by M F Sullivan
“Easy for you to say, martyr. Get away from my neck.” With a slap for Dominia’s hand, Miki lowered her jaw, looked around in a huff, and began to straighten. “I don’t mean to be rude, or prejudiced”—a certain pleased pup pranced back into the room and received a pat from Dominia—“but I’m on edge at the moment.”
“I’m sure you are. Tell me again what happened?”
As the women slipped the body upon a tablecloth to be whisked into the suite bathroom, she did. After her appointment with Dominia, Miki had taken the Redcoins automatically deducted from the General’s virtual wallet once the appointed time had been met and, after exchanging the fake currency for a standard one, laundered their finances in the casino by buying chips, gambling for a few minutes, then cashing out. “Gambling for a few minutes,” however, apparently meant “spending an hour playing cards and another hour getting blitzed at the bar,” the latter being evident in the flush across her cheeks and the brusque way she scoffed, “What’s it to you if I did? Do you judge everyone you meet, Preachy?” in response to Dominia’s innocent query about whether she had gambled away the money.
“I ask because, if you’re going to travel with me, we might need it. They’ve thawed my account for the moment but might freeze it again anytime. That means René and the dummy account he gave me made up most of my wallet.” Now that the professor was revealed as a servant of the Hierophant, though, didn’t that make Dominique LeBlanc’s account as suspect as her own? She frowned while Miki went on.
“Not anymore. As a matter of fact, I made money in the Dragon today. Ten thousand yen—that’s almost a hundred bucks, UF—and furthermore, what are you? My husband?”
“You’re a pretty mean drunk,” observed Dominia, cheerful as she stood before the bathtub-cradled body with her hands on her hips. Despite the betrayal, she felt lighter. Perhaps on some level, she had known René was a traitor who needed to be expelled like an ingrown hair.
“You’re in a pretty good mood,” rebutted Miki, observing this lightness.
“Well, I’m sorry that this guy died, but— Hey”—she assessed the fellow’s features again—“you know, the eye doesn’t pick up on his face.” Nor had it on René’s.
“He must pay a privacy fee to Halcyon. Keeps you out of search engines and facial recognition databases.” Not too bent out of shape over the corpse, herself, Miki turned away to wash her hands, then removed a bottle of golden oil from the drawer of the ivory-inlaid sink whose dead-eyed cherubs made Dominia a little homesick. While Miki wiped the makeup off her face and scrubbed it with some comically bubbling wash, Dominia watched her in the mirror.
“You mean to say that you, a prostitute, don’t value privacy enough to pay the privacy subscription?”
“On the contrary, it’s in my interest to maintain an accessible public profile. Especially—well, I haven’t for some time, but I used to work in hostess clubs after I got out of being a geisha.”
“You were a real geisha.” Dominia laughed.
“Are you surprised? Please, nobody spends hours doing this makeup on a regular basis if they aren’t trained to endure it. You need, like, therapy and shit.”
“You seem more…crass than I would expect from a geisha, I guess. And I didn’t think they existed much anymore.”
“Well, we’re rare. I was. I’m not one anymore. Anyway, the hostess clubs were less involved, but similar, in a way. Sort of like being a geisha, you know, where I would come to a table and be their hostess, get them to spend money on drinks and all. But there’s no art to it. Mindless work, stupid and boring. So”—she turned her now-bare face and big, bright, organic eyes to Dominia—“I promoted myself.”
“You mean, you became a prostitute.”
“I don’t feel there is much difference between promotion and prostitution. Not when you’re a geisha. When I was young and stuffy, of course I did. I used to think that the pure and icy living dolls only bought in pressing circumstances by top-dollar lovers were the epitome of the divine feminine. Anyone easier was classless to me. But I sort of told you before. A woman came to me one day.” Miki slipped past Dominia to right the upended table, then busied herself in the pouring of wine, an act that highlighted the delicate beauty of her hands. “A beautiful woman. She asked me to come with her, to serve Ishtar”—that most popular appellation of the Lady—“with her. And what woman wouldn’t take an opportunity to meet the creator of the Red Market?”
