by M F Sullivan
“You’re in shock,” said the doctor, aided by his temporary translator, as both men guided her into the nearest seat. René watched, arms crossed while Dominia rested her head against the cool surface of the counter behind her. The bun into which her hair had been placed for the doctor’s easier scrutiny had slipped; the inky strands that tumbled down didn’t seem like her own, but Cassandra’s wet from the ocean, and made her cry.
“Now, try not to do that.” The doctor continued plucking splinters of glass from her eyelid without fuss or flinch. “Try not to move.”
“I’m sorry; I’m shaking. I’m diabetic.” As she lied, she watched the doctor’s mouth. Would a fleck of her blood fly in? Would it be enough? Was there a cut on him somewhere? “Have you ever dealt with someone who’s lost an eye before?”
“Not for years and years. But it’ll be fine. We just have to get you ashore as soon as possible— you’ll need eye drops to prevent infection, and a steroid to help your recovery. A conformer, too, for a few weeks while it heals.”
She didn’t have a few weeks, nor did she need the steroids, but the eye drops would be nice. As the sponge became cotton balls and the motions more delicate and careful, he clicked his tongue, saying in Japanese, “Surgical, surgical,” while Tenchi asked, “Who did this to you?”
“Some martyrs,” said René, his flat lie the elegant combination of truth and fiction one would expect of a literature professor. “Dominique and I wandered off to take a pee. At the same time, our group was attacked.”
“Take a pee, huh,” repeated skeptical Tenchi, looking between them with an eye of wry ignorance that must have seemed from within a stroke of genius. “Yeah, I’ll bet.”
“We’re definitely not like that,” said Dominia. The doctor understood that English well enough, for he laughed. “René and I are—associates.”
“Business partners,” supplied René, springing from where he’d sat on the edge of the table with legs swinging to and fro. As his back stretched and his hips gave an audible pop, the professor sighed, then moseyed over to clap his cousin’s shoulder. “No need for jealousy, Ten-chan. She’s gay.”
“What! But she looks so girlie.”
“I’ll pretend that was a compliment,” said Dominia.
The first mate went on with a playful stroke of his multiple chins as his cousin might his beard, “She does have a pretty strong jaw, huh.”
“I miss the United Front already.”
René jostled his cousin. “Have respect, would you! Dominique is a widow.”
“Oh, gomen!” The blanching sailor hastened a bow; the doctor, after taking his meaning, sighed and shook his head. “Very sad,” said the old fellow in marbled English, throwing away the cotton balls before retrieving bandages. Tenchi went on, his ruddy face further reddened by shame.
“I didn’t know.”
“It’s fine. You never know if you don’t try, right?”
The redness now in the tips of his ears, Tenchi nodded again, and the nod turned into a brisk bow. From this bent position, he muttered some excuse and was gone, having so humiliated himself that the only choice was a breezy escape. Despite herself, Dominia smirked, and then, when René also smirked, she laughed, trying not to show the gaps that would betray her in a second. With a twinkle in his eye, René shook his head.
“Man, that guy. He’s never been able to keep it together.”
“Keep what together?”
“Anything. Life.” After dragging over a plastic chair, René flipped it around and sat in it backward; because, Dominia supposed, he felt this made him cool, or edgy, or because it was what Camus did two thousand years before. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m okay.”
“I can see. But how are you feeling?”
While tightening her trembling hands into better-controlled fists, Dominia licked her lips. “I’m fine. Tired. Dehydrated. How long is it until we reach land?” The doctor answered René’s translation of the question.
“Five more days,” said the professor, “though our friend here says when he was our age, this journey would take about seven from here. Thanks, modernity.”
“When I was his age,” Dominia murmured with a hint of a smile and humor hidden in her eye, “it would have taken nine.”
René laughed as the serene and oblivious doctor stepped back to assess his work. After showing her a depressing glimpse of her bandaged reflection in the nearest hand mirror, the doctor took up a cotton ball and emphatically mimed the pattern of wiping on his own eye. “He wants you to clean nose to ear, and never the actual socket. Only around it.”
