Head Full of Mountains

by Head Full of Mountains (retail) (epub)

  They were ready.

  As he hurried to get the dolly back to its dock, he was certain he felt the attention of this doctor, turning toward him. The cortexes would stay awake while passengers slept. They would stay awake while he slept. He even peed a bit into his suit, thinking for some crazy reason that he was already hooked up, but no co-worker, thankfully, noticed the wetness.

  There were ghosts of the past and ghosts of the future everywhere. He was a receptacle; they would fill him, and the idea was terrifying.

  His supervisor laughed when Crospinal told him, and called Crospinal a fuckin’ coward.

  As the tremors crept back, he had begun to fall asleep again, and the darkened room was turning upside down, so furniture became inverted. The bed, suspended from the ceiling. Crospinal had to push himself upward into the mattress, holding onto the crumpled sheet to prevent that, too, from falling.

  “I live here,” he murmured, convincing himself. “I live here, I live here,” while, next door, the boy continued to move about, unhampered by any nocturnal inversions.

  In sleep, breathing slowed. The room swung around, right side up. As his mouth slowly closed in relief, he had a dream of another boy named Richardson opening his, and speaking for the first time. Richardson had made it back to the cockpit. From there, he was sent by sentries to the chamber where the stats were now fully emerged. The corpse of the batch had been removed. A fresh sailor in full uniform and silver helmet was exposed; the door of a cabinet had opened. Richardson took part, holding the arm, helping the sailor down from the booth, his boots firm on the strip of carpet there. A chill washed over him from the stat, the slow breath of time. Dripping, on trembling legs, the sailor looked about, nonplussed. Richardson said his first words to the sailor, meant to reassure, to welcome, but the phrase came out in a language that did not yet exist, a whispering language of sibilant hisses and protracted clicks.

  The sailor fell to his knees.

  Then a wind swept the scene away, multitudes of faces rushing past, a sea of hopes and despair washing over him, none lingering long enough for him to recognize but enough to wake him again, slick with sweat—

  3:47

  Like red eyes.

  Terrified of the coming day, he sat up, fully awake, until the glow of the ambients was just bright enough for him to see the forms of other people, sleeping naked all about. He frowned, wondering if he were remembering a dream, or entering into another one.

  A carbon rod was clenched in both hands.

  All was still.

  Did he have the capacity to use the rod as a weapon? This was a test of sorts. Only one way to get away from the man who had held him down here. Previously, he had swung a carbon rod, but had not connected; the batches, then, ran off. He imagined solid impact, flash-hardened carbon crunching a skull, life spilling out through a hole torn in a man’s guts as the rod jammed upward, piercing intestines and diaphragm and juddering against the range of white vertebra—

  Beyond the alcove, a great expanse of the hub was becoming visible in the growing light of a new day. Mists of polymers rose from the floor, commanded by the burgeoning lumens.

  Had the man been real?

  Crospinal could still feel the hard tap of a forefinger against his sternum, the thump inside his chest. The man’s foetid breath, so close to his face.

  Standing, he walked gingerly from the cove, stepping over the last of the sleeping batches into the larger expanse, the ceiling vanishing, swooping up to join the massive wall, which rose out of sight, swallowed by brighter areas higher in the world. He looked for the ledge where he last saw Clarissa and Richardson, but features were indistinguishable at this incredible distance, so he gave up.

  At the horizon, clearer now, he saw no features.

  He headed toward the open floor, taking big strides at first, picking up steam, leaving the batches and alcove behind, as the batches turned languorously and stretched, as if they, too, were dreaming. No sign of the man. The encounter seemed years ago.

  At the bottom of the world, though, dwarfed on the ancient tiles, and feeling the inrush of time and the insurmountability of direction, Crospinal soon hesitated. An unknowable silence all around. The world poised, waiting. Had he been here before? From the people he was leaving behind there was a sort of peaceful, throbbing weight, settling over his shoulders, cast from them; they emanated the simplest of purposes, like a somnambulant heartbeat. He should sleep more. Go back with them, lie down. Stay.

  He did not.

  The carbon rod burned against his fingers. He clenched it tight.

  A clear purpose would most likely elude Crospinal forever. But he carried within him a history, from sailors to batches, and even from elementals, too, who transversed the bays, watching over young children as they played in the pool, carrying within themselves colder yet no less complex questions about what sense life might possibly make. Any elemental, or lesser device with half an intellect—any living creature, humans of any sort, gazing upon sights such as the ones Crospinal had seen, and who felt the touch of fingers against their skin or uniform or plating—had felt this convergence, this moment of belonging.

  Had he found what he was looking for?

  The moment of peace and clarity was already diminishing.

  He turned to look behind:

  Distant batches were sitting, waking, knuckling their eyes. He saw one urinate, squatting.

  From far away came a low hooting sound and a rumble, and he realized, looking for the source (again trying to evaluate just how big the world was), that he had not heard the engines in some time, nor felt their power, coming up through his reconfigured bones.

  Crospinal resumed his walk.

  Small patches of trees, larger and larger trees, on dried-out nutrient tiles. Between them, dry runnels must have once carried water.

