The Breath of Suspension (12 page)

“A ghost,” he whispered. “All that fancy electronics and software, and all Roman has succeeded in doing is making a ghost.” He giggled. “God, science marches on.”

“Don’t be an ass.” Roman’s voice was severe. “We have things to do. Abigail will be home soon. I sent her on a meaningless errand to buy some spinach pies. I like spinach pies a lot. I’ll miss them.”

“I like them too. I’ll eat them for you.”

“Thanks.” There was no trace of sarcasm in the computer’s voice.

Gerald stared at the field memories, having no better place to address. “Are you really in there, Roman?”

“It’s not me. Just an amazing simulation. I’ll say goodbye to you, then to Abigail, and then you can call the police. I hear her car in the driveway now. Meet her at the front door. Try to make it easy on her. She’ll be pissed off at me, but that can’t be helped. Goodbye, Gerald. You were as good a friend as a man could ask for.”

Abigail stepped through the door with the plastic bag from the convenience store hanging on her wrist. As soon as she saw Gerald’s face, she knew what had happened.

“
Damn
him! Damn him to hell! He always liked stupid tricks like that. He liked pointing over my shoulder to make me look. He never got over it.”

She went into the study and put her hand on her husband’s forehead. His face was scrunched up from the shock of the bullet, making him look like a child tasting something bitter.

“I’m sorry, Abigail,” the computer said with Roman’s voice. “I loved you too much to stay.”

She didn’t look up. “I know, Roman. It must have been hard to watch yourself fade away like that.”

“It was. But even harder to watch you suffer it. Thank you. I love you.”

“I love you.” She walked slowly out of the room, bent over like a lonely old woman.

“Can I come around and talk with you sometimes?” Gerald sat down in a chair.

“No. I am not Roman Maitland. Get that through your thick skull, Gerald. I am a machine. And my job is finished. Roman didn’t give me any choice about that. And I’m glad. You can write directly on the screen. Write the word ‘zeugma.’ To the screen’s response write atrophy.’ To the second response write ‘fair voyage.’ Goodbye, Gerald.”

Gerald pulled a light pen from the drawer. When he wrote “zeugma” the parchment sheet said,
COMMAND TO ERASE MEMORY STORE. ARE YOU SURE?

He wrote “atrophy.”

THIS INITIATES COMPLETE ERASURE. ARE YOU ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN?

He wrote “fair voyage.”

ERASURE INITIATED.

The parchment sheet flickered with internal light. One by one, the indicator lights on the field memories faded out. A distant piece of Mozart played on the speakers and faded also.

“I’ll call the police.” Gerald looked down at his friend’s dead body, then looked back.

On the sheet were the words
COMMENCE ENTRY.

The end of my vacation
was announced with typical abruptness. I was in the
caldarium
, the hot pool, at the Baths of Titus, in Rome. The rotunda was lit by the afternoon sun coming through the hole in the center of the dome, and mist clung to the hot water in the pool. I relaxed, feeling nobly Roman, in one of the bathing boxes that surrounded the central water. I had a foreskin, since it would not do to be mistaken for a Jew. The fashion in male appendages varied so much according to time and place that my foreskin was attached by something approximating physiological Velcro. I had spent the day at the Forum, exchanging scandalous rumors with citizens about the Emperor Hadrian and his beloved, the boy Antinoüs, and what creative use they might make of the Apis bulls during their visit to Egypt, a visit that I knew, though my gossip-mongers didn’t, would end in Antinoüs’s death by drowning in the Nile. I had also taken a walk over to look at the continuing reconstruction of the Pantheon, and finished the day in one of the reading rooms of the new Ulpian Library with a few pages from Suetonius’s
Lives of Famous Whores
, one of the more charming works of group biography that I’ve ever read. I only wished that I was allowed to have a copy made. The water was searingly hot, and I was at peace, looking forward to a dinner party at the house of the irritating but entertaining poet Juvenal.

“Mathias!” a thin reedy voice exclaimed. “How at ease you look, like a chicken being poached. I envy you your serene state, so soon, alas, to end.” I glanced around, but there was no one close enough to hear. There never was, he planned things that way, but I always check. It makes me feel like I have some charge over things.

“Marienbad,” I said. “Are you all right in there?”

“Perfectly, old friend! One branch of my phylum has disported itself for years in the hot waters of Yellowstone. We are a resilient race, remember, quite unlike your sensitive species.”

Marienbad rested on the bottom of the pool of the
caldarium.
He looked like a flat fish, a ray or something, I’ve never quite figured out what, covered with red-and-green Christmas tree lights, with tentacles around his edge. One of his many eyes rose up on a stalk and examined me.

“Your rest has done you well! Now, let us be on our way.”

“Wait, Marienbad! Can’t you give me just a minute to—”

It was worthless. Once he gets something into that aquatic mind of his, there’s nothing I can do about it. The Baths, with their intricate tiling, statues, and spouting dolphins, disappeared, like a slow fade in a movie. The hot water, unfortunately, disappeared along with it, and I found myself with my bare ass resting in ice water. I jumped up with a shriek, and leaped out of the water onto the twisted roots of some huge coniferous tree. I now shivered on the edge of a clear cold lake. The bright light of day, after the darkness of the Baths, was blinding. I squinted. In the distance, across the water, were what looked like icy peaks gleaming in the sun. A fish broke the water, and a biting wind did its best to freeze me solid.

“Marienbad!” I yelled. “Where the hell am I? Why do you do this to me?”