“I’ll try not to cram it with cotton balls.” The doctor passed her the bag of them, then bowed. As she bowed back, she asked René, “Does he expect me to pay?”
“It’s part of his job,” said Ichigawa. The old man hurried off with his bag, following portly Tenchi the way he’d hustled off. “You’re not the only refugee this ship plucked from the ocean. It’s no wonder the Hierophant’s navy seems so dead set on destroying even the most innocuous Japanese vessel they encounter. The last number I heard Tenchi throw out was a thousand people have been rescued over the life of the operation. Just this ship, I mean.”
As the dog, tired of affection, extricated itself from the adoring longshoremen, Dominia held out her hand. It lay its massive head in her palm. “That’s pretty miraculous, considering how the border is controlled.”
“No operation is perfect. If anyone is going to get people out of this place, it’s the Empire.”
True. Much as, in ancient times, the Japanese had resisted with violence the emergence of Christianity within their culture, so, too, did they resist the (initially spiritual, later forceful) entreaties of the Hierophant, who soon after decided to leave the Empire and most of Asia to their business. As a result, the Asian nations thrived as a bastion of liberty while most of the rest of the world succumbed to the centuries-long power campaign of the Hierophant. The endless fight to maintain existing order while increasing what he already possessed. His greatest ambition was all but impossible: uncontested ownership of the entire Earth. Then, his eye would land on Mars—assuming it had not already, for he spoke of the mistletoe planet often enough, and had contributed enough to the technological developments that allowed its blossoming to feel undue possessiveness. It was natural that, after Earth was in hand, the next step was for martyrs to pack into rockets to explore the vast reaches of space. The thought made Dominia shudder; but maybe that was hunger. Her teeth chattered so viciously she feared she’d off her tongue, and she rose with the support of the dog and René.
“You look pale, even considering.”
“I feel exhausted.”
“I’m sure. Come on, let’s get some sleep.”
The prospect sounded wonderful—cool, delicious sleep, soft on her aching, itching eyelid—but was impossible. Sleep would not come. Not on her sad little fisherman’s cot, with its wafer-thin mattress pad, and the stained pillow whose stuffing was unknown (rocks? plastic?) but whose exterior was the worn, smooth fabric of something into which years of foreign dirt, sweat, and face oils had been mashed. Eventually she threw the pillow aside and rolled her coat behind her head, a hard support stuffed under the nape of her neck. Ichigawa snored in the bunk above her, her every shift and twist and turn of discomfort lost on the man who had lured her to sleep to steal it all for himself. That was what he seemed like, Ichigawa. A thief. A thief, or a con artist, hands wet with snake oil. It was even hard to discern his age—and not just because it was hard to tell a human’s age once they’d gotten into the standard panel of antiaging genetic engineering procedures. He looked thirty, but it was clear to Dominia he was a forty-plus who aged well. If you asked, he’d say twenty-seven, and that was obvious bullshit. Sometimes she got the sense that he lied for lying’s sake. That it was a game for him, or a compulsion, or perhaps a result of his identity as a failed writer. Not that she’d known him long: mere weeks. Yet, he had worked from inside
the United Front, risked his life as a pivotal doorway by which humans were liberated from the Hierophant, and she believed him when he said he was tired of shuttling people out while putting himself at risk. For all the risk he endured, it was a surprise he looked so young. Maybe it was the lying; he lied himself youthful. Where no one could see it, Dominia cracked a smile.
