The Breath of Suspension

by Jablokov, Alexander

  Lammiela looked down at it. “You two never got along. You would have thought that you would... but I guess that was a foolish assumption. You tormented her with that thing, that... monster. It gave her screaming nightmares. Once, you propped it by her bed so that she would see it when she woke up. For three nights after that she didn’t sleep.” She slid the drawer shut.

  “Who was she?” Elam demanded, taking her shoulders. She met his gaze. “It’s no longer something that will just be forgotten.”

  She weakly raised a hand to her forehead, but Elam wasn’t fooled. His mother had dealt with dangers that could have killed her a dozen times over. He tightened his grip on her shoulders. “Your sister’s name was Orfea. Lovely name, don’t you think? I think Laurance picked it out.”

  Elam could remember no sister. “Was she older or younger?”

  “Neither. You were split from one ovum, identical twins. One was given an androgen bath and became you, Elam. The other was female: Orfea. God, how you grew to hate each other! It frightened me. And you were both so talented. I still have some of her essence around, I think.”

  “I... what happened to her? Where is she?”

  “That was the one thing that consoled me, all these years. The fact that you didn’t remember. I think that was what allowed you to survive.”

  “What? Tell me!”

  Lammiela took only one step back, but it seemed that she receded much farther. “She was murdered. She was just a young girl. So young.”

  Elam looked at her, afraid of the answer. He didn’t remember what had happened, and he could still see hatred in his mother’s eyes. “Did they ever find out who did it?” he asked softly.

  She seemed surprised by the question. “Oh, there was never any doubt. She was killed by a young friend of yours. He is now your servant. Abias.”

  ❖

  “I have to say that it was in extremely poor taste,” Reqata said, not for the first time. “Death is a fine performance, but there’s no reason to perform it at a dinner party. Particularly in my presence.” She got up from the bed and stretched. This torso was wide, and well-muscled. Once again, the rib cage was high, the breasts small. Elam wondered if, in the secrecy of her adytum, Reqata was male. He had never seen her in any other than a female body.

  “Just out of curiosity,” Elam said. “Could you tell who the dragon was?” He ran his hand over the welts on his side, marks of Reqata’s fierce love.

  She glanced back at him, eyelids half lowered over wide violet eyes. She gauged if her answer would affect her haut. “Now that was a good trick, Elam. If I hadn’t been looking right at you, I would have guessed that it was you behind those glass fangs.”

  She walked emphatically across the room, the slap of her bare feet echoing from the walls, and stood, challengingly, on the curve of Elam’s adytum. Dawn had not yet come, and light was provided by hanging globes of a blue tint that Elam found unpleasant. He had never discovered a way to adjust or replace them.

  “Oh, Elam,” she said. “If you are working on something, I approve. How you fought! You didn’t want to die. You kept struggling until there was nothing left of you but bones. That dragon crunched them like candy canes.” She shuddered, her face flushed. “It was wonderful.”

  Elam stretched and rolled out of the bed. As his weight left it, it rose off the floor, to vanish into the darkness overhead. The huge room had no other furniture.

  “What do you know about my sister?” he asked.

  Reqata lounged back on the adytum, curling her legs. “I know she existed, I know she’s dead. More than you did, apparently.” She ran her hands up her sides, cupping her breasts. “You know, the first stories I heard of you don’t match you. You were more like me then. Death was your art, certainly, but it wasn’t your own death.”

  “As you say,” Elam said, stalking toward her, “I don’t remember.”

  “How could you have forgotten?” She rested her hands on the rough stone of the adytum. “This is where you are, Elam. If I ripped this open, I could kill you. Really kill you. Dead.”

  “Want to try it?” He leaned over her. She rested back, lips parted, and dug her fingernails in a circle around his nipple.

  “It could be exciting. Then I could see who you really were.”

  He felt the sweet bite of her nails through his skin. If he had only one body, he reflected, perhaps he could never have made love to Reqata. He couldn’t have lasted.

  He pushed himself forward onto her, and they made love on his adytum, above his real body as it slumbered.

