Head Full of Mountains

by Head Full of Mountains (retail) (epub)

  “I have a set-up here,” he said. “I don’t get the connection I used to, but I’m at peace. I have a few eyes, and many friends, but that does not make me a father.” His own white eyes stared straight up; Crospinal wanted to cover them. “The rats we’ve brought here have a litter of pink embryos; the crows tend their eggs. They protect their fledglings until they can fly. There are, I suppose, aspects of fatherhood within each of us. Motherhood, too, for that matter. Nothing more than a vanished heritage. I do love these people as if they were my own. They’re innocent, in every way. You’ll help them, after I’m gone. You’ll help them remember what it means to be alive, to be civilized, to remain in the light.”

  “My father,” Crospinal said, “used to say the same thing. But there’s light out here.”

  “Will you stay with them?” The man finally turned his face, tethers rustling. He was utterly blind.

  “They don’t need me.”

  “You were loved by your passenger, as I love these people, raised from the darkness of this world. You have much in common with us now. You are all creatures of beauty and wonder. Nothing can take that away. No amount of time, no world of unnatural substance, no essence of people dreaming for so long they’ve forgotten what waking life was meant to be.”

  Crospinal leaned closer: there was an insignia on the breast of the man’s uniform, an image he could neither make heads nor tails of. Characters around the perimeter, like those he had seen on the crew cabins, outside the garden, but he could not read them. He said, “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “I do, Crospinal, I do.”

  He stood there, dumbstruck. His name seemed to rebound off the walls and rise, like the haptic had done. He felt disarmed.

  “I knew the passenger you called your father. We were friends, a lifetime ago. We woke together. I know he’s no longer alive, and nothing I can express would make you understand that I know how you feel.” Mercifully, the white eyes closed. “I’m also leaving this place, Crospinal, this purgatory, with unfinished business. As all of us must. I’m going to join your, your father.” He smiled. “There are small victories. We will prevail, because we are love, and we love them all. Hold our flames high, Crospinal.”

  “You won’t join him,” said Crospinal, making fists at his sides. “You won’t join him anywhere. He’s been blown to pieces. He’s dead and gone.”

  The blind man said nothing for some time. Overhead, the dim globes buzzed ineffectively. Conduits gurgled softly to and fro. Then: “We moved in different directions. Your passenger, he had his plastics, and—” a gesture, with his left hand, which could not open, and hung, claw-like, at the end of his thin arm, the sleeve hanging loose “—the jumpsuits. He could call forth ephemera, dispensers. His range was strong. We have a more austere catalogue here, a varied agenda. Mind you, with a full crew . . .”

  “How do you know my name?”

  His voice was so dry, hardly louder than a whisper. “We have encountered a future no one could have foreseen. We don’t know the past. I’ve carved paths through the darkness for others to follow. Mine led here.” He laughed that quiet, raspy laugh. “I brought the train. Did they tell you?”

  “What about my father?” Crospinal said.

  “I lost track of him years ago. Real years, human years. Before we started getting weak. Many sailors, as they call us, never found the means to shine, to connect. They sacrificed themselves for all of us. I know parts of your passenger’s story. I know he went as far as he could, and he cleared a large stage. I know of the female, and your struggles.” The man was having trouble with his throat. “No dispensers followed me here. Only a few would grow. So many have been destroyed now. I found it very difficult to locate you, despite my loyal crew. You are the ghost of a ghost. Exhaustion and physical decline hampered my efforts. And, of course, my weakened connection. Tell me something, Crospinal. Tell me: did they bring a crate with them? Did they bring a crate from the train?”

  “They brought nothing.” Crospinal was thinking about Luella. Was she the female the blind father had mentioned? Crospinal didn’t want to ask. Had Luella ever come to this place? Had this father, this sick old man on the daybed, ever met her? He let the talking continue, but had just about had enough.

