by M F Sullivan
“They are damned to eternal hell and excommunicated from the Church. It seems an odd problem to have, but there have been instances of martyred Lazarenes. These, I have snuffed myself. The blood of the heretic Lazarus is poison for the soul; depraved humans force it upon their infants, being of the opinion that death is better for them than eternal life. Horrific, the things people will do to their children in the misguided name of protecting them.”
Cassandra did not speak, or move, or even blink. Neither did he, until he said, “This is one of the many reasons why it is not in my custom to allow the martyring of adults without special permission.”
“That’s why Dominia brought me, Your Grace.”
“Because she understands there can be so great a many…complications. Psychologically and”—the Hierophant studied her up and down—“physically.” He drew nearer, his massive frame shading the human from lights that glowed bright in the ceiling to emulate sunlight without its dangerous effects. When Cassandra’s head lowered and a few honey curls fell out of place, he lifted an eerie finger to push them away. “I wonder if you understand those complications. The ramifications of this choice.”
“I do.”
“Is it immortality you want, Cassandra? Or do you seek this transformation from the purity of your love? What I ask is: Do you think this is a selfish choice, or a selfless one? Of the body, or the soul?”
“I feel…called to it, Father.”
With a few seconds’ consideration, he patted her cheek, and said to Dominia, “You may martyr her as pleases you, though perhaps sooner than later. Can’t have her aging too much before her preservation. Not that she is very old—you cradle robber, you.”
Sweet relief washed over Dominia, who exchanged a smile with Cassandra while her Father guided her new fiancée on to the next painting of a tour that wouldn’t be finished for at least another hour. Sort of the trouble with his approval: once he decided he wasn’t going to kill you, it meant he was going to talk to you. Forever. Luckily, Cassandra was engaging, herself.
“This guy was in the painting of Regulus.” The prospect now observed (with admirably unflinching eye, for a human) a painting called “The Castration of Saint Julius.” Indeed, the torturer in question was identical, his red waistcoat and gleeful expression a trope in martyr paintings stretching further back into history than was recorded.
“That’s San Valentino,” explained Dominia. “Saint Valentinian. The fictional saint.”
Cassandra made a noise of interest. “I guess I never really thought about how the city got its name.”
“Saint Valentinian is the patron saint of death in many of our stories,” said the approving Hierophant. “Death, prisoners, slaves—and painters, because he is the only martyr without an historical basis. I liked him so much after his first appearance that I insisted the following painters slip him into official works whenever possible. He is in every painting in this castle, albeit often hidden. One must have one’s amusements if one is to live two thousand years.”
Laughing in her good-natured way, Cassandra said, “I suppose so. But why pick a fictional martyr to be the patron saint of death?”
“Because, my girl, every martyr has died, and every martyr is responsible for death: every martyr alive or dead has a claim on the patronage of Death. Were it not a fictional martyr responsible for such matters, well, such patronage would become my burden. I’ve enough responsibilities as it is, don’t you think?” Playfully, he nudged her, and though Cassandra restrained her wince, Dominia had been delighted to see that level of familiarity.
Oh! The joy of that night. The joy of sweeping Cassandra up in her arms and feeling for the first time that it was allowed. Now, in the shipping car, amid industrial-size crates of soaps and tea, Dominia tried to hold herself together: tried not to ask herself again and again why he had allowed it. Why hadn’t he stopped them?
Not that she didn’t, deep down, know the answer, but the asking of the question was somehow a comfort. As if, in the asking and in the refusal to comprehend his motives, she was somehow superior. The feeling was similar to the one she had at the Lamb’s failure to intervene in her tragedy. His understanding of probability would have revealed her destiny. Both the gentler Lamb and the not-so-good Father had foreseen all this, and hadn’t warned Dominia of anything. Hadn’t warned her that, in spite of all her success, her strength, her glory, she would someday be crippled enough by circumstance to weep over the loss of a necklace.
