The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  “Dominia! Holy shit!”

  Completely forgetting her work, Miki vaulted the desk and greeted her friend with puppyish enthusiasm while Dominia responded in like manner. “Miki,” she cried, “oh, I can’t believe it! You’re really here!”

  “Hell yeah I am! I—hey, you can’t smoke in here!” With a tongue-dampened pair of fingers, Miki pinched the cigarette out before allowing another squeal. “Man, I didn’t know you’d be showing up! Not so soon, anyway. You’ll never believe how great this place is! They gave me a cushy job at the front desk a couple of days a week, and the rest of the time it’s just, like…so chill.”

  It was at this moment that the General realized her friend spoke, as had Tenchi, in perfectly intelligible Japanese. Dominia hadn’t remembered more than five sentences of the language since her wartime assault. Interesting how the Ergosphere made all languages resemble one, while the Kingdom rendered all separate but intelligible. Dominia observed that aloud, leaving out the bit about the Ergosphere.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Miki, clearly “over” that particular feature of living in the Kingdom, “that’s a thing here. I can’t even tell what language the locals speak. It’s this totally different thing like maybe from the future or whatever; I just know I can understand it. But guess what!” Looking ready to burst with excitement, Miki waited, and the General realized belatedly that she was actually expected to guess. It wasn’t hard.

  “You’re a biological woman.”

  “Yes! Dude! Oh my God! You can’t imagine— Here, look—” She was starting to lift her skirt, and Dominia laughed, staying her exhibitionistic hands.

  “That’s fine, it’s fine, I’m sure it’s even better than your very realistic last one…” She squeezed those hands that she still held. “I’m so happy for you, Miki.”

  “Thanks, man, me, too! Oh, Dominia, look at you!” The laughing porter slapped her in the bicep. “You look like a seriously bad bitch in this place, senpai.”

  “Just in this place?” asked the General wryly. The grinning clerk straightened her scarlet cap.

  “Yeah! It’s the eye patch and the hair. Once you cut your hair on Earth and lost your badass leather uniform, you started looking like a divorce attorney.”

  “Thanks,” commented Dominia, while Miki went on giddily saying, “I can’t believe you’re here! How did you get here? How long are you staying?”

  Now the General glanced over her shoulder and found, to her annoyance, that the door was not the only thing missing. Surprise: the magician was nowhere to be found. Looking back at her friend, Dominia shrugged. “I’m not sure. I guess I’m supposed to see something here? Or do something?”

  “Don’t you know why you came?”

  “Strictly speaking, I was brought here…hey.” The martyr followed her friend back to her post and leaned against the counter, trying (and failing) to see the computer at which Miki re-stationed herself. “All the people from Earth who have been stored—or, brought to this place as refugees—they come through this hotel, right?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Do you know Tenchi Ichigawa?”

  “Why.” Miki adopted a theatrical glower. “Are all humans supposed to know each other? Racist. We probably just look like a couple of talking bento boxes to you.”

  “That’s not—”

  “I’m kidding, you martyr bitch.” Miki tipped her cackling head toward the infinite ceiling, which echoed like a coven of hidden witches. “You should see your face… Hell yeah, I know Tenchi! He’s our courier.”

  Relief! Sweet relief. The General ran her hand over her face with a gratified sigh as the clerk glanced reflexively at her outbox. “As a matter of fact, he just— Tch! That bastard.” Miki whipped a letter from the otherwise empty box and brandished it at Dominia. “He missed one! We don’t have Internet or e-mail here, he needs to take his job more seriously.”

  “But you’re on an invisible computer,” said Dominia. Miki rolled her eyes.

  “One computer does not a network make, smart-ass. We’re trying to get it up and running… Hey, do you know your way around here?” Turning off her acerbic tsundere routine in favor of big moe eyes, Miki wibbled her lower lip. “Will you please take this letter to the market plaza and deliver it for me?”

  And Dominia, though initially reluctant to wander the City without a guide, understood she needed to do it when she read the name beneath Miki’s fingers: “McLintock.”

