The General's Bride

by M F Sullivan

  “Assuming you don’t get tangled up in anybody else’s thread before then.”

  “Exactly,” said Lazarus, as another nasty epiphany churned the General’s stomach.

  “Is that why my Father checks in on me every night? Because he’s—solidifying time to make sure we can’t go back?”

  Perhaps it was the drug, and the way it cleft the Void, the darkness of the tanque, and the General’s spirit; perhaps it was years of indoctrination. All the same, Dominia heard her Father’s voice in her head; she seemed to sit in his dream-study while the disfigured tulpa thrashed in the shadows behind his chair.

  “Certainty of an educated decision”—her Father spoke in words she had not heard him say during that moment, which made it seem more than mere memory—“is the hallmark of intellectual maturity. Certainty of a rash decision is the hallmark of stupidity. Uncertainty of any decision is the death of power. I try only to empower you, Dominia.”

  “That’s basically what he’s doing, yeah,” Lazarus continued, oblivious to either a vivid figment of her imagination or a genuine connection to the Void. Perhaps due to the molecule, the latter seemed probable to the General. Indeed, she sought to feel herself in that chair, finding it preferable to the seat of the tanque, and tried to stoke her imagination like a sun into which she was tempted to step could she but find a way: yet it appeared for all the world that it stepped out of her. There was her Father in the empty seat beside Lazarus, hands folded between his knees as the mystic said, “But your Father has many motives besides that.”

  “Like what?” asked Dominia, focused on that figure who, in turn, set unmoving black eyes upon her. More than imagined, perhaps?

  “Like luring you into his service. Getting you to betray me.”

  “How easily you could kill them all, Dominia,” said the Hierophant, or his figment, or the General’s own bitterness given by her mind a most appropriate shape. “They have no idea.”

  “How could he hope to do that? He can’t give me anything I want.”

  “He can give you what you think you want, or what you think is good enough. What looks like what you want, what seems like what you want.”

  “Take the gun of the man to your left and shoot the one to my right, and by the time the fellow over there hits the button, you’re upon him. You can fight through the pain long enough to see him dead.”

  “What do you think I want?”

  Lazarus did not answer.

  “Then, it’s a simple matter of the driver. And if the mystic tries to stop you, kill him, too.”

  “What?” she asked sharply of the fancy. To cover herself, she turned her scrutiny upon Lazarus. “What—what do you think I want, please?”

  “I think you want to be happy for once,” said Lazarus.

  Dominia’s mouth opened in a jolt of emotional turmoil. Ashamed she had been angry enough to let him in and hear his ill thoughts of her friend, the General glanced to the place she imagined her Father.

  The seat was empty.

  XIV

  O Vas Nobile

  Though the figure vanished, and the LSD wore off six hours into the drive (following a miserable, sweaty, three-hour comedown), that was not the last Dominia was to hear of her Family over the next week. Quite the opposite: having been out of the news loop for what was technically over a month, much had happened beyond her awareness. This became apparent when, around the time the acid relinquished her state of mind but not the impossibly tight muscles of her neck, the driver flipped on the radio and tuned through the stations as if prompted by the rising of the sun. As the man said something in the (at the time, dying) language of Farsi, Lazarus snorted, and Dominia glanced at him out of—not curiosity, so much as obligation. The curiosity ship sailed with her last bit of energy.

  “Tobias told him to make sure you hear the news,” he explained. As the General rolled her eyes, the driver settled on a station whose distinguishing feature was its use of English. Specifically, a familiar, nasally form of English, spoken by her useless baby brother, Theodore del Medico.

  “And just who are these people complaining about my administration, anyway?” he asked a boisterous crowd, having (apparently within days of his term as Governor of the United Front) dropped all pretense of being a professional in favor of off-the-cuff banter with his audience—flavored by a dash of fearmongering. “I’d say they were humans, but it’s not just humans, is it, ladies and gentlemen? After all, there are humans here—the good sort, you know, who can see the bigger picture because they were raised in the Front and understand its culture. No: the problem comes from the west—or the Far East, if you’d rather—and brings with it habits, customs, needs that threaten to divide us as a people. And are we not one people, citizens? Are we not United? One nation, under God, indivisible!”

  This was a violation of her rights as a sentient being. Theodore’s voice was an audible war crime so piercing in its obnoxious emphasis that it was close to impossible to block him out. Last time, when she heard his voice in that holo-vision, she had managed the feat of tolerating it; but now, with her mental faculties burned out from nine hours of high-speed whirring, she couldn’t find anything else to think about—certainly nothing preferable—and was forced to listen as the resounding applause of the audience reduced again to her baby brother’s drone.

  “There are those who have condemned my treatment of these illegal aliens as too harsh, but I say I am not harsh enough! They point to the news stories about kids in cages like I’m some monster, when the reality is these people come to our nation half the time specifically to destroy it, to rend us apart and foment dissatisfaction among you good and wholesome citizen. We are protecting their children, and we are controlling them by funneling them into registered neighborhoods—while still doing them the decency of allowing them to live here, mind! But that’s never good enough for a group as entitled as that.

