“Not for a long time.”
“I was sure surprised to find you, mortally wounded, in the debris.”
“The pen’s gone.” This wasn’t a question. He was able to move his hands again, and he ran his mitt, cupped, down his face, but the material did very little.
“Shit happens,” said the elemental, as if this explained everything. “That’s what they used to say. Another expression. Events occur. You’re lucky I found you.”
The metal rat, thought Crospinal, babbled like a retarded dog. Unlike any other elementals he’d known. Not like taciturn Fox and Bear. Either way, the rat didn’t make much sense. “You’re a strange machine,” said Crospinal.
Coming closer, movements fluid, the elemental was utterly silent. “You’re the one rigged up like a, like a fucking sailor, transponders stripped, a trained monkey. You call me strange?”
Crospinal said, “My father was in there. He taught me everything.”
“If, by father, you mean a man from whose loins your seed sprung, then I’ve left a wedge of shrapnel lodged in your brain.”
“Are you making fun of me?” He had been shooting for sympathy, or to make the metal rat feel bad, not hostility.
“There are mysteries aplenty onboard, maybe miracles, too, but rest assured you never had a father.”
Crospinal was enraged. “I lived with him,” he shouted, “and his ghosts, and his dogs! I lived in his range until the year of, whatever, of independent thinking.” He had been about to shout about Luella but thought, suddenly, that doing so would not be a good idea. Impressions of Luella’s face, and those of his dad, cycled, commingling, through his mind. He was breathing heavily. There had to be a way out of this dumb canister. What Crospinal really needed was to find a console, and a set of holes. He needed to confer. Or hit up a dream cabinet. Was his girlfriend, he wondered, in trouble? There had to be some good reason why she was treating Crospinal so poorly, and why the angry woman had come in her stead. Was she roaming inside the walls? Was she watching over him?
“Wake up,” said the metal rat. “You’ve slept long enough.”
“What are you talking about? I’m not even tired.”
“You were sleeping.”
“No I wasn’t.” He placed his mitt gently, fingers spread wide apart, against his bare chest. The old capillaries struggled. Pushing his hand down to his stomach, fingertips sensitive under the Dacron, to rest below his navel, where his pubis began. He felt the catheter twist, as he took a leak. But nothing else. His pain had gone. All of it. Blown clear from his body. In a much quieter voice, he said, “What have you done to me, rat?”
“I’m no rat.” The elemental’s eyes never altered. “I’m abiotic. Can’t you tell? You can’t tell the difference? What kind of number’s been done on you? I’m a medical professional. Search and rescue, out in the bay. A sophisticated contrivance with a mental capacity ten times yours.”
Crospinal tried to hold both hands up, to placate, but struggled to coordinate the move. “I meant no insult.” Lifting his head extended his reach, so he could bang awkwardly on the rim of the canister with his loose fists, causing the thin material to boom: the numerals, at his waist, changed rapidly with each pound before resuming their previous setting. The icon flickered. “Can you zip me up? Zip me up. I can’t deal with this.”
“You really want to keep that suit on? It’s not helping. I can get you another one. I know what size you are. I’ll have a dispenser here in two minutes.”
“I like this one just fine.”
“It’s poisoning you.”
“I don’t care.”
“You can get a fresh one. Helmet and all. Fresh as a daisy. You can play dress up. Now please stop hitting that. There’s a delicate mechanism in there. You’re like a Neanderthal.”
Crospinal stopped banging. “I know you’re not a rat. I’m not an idiot. But when I woke up, I was thinking about rats. You know what they are? The animal? I got confused.”
“Of course I know what a rat is. Rattus rattus, anachronism extraordinaire. Like you.”
Overcome by a wave of exhaustion, however, Crospinal had closed his eyes.
The elemental said: “While you heal, you have a few options. Live with pain, of course, au naturel. That’s always the simplest. Or I can treat you with mild doses of psychoactivity, to get you back on track. You’re no stranger to them, I see. I can offer you wide selections of entertainment.”
“Like what? Good haptics?” But Crospinal grated the last words from between his teeth, for elements of pain returned, though not as throbbing or as localized as the pain he had previously lived with. After his brief respite, the return of any discomfort was depressing and rather acute. His lower limbs tingled, but not in a good way. Still, he could move his toes now, inside the canister. At least he knew they were still there. “Could you list the entertainments?”
“That would take hours.”
Farther down the hall, under a formation of recent growth, the edges of beams were visible; once, this area was like the pen.
The elemental said, “May I ask you a personal question?”
“Sure.”
“How old are you?”
“I’m twelve.”
“Twelve what? Years? That’s pretty hard to believe. What sort of year were you using as a scale? You’re way too big for twelve batch years. You seem like seventeen, maybe eighteen?”
“There was the year of long walks, and the year of exercise, the year of action, and the year of growth.”
“What are you talking about? Your sailor did a number on you.”
“Leave him out of this. Just show me a haptic already.” A surprising tear had run down Crospinal’s cheek, cooling by the cartilage of his left ear. The shield thrown up by his collar had not recovered from the dream of submersion and did nothing. He cleared his throat. “Show me a recording of what happened to the pen.”
