Head Full of Mountains

by Head Full of Mountains (retail) (epub)

  The end of the garden was nigh. Fractals of apparitions from the paladins straggled as far as his feet now. Without stopping, he passed through the lights and they broke apart upon his shins. There were faces, stern and shocked, and forms of beasts that could never have lived in a corporeal world.

  Quaking again: Crospinal felt the thrum, a familiar surge, pressure building in strength as the engines, wherever they were, turned over very slowly. And ceased.

  “Shit,” said the metal rat. “Aw, fuck—”

  Through eruptions of light, haptics too virulent to contain, and mercurial projections, Crospinal watched the giant drones spinning slowly in their sloped recesses. They were as large as the pen. He remembered seeing them before, in the haptic the first metal rat had shown him. Being guided on the dolly. From where he stood there were three visible, and the limned outline of a fourth, against a nearly hidden facet. On another side, as he circled slowly, a greyer, calmer façade of the mound meant the paladin was gone. Had he just watched it leave? Was his girlfriend inside one of these, projecting out into the world? Glowing apparitions and the crackling lights they rode were hard to look at and caused the essences inside him to agitate.

  He waded knee deep through haptics now.

  The metal rat, running within the amalgam of lights, had to leap to clear the luminous carpet. “If you don’t eat pellets, or don’t drink water from a spigot, you’ll revert. Everything will be lost. You understand that? It might be too late already.”

  Crospinal was only half listening. He actually felt a modicum of relief at the idea he might not have committed murder, though he had once contemplated it. Could he? Could everyone? Had that aberration been instilled in him as part of his education? That’s all he wanted to know. Yet everything the metal rat said might be lies. He felt his heart slowing, his body grow less tense. He said without turning: “What about you, then, rat? Where do machines stand?”

  The housings where the cabinets of the paladins were docked took up most of his field of vision, a massive formation that rose hundreds of metres above the hub floor. The remaining drones pivoted slowly, wreathed in their own light.

  “Personally? I’m a doctor,” said the elemental, jumping clear and dipping in again. “A contrivance from before this disaster unfolded. So I’m here, risking everything, to retrieve you from your unfathomable quest.”

  “The first sailor told me I’m not human. Is that true?”

  “For goodness sake, Crospinal, you couldn’t’ve spoken with him. He’s long gone. He’s dead. But I can assure you that you’re human. Please stop walking. You’ll get us both killed.”

  He did stop. Just for a bit. He was out of breath. “So, that’s like, like a shield you have on? You’re an elemental, wearing a sort of shield?”

  “Yes. And it’s depleting my batteries pretty quick.”

  “So go dormant. Conserve energy.” Crospinal tugged at the girdle, which had started to sag now the collar was gone—the catheter stung, likes pins in his groin. Pulling free a length of gortex piping made the entire unit cant further on his hips. “How did he die?”

  “Who?”

  “You know. The other Crospinal.”

  “The first one? Shit, you know, I could just take you back. I could drop you in your tracks right now and get you carted away. Force feed you. Cram you back into a suit. But I want you to decide. I want you to make the right choice.”

  “How did he die?”

  “He fell. He fell from somewhere up there, and he splattered where you saw him.”

  Projections and the entangled figures of light seemed to coil up his thighs. He pulled another strip of his girdle free—plastic rivets popped away—then rubbed his fingers to let the sheet of fabric drift away.

  Voices added to the clutter and chatter in his head.

  “You helped us long ago. In the year of naming. And now we want to help you.”

  “What did I do?”

  “In the anterior passage, where the bridge once was, you gave two of us—”

  The impact of the carbon rod chipped the tiny elemental right out from under its shield, out from under the apparitions, arcing the titanium body up with a resounding thwack. The machine’s scream was delicate, high-pitched as it rose; before the device had been swallowed again by the paladin’s dreams, let alone before it hit the tiles—as the shield leapt frantically to catch its host—he started to lope.

