Head Full of Mountains (21 page)

“Did you raise him?”

“I’m still raising him. He’s my ward.”

“Why didn’t you teach him to speak?”

“He’s a reject. Year of miracles. But he doesn’t eat the sustenance anyhow.”

Considering cripples, rejects, and controllers that seemed as smart as elementals and maybe as deceitful, Crospinal walked over to the hidden entranceway from which the child had entered the hall; a thick flake of composite exposed a narrow, arched hallway, which extended toward a larger area and continued, well-lit, curving around, out of sight. The air was warm and smelled like recycling. He could see the console from here. A large room, full console with holes, a periscope, and active thumb plates. The icon of the hands burning above.

Gone lightheaded, trying not to react, Crospinal said, “When I was little, two elementals took me to the garden for a walk. My father was tethered, so he could never go anywhere, not in the flesh.”

“Yes,” said the device, perplexed. “A passenger. Connected to a bank. Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I’m going to take this child for a walk.”

“Pardon me?”

“Me and him are going for a little walk.”

“I have to come with you.”

“No, you don’t. You’re going to stay here. I’ll bring him back.”

The controller considered this. “Please don’t hurt him. I feel responsible. Even though he doesn’t use my amenities. I’ve grown quite fond of the child.”

Crospinal’s heart pounded. He went over to the child—who was kneeling now, rolling a carbon tube between his palm and the floor, over and over, making an annoying, rumbling sound. Crospinal touched the boy’s naked shoulder, which stopped the repetitive movements, and the boy turned his face. Astonishing to look into the green eyes from so close. How could this be a boy’s face? His mouth had gone dry. He let a few drops from the siphon moisten his tongue. Searching the features to see if this child felt a mysterious wonder, like his sister had in the haptics, he judged by what he saw in the open candour, the expression, the trust, that this might be the case. Was Crospinal the only person who had not experienced wonder? Had this also been, like his inlays, removed by his father? Unaltered, what might he have been? He held out an open hand.

Tiny, hot fingers locked into his own. Trapped material of his mitt fizzled gently. He helped the boy to his feet. He weighed more than Crospinal had expected. When Crospinal had been this age, his legs were bowed like the frame of a transfer tube.

Crippled, and the damaged.

Clenching his jaw, he took the boy down the hidden hall. The child displayed no hint of dismay thus far and continued to frolic; when Crospinal looked over his shoulder, he saw the controller in the archway, backlit by ambients, peering in.

“There was two machines that worked in pen,” Crospinal said quietly, as if praying. “And a bunch of controllers, like yours, where I grew up. I had a father. He could project dogs and spirits and ghosts.” Crospinal laughed briefly, awkwardly loud, because he had thought at first that he was just going to talk for the sake of it, to calm the boy, but these words actually meant something to him, like a convocation, initiating mechanisms and pulling forth emotions within his body that enabled him; he needed to tell the boy about his past, before things went too far. He needed to tell the boy, in order to continue. “I named the machines. Though my father didn’t want me to. They had red eyes. Do you have any friends?” Crospinal thought about the dirty, crouching trio, their nudity, their horrible teeth, the beasts on their backs that were parasitical and leering and keeping them alive.

Swinging forward, the boy kicked at nothing Crospinal could see. He did not answer, but neither did he let go of Crospinal’s hand. He seemed so happy. Where their flesh contacted, moisture had reached uncomfortable levels. The Dacron was totally useless. Fecal matter and snot and every other repugnancy from the happy child was crawling inside his sleeve.

“Most of my friends were apparitions.” Crospinal looked at his long legs, in the burnt uniform, and gauged the steps of them both, he and the boy, side by side in this composite hall. There was a tight core in his gut from, he supposed, trying to eat the rat. He peed a bit, felt the processor struggling. “Apparitions drifted about the pen. Dogs mostly. Some showed up in haptics. The characters in the escapes weren’t like dogs, because my father didn’t send them out. They were from the world, from the banks, where pellets and water comes from. Where uniforms came from. But you don’t like that stuff, do you?”

The boy paid him no attention. They had reached the console. Crospinal stopped before it and the boy looked straight ahead, wondering. With his free hand—which was shaking—Crospinal lifted the flap, uncovering the pair of holes. He felt the hum already, in his molars.

“Look,” he said. “Want to see better? Want to see what’s at the bottom?”

Bending at the waist, to pick the boy up, but now the boy was frowning.

“It’s okay,” said Crospinal. He took the child by the waist and had to tighten his grip when the lithe boy started fighting. “I’m not going to hurt you!” Clearly alarmed, the boy twisted away, surprisingly strong, and Crospinal nearly lost his balance.

“I just want to see what happens!” he shouted. “Put your arms in these holes, just for a second!” He yanked the child closer, trying to hold onto the tiny torso, but struggling. “
I just want to see what happens
!”

Turning on him suddenly, green eyes flashing, hair flinging forward, the child lunged, and Crospinal did fall, the boy upon him, attacking.

“
You little fuck
—”

Broken teeth found his thumb, and bit hard, crunching into his flesh. Crospinal screamed. Above him, the controller appeared in his narrowing sight, having travelled quickly to resolve the matter, or save the boy. But Crospinal had already lost this fight.

There was a lot of blood.

