Head Full of Mountains

by Head Full of Mountains (retail) (epub)

  She was nearly naked. Her torso wrapped only in a few rags, a material he could not, for the most part, identify, and which could serve no practical purpose.

  “Who are you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  His eyes were still watering profusely, but from the light, he told himself. From the light. Long, tangled hair—much longer than his had ever been—brushed against him as she shifted. Father would have frowned to meet this girl. No uniform. Long hair. Father had wanted Crospinal to let groomer wasps depilate Crospinal’s head at least weekly. (Though Crospinal generally refused.) Hair is a haven for microbes, and hair can disrupt the effectiveness of your filters.

  A few days ago, certain of death’s impending visit, Crospinal had acquiesced. Father, too ill to appreciate the effort, dribbled blood from his mouth.

  Crospinal’s pate was an itchy expanse of stubble. Moving his fingers against the line of the girl’s jaw, he traced underlying bone, toward her chin. Solid, warm. A vein ticked, and the mitt reacted, faintly, but a persistent stinging grew and he had to pull his hand back; he saw no source of discomfort.

  What he feared most was that this person might vanish. He did not want this dream to end. When he tried to sit up, he discovered he was far too weak. His extremities throbbed. The stinging spread, flush with his heartbeat. He recalled nothing from before his nap. Talking about memories? Memory seemed a dubious concept at best. “Where am I?”

  “Trainboard,” she said, all breathy. She had shadows under her cheekbones, and a scent that put him on edge. Her lips were fuller than his, and red. “Hubward,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “The supply train. He brought it back, and now we found you.” She smiled thinly, the way father used to when Crospinal had made unwanted suggestions or asked too many questions. “We’re taking you back.”

  He needed to explain as much as he needed explanation. “My skin, my hands and feet hurt. But not like when, not like before. Something—”

  “Burns,” she said. “From the face. Why did you? They’ll only try to burn you.”

  “Who will?”

  A finger to those lips, indicating he should stay silent, or rest. He wanted to put his finger there, too, to her lips, just as her profile lit up again like a magnesium flare. Pointing at him, but his eyes watered so much he could not see her expression. “Batches are sent,” she said. “They’re looking for you.”

  He inspected his tender hand, and saw nothing out of sorts—except, perhaps, stressed contusions, a split on the thumb, further thinning at the palms of his mitts. Crospinal finally managed to get up onto his elbows. His head pounded.

  The compartment was small, with smooth walls, like those around the back of the pen, behind the throne. A low ceiling. He could not have stood, had he the wherewithal. And, resting on the floor nearby, next to the girl (who, he saw now, was kneeling, as if praying), a lantern of sorts, with a flame, burning in a metal cup. A candle. Like at his birthday parties. But a real candle, burning a real flame. He stared, agog. To be absolutely certain this was no haptic or apparition, he extended his hand, felt the heat singe his already-stinging skin, the mitt unable to do anything remotely protective, and he withdrew quickly, burnt, as the light passed over again, limning the girl’s outline, her tattered rags, her flesh, where a uniform should be. Her long hair. Incongruous walls behind her vanished into gloom again.

  He managed to rub his face with the crook of one arm. His uniform stank of recycling and the spicy tang of feces, backing up in the processor, which was really shot.

  The sound of the wind came from the slot in the ceiling, where the bright light was.

  Whatever they were on moved fast.

  And then Crospinal realized two more things. One: his legs, though throbbing, were not crooked (again), which meant father was most likely dead (again), and all this—the flesh and blood girl, the motion of the train, the candle’s flame—might just remain tangible. Two: more people quietly watched him.

  Turning his head, he saw them, crouching very near, a group of five. Quietly watching. Five silent humans, in tattered rags of plastic, crouching in the shadows, eyes downcast now. But despite the exposed flesh, for a long moment Crospinal could not distinguish which were boys and which, if any, were girls. He was suddenly not entirely sure of the criteria, now that theory had ended and application failed to kick in. Was it length of hair, or the distance between their eyes? Or the smell? Their bodies seemed almost the same as his own, as far as he could recall, though not as pale, or as thin.