  Now, all the trees were dead.

  A few moments later, on the far side of a gentle hump in the floor—revealing the expansive garden he’d seen from above, sloping away from him, also dead—he found the body of the man: eviscerated, flayed, torn asunder in every conceivable way.

  HUB

  A hundred batches, maybe more—an expanse of humanity as large as the body of water had been in his dream, certainly more people than he had ever seen before, all in one place—passed by. Two or three hundred bare feet thrumming at the floor in a ragged rhythm while he remained lurking among defoliated trees, ludicrously hiding behind denuded trunks for what seemed like ages. He felt the energies in his own feet, coming up his legs.

  Who would he have been, if he’d never left the pen, if choices had been different?

  Above the crowd, a massive drone—blunt, airborne—rotated nose down, driving the mass, or at least watching over them. Paladins and drones and orbs.

  When he’d first struggled up the ladders of the harrier, every part of him had screamed with pain. Watching the icon of the hands over the controls as it shimmered into view, he’d shoved his arms all the way into the holes and clenched his jaw—

  She materialized now, to stand before him in all her beauty—while he gaped. With a light smile, she said, “Hello, Crospinal.”

  His face itched where he had touched his cheek, then rubbed it, with the blood of the corpse. Both cheeks. Flaking off now, dried. He tried not to scratch or react for fear of drawing attention—though, when unable to resist the aggravation, he brushed at his face with the back of one hand and felt only his cool flesh, no crusty stigmata there at all.

  At the site of the slaughter, Crospinal had tried to cover up the remains, but there was nothing in the vicinity of the man’s devastated body except for bare floor tiles, withered fragments of ancient composite panels, and dead trees. The volume of gore would remain as he had found it for a very long time, at odds with the landscape, an incongruity of composition whose presence and chronicle was a mystery and an affront. Nevertheless, arranging splintered bones,
shifting coils of still-warm intestines into heaped loops, as if to trigger some hidden mechanism, or at least rebuild the fleeting miracle of life—if only he could get the patterns right—he turned the skull (with a shattered parietal bone, brains spilling free), face up, and stared into the pulped eyeballs, haunted by the thought he might have done this carnage himself; his last thought, before falling asleep, had been of murder.

  Sailors and batches hissed in his veins.

  What Crospinal now believed, hiding in the copse, watching the receding exodus, with what was undoubtedly a paladin spinning above, was that the world and events of his past had not occurred, nor been arranged, the way he presumed. What he remembered fearing the most—that he would drift in darkness until the creatures came for him—would happen. All he could trust was the immediate moment: what he saw, the breath in his lungs. His interpretations were as unreliable as everything he had been told, everything he thought he’d learned, including the years of his father’s advice, his lessons, and preparatory haptics.

  Why had he come here?

  The collar of his uniform slipped from around his throat and lay, writhing, at his feet. Whatever remained of a shield, if any shield remained at all, was now surely gone. No monitor scope, no comms.

  In one hand, Crospinal retained the carbon rod. Had he bludgeoned the man with it?

  What did he mean to accomplish?

  Questions circled, the one constant in life.

  A distant batch dropped to all fours and loped away from the group with an awkward, sideways gait, butt held high. Another lagged. Both sorts of stragglers dropped to the floor just as suddenly, twitching, only to get up and stagger back to take their places again. Did light feed them, like the walls and floors? Or their own flesh? Maybe they never ate, and lived for only a few days, despite what he had been told.

  The flesh Crospinal had eaten sat in his stomach like an artifact. Sailors hummed quietly through his veins as he moved along the border of the dead garden in the opposite direction of the batches, staying within the spindly trunks for cover, though their cover was less than scant. Ironically, trees were tougher in death: they did not shatter as he passed or even as he grabbed at branches for balance. Between his toes, black tiles that had once sustained the root masses had crumbled to dust.

  Soon, smoldering on the horizon, rose what could only be the source, or pen, of the paladins and batches both: an angular structure, heaving up from the floor, over which smaller drones and clusters of data orbs spiralled. Hazy with distant polymers, the mound grew quickly, as if approaching Crospinal at the same pace he approached it. He saw several large drones resting along the slopes on cradled facets, all streaming faint apparitions; shapes of light cascaded down the lower sides of the mound and spilled across the floor tiles before winking out. Some imagoes made it farther than others, as if attempting to escape, but all expired in brief flashes. Crospinal could not distinguish details. They were too vague, though he might have discerned the forms of people, or features of a face—an open mouth; narrowed eyes—rising, half-formed.

  These were the paladins’ dreams.

  Chatter of the sailors became so loud he put his hands to his temples, expecting the cacophony could be heard from far away—the receding batches showed no sign of noticing, nor did the paladin, guiding the batches away, so minute now.

  When he turned back, the mound seemed closer still. Filaments of light crackled from the peak—which appeared metallic from here, certainly non-composite—and shot up into the air. The pattern of features on the surface of the construction meant the formation was built more like the central pen, with grilles webbing polycarbonate girders.

  Polymer mists directly above the mound were frantic with information gathering there. But this intrusion had been formed forever; a cyst at the core of the world, where struggles had gone on for so long they’d become symbiotic and inseparable.

