The Breath of Suspension (9 page)

“That’s the best thing of all. Aya suggested it. Pointed out what a career an ambitious man could make, there on the periphery, far from supervision. Build a base of power there, she said, and you could climb as far as you wanted. I knew immediately that she was right.” He tossed back an entire glass. “Smart girl. Real smart.”

My head reeled, not entirely from the alcohol. Twice she had offered me spiritual equality in her quest—spiritual equality with St. Aya Ngomo. Once at St. Theda’s, once in the canyons of Utah. Twice I had rejected her. So she had used me how she could, as a frugal mason uses an irregular bit of rock. She had hauled me out to Utah to make contact with the plateau technologists, then dragged me to the Belt to find ngomite. She had used me to build her spaceship. And by the way, as a side issue, I had become an Orthodox Councillor and Governor of Ontario, with an entourage and three mistresses.

She had apologized to me. Not for the fall that came after her disappearance. That was incidental. But for having allowed me to become what I was: a man whose uses were at an end.

I stumbled out into Tergenius’s rank and untended garden and vomited.

Thomas has accompanied me to this miserable place, packing my telescope and then unpacking it again. Thomas is a holy man, who has given up what he loved most for God. Thomas, who, despite the warmth of his spirit, destroyed the woman who loved him in pursuit of his mission. It is in him that I see the true force of the Lord. Perhaps someday he too will be a saint.

Aya Ngomo used me, and I must glory in it. I have achieved earthly greatness and now, here, perhaps I will achieve spiritual greatness as well. She did the only thing she could do. I forgive her, though she will never know that I have.

I don’t think I will continue to live in these ruined barns for long with my unspeaking comrades. Soon enough I will retire to a cave somewhere in the Poconos, a hermit at long last. The entire Earth is being sucked into a swirling darkness, but I at least have my light. I look up at her. Her life will be infinite.

And mine? I shake in a palsy and tell myself it is just a chill. I will end my days staring through a telescope, my eyes drying out, living on baskets of food donated by the local faithful. One day they will arrive and find the previous basket uneaten. Glad at this final lifting of an unasked-for responsibility, they will go their own way in this new world.

I look up at the flame of her ship, hold in my breath, and feel myself fly.

The computer screen
lay on the desk like a piece of paper. Like fine calfskin parchment, actually—the software had that as a standard option. At the top, in block capitals, were the words
COMMENCE ENTRY
.

“Boy, you have a lot to learn.” Roman Maitland leaned back in his chair. “That’s something I would
never
say. Let that be your first datum.”

PREFERRED PROMPT?

“Surprise me.” Roman turned away to pour himself a cup of coffee from the thermos next to a stone bust of Archimedes. The bust had been given to him by his friend Gerald “to help you remember your roots,” as Gerald had put it. Archimedes desperately shouldered the disorganized stack of optical disks that threatened to sweep him from his shelf.

Roman turned back to the screen.
TELL ME A STORY
, it said. He barked a laugh. “Fair enough.” He stood up and slouched around his office. The afternoon sun slanted through the high windows. Through the concealing shrubs he could just hear the road in front of the house, a persistent annoyance. What had been a minor street when he built the house had turned into a major thoroughfare.

“My earliest memory is of my sister.” Roman Maitland was a stocky white-haired man with high-arched dark eyebrows. His wife Abigail claimed that with each passing year he looked more and more like Warren G. Harding. Roman had looked at the picture in the encyclopedia and failed to see the resemblance. He was much better looking than Harding.

“The hallway leading to the kitchen had red-and-green linoleum in a kind of linked circle pattern. You can cross-reference linoleum if you want.” The antique parchment remained blank. “My sister’s name is Elizabeth—Liza. I can see her. She has her hair in two tiny pink bows and is wearing a pale blue dress and black shoes. She’s sitting on the linoleum, playing with one of my trucks. One of my
new
trucks. I grab it away from her. She doesn’t cry. She just looks up at me with serious eyes. She has a pointy little chin. I don’t remember what happened after that. Liza lives in Seattle now. Her chin is pointy again.”

The wall under the windows was taken up with the black boxes of field memories. They linked into the processor inside the desk. The screen swirled and settled into a pattern of interlocking green-and-pink circles. “That’s not quite it. The diamond parts were a little more—” Another pattern appeared, subtly different. Roman stared at it in wonder. “Yes. Yes! That’s it. How did you know?” The computer, having linked to some obscure linoleum-pattern database on the network, blanked the screen. Roman wondered how many more of his private memories would prove to be publicly accessible.
TELL ME A STORY.

He pulled a book from the metal bookshelf. “My favorite book by Raymond Chandler is
The Little Sister.
I think Orfamay Quest is one of the great characters of literature. Have you read Chandler?”

I HAVE ACCESS TO THE ENTIRE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HOLDINGS.

“Boy, you’re getting gabby. But that’s not what I asked.”

I HAVE NEVER READ ANYTHING.

“Give it a try. Though in some ways Elmore Leonard is even better.” He slipped Chandler back on the shelf, almost dumping the unwieldy mass of books piled on top of the neatly shelved ones. “There are books here I’ve read a dozen times. Some I’ve
tried
reading a dozen times. Some I will someday read and some I suppose I’ll never read.” He squatted down next to a tall stack of magazines and technical offprints and started sorting them desultorily.

WHY READ SOMETHING MORE THAN ONCE?

“Why see a friend more than once? I’ve often thought that I would like to completely forget a favorite book.” From where he squatted, the bookshelves loomed threateningly. He’d built his study with a high ceiling, knowing how the stuff would pile up. There was a dead plant at the top of the shelf nearest the desk. He frowned. How long had that been there? “Then I could read it again for the first time. The thought’s a little frightening. What if I didn’t
like
it? I’m not the person who read it for the first time, after all. Just as well, I guess, that it’s an experiment I can’t try. Abigail likes to reread Jane Austen. Particularly
Emma.
” He snorted. “But that’s not what you’re interested in, is it?” His stomach rumbled. “I’m hungry. It’s time for lunch.”