  ❖

  Abias’s kingdom was brightly lit, to Elam’s surprise. He had expected a mysterious darkness. Hallways stretched in all directions, leading to chambers of silent machines and tanks filled with organs and bodies. As he stepped off the stairs, Elam realized that he had never before been down to these lower levels, even though it was as much a part of his house as any other. But this was Abias’s domain. This was where the magic was done.

  His bumblebee lay on a table, its dead nervous system scooped out. Dozens of tiny mechanisms crawled over it, straightening its spars, laying fragile wing material between the ribs. Elam pictured them crawling over his own body, straightening out his ribs, coring out his spinal column, resectioning his eyes.

  Elam touched a panel, and a prism rose up out of the floor. In it was himself, calmly asleep. Elam always kept several standard, unmodified versions of his own body ready. That was the form in which he usually died. Elam examined the face of his clone. He had never inhabited this one, and it looked strange in consequence. No emotions had ever played over those slack features, no lines of care had ever formed on the forehead or around the eyes. The face was an infant turned physically adult.

  The elaborate shape of Abias appeared in a passage and made its way toward him, segmented legs gleaming. Elam felt a moment of fear. He imagined those limbs seizing his mysterious faceless sister, Orfea, rending her, their shine dulled with her blood, sizzling smoke rising... he fought the images down. Abias had been a man then, if he’d been anything. He’d lost his body as a consequence of that murder.

  Abias regarded him. As a Bound, and a cyborg to boot, Abias had no haut. He had no character to express, needed no gestures to show who he was. His faceless eyes were unreadable. Had he been trying to kill Elam? He had the skills and resources to have created the zeppelin, grown the dragon. But why? If he wanted to kill Elam, the real Elam, the adytum lay in his power. Those powerful limbs could rip the chamber open and drag the sleeping Elam out into the light. Elam’s consciousness, in a clone somewhere else, wouldn’t know what had happened, but would suddenly cease to exist.

  “Is the new body ready?” Elam said abruptly.

  Abias moved quietly away. After a moment’s hesitation, Elam followed, deeper into the lower levels. They passed a prism where a baby with golden skin slept, growing toward the day that Elam could inhabit it, and witness Reqata’s El’lie artwork. It would replace the body destroyed by the dragon. Lying on a pallet was a short heavy-boned body with a rounded jaw and beetle brows.

  “It was a matter of genetic regression, based on the markers in the cytoplasmic mitochondria,” Abias said, almost to himself. “The mitochondrial DNA is the timer, since it comes only from the female ancestor. The nucleic genetic material is completely scrambled. But much of it stretches back far enough. And of course we have stored orang and chimp genes as well. If you back and fill—”

  “That’s enough, Abias,” Elam said impatiently. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “No, of course not. It doesn’t matter. But this is your Neanderthal.”

  Elam looked down at the face that was his own, a few hundred thousand years back into the past. “How long have I known you, Abias?”

  “Since we were children,” Abias said softly. “Don’t you remember?”

  “You know I don’t remember. How could I have lived with you for so long otherwise? You killed my sister.”

  “How do you know that?�
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  “Lammiela told me that you killed Orfea.”

  “Ah,” Abias said. “I didn’t kill her, Elam.” He paused. “You don’t remember her.”

  “No. As far as I’m concerned, I have always been alone.”

  “Perhaps you always have been.”

  Elam considered this. “Are you claiming that Reqata and my mother are lying? That there never was an Orfea?”

  Abias lowered all of his limbs until he was solid on the floor. “I think you should be more worried about who is trying to kill you. These attempts are not accidents.”

  “I know. Perhaps you.”

  “That’s not even worth answering.”

  “But who would want to go around killing me repeatedly in my clones?”

  “From the information we have now,” Abias said, “it could be anyone. It could even be Orfea.”

  “Orfea?” Elam stared at him. “Didn’t you just claim she never existed?”

  “I did not. I said I didn’t kill her. I didn’t. Orfea did not die that day.” His eyes closed and he was immobile. “Only I did.”

