Head Full of Mountains (22 page)

“You better drink. The one you’re looking for is sleeping. She dreams again, until the way’s open. But she’s shown us. You should stop saying her name, though. Go, drink up. I have to leave. But thanks for the help.”

“Who were those two?” He remembered elements of the fight again, details of which had somehow tried to sneak away. Gathering them back was like trying to catch apparitions with clumsy mitts.

“Batches. Sent to destroy the stations.” Now she looked Crospinal up and down, as if also seeing him the way he truly was for the first time. “What happened to you? Where’s your contingent?”

Crospinal’s teeth clacked together. When he staggered forward, the girl, after the briefest hesitation, moved to support him; her grip was strong, and he felt immediately safer, his arm draped over her shoulder, his side pressed to hers. Her bare skin, right there, against his ruined uniform.

“You’re going to have to move faster. I can’t stay here.”

“Where’s Luella sleeping?”

“Stop saying her name. Not here. I won’t tell you again. Look, batches will be back soon. I surprised those two while they were taking apart a dispenser. Usually there’s more. Now
move
.”

He was hustled through an aperture, into a tiny station. No console, a few half-cupboards, a lightscreen and thumb plates, all lit up by gentle halogens. The reek of newly modified structures, thick in the air; he gagged. At his feet, fresh tiles were in the process of melding into a grille. Toluene stung the soles of his feet. He sensed great collisions, and struggle, beyond those of man and woman.

Deposited onto a stool, and told to stay put, something adverse occurred to Crospinal’s equilibrium and he slipped off, crashing to all fours.

“Damn it . . .”

The girl helped him up, impatient. “You need to stay here. Get under a counter if they come back. They might not even look in this station again, not unless they’ve been told to. If this one starts to close, find another.” Peering up at the ceiling, she said, “The controller was just here. Weird that’s it gone. Hello? Hello?”

He mumbled, “Luella was my sister. . . .”

“
Stop saying that
! I don’t know what the matter was with the sailor who taught you. Fathers and sisters? But you should
stop
. She’s dreaming, I told you, far away. What’s
wrong
with you? Are you trying to curse us both?”

True, Crospinal was not feeling very good. “We had the same father,” he said lamely. “Me and her.”

“All right.” The girl propped him up. “Your father’s dead, right? Your sailor’s gone. You’re alone. You need to change. You need to clean up.”

The controller had evidently decided it was safe to come out from hiding, dropping to hover before Crospinal’s face as the girl spoke curtly to him; they studied each other.

“Watch her,” said the girl.

“He’s a boy,” said the device. “You know those maniacs broke my eyes?” The controller lifted, pivoting, to settle with a tremor at the epicentre of the station, where stitches of blue arced from its skin to the furniture. The entire station shimmered.

“I know.”

Crospinal, faint, felt quavers of intrusion as the rays of information pierced him.

The device said: “He’s no batch. Nor is he from a stat. But he’s dreamt in one. There’s pathogens in his bloodstream. I need to adjust the water.”

“What?” The girl had paused.

“Where’d you find him?”

“
Him
? He, uh, he just . . . showed up. He came down a ladder, at the edge of the construction. He’s been inside a stat? He’s totally deluded.”

“Not from around here, that’s for sure.”

The girl straightened. She’d been crouching at Crospinal’s side. “There were two batches outside. They went running back. He—” meaning Crospinal, who looked up now, into the wondrous face of this girl “—scared them off. He can
fight
. But I’m leaving him here.”

Crospinal tried unsuccessfully to get up. Unfathomable hostilities unfolded beyond the walls of the station. People fought each other. They hurt each other—

“My dispenser,” whined the device, “will never hatch. I can’t get another one started. You know what this means?”

“Yes,” said the girl, with real sympathy. “I do.”

“My chance to run a functioning comfort station is pretty much shot. I’ve let the crew down.”

“You’re doing great,” said the girl. “You’re helping him, at least. You’re helping me, too. You’re doing a fine job.”

“I’m not crew,” Crospinal said, but no one heard him.

