She watched grey sky and grey land merge.
Everyone wondered, even in less dire times, whether bringing a child into the world was wise. But the wisdom of choosing not to have children had to become explicitly clear soon, even for those who didn’t have much capacity for reflection. Another generation could not be sustained.
Even though she’d already had her own children, foibles and all. Both were born during her early twenties, just like her grandmother had done, but a bit of a scandal to have more than one, and at such a young age. Bright, lanky creatures, exhausting, selfish and mercurial, lying there with her after swimming, breathing heavily in half-sleep, salt in their hair, drying in the sun. Magnificent enough to take your breath away.
The swallowtails on this island were as big as her two hands together.
Perhaps the point of revelation had already passed, or was upon humanity now. All selfish reasons to have children (and what other type of reason could there be?)—for the sake of the couple; having reached that stage, another test to their bond, another step in their travels together, or maybe from a more desperate place, a futile attempt at throwing sand in the face of mortality, or even for the brief escape of coitus—were overshadowed by the fact that new lives could not be sustained. The gig was up. Growth, small joys, pain and love and fear.
The world was dying.
When her children got older, they lost their brightness, ensnared in a world that was dying around them, perceptions of themselves and their purpose suffering, fading, but with young families of their own, children born underweight, dangerously premature. . . .
Forests were gone.
Memories, cold as the cardiopelgic solution that would soon fill her lungs.
Shuddering, Crospinal came to, his own essences seeping back; the haptic had collapsed.
Crew were stirring, withdrawing.
Was his role to lead these people? To save them?
He felt winds in the cockpit, stilling, settling his thoughts. The sailors above eased, too, as if collectively catching their breath; they slept.
But there were legacies within Crospinal now, residues threading back through distance and time, back to where his father was from, and to lives that had played out there. He felt these threads flickering like tethers when he took a deep breath.
A shift had occurred while the passengers dreamt—
Crospinal blinked, and turned to see if the girl was still there in the entrance to the cockpit. Others, who had been immersed, turned also, groggy, glancing about.
A fundamental shift had occurred—
His father had wanted to prepare him, to accept these legions within, to accommodate them, but died disappointed.
In blue helmet and fresh uniform, the girl remained in the opening, in the same posture, making Crospinal suspect much less time had passed in the haptic than he had imagined. As he began toward her, Crospinal heard sailors above exchange dull, disturbed murmurs. Were they having nightmares?
But he did not consider for long, because controllers appeared, screeching in, swooping, getting louder and louder, sending mists of polymers from the surfaces around Crospinal as if the whole world was startled. A sailor shrieked. With his arm up over his face, ducking low, Crospinal ran toward the exit.
ENDTIME
It is not our eyes or ears, nor even our intellects, that report the world to us; but it is our own moral nature that settles at last the significance of what exists about us. In all respects each age has interpreted the universe for itself, and has more or less discredited the interpretations of previous ages.
—Richard Maurice Bucke
FOX AND BEAR
They huddled, three of them (though it seemed as if multitudes huddled, in turn, within the loose confines of his body), between fresh walls that gently shifted. The light that gave direction to the world surged from the ceiling in waves of brilliance, washing shadows from their faces that crept slowly back, a little slower each time. Beneath them, floor tiles formed, grilles taking shape. The air stunk of change and ozone and Crospinal had lost his tattered boots altogether: all that remained were two shreds of inert fabric, hanging from the attachment hooks, at the cuff of his uniform. The entire left leg was split to the hip, exposing his boney knee, and thigh, when he crouched, like now, to pray.
Moving his toes against the transmogrification, feeling the change against his bare skin, he ran through a brief list of sights and wonders and obstacles, but ended up mumbling half-finished words, overwhelmed by the volume and incongruity of the experiences that rose to his lips for pronouncement, none of which he could contextualize, now that he tried, feeling pressed for time and out of breath and haunted by the passengers he now hosted.
He lifted his face. His voice had stopped altogether. The idea struck him like a blow. The girl’s visor was translucent. Staring into her eyes, he could tell she was just as afraid of him as she was of every other event unfolding in her life now. She had been expecting Crospinal—all crew had—but he was not who they expected.
Under a sudden focus, rare and crystalline enough for him to behold, crouching there—as two building machines scurried past, and toluene dripped onto his shoulders and arms—similarities close enough to jolt him back through time, as if thrown: he was stunned, before he made any pronouncement. He had wanted to reassure the girl but realized now that the distance between the illicit ceremony with Fox and Bear and when he had first left the pen was very short, mere days: the naming of the elementals was precursor to the end of his youth, catalyst for his straying, the beginning of his loss, and change.
They were coming back from the garden. Crospinal had destroyed a swath of growth. His sleeves were blue with the coating of fallen leaves. Fragments of branches clung to the Kevlar. Heading through the transfer tube, Crospinal in front, rocking painfully from side to side, grunting whenever his weight transferred. He was squat, bent, distorted by pain. His knees flared with white bursts, the way they always did, barking out criticism, taunting, complaining, while the two elementals moved quietly behind him and did not respond.
