Head Full of Mountains (23 page)

Was he expected to share some fundamental knowledge with these people? He did not know what this knowledge might be, nor have any clue how to access it. Common knowledge lurked, elusive. These people expected him to act, to lead. They wanted some monumental decision, or words that would change the direction of their lives.

Behind the girl and the two helping her, rising from the floor of a smaller chamber, set even farther back, he saw the three dream cabinets now, arranged in a ring, doors facing out. Emerging from the material of the floor, they had been exposed, so far, maybe a quarter of their length, glistening fresh, pushing up from the ring of dissolving tiles. He approached, drawn, pushing through. The girl stopped to watch him pass. Purple fixative stained the pit: a veil of polymer mists blurred the area where the cabinets had broken through. All around the fresh doorframes, though not yet fully regurgitated, the ring of lights had already started to flicker.

“Luella’s here? Is this her?”

Helmets turned as he walked; the crew seemed to tense at the sound of his sister’s name, as if they expected the simple phonemes might trigger some monumental event.

“She’s not here,” said the girl. She was no longer angry with him for invoking. “These are new sailors. Never awoke. They’re coming up all along the promenade. A hundred or more. That’s why the prosceniums are being built. That’s why the batches were sent. We came to protect the sailors, hook a batch or two, if we can.”

Even when the girl looked up, Crospinal could not see her eyes through her visor.

“And to wait for me,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“We have to go to the cockpit now. You’ll understand soon.”

Around the base of the booths—though damp with a tacky film of toluene and roils of meshing polymers—beckoned the familiar green carpet, just like the one that had offered him those rare moments of comfort over the past few years, when his relationships had been faltering. Staring at the textures, he wanted only to stand upon it, move his bare toes, even as the floor transformed. He would close his eyes and drift off to a place of dreams and peace. He might step inside a cabinet, if one happened to be empty, and if he could connive it to open—

Close enough to touch the nearest door, his bare hand hovered centimetres from the surface. The smell, expelled with these sailors, from where they’d been dreaming, and the low roar of time, funneling through the booths, washed over him: he imagined a man, much like his father, stirring inside each cabinet, drawing cold liquid slowly into his lungs, a man utterly unaware of what had transpired since he went to sleep, unable to decipher present nor past when he would finally step free.

“Everything is changing,” Crospinal said. He turned. His father had told him composites were encroaching on the pen, and must be held at bay, like darkness, but that wasn’t true, either; composite was transformation, and transformation was inevitable. “This,” he said loudly, to the gathered crew, who were all looking at him, “is endtime.”

Highlights of physiognomies through the matt visors reflected fear and awe, but no more than he felt at hearing himself say such a thing.
Endtime
? He heard his father’s voice. Now Crospinal put his bare hand flat against the door of the dream cabinet and felt the chill, like a shock travelling up his arm. Was the passenger inside dreaming of monsters? Were all dreams tainted now? Or was this father in a more pleasant place, where Crospinal used to go, when indications of struggles and questions of meaning and purpose and responsibilities were wiped clean?

When he removed his hand from the door, a tingling in his skin remained. Were these viruses from wherever the cabinets came from burrowing into his flesh? Crospinal turned to the girl. “Are you all right?”

The girl straightened, and nodded.

“Then take me.”

To expedite their retreat, they would have travelled (she explained) down the
chute
, or
along
it, which, Crospinal deduced, must be the airless shaft he had drifted in, unconscious—the
pylon
—to be rescued by the men with the symbiotic animals on their backs. In a full uniform and helmet, the chutes were negotiable, but Crospinal had no arrangement for oxygen, nor would a fresh helmet mate with the damaged flange around the collar of his compromised unit, even if they had a spare helmet and the integrity of his uniform wasn’t shot. So the group was forced to employ a secondary means of transit, where oxygen was consistent, and gravity held them down, bare feet, bare arms, and all.

Three people left the chamber where the dream cabinets were budding. Crospinal, the girl, and a shorter but broader boy, whose uniform conformed tightly, and who was lending a shoulder to assist the girl’s hobbling progress. Crospinal knew this other was a boy because the visor was set clear, and his features were craggy and heavy. Like several people Crospinal had encountered since the pen exploded, though clearly not a
batch
, this boy seemed incapable of speech. Yet to be seen, Crospinal supposed, if this were truly the case. He had been wrong before.

