The Hierophant's Daughter

by M F Sullivan

  “It is my personal pleasure to announce the traitor, Governess Dominia di Mephitoli, has been killed by Our Lord the Hierophant while attempting to flee her own municipality of the United Front. I’ll remind you that, a mere four months ago, on May Night, Cassandra di Mephitoli had her martyring completed. I think we’ve all heard enough of the official line by now—but perhaps there’s a more sinister story at work.” As the General’s jaw tightened, the idiot ranted on. “The truth will never be known—rest her soul, the poor woman—but I say, good riddance to the worthless Governess, who let her post corrupt her past the point of no return.” There went the pencil. “There’s no room among martyrs for traitors, apostates, and liars who intended to bring secret military intelligence to the enemy. Our leader, however, is more generous than I am.”

  The clip cut to a press conference in what she recognized by the scarlet leather chair and goldenrod drapes to be her own office. Not more than two hours after he’d left her near death, she’d wager. With his beetle eyes the picture of mournful calm, the Hierophant lifted a hand to smooth back his gray-blond hair. He opened his mouth, lost the will, and began to weep.

  “My children—” He covered his lips with his fingers, then let those same deft digits dip into his breast pocket for the folded cloth square with which he dabbed those tears. “My children”—he began again—“I apologize. This morning has been one of great emotion for me. It is with profound sorrow that I announce my eldest daughter, Governess Dominia di Mephitoli, had her martyring completed in a confrontation early this morning—owed to an anonymous tip that the Governess intended to flee the United Front for the Empire of the Risen Sun. When we spoke, she remained unreasonable, and I had no choice—though I wish she had given me one. I wish she had given me a choice, my children; oh, my children, my daughter is dead! Sweet Dominia.”

  His face disappeared behind his hand and his handkerchief. As a camera-decapitated figure rushed to comfort him with a touch upon his shoulder, the Hierophant rose. This forced the camera to pan up and reveal the snot-nosed face of Dominia’s baby brother, smug as a pig in shit.

  “But, as we all know: in every death, there lies an opportunity for rebirth. Therefore, amid this tragedy, I award stewardship of the United Front to my son, Theodore del Medico. Governor Theodore, please.”

  The Hierophant swept away with a microsecond’s bleak stare into the camera, a look that Dominia sensed to be for her, whenever she would watch the feed repeated in cuts and recuts, news and talk shows, for nights or weeks. Unless something worse happened, anyway. Events unraveled so fast that it was possible for something to steal her unwanted spotlight within hours. She started to zone out into the pain of her eye socket as her tedious brother failed to keep the gloating from his voice. “We will all mourn with heavy hearts the loss of my sister. But I swear, citizens of the United Front: I will do you proud.”

  Yeah. Proud. Most of the citizens of the Front were human: Europa, especially in the Baltic region and New Scandinavian region, was the area most populated with martyrs. Therefore, martyrs living in the United Front were better off—at least, less likely to know their neighbors, and given to higher odds of success and social advancement. The humans were better off, too, and with much open land made available by migration in and out of cities as the times changed, hopeful mortals struggling to breathe in cramped Eastern countries made the mistake of immigrating, through legal means or otherwise, to the Front. This meant that there was a proliferation of bounty hunters and terrorists hidden among the human population, but it also meant that there were far, far more good, honest, hardworking people who happily withstood the danger of living in proximity to martyr territory if it meant they got ahead. Governance of the region belonged to somebody responsible, somebody who’d govern with compassion for the latter group of humans, which needed looking after if they, and the planet (and, consequently, the martyrs), were to survive. The Hierophant knew that, which was why he’d put Dominia in charge to begin with, and why he put Theodore in charge now. It would agonize her to see. He knew perfectly well that she lived.

  “He said he thinks you’re dead,” observed Ichigawa when she showed him the feed above deck eight hours later. The professor lit a Sterno can with the electric arc of his lighter.

  “He’s lying so he gets to say later that whoever abetted my escape will merit death.”

  “Don’t you suppose he’ll be made a fool of?”