Perhaps, in the aura of the moments surrounding this memory, Crospinal had tested the guardians, falling from a hunched shelf, or straying out of range, in the round pool, pretending to ignore the crimson stare while he lay on his back under the enhanced water, shield steaming and bubbling, or maybe he’d stood before them, berating them, ostensibly for their silence and dimwittedness, but (he realized) more likely for their self-sufficiency and lack of doubt, which he had not recognized as a self-involved child. Inexpressive, inhuman faces angled down. When they stood and stared, their limbs were perfectly still.
Spells broke when two dogs raced past, chasing each other, happy that Crospinal was returning, safe, to the pen, to be by his father’s side again, barking with a mad excitement: “Crospie, Crospie, Crospie!”
Making his frustration seethe.
They vanished down the tube.
Crospinal had been planning to give the elementals names since the year of disparate viewpoints. Before that, perhaps since birth, the nugget of the idea had been forming, unrevealed. This would be defiance against his father, against the world. Not because he wanted the miserable machines to have an identity, like his own; instead, he wanted them to share his burden of responsibility and the insecurities that accompanied it.
Naming, his father would say, is the origin of all civilized things. Without a name, there is no distinction.
And as his father dozed and mumbled, Crospinal hobbled out to the gardens for his exercise. He had become convinced he would go through with it, tired of inaction, palms sweating inside his mitts and loose bowels making his processor whine in anticipation. Driven toward this point with the aid of jabs shooting up his thighs, and from the look on his father’s face when he was unable to complete the simplest of tasks.
This was the year of independent thinking.
Crospinal was . . . f
ive?
When the dogs dispersed, recalled to his father to offer their report, Crospinal stopped walking. He breathed deeply to try to clear tension. Pivoting, in a lurch, he put one trembling mitt up, palm out. The red eyes stared but the elementals came on regardless, until he commanded them to halt.
Which they did.
Naming these companions in this refuge at what could only be endtime was an antithesis, an echo of his past, repeated once more in time. An attempt to counter or repair what he had done, to undo what could not be undone, or reintroduce it?
Crospinal put his hands (bare now) on the shoulders of the uniforms, one on each, and felt the violation against his skin, capillaries at work, the material fighting against the moisture on his palms.
“I hid from the next wave of my father’s dogs,” he told them.
(Controllers’ alarms were still going off: another attack on the dream cabinets, the girl had said—come, Crospinal, hurry, hurry!
But he insisted they stop on the way back, coming through the crawlspace.
Like he had stopped, that day, Fox and Bear.)
Within the frame of their helmets, both faces peered into his own. Marked with awe, and with elements of the fear he had earlier discerned, they were waiting for him to continue. They were waiting for him to guide them. Crospinal tightened the muscles of his jaw:
“Those red eyes,” he said, “changed. First, I named Fox. I touched the alloy chestplate. Because he was no longer an it. His eyes narrowed. And then I turned to Bear, and I touched him, too, palm flat on his chest, and I told him his name, and it seemed to me those eyes changed just a fraction, a shift in radiance. Fox used to watch me the most, always staring, staying closest, hovering. I felt their power grow. If not grow, then change. I felt Bear move, and Fox, rising up, separating from me.”
Crospinal turned toward the source of the distant alarms, where controllers shrieked. Someone had shouted. Another person. There’d been concussion, sending ripples through the flooring.
“Father discovered what I’d done. A dog must have watched, or one of his spirits, drifting through that tube. I don’t remember how he found out. Perhaps I confessed in a prayer, or he gave me a pellet to say the truth, and I fell asleep.
“He never forgave me, though he claimed to. I think he gave up on me at that point.
“Fox and Bear took their names with them. They took their names, lifted from characters in a child’s haptic, and never came back.”
They looked at him. The boy was newly depilated. His forehead was thick, eyes bright. Behind their visors, they both had blue eyes, like him. The girl blinked. They were watching his face.
“Your name is Clarissa,” he said, placing his free hand flat against her chest, just below the collar of her uniform, and energy tickled him. He had been that sailor, briefly, in the cockpit. He knew what it was like to be Clarissa, if only for an instant, knew enough that the yearning, the strangeness of being alive, the struggle, were bonds reassuring constantly between them across the worlds, across time, and he felt strands of her pass through his fingertips, into this other.
“Clarissa.”
The word, so quiet that the world trembled again, as if straining, incredulous to witness this event.
Something inside the broken tricot of Crospinal’s fractured uniform clicked into place and started to rattle; he adjusted the plates with an awkward elbow as the girl tried to back away, but he held her. Had his father experienced this burst of hope while naming him, and naming his sister? Had names given them the ability to leave home?
Crospinal turned to the boy.
“And you are Richardson.”
The boy, mute, continued to stare, as if unchanged, but Crospinal felt it.
Engines whined, altering arcane purposes. The alarms of the controllers had stopped, and he had not noticed when.
Inside the wall, a device clanked by, unseen, machines belonging to the crew, in no servitude to him, not knowing he was there, not caring if he named every human there was to name.
Could he grant invulnerability?
His own name had hardly prevented misfortune.
