by M F Sullivan
“I figured how to stop my night—tahgmahrs.” At his curious “Oh,” she nodded. “First, I realize I’m having a dream. Then, I decide to open my eyes.”
“Of course, of course!” The Hierophant laughed and exchanged smiles with the other adults at the table, his beloved Cicero and adored Lamb and a few transitory favorites from the Mephitolian court. “How simple. Would all problems had such easy solutions.”
Was he saying those words then, or now? While she was in the chair, or on the floor? She struggled to orient herself against the mouth of the thing until its fingers edged up her face: for a fraction of a second, it attempted to caress her cheek. Then the black band of her eye patch shifted against her ear.
Her drunken, dissociated head cleared as if by the ringing of a bell that focused her consciousness to one point. She grasped that hand and, with a grip automatic as it was steely, broke two fingers. It cried against her mouth in a voice so terrible, so unreal, that the General no longer recognized it as any way related to Cassandra. As she shoved the creature away, she glimpsed its true form, and cried out at the edge of one horrific gray mandible while midturn for the poker. By scrambling to her feet and twice nearly falling, she reached her goal and was ready to fight: it had fixed itself by the time she turned back, though the Cassandra-flesh it wore rippled as if ants crawled beneath. The General saw in it nothing of the terrible bulging eyes and profusion of teeth floating in the adrenaline-drenched recesses of her mind. Her chair was empty. She had collected herself. The only Dominia to be seen stood with her back to the fireplace, brandishing the poker against the thing, which, naked and weeping, retreated behind the Hierophant’s chair.
Someone knocked upon the door. Edging to throw it open without taking eye from the scene, Dominia found herself more ashamed than ever when the man who entered was not Valentinian but Lazarus. He observed the room, then Dominia, his expression tight.
“I take it you touched it?” When she managed a reluctant nod, he sighed. “Well…there’s still a chance. I’m glad you were honest.”
“How could I have hidden it?” Her voice shook as she glanced down. To her surprise, her clothes were in perfect order. Belt and all.
“The truth renders us naked,” the Hierophant said, reaching behind his seat to pat the shoulder of the doppelgänger. “Poor Cassandra’s fingers! It will take her a whole day to recover. I hope you’re happy.”
“I know I am.” Lazarus glanced at the poker Dominia forgot she held. As he removed it from her hand, she felt more like a sullen child than ever. “Come on. Let’s get back on track.”
“But it’s not morning yet.” No one had ever told her she couldn’t leave her Father’s study before the morning came. Even so, the idea of leaving it prematurely numbed her every limb. Lazarus shook his head.
“It’s soon to be.”
“That can’t be—the sun’s just set.”
“The time you spend here is in what you do, not how many minutes you spend doing it. Other measurements are more important.”
Eye watering, Dominia struggled to avoid seeing the doppelgänger. “I didn’t screw up, did I? This isn’t an unfixable fuckup?”
“Nothing’s unfixable as long as we’re friends. Are we still friends?”
“Of course.”
Just slightly, Lazarus smiled. “Valentinian will be glad to hear that, I’m sure. He’s waiting: come on.”
“Actions have consequences, Dominia.” She turned back to watch the Hierophant as she allowed herself led down the path of lights. “How many times will you slap my offered hands?”
“As many times as it takes for you to get the message,” Lazarus responded. Over the threshold, he released Dominia and doubled his stride.
Relieved to escape that place of stasis and surreality, she hurried along with one last glance over her shoulder. “Will it follow us again?”
“Probably not today, not since you damaged it. But you’ll see it tomorrow, I’m sure, good as new.”
Her bones lurched at the thought of what had happened, of more days and nights wandering through this desolate place. She stopped, the back of her neck breaking out in the putrid sweat of a hangover. “Do I have to keep going back there? Why? Why can’t I just stay with you all night?”
