by M F Sullivan
“Hey,” tried Dominia, but Miki waved a dismissive hand. “You know you sounded like a social worker. Anyway, her special—skill, or whatever, is her ability in combat. She’s not one of these crazy people like the rest of the un-Holy Family and other powerful martyrs who can do messed-up stuff to your head. I don’t know why everybody acts like martyrs are so much better because they have talents. Humans have individual talents, too. Like you have a talent for being a real pain in my ass.”
Dominia fell silent while Kahlil rebutted, “Me, in your ass!”
A sly smirk crossed Miki’s face and Kahlil looked horrified, as if he had made a terrible mistake. Instead of making a joke that she was visibly pained to resist, Miki tapped her foot. “Yeah, a pain in my ass: since I brought you a whole bunch of new stock for your pawnshop, and you’re also getting plenty of favors in exchange for the imposition.”
Did she need to cover the dog’s ears? Was this inappropriate for Basil? His fuzzy mouth opened in a canine grin that turned into a yawn, and she was unconvinced that the yawn was not put in place to cover his reaction to her thoughts. Lamb! She’d become so paranoid! Dogs, reading her thoughts, hell. Sapient dogs, hell. She was starving from the trip, or tired from the fight, or both.
Dominia wandered to the cramped and unclean kitchen while the humans quarreled. In the dirty refrigerator, she discovered the pleasant surprise of several pints of blood. Miki had thought of everything—or maybe Kahlil had. Either way, the dog left the living room to prance down the hall once she turned around. She followed, blood bag in her hand like a juice box, and found Basil circling a spot on the floor of a guest bedroom crammed with two sorry twin beds and a lot of crap. A vanity with a broken, inexcusably dusty mirror once very nice; a nightstand with a crooked drawer she wasn’t interested in trying to fix. As she fell into one of the mattresses, the dog sneezed at the dust kicked up from the bedclothes, and Dominia noted that the singular window was sealed against police raids.
She had a feeling it had been like this before they were on their way. The Hunters, who were also known in this area as the Caliphate, al-Siyadun, and al-Saalihin, (or, to their opponents, al-Mawta), posed huge political and legal danger to the states they inhabited. It wasn’t enough for them to act as vigilantes who killed any stray martyr wandering into the area. The official position of the Hunters was that the only acceptable course of action, from a moral standpoint, was for human governments to wage total war upon all martyrs until one side or the other was destroyed to the man. Any government not fighting active war against the species was opposed to the human race and worthy of overthrow. Their presence in South Africa rendered that entire continent highly unstable, and although areas farther north were at greater risk of playing host to the odd tourist martyr (or even, in the Hierophant’s friskier years, an invading army from Europa), living there was still a safer bet than anyplace south or east. The Hunters were scattered across Africa and the Middle States, and though they elicited much turmoil in the region, they also struggled to maintain reasonable foothold. Consensus was that it was better for a human to risk being eaten by somebody on vacation to see the Fertile Crescent than to allow the Hunters power. Martyr tourists were far more reasonable and predictable than the Caliphate.
All this made Dominia wonder again what she was doing there: terrorist organizations aside, every human city held for her limitless danger. It was true that the presence of the Hunters in the Middle States put the region at risk, but since signing the Constitution in 1260, the union had held strong against both martyrs and extremists. The States, though independent and often in disagreement, were able to maintain order enough to serve as stronghold for generations of Abrahamians driven from Europa. This harmony was a defense to support spiritual humans as much as a move against the Hierophant, who had bloodlessly claimed the former human state of Italy, and changed its name, a mere ten years before. Often, he had tried the boundaries of the Middle States, and even after they had banded together, he still sometimes sidled up against them. He forever awaited the time he might penetrate their boundaries. One thing that kept him out was the sun, but if he had means to blacken it, no pocket of civilization would be free of martyr control. Then, the humans would have no choice but to turn to the Hunters for help.