Beyond the arch, as they departed the chamber, the metal rat and its patient remained. Crospinal did not hold the gaze for long, though he knew those red eyes followed him. Exposed by their stare, he worried that the scrutiny could undermine his newly budded determination.

The patient, he saw—the crew member on the floor—had rolled onto his side now, mitts clasped together, and was breathing regularly, tricot swelling.

The corridor extended for some distance, past the makeshift triage area, before becoming too narrow for any comfortable passage here; they slipped behind a bowed panel, into a crawlspace, transversing inside the wall. Pale green ambients in the composite swelled and proceeded them in fits and starts. There was the stench of dust, and recycling. This place was like a slipway between transfer tubes, where Crospinal had first ruptured the sleeve of his uniform, on his way back from the harrier, a lifetime ago. The day his father had died. He recalled where the shell of the world had split, the overnight damage, and the vision he’d had, dissolving into the wasteland outside. He marvelled, now, at this memory, and began to tell the girl what had happened, feeling that the events, and the correlations, must be important.

She stopped to listen, looking back over her shoulder. The boy, too. In this dim lighting, her visor had become translucent, as well, and Crospinal saw her face clearly again: her blue eyes darker now, her frown.

His head was thudding.

There wasn’t much room in the crawlspace.

She didn’t understand the point of his story.

Neither did he.

She said: “You’re a pilot, Crospinal. You know that?”

He shook his head. Somehow his name had returned. This girl was trying to evoke the intangible. Perhaps she had succeeded.

“Paladins can’t hurt you.”

He almost said,
One broke my heart
. That pain could never be excised.

When they walked again, light slid easily over the helmets.

“The rat told me I had died. Is that true?”

“Elementals don’t have power over you, unless you give them power. You should avoid them. They seldom tell the truth.”

The floor felt rougher against the soles of Crospinal’s feet.

He hadn’t made the recess fall, or the console and the people inside. He’d just stepped across the threshold tile as the world shifted, wanting to take the hand of the stricken boy, to help him.

Ahead, the other two moved shoulder to shoulder. Crospinal followed them. When they reached a juncture, a branch of darker tunnels, she raised the forearm of her uniform to touch it to a comm plate, mounted in a frame, and held it there, which was a futile gesture—Crospinal was about to tell her—since these sorts of plates were inert and did nothing at all—

Something came rushing from the darkness. Along the passageway, headed for them, bringing with it a glow—something
large
—hissed to a sudden stop. Crospinal, stepping back, saw a primitive machine, certainly a vehicle, with a teardrop-shaped body and three saddles, each big enough for a person to straddle. This was no elemental, no device with personality or intelligence, but an appliance, to serve, to take them from here to . . . someplace else.

They got on: Crospinal at the back (after a series of missteps), the girl in the middle, the silent boy in front. There were controls there, with which the boy fiddled. He held both forearms against the plate and the vehicle lurched forward.

A second later, accelerating through the wan slipway, Crospinal had to duck to stay out of the growing wind; no protective shield would rise before his face.

More people waited, in fresh uniforms, but with no helmets on. They were watching the transit emerge from the aperture—into light—and pull into the landing, settling there with obvious deference, perhaps even trepidation. Crospinal dismounted awkwardly and stepped toward them. Their faces were similar, hair shorn, and he could not tell the gender, nor distinctions among them. From behind the two who had brought him here, he stared these people down, until they averted their gaze. They each held an arm out, slowly. A pattern of flickering gold lights shimmered in the air itself, and the whiff was ozone.

Crospinal was led past a hump in the floor, stepping off the platform and up to the rim of a large, bowl-shaped area, under a domed ceiling.

