The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  “Just wanted to see if he’d stop screaming, first.” With a chuckle, Dominia lowered her head and did the one interesting thing she’d learned over the last year—she spoke the True Word for “light.”

  If a person asked her in the waking world what that True Word was, she couldn’t have told them. Not because she didn’t want to but because it was physically impossible. As she had learned before the Lady’s union with Her new avatar, True Words in the Void stood beyond language. Rather, they were the objects they represented. The magician had once impressed her with his parlor tricks of making fire out of thin air, and when new to this place, she’d regarded his talents with a childlike glee. Now, she understood what he’d done, and understood why what he did was purer than her Father’s manipulation of thoughtforms from the dark atmosphere. Valentinian, that saint who was once a dog, was not creating or manifesting anything. He was speaking True Words, which bore so little resemblance to terrestrial speech that, when they were spoken, the mouth did not move. The object but appeared, as light blazed forth across the cabin’s interior in a pure golden halo that emanated from the speaker. True Words could not be communicated. They needed be divined, as the Lady had taught Dominia in a series of unrecallable dreams over the previous summer.

  “No wonder I understand every word spoken, and all written words,” she’d once said to the Lady, after the weight of the ceremony had been given time to settle upon her. The oh-so-generous goddess found regular occasion to greet Dominia in Her chambers for reasons other than bad news, and the General used these meetings for spiritual guidance. Well she understood the magician’s pain. Without the Lady, Dominia would have had no one with whom to discuss these matters. Gethsemane had no practical experience, and Farhad, though imbued with an incredibly deep well of religious knowledge, was exclusively devoted to the Islamic faith. Despite her spiteful, PR-related conversion to the Catholic variation over the previous summer, Dominia was interested not in faith but in truth. She knew the Lady would understand her when she said, “The only real words there are the highest ones. Everything else is just ideas.”

  The entity, kneeling upon a satin pillow across from her, seemed stiller than one of those unfortunate Cairo statues. Nonetheless, Her words rang clear, always seeming to use Dominia’s brain stem as Her antenna. There is no name for the language of the Ergosphere, though many have heard it and tried to put a name to it; but in naming it, it is no longer itself. A named thing is not a wholly true thing. When a thing has a name, it is objectified. It is drawn down into the Earth and into a mere symbol in the mind. That is why, when the truest, highest words are spoken, they will create the object that they evoke, because they are the object. Do you understand? All other words, all human words, are metaphors. The words We speak are the only real ones.

  Her lips parted, Dominia shifted upon the tatami mats of the avatar’s room. She thought of the magician, making fire and playing cards and electricity from thin air. “Will you teach me these words?”

  You will learn a few in your life. We will teach them to you in dreams. Only in dreams. In waking, We will take them from you. The True Words are not for the pleasure of the living but for those who have burst from the Void into the physical Earth. Were we to speak these words, it would mean the end of reality. Only during such times of flux as on the eve of Our wedding can these words be spoken safely, to any effect. Only during such times can they even be remembered upon Earth.

  Dominia was so used to people refusing to give information that she was not even surprised. “Don’t you think it will come in handy for me?” she bothered to ask, and the deity’s avatar smiled.

  They will serve you greater purpose after death than before, child; and after death, it will be the only tongue you speak.

  Well, the General had always been the type of kid who wanted to grow up fast. To the Lady’s credit, She kept Her promise, and Dominia had a series of weird dreams beneath the peak of the Dog Star and the festivals venerating it. Interestingly, such festivals were common amid the Red Market women and the martyrs back home. Everybody could agree on a few things: to her Father’s people, bright Sirius and its nearby companion, Procyon A—the star that hosted the promised land of martyrs, the not-yet-formed planet Acetia—was a symbol of the distant future from which the Hierophant hailed to bring them the protein’s good news. To the Red Market, the Dog Star was the symbol of about forty esoteric things that Dominia hadn’t fully grasped, mostly because she didn’t care. She was more concerned (as had been Akachi before her) with building up her armaments, and rebuilding a body that had suffered a great deal of malnutrition, physical trauma, and battle without rest. Her vision, tunneled by hatred, saw only those moves that would best organize her and her people against her Father.

