by M F Sullivan
“It shouldn’t surprise you,” suggested the Lamb as she realized she’d forgotten to pray for him, although she had been responsible for his death in incidental fashion. His horns were gone—she had never seen him without that false silver halo. “It’s always given me headaches, the way you worry things over in your head, again and again, even when you tell yourself you don’t care about them. Of course those old wounds seem fresh, Dominia.”
“Sorry,” she said, not without a trace of humor. “And I’m sorry about— I’m sorry you had to die.”
“I’m not,” he assured her. “‘Long-suffering’ doesn’t begin to cover my experience, being Cicero’s brother. And the Hierophant’s… If it mattered to me, and I wanted to live, the bullet would have missed. Actually, I had to nudge it toward me a little. Your friend is a terrible shot.”
He was trying to be funny, but the good Rabbi’s downright desire to die broke her heart. Who could have blamed him? Paraded around from town to town to have his throat slit every Noctisdomin…she’d want to die, too. “I’m sorry that living is such misery for you.”
“‘Was’—in this state, anyway. But it’s all right. The next state will be better. Probably. It can’t be worse. Do you want me to help you pray?”
“Could you, please? I’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
“Then it’s a good thing,” said the Lamb, kneeling beside Akachi, “that we have so much time.”
He wasn’t kidding. Dominia was grateful they had all eternity to shuffle through the masses of the dead. The list unfurled in all intangible directions while her mind leapt across time from one battle to another. Once, she looked over her shoulder and found more people—many more—than had announced their presence to her. Some, unrecognized, had perhaps been summoned by the ruminations of the Lamb or Akachi. These spirits also prayed for those they had known or wronged; and of those spirits, a few came forth to add to the effort. Their number grew before her eye, and the General, chilled, returned to her fervent prayers with renewed vigor. When she could not remember or did not know a name, she pictured a face, and evoked a battle, and remembered the impact of her weapon or the sound of her gun’s discharge.
The way she figured, at least one hundred thousand people had been put the slaughter, directly or indirectly, by the General’s hand. This did not touch the many destroyed en masse in the Black Night. Yet, this was not a fraction—not a seed!—beside that multitude of souls forming the quintessence from the beginning of linear time. Still, she needed continue; still, she prayed, though her heart despaired that the task before her was impossible. As this despair reached its peak, a hand touched her head. She looked up, and found Kahlil.
“Jeez, will you relax.” He said that, perhaps, as much to himself as to her, for in this space, no spirit was yet purified of their anxious death memories. Emboldened by the sorrow in her face, the young spirit knelt beside her. “Try to look at it like this. If you save everyone in the future, then they’re already saved in the past—so they’re praying for you, too, forever and ever. What is that? ‘Teleological’ thinking?”
“Every moment,” she murmured. “Every prayer, shaped to a purpose.”
Yes: that notion was, somehow, very encouraging. Prayer did little perceptible good other than serving as a kind of spiritual cell phone, but it did have a way of bolstering the speaker in a time like this. In an eternal time like this, where the information making up reality went unmoved, yet the veritable army of souls behind the General grew to limitless expanse. It was a good thing that time did not exist in that place, however, and that issues of thirst and hunger did not matter: based on the time it took an individual in reality to recite the prayer on behalf of Saint Valentinian, it would have taken the General 3,472 earthly day/night cycles to complete her penance.
If she did not eat.
And did not sleep.
And did not excrete, or move, or think a thing that was not a plea that the souls of the dead be granted the eternal rest of paradise and comfort of Valentinian rather than this state of nothing. This state of suspension. Perhaps it was those great many unheard prayers of eternity that had helped the General so quickly find her soul after death, rather than her year of training in the Ergosphere. She could not be sure.
