The Breath of Suspension (47 page)

“He wants to hurt us more,” Deimos said. “This way he can drive
all
of us. He will use the Remora like a narwhal’s tusk. He will pierce us. Isn’t that true, Colonel?”

“It’s true,” Stasov said. “But it doesn’t matter. It has no effect on the validity of my request.”

“Stop knocking a dead body around with your snout,” the massive Phobos said. “Save logical games for the orcas, who like them. They bore us.”

The three dolphins’ voices sank through the water like lumps of lead. Each phrase seemed a deliberate effort, but that did not silence them.

“I’m not playing games,” Stasov said. “I am serious.”

“But why do you care?” cried Harmonia.

“I do. I always have.”

Phobos swam up and knocked Stasov aside as if he were a vagrant piece of seaweed. Three chevrons, now dark and tarnished, marked his dorsal fin, one for each of the American submarines whose destruction had been attributable to his skillful use of his sonic and magnetic detectors. He had also helped sink the American
Aegis
cruiser
Wainwright
, saving the landings on Kagalaska.

Even now, his side bruised, Stasov felt that same surge of gratitude that had overcome him when he watched the cruiser sink into the North Pacific. “Answer her question,” Phobos said. “Why do you care?”

Harmonia did not allow Stasov to answer. “
We
certainly don’t. God talk is stupid.”

“God will rise when She wants to,” Deimos said. “We can’t push Her flippers with our snouts.”

They circled Stasov like mechanical murderous sharks.

“Tell us why this matters to you,” Phobos roared.

Would they slice him apart with their ultrasonic blades, these decorated veterans of that heroic, futile war, and stain the clear water with his blood? He felt like a man returned to the grave of his comrades, only to have their bony hands reach out from death to pull him beneath the surface. He would welcome their cold touch, because he knew they had the right.

“It matters because it has to happen,” Stasov said. “It is necessary.”

The dolphins hooted contempt. “You always do what is necessary, Colonel,” Deimos said. “You tortured us until you ripped the voice from our throats—because it was necessary. You took away our bodies and turned us into mechanical sharks—because it was necessary. You killed us in your incomprehensible human war—because it was necessary. Now you come to tear us from the womb of our sea and throw us into the cold deeps of space
because it is necessary?
”

“Eating is necessary,” Harmonia said. “Fucking is necessary. Breathing is necessary. Death is necessary. You’re as stupid as a sea turtle that fucks in the sea and then climbs out into the air to lay its eggs where the land dwellers can steal them. I’m sure the turtle thinks it’s necessary.”

“You’re like a shark maddened by the smell of blood,” Phobos said, suddenly quiet, “who eats and eats and can’t stop until its belly bursts. Won’t you ever have your fill of us, Ilya Stasov?”

Crying under water seemed so maddeningly futile. He reached his arms out to them, a meaningless gesture. But what could he give them? An apology? A confession?

“You are right,” he said. “I need to do it so that at last I can rest. I can try to forget what I have done to you.”

“Rest,” Deimos said. “A human word.” Dolphins slept with only one hemisphere of their brains at a time so that they could always keep swimming. They could never stop, because they had to breathe. “Why should we grant it to you? The Treaty does not require it.”

“And if the Treaty does not require it,” Phobos added, “we will not do it. Name us the proper articles or leave.”

“Brothers,” Harmonia said, suddenly quiet. “Stasov wishes to die. He cannot until he is finished.”

“Yes,” Stasov said. “Give me your Messiah. And let me die.”

It was the scene of his nightmares. The tanks were now empty, the floor dry, the electronics long since packed up and discarded, but the high vault of the laboratory still contained all of the pain and terror that Stasov could imagine. From the platform where he stood, the pattern of tanks on the floor looked like an ice cube tray in an abandoned refrigerator. The vault’s concrete was cracked and aging, the color of long-buried bone.

Stasov held tightly to the thin metal railing, though there was no danger of falling. Even empty, the building whispered. The Japanese had long ago given up on the idea of turning the Uglegorsk station into an atrocity museum. It was too far from anywhere, and the torment there had not involved blood or physical torture but pain too subtle for a human to see. They concluded that the museum would have been utterly unvisited. So it had lain empty, until Stasov’s irregular request for a last look at it.

The Japanese had been extraordinarily polite and cooperative, and had left Stasov to wander on his own through the ruins. Perhaps, Stasov thought, it was because they knew he could punish himself more effectively than they had ever been able to.

