The Breath of Suspension

by Jablokov, Alexander

  It had taken Tessa two days to make that hawk’s-eye-flick journey from Hammerswick to middle Cooperset Canyon. As she stood by the hanging rail, which still vibrated with the train’s departure up-canyon, waiting for her brother Dom to pick her up, she realized she would never rest with a book in Hammerswick’s quiet study garden again. That part of her life was over. Her mother was dead from a sudden wasting fever. Tessa had returned to bury her and, returning, would not leave. She felt as if her own life had just ended as well.

  The hawk slid directly sideways, scratching its belly on the wind, and vanished behind the rocky plates that made up Dragon’s Back. It did not reappear, and with the disappearance of its eyes, Hammerswick and Perala became definitively part of another world.

  “Tessa!” a voice called. She hesitated, as if moving was giving something up, then left her bags and ran toward it.

  Dom caught her up and swung her. Everything blurred but her brother’s sturdy face, its tightly curled black hair quite unlike Tessa’s looser brown. He put her down and they looked at each other appraisingly, challenge already beginning.

  “Town life agrees with you.” His tone concealed a hint of accusation, as if she had deserted them all. “You’ve filled out.”

  “Filled out” was one of those terms older people used to younger ones that Tessa never failed to find annoying. Dom was only eighteen. If he’d already started talking that way, he was doomed.

  “I learned a lot there.” She strove to relax.

  “Oh? Anything at all useful?”

  She tightened her jaw. “That remains to be seen.” Not two minutes with him and she wanted to fight. It must be something about the way older brothers smell. Pheromones. That was it.

  “So when will you be going back? You do want to go back, don’t you?” Trust him to hit her most sensitive spot right off. It wasn’t pheromones, it was just plain meanness.

  She was too tired to fight. “I’m not going back, Dom. That’s what Poppa told me.” She looked out across the dense plantings of the twenty-kilometer-wide Calrick Bend. The green-and-gold growth lapped against the sheer pink canyon walls, which, in turn, marched grandly off in either direction. This was her home and it had reclaimed her. “He needs me here. Now that Momma’s gone—”

  “Now that Momma’s gone we don’t need anyone else. You can just go back and study ancient interplanetary history or whatever you want.”

  “Now, Dom Wolholme, there’s no reason to get nasty with me. I just got off the train. I haven’t slept all night. And Momma’s dead.” To her dismay she found herself fighting back tears. It didn’t make it any easier to see that he was doing the same thing. “Give me a chance.”

  “Sorry.” Dom apologized the same way he washed dishes, a quick swipe and done.

  “Fine. Please pick up my bags.”

  Without waiting to watch him, she hopped on the cart. The low-slung mule glanced back at her, erecting its vertebral spines, and flicked out a split tongue. It then returned to its contemplation of a grass clump. “If you don’t decide to eat soon, it’ll be too late.” The mule ignored her. She was clearly a prophet without honor in her own canyon.

  “God,” Dom grunted behind her. “Everything I own doesn’t weigh this much.”

  “A Indy has special needs. For example, I own more than one pair of underwear.”

  Dom was too demoralized to come back at her, and she was immediately sorry. Momma was dead. She could feel her family loosening around her. And God knew they needed to be tied together. Life on Koola demanded it.

  Dom yanked at the mule’s reins. It abruptly decided that the grass clump was the most delicious thing it had ever seen, but had time for only one mouthful before it was forced, resentfully, to move off.

  Calrick Bend was a wide elbow of Cooperset Canyon. The hanging rail ran above the high talus slopes that covered the base of the eastern wall, so Dom and Tessa had a wide sweeping view as they descended from the station. The canyon walls were broken here and there by the terraces of tributary canyons, their outpourings marked by giant boulders. Hundreds of kilometers beyond were the frowning giants of the Boss. One could climb toward them for weeks and find them no nearer. Kardom, the northernmost visible peak, trailed a fine line of snow into a high wind, glowing in the morning light. Despite herself, Tessa thought it had to be one of the most beautiful places on Koola.