“Quite a few. Most.” Dominia lowered into the couch and Miki flopped beside her. “Most people don’t want to meet the queen of prostitutes.”
“She’s not the queen of prostitutes!” Miki’s tone was as sharp as her clout of Dominia’s head. “She’s the mother of the world. And that’s capital: the Mother of the World. She’s also the Queen of Springtime, of Youth and—cows. Bees.” The already-drunk prostitute made herself drunker between objects, and the General wondered if that wasn’t how she had gotten through most of her life. Not that Dominia couldn’t relate. “Lots of other things, too, but it’s pearls before swine, talking to you about it. Oh…pearls are sacred to her, too, I think.”
“And swine?”
“No, that’s your Father.” Miki laughed at her own joke until she snorted, looking like a schoolgirl. Most humans looked somehow fresh, childlike to ancient martyr eyes (or, depressingly, eye). Even without the sacred protein, they modified themselves to hell, and experienced a pretty extended shelf life given money and diligence. Miki was probably in reality more of a late thirty-, early fortysomething, but Dominia looked at her and saw, at best, a twenty-year-old when she wasn’t burdened by makeup. Her age became visible when her eyes narrowed and she got a stern, serious look. “Have you turned off that DIOX-I? Its recording capabilities, I mean. He’s for sure watching us right now, you realize—you think it’s just René’s data he’s got?”
“I hadn’t had a chance to think about it until now. I’ve been trying not to.”
With a curse, Miki threw back the contents of her glass, wiped her lips with the back of her hand, and leaned toward Dominia’s right eye, her lips over-forming the words to allow easy lip-reading. “Then I’ll take this opportunity to say, ‘Fuck you, you snooping pieces of shit. And your rat, René.’”
“Which, for the record—”
“No more talking. First, go into your eye’s settings and turn off its data transmission to all places—storage clouds, DIOX error teams, anything.”
Dominia blinked. “What?”
“It’s a front-line precaution at best, if you know what I mean. There’s probably software still embedded in the eye that’s inaccessible to the user: something that streams data to the Hierophant’s offices no matter what we do, especially if the eye was originally leased to him. But we can keep DIOX from delivering it over the table. You don’t know how to shut it off? Don’t you care about computer security?”
Still startled by the woman’s chiding, Dominia tried to find some excuse, but was forced to admit, “Computers and—anything more than a cell isn’t popular with my people. Even fancy phones and watches aren’t popular. They’re frowned upon. E-readers are about as high-tech as we get.”
“What? Why the hell are you guys such Luddites?”
“It’s the blue light. The blue light of the sun is what causes our reaction to it; the blue light of electronics isn’t as bad, but studies have indicated it impacts a martyr’s motivation and, in some cases, digestion.” Never mind that she and Cassandra had once made frequent fun of goofy martyr housewives who claimed to have any number of nebulous issues thanks to the glow of their neighbor’s holo-corner as seen through a curtained window. Miki, as though sensing this, snorted, and forced Dominia to struggle on. “I think my Father has a point when he says that people don’t learn anything when they rely on computers.” That justification seemed ironclad to the General, as it was one of the few “common sense” beliefs she had always thought exceptions to the rule of her Family’s backward evil. Nevertheless, Miki laugh
ed.
“How do you have room to create anything when you’re wasting your mental space remembering junk you could store on a computer? Doesn’t a computer run faster when it isn’t bogged down by nonsense? Of course it’s important to learn, but it’s more important to discern.”
“Was that a poster on the wall of some depressing school of yours? No wonder you humans are in the shape you are.”
“Sassy. But I mean what I said. And for the record”—Miki’s eyes blazed bright—“humans will always come out on top. That’s because we’re willing to rely on tools outside ourselves. You can tell an animal over a human because the animal has too much pride in its physical traits to condescend to the use of a tool.”
Dominia blustered without meaning before stringing together a wounded conclusion of their debate. “You’re a fine one to speak of condescension. Just help me with this stupid eye, okay?”
