The Breath of Suspension (26 page)

“Where are you from?”

He passed a hand over his forehead. “You know, I’m not even sure I remember. A lot of white stone buildings. Apple orchards. A big blue sky. Doesn’t tell you much, does it? I guess it didn’t tell me much either. But I remember school, a big hall with a dome, and my first world. It was a clunky thing, with brass-and-mahogany steam carriages and wars full of cavalry charges and solemn republics whose capital cities were always built of white marble and top-hatted ambassadors who exchanged calling cards and people who lived, breathed, and died, just like they did at home. I went to live there, a requirement for graduation, I think. I never went back. I just made worlds, Shadows you call them here, and moved on, sometimes into one of mine, usually into one I stumbled onto made, presumably, by someone else.”

“So yours was the real world.”

“Jacob, I’ve always been amazed at your inability to detach your emotions from your intellect. That world was created as a private project by a man from a culture so different from this one that my mind does not retain any information about it at all. He was ancient when I was a child, the grandmaster of the school. He died much honored, since he was, I suppose, God.” He cut himself another slice of bread. “It would be nice to be certain one existed, but as long as we spend our time twisting time like this, rather than on more rational pursuits, none of us ever will be sure. Most of the inhabitants of the worlds I have created at least
believe
they exist, which gives them the advantage over us. Your Lords devised these absurd Keys in your limbic systems to give you all a sense of reality, since you always feel like you are coming home. A nice touch. You, incidentally, no longer have one.”

I remembered my strange dizziness and disorientation at the medical ward. At the time, I had chalked it up to radiation sickness. “How did you manage that?”

“Friends at the hospital in Centrum, willing to do me a favor. And why shouldn’t they? I created them, after all. It’s really a simple modification, and performed more often than you might think, even in this most real of all possible worlds.” He ate the rest of his sandwich and stood up. “Well, that’s enough for now. You’ll be seeing me again, I think. You’re one of my more engaging creations.”

“Oh, shut up.” I put my head in my hands. This was too much. “Good luck on your next job.”

“What do you know about my next job?”

He grinned maliciously. “It’s by Martine.”

I choked on my food. “That son of a bitch has taken off with my wife.” I stopped. It hurt. It was surprising how much it hurt. “Don’t worry. It’s no more real than anything else.”

“It’s no less real. My guts feel like they’ve been caught by a fishhook.”

“And you sneer at gustatory ontology. Good day, Jacob.” And he walked out the door and was gone.

❖

The various portions of the Chancellery Gardens of Laoyin harmonized not only in space, but in time. The arrangement of dells and lily ponds, of individual Dawn Redwoods, laboriously dug, full grown, in the fastness of old China and brought here up the Lao River, which I knew as the Columbia, in barges built for the purpose, of stone temples with green bronze cupolas, and of spreads of native prairie, seemingly engaged in a devious wildness but actually existing because of the efforts of dedicated gardeners, took on meaning only when observed at a receptive stroll. I emerged from the yellow-green of a stand of ginkgoes, descended a gorge alongside a stream, and arrived at the rocky shore of a lake, its verge guarded by cunningly twisted pines and Amur maples. I trod the gravel path farther, and felt uneasy. While I strolled, too many others strode purposefully, usually in tight groups of three or four. The vistas were ignored by men who muttered and gestured to each other. Either trouble was brewing, or the inhabitants of this Shadow had decidedly odd ideas of how to enjoy a sunny afternoon in the park.

A Bodhisattva blessed my exit with bland beneficence. In contrast to the serene order of the Chancellor’s garden, the city streets beyond were a tangle. What had been intended as triumphal thoroughfares were blocked every hundred paces by merchants’ stalls, religious shrines, or entire shantytowns, complete with chickens and screaming children. Under other circumstances, it would have been a swirling, delightful mess.

However, the streets had the same feeling of oppression as the park. Everywhere there were knots of people discussing dark matters. A scuffle broke out between two groups, one with dark skin and bulbous deformed Mayan heads, shouting loudly and striking out clumsily, the other short, sibilant, with narrow catlike eyes and flat noses, darting with precisely placed energy. Suddenly abashed by the attention they aroused, both groups melted into the surrounding crowds.

