The Breath of Suspension (46 page)

Stasov greeted her with a formal triple cheek kiss. She held on to him for a moment longer. He had put on weight since Homma, but was still thin. “It is good to see you,” he said. “Have you succeeded?” His hair was shaved close, like a swimmer’s. He looked tired, and had circles under his eyes.

“Yes,” she said. She thought about the years of effort that had finally brought her here to St. Petersburg. “We’re going. In principle. As to your idea about our funding...”

The silent woman brought two glasses of strong tea. Stasov sweetened his with a teaspoon of blackberry jam. His left hand was no longer bandaged, and he held his glass with his thumb and first two fingers. “It is not a joke. The Delphine Delegation will provide the funding, as they have agreed at Santa Barbara.”

“But why? To haul a maimed sperm whale off to Jupiter? It doesn’t make any sense!”

“I have told you, though you choose not to accept it. It marks the arrival of their God. If you don’t understand that, of course it doesn’t make any sense.”

“God save us from religion.” She felt a deep sense of frustration. “I feel like I’m being financed by some dotty maiden aunt who wants her Pekinese to see Jupiter.”

He tapped the rim of his glass with his spoon. “This maiden aunt will have billions of dollars in reparation money from the Santa Barbara agreement. That money is as good as any other. It is the only way you will succeed.”

“I understand that. But I don’t have to like it.”

“None of us have to like what we have to do.” A bell rang in the next room. “Excuse me,” he said. “That’s Vladivostok.” He walked out, slumped, his limbs heavy. He looked infinitely tired.

She glanced around as she listened to his low voice on the phone. The room was packed with papers. Diagrams and maps covered the elaborately figured wallpaper. The lion-footed desk was covered with strip charts and sonograms. A small bed, severely made in a military manner, was the only clear area. A heavy red folder lay on the desk. In a mood of idle curiosity, Morgenstern flipped it open. ‘Minutes—Santa Barbara negotiations,’ it said. The date was yesterday’s. She flipped through. Every day of the negotiations, supposedly kept under rigid security, was there, extensively marked and annotated in Stasov’s angular hand. She closed the notebook and sat back down in her chair.

Stasov’s voice continued. She listened to it, but couldn’t make out the words. After a moment, she realized that he wasn’t speaking English or Russian. He was speaking a dolphin dialect. The... person on the other end of the line was not a human being.

“Did the dolphins fight a war with us?” she asked when he returned.

“With whom?”

“Don’t be coy with me, Ilya!” she said heatedly. “Did they sink ships, those veterans of yours?”

“Until the Treaty of Santa Barbara is signed, the war between human and cetacean will continue, as it always has. It’s simply that recently the struggle has been a trifle more even. That’s all I will say.”

“What do you have to do with Santa Barbara?”

He glanced at the red folder. “I’m not permitted to have anything to do with Santa Barbara. But I like to stay informed.”

“How do you hold all this in your head? The whale... you might have started another war when you took it from the Indian Ocean people by force.”

“I had to do it,” Stascv said. “There was no other way. It’s a step on the way out.”

“Did you see all this, when we met at Homma?”

“I saw the sun. I saw freedom. I saw that I still had to live. I felt my redemption, but did not yet see its shape. There are still a number of things I have to do. Some of them frighten me.”

“Did you see me, Ilya?” she asked, with a feeling of constriction in her throat. “Have you ever seen me? Or just what I can do?”

“I saw you, Erika. But I saw myself as well. Don’t try to force me into a position I do not hold. You understand better than anyone what it is that I’m after.”

She sighed. “You don’t look well, Ilya. Do you sleep?”

“Poorly. Nightmares.”

“Of course,” she said. “Homma.”

“No,” he answered. “Uglegorsk.”

The cliffs rose up a thousand feet above the water, encircling the twenty-mile-wide harbor like protective arms. Whitewashed villages clung to the cliff tops, glinting in the morning sunlight. The sky was a vivid cloudless blue. Stasov leaned against the mast, feeling it warm on his back. The
St. John Chrysostom
creaked serenely across the still water in the harbor. His guide, Georgios Theodoros, silently trimmed the boat’s bright sail. It billowed out in the breeze, and they began to flop over the water. Soon they had emerged from the bay of Thera onto the open waters of the Aegean Sea.

