The Breath of Suspension (7 page)

I go to the window. A few clouds are in the sky, but those are mostly to the east where the moon is rising, so that by blocking its light they actually aid my vision.

“You can’t see the asteroids with the naked eye,” I say. “They’re too small, too far away. But with this handy image multiplier...” I put my eyes to the optics. “Let me describe them to you.”

Thomas makes a grunt, which I choose to interpret as assent.

“There’s Vesta... Ceres is on the other side of the sun. I remember Ceres like a nightmare. I can’t show it to you. And... I keep track of these things, you know. It’s important to maintain one’s own history. No one else will. There’s 944 Hidalgo. A real eccentric orbit, interesting specimen. Flora and Eunomia. And a tiny speck, almost invisible, 3920 Ngomo. Well, all right, Thomas, it
is
invisible, even to this telescope. It’s a rock no bigger than this building. If it’s the right rock at all.” The flare of a fusion rocket cuts across my field of view. For an instant I feel angry envy. I helped in the discovery of that damn drive. But look in vain. You won’t see my name on it anywhere. Only hers. Aya Ngomo’s. Only hers.

I look at Thomas. He isn’t interested in my sad envies. He sleeps, the Virgin watching over him. I wish I had someone to watch over me.

There are monks out there now, meditating among the flying mountains. Each of those hermits is incredibly expensive. The Church funds them to its own greater glory. I didn’t even try to apply. I could be out there now, meditating on Aya Ngomo’s past and future.

Thomas moans and wakes up. His eyes are bright on me.

“Do you have any interest in hearing about the Asteroid Belt?” I’m proud of the question. Since when do garrulous old men ask if someone wants to hear one of their endless stories?

Thomas nods.

The Asteroid Belt isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind. Within, it contains a volume larger than that of the sphere inside the orbit of Mars. Most pairs of points in the solar system are easier to get between than one end of the Belt and another.

I pushed my way off with slippered feet and drifted down the passageway. Two parts of the cobbled-together spacecraft shifted and groaned. I waited for a rupture to pull me screaming out into vacuum, then let out my breath and continued.

I was lost here in a way I had never felt, even when my parents dumped me at St. Theda’s like a spiritual foundling. I had spent the previous ten years traveling the Orthodox world as a powerful man, the
parakoimomenus
of Master Tergenius, newly named Dispenser of the Atlantic. And yet my life had obviously been compelled by forces beyond my understanding, for when Aya Ngomo’s spacecraft left Earth orbit, I was aboard her. I still had no idea what use Aya had for me.

Perhaps she still loved me. If so, she had a saint’s way of showing it. For example, she had not bothered to tell me our destination. I was left to perform course extrapolations on the computer, trying to second-guess her.

I pulled myself into the next module, made out of an old Japanese space station.

“Aya?” I called. There was no answer. I made my way slowly through the dark intestine kinks of the passage. There was a vague glow ahead. I rounded the last bend and found her.

Aya Ngomo hung in the central space like a gigantic fetus. Her spine was grotesquely curved. Some drug treatment had softened the bones of her skull, which now fit into an inductive control assembly that gave her direct feedback from the ship’s functioning. Its supports had creased her skull. Her beautiful eyes were open but saw nothing. Her mind was staring out through the forward image telescope, searching for her first sight of the asteroids. Her legs were mere nubbins, and her arms were strapped into articulated machinery. Air compressor jets gleamed at the base of her spine, her shoulders, her hips.

As far as I was concerned she was barely human, more a part of the ship than anything else. She terrified me. I didn’t know what she had become. Would theologians argue about the state of her soul? I thought that they should. By now she was something other than human. Or perhaps she had always been something different and it had taken this ship to show it to me.

I here was a gush of air. Aya twisted and then drifted down another passageway, maneuvering deftly with her air jets, which were linked directly into her brain. ‘They were products of her friends in Utah, one-of-a-kind devices. Here in space she was at home and I was the cripple, pulling myself painfully along.

A mass shifted somewhere and the reaction drive rumbled. I knew that Aya was monitoring it, but I still flipped up a control panel and checked the flow diagrams. No need for us to explode in a hydrogen fireball simply because Aya was in some sort of mystic trance. Our fusion drive was an inefficient, clumsy piece of technology. Controlling it took sophisticated processing and constant monitoring. Even so, the hungry flames gradually eroded the inside of their containment vessel. At some point I would have to climb into a suit and then into the engine for repairs. I shoved the thought down. It terrified me.

An unexpected surge of acceleration made me drift against a wall. Aya was changing direction. Without consulting me, of course. I arrowed down the corridor and into the huge sphere that served as our main life-system. The air here was lush with the smell of plants. Aya floated in the center.

I could check some of what was being fed into her brain. Along with the visual information from the forward image telescopes, she received scintillation data, gamma-ray and X-ray imaging, gravitation anomaly detection. A magnetic monopole would have been instantly detectable to her. As a bright flash of light, the sound of a saxophone, the smell of burning lavender? I had no idea. Just as I had no idea what other things were being poured into her brain from the mysterious devices that filled our spaceship. I’d poked around, trying to figure out what all of them were, but I was not technically trained, and could not risk breaking any of them. For all I knew they sensed emanations from the Godhead and recorded the vibrations of the music of the spheres.

“Aya. What’s going on? Where are we going?”

Her eyes drifted across me, but it took a long time for them to see me. She blinked. Did she see me as some flaw in her imaging equipment, something to be corrected by replacing a circuit module?

“What is it, Vikram?” Her voice was weary.

“Oh, nothing. You changed course just now. I wondered if you had a reason for it or if it was just whim.” I sounded whiny even to myself.