The trick was staying calm. She had made it this far and stayed calm. Would she fall to pieces over some glittering rock? Of course, it was more than that (poor Cassandra’s beautiful body, rendered to ashes), but she had to tell herself (in the clutches of some uncaring stranger who thought it a base, mined diamond), for the sake of reason (instead of the General’s one chance to see her wife again), that it wasn’t. Otherwise, Reason would find itself too poisoned by Emotion to do its work—to raise Dominia to her feet and allow her to ponder, as she dressed, why the woman who knocked her out and stole her diamond would also be kind enough to leave her a disguise. The DIOX-I, at her behest, scrolled through its most recent profile, and Dominia repeated the name out loud as she tucked the bun of her hair beneath the porter cap: “Miki Soto.”
Real name? Fake name? Not a porter, whoever she was. Her profile listed no occupation, and no age or relationship, either; but there were self-taken photographs enough to indicate to Dominia that the girl was not a complete construct. It looked like she had spent time all over the world. The human parts of it, anyway. Most of her status updates (the name given by digital social networks of the era to doomed-to-remain-unread blurbs about the user’s life) had to do with what bubble tea restaurant she’d visited or where she’d eaten in Hokkaido, and most text posts were high on the ratio of emotive icons to actual words. Dominia’s IQ dropped to see such statuses, so she blinked the image of the page away while she tossed away the remnants of her broken watch and examined the dummy. A newer, less-abused device, it had survived the electrocution and would at least serve enough to get “Dominique” into her suite.
Damn good thing. Whoever Miki Soto was or wasn’t, she was still on the train. She could be found, and had to be found, before she absconded with the diamond. That meant the General would have to leave her room far more than she’d anticipated. But, of course, before she worried about leaving her room, she had to find it. That was a challenge all its own, and she checked her ticket several times before wrapping her equipment in a parcel made from the paper covering of a crate. Their room was in the Satin Car, with each car of the train named for a kind of fabric as a nod to the Silk Road it traveled. This storage car was not open to the public and, according to the map upon the wall, was positioned behind the kitchen and dining cars. These let out to the Observation Car (the Cotton Car), the Silk Car, and then the Satin Car, with many others to follow until, near the Luggage Car at the front and past Coach, the Burlap trio of ultra-economy cars rushed along, packed with budget travelers.
Though Dominia kept her head down as she navigated through the diners, it was impossible to avoid awe when a room of such elegant design fit in a train car. It seemed not just a restaurant but one modeled after the European aesthetic preferred by martyrs. A great crystal chandelier irregularly swayed from the ceiling, and the frescoed walls were decorated with frosted molding like a well-iced cake. And all the flowing wine! It provoked a twinge of desire. She was thrust back into the Hierophant’s parties, right down to the haughty glance of some woman who might have been a courtier had she not been a human on the train. Amid all the luscious fur stoles and tuxedos, Dominia couldn’t help but feel out of place; yet, for that reason, she was invisible, the parcel in her hands and the uniform around her better than any cloaking device. A porter she may well have seemed, but the delivery in her hands marked her as unavailable for use, so she was free to cross the scarlet carpet of the Dining Car and emerge on the other side with a soft breath as she made her way across the g
angway connector wubbing with the eerie whip of the tunnel outside. The short, glass-enclosed passageway, empty of all other bodies, just her and the dark vacuum outside: she shuddered and moved on.
The Observation Car was a strange affair. With nothing but the tunnel walls to observe, the large glass windows now bore holographic simulations of the vibrant fish and strange, giant creatures beneath and beside which the mega-train rushed. She suspected a similar effect had been installed in the Burlaps, as she had seen so many face-filled windows.
In the next car, a multilevel masterpiece in similar style to the Dining Car, a Japanese conductor emerged from one of the Silk Car’s compartments; she strove not to hasten her step. He nodded at her, then did a double take when he did not recognize her face, but she was already on her way out of the car and looked so busy that, surely, she was a person who did what she was supposed to be doing. Yes, she looked busy, was busy. So busy, and in such a hurry, that it took her until halfway across the gangplank to recognize what her sensitive nose had smelled as she’d passed that cracked door. Lavender.
The temptation to turn around was enormous, but porters had special pass cards that allowed them to enter any room. Dominia, not being a real porter, had no such pass card, and had to settle for swiping the digital ticket on the face of her dummy watch at the (difficult-to-find) second floor door of their suite. This same false watch dropped from her hand in surprise as the door slid open to the greetings, not just of René, but a dog.