“They call it the Temple of Poseidon Pankrator,” Theodoros said. He rested easily at the stern of the boat, bearded face turned to the sun like a cat’s, eyes half closed while he kept one arm over the tiller. “Poseidon, Ruler of All. Wishful thinking, attributing ancient supremacy to the Sea God. He ruled the sea, and horses. Not much else. But the Temple is the only structure this near which survived the eruption of the volcano Strogyle, that black day four thousand years ago, so perhaps Poseidon took it back to his bosom.” That eruption had left behind the harbor of Thera, which was the immense caldera of the collapsed volcano.

It had been years since Stasov had seen Theodoros. The Greek had aged gracefully, gray appearing in his beard. He had gained a certain unpleasant notoriety due to the association of his theories with Stasov’s infamous work at Uglegorsk, but he showed no hurt or anger. In his home waters he was quite an eccentric. Though the regulations governing the Aegean dolphin territories prohibited the use of noisy motor-driven vessels, they certainly did not require the hand-built wood hull blackened with pitch, the dyed woven linen sail, and the watchful painted eyes on the
St. John Chrysostom’s
prow.

“I never guessed what it would take,” Theodoros said. “All my studies, and I never understood.”

“I never guessed how much it would cost,” Stasov replied. “But without you I would never have figured anything out.”

Theodoros looked out over the sea. “It may have been a mistake, Ilya. But of course that’s absurd. We had to discover their intelligence. If only...”

“If only they weren’t a contemptible, corrupt, sexually perverse bunch of braggarts, cowards, and fools?” Stasov snorted. It was now proverbial that the more one studied dolphins, the more one disliked them. “Why didn’t your ancient sources mention that?”

“They mention it, but obliquely. The humans of that era were perhaps not much different, and didn’t see that it deserved much comment.”

“But how did
they
figure it out?” Stasov asked in wonder. “That was four thousand years ago! They had no sound generators, no signal processing laboratories. How did the men of the Cretan Thal-assocracy learn to speak to dolphins?”

“You’ve got it backward. I think dolphins learned to talk from humans, being too pigheaded to think of something like that on their own, just like the unlettered Greeks learned civilization from the Cretans.”

“Learned?” Stasov said. “Or were compelled to learn?”

“Did the ancient Cretans enslave dolphins to guide their ships into dangerous harbors, assist in salvage operations, and scout out enemy defenses? Most likely. I doubt, however, that they felt any great guilt at having done so.”

“But still.” Stasov hit the wooden gunwale with his fist. “To sail out in a ship like this, dive into the water, and learn to speak to an animal. It’s incredible. The equipment we used, the time....”

“Don’t underestimate your own achievement, Ilya. In ancient days, remember, the dolphins had not resolved to be silent. Breaking that resolution was the difficult thing.”

“Difficult,” Stasov said, eyes downcast. “That’s one word for it.” Theodoros ignored his companion’s sudden gloom. “And we were all closer to nature then, and the gods. Remember that story about the lyre player, the whale, and the dolphin that I told you back at Uglegorsk? A whale was more than a whale. He was the Foreswimmer, he who comes before, the First Bubble that rises from the spout of God to foretell the coming Breath, the new incarnation. The dolphin over whose dim head our singer broke his lyre is the Echo of God, or as others have termed him, God’s Remora, Her humble, material associate, the Messiah. And that brings us here.”

“Whatever happened to that dolphin?” Stasov asked. “After he guided the priests to Delphi.”

“Did he die, his task finished?” Theodoros shrugged, looking closely at Stasov. “The story doesn’t say. Dolphins perceive the universe by sensing sounds they generate themselves. This makes them arrogant, as if they define the universe, and their final arrogance is their belief that they can finish what they have to do, find closure and die, achieving completion. Fortunately humans, dependent on the world outside themselves, are incapable of such a self-satisfied attitude.”

Stasov turned away. “After four thousand years, they tell me, the Messiah has been born. The orcas are angry that he is not of their number but otherwise don’t seem to find it much of a matter for comment.”

“Why should they? He is a material Messiah, immanent, not transcendent. A money changer. A Pharisee. Even dolphin theology is crude and stupid.”

That made Stasov smile. “At last we’ve found your pet peeve, Georgios. Lack of theological rigor.”

“Don’t laugh, you’re the one who has to deal with it. So you want to push these lazy, incompetent creatures to the Time of the Breath. Why?”