It wasn’t so bad, being awake all night and all day, the rough wool blanket around her body the only source of warmth, her stomach eating itself while her hands shook. Being awake meant that she couldn’t awaken further into crushing disappointment. It meant she wouldn’t sleep in that deep, deathlike way, plagued with awful dreams: petty, stressful dreams where Cassandra had gone for a walk and wouldn’t come back for a long time, or any of the other uncountable images reflecting Dominia’s heartache at being left behind. But the dreams were preferable to that second she awoke saying, “No, please,” halfway out of bed, expecting Cassandra to sit up with her. To be there, murmuring, “It’s okay, you’re with me, you’re safe.” That wouldn’t happen anymore. Instead, the memory of her absence and terrible death always flooded back into Dominia’s brain, an imitation of the painful moment lived anew each waking.
All that was avoidable if the General never slept. Insomnia wasn’t so bad. This tiny room wasn’t so bad. She might live here. Starve to death here. How long ago had she last eaten? The day before yesterday, she guessed. The longest she’d gone in ninety years. Since the Battle for the Reclamation of Mexico from the South American Resistance Army, when she’d spent six days and nights as a prisoner of war in a Nogales cell. She still tasted the dirt, sensed its granules up in her gums, all the grit and filth in the air having settled in to make her suffocate. To grind her down. But it didn’t. She survived, and she would survive this, too.
Her growing concern, however, was that this could not be said of everyone aboard. On the main deck, the night crew worked their twelve-hour shift. She, wrapped in her blanket, wandered to watch them. Like a woman’s cry, the winch squealed the trawl aboard and revealed to the flooding lights of the boat a pulsing tumor of fish bodies, which, quivering with slime, gasped for impossible breath. What were they? She’d never been good at identifying fish. Pollack and flat fish, Tenchi would tell her, later, once the crew was no more. For now, a few of their number working together split open the great net and, after loosening the bundle by pushing a few fish down into the grate to the processing deck, shoved them all in a gross, living pile to mechanical deaths.
IV
The Massacre
Ensuring the crew’s survival meant avoiding them. This wasn’t because she was some savage animal. Nor was the issue one of self-restraint. She could restrain herself. Starving humans didn’t walk around taking bites out of living cows, did they? When a starving man killed an animal, there was butchery involved. Steps were taken between the moment of death and the act of consumption. Thus, Dominia’s hesitance to spend time around the crew of the Jun’yō was not motivated by insatiable craving. Rather, it arose from the implicit understanding that humans and martyrs had built over the centuries: martyrs were predators, and, like most predators, were considered by most humans a threat worth eliminating. There were humans who had, like the McLintocks, managed to eke out a living by keeping their heads down, and contributing to society in a tangible way; there were also those who, like Ichigawa, took the risk to mingle with martyrs in the name of education, art, and daring social advancement; but then there were those humans who took a dim view of martyrs, their appetites, and what the two had done to the human race.
The men on that powder keg of a ship were the third sort of human. All it would take was one spark to send the whole thing up in flames. She wasn’t sure what that spark would be, but she somehow wasn’t surprised when it proved the fault of her Family member, Cicero.
Cicero—or the Hierophant, anyway. Both, she supposed, had hands in the speedy orchestration of her funeral, which must have been in the planning since at least Cassandra’s death to so hastily tail the incident at McLintock farm. Not surprising. The surprising part of it was that the sailors’ network of choice was livestreaming the event. She knew that, for the sake of the intelligence, the Empire of the Risen Sun kept tabs on martyr media, but she didn’t expect livestreams of anything but theater: actual broadcasts by the Hierophant, she’d assumed to be kept for political or military use. Had she known otherwise, she would have disabled their televisions while they slept, and done her best to wreck their Internet. Things could have stayed peaceful.
They were peaceful to start with. She had read somewhere once—several somewheres, several times—that real sailors thought it bad luck to bring women aboard, but these men, she assumed, were used to it with all their rescue work. They kept to their own devices, maintaining the ship and attending to their duties as though she were not there. For the most part, she was indeed not there: rather, she was in her bunk. The dog—trauma-bonded, she supposed—stayed with her, which meant René had to return to feed it sometime midday.
“Have you thought of a name, yet?”
“Bentley?” The dog snorted over its food, a big bowl of dried jerky and rice flavored with some foul-smelling gravy made from the stored grease of many meals. “No?”