  ❖

  It was a land that was familiar, but as Elam stalked it in his new body, he did not know whether it was familiar to him, Elam, or to the Neanderthal he now was. It was covered with a dark forest, broken by clearings, crossed by clear icy streams scattered with rocks. The air was cold and damp, a living air. His body was wrapped in fur. It was not fur from an animal he had killed himself, but something Abias had mysteriously generated, in the same way he had generated the fur Elam had worn when he died in the Michigan winter. For all he knew, it was some bizarre variant of his own scalp hair.

  Since this was just an exploratory journey, the creation of below-conscious reflexes, Elam retained his own memories. They sat oddly in his head. This brain perceived things more directly, seeing each beam of sunlight through the forest canopy as a separate entity, with its own characteristics and personality, owing little to the sun from which it ultimately came.

  A stream had cut a deep ravine, revealing ruins. The Neanderthal wandered among the walls, which stood knee-deep in the water, and peered thoughtfully at their bricks. He felt as if he were looking at the ruins of the incomprehensibly distant future, not the past at all. He imagined wading mammoths pushing their way through, knocking the walls over in their search for food. At the thought of a mammoth his hands itched to feel the haft of a spear, though he could certainly not kill such a beast by himself. He needed the help of his fellows, and they did not exist. He walked the Earth alone.

  Something grunted in a pool that had once been a basement. He sloshed over to it, and gazed down at the frog. It sat on the remains of a windowsill, pulsing its throat. Elam reached down... and thought of the dying frog, shuddering its life out in his hand. He tied it down, limbs outspread, and played the hot cutting beam over it. It screamed and begged as the smoke from its guts rose up into the clear sky.

  Elam jerked his hand back from the frog, which, startled, dove into the water and swam away. He turned and climbed the other side of the ravine. He was frightened by the savagery of the thought that had possessed him. When he pulled himself over the edge he found himself in an area of open rolling hills, the forest having retreated to the colder northern slopes.

  The past seemed closer here, as if he had indeed lived it.

  He had hated Orfea. The feeling came to him like the memory of a shaman’s rituals, fearsome and complex. It seemed that the hate had always been with him. That form, with his shape and gestures, loomed before him.

  The memories were fragmentary, more terrifying than reassuring, like sharp pieces of colored glass. He saw the face of a boy he knew to be Abias, dark-eyed, curly-haired, intent. He bent over an injured animal, one of Elam’s victims, his eyes shiny with tears. Young, he already possessed a good measure of that ancient knowledge the Bound remembered. In this case the animal was beyond healing. With a calmly dismissive gesture, Abias broke its neck.

  The leaves in the forest moved of their own will, whispering to each other of the coming of the breeze, which brushed its cool fingers across the back of Elam’s neck.

  He remembered Orfea, a slender girl with dark hair, but he never saw her clearly. Her image appeared only in reflections, side images, glimpses of an arm or a strand of hair. And he saw himself, a slender boy with dark hair, twin to Orfea. He watched himself as he tied a cat down to a piece of wood, spreading it out as it yowled. There was a fine downy hair on his back, and he could count the vertebrae as they moved under his smooth young skin. The arm sawed with its knife, and the cat screamed and spat.

  The children wandered the forest, investigating what they had found in the roots of a tree. It was some sort of vast lens, mostly under the ground, with only one of its faces coming out into the air. They brushed the twigs and leaves from it and peered in, wondering at its ancient functions. Elam saw Orfea’s face reflected in it, solemn eyes examining him, wondering at him. A beam of hot sunlight played on the lens, awakening lights deep within it, vague images of times and places now vanished. Midges darted in the sun, and Orfea’s skin produced a smooth and heavy odor, one of the perfumes she mixed for herself: her art, as death was Elam’s. Elam looked down at her hand, splayed on the smooth glass, then across at his, already rougher, stronger, with the hints of dark dried blood around the fingernails.