  The smooth walls of the compartment extended beyond the group an additional two metres or so, and the top rung of a ladder—just like one of the seven leading up to porthole of the harrier—descended into a hatch.

  “Where’s your father?” he asked. “Do you all have the same father?”

  They must have made their own tattered garments. A preposterous notion. No amount of inert shreds of plastic and scraps of insulation were able to protect delicate flesh and the systems of a complex biotic. Not in this world. They were on borrowed time.

  “Where’s your pen? You’ll all get infections—”

  Now the light erupted off stark cheekbones, pale skin, and wrists thrust out, exposed to him, like offerings. He had seen the black marks, the inlays that the elemental had told him he lacked.

  “Shit,” he said. “Can you speak? Can you understand me?”

  No one moved or even looked at him. Not even the girl now. During the period between the flares, the candle’s light did little to illuminate the area where they crouched. Each of the five wore a loop of foil, like a cowl, over their heads. Were they all boys? He could hardly see any features.

  “Your shower’s broken? Electrostatic energy is a drag. It’s best to encourage them to shut off for a day or two. But your father must know that. Where is he?”

  A sudden image of stark obeisance, ten marked wrists, exposed for him.

  “Shit . . .”

  The girl by his side said, “Talking too much. Rest. But, oh, certain, for certain. Real as real. No fathers here. Not with us. No fathers.”

  Crospinal said nothing until twice more the girl was haloed by the passing light. His eyes stung from looking into the nimbus and the beauty of her face within. “Was that you,” he asked, “in the garden?”

  A thin, almost pained smile, and her naked hand sweeping, indicating the silent companions, or maybe whatever strange, unseen landscape rapidly fell behind. “Bayside, not as far as growth. Paladin trapped you close to the depot. Waiting a long time, watching. Sailor told us you were coming. Sailor sent us to find you.”

  Laying back and closing his eyes, he half-expected the girl and the other five people to be gone when he opened them. “Sailor,” he repeated, but cognition failed him. As the light exploded again beyond his eyelids, he felt distances between himself and everything he had once been widening, a chasm. He grabbed at the girl abruptly to close the gulf, gathering stiff mylar sheets in his mitt, pulling her closer. The weight and resistance of her mass, the strength of her tugging free, her scent, was too powerful a shock and he faltered.

  “Who sent you?” he said. “A sailor? How did the sailor know I was there?”

  Her eyes widened; he was scaring her.

  “The elemental told me two runners hid in the trees,” he continued. “But we never found them. And in the cabins, on the far side, where I talked to the controller, I was betrayed. I walked into a trap.”

  Because Crospinal remembered now: there had been a dream, but without a cabinet, in which he had returned to the pen, and father had not died, not yet. His legs were bowed like grotesque tree roots. (Looking at his limbs now, a rush, almost giddy to see them straight, side by side. But his feet were throbbing—the bottoms of his feet—and getting worse; the tingle in his extremities was insufferable.)

  “I was attacked,” he said, rubbing his mitts together to clean them.
“Before I even put my arms in the holes of the console.”

  “Console,” repeated the girl. “You called the paladin.”

  Crospinal thought he understood an aspect of this explanation, and he clung to the notion like it might save him. Paladins were not devices or elementals, but manifestations, roaming inside the structures of the world, showing up at the consoles. These were the paladins. Including his girlfriend.

  Paladins had hurt him, trapped him, tried to kill him.

  Paladins were after him.

  His girlfriend was in trouble, wherever she was. Because she fell in love with him? Maybe he shouldn’t talk to this flesh and blood girl about his relationship. Maybe he was too trusting. He needed to learn more about allegiances, about truth. Was this girl telling him the truth? What was her version? Like the elementals he’d met, she spoke in riddles. Each perspective looked upon a different facet of the enigma. He could not express himself.