“Lay on the floor,” the controller told him. “I’ll try to get the rest of that jumpsuit off.”

“We’ll get through this,” said the girl.

Crospinal, as firmly as he could, held one hand up to keep the girl and controller away, though neither had attempted to unfasten even one clasp of his tricot. The effort on his part was huge. He was breathing hard. He would be the one to remove his suit, if anyone.

A moment later, when nudged, he knew he had missed something. The girl was no longer standing to his right. Instead, she was before him, proffering a bulb, which had materialized in the clean palm of her mitt. The controller had vanished. Crospinal frowned. From the halls outside came a far-away hum. Crospinal took and emptied the bulb, drinking slavishly, admitting defeat, knowing enhancements were entering through his mouth, proceeding into his stomach, spreading throughout his body and newly configured extremities. The empty bulb against his bare fingers dispersed into molecules like a puff of smoke, and the surge of support within his body made him crave to live a life of much less transitory meaning than he suspected most people, if not all, could ever achieve.

“Look,” he said, pushing up his tattered and blackened left sleeve. Neoprene flaked off as he exposed his skinny white forearm. “
Look
.”

The girl stared. Stricken. She reached out slowly but did not touch the thin white scarlines on his wrist.
Now
there was wonder, returned to her face. Now he saw it. “You
are
like her.” Her voice rendered to a breath. “I thought the controller was messing around.”

“I’m telling you. Luella is my sister. We were born together in the pen, past the bay, past where the train stops. At the end of the world. I saw her, in a dream cabinet. She’s in trouble. They all are.”

The girl was silent for a long time. She’d taken a few steps back. “Paladins are angry.” She was obviously trying, and failing, to evaluate this development, glancing again and again at Crospinal’s scarred arm. “They’re hunting. They’re destroying. And the batches . . .”

The water surged inside him. Crospinal felt all kinds of desire. He looked at the girl’s limbs, the exposed skin ruddy over wiry, toned muscles, and felt his catheter shift. He put his two bare hands into his stubbly hair, trying to keep his thoughts and the images they conjured within his skull.

“Your thumb . . .”

“I was bitten.” He managed to get to his feet, supported once more as the girl stepped in.

“Where are you going?” But there was reverence in her tone. She looked at him differently, she held him differently.

“With you.”

Moving forward, under his arm: they left the station together, but the corridor, as if waiting for them, burst immediately into life with apparitions, bizarre and indistinct formations of lumens circling about their knees, startling them both by nattering and swooping and whirling before sinking to the floor, where they dispersed into wisps.

“Paladin,” the girl hissed. “Batches have called them. We’ll have to go the other way.
Now
.”

Crospinal resisted her tugging. He was watching the ghosts, looking among them for a dog, hoping to be recognized, but these apparitions were dark and squat sculptures, with no faces or features he could discern or recognize. When the girl pulled insistently at him again, he understood that the appearance of these projections might not be a welcome sight.
Paladins? Fathers?
They could both project. The banks were like drones. And there were connections.

Circling in frenetic loci, the apparitions appeared to pass through walls and come back again and again at Crospinal, mapping the area, reporting. He knew the patterns. Dogs had done this.

“
Let’s go!”

But he pulled free. He needed to reach the source, dismayed at the violence and destruction of his past, at the fighting and, most of all, at the mortality hanging over them all. As apparitions crackled, spinning past—and through—him, making him shiver, Crospinal moved down the hall, away from the girl, who stared, helpless:

“I can’t go that way,” she grunted. “Pilot? Pilot? Where are you going?”

He’d taken her strength. He walked among the apparitions, against their tide, feeling as though he was floating atop the projections as they gyrated uselessly at his feet. Was he expecting a forum? A chance to talk one more time with his father? Resolution seemed absurd, even to him. Yet he did not turn around. She had said
paladin
. There was the increasingly strong smell of ozone.

