The General's Bride

by M F Sullivan

  “It’s safer to come to the Ergosphere from the earthly day, but you can leave it at any time. And the trip from the Ergosphere back to the planet is, from our perspective, faster than this one. From Earth’s perspective, it doesn’t matter.”

  Close though they were to home, and Cassandra’s diamond, and what she hoped would be the end of her journey, Dominia was nonetheless seized by a wave of sorrow. “Will I be able to see you with my own eye? Is there really a way?”

  “Of course, buddy. You’ll see Basil.”

  “But, I mean—as you are now. A person I can talk to. Sometimes.” They shared a grin and she turned her face toward the skylight that had grown so close and so large it pushed away the golden tiles of the sun. The cosmos beyond swirled so clear that the General was chilled by the sight. She had never seen such stars: swirling columns of gas beckoned them close, and sweeps of color tantalized with iridescent glimpses of neighboring galaxies. She still had too many questions. “Are you real?”

  “Is anybody?”

  “Are you really Death?”

  “Your Father says I am. Pretty flattering.”

  Turning to see him with her good eye, she pressed, “Are you God?”

  “Who, me?” With a cheeky grin, the magician turned a sparkling eye her way. “I’m just some dog.”

  She didn’t manage to catch that Planck wherein he transitioned into the mangy-but-adorable shepherd dog. As he spoke, the skylight leapt for them—closed that last gap, itself—and on its other side, the General found herself adrift in outer space with Basil. It was all so abrupt she gasped. Tried to, anyway: her airless mouth, mere information being recompiled into her physical body with a new location associated—thanks, she supposed, to Hawking radiation, the Higgs field and Valentinian-only-knew-what mechanics, produced no sound in the vacuum of space. It was Basil’s softly wagging tail that galvanized her resulting fright into exhilaration. She sensed no harm could come to her in this transition period, and suspected that she flew through time as much as space. In particular, the planet Mercury formed seconds before she was hurled past it. Miles and millennia passed in microseconds, and the tail of a timely comet revealed, like a curtain drawn away, the distant face of blue-green Earth swirling in a more beautiful—and more astonishing—vision of home than any she’d seen.

  Legs paddling through the void, the dog twitched its ears with a look of such pure animal delight that she almost forgot—that quickly—he had ever been a man. But she would stubbornly hold on to everything learned from this place. She would take every scrap of knowledge and make it another component in the weapon she forged of herself. A weapon meant to destroy not just Tobias Akachi but her arrogant Father as well.

  If it was possible to go any faster, the pull of Earth’s gravity did it. On instinct, Dominia lifted her hands above her head, but, in turning her face away, was astonished by the source of her journey. Still floating at the edge of space, she rolled upon her back and looked the way they’d come. In the distance burned the naked face of the sun, which propelled them, its little sunbeams, the eight minutes and twenty seconds it took to get to Earth.

  Her throat tightened. She imagined Cassandra’s radiant face and looked away, urging her eye not to leak half-real tears lest they freeze to her face, or boil when they regained physical form on contact with the atmosphere. Incredibly, against all logic or rule of physics, they slowed. Dominia had undergone a palpable shift in dimensions experienced only by her sensory relationship to her own body, which grew solid enough to establish a clear difference between a thought-body and a real one. Vertigo twisted her renewed stomach as she turned back to Earth and saw they plummeted for the continent of Africa at increasing—but material, and therefore somehow comforting—speed.

  Who could waste time being terrified by a sight so marvelous? Free to bark, Basil did, and Dominia grinned against the whipping air. Home! Home! Oh, her beautiful planet. She had never been to Cairo, but every part of Earth was home to her now, and as she fell to its good grounds, she let that tear escape.

  The speed with which the skylight leapt to meet them was as quick as the bustling city of Cairo—more dense with highways, bullet trains, and sky-scrapers than its ancient founders ever envisioned—distinguished itself from the landscape. Like most cities, Cairo stretched to such an extent that even its mighty pyramids, dwarfed by mega high-rises, resembled children’s toys. Astonishing to think that, from the black hole at the beginning of reality, they could hone in on an exact point in space-time: yet, she saw the indigo diamond of the Lady’s temple well before they hit it, apparently not quite solid as she’d anticipated. The General and the dog whizzed with harmless grace through several closed floors before they landed, as if always there, upon the crimson carpet of Miki Soto’s bedroom.

