The Breath of Suspension (16 page)

“It would be robbery,” boomed a hearty voice from another room. “Sheer robbery. They kill for this stuff around Fomalhaut. Kill for it! This is quality, Ngargh. Top-notch stuff. We’re talking authentic dualism here. Real conflict. Light versus Darkness. Good versus Evil. The top match, Ngargh. The Big Event. You can’t miss.”

“That may well be, Mann,” another voice replied. It was a disturbing voice, quavery, distant. I recognized it as belonging to a species from a planet circling the star known on Earth as Epsilon Eridani. “But ‘kill for it’ is an uncertain, and cheap, price. We speak of cash, valuta. For such an uncomplicated theology, you ask too much.”

“Uncomplicated! You call this uncomplicated?” Mann was offended. “It’s structured for maximal cult spin-off potential. A couple of generations, you got a dozen competing sects, you got spiritual ecstatics, you got self-mutilators, you got hysterical millenarians. Cut this stuff with some ritualistic filler, and you got some real profits. I’m talking Manichaeanism here, Ngargh, not some cheap Gnostic bullshit. Real quality. It always tells in the end.”

I peeked around the edge of the door. R. E. Mann looked pretty much the way I would have expected, a fat bald man with a double chin, pinky rings, a purple shirt, and a cigar. He pointed the cigar at Ngargh, who resembled a large grasshopper with its head coated with metal shavings. “Whaddaya say?”

“I don’t know, Mann. My principals were not pleased with the quality of the last shipment. Not pleased at all.”

Mann snorted smoke. “Are you guys still whining about that Lamaism business? It’s not my fault if you don’t take the proper precautions, is it?”

“Yak butter!” Ngargh said. “The planets of Antares alone require fifty million metric tons of yak butter per year to burn in their ceremonies. Their economies are in a shambles.”

“Whoever told you you can get religious ecstasy without side effects? Smarten up, Ngargh. Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll throw in a few small cults, Rastafarianism, that sort of thing, with no price increase. Sweet deal. How about it, Ngargh?”

“I wish to think about it.”

“Fine, fine. Go in the other room, play with some paraphernalia. Some of it’s kind of fun.” Ngargh slumped out unenthusiastically. Mann’s eye wandered for a moment, seeking distraction. It fixed on Solomon ben Ezra.

“Solly! Just who I wanted to see. Come in, come in. You know, Solly, I’ve been thinking. I’ve been thinking about marketing. A new concept. Now this Jewish stuff you’ve been giving me is great, no kidding, all these pillars of fire, manna from Heaven, angels on ladders, talking serpents, floods, dens of lions, burning cities full of queers. Great stuff, and it’s been a real good seller, no kidding. Hell, we got Hasidic Rigellian mud dwellers wearing spit curls and fur hats. But as I said, I’ve been thinking. We could really make it, I mean graduate Judaism to real blockbuster status, if we had a good central symbol. A hook, Solly. We need a hook.” With a hand on his shoulder, he led Solomon over to a bulky shape covered with a drop cloth. “You know, we helped old Pharaoh Akhenaten out with that sun worship business of his. He didn’t get the hang of monotheism for quite a while, kept asking if his god wouldn’t get lonely, with no pantheon to play with. But I convinced him. I could do the same for you. If I could take a meeting with one of your top boys, you know, Moses, Abraham, Jeremiah, whoever, we could come up with something that would sweep the market. We’d be rich in no time. I’m talking awesome.” With a grand gesture, he whipped the cloth off, revealing a gleaming statue. It was a golden calf. “Hot stuff, eh, Solly? Can’t miss.”

Solomon’s face went white. “I’ll... I’ll have to think about it.”

“You do that, Solly. No rush.” Mann sat back down in his chair, clasped his hands over his belly, and stared at me. “And who’s this guy?”

Solomon turned a startled and speculative look at me. “Why—he is one of our agents, from Akhetaten.”

Mann shook his head decisively. “No way, Solly. I ain’t never seen him before.”

“He is an agent of our enemies, those minions of Rylieh who seek to profit from the teachings of Our Lord. He came to me, asking of Kinbarn.” The Bishop of Chartres entered the room. He wore local garb, loose flowing trousers and vest, but still had his cross dangling in the middle of his chest. It sounded as if R. E. Mann had really sold him a bill of goods, coming off as Mr. Clean.

