The Breath of Suspension (41 page)

I awoke. Willoughby had huddled against me in his sleep, pushing me into the side of the funk hole. He was murmuring, “Mother... Mother...” under his breath, shivering. With a surge of annoyance, I shoved him over to the other side, where he remained. A light rain was falling from the sky. I let it fall on my face, trying to pretend that the tracks of tears were nothing but raindrops.

I stood up and looked at the sky. From the light, evening stand-to would be shortly. I heard the whistle of an incoming shell. Instead of diving into a funk hole and cowering against the wall, I looked up. It hit a few traverses down from where I stood. The blast thundered and cast a soldier into the air. He had his arms flung out, as if to embrace the sky. His body landed on the parapet, where it was stitched by machine-gun fire by a German who had no better target. A hand reached out and grabbed the body by an ankle, pulling it back into the trench. The firing stopped.

Captain Totenham walked up and told me that Pogue and I were leading a patrol that night. I said nothing.

❖

The air in no-man’s-land is thick and cloying, quite unlike the sweat and cordite stink of the trenches. The ground is soft, like dead men’s flesh, which does, in fact, make up part of its composition. Every bump and dip in that terrain was familiar to us, but only familiar as seen at night, through a haze of fear.

Pogue strode on, past the huge old mine crater full of water. Willoughby hung back with me and looked as unhappy as I felt. We were to chuck a few grenades at the new German forward gun emplacement. It worried Captain Totenham, gave him trouble sleeping. Poor fellow. The wreckage of a German tank bulked to our left, and we angled away from it. It was about forty yards past that point that we ran into the German patrol.

They were as surprised to see us as we were to see them, I think, but there were six of them to three of us. Willoughby reacted faster than anyone, promptly turning and fleeing. I heard him cry out as the gunfire brought him down.

I dropped to the ground, reaching for my grenades. Pogue dove forward and rolled past the Germans. I saw a glint of metal as he reached... and fired straight up into the air. The Very pistol. “It can’t go on forever,” he called. “Good luck, Dick!” I raised myself up and tried to throw a grenade, but dropped it when a hot poker plunged through my shoulder. I tried to use my other hand to find the grenade, whose pin I had already pulled, but it was on the wrong side of my body. I rolled on my back to get at it, knowing I was dead. Above me, glowing in the night sky like holes to another universe, were four dark blue, almost black, spots, arranged equidistant from each other. I fought against it, but felt the darkness wash over me like a warm tide.

❖

Bright sunlight pried its way between my eyelids. I turned my head to escape the glare, and felt an explosion in my shoulder. The pain shocked me awake. I was lying on the wet earth where I had fallen. The grenade I dropped had not exploded. What luck. Now I could just lie here until a German gunner decided to pump a few slugs into me to make sure I was dead. I lay there, squinting at the blue sky. The silence was total, preternatural. There was no gunfire, no explosions. Finally, unable to stand it, I raised my head and looked around me.

Fifty yards away lay the German trenches. Or rather, obviously, where the German trenches had been some decades past. There was no barbed wire, no gun emplacements, no parapet. Only a shallow depression, overgrown and eroded. The British trench, on the other side, was the same. Straining, I managed to stand up. I did a slow turn around, examining the peaceful, leafy country landscape.

It was then that I saw the corpses. It looked to be the result of a firefight. Five bodies, three in green uniforms, two in gray. I put up a hand to rub my forehead, and froze. The uniform I had been wearing for as long as I could remember had never been this shade of green, and Had been tighter around the wrist. This uniform was just as worn, just as threadbare. But it was not the one I had been wearing last night. It was, in fact, the mate of those worn by three of the five corpses.

They lay scattered around the wreckage of a lorry, overturned and still smoking. A blackened circle in the grass showed a petrol tank explosion. I walked over and turned one of the bodies over. Its placid, anonymous face told me nothing.

I heard the grind of gears and a laboring engine. Coming from the direction of what had been German lines was another lorry. I braced myself, although I was feeling so weak that there was nothing I could have done in self-defense.

The lorry had a white star on the door and a black man at the wheel. He looked at me, as if unsure of whether to stop. I was standing in his way, so he finally did. We stared at each other.

“Could you give me a lift to the nearest dressing station?” I asked, holding my shoulder.

“There’s a field hospital near Albert,” he said, with an American accent. “Hop in.” I dragged myself into the cab with my good arm, and we started off.

“Trouble?” he said.

“Bit of a dust up. Nothing serious.”

He grunted. “We should all be so lucky. Big battle, I hear, at Boutencourt, on the road to Rouen”—he pronounced it “ruin”—“and it don’t sound good. Damn. Goddam. It’s been a year since I got here, and I want to see Paree, and it don’t look like I’m going to get to soon. Sheeit. Some big deal Invasion this turned out to be. Those that planned it aren’t getting their asses shot off, you can bet on that.”

“They never do,” I agreed. Invasion? Were we so badly off here that we weren’t even in Paris? Or were we fighting the French?

Ahead of us was the town of Albert, no longer Bert. It was the way it must have been before the War, full of small ugly houses of red brick. And—I looked hard. The basilica stood, and on top of it, proudly erect, was the Golden Virgin. A flight of monoplanes, which my comrade identified as Spitfires, roared by overhead on their way south. We drove through town, and he dropped me at the dressing station.

