The Breath of Suspension (37 page)

Al-Bukhari got up, and bustled to the front of the shop. Customers should always be treated well, as Fatima had often explained. Al-Bukhari was a stocky, slightly plump man in his midthirties, his short beard already going gray. He had a sideward gaze and a strong voice that made him a Koran reader most Fridays at the mosque. “Come in and sit.”

They sat cross-legged on the carpet and were served cooling drinks of rosewater and honey by Zaynab, al-Bukhari’s second wife. She vanished through the door at the back of the shop into the darkness of the house. As he talked, al-Bukhari occasionally turned away to feed his brazier. The shop was full of precisely arranged hammers, tongs, tweezers, anvils, and other equipment. “How may I help you?” al-Bukhari said.

Solomon suddenly felt confusion. What did his quest have to do with this energetic little man and his life in this corner of Time? Yet, somehow, this man seemed important. “I wish to buy,” he said.

Al-Bukhari showed him his work, mostly in gold and enamel, earrings, turban pins, and bridle ornaments. “You are not from this place,” Solomon said. He picked up a bracelet and hung it on his wrist, letting a beam of sunlight fall on it and shatter into glittering splinters.

“No,” al-Bukhari said. “I am from Bukhara. That is over two months’ journey from here.”

“You must miss your home.” He set the bracelet down and picked up a jewel box of carnelian and onyx. “Your work is excellent. Your gifts would not have been unwelcome at the wedding of al-Ma’mun, or the royal banquet of al-Mutawakkil.”

Al-Bukhari colored with pleasure. “Your words do me honor, Suleiman. Those two occasions have no third in Islam. But my home? Ah, how could you know? The valley of Sogdiana is one of the four earthly paradises. The gardens and orchards... Syria is a dry place.” He crinkled his slanted oriental eyes, remembering. He thought about his cheating uncle, and about the power of visions and the hand of God, but did not speak of them. Instead he pulled out a box, on impulse. “You have not seen these.”

Solomon stared down at the rings in the box, each a gleaming pure circle of gold. Thinking of the ring he had in his pouch, he looked at each in turn. What a hoard! How delighted Fedoseyev would have been. In this single market he could have made enough arrests to keep him in interrogations for the rest of his life.

But the ring he was looking for was not there. They showed a similar technique, though a different style.

He looked at al-Bukhari. “Have you sold a ring recently, in the shape of a serpent with its own tail in its mouth?”

“A serpent... no, I have never made such a ring.” He looked frightened. “With its tail in its mouth...” How could Suleiman have known of his vision of the golden serpent? He stood up, suddenly agitated. “Please... I must get back to work. It is getting late.” This man Suleiman, he realized again, was dangerous. Who was he? What evil did he represent?

Solomon stood also, surprised and himself suddenly suspicious. Did the jeweler know more than he was letting on? Was he an ally of Tarkin’s? He wished he had Fedoseyev back, and a comfortable interrogation room where he could uncover the truth....

Al-Bukhari moved quickly to the front of the shop, and froze. Across the street, walking amid the crowds, he saw an Ifrit. He dared not breathe. Why did an evil djinni walk abroad?

A holy man, his voice sonorous against the screaming background, led a gaggle of students toward the blue-domed mosque of Jami Zakariyah, where he would lecture in the courtyard. For all his knowledge of the Koran and the Law, he walked right past the Ifrit without perceiving it. A wealthy noble, turbaned and bearded, peered moodily into a crystal sphere at a stall across the way, while his Greek slave declaimed Aristotle in bad Arabic. The Ifrit jostled his arm, but aside from a glance of irritation, he did not notice it. The Ifrit wore the face of guilt, and stalked its victim with staring mad eyes. Al-Bukhari watched with fascination as it pulled its headdress across the lower part of its face, leaving only those staring eyes, and drew a sword. It keened like a newly widowed woman, and attacked.

Suleiman swore in some harsh foreign language and drew his own sword with lightning speed. The two blades met with a bold ringing and slid along each other, the unexpected resistance causing the Ifrit to stumble back. It seemed old, somehow, old and slow. Up and down the street were sounds of fear and concern as merchants either hid themselves or tried to protect their merchandise, depending on their personalities.