“I told you already about time. It’s doing things that makes the morning come. Otherwise, we would have to wander in the dark; and whether you believe it or not, that’s more dangerous than enduring a nightly visit with him.”
“How could that be more dangerous?”
“You could completely forget who and what you are—or, worse, drop to lower frequencies. It’s easy for any of that to happen in this place no matter what, especially for somebody unprepared or with no will of their own. But in the darkness, when you can’t see your body or anything else, you can forget what you are. Become something else.”
“Something like what?”
“It’s one thing for a man’s physical body to be swapped with a dog’s. It’s another thing if the soul thinks itself a dog. The same is possible for you. Get caught up in a flight of fancy, and with no body to act as a frame of reference, you could become anything: a dragon, an eagle, a tiger. It sounds great, but when you’re doing it, you forget to enjoy it. You forget that it was ever any other way, and become so caught up in being that thing you could live a whole lifetime. Trust me: your Father would love that.”
Worrying her tongue against her teeth, the General asked, “About what happened before—”
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want.”
“But what have I done? I got drunk and it just…things happened, but I didn’t mean—”
“Gazelle don’t mean to be eaten by lions. But you still fed it, and reinforced it and your Father’s study. Valentinian talked to you about the wine.”
Yes, the wine. It hadn’t felt like any alcohol she’d had—like any drug. So heavy and strange to imbibe; yet, its effects had already disappeared. The mystic nodded at that.
“You’re drinking his spirit. His thoughts, his ill intent…it’s poisonous. The more you drink his wine, the more you’ll accept his way of thinking, and the more you’ll be tempted by his servant. But it only has power over you while you’re engaging with it in his reality bubble.” Her own luminous bands, their edges fading in with the graying morning light, were evoked at that term. The furniture and the space of the study had been formed by her Father’s fields, were her Father’s fields—and her fields, too, while she visited. All other fields, by virtue of the observer, were drawn into the system of the imaginary object. And, as with the thoughtform, it reflected the inner essence of that observer.
It was more than a visible demonstration of electromagnetic fields, this series of neon streaks encircling them. It was them in so many ways; ways she could not articulate; ways that so stirred her she migrated the subject back the conversation at hand, and the mystic’s description of the memory bride as her Father’s servant.
“Did he send that doppelgänger? It seems…close to him.”
“No. You attracted it without knowing. But your Father likes to think himself compassionate toward all things, thoughtforms included; he doesn’t care that it’s a compassion that comes at the expense of compassion to humans, and even martyrs.”
For the first time, Lazarus hit a nerve he himself had exposed. “You’re a fine one to talk about compassion to martyrs. Wanting to shoot a whole species into space.”
“I’m not talking tomorrow,” said the old man, looking as annoyed as she felt. “And you’re jumping to conclusions. I never said anything about outer space. That was your idea. Not mine.” At her astonished expression, he barged on: “Look: when your Father is killed, there will be a schism among your people. However you slice it, his death will cause so many problems that martyrs will lose their grip on the power structure of the planet. You know that. You also know that your Father needs to die.”
She lost any hope of adequate response, and chose
to linger in troubled silence as he continued. “You know things can’t proceed as they have. All this suffering is unnatural: you know it, the good martyrs hidden among the population know it. Those good martyrs, and the good martyr we choose as their leader, will see that it is not only in the benefit of humans to depart Earth. It is in the benefit of martyrs.”
“How will we eat? What will we do for all those centuries of travel? Surely you don’t want me for leader after him, right?” Now, it was Lazarus’s turn to remain silent. Finally, her lips pressed thin, Dominia tried one more nagging question. “Please. Is Valentinian real? A martyr? Or is he just some dog, some fictional character, who only exists because I’ve convinced myself he does?”
After studying the General, the mystic admitted, “As long as I’ve known Valentinian, I have been personally unable to remember when I met him, or how I knew him. Valentinian says he was once my son, and that he regrets not salvaging my consciousness from that first world.”
