The Breath of Suspension (22 page)

She looked at him. Until today, the hatred in her eyes would have frightened him. Now it comforted him, for he must be near the truth.

“You were a monster as a child, Elam. Evil, I would have said, though I loved you. You were Laurance, returned to punish me for having killed him....”

“I tortured animals,” Elam said, hurrying to avoid Lammiela’s past and get to his own. “I started with frogs. I moved up to cats, dogs....”

“And people, Elam. You finally moved to people.”

“I know,” he said, thinking of the dead Orfea, whom he feared he would never remember. “Abias told me.”

“Abias is very forgiving,” Lammiela said. “You lost him his body, and nearly his life.”

“What did I do with him?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know, Elam. He has never said. All these years, and he has never said. You hated Orfea, and she hated you, but somehow you were still jealous of each other. She cared for Abias, your friend from the village, and that made you wild. He was so clever about that ancient Bound knowledge the Incarnate never pay attention to. He always tried to undo the evil that you did. He healed animals, putting them back together. Without you, he may never have learned all he did. He was a magician.”

“Mother—”

She glared at him. “You strapped him down, Elam. You wanted to... to castrate him. Cloning, you called it. You said you could clone him. He might have been able to clone you, I don’t know, but you certainly could do nothing but kill him. Orfea tried to stop you, and you fought. You killed her, Elam. You took that hot cutting knife and you cut her apart. It explodes flesh, if set right, you know. There was almost nothing left.”

Despite himself, Elam felt a surge of remembered pleasure. “As you were murdering your sister, Abias freed himself. He struggled and got the tool away from you.”

“But he didn’t kill me.”

“No. I never understood why. Instead, he mutilated you. Carefully, skillfully. He knew a lot about the human body. You were unrecognizable when they found you, all burned up, your genitals destroyed, your face a blank.”

“And they punished Abias for Orfea’s murder. Why?”

“He insisted that he had done it. I knew he hadn’t. I finally made him tell me. The authorities didn’t kill him, at my insistence. Instead, they took away his body and made him the machine he now is.”

“And you made him serve me,” Elam said in wonder. “All these years, you’ve made him serve me.”

She shook her head. “No, Elam. That was his own choice. He took your body, put it in its adytum, and has served you ever since.” Elam felt hollow, spent. “You should have killed me,” he whispered. “You should not have let me live.”

Lammiela stared at him, her eyes bleak and cold. “I daresay you’re right, Elam. You were Laurance before me, the man I can never be again. I wanted to destroy you, totally. Expunge you from existence. But it was Abias’s wish that you live, and since he had suffered at your hands, I couldn’t gainsay him.”

“Why then?” Elam said. “Why do you want to kill me now?” He stretched his hands out toward his mother. “If you want to, do it. Do it!”

“I don’t know what you are talking about, Elam. I haven’t tried to kill you. I gave up thinking about that a long time ago.”

He sagged. “Who then? Reqata?”

“Reqata?” Lammiela smirked. “Go through all this trouble for one death? It’s not her style, Elam. You’re not that important to her. Orfea was an artist too. Her art was scent. Scents that stick in your mind and call up past times when you smell them again.”

“You wore one of them,” Elam said, in sudden realization. “The day my death in the north woods ended.”

“Yes,” she said, her voice suddenly taut again. “Orfea wore that scent on the last day of her life, Elam. You probably remember it.”

The scent brought terror with it. Elam remembered that. “Did you find some old vial of it? Whatever made you wear it?”

She looked at him, surprised. “Why, Elam. You sent it to me yourself.”

❖

Abias stood before him like a technological idol, the adytum between them.

“I’m sorry, Abias,” Elam said.

“Don’t be sorry,” Abias said. “You gave yourself up to save me.”

“Kill me, Abias,” he said, not paying attention to what the cyborg had just said. “I understand everything now. I can truly die.” He held the vibratory surgical tool above the adytum, ready to cut in, to kill what lay within.

“No, Elam. You don’t understand everything, because what I told Lammiela that day was not the truth. I lied, and she believed me.” He pushed, and a line appeared across the adytum’s ovoid.

