Free The Breath of Suspension by Alexander Jablokov Page A

and walks quickly away. She wears a shawl, like a woman already growing old. But she bounces her auburn hair once, a brief flash of the old flirt, and is around a corner and gone.
    I turn back to the monastery and draw in a breath. Thomas stands beneath the old apple tree. Tears run down his cheeks.
    “You should have come to talk with her,” I say. “It would have made her happy.”
    He shakes his head. “That’s impossible. I’ve made my choice, Brother Vikram.” He doesn’t try to wipe his tears. “I still love her.”
    So all along, as I’ve been explicating my wonderful life to this poor young man, who respects me for all I have lost, he has made a sacrifice that I could never imagine. Love! How could he ever give it up?
    “Help me, Thomas. My bones are tired.”
    He puts a strong arm under my shoulder and leads me back to the monastery.
    “I’m leaving, Thomas. When we get back to St. Sergius’s I am requesting transfer to the Skete of St. Nil Sorsky. You know it? It’s in the foothills of the Poconos. A howling wilderness. A tiny place with only two other monks and one lay brother.”
    Thomas doesn’t seem surprised. “Do you have a spiritual reason for the change, Brother Vikram?”
    “Would you believe me if I said the bustle and pomp of St. Sergius’s were beginning to offend me? Of course not. Perhaps it’s because you’ve taught me something.”
    “And what have I taught you?”
    “How to face the past and understand it. I don’t think I’ve been entirely clear to you. But that’s because it took me so long to understand it myself.”
Earth Orbit, 2147
    Aya Ngomo tricked us all. I had always underestimated her deviousness: the vulpine cleverness of true holiness, which always knows what is necessary.
    It took several years to build the ship incorporating the new fusion drive based on the minerals she had found. Both an act of religious devotion and a technological proof of concept, it was a dominating high-visibility act. Tergenius took charge and rose ever upward. I rose with him. Somehow, I had never managed to disentangle myself from Tergenius. That tedious bureaucratic man, his silly droopy moustache now white, seemed able to dance through the maze of Orthodox Imperial administration in a way that I, far cleverer and better liked, never could. So I held on to his belt and was pulled along behind him.
    Aya Ngomo retired to St. Catherine’s in the Sinai. A laboratory was built for her there, experts sent to the desert to do her bidding. There she assessed the meaning of ngomite. And that was indeed what it was called. Try as she might, her name, xenite, was never accepted by anyone. Eventually she gave up trying to change it.
    Besides being beautiful, ngomite provided an easy way to control and manage a fusion flame, almost as if its crystal structure was intended for such a use. No one really cared to speculate. Orthodox theology had no place for Aya’s Ancient Ones. Once ngomite’s structure was analyzed, it proved a remarkably useful substance. Other deposits were eventually found in the Asteroid Belt, though no one ever came across the location of her original strike. That was a mystery that she still keeps to this day. But ngomite was a godsend.
    This new spacecraft was nothing like the old pile of junk that had hauled us out to the Belt. This was a sleek, beautiful creation. As a signal personal honor, Aya Ngomo herself was the pilot on the first full test of an ngomite-controlled fusion spaceship.
    I talked to her one last time before her test flight. It was in a tiny room in Boston, not far from the Orthodox Cathedral I had once pretended I had seen.
    I was by this time a Full Councillor. For the past five years I had been Governor of Ontario. When I came I arrived with proper pomp, escorted by ceremonial horse troops from the north, in dark red uniforms. We made quite a brave show on Boylston Street. I had brought my favorite mistress, Tanya, with me, and installed her in an