That assumed, of course, there could still be a world after the sun went black. Did the blackening of the sun not mean the death of Earth? She had once, long ago, read the story of an unwilling man, a torturer, who journeyed to renew the sun of his world, and became a man of God: but there could be no renewal here. Not of this world. Further, if Miki was right, and the blackening of the sun meant the death of Lazarus, and the creation of a new iteration of the universe, did it matter if it, everyone, everything, died? Hadn’t they all done it before? Hadn’t Cassandra died before? Hadn’t her baby, also, died before? Died twice over each iteration: once with her mother’s martyring, and once on her own, not long after those delayed first kicks. Not long after Dominia, in equal maternal joy at tangible evidence of life, rushed to furnish a former guest apartment in the palazzo with a gilded crib, and a real ivory changing table, and sweet little cashmere socks, and far more stuffed animals than even comforted the sick mother through each day’s restless sleep. The kicking continued, night by night, and Cassandra’s nausea worsened: but then, at the apex of that sickness, the kicking stopped. Cicero was on a plane from Europa that same night. The next, he sat at Cassandra’s bedside in the midst of another ultrasound, lips narrowed in a frown behind his mustache while the expectant mothers asked in stereo, “What, what is it, what’s wrong?”
“Cassandra”—the words rolled from his lips after an agonizing moment of thought—“I am sorry, but this is one of a great many reasons why this sort of thing is ill-advised.”
Pale Cassandra began to sit up, only to be pinned by Dominia. The General demanded, “What are you talking about?”
“The baby’s heart has stopped.”
The silence carried its own sound: a ringing experienced by both openmouthed women. Cassandra, of course, felt the weight of the words more intensely than Dominia ever could. Cicero went on explaining, “It is too early to tell, of course, but I would suspect it to be a result of the protein’s interaction with her particular anomaly.”
“What do you mean, ‘it’s too early to tell’?” Numbed by the notion that her wife’s pain had been for nothing, Dominia realized the question had come from her own lips once Cicero looked at her.
“I mean—unpleasant as this may be—your wife shall have to carry the fetus to term.”
“Oh, no, please,” Cassandra now forced herself upright, tears filling her eyes. “Please, can’t something be done? Oh, God, if she’s dead, I can’t—I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” She was unable to vocalize the words “carry her to term,” her lips and cheeks wet with the tears of a rising panic attack. Dominia pushed onto the bed and folded heaving Cassandra into her arms.
“Can’t you induce and let her deliver it early? Won’t it calcify?”
“We are on the barest cusp of eight months now, Dominia.” As her brother slid away and packed his equipment, wailing Cassandra was forced to bury her face in Dominia’s breast if anyone was to hear. Cicero continued as if deaf. “Blood clots would be the biggest risk facing your wife, but the protein would never allow that to occur in a martyr. These situations clear up after two weeks, but if she requires the full four to come to term, we should not be alarmed.”
In the end, of course, it took five weeks. Five miserable, painful weeks of Cassandra knowing each evening, each morning, that her baby was dead inside of her. That she would have to give birth like it lived. When the day arrived, there was a strange, almost complete disinterest on the part of the staff in seeing to her, as if she had disappointed the nurses by her failure to keep the baby alive. It was far from her responsibility, of course. Neither would Cicero arrive in time for the labor; a replacement doctor had to oversee, and in the midst of all the disinterest and confusi
on, despite repeated pleas from both Cassandra and Dominia, by the time said replacement arrived, he announced it was too late to give an epidural. Cassandra had to deliver the corpse naturally.
All the screaming, and the blood, and the joyless, alien silence of the staff. The silence of the baby. The silence of Cassandra when her screaming stopped and she slipped into unconsciousness, a blissful break for which Dominia was glad when she saw the infant. She had always been skeptical, when people—usually humans—referred to sleeping children as “perfect” or “angelic.” Yet, in that second, she understood. A perfect porcelain cherub: wrapped in a pink blanket, then shipped away. Oh, Cassandra’s face when she learned she wouldn’t be able to see her baby, that she was already being prepped for burial. How she cried, and cried, and carried on with her crying while her breasts wept, also, with gifts for an unreceiving baby.
