Head Full of Mountains (2 page)

Glancing aside, and down, to flash the dog a look meant to wither, but this time the dog didn’t look up.

“You aren’t meant to know,” he said. “That’s the whole point. I’m not doing anything. Just thinking.”

“For now are you returning? To father? To his throne? Are you going to sleep in your own daybed tonight?” Panting, as if the dog really did have to breathe, and was winded. “He asked about you, earlier. He’s
always
asking about you, Crospie. You’re everything to him. You’re all he’s got.”

Taking a deep breath, a real one, air filling his lungs, coming through the shield, filters hissing, chestplate expanding, microbes and other unwanted guests cycling through the unit of his uniform, Crospinal wiped at his moist cheeks with a sheathed knuckle. He had stopped again. Peed a bit, into his catheter, felt the processor deal. As he bent to rub at his knees, which had been hurting a lot more these days—excruciating—he said, “Father asked about me? Really? I mean, he was awake? He
spoke
?”

“Well.” The dog reconsidered. “Not really. Not
per se
. He was
sort
of alert, a while ago. Briefly. Eyelids flickering. He’s asleep once more. But he
would
have asked about you, if he were awake. He
would
have, Crospie.”

Now they looked at each other. Crippled human, in his stale uniform, lovelorn and feeling sorry for himself, and this luminous projection, here to protect, instruct, and fetch him back. Resentments that Crospinal tried to sustain were fading. He felt sorry for the stupid dogs. They were distilled emotion, thoughts with singular-minded agendas, neurons riding on weak sine waves.

Crospinal experienced a degree of envy, for identical reasons.

“That makes no sense,” he muttered.

“Crospie?”

Tensing for more bad news, he blinked. The sound in his ears was a roar. One day, all this would be gone. “Yeah?”

“I’m afraid, father, his body that is, has been coughing up blood.”

Coughing up blood.

“Maybe you could come back for good? Like old times. Father would love to hear your voice. Please come back.” The dog had starting to whine, getting worked up, words pitched higher and higher. Since father’s condition had taken a sharp downturn, all apparitions were less stable. Which stood to reason.

Crospinal wanted to ask:
How much blood?

He rubbed at his scalp instead, the shield crackling about his head.

“We
know
,” said the dog, quieter now. “We know he hears you.”

“Look.” Crospinal’s cheeks were getting hot. “I’ll come by, all right? I’ll come by. Later. But take it easy. You’re gonna burn out.” This was meant to be a joke, though Crospinal felt horrible as soon as he said it.

“Come by? Come by!” The dog spun, happy; it didn’t care about insults. The projection struggled to keep up. “Oh, that would be great! Just great! Thank you
so
much.” Circling his feet now, dashing about. “We miss you, we miss you, we miss you!”

He ignored the litany of high-pitched questions and the further pestering of the dog. At least, he tried to appear that way. Why waste breath telling an apparition a joke anyhow? Why tell a joke at all?

“Okay,” Crospinal said. He meant it this time. He
would
pay father a visit. He would spend time in the pen, sleep in his own daybed. “But don’t call me Crospie. I tell you that all the time. Crospie was my baby name, and I’m not a baby anymore.”

The apparition, happy for any concession, for any bone tossed its way, moved its hind quarters from side to side so vigorously it shook itself apart.

He was pretty sure he could not remember what it was like to be that baby, Crospie. Memories of memories. Haptics and replayed files. Naturally, there were recordings by eyes of the world, stored in the banks behind father. Not many, but enough.

He’d had a sister then, apparently, the same age, at first, though she disappeared at some point during the first two years of life, and seemed to age at a different rate. Father had immersed Crospinal in a few dozen scenarios: two infants—Crospie and the girl, Luella, in tiny uniforms. Crospinal dragged himself forward, crooked thighs splayed, while his sister began crawling, pulling herself up, and toddling, long before him. Flesh and blood. Two babies, tumbling together.

Side by side in the garden, taken from a remote perspective, or playing with father’s garrulous projections in the halls outside the pen’s core while the two elementals he had called Fox and Bear watched, begrudgingly, over them both.

Maybe mnemonic triggers were set off by the sight of the children, but he was absolutely certain he had no recollection of the feel of another person’s palm against his own, no living hand, mitt in mitt. He watched contact happen—at least on two occasions—on floating screens, and within the haptics, but that was all.

Generally, in the years since Luella surpassed him and then vanished, father and he kept their distance, ostensibly to prevent the exchange of unpleasant organisms, but Crospinal, even at a young age, sensed a whiff of shame. He was sure he smelled the faintest tinge of repulsion.

In one such recreational file from the library of haptics, the siblings were naked together, actually
naked
, without any latex or neoprene, no processor, nothing, splashing in the collecting pool, bathed by the clumsy elementals. They must have been days old, bandages still on their arms. Their pale, fresh skin, a rare and incredible sight. The damp folds of their genitalia, glimpsed but once, dimpled buttocks, large heads. Before any uniform went on, before catheters drilled in and the clinging spandex covered their limbs, before delicate shields swung up, over their faces to filter the air. Bodies were pink and sudsy and gleaming clean.

But he could never recall contact.

