by M F Sullivan
“Please.” She glanced at her companions. “Don’t tell them. I don’t think they’d respect me anymore.”
“Dominia…I had no idea you had it in you.”
She managed her grimmest smile, which left her eye untouched. “Neither did I, until it was all over.”
“No wonder…no wonder.” Frowning, Theodore shook his head, and looked at Dominia without a hint of his usual clownishness. She’d never seen him so serious, in fact, and it almost worried her as he stood in contemplative silence for an uncountable time.
“You know,” he decided at last, “I don’t think I’ve ever had what it takes to be a martyr.”
“Very few people do.”
“But you do.”
“Yes. I wish I could say I ‘did,’ and that the person I was then was a totally different person from who I am now, but…I have to bear responsibility for my own sins.” With a glance toward the E4, then up to the black sun illuminating the darkness, Dominia realized that sun also illuminated something new in that darkness. Beyond and through and within her compass glowed neon threads: thin jet-stream lasers that, thinner than strands of silk, were suspended in the air and seemed, at certain points, gathered in clusters. As she noted these and became amazed, new ones appeared, and others faded. Violet was the color of these new threads, rather than the gentle cerulean of the ones prior. The astonished General looked all around herself, and as Teddy asked, “What is it?” she grew sure he could not see them.
“I don’t know.” With a delicate touch, she stroked a lavender thread that inspired a fascinating flash of understanding. Namely, that the threads represented digital data. All the information one might retrieve about an electronic device—from its location based on its IP address to its purpose to its user’s name—could be divined at the tap of a thread. How easy such a thing might make navigating one’s way across the Ergosphere! Retrieving information! This, or some variation of it, was surely how Lazarus and Valentinian found their ways across this space more precisely than by their warping compasses. Some artifact of her dream-epiphany—if it had been a dream at all. Perhaps if she had dreamed of the True Words while staying in the Void, she might have retained the memories of those dreams, too. She regretted she hadn’t.
She was more uncertain of dreams all the time. That moment more than any seemed to indicate dreams may well have been closer to reality than she’d have cared to think, as Tenchi’s sudden cry pierced the air. Both martyrs leapt to immediate defense, Dominia out of instinct and her brother out of terror, but both soon recognized the sound as excitement.
“Yatta! Wakarimasu, oh—oh, I get it, okay—”
Then the air rumbled with the life of the aircraft: no more the stuttering on and off of yesterday’s brief efforts, but the prolonged rumble of a plane ready for takeoff. Floored, the General darted to the jet’s other side, past her stirring companions, and called to the wide-eyed first mate. “Tenchi! How did you get it working again?”
“I—I don’t— I had a dream. And I learned the name of the ship, it’s—” His words abruptly ended in the manner of someone trying to work a True Word into a sentence, and the lights of the cabin blasted so bright it appeared the BLP might have come back online. As Dominia comprehended in a click, the sailor frowned. “I just said it, but no sound came out.”
“Because, you genius, it’s not just a name. It is the ship.” In wonder, Dominia said, “Say it again,” and watched Tenchi’s face. No hint of movement crossed his mouth, just as no movement might have emerged from Dominia’s while she called up light or fire; yet there was another burst of power in the ship, another groan as if from a living thing. The General laughed and slapped the human on the back.
“Look at you, Tenchi! This is incredible. I understand, now. Any ship coming in or out of the Ergosphere has to be—amphibious, you could call it.”
“Like me, General,” Gethsemane said, sitting up and rubbing her eyes amid all the excitement.
“Yes,” agreed Dominia. “Like you…a physical, earthly thing, imbued with the spirit of a Word…or a Word’s daughter. Bound to the blood of Lazarus, somehow. But how?”
Farhad, who was not as on edge as the veteran martyr but still a high-strung man of war, had determined the commotion that awoke him was not a threat, and now shifted about, consulting the broad bands of an electromagnetic field that quadrupled in size as the airship—or amphibiship—came online. “If it could give a man like Tobias Akachi a soul, why could the blood not impart a spirit to a plane? Allah would not permit a righteous man who loved his ship to be eternally without her, or a pilot who loved his plane, or a rider who loved his camel. The spirit of your gun is here, Mahdi. Perhaps Tenchi was brought here because it was known he would connect to the plane in an…emotional way.”
“Emotional valence,” said the thoughtful General, crossing her arms and regarding both the sailor and the craft. “Personality has to be given to the thing…someone has to think well enough of it long enough to produce its real name. You’re saying its name, Tenchi, though it doesn’t sound like it. You know a True Word, now. Did the Lady come to you in your dream?”
“No,” said the sailor, looking and sounding surprised. “You did.” At Dominia’s start, the sailor continued, “It was so vivid—I thought I was awake! You told me you wanted to talk to me before bed, after everybody settled down. After you started the fire for the night.” An event of which she had no memory, but go on. “We walked off a ways with your light, and then you…started showing me these pictures in my head.”
