The Breath of Suspension (49 page)

She stared at him, suddenly frightened. “And have you?”

He shook his head slowly. “Nothing is ever complete. But I reached my ending before I left Homma. I realized that when I tortured Weissmuller, with the full knowledge of what I was doing. I’d always had that knowledge. I’d always known. I ripped their minds apart so that we could conquer some rocks in the North Pacific. I tormented them to satisfy my curiosity.”

“No,” she breathed. “No. You never knew.”

“Perhaps I didn’t know they could speak. But I always knew they could suffer. And as long as I live, they
will
suffer.”

“They’ll suffer even if you don’t live.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “True. But that will be none of my concern.”

❖

Stasov floated in space, the great form of the whale in front of him.

“Ilya,” Weissmuller said, his voice large and hollow. “I have done all that I had to. We can float now, humans, dolphins, and orcas, on a great sea of cash. With that money we can swim to the stars. It’s hateful! I feel more disgusted than I ever thought I’d be.”

“Yes,” Stasov said. “The Time of the Breath is upon us.” Jupiter loomed above him, through some odd error of perception, like a heavy fruit ready to fall. Clarence drifted quiescent, singing a simple song to himself, almost a lullaby. His physical systems had been checked, and Weissmuller had managed to calm him down, finally doing the job that most humans believed he had been brought to do. Stasov alone knew that he had been brought to lead his people forth from the sea.

Looking at the dolphin and his massive companion, Stasov had a sudden image of dolphins, grinning faces at the front of the bodies that were their ships, slipping through the spaces between the stars, gamboling amid the debris of the cometary Oort cloud that surrounded each star, whipping, in tight formation, over the frozen surface of a neutron star, and finally plunging through a planet’s warm blue atmosphere to fall hissing, red-hot, into the alien sea, there to swim and play as they always had. When the time came to move on, they would blast with a roar back into the infinite spaces that had become their second home. Humans, more sedate and deliberate, would follow after in their own ships, dolphins leaping in their bow waves and guiding them to a safe port.

Morgenstern would, he knew, continue the task that had driven her since youth, even though she had discovered that her passion had been used by another for his own purposes. Neither she nor the dolphins had seen any reason to pull cetaceans into space, but Stasov had decided.

“What happens to the Remora once his God breathes?” Weissmuller said. “What happens to the Echo once God has located what She is after? What am I now?”

“Nothing,” Stasov said. “And less than nothing.”

The countdown was reaching its conclusion, and Clarence’s rockets prepared themselves to blast.

“Then let me die! I can go with Clarence and sink into the endless seas of Jupiter. I’ve done what I had to.”

“No,” Stasov said. “You’re still necessary to others. It’s my turn to die.”

“You selfish shark spawn!” Weissmuller shrieked. “You’ve played with us, ripped us apart, driven us to our destiny, and called up
our
God to help you create the echo that
you
want to hear. You always get your way! I say I will die and there isn’t anything you can do about it!” He thrust his tail and his rockets flared. “I won’t stop at Io this time!”

Stasov had expected this, and was already straddling the dolphin, as if riding him through the sea. He manually stopped down the oxygen flow until Weissmuller was suffocating. The rockets died, and the dolphin shuddered beneath him.

“Ilya,” Weissmuller said forlornly. “I fear the net. Humans caught us when we followed the tuna, suffocated and killed us, thoughtlessly. They didn’t realize that when we listen we do not think, and are thus easily captured. You tortured us with false echoes and woke us up. Are you going to haul us to the stars in your nets? Won’t you ever leave us alone? Won’t you ever stop tormenting us?”

“There’s only one way to stop. I see that. You don’t have to tell me.”

“Do you think death will stop you? The pain is always there. Damn you!”

Stasov drifted near Clarence, until the surface of the whale suddenly changed from something next to him to something beneath him. He found the point of attachment and tied himself to it.

With smooth thrust, fusion flames blossomed around Clarence’s midsection. Clarence sang a journey song, one full of landmarks in a sea that he would never hear again. Could he invent new ones for the deeper sea of Jupiter?

Stasov rested against the gravity created by Clarence’s acceleration.

He
would never hear Clarence’s new songs.

Soon he would sink into the deepest sea of all.

Version History

Version #:
v3.0

Sigil Version Used:
0.7.2

Original format:
ePub

Date created:
July 16, 2016

Last edited:
July 16, 2016

Correction History:

Version History Framework for this book:

v0.0/UC
==> This is a book that that's been scanned, OCR'd and converted into HTML or EPUB. It is completely raw and uncorrected. I do essentially no text editing within the OCR software itself, other than to make sure that every page has captured the appropriate scanning area, and recognized it as the element (text, picture, table, etc.) that it should be.

v1.0
==> All special style and paragraph formatting from the OCR product is removed, except for italics and small-caps (where they are being used materially, and not as first-line-of-a-new-chapter eye-candy). Unstyled, chapter & sub-chapter headings are applied. 40-50 search templates which use Regular Expressions have been applied to correct common transcription errors: faulty character replacement like "die" instead of "the", "comer" instead of "corner", "1" instead of "I"; misplaced punctuation marks; missing quotation marks; rejoining broken lines; breaking run-on dialogue, etc.

v2.0
==> Page-by-page comparison against the original scan/physical book, to format scenebreaks (the blank space between paragraph denoting an in-chapter break), blockquotes, chapter heading, and all other special formatting. This also includes re-breaking some lines (generally from poetry or song lyrics that have been blockquoted in the original book) that were incorrectly joined during the v1 general correction process.

v3.0
==> Spellchecked in Sigil (an epub editor). My basic goal in this version is to catch most non-words, and all indecipherable words (i.e., those that would require the original text in order to properly interpret). Also, I try to add in diacritics whenever appropriate. In other words, I want to get the book in shape so that someone who wants to make full readthrough corrections will be able to do so without access to the original physical book.

v4.0
==> I've done a complete readthrough of the book, and have made any corrections to errors caught in the process. This version level is probably comparable in polish to a physical retail book.

Some additional notes:

vX.1-9
==> within my own framework, these smaller incremental levels are completely unstandardized. What it means is that I—or you!—have made some minor corrections or adjustment that leave me somewhere between "vX" and "vX+1". It's very unlikely that I'll ever use these decimal adjustments on anything less than a "v3".

Correcting my ebooks
— Even at their best, I've yet to read one of my v3.0s that was completely error free. For those of you inclined to make corrections to those books I post (v3, v4, v5, and all points in between), I gratefully welcome the help. However, I would urge you to make those correction in the original EPUB file using Sigil or some other HTML editor, and not in a converted file. The reason is this: when you convert a file, the code—and occasionally the formatting—is altered. If you make corrections in this altered version, in order to use that "corrected" version, I'm going to have to reformat it all over again from scratch, which is at best hugely inefficient and at worst impossible (if, say, I no longer have an original copy available). More likely, I'll just end up doing the full readthrough myself on my file and discarding all of your hard work. Unlike some of the saintly retail posters who contribute books that they have no interest whatsoever in reading, I never create a book that I don't want to read... at least a little. So, having to do a full readthrough on my own books isn't really going to put me out, but it will mean that the original editor's work (i.e. your work )will have been completely wasted, and I'd feel more than slightly crummy about that. So, to re-cap, I am endlessly grateful to those who add further polish to the books I make, but it's only an efficient use of your time if you make corrections in the original EPUB file as you downloaded it.