by M F Sullivan
“Oh, goodness, no! Lucky for you. After all, had you not volunteered, I planned to yank it out when next we met!”
The more merrily he laughed, the more Dominia wished to grind his face in the dirt with her uncuffed, perfectly free hands: but she knew that he—and one or two others with auxiliary remotes—hoped she would do exactly that. Instead, as was apparently in vogue, she spat upon the dirt. “I’ll keep that in mind when I get you alone.”
As the handful of nearby men who spoke English laughed along with the dentist, another pair pulled up in a light utility vehicle: unarmed and intended for reconnaissance or speedy transport, as opposed to the heavy-duty operations of a tanque. While the men climbed out, Akachi said, “Then you may be excited to know you are about to have an opportunity to do just that! There is something I would love to show you.”
That was never a good thing. Time to find excuses. “And I’d love to come along, but this sunlight—I know the collar is keeping me here, but I feel like my body might fade off at any minute.”
“Oh, Miss Mephitoli, of course! Never fret: we have a very advanced piece of technology to keep the blue light from your eyes and prevent you from being swept away to the end of time.” Turning, the dentist said something in Arabic, and the man to whom he had spoken produced a pair of sunglasses. He handed these to Dominia with a shit-eating grin.
“You know”—she turned the glasses over before putting them on, as if in search of their anthrax coating—“if I didn’t have this collar, I’d kill you with these.” But, it was true. The sunglasses did stabilize her. Akachi was getting in the truck; with a helpless glance in the direction of Lazarus to find him silent, she asked, “What about him?”
“Lazarus will remain here at camp with my men.”
At last, Lazarus spoke. “I can’t do anything for your men.”
“Now, that is simply not true! But, you need not fear. I know your blood is the most precious commodity this Earth has to offer. Gold, diamonds, coal, oil: all good as lead next to the blood of Lazarus. Killing you—as, say, desires the Hierophant—well, that is a shortsighted idea!”
“Not as shortsighted as giving my blood to people who shouldn’t have it.”
“Now, I think it is fair to say that if someone drinks your blood in this world, they have earned it! The good Lord would not have made the action capable of happening in the future if it were unacceptable to Him in the past and present. All things in the world of men are precisely as they need be at the given moment: all the damned are damned and all the righteous are righteous, and nothing can be done to deviate these game pieces from the colors God wills them to take.”
Now it was the mystic’s turn to be annoyed. “That’s right. I forgot about your position on free will. How it’s all an illusion. You think that because you don’t have any, yourself.”
“How fascinating it will be to talk to you, and learn what else you’ve forgotten about me!”
“Well”—the mystic stared down the dentist who was, in the end, little more than a human—“I remember how you die.”
For but a second—a sweet, gratifying second Dominia drank like the Hierophant’s wine—Tobias’s mouth opened without a sound. The eyes behind his sunglasses even widened a hair. Bit by bit, he recovered and tried to laugh as though it did not bother him. He settled on an uncharacteristically tight smile. “Perhaps I will make you tell me about it so I can dodge this fate, eh?”
“How can you?” asked Lazarus, so dryly it was the General’s turn to laugh. “You think free will is an illusion.”
Again, that mouth opened; one of the English-speaking men glanced at the talkative dentist with his eyes narrowed until Akachi turned to him with an Arabic snap. As he and a few other men collected Lazarus, the dentist told him they would speak later. He leveled his gaze with Dominia’s.
“Now, please, Miss Mephitoli, tell me you will accept my invitation of a drive. It is not long. Only a few hours. I think it important you see Jerusalem.”
“Yes.” She glanced at Lazarus as he was dragged away, her ears filling with the memory of screams. “I think it’s important, too.”
In mild relief, the dentist smiled again. “I am glad you agree. I am sorry—I did intend to remove your collar as a sign of respect, but I am afraid”—that laugh was yet a little warbling, a little unsteady—“your friend’s commentary does rather have an effect on a man’s mind!”
