The Breath of Suspension (5 page)

I sit at my table and watch Thomas attach the telescope to the window frame. I don’t have enough strength left in my arms to even turn the screwdriver.

“Are you sure this will hold?” Since my confessions to him a week ago, Thomas has been noncommittal, any interchange with me being kept to a purely mechanical level. This doesn’t bother me. Thomas’s mind works slowly but powerfully. He is reserving judgment.

“I’m not an engineer, but I think it will.”

His shoulder bulks as he turns the screws. I hear the dry wood of the frame crack. Thomas looks dismayed at his inadvertent vandalism, then shrugs and proceeds. When he is finished, and the image-multiplier telescope rests in its mount, pointed at the sky, he waits a long moment and then turns to me. His blue eyes are innocent in the candlelight.

“So you knew Aya Ngomo was a saint when you met her?”

I run my mind over the story I told him. Did I really make that claim? In my memory her face is surrounded by a retrospective nimbus. Hell, I remember St. Theda’s itself as a pleasant place, high point of my youth. Memory is treacherous.

“If saints were so obvious, we would have no choices to make.”

“I don’t want catechism.” For the first time since I’ve known him, Thomas’s voice is sharp. “I want to know what happened to you.”

So he’s pushed me up against it. It sounds like he actually wants the truth. Washed up here, half-drowned on the far shore of my life, I am inclined to give it to him.

“I had no idea of who Aya Ngomo was. She compelled—but not through force of sanctity. She was of some other metal. But then, she is the only saint I’ve ever met. Perhaps they were all like that, grabbing our heads and peeling back our eyelids with their thumbs to force us to look at the light.”

“And this woman loved you.” I have achieved my first objective in Thomas’s education. Thomas looks dubious.

“And have you never known the love of a woman, dear Thomas?”

He does not answer but sits silent, running his hand through the unmown-hay wildness of his hair. Aha. There’s usually one somewhere. And I want to know what this man has given up to be here. Even if it should cause him pain. I want to know. After all, I’m willing to reveal my life to him.

“Laurena loved me, the way a caged bird loves the hand that can free it. Others have loved me too, for as little reason, or less.” I watch him. He is not attending, his thoughts far away. “Who was she?”

His blue eyes lock onto mine. “What, Brother Vikram?”

“Never mind, if you—”

“She grew up near me,” he says, his voice rushed. He looks away as he speaks. “Her name was—is—Janielle. I first remember her as a little girl with long hair in clips, wearing a dress and playing with a ball against a brick wall. It was afternoon, sunny. It was a big rubber ball, and she hit it with the tips of her fingers.” He pushes his fingertips out in front of himself to demonstrate, then pulls his hands back into fists. “She was always very graceful. I was clumsy.”

“What did she smell like?”

He doesn’t hesitate. “Like heaven. We first made love outdoors, behind Crofter’s silos. We had nowhere else to go. Her parents didn’t want her seeing me. The grass was wet from the rain. I lay down and she lay on top of me. The sun was behind her head as she laughed. I could feel the wet mud on my back. She brushed her hair over my face and kissed me. After.” His face is bright red. He stands. “Good night, Brother Vikram.”

He shuts the door gently behind him. I walk to the window and watch him trudge through the bean poles and pea trellises in the garden. His shoulders are hunched and his face is down so that I cannot see it. The stars gleam above him.

I wait there by the window for a long moment. The aging body is so little capable of the old pleasures that anticipation is about the only one left. The stars knock on the glass for admittance. In response to its computer, the telescope swings and locks in to its goal. I put my eyes to the viewer.

For an instant all is chaos, the stars and nebulae of the external universe confused with the stuff that floats in the interior of my own eyes. Space seems alive with writhing snakes. Then it settles down. Blackness, and a tiny glowing speck: the fusion flame of Aya’s ship.

I push the magnification as far as it will go. The image plumps slightly, like a cooking rice grain, but develops no more detail. But what detail do I expect? The light is several years old. Aya Ngomo lies within it, frozen by Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction. The days that bring me ever closer to death are but fractions of seconds to her. I could dry up in my grave and vanish into dust in the time it takes her to raise a bulb of water to her lips. She is sanctified by time, an incorruptible effigy.