  “No. He’ll make me look like a cunning terrorist. Not so hard, now that I’ll need an eye patch.”

  “Not necessarily. Your new eye can appear identical to your old one, depending on the features you’re after. The fangs, though—those’ll be harder. Nobody does fangs in the Risen Sun, for obvious reasons.”

  “I’d like something more reasonable, anyway. Those surgical fashions…they’re practical so long as you’re a predator. I’d started to regret mine.”

  “Trading in your fangs for teeth?”

  “For Cassandra. I’ve given up everything for her. My whole Family, my whole world.”

  “You still have to give up one more thing before we’re able to resurrect your wife.”

  “Sell my Father and my nations to the Hunters, you mean.”

  “What does he want?” asked Ichigawa. Dominia lifted her head to the white face of the winsome moon; beyond, semi-terraformed Mars glowed with starry promise. It had been so bright in the sky the night of the meeting—mere weeks after Cassandra’s funeral—wherein the Hierophant announced to a room of military geniuses the implementation of a multiphase plan. A lunatic’s plan. Project Black Sun, which had, after Cassandra’s death, pushed Dominia into final, foolish action.

  “He wants to give martyrs the ability to walk in the sun.”

  “How will he do it?”

  “He never said. Only that it’s a multiphase effort relying on an assault on Jerusalem. There won’t be anyone who knows more if he’s not one hundred percent sure they can be trusted.”

  “How does he know that they can be trusted?”

  “How does he know anything? How does he evade bullets, how does he seem capable of traveling vast distances in impossible spans of time? Why does he seem to know everything I do? He’ll tell you it’s because he’s close to God, but I suspect it’s the Lamb. He affects probability; he must know something about the future. All he needs to do is say the word to the Hierophant, and your whole plan is kaput. Once a person is equipped with information and therefore has a high probability of betraying them with that information, the Lamb is able to rectify the situation. But there’s one person that the Hierophant would trust with anything. Cicero.”

  With a sickle smile, René lifted his eyebrows. “El Sacerdote. His eldest child, yes?”

  “By a hair, though it’s said he and the Lamb were martyred at once. And he’s not just the eldest: they’re the only survivors out of…countless generations. The Hierophant has ruled for two thousand years, and Cicero has been his highest priest and right hand the whole time. My Father acts like I’m the first kid he’s ever killed for disobeying him after the age of a hundred, but there have been plenty more. At least six generations I can name. He’s taking advantage of short memory spans: the median age for active martyrs is something like three hundred and sixty right now. Martyrs who were alive for his older generations of children are few and far between.”

  “So Cicero is almost two thousand years old. How old is the Hierophant?”

  “Ageless, he says.”

  “How is it he’s so much older?”

  “Time lived before his reign, of course, on his planet of origin, where he was the high priest in the way that Cicero is here. The martyr planet, from which he brought his blood and the ways of martyrs. That’s the official line, anyway.”

  Here, Dominia lost the professor, as all martyrs lost any human with whom they discussed the subject of the exoteric trinity and the origins of the Hierophant. It was touchy for them, as it was for René, who shook his head. “That’s f
ine, if goofy, but mixing it up with a bunch of religious nonsense is where I get prickly about it. The last great barrier to sensible living.”

  Her lip gave the instinctive twitch of someone too long in the practice of suppressing their smirks. “It’s one he’s tried his best to eliminate. Any religion but his, anyway. Always hard to stamp that spirit out, though.”

  Lowering his head over the canned stove, Ichigawa probed the roasting potted meat. Hard to digest as what she had told him, that stuff; but the professor took both in stride. “Mankind has, in all fairness, been unified by the martyrs and the Hierophant. Old prejudices of race, language, gender, disability, sexuality—none of it matters now. There are the poor and the rich, but so it will always be, I think. Perhaps one day, religions will be unified. The final prejudice to be destroyed is the prejudice between the living and the dead.”

