The Breath of Suspension (42 page)

“Erika,” Stasov said, keying another comm line.

“Director Morgenstern’s line,” a heavy male voice answered. “Miller.” Stasov hadn’t expected the Security Chiefs voice. But if he had him.... “Why is the dolphin running loose around Io?”

“There’s something wrong with your comm, Colonel. You sound like you’re underwater. You’d better check it.”

Stasov kept one eye on the increasingly agitated whale. “I’m not a colonel,” he snapped. “I hold no such rank. Please give me Director Morgenstern. We can deal with your dereliction of duty later.”

“Dereliction, Colonel?” Paul Miller’s voice had the lazy drawl that Stasov associated with thuggish political policemen and prison camp guards, whether they were American, Russian, or Japanese. “The dolphin wanted to go. My men aren’t KGB officers.” He chuckled. Stasov knew that sound well: the laugh of an interrogator putting a subject at ease before hitting him again. He’d heard it over and over during his months at Camp Homma. It had begun to seem an essential part of torture. “Should we have held him under physical restraint? That would be a treaty violation. Do you want me to order my men to commit a—”

“Damn it, Miller, quit babbling and get me the Director!” Stasov tried to conceal his sudden fear under anger.

“You just watch yourself, Colonel.” Miller’s voice was suddenly cold. “None of us are under your orders. It’s a long way from Uglegorsk. The Director’s busy. I don’t have to—”

“Ilya,” Erika Morgenstern’s voice broke in. “What’s the problem?”

“Cut all of the whale’s systems immediately,” Stasov said tensely. “None of the problems are on the engineering side. He’s not responsible. Weissmuller’s off somewhere around Io, and I can’t handle the whale alone. I know it throws the schedule off. And the budget. But do it.”

Morgenstern didn’t hesitate. The hectic flaring lights along the whale’s sides died and it floated, quiescent. “Done,” she said. Subliminally Stasov heard cries of surprise and frustration from the engineers testing the vehicle. The vehicle. Clarence the cyborg sperm whale, hanging in orbit around Jupiter. He was there. Stasov could see him, but still wasn’t sure he believed it. Test levels dropped to zero.

Stasov swam slowly to the tank’s surface and edged out through the enhanced-surface-tension barrier that held the liquid sphere together, feeling the boundary as a line of almost painful pressure on his skin. He floated into the air, globules of water drifting off his body and reuniting with the large quivering sphere of the fish tank. Once he had detached the carotid oxygenation connections, he drew a deep painful breath of the unfriendly air, reestablishing his ventilation reflexes. His diaphragm contracted painfully, having relaxed during his conditioned apnea.

A tiny fish flopped in the air, pulled out of the water along with him. Stasov shepherded it back to the tank. The cold air gave him goose bumps, and he shivered. He pulled himself over to an actual porthole and peered out at space. Clarence floated, surrounded by vehicles and swarming human beings, afflicting him as had the parasites that had clung to him in the seas of Earth. It would be hours before Weissmuller returned. Something had to be done. Stasov felt a twisting in his belly. It had been a long time since he’d tortured a dolphin. He knew that if he did it again, it would be his last act. But he could see no other way.

“Ilya,” Erika Morgenstern said in exasperation. “You have to realize what these people think you are. What they call you—”

“The Shark of Uglegorsk,” he finished. “You and I have been through all that. They don’t understand anything.”

Morgenstern stared at him with those efficient brown-green eyes that seemed able to see through both glare and darkness with equal ease. The first time he had seen those eyes they had spelled his salvation. He tried never to forget that. “You’re the one who’s not aware of anything. I have to balance two hundred fifty people from twenty countries aboard this space station, and turn in a job of research to boot. Hatred and fear aren’t imaginary.”

Stasov rubbed his maimed left hand and looked back at her. The room was in half darkness, as she preferred, giving her head, with its flat face and short graying coppery hair, the look of an astronomical object. She held court in an imperial style that would have dismayed her superiors at the UN Planetary Exploration Directorate—had they been permitted to know about it—guarded by acolytes like Miller, aloof, inaccessible, but aware of everything that went on aboard
Jupiter Forward.
Stasov was sometimes startled by what had become of her.

“They should still be able to do their jobs,” he said. “Or is your authority over them insufficient?”