“I keep feeling like she’s alive,” repeated Cassandra, sobbing into her hand, into Dominia’s neck, into the pillows of her recovery bed. “I keep forgetting. Oh, God, I wish I could hold her.”
Once, Dominia thought she could never comprehend her wife’s heartbreak; now, she only hoped hers would not take ninety years to fade.
XII
Filling in the Gaps
Wherever Dominia went, she seemed to end up in the hands of medical professionals. Funny, in an unfunny way. Twenty-four hours after arriving in Kabul, she lay in the chair of a dentist with a booming laugh, a Nigerian accent, and a face that filled her vision like a great blob rendered square by the lines of that same DIOX-I that tagged him “Doctor Tobias Akachi.” The dark flesh of his face left his perfect smile all the whiter, and Dominia found herself thinking of the man as a talking set of disembodied teeth. “You know, I’ve never worked on a martyr before! What a crazy world we live in. But people’s mouths are all the same, no matter who they are.”
When was the last time she’d been to the dentist for more than a cleaning? When she got her artificial teeth, she supposed. She barely remembered the occasion, since, at the time, she’d been put under anesthetic and had woken up with a pair of fangs. Her Father had done her a favor by yanking them out; she increasingly felt toward them what a fortysomething businessperson felt toward a regrettable lower back tattoo. Since they were gone, the step of removing them was saved. She’d ought to write a thank-you note.
“I’m surprised you were willing to see me at all,” she admitted when the man swiveled to examine the x-rays of her mouth, fine aside from absent cuspids.
“You mean after the train? Miki told me you saved those people!”
“And the destroyed hospital in Japan, and the ship, and…”
“I know bullshit when I hear it.” The man chortled in a booming bass while he rolled from her vision to root through a tray of tools. “Even if you were a terrorist, I mean…the whole hospital? Come on.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying.” She felt motivated to talk by the vague sense of dread instilled upon finding herself at the mercy of anyone, no matter how friendly; Cicero’s fault, to be sure. “It’s so over the top. Don’t people think it’s absurd?”
“Always easier to assume the other person is wrong and that our own opinions are right—that there is no conspiracy and that mankind is fighting a battle against itself, instead of playing a game for God.”
Beyond the window, Kabul glowed in a neon rainbow by even those earliest hours of the evening. “I thought ‘God’ was ‘Allah’ in these parts.”
He rolled back, now holding a device resembling a mechanical pencil, mouth hidden behind a blue mask. “Only when my patients discuss Him. I am an English-speaking Christian, myself.”
These Abrahamians! Jewish, Christian, Muslim. You couldn’t tell them apart for trying—at least, martyrs couldn’t—yet they were touchy about getting mixed up. Their petty distinctions made little sense to her, and this must have been communicated by the near roll of her eyes as the dentist opened her jaw and began using the small water drill. Though less cruel than its prehistoric metal counterparts, it still made her wince deeper into the uncomfortable chair. As he cleaned, the dentist continued above the whine of water, maybe imagining her responses.
“You probably don’t know much of our faiths, soldier as you are, but we Abrahamians are quite different from one another. Even Christians are different from one another! You know that, don’t you?” She tried to nod, but he carried on, using another implement to vacuum spittle from her gums while he lectured. “As it happens, none of us used to get along. Even before your Father showed up, and for many generations after, there was much struggle about ‘the right faith.’ That was what helped him rise to power. But, as he took control of North America, we realized we all fought the same enemy; and when we were abandoned in the Rapture by the wealthy and the elite, a new era of cooperation began on Earth.”