“I thought it was your blood that caused your memory to come back—why wouldn’t it contain the memory of that first time?”
“The blood allows it, but I think he’s responsible for it somehow. He won’t admit it. I’ve sort of given up caring. He seems lonely. It’s one of the reasons why he makes me suffer this eternal existence, I guess: so I don’t forget him again. Apparently, his mother in that place was the woman who became, in all universes thereafter, the current manifestation of the entity known as the Lady. I do know her. Trisha,” he said with longing. “But we never had children. Hell, we never had more than one date before she sort of fell off the map, and I was too embarrassed over a misunderstanding to track her down. Now, I see that misunderstanding wasn’t a coincidence. It was designed so she and I wouldn’t be together: so she could become the Lady, and Valentinian could never be born.”
So that was the space her Father had made for himself. “Do you believe him about his parentage?”
Lazarus shrugged, which was becoming the physical expression of choice around those parts. “Someone has to be responsible for all this. This conflict, this eternal loop, this struggle against your Father. If he wants to take credit, I’m happy to let him.”
“But if he can extract your consciousness and restore it to your new body, why can’t he do that for me?”
“Do you want him to do it for you?” At her grimace, he nodded. “We did try that once, actually.”
“How did it go?”
Following an ominous pause, he answered, “We decided it was better you don’t remember your past…attempts.”
She shuddered, and tried one more point: “If he’s a magician, can’t he turn himself into a martyr instead of staying stuck as a dog?”
The old man chuckled. “The material world is, by definition, more concrete and static than this one. It takes a higher power than that of mind alone to change something as vast as the molecules of a being’s body, or to replace one being with another. Valentinian is a great magician, it’s true, and he has tremendous power, but…let’s say it is prohibitively difficult for a man operating the body of a dog to upgrade to bipedal, sapient primate.”
“Is there a way to help him?”
“Yes.” In the distance, the red-and-black figure of the magician appeared to be packing his true fire as though coaxing it into an invisible kennel. “But if you want to help him, you’ll have to make a choice.”
“What choice is that?”
“When we get to Cairo, there will be an opportunity for a miracle. You can have a wish granted: something restored. But you only get one wish, so you have to choose.”
Beneath the anchor of his meaning, her heart began to sink. “Restore Cassandra, or help Valentinian?”
Lazarus turned toward the magician, who noticed them, and waved. “Sometimes,” the mystic said, “the fastest way is not the best.”
VI
Tyger Tyger
Valentinian’s mood had so improved by the time they reunited that the General was forced to consider she had been the only one upset. She even felt she was the only one in a tizzy about the tulpa business, though it was possible they only pretended not to be upset, lest the emotional energy remotely heal it. On reaching his side at the shadow-gray apotheosis of dawn, the magician asked in the knowing tone of a bosom buddy recovering from his own night on the town, “Good morning! Did you have a fun night?”
She somehow felt the only appropriate answer was, “It was great.”
“Good!” The twinkle in Valentinian’s blue eyes was so different from the one in her Father’s, yet so much the same. “Let’s get a move on.”
“We haven’t lost a day, have we?”
“What did I just tell you twice over about time?” asked Lazarus. “You sort of did us a favor.”
“Yeah, we basically partied all day. I won four hundred bucks. You know, theoretically. Eventually. When I have a body with a wallet again.”
“Does this bum even know how to use money?”
“I’ve been running the stock markets since before you were born,” grumbled the old man.
“That’s just informed gambling,” she said, and he answered, “Not if you know what’s going to happen.” Dominia considered this was true, and thought, with a faint pang of sadness, not just of gambling Miki Soto but of René Ichigawa. He seemed the gambling type and surprised her with something worse. A big brick in the foundation of her trust issues with Valentinian and Lazarus, that professor. They hadn’t done anything untrustworthy outside withholding information; but Lazarus had a point. It would be horrific to remember every possible (and definite past) method of death. What a paralytic notion! On top of that, knowing all the times she had failed Cassandra…all the Cassandras out there, dead forever. It ached her.