Suddenly something thunked on the metal stairs. Stasov shivered. Was the place really haunted? The thunk became regular, and Stasov heard the heavy breathing of someone pulling himself up the stairs.

A large figure loomed out of the darkness. “Ilya,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

“Antosha!” Stasov embraced the massive Anatoly Ogurtsov and kissed him. He hadn’t seen the general since the middle of the war. Veterans of Uglegorsk never spoke to each other, even if they lived in the same town. The slightest word would have shattered the icy barriers they had set up around that time. Stasov suspected he knew why the other was there. Ogurtsov would ask a question, eventually. Stasov only hoped that he would be able to answer it.

Ogurtsov stepped back. His right foot was a prosthetic. When he noticed Stasov’s attention, he slapped it with his cane. “Not an orca, unfortunately,” he rumbled. “Nothing appropriate like that. A single bullet through the knee at Unimak. An ordinary soldier’s wound.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a vodka bottle. He pulled the stopper out with his teeth and offered it to Stasov. “To old times.”

“To old times,” Stasov responded, and took a swallow. He almost choked.

Ogurtsov chuckled. “Now don’t insult me, Ilya. I make that stuff myself. An old man’s hobby. Flavored with buffalo grass.”

“It’s excellent,” Stasov managed to choke, tears in his eyes. “Have you lost your taste for vodka?” Ogurtsov laughed. “I remember,” he gestured with his cane at the tanks below, “how we sat, you, me, and that Greek philosopher, Theodoros, and unriddled the ways of the dolphins. The drunker we got, the more sense we made of their myths and their gods. And we figured it out.”

“And we did it. We tortured them until they spoke.” Ogurtsov regarded him warily. “How were we to know? How should we have realized the incredibly strong response of the cetacean brain to the sense of sound? The aural illusions we generated for them tormented them, drove them mad. It’s as if those optical illusions you find in children’s books drove humans to extremes of agony.”

“We didn’t know,” Stasov whispered. “For months, years, we tortured them with illusions of moving seabeds, of impossible echoes. Their absolute faith in their senses broke them like dry sticks in our hands.”

“It was a long time ago,” Ogurtsov said. He put his arm around Stasov’s shoulders. “Let’s get out of here.”

They climbed down the stairs and walked among the crumbling tanks. “Remember the first time one of them spoke?” Stasov said. “Ilya, please—”

“Do you remember?”

Ogurtsov shook himself. “Of course I remember.” He paused by a tank and looked in at its cracked and stained bottom. “There were four of us. You, me, Sadnikova, and Mikulin. Mikulin died last year, did you know? He tripped and fell down in the snow. He was drunk. He froze to death.

“I can see it. Sadnikova stood over there, her hands on the signal generator. I stood here, you next to me. Mikulin on the other side. It was our final, most sophisticated sonic pattern. The eruption of Strogyle and the sinking of the sea bottom. We’d spent months on it. We played it for that one we called Kestrel, because he swam so fast. I don’t know what—”

“He died in the Battle of La Perouse Strait.”

“So he got his wish at last.” Ogurtsov grabbed onto the edge of the tank. “We played the illusion. And he cried out—”

“‘Let—me—die,’” Stasov said through clenched teeth. “That’s what he finally screamed. ‘Let me die!’” He shivered. “That’s how we began to talk.”

“We never listened to what they said, you know. We made them talk, but we never listened. We’ve never understood why they want to die.”

They walked through the rest of the building silently. At the back door they stopped. The sky had its usual high overcast. The
Sterlet
, the boat from the Vladivostok Oceanographic Institute, floated just offshore, its gaily fluttering red flag the only spot of color against the sea and sky. It was the vessel that would take Stasov to Vladivostok, finally back in Russian hands. From there he would go to Tyuratam, and from the spaceport there to Jupiter.

“They fought a war against us, didn’t they?” Ogurtsov said. “And most of the human race never really believed it. The slimy aquatic bastards.”

“Yes,” Stasov answered. “They did. They sank ferryboats, pleasure craft, fishing boats. Whenever they knew they wouldn’t get caught, whenever events would be confused. Terrorism, plain and simple.”

