The Breath of Suspension

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always, to the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop and its various members over the years, who read many of these stories in their nymph forms: Steve Caine, Joe Carrabis, Pete Chvany, Dee Meaney, Resa Nelson, Steve Popkes, David Smith, and Sarah Smith.—A. J.

“Above Ancient Seas,” copyright © 1992 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines for
Asimov’s Science Fiction
, November 1992.

“At the Cross-Time Jaunters’ Ball,” copyright © 1987 by Davis Publications, Inc., for
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, August 1987.

“Beneath the Shadow of Her Smile,” copyright © 1985 by Davis Publications, Inc., for
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, April 1985.

“The Breath of Suspension,” copyright © 1991 by Davis Publications, Inc., for
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, August 1991.

“The Death Artist,” copyright © 1990 by Davis Publications, Inc., for
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, August 1990.

“Deathbinder,” copyright © 1988 by Davis Publications, Inc., for
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, February 1988.

“A Deeper Sea,” copyright © 1989 by Davis Publications, Inc., for
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, October 1989.

“Living Will,” copyright © 1991 by Davis Publications, Inc., for
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, June 1991.

“Many Mansions,” copyright © 1988 by Davis Publications, Inc., for
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, May 1988.

“The Ring of Memory,” copyright © 1988 by Davis Publications, Inc., for
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, January 1989.

TO MY WIFE, MARY

When the knock comes
, it wakes me from a light doze. I was drifting through endless layers of thin clouds, lit from below. I try to convince myself that I was meditating—on what, the diaphanous undergarments that clothe the ever-incomprehensible Godhead? I am an old man, I need my rest, and acknowledge my weaknesses. I can still lie to others, but the time has passed when I must needs lie to myself.

“Come in, Thomas.” I hope that he doesn’t recognize the spuriously resonant tone of a man caught napping.

Brother Thomas drifts in with the soft step of a courtier. His flaxen hair bristles like uncut hay. When I first met him, I thought Thomas was extremely young, but he must be near thirty. The innocence of his gaze gives him his youth.

“They finally came.” He is pleased to be the one to bring me the news.

“Show me.”

He puts the package on the table and unwraps it. I move the devotional cross away to give him more room. The thing is enormously heavy and seems intended for physical as well as spiritual exercise. It leaves yet another scratch on the table’s worn surface. Even in darkness I can feel the patterns of my devotion upon it with my fingertips.

Together, we huddle over the tiny wonders revealed in the fitful candlelight. The charge-coupled devices are precise circuits from a different world than the Monastery of St. Sergius.

Thomas stares at them in awe. “What do they do?”

He’s a wise one, I’m coming to realize. Not “what are they?” but “what do they do?” He knows the right questions. What questions did he ask in the past that the answer to them is St. Sergius’s?

“They amplify light by bouncing electrons around. More than that, Thomas, I don’t know. I just know that I need them to complete the work.”

As if to mock me, one of the tallow candles sputters. These are an unsuccessful experiment of Hegumen Afonse’s. The local power grid gives us electricity only four hours out of twenty-four, and the Hegumen likes to conserve our fuel cells. And beeswax is reserved for the candles that illuminate the saints in church. The tallow candles stink and attract insects. With the CCDs, my circuits could focus the light of that candle from a hundred kilometers away. Under the table sit hydrogen fuel cells designed to power an interplanetary spacecraft’s life-system. We live in a world of irrelevant miracles.

Thomas picks up a CCD and holds it in his hand. It is as light as the carapace of a dead insect. “The Hegumen wanted to wait until morning. But I thought you would want to see this as soon as possible. They must have cost you a lot.”

“I thank both you and the Hegumen for your separate concerns. Cost? It’s greater than you think, not being in money. There are still some left at Court who are willing to do an old man favors. These, I think, are the last favors anyone will ever do me. All are now long called in.” Am I sounding maudlin? It must be the hour. I have long ago accustomed myself to a mood of steely resolve. It is only late at night, with death pushing itself against the window-panes, that I forget.

Thomas looks at me curiously. “Does the Hegumen know what you wanted these for?”

“Eh? I suppose he has no idea. He just wants to keep his pet Court refugee happy. He doesn’t know how futile it is. I’m here in this midget twenty-monk monastery in Pennsylvania under special Patriarchal dispensation, and God only knows what changes back in Moscow could raise me back into a position of power. The Hegumen thinks he’s being shrewd. I’m not going to disabuse him, as long as I can get what I need.”

Brother Thomas endures this outburst calmly. To him I link holiness with secular power, a potent combination. He permits me my quirks, unusual forbearance in a young man.

“So,” he says, setting the CCD back on the table as delicately as if it is a holy relic. “Are you going to see her now?”

His blue eyes shine. He is in the presence of the one fleshly link left to St. Aya Ngomo: the holy Vikram Osten who rose to high power and was then struck down because of his stalwart devotion to his saint.