  She was so devoted to her one task that she could not even remember the extent of the dreams that had taught her the Words—but, as the Lady said, that was also by design. Dominia remembered nothing of her dreams but awoke the next morning with the feeling of important information slipping from her grasp. At first proper sunlight, she would hurry into the Ergosphere, and discover to her astonishment that she now knew with a click the True Word for a basic concept like “light” or “pebble.” How did she learn them? The aggravating part was she had no idea. Instead, she had the sense she’d always known them, and had forgotten them until the Lady had shifted something in her memory.

  By a stretch, the most important word she had learned was the word for “reality,” which allowed her to wink home from even the Void no matter where she looked or what the status of Earth’s morbid silhouette. She could even take a friend or two home with her—maybe more, they hadn’t tried. Such small abilities made the scientists’ research in the Ergosphere’s nighttime Void somewhat safer, and it had even inspired a few of them to pick up meditation and spiritual devotion to the Lady in hopes that they, also, might be able to divine the True Words and carry on such work without Dominia. More religious sorts might have found such material intent a profane thing, but the General approved of their habits wholeheartedly. The sacred Words were little more than another set of tools to her, and she swiftly trained herself to use them on entering the Ergosphere, where dream and reality were one in the same, and where the raw information of matter’s hologram was present in the strange interference pattern legible only with the laser of consciousness.

  But was the metaphor (the damned metaphor) a perfect one? Did the laser engaging the playback need to be identical to the laser doing the recording? What did that mean for her consciousness? What was the recording laser? It made the poor General’s military head spin; she had spent three centuries religiously avoiding questions of spirituality, and now she’d gotten herself obsessed with holograms, and begun to wonder about the magician and his relationship to not just True Words but the Word. The old spiritual symbol of the Logos, for which, Gethsemane had once said, the Dog Star was one of many attached images.

  What did any of this mean? The General was getting obsessed with the idea of perfect Words and holograms and blah-dee-blah, as René mocked when she drunkenly confessed this sort of thing to him. But, of course she was obsessed. Maybe some of it would help Cassandra return. Maybe she could divine Cassandra’s highest name and speak it, and there she’d be—or somehow a computer could step in where the sacred and the psychedelic could not, to derive her wife’s actual consciousness with a sad combination of algorithms and silicone. Maybe, maybe. All she could do anymore was say, “Maybe,” even when her little brother’s fear turned to wonder at the great blaze of light, and his eyes sought purchase in a place where there was none but the faces around and hints of the cabin implied on the edges of the glow.

  Theodore, touching his own face and then releasing the other hand, which had clutched his sister’s arm, calmed enough to speak. “What is this? Are we dead?”

  “Maybe,” she admitted. The first time she had come to this place, after all, she’d stepped into the certain death of the sun. It was a kind of dea
th, she supposed. She glanced down at herself with her single, unpatched eye, at the leather jacket she had not worn in real life since well before the tragedy of Kabul. “I mean, who’s to tell the difference between ‘dead’ and ‘alive’? We already died once, after all. Technically.”

  “But what’s happened?” pressed the Governor. “We were about to be shot down just now—right? And then the BLP, and now…why do you look—like you used to? Even your hair, it’s so long again! I feel strange.” His hand fluttered against his forehead while his seeking eyes darted between Gethsemane and Farhad. The pilot appeared much himself, albeit older, which bolstered Dominia’s sense that perhaps things might work out all right. Even Teddy, now that she focused through the Void-muted glow, seemed dressed and groomed beyond his current station.

