The Breath of Suspension (45 page)

“We’ll talk with them at Santa Barbara. But you, thank God, won’t be there.”

“No. I am forbidden. I am a war criminal.” Stasov shaded his eyes. Was she finally there, at the northern horizon? He watched as the huge white shape of the
Andrei Sakharov
pulled itself over the edge of the water. From this distance she looked pure, almost Japanese. Her rough welding and patched cables didn’t show. “We want the whale, Mr. Williams.” His voice was distant. “We intend to take it over from you.”

“What?” Williams followed Stasov’s gaze. His face hardened when he saw the ship with the red star on its prow. “Damn you, you can’t have it.”

“Is that your choice, Mr. Williams? The
Sakharov
is equipped with the full complement of systems for keeping the whale alive. It will die otherwise, within hours. You know that.”

The
Sakharov
had once been an Aleksandr Brykin-class nuclear-submarine tender with another name, and had loaded sea-launched ballistic missiles into their launch tubes, missiles that, fortunately for the human race’s survival, had never been fired.

“Better dead than in your hands,” Williams shouted.

Stasov gestured, taking in the dolphin-filled sea visible from the whale’s back. “The dolphins don’t seem to agree with you.”

“Fuck the dolphins! They probably want to haul the whale into the ocean so they can rape it.” He ran a hand over his scalp, gaining control of himself. “No. I can’t do it. It will imperil the treaty negotiations at Santa Barbara.” He smiled, pleased at this legalistic solution. “If we turned a whale over to Colonel Ilya Sergei—”

“I’m glad you take so much trouble to pronounce my entire name,” Stasov said icily. “But who is being legalistic now? Unless we intervene, the whale will die.” He paused, in wonder at the threat he was about to utter. He had long ago resolved to put the military behind himself. “The
Sakharov
took on a platoon of Russian troops when we resupplied at Karachi a week ago. We are taking them to Oman. I think they would be willing to assist us in saving this whale’s life.”

Williams stared out at the approaching ship. “You don’t give me any choice,” he said stonily.

“Choice is usually an illusion.”

The aerobody had developed a noticeable list to starboard and vibrated vigorously, as if drilling through air suddenly solid. The airship’s pilot, Benjamin Fliegle, took a slow sip of the steaming green tea in his stoneware cup and set it back in its heated, gim-balled holder on the control board. The sleet was heavy outside, and the windshield wiper, inadequately heated, stuttered under a thick layer of ice. Fliegle, his small shaven head perched on top of his orange saffron robe like a potato on a pumpkin, leaned forward and pounded on the windshield with his fist. The wiper tossed a chunk of wet ice and moved more smoothly. The aerobody tilted perilously, and he grabbed the wheel. “Pesky thing,” he muttered.

The rear hatch opened and admitted a figure in heavy insulation, as well as a blast of wet freezing air.

“How does it look?” Fliegle said.

“Not bad,” Olivia Knester said as she stripped her suit off. “Just noisy. I’ll overhaul it in the shop when we get back to Kushiro, but it won’t give us any trouble.” Now naked, Knester also pulled on an orange saffron robe. She was a chunky middle-aged woman with extravagant curled eyebrows that tried to compensate for the shaved skull above them. “However, Benjamin...”

“Yes, Olivia?”

“The engine isn’t buying your theories about the virtual identities of reciprocating parts. It will not ‘wear into perfection,’ it will wear into junk. Keep the crankcase oil full. Until we achieve satori and leave the Wheel, we must keep it lubricated.” She turned to Stasov. “Put on your suit. We should find the proper pod of orcas soon. Benjamin, it’s time to start listening.”

Fliegle dropped the aerobody’s altitude to fifty feet and cut back the engines until they moved at twenty miles an hour. A lever on the panel released the hydrophone. As Stasov pulled on his wetsuit, Fliegle put in his earphones and leaned back in his seat with his eyes closed. The altitude continued to drop.

“Benjamin!” Knester said sharply.

The nose went back up. “Sorry.”

Stasov put on his fins, fitted underwater lenses into his eyes, and snugged the oxygenator onto the valves on his neck. Then he attached the microphone to his throat, strapped the transducer and signal processor to his chest, and activated the bone conduction speakers behind his jaw hinge. Orca speech included frequencies from 5 Hz to 80 kHz, far beyond the range of human hearing. His equipment compressed and processed the information so that he could communicate.