“What is the truth then, Abias?” Elam waited, almost uninterested.

“Orfea did not die that day, Elam. You did.”

The adytum split slowly open.

“You did try to kill me, Elam,” Abias said softly, almost reminiscently. “You strapped me down for your experiment. Orfea tried to stop you. She grabbed the hot cutting knife and fought with you. She killed you.”

“I don’t understand.”

The interior of an adytum was a dark secret. Elam peered inside, for a moment seeing nothing but yards and yards of wet dark hair.

“Don’t you understand, Orfea? Don’t you know who you are?” Abias’s voice was anguished. “You killed Elam, whom you hated, but it was too much for you. You mutilated yourself, horribly. And you told me what you wanted to be. I loved you. I did it.”

“I wanted to be Elam,” Elam whispered.

The face in the adytum was not his own. Torn and mutilated still, though repaired by Abias’s skill, it was the face of Orfea. The breasts of a woman pushed up through the curling hair.

“You wanted to be the brother you had killed. After I did as you said, no one knew the difference. You were Elam. The genes were identical, since you were split from the same ovum. No one questioned what had happened. The Incarnate are squeamish, and leave such vile business to the Bound. And you’ve been gone ever since. Your hatred for who you thought you were caused you to kill yourself, over and over. Elam was alive again, and knew that Orfea had killed him. Why should he not hate her?”

“No,” Elam said. “I don’t hate her.” He slumped slowly to his knees, looking down at the sleeping face.

“I had to bring her back, you understand that?” Abias’s voice was anguished. “If only one of you can live, why should it be Elam? Why should it be him? Orfea’s spirit was awakening, slowly, after all these years. I could see it sometimes, in you.”

“So you brought it forth,” Elam said. “You cloned and created creatures in which her soul could exist. The zeppelin. The dragon.”

“Yes.”

“And each time, she was stronger. Each time I died, I awoke...
she
awoke for a longer time in the adytum.”

“Yes!” Abias stood over him, each limb raised glittering above his head. “She will live.”

Elam rested his fingers in her wet hair and stroked her cheek. She had slept a long time. Perhaps it was indeed time for him to attempt his final work of art, and die forever. Orfea would walk the Earth again.

“No!” Elam shouted. “I will live.” Abias loomed over him as the dragon had, ready to steal his life from him. He swung the vibrating blade and sliced off one of Abias’s limbs. Another swung down, knocking Elam to the floor. He rolled. Abias raised himself above. Elam stabbed upward with the blade. It penetrated the central cylinder of Abias’s body and was pulled from his hands as Abias jerked back. Elam lay defenseless and awaited the ripping death from Abias’s manipulator arms.

But Abias stood above him, motionless, his limbs splayed out, his eyes staring. After a long moment, Elam realized that he was never going to move again.

The adytum had shut of its own accord, its gray surface once again featureless. Elam rested his forehead against it. After all these years he had learned the truth, the truth of his past and his own identity.

Abias had made him seem an illegitimate soul, a construct of Orfea’s guilt. Perhaps that was indeed all he was. He shivered against the roughness of the adytum. Orfea slumbered within it. With sudden anger, he slapped its surface. She could continue to sleep. She had killed him once. She would not have the chance to do it again.

Elam stood up wearily. He leaned on the elaborate sculpture of the dead Abias, feeling the limbs creak under his weight. What was Elam without him?

Elam was
alive.
He smiled. For the first time in his life, Elam was alive.

I had gotten lost
again, as I so often did, because it was dark there, in those musty and unswept hallways that run between the universes. I’ve always been impressed by the amount of crap that seems to float in through the doorways and settle there, in some sort of plea for reality. An infinite network of passages linking the worlds of Shadow with that of the real might seem like a good idea, but who was going to keep it clean? The Lords were too haughty to concern themselves with things like that, and we humans were too... finite.

