The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  “Look!” The word was expressed as a hiss while she wheeled on him, having barely fought the impulse to clutch the lapels of his jacket and crack his nose with her skull. “You want to have this fight with me right now? No problem. I loved Cassandra. I did everything I did because I loved Cassandra. What she did to herself was a calculated decision to hurt me. If anybody was cruel, it was her. Right?” On turning to the Lady, Dominia was deflated by the multi-woman’s cold appraisal.

  There is no conscious being without fault in the world of the Hierophant. The Lady was polite enough to refrain from offending the General, who deserved to be offended. The difficulty is not in having faults, or even in their improvement, but in their admission.

  There was the old motherfucker with his Shakespeare: “‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’”

  “I can admit my faults,” the General insisted, pained, drowning in her own arguments and sorry self-denial. “I can admit everything I did while in my Father’s service. I orchestrated genocide. I didn’t even do it, myself. I stood like a coward in the shadows, where I helped suggest and design a calculated effort to eliminate undesirables in the human race while trying to attract new, other undesirables for future food. But I only did this because of the values he instilled in me.”

  What else have you done as a result of what you were taught was acceptable?

  The General’s throat closed as if in allergic reaction to the truth. She turned her blinking eye to the light-bled sky, avoided her Father’s gaze, hurried her pace. “I did what I had to do. I did what I had to do for my family, and for my species, and for my own sanity. I did what I had to do for my wife.”

  “You did it, also, to hurt her,” suggested her Father. “Even if only slightly.”

  That did it. She couldn’t stand it anymore. “And I’m sorry,” she blurted, eye squeezing shut at a sudden flicker of Cassandra’s face across her imagination. Flushed with the pleasure of love, stained with the tears of loss, lifting from the toilet bowl that fateful night after their marriage. That night when it was too late to do anything about the reality of the situation. Too late for Dominia to change her mind. “Yes,” the General admitted in the thick silence of the Ergosphere, despite her stinging throat, “I’m sorry. Yes, I did.”

  She did. She put her wife to bed and left her, ostensibly to go out for some wine. Instead, she chartered her private jet to take her home to Europa, and went directly to Venezia’s small but beautiful palazzo. The refuge’s lease was awarded to her after her some long-forgotten victory when she was about Theodore’s age, and would almost never be visited after the following nine months. After that, it was forever tied to the discovery of Cassandra’s pregnancy.

  A car waited for her at the airport, having been alerted to her arrival. Would she be staying long? She didn’t know. She wasn’t even sure what she was doing there. She had nothing to say to the driver. She had nothing to say to anyone. The car took Dominia directly to that old property where she discovered who else but her Father. She didn’t mind. It was, ultimately, his domicile.

  “What a pleasant surprise.” He looked up from where he sat reading in the parlor of her master apartment, his voice so full of pleasure it could only be described as a crow. “Is Cassandra awake, a martyr at last? Have you and she decided to honeymoon here? I shall be out by midnight, my girl.”

  Just listen to him talk. She slipped her keys into her suit pocket and sat across from him, in the high-backed chair by the empty Renaissance-era fireplace she studied for a long time—such a long time—before saying anything at all. Then, perhaps because of some particularly empty set of cherub eyes gazing out at her, the General scorned the barren stone mantle and said to the Hierophant, “Cassandra was pregnant.”

  He did not speak. Did not even move, the book still resting upon his knee with his hand upon its cover. She had a need to fill the silence, much as she wished she could fill that vile hollow that opened in her chest to comprehend this betrayal. “I’m not sure what to do.”

  “We will do everything we can to support her, of course,” had been the Father’s answer. Dominia studied him, expression bleak.

  “She’s very sick.”

  “She will survive.”

  “Will the baby?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “Do you wish it were otherwise?”

  Her lips pressed thin, the General said at a dark octave, “I wish this wasn’t a problem.”