Sitting on the rocky peninsula of Shiretoko Hanto, communicating with the notoriously touchy orcas, had left the esoteric Buddhist monks of Yumeji Monastery unconcerned with human things. Fortunately this attitude encompassed Stasov’s own past, so he had received evenhanded treatment. The monks reassured him. Everyone wanted to escape the Wheel, but everyone was bound to it. Death, in the dolphin view, was the only possible escape, an escape the Buddhists did not permit themselves. Stasov found himself more dolphin than Buddhist.

“I hear him,” Fliegle said. Knester nodded at Stasov, and the double bay doors swung open.

He stepped out, tucked, and fell through the gray and vaporous air, then smacked painfully into a cresting wave. As the water closed over his face, reflexes drilled into his autonomic nervous system took over. His diaphragm ceased to inflate his lungs, in a conditioned apnea, and he began to derive oxygen from his carotid gill connections.

He listened to the chatter in his earphones, sorting signals from noise. A long descending note rumbled, found the resonant fre-qucncies of his joints, and intensified until his entire body was in pain. An orca’s shout could break bones, rupture internal organs, and fill the lungs with blood. The orca’s voice died away, then sounded deeper, and he was suddenly filled with unreasoning terror. Orcas’ voices could kill, or they could stimulate a fear response, pump adrenalin into the human bloodstream, and race the human heart. Cetacean tricks were old to Stasov. Somewhere inside his mind a stopcock opened, the dark waters of fear drained, and he was calm again.

“Greetings, Stasov,” a cool voice said. It used the sliding tones of the simple orca dialect reserved for speaking to children, or humans. The voice was familiar. Where had he heard it before? “Thou hast words to speak. Speak them then, for thoughts must be herded and swallowed, lest they escape to the open sea.” Of course.

“It is a long way from Kagalaska, Bottom-Thumper,” Stasov said, using the slightly contemptuous nickname this orca had earned for his childhood habit of bumping the hulls of Japanese fishing boats. “I trust your hunger has been stayed?”

“My hunger is infinite. But thou art still spoiled food. I must content myself with swallowing the minds of men, leaving their bodies to the sharks and fishes.”

“Are you still chasing prime numbers?” Stasov asked.

“I am. I taste the fins of the Goldbach Conjecture. Soon I will sink my teeth into it. It shall not escape.”

Bottom-Thumper was a highly respected mathematician, both among humans and orcas. Dolphins, on the other hand, had no interest whatsoever in mathematics. “Your prey weakens,” Stasov said politely.

“Do not seek to distract me with minnows. Let loose thy desires and get thee from my sea!” The thunder of Bottom-Thumper’s voice buzzed in Stasov’s ribs. He hung alone in darkness, only the speed of Bottom-Thumper’s replies indicating the orca’s proximity.

“The Bubble Has Risen,” Stasov said. “We have the Foreswimmer, the whale that signals the coming of God’s Echo. We want to take him out of this sea, and let him swim in the deeper waters of the planet Jupiter. I ask you to allow this and to make the proposal in your negotiations at Santa Barbara.”

Absurd and makeshift, it somehow all fit together, the only way Stasov had found out of the trap he had placed himself in. Unfortunately, it involved putting himself here in the black water, making a request that could cost him his life. Cost him his life much too soon.

“Do I hear the echo of thy guilt, Stasov?” the orca asked. “I detect its ancient fleeting shape in thy voice. Thou art foolish, as men are wont to be. Thy crimes were necessary and thus were not crimes at all. Thou may live or die, as thou thyself choose. Does an orca need to tell that to a human?”

“Is this prey then released to our jaws?” Stasov asked formally, ignoring the orca’s reasoning.

“It is,” Bottom-Thumper replied. “But ye humans know not the swift current that has seized you. We shall provide a guard to windward: who will be the Echo of God.”

“The Messiah,” Stasov said in shock.

“Thy term, inadequate and misleading, but it will do.”

He had expected the orca to insist on providing an intelligent cetacean as escort to the sperm whale, whose intelligence was about that of a great ape, but had not expected the Messiah himself. It all made sense, though. It all fit together. “We will make the proper arrangements. It will not be easy. We have never taken a cetacean into space before. For an orca—”

“Not an orca! The voice of God echoes without speaking, and the Echo is not an orca!” Bottom-Thumper was suddenly in a high rage, his syllables ragged like fish with their heads bitten off. The orca spoke in an odd grammatical tense that was used either to describe dreams, or to make statements so true they were apodictic, such as ‘all things die’ or ‘before my conception I did not exist.’ Stasov could barely follow the grammar.