“Rylieh!” Mann’s face tried to turn as purple as his shirt, and almost made it. “That scumbag’s been giving me a real pain. Particularly Egypt. We divided up the territory, but he’s trying to horn in.” He peered at me. “Or are you some small operator? Did Belle Zebub send you? She’s got the monopoly on the Pharisees. Small sect, but really popular, for some reason. Ah, screw it. Alphonse, get ’im!” There was suddenly a huge figure behind me. How did people keep sneaking up on me? He took hold of me, gently. I felt like I had been welded into an Iron Maiden. He was about twice the size of the two goons from Akhetaten. He had a tiny head whose only apparent purpose was anchoring neck muscles. With a turban on it looked like a bandaged thumb. He caught me looking at him and hit me. I got the idea, and stopped looking at him.

“What luck!” Mann said. “Ngargh was thinking of buying Thuggee, the ritual murder cult of the goddess Kali, but I told him we were fresh out of demonstration models. I think we can put it back in the catalog.” He began to stalk around the room, throwing open cabinets and burrowing through them. “Silken strangling cords, silken strangling cords,” he muttered. “How come nothing ever stays put around here?” He looked up at all of us. “Don’t just stand there. Stick him in a cell. Hell, let him pick out some last rites for himself, on the house.” He winked at me. “No one ever called R. E. Mann a cheapie. Enjoy yourself.”

Alphonse hauled me downstairs and threw me into a room the size of a gym locker that smelled of urine and pain. The door slammed shut and left me in total darkness. I leaned against the rough stone walls and decided that, at long last, I could not console myself with the thought that things might be worse.

❖

The Bishop looked worried. Extremely worried. “You are a Catholic?” He spoke to me through a slot in the door.

“Yes, of course,” I lied. “You cannot allow me to die unshriven.” I tried to fall to my knees, as well as I could within the confines of that tiny cell.

“Wait, wait,” he said. I could tell I’d called him right, from what I had seen and heard that night, when he’d gone to Kinbarn’s monk’s cell with Martin. He was a genuine and convinced Christian. “If you are a Catholic, why do you not help us in our struggle to convert the ignorant races of the galaxy?”

Oho. So that was it. The urge to proselytize is a dangerous one. The Bishop was bagging souls and racking up an immense score, not realizing the hollowness of his triumph. Martin had known the truth.

“I pursued Kinbarn,” I said, “because of the sacrilege he had committed, to assist in Mann’s marketing plans.”

A sharp indrawn breath. “What sacrilege?”

“He stole the true Tunic of the Virgin, put a false one in its place. The true Tunic will go to one of Mann’s local dealers, somewhere else in the galaxy.”

“You lie! It is the same relic that has been there since I can remember. I was almost convinced by your—”

“The Tunic was switched long before your time, at least before the fire, forty years ago, your time. There are other wormholes to Chartres, you realize. If you wish to find the real Tunic, it lies among Mann’s loot, upstairs. It lies on top of—” I was talking to empty air. The Bishop was gone. But the door was still locked.

A few minutes later I heard voices. It was Rachel and Solomon, who had decided on the hallway leading to my cell as a convenient place to argue.

“I warned you,” she said. “I told you it was dangerous, that it was a sacrilege. The search for knowledge is God’s work,’ you said. ‘Selling your soul is the Devil’s work,’
I
said. Now look where you’ve gotten us.”

“I know,” Solomon said miserably. “We will leave now, and return to our shtetl in Chelm. It was so green there.” He sighed. “I never thought that I would miss Poland.”

“Leave? And allow that abomination to continue its foul existence? The golden calf, Aaron’s sin, right before your eyes. How can you ignore it?”

Solomon groaned. “Oh, God, I should have stuck with my study of the Talmud. It is so much less complicated.”

“That’s what I told you.”

“I know, I know.”

“Hey!” I said. “I can help you.”

They stopped their argument and came up to the door to my cell. “How can you help us?” Solomon said, hope coming into his voice.

“He can’t,” Rachel said venomously. I felt like hitting her. “He’s just one of Mann’s competitors. He’d sell that golden calf just like Mann. He’s no different.”

“You’re wrong. I’m not like the others,” I said. “I’m an agent of the Constabulary. I’m after Kinbarn.”

The slot opened up and Solomon peered in, eyes wide. “The Constabulary? Why are you after Kinbarn? He’s just a runner, small fry.”