A quick, shuddering sequence of muffled explosions put an end to the ceremony: the three of them turned, faces lifted toward the disturbance. Even the walls had recoiled. Polymers rained down.
Batches had returned. A dozen or so, he was told later, by crew that had fought. They had attempted to access the new dream cabinets to prevent the sailors from emerging, though how these naked humans expected to tear sealed booths apart with bare hands—even if they did manage to get close enough—Crospinal could not conceive.
The regrouped attackers were reticent, though, and skittish, and by the time Crospinal, Clarissa, and the stout boy he’d called Richardson made it back to the chamber, outside which Crospinal had been drained of blood, the batches were already defeated, scattering back to the darkness from whence they’d come. Without the active console nearby, no manifestation or paladin could get close, or accompany the contingent, projecting apparitions about their feet.
Ambients in the walls of the station were much brighter than they had been; uniforms of the crew who had remained behind seemed to glow. Their helmets and tricots were reflective sheens. Fleetingly, Crospinal wondered if this display—the renewed attack, the brisk defense, the surge of lumens at this battle scene—were for his sake, because of the naming, but that was absurd.
The batches had done no real damage.
On alert, adrenaline levels elevated, the crew that had defended the dream cabinets watched Crospinal enter, Clarissa and Richardson behind him. The visors of the crew made them look like some beast neither human nor machine. As renewed gusts of acrid scents infiltrated Crospinal’s sinuses, burning them, he put his hand over his face. Smoke, real smoke. With another tang underlying he could not identify.
The local controller, alone now, up by the ceiling, orbited in eccentric revolutions, quieter, though still clearly agitated.
Upon stepping over the threshold, Crospinal had actually seen the last batch, the last attacker—as stripped bare as himself, even more so, without a girdle—but darker, and sleek, moving with the same grace as a crow, or a rat. Had he or she fled when Crospinal showed up? There was an instant of eye contact, a jolt of what could only be recognition—
But Clarissa’s breath, catching in the comm’s speakers, caused Crospinal to cease his ruminations. He had been wondering if all crew began life as a batch, and if they were without torment, content in their condition. Turning, Crospinal looked where Clarissa looked:
In the rearmost chamber of the room, which was larger now, the dream cabinets were almost fully emerged. Lights around the rims of the doors flashed like the ones had back home, in the same patterns of yellow and red; he felt a rush of nostalgia, missing what he could never again possess, the past behind him now for good, no matter how jumbled.
Arrayed side by side, facing the entrance, the cabinets had been rearranged. Tiles at their base were almost totally resealed and hardened, and the green carpet had settled. As he began to turn away from the sight—unable to accommodate the continued rush of longing, those vanished afternoons in the pen, and the peaceful dreams he’d discovered in his own stat—he registered the body, the corpse, lying half-hidden on the soft green strip; his indulgences came to an abrupt halt.
He stepped closer.
One of the batches. A girl? A boy? With long hair, clearly dead, blood flowing from the ear, smeared across the cheek, dark and thick. But blood would not be assimilated, and a growing pool had formed, thickening now, coagulating.
Kneeling, he saw that the corpse had been, moments ago, a human around the same age as himself, during the year of long walks, or maybe younger, during disparate viewpoints. The haptic of accelerated decomposition—from life to nothingness—played through his mind as he rolled the body toward himself, almost stiff, and looked directly into the pale
, bluish face. Drained eyes were a milky plastic.
His father’s body had rotted while he was still breathing, as if death had been an afterthought.
He touched the cool, firm cheek. Batches were aspects of himself, of all people, reflections of a rudimentary persona that lurked beneath his exposed skin, beneath the veneer constructed from a father’s lessons and teachings and prayers. Batches hid inside each crew member, and even inside the sailors who had passed through him and those who resonated there still.
When he moved his fingers into the black morass, touching the blood with his skin, he expected a reaction, exterior to him, a shock, but without mitts there was none. He wanted to weep, to say a tribute, thanks for surrendering life, or maybe an apology, but no words or strong emotions came and he was not sure if he should be grateful, or even if life, in any form, was a gift or a curse.
“Another console,” Clarissa hissed, as if she had heard a voice Crospinal had not, speaking into the comm of her helmet. “Another console . . .”
She had followed him, and Crospinal looked up at her now. She did not even seem to notice the body of the batch, though the toes of her fresh boots touched it. “Crospinal,” she said, “you have to get up now. They’ll regroup, call the paladin. They know where we are. They know where the sailors are. If a paladin makes it as far as the cockpit . . .”
Now Crospinal broke into something almost like a sob. The first sailor he had been, in the haptic, the one with shaky hands, moved fingers again through the thick blood of the dead batch. No, skin did not react like mitts. Capillaries didn’t hiss into action. “Paladins are ghosts,” he said. “They’re nothing.” But he knew what paladins could do. He had seen Clarissa collapse in the hall. The metal rat had tried to heal the others, who had been stricken. And his own heart had been broken by a paladin, never to be the same again. They were ghosts that could change the world, transform a life. End it.
But so could crew.
Head Full of Mountains Page 22