by M F Sullivan
Lord love the Lamb, but she was already thinking about the place like she’d moved in to stay. Time to get Lavinia and get the fuck out.
“I’m glad to see you,” the Lamb said, snapping her from thoughts he knew like his own. “But do you think it was the right thing to come back now?”
This room was no doubt as bugged as any other in the castle, with the Lamb two parts concerned Family member and one part sorry pawn. He may well have come to visit her of his own volition, but more likely he’d been sent to butter her up. That was the way things had been ever since she was a kid. Good cop/bad cop didn’t even begin to cover dealing with the Lamb and Cicero. No matter how friendly the Lamb may have been to her cause, she could say nothing incriminating of herself, the Lady, or her intention to assist Lavinia. But even if she shared no information, interactions with her Family members could be perilous to her resolve.
In the many histories of infinite universes, the General must have defected a litany of times for a laundry list of reasons, none of which she knew. This meant the Hierophant also knew of the possibilities and may even have known a few of the concrete ways she defected before—which meant she could pretend she was open to the possibility of returning home for good, as long as she didn’t come on too strong.
The best solution was, as usual, a concoction of lie and reality. “I couldn’t imagine what else to do,” she said with a shrug. “I looked at myself and said, ‘What am I doing?’” This was true. “I couldn’t keep treading water out there. Just waiting for…something. I haven’t felt myself at all lately. Then when I heard about Tenchi…it seemed like it was time to come back.”
“Tired of waiting for the sky to collapse.” The Lamb observed the open window through the murky glass of his drink. “Why sit around when you can collapse it, yourself?”
Best not to answer loaded questions, even from semi-sympathetic mouths. After two millennia of being beaten down by Cicero and the Hierophant, the Lamb was ultimately worth about as much as one of his own dogs. Speaking of: “Add any new animals to the collection since last year?”
“Oh, always a couple…you know how it is.”
Yes, she did. The Lamb had a sensitive heart. He couldn’t bear to leave abandoned the pets of those humans unlucky enough to attend a martyrs’ Mass. Most relocated pets adjusted to their new homes with little problem. Dogs, and especially cats, forgave even homicide given sufficient food and affection. Could the same be said of God?
“Your Father would like to see you, when you get a moment.” With one last bob of his throat, the Lamb drained the glass, set it at the edge of the emptied bar, and retraced his steps to the door. “I wouldn’t have bothered you if he hadn’t asked me to tell you that…not that I don’t want to see you, but I’m sure you want some time alone.”
The General offered a wan smile. “It’s not that I don’t want to see you, either.”
She caught the barest edge of his upturned mouth as he shut the door. Alone, the General consulted her reflection in the vanity across from that oddly centered bed. No matter how often she studied it in reality, the vision of her body never aligned with what she pictured in her head, or how she appeared when wandering around in the Void—the Ergosphere. (Cogito, ergo…) Yes, she could shower in a downright glorious bathroom of which Hamlet never dreamed, could dress in one of the crisp white shirts and black suit pants stocked in the closet, could smooth back her hair and comb pomade through its dark strands until she looked like the bureaucrat she’d become after the army; but she felt forever her leather jacket, her flowing black hair, the phantom cup of a patch against her shut right eye. This person who she truly was felt like a great secret within her. Some source of power from which she could never be separated. The only consistency between these two selves was Cassandra’s diamond. Her little wife who was with her in the Ergosphere and remained with her outside it—even if that wife could not be said to know.
It was that diamond that put her friends on her mind as she strode down the great checkerboard halls (not unlike her Father’s dream study), past courtiers, servants, and a few human slaves. All of them marveled and whispered to see Dominia again. Now that she considered it, it had been some months since she’d spent any prolonged time in Kronborg. When she visited it in the wake of Cassandra’s death, she’d hardly been of mind to take in her surroundings. Now alert, it was revealed to her that in the time she’d spent living and working in the United Front, the fashion of the castle women had grown stuffier than ever. An elaboration of petticoats and bustiers rendered most female specimen more akin to walking umbrellas in the midst of a windstorm than the sleek beings Dominia so loved. Meanwhile, men’s fashion had remained the same over the past hundred years—save the number of breasts given a suit, or whether items such as hats and capes were “in.” Seemed like “in” for short capes, “out” for hats. Easy. Was it any wonder the General preferred a more masculine fashion sense, even with long hair? Life was less complicated in a button-up shirt.