“Probably the smarter choice,” agreed the General, tapping the metal device and fancying for the sensitivity of her cells that static built within them. Perhaps that was part of the reason for her foul mood. “But it is incredibly uncomfortable.”
“Well, in the long-term we can discuss removing it. I suppose it depends on the changeability of your mind.”
As the dentist patted the empty seat of the vehicle, the General evaded a man who intended to drag her over and made her way to the passenger’s seat. With that ever-cheery mien set in place, Tobias resurrected the engine with the push of a button and advised her, “Be sure of your seat belt!”
How difficult it was to avoid saying anything to him! But, engaging him in conversation was a trap. The Hierophant had his way of goading people when in an outrageous mood, but it was Cicero who exhibited this quality on the regular: yet, even he, who had not so much as spared a teenage student from his taunting (the bitterness of youth’s lost battles no doubt stoked the flames of future battles won, for whatever that was worth), failed to approach the soulless nature of Tobias’s so-called cheer. Her relatives’ laughter, even at the evilest of circumstances and the blackest of jokes, had seldom been anything but pure; and, in the case of the Hierophant, it had often been the gay laughter of a man who, one needed grudgingly admit, was of extraordinary intelligence and no meager stock of wisdom.
Tobias’s laughter was patronizing. This was a man who believed the world was a pit of fools, and not in the harmless way Miki did. The Hierophant’s laughter was the laughter of a man who waited for the world to teach him something new, and reveled in it, greeting each new piece of information with an excitement comparable to a child’s. Akachi’s laughter was the hollow sound of a man who waited to die, because he thought he already knew everything and scorned the notion that he didn’t.
“So”—Dominia couldn’t resist engaging him for the entire two-hour length of the drive—“how do you think you’re going to die?”
“Trying to get into my head, are you, Miss Mephitoli? Good. That means I am already in yours. But, if you must know, I expect I will lose my life in a battle of some kind, like so many of my men. I can only hope by the grace of God that it will be a battle in His name, which glorifies Him and secures my place in the afterlife.”
“You know what the afterlife is, though, right? Souls? The Ergosphere?” Burned out from the LSD, which had never quite elevated her drug experience from “vaguely uncomfortable” into “psychedelic trip,” the General could not explain what had been so comprehensible when in the Void or influenced (however mildly) by the foreign molecule. Instead of trying to grope her way through an argument whose firsthand meaning she had lost, she settled on, “You’re already saved, through Lazarus’s blood.”
“Blasphemy! That is pure and simple blasphemy. I forgive you for saying such a thing, but I must ask you to refrain from insisting on it in my presence. It is offensive to my spirit, Miss Mephitoli.”
Was it possible for a person who had drunk of Lazarus’s blood to be so corrupted their soul no longer sensed the truth? Or was he right, as he went on to insist, “The mysteries of God cannot be made known to us in this life. Once upon a time, the true Church kept the mysteries of Christ for Man, and by meditation on these mysteries and the acts of the sacraments, the soul could hope to transcend purgatory after death. Men of all stripes have meditated on this subject in all ways, and on achieving revelations from small to great, unique genetic markers are activated. The blood of Lazarus activates all these markers, along with many others whose uses we cannot yet e
xplain. The Lord may allow the consumption of blood by the masses for now, General, but the cults that imbibe it are becoming as dangerous as the so-called Church of your Father. Soon God will see fit to smite them for their insolence. Then it will be a return to the old ways, when humbled human men and women understood that the mysteries of the divine should be kept for the afterlife. For mankind to insist that they are intelligible is not only blasphemous: it is dangerous!”
“Aren’t you the guy in charge of the organization who says murdering martyrs is God’s will? Aren’t you talking to me about God’s will and intentions right now?”