Ah, yes. Dominia had been so young those nights: not quite hopeful for the future anymore, but not as bleak a woman as she would become. Martyrs had been open about their presence for almost seventeen thousand years at the time of Dominia’s human birth as Morgan, but the species had begun to close their iron grip decades before that fateful day in which the wealthy fled. This had mostly to do with the failed attempt to conquer Japan, regarded as a victorious maintenance of the boundaries of the UF in much the same way that the harrowing destruction of Moscow and the inhabitability of much of Russia was forever regarded as an opportunity to experiment with terraformation technology—and further evidence that martyrs were a cruelly maligned, unfairly detested people.
He had given society so much, the Hierophant: by the time Russia’s terrain was at all recovered, he donated the many technologies established in its healing alongside tech developed for asteroid miners to support the first living colonies of Mars. These were quick to die, of course, but every generation after died slower; and while humans on Earth were busy fighting among themselves and keeping their heads down to avoid Hierophant attention, Martian humans slaved to make their planet habitable. By the time 1700 rolled around, it was in impressive shape; come 1744, the wealthy multitudes, whose human life spans shielded them from the knowledge that the Hierophant had begun the terraforming effort in the first place, were ready to flee to the stars. Her Father had gladly let them go: more land for him. The impoverished of Earth, however, hardly realized they had been abandoned until too late. They seldom realized anything until too late. As Dr. Akachi pointed out, this was because they had been under the thumb of the Devil.
“You Father would like nothing more than for us to continue the old ways—persecuting one another while crying over our own persecution. So, we have done the opposite, and brought ourselves together!”
When Dominia gagged at her ill-advised attempt to speak, the dentist removed his hands enough to let her sputter, “Except the Hunters,” before he dove back to work.
“Well, I can tell you, miss, that their mouths look like yours. Maybe they would like their mouths to look different! But no. The same. Only”—he dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper—“they are bad about brushing. And try getting one to floss. Gum disease! It’s rampant with that sort. Which reminds me—are you being sure to brush your gums? You’d ought to take your time. I notice you haven’t been in the habit lately.”
“I’ve been busy,” she said, her tone sufficient to tan a hide. The man laughed.
“So I understand. This process takes a few weeks, but Miki told me we do not have that luxury. I can see why she insists it needs doing. Rather indiscreet, eh? If one of the Caliphate saw your missing teeth, you would be good as dead. We’ll have to install both your titanium implants and the crowns that lock into them, all four in the same appointment. I don’t care for that, even if it can be done on a martyr, but we have no choice. I’ll still need a day to prepare the crowns; those, I can print at my apartment. Are you comfortable waiting that long?”
“Do I have a choice?”
With a hearty chuckle, he lowered his mask and offered a cu
p of pink mouthwash. “Of course! You have many choices. You could go running in the street and get hit by a car. Fine a choice as any. You could go home. Or, you could choose to carry on. And since it seems to me like you’re making that last choice, I have to say, I am pretty impressed.”
“Thanks,” said Dominia, who fell silent as the dentist carried on.
“We’ll put you under light anesthetic, and when you come out of it, you’ll be good as new!”
At this statement, her brain replayed the cartoon nurse’s assurance that her eye installation would be, “Just like going to the dentist.” As Tobias turned away, she snatched his arm. His understandable wince passing by, the man met Dominia’s blazing eyes with curiosity.
“Can you remove DIOX-Is? Or—uninstall them, I guess.”
The dentist regarded her face, his own a cautious mask in the wake of his fright. “I could, but I hardly see why you would want such a thing. After going to all the trouble of having it installed…isn’t that why you were in the hospital?”
“Yes, but”—she considered how unwise it was to confess to the man, whose face was labeled by an azure box, that the Hierophant may have watched her every movement because he owned her eye—“it’s a terrible distraction. The features are outweighed by—everything. The ads, for example.”
“You would rather be blind in one eye than see a few targeted commercials!” The earnestness in her expression faltered the humor in his. With gravity, he pressed, “Have you given this much thought?”