There was a stirring in the water beneath the roots, and Marienbad appeared on the sand, about three feet below the surface. “Is it not beautiful? This is what your geologists have called Lake Athabasca, someday to become Lake Michigan. The glaciers have retreated, but the escape of meltwaters is blocked to the south by the terminal moraine. Excuse me a moment.” He vanished into the deeper water.

I looked toward what I had thought were mountains: a mile-high continental ice sheet. Marienbad had dropped me in the middle of the Würm glaciation totally naked. So there was a wormhole between Rome in 130
CE
and northern Illinois in 10,000
BCE
. The memory modifications I had gotten from my employment by Marienbad made sure that I would remember that fact, along with everything else, including the other two thousand or so wormholes already in my memory. The space-time matrix around Earth was so lousy with them that the more I learned about them the more surprised I was that anyone managed to stay in his own time and place for more than a couple of days. I wrapped my arms around myself and curled into a ball. It didn’t help. The wind sliced through me like a cleaver through calfs liver.

Marienbad reappeared, a wriggling fish in his tentacles. He proceeded to bite its head off. “Ah, delicious. Are you more alert now, old friend?”

“Alert?” I talked through chattering teeth. “In a very few moments, I will be dead.”

“Mathias, you are forever difficult, and have no faith in me. Did I not hire you from your tedious archivist’s post and give you the run of the centuries? Do I not defend your interests at all times, keeping various of my colleagues from eating you, or stuffing you for their collections? Do I not—”

“Get to the point, dammit!” I screamed.

“All right, all right. Behind the tree, with the rucksack. No faith. He has no faith.”

I crawled around to the other side of the tree, my limbs already numb. Piled over the rucksack was a huge fur robe, large enough for the Jolly Green Giant, with the fur on the inside. I crawled in, wrapped it tightly around me, and just lay there for about ten minutes, shaking desperately, until I felt warm again. I poked my head out. One of Marienbad’s eyes was looking at me. “Are you now prepared for converse?” he said, in a coldly annoyed voice.

“Yes. Now that I have at least some chance of surviving to the end of the conversation, we can talk.” I looked at the fur I had wrapped around me and wondered what manner of beast it had come from. It was very rough. A giant ground sloth? A saber-toothed cat? Maybe a young woolly mammoth. I didn’t even want to think about what manner of being that huge robe had been made for. The different millennia of Earth’s history, as I had gradually found out during the course of my employment with Marienbad, played host to some four dozen species of aliens from all the planets of the galaxy, and most of them were quite unpleasant.

“I have a job for you, Mathias Pomeranz.” I hate it when he uses my full name. That means that he is acting in his official capacity as my superior officer in the Transtemporal Constabulary. “I must use your remarkable skills to track down a desperate criminal. His name is Kinbarn, and his place of origin is a planet that circles the star you know as Deneb.”

“What has he done?”

“He is a dangerous addict, with a most reprehensible stimulation habit.”

“And what might that be?”

“Religious revelation. Extreme caution is advised.”

❖

I slogged up the mud hill with the rest of the pilgrims. It was raining. It always rains in the Île de France during April, even in 1227
CE
. That’s what makes it so green in May. But it wasn’t May. It was April. My felt hat was soaked through, and my cloak was about to be. My feet sloshed in my shoes, which in turn sucked in and out of the mud with every step. I occasionally lost a shoe in the mud and had to go back for it. The wet wood of my staff was rubbing my hands raw. My vacation was over, and I was back at work.

By evening the rain had stopped, and we had reached the town of Chartres. The towers of the cathedral caught the last rays of the sunset. It was the hour of Vespers, and from within came the sound of plainsong, and the bells rang out over the countryside. We made it in for the chanting of the Magnificat. The cathedral was dramatic in the dying light of the late afternoon as the torches were being lit, but we were herded out rather briskly once the altar had been censed and the service was over. In the Middle Ages, pilgrims like us were treated basically as tourists with no money, the lowest of the low. We would have to wait until tomorrow to see anything.

With the disappearance of the sun it had become cold. I led the way to the pilgrims’ hostel on the edge of town. There, we were all given a watery barley stew and some not overly clean straw to sleep in. I had done better, in my time, but I had also done considerably worse. The one night I had spent at Versailles, in 1672, for example, had been in a disgusting room near the only privy in that wing of the palace, and even the privilege of seeing Louis the Sun King eat his lunch had not really made up for it. Several of my fellow pilgrims and I shared the sour wine in our leather flasks, swapped dirty stories, and went to sleep, near enough to each other for our fleas to compare notes on accommodations.

When I came awake at about three in the morning, according to my internal clock, it was silent except for the snores. With the torches out, the inside of the hostel was so dark that for a moment I wasn’t sure if I’d actually succeeded in opening my eyes. I tripped over sleeping bodies all the way to the door.

Marienbad hadn’t been able to give me much. He never does. It’s always a hint, a clue, a rumor. It’s no way to run a law enforcement agency, as I’d told him any number of times, but then the laws we were enforcing tended to be vague and obscure themselves. Half a million years of an entire planet’s history is a hell of a jurisdiction. My lead, for what it was worth, was that Kinbarn the Denebian was known to have been in the vicinity of Chartres in the spring of 1227. Marienbad had even managed to rustle up a photograph of my quarry, along with some vital statistics. Kinbarn was about four feet high, had shiny black skin, like lacquer, and was covered head to foot with flecks of what looked like diamonds. His eyes, three of them, flickered with their own light and resembled fire opals. He smelled like the oil of bitter almonds, or perhaps like cyanide, depending on which way your fancy runs. He seemed to have no distinguishing marks or scars.