“I see where we are going. The Ancient Ones have shown me the way. Don’t worry, Vikram. We will be there soon.”

Those Ancient Ones again. Aya had never explained to me who they were supposed to be or what they had to do with her. As we traveled they became more prominent in her mind. I sometimes think they canonized a polytheist.

One night I awoke from a nightmare of being smothered by rotting bodies. Dig as I might, I couldn’t get out from under them. Waking did not help me breathe. I panted. The air in the sleeping area was foul with ketones. Something was wrong with the life-system.

I undipped myself from my sleeping harness. The lights came on. The air was clear. Had it been part of the dream? I took a deep breath and almost choked. The air was growing poisonous. No alarms had sounded, though they were programmed to scream at the slightest imbalance in the air mixture. I drifted to a diagnostic board. It blandly told me that everything was fine, that we had five nines of performance on everything. I cursed it as a lying bastard, a snare, and a delusion. I twisted in the air and sent my way down to the main life-system. Panels drifted open at my command. I looked in—and felt sick. The thing was hopelessly fouled. It must have been malfunctioning for weeks. Bacteria and fungus clogged the tubes. Algal growth had obscured much of the light focused and pumped in from the sun. Inherent circuit diagnostics showed that half the circuitry was dead. But the system diagnostics still told me everything was fine. So much for the clever engineers of the desert.

I arrowed my way to Aya’s control station.

“Aya!” Panic tinged my voice, though I tried to sound calmly competent. “Our life-system is malfunctioning. Soon it will cease to operate altogether.”

“Yes, Vikram. That’s true.” I waited for her to say something else, but that was apparently it.

“We have to turn back. We can get to Ceres—”

“No.”

“Don’t be crazy, Aya. They have automated repair facilities there. We can’t go on. We’ll be dead in days.”

“We’re not turning back, Vikram. Is there anything else?”

Her eyes, though still open, were no longer looking at me. The stink of the bad air washed over me. I realized that Aya was completely crazy.

I turned from her, heart pounding. What could I do? There was no way to override her control of the ship. Not without killing her. I looked at her, floating placidly in her mystic trance. I could put my hands around her neck and squeeze.... I could never pilot the ship on my own. It was part of
her.
I was just a parasite.

But in a few days we would both be dead and our ship would be a lifeless hulk hurtling through the Asteroid Belt. I went back down and stared at the life-system. Aya had played with the diagnostics. I was certain of it. Had she indeed gone insane?

There was only one thing left to do. The thought terrified me, so I moved as quickly as I could, hoping to move faster than my doubts. I didn’t even go back to my cabin but instead shot toward the access bay.

Hanging there among the exterior repair equipment was a dull cylinder only slightly larger than I was. This was our singleship: a tiny vessel capable of a journey of several million kilometers, if the pilot was crazy. Or desperate.

I started the launching cycle. For a moment I wondered if Aya had blocked this too, if she wished for both of us to die here of suffocation, but the singleship descended and opened its hatch for me. The diagnostics cheerily told me that it was completely operational. There was no way of checking whether this was a lie. I climbed into the ship, strapped it around myself, and felt the acceleration as it was spit out of the bay. Stars appeared around me. I input the coordinates for the Ceres repair post. The panel blinked acknowledgment and the ship accelerated.

We swept past the pile of orbital junk that was Aya’s spaceship. Cylinders, spheres, long cones of drive pods. It showed no signs of life whatsoever. In a few moments it had vanished and I was alone among the stars.

It was the worst experience of my life. I had no idea of where I was and whether I would ever get anywhere. There was not enough room to move to scratch my shoulder, while all around me space was infinite, with no support for me. All I could do was lie there.

I think it was that trip that turned my hair white. If I’d remained on Earth like a sensible person I would still have that thick head of black, black hair, which everyone always thought was dyed.

And if I hadn’t left Aya Ngomo’s ship at that point, perhaps I would have witnessed one of the most important discoveries in human history. I would have died soon after seeing it, of course, but that might have been a small price to pay. It is so seldom that one finds a good end to anything.

The base at Ceres was automated and uninhabited, built to satisfy some mysterious Imperial purpose. The interior chambers were dark, since the machinery in them didn’t need light to operate. Using my Imperial authority I requisitioned the appropriate ecological and life-system modules. Silent devices moved to obey. As they did so, an electronic bell played the tune of the Lord’s Prayer. The air was cold and thin.

I began to weep. What was I doing there? Why was I so near the edge of death? I had done nothing. If I was not both skilled and lucky I could be dead sometime in the next few days. It wasn’t fair, not at all. It didn’t make any sense. I had suffered so much. Would the future recognize me for the martyr that I was? Somehow I doubted it. Devices crawled like bugs over the singleship, attaching modules.

I had trouble finding Aya’s ship when I returned. It was no longer near the coordinates where I had left it. If it hadn’t been for its transponder I never would have found it among all the rocks. It floated quiescent, not near anything in particular.

The singleship clicked back into its berth. I reentered the ship. The air was almost unbreathably foul. I snapped the support gear together and headed for the main sphere.

Aya was there. And she had found what she was looking for.

She hung there in the center, a glittering blue-green jewel in her deformed hands. She was unconscious, almost dead. The jewel illuminated her peaceful face.

Alone, untrained, desperate, I went to work repairing the life-system. Glowing spots floated in front of my eyes. I clicked new modules in, checked and double-checked them, scraped off corrosion, tested circuitry. At last, fresh air blew through the fetid stink. I sat back, not quite believing I had succeeded, and wiped the sweat from my forehead.

I went back up to Aya, to sink into the jewel. Chunks of carbonaceous chondrite, the rough egg in which the jewel had been encased, floated all around her. I cleaned it up before it destroyed any equipment.