  X

  There’s No Place Like Home

  The notion that this was Miki’s bedroom took a bit of doing to puzzle together. Her ears, once filled with the high-pressure “welcome home” scream of sweet oxygen, clamored with feminine voices, a shouting man, a barking dog, and a woman saying, “What the fuck? What the—Dominia? Holy—”

  Her eyes resolved hints of bronze tapestries, which distinguished the crimson walls of an octagonal room. Its door was impossible to find amid the ornately dressed women whose sabers and halberds were drawn from veils so translucent it was amazing they concealed anything. All the while, a voice she recognized as Miki’s called, “Stand down! Stand down, would you people just relax? She was probably the point of this thing, right? Right? I don’t know, you guys are supposed to know this. You’re the priestesses or something, right?”

  On the round bed that was the room’s centerpiece, Miki’s glowing face hovered between curtains of gauzy silver and emitted a high-pitched squeal. As the baffled women began to (almost) relax, Basil was so overcome with delight that he chased his tail. Glad to be on Earth, herself, the General laughed. “I never thought I’d be so relieved to see you,” she said. “Or so confused.”

  “Not as confused as you’re about to be.” Lazarus, of all people, sat up behind Miki’s painted face to reveal a trimmed beard and a hairstyle that had been moderately managed. “Glad you made it back.”

  As if reaching his own escape velocity, the dog plunged past the armed women to leap upon the bed and dash in small circles around giggling Miki. “Basil! Basil! There’s my Basil! Who’s a good boy?”

  “Definitely not the dog running all over the bed.” The naked old man grumbled his way up and stooped to collect his pants while a grimacing Dominia shielded her eye. As he covered himself, he said something in Arabic, and the women stood down. Miki crossed her arms over her loosely closed gold kimono with an indelicate snort.

  “Real nice. I thought you were supposed to listen to women! To me! Not some dude.”

  “Some dude who knows more about all this than you,” Lazarus said. “No offense, Miki, but just because you’re the next Lady doesn’t mean you know anything now. For all you know, this is Dominia’s doppelgänger.”

  The General rubbed her forehead. “Don’t say that word,” she pled, almost too exhausted to consciously integrate the piece of information Lazarus had slipped in. (And too distracted by her missing hair—heartbreak!) Miki, the next Lady? Miki Soto, serving as the avatar of some trans-dimensional goddess best interpreted, maybe, as a pool of water upon the event horizon of a black hole, or even the substance of the black hole and therefore the basis of both reality and eternity? Soto Miki-chan, cramming her mouth full of falafel, shaking her short-shorts, and swearing like Tenchi Ichigawa never could, the next head of the Red Market and its global cult of pagan women for two thousand years?

  It was easier to focus on the tulpa.

  “It can’t come here, right?” she asked Lazarus, who strode over, she presumed, to shake her hand. “I mean, to Earth.”

  “Not without your help, it can’t. The physical body is like a portal to those things.”

  Then, he did reach for her—but kept reac
hing past her hand, up into her mouth, where, like a grandfather yanking a baby tooth, he popped her recently implanted right canine out of her mouth.

  “Elijah,” she screamed; the old man investigated the thing while Miki shouted similarly.

  “No”—he showed her the speaker before he crushed it between his martyr fingers—“Lazarus. You want me to do the other one, too?”

  Oh, how she’d hoped he was crazy when she’d met him in the basement of that record shop where he told her Akachi listened through her teeth! Removed from earthly concerns as she’d been, she had all but forgotten about those things, and was now forced to pull the remaining device with a terrible series of eye-watering cracks. Much worse than the one Lazarus had pulled; she should have had him do it. As, gasping, she tore it free, Miki’s horrified face emitted the word, “Sugoi…”

  “Uh-oh.” Lazarus frowned, investigating the tooth. “This one doesn’t have—”

  Dominia’s shriek of fury quickly crumbled his facade into laughter. “I’m kidding. Good God, I’m kidding! Don’t look at me like that… Everybody’s so serious around here.” After demonstrating to Dominia’s tear-filled eye that this tooth was a location-tracking device, Lazarus crushed the thing, and said, “How about we get you some new ones?”