  They dropped into the vine-laced stillness of the fields and were closed in by plants. The lush aromatic air here was not that of the high canyons and mountains. Tessa sniffed at it, trying to decide if she liked it. Unlike the thick air above the salt pans of the Great Valleys, deeper in Koola’s atmosphere, this was an air made by human beings.

  The mule maneuvered through the kinked lanes with the ease of long familiarity. Tessa found herself craning forward and, after a while, was rewarded by glimpses of the house through the fronds overhead. The Wolholme house hung from the cliff face, growing larger the higher up it went, like all farmers’ houses unwilling to take up valuable growing land for the mere business of protecting humans from the elements. The morning sun reflected in its windows. It was a beautiful house, designed by her father, who should have been an architect rather than a farmer. As the wagon approached, the plants grew lower, becoming the kitchen garden, until the entire house was visible at once, as well as the sturdy tower of the Wolholme family ward that rose beside it.

  The rest of the family waited at the door. Benjamin, three years younger than Tessa’s sixteen standard, stood and cried. He’d probably been crying for days. He always overdid everything. Standing next to Benjamin, one small hand on the doorway to keep himself steady, was Kevin, the youngest. He gazed up at Tessa with grave eyes. Looming over them both was Perin Wolholme, Poppa, a vast balding man who stood blinking at her as if he had expected someone entirely else.

  She regarded them with trepidation, for they all looked at her as if she was supposed to do something to make it all work. Then she jumped from the cart and put her arms around her father’s huge chest.

  Dom and Benjamin squabbled over who should carry Tessa’s bags into the house. Dom, previously resentful of the task, won. Kevin trotted along behind, assisting with one hand under a corner of a suitcase, until he tripped in the doorway. He found something interesting in the pattern of the cut stone and sat there in fascination, completely in everyone’s way.

  The others went up the stairs to her room, but Tessa stopped in the second-floor living room. Momma had been dead less than three days. The room was already a mess. Not blatantly, but Tessa knew Momma would never have left a clump of tree-training wire hanging by the door, or allowed anyone to set sprouting pots down on the rug. And who had dared to use one of Momma’s large trilobite fossils as a doorstop? Tessa pulled it away. The door swung loose, obviously needing to be rehung.

  Holding the heavy fossil, she walked to the window. Leafy trees with white blossoms and spiky calyx plants filled the view. On the canyon wall’s next spur hung the great house of the Dalhousies with its many roof terraces. A figure strolled across one, serene in its dominion, but she couldn’t recognize who it was. The Dalhousies were a large family. She held the trilobite up to the light. Segments gleaming black, its back was twisted, seemingly with the pain of its passing. When she had been younger Tessa had seen the random marks on the rock substrate as the traces of the legs’ last frantic scrabbling. Now she wasn’t sure.

  “Benjamin!” It would do the boy good to have work. He appeared, sniffling. “Put those wires where they belong. Be careful! If you tangle them it will take all day to get it straight. And when you see him, tell Dom to carry these pots out of here. This is the living room, not the nursery. The rugs I’ll clean myself. I can’t expect you boys to handle anything like that.” The last remark was unnecessary but made her feel better.

  Enough delay. She climbed the stairs to her mother’s room, trilobite under one arm as if to weigh her down. The door swung open at her touch.

  Sora lay stretched out
on the bed. It could not be mistaken for sleep: in life she had always slept curled up in a ball. She wore the long-waisted gray-and-pink sleeveless dress she had favored at the time Tessa left for school. She’d been wearing it during the last argument Tessa had with her. Tessa remembered shouting, feeling her face distend with anger, but try as she might she could not remember what the argument had been about. She turned and carefully placed the trilobite, a piece of evidence in that mysterious investigation into the ancient depths of Koola that had been Momma’s abiding private interest, on the lace covering of the bureau, amid the keepsakes that crowded there, already dulling with dust.