Arcs of small consoles, arranged in several rows, lined the slope of the basin. Thirty, thirty-five consoles, and at each stood a crew member with their back to him, in fresh uniform and blue helmet, sleeves deep into the holes. He stood there, gazing down, thinking for the briefest of moments that this could be a trap to conjure an angry manifestation, or maybe even his girlfriend. Instead, he saw apparitions, so faint he had to blink to bring them into focus, and even then, drifting aimlessly, they moved languorously past the features of the cluttered room, past the oblivious people. Were these phantoms compromised somehow, slowed? Certainly there were no frantic dogs, or any mercurial projections. No incessant chatter and worry and energy.

A crackle of brilliance from above made him look:

Where the walls curled in on themselves to form the ceiling, banks of dark gates angled out, washed in the growing light, as if they had arrived to watch over the proceedings. Large banks, like the one in the pen, with the same grey, null sheen. Tethered beneath each, in suspended thrones, was a father. A gathering of passengers, of sailors, connected.

The network of conduits bobbed toward the gates, but also fanned out, laterally, connecting the fathers to each other. There were ten in all. The ozone reek of their connections intensified, and Crospinal tried not to gag, or turn away.

“This is the cockpit,” said the girl. “This is what Luella gave us. She said you would come.”

Engines thumped in their distant haven. He took a step closer. “Luella told you?”

“Generations ago. Long before I was saved.”

The name seemed to echo. At the farthest end of the cockpit, several more crew stood, hard to see how many, because they were blurred, crammed shoulder to shoulder, flickering somewhat in what could only be a haptic. Watching them, reacting and countering with scenarios and educations and images only they could see, Crospinal knew how absurd he must have looked all those times to his own father. The ghostly fractals, seen from the outside, where Crospinal watched, might be figments of an unhealthy mind.

“Crospinal—”

He had already started toward the crew.

Vanished now from all but seemingly irremediable fragments of memories, scattered in recesses and crevasses, subsumed by the structure, juxtaposed and drifting through foetid back rooms, the other world once had
permanence
, and primordial history, never swayed by mere bursts of instructions or the whims of some remote generator. There had been a stillness, and patience, and the linear passage of eons. No engines turned over in unreachable depths, no landscape of false ruins, painted on lenses of the portholes. Toluene didn’t dissolve chambers only to have them reconfigured and flash-hardened by mindless machines to suit the capricious agendas of an unfathomable power.

Yet a compression of time, and distances travelled, passing through flux lines of force and maybe back again, had brought distortions, and loops, and wiped the cortexes nearly clean, to lose coherency of the other world along the convoluted way.

Mountains of his father’s fractured recollections were here, traces of them at least, their figments looming over the shadows of this haptic, joining memories of
stars
, from the first sailor Crospinal had met, in the sky station, and soft shards from other lives, all floating down, gleaned from the sailors tethered to the gates above, passed among them. Remnants of their world lurked in the bones of latent genealogies. Combined, they gathered momentum.

When a passenger woke, over the years of this or the years of that, they brought with them from their dream cabinet a tenuous network of recollections, memoirs so far out of context, so arcane and isolated, that only faint spheres of fragile logic could rail against the chaos. Even then, not for long. His own father had been fortunate and desperate enough to find, or maybe call into existence,
the pen
, connecting to a gate there, and raising his children. But Crospinal’s father, in his solitude, could never rationalize nor arrange the ruins of his past into any form of tribute, just as much as he never really understood where it was that he had returned to life, or for what reason, not even within the information from the banks flooding into the back of his head.

But sailors were just men, ultimately, and men get sick and die, and the ethos they try so hard to build and sustain dies with them. Sons get older, and they wander off, bearing memories of their own, and echoes of their fathers’.

Fringes of the massive haptic lapped at his bare skin, sinking tendrils, hooklike, right into his scars. Crospinal already knew the impending immersion—without a functional uniform, or his dad to project him—would be nothing like entering the bland escapes from his childhood. Simple messages and haptic lessons he had taken part in as a boy had been succinct, and—from the sole source of his father’s perspective—relatively
cohesive
. Where multiple spheres of shaky logic and viewpoints were brought together, memories of the lost world were cast down, to mingle, and a coherence had begun, a bastion, bringing the passenger’s old world closer: this haptic would engulf Crospinal entirely.

