The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  Not even drugs could keep the sour note from his voice. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Innocently, Dominia said, “Only that you’ve spent so much time with her,” as though not referring to a notoriously un-secret romantic crush widely regarded as—for lack of a more exact term—kind of creepy, considering Theodore, as a human, had been the doctor assigned to monitor the welfare of the comatose Lavinia when she was roughly twelve. Nothing untoward had happened, of course. At the time, his feelings for her had been strictly those of a caregiver. But since Lavinia awoke into the spotlight, and Theodore was rewarded for his efforts with that oft-cherished “gift” of a late-life martyring, it had been impossible for the public to miss the puppyish mannerisms Teddy adopted in his closest sister’s presence. Certainly, they had been impossible for Dominia to miss. But the crush was such a harmless and pathetic thing, and Lavinia was so oblivious to it, well—sad to say poor Theodore’s unrequited love was more of an international running gag than the great romantic saga he envisioned.

  “Of course I’ve spent time with her.” His tone was as defensive as the hunch of his shoulders. “More time than you, anyway. Always too busy off in the Front to come home and visit your Family. We went four—no, five, years without seeing you that one time.” Yes, a fine couple of years. Not as fine as the Canadian vacation, and not motivated by anger so much as apathy, but still very fine, very fine. She tuned back into his rant. “Poor Lavinia misses you, she looks up to you! Do you know how disappointed she’s been?”

  “When was the last time you visited Europa since taking the ship to America?”

  “Don’t try to make this about me.” His voice mounted that womanly pitch that inspired, as always, Dominia’s smirk. “I don’t deserve any criticism. You’re the one doing the kidnapping here!”

  “That’s right. And you’re giving me a lot of lip for somebody who’s been kidnapped.”

  “Well, I just don’t see the point! You’ll only succeed in getting Father all riled up. Cicero, at least. He cares more—well, not about me, but about normalcy.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping. And I’m also hoping you’re more valuable than you let on.”

  “Of course I’m valuable. But what’s helped you see the light?”

  “Other than the fact that our Father martyred you instead of killing you when Lavinia woke up, call it…the inspiration of a friend.”

  As much as Tobias Akachi could be called a friend. Of course, Teddy tried to point out, “You know everything that I do. More. This job is the first time Father’s trusted me to so much as take out the garbage.”

  Gritting her teeth at the horrendous euphemism for genocide that she herself had been guilty of using many times over (then wondering if she overthought it and he really meant “take out the garbage,” which was possible), Dominia inhaled. “But I think you do know something, Te—Theo. Something you’re not telling. Why did he martyr you? Why not just kill you?”

  “Well that’s very kind of you, Dominia.”

  “That’s how he thinks, not me. I’m trying to think like him. If I were him, and knew all the things he knew, I would only martyr you if you were of use to me. I would only martyr anyone if they were of use to me.”

  As she herself had been martyred for a strange and abstract destiny: for purposes of ending the modern world, and granting victory to one side or the other. She studied her brother and tried with caution to evoke the spirit of her Father without literally invoking it, as she had in Akachi’s van when the Ergosphere was still so close and her mind, translucent with psychedelic drugs. She imagined the Hierophant’s being, could smell in the center of her mind the distant edge of sandalwood and frankincense—a walking Mass, that man, their Father, who disguised pragmatism with joviality and could make anyone in the world feel as if he loved them most of all not seconds before seeing them put to death. Or, more rarely and always more brutally, killing them by his own hand. He did not martyr Theodore out of affection. Not out of generosity or kindness. If the man had secrets that the Holy Father did not want Dominia to someday learn, the most expedient thing would have been to kill him.

  Instead, knowing through his admitted dry run of reality that this moment would come, the Hierophant had martyred Theodore and made him part of the most powerful, spiritually decadent Famiglia in the world. And if Dominia were the Hierophant, she would only do a thing like that if Theodore possessed information the Hierophant wanted her to have—if the kidnapping of the Governor served no use but to turn her around in circles. Then why had the Lady given her the task? Surely the divinity knew all her Father did, and more.

