Dogs appeared, so to speak, either side. When Crospinal looked back up, father was staring directly at him. Dark eyes watched him, brimming with fear of the impending nothingness and resignation of its inevitability.
“You’re awake.” Crospinal’s heart thudded, a barrage of his own hopes and pain and guilt—
But there was blood inside father’s mouth, dripping down, and father’s gaze turned darker, lost focus, like dim lights dimming more. His head, looking tiny atop the padded collar around the neckpiece of his uniform, lolled. Tubes shifted. He had said nothing. Crospinal thought of his girlfriend yet again, of her misaligned gaze. Had falling in love with her been the betrayal that caused this demise? It seemed important to remember details of his relationship but details eluded him. A transfer of allegiance, away from father, making Crospinal the agent of this change? He ground his teeth together as a black clot slid and hung from father’s boney chin, the throat working, trying to swallow—
“Sometimes . . . I look around,” father whispered. “I don’t know who lives here, in this house.”
“What?” Crospinal leaned forward to hear better. “What house? What’s a house?”
“The furniture.” Father’s chest shuddered; tubes rustled; the clot broke free and fell to his chest, where it slid farther. The material of his uniform went to work, reclaiming it. “Furniture is upside down. But then I stare for a bit longer—because I can’t move from this spot—and I see the same thing. I live here. This is my house.” Showing red-flecked teeth and trying, unsuccessfully, to lick those dry lips. “No furniture is upside down, is it? Is it, boy?”
“Dad, there’s a helmet, in the dispenser at thin tree. I saw it coming in. A blue one, with a clear visor. Perfect. You know? Should I get it? I could put it on.”
“This is a nice place . . .”
“Dad? Would you like me to get a fresh helmet? And put it on?”
“I lost my way . . .” So quiet, almost a breath. “For the longest time I couldn’t conceive. There was a man, next door, when I was a child. But I’ve reached endtime now.”
“This isn’t endtime.” Though Crospinal did not believe his own words. What was he supposed to say? He did not understand. At times, father had known so much about the world, yet at others, like now, seemed to know absolutely nothing. Hard to imagine him as a younger man, in the state he had often described as newborn, in an adult body, with instincts to run, find a gate, raise a family. Haunted by his broken memories, he would call the pen forth, to rise into place around him. No haptics existed from before Crospinal was born, or, if they did, they had been kept away. He relied on instructions, ramblings, and asides. Struggling to understand everything these days, he wondered how father’s brief speech and signs of life could be cause for joy, for celebration, because Crospinal felt no emotion akin to joy, nor did he think, as his girlfriend turned away from him, and father was leaving him alone forever, that he would ever have the capacity.
“Son,” said father suddenly, but when Crospinal looked into the black eyes once more he saw no passing flicker of days past, no lessons, no guidance, no love, just the impending victory of darkness.
The world juddered. Maybe it was chuckling at them. Crospinal stood. His joints popped loudly in the silence and brought, at last, a flood of tears.
Father had begun to snore.
One of the first actions young Crospie had been asked to attempt, in that year, was to turn a brass dial in the wheelroom, directly behind the pen. The wheelroom was a chamber of hard, grey walls and polymethyl floor. This task had never been tried before—for obvious reasons. Touching the thumb pad of the contraption that occupied the centre of the wheelroom went all right: the blue panels activated, the way they should have, under the Dacron layer of his mitt, and the icon—an arrow—appeared. Yet the mechanism of the dial itself was seized pretty good or had not properly emerged in the first place. It would not budge.
The local controller swooped overhead to get a better look.
Penetrants Crospinal was directed to apply took several hours to soak in. These were not toluene, but a glutinous solution father called oil. Crospinal found the canister of oil in a cupboard, also sealed, but which he was able to tug open. The canister possessed a form of very mild intelligence and was shy, reluctant to come out. But a canister had to believe enough in determinism not to resist too strenuously to a human’s grip. Spirits and dogs and other apparitions crowded about, excited, encouraged by small victories. Tension in the wheelroom was palpable. Father watched from many places that day, from many angles. Crospinal raised high the canister, feeling foolish.