  “New life is never a ‘problem.’ My girl”—his tone took a dangerous turn of its own as he rose, the book in his massive hand revealing itself as a copy of Divina Commedia as he meandered around the coffee table—“I hope you are not suggesting what I think you are suggesting. Termination is one thing for a mere human—but for a martyr?”

  “I don’t know what I’m suggesting.” Though unruffled by his approach or the danger in his tone, which seemed in that instant an almost welcome threat, she remained still as black marble Juno, gazing with empty eyes up at the book he rested on the mantle. “I just wish this hadn’t happened. If I had known—”

  “If you had known, you would have waited to martyr her, and martyred the child when it was old enough, yes? A happy family.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want children. I’ve never wanted children—never wanted to do that to a child. Force it to be in this world.”

  Shaking his head, the Hierophant said, “Yet, how I wish it were otherwise! I so long to be a grandfather again. You’ve denied me for too many centuries.”

  “Would you settle for being a Father again?”

  She had meant it as a joke, maybe. At least, that was what she told herself over and over through the years. Joke or not, the second the suggestion left her lips, it was too late. All that mirth in his eyes. He had waited for this moment—had known before Dominia presented him with Cassandra that this was how things ended up. How Dominia hated him for letting it get this far! Her love was a ploy to him. A means to acquire the new child he wanted. And not just a new child. A child born a martyr, rather than martyred in life.

  After finding his quiet daughter sufficiently deferent to his soft-spoken threats, the Hierophant strolled to the bar to pour them both drinks. “Do you know, my girl, the true joy of parenting? It is the shaping of not just an individual but of a new generation: the future of a species. The trouble with being a martyr is that parenting is difficult—often traumatic for the child. But what a wonderful world it would be if our race could propagate the same as any other! How much suffering could be saved if the protein did not wreak havoc on the reproductive cells of the body, and we could produce live children.”

  With two glasses of burgundy wine, he returned to pass her one. “Most pregnant women would never knowingly be martyred. Those in a position to be martyred are not often in a position to be pregnant or are not interested in such things. My own legal restriction on the martyring of pregnant women is one of—well, it does rather pose me a problem, does it not? I am used to reviewing the martyring of children, or I was before our effort at population expansion these past few decades. We are a highly selective breed. And, frankly, the majority of martyr pregnancies will certainly end in the death of both mother and baby. The amount of nutrition required to maintain both is untenable. Trust me, I have studied this subject. But it is possible to maintain the child to birth. And what is possible, to even a narrow degree, our good Lamb can make reality. He could turn the odds in favor of mother and baby; and being given as they would round-the-clock medical care with attention and techniques far in advance of public technologies available at present…imagine the possibilities.”

  “Why is this so important to you?”

  “She must be no more than five or six months into her pregnancy—you met her in July, and we’re in September now, so she must have conceived long enough before your meeting for her to have known.”

  “She told me she’s five months.”

  “A
h…so just before your trouble at Nogales, give or take a few weeks. Very interesting.” Acting like he didn’t know, as always. She hated him twice as much in memory! But in that moment, what he proposed next was so extraordinary that she simply couldn’t feel anything, let alone hatred. “If the infant is a girl, her ovaries will be developed by now, but her eggs may not be complete. Lamb be willing…”

  “You think the baby would be born fertile.”

  “I’m certain of it. The transition sterilizes a martyr because of the death process the body undergoes between their human and martyr existence; normal functions of puberty in a prepubescent are aborted and replicated by the protein, which cannot replicate healthy reproductive cells and cannot, therefore, generate novel life. But when the protein is introduced in the womb, it presents a unique opportunity in the appropriate circumstances, with the right medical care and a mother who can survive to term. In such a theoretical case, the protein is like a third parent. The sperm, the egg, and the protein make equal, early contributions to the fetus, the shock of the death is lessened, and prepubescent functions are uninterrupted. Was Cassandra deceased long?” At the shake of Dominia’s head, he continued his thought. “With a child in the womb, there is a longer, enforced incubation period in which the protein can make improvements, and more resources to improve with—Cassandra’s resources.”