Frowning, Tenchi touched his forehead and laughed. “It’s funny. It’s not that I’m remembering the name so much as…I have to remember the sequence of pictures you showed me leading up to the name, and then I remember it’s—”
The plane’s radio cranked on, and the disembodied voice of none other than Valentinian carried throughout the amphibiship’s cabin. “—for the weather. Looks like another calm day over the Atlantic Ocean, folks, but ‘calm’ doesn’t mean ‘short,’ so if you have someplace to be and a craft of some kind to travel there in, I’d get along as soon as possible. Never know when conditions will change out there, and especially never know when conditions will change in reality. You’ll know you’ve gone far enough east when your friendly neighborhood magician stops you for the night. And if you’re planning to walk”—Dominia’s ears perked up, her expression remaining neutral even as the eyes of her companions turned to scrutinize her—“then just be glad your Father shot you folks down well before your intended extraction point, or else you’d be in for an even longer march. Thanks for listening: now back to the music.”
Said “music” was just a hissing wave of static. With a frown, Dominia stepped aboard to shut the radio off, then turned to see her friends crowded at the door.
“Are you separating from us, Mahdi?” Farhad stroked his beard before offering, “The men will suppose you a traitor if we return without you. If you are going where I suspect you are.”
“I have to help somebody.” She glanced at Tenchi. The sailor, flushing, lowered his gaze until she looked back at her other friends. “Several somebodies. Lavinia, my sister in Elsinore—she needs me more than you do. I’ve been plagued by that this year, and I need to face it.”
“I wish you wouldn’t go,” Teddy whined while she hopped down from the craft.
“I wish I didn’t have to. But I do.” With brief acknowledgment of the woman who stuttered between, say, half the hair or one of the eyes of the nymph before jolting back to her own features, the General said, “Nobody here needs me much longer, anyhow.”
“No,” said Gethsemane. “But we want you.”
Tender words that took some strength to be spoken from a woman who would put the will of her deity over her own life. It was the will of that deity that had sent Dominia thus—but also the weight of her own guilt. With that in mind, she glanced at Theodore, and asked, “Still want to return to the Family after everything that happened last night?”
>
“Oh, of course not! Get me as far away from him as possible. But…” He studied the humans before saying to his sister, “After what you said to me back there, you’re doing the right thing by going back for her. Somebody needs to.”
“Thank you. Travel safe, everybody. I have to—” Her heart sagged in her chest and the General turned to avoid revealing her sorrow. “I should get going. Don’t want to drag this out.”
Definitely not. She was tired of parting ways with her friends. Once, Miki and Kahlil had left her by way of that cherry-colored rental car. Now both of them were dead, strictly speaking, though she had seen both—Miki’s body, and Kahlil’s spirit—last night, in her dream. “Dream.” What was a dream in this place?
Maybe just a conversation hidden in a private pocket of the universe within the self. Without looking back at the vanishing point of her friends as the humming amphibiship rose under the hands of Farhad and his spiritual copilot (first mate), Dominia set out east and received help from those threads that had overflowed from a recent pocket of hers. The data collapsed, reformed, recolored based on her intention. Each step, she followed not her imprecise compass but the ethereal veins that guided her directly to Tenchi’s execution in America. Three weeks from his capture: this date, implied by the sailor’s testament to walking three days, was confirmed by the threads that contained enormous assortments of information conveniently arranged by humans. How incredible it was! How convenient the mortal development of the Internet made navigating this formless space, which was dark even in daylight!
“It is most convenient,” agreed the voice of her Father, who startled her only slightly as he appeared to her blinded right.
“Where did you come from?”
“I thought I would accompany you, since it seemed to me you could use a friend in a moment like this.”
“A friend, yes. Not you.”
“What better friend have you than I, my daughter?”
She tried not to roll her eyes. “Can’t you just wait for me to come to you? Do you always have to show up to bother me?”
“Then you would be alone with your own thoughts. Far worse than listening to me drone on.” Still smiling, he plucked a metaphysical thread that Dominia could not herself see at that moment, her mind being focused on other matters. “Isn’t it funny how all it takes for us to gain a new power in this place is to notice something? To apply a bit of attention—of consciousness. So much is revealed when we wake up to what has been around us all this time! At any rate, as you were thinking—yes, my dear, the Internet is convenient for mortals. More convenient, still, for those entities that thrive in multiple dimensions. It’s far easier for thoughtforms to enter the human mind when they have the gateway of digital data. All the stuff on your computer is but a physically intelligible form of pure information. To attract a so-called demon once upon a time, one either had to be very sick, or very curious. Now all that attachment requires is the Internet. If I can find any person in the world by studying this stuff long enough, imagine what effects could be had by a thoughtform attracted to some vapid vessel emptied out by a panoply of funny cat pictures and permutations of cartoon frogs.”
Ridiculous. “Are you trying to tell me the Internet is a cause of spiritual or demonic possession?”
“It can be. There are a few other ways for one to be possessed. Think about it—that old classic horror-movie method of reading the wrong grimoire isn’t a far cry from visiting a nefarious website or adopting the nasty predilections of a terroristic chat room. Anytime one gives up control of one’s mind to a concept, that is, strictly speaking, a form of possession: extremist politic groups possess fragile human minds all the time, hence the Hunters and the very UF militias you’ve put down. However, in a place such as this, one is tempted to symbologize the concept—”
“Please!” The General sighed in exasperation. “Please, I just got up and I had a long night.”