There was a long list of chores to attempt, a lot of expectations to alter, or assert against, the landscape.
He got low-viscosity oil down the front of his uniform, which was repelled by the neoprene, but some made it through his shield, and into his mouth. Even after electrostatic cleaning, which he let flow past his gums to scrub his insides, he would never lose, nor forget, the taste of oil.
Crospinal never did learn what would have happened had he actually managed to budge the dial. Stop something else from breaking down? Change the view out the portholes? Make life go on forever and girlfriends stay in love?
He felt blankets of futility settle over him, over everything he touched.
Spirits watched more and more forlornly while Crospinal fumbled and faltered. He groaned, raised blisters on the skin of his hands (which were tended to by his mitts), and he ground his teeth together. Father eventually told him to stop. Give up. A very dejected voice. Stop, Crospie. It’s not important. We’ll try again next year. . . .
Dogs howled and offered support but ultimately could do nothing.
Which was part of the problem.
Every task on the list, or so it seemed to Crospinal, was, to greater or lesser degrees, equally pointless: opening a cap to release green fumes from a pipe; bending a tiny rubber seal in an access room so the two ends of a hose could never align; cleaning fresh polymers from the gutter around a metallic floor plate in some out-of-the-way dead end.
A handful of chores were accomplished.
Most failed.
And nothing changed, not for the better anyhow. Father’s disappointment, which he could not hide, no matter how much he talked, or smiled, or reassured Crospinal that everything would all be okay, grew steadily. Apparitions became sombre, including the dogs, as the pen subsided into longer and longer bouts of silence. Crospinal felt the pressures growing, pushing him down, and away.
Before too long, blood flecked father’s spit.
SOJOURN
Struggling along the walkway toward the dream cabinets, head down, ruminating as he looked through the grille, Crospinal was somewhat surprised to recognize where he’d been heading. Most days he managed to get through with just one dose. He’d promised the dogs he would sleep in his own daybed and keep father company, but searching himself for the will to turn around, return to father’s side, he found the will was not there. This did not make him feel much better. He did not turn around.
On a ledge below, arrays of ambients flickered, as if trying to tell him something.
Engines boomed distantly.
There were seven dream cabinets, side by side. Before each was a strip of green carpet, soft, even through the worn soles of Crospinal’s boots. A green floor like no other. He stood and wriggled his toes against the rare luxury and felt his soles activate and briefly stopped wondering about everything he was powerless to affect.
Four of the cabinets had been smashed by an ancient girder, a massive beam, fallen from above, neither plastics nor polymers, long before Crospinal had discovered this place. Clearly, there had always been cataclysm. Maybe even before the pen had formed. Some great force had once struck, knocking fundamental structures from their arcane configuration.
The girder angled upward, where it came to rest, having cleaved masses of composites, none of whic
h had returned to its original form, and puncturing floor tiles, too, which still bore evidence of trauma. Twisted coils of stunted growth bloomed in bizarre formations, like the yellow flowers that sometimes opened at the base of trees in the garden. Perhaps the extent of the damage, and the age of the material out here—and peculiar composition—were part of the reason why the world had not cleaned up the area or taken molecules back into its pool of resources.
Barely visible from where Crospinal stood, staring up—on the ceiling—were other, similar beams, dangling from their roost. There were no mists today. The fractured area looked like clusters of gossamer threads; up close, the fallen girder was as big around as the biggest food dispenser, and must have weighed many tons.
Had something tried to come in?
Or had something left?
The breach, if it had ever existed, closed long ago.
Only two dream cabinets remained intact, sealed from the inside, and could not be opened by any amount of tugging or prying. (No surprise there, Crospinal supposed.) Patches of light around the door frame flickered cool blues and reds. The last cabinet in the row—accessible by stooping under the extremity of the fallen girder—glistened with yellow, and was where Crospinal went to dream.
As he ducked, from a tiny cabin at the end of the corridor—too small to contain a console, with no periscope, no thumb plates either—came the controller, bobbing and listing.