Of course, the explosion of suffocating fabrics for women was due in large part to the influence of one particular fashion maven, who was only a maven because no one dared tell her no. This same unqualified influencer dashed around a distant corner with such a furious tap-tap-tap of slippers—of both herself and her bevy of attendants—that Dominia fancied a small army of gazelles charged down the hall. It was only Lavinia, who, on seeing her older sister from across the distant moonlit path, let her great black skirts fall swishing around her feet so as to clasp her hands over her heart and cry, “Oh, Ninny!”
“Lavinia,” said the General, bracing herself much as she would while in the presence of the Lamb’s dogs. Lavinia hurtled down the hall and threw herself, weeping, into Dominia’s arms with such force that the slim girl might have bowled her over amid the added weight of all those petticoats.
“Ninny! Ninny, I’ve been so worried about you! Oh, I’m so happy you’re home! Where are you going? We have to talk! Were you scared?”
Hard to answer twenty questions at once. She settled for two. “Father wants to see me. I was never in any real danger.” Simpler to lie on that last bit than to point out that Lavinia’s beloved “Daddy” was responsible for most—or all—of the danger in which Dominia had been put. Bad personal choices aside.
Granted, were her choices all that bad? Looking at Lavinia’s tearful face, the General couldn’t help but think there was no possibility for her sister’s life to have gone another way. Would the Hierophant have allowed Cassandra to keep the child, had Dominia not donated her to him? Would that have been all the more traumatic for her little wife? Hadn’t this been the better choice?
“Ninny,” said Lavinia, “you’re frowning! You’ve got that little line you get in your forehead. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter, Lavinia. I’ve just been more worried about you than you’ve been about me, that’s all. And I’m still worried about you.”
“Worried about me, silly!” As the Princess of Europa tittered, so did the coterie hired to shield her from loneliness—and perhaps, Dominia now realized, shield her from knowledge of her own fertile body. Two of the gutless harpies hid behind their fans while a third, attractive one, made brazen eye contact with the General. “Why would anyone worry about me! I’m the most spoiled girl on Earth.”
At least she was sort of in touch with reality. Dominia forced a smile. “I guess I was worried about you, worrying for me.”
“Oh, that’s silly.” With a sudden fox-sly look about and a dropping of her voice, Lavinia leaned in to ask, “Do you have to go see Daddy right now?”
“I better get it over with, don’t you think?”
In an adorable moue of concern that resembled a dilution of Cassandra’s soft features, the girl nibbled the edge of her lip, then replaced her lip with the pink tip of her gloved thumb as she gazed through the hall-length windows. Rather than acknowledge what may come of the meeting with her Father, Dominia would have opted to continue co
ntemplating dreamy Elsinore’s old world—frosted with snow like this, the town looked to the General like a movie set. She’d been here in summer many times, but she only ever pictured it in winter. Happy and peaceful times, winter. Reality insisted on intruding, much as Lavinia insisted on disrupting her thoughts with the urgent whisper, “Won’t he be very angry with you, Ninny?”
She laughed. “That’s your second understatement after assuming you’re the most spoiled girl on Earth and not the most spoiled girl in this universe—and every other.”
“I suppose I’m more spoiled than anyone on Mars. But you’re trying to distract me! Don’t you think you should come and spend time with me before you see Daddy?”
With a brief spell of nausea, the General eyed her adopted sister. “Do you know something I don’t, Lavinia? He’s not planning to execute me or anything, is he?”
“Oh, of course not! I hope not— Ninny, Daddy would never do that. At least, not since you came home.” With her silk-enclosed hands fidgeting anxiously before her, Lavinia glanced once more out the window. “Can’t I at least walk you to his office,” she insisted.