“God no. What is he, the member of a country club? ‘Bentley,’ please. You need a real dog’s name. ‘Basil,’” suggested Ichigawa. The collie’s tail wagged. “You like that?”
“Fine, ‘Basil.’ What do I know about naming things? If I wanted to name something, Cassandra and I would have had a kid.” Lifting her head to regard the canine, which scoffed, eyes toward her, she noted, “Pretty sapient dog.”
“It does seem that way.” The animal, licking the bottom of the bowl, then stuck its hind leg in the air and contorted to lick its privates. Ichigawa smirked. “Sometimes.”
As Dominia’s head lowered upon her bunched coat, the professor asked, “So you’ll stay inside the whole time? Right here? They’ll get suspicious, you know.”
“They’ll be even more suspicious when they see the way I’m shaking.”
“Keep telling them you have low blood sugar. You’ll get free sweets.”
“The last thing I want is unproductive food.”
“Well, I can’t help you, I’m afraid.”
“Strictly speaking, you could.”
“Yeah, so they can notice Chekhov’s puncture wound? I won’t do it.” His arms crossed, and his back went rigid like a woman ill-propositioned in a seedy bar, so Dominia dropped the subject and folded her hands over her ribs.
“We’ll have to think of a long-term solution,” he admitted while staring off into space. “We still have to take the Light Rail from Kyoto to Shanghai and all the way into Afghanistan. And that’s the easy part. When we’re bumbling around Kabul trying to find this guy…”
“I thought your Hunters knew where he’s preaching.”
“Sure, but that doesn’t mean he’ll be easy to find, or working on a convenient schedule. You’re going to need rations, and protection from the sun, if we’re going to make concrete progress in a reasonable amount of time.”
“You think this guy is real? Lazarus? They’re not conflating old biblical stories about Lazarus and Jesus with facts about the Lamb? I always thought it sounded crazy.” To say the least. What she had done to the Lazarenes during her two-hundred-year tenure as one of the top generals in the martyr military—and, during rare bouts of peacetime before her governance, head of secret police—was enough to gray the faces of even the most irreligious humans. But, as she told herself, she had done this with cause. Dangerous cults had to be broken up before they corrupted the masses.
“There’s at least a guy calling himself ‘Lazarus.’ I think he named himself after the famous human. He can’t be that biblical Lazarus; martyrs didn’t exist until 2045 CE— at least, not officially. Cicero and His Ass-Holiness and your beloved Lamb had to be operating for at least a few decades prior to that, since they didn’t come out with n
ews about the protein until they made sure they had every big-name politician and tabloid beauty queen in their cannibalistic pockets. Imagine being alive back then! Weird to think about—but the point I’m trying to make is that, based on all the texts I’ve studied over the past few years, this Lazarus starts showing up around that time. As far as the static, historical record is concerned, I mean. The Lady’s prophecies kept by the religious higher-ups of the Red Market have predicted his coming since before the Jews predicted a Messiah. Maybe they’re one in the same.”
Speaking of dangerous cults whose groups she’d many times interrupted over the course of her career. The Lady and the Red Market were a whole other can of Pagan worms; she didn’t even want to get into it. “So we know there’s a verifiable martyr masquerading as this guy. But why would the Hunters let him live? Abrahamians despise martyrs.”
“He’s an exception to the rule, because he’s valuable to them.”
“That immortalizing blood he has, right?” She laughed and rubbed her forehead while contemplating the notion. “The one that makes people live forever without martyring them, or damns them to hell, depending on who you ask.”
“I don’t think the Hunters are worried about your Father’s hell.”
“Then why aren’t all Hunters immortal?”
“Same reason they’re able to track his location but not get him. He won’t let them. I’ve heard he’s as fast as your Father, or faster, and disappears in the blink of an eye the same way.” At her skeptical look, René lifted his eyebrows and added, “I’ve also heard that he doesn’t partake of meat or blood.”