The Breath of Suspension

by Jablokov, Alexander

“Do I! I once got thrown out for climbing the flagpole. You can see the whole city from the top! It’s the tallest flagpole in Schekaagau.” He hung the fish on a string around his waist and picked up the jar containing the frog, which began to jump more frantically. “Follow me.” We crossed the tiled dam square, passing the triumphal arch, an explosion of soldiery, waving banners, crosses, and captive Indians pleading for mercy. Somewhere beyond city hall, bells were ringing Angelus. We walked down a narrow street, where merchants were locking up their stalls for the night. The blue lamps that taverns and places of public relief were required to show already glowed at spots along the street, lighthouses for the weary. A few minutes later, we emerged into a square that opened out onto the dark water of the canal called the Streetergracht. The other three sides of the square formed the ornate classical pile of the hotel. On top, hanging over us like a burnished artificial moon in the laboratory of a medieval alchemist, a gilded dome caught the last rays of sunlight. Three flagpoles stood in front, the flags those of the hotel, the city of Schekaagau, and the Stadt-holderate, in the process of being lowered by a squad of hotel employees in scarlet tunics and knee pants. The boy proudly pointed out the taller, center pole as the cause of his expulsion. I was properly impressed.

  I reached into my money purse, pulled out a crescent of silver, and flipped it to him. He stared at it in wonder, then stuffed it away in one of the secret pockets boys have. “I better go. Mum will be worried. I’m late for dinner.”

  I winked at him, which he liked. “Don’t let me catch you climbing the towers of city hall.”

  “You won’t,” he said ambiguously, and was gone into the gathering darkness, his captive frog still tucked under one arm. I had never learned his name.

  ❖

  It was after I had been lost for quite some time that I noticed I was being followed. For a moment, in my drunken state, that was funny. The poor fool thought he was going to end up in a nice hotel lobby with plush chairs and a bar where he could get a late-night glass of arrack, but instead he was doomed to wander with me through back alleys and unlit warehouse-lined streets for the rest of the night, his path constantly disrupted by dark flowing canals. That was not why he was following me, of course, and I quickly ceased to find his company amusing. I glanced over my shoulder as I turned a corner. He was dressed in some sort of robes, not normal clothes at all, and didn’t seem to know the streets any better than I did. I emerged on the quay by the river, its edge marked by a line of heavy granite posts holding a chain. The river flowed quickly here, constrained by the quays, and I could hear its churning and grumbling.

  Out in the darkness a procession of torchlit barges, loaded to the gunwales with masquers, drifted on the reflected waters of the river. They laughed and screamed and seemed to be having a terrific time, just as they had when I was with them, though I had not enjoyed them at all. I had drunk too much, and almost gotten sick. I had taken a walk to clear my head and work out my thoughts on my critical analysis. I doubted anyone had noticed my absence.

  Despite the threat at my back, my main emotion was still annoyance. The judgment of a good critic never relaxes. Peter Lucas had made a specialty of this sort of genre piece, and I was getting tired of it. It irritated me to think that I had another day to spend here before the Key the Lords had implanted in the limbic system of my brain would take me home to the real world. To think of all of Lucas’s labor in twisting human history, to create yet another set of drunken shipping magnates and aldermen in fancy masquerade pounding mugs on wooden trestle tables and pissing heartily over the sides of their barges. It made me sick. Lucas demonstrated that there was an infinite number of redundant possibilities, like a gallery hallway lined only with paintings of courting couples, or children playing with a little furry dog.

  I didn’t know what Lucas had done to history in order to create this Shadow, what kings and queens he had given fevers, what storms he had raised, what matings he had arranged, what battles he had altered, in order for William Vlekke of Antwerp to discover this place so that Schekaagau stood on the shores of Lake Vlekke, rather than Chicago on Lake Michigan, and didn’t get much more of a chance to think about it, because my pursuer decided that that was a good moment to jump me.