Just over nine years of prayer and penance, densely packed into a single instant. A single instant of death. The only movement the General made—which, while hypnotic, also kept her aware of her thoughtbody and maintained its integrity apart from the Void—was the movement of her waist, up and down, as she bent to the floor for each new prayer, then up again to cross herself. Then, again, back down. On Earth, even the martyr General would have collapsed from exhaustion, but there was no exhausting her now. Not here. Her legs, quite literally, became one with the base of the Void, but she did not cease for an instant her meditations save for those brief splits in which she grew aware of the overwhelming noise of the crowd, the murmur having long since grown to a persistent buzz, clamor, roar. She prayed; they prayed; in the Kingdom, their eternal selves surely also prayed.
And, as Dominia neared the beginning of her career—those long-lost nights of Lieutenant di Mephitoli, Private di Mephitoli, and all her many variations—a change overtook the Void that was, in and of itself, miraculous. Without any spatial movement on the part of the General or the passage of a single second in reality, the black circle of Earth at the edge of the Ergosphere rose as though they sat at dawn.
Or perhaps—perhaps it was not so much that, as it was that the quintessence around them evaporated. A vast army of souls chanted their prayers behind her, drops of water condensed from that bleak mist of indistinctness and fear.
Around her neck, the diamond of her wife beat back and forth: a pendulum whose sways marked another soul, another soul, another soul. Reminding Dominia each time, I’m here, too.
I’m always here with you.
All this continued until, so suddenly it surprised her, the General looked up, and saw all the darkness had cleared from the sky. She understood why the Void’s darkness was said to be unclean even beyond its radioactive signatures, for it was filthy with the psychological toxins of all these unpurified souls. But as the place grew cleaner, so, too, did its cleanliness hasten, the prayers multiplying exponentially until a whole world of people, past, present, and future, had been derived by the connections and good wishes of those lost spirits whom the General pursued—of those nous who saw the labors of Dominia and were moved by her anguish for the person she had been. Those individuals had distinguished themselves from the quintessence, and the quintessence was no more, and the beauty of clear space revealed to Dominia a glorious truth. Even the darkness of the black sun had disappeared, as if the black hole returned the light it had stolen from the planet’s face. There was the glory of Earth, the radiantly mossy soul of itself resting upon the edge of the Ergosphere.
“The black sun of your Father’s is a fiction.” She tore her eye from that great swirl of blue and green only when her periphery noted Valentinian’s form. “Just like death. Here we are, suspended at the end of the planet’s history: eternally frozen in this moment of destruction, when that which was once Sol of Earth ravages, in an eyeblink, its already dead infant. Then this black hole will be devoured, and that one; in other galaxy clusters, other black holes will devour other black holes. Yet I say again, the black sun is a fiction. There is no such thing as death.”
“The Earth looks so new, and alive.” The General’s eye filled with tears to see the glory of the planetary atom hanging above her head. “Like it was just born.”
Kneeling at the side unoccupied by Kahlil, the magician crossed himself and prostrated as had Dominia. “Because the moment of destruction is also the moment of creation, and it is also an eternity. Can you imagine what eternity is? What it really is? What maintains it?”
“God,” she supposed.
“But what is God?”
Even now, annoyance for him crossed her face. “I asked you that
.”
“If you’d stop asking other people that and think about the question for a while, you might astonish yourself with the real answer.”
The General dared not interrupt his prayers to press him further, and intended to resume her own: yet she realized with an uncanny feeling of relief she had but one more prayer to utter. When she tried to remove the necklace from her neck, it was with an urgent chill of panic that she found it gone. Had it fallen off, somewhere into the Void? Her head lifted to see where it dropped, and then—there.
Ah, there.
There!
“How can I deserve your prayers?” Cassandra, wan from her time in the Void, stood before her—not yet brightened by the peace of the Kingdom. “How can I deserve to live at all? To have lived, and thrown my life away…oh, I didn’t understand until I saw your face. Until it was already too late. I didn’t understand until that second that, as long as I was alive, I could recover from anything. That I could adapt. I didn’t realize until the second it was too late that I could have hated you, and you still would have loved me, and stayed with me, and taken care of me, until I didn’t hate you anymore. Or even if I hated you forever.”