“The Prince is dead.” Everywhere I heard the murmur. “The Prince, murdered. Vengeance, for our Prince. Where is his murderer? He must be found. He must be killed. The. Prince. Is. Dead.” Each word was a call of anguish.

I emerged onto a wide street that had been kept clear. Flat-fronted buildings of basalt bulked on either side, all identical.

There was a sound down the way, the rhythmic thud of metal drums, growing ever louder. In response to some signal not perceptible to me, a crowd had gathered. Some of them were dressed in woolen robes that looked suspiciously familiar to me, but there was no time to think about it. Everyone began to sway in time to the beat. As the sound of the drums approached I could hear, over it, the baying of hunting horns. I looked up the street. Sailing toward me like an image from an involuntarily recalled memory was the Face.

“Woe!” the crowd wailed. “O woe! Dead. Dead!” Tears streamed down every face, and every body moved to the beat of those awful drums. “The Prince! Woe!” And the Face continued.

It was huge, at least thirty feet high, carved out of some dark gray-flecked rock. The eyes, blank and pitiless, stared into mine, and beyond me, to infinity. The lips were curved in a slight smile, like that of a Buddha, but seemed to be arrested in the process of changing to some more definite expression. What would it have been? A grin? A scowl? A grimace of pain, or anger? Or a mindless nullity? The Face was of stone and would carry that secret forever. There were creases in the cheeks, and the nose was slightly bent at the end. The Prince was becoming a god, but obviously intended to keep his nose intact. A god is not handicapped by a twisted nose.

The sculpture rested on a great wagon, each of its many wheels reaching to twice the height of a man. It was pulled by teams of men and women, volunteers. Everyone wanted to help, and unseemly scuffles broke out for places on the ropes. The drummers seated below the god’s chin occasionally enforced justice by clubbing someone with their brass drumsticks. And the crowd cried “Woe!”

The Face swept by, becoming, from behind, a rough-hewn lumbering mountain of stone.

The mood of the crowd changed. Like a shadowed pool of blood in the corner of a slaughterhouse suddenly illuminated by shutters flung open on sunlight, the black despair of the crowd was revealed as scarlet imperfectly perceived. Icicles grew on my spine as shouts of rage and upraised daggers greeted the approach of the second Face. The daggers...

“Murderer!” they cried. “Death!” Though essentially a thirty-foot-high-stone wanted poster, the sculptors had lavished no less care on this Face than on that of the Prince. Its brows were knit in jealous rage, its eyes glowered. Its lips were pulled back in a contemptuous grin, challenging us all to do our worst. Though fleshier and more dissipated than I remembered, the Face was familiar. It should have been. I looked at it every morning in the mirror when I shaved. It was my own.

The sculptors had done their work well. So compelling was the Face that no one noticed my real face as, shaking with fear, I slipped through the crowd. Their daggers, with silver hilts chased with a pattern of eyes and lightning bolts, were also familiar. The last time I had seen one, it had been sticking out of a bedpost next to my head.

Martine! It had been him the whole time. He’d sent his creations to kill me in Schekaagau, and when that had failed, he’d exposed me to radiation from his Virgin Mary, so that the cumulative dosage from my visit to Berenson’s radioactive world would kill me. Hell, he’d probably locked me in my room at Cuzco. But for what? My wife? It made no sense, but then, murder often made no sense, at least to the victim. But didn’t the idiot know that none of this was real?

So Martine had created this entire world just to kill me, despite what Halicarnassus had said about my ego. I should have been flattered, but it’s hard to feel flattered when you’ve pissed in your pants and are fleeing for your life.

I quickly became lost in the tangle of streets, though I really had no idea of where I was going, or for what reason. Everywhere was equally dangerous in this city of Laoyin. The houses were all about four stories high, of cracked stucco, and leaned crazily. The air smelled of frying fish and fermented black beans. I turned a corner into a dusty square. A group of locals sat gloomily around a nonfunctioning fountain. I slunk past them, trying to look nonchalant. I almost made it.

“Look, Daddy!” a little boy said, pointing at me. “Prince!”

“No, it isn’t. It’s—” Their knives were out in an instant. They didn’t waste time debating points of tactics, but launched themselves at me in a mass. I turned and ran.