  “Sure,” said the General, trying not to betray the complex admixture of anxiety and hope growing beneath the breast pocket into which she tucked her cigarette. “Won’t you get in trouble with your boss for this?”

  “Who—the last Lady? Trisha? No, Tish won’t care. Her shift doesn’t even start until…well, later. Time is sort of weird here, I can’t explain it. Anyway, just run that to Mrs. McLintock for me. And don’t lose it!”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s her stipend. The refugees need money to stay in the City, just like the citizens, and so this guy—you wouldn’t know him—”

  “Valentinian?”

  “Okay, I guess you do know him—anyway, he funds the refugees’ presence in the City through the hotel, and they in turn pay the hotel for their rooms.”

  “So it’s just a big circle, sponsored by the martyr Saint of Death.”

  “Seems sort of silly, but it works.”

  “Why can’t they just stay in the City for free?”

  “What is this, communism? Hell no! If they want to live somewhere for free, I guess there’s another City in the desert, way farther West, and it’s different? They aren’t down with money, so commies can go there. I don’t know the deets, I’m a refugee like anybody else. Anyway, I don’t think it matters. Definitely not as much as taking Mrs. McLintock’s wages to her before the end of the day, so she can pay her way back into her family’s room at the end of the night!” With a shooing motion, Miki waved Dominia off. “Gee whiz, the minute you ask somebody to deliver a letter, they want to talk for hours… Some of us have to work, you know.”

  After a sly wink, Miki resumed her typing, or tried. She realized with a few keystrokes and a sharp gasp that she had left the phone off the hook. After yelping into it, “Hello? Hello?” for a few seconds and receiving only dead air, the girl hung the thing up as if it were guilty of some great injustice.

  “Damn…that was the telephone company, too. I’d already held forty minutes!”

  “What did you hold them with?” asked the General, who ducked a hurled clipboard on her laughing way to the street.

  Above the Kingdom shined a sun more beautiful than Earth’s, but just as harmless. Funny: she had been able to move in its rays for a year, yet still she lifted her hand in instinctive shield, wincing back, then, after a few seconds’ remembrance, edging out of shade with her good eye still protected from the blaze. Vaguely, she recalled the route she’d taken with Gethsemane and began to head left, its opposite direction. She had no compass here, but if Dominia’s bearings were correct and the sun still set in the west, the market lay east.

  The City was a sight to behold, with its flowing hills centuries ago covered in masonry so exquisite that the white stone crested like sea-waves. Set decoration to artfully accent the queer-yet-natural variety of costumes that, elsewhere, might seem anachronistic. Here the mishmash was only a natural sign that men’s souls had fled to the Kingdom, however it was perceived, in infinite masses and by infinite means since the dawn of existence. The blood of Lazarus must not have been the only means in. Didn’t that peplos-draped woman who passed with a sensual smile resemble illustrations of Sappho? Dominia turned her head but could not tarry to see, carried along with the pace of busy walkers all around as they surged, a river, to their destinations: she settled for remembering that meaning-laden final stanza of the poet’s “Ode to Aphrodite.”

  What a miracle to behold a woman of such genius! This place was of a very uncommon sort, to be certain—yet not uncommon at all, for it seemed in t
hat time and space perfectly normal. Each second spent there felt more natural than the last: Not only that, but freer! Godlier! Look at all those good people! Look at all that joy!

  What had the Lamb shown her in the Void when she saw through his eyes and watched the martyrs devour the blood and substance of the sacrificial humans? Was it not the sin her Father proclaimed, but that part of the self that, bound by the electromagnetic field of the brain, could for whatever reason not escape when it was devoured by a martyr? That meant martyrs were even worse than they superficially seemed, for each one was a walking prison who contained at least part of the self of each person they’d eaten. Was anyone devoured by a martyr doomed to the fate of those souls her mind had conglomerated into the bloody ocean of her dream? Were martyrs that unsalvageable? The General could not accept that possibility. She could not afford to believe anyone was beyond salvation. If they were, she was surely unworthy of it, herself.