  Momma looked older now, without her quick movements to belie the face wrinkled by sun and wind. Her hands were folded prayerfully on her stomach. And—Tessa frowned—she wore her favorite sunstone ring on her left hand. In Tessa’s life she had never seen Momma wear it other than on her right. Wincing at the feel of dead flesh, she switched it to the proper finger.

  That was the sign for Tessa to see all the other incongruities in her mother’s appearance. Her makeup was too emphatically applied, her lips an odd shade of red. Tessa remembered Momma bringing the tube back from some exclusive shop in Perala, laughing in dismay at the way it made her look when she finally got it home, and throwing it not in the trash, but, as women do, back in her case. The slim golden tube had obviously caught some unperceptive male eye. Tessa wiped the makeup off with cream and reapplied it properly. Then the dangling earrings—hadn’t it occurred to anyone that Momma was lying down rather than standing up? Finally, the X-belt just under the breasts was backward. She switched it around. Her mother felt light in her arms. Tessa let her breath out. Her mother was dead.

  Protesting voices came up the stairs. Vainly protesting—they had a tone of foreseen defeat. The bedroom door swung open, revealing the figure of a ponderous woman with a huge spray of hair, carrying a vast shapeless bag.

  “Theresa!” She dropped the bag with a heavy thump and opened her arms. Her voice was a resonant tenor.

  “Dalka.” Tessa hid her reluctance and slid into the embrace of her mother’s best friend. Dalka’s breasts were extravagantly large, the sort that dismayed rather than comforted men and infants. God knew they dismayed Tessa. In the face of this aggressive statement of matriarchy, her own womanhood became an afterthought.

  Tessa didn’t want to be forcibly comforted. She wanted to crawl away somewhere private to think. But she found herself weeping into Dalka’s capacious bosom. “Oh, Dalka, I never said a nice thing to her. We just fought. What can I say now?”

  “Hush, Theresa. No woman expects her sixteen-year-old daughter to love her. No sensible woman, that is, and Sora was as sensible as they come. She knew you’d understand eventually.”

  “But did she know I’d understand too late?”

  Dalka just made a comforting noise.

  “Dalka... can you help me wash her hair?”

  “Surely, Theresa. It is a mess, isn’t it? She was real sick and no one thought much about anything else.” She opened the door, brusquely ordered a basin from whoever was standing there, and found Sora’s aromatic shampoo.

  Together the two women washed Sora’s hair, then set and dried it, as slowly and patiently as if performing an ancient ritual. The men buzzed around the closed door like disturbed wasps but did not dare intrude.

  Finally they pulled shining threads through the hair, accenting the curving lines they had put in it. Tessa was astonished by how thick her mother’s hair was. Her own hair was much thinner, but then she lacked much of her mother’s beauty, being stronger and shorter, from Pehn’s blood.

  Dalka picked up Sora’s hand and pulled off the sunstone ring Tessa had just transferred there. She smiled grimly. “We want her to look nice, but there’s no reason in your family’s starving for it.” She started to put the ring back in the jewelry case, then turned and put it on, with some difficulty, over Tessa’s thicker finger. “There. As safe a place for it as I can think. A better memory of your momma than putting it under the fleshgrass at Topfield to be dug up by high plainsmen, isn’t it?”

  Tessa looked down at the ring and nodded.

  Perin knocked. “Please.” He held his hands in fists, an oddly aggressive posture he took in moments of nervousness. He peered over Dalka’s shoulder at his daughter and dead wife, blinking. “The death cart is waiting. We must leave soon if we’re to make Topfield—”

  Dalka slapped his shoulder the way one man would another. “Do good by her, will you?”

  “I will. Our family is strong enough.”

  “I hope you’re right.” She turned to look back at Tessa. In the dimness of the hall her eyes seemed extraordinarily large. “I’ll talk with you later, Theresa.” Tessa and Perin stood and listened to the creak of the stairs beneath Dalka’s bulk.

  “Well then. Well then.” Perin stood over his wife’s body and looked down at it as if he had found her napping and was wondering whether to awaken her. His large hands dangled loose at his sides.

