The Breath of Suspension (48 page)

Weissmuller’s lust was now an agony. Could he ever violate Jupiter the same way? Could even the humans, through one of their massive incomprehensible devices? Damn them for this insulating suit!

He distracted himself by thinking of international securities markets. The flows appeared as clearly in his mind as the currents in the Cyclades, which he had maneuvered since youth. What a roiled and complex sea the humans had invented! Capital flowed from Japan the way fresh water pours from an iceberg. The money fluid washed back and forth, rising here because of the hectic warmth of success, roiled and turbulent there because of an opposing flow. His investments, concealed under a variety of front organizations like clever hermit crabs, were doing well. It was another sea where Weissmuller could swim. No other dolphin could. But then, no other dolphin was God’s Remora. He could eat the morsels from Her jaws.

Ahead, finally, was
Jupiter Forward.
Exuberantly, Weissmuller did a polyoctave Tarzan yell that stretched up into the ultrasonic. He arched gracefully around the space station—and whipped his tail to brake. The vast bulk of Clarence, the cyborg whale, floated beyond it, a tiny human figure just above the whale’s head. Ilya Stasov. Weissmuller fought down the urge to turn and flee. He was bone-tired, and the radiation alarms were becoming actively painful. Besides, what could Stasov do to him? After all, he was the Messiah.

“Ah, Weissmuller,” Stasov said. “Thanks for coming back. Find anything interesting?” Aided by computer voice synthesis, he could speak almost as well as a dolphin. Weissmuller found his speech slightly menacing, as if the dolphin words concealed orca teeth. “None of your business,” he said sullenly. “Bugger off.”

“I’m afraid it is my business.” The tone was mild. “You must talk to Clarence.”

Weissmuller approached the whale. Microwave echo-location was useless at this range, since the click and its return overlapped, but the clever humans had installed a processor that gave the dolphin a calculated synthetic echo. The human-modified sperm whale was now huge, much larger than even blue whales had ever been. Weissmuller had never heard a blue whale. They had vanished long before he was born.

“Don’t threaten me! You can’t. Article Fifteen of the Treaty of Santa Barbara. I’ll tell the Delphine Delegation and they’ll replace you. See if they won’t.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Weissmuller. They won’t replace me.” Weissmuller twitched irritably, setting off random bursts of fire from his rockets. He knew they would never replace Stasov, no matter what the human did. Stasov had continued to live when he should have been dead, because his tasks were unfinished. The thought of what completion would mean frightened the dolphin. “I won’t do what you say, I don’t care what—”

“You must talk to Clarence now, Weissmuller. He’s in terror. He doesn’t know where he is. He needs your help.”

“Fuck you!” Weissmuller shrieked, and buffeted Stasov with his powerful tail. The man sailed off helplessly, tumbling until he managed to regain control with his own clumsy maneuver rockets. “You float like a jellyfish,” Weissmuller called. “A sea urchin!” When Weissmuller had been young, he’d heard a story about ghost voices, about long-dead whales whose last calls had echoed around the seas for decades, refracting through thermoclines, sucked into the depths by cold subsurface cataracts, resonating through abyssal trenches, to finally rise up and moan their long-sunken words to the hearing of a terrified dolphin. When Stasov finally spoke, he spoke with the voice of a ghost.

“When I first did this, I had no idea of what I had done. Now I understand. It is... necessary. Forgive me.”

“Forgive you? Feed me, and I’ll forgive you. Ha ha.” While orcas and humans laughed, dolphins expressed their pleasure more in the way an elderly pervert snorts at short-skirted schoolgirls.

Suddenly, Weissmuller heard the wide sounds of the sea—the clicks, groans, wails, chitters, and thumps of the aquatic obbligato. Ranging far away were the overlapping calls of a gam of humpback whales and the sharp slap as one of them breached and fell back in the water. Nearer were the loud thumps of a school of the tiny fish humans called sea drums. He was afraid. This sea was far away. The dolphin pinged out a tentative echo-location signal.

The echo returned. Bottom was a mile down, past an ill-defined thermocline. There was a set of three submerged volcanic peaks, one with a coral atoll around it, some twenty kilometers away. Nearer was a seamount that made it to the surface, creating a tiny island. Weissmuller knew the place, though he had never been there. The dolphin language had a word for every place in the sea, a word that is a schematic of the echo that the place returned, a sort of physical pun. An intelligent dolphin could carry a map of all the world’s seas in his head like an epic poem.