  Staring out into space, the wine staining her lips more opaque with each sip, the General said, “She lied to me.”

  “She did not know what else to do,” was her Father’s gentle assurance.

  “Will you help me, really? She can’t ever know about this. Can’t know that you’re responsible for this.”

  “You are responsible for this, my girl. But she will not know. At the opportune time, we will make it all seem very believable that her baby has died. This will not be difficult to mimic. The protein will take advantage of the baby’s state of un-life and alter much, causing many physical problems until she is completely developed. But however difficult it is, when the moment of delivery comes, the infant will be out of your hands before poor Cassandra has even had a chance to think about what happened. Why, I’m even feeling inclined to offer you a promotion for bringing all this to me up front. I so value your honesty, Dominia.”

  “And how will you keep her from figuring out your new kid is hers?”

  “Oh, we’ll concoct something. Will she have time to think of such things as the new Sponsa Prima of the United Front? As I said, there will be complications in the process, and the child will need be hidden from the public eye for some time. By the time our people become aware of the new Family member, Cassandra will have long convinced herself that her child died. She won’t connect the two.”

  “Do you think she’s stupid?”

  “Of course not—but do you realize how paranoid she would have to be to believe the truth?”

  After finishing her wine, Dominia took a second bottle and returned by the same jet on which she’d left. Maybe on her departure she’d intended to leave Cassandra for good, but now she returned with a better alternative and gentler face, her fury having been purged by the time her wife awoke after a long, dense, coma-like slumber.

  “We’ll get through this,” Dominia swore, smoothing her wife’s golden waves. “I promise. We’ll get through this together, Cassandra.”

  By the time the General was freed from the shameful memory that she had ignored and denied for almost a hundred years, it seemed that the Hierophant and Lady had both left her. Both, surely, had business to attend to in reality; and both, surely, knew that she drew near New Elsinore. She had traveled days while plunged in those awful thoughts. Somehow, it didn’t alarm her; perhaps because she had no emotional energy left after reviewing that terrible meeting.

  Above her, the black sun had vanished from sight. The tangles of red thread were far more numerous, and she wondered if this was not a result of the livestream of the execution. Vultures tuning in to watch poor Tenchi die.

  Good. She wanted an audience.

  The strings she followed converged at the reflection in the Void of that physical point in space-time that concerned the psyches and phones of so many across the globe. With a chill, Dominia plucked the heart of the threads, and saw uncountable news broadcasts all discussing the same thing: Cicero’s demand that the Governor of the United Front be returned, with Tenchi’s life at stake. First Mate Tenchi Ichigawa, the terrorist.

  More like Tenchi, the good-natured sailor who had never done anything wrong—who had encountered Dominia at the start of her journey and been a friendly, generous, albeit cowardly little fellow. A purehearted and sweet enough man that he could even bond with an inanimate ship, and render it animate. This was a man who did not deserve to die for any so-called cause.

  Closing her eyes, Dominia focused on the strings beneath her hands, and spoke that True Word for “reality.”

  This method was never any less disorienting than her trip through space had been. Particularly not this time, as the black Void submitted to the image of reality that she had half seen replicated in the news broadcasts reflected by the threads. A New Elsinore court building, full to the brim with reporters: with Cicero and the Lamb, and, most of all, Tenchi, who let out a tearful cry of absolute joy as the General tore the vial of Lazarus’s blood from her throat, shattered it against the desk where the prisoner awaited his fate, then sprang across to wipe her bloodstained fingers over Tenchi’s mouth.

  “Drink the blood, Tenchi,” she urged amid Cicero’s shouts that the guards, already moving in, needed control of Dominia before she hurt one of the screaming reporters. “Drink the blood, and when you end up in the Ergosphere, walk east until you meet the magician!”

