The Hierophant's Daughter

by M F Sullivan

  She had, and once more reached up to touch the long locks shorn to make a fast disguise on the Light Rail. Still amazed to feel them again, she asked, “How is this so?”

  “It’s how you’re used to thinking of yourself, isn’t it? How you picture yourself in your mind, in your dreams. That’s who you are all the time, but here it’s visible.”

  “But my eye?” She realized she had not removed the patch, and began to reach for it. Valentinian stayed her hand.

  “The damage incurred by your physical eye is symbolic of higher truth. You do have a sort of eye here, but the magnitude of its powers means it must be hidden. Leave it shut: when it opens, it’ll end the world.”

  “You can’t just be telling her these things.” Lazarus, about to toss a third pebble into the distance, offered Valentinian a resentful glance which was bounced back to him in the form of an eyeroll.

  “People have already started hinting stuff about her end-of-the-world responsibilities! It’s worse to tell somebody a bit of something without telling them the hows and whys. Like keeping a gun around a kid and telling them not to touch it, but not specifying which end is dangerous.” Dominia sickened at the metaphor, but Lazarus blustered off in immediate response, not noticing the expression, or the chill that wracked her to remember that odious moment in this place where thought was naked.

  “It’s all dangerous, which is why it’s better the kid should know the gun is going to kill them if they touch it. Leave it at that.”

  Valentinian scoffed. “You’re hardly an expert on child-rearing.”

  “And you are?” Lazarus laughed, his language shifting, then, to that old English variation. It had frustrated her the first time she’d heard it, like listening to characters in a dream babble in made-up languages only the unconscious understood: but, by the final time she would hear its words bandied between the two men, she would come to wonder if this was not how prelingual children perceived the chatter of adults. For now, trailing behind them, she observed by tone as the conversation escalated into argument. Though she knew a great many languages, Dominia found this one beyond her grasp; and she was used to being around many other people who spoke in foreign tongues, but she never appreciated when others had private conversations in front of her. This was how she began to assail her own brain, each thought punctuated by the irritating ping of a pebble as she came up with a great list of questions that seemed without number, and that were impossible to flesh out with the pinging of the pebbles separating each thought. By the time she managed to articulate a question, ping! Another pebble scurried across the textureless ground like the full stop at the end of a sentence, a period, a point audible with each stone flicked away. How long had they marched? Ping! Where were they? Ping! Who was Valentinian? Ping! How a dog, why a dog? Ping! What was beneath her eye patch now, and what did it have to do with the world, its end, anything at all?

  Having thoughts in this place seemed futile as collecting water in one’s cupped hand. Or perhaps it felt like sitting at the edge of a (pinging) fountain and trying to will it to collect itself into the form of a cup, without having a cup or a means by which to direct the liquid. Ping went a pebble, and Dominia was almost grateful for it, now. She became afraid of what might happen should she indeed follow a thought to the point of getting lost. The men chattered among themselves, their backs to her, and her body leadened at the absurd worry that they would forget her. Might she vanish while their backs were turned?

  On the edge of quavering anxiety that felt it might be deadly, Dominia interrupted their conversation. “Are there other people here? Are we ever going to meet anybody else? What’s going on?”

  Their argument paused (for now), the men turned to look at her. While gentle relief flooded her mind to confirm that she, if nothing else, still existed, Valentinian said, “We’ll meet some other people eventually. Lots of other people, but not for a while.”

  “We’re going to Cairo,” answered Lazarus. “It’s a shortcut. Kind of. The walk won’t be quite as bad as you’re thinking.”

  “But we’ve been walking such a long time.”

  “It’s been about”—Valentinian paused to check his pocket watch, and Dominia discerned a wing-cloaked tetramorph etched into the metal—“oh, six days or so.”

