The Breath of Suspension (21 page)

“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?”

“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.
”

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.

“Please, Reqata,” he said, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I don’t want to die.”

“Well, isn’t that the cutest thing.” Her blade pushed into his chest, cold as ice. “Why don’t you figure out who you are first?”

❖

He awoke in his adytum. His eyes generated dots of light to compensate for the complete darkness. His blood vessels burned as if filled with molten metal. He moved, pushing against the viscous fluid. Damp hair swirled around him, thick under his back, curling around his feet. It had gathered around his neck. There was no air to breathe. Elam. Where was Elam? He seemed to be gone at last, leaving only—

Elam awoke, gasping, on a pallet, still feeling the metal of Reqata’s sword in his chest. So it had been her. Not satisfied with killing everyone else, she had needed to kill him as well, repeatedly. He, even now, could not understand why. Orfea.

He stood silently in the middle of the room and listened to the beating of his own heart. Only it wasn’t his own, of course, not the one he had been born with. It was a heart that Abias had carefully grown in a tank somewhere below, based on information provided by a gene sample from the original Elam. The real Elam still slept peacefully in his adytum. Peacefully... he had almost remembered something this time. Things had almost become clear.

He walked down to Abias’s bright kingdom. Abias had tools there, surgical devices with sharp, deadly edges. It was his art, wasn’t it? And a true artist never depended on an audience to express himself.

He searched through cabinets, tearing them open, littering the floor with sophisticated devices, hearing their delicate mechanisms shatter. He finally found a surgical tool with a vibratory blade that could cut through anything. He carried it upstairs and stared down at the ovoid of the adytum. What was inside of it? If he penetrated, perhaps, at last, he could truly see.

It wasn’t the right thing, of course. The right instrument had to burn as it cut, cauterizing flesh. He remembered its bright killing flare. This was but a poor substitute.

Metal arms pinioned him. “Not yet,” Abias said softly. “You cannot do that yet.”

“What do you mean?” Elam pulled himself from Abias’s suddenly unresisting arms and turned to face him. The faceless eyes stared at him.

“I mean that you don’t understand anything. You cannot act without finally understanding.”

“Tell me, then!” Elam shouted. “Tell me what happened. I have to know. You say you didn’t kill Orfea. Who did then? Did I? Did I do it?”

Abias was silent for a long time. “Yes. Your mother has, I think, tried to forgive you. But
you
are the murderer.”

❖

“You were not supposed to remember.” Lammiela sat rigidly in her most private room, her mental adytum. “The Bound told me you would not. That part of you was to vanish. Just as Laurance vanished from me.”

“I haven’t remembered. You have to help me.”