  She was tired of being a pawn. Blindly wandering at the behest of those who knew the many histories of the many realities happening for eternity. Who was to say it was a matter of chronology? Perhaps Lazarus was placed arbitrarily in any one of an infinity of random, concurrent probabilities, and was therefore present in all his lives at once, as she had felt herself so physically in another world. That world of the Kingdom. The magician’s world.

  That son of a bitch, Valentinian. There was still not a trace of him: not after all this time. True, she hadn’t looked hard for him. Her work in the world had kept her from finding time to try and visit the Kingdom within the event horizon of the black hole at the end of Earth’s linear time. Many flesh-and-blood, living people needed her help, because they still experienced matter and time as normal people.

  Dominia experienced it, too, of course. But, having been in that strange other place, that Void, that dark essence of the black hole, the General was numbed to the sordid reality that her Father considered his. She saw the strings. The whole social charade reminded her of the concerts in which her Father would employ Cassandra, who had by the end of her life moved from Noctisdomin school into a career as the music teacher in a very fine Holy School (one of roughly four hundred across the United Front, all exceptional academies where exceptional human children learned that they would, nonetheless, always be inferior to martyrs). Those concerts were but a handful of extensive interactions American Cassandra had with European Lavinia, who did everything with tooth-gritting perfection because pleasing their Father was the girl’s sole reason to live.

  For the first—oh, almost two hundred and fifty years she was alive, Dominia was able to enjoy concerts and theater as sheer entertainment. But when the Hierophant wanted Lavinia to be a star for his entertainment and felt he needed to drag Cassandra into it, the then Governess was exposed to all the dramatic minutiae that came with her wife’s preparation for the show. Voices of background choristers going out, Lavinia being a spoiled drama queen about some costume…it was all such a tahgmahr. And it was all Cassandra would talk about for a while, there, too. The concert, her nerves, how grating Lavinia could be when given license to exercise her undeserved political powers—or, worse, her protein-given ones.

  Yet, for all the stress and angst and nonsense those scattered nights of buildup brought to the General’s life, she would gladly live them again if that was what it took to be with Cassandra. It was a heretical, human belief among the women of the Red Market that the universe unfolded in oscillations, existing again and again in alternating amplitudes of existence and nonexistence. Dominia had come to believe that, and not because Valentinian had told her so or Lazarus had proven it with many lifetimes’ worth of foreknowledge. She had come to believe it because, with what was left of Cassandra relegated in this world to a shiny little stone around Gethsemane’s neck, the hope that her miserable life would happen over again was all the hope Dominia managed.

  She had to tell herself that this effort was worth something. This time wouldn’t be like those last times that she couldn’t remember, but that were implied by fairly convincing arguments for a cyclical timeline (or timesphere, perhaps). An infinity of failures, which demanded to know: What, precisely, had she failed? What were the incorrect variables in those iterations abandoned by Lazarus, the magician, and her (un)Holy Father? What was out there,
out of her control, ready to get her—and what was within her control, only to serve as the means by which she might destroy herself? A year’s worth of unanswered prayers and tahgmahrs and unceasing work had left the General more hardened than ever before, and more ready for anything to go wrong.

  “Anything” happened sooner than she’d hoped, but it made her glad for their plane’s speed: they were practically within extraction zone by the time the jets came into screaming distance. Through a window clarified by reduced cabin light, she caught the abrupt appearance of a trio of monstrous hypersonic planes that tore through the sound barrier at Mach 12, or about 2,747 kilometers per hour faster than most missiles developed by humanity early in the Hierophant’s rise to power—a difference of about 1,707 miles per hour to those stubborn rural folk of the Front. Any chance they had of completing their journey to the landing pad in Tangiers dropped to zero as soon as those enemy aircrafts were on Farhad’s radar screen. It was already too late to avoid projectiles that were comparably faster than the hyper-fast jets, and surely informed by exact knowledge of their location—probably from the Lamb, as much as any battle fought with his help in her once-lived life. Teddy, well hypnotized by his two sedatives, had begun dozing off around the time of the first impact. He awoke with a squeal while Farhad’s tinny voice clicked over the cabin speakers.