  At last, on instinct, the General looked up and found herself at that corner where she’d first seen Tenchi calling her name and running, breathless, through the crowd. Though now she had expected—hoped—to see him, he was nowhere to be seen, and she glanced, with another soft thud of anxiety, at the envelope for Mrs. McLintock.

  What would she say? What could she say? It was miraculous that such interface with eternity was possible, even for vision—but how could speech cope with the enormity of interaction with the living dead? Especially when that living dead had all the reason in the world for hatred. And who was to say this was even the right McLintock? Carol? Perhaps it was her mother, or her mother’s mother, or whatever woman who before her had fled to the Mars colony when it was more than a wild and dangerous frontier. For her part, Dominia could see the appeal of escaping to space long before she boldly entered the gate of the busy market, passed a few stalls in search of the McLintocks’ fruit stand, and was struck in place by the incredible sight of none other than young Murph McLintock shouting for their buyers. Forever the eight years at which Dominia had shot him in the head, rather than allow his martyrdom.

  Her hands numb with shame, the astonished General was nonetheless more shocked when the boy responded to his own recognition of her not by freezing in terror or running away or screaming for help. Rather, his face brightened, and he called her name.

  Every head in that marketplace turned.

  It took Dominia a few seconds to register this. By then, silence spread like yet another wave throughout the crowd. A few people shuffled, smilingly, from out of her way. She could not help but think some looked familiar, but became preoccupied by the boy who dashed to hug her, tightly, around the waist.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, her eye wet and batting as people, looking pleased, arranged themselves to murmur softly and watch the unfolding scene. “How did you get here?”

  The grinning boy studied her, and said, “Well don’t cry, please! It’s nice!”

  “She’s crying because it’s nice, Murphy,” said Mrs. McLintock. His very tired mother looked here a little less tired. After wiping her hands on her apron, she emerged from the crowd to accept the envelope from Dominia’s amazement-loosed grasp. “Thank you, General.”

  “You’re— I’m so sorry.” Her lips strained in a way that made Carol exhale and fan her eyes with the envelope.

  “Well, goodness, don’t make me cry, now. It’s— Don’t think of it, please.”

  “But I do.”

  “I know.” With momentary reticence touching the eyes above her straining lips, the dead woman patted her hand. “But don’t. At least, not as much, or as sadly as you do.”

  Stunned, the General tried to speak, and failed. It was as she had guessed. What use were words before the dead? Before, worse yet, the forgiveness of the dead? What forgiveness—what at all—did she deserve in life? Her mind was a spinning Ferris wheel, but not so spinning as it was when the boy released her. Then she looked up through the crowd, through its many faces, and, in a crescendo of beautiful glory, focused beyond the shoppers and salespeople and couriers. Rendered that much more beautiful through the stained-glass filter of tears, she recognized the people around had edged wide to reveal, as or more astonished than Dominia, that vision that had driven her each step of her long journey.

  Oh, her absent heart! There was its beat again.

  IX

  Cassandra

  Life does not always afford catharsis. All too often, unresolved pain remains an open wound forever, or seems to while we live. But perhaps that is only so those catharses that do arrive—those moments of relief that signal the annihilation of lifelong tension—mean that much more to us as we lie awake, counting each soft breath from the parted lips of a lover we thought we’d never see again.

  A lie? A dream? Nothing that felt this way could be either. Dominia and her deceased wife embraced by the overflowing fountain of the plaza, and, weeping, Cassandra succumbed to kiss after kiss. Between each sob and each press of lips rang their words in duet: “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, forgive me, I’m sorry.”

  “You have no reason to apologize.” Dominia touched that warm cheek. The damp beads of Cassandra’s tears burst under fingers that had missed, missed, missed this sensation. “Oh, Cassie, Cassandra—oh, I’ve missed you. After all I did to you, you don’t need to apologize.”

  “But I do. I did that to myself. Nobody did it to me, least of all you. I was just so…angry and shocked and hurt and I—I did the thing that would hurt you the most.” Those perfect eyes, big glass marbles of the world, wrapped themselves in a new sheen of tears. “I thought I’d had enough of living, but I was in so much pain! And the depression made me so shortsighted. Death wasn’t even real to me until I was already dead.”