Rather than taking offense, Miki laughed, and proceeded to walk her through the process of turning off things like forced software updates and data backups from her eye to the cloud. “The cloud” was a term for data virtually stored in (often insecure) servers, rather than more controllable personal hardware. Somewhere along the line, her Father had helped convince everybody this was a good idea, like Halcyon; it might have continued to seem like a good idea until martyrs showed up, and even for a while after, when people still believed there was no way he could access their private information. But, long before Dominia’s birth, the digital line between “personal” data and “government” data became blurry. Privacy meant keeping one’s data in one’s personal possession, which meant scouring a new device for any sign of uploading software, malicious or otherwise. Basil, bored, wandered off, and Dominia admitted during their work, “I suppose it is pretty stupid to refuse to use something out of pride. That’s probably why I got stuck with this eye now. Karma, right?”
“That’s almost how karma works,” agreed Miki, impressed. “Is it off?”
“All off, I think.”
“Good. You should still be able to use the Internet, but—hasn’t he frozen your Halcyon account, yet?”
“Well—no. The eye nabbed my real information from my brain before I could stop it, and everything was frozen at first, but by the time I was on the train, it seemed to have been released again. I’m going to toss the dummy watch René gave me—not like I need the ticket anymore.” Despite this sensibility, annoyance tensed the human’s face.
“You need to delete your should-be-frozen account, if you still can. He’s for sure using that to track you, too. Accessing your brain— Ugh! Stuff is evil these days. All these details!” The prostitute raised her hands from where they’d rested on her hips. “You have to take care of them.”
“I will. But, as far as details are concerned, there’s one I’m worried a…bout.” Dominia’s thoughts trailed off as she became aware of the horrific, wet sounds of a dog eating. The women shared a sidelong look of disgust before they peeked into the cramped bathroom with its undefended corpse. Basil, tail wagging, lifted his head to smile with a gory muzzle, eyes brighter and coat shinier by the minute.
Eating him had crossed her mind, but it was hard to prepare such a large body in such a small space. She had to admit she was a little jealous. Dominia’s mouth opened and shut in silence before she found her question, at which Miki scoffed. “Is this dog a martyr?”
“What? No, stupid, of course not. Dogs eat flesh all the time. This one’s been eating poorly, running around with you. No wonder he’s hungry. Sukuramu, sukuramu.” The human waved the dog away so that it scrambled between their legs and out of the room like a more innocently mischievous hound caught in garbage.
“Right,” cautioned Dominia, but Basil’s innocent look stayed her from further discourse. Right, of course. Dogs ate flesh all the time. That was what her Father had suggested to her, right? That she leave the door open so the dog wouldn’t starve once he’d eaten his humans. And their own dogs in Europa: some of them were trained to eat human flesh, too. The hunting hounds, and all. Of course, dogs ate flesh. It was just— Basil was so…intelligent. So…
“So, what are we going to do about him, huh? You’re daydreaming.” Miki snapped her fingers in front of Dominia’s face while standing between the General and the dog; the pup behind her appeared oblivious to the dollop of blood gathering at his lip, about to drop upon the spiraling pattern of the lilac-moss carpet. “I can’t take care of all this by myself. It’s your man who did this, so it’s you who should clean it up.”
“There’s only so much I can do.”
“You need to at least keep him out of sight of the porters for the next few hours. And keep the smell down, too.”
“It won’t be that bad that fast,” said Dominia, observing the gaping stomach wound carved by Basil’s hungry jaws. “But you’re right. We have to keep this from getting out, and we have to keep other people from getting in. For all we know, René could make a noise complaint. Maybe somebody’s already lodged one.”
“Too impolite. These people mind their business to a fault. It’s a matter of keeping our volume polite and quiet between here and Kabul. Easier said than done”—the human rolled her shoulders in a shrug—“but all we can do is try.”