  Shadowed by the candle’s dim light, searching for a clue or a signal, he stared into her eyes until the compartment flared blindingly again and she turned away, trembling. The glare seemed brighter and brighter each time. His hands were on fire.

  “She was all I had,” he said, lamely. “She was all I ever had.”

  Touching his shoulder, then the skin of his cheek, the girl said, “Paladin of the outlands. And the rejects. The year of miracles. Bayside now, exiled there. Angry, for certain, and angrier now. But sailor watched you. Sailor cares for us.” Her hand was firm; she let it drop away. “These are endtimes. He tells us at every opportunity.”

  “Your father,” because he was drifting off, thinking about his own dad. Confused, exhausted, Crospinal struggled to stay awake, to sit up, to clear his head. The soles of his feet, and his burning palms, were sending messages of distress to each other. He was going under.

  The girl said: “Bayside no longer. Sent up the tower.”

  I don’t understand.

  A whine he had never heard before hit a higher note, helping him stay awake.

  She was making a cage with her fingers.

  “I have a headache,” Crospinal muttered. “And my hands, my . . .”

  Helping him recline once more, she leaned over him, to push against the wall, where a slot squealed open, revealing a small aperture, through which she now peered. He lay directly under her, in contact, pressed by her warmth and proximity and by the subtle, acrid smell of her body. Her chest was smooth, and muscled with fine, grimy definition. Breathing in, holding the scent in his lungs, he was certain he felt circuits that had gaped open all these years close. The sound of a primitive motor fell over him, lulling. They were inside some form of device. He was so tired. “Where are we going?”

  “To where sailor waits.”

  “Who you talking about? Who’s the sailor?”

  “You would help him. You would teach us.”

  “I’m going to help you?”

  She smiled, nodding. Her eyes shone. “He has answers. A good sailor. He brought this train back. He teaches us, but now he sleeps most of the time. He knows the paladins can’t see you. Not really. You’re like him.”

  “They see me.” This seemed important. He wanted to be seen. Invisibility was anathema.

  The girl brought her hand down so that her fingers approached the broken ring of his collar. Controls there hissed lightly and a brief flicker of electrostatic energy quavered the air between them. He lifted one arm, and saw dark scorch marks on the sleeve of his uniform—

  “You are deicida,” she said.

  He was staring at the frayed discolouration with disbelief. What could possibly burn the neoprene off the base of his sleeve? He had neared the real candle, felt its heat, but even the worn Dacron of an old mitt could withstand two hundred degrees, and for some time, bursts of heat much higher for short periods. Bur the flesh of his hands, through the mitt’s thin layer, seemed darker now, mottled. He might be transforming. He wanted to whimper. “Who’s the sailor,” he asked, “if not your father?”

  “Deicida.”

  The black duplicates of his own scars on both her wrists were again held out, close to his face, and when he looked back at the others, they remained as they had previously, wrists exposed, immobile, faces covered and eyes downcast.

  The light erupted and faded.

  He was supposed to say something, do something. But he was tired and he felt his eyes close at last.

  “You’ll help,” she repeated, her voice coming from far away, then rising, reverberating, getting louder, as if this comment was proper resolution to all of the questions and was being sent out into the world to stake claim. Funereal mist, black as the marks on her arms, rolled from nowhere over him. Crospinal heard the girl say: “And you’ve come to save us.”

  Words drove him, stumbling down hallways and through ambient-lit extensions; they seemed his only hope for respite. Of course Crospinal was terrified, fleeing where no apparition could follow, but he couldn’t stop, or turn back; he was equally terrified of those options.

  Enraged, father had shouted: “I don’t know why I ever had a son!”