  “Ah well. Too late, anyhow, for relief. My influence has been moderate. No other sailors joined me, such as your father, though we were close. I know your company, now. I feel better. I can only aspire that my calling be as powerful as that of your passenger. There must have been peaceful times, Crospinal, before he died. Did he recall much? Did he tell you many stories from the past? Was there a modicum of peace in this chaos?”

  Crospinal turned; the girl stood quietly in the doorway, head bowed. From beyond came the sound of muffled voices. They can speak, Crospinal thought. The five boys. . . .

  He told this father the answer he wanted to hear, though Crospinal did not believe it. He said there had been peace, and he watched a thin smile appear on the man’s face.

  “Do you have cancer?” Crospinal asked, mostly to wipe the smile off.

  “We all have cancer. All of us. The sailors. The passengers. We carry it inside. If we don’t die while we sleep, if we evade the demons when we wake, and if we manage to set up, and connect in any capacity, to begin our mission, cancer waits inside us. Cancer is how we break down. You have nothing like it among crew, or among the batch. I don’t know how many passengers began this journey, nor how many survive to this day, scattered through the darkness. I should know, but I don’t. How many remain asleep, for that matter, inside a stat? So easy to die, trying to understand rules, trying to remember the rules of our past. Establishing crew is paramount. In here—” gesturing again “—and where you were raised, bayside, we brought love, and we’ve been able to receive love in return. We brought light to this world. And you, Crospinal, you shine very bright.”

  “Is this the hub?”

  The father’s soft laugh was, again, like the sound of leaves in the garden, adjusting, in unison. “This is not the hub. They tell me the hub is far away. This is but a humble outpost, a sky station. There are no consoles, and I could never get any built. We are a small colony, forgotten, but we found our serving of peace.” Again the smile spread. “Forgive my crew, but they are happy. They’ve forgotten their dark heritage, as have you all.”

  Crospinal had started to fidget. His fingers clenched and unclenched, and he felt the ruined Dacron crease.

  “I see other parts, you know, like your passenger, through the gate. I have eyes on my train. Without a full interface, though, I only ever saw wisps, but I knew where he went. And I can see the cortexes on a good day. The paladins in their coffins. My gate is so small. Charging is difficult.” His lame gesture might have indicated the cabin, the daybed, or perhaps the pharmacological tubes, scattered across every available surface in this room. The man was wasted. “There’s another world, Crospinal. Men like us came from there, but details from before biosis are elusive. Just as your memories of the hub are gone. For you, the cleaned slate was a blessing; for us, a curse. What was a dream, while we slept? What was our past? We floated on a lake, under stars, and drifted for eternity. Tadpoles rising to the surface, ponderous in the cold, April water, mouths working. Not breaking a meniscus. A child looking through a screen window at night while June bugs thumped against the wooden window frame. Were these real? Are these my memories? There’s an island in the lake, not far from the shore. Two dead trees silhouetted, as if drawn in ink, and a black picnic table, thin ribbons of smoke threading upward into a windless sky. My head is full of wonder. Constellations of bright stars.”

  Crospinal was looking down at the refuse by his feet.

  “Can you sit by this daybed? I have so much to say to you.”

  He stepped closer but did not sit. The father had already said too much.

  “You have a power. Did he tell you that, Crospinal? Your name. You have a pow
er, and you can help us.” The man blinked, and it seemed that a dark tear ran from the corner of his blind eye.

  “Your people,” said Crospinal. “Your children. They called me the deicida.”

  “My children,” the man repeated. “Children. The word deicida means god killer, though I never taught them that. Some itinerant.” He laughed weakly, once again. “I know they call you that, though I’ve tried to dispel such crude ideas. There are no gods here. They want you to save them. Are we all like the Akuntsu, looking up from shelters, seeing deities in the turmoil, feeling gods move through the earth, the power of the universe in each bush, and fish, and blade of grass? You are a shaman, naming the newborn chief, distributing souls. I try to explain that there are no longer gods to kill, not here, not anymore, but they consider the twelve cortexes to be forms of deities, and fear them, as if they were gods. I imagine you do, as well. But the paladins are not gods. They were once human, like me. I have one candle to burn and would rather burn it in a land of darkness than in a land flooded with light.” He paused, then struggled as his fingers fumbled, for a third time, to rise. “Please, sit. You’ve come a long way.”