“Where you came from? That’s pretty dry stuff. You choose this as a distraction?”
Crospinal concurred, and the show began, with blinding white flares bursting silently against a backdrop so black it was an absence of light and life. He was somewhere high above, watching, hovering there, like a ghost. Was he back in the realm of the dream cabinets? Were creatures hunting him?
A structure of delicate latticework grew incrementally, threads juxtaposed, an imposition on the dark. Was there water below? He would have looked but could not move, nor was he sure he possessed eyes to rub. He seemed to be nothing but frustrated energy, floating, unable to determine scale of any sort.
There was no sound, except the distant thrum of blood through veins. Each flare caused an addition to the creeping growth, a web of thin beams, getting thicker, closer. The magnitude of the artifact was implied only by the vastness and quietude of the black—
If he was transplanted back to the dream, with the ebony vault, were the creatures waiting to tear him from the booth, to kill him?
A quick scene change left him with vertigo:
The images of people, a group, seen from behind, maybe seven or so, each wearing a dark uniform, like the one his girlfriend and, more recently, the angry woman had worn. They strode purposefully down the length of a hexagonal corridor composed entirely of geodesic beams. They wore amber helmets, snug to their heads. All geometry about them was uniform, hard-edged. The void was gone. Were these manifestations, living within the structures of the world, seen in their own time and location? Was his girlfriend among them?
Maybe he was the apparition now, manifesting in their place?
Using hand gestures, the figures were guiding a dolly, the stature of which Crospinal had not seen before, which bobbed gently among the tangle of legs.
At each corner of the dolly, a quavering icon of two hands, pressed together. And on the dolly was a drone, like the ones that inhabited the abyss, off the catwalks, but three times the size. The drone
rotated slowly, glimmering, bathed in a reservoir full of pale grey liquid that rolled over the surface as it cleared the tank, like mercury.
While he watched from on high, a dozen such drones bobbed beneath him, on a dozen such dollies, guided by a dozen teams, movements becoming faster, reaching an accelerating blur, until the last of the manifestations vanished, almost comically. More jumps in time. Something was wrong with the projection. He wanted to tell the metal rat to stop the so-called entertainment but no part of him responded to his wishes. Flickers came and went. There was a final flash, but black, and the visual of the hall transformed as if bubbling, grew folds of composite, and pores filled with ambients, which bloomed before going out. Ghosts passed by in a blur.
He hovered there, watching.
Static. The long, fading corridor, coruscating, twisting, became a passage of buboes and dripping toluene. Data curtains, sweeping almost too fast to see, then no activity, no movement at all.
The tear finally fell from his ear lobe. He felt the trail drying, the minute tightness on his skin, saline deposited there.
“Oops,” said the metal rat, standing very near to Crospinal’s face. “That wasn’t what you asked for at all, was it?”
“No,” he said. “You’re messing with me.”
“An honest mistake. That was from creation series. Loading of the quorum. Before everything went nuts. Though why they depict it in space I’ll never know. Your selection was, well, overridden, I guess. Which is weird, but nothing works the way it does in training material. On the other hand, your bones have healed quite nicely. Would you like to try walking?”
“Already?” Crospinal looked inward: pain lingered but once again had lessened. He tried to move his legs and felt them shift inside the confines of the canister: no searing burn, no jabs, though he had tensed for them. Perhaps the elemental was telling elements of truth. “I’m better,” he said. “I’ll try to take a step.”
“Okay, good. But not here. I have to take you back. I told you.”
“Why can’t you just let me out?”
“You’re a bit of a, well, special case. You must admit. My colleagues and I need to confer.”
“About what? What colleagues? Machines, you mean? Smart machines?”
The metal rat hesitated. “Maybe this is a good time for you to give me some more information about your father.”
“Leave father out of this. Have some respect. He was a virtuous man. And because of what I did, because of who I am, my father is now—” But Crospinal could not say the last word, for it had jammed in his throat. Suddenly, surprisingly, emotions were rising up, waves of them getting wedged behind the blockage. They would burst free soon. He would burst. His lips trembled. Crospinal tried to tell himself death was only a word, just one word, like all the others, yet he could not convince himself. Everything that had once been father expired when father’s heart stopped. This could be the only truth. Death was final, one last insult, and nothing existed beyond. The world closed back in, and the light was snuffed. (Even before death, as illness sunk into father’s bones, and started to show in his eyes, the pen shrank. . . .)
This strange, distant hall was no place to rail against indignities. The horror and pain of wasting away. The end of time. He closed his eyes again. Energy to keep going, the experiences that shaped life: what was the point of learning, accumulating wisdom, growing, planning? All that work and struggle and progress for nothing.
Now floods overwhelmed him as the dams inside broke. He tried to say, one more time, that father was dead, but released, instead, a miserable wail that rose plaintively and hung in the air.
“Please!” His nose ran (crusts in there softened). His cheeks were soaked now. “Just let me out! I haven’t done anything wrong. Ever. I only wanted to explore, to find solace, or understanding, or whatever, because remaining in the pen became a sort of oppression—
“Here we go,” said the metal rat, disinterested. “Ready?”