“That’s the way it always is,” said the magician sadly, “in that last second. All our errors become so clear.”
“It’s why I can’t—I can’t possibly deserve better than this.” Cassandra wept, the back of her hand against her lips.
For the first time in the equivalent of nine years, the General rose. Behind her the prayers had hushed, but she’d stopped hearing them, anyway. Step by step, Dominia closed the distance between herself and the spirit of her wife.
On Earth, Basil licked her face.
“You did what you did because you wanted to hurt yourself—and me—worse than I hurt you. I’m so sorry, Cassandra.”
While the body of the General di Mephitoli eased open its half-blind eyes to study the dog above it, the muted sounds of Cicero’s weeping filled its ears.
“In those seconds you first appeared to me, I thought you were perfect. Your body, your face, the way you smiled, the way you held yourself—the way you looked at me. Everything about you in that second was so perfect. It’s how I always think of you.”
Beneath the hand of Lazarus’s sprawled body lay the dagger intended for him.
“But nobody’s perfect, Cassandra. I should have known that, and accepted it, instead of reacting to your imperfection like it was a crime.”
The earthly body of the General relied on what was left of its muscle memory to claim the dagger. With this ceremonial weapon, it slumped toward Cicero’s back.
The true body of Dominia touched Cassandra’s face, so cool and soft that it was like touching the meniscus of a glass of milk. “I hurt you, then spent a lifetime trying to make up for it with the force of my love. But instead I made you the prisoner of my lies. And I have to—” Dominia fought a hiccup of tears to no avail, and her facade crumbled to trembling lips in an expression that, as ever, was mirrored in her empathetic wife. Especially as the General forced herself to say, “I have to let you go.”
Dominia turned to see Benedict stood in the spot where she had prayed. She took one step to the side.
As Cicero sobbed over the body of the Lamb, the General plunged the dagger into his ribs.
“Benedict.” Weeping Cassandra covered her face. “I can’t be seen by you this way.”
“What way?” He hurried to his lover’s side and took up those hands Dominia longed to take, herself.
“At my worst. My cruelest, my stupidest.”
“Honey,” said Dominia, at the same time and in the same cadence as Benedict. This elicited a wry smile out of both before the man allowed the martyr to go on, “I don’t think there’s anybody here who hasn’t been cruel or stupid at some point.”
“We’re all just people,” said Benedict. Cassandra’s lips trembled in that rapid, familiar way that ached Dominia’s jaw with the urge to kiss her calm.
“But I don’t deserve people,” protested the woman. Dominia wiped tears from her cheek, at last drawing back her attention.
“You feel that way because I made you feel that way. And I’m so sorry, Cassandra. You deserve people. You deserve happiness. You deserve a family. All the things that I couldn’t give you here.”
“Maybe,” Cassandra continued lamenting. “But I took from myself any chance I had to live a happy life.”
“Happiness is still possible,” insisted Benedict.
“Eternity is a long time,” said Dominia.
Although, for a glimmer, hope lay in those doe eyes, Cassandra squeezed them shut. “How can I be happy, thinking of my daughter? What a fool I was. She was right in front of me all those years and I never saw it. Of course not. I didn’t want to see it. The things he’s done to her, Benny, oh! To our daughter.” The woman emitted a sob that broke the General’s heart.
“Dominia will make it right,” said Benedict, but Cassandra wailed, “How? How can anything that’s happened to Lavinia ever be put right?”
“Tonight is a night for earthly miracles.” The magician rose to his feet. “Tonight is a night where anything is possible.”
“If that were true—if all this about eternity were true—then where is my daughter now?” Lifting her head, briskly wiping her eyes to reveal their defiance, Cassandra demanded, “She should be here, if this is eternity.”