She didn’t flush—she had more control than that—but she narrowed her eyes in an expression of authority, to let him know that he’d gone too far. He stared back at her with the pale blue-eyed absence of expression that let her know that he’d been through worse than she could ever throw at him.

A hologram of Jupiter gave the room what light it had. The planet was sliced apart to show magnetic fields and convection cells, as if Morgenstern could as easily order a modification in the circulation of the Great Red Spot as she could in the air pressure of the storage lockers or the menu in the dining hall.

“We’ve come this far together,” she said. “Since Homma. Now we’re about to drop a cyborg sperm whale into the Jovian atmosphere.” She shook her head. “I’m still not sure I believe it. But I can’t risk the anger of the Delphine Delegation. They provide most of our financing. You know that. Miller’s an idiot, but he’s right. We cannot physically restrain an intelligent cetacean. It violates the Treaty of Santa Barbara.” Her voice still had a trace of an accent from her native New Zealand.

“Articles twelve and thirteen,” Stasov muttered. “Open Seas and Freedom of Entities. Damn right I know it. Better than anyone else. And dolphins love the letter of the law. They think it’s the stupidest thing they ever heard, but they use it whenever it’s convenient. They can afford good lawyers.”

“Exactly. I can’t jeopardize the project. Not now. Not ever. The Delphine Delegation keeps us on a short enough financial tether as it is.”

“Miller didn’t oppose me because of the treaty,” Stasov spat. “He did it because he thinks dolphins are wonderful innocent creatures, and because he hates me for what he imagines I did to them. There’s nothing more terrifying than a sentimental thug. By letting him oppose me,
you
are jeopardizing the project. That’s not just a machine out there. It’s a perceptive being, trapped in a metal shell and hauled to a world he doesn’t understand. He’s going mad. Weissmuller’s
already
crazy. Even for a dolphin. Look clearly, Erika. The project could end here.”

She looked at him. He didn’t have to say any more. Looking clearly was what she did best. It had taken her from an after-college job as a junior observer on a UN War Crimes commission to one of the most powerful jobs in the UN Planetary Exploration Directorate. And it had been the look behind Stasov’s eyes, in the gardens of Camp Homma, that had given her the first glimpse of the direction to move in.

“All right,” she said, finally. “Do what you have to.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Of course I do!” she blazed. “I said it, didn’t I? I’m giving you full authority, answerable only to me. Do what you want to your dolphin Messiah and his acolyte. Just get the project moving.”

“Don’t mock me, Erika,” Stasov said heavily. “Don’t ever mock me.” He stood, raising himself up slowly in the low gravity. Director Morgenstern’s comm terminal had been flickering constantly, and there were undoubtedly a dozen crises already piled up while she had chatted with her unpopular and essential Cetacean Liaison. “The project will move.”

She eyed him, suddenly the more uncertain younger woman he remembered. “Ilya. What do you mean to do?”

“Don’t ask me,” he said, his voice dead. “I’ll only do what’s necessary.”

“You don’t seem like a man who would be interested in stories, Colonel,” Georgios Theodoros said as he stumbled up the wet stone steps, his long coat inadequate protection against the wind blowing off the Tatar Strait.

Colonel Stasov smiled, the third large star on his officer’s shoulder boards new enough that he still enjoyed the novelty of the salutation, even from a foreign civilian. “It’s not just a story, is it? It’s evidence that what we are doing has been done before.”

“I’m not sure that’s true. It’s all allegorical, allusive.” Theodoros, a dreamy-eyed Greek with an ecclesiastical beard, stopped on one of the landings, affecting to examine the view, but actually to rest. There was little enough to look at. The sea before him was gray, with sharp-toothed waves. The thick clouds lowering over it obscured the boundary between sea and sky. This was nothing like the warm, dark Aegean where he did his delphine research. The island Sakhalin was a rough, hard place. That was why this Russian colonel with his pale blue eyes was so intense in his work. Though those eyes sometimes shone with the joy of a true discoverer, a look that had automatically led Theodoros to accept the other as a friend.

“No,” Stasov stated decisively. “What humans and dolphins did during the reign of the Cretan Thalassocracy is significant to us here. That’s why we brought you. Not just to hear stories. Thirty-five hundred years ago they developed the mental technology to deal with the problem. I believe you have brought the vestiges of that technology with you to Uglegorsk.” He tugged at the binoculars he wore around his neck.