I looked in through doorways as I walked, to see such things as a city of hanging tree dwellings or an endless stairway that curved up from mist into blinding sunlight. These were delicate worlds, miniatures. As a professional critic of such Shadows I had to say that these worlds were not the style I usually liked, though one, where a regatta of multicolored dirigibles sailed above a city whose towers stood half in the sea, was excellent.

A rough wind blew past, carrying with it the clamor of a cheering army and the pounding of swords on shields. The passage tilted upward, and I climbed a set of rough stairs, smelling first lilacs, then, when I took a deeper breath, an open sewer. I choked, and was surrounded by buzzing flies, which had wandered irrevocably from their world and, looking for shit, had found only the meager substitute of a critic. I ran up the stairs, waving the flies away, past the sound of temple bells, the dense choking of dust from a quarry, and a spray of briny water, accompanied by the shrieking of sea gulls.

Gathered in a knot in the hallway ahead of me was a group of Lords, with their servant, a huge man wearing a leather helmet. Lord Prokhor, Lord Sere, and Lord Ammene, three balding men with prison pallor and rings below their dark eyes, waited for me to give them advice on acquisition. They sat on little folding stools and looked uncomfortable.

“You are late, Mr. Landstatter,” Lord Ammene said, in a reedy voice.

“Your servant, sir,” I said, ignoring the challenge. I eyed the three of them suspiciously. Lords were entirely unpredictable, and their motivations obscure. On my last trip I’d almost been trapped when Cuzco, capital of the Incan Empire, fell to invading Apache Sacred Warriors who had hired Maori warships for transport from their temple cities along the Pacific coast of Mexico. I’d spent three desperate days freezing in the Andes, my nights lit by the glow from the burning city reflected in the ice fields, before I could return home. I had wondered if it was an accident, because someone had locked me in my room just when the attack began. The three of them returned my bow without standing.

The servant raised the lamp he held in his hand and examined me. I wore a three-cornered plumed hat, a heavy powder-blue tailcoat covered with useless gold buttons, a stiff embroidered vest with hunting scenes on it, extremely tight cream-colored silk trousers, and black leather boots trimmed with sable. Beneath the hat, my hair was pomaded, powdered, and pulled back into a ponytail by an ornate silver clasp. The servant sneered at me.

The Lords were dressed in their usual sober dark clothes, gold chains around their necks indicating rank. Unlike most people, they did not adopt clothing from Shadow, implying, I guess, that what they always wore was “real.” Style is never real, but I am a critic of worlds, not dress, so I said nothing.

Then the servant turned the lamp around. I straightened my hat. We stood in front of a stretch of blank wall. Humming gently to himself, he adjusted the lamp until it focused on the wall. The wall shimmered, and a door opened onto a brightly lit street. I could hear the ringing of steel wagon wheels on cobblestones and the puffing of a steam launch on the river that flowed just out of sight of the doorway. “There you are, Mr. Landstatter. See you in forty-eight hours.” I stopped just in front of the shimmering, the way I always do, no matter who is watching. Vanishing into unreality makes me nervous. He pushed me through, not roughly, but the way you would direct a timid actor onto a stage in front of an audience. I turned to protest, but he and his masters were gone, and I found myself addressing my retort to a broken and stained brick wall.

❖

The water swirled against the brick side of the canal, as if irritated at having its freedom curtailed, but finally acquiesced and flowed under the arch of the bridge. On the river beyond, a vendor guiding his empty flatboat home from the market negotiated the uneven current with tired familiarity. Past the inflow of the canal he put his shoulders into his poling, undoubtedly thinking of a bowl of stew, a mug of beer, and a pipe of tobacco.

I was starting to think of things like that too. I watched the boatman vanish into the iridescent meeting of sunset and oily water, then turned and began to walk in the direction of the dam, which was where the north and south branches of the Schekaagau River joined and flowed into Lake Vlekke. It was also where the best hotels were. I strayed into the path of a pedicab, and was startled by a jangle of bells that sounded like an angry gamelan. The white-suited driver bared polished scrimshawed teeth, cursed at me in Malay, and was gone, leaving only a cloud of ginger and curry to mark his passing.