Head Full of Mountains (17 page)

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.

“Hello,” she said. Her eyes were wide and blue. She was not thin like him, but more like father, with thick limbs, or at least the way father’s limbs were before he got sick. “I’ve been waiting.” Her voice was not quite synced with her lips.

Crospinal had no idea what to say.

Her smile grew as she watched him. When she laughed, he was lifted up, taken away from concerns and doubts and expectations. He was free.

“What took you so long?”

They shook him awake and helped him to his feet while he mumbled thank-yous and nodded idiotically. He could not straighten fully in the cramped compartment, and was reminded of this by banging his skull against the hard ceiling. Putting tentative fingers up, he felt no blood on his scalp. He’d fully expected his mitt to engage with a gushing mess. The stinging in his palms had diminished, though his feet felt tender against the metallic floor. Crospinal was dazed, but he had been dazed long before hitting his head. He stood in the candle’s glow, supported by strong hands, their grip a sensation he could not process or get over. Sinews and tendons, taut against him—muscles, bones, flesh—while he held his own head, waiting, unsuccessfully, for confusion to finally vanish.

“Starting descent,” said the girl.

He muttered something. He wasn’t sure what. The girl was behind him now. By the motion relayed through his soles, he knew he was still inside the giant device she had called the
train
.

Where memories had once intruded upon him, dreams now seemed to bleed. By nearly drowning in the cabinet, had he released dreams into the world?

Bright lights no longer flared through the slot above. He saw ambients out there, far away, diffused through the opening, but no sudden glare.

Carrying the tin cup, flame wavering within, casting both light and shadow, the girl had appeared peripherally, so close he could see downy gold hairs highlighted on her cheeks, when he looked, and pores in constellations across her nose. Crospinal wanted to touch her skin again, to see if she remained composed of yielding, warm flesh, but was surprised by a sudden mouthful of bile, which he tried—turning quickly away—to spit out; this took several attempts and left his mouth foul.

The hands held him secure the whole while.

“I’m okay, I’m okay.” Convincing no one, least of all himself.

“Over station, near enough,” said the girl, clearly concerned for Crospinal’s well-being: glances were exchanged. “No more rest here, deicida.
Prepare
.”

The scorch marks went right up the sleeves of his uniform, all the way to the elbows. And he was stunned to realize—when he finally shuffled forward—that the tingling sensation in his feet was actually the texture of the floor directly against his
bare skin
: lifting his left foot—resting it against his right shin—he saw burn marks there, too, on his boot, and cuffs, and ragged holes blown right through the Dacron sole, exposing areas of blackened skin.

“We go,” urged the girl. “Station’s coming. No more sleep.
We go
.”

“How did this happen?”

They moved him toward the hatch in the floor, without an answer. The train’s tone and resonance shifted again and Crospinal had to adjust his balance as the boys holding him swayed. From beyond the walls came muted sounds: voices, audible shreds, torn swiftly away, and the brief din of other large devices, working.

He was third to descend. They had released him, pointing. He looked down the hatch to see another platform within a larger, confined area, with better lighting, made of the same metallic composition as the upper area. He went down backward, placing his feet onto the rungs, and grasping the ladder, disquieted by the contact. A few broken crates, construction tubes in tight bundles, spools of fibre . . . and an elemental—tarnished, on all fours—listing to one side and patiently facing the featureless wall. For a second, Crospinal thought it might be Bear, doubled over, but even old Bear would not have become this decrepit, not in a dozen lifetimes. The smart machine below paid him no heed but Crospinal frowned toward it nonetheless.

As those voices outside continued to swell, rising and fading, and it became cooler, he descended into a chill. The others, climbing after him—and the two already down—did not seem alarmed by the conditions or by the silent elemental, and so Crospinal tried not to be alarmed, either, but he recalled what the riding machine had said to him—before the betrayal—as they’d headed into the giant garden, about thousands of people in the world, and Crospinal wondered if they were all waiting for him, just beyond.