Before Crospinal had a chance to register what the elemental had said, still bawling, the canister started to float, rising, perhaps, to the height of his own hip, had he been able to stand. He was blubbering like the baby he’d once been. Armature had snickered out, to support his head and shoulders. He could no longer see the elemental, but he heard it for the first time, scurrying underneath, making sounds like a real rat, he thought, keeping up as the canister moved down the hall. Peering over the flange at his waist, straining to keep his head lifted, to see where they were headed, he passed under ambients. Fresh tubes of carbon hung low, dripping. An eye of the world followed his helpless progress.
“Are there more people? I had a sister once.” He felt a tightness in his chest. “Her name was Luella. Not a haptic. A girl. But like me. Who was that I saw in the escape? In the dark uniforms? There was some kind of— There were twelve huge drones.”
“The paladins.”
“What?”
“The quorum. I told you.”
“Was that something that happened a long time ago?” Crospinal tried to turn onto his side. “Or was that some other place?”
“You need to regulate your breathing,” said the metal rat. “You’re getting worked up. You’ll need to be tranked again, if you continue. My advice would be to ramble less and ask fewer stupid questions. And keep your names to yourself, and the name of your so-called sister.”
The canister bobbed along, banking gently, and entered the aperture to a small, discreet station. His anger at the elemental’s attitude about his family broke, transformed, and settled into something else entirely. As the door slid shut behind him, a controller swooped in through the crack.
Crospinal, with a surge of anxiety, had seen the console: periscope and thumb plates, thin flap covering the twin holes.
“I’m bleeding,” he said.
“There’s no bleeding.”
“Something’s wrong. I can feel blood, running down my calf inside this thing. The uniform’s not dealing. I’m bleeding!”
The metal rat leaped up onto the canister, and leaped again, onto Crospinal’s bare chest. Delicate feet caught on his skin as the elemental walked, but the machine was very light. Crospinal looked into the unreadable red eyes and got a whiff of cordite and ozone before snatching the metal rat, rather easily—much easier than he’d thought—in his fist.
Shrieking, “What the fuck?”
Thin titanium arms offered little resistance. Crospinal clutched the rat tighter. His weakness was gone.
“I’m trying to help,” said the metal rat. “You’re insane!”
The controller orbited, nonplussed.
But the chassis of the small elemental was not crushing easily, so Crospinal took one of the legs with his free hand and twisted it backward, buckling titanium until a thin wire tendon snapped, stinging the flesh of his palm, marking the mitt there with a white slash as the Dacron parted.
“Stop,” said the rat. “Please. For fuck’s sake. You’re crazy! You’ve wrecked my leg!”
“Release me,” Crospinal hissed. “I asked you ten times and you never let me out.”
“You’ll fuck everything up. Stop!”
A small bolt popped off. The elemental made feeble sounds. Green coolants dribbled.
“I won’t be able to fix myself.” Even the voice was faint now, garbled. “I should have let you die again. I tried to help. Without me, you’re a goner. You’re making a big mistake. You’re—”
“I’ll pull you apart, you piece of shit.”
But as Crospinal sought the battery with his fingertips—fumbling in the confounding miniature interior of the machine’s underside—some form of anesthesia was administered and he blacked out.
The year of disparate viewpoints was perhaps his happiest, in relative terms. He had yet to learn father would die, and that he, too, would one day disperse into nothing. Disappointment over failed tasks had not soured the atmosphere
in the pen. No girlfriend, no dream cabinets: a simpler life.
Crospinal would sit on the prayer mat (in his own fashion, legs splayed), rubbing at his knees as the lessons played.
Whenever Fox or Bear took him to the garden for recreation, Crospinal would have fun annoying the surly elementals, who could, at least, throw a ball. Spirits knew hide and seek really well but that was about it. Crospinal was able to get around pretty efficiently; the discomfort had not yet reached levels it achieved a mere year or so later. Young Crospie, at this point in his life, came closest to sensing positive elements of a potential future, as if possibilities were available and opening up before him, but never made the leap. He felt, if not a sense of wonder, at least burgeoning belief in an interesting and maybe even rewarding life.
Father was calmer, too, his apparitions less frantic. The dogs liked nothing better than to remain inactive for hours at a time, drifting, or curled by Crospinal’s side, feigning sleep as he learned.
Father, during one of the lower points that followed, with cancer already destroying his marrow, described this halcyon period thusly:
“You’d get up from your daybed with a spark in your eyes. Each morning, I watched you—how you woke, of a sudden, a smile playing across your face. I was ecstatic. Or as close as I have been since waking. From the moment I opened my eyes, my desire had been to raise children. A mad desire. To raise a child from the dim seas of oblivion. To know that my testimony to civilization and enlightenment was healthy and happy, brought a joy like no other. I had gone to great lengths to establish and grow our safe haven. Your sister was already striking out. You both wore the freshest of uniforms, amber helmets, and your minds were compounding mine. . . .
“Learning held potential for both of us. I discovered, each day, the rewards of sharing knowledge. I began to understand who I was. As you grew, my purpose became clearer and clearer.
Head Full of Mountains Page 7