He did not hesitate, stepping around and between consoles, around the entranced crew, faces hidden by visors, as if he, too, were an apparition. Walking was as slow as it had been at the bottom of the viscous water. The fabric of visions and recollections and ancient desires, woven together, more dense than any single passenger could relay, slowed Crospinal’s progress, distorted time and pulled him irrevocably into an embrace he could never deny: here, at last, was human contact.

The floor before him was littered with concrete ephemera. Fragments, small metal tools, obscure forms: he kicked them as he stepped forward. Other artifacts fell from the ceiling, clanking as he passed.

He arched his spine, to shed his self, surprised by how readily he wanted to release his persona, shake it off, though flashes of identity persisted, like flakes of static composite, almost impossible to lose, each flash retaining a facet of his cognizance.

He knew he was walking through an area crammed with devices and consoles. He knew he might have died, several times over, and had been brought back to life. He knew there were fathers above him, and that they were linked together. He had facilitated the link, by entering.

Toward the end of the cockpit, in the haptic, lesser apparitions passed through him while the delirious fathers rustled overhead—

Elsewhere, a girl in full uniform and rare blue helmet called his name, the name his father had given him, shouting it in clear warning.

But he was dispersing as he went, like a cloud of polymers, helping to make up the walls and floors and furniture. Deeper in the mnemonic fray, his last thought was of being locked inside a dream cabinet, as it drained of chilly liquid, taking him from one algorithm to another. Or was he standing in the pen, in front of his father’s throne, while colours and characters capered about like simple-minded fools—

There was, abruptly, an
isthmus
, upon which Crospinal stood. Hands behind his back.

Then, in the backyard of a small house, where he sat at a patio table, mug of whiskey between cold hands, looking up through the branches of a delicate oak at a dark sky, seeing breathtaking arrays of stars. The night was chilly and clear. He stared, unable to be moved by such sights. He’d be there soon, among them—

Wind pushed hair from his eyes. Standing on a strip of beach at night, the lights out to sea looking almost like another land, an intriguing and beckoning country he could never discern during the day. The beach was at the end of his street, between rows of buildings. More like a strip of debris and junk than a beach. There was a mattress before him, and foam on the rocks. An idle man, sitting there, in the dark. He looked at the lights again, out to sea, thinking of the family next door, in the apartment adjacent to his, who moved about frequently, always shuffling, moving, regardless of the hour. He heard the occasional brief shout, as if they somehow managed to surprise each other shuffling in the hallways of the tiny place. Never did he hear voices. Never the tones of talking, not from anyone in the family, not even the kid, who lived there, with his parents.

The boy
.

Who seemed happy enough when they passed each other on the stairs.

Crospinal’s meager contribution had woven in: ways to kill time; living with pain; apparitions as friends. Drifting past the crew now—their arms in holes, shuddering slightly, as if aware of his passage, and perhaps even who he was—past the last of the consoles, a thousand phantasms unravelling his fibres, picking him clean; he closed his eyes and was gone.

Nudged from one body, one scene, to another.

Once again he was walking, this time among a group of people in strange, inert garb, midway between the world of flux he had lived in and the lost world, lingering beyond.

Rows of dream cabinets, either side, open, and empty. They were called
stats
. Stats would soon be filled, and sealed.

The other men talked, but quietly, among themselves. They never talked to Crospinal, bringing up the rear, one glove resting on the rail of the dolly, maintaining its height. Talking sounds were a drone, the sounds most men made, pointless and dull, of no consequence, background to the thoughts that flitted like silver minnows in the dying pools of his brain.

He had not been sleeping well. His hands had started to shake. He felt as though he would never fill his lungs to capacity again.

He had a wife, and he would return to her after struggling through each day—trying to stay intact—often entering their apartment to a different kind of tension, one that was like tiny needles pushing against his skin. These days, the air inside his home passed right through his pores, through the holes that the tiny needles made in his flesh.

He and his wife would eat together, in silence. She never asked about his tremors or his day or showed any concern. Whenever he looked at his hands, flat on the table, he could not really discern the trembling either, yet he was convinced the shaking would soon break him apart. Incongruence between what he felt and what he saw was in no way comforting, serving only to add to his disconcertion and general state of discomfort.