  Abias stood above them. He danced on the smooth glass, his callused feet slipping. He laughed every time he almost fell. “Can you see us?” he cried to the lens. “Can you see who we are? Can you see who we will become?” Elam looked up at him in wonder, then down at the boy’s tiny distorted reflection as it cavorted among the twisted trees.

  The sun was suddenly hot, slicing through the trees like a burning edge. Smoke rose as it sizzled across flesh. Elam howled with pain and ran up the slope. He ran until his lungs were dying within him.

  The Neanderthal stopped in a clearing up the side of a mountain. A herd of clouds moved slowly across the sky, cropping the blue grass of the overhead. Around him rocks, the old bones of the Earth, came up through its sagging flesh. The trees whispered derisively below him. They talked of death and blood. “You should have died,” they said. “The other should have lived.” The Neanderthal turned his tear-filled eyes into the wind, though whether he wept for Orfea, or for Elam, even he could not have said.

  ❖

  The city burned with a dry thunder. Elam and Reqata ran through the crowded screaming streets with the arsonists, silent and pure men. In the shifting firelight, their tattoed faces swirled and reformed, as if made of smoke themselves.

  “The situation has been balanced for years,” Reqata said. “Peace conceals strong forces pushing against each other. Change their alignment, and....” Swords flashed in the firelight, a meaningless battle between looters and some sort of civil guard. Ahead were the tiled temples of the Goddesses, their goal.

  “They feel things we don’t,” she said. “Religious exaltation. The suicidal depression of failed honor. Fierce loyalty to a leader. Hysterical terror at signs and portents.”

  Women screamed from the upper windows of a burning building, holding their children out in vain hope of salvation.

  “Do you envy them?” Elam asked.

  “Yes!” she cried. “To them, life is not a game.” Her hand was tight on his arm. “They know who they are.”

  “And we don’t?”

  “Take me!” Reqata said fiercely. Her fingernails stabbed through his thin shirt. They had made love in countless incarnations, and these golden-skinned slender bodies were just another to her, even with the flames rising around them.

  He took her down on the stone street as the city burned on all sides. Her scent pooled dark. It was the smell of death and decay. He looked at her. Beneath him, eyes burning with malignant rage, was Orfea.

  “You are alive,” Elam cried.

  Her face glowered at him. “No, you bastard,” she said. “I’m not alive. You are. You are.”

&nb
sp; His rage suddenly matched hers. He grabbed her hair and pulled her across the rough stone. “Yes. And I’m going to stay that way. Understand? Understand?” With each question, he slammed her head on the stone.

  Her face was amused. “Really, Elam. I’m dead, remember? Dead and gone. What’s the use of slamming me around?”

  “You were always like that. Always sensible. Always driving me crazy!” He stopped, his hands around her throat. He looked down at her. “Why did we hate each other so much?”

  “Because there was really only ever one of us. It was Lammiela who thought there were two.”

  Pain sliced across his cheek. Reqata slapped him again, making sure her nails bit in. Blood poured down her face and her hair was tangled. Elam stumbled back, and was shoved aside by a mob of running soldiers.

  “Are you crazy?” she shouted. “You can’t kill me. You can’t. You’ll ruin everything.” She was hunched, he saw now, cradling her side. She reached down and unsheathed her sword. “Are you trying to go back to your old style? Try it somewhere else. This is my show.”

  “Wait,” he said.

  “Damn you, we’ll discuss this later. In another life.” The sword darted at him.

  “Reqata!” He danced back, but the edge caught him across the back of his hand. “What are you—”

  There were tears in her eyes as she attacked him. “I see her, you know. Don’t think that I don’t. I see her at night, when you are asleep. Your face is different. It’s the face of a woman, Elam. A woman! Did you know that? Orfea lives on in you somewhere.”

  Her sword did not allow him to stop and think. She caught him again, cutting his ear. Blood soaked his shoulder. “Your perfume. Who sent it to you?”

  “Don’t be an idiot. Something in you is Orfea, Elam. That’s the only part I really love.”

  He tripped over a fallen body. He rolled and tried to get to his feet. He found himself facing the point of her sword, still on his knees.