“There is only God’s will, Miss Mephitoli, which is revealed over time. Not yours or mine. Even the will of your so-called magician friend is but a dream!” The General clenched her teeth at the thought of Valentinian but tried to find solace in the obvious anxiety he caused Akachi to provoke these semi-frequent mentions. “I find myself thus, and thus, it is God’s will. Just as it is God’s will you should be here with me; just as, I am sure, it is God’s will you will come around to seeing things my way.”
“Dubious” didn’t begin to describe the General’s attitude, or even her facial expression as, during the long, dusty drive to Jerusalem, Tobias proceeded to lecture her on everything from the inherently sinful nature of martyrs to the barbarous war crimes her kind had committed. “You, yourself,” was a phrase which oft punctuated the monotonous drone, and it was, truth be told, the only thing that kept the General awake after the first hour. Now she was truly over the effects of the drug, worn from her battle, and growing famished. Not to mention drained by the unfamiliar heat of the sun, which, while no longer fatal, had already left her so sunburned she seemed to have laid her face on an iron.
The slightly worse part was the traffic as they approached the city. The highways snarled across one another to account for a populace whose size had grown completely out of bounds of the original, meager imaginings of its long-dead planners. In fact, the boundary of Jerusalem, she heard amid all his rambling, had technically been reached an hour into their drive. If they wished to hit the center of the city, it would, at this time of day, take three or even four hours. This was not an uncommon problem in that night and age: Dominia’s long-missed San Valentino had, in the United Front’s ancient nights, been a conglomerate of several cities that had merged together over time, proximity and environmental pressure—not to mention social laziness. It was easier to refer to the massive areas as one sprawling unit and the individual, former cities within as secondhand townships when one didn’t know the area or didn’t care. Had the General been driving Tobias on a courtesy tour of San Valentino before murdering him, for instance, she would not have bothered pointing out the boundaries of the counties within, like where San Francisco let out to San Jose or where that became Modesto; nor would she even touch the small boroughs within those. This was in part because he would not retain the knowledge posthumously, but mostly because he had no frame of reference for it. Maybe if he’d read Steinbeck. Doubtful.
However, Tobias did not show similar courtesy. He was too in love with the sound of his own voice to be stopped from naming every part of his city in agonizing detail, and explaining, until her slumping head was barely supported by her hand, how his cell was encamped in an area not far from what was once called Be’er Sheva. Once a jewel of its nation, it had been rechristened by the predominantly Arabic-speaking Hunters “Bi’ir as-Sab” and, from what Dominia could tell, had been trampled by the terrorist presence like the carpet of a Front farmer who wore his shoes indoors. As Tobias began to explain the city’s name meant “Seven Wells” (or “Lion’s Well,” depending), Dominia groaned in frustration.
“I know! I know about Be’er Sheva. I’ve read the fucking Bible. Somebody swore some oath over water there, or something. Jacob had his vision of the ladder when he left it.”
“That is good! Then you will understand God has been here since the dawn of time. Since long before the state of Israel, and the founding of Jerusalem! His design is such an intricate one that He understood someday Jerusalem would explode to stretch as far as the Seven Wells, you see? That is why this country has always been holy, has always been contested.”
“‘The Promised Land,’” suggested the General dryly, unwilling to humor the hypocritical rantings of the most boring man on earth. “Yeah, I get it. But what about your spiritual promised land? Is this all there is to you? Earth, then death? And what’s going on with death, then?” Somehow she’d not only gotten into a religious debate, she’d revealed to herself, by total accident, that she was developing beliefs of her own.
“Only at the true end of the world, upon the second coming of Christ, will the gates of Paradise open. For someone who claims to have read the Bible, I am surprised you do not know that! But that mistake you have just made, that dangerous mistake, is why I have brought you here.
“I am not an unfair man, Miss Mephitoli. Unlike your Father, I do not believe in punishing the ignorant for crimes they have not known themselves to commit. Quite the opposite. Minds can be changed, because they are only human, and God’s truth is law! The highest law is not intelligible to Man.”
“The poet William Blake once wrote it is impossible for the truth to be communicated in an intelligible way without being understood.”