  “Before or after somebody tells me what I walked into?”

  “Just, like, a ritual,” said Miki, as if that explained everything. “You know.”

  “That explains the plum incense, but not…” She couldn’t bring herself to vocalize—or even form the thought—and instead waved vaguely in Lazarus’s direction. The Lady-to-be grinned.

  “Well, it’s like, like a sacred marriage? Lazarus is symbolic of the energy that’s supposed to be entering me, and—”

  “Okay,” said the General, “I’ve heard plenty.” While trying to erase the last few seconds of her memory, she forced a bloody smile for Lazarus. “New teeth, you said?”

  “Better: your real teeth.” Having slung the neat white robe of a spiritualist over his shoulders and adjusted its high collar, he marched for one of the tapestries. Miki whined.

  “I was just about to tell you all to buzz off so I can talk to my”—her voice lilted into singsong—“best-friend-in-the-world, because-she-has-been-gone-too-long.”

  A smile quirked the General’s swelling upper lip, but, from the cluster of rearranged guards, a low voice spoke in a cadence familiar even if the tone was not.

  “Neither the General, nor the magician, may see the Lady while unclean.”

  Heads turned, Miki looked annoyed, and Dominia tried not to reveal her abject embarrassment at the thought of meeting Gethsemane’s physical persona with a swollen, bleeding mouth. It was impossible to hide the shock, however, or perhaps the delight of finding her to be so different in this place. The fair nymph with lips so pale they were almost sapphire and hair as blonde as Lavinia’s curls had been replaced by a slender ebony Amazon, who, though dressed as the other priestesses in the room, seemed to Dominia’s eye a thousand times more flattered by the sky-colored bodice and those many flowing veils. Ignoring or missing Dominia in the act of picking her jaw off the floor, Miki snuggled the tail-wagging mutt with an expression of motherly defense.

  “Basil is a clean dog!”

  “I don’t know about that,” muttered Dominia, watching an animal that accepted belly rubs in so convincing a way that she might have doubted Valentinian’s existence had the memory of his arm not remained so real in her hand. From the door, Lazarus snorted right along with her.

  “Even if I could begin to tell you how wrong you are, Gethsemane is right. He’s mildly radioactive at the moment.” Miki’s hand jerked away and her lip curled with a little “ew” while the mystic shrugged. “Doesn’t matter since you’re going to be resistant in about an hour and immortal soon anyway, but rituals exist for a reason.”

  “He is correct.” Gethsemane slipped past her peers and took Dominia’s hand with her gloved one. “The General is much the same. She has returned from eternity, and its energies have followed her as well as Basil. Even Lazarus required purification before entering this holy room. They should not be allowed to touch the new Lady until they have been cleaned.”

  The woman nearest Miki hefted the border collie, struggling to hold the wiggling dog and evade its cheek-seeking kisses. As Dominia took a protective step forward, so, too, did another pair of women, but Gethsemane calmly tightened her grip.

  “There is no need for conflict, General. Please: Nein takes him for a bath, as I take you.”

  Just like that, she was much less concerned about Basil. Dominia grinned crookedly. “Should we be talking about this in front of everybody?”

  This elicited a slap from the Bearer, the pain on her bloody mouth an unimaginable fire in her long-missed body. “Please, General,” said Gethsemane above the giggles of the other women and the ringing of the martyr’s cheek, “this is a holy room.”

  Just slightly, the woman cracked a smile, and Dominia repressed her own smirk as she allowed herself led out. “What about Kahlil?” she called before exiting. Miki rolled her eyes.

  “Oh, he’s around.” Her tone told Dominia more about the interactions of her friends over the past weeks than they would tell her, themselves. “Probably in the gardens.”