“Basil!” While the great beast looked up at her, tail still wagging, eyes still bright, coat still black and white and alive, Dominia lowered to her knees and let her parcel of things lay where they’d fallen with the ticket. The door shut behind them while the border collie accepted her embrace with a wagging tail and kisses for her jaw. “Did you smuggle him out somehow? I don’t understand. I thought you must have made it in right before the gate closed.”
“I wondered the same thing.” René muted the television and sat up from where he reclined in the lower bunk. “It was weird, like magic. As soon as you stopped, I got out of the car and biked like a Tour racer—made it without getting shot even carrying my bag, no thanks to you. I slipped in right before the station gate closed. Then, it’s a few shoves before I’m on the train, economy boarding, since all the other Satin passengers have been aboard for hours. I go to the economy bathroom to clean up, all well and fine; then, I’m making my way to the room, and I’m alone in the hallway, but all of the sudden I get the feeling that I’m being followed. I look, and bam!” The professor waved a hand at the dog in her arms, who assessed René with much less unconditional affection than he seemed to have for Dominia. “There’s Basil, creeping along like he’s been there the whole time!”
“What’s your deal?” she asked Basil, almost too happy to argue with a being who couldn’t argue back—almost. “I don’t understand. How did you get out? I left you. I saw—”
No, she didn’t. She realized while looking into skeptical dog eyes that she hadn’t verified he was still in the T1-63 before she left it. She hadn’t been able to look at the animal, so she had spoken to it without looking back, and assumed it was there. Who was to say it had been? Logic, of course, but…her mouth opened and closed. She frowned, squished the dog’s fuzzy cheeks, and frowned harder still.
“Border collies have always been my favorite breed of dog,” she said. As Basil’s tail wagged, René turned up the volume on the television. Her thoughts lost track as Theodore’s whiny voice pierced her ears with the explanation that “the new Governor of the United Front will do everything in his power to protect the freedoms humanity enjoyed under Governess Dominia’s rule.”
“They’re bringing back camps,” translated Dominia, slipping her cap from her head. René scoffed.
“That could mean anything. Are they going to jump right to that?”
“Watch. First it’s ghettos, then it’s camps.”
Theodore, who had continued droning under their voices, could be heard answering: “—best way to protect these most precious liberties is to band together in a group. Thus, we will be establishing new communities for the Abrahamian spiritualists, and for the descendants of the Risen Sun. It should be easy to migrate them, why, after all—San Valentino looks a bit like China, doesn’t it.”
His ignorant titter made Dominia say, “Oh, that idiot. Turn it off! I can’t watch him anymore. I’ve had to deal with this simp for almost sixty-seven years. If Cassandra hadn’t been enough to ruin my view of the Family, his existence might have done it by itself. Speaking of Cassandra”—she slipped out of the heels and cracked her toes with a sigh, then swept the lotus card from her bundle—“do you know about this?”
“Tsk! Naughty girl.” After flipping the card all around, René laughed and stroked his goatee. “I suppose widowhood is lonely.”
“What are you babbling about?”
“This is the Red Market! Their calling card.” He gave it a waggle before reading its back. “‘See you soon’? ‘XO, XO’? What did you get up to while you were gone? No wonder it took you so long to show up.”
She snatched the card from his hand. “How long have we been on the train?”
“Oh, two hours. Not too long. Lose track of time?”
“Lost track of consciousness.” In brief, she told him what happened: the blur of gunfire, swinging her way onto the car before the train was sling-shot all the way into its tunnel, the foxy porter, her missing wife. “I think this Miki’s in the Silk Car, but I can’t get to her.”
“She invited you, didn’t she?”
“Don’t be stupid. I’m surprised this place isn’t on lockdown: I passed a conductor on my way over, and he looked tense. The more often I leave this car, the greater risk I run of bumping into a problem. Besides: I don’t know what the hell I’m walking into.”
“You’ll have to get that diamond back somehow. You want me to go get her?”
“God no. You’ll either never come back or repel Miki into keeping her.”