  “The sun will set soon.” Lazarus gazed at the great mole that hadn’t shown any signs, so far as Dominia had seen, of moving an inch, west or east, whatever good such directions did in a place like this, where she sensed—and where the fields around them seemed to indicate—that there were more than four cardinal directions. “We’ll have to make a camp.”

  “We can go farther,” insisted Valentinian, snapping shut his watch and studying Dominia with eyes that would be glacial were they not crinkled with cheer. “How’s it going, kiddo? Can you keep it up? You’re not tired, are you?”

  “No, it’s not that. I don’t understand how we’ve traveled so long when the sun hasn’t moved.”

  Lazarus seemed inclined to let the magician field these questions. “Time works differently here. Not only that, but the flow of time back on Earth—so far as our own perceptions are concerned, anyway—is more related to perceived distance traveled here than actual earthly time spent. If we spent three days hanging around the same place, like, say, a town, or a ship, or anything else one might find in this place, we wouldn’t notice much of a difference when we came back, and we also wouldn’t find ourselves having experienced a significant change in our relative space compared to that of other Earthlings.

  “Think of it like a film strip.” Valentinian rolled back his sleeves and from his empty hands produced an antique strip of movie film. As he ran it through his fingers, light projected from them to terminate in a moving image at an arbitrary point in space: a simple show, played upon a screen unobserved. “As the physical film moves in space, the images and sounds it’s projecting carry forward in time and perceived space—though, of course, the film itself never leaves the boundaries of the projector, and the movie watched never leaves the screen on which it’s being played. Unless it’s stopped. But when the film stops moving, the image on the screen also stops. Strictly speaking, when we’re at the movie and unaware of the film on which it’s printed, we’re still simultaneously viewing the physical print and the motion picture: but when we become aware of the prints, we’re able to manipulate them, and our position in them, by operating solely on that level. Instead of being a viewer, we become a projectionist.”

  Somehow, perhaps because of the dreamscape the trio inhabited, the man’s production of the film seemed so natural that she was not surprised by it. She decided he must be some sort of magician since he knew so much about the fabric of reality. It struck her then: Valentinian was that magician to which Akachi had referred. As she watched but did not see the image of a woman walking, the General asked, “Is it possible to run the film strip backward? If we walked back to the point where we started—assuming we even could—”

  “Would time go backward? Well, yes and no. Think about the movie again. There’s multiple perceptions at work: first, the character’s in-world perception—that’s everybody else, everybody we left behind, Miki Soto and René Ichigawa—all the people in the world. Everybody who hasn’t entered this space. If I stop the movie and rewind”—he pulled the film backward through his fingers, so that the woman’s wobbling stride reversed its motion as though she beat hasty retreat from some threat that left her expression bland—“what is this lady going to notice when I start it running again?”

  “Nothing,” said Dominia. “From her perspective, she never even got to the point from which you rewound it.”

  “Okay. How about from your perspective, as an audience member? That is to say, someone who knows the movie’s a movie, but who also has the potential to walk up to the booth where the projectionist works? Now that you’ve seen the black sun once, you can call on it again any time that you need it, like how a person awakened to the existence of a projectionist can go kn
ock on his door. What happens from your perspective when you’re watching the movie and it rewinds, then starts again from a point not at the beginning?”

  “Well, I get annoyed.”

  “Because you can’t unknow what’s already happened, and it’s not going to change. It’s filmed and already on a track, so your chances of having a new experience are reduced. In fact, you can’t have a new experience. And since the present is nothing but new experiences, once you have crystalized reality by experiencing it—by rendering the abstract information around us the physical space of reality—it is impossible to go back. The projectionist can’t rewind his film because the audience can’t unsee what they’ve watched. He only rewinds it”—Valentinian let the film slip from his fingers, and the light vanished along with its walking woman—“when the whole thing’s done, and it’s time to show the movie over again.”

  “In other words, we can only really fast-forward.”