  Tessa started to move out of the room, to give her father privacy, but paused at the door, overcome by curiosity. Who were these people, her parents, and what had they meant to each other? Perin knelt by his wife’s side and wept bitter unashamed tears, sobbing so hard he sounded like he was hiccuping. He put an arm around her waist and pulled her to him, resting his head on her shoulder and disarranging her hair. Tessa turned her head away, suddenly feeling her intrusion, but not before she saw, with sick shock, that her father’s hand held her mother’s now-cold breast.

  Dom and Benjamin stood stony-faced in the hall holding the funeral pallet. The heavy scent of its flowers, woven around the edge by the neighborhood women, filled the hall. It made Tessa dizzy, and she put a hand against a wall to steady herself.

  “Come in and get her.” Their father’s voice was muffled. “Come.” With an air of exaggerated dignity, the two boys stepped through with the pallet. The men clustered around their dead woman and Tessa stood in the hall, watching their backs and wondering at their passions.

  Like all houses in the Shield’s upper valleys, the Wolholme house had a Death’s Door at the rear, just under the cliff. It was used for the exit of a corpse and no other purpose, so that if the dead got lonely in their grave beneath the fleshgrass of Topfield and tried to return home, the only door they could find would be sealed against them. Characteristically, Perin had lavished great care on this almost-always-useless portal. It was surrounded by dark tiling, and the doors themselves were carved with flowers. The foil-and-wax seal over it tore as Perin pulled back the bolt, and the two heavy doors, perfectly balanced, swung open into the noonday sun.

  Dom and Benjamin, strong wide-shouldered boys, carried Sora lightly on her pallet and slid it onto the high spring-wheeled death cart. They looked so manly and serious that Tessa suddenly felt overwhelmingly proud of them.

  A few of their neighbors stood among the trees to bid farewell, but most of the people of Calrick Bend would wait, prudently, until the Wolholmes returned from the burial, their success in carrying the body to its final resting place a reaffirmation of their strength as a family.

  The cart was ancient and motorized, a common property of the communities of this length of Cooperset Canyon. Parts of it were rumored to have come, centuries ago, from Earth itself. They climbed aboard and hummed up-canyon.

  ❖

  Calrick Bend’s community cemetery was at Topfield, in the dry, high valleys that backed up against Evening Crest.

  Funerals were always performed by members of the deceased’s family, a significant test of their strength, stamina, and solidarity. Failure to bury a dead family member at Topfield was an indication that the family could no longer maintain itself or its holdings.

  Where Sterm Canyon split from Cooperset the road became rough, climbing the dry bed. Coiling tubes emerged from the red rock, turgid with the water they had sucked from deep aquifers, but no one farmed here, and only native Koolan plants grew. The canyon
walls were defaced by old mining operations. Metal was rare anywhere on Koola, but particularly here on the Shield, a continent of light rock that rose up out of the dense atmosphere of the flats that made up the rest of the planet’s surface. The embedded remains of heavy asteroids, a possible cause of the Shield’s existence, were the only source of metals.

  Tessa remembered the story of the Prochnows, who, weary, riven with internal dissension, had spent a week taking their father’s body to Topfield, or so they announced when they returned with the cart. A few weeks later a hunter found the father’s body hidden in an old excavation here in Sterm Canyon, at least two days’ travel from Topfield, which they had never reached. The Prochnow family had been unable to survive the disgrace and had vanished as an organized unit. Better to die, Tessa thought. Better to die in the heights of Evening Crest, lungs drying in the merciless Koolan air, than have the Wolholmes end that way.

  “Mother came here to hunt her stone bugs,” Dom said, half sorrowful, half contemptuous. Indeed, the exposed rock layer flanking the jolting track was dense with a tangle of ancient Koolan seafloor life.

  “She wanted to understand where we come from,” Tessa said. The men in the family had never understood Sora’s paleontological hobby. But that wasn’t fair: Tessa had never understood it either. Now it seemed overwhelmingly important that she do so.