  “Mahdi, we are being targeted.”

  “No kidding,” was her response, as Theodore cried, “But I’m on here, you idiots!”

  “They know.” Head low, Dominia ducked from her seat to the cockpit.

  “So why are they shooting at us, then?”

  “Because they’re trying to shoot us out of the sky, of course.” She smirked, feeling a responsibility to find humor in the situation while avoiding the obvious fact that the Hierophant didn’t care if Theodore lived or died. As she reached the door, it slid open to leave Dominia face-to-face with Gethsemane.

  “There are more missiles coming, and the fighters will wheel back around, but it will take some time. We have countermeasures available at our disposal, General.”

  “Not enough countermeasures to handle all they’re going to throw at us,” Farhad said without so much as blinking, lest the precious microseconds mean the difference between another direct impact and a near miss. “Already, that one strike— We are looking at very serious damage and will not be able to fly much farther.”

  “I thought you couldn’t speak English,” said Theodore sourly from behind Dominia’s shoulder, rendered brave enough by the drug to leave his seat in the chaos of an emerging dogfight—the exact time he ought to have stayed sitting.

  “As we tried to tell you the first time, he just doesn’t want to speak it with you. Not that anyone does.” Dominia turned her attention back to Gethsemane. “All right, listen. We’re going to—”

  “General.” Gethsemane’s expression was tight as another screaming missile rocked the plane. An alarm had begun to go off, and the martyr grit her teeth while her closest adviser took her hand. “We must evacuate reality early.”

  “This is why I told you that you shouldn’t have come.”

  The naiad offered a thin smile. “Then I would have lost my life in some Jerusalem bombing while you were out of town. This is how misfortune likes to play its cruelest games. I’d rather risk staying in the Ergosphere forever than failing you, General.”

  “It’s dangerous for you,” Dominia repeated.

  “I do think I come out a little less myself, and replaced by nothing…but I do not think anyone—even you—can safely do this forever.” The General could already smell her Father’s cologne, the pressure of his presence creeping through the plane as the human gently said, “I see in your eyes you agree. Well: you are very strong. Frighteningly strong! And you have only one woman to be. I am two women; that makes me as strong as you.” A playful edge danced along the woman’s tired smile. “Perhaps stronger, if I could but dream as much.”

  No kidding. Certainly stronger. Gethsemane made a selfless decision with such knee-jerk ease that it was almost implicit she had thought of it before the moment. Dominia always struggled with such things, herself. She’d lost Miki and Kahlil within fifteen minutes; she was pained at the thought of losing another friend, if not to death, then to a kind of subsumption of the soul. Was that the true nature of madness? A frightening notion.

  But would the General rather lose her friend, or see her entire party blown to smithereens? To parachute to their arrests? A thousand paintings whose violence was illustrated to an outlandish, sometimes lurid degree flickered through her memory like a series of martyr trading cards. She could not speak. There was never any good in speaking of the tortures, the war crimes, her Father had committed. Never any good in inspiring fear. Hope was the way, and the generous sacrifice of her human friend was the source of a sliver of optimism. She squeezed Gethsemane’s hand, then released it. “We have to go soon, before the electronics go down, or before the battery blows and we lose the BLP.”

  “A blip,” said Theodore, pale, now, no matter how many pills he’d taken. He glanced up to the lights as he repeated the common nickname of the Blue Light Projector, then asked, “This jet is equipped with a blip? What do we need that for? Dominia? You know blue light will kill us, don’t you? That much blue light? That’s why it was invented, you understand, it’s the same technology as those damn fences, those thresholds!”