  “What are you talking about?” he said, instinctively licking his lips at the moment massive hands claimed the General’s arms and gun barrels were pushed against her head. She laughed all the same to know that Tenchi was saved, and lifted her gaze to find one intrepid reporter whose cameraman still filmed from where they cowered in the corner. Too devoted to the story of a lifetime to worry how long that lifetime would be, it seemed.

  “I am the terrorist Dominia di Mephitoli,” she said, grinning in defiance as her face was forced to the table and her wrists, cloistered by the tight snap of electrified cuffs, “and I’ve come here tonight to surrender.”

  VI

  Jiggety-Jig

  On waking in her old Kronborg bedchambers, the first thought to cross Dominia’s mind was one of suicide—but the window had been left unlocked, so she supposed her Father hoped for the possibility. Not an option. After sitting up, she absorbed her second conscious element of the room: the bar, fresh-stocked with a panoply of spirits all artfully topped with a cheerful plum ribbon whose attached tag read “Welcome Home.”

  The third action of the homecome General was the defenestration of most bottles out the unbarred window and into the snowy gardens below, followed by the emptying of another—with a regretful whiff of wasted whiskey—into the roots of some hapless shrub too far beneath to be seen. A brusque knock upon the door attracted her attention as she turned for another. On her call of admission (in Mephitolian, the dominant language of her speech for the rest of that life on Earth), the Lamb stepped inside, a thin smile beneath his close-clipped beard.

  “Making yourself at home, I see.”

  “Good night to you, too, Rabbi. I’ve come to the conclusion I have sort of a drinking problem.” She hefted the nearest vessel of rum. “Want some?”

  “This early in the evening? Please, as big a glass as you have.” The General permitted herself the luxury of laughter and turned to pour her gentler parent a glass. He, arms folded, asked, “How was the…uh, flight over? Devolving from New Elsinore to Old…”

  “Fine. The men Cicero assigned to accompany me only smelled a little nervous, from what I could tell through the muzzle. At least they were polite. How was yours?”

  “Cushy.” Accepting the drink, the Lamb lowered his ram-hor
ned head to sniff the glass’s contents. “Suppose you want to know about your friend.”

  “He’s still alive, right?” Not that it mattered, him having had the blood, and her having seen his future spirit. One way or another, he was in the Ergosphere, and that would be true even if he’d been killed on Earth. That said, the thought of Tenchi’s bodily death devastated her. Luckily, the Lamb nodded.

  “Yeah—Cicero kept his word. You came back. Didn’t bring Teddy with you, but execution’s still off. Although—I’m sure you know this—it’s mostly your Father’s doing that stayed his hand. Cicero would love to slaughter everybody who’s ever called themselves your friend after that whole marathon thing.”

  “I was stressed at the time.” She jutted her chin in the direction of the door. “So, what’s the deal? Am I under house arrest, or…”

  “What do you think?”

  “Of course not. Free to come and go as I please.”

  “I’m pretty sure he’s having a car delivered for you today. Maybe tomorrow.”

  The snorting General studied the bedroom in which she’d finally parted ways with those cagey guards following about twenty-four hours’ worth of check-in, transportation, and checkout. Had she not administered such hasty captures and deliveries, herself, she would have been disoriented, but to be fair, the bedrooms in Kronborg were disorienting enough on their own. She had always disliked the castle’s style of placing its beds so they floated in the center of the floor, rather than standing with the support of a sensible wall. This was a problem with most of their estates, which, aside from a few modifications and the odd added balcony or torture chamber, were fussily maintained in their “proper” condition. Kronborg was the exception in its architecture—whole wings had been added to the castle with the Hierophant’s cautious oversight—but the added rooms could have passed for original parts of the building, so carefully they had been furnished. She didn’t see why it mattered where the damn bed went, or how the furniture looked. With a palace like Versailles, she could understand, but Kronberg’s design had always been more forgiving. Surely the bed could be put in a more comfortable position.