“Watch your rectum,” Stasov said in dolphin, recalling the insult he had made to Bottom-Thumper when they first met in the bloody waters off Kagalaska. “The walrus is still awaiting your pleasure.”

The orca went silent for a long moment. “I should have eaten thee then, Stasov, in that swarming evil-tasting sea. But my belly was full of men. For the last time, I fear. Thou hast the Foreswimmer, a wounded sperm whale ye wish to lift to Jupiter, a planet none of us sea dwellers has ever seen. God’s Remora must accompany the whale, for the Time of the Breath is near. Go now to the Aegean Dolphin Sanctuary. There is thy goal. And much good luck may thou and all thy fellow humans have with whom thou will find there.”

And then he laughed. And laughed. And
laughed
, a sound like an immense train at a grade crossing. Razor-edged, their thoughts suffused with blood even as they reasoned their way through the most subtle philosophies, bitter thinkers on the end of all, dispensers of justice and death, orcas laughed long, hard, and often. Bottom-Thumper’s laughter stopped.

“Art thou willing to pay the price?”

“I am, whatever it is.” Stasov could not slow the pounding of his heart.

“Float out thy limbs and remain still. Well met then, Ilya Sergeiivich Stasov.”

Stasov relaxed his arms and legs and floated spread-eagled. Suddenly, silently, the smooth shape of the orca sped by, thirty feet long, black, powerful, and vanished again.

The pain was as sudden as the smash of an ax. Stasov twisted his body in agony and managed to activate the buoyancy harness. It righted him and carried him to the surface. He spit water, gasped in the cold air, and was finally able to scream.

The aerobody floated overhead in the pewter sky, a blunt-nosed wedge with two propellers flickering aft. It turned lazily around and drifted over him, buzzing like an immense insect. A harness lowered and scooped him up delicately. The sea opened around him. He looked down. Scarlet drops of blood fell past his dangling feet, the only flecks of color against the gray of the sea and sky. A six-foot-long hooked dorsal fin cut the surface of the water. The orca’s head was just visible, water flowing over it in a smooth layer. Bottom-Thumper spouted once and vanished.

Knester was ready with salve and bandages. “Such accuracy,” she said admiringly. “He charged a price only a human could pay.”

“Damn him,” Stasov said through clenched teeth.

“Don’t be such a baby. A wound like this is a compliment. Usually an orca will smash you with a fluke, toss you in the air, or puncture your eardrum by shouting when making an exchange, to show his contempt. A blood price is a genuine honor, but usually involves death or maiming for life. The spinning of the Wheel is beyond our knowledge, so I can’t guess why he thought you deserved such delicacy.”

“We’re old friends,” Stasov said. She was right. It wasn’t every man who was charged a blood price by an orca and ended up losing only the last two fingers on his left hand.

Erika Morgenstern forged grimly up the street into the teeth of the wind. Huge rafts of dirty ice thrust out of the Neva River, revealing black water beneath a quickly freezing scum.

The dark granite blocks of the embankment held the elegant Baroque city out of the greedy water. Despite the cold, she paused, to marvel at the golden spire of the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul as it rose above the frozen city.

Ilya Stasov was housed in an eerily beautiful eighteenth-century red-stucco building with white pilasters, vivid against the snow. Two guards in bulky greatcoats, rifles slung across their shoulders, checked her papers before unlocking the door.

“You have been meeting at the Institute for Space Research?” one of them asked, a friendly youngster with straight flaxen hair sticking out from under his fur cap. “That is good. We have long waited for the Americans to ask for our help. We are smart, but poor.”

That wasn’t quite it, of course, and she was from New Zealand, not America, but Morgenstern wasn’t about to argue with him. Instead, she smiled back. “Yes. We’re going to Jupiter.” She wasn’t sure she believed it herself, but the agreement had been signed just that morning.

“Together, ah? That’s the only way to go so far.” He opened the door for her and saluted.

The hall was dark, and like all Russian hallways smelled of cabbage, this time with an overtone of frankincense from the icon lamp that glowed in the corner.

Typewriters clacked somewhere in the rear. She only belatedly identified a low moaning as a recording of a humpback whale call. A silent, suspicious woman, her hair tied severely back, led Morgenstern up the stairs to the front of the house.