The right wing was flopping loose, sending waves of pain through his body. He veered wildly, land and sky switching position. Pulling up desperately, he angled his cutting leg and sliced off the loose part of his wing. Hot pain slashed through him.
He had finally managed to stabilize his descent, but it was too late. A field of corn floated up to meet him. For an instant, everything was agony.
❖
“I want something primitive,” Elam said, as the doctor slid a testing limb into the base of his spine. “Something prehistoric.”
“All of the human past is prehistoric,” Dr. Abias said. He withdrew the limb with a cold tickle, and retracted it into his body. “Your body is healthy.”
Elam stood up, swinging his arms, getting used to his new proportions. His current body was lithe, gold-skinned, small-handed: designed to Reqata’s specifications. She had some need of him in this form, and Elam found himself apprehensive. He had no idea if she was still angry about her defeat over Australia. “No, Abias. I mean before any history. Before man knew himself to be man.”
“Neanderthal?” Abias murmured, hunching across the floor on his many legs. “Pithecanthropus? Australopithecus?”
“I don’t know what any of those words mean,” Elam said. Sometimes his servant’s knowledge bothered him. What right did the Bound have to know so much when the Incarnate could dispose of their destinies so thoroughly?
Abias turned to look back at him with his multiple oculars, brown human eyes with no face, pupils dilated. He was a machine, articulated and segmented, gleaming as if anointed with rare oils. Each of his eight moving limbs was both an arm and a leg, as if his body had been designed to work in orbit. Perhaps it had. As he had pointed out, most of the past was prehistory.
“It doesn’t matter,” Abias said. “I will look into it.”
A Bound, Abias had been assigned to Elam by Lammiela. Punished savagely for a crime against the Incarnate, his body had been confiscated and replaced by some ancient device. Abias now ran Elam’s team of cloned bodies. He was considered one of the best trainers in the Floating Game. He was so good and his loyalty so absolute that Elam had steadfastly refused to discover what crime he had committed, fearing that the knowledge would interfere in their professional relationship.
“Do that,” Elam said. “I have a new project in mind.” He walked across the wide, open room, feeling the sliding of unfamiliar joints. This body, a clone of his own, had been extensively modified by Abias, until there were only traces of his own nature in it. A plinth was laid with earrings, wrist and ankle bracelets, body paints, scent bottles, all supplied by Reqata. He began to put them on.
Light shone from overhead through semicircular openings in the vault. A rough-surfaced ovoid curved up through the floor in the room’s center. It was Elam’s adytum, the most secret chamber where his birth body lay. After his crash in Australia, he had woken up in it for an instant, with a feeling of agony, as if every part of his body were burning. The thought still made him shudder.
An Incarnate’s adytum was his most strongly guarded space, for when his real body died, he died as well. There could be no transfer of consciousness to a cloned body once the original was dead. The ancient insolent machines that provided the ability to transfer the mind did not permit it, and since no one understood the machines, no one could do anything about it. And killing an Incarnate’s birth body was the only way to truly commit murder.
Elam slid on a bracelet. “Do you know who attacked me?”
“No one has claimed responsibility,” Abias answered. “Did you recognize anything of the movement?”
Elam thought about the billowing froglike zeppelin. It hadn’t been Reqata, he was sure of that. She would have made certain that he knew. But it could have been almost anyone else.
“Something went wrong in the last transfer,” Elam said, embarrassed at bringing up such a private function, even to his servant. “I woke up in my adytum.”
Abias stood still, unreadable. “A terrible malfunction. I will look into it.”
“Just make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
❖
The party was in the hills above the city of El’lie. Water from the northern rivers poured here from holes in the rock and swirled through an elaborate maze of waterways. It finally reached one last great pool, which extended terrifyingly off the rocky slope, as if ready to tip and spill, drowning the city below it. The white rock of the pool’s edge extended downward some thousands of feet, a polished sheet like the edge of the world. Far below, cataracts spilled from the pool’s bottom toward the thirsty city.