Ogurtsov shook his head. “We trained them well. Phobos probably sank more than his share. He was a mean one.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

They went down to the water and strolled along the rocky shore, letting the waves lap against their feet. Ogurtsov maneuvered easily over the rocks, occasionally kicking a loose one with his prosthetic foot. He looked at Stasov. “I’ve talked to people in St. Petersburg. You’ve gotten everything. Everything we hid. Why do you want it?” Stasov did not return his glance. The question had finally come. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Ilya!” Ogurtsov took his shoulder, his hand massive. Stasov stopped. “You’ve cleaned out the black files, the ones the War Crimes Commission was always after. Circuit diagrams, sonic structures, echo formats. All the ways we generated those sonic images, and the effects that they had. The recordings of dolphins in pain. All of our results.” He shook Stasov’s shoulder. “I thought most of it had been destroyed.”

“No,” Stasov said. “We never throw anything away. You know that, Antosha.”

“No one knows that stuff exists. The Japanese suspected, the yellow bastards, but they couldn’t get their hands on it. They tried hard enough to open you up.”

“They tried. I learned more from them than they did from me.”

“Why do you want that stuff? After what we’ve been through? We never wanted to have anything to do with it, ever again.”

“I don’t
want
it,” Stasov said. “I’ve never wanted it. But I need it.” Ogurtsov stopped, as immovable as a mountain, holding Stasov in his grip. “Ilya, I fed guilty. We all do, each in our own way, some, I grant you, more than others. But we try to forgive ourselves, because we didn’t know what we were doing. What gives you the right to think that your guilt is more important than anyone else’s?”

“I know what I have to do, Antosha. That’s all. I’m not trying to compete with you.”

Ogurtsov dropped his hand, letting him go. “Do it then,” he said, his voice tired. “Do it and be damned.”

Weissmuller pumped his way toward
Jupiter Forward.
His entire body ached with fatigue. He’d never swum so far before, and he couldn’t stop to take a rest. That was all right. The universe was really not such a big place after all. Surgically implanted physiological indicators buzzed into his bones, frantically warning him that Jupiter’s magnetic field was about to give him a radiation overdose. The medical personnel at
Jupiter Forward
had warned him strictly. He belched in contempt. What was the problem? Humans were always afraid of all sorts of things they couldn’t see or hear. The problem of ionizing radiation was too bizarre and subtle to interest Weissmuller. It could be taken care of. Humans liked solving things like that. That was what humans were for.

Though he accepted it as his due, Weissmuller’s spacesuit was a marvel. It followed his contours closely. Since dolphins cannot see upward, the head dome was clear on the underside of the head only, revealing the slyly grinning jaws. The suit circulated water around the dolphin’s body while hugging it closely to prevent bruising his tender dolphin skin. The microwave array thrust up between the oxygen tanks on either side of his dorsal fin.

Myoelectric connections to Weissmuller’s swimming muscles operated his suit rockets, so that his motions in space were the same as they were in the water. The powerful movements of his tail operated thrust rockets; his fins fired steering rockets. A velocity-dependent retro-rocket simulated the resistance of water, slowing him if he ceased to thrust with his tail. He was kept stable by automatic sightings on the fixed stars, which washed around him like sea-foam.

Weissmuller felt a resonant self-satisfaction. All the way down to Io and back! Jupiter and its satellites floated around him like diatoms. His echo-location signals told him that Ganymede and Jupiter were each about five kilometers away, since the microwave signals took seven seconds to get to them and back. He knew that the distance was actually much greater, but the illusion was powerful, giving him the feeling that the Jovian system could have been dropped into the Aegean Sea and lost. Even the most distant satellite, Sinope, seemed a mere hundred twenty kilometers from Jupiter.

“I fuck you, Jove!” he shouted, and shrieked in delight. He felt an erection and cursed the human engineers who had not designed the suit to provide him a release for it. He hunched, trying to rub it against something. No good. The suit fit too well. Humans had hands, so they could masturbate. Their one evolutionary advantage. He wanted a female to assault, but there wasn’t one for millions of kilometers.

He thought of a shark he and the rest of his pod had killed. The dolphins had violated it repeatedly, contemptuously, then sent its body spinning into the depths, cursing it as it sank. The thought gave him a warm glow. And that sailor, who had fallen off his fishing boat near Malta! Humans were poorly built, and Weissmuller still fondly remembered the way the man’s ribs had cracked like brittle coral against his snout. Had there been witnesses, of course, the dolphins would have ignored him, or even saved his life by pushing him to shore, the sort of grandstand behavior that so impressed humans. But it had been night and the man alone in the sea. How he had struggled! One of Weissmuller’s brothers still bore scars from the man’s scaling knife, making him a target for mockery.