Unlike the chat of the dogs, these phantoms made high-pitched, buzzing sounds, almost inaudible, a keening transmutation of misanthropy as opposed to the concerned anxieties of his father’s far-flung yet gentler neuroses: whatever projected these apparitions up ahead was no father.

Crospinal looked to see if the girl was watching, or if she had tried to follow, but she was asleep now, curled on the floor, cozy in her fresh uniform.

A metal tool, concrete ephemera, regurgitated by the wall—with prongs at one end and a sort of handle at the other—fell clattering at his feet. There was movement within the walls, some large thing, and he walked in an aura of light. His nostrils burned. The exposed skin on his hands and feet tingled. As the world grew and changed, lives winked in and out, like sparks, but left nothing behind. There was no reason to thank the world for this strange and rare brevity. His father had been wrong to offer appreciation and thanks. The world existed beyond ten thousand flickering lifetimes.

Cresting a narrowing dip in the floor (where a handful of silent controllers commiserated, clustered together, bound by an exchange of data, and the shared loss of their stations), the walls became a partially formed lattice, illuminated by flows of light from data streams, dotted here and there with builders, hardly solid at all, reeking of construction. Through the gaps, he saw an open area hinting a volume larger than any that had thus far dwarfed him into this insignificance.

Apparitions moved faster here. He was close.

In a small, delicate recess—the stink of fresh structures so strong he could not swallow or breathe, not more than just gulps of air—several naked humans crammed. Like the girl he had left behind, they slept, fetal, on the hardening floor. One twitched. Possibly the pair of boys, or perhaps girls, he had chased away were among this group—there must have been six, no, seven in all. They looked so similar, with a skimpy garment of plastic sheeting over their pelvic area. Some were still clutching tools: lengths of composite spike; a carbon tube.

Hissing with energy, the apparitions tore right through them all.

With his back to Crospinal, aquiver, stood another person, propped at an incomplete console, arms deep in the holes. The body was trembling with the power coming up through its arms. Maybe sleeping, or entranced. Maybe dead—

And the manifestation called forth suddenly filled the small recess—neither his girlfriend nor the angry woman, but a large man, bigger than his father, in a dark uniform, with a black helmet over his head. The features, turned in quarter profile, were obscured. A man whose anger and frustration emanated like a chilly blast.

Crospinal stepped onto the threshold of this burgeoning station, and the world swayed about him.

Huddled against one of the walls, tucked against the edge of the console, a kneeling youth, stiff with pain, was awake, and met Crospinal’s gaze. Shadows pulled at the face, trying to stitch it into the framework of the recess, to draw it in, but flesh was not palatable. Crospinal saw fear in the eyes, a child much younger than himself, and he stepped inside to take the arm of this kneeling girl, or boy, the patterns of the inlay like hot wires against Crospinal’s palm, searing him; the skeleton was locked into position, joints fused, and would not budge.

Over the next brief moment there was silence, a frozen tableau, before the manifestation flared and grew much higher than any console this size could contain. Apparitions whirled and Crospinal, looking up, roared, as father would say, at the top of his lungs.

The manifestation had noticed him—

When the entire recess sheared away, like a haptic ending, the arm was torn from Crospinal’s grip and he had to stumble back, into the hallway, to avoid falling. A faint rumbling, far below, as recess and contents plunged.

He got to his feet in front of an aperture as tall as himself, and several times wider, at a great height, looking out and down over a chamber infinitely larger than the bay. Each chamber larger than the last. Console, manifestation, batches: all gone.

He stood on the brink of a massive drop.

A large drone retreated, spinning.

And in the distance, unimaginably far, movement, a churning amid columns of polymer clouds.

Data orbs passed each other: four; six; a dozen.

The features on the horizon could only be mountains.

Coming out of uncertain brightness, Crospinal flew. Arms spread, angled down, he was blinded for a moment. Below were clouds, mist of polymers, waiting instruction, but he quickly shredded their white vapours, soaring out over an open area. The vastness of the world was arrayed for him down there, mostly in tones of grey. Infinite paths, forks and crossings, like the white lines etched up his forearms. Each line indicated a way for life to progress, or fall back, or hit a dead end. No hints which path might be best.