  “That’s true when you’ve made contact with the material plane, or crossed paths with a visitor who isn’t in your group; but when you’re in this place, if you go too far or get lost and you haven’t met any strangers to confuse your field, you can get back to your original position and no harm will be done. It will be like you never even left the spot where you stood in reality. All places you initially walk represent forward motion in time and space toward one of many potential ends, depending on which direction you pick and what intention you have; however, all places you backtrack represent backward motion along those same lines. Think of it like this: until you are forced to make up your mind by returning to Earth, you’re free to change it as often or as much as you please. Like our projectionist searching the film strip, frame by frame—the movie can’t start until he locks it into position.”

  “So I can do this any time? Come here?”

  Lazarus said, “If a person, even a human, has had my blood once in their life, they can come here any time. Be here forever, if they wanted. But, please—don’t do that.”

  “We need you too much,” said Valentinian, laughing. “So, does that satisfy you?”

  Enough, she supposed. There was no satisfying her in a situation like this, but there had not been any satisfying her since the Hierophant pulled out her eye, or before—since Cassandra died.

  Cassandra. She had not thought of her wife in what was technically a week. The setting of the black sun banished the embroidery of their colored fields and Valentinian stood before the final pebble. As a fire blazed to life, seemingly sourced in the stone, she found herself thinking of her poor wife with stabs of sadness—and bitter disappointment that the vast space afforded no true backward motion. The darkness enclosing the circle of their fire, without benefit of their rays, was thick like tar. In day, the landscape had been already bleak under the dark un-light. Now, in this night that lacked a moon, the rest of existence had vanished, and Dominia failed to prove to herself that it had ever been there to start. Memories of Cassandra were her tether to reality, for they were the only memories of which Dominia could be sure.

  There was something to be said for that place when it came to the subject of memories. Perhaps that was because, while lying beside the fire, she felt weightless. As if the ground upon which she lay was not ground, or even water, but a vacuum. Thus, with nothing to look at, nothing to feel, and nothing to contain her rampant memories, she dreamed. Hypnotized by the sound of shuffling cards Valentinian had produced from his pocket, it seemed to her the warmth of the fire now was the warmth of their estate’s fire then, all those years ago, not that long after Cassandra had first appeared. Not all that long, either, after she had lost her baby. Night after night, her wife sat immobile by that fire.

  At the time, Dominia feared Cassandra would never recover from her depression. She still felt that fear, ninety years later, and wondered if her wife ever did recover in a way that mattered. But, one night, in an effort to see some change in demeanor—and to prove it was possible to find moments of joy after a storm of loss—she took Cassandra to the zoo. San Valentino had many zoos, of course, but the San Diego Zoo was known as one of the best, and most compassionate—they subscribed to a strict anti-alteration policy when it came to the genetic code of cloned animals, and showed consistent preference for the acquisition and breeding of organic ones. Especially endangered species, which were legion, thanks to the long-lasting climate changes of industrialization. Most of the world’s more fascinating animals, like its rhinos, its elephants, its tigers and its lions, would have only survived immortalized as weapons were it not for the noble cloning operations that had made their rebirth possible.

  Cassandra had never seen a live elephant before—or a tiger, for that matter. Ocelots, parakeets, markhors: all were mythical animals to the twentysomething, who appeared a giddy girl dashing from cage to cage. The prohibitive cost of zoos meant they were predominantly attended by martyrs; humans who wished to see them often found the easiest way was to get a career as a keeper. That was a good, safe job for a human. No martyr was inclined to hurt a zookeeper.

  Yet, as cherished an opportunity as this had been, and as bright as Cassandra had become in their hours wandering from exhibit to exhibit, the animals paled beside the moment her wife laid eyes on a trail of schoolchildren, aged eight to ten, forced to hold hands as they navigated the zoo. While Dominia had tried to turn down another path to save her wife’s emotional state and to avoid wading through a crowd, Cassandra tugged her to a halt.

  “Is that a school?”