The tangled streets, confusing enough at a walk, were a nightmare at a dead run. Every few seconds I crashed into a wall or the sharp corner of a building. I began to gain on my pursuers. Despite their hatred, they still had some concern for their bodies. I could not afford to have any.

I broke clear of the high buildings and found myself on a wide promenade, paved with multicolored slabs of rock and bordered on my left by an ornamental railing. Through the railing, far below, were the waters of the Lao, as they flowed toward the Pacific. Leaning casually on the railing, as if on the parapet of his palace, was Martine. He nervously held a gun in his hand, as if unsure of what to do with it. He had been unable to resist taking a direct hand in things, despite all of his efforts to set up a perfect trap for me. I
was
trapped. I stopped. Would he posture, preen, and carry on first, or would he simply gun me down? Right on the first guess.

“At last,” he said. “At last I can have my revenge.”

“What? What the hell are you talking about?”

“You have tormented and ruined me. I did my best, I poured my soul into my art, but it was not enough for you. My genius was never enough.” He raised the pistol. “Say your prayers, Jacob.”

“Wait a minute, for God’s sake.”

“Nothing can stay my hand now, Jacob. Compose yourself for death.”

“I’ll compose myself for anything you want, if you tell me what you’re going on about. You’ve got Amanda, what more do you want?”

He frowned, confused. “Amanda? What does Amanda have to do with this? How can you mock my work, humiliate me, degrade me—”

I should have known. I grinned in relief. “Is that it? You’re all upset because of some lousy reviews? Don’t be ridiculous.”

His finger whitened on the trigger. “You have destroyed me. Now I destroy you.”

“For crissakes, Salvator, are you crazy? Who takes critics seriously?” I was almost in tears. Here I’d finally found someone who paid attention to my criticism, and he wanted to kill me for it. It wasn’t fair.

“Make your peace with God, though I have no doubt that you’ll pick enough with Him that He’ll wish He never created you.” Mar-tine was proving to be an extremely gabby murderer.

A knot of people emerged from an alleyway behind Martine. Seeing that he had held me prisoner rather than killing me outright made them smile. It’s always nice when someone is willing to share.

I nodded. “All right, Samos. Take him.”

Martine snorted. “A feeble ruse, Jacob.”

The first man in the group brushed past Martine’s elbow. With a shriek, he turned and fired, blowing the man’s chest open and leaving him with a surprised and offended expression on his face. Before Martinc could get the barrel pointed back in my direction, the blades were into him, silver into scarlet. He screamed once. That done, the blades turned toward me. With the sharp decisiveness that makes for John Doc corpses in the morgue, I took three quick steps and threw myself over the railing into the air. I don’t know if I screamed. I know that those behind me did, in disappointment. I watched the river. It didn’t seem to get any closer, just more detailed, ripples, whirlpools, and flotsam appearing and sharpening as if on a developing piece of film.

I must have remembered Halicarnassus’s modification to my Key subconsciously, because the next instant I found myself, sweating and soiled, in the dark hallway beneath Centrum.

❖

She was home, sitting in the quiet room reading a book about Caravaggio. She looked up at me as I entered, smiled, then went back to her reading, saying nothing. It was not a silence that could be easily broken, for it seemed to me that it would shatter into a thousand pieces at the first word. I walked to the bedroom, took a shower, and changed into household clothes. There was no clothing out, no suitcase, and everything was folded neatly in the drawers. I breathed. The air smelled, just slightly, of jasmine. Jasmine? I went to the kitchen.

Amanda had cleaned up the remains of the final lunch Halicarnassus and I had had together. I opened the green kitchen curtains to have a view of the garden and began to pull out ingredients. Had the knives always been on the left side of the drawer? How observant was a critic? I examined the curtains. Still green. The last time I had seen them, at lunch, they had been red. That I remembered.

One Shadow differing from another in only one minor, but significant, way. Amanda and I had had a discussion about those curtains. I had wanted green, but finally gave in. My hand shook a little as I chopped the onions, as I began to realize that Halicarnassus had sent me drifting through Shadow, with no way to ever return to the world I had spent my whole life believing was the real one.

I flipped the top of the garbage can up to throw away the onion peels. Inside, crumpled, was a set of red curtains. A note was pinned to them. “You’ll never know,” it said. “Get used to it.” It didn’t need a signature.