  The General would have to ask him what he thought about all this when she got the chance. Or not—she didn’t want to rub it in, after all. But she couldn’t imagine Kahlil was thrilled by the thought of Miki, at whom he looked with obvious and ill-fated stars, engaging in ritual sex or sacrificing her body to some goddess. Dominia wasn’t sure about that, herself. But there wasn’t anything he could do about it; it was Miki’s body, and though he may have been able to talk her down to Earth if given time alone, the future avatar had surely spent every waking moment attended to since their arrival in Cairo, and no doubt didn’t want to be talked down at all.

  In the hallways, Dominia was stunned again—not by Gethsemane’s beauty in the brighter light but by the light itself, doubled by the rosy marble of lapis-accented columns that served as canvases for many murals: from what the General glimpsed, of life, the afterlife, and the worship of the Lady, but it was hard to make out details as she was being hurried to the baths. There was a lot of emphasis on the numbers seven, eight, and nine, if she was counting right—and colors. Many colors. Specifically, arrays of colors she recognized as a rudimentary depiction of the electromagnetic field that had bent from her ribs. Still bent from her ribs, her mind, though she couldn’t see it with her eyes. Seeing this depiction, this rainbow of stripes (like wings, she thought as she was whisked past a large image of an ascended soul) only heightened the beauty of what she had seen, but which could not be grasped by memory, because there were no words to describe the colors there, nor cones in physical eyes sufficient to translate them to sight. Perhaps in the fabulous mantis shrimps, with their bullet claws and magical eyes: she had always loved those creatures. Always wondered what it was like to be one, and now she knew. She wanted to reminisce, but even memory, when bound to her mind, failed to reproduce in true strokes the tori of her spectrum. Somehow, rudimentary though the exquisite images were in comparison, looking upon the murals of the temple brought those memories to clear, almost tangible life. Had she known how quickly everything would unfold, she might have urged Gethsemane to wait, and let her take time to examine the beauty of scenes that would not exist much longer upon the planet.

  Instead, she studied the profile of the woman who guided her—who had technically guided her from the first moment she’d emerged in the event horizon. “I knew you for Gethsemane the second I saw you, somehow.”

  “I am amazed you recognized me, General… I have dreamed of the woman I am bound to in that other place, and she is not like me.”

  No, not at all. Just as beautiful, but a completely different kind of beauty. If the nymph’s beauty bore whispered resemblance to the name “Cassandra,” the beauty of her aligned human was the elegant
compound word of a foreign language. What language that might be was impossible to discern, and somehow pleasing to keep a mystery. Without the attachment of heritage, she still seemed a pure, dreamy beauty, as all things in the Ergosphere and event horizon seemed the purest versions of themselves. Gethsemane’s earthly form was so perfect to Dominia’s eye that the priestess was a walking rift by which one glimpsed that other world where boundaries dissolved.

  Yet, that rift reminded her she was not in that other world. Technically she was, the magician or the mystic might lecture her. But that was just it—she couldn’t hear the magician lecture her in this world. Ergo, it was different. Only a few moments after she had fallen to Earth alongside a dog who in that other place was a man, the memories of her experience in the Ergosphere possessed that obscured quality particular to memories of dreams, rather than of real events. She bore a certain guilt for what she had done there, but those mistakes felt understandable now in her actual, causally bound body, hair cropped disappointingly short against her head and clothes notably more ragged than they had been in that other environment. Not to mention starkly different. As happened in dreams, she had forgotten the ruin of her leather coat; René’s tattered jacket and shirt had also been abandoned. But even this crisp white button-down Miki had bought her in Kabul was soaked with Hunter blood—not dried, she noted. As if she had just been at the battle with the Hunters and her Family. And, boy, did she ever feel like it! Her body ached for rest.

  Wasn’t it pleasing, though, to be exhausted again? Connected to her senses, she was once more in control of her thought process and reassured nothing “magical” could happen without extraordinary circumstances—and by the Lamb, she appreciated it.

  The General cleared her throat as they entered the baths, and those (mostly) controlled thought processes wandered to a different place. The steam-thickened room was dense with the cloying aroma of honey—and lavender, that scent that followed Miki Soto everywhere she went. All of it—the scent, the steam, the air she breathed—formed to the General some kind of protection from the beautiful woman who shut the door to seal them alone in the wide pool room. One of several in the complex, Dominia assumed.