Elam stood on a terrace and gazed down into the water. Reqata floated there, glistening as the afternoon sun sank over the ocean to the west. She was a strange creature, huge, all sleekly iridescent curves, blue and green, based on some creature humans had once encountered in their forgotten travels across the galaxy. She sweated color into the water, heavy swirls of bright orange and yellow sinking into the depths. Until a few hours before she had been wearing a slender gold-skinned body like Elam’s.
“They seem peaceful,” she whispered, her voice echoing across the water. “But the potential for violence is extreme.”
Reqata had hauled him on a preliminary tour of El’lie, site of her next artwork. He remembered the fresh bodies hung in tangles of chain on a granite wall, a list of their crimes pasted on their chests; the tense market, men and women with shaved foreheads and jewels in their eyebrows, the air thick with spices; the lazy insolence of a gang of men, their faces tattooed with angry swirls, as they pushed through the market crowd on their way to a proscribed patriarchal religious service; the great tiled temples of the Goddesses that lined the market square.
“When will they explode?” Elam said.
“Not before the fall, when the S’tana winds blow down from the mountains. You’ll really see something then.” Hydraulic spines erected and sank down on her back, and she made them make a characteristic gesture, sharp and emphatic. If she was angry about what had happened in Australia, she concealed it. That frightened Elam more than open anger would have. Reqata had a habit of delayed reaction.
Reqata was an expert at exploiting obscure hostilities among the Bound, producing dramatically violent conflicts with blood spilling picturesquely down carved staircases; heads piled up in heaps, engraved ivory spheres thrust into their mouths; lines of severed hands on bronze poles, fingers pointing toward Heaven. That was her art. She had wanted advice. Elam had not been helpful.
Glowing lights floated above the pool, swirling in response to incomprehensible tropisms. No one knew how to control them anymore, and they moved by their own rules. A group of partyers stood on the far side of the pool, their bright-lit reflections stretching out across the glassy water.
“This water’s thousands of feet deep,” Reqata murmured. “The bottom’s piled up with forgotten things. Boats. Gold cups. The people from the city come up here and drop things in for luck.”
“Why should dropping things and forgetting about them be lucky?” Elam asked.
“I don’t know. It’s not always lucky to remember everything.”
Elam stripped off his gown and dove into the dark water. Reqata made a bubbling sound of delight. He stroked the spines on her back, feeling them swell and deflate. He ran a cupped hand up her side. Her glowing solar sweat worked its way between his fingers and dripped down, desperate to reach its natural place somewhere in the invisible depths.
“Put on a body like this,” she said. “We can swim the deep oceans and make love there, among the fish.”
“Yes,” he said, not meaning it. “We can.”
“Elam,” she said. “What happened on the balcony after we saw you die in the forest? You seemed terrified.”
Elam thought, instead, of the frog. Had his memories been real? Or could Reqata have laid a trap for him? “Just a moment of nausea. Nothing.”
Reqata was silent for a moment. “She hates you, you know. Lammi
ela. She utterly hates you.”
Her tone was vicious. Here it was, vengeance for the trick he had pulled over the Nullarbor Sea. Her body shuddered, and he was suddenly conscious of how much larger than he she now was. She could squish him against the side of the pool without any difficulty. He would awake in his own chamber, in another body. Killing him was just insulting, not fatal. Perhaps it had been her in that frog zeppelin.
He swam slowly away from her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you don’t. You’re an expert at forgetting, at just lying down, dying, and forgetting. She hates you for what you did. For what you did to your sister!” Her voice was triumphant.
Elam felt the same searing pain he had felt when he awoke for one choking instant in his adytum. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, as he pulled himself out of the water.
“I know! That’s just the problem.”
“Tell me what you mean.” He kept his voice calm.
