Head Full of Mountains (19 page)

“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.

Death was a monster, under a black, vaulted ceiling, like this. Infinity was scattered with pinpricks of white.

Had his father sailed here, inside a cabinet?

Looking up, Crospinal thought he saw the pale glow from ambients, almost dormant altogether, deep into the night.

He began to walk, choosing the opposite direction from which he had arrived.

A warm breeze rose, caressing his uniform, penetrating the splits and areas worn thin, touching his skin. He stopped to feel this breath of the world, stirring against him, feet on the hard grilles, hesitating.

There were fewer cabins, in less complete states, and soon the surface became patchy, softer, revealing a coarser screen of sorts. He did not feel tired or hungry, though he could not recall the last time he had slept, or eaten. Tonguing the siphon—but not sucking—he climbed a shallow incline, a woven ramp of polymethyl, and was afforded a view of a broad expanse where there were no longer any structures at all, but a smooth, conically sloping crater, glistening in the dark, that led into a pit of blackness so devoid his eyes could not penetrate nor distinguish any detail within. Like an eye of the night, or maybe the source. Breezes he’d felt earlier rose out of this negative space, foul gas from beneath the world. On his face, a light spray of moisture, but when he touched his cheek with tingling fingertips, the ruins of his mitt detected no such dampness.

How long he stayed there, peering at nothing, he would never be sure. He thought he heard voices, maybe even those of a multitude, whispering from far away. He thought he heard his name. The end of the station grew colder, and darker, and the rancid breeze continued to flow from the void, churning slowly, dousing him.

Crospinal had to take a few steps forward and crouch lower to alter his centre of gravity before he really started to slide.

Falling was not like falling, more like drifting, as if he were inside a cabinet again, ensconced, his thoughts and concerns swept away. He had not felt this way since the creatures that hunted him had infiltrated his dream, and he’d drowned in the cold fluid. Though he wondered if monsters would appear again as he drifted, or if he were currently filled, unawares, to brimming, with viscous liquid. He tried to keep his eyes closed and his thoughts subdued, to make the best of this relative peace.

He could breathe quite comfortably. The atmosphere, though, was a bit chilly, and whatever quality gave it the unpleasant smell also made his lungs ache when the air got inside him and was distributed throughout.

Later, he brought his hands close to his face, and saw them, in their tattered sheaths, as pale, disembodied forms, nothing else—an impenetrable blackness all around. His body was nothing. No wind against his uniform, no feeling that some unforgiving surface of ancient composite or even metal at the bottom of the world was rushing up to meet him, to sunder his body, snuff out his life, an explosion of guts and broken bones—

Hadn’t that been a desire? Just moments ago?

Keeping his hands in front of his face became an effort, so he stopped.

At this point, Crospinal had another vision of his father, standing before him, straight and youthful, tethered to his gate. The way Crospinal remembered his father from his earliest memories: healthy, strong, newly connected.
Hopeful
.

Crospinal wanted to ask why he had been told untruths, but he was beginning to understand that his father had only been trying to protect him, and that truth was subjective. One could hope for glimmers in life, pieces that could be arrayed into a semblance of pattern but upon which order or coherence or satisfactory conclusions could never be imposed.

He looked into his father’s eyes again, saw other worlds, their faint majesty.

Life, and the struggle to make sense of it, had not always been this way.

He wanted to resolve the image of his father, let memories go, and forgive, because falling in this void was the most pleasant interlude Crospinal had experienced in some time—

Until he was punched, that is, in the ribs.

Pleasantries vanished as he curled, winded, around the fist. Another dirty, pale hand (not his own) hit him, again in the stomach, managing to grab the tough fabric of his cruddy old uniform and tug him sharply aside while he gasped. He could do nothing to defend himself. He tried to suck in air as yet another hand appeared, moving under his head, supporting him while clenching his collar and pulling: his lungs had stopped working.

As he opened his mouth to complain or scream or maybe rasp out his death rattle, a hard, blunt object was forced violently between his lips, and down, into his mouth; he struggled and gagged against this indignity but fingers pinched his nose shut and whatever was in his mouth moved as if alive, heading deeper; he felt a blast inside his body, white heat, reviving, and he heard faint voices—

Hauled out of the darkness, Crospinal flopped on a catwalk’s illuminated grille. The tube down his throat blew him full of air. Gagging, he tried to clear the obstruction but was prevented by a series of insistent hands, holding him flat, so he had little choice but to lay there, breathing heavy a few more times.

Ringed above him were three faces. The expressions hard, creased, wearing crude masks with goggles, and each had a luminescent halo. Something wrong with their mouths. Crouching over Crospinal.

His words came out gargled, a mealy mess; he choked on his own spit.

