman. As much in you as in me, or more.”
“Okay,” said the General, usually willing to agree with anything said by a cultist to end conversation, and always, for obvious reasons, willing to agree with anything said by a woman edging into her lap. There was as much self-flagellation among the religious martyrs of her barracks as mutual flagellation in any bedroom of Dominia’s. It was as if, in the absence of any meaningful God, her deity had become violence, and that violence suffused everything about her. Cassandra had known that violence, though not always (and not always consensually, either); she had known it implicitly, like Benedict’s skeleton enclosed in the foundation of their relationship. But her wife had found pleasure in those small acts of violence, too, and Dominia had enjoyed her share of love-laced agonies. Perhaps it was just that when she thought of Cassandra, Gethsemane slapped her face.
“Shit,” said the General as the Bearer clutched her restored hair.
“Miki Soto is right: you are a man, as much as any I have met. Your troubles are a man’s troubles.”
“They’re a person’s troubles,” protested Dominia while struggling to extricate herself. “But I’ve heard I fight like a man, too, if you want to find out.”
As she attempted to twist away, she confirmed herself no stronger in this place than an extraordinarily athletic human—not that she minded, when she noticed the free hand of the nymph had unzipped her jacket and now slipped a cold set of fingers beneath her cotton shirt.
“I am not concerned if you fight like a man, General, but I am curious if you fuck like one.”
Scandalized, somehow, to hear such a word from this illustrious entity’s Cupid’s-bow mouth, the General turned her blushing face away and found no escape when the nymph straddled her lap. “I’m married.”
“And if your wife were here, I would have her, too.” Oh! Those lips! How soft they were: impossibly plush, so much so that Dominia sagged hers open at the lightest touch of them upon her jaw, her cheek, her mouth. “I told you when first I saw you and mistook you for a stranger that it is not often women of your needs arrive to us.”
“And when we do?”
“We drown them, as we do the men.” At the horrified sputtering this elicited, the nymph loosened the buckle of Dominia’s belt. “Never fear, General. We are on land now; the bathtub is not large enough to drown you in, I think.”
“Why do you drown them?”
“Why?” The nymph, who had knelt between the General’s splayed legs in effort to better unzip her trousers, now looked up with pure curiosity filling the eyes beneath her golden curls. “No one has ever asked us that, General. Most just assume we eat them…but I suppose we do it because they are so happy when we have all played together, they submit to being drowned because they do not wish to tarnish the moment by allowing it to recede to memory. They would rather dwell there forever and allow us to dissolve their energies back into the pool of the Lady. Perhaps you will understand why.”
“But my wife—”
“Will not be upset.” Gethsemane lifted that wandering right hand to touch Dominia’s good cheek. “Would she wish you to be so restless? So ascetic? Lonely?”
“Lonely.” What a horrible word. Oh, Lamb, what a horrible word! Pain welled in the General’s breast, and in her good eye. She shut it against the nymph’s touch and turned her face away. All this time, surrounded by people, she had never had time to think of herself as lonely, but she was. She had been lonely since that final, horrible moment of Cassandra’s life. She had been empty. No more the smell of sidewalk chalk on wholesome hands after school nights; never again the light in her eyes while extolling her new favorite book; lost was the way she looked at Dominia, sometimes, when she thought the General slept. The way Gethsemane looked at her now, with adoring innocence and deep concern.
“The gun stays close,” she said, minding the holstered weapon clipped to her belt. “And the eye patch stays on.”
“I would never dream of touching them, General.”
Mysterious. The idea of sex had been repellent since Cassandra’s death, and now in the space of—well, a few days, from her perspective—she had succumbed twice. No doubt the doppelgänger had sensed her weakness, and that was why so much nothing had so quickly swooped in to mock her with her dead wife’s face. The guilt, too, played a hand. There was no way of knowing why the creature found her so quickly that first time: but it was easier to detect the cause this time, when the thought of repellent sexuality provoked immediate thoughts of the fiend. Thoughts unavoidable no matter what her limbs, tangled with Gethsemane’s, got up to in the bed of the City’s hotel. Yet the nymph, lips against the General’s jaw, spoke no admonishments. She did not urge the General, as before, to turn her thoughts from that semi-formed study where it seemed she remained, nauseous, drunk on false wine and shame.
“Dominia.�
�� The voice of that thing, rooted in her memory, yet emerged from that memory to float, sourceless, within the room.
“It’s here,” breathed the General, turning through the haze of pleasure in search of the naiad’s eyes. “Gethsemane—”
“Sh.” Those lips planted upon Dominia’s. “This hotel is its own space. Closer, perhaps, to the Ergosphere than to the Kingdom; yet the Kingdom leads to it more easily than the Ergosphere. It is the function of the attendant to repel pests that slip into the hotel from that place, you see, General—and to keep them from leaving the hotel at full strength. Once it is wounded, it is free to leave, for the guardsmen can eject it easily.”
“But this pest?”
“Dominia,” whispered Cassandra’s voice. The General recognized with a clench of infantile terror that it emanated from under the bed.
“Surely there’s something we can do.” She turned her face in the silence of terror to regard with her good eye the edge of the bed and the leather jacket left upon the chair across the room. At least she had trousers to pull up. “What will it do if we try to get down?”
Gethsemane, unconcerned by her nudity, shrugged. “It will try to devour us.”
Shock, cold and white, streaked through the General’s body. “Valentinian said it can’t kill us,” she protested, though she heard him appending the words “in the Void” at the same time the nymph appended, “There. Here, it’s more desperate to couple with you than ever. This place is a space of high density, eternity: you are more physical than you were in the Ergosphere, where falsity and reality are meaningless distinctions. You are of even higher density here than you are on Earth, though you could not possibly measure or perceive this effect. There is gravity to everything. Here, terms do have meaning. Here, General, words are everything. The thing in pursuit of you wishes to take advantage of that meaning. It wishes to reach you in a place from which it can easily slip into the real world and take on physical presence. Wouldn’t you, if the alternative was a life of shadows and darkness?”