  But—Gethsemane. They had experimented once with taking her into the Ergopshere, and Dominia had halted the experiment soon after it began to whisk her friend right back out. Now, “right back out” meant “back out into the nighttime waters of the Atlantic Ocean,” but it sounded almost preferable to standing there and watching her skip like a corrupted video between shards of the earthly woman she was, few sparkling features of the nymph, and—recalling the tulpa as much as her wife—expressions and mannerisms resembling those of Cassandra. That was perhaps due to the diamond around Gethsemane’s neck, still hanging even in this space where the human’s dress had changed and was sometimes a priestess’s garb—sometimes nude or protected by wooden armor, as had been the nymph. Elements of Dominia’s dead wife were the only visual constants. A lynchpin, or a yoke. Hard to say.

  “There’s nothing to be alarmed about,” the General assured Teddy, and herself, and Gethsemane. Nonetheless, her brother’s eyes remained wide with obvious fear. “We’ve got to get to shore now. Just a little walking to do.”

  “Walking?” Teddy’s eyes boggled, and Dominia nodded.

  “The plane’s out of commission. They all lose power once they hit the Ergosphere without making it to their landing pad. Electromagnetic devices don’t work here. Not by any means we’ve been able to find, anyway—so we’re going to have to cross on foot. But don’t worry! I mean, really, don’t worry. It’s bad for your health here. And for mine.”

  Of course, such a thing was hard for even Dominia to remember during the next instant, when that spectral face appeared in the window of the cockpit’s door.

  III

  A Sailor Out of Time

  What a funny thing, fear! A familiar face when we least expect it is worse to us than a stranger’s, as was the face of former Jun’yō first mate, Tenchi Ichigawa, whose smiling features appeared half illuminated by the circumference of Domina’s glow. At the scream of everybody in the cabin, the sailor screamed, too, and dropped from the window with an unnerving lack of thud upon the Void’s un-ground below. Delay induced by the shock sweeping aside, the General dashed to the door, threw it open, and leapt down beside the groaning man before the stairs could lower.

  “Tenchi! What are you doing here? How are you here?”

  They’d discussed this many times over the last year. Tenchi was the reason his cousin knew as much as he did about Lazarus; why wasn’t the sailor a confirmed Lazarene? “I don’t understand it all enough, yet,” he would say. Or: “Eto…I’m afraid it will change me, I guess.” But here he was, rubbing his head as he sat uneasily up on the implied ground, saying, “Well…I can’t explain that.”

  “Can’t, or won’t? Have you lied to me, Tenchi?”

  “I wouldn’t!” Pulled to his feet as the other passengers of the plane leaned out into the glow, the rounder Ichigawa smoothed his sailing uniform and said, “I had to—to take the blood, and to come here, to this spot.” After a glance of reluctance back to the watching faces, he fessed up to Dominia: “The magician told me to.”

  The magician! Valentinian? That former dog of a deadbeat friend? “You saw him?”

  Tenchi nodded. “He brought me here. He met me when I came into the Ergosphere and told me I had to help fix your boat.”

  “This isn’t a boat,” Farhad told him. “It’s an experimental plane.”

  “Really? I think she looks kind of like a submarine…”

  “Forget all that.” Hands on his shoulders, Dominia attempted to contain Tenchi’s interest because anything less could be downright dangerous. “When did you come into the Ergosphere, Tenchi?”

  An anxious expression twisting his mouth, Tenchi tried to glance away at Farhad until Dominia tightened her grip. “I’m not supposed to say yet… He said it will distract you. You’ll try to do something— Well. I’m just supposed to fix the ship.”

  “Plane,” Farhad corrected again, stepping down, then helping Gethsemane do the same. The sailor looked at him, aggrieved.

  “The magician told me she’s a ship. Maybe she’s both. But anyway, I’m supposed to take care of her.”

  “How do you expect to take care of a plane you think is a ship?” The pilot stepped aside to let the first mate climb aboard, and all the while, the Governor worried the cuff links of his posh suit jacket the way his lip worried against his teeth.

  Teddy asked, “Can the ship get us home once you’ve fixed it?”

  Ichigawa, followed by Dominia, stooped to investigate the instrument panel of the cockpit. “I guess so… To be honest, I’m not sure what the magician expects me to do.”