Banking lower still, Crospinal tilted past increasingly challenging obstacles as the landscape neared: clusters of massive carbon tubes, optic bundles slicing in his direction, the information they relayed glittering like sparks. Fresh extensions were being shaped here, a meld of composites and plastics, encouraged to grow to levels he could never have imagined: swarms of mindless builders agitated the polymers and allotropes into mysterious shapes, spitting arcs of toluene behind them. The halls and floors and budding stations formed so fast he had to veer away to avoid them as they rose. Vapour burned his sinuses.

Briefly, black crows flew next to him, maybe four or so, trying to keep up, to tell him something; though he could not understand their language, he was content knowing the birds were there with him, and wondered if he might look, in flight, as graceful as they. But the creatures seemed to be escaping something, rather than accompanying him or offering support, and Crospinal was forced to concede that he, too, might be fleeing a past he could not properly recall.

Now he approached the opening of a rotating corridor, set into a wall of composite unfolding before him so old and massive, Crospinal could soon see no extremes. The mouth of the corridor was a pinpoint pupil in a rat’s eye, a black data orb, an occluded porthole, growing larger every second. As the scale settled in, Crospinal had little choice: aim for the centre or smash against the shell of the world. Would he fly out into the ash wasteland, to be incinerated? To enter the tunnel at this speed was madness; to smash against the wall, madder yet.

He was not afraid.

He shot right in.

Before his eyes could adjust, gravity touched unwanted fingers to his body, trying to slow him, to bring him down.

Were there voices?

He was not outside.

In this darkness, losing speed, he would land soon, or crash. As details emerged in the brightening ambient light, he appraised the tunnel accordingly. Lumens struggled to accommodate Crospinal’s sudden appearance, and keep up with his rate of travel.

Other than the large girth, the rotating corridor was very much like the one churning outside harmer’s corner, through which he had hobbled a thousand times, fighting to stay upright on the shifting tiles.

Had he really once been that bent, unhappy troll?

To help retain the last of his altitude and speed, he had to touch his hands down, pushing off the formations and features jutting up from the tiled floor. His naked flesh felt tough as nylon, with a layer of callus instead of Dacron. Grabbing at whirring eyes of the world, surprising them on their stalks, or launching with all his remaining might from slowly spinning bulkheads, he nonetheless moved forward in increments of decreasing span and velocity, and would touch down soon enough, one way or the other.

He twisted to prevent piercing a brilliant data stream as it poured from the curved ceiling, cascading like the curtain around his daybed when he’d curled there, seeking refuge.

The next barrier, a hazy, white tympanum of catalysts, was unavoidable.

He managed to get his feet under him, to touch first, stumbling forward on the uneven, soft tiles, gasping, pitching headlong—

Red eyes.

He closed his own again, moaned, and re-opened:
the cold red eyes of an elemental
.

He was flat on his back.

The metal rat sat on his chest.

There were loops in life, loops in time. Progress in a particular direction was difficult. The flying, most likely, had not occurred. Which was a shame. Crospinal licked his lips. “What happened?”

“You died,” said the metal rat. “Again.”

Crospinal stared, waiting for elucidation, or a punch line.

“I’m losing track of the amount of times you’ve kicked the bucket.”

But an elemental’s red eyes were resolute, inscrutable, and Crospinal could not ascertain if the machine was kidding or deluded or just plain lying. “I saw mountains,” said Crospinal.

“I don’t think so.”

“I did. And a man, who could shut people off, just by showing up. He was—”

Lifting his arm, he’d frozen, mid-gesture. The sleeve of his uniform was gone. The entire sleeve: latex and the crumbled layers of neoprene and even the spandex once snug beneath it, up against his skin. Entirely gone. Nothing but his skinny arm extruded beyond the uniform’s shoulder flange, all bones, one finger frozen, pointing into the face of the tiny elemental straddling his chest.