  Dominia regarded her hand. Was it really her hand? What once was animated and controlled by cells was now animated and controlled by the sacred protein that had edited those zombie cells, dead but still alive. Preserved for eternity in their ideal physical state by a protein that never ceased its editing. To support the body’s state of constant high maintenance, martyrs kept their proteins educated with DNA samples from healthy blood and flesh; otherwise, the protein was liable to overedit, as it was when exposed to the sun. The result of this starvation long-term was not death, but something closer to epilepsy, or, in certain unlucky martyrs, cancer. Ergo, their diets were incompatible with peaceful existence, much as they were incompatible with an average level of vitamin D. Exposure to sunlight resulted in a hyperefficient state wherein the martyr’s immune system destroyed itself and the body it inhabited in a matter of ten to twenty minutes, depending on age. If that were to happen to the General, would the sun kill her, or reveal her?

  His mind along a similar track, René split the potted meat between himself and the dog head poking out from the lazaretto. “I didn’t manage to save any rations more than the Spam in the locker. When was the last time you ate?”

  “Twelve hours ago.”

  “The tremors will start soon.”

  Yes, the tremors. Then the insomnia. Then the dysarthria. “There’s nothing to be done.”

  “Nothing, yet—but we’ll be picked up soon. I hope.”

  “A fishing vessel out to sea isn’t going to have a steady supply of blood.” At Ichigawa’s blank look, Dominia sucked the gaps in her teeth. “No, René.”

  “I’m just trying to make suggestions!”

  “They’re helping us!”

  “They’re not helping us so you can starve.”

  “I’m not going to starve.” Over the edge of the boat, she stretched her fingers toward the water. Her reflection, disrupted by the churning water and the brooding dark, recalled Cassandra. “I’m not an animal. I can wait.”

  As if on cue, a ship began to peel itself from the invisible horizon that blended water and sky. “We’ll see about that.”

  Dominia drew her collar high around her face. “How much do they know?”

  “As much as you’d tell a cab company. ‘One woman, one man, a little luggage.’ Didn’t mention the dog.”

  “Or the martyrdom.”

  “No, didn’t mention that, either. Would have been much harder to secure transportation, even with Tenchi’s help. These fishermen are used to helping whole families of humans escape martyrs, not helping martyrs escape to East Asia. At any rate, they won’t ask many questions when they see—well.”

  The wind nipped up to splash salt water across her lips. As Dominia’s remaining eye trained on the ship, she refused to allow herself to feel trepidation, or pain. Certainly not grief over her eye, the eye that had been with her since her first, human birth and before—the eye whose companion now looked on with agitated acuity, presenting a world that began to her left and ended at the crescent of a nose she noticed more than ever. Another brisk slap of the water licked her mouth, and she allowed this one to conjure the spray of foam that had produced her first look of naked Cassandra while the human emerged, laughing, from the sea. Dominia had taken shelter from the sun in one of a great many coves around the dramatic Pacific beach, and lo! was visited by an angel.

  She would forever remember Cassandra’s eyes: those fair twin moons rendered crescents as she looked around herself with one hand across her breasts and the other planted between her long legs, bared by the kind ocean for (then mere General) Dominia’s astonished scrutiny. Four hours had the General remained in the cove, praising the low tide and waiting for some break in the sun. Now she saw why she had come, why she had been drawn to the ocean and to what hint of light her body could stand. A run seemed it would do well for her distracted mind. That was why she’d come to the shady seaside town in the Pacific Northwest, after all: distraction. It had been as different from Mexico as one might imagine, and a fine place to get lost in thought.

  But the dawn that called her to her senses had found her miles from her cabana. The Pacific northwest and its sullen coastlines were known for their morning haze, so where had it gone? She’d felt so stupid, sitting with her coat spread beneath her, hidden in the darkest, driest place she’d managed to find. That foolish feeling remained until sweet Cassandra appeared, her rich honey hair wet to a dark-taupe tangle of curls that streamed over her shoulders and clung to her breasts like the seaweed of a mermaid’s fabled locks. Then, this woman with her tumbling hair and her big eyes saw the martyr hidden in the cove and, likewise amazed, let her brassy limbs fall free from her body. In the sun, she almost glowed.