“I’ve figured that out, finally. Don’t you know how hard it is to police an entire planet over five hundred millennia? Let me tell you, it’s a real bitch.” I realized I was sounding querulous, but figured I’d earned it. “It’s a wonder we get anything done at all. Particularly stuck in a cell in the basement of a building in seventeenth-century Isfahan. Now if you just let me out—”

Rachel muttered something that indicated that she was still suspicious about my bona fides, but Solomon simply said, “How?”

“Do I have to think of everything?” I said aggrievedly.

“It would certainly help.”

Before I could think of a wise reply, we all heard the stair creak beneath an abnormally heavy step. Solomon and Rachel vanished. The door groaned open, and Alphonse hauled me out of the cell. He carried me up to the top floor, kneeled me down, tied my hands and feet, and left me alone with Mann and Ngargh.

Mann held a scarlet silk cord in his hands. He stroked it. “See how it clings, Ngargh?” he said. “Only the best ones do that.” He put it around my neck. Ngargh watched with interest. “Doing this is a little tricky. It’s harder than it looks. When you’re done with the messy part, there’s a few chants, the consecration of the pickax, and the sacrifice of sugar. Nothing to it, really, but it makes for a nice change of pace.”

“Do proceed,” Ngargh said.

The cord tightened. Suddenly, the door crashed open. Mann jumped back and dropped the cord. Standing in the doorway was an awe-inspiring figure. It was the Bishop of Chartres, in the full glory of ecclesiastical vestments, chasuble and stole in gold and scarlet, a mitre on his head, and a gold crosier in his hand. For the first time since I’d seen him, he was unmistakably a Bishop. He made the sign of the cross at us.

“My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves,” he thundered.

“Save it for the marks, Bishop,” Mann said, as he pieked the cord back up. “Close the door, you’re letting in a draft.”

“You have committed a gross sacrilege and are beyond forgiveness, R. E. Mann.”

Mann looked irritated. “Hey look, Bishop, don’t you know your own product? Forgiveness is one of the biggest selling points of—” The heavy gold-encrusted crosier made a misleadingly soft thunk as it struck Mann’s head and knocked him across the room into a corner, where he lay sprawled and unconscious. Ngargh backed into the opposite corner, trembling. “I believe I expressed an interest in some rather less violent devotions. Zen Buddhism, for example. This is not to my liking. No, no indeed.”

The Bishop stared at what he had done, now at a loss. There was a huge crash and someone else came through the door, though he didn’t bother to open it first. It was Alphonse, who came through as if fired from a cannon. A very large cannon. He fell on his back but was on his feet in an instant, completely unaffected by his unusual mode of entry. Rachel and Solomon ran in after him. They darted around Alphonse like rabbits around a bear. Rachel grabbed his knee, barely having to bend down to do so, and Solomon bounced high into the air and kicked him at the angle of his jaw. His head snapped back. Rachel’s fingers went under his kneecap, and he screamed and toppled. They both played soccer with his head for a while, and he was finally silent. I was not able to do anything but kneel and watch, which was fine, because there was no way I could have helped.

Solomon came up behind me and cut my bonds with a knife. “Where did you learn to do that?” I asked.

“Where I grew up, Polish soldiers are a constant problem. We are not allowed to carry arms, but we have learned to deal with it.” As an afterthought, he walked over and punched Ngargh, who fell over, kicked once, and was still. “Now we must try to escape with our lives.”

The Bishop shrugged out of his robes. “These are most strange,” he said. “So soft, like a lady’s undergarments. Satin and silk. See?” I felt the material. It did indeed feel like lingerie, though how the Bishop knew what lingerie felt like I did not ask. I examined the insignia on the buttons. After a moment it came to me. “Ah,” I said, “sixteenth-century Italian. Borgias, Medicis. They did believe in comfort in everything, even their vestments, when their families succeeded in making them a Bishop.” I smiled to myself. Did wearing these make the Bishop of Chartres a transvestmentite? I suppose that that then made Kinbarn a transectual. I wished there were someone around to appreciate the joke, though on second thought I suspected that such a person might be hard to find.

Solomon and Rachel took some time to destroy the golden calf. It turned out to be gold sheet over a figure of wood, which broke satisfyingly into splinters.

When they had finished, Solomon led us all through several back passages and out into the street. At his insistence, we carried Mann along with us. He would not listen to any arguments to the contrary, and he and the Bishop seemed to have reached some sort of agreement, so I was outvoted. Mann was heavy, and we kept trading him back and forth. We crossed over the tree-lined Chahar Bagh, the avenue that led south, and into a tangle of houses and shops. Several passersby stopped to stare at us and our burden.