For some time, Crospinal said nothing. He continued to hold his finger poised, attempting to process the sight. White skin; knobby elbow; strings of sinew from his wrist. The whiter networks of his scar, like a net, wiring it all together. So rarely did he look upon this unattractive bundle of biology—oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and phosphorus—wrapped in a translucent sheath of pale flesh. The human body, without protection, was alarmingly fallible. He could see the interplay between pale veins and the brighter ridges of the stigmata his father had bestowed upon him. Was there a reading in the configuration of the fibrous tissue, a message to be deciphered, now, after father’s death? “What happened?”

“You’re a total mess,” said the rat. “I would’ve taken off the rest of that old jumpsuit but I need your permission.”

“Why? You didn’t ask me before.”

“Because the processer is fully fused to your ischium. You’ll need surgery.”

“My what?”

“Your hip. A bone in your hip. Colleagues and I conferred on a strategy to remove it. Hard for us to ascertain where your body ends and the suit begins.”

Remembering the paths and possibilities, laid out below him when he flew—as if choices could somehow be plotted, or at least tracked—he turned his forearm along its axis, studying the unlikely mechanics. He made a fist, turned his arm one way, then the other. Downy hairs, troglophiles, seemed to wither in the ambient light. “A girl,” he said, at last, looking up once more. “Where’s the girl?”

“Which one?”

This was a good question. Crospinal couldn’t answer. Had there been several? At least two. He recalled faces; long hair swaying; fresh, grey uniforms.

He spent a bit more time making sure nothing else was missing. Just the sleeves, it turned out—both of them—though the remainder of his uniform, already in bad shape, was now shockingly
threadbare
(father’s voice), and in a terrible way. His boots were entirely flayed open, like petals of a tremulous blossom, back in the garden. He had watched his mitts fall from within a feverish cocoon. The shield and collar were fried. “I was with a girl. She was fighting. That’s who I’m looking for. I was with this girl who looked like me, before I saw the mountains.”

Stung by memory: standing at the brink, overlooking the vista—

He sat up. The elemental, forced to jump clear, landed without a sound onto an adjacent shelf, raising small clouds where its feet touched down. Leaning away, Crospinal held his breath until the fresh polymers settled—

Another person lay, a few metres to his left. Inert, in uniform and full blue helmet. Fresh boots and fresh mitts. Chest rising. Not a corpse, thankfully. “Who’s that?”

Because of the lighting, and the refraction of the visor, Crospinal could not see the face, but the body—though thin, and as tall as him, was not the girl’s. (
She had just lain there in the hall, last time he saw her, while the manifestation raged. Absurdly, he had thought she was asleep.)

“Some crew member,” said the metal rat. “Who else could it be?”

Crospinal was no longer in the rotating corridor, if he ever had been. This was some older vestibule. The pale finish of the walls, hardened for ages, reminded him of those inside the throne room. “What else did you do to me?”

“Blood transfusion.”

“My
blood
?”

“There was no choice, so don’t give me a hard time. Your blood was a cesspool. Bacterium and residues of the distillates pumped into you over the years. I’ve installed a shunt in your occipital, so you shouldn’t go into hemolytic shock. You’re done. Good to go.”

“I can just walk away?”

“Yep. And don’t say thanks.”

He rubbed at the back of his neck with his bare fingertips but felt no tender area. There were strips of gauze on the tiles near his feet and an array of tiny metal tools at his side.
Ephemera
. A skittish device parked very close to his waist. Vaguely sentient, the machine was mostly a skinny, transparent tube, which must have been tending to him, or at least involved in the procedures, with a pipette face and thin, threadlike legs. But when Crospinal moved to touch it, to see what it might be, a ridge of cilia oscillated around the lateral flange and the device drifted out of reach, very quickly. Crospinal could have lunged and brought the stupid thing down but he held back. He thought about his feverish climb down, the ribs of the fixed ladder enclosing him as if he’d been swallowed by the world. How far had he descended? With solid pressure against the thin backshell of his tricot—relieved, at least, to know he had not been delivered into the past again—he said: “Tell me how I died.”