“Hey,” said Crospinal. “Light.”
Ambient illumination increased briefly, flickering, and dimmed.
“Thanks,” he said, without sarcasm. “Good job.” Because this controller, like many, was earnest, eager to please, and Crospinal did not want it to feel bad. (Others, like the one out by harmer’s corner, understood a larger vocabulary, and were almost as smart as a low-end elemental, but were ultimately less interested in fulfilling Crospinal’s desires. They were sarcastic at times and rude. Crospinal, naturally, preferred these subservient, if somewhat challenged, versions. He felt an affinity.)
The upper part of the door to his dream cabinet had actually suffered damage during the girder’s fall: the frame, which was burnished polycarbonates, had bent, split away from the body of the cabinet, so the entire device hissed quietly and incessantly and could never lock. Not like the other two. The door’s seal was broken and, for this reason, granted him egress.
The warm handle slipped into Crospinal’s mitt smoothly, as it always did, moving with fluid grace before he’d flexed; he felt the quiet click and a shimmer pass up his arm, a sensation so similar to the console’s hum that, for a second, he often, absurdly, expected his girlfriend to appear.
The icon was a person, in uniform and helmet, leaning back at an impossible angle, rotating.
Why was she pushing him away? Had he truly once known the reason why she didn’t want to see him anymore? He needed his girlfriend more than ever, during father’s last days, but was unable to keep her affection. He vowed to continue putting his arms into every console he knew until she loved him in return. Until she loved him like she had before. She might be cross when he tried to conjure her, but that anger would surely pass, because he was Crospinal, after all, and who else was the world for? Who else had hands, and feet, and a heart? Who else was alive?
He opened the door of the dream cabinet as far as he could. Vapours escaped, curling toward his face. Crospinal licked the knuckles of his mitt, tongue crackling, picked at his clogged nostril, Dacron sizzling, and breathed in so deeply his shield went opaque. When he exhaled, and breathed more deeply again, he started to feel better, a growing sense of peace, of clarity, as if meaning or a point might eventually be found to the moments that fell by, one after the other, into the murky past.
Turning, he squeezed backward into the cabinet, pressing himself against the padding, which crumbled where he touched, and pattered down, behind the covering. Pain tickled along Crospinal’s side, where he had recently scraped himself. The rough wall in the transfer tube had actually ruptured the already-thinned nylon of his old uniform. He touched the split now, at his elbow, felt the insulation beneath, and his skin and bones beneath that, surprised by his own lack of personal maintenance. Small wonder he’d been dumped. Yet, inside the dream cabinet, Crospinal felt all wounds heal, ruptured cells rebind. Even his knees were soothed. Who needed a girlfriend, or father, or love from either? Tranquility descended.
With his eyes closed, drifting away, Crospinal smelled the dream coming, a strong one this time.
Unseen lights flared around the faulty seal. One by one, on the inside, flickering blue scanned over Crospinal—who, asleep, managed nonetheless to hold the door shut. Vapours rose before his face like ghosts. There was a tic at his cheek. The cabinet’s icon flared and winked out.
Later, in a state of heavy grogginess, he understood only that something had gone wrong, not where he was, nor even who. His head pounded and his mouth was very dry. Gradually, Crospinal remembered climbing to the harrier, and the events that followed. The throb of his knees was like a malevolent heart. No lights were on. He groped the lining of the door, just inches from his face, but when he found and tried to pull the handle, nothing happened; he gripped inert plastic.
Trapped.
Already his breath was jagged in his chest and his stomach churned sour. He released a trickle of urine, and his processor, reacting, was startlingly loud. He heard a quieter hiss, and felt chilled, on his nape. How long could he last in here?
He took a small hit from his siphon, but the uniform’s water had no additives and did nothing to help him relax.
Moving his knees carefully against the door, Crospinal braced himself and pressed outwards; the pain was exquisite, but instead of the door giving way, the padding behind him collapsed farther. Absurdly, he shouted for help:
“Something out there? Hello? I’m stuck!”