  “They would have you think your nation, your government—your Holy Father!—doesn’t care for you. They come to take food from our mouths and money from our wallets all so they’ll be ready to rise against us on that fatal night. Some extremists, I have heard, even wish to”—his voice dropped—“euthanize the children of martyrs! Some of these immigrants might be good people”—this was added in such a half-assed way that Dominia and Lazarus made eye contact before the former rolled her eyes—“since China, India, and the Risen Sun are so tightly packed, along with the rest of Asia; but far more of them come farther, from the Middle States, or have been indoctrinated with the values of the Hunters’ South American branch. We can take no risks. Our Adaptation Centers have already reduced crime and improved the living conditions of our true citizens beyond measure. It is our hope that by isolating those individuals who we believe to have come to sew dissent, we will sort out the good apples and set our future citizens on the path to right living.”

  Yes, having one’s children taken away while one is made to labor on a fodder plantation will do that. Especially when said fodder is sent to the same concentration camps (sorry, “Adaptation Centers”) where the children were staying. If they were (un)lucky, some compassionate martyrs were browsing the aisles right now, looking for a son or a daughter the way humans looked for puppies.

  Once, when young, she had believed all that about dissenters, or lunatics planning to euthanize martyr children (though, in fairness, that was a genuine concern on occasions when Hunter cells found balls enough to attack a lesser town with a small martyr population). She had also once believed, quite wholeheartedly, that all humans were scum. Food at best, half-formed martyrs at worst, she had perceived them for the first 150 years of her life as filthy animals full of hate and resentment. But, over a long period of time, she found her opinion changing, and this was before her encounter with Benedict. Her nagging sense of wrongness about her lifestyle culminated in that moment with her Father’s total disinterest in even paying lip service to his appreciation for her. He would say or do anything to get her to obey him, believe
in him, kill for him—except respect her. She recognized with that simple brush-off—still recognized, every time she thought of it—that she was as much an object to him as every human he had ever killed, and he would kill her the way he had killed all his children. The way he had enacted so many deaths.

  That’s the kind of realization from which it takes twenty years of cold isolation to recover. By the time the General met Cassandra after a final, four-year spray of battles, she had been ready to eschew her speciesist perceptions forever.

  Yet, it was so tempting—easy, too—to consider falling back into the trap of old, bigoted beliefs. Locked in a rumbling box with the same Hunters who, during a religious ceremony, invaded a palace, killed a score of unarmed women, and destroyed every work of beauty on the property, it was hard to remember there were good humans in the world. But—poor Kahlil’s face emerged behind her eyes countless times. The issue of the Hunters was not an issue of humanity. The hacker had been human, and so were the women cut down in the throne room.

  Was this the natural state of humanity, this struggle of mankind against mankind? Or was it perhaps the state of consciousness, which struggled between the species for fear of those foreign traits that rendered unrecognizable its own divided identity? Problems of race, gender, religion, and geographic location had plagued humanity since the dawn of time. Consciousness could make an argument of anything just for the sake of having an argument.

  The radio prattled throughout the drive, occasionally relenting to Arabic and Farsi stations as the men checked the weather or took advantage of a break in the English broadcast to listen to a few songs. She hung on to those details because they made her think of the men as people, rather than things or animals, which was how her Father had conditioned her to think of them for the majority of her life. But, ah, was it not tempting—would it not have been easier—to cut their throats, as she had cut the throats of all those crude men in the temple?

  No—that was the Hierophant. When she peeled her Father’s conditioning from her honest opinions, the General uncovered, to her surprise, a wellspring of shame: as if she’d lifted a rock to allow the expulsion of some boiling geyser. Those men she’d killed may have been wretched—may have joined the Hunters knowing their lives would meet a bloody end at some martyr’s hand—but Dominia could no longer shake the notion they had once been children, with hopes and dreams and mother and fathers. They were not always cruel and evil. No one was born a rapist, were they? But, if the world happened over and over again, was it not true that the seed of evil lay dormant in the growing mind, perhaps expanded backward to the newborn, the way the newborn expanded forward through time? Then there must lay seeds of good in equal measure. Why should Dominia, mere gardener, have blamed herself for turning over soil that decided to germinate asphyxiating weeds, rather than sunflowers?

  How difficult to find consolation! Perhaps it was the acid. Perhaps, even more, it was the ceremony. The difficulty may also have rested in the notion that she once again had two eyes. Did she deserve them? And her teeth: By Elijah, what made her special? She had killed many more than those men had, and been crueler, too. She liked to look down on the Hunters for their misogyny, but Dominia had been, at times, a misogynist. Her soul was not clean of striking Cassandra any more than Cassandra’s spirit was clean of striking her.