Weissmuller was near the Maldives, in the Indian Ocean. He could hear the shapes of the distant whales as well as those of the fish that swirled around him. He pinged out a stream of signals. They returned, bearing their load of information, the details of the terrain, the sizes of the schools of fish.

With that, the pain began. His mind knew that what he heard was not real, but the part of his brain that processed the information was beyond conscious control. He felt a growing panic.

He heard the terrified call of a sperm whale. It was alone and had lost track of its gam in a storm. Weissmuller ignored it. The fears of the huge foolish whales were none of his concern. It called for help. He yelled at it to shut up so that he could hear that marvelous all-encompassing sea.

Suddenly, the bottom moved. The dolphin felt a primal terror. The sea and its creatures moved eternally, but the land always remained steady. When the bottom of the sea became unstable, everything ended.

He was no longer in the Maldives. He swam the Aegean, and could sense the landmarks of the Sea of Crete as they had been four thousand years before. This was where it had started and where it had ended. The water roared and the bottom shook, marking the destruction of the only universe intelligent dolphins had ever known. Panic pierced through him. The bottom of the sea rippled like the body of a skate, and his mind dissolved in agony.

As the sea bottom rippled it lost its contours, becoming as smooth as the back of a whale. And indeed that was what it was. The floor of the sea had become a whale that thrust powerfully beneath him. Her spout could blow him to the stars.

“Ah, my Remora,” a giant voice spoke, using the dolphin language but not sounding like a dolphin or an orca. “The parasite on God. I should rub you off on the barnacled hull of a human ship and leave you to sink to the bottom of the sea.”

“No!” Weissmuller screamed. “You can’t! I am your Echo. I know it all. All! I have done my duty. I know how humans work. I know their money, their markets. I can defeat them. I can achieve our destiny. You know me!”

God’s back rose up toward him, and the edges of the sea closed in. The surface of the water above him became solid. Weissmuller heard his own echoes returning faster and faster, with improbable clarity. And he would be unable to breathe! He was trapped. He was going to die.

“I know you,” God’s voice said. “You are a coward and a fool.”

“No! Forgive me! Forgive—”

The walls closed in around him and then vanished, leaving the vasts of space. Weissmuller keened desperately and flailed around in terror. “Stasov!” he shrieked. “Where are you? Let me die!”

“You know me,” Stasov said quietly.

“I know you! You changed the world so we would speak. You tore the voice from our throats! Your teeth gave us birth. Oh, it hurts. Life hurts!”

“It always hurts. You are the Echo of God. The thinking races of the sea have raised you up here so that you may pull them after you. You will hurt most of all. Or so you will believe.” Stasov paused. “I’ll never forgive you for having forced me to do this. Instead of completion I end with the knowledge that pain is never finished.”

“A human problem, not mine,” Weissmuller said. “I will talk to the whale.” Then, plaintively: “I’m sorry I went to Io. I feel sick. Ilya?”

Stasov silently activated the whale’s voice. Clarence promptly sounded an elaborate and specific call.

Weissmuller shook, panicked. “It’s a death call, Stasov. A death call!”

“What else do you expect?” Stasov said coldly. “Do you think that you’re the only one who wants to die? I’ve heard that call before.”

Stasov had once watched a gam of seven fin whales get chased for three days across the South Atlantic by two cooperating pods of orcas. It was a vicious, hard pursuit. Finally the fins, tired and spent, sent a call to the orcas, who stopped pursuing immediately and waited. The fins gathered close together and talked to each other while the orcas swept around them. Finally, one fin whale emerged from the gam and swam out to the orcas. The whales had decided among themselves which was going to be eaten. The orcas tore that one to pieces and let the others swim away unharmed. “Clarence wants to negotiate his death with you.”

“What do I say to him? I don’t know what to say!”

“Tell him he has to live. To live and suffer. Just like the rest of us.”