  Now Crospinal brushed plastic tubes from the surface of an inert stool next to the daybed and sat, while the energy of another haptic burst in the room, struggling to take hold. The man on the daybed moaned with effort, almost invisible as the rush of fractious images dashed, until Crospinal found himself, dizzy, standing on the green strip before a row of pristine dream cabinets. He looked at the sealed chambers before him, but did not rise. In either direction, more cabinets extended, perhaps two dozen in all. Not the cabinets he knew. Pristine, in a pristine hall. There was the sound of liquid draining. Lights around the door of the closest cabinet went from blue to pale green to white while he watched, and the icons spun.

  The sounds of gurgling ceased.

  He lifted one hand to touch the nearest cabinet—though of course he could not feel the familiar shape of the handle greet him, no movement at all against his mitt, for they were mere light—

  (A sudden lurch: the line of cabinets vanished, revealing the foetid room again, and the blind father, lying ill on the daybed, breathing heavily while indistinct remnants of apparitions stuttered from his body; in the doorway, the girl continued to look on—with the others arrayed behind her, faces hidden by the cowls—open-mouthed in absolute astonishment. But the man moaned, arched his back, and the haptic resumed:)

  —the doors of the cabinets hissed open in unison, revealing the glistening forms of men, as large as his father, and as the blind father must have once been, standing erect, sleeping, dreaming, no doubt, all wearing fresh uniforms and glistening blue helmets, all dripping with the same cold fluids that had once embalmed Crospinal.

  Pacing, while the ailing father rested fitfully in the back room of the crew cabin, Crospinal said: “He’s dying.”

  The haptic depicting the sailors in the cabinets had not been sustainable, the portable gate insufficient for such activity or passage of information. Crospinal was once again confronted by the idea that his father not only knew about dream cabinets, but had emerged from one, and had obscured this fact, intentionally or not, from his son. Possibly, his father had once known much more about Crospinal’s life and the secrets Crospinal thought he had maintained, such as his own visits to the cabinets, and maybe even his doomed romance. Then, as his range and power diminished, so did his knowledge.

  Crospinal had stood in numb shock while the girl who spoke fumbled with plastic tubes, pressing them after their father had passed out, to no apparent avail, against the man’s straining neck as he arched and moaned and eventually lay still again. Crospinal watched her limbs, her movements, with an odd sort of intrigue. Without a uniform, the body had elements of awkward beauty, the curves an intimate shape that stirred the pit of him.

  Now, emerging sheepishly into the cabin’s front room, trembling—no longer so eager to touch Crospinal, it seemed, let alone approach him—the girl said: “Never before colours. Never such as that. You brought colours.”

  Crospinal shrugged. “That was just a crappy haptic, a show. He was trying to tell me a story but he couldn’t finish. He never did that for you, show you those stories? Fathers do that stuff. They get information from the banks, and it goes through the optics into the gates, right into their brain. And then they can project.”

  She shook her head. “Never.”

  “Does he have dogs?”

  Her expression was blank, so Crospinal explained: “Apparitions. Made of light, on waves of pathos, like a haptic, but reflecting his mood. To follow you around. Would he ever send a dog after you?”

  “No.”

  “Were you born here? Is your womb nearby?”

  “I . . . don’t know.” She answered with visible discomfort, voice hardly audible. “Sailor taught us all we know. He taught us. He gives us food and water, and he shows us how to believe. He told us you would change the station, bring us into the light.”

  “Has he told you what’s going to happen next?” Frustration made Crospinal pace again. “Do you know what’s happening?” There was a bitter taste in his mouth. “Has he told you about death?”

  By this point, only the girl remained. (And the ill man, of course—the father, the sailor—faltering in the back room.) Others from the train, the boys, perhaps frightened by what they had seen, or having played their roles, had, like the haptic, disappeared.