Jumping the last metre or so, Crospinal landed heavily on the platform, extremities throbbing. One of the boys who had gone ahead reached out to steady him and, as he turned, their eyes met. To his surprise, Crospinal grinned. The boy did not, averting his stare. Despite the burns, and the damage to his uniform, Crospinal’s new limbs were strong and worked well. He revelled in the tingling, in the physicality of the hands that grasped him once more, in the feeling of the floor against the soles of his feet.
He was not alone
. And a lifetime of struggles on ladders, of tumbles and scrapes—crying silently sometimes, for hours, the pain horrible in his knees, while father waited, staring into space—were gone.

Glancing up at the person following him down—bare legs, a wrap of plastic sheet—he wondered for a second if this might be another female, one he had not previously seen, or if he’d been wrong initially. Distinction between boys and girls no longer seemed very clear, if it ever had been. This entire group looked more like him, angular, slight, than like the soft beauty and grace of his girlfriend, or the taller bulk of father. How could Crospinal be sure who was who? Did it matter?

The tin cup came clanking down, against the metal ladder; the long-haired person stood next to him, the last down. Surely a girl. She took Crospinal by the shoulders, looked into his face (she was much shorter than he had thought), and said, “You all right? You ready?”

He nodded, but doubted very much that he was either. Her eyes, close together, were mostly blue, yet the shape was different than his own.

“Leave when we leave. Walk like we walk. Face down.”

Next to Crospinal, the elemental minded its own business—once or twice when they were coming down, it had glanced over.

Then the girl pulled a recessed handle, and an entire segment of the wall vanished with a popping sound, revealing colour and sound and scents behind a broad, protective shield: Crospinal stood there, looking out, blinking and bewildered.

The train had stopped.

There was activity.

Just past a narrow catwalk, flimsy structures sloped up—rows of small cabins—crew cabins—dozens of them, small, and geometrically arranged—merged into the base of a massive, composite wall that rose, even higher, out of sight. Two data orbs whizzed past, so near to his face that he recoiled, causing the shield between them to ripple. People, too, on the catwalk platform, though certainly not a thousand; maybe seven or so, all without uniforms, nearly naked, all filthy, paying Crospinal no attention whatsoever as they broke through the shield from the other side, passing him to ransack the already-broken crates and torn packages on the floor of the train, kicking through the refuse with a calculated sense of efficiency and desperation.

The ancient elemental groaned and took a ponderous step forward, out onto the catwalk, bowing under the weight of its own body. Crospinal saw another machine, identical, farther along the platform, emerging sluggishly, from another part of the train. They moved as though crippled, as he had once been. They had been altered, modified.

Nudged from behind, Crospinal stepped through the shield, and felt a warm, cloying humidity against his exposed skin.

From his awkward place among these others—with the girl who had spoken leading the way—Crospinal shuffled past rows of cabins, each built upon a thin floor of interlocking girders, smaller versions of the one that had crushed the dream cabinets, outside the pen, with metallic walls and an insulating layer of mylar sheeting. The structures appeared about to collapse, or maybe drift off. In the narrow corridors of the station, no controller approached. After a few turns, the train that had carried him here (like a massive, corrugated hose, when seen from the outside), and the catwalk platforms where they’d disembarked, were left behind. Activity diminished, though he still saw the occasional person, peering half-naked from an open doorway, or standing aside to let him pass. Two struggled with a broken, half-formed spigot, which still had a bit of fight left. A man, older than father had been, but thin and with a bony face, like Crospinal’s, or like the faces of these others surrounding him, slept fetal on the floor. No one here wore uniforms of any kind, yet they didn’t remark upon his own, or try to take it, to save them from microbes. He was in a community of infection and susceptibility; they, in contrast, seemed blasé. Were all these people distorted apparitions, carved from a light that shone on frequencies beyond rational or irrational ken? He had to resist trying to put his hands on those they encountered, not because of the spread of contagions, but because he was afraid he might disrupt their tenuous integrity, or discover that they were not physically there at all.