But no apparition could come this far from the pen. Even if one could, they were projections, and could do nothing to help.
The remote sound of running fluids, and the clink-clink of hardened material, rapping lightly against the shell of the cabinet.
In both palms, against the inside of the curved surface of the door, he felt vibrations.
Crospinal was sure he had never mentioned the discovery and use of these dream cabinets to father, or the peace he felt when he closed himself inside. Like the harrier, this place was another of duplicity, another wedge to drive between him and his dad. Even from his girlfriend he kept secrets. Well, now his secrets had trapped him, literally, and would soon kill him.
He pounded the interior, but when he felt himself tipping slowly backward, he realized with a surge of relief that this was all a dream’s beginning, or continuation, and he should just let the dream take him where the dream wanted to take him. Knowledge eased him of fear. He stopped pounding, let his hands drop to his sides, and smiled.
A dream . . .
Delirious freefall. Seconds later, gentle impact. Crospinal felt no discomfort, perhaps a splash, and then he was bobbing, within the dark cabinet, on his back.
Floating peacefully.
He closed his eyes again.
Welcome, passenger, said a soothing voice. Please remain still for a moment or two. Stats seven point five and rising. Sleep, if you wish, passenger. Sleep.
“Okay,” said Crospinal. He had heard this voice from sundry devices, but never as clear, not at the dream cabinets, and had never been called passenger before. If the term was familiar, context eluded him. Nonetheless, Crospinal drifted off, rather peacefully, obediently, until silence crept in and gently woke him. He stared up at an infinity so black and humbling that he felt tears form in the corners of his eyes. He put his shaking elbows on the rim of the dream cabinet and sat up.
The door, obviously, had finally opened: the vault not fully black, he realized now, for there were tiny glimmers, indicating a ceiling more distant than any ceiling could ever be. And he saw, af
ter a few moments, more and more pinpricks of white, spattered against the ebon, some tiny, some infinitesimally smaller. Indeed, the longer he sat there, watching in awe, the greater the array of lights until it seemed that countless glimmers arced overhead, and Crospinal marvelled at how he had not initially seen this magnitude, let alone lived his life, thus far, without experiencing such a wondrous sight.
There were no boundaries here, just an endless dark sea and the blackness above. Silvered on the water, the myriad points of white reflected, enhanced the yearning that spread out inside his body and took it beyond, leaking from his pores, leaking from his uniform, attempting to stitch him into the vista. Was he in father’s memories?
The air was body temperature. No breeze. He breathed easily, filters silent, draining himself of aspects that had once made him the lonely, bitter boy called Crospinal. Elements of rejection escaped; lingering elements of his sister’s departure. Elements of father, and their shared loss, and pain (though his grotesque knees rose, looming, either side).
To his left, other dream cabinets also floated on the water. Unlike the one he sat in, these remained sealed. Arrayed in a procession, they were all moving at the same rate across the placid sea. Without looking, Crospinal knew other cabinets followed his. In the direction he was headed, he could see even more, preceding, converging in the distance with those in the other lines. Was there one cabinet for each light overhead? They seemed as infinite.
Transfixed by the streams of cabinets dovetailing on the water ahead, he hardly noticed a thin line of light at the horizon beginning to intensify. Soon, webbing of cracks in the neoprene on his sleeves appeared, shadows of the veins on the backs of his hands twisting under the thin layer of his mitts. He gripped the rails to see better: a dark mass had coalesced, a silhouetted intrusion from the solid world, ending this water, or perhaps just a reprieve. Backlit by the glow fanning out across the surface: there was something large up ahead.
In a landscape of chaos, he could recall, so vividly, in a sudden flash, the way father had once been but would never be again: a young man, in his clean and efficient uniform, able to stand in his pen, and pace with vigour inside the limits of the tubes and cables that tethered the gate to his head. Father had known the answer to many questions, could send apparitions out, attract elementals, and dispensers, had been able to provide tutorials, instructions, anecdotes and warnings.
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