The Breath of Suspension (20 page)

The dragon whipped around quickly, cornering him. With a belch, it sprayed acid over him. It burned down his shoulder, bubbling as it dissolved his skin.

“Damn you!” he shouted, and threw himself at the dragon’s head. It didn’t pull back quickly enough, and he plunged his fist into its left eye. Its surface resisted, then popped, spraying fluid. The dragon tossed its head, flinging Elam across the ground.

He pulled himself to his feet, feeling the pain of shattered ribs. Blood dribbled down his chin. One of his legs would not support his weight. The massive head lowered down over him, muck pouring out of the destroyed eye. Elam grabbed for the other eye, but he had no strength left. Foul-smelling acid flowed over him, sloughing his flesh off with the sound of frying bacon. He stayed on his feet, trying to push imprecations between his destroyed lips. The last thing he saw was the crystal teeth, lowering toward his head.

❖

Lammiela’s house was the abode of infinity. The endless rooms were packed with the junk of a hundred worlds. The information here was irreplaceable, unduplicated anywhere else. No one came to visit, and the artifacts, data cubes, and dioramas rested in silence.

At some time in the past millennia, human beings had explored as far inward as the galactic core and so far outward that the galaxy had hung above them like a captured undersea creature, giving up its light to intergalactic space. They had moved through globular clusters of ancient suns and explored areas of stellar synthesis. They had raised monuments on distant planets. After some centuries of this, they had returned to Earth, built their mysterious cities on a planet that must have been nothing but old legend, and settled down, content to till the aged soil and watch the sun rise and set. And, with magnificent insouciance, they had forgotten everything, leaving their descendants ignorant.

Lammiela sat in the corner watching Elam. Her body, though elegant, was somehow bent, as if she had been cut from an oddly shaped piece of wood by a clever wood-carver utilizing the limitations of his material. That was true enough, Elam reflected, examining the person who was both his parents.

When young, Lammiela had found a ship somewhere on Earth’s moon, tended by the secret mechanisms that made their lives there, and gone forth to explore the old spaces. No one had any interest in following her, but somehow her exploits had gained enough attention that she had obtained extraordinary privileges.

“It’s curious,” she said. “Our friends the Bound have skills that we Incarnate do not even dream of, because the machines our ancestors left us have no interest in them.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “It’s surprising, some of the things the Bound can do.”

“Like make you both my father and my mother,” Elam said.

Her face was shadowed. “Yes. There is that.”

Lammiela had been born male, named Laurance. But Laurance had felt himself to be a woman. No problem for one of the Incarnate, who could be anything they wished. Laurance could have slept securely in his adytum and put female bodies on for his entire life. But Laurance did not think that way. He had gone to the Bound, and they had changed him to a woman.

“When the job was finished, I was pregnant,” Lammiela said. “Laurance’s sperm had fertilized my new ova. I don’t know if it was a natural consequence of the rituals they used.” Her muscles tightened with the memories. Tendons stood out on the backs of her hands. “They kept me conscious through it all. Pain is their price. They slew the male essence. I saw it, screaming before me. Laurance, burning.”

It had cost most of her haut to do it. Dealings with the Bound inevitably involved loss of status.

“I still see him sometimes,” she said.

“Who?” Elam asked.

“Your father, Laurance.” Her eyes narrowed. “They didn’t kill him well enough, you see. They told me they did, but he’s still around.” Her eyes darted, as if expecting to find Laurance hiding behind a diorama.

Elam felt a chill, a sharp feeling at the back of his neck, as if someone with long, long nails were stroking him there. “But you’re him, Lammiela. He’s not someone else.”

“Do you really know so much about identity, Elam?” She sighed, relaxing. “You’re right, of course. Still, was it I who stood in the Colonnade at Hrlad?” She pointed at a hologram of a long line of rock obelisks, the full galaxy rising beyond them. “I’m not sure I remember it, not as if I had been there. It was legend, you know. A bedtime story. But Hrlad is real. So is Laurance. You look like him, you know. You have your father’s eyes.”

She stared at him coldly, and he, for the first time, thought that Reqata might have spoken truly. Perhaps his mother did indeed hate him.

“I made my choice,” she said. “I can never go back. The Bound won’t let me. I am a woman, and a mother.”