I cannot meet his gaze. I turn away and pull the cloth from the image-multiplier telescope, a lumpy piece of work. The crude welds are my own. There’s a monk at St. Sergius’s who could have done a better job, a former pipe mender, but I owed it to Aya to do the work myself. She had always felt that I was, in some deep sense, useless.

It’s taken me almost five years to put the whole thing together, five years since I finally realized what I had to do. In that time, Aya’s gotten more than four light-years farther away. And I have gotten that much closer to death.

Sometimes when I walk I can feel the wind blow clean through me, as if it has forgotten I’m there. I’m just a tattered coat on a stick, with thin white hair. Well, let’s be completely honest. It’s a sticky pale yellow, like a tallow candle. The pathetic vanity of the old is never anything but disgusting.

I turn and open the shutters on the night. I always delay it, the way I sometimes used to delay taking a drink during my years of exile from Court. It’s a teasing game and proves my will. The shutters slam back against the wall. Six of St. Sergius’s monks are sleeping in the small stone building opposite, but their sleep is as heavy as their souls and they don’t wake up. That desperate nocturnal bang is long familiar to them.

It’s finally time. I raise my eyes from the dark and silent monastery to that sky from which St. Sergius’s and our whole world hang merely pendant. There was some high cirrus earlier in the day, but now the air is transparent. The Milky Way splashes across the sky. Jupiter is low in the west. I lean out of the window and look toward the east into the constellation Coma Berenices. Up there, pointed toward the Galactic North, at +29 degrees declination, 12h 57m right ascension, is the flare of a hydrogen fusion flame, its absorption spectrum shifted viciously into the red, pushing the barrier of light speed, that Nirvana of the macroscopic world. It’s Aya Ngomo’s ship, heading God knows where. I can’t see it with my naked eyes. I try to, every night. I try now. I stare upward until my eyes tear in the wind. I cannot float up through the window after her. My soul is still tied to the dross of my flesh. And why, if the flesh no longer brings the pleasures it once did? Then I close the shutters and turn back to the image multiplier.

Thomas sits alertly, like a hunting dog waiting for his master’s call. To him that invisible speck of light is a relic, like the joint of a saint’s forefinger or a handkerchief dipped in a martyr’s blood. He barely dares breathe as I proceed through my devotions. I should ask him to leave. I don’t, because I suspect my historical contact with holiness is not the only reason he is here. He does, after all, sleep near the Hegumen. Afonse thinks that he is the Archimandrite of a vast metropolitan monastery, and often awakens poor Thomas to dictate an important memo on the remortaring of a wall. It isn’t easy being
parakoimomenus
—one who sleeps near. For a long time I “slept near” the Dispenser of the Atlantic, Master Tergenius. So I know that sometimes it is better to remain awake than be roused from sleep suddenly too sweet. As long as one is truly awake.

“Here, Thomas.” He joins me at the image multiplier. His fingers are nimbler than mine. I always fear that I will break some irreplaceable part.

He takes a deep breath. “Will you let me look? When we finish with this machine?” The words come in a rush.

“Eh?” His face is flushed and he does not meet my eye. “You wish to see the glow of St. Aya Ngomo?” He nods. “Is that for my sake, or for hers?”

If he senses a selfish motive in the question he does not admit it. “For both. How can they be separated? The both of you—it has been an honor for me, did I tell you that?” Thomas, usually a model of imperturbable dignity, is babbling. “To have gone so high and then to have renounced the things of this world... when I came here to St. Sergius’s I had no idea that I would find such a clear signpost to God—”

“Don’t be absurd.” My tone is gentle, but I am afraid. Afraid of being loved, as I have so often been, for the wrong reasons. Still, is that worse than not being loved at all? “My sacrifices, if such they were, were my own. I can’t serve as an example to anyone else.”

He nods, not meeting my eyes. “I understand.”

He doesn’t. I did not renounce the things of this Earth. I had them taken from me. Heaven and Hell know no greater difference.

“But you, my young Thomas. What do you know of sacrifice? I’m afraid you’ve come to this monastery too early.” I adopt a didactic tone. “To give up the world one must first possess it.”

For a long time he is silent. “I have possessed it.” His voice is compressed, as if someone else has a hand on his throat. “I possessed all of it that mattered.” He takes a deep breath and stares off into space.

An apology would be pointless. God only knows what festering sin I have so incautiously flicked. I sit down at the table opposite him, one hand on the image multiplier. “I think you deserve a story. For your good work, Thomas. The story of how I met Aya Ngomo, Saint of the Outer Spaces.”

He is galvanized. His personal pain is forgotten, or at least con cealed, as he leans anxiously toward me. Nothing about my own life would interest him as much. But St. Aya Ngomo focuses him. Perhaps what I know of her can teach him something about me.

“When I was young,” I say, beginning with the most painful words an old man knows.

When I was young, I believed that if I held my breath completely, totally, not letting a single molecule of air escape, I would float weightless up through the sky. I spent summers jumping from the sycamore tree behind my parents’ house in Mackinac, longing to part the clouds.