  His attack was theatrical, with a scream and leap. His body was slim and strong underneath the heavy wool robes, but he was more enthusiastic than skilled, and I threw him off. He hit the ground heavily, then rolled and came up with a glittering curved knife in his hand. I backed away. He didn’t seem to be trying to rob me. He had other things in mind. My ridiculous clothes suddenly seemed as constricting as a straitjacket. He came forward with his blade dancing before him. It was a beautiful piece of work, I noticed, with an elegantly patterned silver hilt. It would look wonderful sticking out of my chest in the morning light.

  Critics of Shadow are used to such things, however, and I was not as defenseless as I looked. As he came at me, I pulled a packet of powder out of a pocket and threw it at him, squeezing my eyes shut at the same time. Even through my closed lids, the flash of the powder left an afterimage. He shrieked and stumbled back, completely blinded. I slipped brass knuckles over my fingers, moved in, and punched him at the angle of his jaw. This was unfair, but I wasn’t feeling sporting that night. His head snapped back and he yelped. He slashed back and forth with his blade, still not able to see anything, but dangerous nevertheless. I dodged in and hit him again, and he stumbled and fell. His head crunched sickeningly against one of the granite posts, and he rolled over the side of the quay into the water. For a long moment I stood swaying drunkenly, trying to figure out where he had gone. Then I ran up and looked over the edge. Water roared heavily below in the darkness, but there was nothing else to be seen. I slipped the brass knuckles off my hand and started to try to find my way home again. It was a long while before I found the square in front of the hotel, and I was still shaking when I did.

  A marble bathtub is a beautiful thing, but it takes forever for hot water to heat it up. I finally slid into the bath and was able to relax my muscles. The attack had left me with a number of bruises, but no answers. Answers were sometimes scarce in the many worlds of Shadow, which the Lords had caused to be created for their mysterious pleasures. But the municipal river patrol would be pulling a body out of the weir at the dam in the morning, and I had no idea why he had tried to kill me, and I like to have reasons for things like that. Cuzco, Schekaagau... Had the Lords tired of my aesthetic sniping? Was I simply paranoid? That was an occupational hazard. I knew I would get no answers that night, so I got out of the bath, toweled myself dry, and went to bed.

  I turned the key on the gaslight, dimming it to a blue glow. The boy had been real, though. Give Lucas that much. Everyone else seemed like a moving waxwork, but that boy was as real as anyone. I was not sure the Lords enjoyed “reality” in that sense, since they themselves did not seem particularly real to me.

  Reveling in the feel of satin against skin, I turned over in bed to find myself staring at the patterned silver hilt of a knife, still vibrating from its impact, that had somehow come to be embedded in the bedpost next to my head. The motif was one of eyes and lightning bolts. The last knife I had seen like that was now at the bottom of the Schekaagau River. I wrenched the knife from the bedpost and ran to the window, but my second attacker had already slid down the drainpipe and vanished, leaving me with a souvenir of my night at the Emperor Kristiaan.

  ❖

  “Mutated E. coli,” Salvator Martine said. He had pulled me away from the other guests at his party to give me this information.

  I swirled the Tokay in my glass and watched it sheet down the sides. “E. coli?” Only Martine would serve a wine as sweet as Tokay before dinner.

  Martine grinned, bright teeth in a face of tanned leather. He was annoyingly handsome, and smelled sharply of myrrh and patchouli. The Lords loved him, for no good reason that I could see. Several had even come to attend his party. “Normal intestinal flora. Mutated and hybridiz
ed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Infects via the GI tract and destroys the central nervous systems of higher primates. Neat. Grew it in the guts of an Australopithecine on the African veldt, two, three million years ago. Not easy, Jacob, not easy. When I woke up on that pallet at Centrum, I had bedsores, and a headache that lasted a month. Killed them all. Every last one of the buggers. Nothing left on this planet with more brains than an orangutan.” He downed his glass of Tokay as if it were water. I took another slow sip of my own.

  We stood on the parapet of what he called his “palace.” Behind us I could hear the sound of the party, voices and clinking glasses, background music, occasionally a laugh. The sun set beyond rolling green hills. From a distant ridge came the cry of a deer. A trail of mist descended on the valley, glowing in the evening light. Except for the ones behind us in the party, there were no other humans on the planet.