The tube led from inside him, up his throat, between his lips, to behind the back of the nearest man. (He decided.) An amber tube, with distinct bends in it. There was a sucking sound, and that blowing into his trachea, which made the core of heat in his chest, spreading through his limbs—

Three sudden grins exposed brown, broken sets of pegs, and darker gaps where there were no teeth at all. Crospinal blinked. He could not see any eyes behind the reflections off the lenses, just scales of light, flashing at him. The halo of each man glowed with pale blue. There was a row of halogens beyond them, recessed into the low ceiling. More shadow fell harshly down the grinning faces.

“Your teeth,” Crospinal tried to say, for rotten teeth was not even a possibility, unimaginable, since water swam with every additive teeth needed to stay healthy, dentites and nanites and calcium. Teeth fixed themselves, with water. But there was something even stranger about the glowing halos, which extended down the backs of their heads, and were attached around each bust with the bent tubes, one of which extended all the way—

Only when a tube shifted position in the corner of one man’s mouth, clenching of its own accord, did Crospinal understand that the strange headgear was
alive
, biological, a blue-glowing creature riding on their backs. The tubes were legs. One of which, coming from the creature’s flattened body, vanished into the corner of each mouth, while another bridged across, into Crospinal’s—

This time he managed to yank the hollow limb clear, grunting, wiping at his mouth, for his actions had seared his throat and torn bile and mucus up from his stomach. He coughed and grasped at his neck.

The men laughed, lenses flashing. Their open mouths, the ruined teeth, were an affront, and the symbiotic beasts seemed to flow forward, to better see and illuminate Crospinal’s distress.

“Why didn’t you let me fall?” he moaned.

In conference, they whispered, hissing, consonants sharp against ruined bicuspids and incisors, a language Crospinal could not understand. Most characters in his father’s escapes who spoke tongues other than what his father had spoken could never be trusted, but maybe it was Crospinal who could not be trusted, not out here, shared language or not. He searched the thin band of the creature resting about the nearest man’s head, looking for features he could relate to—eyes, a mouth—but saw very little of the sort, just a tangle of collapsed mandibles, churning together.

“Dressed like a sailor’s asshole,” the closest man said, his cheek hooked back by the leg of the creature. “
Crew
.” Ejected like a bad word, but he grinned large, breath terrible. Grubby fingers rubbed at Crospinal’s uniform, testing it, pulling at the burnt fabric and crumbling neoprene.

The other men laughed and sprayed spittle.

“You can speak? My language?”

Fingers on the fabric stopped. The goggles went blank. “Sure,” the first man said. “The language of assholes.”

“You should’ve let me fall.” Crospinal’s throat was raw; talking hurt.

The man had taken Crospinal’s arm, turning his wrist. He saw areas of flesh through the ruined sleeve. In his cheek, the symbiote’s leg made a gurgling sound. He unhooked Crospinal’s mitt and pushed the sleeve high as the elbow, and then the slack lining, sliding the tip of his finger over the exposed scars. Crospinal felt cold all over, as if dead. Looking askance at his companions, the man said something else Crospinal could not understand—to which the companions did not reply. They were no longer laughing.

“What?” said Crospinal.

“You weren’t
falling
.” Turning back, shifting the leg in his mouth with a twitch of his cheek, he said: “You were
floating
.” His words came out sibilant and wet. “See? Not enough air. No oxygen. No gravity. Understand? Drifting in the pylon. No helmet, no mite. About to
die
. Maybe dead already.”

Crospinal yanked his hand free, reattaching the useless mitt, doing his best to cover himself back up.

“How’d you get there, sailor boy? How’d this happen? Someone toss you in?” He gestured toward Crospinal’s arm. “And what happened there? Where you from?”

The harsh, dirty faces were creased with lines almost as deep as those that had appeared on his father’s face in the final stages of life, but there was another quality Crospinal could not quite define, a raw vitality his father had never exuded, nor had any others Crospinal met, even though the skin of these men was blotched, asymmetrically blemished, and unprotected by any sort of supplementary system.

He sat up. The hands moved aside to release him, make room. “I’m no sailor. I know what that means. I’m a boy, in the year of long walks.”

Laughter all around, which he tried to ignore.

“What happens to your urine?” Crospinal asked. He saw the tiny bulge of their genitalia, uncathetered, as shadows between their legs. He pointed. “You just let it dribble out? Waste the enzymes? What happens if you get sick? What happened to your teeth?”

They seemed amused by his barrage of questions; they were not as smart as they thought.

The masks were composed of scraps of plastic, poor quality mostly, the goggles just broken lenses, from a porthole maybe, and held together by twisted wires.

“And why do you have . . . 
animals
on your backs?”