BON APPETIT.

“Thank you.”

Roman had built his house with exposed posts and beams and protected it outside with dark brick and granite. Abigail had filled it with elegant clean-lined furniture, which was much less obtrusive about showing its strength. Roman had only reluctantly ceded control of everything but his study and his garage workshop. He’d grown to like it. He could never have remembered to water so many plants, and the cunning arrangement of bright yellow porcelain vases and darkly rain-swept watercolors was right in a way he couldn’t have achieved.

At the end of the hallway, past the kitchen’s clean flare, glowed the rectangle of the rear screen door. Abigail bent over her flowers, fuzzy through its mesh like a romantic memory, a sun hat hiding her face. Her sun-dappled dress gleamed against the dark garden.

Roman pressed his nose against the screen, smelling its forgotten rust. Work gloves protecting her hands, his wife snipped flowers with a pruner and placed them in a basket on her arm. A blue ribbon accented the sun hat. Beyond her stretched the perennial bed, warmed by its reflecting stone wall, and the crazy-paving walk that led to the carp pond. White anemones and lilies glowed amid the ferns, Abigail’s emulation of Vita Sackville-West’s white garden. A few premature leaves, anxious for the arrival of autumn, flickered through the sun and settled in the grass.

“I’ll have lunch ready in a minute.” She didn’t look up at him, so what spoke was the bobbing and amused sun hat. “I could hear your stomach all the way from the white garden.” She stripped off the gardening gloves.

“I’ll make lunch.” Roman felt nettled. Why should she assume he was staring at her just because he was hungry?

As he regarded the white kitchen cabinets, collecting his mind and remembering where the plates, tableware, and napkins were, Abigail swept past him and set the table in a quick flurry of activity. Finding a vase and putting flowers into it would have been a contemplative activity of some minutes for Roman. She performed the task in one motion.

She was a sharp-featured woman. Her hair was completely white, and she usually kept it tied up in a variety of braids. Her eyes were large and blue. She looked at her husband.

“What are you doing up there in your office? Did you invent a robot confessor or something?”

“You haven’t been—”

“No, Roman, I haven’t been eavesdropping.” She was indulgent. “But you do have a piercing voice, particularly when you get excited. Usually you talk to your computer only when you’re swearing at it.”

“It’s my new project.” Roman hadn’t told Abigail a thing about it, and he knew that bothered her. She hated big-secret little-boy projects. She was the kind of girl who’d always tried to break into the boys’ clubhouse and beat them at their games. He really should have told her. But the thought made him uncomfortable.

“It’s kind of egomaniacal, actually. You know that computer I’m beta-testing for Hyperneuron?”

“That thing it took them a week to move in? Yes, I know it. They scratched the floor in two places. You should hire a better class of movers.”

“We’d like to. It’s a union problem, I’ve told you that. Anyway, it’s a wide-aspect parallel processor with a gargantuan set of field memories. Terabytes worth.”

She placidly spread jam on a piece of bread. “I’ll assume all that jargon actually means something. Even if it does, it doesn’t tell me why you’re off chatting with that box instead of with me.”

He covered her hand with his. “I’m sorry, Abigail. You know how it is.”

“I know, I know.” She sounded irritated but turned her hand over and curled her fingers around his.

“I’m programming the computer with a model of a human personality. People have spent a lot of time and energy analyzing what they call ‘computability’: how easily problems can be solved. But there’s another side to it: what problems
should
be solved. Personality can be defined by the way problems are chosen. It’s an interesting project.”

“And whose personality are you using?” She raised an eyebrow, ready to be amused at the answer.

He grimaced, embarrassed. “The most easily accessible one: my own.”

She laughed. Her voice was still-untarnished silver. “Can the computer improve over the original?”

“Improve
how
, I would like to know.”

“Oh, just as a random example, could it put clothes, books, and magazines
away
when it’s done with them? Just a basic sense of neatness. No major psychological surgery.”

“I tried that. It turned into a psychotic killer. Seems that messiness is an essential part of a healthy personality. Kind of an interesting result, really...”

She laughed again, and he felt embarrassed that he hadn’t told her before. After all, they had been married over thirty years. But he couldn’t tell her all of it. He couldn’t tell her how afraid he was.

❖

“So what’s the problem with it?” Roman, irritated, held the phone receiver against his ear with his shoulder and leafed through the papers in his file drawer. His secretary had redone it all with multicolored tabs, and he had no idea what they meant. “Isn’t the paperwork in order?”

“The paperwork’s in order.” The anonymous female voice from Financial was matter-of-fact. “It just doesn’t look at all like your signature, Dr. Maitland. And this is an expensive contract. Did you sign it yourself?”

“Of course I signed it.” He had no memory of it. Why not? It sounded important.

“But this signature—”

“I injured my arm playing tennis a few weeks ago.” He laughed nervously, certain she would catch the lie. “It must have affected my handwriting.” But was it a lie? He swung his arm. The muscles weren’t right. He had strained his forearm, trying to change his serve. Old muscles are hard to retrain. The more he thought about it, the more sense it made. If only he could figure out what she was talking about.

“All right then, Dr. Maitland. Sorry to bother you.”

“That’s quite all right.” He desperately wanted to ask her the subject of the requisition, but it was too late.

After fifteen minutes he found it, a distributed-network operating-system software package. Extremely expensive. Of course, of course. He read over it. It made sense now. But was that palsied scrawl at the bottom really his signature?