  “Infectious lateral sclerosis...,” I murmured to myself. This was art?

  Martine laughed. “Not to worry. With no hosts, it died out, and there are no other vectors. I was careful about that.”

  He’d misunderstood my moodiness, of course, but it took a particularly impervious cast of mind to be a molder of worlds. Martine had succeeded in wiping out all of humanity, collateral branches to boot. By some standards, that made him a god. A god with bedsores. That left me with a blank canvas to look at, but nothing to review, which was perhaps his intention. If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, that’s one thing, but when the acorn is worm-devoured and the tree never exists, what sound does it make then?

  “You are looking at Berenson’s new world next?”

  “Yes. She’s been very mysterious about it, but I suspect—”

  A voice interrupted us.

  “There you are. The most notable men at the party, and the two of you stand out here watching the sunset. Where’s your sense of social responsibility?” We both turned. Amanda, my wife, closed the door behind her, passing through in the roar of voices. She wore a dress that fell in waves of green-and-blue silk, and she emerged from it like Aphrodite from the foam, her blonde hair braided and coiled around her head. A moonstone glowed in its silver setting as it rested on her forehead.

  “We were waiting for you,” Martine said with that charming insincerity that Amanda seemed to like.

  She came up and took a sip of my drink. She smiled at Mar-tine. “I’ll have you know, Salvator, that Jacob detests sweet drinks before dinner.” She took another, and kept the glass. “I’ve been wandering around your palace. It’s wonderful! How did you ever create anything like it?”

  I felt a surge of annoyance. The palace was a monstrosity. It had towers, with pennants snapping in the breeze. It had triumphal staircases. It had flying buttresses. It had colonnades. What it didn’t have was structure. It looked like an immense warehouse of architectural spare parts.

  “It was built by some people from a world I did a few years back. Remember it, Jacob? The Berbers of the Empire of the Maghreb ruled Northern Africa. They flooded the desert and built great palaces. I had planned that.” He turned to Amanda. “As I recall, Jacob didn’t like it much.”

  He recalled correctly. I couldn’t remember much about that particular work, just hot sun and blinding water, but I did remember that I hadn’t liked it. The Lords had bid it up, though, and it was now in someone’s collection, making Martine wealthy. Critics should never socialize with artists; it’s difficult enough to like their work in the first place.

  Amanda came up and pushed herself against me. Her perfume smelled of violets, and I lost track of what I was thinking. I put my arm around her, and she pulled away, as she always did once she had my attention, and walked to the other side of the parapet to enjoy the sunset.

  Amanda had once been close to me, but was now distant, and I couldn’t remember when that had changed. It could have happened overnight, since Amanda often went to bed loving and woke up cold. Something she saw in her dreams, I’d always thought. But now it was that way most of the time, and I felt I’d let something slip by, as if we’d had an immense knock-down-drag-out fight that I had not been able to attend. On the infrequent occasions when we made love it was like two people sawing a tree trunk, the length of the saw between us and only the rhythm of the task keeping us together. This still left me wanting to do it much more often than she did.

  Voices shouted for Martine inside, so the three of us went in through the French doors. The banqueting hall was an immense room, thirty feet high, and banners from the Shadows Martine had created hung down from the beams supporting the ceiling. Someone pressed a glass of wine into my hand, not Tokay, mercifully, but some dry red. The party poured after Martine as he strode through the hall, out the double doors at the other end, and down the immense stairway. At the bottom rested a cube wrapped in black velvet, about six feet high. It had been delivered through the hallways by servants available to the Lords. Despite myself, I was impressed. They did not usually permit ordinary men to move objects from Shadow to Shadow.

  “Let’s carry her up,” Martine said, and the party surged forward with cheers. It took a half-dozen people to lift it. “Take my place, Jacob,” Martine said, and I found myself with a shoulder under one corner of the cube. We angled it back and, cursing and laughing, hauled it up the stairs. It was heavy and tried to slide back. I started to sweat.