Fox was thin and upright, a smart machine, casting a thin shadow. Bear was the same. Like all elementals—there were a few that came and went, assisting around the pen—they had cold, red eyes. Clearly, father had sent a few spirits in, too, to watch over proceedings: spectral shapes hovered in the background, translucent and fleeting, stymied by the trees.

Now, Fox and Bear, like Luella, and all the other elementals, were long gone. Of this Crospinal was also certain. The pen and environs were crumbling as father sickened. Composites encroaching again, the way it was before he’d come. Even haptics were changing, edited, or unavailable. Vanished from within father’s diminishing range and what few external areas Crospinal had lamely explored. Maybe the machines—and his sister, too—were broken in adjacent landscapes, whatever configurations they might be, unable to return. Batteries might have died. Oxygen could have ended. Truthfully, Crospinal did not miss the machines much, though he often wondered what had become of Luella. Despite Fox and Bear being tangible, their titanium fingers had been cold, their movements slow, their silence and awful eyes unnerving.

Spirits still drifted around. They didn’t get in the way much. And ghosts. And dogs, of course, father’s dogs, all over the place.

In another haptic, baby Crospie, unaware of anything the future might bring, or take away, slept fitfully on his back, arms flung wide, curved legs canted. In a fresh uniform, maybe his second or third, with fresh boots and fresh mitts. His sister, awake, managed to lift her head and stare out at the lens recording the shot: her expression, under the patina from the collar’s shield, showed evidence of a rapture that clearly defined the wonder she felt in her life and perceptions. Crospinal could tell by the gaze, the partly open mouth, the intake of breath. Her blue eyes were almost round. Behind her, even in sleep, Crospinal’s contrasting pain and angst were visible. He had never felt wonder, nor assurance, or security. Not to this day.

Luella was gone.

Impossible to pinpoint when, exactly, she had vanished. Impossible for him, anyhow. In one haptic, she appeared twice his age. Impossible for him to pinpoint any event, really. Like Fox and Bear, like the past itself—and like the baby called Crospie—all he knew was that his sister was no longer around. Times when he had wanted to ask father about Luella were also gone. Times when he might’ve gotten a straight answer. All he ever got now was blank stares, catatonia, or fragmented lectures from the apparitions as father unravelled more and more toward madness and his demise.

Bloody drool, dangling . . . 

Crospinal had stopped asking anything. Most of his time was spent wandering the edges of the disintegrating pen, or beyond, in the less defined areas he was warned so many times, as that child, to avoid.

The clutch of carbon tubes clattered together like bells as they plummeted. He had snapped the tubes away from where they’d been rooted, separating the brittle material at the base. Not long ago, this entire area had been distinct and hard-edged. Now, sheets of hardening polymers encroached on the landscape and curtains of light swept back and forth over areas, reconfiguring, instilling information. Building machines—dumb, six-legged, carapace the size of his fist—watched from the walls as the tubes fell until the roiling mists below broke them down. Other movements down there, through a lazy rent in the clouds: beams of white energy suddenly revealed, magnesium bright, a growing extension, coaxing fullerenes from the composite foundation. Two hovering drones watched, in a swarm of data orbs, as construction splayed where none had been before, the world shifting, growing down there.

Crospinal turned, reluctantly, from the abyss.

There had been a thought, a flickering thought, about following the tubes down.

Past the remaining platform ringing the aperture, a layer of tiles, marred purple with toluene, had formed, completely separating the main rib from the pen, compromising the transfer tube he’d planned to take in such a way that Crospinal would have to hunch to walk under its sloped ceiling. Even now, strings of allotropes dripped from the seam of the split to the fresh tiles, where they were absorbed into the world with tremendous stench. He stood in wonder at the transformation that would sooner or later eradicate everything he knew. Data streams webbed the opening, information pouring over the freshly exposed material, programming reform, telling polymers to join forces. Changes were afoot up here, too, reconfiguration in the old as well as the new. What would father say about this, if he knew? Change was no longer kept at bay.

Not foolish enough to pass, for transmogrifications of the layout might not cease because of his presence, Crospinal held his nose pinched, capillaries crackling (these mitts were not new, and also compromised by wear). After a brief inspection, he took a narrow passage into what remained of the original structure, into a crawlspace, shimmying sideways between old plates.

The tunnel that had formed here was quiet. Sometimes he felt a breath of stale air, and he thought he heard movements, but he did not see indications of what, if anything, might be travelling. Ambients in the wall kept the lighting dim. At his back, the construction was warm, almost hot. Getting increasingly rough. If the structure changed abruptly, he could find himself plunging—not as appealing a concept as it had just been. He wondered if, on the other side, lay the barren horizon he’d gazed out on, not so long ago, from porthole of the harrier. Was there truly another world, with another set of rules, outside this one? The wasteland Crospinal always saw could not be what father coveted, where there had been mountains. His insistence meant there could be a third, or dozens more, for traces lingered, through fragments of memories and jumbled knowledge: the gate connected to father’s brain once supplied the ability to burn brightly, and project, but proved inconsistent and, as he died, unreliable.

Life had not always been this way.

Putting his hands against the ancient surface of the construction, Crospinal felt tremors of energy through the thin layer of his mitts. He thought again about his girlfriend’s words. Just as there was no way to see what lay beyond this shell, he had no chance of understanding the motives of the manifestation he had fallen in love with. Portholes did not open on this facet of the world. His girlfriend was unfathomable.