The air, though warm, was somewhat sickly, and soon the inside of Crospinal’s sinuses stung. He could only attribute this discomfort to be a byproduct of gathered humanity: there was the faintest scent of feces and urine, and though it might have been coming from his own reservoirs, he shuddered to think about what happened to bodily functions if no catheter or any form of processor dealt with it. Debris and grime on every surface, smeared across the flimsy, hard-edged dwellings, across the peoples’ skin, across the path under his feet. No cleaners, no devices. What could that bode?

Crospinal saw a depilated woman (he was sure this time of the gender: there were swellings in this older person, curves he did not have, and a gentleness in the gaze that fell upon him now), with another individual, but altogether naked, crouching in shadows like beasts, bodies grey with dust.

Above, cabins loomed. Most were abandoned, in various states of completion or destruction. He saw the ceiling beyond—

And was startled by the blunt shape of a drone, hovering overhead. He stumbled, but was caught. He recalled the speed of the attack in the garden, and kept his head low. He wanted to bolt. He didn’t speak or ask questions of his companions, who seemed more concerned with ushering him forward than with any sort of airborne menace or surveillance.

The others, in their cowls, remained as silent as they had been since he woke; none seemed fearful, or furtive, or distraught. Should he be led like this, without resistance? The feel of their hands upon him had altered. They were gentle yet insistent. What could he possibly ask, even if the drone were not up there, watching, even if these people spoke?

Sounds of the engines were louder, sporadic, with a grinding quality that set Crospinal’s teeth on edge and reverberated through his body. The burning sensation in his hands and feet had faded, at least, but his bare soles still felt tender and exposed against the texture of the hard, metallic floor.

He imagined that the train had travelled upward to get here. By extension of that logic, the engines, operating at the core of the world, should have been quieter. Yet that was not the case. Were they below the level of the pen now? Had they descended? He had no orientation.

Presently, the floor became neither grille nor composite tile; rather, a dark, fairly smooth surface composed of thin filaments woven together. Almost warm against his skin, and he imagined germs crawling up, inside his uniform, filling what remained. He stepped over expansion grates, through which he glimpsed distant, bright lights and indications of greater depths, as if an entire other world sprawled in the gaps down there—

Startled by a roaring, Crospinal looked suddenly upward again, wildly, to see the train—or one just it—leaving the station, rising as if yanked over the cabins, twining and banking away, moving faster than anything that large and heavy should ever be able to move.

The drone was gone.

Turning a corner, the group still around him, a lone child—wrapped in lengths of black cellophane—saw Crospinal, and stopped, eying Crospinal’s face and old grey uniform with huge eyes; Crospinal too had stopped for a moment to gawp in return at the round, smooth face, and the wonder he saw evident there.

“What year are you?” he asked the child, breathlessly. He could not be sure of the gender. He saw elements of himself, yet the wonder was Luella’s, from the haptics, and not his. “Cognitive leaps? Or before that? What year are you?”

But the girl nudged him forward. “We go,
we go
.” Pulling at him with strong hands.

Moments later, an old man—even older than father had been, older than Crospinal had imagined possible, whose filthy, skeletal body was bound by strips of the same sort of insulating material father had instructed Crospinal to pull over the both of them when the temperature regulator refused to work, and the pen dropped below zero for two consecutive nights—called them out. Lungs rattling a warning, like hard rain, the old man spoke from where he sat. Crospinal had stopped; the others tried to hustle him along.

“Reasons for anger,” the old man called. “Who are you bringing here?
Another
sailor? That can’t be a sailor. A pox upon us all.”

Behaviour among people was proving to be a series of unfathomable surprises. Crospinal looked back, the girl tugging at him, but the old man wasn’t even looking anymore.