Is she alive or dead? The Synod, ignoring the ambiguity, has canonized her, for she is no longer of this Earth.

After some endless time I turn from the telescope. My neck aches. I groan as I loosen my joints. I want to celebrate what both Thomas and I have lost.

The bottle is under my books. I don’t even remember where and when I bought it. Since I know that I am unlikely ever to get another one, it’s lasted for years. I pull it out. High Slivovitz from the Hungarian Danube. A few inches of the precious plum brandy still sloshes in the bottom.

I take a swig and almost choke. The hot liquor sears down my throat. Over the years I have become weaker, while the booze has retained its strength. I cough weakly, a pathetic sound. Recovered, I drink again.

It doesn’t take much to make the world seem a warmer place. Just a few swallows of an aged brandy from the other side of the world. The taste brings with it the sound of a crowded Court, the smell of sharp perfumes, the glint of gold cloth, the feel of silk. My days of power glimmer around me.

Strength fills my limbs. I stand up and walk out of my poor monk’s cell. I should take a stroll in the garden before going to sleep. It will clear my head. I can collect my thoughts so that my presentation to the Imperial Legate tomorrow is both coherent and elegant—two steps down the stairs I trip and roll headlong. The risers are soft and cushioned with ancient oriental carpets. It’s a joke, really. I’ll bounce at the bottom and get up. Everyone will laugh.

I lie crumpled at the bottom of the hard wooden steps, unable to move. Bones have shattered like cheap crockery. Glow lights appear above me, held by monks who look more irritated than concerned. No one speaks.

Thomas sweeps out and stands over me. His eyes are red. He doesn’t cry for me, though he should.

“I fell.”

He leans over and picks me up as easily as if I am a fallen scarecrow. He lays me gently in my bed.

“We’ve called a doctor,” he says. “It will be morning before he can come.”

“No matter.” The pain is surprisingly distant. I grab his arm so he won’t leave. “There’s more to the story, you know.”

His face doesn’t change, but he sits.

Have you ever been to Cedar City, Thomas? Don’t bother. At one time, I suppose, it was a real city, but the water is long since gone, and the Imperial capital of Utah is a collapsing dump. Our power there was more fictional than Orthodox power usually was, even in those times, which in retrospect are the very zenith of empire.

It was inevitable that I come to Utah, I suppose. Tergenius always seemed to think so, and after my expulsion from St. Theda’s there was nowhere else for me to go. There was an office ready for me when I arrived. A small office, with work already piled on the desk.

“I received an interesting message this morning,” he said, staring out the window of his office at the twisted beams and piled brick of the building opposite. “You’ve been asked for.” The building had been burned in an assault by desert partisans half a year before and he had left it as an object of meditation, much to the Regional Inspector’s dismay on his last visit.

I looked up from my examination of the gadget on the table. “Another of these political visits to the ranches? Please, Master Tergenius. The last one took two months. I still have grit between my teeth.”

He shook his head. “Nothing so pleasant.”

“Am I finally going to have to talk to these people?” I picked up the gadget. It twisted heavily in my hand as if containing wrestling gyroscopes. It was a lattice of crisscrossed filament crystals. Its purported use was to manipulate monopole magnetic fields, presuming anyone ever found a magnetic monopole to put in it. How Tergenius got his hands on things like that I had no idea.

“No. We’ll save the plateau technologists for another time. But you’re getting warmer.”

He pulled a map out of a locked drawer and spread it on the desk. It was an unofficial map, heavily annotated in Tergenius’s own hand, so the territories of Deseret, where the Mormons held sway, were clearly marked. Official maps did not recognize their existence.

Water resources were carefully noted. Tiny red dots indicated the far-flung ranches and huddled communities of the Tushar Mountains and Sevier and Virgin Creeks. I knew each of them well, having crawled my dusty way from one to another on my diplomatic missions.

Tergenius’s finger moved slowly across the map, each inch a week’s journey. He tapped the Kaiparowits and Aquarius Plateaus, where the mysterious builders of the monopolc focus lived, and passed onward, finally coming to rest in the canyons to the west of the Colorado River.

“Judaea!” I exclaimed.