  “Had you ever met him before?” the General asked while the sailor settled into Farhad’s vacant seat. As Tenchi bent forward to better read the labels of the panel, the martyr rested her hand a few centimeters above it to illuminate the text. “In real life, before the Ergosphere?”

  “Iie…he met me here, as soon as I came. I followed your—” The little man winced before continuing with a sigh. “I just did what I was supposed to do, to come here. When Earth disappeared, there he was with his red waistcoat.”

  That was Valentinian, all right. “But what about your cousin? What about the airport, Tenchi? Didn’t you catch a flight like we discussed?”

  “Well…I really think you should talk to the magician.”

  Before she could press him further, Farhad called from outside the craft, “There is no damage to the hull, Mahdi. I cannot see well, but I’ve touched where the damage should be—nothing.” The plane’s surface reverberated with the knock of his fist. “Hear? Solid.”

  “That’s because it’s the soul of the plane,” she answered, which made Tenchi look up in some surprise.

  “Soul…”

  “Didn’t the magician explain anything about this place to you?” she asked him, which elicited the shocking reply, “Oh, of course! We’ve had three whole days to talk.”

  This wasn’t her Tenchi. Not the Tenchi at the dim sum restaurant. This was the Tenchi of the future. Three days in the Ergosphere was closer to three weeks on Earth. Something happened between the restaurant and the sailor’s entry into that other space: something that had caused him to become a Lazarene, brave the Void, and meet the martyr saint of death.

  Dominia didn’t like that one single bit. But she had to pretend she hadn’t copped to anything as the cheerful little man clarified, “It was just strange, that’s all. I wasn’t sure what he expected of me… I can do some basic mechanical things, but to fix a whole ship by myself? In a place like this? But he just kept telling me, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get it when the time comes! You’ve got a vivid imagination. That’s all you need to speak to the soul of a ship.’”

  Hands sliding over the instrument panel, Tenchi said, “I still don’t understand what he meant. But if this is the ship’s soul…why won’t she work?”

  “We can’t figure it out. This is the fourth craft we’ve lost to the Ergosphere. Have you seen one of these before?”

  He shook his head. “I never got to see the things we engineered…not my department. But it bothers me! Why make a plane, a jet, that looks like a submarine?”

  “Well, we did technically crash into the Atlantic Ocean, or come
close to it before entering the Void. And, as the Lady says, Her darkness and Her waters are all one in the same.” Dominia watched nervous Teddy ease down the stairs and gingerly lower the toe of his shoe to the dark ground. “Not that it matters here. Anyway, the E4 is built like that for reasons of stealth and speed; it’s like its own entry point teleporter, and designed to whip to its end point.”

  “So it’s meant to travel into this place.”

  “Not really…more to pass through it, like a tunnel. The ones that enter this place stay here, because we can’t figure out how to get them out. An electromagnetic failure.” She frowned, arms folding, and thought of her own electromagnetic field, which was not absent, but so barely visible in the glow from her speech that one couldn’t possibly see it unless one looked for it. “Valentinian and Lazarus taught me that souls in this place are electromagnetic energies, essentially… Maybe that’s why the craft doesn’t have the ability to function. Because it has no consciousness, therefore, it has no soul.”

  “What? No consciousness?” The sailor almost laughed at her, but he caught himself and said, “You Westerners! I always forget…what a stagnant world you inhabit.”

  Everybody knew more about spirituality than she did—even Tenchi! As he went on to say, “Shinto reveals that everything has consciousness. I guess it’s not fair to say Easterners only believe that…after all, that’s what alchemy is, right? Crazy old guys talking to the spirits of molten metals. But that’s not so crazy. We call them ‘kami’ in Japan, these spirits, these energies…”

  “Thoughtforms,” Dominia almost said; but as she opened her mouth, the body of the craft rumbled and groaned, then fell silent once again. The sailor laughed in surprise. “See? She’s a living thing like any other spirit in this world…all made by the same deity. Maybe that’s why I’ve been so afraid to come here! I knew I wouldn’t be able to see the world the same way. Not ever again.”