  “Bible school, I think.” The Governess studied the uniforms, then tried to draw attention to the map. “Look—”

  “Like Sunday school, you mean? Martyrs have that?”

  “Sure we do. But remember, sweetheart, it’s Noctisdomin.”

  While Cassandra substituted a bland stare for the eye rolls that she had learned were an insult to the Governess, she primly agreed, “Noctisdomin school. Cumbersome.”

  “Makes more sense than a bunch of nocturnal people talking about the days of the week. And, anyway, it sounds better in Mephitolian.” At her wife’s continued look, Dominia began to worry they would have a fight there, in the zoo, in front of the now-passing stream of kids; they’d been having a lot of fights around that time, weird fights, due to Cassandra’s emotional state and—well, to be frank, the Governess’s inability to empathize. She didn’t want to be around kids, herself. That’s why it amazed her so when Cassandra, with an abrupt flip to her bright expression again, strolled to the pretty Filipina martyr who seemed to be one of their three teachers, and asked for a moment of her time. Ten minutes later, she was back with a phone number written on her wrist, and—oh, Dominia’s poor heart, just to remember it—a big, real smile on her face.

  “She said I should call her sometime, and she can tell me more about how to get certified.”

  “You’re going to teach Bible school?” Dominia laughed gently. “You haven’t even been to Mass since we got married.”

  “It’s creepy, that’s why.” Away from other people, they spoke of her Father’s culture and their opinions on it. On everything. Together, they strolled hand in hand past aviaries of sleeping tropical birds. “If I taught Bible school, it would be during Mass. I wouldn’t have to go.”

  “But you have to learn the material you’re going to teach, is what I’m trying to say.”

  “I can learn it. You think I can, don’t you?”

  At her wife’s anxious expression, Dominia’s own had filled with pain. She had pulled Cassandra close, into a kiss. “I think you can do anything.”

  Oh, Cassandra! Ah, memory! But what was memory in this boundless place? There they were now, those lips, those soft lips, those hands, that—

  “What are you doing,” cried Valentinian above the scattering of fifty-two cards. Or, maybe the cry came as he shook her back to her senses: hard to tell, with half of her dreaming of Cassandra’s mouth, from which she was unwilling to be torn away. “Hey, wake up, look at me!”

  Bu
t she was with Cassandra, who said, so gently, “I love you, Dominia—oh, Dominia, I’m so glad I have you. Dominia, you’re all that I have.”

  Those words! That woman who clutched her and looked up at her with such sweet, big eyes. That woman who needed her love and protection, who stood now by the fireside.

  Yes, by the fireside, at its edge. Her form, dark in the unholy night, yet discernible as Cassandra’s. But, oh, cruelty! The shouting men (Lazarus having awoken) would not let Dominia near the lover whose name she repeated in a chant. That name that rang across the thick night of formless space. “Come here,” she cried, “come here, Cassandra, please— Oh, won’t you stop! Let me see her!”

  “It’s not Cassandra,” shouted Valentinian. Lazarus stooped for the king of hearts and ace of spades, which he caught in the fire. As the General tried to extricate herself from the magician’s grip, the mystic tossed the flaming cards at the apparition. Light singed the shadow’s face to reveal features much like Cassandra’s—but not hers. Those eyes—bleak and flat rather than the great, emotional, haunted ones of her wife—awoke Dominia, who also found brassy hair to be a tarry lie. This entity was not her love.

  “What is it?” Dominia asked. The shadow resumed its watch from the other side of the fire’s circumference.

  “Call it a thoughtform.” Valentinian collected the rest of his cards. “It won’t come into the light. It can’t, without showing us how it looks. But that’s the problem with this place, with remembering things too vividly here. There’s a lot of…stuff…hanging around. Think of it as sentient negative thoughts: an active type of information that, given sufficient energy, looks for the best way to harvest more energy from you, for better or worse.”

  Cold, the General watched the odious thing. To think anything could be so sick, so cruel, as this which mocked her wife! “Why?”