The metal rat shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter. All told, you’ve made it pretty far. Especially considering you’re a low average conversion.”

Crospinal got to his feet with ease. He could see aspects of the other person’s face better from this vantage: a hint of cheekbone; the shape of lips, pressed against the polymethyl visor like a kiss. Enough to feel some confidence that it was a boy, sleeping there—peacefully, he hoped—in helmet and clean uniform. “Is he going to be okay?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Something happened when the manifestation showed up. He made them sick.”

“That he did,” agreed the metal rat.

Crospinal brushed off what was left of his tunic with pipe cleaner arms. “Aren’t you bound by some pledge or oath, or some shit like that, to be nice to me?”

“I gave you your life back. Isn’t that enough?”

“You followed me all the way here to save my life? I don’t believe any of it.”

“You’ve got the wrong idea. I’m not the same individual that fixed you in the outback. Not the one who sutured your intestines. Not the one who aspirated your lungs or straightened your bones or nursed you back to health. No. I’m not the one you tore apart.”

Crospinal didn’t like where this conversation was going. He put his hands on his hips, where there remained a nylon ridge, and rested his knuckles against the waistband. The catheter unit chugged weakly, detecting the added pressure, so Crospinal made adjustments. He
could
hear voices, coming through the wall behind him. There
were
other people nearby. “I said I was sorry.”

“The unit you destroyed was the same configuration as me—hardware wise, anyhow. Components are re-assimilated, endrohedral atoms dispersed, but the reactor that gave that unit life is gone.”

“There was a misunderstanding. I already explained.”

“That’s it? A misunderstanding? You broke components down to the point where the business plan to put them back together made no sense, and all you have to say is that there was a misunderstanding? You know what? If you attack me, or even try to damage me in any way—
ever
—I won’t save you again. None of us will. None of us
rats
. We’ll let you stay dead for good. Nothing will get better. No one will win your struggle. We won’t care.”

“Get better? What do you mean?”

“Just go, all right? Spare me your false questions. Your act. Everything’s fine now, so go. The girl you’re looking for is through the arch, in the back there. She has problems, too, maybe not as bad as this guy here. At least she’s on her feet.
Hypo perfusion
. When one of the paladins trigger, they all shut off. Potassium accumulation’s keeping your friend here down.”

But Crospinal was already shouldering through the archway, breaking away soft flakes of composite with his exposed shoulder in his haste to see the girl again—

Stopping in his tracks pretty quick.

The low-ceilinged chamber (a bigger space than he’d been expecting) was packed, perhaps twenty people or more, some sprawled on stools, others reclining on the floor or leaning against the walls in various states of duress and exhaustion. All wore fresh uniforms. And blue helmets, which were the rarest type. Voices died at his entrance. There was a tension, though he could not be sure if he had brought the state with him or if it had been here, in the room, before he arrived. He had only ever seen one blue helmet before, maybe two, ill-formed, in the belly of an ancient dispenser that had eventually crawled into a cupboard outside the major toluene station to retire.

All these blue helmets faced him now, visors ashen. He stood, decrepit in the archway, arms exposed, feet bare against the threshold’s tile, his own uniform nothing but a sagging tricot and disintegrating pants.

“
Crospinal
.”

To hear his name meant a spell was broken, or cast. From the rear of the chamber, through the crowd, the girl approached. Even without seeing her face, he knew it was her, by her stature, the movements of her frame, the cadence of her voice. She came toward him through the others, supported either side by another. Despite her helmet and fresh uniform, she seemed almost as damaged as he had once been, her legs not working properly, one foot dragging, left arm curled in tight to her chest. He felt a clenching inside, a sympathy, and a repulsion.

“They won’t be back,” she said, “until the next console. We were waiting. We need to go. Are you able now? Have you been discharged?”

Her words were slightly distorted by a remoteness helmets inflicted, which had always creeped Crospinal out as a kid, whenever his father had made him put one on. He recalled recitals, a voice coming from the comm around the chin ridge. He took a step back.