Moving then, as if registering Crospinal’s words, the symbiotes’ legs wrapped tighter around bare chests and necks, one leg pulling aside a cheek. Three trails of drool down three filthy chins. Flat bodies, covered with a thin shell, in segmented plates, hung halfway down the men’s backs, where a short, pointed tail dangled. Eight legs—only the front two formed the long tubes that went down inside, clenched. He watched the glowing beasts adjust, settle, adjust.

“We don’t eat pellets,” said the man, at last. “Or drink from a spigot. But you know that.” He flicked at the tattered cuff of Crospinal’s uniform. “And we don’t dress up, though they tried to get us to. You piss in your own mouth, sailor. You eat your own shit. Is that enlightened? I don’t know what’s worse: sailors, crew, or remaining a mindless dolt.” Showing his poor teeth, to make a point, he spat. The other two stared, bodies tense. “Were you trying to kill yourself?” Lips and tongue worked around the hollow leg. “How did you end up in the pylon? Can’t go in there like
that
. We can toss you back, if you’d like. Finish the job.”

Though the three men laughed again, Crospinal seriously considered this offer. “I fell in,” he said, and they laughed even more.

Beyond, he saw the coarse grilles he rested on extending toward a warren of tunnels in a moderately smooth wall, with composite deposits like a honeycomb over subsumed beams. Each tunnel entrance was ringed by a cluster of lights, flickering semaphores, indicating depth and function, and giving directives. Crospinal had never learned the code, nor could he see any details within to judge for himself the depth or content.

Perched here, over the abyss, with a quiet, flowing silence coming up from the bottom of the world, he looked down. The blackness from which he had been pulled was absolute, and it called to him. Had he wanted to end his life? How long, he wondered, had he drifted?

“We look for treasures,” said the man, “but we never caught someone in there. Not alive, anyhow.” The laughter was quieter, wet as the words. Dark saliva bubbled around the leg of the symbiote. When the man tried to take Crospinal’s wrist again, Crospinal made a fist and pulled back.

“
Leave me be
.”

“There are three kinds of people in the world,” the man said, assessing the potential of getting hit, and deciding chances were low. “And you aren’t any of them.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

The pale aura of the animal’s glow illuminated traces of the inlays, shimmering under the flesh of their stringy forearms, which were held out to him now, just like the girl and the cowled boys from the train station had done. The inlays were where his own would have been, had his father not unstitched them from his veins. When he looked back up, the lenses were intent upon him. He was expected to speak.

“If you don’t eat pellets, how can you survive? And if you don’t drink water, well, your teeth will rot.”

“We’ve come out the other side, asshole.
You can’t turn your back on flesh provided, nor water. You can’t live without them.
But you can, sailor boy. You can break away. You’ve woken up now, and you can decide.”

“I carry my father’s light,” Crospinal said.

Shifting on his knuckles to lift a hand, and poking Crospinal, the man hissed: “No sermon can save you. Tell me, sailor boy, do you believe the world is travelling through a void, and one day we’ll arrive?”

“What?”

“Isn’t that what sailors think? Though they’re too messed up to know it. The destination is where they came from. The great circle.”

“I told you I’m not a sailor. I was born in the pen. I never heard anything like that.”

Above the goggles, an eyebrow arced up. That finger jabbed him again. “We started from the same place, me and you. Different years, different guardians, but the same hub. Maybe you think we’re rolling across the wasteland, under a big, red sun, waning, inside an ancient vehicle supported by wheels as big as the moon.”

Crospinal almost touched the man’s arm but could not bring himself to contact the dirty flesh with his own. He was pretty sure the man would not have permitted it anyhow. These theories had struck him, and in a strange way, reminded him of his father’s trances and speeches, and had made Crospinal think of mountains. Images the words evoked were strong. “I’ve seen it,” he said. “I’ve seen the orb, and the windblown dust.”

“That’s why you’re an asshole.” Smiling that jagged smile. “It’s all lies. All beliefs, theory. When you see that sun, you’re looking at a file. A picture. Right now is all there is. There’s no void outside—only here, in the pylon. Sailors are fanatics.” The words echoed, but the echo was silenced instantly by the dark pylon behind them. “We bring supplies. That crusty old shit in the back room, he hijacked a collection of misfits—” the man spat again “—before he discovered the ampoules. I spent some time there myself, but I figured it out. We all did. Saw the light, as you would say. Who would die for a sailor? And who would wear a suit that takes away humanity? But his suits are gone now. His train hardly flies anymore. There’s no saviour and never was, and nobody can change the course of the world. Sooner you break from your ideas of saving everyone the better.” Tones of anger had crept into the man’s voice. A bare arm swept out, toward the darkness. “You eat your magic pellets, and drink your poisoned water. You suck it until you’re plump and as stupid as they are.” Holding out his arms again, the integrated wires or filaments under his grubby skin were clear, climbing up under a bracelet of copper strapping, to fade near his elbow.