Lammiela did not live in the city where most of the Incarnate made their home. She lived on a mountainside, bleak and alone, the rigid curving walls of her house holding off the snow. She moved her dwelling periodically, from seashore to desert to mountain. She had no adytum, with its body, to lug with her. Elam, somehow, remembered deep forest when he was growing up, interspersed with sunny meadows. The vision wasn’t clear. Nothing was clear.

After this most recent death, Elam had once again awakened in his adytum. He’d felt the fluid flowing through his lungs, and the darkness pressing down on his open eyes. Fire had burned through his veins, but there was no air to scream with. Then he had awakened again, normally, on a pallet in the light.

“Mother,” he said, looking off at a broad-spectrum hologram of Sirius that spilled vicious white light across the corner of the room, too bright to look at directly without filters. “Am I truly your only child?”

Lammiela’s face was still. “Most things are secrets for the first part of their existence, and forgotten thereafter. I suppose there must be a time in the middle when they are known. Who told you?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes. It was thrown at you as a weapon, wasn’t it?”

Elam sighed. “Yes. Reqata.”

“Ah, yes. I should have guessed. Dear Reqata. Does she love you, Elam?”

The question took him aback. “She says she does.”

“I’m sure she means it then. I wonder what it is about you that she loves. Is that where the discussion ended then? With the question?”

“Yes. We were interrupted.” Elam described the dragon’s attack.

“Ah, how convenient. Reqata was always a master of timing. Who was it, do you suppose?” She looked out of the circular window at the mountain tundra, the land falling away to a vast ice field, just the rocky peaks of mountains thrusting through it. “No one gains haut anonymously.”

“No one recognized the style. Or if they did, they did not admit it.” The scene was wrong, Elam thought. It should have been trees: smooth-trunked beeches, heavy oaks. The sun had slanted through them as if the leaves themselves generated the light.

“So why are you here, Elam? Are you looking for the tank in which that creature was grown? You may search for it if you like. Go ahead.”

“No!” Elam said. “I want to find my sister.” And he turned away and ran through the rooms of the house, past the endless vistas of stars that the rest of the human race had comfortably forgotten. Lammiela silently followed, effortlessly sliding through the complex displays, as Elam stumbled, now falling into an image of a kilometer-high cliff carved with human figures, now into a display of ceremonial masks with lolling tongues. He suddenly remembered running through these rooms, their spaces much larger then, pursued by a small violent figure that left no place to hide.

In a domed room he stopped at a wall covered with racks of dark metal drawers. He pushed a spot and one slid open. Inside was a small animal, no bigger than a cat, dried as if left out in the sun. It was recognizably the dragon, curled around itself, its crystalline teeth just visible through its pulled-back lips.

Lammiela looked down at it. “You two never got along. You would have thought that you would... but I guess that was a foolish assumption. You tormented her with that thing, that... monster. It gave her screaming nightmares. Once, you propped it by her bed so that she would see it when she woke up. For three nights after that she didn’t sleep.” She slid the drawer shut.

“
Who was she?
” Elam demanded, taking her shoulders. She met his gaze. “It’s no longer something that will just be forgotten.”

She weakly raised a hand to her forehead, but Elam wasn’t fooled. His mother had dealt with dangers that could have killed her a dozen times over. He tightened his grip on her shoulders. “Your sister’s name was Orfea. Lovely name, don’t you think? I think Laurance picked it out.”

Elam could remember no sister. “Was she older or younger?”

“Neither. You were split from one ovum, identical twins. One was given an androgen bath and became you, Elam. The other was female: Orfea. God, how you grew to hate each other! It frightened me. And you were both so talented. I still have some of her essence around, I think.”

“I... what happened to her? Where is she?”

“That was the one thing that consoled me, all these years. The fact that you didn’t remember. I think that was what allowed you to survive.”

“What? Tell me!”

Lammiela took only one step back, but it seemed that she receded much farther. “She was murdered. She was just a young girl. So young.”

Elam looked at her, afraid of the answer. He didn’t remember what had happened, and he could still see hatred in his mother’s eyes. “Did they ever find out who did it?” he asked softly.

She seemed surprised by the question. “Oh, there was never any doubt. She was killed by a young friend of yours. He is now your servant. Abias.”