  Could this be the icon of his father’s memories? Was this the mountain he tried so often to recall?

  “Hey, Crospinal!”

  For a second, he thought his name was being called by one of the voices murmuring in his head, but wheeling at a secondary, rustling sound, he saw movement behind a dead root mass: something low, shiny, and quick.

  When the metal rat stepped into view, between two leaning trunks, its red eyes glowed in the already bright day. They stared at each other for a long while. Crospinal clenched the carbon rod tighter. The air seemed suddenly hotter, and the elemental wavered, as if projected. Not likely, though, with these dead trees all around, unless the image came from some device Crospinal had not yet encountered.

  Nodding toward the distant procession, the individuals of which were now no bigger than the last joint of his smallest finger, he asked, “Where are they going?”

  “They’re being moved. All of them. That’s the year of constitution. The year of delivery and the year of bad timing have already been moved. The cortexes are leaving.”

  “What?”

  “Everything’s changing, Crospinal. That’s why I’m here. You need to come back with me. We’ve invested, well, a lot in you. I’ve been searching for days. You don’t emit anything. You need to come with me, now.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” He frowned at the distant crowd, a blur that might not even be moving; they appeared to be climbing, as if the floor curved up, and were all on the inside of a massive sphere. When he turned back, to meet the fixed red eyes, he said, “What do you mean?”

  “We have to go. I’ll tell you as we travel back. I’m taking a big chance coming down here. I mean, if this shield dies, I’ll be toast. They’ll fry me in a second.”

  “I thought you might be a haptic.”

  “A haptic? Shit, no. That’s all neurons and human energy bullshit. I’m real. I got a shield on. This is a force. They don’t like us machines. Now let’s go. I’ll tell you everything you want to know once we get back.”

  “Just leave me alone, rat.”

  Rumbling shook the dead trees, but not from the engines. As if something equally hollow yet even more massive than the world ground gently against the other side of the floor. They both, elemental and man, looked toward the distant mound.

  “We’re not biotic, you know,” the device said, after a moment. “So will you get that right? Look, Crospinal—”

  A surge of frustration, or even anger: in sudden tears, he shouted, “I’m not going back! You’ll tell me I’m sick, or that I died, or some shit like that. You’ll tell me you’ve been looking for years and that I’m five hundred years old!”

  “Keep it down!” Crouching low, the elemental became almost flat against the dried nutrient tiles. The shield wavered, curling over it, sheltering.

  “Stop following me.”

  “Crospinal, you are ill. That’s the thing. I’m telling you the truth. You really are. We want to help you.”

  “Just stop.”

  “Listen to me. This is important. I need to scan you. You’ve done a lot already, Crospinal, each time, but this one’s gone off the rails—”

  “Shut up.”

  “All right, all right, listen, Crospinal. Listen. All right. Just keep it down. The cockpit’s doubled in size. The crew you named—Richardson, and the other one, with the girl’s name, Clarissa—have brought back twenty seven more sailors. They’re coming up fast now. Other crew are named. A structure’s forming around them and the other pilot, the one like you, is awake again. She’s coming back. The journey’s almost over, Crospinal. We’re so close. But they need you up there. You need to be well. You need to get better. You need to suit up.”

  “I killed someone.”

  The metal rat, silenced now, cocked its head. “Who?”

  “Back there.” He indicated with a nod the ridge where he’d found the remains. “On the far side of this garden.”

  “You mean the sailor? The first sailor? Tattooed and dismembered?”
<
br />   “I don’t know what tattooed means but, yeah, torn apart. I killed him.”

  The elemental stared.

  “Well? Did I? Did I tear him apart?”

  “Of course not, Crospinal. He’s been there, well, since the beginning. Can we please go? I’ll tell you later, I promise.”

  “Who was he?”

  “The first passenger. The first sailor. There were no dispensers then. Us elementals were dormant. No one was set to wake up. No one had any idea what had happened. But he woke others and helped them find food and water, and ways to stay alive. He woke us. You were named after him.”

  “He had a name?”

  “All sailors did.”

  “And his name was Crospinal?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know what? Stop talking, okay? You’ve lied to me so much. You’re a shitty fucking liar. He would have told me that Crospinal was his name when I said who I was. He would have told me.”

  Again the elemental paused. Delicately, it said, “Except he’s dead, Crospinal. He’s been dead for thousands of years. He can’t tell you anything.”

  About to point out the fresh blood he’d smeared onto his face, the lesions he’d seen on the man’s arms, the shreds of meat hanging from sharp carbon rods as he ate, Crospinal turned away instead, disgusted. The batches were no longer visible, nor was the paladin. A mist of polymers blew lackluster from the trees, catching on the bare branches and twinkling like grey streamers.

  He walked away.

  “Crospinal!” Following swiftly in leaps, the elemental would not be left behind. “You have no idea what you’re doing. We’ve been trying to help you. Every generation. That’s why we’re here. We want to help you get better because you can fly this thing! With Luella. I need to bring you back. Please, Crospinal. Listen.”