  “We’re safe here,” she said.

  “You’re not safe. And you’re going to find out soon enough. No matter what you believe.”

  The girl repeated, even quieter: “You brought colours.”

  Crospinal turned away. He wanted to tear the tethers from this false father’s head, leave this cabin forever, forget he had ever met another person. Were all humans this enigmatic and stubborn? He yearned to return to familiar parts of the world, to the life he’d known, before he ever left the pen, before he left father’s range, but that was impossible. Suddenly he grabbed the girl’s hand, roughly twisting it palm-up, so the black marks on her wrist were visible. In the sharp light of the globe, he saw traces of filaments, subcutaneous, thin wires mapping her forearm. “Did he put this there?”

  Not attempting to pull free, she would not even meet his eyes. “We carry it.” Like a breath. “Paladins put it there.”

  “My father took mine. Is that what makes your sailor think I can help? Is that why I’m being hunted? He nearly killed himself trying to find me.”

  She was clearly terrified of him now. “You move like them,” she whispered. “He told us you would help, but, but you’re hurting me.”

  Crospinal let her hand drop. From the back room, the false father began to cough and make other sounds of discomfort. Above the daybed, the broken globe fizzled, dimmed, and harsh shadows moved over the dead furniture.

  Draining the reserves of the portable gate had brought a deep, unhealthy slumber upon the father, though he spoke in bursts of a startling tongue, words Crospinal could not understand. The man’s eyes were half open, glowing in the dim room. What looked like foam flecked the bloodless lips.

  Crospinal went to the cabin’s entrance and looked out. He was having a hard time breathing. The chestplate popped with each inhale and some seam was jabbing at his chest that he could not dismiss or even locate. Darker outside than it had been. Beyond the ragged line of crew cabins, he discerned the blunt drone, drifting quietly once more—

  Much closer, startling him, two people rising, to hurry away. Two of the hooded boys. Had they been hiding, crouching there, hoping to remain unnoticed? Having tried to run away only now, when he came out and looked their way? He lifted his arms. They did not turn to him, but he shouted, “Your teacher is dying. Your father—” spitting the words out “—is a liar. You shouldn’t trust him! He’s not a true father!”

  When Crospinal paused, he heard the girl behind him, speaking and, even
fainter, the voice of the passenger, who sounded almost lucid now. He must have woken, or perhaps he had feigned his unconsciousness when Crospinal had poked his head in.

  “He wants me to teach you,” Crospinal said. The boys had not gone far; stopped, they were listening tensely, with their backs to Crospinal, from a safe distance. They were tall and thin and wore very little. Scraps of nylon and mylar, in a concession to cover limited parts of their flesh. Their bellies, genitals, and buttocks. Cowls were tied about their necks. “I have no lessons to give,” he said. “Go back where you came from.”

  The pair hesitated, then obeyed, heading away. Crospinal watched them go before returning inside. In the back room, the girl knelt by the daybed, as she had for Crospinal, in the train. Crospinal leaned through the doorway and watched, breathing heavily, trying to see an indication of conspiracy or plot, until the girl looked at him over her shoulder.

  He was astounded by the vulnerability and odd familiarity of her face. He had encountered other people, physical beings, touched them and been touched in return, had felt a range of desires and suspicions. Yet he was left cold. Had the metal rat done this to him? Or was lack of empathy part of his humanity?

  “I’m leaving,” he said.

  The girl did not reply, except to blink, but the man on the daybed, the false father, staring ahead with his blind eyes, said, “Don’t turn your back. Not again. You would have died for good if we hadn’t retrieved you. There’s a calling. You have a power.”

  But Crospinal turned and left the cabin. Their voices continued only briefly. Standing in the corridor outside, between the ranks of cabins, under a dark ceiling, he heard the distant booming of the engines. There was no one else in sight and he wanted to imagine, once again, that no other people existed. He felt the extent of the world, the knowledge and vastness no single life could chart. He felt the yearning.