“So sorry to hear that, princess. Rest assured, your suffering is soon at its end. With these threads, you can even navigate in the dark, albeit at your own peril. I only mean to say that, even through a digital interface, the mind of the individual is a powerful portal into this place and back. Into the future, and eternity.”
“Did you come here just to pontificate?”
“No, my dear. As I said, I came to keep you from being alone with your treacherous thoughts. Would not want you feeling bad about all this, would we?”
“‘All this’? What’s ‘this’?”
“Why, this business of your running away. Of Cassandra. I think you did the right thing, darling. Doesn’t that matter for anything?”
“Of course you think I did the right thing.” Laying her hand across her forehead as though to physically shield her brain from the onslaught of the Hierophant’s words, she said, “You corrupted me.”
His tone was infinitely calm and inappropriately teasing. “It’s always my fault, isn’t it, Dominia?”
“It is, damn it! It’s your fault that I was martyred! That I turned out this way. I didn’t ask to be martyred. Fuck—I never asked to be born as a human!”
“Didn’t you?”
The General’s mouth opened to silence, then shut in like fashion, and she realized only then that she had, at some point, stopped walking to focus on arguing with her Father. Nonetheless, the black sun continued its dark journey against its indigo backdrop, as though the contents of their conversation (or perhaps the distant journey of her companions) was enough to move that great dot toward its destination, and the end of Tenchi’s life. As she carried on at double pace, she said, “Maybe a past me, my last self, set me up so I could be here, sure. I freely admit that if you ask me right now if I’d do all this again just to be with Cassandra—if that was the only way to be with Cassandra again, I’d do it. But I—the ‘me’ I am right now, with my memories and my choices and my future still open before me—I never asked for any of this. You never had to show up at my parents’ house. You never had to martyr me. Theodore has every right to be pissed at you. Why did you do any of that, if you knew what would happen?”
“Because, my dear girl! I love you.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“Now you’re only hurting my feelings. It’s true.”
“Okay,” she said, trying not to roll her eye as he carried on, “Who could but love such a scrappy cub falling into their arms, ready to fight them to the death! My good, bold girl with such big opinions. I knew your fate and wanted to save you. I wished to give you the immortality of martyrdom because I think it is still possible for you to make the right choice.”
“It’s a false immortality! Martyrs die all the time.”
“You would know.” That ugly little smile! She tried not to bite off her own tongue, particularly as the Lady’s voice emanated from her left periphery.
Waste less time tormenting your daughter. You are the murderer of races, of planets, and of a greater number of humans than even the General.
“Yes,” he said, with that look of cartoonish innocence, “but all those deaths were necessary, if you ask me. Dominia cannot say the same. Therein lies her problem.”
“Are you both real?” she asked sharply, while the two walking behind her carried on with only the Hierophant’s unhelpful, “I imagine I’m as real as she is.”
You, Dominia, are a distinct entity within the Ergosphere, the Lady more helpfully explained. Easy to find. A landmark of your own. It is the energy you exhibit. Space bends around you.
“Me?” she asked, but the Hierophant already carried on. “Since you are so eager to join in on conversations to which you were not invited, O Lady, let me give you context: we were just discussing my concerns that Dominia cannot accept responsibility for her actions and wants, more than anything, to blame the woes of her life upon me.”
“I take responsibility for what I’ve done, but I don’t take responsibility for what you’ve done, or what you’ve made me do.”
“What I’ve made you
do is, strictly speaking, most of what you’ve done, for most of your life.”
No wonder she was such a violent person, as much as she was forced to repress around him! With a twitch of her hand, the General turned her attention toward the Lady. Under the light of so-called day, Her image seemed infinitely more unstable than had Gethsemane’s: it consisted of not just Miki Soto but her red-haired predecessor, and hers, and, and, and, until Dominia looked so deeply into the Lady under the black sun that she saw the first, hefty avatar, whose melanin-dark skin was baked further by the sun and whose body seemed immobile (and who, in retrospect, probably began the tradition of the Lady’s permanent carriage from place to place in the mortal world). Despite her size, this manifestation glided with feminine ease across the frozen waves of the Ergosphere.
Not shown among all the visions was that black entity that had appeared briefly during Miki’s ascension. Dominia realized with an uncanny chill that this was because the being was the substance around them: the black waters of the Lady that contained all forms of data, including the dead, and potentially dead.
“Yes, Dominia,” said the Hierophant, again annoying her with his observation of her thoughts. “All the dead dwell here, though I have never discovered the means by which to contact them. Have you?”
“Why don’t you just dig through my head and find out?”
“I understand that you saw the dead, yet I do not understand the mechanism. But what potential if one could! Why, even bodily resurrection would be possible.”
“Please,” she begged, but he went on.
“I mean it, my girl, I mean it from love for you! Would it not be glorious to bring your Cassandra back into the world? Even after the crime your cruelty forced her to commit against herself?”
“I didn’t force her to do anything. And I wasn’t cruel, either.”
“I’m not certain your wife would agree.”