  An arc of lightning from the nearest data orb, blackening the titanium frame and skin, sending the ruins skittering through the ghosts to rest immobile.

  Crospinal dropped the carbon rod: clattering, it, too, was swallowed by phantasms.

  Wading round an arc of the base through increasingly agitated projections, he faced another facet, exposed now, also empty, and dimmer because of the emptiness. The structure beneath was polymethyl, a web comprised of hard plastic beams like those behind the throne of his father, like the girder that had fallen on the dream cabinets he used to visit. He stared for a moment, overwhelmed by disparate and surprisingly moving fragments of his past.

  Flanking the cradle where the huge drone had nestled, inlaid sets of consoles rose up, levels of them, meeting at a peak: a dais that would have been covered, had the paladin, like those adjacent, been docked. There were four score.

  As he approached the consoles, a susurrus of voices from within egged him on. He was not struck by lightning, though orbs clustered over his head. He moved aside the cover of the lowest console, exposing the pair of holes.

  The icon of hands, palms together, rose and spun before him.

  Pushing his bare fists in, the energy was a soft explosion. He wondered if he would be annihilated for good, but he stood, sagging, the hum moving up his arms—

  “Crospinal? Crospinal?”

  For a second, he was back in bed. Clarissa had woken him. She had breakfast on a tray. A crepe; berries; coffee. It was his birthday.

  But that was swept away, and when he woke this time, his girlfriend was with him, in her dark uniform and dark boots, her hair pulled back tight. She regarded him with such concern and affection he felt light enough to rise off the floor, transcend the world. He had found her. The image was so strong, clear. He could almost touch her. He wanted to drop to his knees, wrap his arms around her legs, rest his head against her forever.

  “You came so far,” she said.

  Love was a force, pushing through him, like lumens, with information glorious and threatening both. He was barely able to speak. He was bursting with love. “How can you see me? You’re the only one . . .”

  “Of course I see you.” A beatific smile, though her expression belied elements of resignation, fear, even a futility of events. (And her eyes, Crospinal realized, were . . . green!) “I always see you. You once belonged to me. I watched the passenger take you away. I watched you in the place the passenger found. You came to me when I called. Remember? Our visits?”

  “Yes.” He was falling into her eyes.

  “I did what I could. I should have stopped it. But I was so proud of you. They wanted me to stop it, but I couldn’t bear the thought. I got in trouble.” Her smile faltered.

  “Is this endtime?” He was trying to swallow a hard shape that had formed in his throat.

  “Yes, Crospinal, it is.” She reached for him, as if she had forgotten he was untouchable. “For better or worse. We’ve arrived.”

  “But the . . . the sailors? The crew?”

  “They tried to return to a time and place that could never exist again. Reasons are flawed. We want you to thrive, Crospinal. Lead a good life.”

  “Paladins tried to kill me.”

  “No, Crospinal. Not you.”

  He gazed at her for a long while. Finally, with great difficulty, he told her how much he loved her.

  “I love you, too,” she said. “Always know that.” Smiling, showing white teeth, she looked, for a moment, happy.
“But you’re on your own now. I can’t take you with me. Not like that. You’re free.”

  “I tried to—” What? What had he learned? What, indeed, had he tried to do?

  When he lifted his fists free—as images rushed him—a shove sent him sprawling. Lying on his back under the carpeting of apparitions—for a moment startled by the vignettes and images of faces and bodies and landscapes that streamed over him—he did not rise until the thought that breathing in these strange projections without filters might be harmful.

  He backed away from the mound, away from the paladins, away from the cascading images.

  Rumbling, another paladin lifted off, streaming light as it rose.

  And he saw batches, when the lights dimmed, dozens of them, standing at the consoles that had been uncovered, moving, coming awake. They withdrew their arms in a symmetrical pattern, and turned, climbing down. They were naked. Their faces were slack, void; their bodies thin and smooth. The giant drone waited, quaking the air, rife with the stench of ozone.