  “Oh, Cassandra…but what are you doing here?” Dominia turned her own trembling lips skyward, then back to her wife, whose honey curls were then plastered with laughing kisses. “I thought you were lost. That was what they said. The dead wander in the dark night of the Ergosphere forever, get trapped in low-frequency vibrations or…Lamb, whatever, when they have no soul. When they kill themselves.”

  The hitch of Cassandra’s breath made her tighten her grip. “I was lost. I was lost eternally. I’m here because you saved me, Dominia, just like you saved everybody else.”

  Lips parted, the General looked up and saw through her tears the faces of the surrounding crowd. Their faces revealed themselves to her struggling memory now that the first dominoes of recognition were tipped. There was the man who must have been Mr. McLintock, slipping through the shoppers to hold his wife; Sakaki Kurosawa, the cutest of the Japanese nurses killed by Cicero in the hospital massacre, was there with her coworkers; a couple of soldiers she herself had destroyed on the same occasion were there with their wives and Kahlil, whom Dominia almost didn’t recognize without glasses. All the people she had ever killed, failed to save, watched die—every single one of them was there. Even that son of a bitch Tobias Akachi, who smiled along with the rest of the watchers. Even Cassandra’s first spouse, Benedict, had a misty eye and a gentle smile as Dominia savored her long-awaited reunion. Long-awaited, long-wished, hardly-dared-to-dream! Oh, Cassandra!

  “I’ve hurt all of these people. I hurt you. And Lavinia. She’s still being hurt because of what I did. I don’t know if I can help her.”

  “You can. You will.” Fire burned beneath the shimmer of Cassandra’s eyes, beneath her trembling voice. “I believe in you.”

  To hold her! Dominia clutched her fair wife to her heart, feeling once again that body as, for over a year, she had only in memory, dreams, sorrow. But this! Oh, this. The General endeavored, somehow, to abate her own tears, and kissed the sweet-smelling head that tucked so perfectly into the crook of her neck. Like home, that feeling. “I don’t deserve your belief after what I did.”

  “Don’t say that. We all believe in you.”

  “But I made you so miserable. And I’ve hurt so many people. I hurt you.”

  “Dominia…” Cassandra
lifted her head, and the irreplaceably soft touch of her fingertips nearly foiled the General’s efforts to stave off tears. “I hurt myself. You never hurt me the way I did. You never made me miserable. Is that all you think— that we were miserable?”

  “Of course not. We got along. I thought we were happy most of the time.”

  “We were. You gave me so much. Don’t you remember? You made mistakes, and I was in pain, but even so…we were happy. You remember how you used to come home from work, and we’d curl up by the fire and I’d read to you, or we’d turn on the holo-center and the whole room would be our movie, or you’d draw me until I fell asleep? And how you bought me pets, and took me to the zoo, and helped me to start going back to Mass…to start teaching Noctisdomin school. I teach it here, too. Only”—Cassandra’s eyes and mouth crinkled with the weight of her smile, and Dominia battled the urge to kiss those delicate webs until they bruised—“I get to teach the truth, here, and it’s just Sunday school.”

  “Less annoying to say in English, not that it matters here…I bet you’re even better at it in this place. Those children loved you so much. You were the gentlest, most compassionate person in their whole lives. I know you were in mine.”

  Her jaw deforming in that sweet way it did when she tried not to cry, Cassandra patted the General’s cheek and then, as if not knowing where to lay that hand, her yet-living wife’s heart. “If that were true, I would have talked to you more, instead of doing what I did. I just didn’t understand. But being here, I learned—the way it was is the only way it could have been.”

  “But that’s not true. I had free will. I made an evil, selfish decision to give away your daughter so I wouldn’t have to share you with the memories of the person who loved you before.”

  “You took care of Cassandra.” Benedict approached from the edges of the crowd to shake Dominia’s hand. “For a longer time—and in better ways—than I could have. And Lavinia…she’s not really mine, now, is she?”