It came to the General then. This was the worry of a little girl for her older sister’s emotions. She was afraid that Dominia was secretly afraid, and trying to be brave. In all fairness…for Lavinia’s sake, the General manufactured a smile and squeezed her gloved hand.
“Sure. You can walk with me.”
The Princess of Europa’s expression flipped in an instant, and she turned to her followers. “Why don’t you girls run along and, oh, I don’t know…amuse each other somehow!” While Dominia coughed at Lavinia’s innocent choice of words and tried to keep her mind from inappropriate territory, the princess waved away her pretty friends as if shooing birds from window boxes. “I haven’t time for you now, please! I must be alone with my sister.”
“Is it safe for you to be alone with her, Your Majesty?” asked that girl who had eyed the General for reasons Dominia’s ego mistook as attraction. Lavinia wheeled on this servant with a sharply narrowed gaze.
“Does my Daddy pay you to second-guess my decisions, or does he pay you to be my friend?” (Slave, Dominia mentally corrected.) “Run along now! I’ll fetch you somehow when you’re wanted.”
Or put up a big, bratty fuss when they weren’t telepathically where she expected them at the exact second she arbitrarily wanted their company again. Though aware of this fact as Dominia was, the girls obediently hurried away in a bustle of whispers—and one furtive glance from that scrutinizing one. Outside the occasional passing courtier going for an evening constitutional around the castle, the women were now alone, and Lavinia became a chatterbox. Oh, she had missed Dominia! She had cried for nights after that awful business in Kabul, but the General didn’t need to worry because Lavinia had already forgiven her. Although Cicero—well, Cicero was another matter. He was very cross. But that was just like him, wasn’t it? Not that he had ever been cross with Lavinia all that much, but, why, she had seen how he could be, and she had certainly seen how he was after all that business with his eye. Now, just why did Dominia do that, at any rate? Didn’t she know the Golden Rule? Daddy’s testament? “Do unto martyrs as you would have them do unto you”? Remember, Ninny? Ninny? Remember that?
“You know,” said Dominia through a strained smile, “for some reason, I’ve always been bad at that one.”
T(he)i(r) talking paused outside the door of the Hierophant’s office, outrageously oversize and set at the end of the most strategically imposing hallway in any of his properties. Of significant length, its walls were decorated by tapestries that, one per century, detailed the Hierophant’s various conquests and cultural developments. From his early years on Earth dancing between the Russian Federation and the North American Empire of the United States, through the persecution and emergence of the martyr people, past the colonization of Mars, and to the present day. The most recent three contributions prominently featured Dominia’s many bloody victories with increasing prominence, until the Battle for the Reclamation of Mexico formed the centerpiece of the latest. It had been commissioned and produced to be ready for the turn of the century, and was revealed on New Year’s Day of 1997 AL, two years earlier than its standard due. When asked at the time, her Father had cheerfully responded he’d “wanted to get a hop on things.” Now, the General understood he had wanted it here for this moment. To remind her all she’d done in his name. His psychological cruelty never lacked in detail.
From within the office drifted the eerie sound of music—what else but Mozart’s Requiem. With a nervous look for the General, Lavinia pressed again: “You’re sure you really have to see him now?”
“It’s now or later… I’d rather get it over with.”
“Will you come see me after, Ninny, and tell me what happened? I’m afraid. Daddy’s so frightful when he’s cross!”
“Surely he hasn’t had many reasons to be cross with you,” said Dominia, who now studied her sister’s expression in search of some truth she knew not what. Lavinia’s eyes dropped from the General’s face, and the girl turned back the way they’d come.
“I can’t be good all the time, Ninny. Goodness! I’m a saint, not God. But, oh, Ninny—” The girl frowned and fussed a moment, then darted back to plant a kiss on Dominia’s cheek before she once more hurried down the hall. “I’ve missed you, I want you to be here! Please don’t give him a reason to lock you up, or—oh, just don’t.”