And she ached more to consider she might need to leave Cassandra dead forever, even if for the good of the world. Of the human race, and the martyr one. Oh! Who could be asked to make such a choice? Who dared even call it a choice? Only the most selfish soul would entertain it: but she must have made the choice once or twice, in her litany of unseen mistakes. The phantom weight of a familiar body pressed her arms. She dismissed it, lest it produce a second, more horrible duplicate. She focused on where she was: following the men as they trudged through a barren landscape whose hues gained saturation, for what was once black and white warmed into sepia. Or perhaps, having been there so long, her mind gave the grit at her feet an artful flaxen cast generously shared with the day-gray sky. When—at last!—some distinction emerged in the distance, Dominia cried out and dashed beyond her friends.
From a distance, this protrusion in the landscape resembled a gangly tree; but, on her approach, it resolved into a signpost whose two roots furled roughly south by southwest and north by northwest in the form of long paths laid in clay brick. The marker at this juncture, hand-carved of teal- and bright-pink-painted wood (though Dominia had seen no real trees), was marked with characters that appeared that same combination of readable and unreadable as her Father’s books: here, mysteriously, the characters appeared a kind of dream-Arabic. Though she did not know the language in real life, she read the signs just fine. The left-hand one declared “CAIRO,” while the one pointing right indicated “JERUSALEM.”
“Not much farther,” said the relieved mystic. “I’m always happy to see this sign.”
The General was pretty amped, herself. “How much longer? It should only be a few more night cycles now, right?”
“About two.” Valentinian crushed another cigarette filter. “Just a while to wait. Then, you can have Cassandra. If you want.”
He watched as if waiting for her to broach Lazarus’s warning, but she could not yet speak on it. Her face turned away, toward Jerusalem. “Earthly cities appear here?”
“No, no. This just puts you in the right direction. Like Lazarus told you before, you can leave this place by looking at the black sun for long enough; it’ll take you to a specific point in Earth’s space-time based on where you’re st
anding and the sorts of things you’ve done. However, that takes practice, so kindly magicians such as yours truly make signs.”
“Magicians such as you? I wouldn’t call you ‘kindly.’”
“For all I do to help you,” asked the man in a mock-wounded tone while the mystic sighed in disgust to which neither of them paid attention. “To help you save the world and your wife!”
“If you’re such an amazing magician, why haven’t you helped me to the finish line before?”
“Ouch! There’s just so many ways to go wrong. It’s hard—impossible—to know what any given iteration of the universe will hold for us. Your Father remembers it as well as we do, so he’s liable to tweak his strategy each time. We just have to do the best we can at piecing together past experiences, and hope we know enough to get through this time.”
The weight of her patch seemed almost painful against the right side of her face. “If I’m such a threat to the Hierophant’s world, and he knows the future, why did he martyr me at all?”
A jolly bass voice emanated from the blind spot that hid Jerusalem’s path. “Because you, Miss Mephitoli, are too valuable a commodity to be passed by: no matter the risk.”
Dominia and Valentinian turned toward the disruption Lazarus had long since noticed. The approaching figure drew his hood from his face, and there he was in all his white-toothed glory: Dr. Tobias Akachi, the dentist who fixed her teeth and removed her DIOX-I, then betrayed her by assaulting her Family during the tragic Kabul marathon. He tried to win the General to his side; worse, he showed interest in acquiring her powerful sister, Lavinia, whose memetic curse brought many marathoners to their mortal end—before the bomb detonated by the dentists’ men murdered more.
Her chest tightened along with her itching fist. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you! Do you know how long you were missing when I came here to find you? Nearly an entire lunar cycle! Almost a month!”
“You’re al-Mawta. Hunter trash—and the king of the trash heap, at that.” To Lazarus, she said, “At least one cell of Hunters stole some of your blood, didn’t they? Their most initiated members come here?”