“I cannot say I have read his work”—of course not—“but he sounds like a heretic.”
“Oh, by your standards, he was.”
“My standards are God’s standards, Miss Mephitoli. The only standards.”
“And how do you know what standards are God’s if nobody can know the highest truth?”
Tobias took an exit ramp, and they eased into the city in some long-neglected factory district—though, in fairness, what she had seen thus far looked much neglected already, war-torn by the Hunters’ thousand-year, on-again-off-again occupation. “His law has been handed down from generation to generation in the form of His book.”
“Yeah, thank God we’ve preserved all those rules about mixing fabrics and selling slaves.”
“Indeed! Or else your Father might be at as great a loss as I. How do your people treat human beings who kowtow as ‘Renfields’ and other forms of servant but as slaves? And these consent, unlike the trafficked or encamped.”
The most repugnant person on the planet, Akachi: lecturing her as if she didn’t know. He turned the corner into a (fairly harrowing) area of town from which everything was obscured but the towering factories, defunct and appropriated, blotting out the sky to prevent a good look at the breadth of ravaged Jerusalem.
“Will you follow me?” He asked as though it were really a request when they stopped in the dusty parking lot of a seemingly abandoned building. Grinding down her irritation somewhere far beneath her feet, Dominia obeyed only when, to her astonishment, he threw open the doors to reveal the testing facility of a superweapon.
Over the stomping of metallic feet sprinting in seven seconds from one end of the soccer-field-size building to the other, the proud dentist announced, “This is the world’s first musculature-unifying suit: the ALIF-8.”
“An exoskeleton.” Against the northern wall stood an uncanny rack of empty suits that, at eight and a half feet with back legs poised to thunder across the ground with an almost-feline gait, recalled in some ways the articulating mode of the T1-63 R tanque; in others, the odious movement of the tulpa. As the in-testing device pummeled an already brutalized punching bag, she observed, “I’m surprised it took humans so long to produce something like this. Or surprised it was your kind who developed it, instead of a respectable government.”
His eyes, visible as his lenses faded from their sun-exposed state to their indoor one, curled with glee. “Not for want of trying! I am told that, similar to the problems of space flight and the initial visions of the Light Rail, development on most such weapons halted as your Family rose to power.”
“Same reason artificial intelligence capable of anything beyond brewing coffe
e is illegal in Europa and the Front. Can’t have anything that might be used against him. Not unless he’s developed it, himself, and can maintain control with the flip of a switch.”
“Quite right. But now, the only thing preventing countries across the world from developing such technology—aside from the spies and lobbyist traitors he has slipped into the human populations—is slothful fatalism. We are all dying. The planet is poisoned by us; the species is held captive by martyrs. Why not submit to the idea and enjoy our debauched lives while we can? The average man is too busy enjoying himself to contribute to the human race, and those still motivated by the thrill of scientific discoveries are too afraid of provoking your Father to engineer any new military technology not meant for defense. But, you see, we Hunters have time on our hands, and there is no one to tell us to stop doing what was do. And we are certainly not afraid of your Father.”
When, in a brotherly way, Akachi draped an arm around her shoulders, the tensed martyr allowed herself led on a stroll toward the exoskeletons. Closer, its structure was such a mass of wires, hydraulics, and metal bones that it resembled a skinned metal being, as though it were organs, flesh, and—well, a torso and head away from a living entity. “As a military woman, I knew you would respect what you are being shown. I can see you do, I can see it in your eyes! You know what devastation these things could wreak among your people.”
Not untrue. The General leaned into the nearest suit and studied a graphene-encased battery pack tucked away within, its power source both surprisingly mobile and only accessible from the front, through the body of the human controlling it. The back was defended by osteoid plates of steel armor, and all pieces were designed in a way that, taken from the tanque, made it impact resistant: not even a fall would destroy them. “Martyrs may be swift and sometimes so gifted they seem capable of unholy magic—but, wearing one of these, I could break your hand with a twitch of my own!”