“This is more a holding cell,” Valentinian said. “For you immovable individuals with too little soul and too much grief keeping you from transcending someplace higher. Your daughter isn’t here because she doesn’t need to be.”
At last! A spark caught the dampened tinder of her spirits. Cassandra stepped past Benedict, toward the magician. “Where is she?”
“You’ll see her. But Dominia won’t see any hint of you for quite a while—and this you, the you that remembers everything she does for the world, she won’t see for a long, long time. So…you know.”
Her hand a fist at her breast, Cassandra turned to see the stoic General, who tried with every fiber of her being to remain stoic. “You’ve done so much for me,” Cassandra said, coming to hold Dominia’s hands.
“I would do so much more for you, if I could. If I could change the past.”
“You don’t have to. Even though I hurt you so badly—even though I killed myself—you still looked for me. You traversed a whole planet just to find me again, and died, and came here. You spent an eternity in this place, just to remind me that I used to exist. That I used to be a person. That you used to love me.”
“I still do love you,” Dominia swore. “I will love you forever. I’ll never love another beside you.”
“But I wish you would.” Color returning to her being degree by degree, Cassandra blinked her wet eyes and touched her wife’s face. “I wish you would let yourself forget me. Then you might be able to be happy.”
“There’s no such thing as happiness without you,” said the General, who bent to kiss those perfect satin lips, which pressed back; parted into a breath of air like Dominia’s name; dissolved into atoms of light that embraced her, then filled her. In the space of a second, her senses were overwhelmed with the infinity of her wife’s existence, of her kisses—of, not that sad death, but a long life joyful in the face of many sorrows. The warmth that filled the General was indescribable, as was the force that punched her chest as she was penetrated by this…what, if not soul? Spirit, she supposed. She could not fathom what it was in truth, in its highest form, this essence of Cassandra: nor could she imagine why it flew into her as if to settle there.
But, as the personas—those consciousness-less or consciousness-tainted egos—of Benedict, Akachi, Kahlil, and all those others began to dissolve into light and do the same, the General understood. This was how a soulless spirit might be bolstered for eternity, might be given a soul. She had more than enough consciousness to go around. Her lungs winced while her mind was barraged by more entities than she had known to exist. Wit
h each spirit came each one’s reality. Before the feeling of one existence could pass, another burst through her like a gunshot, and another, and another: a great chain of people all plunging into her, and all of them, spirit after spirit, reminding her that there was one dead spirit outside of herself for whom she’d yet to pray. Barely enduring those glowing bolts, Dominia eased to her knees and spoke one last prayer for Lazarus.
“Do you think I need it?” asked the old man’s spirit.
She laughed, moaned in pain, closed her eye against the cold tears of divine ecstasy. Before her, the True Protomartyr knelt. “Praying,” he said with a chuckle. “Salvation. I just want to rest! The way I see it, I’m already saved. Same way you are.”
“The protein?”
“‘By you,’ I was going to say—but the protein, too. Maybe you’re right, though. Without the sacred protein, after all, you wouldn’t be able to save anybody.”
As that soul dissolved and entered her, she found that he was right. The true sacred protein was a greater hero than she was. An eternal connection to this place, to the divine. Was there any point in praying for a set of friendly cells? She thought of the E4, which had a name, a True Word—and dear Tenchi, who believed all things in the world possessed some form of spirit. So, as those effervescent spirits plunged into her, the General rationalized that she owed it to the protein to pray for it. Perhaps she might ask it for its help.
Perhaps it, too, had a true name that might reveal some avenue of assistance.
Her forehead against the cool un-ground as she submitted to the ceaseless flow of intrusions, she plunged into the depths of herself and prayed for that very same protein that had led her this far—prayed it might continue to lead her, and that it might spread itself beyond the reaches of its malformed cousin. That it might teach her to do the works of the Lord. That it might act to her as a friend and companion. That it might see her Father’s regime collapsed into the dust from which it had been built.