He nodded and pulled at his absurd moustache. “Just so.” He called those unconsolidated territories Judaea because they contained prophets, great revelations, and mass hysterias. The place was a theological pesthole, according to Tergenius, who normally was not concerned with mere spiritual issues.

“You haven’t asked me the important question.” He looked at me expressionlessly.

“All right. Who asked for me?”

“An important citizen of Judaea, known to some as the Lady of Escalante. This connection may prove useful to us. I think you remember her as Aya Ngomo. You leave tomorrow.”

❖

The village of Page rested in the shadow of the ruined Glen Canyon Dam, destroyed in some vicious water war in which everybody lost. The Colorado flowed smoothly over the broken concrete. Behind it was a swamp filled with screaming water birds. I acquired a burro named Hermione there for my journey up-canyon.

I suppose Glen Canyon is beautiful, but I was too afraid for my own life to really appreciate it. The canyon territories were rocky, complex, intertwined, an exercise in higher-order mathematics, where points seeming close together are actually infinitely far apart. The deep canyons were tangled and lush, the slickrock above barren and open. The high benches were what was left of centuries of silting behind the dam. Someday the water would scour them away and the Colorado would flow clean again. I looked up at the line of visible sky and thought about holding my breath so that I could float out of the canyon. The rock held me back.

Passion and spiritual power reflected off the sandstone walls. I watched fire walkers, men who put swords through their tongues, snake handlers, flagellants. I passed a line of bodies hanging from a cottonwood. They had been wrapped in layers of plastic sheet to ferment in the sun.

I asked after the Lady of Escalante. My old friend Aya Ngomo was the subject of many stories, but none seemed to have anything to do with her, and the more of them I heard, the less I believed in her existence.

I reached Hole in the Rock and made my way up the Escalante, collecting information. The variety of stories was dizzying. One struck a chord, a tale of Ancient Ones who lived a million years ago and left their traces on all the planets. Perhaps Aya was up here somewhere after all.

One dawn I awoke with a start. I had driven an irritated porcupine from his shelter beneath an overhang and now stared up at the just-visible rock sky in puzzlement. Sleepy as I was, I took several seconds before realizing that the shapes blocking in my campsite were the figures of men.

Unspeaking, they hauled me out of my sleeping bag. I struggled, but they didn’t acknowledge my efforts with even so much as a grunt. One of them finally took out something I couldn’t see clearly and hit me on the head with it. I went back to sleep.

I woke again with agony in my head. I bent over and vomited, not caring where I was or who was watching. Then I looked up. Above me was a cottonwood tree. From a bough hung a rope with a noose at the end of it.

“Wait!” I shouted. “What is this? What have I done?”

My hands were tied behind my back. I rolled over and tried to stand. Two of them came over and solicitously helped me up. But when I was standing they kept lifting me until I found myself sitting on my burro, Hermione. She looked at me and flicked an ear.

“This is intolerable.” I was stern. “I haven’t done anything. What have I done? You can’t!”

They lowered the noose over my head and snugged it on my neck. My heart jerked in my chest. Though the noose hadn’t pulled tight yet, I couldn’t breathe. The sun had risen above the canyon’s edge and glared in my face. I was going to die.

The men turned as one and stared up a side canyon at something I couldn’t see. They glanced at each other, and walked away. Walked away and left me there with a noose around my neck. Perhaps this was the method of execution in these parts, leaving death’s timing up to the whims of a nervous burro.

In the silence I heard the whir of electromechanical equipment. Shrubbery crackled. Slowly, not wanting to startle Hermione, I turned my head. Coming painfully toward me across the rocks and thorny bushes was a twisted figure with shriveled legs. The metal of prosthetic supports gleamed in the sun. Her long black hair was carefully combed and tied with colorful ribbons.

“Aya.” I managed a smile. “I knew you weren’t the sort of person one meets only once.”

“Hello, Vikram.” She straightened to a normal human height, supported by scaffolding. Her tiny legs dangled beneath her. Her face was unchanged, sharp and intelligent.

We stared at each other. Wind rustled through the cottonwood leaves. A blue hummingbird zigzagged above her head. The rope was rough around my neck.

Hermione saw some interesting leaves and took a step forward. The noose started to pull me off her back.