  A space was cleared on the floor among the armchairs and the tables covered with half-finished drinks. The cube was put down. I looked for Amanda in the crowd but couldn’t find her anywhere. I remembered what she was wearing, and her moonstone, but wasn’t sure that I knew what she looked like anymore. It seemed that as she had grown more distant her face had stopped being familiar.

  “This is from a world I did recently. It’s not worth visiting, believe me, but it did produce one thing that’s worthwhile. I asked the Lords for permission to bring it back for my collection.” He pulled on a cord, and the black velvet fell to the floor. The crowd grew silent and drew back, but no one took his eyes away.

  The most beautiful woman in the world was in Hell, but she had been turned to stone and no one could do anything about it. She stared at us from behind five inches of leaded glass with pleading in her eyes. She was a Madonna, and a newborn child lay in her lap. His eyes stared blankly upward, for He had been born hideously blind.

  I had more information than Martine thought I did, from my sources at Centrum. I knew that Martine had caused eight entire worlds to be destroyed by nuclear war before he got the effect he wanted. On the last try, a group of artists, vomiting, losing their hair, seeing the constant glimmer of optic nerves degenerating in the radiation flux, had found a boulder in a blast crater and set it on a hilltop. The rock was dense with exotic isotopes and had killed the sculptors as they chiseled it. They had worked as one, and it was impossible to tell where one artist had left off and the next began. They had created a masterpiece, probably not even knowing why, but Martine claimed this work as his own. Radioactive fantasies had been fashionable among the Lords lately.

  I turned and walked away, rubbing my shoulder. The party was getting loud again, despite the pleading eyes of the Virgin Mary, and I felt a little sick. I walked down a long hallway lined with loot from Martine’s various creations. I stopped in front of one painting, of Christ being carried drunk from the Marriage at Cana by the Apostles. It looked like a rather murky Titian, all droopy flesh and blue mist, but Amanda had pointed it out specifically to me earlier in the day. She never really seemed to care much about art herself, but she somehow always knew precisely what I would like. Or would not.

  “Mr. Landstatter. Good evening.” Sitting in the shadows on straight-backed chairs, like Egyptian deities, were two Lords, Jurum and Altina, who seemed to be married, although it was hard for me to tell. At any rate, they were always together.

  “Good evening.” I bowed, but did not speak further.

  “We’ve just been looking at Martine’s little collection,” Altina said, her voic
e a gentle hiss. “Symbols and parts, it seems to us. Reflections of worlds in objects, and so an imitation of our strings of Shadow. What say you?” They awaited my judgment.

  Lords are strange beings. They collect worlds the way children collect brightly colored stones and seashells, but require others both to create those worlds and to determine whether they are worth having. They had gained control of the infinite universe of Shadows before anyone could remember, raised Centrum, and seemed intent on continuing in this position forever. Had one of them decided to kill me? The fact that two attempts had already failed suggested that a critic of murder would have had to give their efforts a bad review.

  “The objects have significance in themselves, and not just as signs to Shadow,” I said. The Lords often had trouble understanding ordinary art. “This statue of Apollo, for instance...” They stood and listened, Altina resting slightly on Jurum’s arm, as I took them through Martine’s collection, which ranged from the brilliant to the mediocre, and seemed to have been forgotten here, like junk in an attic. They thanked me, finally, and walked off to bed, discussing what I had said. I realized that the party above had grown silent and that it was time for bed.

  When I returned to the banqueting hall, it was empty save for the tormented Virgin. I stopped to look at her, but her expression had become reproachful, as if I were somehow responsible for her fate. I turned away and went to our room.

  The bed was still made, and Amanda was nowhere to be seen. I took my clothes off, threw them on the floor, and climbed in under the covers. Our room was in one of those dramatic towers, and there was nothing but darkness outside the windows. I fell asleep.

  Amanda woke me up as she slipped into bed, sometime later. I started to say something, to ask where she had been.

  “Shh,” she said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.” She hunched up on the other side of the bed, the way she did so often, even though the bed was not particularly large and this meant that she dangled precariously over the edge. I moved closer to her and nuzzled her neck. “Please, Jacob. It’s late and I want to sleep. See you in the morning.” She yawned and was quickly asleep, or at least pretended to be.