The prostitute wove past Dominia, past the bloody dog, and tumbled into her bed: not a bunk like the arrangement in Dominia’s room, but not near as wide as most would wish and barely comfortable for two. Alone for the space of a second, she studied the corpse and wondered if her Father watched through her eye even with its backup features disabled. If it was true what Miki said about programs for some reason delivering information to the Family, wasn’t it possible that the Hierophant had potential access to every pair of DIOX-Is available? That was paranoid thinking, but if anyone was capable of such a thing, it was him. How? He couldn’t manage it. He owned Halcyon, but DIOX and their cyborgans were an enterprise of mostly human clientele. Why would he fund their medical technology?
She had to hope he wouldn’t. If that was the case, it didn’t matter if she had a DIOX-I of her own. Walking down the street, she would be exposed to thousands of streams recorded by passing strangers, and the Hierophant could observe any or all. Horrible. This thought lulled the General into a trance from which Miki drew her with the pluck of a shamisen string.
“That’s a pretty old-fashioned instrument,” said the martyr, coming to sit in the awkward, armless white chair in the corner. “I’ve always liked it.”
“You martyrs love human culture. You just hate humans. At least, you don’t think that we’re as good as you.” While Miki’s slender fingers produced twangs that filled the air like incense, she talked away. “He’s convinced himself—and everybody else—that you’re all so much better than us. That you’re different from us, at all. How is a martyr different from a genetically engineered human?”
For an ugly second, she was back on McLintock farm. “I’ve begun to ask that, myself. I always asked that. I…ignored it.” Dominia frowned at her hands, at her hungry stomach. Soon she needed to eat, and she regretted letting the dog get dibs on the businessman. “You have to ignore things to survive sometimes.”
“When your nervous system tells you a situation is bad, you should listen.”
“Of course, but what’s a kid supposed to do?”
Miki’s lips twisted in the shred of a sympathetic frown as her face lowered to her instrument. “That is the tragic part about this. Things would be different if martyrs were not so convinced of their own righteous nature. But your Father is good with children. Give him an infant, and blue will be red in a few centuries.”
Too true. The martyr rested her face against the cool wood of the door and listened to the instrument, let it quiver into her while she said, “I wanted to protest. I did, often, but I was afraid to take action.”
“What changed? Why have you taken action now? Not because some rat came to you. Not because your wife died.”
“But it was Cassandra.
Cassandra changed me.” In the back of Dominia’s head, she saw her, pale at the table, the adult version of the girl that the General had once been. So reluctant—so terrified—to exchange humanity for immortality. Every bite of food Cassandra consumed for the next six months were for her child; after the birth, they were for Dominia. Now, Dominia regretted that fact more than any. “She never let anyone make her forget that what she did was wrong. That shame kept her human, but it also kept her apart from us. It kept her so unhappy.”
“Better to be unhappy and repentant than an ignorant sinner,” said Miki. Dominia laughed.
“You believe in sin?”
“I might not worship your Father, but I’m a very religious person.”
“Ishtar, the Lady?” At Dominia’s question, the human’s dark eyes fluttered in surprise. The General smiled. “I’m not concerned anymore with the illegality of— It’s just a word.”
“Nothing is ‘just’ a word. Nothing is a word. Words have power; words bind, conceal, illuminate, and curse. So, too, can they free. The Lady is older than the word that is Her name; older than the word ‘Lady,’ older than the concept of ‘man’ and ‘woman.’ Older than the world.”
Over the plucking of the shamisen, against the closed lids of her eyes, great imaginings of near-psychedelic variety played out against the warm madder backdrop—some formless Lady with the world in her arms. Miki went on. “The world has been created many times over: so believe the Lady’s priestesses, those in the marketplace who have been initiated into its higher echelons of truth. But we are not the only ones who believe that. Many religions—all of them, if you pay attention—say the world has been created again and again. All of this has happened again and again.”
“That’s a depressing thought.”
“Then let that be motivation to live a pure life. That way, you can minimize the amount of pain you endure for eternity.” While Miki chuckled cheerlessly, the shamisen carried Dominia away with the sound of the human’s low voice. “The Lady is the one who creates the world each time it is destroyed. She was not present in the universe when it first began. Rather, She was created by the first destruction.”