  Irrelevant to think about why the argument had started. The petty butting of heads, a son testing father’s limits, the father perhaps concerned about danger, keeping the dark at bay. . . . Maybe there was guilt at bringing a suffering child into the world, one who would, in time, expire. Crospinal was not keeping his area clean. Crospinal didn’t change his uniform. He didn’t let the electrostatic showerheads give him a good going-over. Prevented the depilatory wasp from trimming his hair. Whined about his legs. His inability to shift or turn anything substantial, or hold his own torch very high. Father never slept. And Crospinal was constantly in pain of some sort. He was miserable company, didn’t listen, or comprehend very well. They were both miserable company. But this declaration from his dad, this shouted truth, cut Crospinal to the bone.

  He had to keep moving, to escape.

  I don’t know why I ever had a son.

  When he first turned, to lurch out of the throne room, father, shuddering from his anger, clearly aghast at what had emerged from his mouth, was desperate for Crospinal to stop, yet Crospinal lurched away nonetheless, pulling himself farther and farther down increasingly dim and empty halls, hoping never to turn back, or even survive, vision blurry with tears.

  The ladder he found in a narrow cul de sac led up through a hole in the ceiling, to a small platform. As he gripped the lowest rung, a controller arced out, to hover in front of his face:

  “Welcome to the harrier. We are functional and free from parasitic intrusions. Welcome.”

  Crospinal grunted, tried to push the device aside, and climbed, to punish himself.

  Another ladder, and another one after that—even though his knees had given out, and he had to use his arms to pull himself rung by rung, throwing his elbow over, one after the other, and grunting, trying to harness his pain to continue.

  The controller, whistling happily, accompanied Crospinal for a spell but got bored with the boy’s slow progress and random, loud bellows. If the tiny device was at all concerned that Crospinal might fall as a result of his disability, or that he was in such a state of alarming distress, there was no indication. Seven ladders, in fact, Crospinal mounted that day, filled with remorse and self-pity, trying to retreat from the echoing words, and from the notion that, as he had suspected for some time, father regretted the day he was born.

  Each rung, taken with diminishing strength and stubborn perseverance, brought him to where he was lying on his back, on a platform, between the lengths of ladder, roaring out his pain, raging and screaming until his throat was raw and he was left drained.

  He managed to take the next bar in his already-blistered hands. (He let his mitts, even back then, become compromised.) He was empty and would climb forever, if need be, higher and higher until he snuffed out. Luella was the one who should have remained with
father, not him. Luella would have made father content. Instead, he was stuck with a cripple, a dismal boy who struggled to laugh, who saw the dim and grey in everything, and who could not perform even the simplest of tasks.

  Mitts in tatters, skin sloughed from his palms, knees pounding, feeling like he might die and fulfill father’s wish, Crospinal made it to the top.

  This was his year of growth.

  He was six.

  Emerging headfirst into the harrier station that first time, Crospinal pulled himself onto the final grille. The world seemed to be thrumming like a heartbeat, getting more insistent. Engines were faint. He was far above the pen, far away from father, in some sacred recess.

  With a full console.

  He took the handles of the odd periscope, pressed his face against the lens, one eye shut, drawing a sharp intake of breath, but saw that ash horizon, the orb’s eternal glare. He would never peer upon the rapturous sights father described, let alone find himself walking a cool green landscape between sky and land, transforming into fabled mountains, the winds cool and hushed.

  He turned from the eyepiece and let it close. Thumb plates activated a haptic table. A series of statistics and coordinates sprang luminous in the air, spinning too fast to read. He batted at them. Another plate was broken and fizzled under his touch. Could he live here forever? There were no dispensers.

  He wondered where the controller had gone.

  Under the flap, twin holes, easily large enough for his fists—each marked with a small, quavering icon of just that. Slipping both hands in, he felt a gentle tug, as if he were being pulled closer, to confide, or be confided in, and then the hum spread through his body, up from his hands, in his bones.

  He would answer the world’s call.

  From within the walls she approached, some form of apparition, to manifest next to him. In her dark uniform, a light smile on her face. An intangible girl, appearing slightly older than him, whose spirit lived in the structures and amorphous composites beyond the pen. She made his heart race; he presumed this was fear. When he pulled his hands free, she vanished, so he put them back, felt the connection like a mild shock, and she appeared again.