That was two weeks ago. I was treated by a doctor and billeted. No one questioned my right to exist. The War had ended here a long time ago and was called World War I, because World War II was here, and I was part of it, as a member of the invasion force that had crossed the Pas-de-Calais the previous year and now held most of the Artois peninsula, though there was talk of a German counteroffensive before winter. It was early September here too. September, 1947.

Pogue had achieved something, for I was, vaguely, starting to remember the ages of soldiering, in wars that always went on too long. I received my orders today. I am to report to the front, which is south of Amiens, along the western reaches of the Somme. From my cot, I can see the Virgin in her tower. She is smiling at me, but that tells me nothing.

They say the war should be over by 1949, 1950 at the latest. I can hear some of the hospital orderlies relaxing by digging in their gardens, just behind my tent. They are strengthening their squash poles, each thumping at his own squash with evident pride. Others are spading the soil around their parsnips. I roll over and look at them, catching glints of metal through a gap in the tent as they dig in the sunlight. One of them, wearing a broad-brimmed floppy hat, closely resembles Pogue.... I look at them and think, about thousands of years of his earnest advice, and his knock on the door. I should take a spade and join them. I really should.

Maybe then, Mother will let me come inside.

The whale screamed
in fear, the complex harmonics of its terror rumbling in the warm water around Ilya Stasov. He hung tensely in the null-g hub of the research space station
Jupiter Forward.
Stasov had concealed himself in an aquarium with the ecology of a Caribbean coral reef. He hung there, pulling water through his artificial gills, and listened to the whale as it screamed from the cold wastes of interplanetary space. The multicolored fish surrounding Stasov had adapted to the lack of gravitational orientation, and floated with their dorsal fins in all directions, oblivious to the whale’s cry.

The sperm whale screamed again. Stasov tightened himself into a ball, as if to escape the sound, then straightened and twitched a finger, calling on the imaging capabilities of
Jupiter Forward’s
computer system. The space station orbited in Ganymede’s trailing trojan point, and the whale floated near it. Instead of leaving the tank and going into space to confront the whale, Stasov brought the Jovian system into the water.

Banded Jupiter appeared in the aquarium like a sunken fishing float. A moray eel in a crevice watched it carefully, judging its edibility. Stasov imagined the chill of interplanetary space penetrating the tropical water. The dark-spotted sphere of Ganymede rolled among the sea anemones like a jetting snail. Stasov sucked hyper-oxygenated water through his carotid gill attachments and looked for the cyborg sperm whale.

“Calm,” he murmured through his throat mike. “Calm.” He was linked directly to the whale’s auditory centers.

The whale’s image was still invisible in his view. Another finger twitch, and Jupiter shrank while Ganymede swelled. The water darkened in the tank, and the stars peeked through above the coral. The fish ignored these astronomical manifestations and went calmly about their business. The image of Ganymede grew to the point that Stasov felt himself flying over its rough surface. He no longer saw the tank in which he floated.

The sperm whale suddenly breached the surface of darkness and rose up out of Ganymede’s invisible shadow. Fusion rockets burned blue along his length. Sunlight gleamed over the whale’s great ridged bulk and glittered on the tessellations of the phased microwave array on his back.

But where was the goddam dolphin? “Weissmuller,” Stasov said.

“Speak to Clarence.” Silence. “The whale needs your words.” A longer silence. “Damn it, Weissmuller, where are you?” His left hand throbbed and he clenched it into a fist, as well as he could.

His only answer was the roaring hiss of Jupiter’s magnetic field and the low murmur of the engineers as they checked the function of the whale’s engines. Stasov keyed in more astronomical data. Ganymede shrank to a marble. The entire Jovian system now floated in the tank, satellite orbits marked, the computer giving him direct perception of their gravity wells sinking like holes in deep perspective. The space station of
Jupiter Forward
appeared in Ganymede’s trojan point, a bright dot. The computer located the transponder on the dolphin’s space suit and displayed it as a spark. Stasov looked at Weissmuller’s current location and swore.

The dolphin had dived into Io’s gravity well and been slingshot out toward Europa. Jupiter’s plunging gravity well gaped before Stasov’s eyes, and he felt as if he were being sucked into a whirlpool. He fought down a moment of terror. The dolphin’s spark climbed slowly up toward him. Weissmuller always played things close to the edge. It would be hours before the dolphin could get back to
Jupiter Forward.

Stasov examined Clarence’s image, wanting to stroke the whale’s back to comfort him. A trigger fish examined the hologram, seemingly surprised to see a sperm whale its own size, then darted away with a contemptuous flick of its fins. The real Clarence, desperately alone in space, of course perceived nothing of this.

Despite the immense modifications to his body, Clarence was still vaguely cetacean, though he now had vast, complex control planes to guide him through the Jovian atmosphere, making him look like a whale decorated with streamers as a float in a parade. Stasov spoke calming words, but he wasn’t an expert in sperm whale dialect. That wasn’t why he was there. The whale continued to send out echo-location clicks in the microwave band, unable to understand how he had lost consciousness on an island in the Maldives, in the Indian Ocean, and awoken here, in a mysterious place he had never heard of, a place of no water, no fish, and a dozen featureless spheres.

Irregular bursts of rocket appeared along Clarence’s sides, spinning him. Data streamed into the tank, crowding the fish: fuel use, accelerations, circuit status. Voices muttered technical jargon. Stasov felt as he had when as a child, put to bed early, listening to the intent, incomprehensible adult conversation of his parents’ friends through the closed bedroom door.