“Boarding starts tomorrow.” His voice sounded like blocks, falling. Wooden blocks. His tongue was wooden.

Clarissa.
That was his wife’s name. He recalled this now, like a sharp knock. The recollection brought her image into clearer focus. Nevertheless, Clarissa did not respond, nor even look up. Her hair was thinning. A whorl of flesh visible where the roots were grey. Flakes of psoriasis poised there.

Dinner this evening was a form of stew. Clarissa remained bent over her plate, and he watched her jaw moving, thinking of insects with mandibles, dissolving prey with their gastric fluid.

Or maybe Clarissa had already left by this point. Maybe he was alone in the apartment, sitting at the table, by himself. His bones were sore.

He tried again: “The stats are ready. The hub is full. Cortexes are beginning to think. Contract’s almost up.”

Nothing. A hiss of static. No, not static: next door, they were creaking about again. He heard the floorboards, the shuffling, and one of those rare shouts. Clarissa flinched but still did not look up. He watched his hands, inert either side of his bowl. He felt the shaking intensify but they appeared perfectly still.

Clarissa might have been crying.

Sometimes he would lay awake in the middle of the night, listening to the family. All hours, day or night. They had no routine. The boy was seven or eight, but Crospinal didn’t know much about children, except that no child was going into a stat. The youngest passenger, other than the batches, was twenty four. A woman from Nairobi. He’d seen her at one of the conferences. She smiled a lot, in a nervous way. Her hands were very steady.

The oldest heading out was two hundred and seventy four.

Part of his job now was to guide the dolly, like he was doing. A cell in the palm of his glove adjusted the hover and equilibrium.

Concern gave him night sweats.

Startled, he looked suddenly about for his wife, his apartment—seeking the uneaten stew and red melamine table—but they had vanished.

Stats lined either side. Open stats.

The men in front of him were talking.

This load was fresh strings of polymers and scales of allotrope mesh. One of the last to the development area, in the north of the site, where they would be bombarded with instructions of light. Or rather, bombarded with a latency to
understand
instructions.

Dollies could almost guide themselves, like most low-functionals, but laden with raw materials, which sometimes developed ideas of their own. Even before composites were imprinted, they needed watching.

His foreman was a short, bald man who showed too many teeth too often, and who called what they did with dollies
chaperoning.

Chaperoning
, he would say, staring with his little eyes,
was a job for dumbasses
.

When he first brought up the tremors, and the sleeplessness, and the other unsettling sensations that were taking over, he was told simply by his foreman,
go home
. So he explained very carefully how he had been watching the pulses of instructions for so long now that he was able to decipher them, and that he could see individual polymers in the air, and he signed several forms, and reported to medical. He did not look in the development area again, keeping his eyes downcast. Though the light called to him on occasion and the other workers laughed at his fear.
There’s visors for that shit, health and fucking safety. Why did they have to work with such retards anyway?

Once, he had excelled at school, a good student, eager. Made it as far as second year of his Masters and, from there, getting cherry-picked for a pretty great job. There was a girl from childhood, and parents that seemed to
love
him.

Then he heard stories about the transponders, latent under the skin of the batches. He couldn’t stop thinking about them. Ten thousand embryos, all tampered with. He felt there were beasts, searching for him. Was he supposed to know as much as he did? While looking for his inlays, he ended up in hospital, bandaged to the elbow, with a nurse at the door. The tremors started then. They were difficult to hide, though at first he politely feigned belief when people told him they couldn’t see the shakes. He asked so carefully, an impromptu poll, thin smile on his face, trying not to draw too much attention. Holding his hand out, asking.

“Shaking? No.”

The problem was connected to the wires in his arms. He would have to get them out discretely. He didn’t ask anyone about them, not the doctors, who clearly knew, and not his mother, when she visited, who did a pretty good job portraying concern.

The second time he tried to remove the inserts, the hospital put him on suicide watch, and he was kept in a ward for a month, sedated.

He was even more careful after that.

Though he was no longer consulted on matters of construction, he kept his job, and his option to take up a stat.