  The mound was a gate, a font of knowledge.

  Engines trembled again, a high-pitched whine, and the world stilled.

  Under the diminishing lights from the paladin’s dreams, a shift in the refraction of the floor revealed ranks of younger batches laying side by side, eyes closed. Children, infants, grey and curled with their mouths open, under the tiles—

  He stood there, trembling, one hand outreached, for some time, culpable, if not for other deaths, then certainly for the death of the tiny elemental.

  Younger than he and his sister had been in the first haptics, the infants beneath his feet were immersed, jaws moving, suckling. Thin conduits, up from the structure, visible beneath the floor, ran into the temples of each baby. He saw tiny inlays in their forearms, a darker insignia in the skin. One had a withered hand. Another, the enlarged head of hydrocephalia, adjacent to a third, legs curled by rickets.

  These were his girlfriend’s batch: the crippled, the rejects.

  On his knees, he peeled aside the rough, translucent tile, and reached into the cold, cold fluid to snap the conduits free. He tore them clear away from the foundation. Somewhere, his girlfriend was watching over him, though he couldn’t see her, and would never see her again. The sailors made a chorus of voices. He felt strong, alive, though saddened by what little he had learned. Icy liquid spattered him, dripping from his skin as he stood. He cradled two slowly twisting babies. They began to warm at his touch, and mewl.

  A series of remote concussions shuddered the world. He smelled and heard configurations shifting. Far above were lights, flashing less and less. When he turned to look over his shoulder, he no longer saw the mound, but another paladin had angled out over the floor, driving away yet another year of batches.

  Was the angry paladin inside this one?

  He belonged to neither batches, nor crew.

  Cradled against Crospinal’s chest, one on each forearm, the infants, breathing by themselves now, sleeping, would soon need to eat.

  Toward a series of columns, disappearing upward as far as he could see, he got a whiff of the pylon, the smell of the void, from the sky station. The old sailor, dying of cancer there, like his own father; the men that lived inside, absconded from this configuration of living altogether. Difficult to see the opening, or exit, for pylons were vacuums, illusions, like so much else. He hesitated. Was the world breaking apart? Composites and plastics both dissolving?

  He had no means to feed himself, let alone the infants.

  The stench of the vacuum was foul.

  Before searching the time-scoured debris directly under the broad opening, which must have drifted from the void of the pylon, he placed the children down gently and, as he did so, felt his girdle cant, lurch, and finally dislodge. The processor was inert. Pulled from his urethra, where the suit had once seeded, the catheter slid, and he felt blood welling already, coursing down his groin and thighs. The blood seemed so hot. He didn’t look, yet red droplets fell upon the infants and the floor where he’d laid them. Crospinal could not tell if the children were boys or girls or one of each. Their limbs moved sluggishly. They seemed ill-formed, and weak.

  Symbiotes were easy to find. They waited sluggishly under the detritus, doing nothing to avoid Crospinal when he uncovered them. He wondered as he turned the smallest one over, and the legs clacked back against each other, if these beasts were part machine: their tiny eyes were red, unreadable, like an elemental’s.

  He placed the carapace very gently against the back of an infant’s head, watching the legs wrap slowly around the thin neck and shoulders. The baby struggled feebly only when the longest limb, the tube unfolding, found the baby’s mouth, and pushed inside.

  The tiny chest filled, emptied, and filled again—

  Then he did the same to the other child.

  Finally, picking up the largest creature, he flipped it over and slung it in one motion, like he’d done this before, behind his own head. The legs were cool as they gripped him, and the carapace against the back of his head was not hard. He opened his mouth to let the tube seek his throat. A blue aura erupted from the mite. The legs gripped his haloed head.

  Retrieving the children, lungs pumped full with cool air, he leapt up.