  “You’re that martyr general.” Without a trace of fear. “I know you. Dominia, right?”

  Yes, yes, Dominia, yes, general, yes, martyr, yes, yes, many things. Oh, agony! What to say? What trouble, words! “I feel like I’m interrupting something by being here.”

  “Interrupting? Oh!” Those hands began to move, and so did seated Dominia’s, until she conquered instinct—but there was no stopping her voice, which pleaded, “You don’t have to,” before tapering off in a sad note of embarrassment. At the exquisite stranger’s smile and the way her body relaxed, the General’s self-consciousness faded.

  “It’s so hard to get morning sunshine here! I was sunbathing, and just… My name’s Cassandra.” The human stepped with nimble feet across the rocks, and Dominia sat straighter, heart hammering. “What are you doing here? I thought martyrs couldn’t go outside in day.”

  “We can’t, strictly speaking. I went out late for a walk, and I—I thought it would be cloudy.”

  “Do you live near here?”

  “Sort of wish I did.” Both laughed, and as the naked woman embanked near Dominia’s shelter, the General bit her lip. “You strike me as a local.”

  “How’d you guess? I love the sea. The soft sound of the waves. They put me to sleep every night.” She hovered at the edge of the shade. “Can I— Am I bothering you?”

  “No, please.” Dominia’s voice was as hoarse as her lips were dry; but, oh, how she smiled in that moment. “Please come in, Cassandra. Sit with me.”

  “Dominia.”

  René’s voice called her back to the present, where salt water heralded only the looming trawler. A flashlight poured into her sensitive eye, and the sound of a barking animal rose over those of waves as the professor shouted, “Are you okay? Did you hear me?”

  “What did you say?”

  “I asked you, ‘How do we move the dog?’”

  “I’ll take him,” she said, shaking herself free of her one moment of joy. “Don’t worry.”

  III

  Aboard the Jun’yō

  If a refugee wanted to avoid questions when boarding the fishing vessel set to smuggle them to freedom, all they needed do was lose an eye. That, or bring a dog. The McLintock border collie so stole the proverbial show from either Dominia or René that they barely had to do a thing but accept a coarse pair of blankets and watch the comfort-starved men fawn over Fido, who tried his best to pay all sailors e
qual attention while he pranced around the mess hall. “I’m going to have to come up with a name for that dog,” she said as the first mate, a portly, tanned fellow—the Tenchi who was Ichigawa’s paternal cousin—came with the ship’s doctor. René barely looked up from the lab-grown leather shoes he’d begun to polish the second it was polite. This doctor, a strange and squat fellow who looked less Japanese and more like some sort of gnome, lifted his eyebrows as he examined her socket.

  “He says it’s a clean job,” supplied Tenchi at the doctor’s muttered Japanese. “He says if it wasn’t for a few bits of glass, it would look like a soft-boiled egg had popped, whole, from its shell.”

  She asked René, “Whose bedside manner is worse?” The professor laughed while the doctor rifled through the contents of his medical bag. “It’s hard to tell with a translator. Is it the doctor, or is it your cousin?”

  “Don’t blame me,” said Tenchi. As the doctor hurried away to wet a sponge and clean the tweezers, he waved a hand at his back. “This guy’s used to working with sailors.”

  Dominia snorted. “What’s your excuse?” The doctor, now gloved, returned to wipe the sponge over her nose, cheek, and brow, uncomfortably close to what she’d begun to intellectualize as a depression in her face. Still, she felt her eye like it was there, and feeling her eye made her think of losing her eye. The doctor was right. It had been a tidy job, outside the expected blood. It made her sick to think about, that egg thing, but now it was all she thought—eggs and grapes and her eyeball dipping in and out of the Hierophant’s fucking teacup. She shoved the doctor away and ran to the big mess hall sink where she vomited, full of clots and tissue she rushed to rinse away before anyone noticed. “Sorry, I’m sorry.”