While René tittered at her bad humor, Dominia swept up her real clothes. How they stank of sweat and dried blood! Her beloved leather jacket was as good as destroyed. Just as well; most humans along her journey would have been disgusted to realize they interacted with the General while she wore one of them. Examining René’s new tie and white shirt, Dominia sucked the gap in her teeth she wished she’d had time to see replaced in Japan. “Did you happen to get me some fresh clothes while you shopped for yourself?”
“You know, I thought about it, but I didn’t know your size. Those pants are leather, right? They wash.”
With an annoyed look shared by Basil, Dominia strode to his bedside, pulled his bag from beneath his bunk, and, over his shouts of irritation, obtained a shirt and pair of slacks. “I’m taking a tie, too. It’ll help me blend if I have to go out.”
“Oh, these fussy rich people wouldn’t know you from Eve. They don’t pay any attention. You want to know why the staff hasn’t put the train on lockdown and turned over every car?” René ground his fingers and thumb as if rubbing coins. “Have to keep the people who paid a fortune unaware of danger, lest they never drop the cash again.”
As René again turned up the volume, Dominia grimaced to find he had changed to a station reporting the incident in Kyoto. Though the broadcast was Japanese, her DIOX-I transformed hiragana, katakana, and kanji characters into English words. This allowed her to read the scroll beneath the stern reporter. Officials still seemed to be piecing together what happened, but the Hierophant himself was expected to comment on the incident, which leant weight to the international rumor of ties between this incident and the allegedly dead Dominia di Mephitoli.
Dead. She wasn’t dead, but seeing news of her death continued to bother her. The urge to right the wrong perception was strong, but that was what they wanted. They wanted her to claim responsibility for her so-called crimes. Jaw clenched, Dominia slipped into the bathroom and sank into the tub.
At s
ome point, she would have to deal with the woman, but not now. Theodore flitted up into her thoughts like a big-nosed moth bashing itself against a lightbulb. All those citizens of the Front were now in such peril that Dominia was sure her escape from the country would be but herald of others. The government would be prepared for it. It astonished her to see over her three hundred years of life how that vast country that she so loved seemed to dwell in a bizarre cycle of perpetual cognitive dissonance, alternately inviting and castigating (often downright imprisoning and killing) immigrants. The immigrants knew this, and yet they continued pouring in—why? Because of what the region had once been, she supposed, or because they had no choice. When, in one’s home country, one was poor and famished, the Hierophant’s lure—his universal basic income for the first five years of a human’s legal citizenship, and his promises of land and dreams and futures—seemed of greater weight than his threat. This was nowhere truer than in the western UF, around that capital city of San Valentino.
The Western Front often felt its own country from the rest of the continent-spanning empire, and that was due in part to the large Asian population inhabiting the coast: their ancestors or lost relatives had come to the land many years before and joined a panoply of industries, and more immigrants continued enduring the risks with similar hopes of integration. Even though it had once been the cause of war and, ultimately, the ruin of Tokyo, the Empire of the Risen Sun remained protective of Western Front citizens. Martyr military intelligence stretching back to the late 1600s indicated Hunter cells based in Japan often infiltrated United Front lines. The Hierophant had never cared for that, and, after his many attempts to deport dissenters failed due to the wily nature of the human race, he’d turned to Dominia to keep both groups pacified. This had been her duty, lest they consume the Front, and the Empire of the Risen Sun come to believe they own the entire stretch of land, sea to shining sea: north to the Hierophant-controlled Canadian Winterlands, and south to the border of Latin America, filled with humans who sometimes got the idea to press north and contest his occupation of the Mexican Territory. In truth, since the United Front annexed Mexico around 1412 amid spurious mutters of “weapons of mass destruction” and “terrorist cells,” it could be argued that the Front was never not at war. Hence its name. Mexico was, so far as the UF was concerned, its 64th Jurisdiction, after Puerto Rico, Washington D.C., the United Kingdom (a controversial single Jurisdiction), and those ten added in the Canadian Deal. Of course—try telling a Mexican that. The UF tried to tell all of them that for good around the turn of the century, and by 1906, it had culminated in the worst loss of the General’s career.