“Come inside,” she said. “Come now. Come inside.
”

Domed structures of the ceiling, visible beyond the last of the scattered cabins, were almost free of polymer mists. Ambients shimmered with a greenish quality here, and the engines at the heart of the world changed tone yet again. After he had stood next to the ancient or disabled elemental on the train, and had stepped off with it, there had been no other machines, no devices other than data orbs whizzing overhead, and the drone. Activities, movements, solely from people—and all of them with the black patterns on the inside of their forearms, which a few held out to him as he passed. Although whether this was meant to impress him or ward him off, he could not tell.

This cabin was indistinguishable among the many. He passed through a narrow aperture, bent, others behind him. Even within the chamber—which had distinct corners and right-angled walls, and was lit by two floating globes—no controller came out to meet him or ask what he required. From a second, darker doorway at the rear of this room came a stench that made Crospinal feel ill.

No ambients suffused the surfaces of the walls. Was this cabin choosing to be silent, like the sustenance station? Was it waiting? The room seemed totally inert. He sensed a stillness, an absence of even the most remote glimmer of intelligence.

Furniture consisted of a simple flat platform on legs, like a primitive table, with no means of locomotion. Two equally immobile stools. He could not even tell what they were made of—certainly not metallic, or a carbon compound.

A filthy counter running the length of one wall was covered in tiny, crumpled tubes. He reached out, pushed at several of these tubes with his still-tingling fingers.
Kevlar
. Pharmacological in nature, but not from any health dispenser he had known. Devices had not cleared away this trash. No cleaners rested, dormant, charging. As the others crowded behind him (seeing no console to tempt him, no way to contact his girlfriend or attract the angrier manifestations), he understood that he was expected to enter the rear room.

Kicking at more of the Kevlar tubes with his unshod feet as he was nudged forward, encouraged by the girl, Crospinal caught a twinge of another, more subtle scent, but lost it quickly—and what he thought it meant—among the other overwhelming odours.

When he leaned forward to try to see into the gloom, the faint incandescent globes moved also, emitting their cold light over him, and over the spartan contents of—

The underlying scent was ozone: he’d found their father.

Or, rather, their father had found him.

Upon a filthy daybed, certainly a man, similar to but not his father, lay in a sagging uniform, no helmet, whose eyes were glazed and white as bones. He stared blankly at the ceiling. Crospinal shook his head to clear it of roiling memories.

“Reunited,” said the blind father at last. “I saw them lift your dead body and carry it toward the train.”

He spoke with the same tone and quality as Crospinal’s father had.

Crospinal took a step back.

“I watched the machine slink away. They don’t like us, you know. The machines, the smart ones. They desire to be the same, and they pledge to remain nonpartisan. They approach, and they follow, but they can sell us out in an instant. They resent our blood, our meat. They want a soul. Come closer, boy.” One mitt weakly raised, beckoning. The uniform, though ill-fitting, was fresher and in better shape than Crospinal’s.

He did not approach.

Rigid support rings, multiple pockets, and from the back of the father’s head there led a narrow bundle of thin cables, almost hidden by what Crospinal now realized was a mass of grey hair, all spilling over the far side of the mattress and draped over a grey orb the size of his own head. “That’s your gate?” Watching the laboured breathing, the quiet hiss of nutrients, while the ozone, and what it triggered, tried to subsume him. “They told me they had no father.”

After a moment, the man laughed weakly and soundlessly, as if Crospinal’s words had just trickled in and were a good joke. His own white eyes never moved. The prominent rings of the uniform were like bones from a different sort of skeleton altogether. He licked dry lips. “The days of fathers are gone. I’m merely their teacher, their mentor.”

“You have a tether,” said Crospinal, pointing. “Connecting you to a gate, and from there to an info bank. This room is your pen.”

An apparition swirled upward from the man’s chest, rising, assuming the form of a helix in the centre of the room and passing onward, through the ceiling. Crospinal heard the girl, who had not accompanied him past the threshold—but must still have been watching—gasp. This father was smiling. Tendrils wavered over his forehead and subsided as the apparition broke apart.

“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?”