Something moved heavily in the darkness, and a row of chairs overturned with a clatter. Elam turned away from the pool. His heart pounded. A burst of laughter sounded from across the pool. The party was continuing, but the guests were impossibly far away, like a memory of childhood, unreachable and useless.
A head rose up out of the darkness, a head twice the size of Elam’s body. It was a metal egg, dominated by two expressionless eyes. Behind dragged a long multilimbed body, shiny and obscene. Elam screamed in unreasoning and senseless terror.
The creature moved forward, swaying its head from side to side. Acid saliva drooled from beneath its crystal teeth, splashing and fizzing on the marble terrace. It was incomprehensibly ancient, something from the long-forgotten past. It swept its tail around and dragged Elam toward it.
For an instant, Elam was paralyzed, staring at the strange beauty of the dragon’s teeth as they moved toward him. Then he struggled against the iron coil of the tail. His body still had traces of oil, and he slid out, stripping skin. He dove between the dragon’s legs, bruising his bones on the terrace.
The dragon whipped around quickly, cornering him. With a belch, it sprayed acid over him. It burned down his shoulder, bubbling as it dissolved his skin.
“Damn you!” he shouted, and threw himself at the dragon’s head. It didn’t pull back quickly enough, and he plunged his fist into its left eye. Its surface resisted, then popped, spraying fluid. The dragon tossed its head, flinging Elam across the ground.
He pulled himself to his feet, feeling the pain of shattered ribs. Blood dribbled down his chin. One of his legs would not support his weight. The massive head lowered down over him, muck pouring out of the destroyed eye. Elam grabbed for the other eye, but he had no strength left. Foul-smelling acid flowed over him, sloughing his flesh off with the sound of frying bacon. He stayed on his feet, trying to push imprecations between his destroyed lips. The last thing he saw was the crystal teeth, lowering toward his head.
❖
Lammiela’s house was the abode of infinity. The endless rooms were packed with the junk of a hundred worlds. The information here was irreplaceable, unduplicated anywhere else. No one came to visit, and the artifacts, data cubes, and dioramas rested in silence.
At some time in the past millennia, human beings had explored as far inward as the galactic core and so far outward that the galaxy had hung above them like a captured undersea creature, giving up its light to intergalactic space. They had moved through globular clusters of ancient suns and explored areas of stellar synthesis. They had raised monuments on distant planets. After some centuries of this, they had returned to Earth, built their mysterious cities on a planet that must have been nothing but old legend, and settled down, content to till the aged soil and watch the sun rise and set. And, with magnificent insouciance, they had forgotten everything, leaving their descendants ignorant.
Lammiela sat in the corner watching Elam. Her body, though elegant, was somehow bent, as if she had been cut from an oddly shaped piece of wood by a clever wood-carver utilizing the limitations of his material. That was true enough, Elam reflected, examining the person who was both his parents.
When young, Lammiela had found a ship somewhere on Earth’s moon, tended by the secret mechanisms that made their lives there, and gone forth to explore the old spaces. No one had any interest in following her, but somehow her exploits had gained enough attention that she had obtained extraordinary privileges.
“It’s curious,” she said. “Our friends the Bound have skills that we Incarnate do not even dream of, because the machines our ancestors left us have no interest in them.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “It’s surprising, some of the things the Bound can do.”
“Like make you both my father and my mother,” Elam said.
Her face was shadowed. “Yes. There is that.”
Lammiela had been born male, named Laurance. But Laurance had felt himself to be a woman. No problem for one of the Incarnate, who could be anything they wished. Laurance could have slept securely in his adytum and put female bodies on for his entire life. But Laurance did not think that way. He had gone to the Bound, and they had changed him to a woman.
“When the job was finished, I was pregnant,” Lammiela said. “Laurance’s sperm had fertilized my new ova. I don’t know if it was a natural consequence of the rituals they used.” Her muscles tightened with the memories. Tendons stood out on the backs of her hands. “They kept me conscious through it all. Pain is their price. They slew the male essence. I saw it, screaming before me. Laurance, burning.”