“They claimed to speak to dolphins,” Theodoros murmured. “Perhaps they did.” For years, no one had listened to his theories, and now that someone was willing to, he found himself somehow reluctant, uncertain of the consequences. The Soviets weren’t interested in mere theories. They meant to act.

The research station at Uglegorsk sprawled out beneath them. Beauty being pointless against the cold rocks of Sakhalin, the station had seemingly striven for extreme ugliness, and succeeded in the Soviet manner. The metal huts, some of WWII Lend Lease vintage, were rusted and patched. Holding pens crowded the shoreline, their captive dolphins splashing and leaping. The base was dominated by the concrete vault of the dolphin laboratory, built with more recent American aid.

Theodoros’s specialty was human-dolphin interactions during the second millennium
BCE
, a research topic too vague for delphine researchers and too practical for classicists and mythologists. So he had been surprised when he received an official invitation from the Vladivostok Oceanographic Institute to fly out to Uglegorsk to talk with Ilya Stasov. It hadn’t been simply a polite facility tour followed by an hour talk, either. He’d been questioned intently for three days. A map of the Aegean Sea now hung in the main seminar room, the sites of Cretan cities marked on it, with a big star on Thera, the island that was the remnants of the great volcano whose eruption had brought an end to Cretan civilization. The Soviet researchers gathered in front of it to argue, arms waving, in their loud Russian. He and Stasov spoke English with each other.

The burly colonel sat down on a rock wall and stared off to sea. “Could you tell me the story, Georgios? Never mind how insignificant it seems.”

Had the man really climbed up all this way for a view of various shades of gray? Through binoculars yet? Theodoros shivered and sat down next to Stasov.

“It took place on Delos, long enough ago that the Egyptians had no Pharaoh, and built with reeds. A singer lived on this island, a lyre player who had dedicated his life to Apollo and played to the sky and the sea. After a storm, the singer went down to the sandy shore to see what the sea had tossed up. On the beach lay a whale, sighing at the knowledge of his certain death. He cried thick, bitter tears.

“‘Why are you here, brother?’ the lyre player called. ‘Why are you not off tossing the sea over your back, as is the natural duty of whales?’

“‘I have come to hear your songs,’ the whale replied. ‘Sing to me, while I die.’

“The singer sang to the whale for three days, while the birds wheeled and cried overhead and the sun rose and set and the whale’s flesh began to stink. At the end of the third day the whale died. The man wept and sprinkled water on the whale’s head, since dust seemed improper, and wished him good hunting in the world to which whales go, for he did not think that Hades had a place for him.

“He looked out into the sea and saw a dolphin dancing. The dolphin leaped and gamboled, but said nothing. When he saw the man on the shore he first ignored him, then slid up onto the shore.

“‘Do you wish to sing to your dead brother?’ the lyre player asked. The dolphin said nothing. ‘His soul needs your songs to speed him to the dark sea where he now swims.’ Still the dolphin said nothing. ‘He cries for the sound of your voice.’ The dolphin remained silent. In a rage, the singer raised up his lyre and broke it over the dolphin’s head. ‘Speak not then, dumb beast, and go to your death unknown.’

“Blood came from the dolphin’s blowhole and he cried out. ‘Why do you torment me so?’

“To teach you the responsibilities of death and the songs that it calls for,’ the singer said.

“‘I will hear you then,’ the dolphin said. ‘Teach me the songs, if you will not let me be silent.’

“And so the man taught the dolphin to sing the rhythmic songs of the ancients, those sung by shepherds at first light, by fishermen pulling in full nets, by priests to the brow of the impending storm. The dolphin took the songs and made them his own, adding the sounds of the sea.

“Apollo, hearing the songs, came down laughing, though his hands smelled of blood and corruption. He was an Asian god then, from Lycia, but was on his way to lead the Greeks.

“‘I have slain the monster, Typhaon, at Crisa beneath snowy Parnassus,’ he told them. ‘My Temple and wooded grove are to be there. Now that you are able to sing, friend dolphin, you will aid me. Find me my priests.’

“‘The sea moves,’ the dolphin said. ‘The land is solid. I will search.’

“The dolphin swam the seas until he saw a ship of Cretan priests bound for Pylos. He sang to them from the sea and they followed him, to that place beneath Parnassus that was, forever afterward, to be called Delphi, after the dolphin who had led them. Men and dolphins spoke from that time afterward.”