“Tarkin!” Solomon shouted. But what argument could he use? Tarkin had every reason to want to kill him. How had he escaped from the train car? Or was this yet another Tarkin, a younger one? A younger Tarkin from a time before the Moscow interrogation could not be killed, since he had to continue to exist, but there was no time to think about paradoxes.

The other clumsily attacked again. Solomon was fascinated by the other’s eyes. What had they looked upon? His assailant’s reflexes were slow. As the attacking blade moved, Solomon darted aside and drove his blade home. The other fell to the street.

Solomon reached forward to pull aside the covering so that he could look Tarkin in the face, but glanced up as he heard the hiss of swords being drawn from scabbards. A body of armed men was approaching, cautiously. The local gendarmerie. Without another thought, he turned and ran. Solomon lost his pursuers for long enough to dart into a cul-de-sac, slap an ampoule of Tempedrine against his neck, and disappear from that time.

Eras before the First World War were the easiest to travel in without preparation, because everyone took gold, though sometimes at a ruinous discount. Solomon darted up the street and into a doorway beneath the three gold balls of a pawnbroker. Me sold the bemused proprietor his suddenly ridiculous clothes and bought an ill-fitting pair of work pants held up by a length of rope and a wool shirt, much too warm for the day. With these clothes he walked farther up the street and bought a decent suit of clothes. Used to the sudden accesses of wealth that came to gamblers and criminals, this proprietor made no remark about the exchange of rough work clothes for a dress shirt and a suit of light gray gabardine. Yet farther up the street he exchanged gold for dollars, then rented a room in a boardinghouse with a shared kitchen and an outhouse in the back, and prepared to make his investigation. He was only a few blocks from where he and Tarkin had lived—were living—during their research, but he had already violated so many Time Center regulations that he did not let this bother him.

With slow patience, he searched, starting conversations in bars, in stores, on the El. A number of people in and around the Levee had seen Tarkin: some described him as old, while others said he was young. Many professions were ascribed to him. Solomon walked the streets all day and all night, searching every face he passed. Chicago had over a million and a half people in 1902. There were a lot of faces to look at.

He was led to the first Tarkin he saw by a small boy who earned his two bits. Solomon passed by the plate-glass window of a drugstore and saw a middle-aged man wiping down the counter with a white cloth.

The second Tarkin, somewhat younger, drove a milk cart. The third Tarkin was an old man who told people’s fortunes, while the fourth was another middle-aged man who worked in a dry goods store. By the time Solomon had seen seven different versions of Andy Tarkin he stopped counting. Each had a somewhat different disguise, hair color, pair of glasses, and posture, but it wasn’t difficult to spot them once you knew what you were looking for. Each wore a gold ring.

Tarkin would have given the Controllers of Time Center screaming fits. He had doubled back on his own life, over and over, weaving a web of himself around the incident that had forever directed his life and Solomon’s. But, Solomon thought as he passed yet another version of Tarkin, this one pushing a knife-sharpening cart, he had obviously never succeeded in changing one damn thing about what had happened. As demonstrably physical as it was, Tarkin’s obsession about the past had no more effect on things than such obsessions ever did.

But now Solomon had obsessions of his own to deal with, for it was once again late afternoon on June 11. Before the night was through, he would find out what really had happened at Mrs. Mulvaney’s boardinghouse. “Just think of it as historical research,” he told himself as he walked that long familiar path up the cobblestones of Harrison Street from the end of the streetcar line, past the corner of Wilmot, where Mr. Kirkby kept his prize sow Ernestine in her pen by his front steps, and up Furnace Street to Mrs. Mulvaney’s three-story mansard-roofed boardinghouse with the crazily leaning barn next to it.

It was a warm day, with a high and clear afternoon. How many times had Tarkin already lived it?

He was stopped cold by a woman’s laugh. A man’s laugh answered it.

“It’s true,” the man’s voice insisted. “The Japanese use hard wooden blocks for pillows. So when one of their ambassadors was staying at the Hotel Willard in Washington, where the pillows are full of down, and found the chamber pot under the bed, he used that instead and slept quite well.”

“Oh, Hugh,” Louisa said, still laughing. “That still doesn’t explain why the first time you tried to use a gas jet you almost burned your hair off.”

“Where I come from, in North Dakota—”

“Oh, stop that!”

“All right, Tibet. We use yak butter there.”