❖

“I have to say that it was in extremely poor taste,” Reqata said, not for the first time. “Death is a fine performance, but there’s no reason to perform it at a dinner party. Particularly in my presence.” She got up from the bed and stretched. This torso was wide, and well-muscled. Once again, the rib cage was high, the breasts small. Elam wondered if, in the secrecy of her adytum, Reqata was male. He had never seen her in any other than a female body.

“Just out of curiosity,” Elam said. “Could you tell who the dragon was?” He ran his hand over the welts on his side, marks of Reqata’s fierce love.

She glanced back at him, eyelids half lowered over wide violet eyes. She gauged if her answer would affect her haut. “Now
that
was a good trick, Elam. If I hadn’t been looking right at you, I would have guessed that it was you behind those glass fangs.”

She walked emphatically across the room, the slap of her bare feet echoing from the walls, and stood, challengingly, on the curve of Elam’s adytum. Dawn had not yet come, and light was provided by hanging globes of a blue tint that Elam found unpleasant. He had never discovered a way to adjust or replace them.

“Oh, Elam,” she said. “If you are working on something, I approve. How you fought! You didn’t want to die. You kept struggling until there was nothing left of you but bones. That dragon crunched them like candy canes.” She shuddered, her face flushed. “It was wonderful.”

Elam stretched and rolled out of the bed. As his weight left it, it rose off the floor, to vanish into the darkness overhead. The huge room had no other furniture.

“What do you know about my sister?” he asked.

Reqata lounged back on the adytum, curling her legs. “I know she existed, I know she’s dead. More than you did, apparently.” She ran her hands up her sides, cupping her breasts. “You know, the first stories I heard of you don’t match you. You were more like me then. Death was your art, certainly, but it wasn’t your own death.”

“As you say,” Elam said, stalking toward her, “I don’t remember.”

“How could you have forgotten?” She rested her hands on the rough stone of the adytum. “This is where you are, Elam. If I ripped this open, I could kill you. Really kill you. Dead.”

“Want to try it?” He leaned over her. She rested back, lips parted, and dug her fingernails in a circle around his nipple.

“It could be exciting. Then I could see who you really were.”

He felt the sweet bite of her nails through his skin. If he had only one body, he reflected, perhaps he could never have made love to Reqata. He couldn’t have lasted.

He pushed himself forward onto her, and they made love on his adytum, above his real body as it slumbered.

❖

Abias’s kingdom was brightly lit, to Elam’s surprise. He had expected a mysterious darkness. Hallways stretched in all directions, leading to chambers of silent machines and tanks filled with organs and bodies. As he stepped off the stairs, Elam realized that he had never before been down to these lower levels, even though it was as much a part of his house as any other. But this was Abias’s domain. This was where the magic was done.

His bumblebee lay on a table, its dead nervous system scooped out. Dozens of tiny mechanisms crawled over it, straightening its spars, laying fragile wing material between the ribs. Elam pictured them crawling over his own body, straightening out his ribs, coring out his spinal column, resectioning his eyes.

Elam touched a panel, and a prism rose up out of the floor. In it was himself, calmly asleep. Elam always kept several standard, unmodified versions of his own body ready. That was the form in which he usually died. Elam examined the face of his clone. He had never inhabited this one, and it looked strange in consequence. No emotions had ever played over those slack features, no lines of care had ever formed on the forehead or around the eyes. The face was an infant turned physically adult.

The elaborate shape of Abias appeared in a passage and made its way toward him, segmented legs gleaming. Elam felt a moment of fear. He imagined those limbs seizing his mysterious faceless sister, Orfea, rending her, their shine dulled with her blood, sizzling smoke rising... he fought the images down. Abias had been a man then, if he’d been anything. He’d lost his body as a consequence of that murder.

Abias regarded him. As a Bound, and a cyborg to boot, Abias had no haut. He had no character to express, needed no gestures to show who he was. His faceless eyes were unreadable. Had he been trying to kill Elam? He had the skills and resources to have created the zeppelin, grown the dragon. But why? If he wanted to kill Elam, the real Elam, the adytum lay in his power. Those powerful limbs could rip the chamber open and drag the sleeping Elam out into the light. Elam’s consciousness, in a clone somewhere else, wouldn’t know what had happened, but would suddenly cease to exist.