“I shattered their silence, and now I forever hear their voices. If I bring on the Breath, and they reach their new incarnation, perhaps I can find peace.”

Theodoros looked sorrowful. “You won’t, Ilya. You never will. Peace is only within. But here we are.” He dropped sail and the boat stilled. No land was visible. A buoy marked the shallows where the Temple lay. “Into the sea with you. Seek the Messiah. I will await your return here.” He smiled sunnily at Stasov, who sat, motionless, staring at the smoothly shining water.

“You have to face them,” Theodoros said. “You have madly driven this far. How can you stop?”

“I can’t. I always want to, but I can’t.” Stasov put on his fins and slipped into the water. Dolphins commented to each other somewhere in the distance, but the water around him was empty. He swam toward the voices, recognizing them. Bottom-Thumper at Hokkaido, and these three here. Who else?

In a few moments he came into sight of the Temple of Poseidon Pankrator. Buried by volcanic ash and millennia of bottom sediment, the Temple had been lost until a sounding survey detected a density anomaly. After negotiation with the Delphine Delegation it had been cleaned and restored. A forest of the distinctive Cretan columns, wider at the top than at the bottom, held up a roof edged with stylized bull’s horns. Everything had been repainted its original bright polychrome, the columns red with green capitals, the bull’s horns gleaming with gold. The Temple was used as a symbolic site for formal human-dolphin negotiations, since it had been from the men of the Cretan Thalassocracy that dolphins had first learned the habits of speech.

Stasov swam slowly over the old sacred precincts, tracing out the lines of the religious complex of which the Temple of Poseidon Pankrator had once been the center. The rest of the ruins had been cleared of debris and left just as they were. In front of the Temple was a large open area. This had once been the Sacred Pool, where dolphins had swum to pay homage, with the sullen sarcasm that must even then have been part of their personalities, to the humans’ anthropomorphic version of the Sea God.

Three dolphins swam fitfully around the Temple. The sun probed through the water and gleamed on the ultrasonic cutting blades that made up the front edges of their flippers and dorsal fins. Their sides were armored and their bellies packed with superconducting circuitry. They turned and swam toward him in attack formation. Phobos, Deimos, and Harmonia. A coincidence, that those three had survived. The children of Aphrodite, wife of the cuckolded artificer Hephaestos, and Ares the War God. Fear, Panic, and Harmony, the contradictory emotions of Love and War, with a healthy assist from sullenly impartial technology.

“Colonel!” Deimos said, and the dolphins stopped, awaiting orders. They would still obey him, he knew. If he commanded them to cut Theodoros’s boat apart, they would do it without a moment’s hesitation, despite the treaty violation it would entail. His authority over them would always exist, for they knew he had the power to change the shape of the world, a power that caused them agony and terror.

Stasov ran his maimed left hand down Deimos’s side, feeling the scars and machinery. In the war’s second year Deimos and a dozen of his fellows had preceded a run of Soviet attack submarines from Murmansk through the perilous sea gap between Greenland and Iceland, where the enemy had placed his most sensitive submarine detection technology. Packed with equipment that made them appear to all sensors as Alfa-class submarines, the dolphins had drawn ASW forces away from the real Soviet attack. Five of the nine submarines had gotten through, to provide a useful diversion of enemy forces from the main theater of war in the North Pacific. Deimos alone of his comrades had survived, and been decorated with an Order of Lenin.

“I am not a colonel,” Stasov said. He was tired of saying it.

“What are you then?” Harmonia said. Her artificial left eye glittered at him, its delicate Japanese optics covered with seaweed and algae. “An orca that walks?”

“An orca with hands,” Phobos agreed. “A good definition of a human.” He was the largest of the three and had gotten through the war miraculously unscathed. “We know what you want. You want God. That’s why you’re still alive.”

“Why the hell do you care?” Harmonia made a thrumming noise indicative of disgust. “Why should we?” Her eye kept twisting and focusing at nothing. She had lost the left side of her skull during the landings at Kagalaska. Her job had been cutting free mines with her ultrasonic fin blades while suppressing their magnetic detection circuitry. At Kagalaska the dolphins had encountered a new model. Stasov had never figured out how Harmonia had managed to survive. “Why have you dragged us here to do this? I’m bored.”