  Was it the Hunters who were so repellent? The humans? Or was it all those undesirable traits of herself that the Hunters forced her to see by reflection? Their behavior was the logical conclusion of her own. A caricature. Was she not as bad as her Father, playing his game of Holier-Than-Thou?

  “I wish you would tell me where that fucking magician is,” she snapped at Lazarus somewhere during the fourth rebroadcast of Theodore’s speech. This time it was with Arabic translations at which the Hunters jeered, nudged the General with their rifles, or, most appallingly, spat at her feet. “Not all humans,” she reminded herself in silent ad nauseam until her irritation found outlet on Lazarus. The old man hardly opened his eyes, being exhausted as she and still just as sleepless due to the stimulant effects of the drug.

  “I can’t. Takes all the fun out of it when the rabbit pops out of the hat.”

  “But he’s coming back?”

  “I need you to have faith.”

  “And I need you to stop saying that.”

  “Well? It’s true. I know, inquiring mind. You’re desperate to know everything all the time. But the fact of the matter is that, sometimes, you can’t.”

  “Is he in the Void?” she pressed, which elicited from Lazarus a groan.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “The Kingdom?” When he didn’t respond, she kept going. “If he’s in the Kingdom, I can find him. I’m sure that—”

  His eyes opened, words as contorted by annoyance as his face. “Look, kid! I don’t know where he is. Now that you’ve put him on Earth, he’s got work to do. So do we. Having a shitty attitude isn’t going to help. Jesus! How can somebody take acid and see something like that and just be so—pissy?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry! Maybe I’m rattled after having had the whole thing interrupted by a bunch of fucking—” The humans were staring; the word she had almost used, “bits” (a reference to early asteroid mining), was a derogatory term understood across most languages despite its archaic origins. She closed her eyes to do some deep breathing before continuing in Mephitolian.

  “I am having a challenging year. And this week has been, in particular, very hard. So please, Lazarus. I’m trying. I don’t get the so-called benefit of having lived this before.”

  With an exhalation of his own, Lazarus squinted through the slit window. “I know. I’m sorry. I do have trouble remembering that sometimes. You have no idea how tired I am of all this.”

  “As tired as I am?”

  A small smile touched the corner of his mouth as he looked back at her. “Maybe not.” Blessedly, the tanque screeched to a halt. “Look, Dominia: I need you to keep this in mind for me. Valentinian has a lot to do, and not a lot of time to do it, which seems sort of weird, but it’s true. If he spent his time here helping us, when you can help more adequately than he could—I mean, not only would that be a waste of resources, but certain things that need to happen might not be able to happen. I need you to believe in him, and I need you, whatever happens, to also believe in me.”

  “‘Whatever happens,’” she repeated lamely, the words rolling over her tongue with distaste as the black doors of the tanque were thrown open. Light exploded in with such immense fury that she did, just for a second, feel it in her soul like the chilling dissolution of the acid. But Lazarus was right: she was hyperaware of her neck, of the tension of the collar around it and of her own furious desire to stay and throttle every man around; those things, like leaden weights, restrained the coming of the Void. Just as well. She didn’t want to risk bumping into that useless magician, anyway. He needed to do what needed doing, she supposed—whatever the hell that was—but she was no less sore about the matter. It felt not unlike her parents’ abandonment, and because of that, Dominia did not allow the hope that she could be saved by anybody but herself.

  And then—then there was another small detail that, as she was yanked from the van, encouraged her to force awareness of the Earth beneath her feet and focus her consciousness on staying grounded despite the intensity of the vibrations in her body: as that darkness of the Void trembled in, so, too, had a strange series of terrible screams. In her periphery, there writhed gray shapes that could not assemble themselves into a form before her because she had not entered that bizarre, quasi-imaginary space. In those seconds in which she was exposed to the clamor, however, her mind tried to make sense of it. Amid the screams, she was able to discern, in languages her physical ear could not understand, a spray of agonized questions—“Where is Jerusalem?” “Where is God?” “What has happened to me?”—before her body was set before smiling Dr. Akachi.

  “Hello again, Miss Mephitoli! And good Lazarus. I tr
ust your journey was not too uncomfortable? It is not complete yet, I admit, but I expect—or hope—that you will find the last leg more bearable, being, as you are, with me.”

  “If only my Father were here! Then it’d be a real party.”

  “Be careful what you wish for, Miss Mephitoli! But that is unlikely. Our nation’s defense is top of the line, and our base camp changes its many locations often, even in the course of one year, to evade his attention. Oh, every now and then he gets a valid piece of information, but I do not expect he will ever be able to find all of us. Certainly not at once. I suppose we are rather like cockroaches that way!”

  “Your words, not mine.” She squinted across the desert as her long-time dark-adjusted eyes adapted to the light. All around swelled the (oddly comforting) sensations of a ramshackle military encampment: trucks rumbling hither and thither, men practicing their shots in the clear morning air, boots on the ground, and the overall clank-and-clamor of energy. “It’s a lucky thing I had you remove my DIOX-I, huh? For you, I mean.”