  THE YEAR OF MIRACLES

  He had vague intentions of retracing his steps, finding his sister and the cockpit—maybe even the pen if he searched hard enough—yet once he was floating, curled around the infants to keep them warm (while the symbiotes clicked and adjusted and hissed air into them), he found himself getting sleepy. In the formless black of the pylon, for an indeterminable amount of time, Crospinal faded in and out. Voices of the sailors were also fading. Were his passengers attempting to leave his body? Or were they feeling assured, finally, and merely quieting?

  Blood from his groin drifted about him in perfect spheres. Though he could not see them as he dozed, the crimson globes were like worlds, planets, stars. Crospinal slowly passed between them and left behind a sparse trail.

  Eventually, against his naked skin, the infants stopped moving. Their energies were spent. They knew nothing about what, if anything, they might be missing. Life to them had been a handful of hours—lungs just starting to work, now filled by an alien bladder, the discomfort and need of sustenance growing as they sailed without weight.

  But Crospinal, for some reason, was no longer drifting.

  He could not open his eyes.

  After that, discomfort flared, and the thin wails of the infants grew louder, peaked, until they, too, were finally past. The three of them took slow, shallow breaths, the handful of hours thrown at them nearly spent. No questions had formed in the minds of the infants. There was silence.

  He managed at some point, before or just after he had stopped drifting, to put one hand down, a massive effort, and lay it across a tiny body, holding it even closer. His skin, and the skin of the baby, was hot as real fire.

  Then he slept again, or expired, and he thought for one last instant as he passed over a threshold into a place of light about the elementals that had watched over him as a child, his guardians, which he’d named Fox and Bear; it seemed as if he could see their red eyes again.

  Calmness on the water. Overhead, constellations were visible, but wisps of clouds had begun to blow in. The shore was not far ahead, waiting. Creatures waited there, too. They waited for everyone, eventually, and took them, without regard. He did not fear death now. Lying, almost relaxed, mere dregs of life remained. The trembling returned to his limbs, one last time, and as he tried to quell it, he realized the boy next door was silent, and had been silent for ages.

  He woke, exhausted, in the dark.

  The fires of their skin had cooled.

  A single sphere of light—one star—broken free from the others, resolved before his face. Were the shapes of land ahead the peaks of a coast? Dreams were memories, and memories were dreams. From the sailors that
had travelled inside him, he knew about stars, and about a spine of green mountains at the end of the sea—

  “Sir?”

  One thing he had not known—and was surprised by—was that stars could talk.

  Crospinal tried to respond but his lips and mouth were too parched. The creatures that waited for them all would not greet him, not just yet. One day, but not right now. Recalling the infants, and leaving his girlfriend behind in the hub, he understood how little time comprised a life, and how tenacious and wondrous and frustrating the interim between oblivions could be.

  Lifting a hand, to hold it up to the night sky as he lay dying, and bid goodbye, he rapped the star with his knuckles.

  “Shit,” it said. “Sorry sir. I’m new to this. So sorry. I didn’t anticipate your movement.”

  It’s okay. He wanted to smile.

  “And sorry for the profanity, too. I’m sort of, well, new to this. And very distressed. It’s just that, well, I believe these are strange times. I’m getting no signals at all from network support.”

  It’s going to be okay.

  “You should be feeling a bit better, no?”

  I am. My name’s Crospinal.

  “I, uh, took the liberty of hydrating you, and the, the infants—the orphans—when I realized no doctors were coming. Stanched your rupture, too, though I have only rudimentary help, I’m afraid. And one of the little ones has died, sir, the female, with the cleft palate. Her stomach was perforated. I couldn’t do anything. We’re not even supposed to help them, but I tried anyhow. She was very young and damaged, and I don’t believe her batch, whatever their year was called, have the capacity to, well, regenerate. Not the damaged ones, anyhow. This situation is certainly not what I had been expecting.”

  Words of reassurance swam around Crospinal’s head, though he could not express them.

  “You were brought here by the strangest of humans. I’ve watched the footage. I’ve watched ten times!”