“I’ll try not to.” The General squeezed out one last laugh, watching her sister go, before turning her attention back to the towering door. With a deep breath that came in time with the voice of Tuba mirum’s tenor, Dominia knocked its ivory-inlaid surface.
“Entrez,” rang his pretentious reply. Steadying herself, she pushed open that great portal with both hands to find the Hierophant writing at his gilded desk with the fire crackling soft (and normal) in its marble place. Cicero, in one of two leather seats across from him, turned both his good eye and the rolling black one against this intruder to his appeal, then froze. His organic pupil dilated while the red one bloomed eerily within his DIOX-I.
“Dominia,” acknowledged her curt brother, implied uncle, and least favorite Family member. She shut the door behind her and the Hierophant, in tone far more joyous, also called, “Ah, my Dominia!” and sprang from his seat to embrace her whether she wanted it or not. “My girl, my girl, my poor prodigal daughter”—she thought of the Lady, grimacing in his embrace, and hoped he couldn’t read her thoughts here while he stood in the flesh—“mere words are not sufficient to relay my true relief. You’re home! My dearest daughter is home, at last. I have spent every second of this year pining for your return.”
“Good to see you, too,” the General said, glancing but once at Cicero. She, for one, was glad to pretend she hadn’t seen the Holy Father since last September’s marathon. His immediate uptake of the charade was tacit reinforcement of his prior reassurance that El Sacerdote knew nothing of the Ergosphere, or the true nature of Lazarene blood. As he released her from his hug and she suffered his kiss upon her cheek, she marveled to see he’d even worked up a watery eye. Bravo. “I’m sort of surprised I’m allowed to wander around here, after all that’s happened.”
“As am I,” muttered Cicero, turning his attention to the window behind the Hierophant’s deserted wingback chair. “I hope the bruises from your acquisition last night have disappeared, sister.”
“More or less,” she assured him, glancing at her wrists, then studying that same empty seat. “Hope you’re getting used to your cyborgan, ‘brother.’”
Said eye whirled in her direction as the Hierophant, tutting, hid his smile on the way to reclaim his chair. Dominia remained in place by the door. “Now, children—this is why I brought you both here for this conversation. I’m sure after all the sordid business of the past year, there’s nothing you would both like better than to ignore one another completely!”
Cicero, passive-aggressive as a cat
, folded his hands and turned his face toward a bookshelf. “‘Ignoring’ is not on the list of things I would do to my sister, Father, if I had my way.”
“So we’re talking about each other like the other one’s not in the room?” Cicero deigned to shoot her a dirty look while she continued, “Because if so, ‘Dad,’ I know a real douchebag with an over-waxed moustache, and—”
The Hierophant snapped his fingers until she stopped. “The same as it ever was, I see. My goodness—how long it takes carbon lifeforms to grow up! I am still engaged in the process, myself.” With that twinkle about his eye, the Hierophant straightened the pages before him and set them neatly aside. “With dear Dominia, the odd immature moment is more understandable, at least from my perspective—although you are well over three hundred, my dear. Far too old for these shocking displays of immaturity. We will discuss that in time. But so far as you are concerned, dear Cicero—”
With his brows lifted in a way that mirrored the shocked arch of Cicero’s, the Hierophant wagged his finger. “You are the most powerful priest in all my Church, aside, of course, from myself. Old as your brother, the Lamb, at two thousand! Yet, how easily you submit to the very human flaw of wrath! Too long you’ve held this grudge, this loss of your eye. How very many classic passages could either of us quote on this very topic? Each more on the nose than the last! ‘Turn the other cheek,’ ‘an eye for an eye’”—he glanced at Dominia—“although that second is better advice for you. Won’t you sit?”
Once Cicero scooted his chair as far left as the unsubtle squeaks of its stubby legs allowed, Dominia filled the vacant seat. The Hierophant folded his hands after favoring his children with an approving smile.
“There. It’s so nice to have the Family back together again, don’t you think?”
“I just saw Lavinia,” said the General, licking her dry lips. “I’ve missed her. It was good to see her again. It’s good to be welcomed back by somebody who cared that I was gone.”