Solomon felt wonder. Had he really ever been that young, that easy? Could he ever have flirted so casually with the landlady’s daughter? He peeked around the edge of the porch. There he sat, lean and young, his hair greased back, wearing a seersucker suit and a straw boater. He looked as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Louisa sat across from him, kicking up her heels, dressed in a blue shirtwaist dress with puffy sleeves. Her hair was curly black, and her dark eyes darted all around as she talked.

“Mrs. Mulvaney says that dinner is almost ready,” a third voice said. The tousled ginger hair of Tarkin’s head poked around the edge of the door.

“Oh, Andy, sit down, sit down with us.” Louisa jumped up and pulled him down next to her, opposite Solomon, so that she was flanked by her two suitors, the two history students who had had to come eight hundred years into their own pasts to learn what life and love really were.

“You look very well, Mr. Tarkin.”

“Never felt better, Mr. Solomon.”

The old Full Historian Solomon rested his forehead on the cool granite of the boardinghouse’s foundation. This was the last afternoon that cither of them would ever be truly at peace. After this it would be nothing but endless blow and counterblow, watching massacres, plagues, and disasters, of never knowing an instant’s peace, for they would both have ceased to be the sort of men who would recognize peace if they were offered it. He stood and listened to them talk and flirt until they were finally called in.

As they went in to dinner, Solomon heard Tarkin say, shyly, “I... I have something for you, Louisa. I had it made specially. I’ll show you after dinner.”

The fire had started in the old barn, which was dry as tinder after three weeks with no rain. His guts cold and hard as ice within him, Solomon commenced to watch the house and its barn, to wait for the moment when the flames would emerge and consume everything, making him the man he now was.

The night grew cool, giving up the summer warmth of the afternoon. A breeze sprang up off the lake. The Mulvaney household spread out on the porch and talked in a desultory way. Eleven o’clock passed, announced by the bells of a church, and midnight approached. Still no hint of a fire starting, and it had started just at midnight, the time his younger self usually went to bed.

He climbed into a window of the barn and looked around inside. Jenny, Mrs. Mulvaney’s brown mare, nickered softly in the darkness. There was no open flame, such as the kerosene lamp Mrs. O’Leary’s legendary cow had kicked over to start the great Chicago fire of 1871. The silage was fresh and was kept turned over to prevent fermentation, which could get hot enough to start a smoldering fire. Outside, he could hear the bell of the church tolling the twelve strokes of midnight.

In doing their research to recover what had been lost in the Great Forgetting, the Historians of Time Center sometimes inadvertently caused temporal paradoxes. Such paradoxes had to be resolved. Solomon’s duty as a Full Historian was explicit. The fire had happened. He had witnessed it. Thus, the fire
would
happen. Mechanically, because thinking might have stopped him, he pulled off some of the drier stalks of grass and piled them against one of the barn walls. Shaking, he untied Jenny, who nuzzled him curiously.

“You lived,” he whispered. “The rest of us didn’t.” He unbolted the door of the barn so that the horse would be able to open it by pushing against it, then without any further hesitation, walked back to the pile of straw, struck a safety match, and touched it to the tinder.

In a minute the dry boards of the wall were burning as well. The flames were hot on his face, and the roar as loud as Niagara Falls, which Louisa had always wanted to see.

The fire spread like wine spilled on the floor. The roof of the barn exploded into flame all at once. Jenny neighed in terror, pounded herself against the barn doors, and escaped onto the street. The barn was filling up with smoke, and already the beams overhead creaked as they were eaten away by the fire. Solomon turned. Standing in the open doorway, staring at him, was the young Tarkin, barefoot, obviously interrupted in his preparations for bed. Tarkin shook his head, as if unable to believe what he was seeing. It would take some moments, Solomon knew, for his astonishment to turn into bitter rage and hatred and not much longer to change him from a friend to an enemy.

“Andy!” Solomon shouted, above the roar of the flames. “Wait!”

But Tarkin was gone, running back toward the house, shouting, “Louisa!”

Solomon ran out after him. The blaze had spread from the barn to the house it leaned against, and flames were already leaping out of the third-floor dormer windows. Mrs. Mulvaney and her son Arnold were even at that moment escaping through a second-floor window onto the bough of a sycamore that stood near the house. His younger self, having been smoking a last pipe on the porch before going to bed, would get into the house and make it halfway up the front stairs before being driven back by the flames. Louisa’s room was on the second floor, facing the alley in back.