  Yes, she understood why the idea made him upset. The BLP was a device humans commonly installed in all sorts of solar-powered vehicles, personal and public. In fact, the Light Rail was only lacking a BLP in every car because its construction had been partially sponsored by the DIOX corporation, which Dominia now understood to be controlled by the Hierophant. The use of Blue Light Projectors was simple, though highly illegal in the United Front and other martyr-controlled territories if not in the form of a DIOX-approved threshold kit. Otherwise, if one found oneself trapped in one’s home with a martyr as one’s uninvited guest, and negotiations (for lack of a better word) took a southern turn, one could flip a switch to flood the room with sunlight-approximating beams. These, hyper-concentrated, were far more brutal than actual rays. BLP units vomited a room so full of light that even humans could only bear exposure for a few seconds without welder’s goggles. Though true that, in the case of a unit such as the one on the plane, extended use would drain the associated battery to nothing with alarming efficiency, even a twenty-second exposure would blind and wound a martyr long enough for a human to find means of escape.

  And, in the case of the unit on the plane, it was only intended for a single use before requiring recharge. The threshold technology employed on the E4 was not intended as a defense against martyrs but as the means by which the aircraft could raise its electromagnetic frequency and pierce into the Ergosphere. Like Akachi’s teleporter, the whole plane was an artificial solar plexus in that the entire craft was able to exit physical spacetime. But it had to be tied to a future/present destination point by way of entry at any one of several carefully decided past/present positions in space-time, calculated to a narrow window of extraction space for any given potential exit. In ideal settings, the E4 had made it to the landing pad but once. The other three wasted planes now qualified as cosmic junk sitting where they’d crashed in the Ergosphere, because nobody could figure how to get them out. At the start of the experimental project, she’d been presented with four inter-dimensional jets, and three had predictable failures of timing for one reason or another, usually due to imprecision of location. Planes weren’t sentient, so they couldn’t look up at the “black sun,” aka Earth at the edge of time; the BLP and all other electromagnetic devices of the crashed jets were rendered nonfunctional; and most people were uncomfortable about spending a lot of time in the Void, so very little follow-up had been engaged, and there was precious time to ruminate on failure, anyway. Better to focus on the one success and see if it could repeat itself in the field—that had been the aim. The reality was success had no cha
nce of repeating itself, and they would have to crash the plane into the Ergosphere’s interpretation of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Good thing those pills she’d given Theodore were laced with Lazarus’s blood, containing the real sacred protein. The proudly worn vial of old Lazarene blood she’d obtained from Akachi had successfully traveled in and out of the Ergosphere a great many times along with her, but that didn’t mean it would have an effect on a soul who hadn’t imbibed it on Earth if they were trapped in a device such as an E4 during a malfunction. Who knew how hard it would be to get a non-Lazarene out of that place, assuming they arrived at all?

  But, maybe it was for the best that such a spirit stay there. After all, the purpose of the old mystic’s blood seemed to be escape. That was just how fucked up her Father’s world was, Dominia supposed, how corrupt and base—a granule of blood like those in the pills could save a person eternally, even when taken in ignorance.

  “Try not to freak out too much, Teddy,” urged the General, grabbing him by the arm like a teacher grabbing an unruly pupil. “Gethsemane, Farhad? Ready?”

  “We have to be,” the pilot observed as their pursuers again howled past. “Activating the BLP, Mahdi.”

  Amid the sirens of enemy jets and the pleas of Governor Theodore, Farhad filled the cabin with mock sunlight, and the real world dissolved into a figment of imagination.

  The amount of time required for Theodore to notice he was not burning to death, and the related amount of time required for him to stop screaming was—well, impressive. While inky black bloomed about the smoking, rattling, beeping E4, the electronics systems failed, and Dominia gave a sigh of relief as all alarms stopped along with the BLP. That same darkness of the Void plunged unnervingly into the cabin of the ship, smiting all vision and leaving the crashed object as nonexistent as the rest of the landscape in the Ergosphere’s bleak nighttime presentation. This was why she’d hoped to skip over it: this, and Teddy’s ceaseless screaming, now turning into weeping even as Farhad groaned, “Please, Mahdi, will you turn on a light!”