It had cost most of her haut to do it. Dealings with the Bound inevitably involved loss of status.
“I still see him sometimes,” she said.
“Who?” Elam asked.
“Your father, Laurance.” Her eyes narrowed. “They didn’t kill him well enough, you see. They told me they did, but he’s still around.” Her eyes darted, as if expecting to find Laurance hiding behind a diorama.
Elam felt a chill, a sharp feeling at the back of his neck, as if someone with long, long nails were stroking him there. “But you’re him, Lammiela. He’s not someone else.”
“Do you really know so much about identity, Elam?” She sighed, relaxing. “You’re right, of course. Still, was it I who stood in the Colonnade at Hrlad?” She pointed at a hologram of a long line of rock obelisks, the full galaxy rising beyond them. “I’m not sure I remember it, not as if I had been there. It was legend, you know. A bedtime story. But Hrlad is real. So is Laurance. You look like him, you know. You have your father’s eyes.”
She stared at him coldly, and he, for the first time, thought that Reqata might have spoken truly. Perhaps his mother did indeed hate him.
“I made my choice,” she said. “I can never go back. The Bound won’t let me. I am a woman, and a mother.”
Lammiela did not live in the city where most of the Incarnate made their home. She lived on a mountainside, bleak and alone, the rigid curving walls of her house holding off the snow. She moved her dwelling periodically, from seashore to desert to mountain. She had no adytum, with its body, to lug with her. Elam, somehow, remembered deep forest when he was growing up, interspersed with sunny meadows. The vision wasn’t clear. Nothing was clear.
After this most recent death, Elam had once again awakened in his adytum. He’d felt the fluid flowing through his lungs, and the darkness pressing down on his open eyes. Fire had burned through his veins, but there was no air to scream with. Then he had awakened again, normally, on a pallet in the light.
“Mother,” he said, looking off at a broad-spectrum hologram of Sirius that spilled vicious white light across the corner of the room, too bright to look at directly without filters. “Am I truly your only child?”
Lammiela’s face was still. “Most things are secrets for the first part of their existence, and forgotten thereafter. I suppose there must be a time in the middle when they are known. Who told you?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes. It was thrown at you as a weapon, wasn’t it?”
Elam sighed. “Yes. Reqata.”
“Ah, yes. I should have guessed. Dear Reqata. Does she love you, Elam?”
The question took him aback. “She says she does.”
“I’m sure she means it then. I wonder what it is about you that she loves. Is that where the discussion ended then? With the question?”
“Yes. We were interrupted.” Elam described the dragon’s attack.
“Ah, how convenient. Reqata was always a master of timing. Who was it, do you suppose?” She looked out of the circular window at the mountain tundra, the land falling away to a vast ice field, just the rocky peaks of mountains thrusting through it. “No one gains haut anonymously.”
“No one recognized the style. Or if they did, they did not admit it.” The scene was wrong, Elam thought. It should have been trees: smooth-trunked beeches, heavy oaks. The sun had slanted through them as if the leaves themselves generated the light.
“So why are you here, Elam? Are you looking for the tank in which that creature was grown? You may search for it if you like. Go ahead.”
“No!” Elam said. “I want to find my sister.” And he turned away and ran through the rooms of the house, past the endless vistas of stars that the rest of the human race had comfortably forgotten. Lammiela silently followed, effortlessly sliding through the complex displays, as Elam stumbled, now falling into an image of a kilometer-high cliff carved with human figures, now into a display of ceremonial masks with lolling tongues. He suddenly remembered running through these rooms, their spaces much larger then, pursued by a small violent figure that left no place to hide.
In a domed room he stopped at a wall covered with racks of dark metal drawers. He pushed a spot and one slid open. Inside was a small animal, no bigger than a cat, dried as if left out in the sun. It was recognizably the dragon, curled around itself, its crystalline teeth just visible through its pulled-back lips.
The Breath of Suspension Page 15