❖

One of
Jupiter Forwards
spinning rings was filled with water, providing Weissmuller with a place to live. He could swim around and around it, leaping into the air at those points that engineers had raised the ceiling, and feel almost at home. No solid place intruded. There was nowhere for a human being to stand, so Erika Morgen-stern and Ilya Stasov floated in the water. Morgenstern hated this, as an affront to her dignity, but there was no way to compel the dolphin to visit her office.

“What did he do to you, Ilya?” she whispered. “I haven’t seen you look like this since... since we met.”

“It’s what I did to him that matters,” he answered, his voice flat. “But what—”

“I had to do it
again.
What I once did all unknowing, I just did with full understanding of what it meant.”

The dolphin appeared around the curve of the ring, skimming the water toward them. He had learned to use the low gravity and the Coriolis force of the spinning ring to extend his leaps. He hit the water with his belly, splashing them, and vanished. A moment later he nuzzled the Director’s crotch. She gasped, then, having been briefed by Stasov, reacted by driving her heel into the dolphin’s sensitive blowhole. Weissmuller surfaced and keened in pain. “Stop it,” Stasov said. “It’s what you deserve.”

“Screw you, Madame Director,” Weissmuller said. In air his breath was foul with old fish. He moved his head toward her, and despite herself, she ran her hands down his smooth sides. He wriggled. “Did you buy Vortek like I told you?”

Her hands stopped. “Yes.”

“And?”

“It’s up seventeen in the past month, damn you! How did you know? How could a dolphin possibly know anything about the technical knowledge market? And more importantly, why did you tell me?” She pushed him away.

“I wanted you to understand that I’m not just kidding around. I know where the tuna school. Believe it.”

“What are you talking about?”

The dolphin was silent for a long moment. “About one kilometer south-southwest of Portland Point, in the sea off the island of Jamaica, is the wreckage of the
Constantino de Braganza
, a Spanish treasure ship out of Cartagena, sunk in 1637 by a Dutch privateer as she tried to flee to the safety of Port Royal. We heard it happen, but we didn’t know what humans were fighting for. It carried three tons of gold bullion, another ton and a half of specie, and an equal amount of silver, all of which now lies on the bottom, along with the bones of men.” He spoke almost tonelessly, as if reciting a long-ago lesson. “Given the rights of the Delphine Delegation in such matters, I think it might be possible for us to assist you directly, Madame Director Morgenstern. If you agree to assist us. We know where the ships lie. We remember.”

“You mean the goddam Treaty of Santa Barbara gives the dolphins—”

“Full salvage rights,” Weissmuller interrupted gleefully. “Anything that went down more than fifty years ago. Article Seventy-seven and sections one and two of Article Seventy-eight. You thought your technology gave you the advantage. Ha. You forgot about our memory. It’s long. Longer than you ever dreamed. Humans think they’re so smart. Big joke.”

She turned to Stasov. “You must have known. How did you allow them to swindle us like this?”

He stared back at her and did not reply.

“All that money,” she murmured. “All that money...”

“We want to make a deal,” Weissmuller prompted.

“What are you offering me?” she asked.

Weissmuller twitched and wailed suddenly, as if he were a mystic in a trance. “Full control of the next project! Not subject to restrictions, regulations, and the need to resolve conflicts between various entities. I’m the first dolphin in space. I won’t be the last. Not by a long shot. We want to escape, and we need the hands of humans to do it. Humans must carry us to the stars. I hate it! Our destiny, in the hands of
humans.
All I can do is pay you. There’s a Venetian galley off the coast of Dalmatia, full of gold. It sank in 1204. I hope you rot in Hell.” He twisted and disappeared into the water.

“
They
aren’t the ones who want it, Ilya,” she whispered. “I don’t know why, but
you
want them to go to the stars. That’s why you helped them with the Treaty of Santa Barbara.”

“That’s true,” he answered simply.

“I’ve known it since I visited you in St. Petersburg and saw that folder, as I suppose you meant me to. It was just part of your expiation.” She swallowed. “Just as I was another. You tried to show me, but I never listened. I had no idea how little I meant to you.”

“Erika, I had no choice. I had to make up for the evil I had done. I’ve explained it to you before.”

“Is your guilt the most important thing in the universe? Is everything you’ve done since I found you at Camp Homma justified by it?”

They drifted apart in the water as if physically pushed by her intensity.

“I needed to reach an ending,” Stasov said. “I needed to find completion.”