Descending, swooning, and clutching his left arm to his belly, Crospinal had to rest often, his back against the curved ribs of the fixed ladder, his eyes squeezed shut. The indifferent world swam. He could not stop replaying his father’s lectures about infection and sterilization over and over in his head. He could almost hear the frightened dogs barking:
What have you done, Crospie? What have you done?

Blood actually dripped out the rents in his left mitt. More blood ran down the inside of the left leg of his uniform, a volume too excessive for the exhausted processor to deal with, though capillaries in the fabric laboured and sucked. Tiny globes of his life escaped nonetheless, falling freely from his ruined boots to plunge down the shaft along gentle trajectories, until hitting a rung or he lost sight of them (though when Crospinal closed his eyes tight, he could still visualize the curves, trapped within his mind).

His energy was fading. Microbes, eager to have access at last to his body’s various systems, intended to swarm, finish the job, racing each other to besiege every diminished stronghold left standing in his glands and organs. He could sense their progress and final victory. Sweaty already. His teeth chattered.

The fixed ladder seemed to go down and down forever; the extended skeleton of some extinct beast, pinned like a specimen to the giant wall. A
hot
beast. Crospinal had so far descended maybe five or six floors of this construction site, peering out from within the rib cage as these monstrous, layered locales rose before him. Engines were below, yet getting closer; he felt them in the metallic material pressed to his back. Perhaps the bottom of this ladder was where Crospinal was always meant to end up. He was certainly physically incapable of heading the other direction.

The boy’s rotten incisors had pierced the once-tough Dacron, punctured unprotected flesh. Crospinal’s left mitt was now peeled back to the wrist, exposing most of his damaged hand. The material flopped, utterly inert. In the light from the landings he passed, he saw interstices of his scar, mapping his bony wrist at the cuff of his sleeve. His thumb was nasty gore. But he no longer had the stomach to inspect the tears in his uniform, let alone his ruined flesh. The wound throbbed so hard his entire body shook.

First the rat, now the boy.

The two bites should have had analogous meaning, establishing, by their pairing, a form of parenthetical closure, but his foolishness and impending demise was all he could consider.

Now malignant invaders had reached the chambers of his heart. They gathered there, getting ready to climb the final ridges of his spine to access the spongy meat of his brain. Crospinal unfastened the connecting clasps of his useless left mitt, which he held limp before his face in its torn and ruinous state, and thought absurdly about addressing, before letting go.

He watched the mitt sail down, taking shape as if trying to retain functionality, recalling a hand one last time, falling slowly, to land on the ledge of the structures far below. Six years Crospinal had worn the same uniform. The mitt had literally been a part of him. Even from this height, he saw the Dacron amalgamate with the world, split into molecules, recycle; he imagined that he caught a whiff of its final and absolute transmutation.

Then he eased off his right mitt, keeping his thumb clear, and let it, too, drop.

Resuming his descent, Crospinal’s naked hands took the rungs. Textures of the construction ground directly against his flesh, making him breathless. Despite his swollen thumb, he clenched the rungs as tight as he could. Direct contact was all that kept him going.

After releasing the boy—or, to be more precise, after the boy had finished biting, and flailing away with his tiny but surprisingly solid fists—Crospinal had scrambled to his feet, aghast at the extent, the mere
existence,
of the wound. He had intended to return quickly to the spigot, to wash with enhanced water, rinse his thumb under the flow and drink as much as possible until his blood was cleaner, but the controller must have been shorting out, for it had not responded well to his demands and was almost hysterical by that point, gyrating and diving at Crospinal’s head, shouting awful accusations; standing apart from them, against the wall marked with glyphs, the child was also crying, head back, bawling so loudly (with a streak of crimson on his chin, and a gobbet of flesh caught between the sharp peaks of his rotten teeth) that Crospinal had no choice but to run, leaving behind the unpleasant drama and a trail of his leaking blood.

He’d stumbled for some distance, peering desperately into the first hatch he came across (nearly pitching headlong). The engines throbbed remotely with the same pulse as his wound. In that pulse, they called to him, enticing him with the name he could never recall:
come down, come down.

He made very slow progress—and getting slower—sinking gradually below yet another floor. How much blood, he wondered, could a person lose before they expired? How long could natural immunodefenses last, before being crushed? He touched his forehead to the rung between both fists, but received no cooling reward. Without a uniform’s recovery and staunching, and general concern for his well-being, was there a remote chance that coagulation would kick in? People could live without protection. He had seen them. Perhaps not for as long, but they could survive. Animals lived without augmentation. The rats and the crows and the miniature creatures in the garden. Maybe he, too, had the latent capacity to get better?

Unable to remember lessons. The knowledge of a naked body in a world of virulence. Blood dripped and dripped. Here he was, overrun by microbes. He had never bled this volume, uniform or no.

At least, not while conscious.

Infections were killing him.

He should swan dive between the ribs of the fixed ladder, following the mitts to where they’d dispersed—

Possibilities of less remarkable demises vanished with each floor gone by. He considered them all, in his fleeting way. He knew he should get off the ladder, stop this nonsense, stop climbing downward, look instead for a quiet place to clean his injuries, get some rest, curl up in a daybed. Maybe there were fresh dispensers in their rooms. Antibodies could wake from dreams of how to neutralize antigens. Crospinal was both leery and tired of traipsing around on level ground. He’d had enough of being out there, enough of his inability to interact or decipher.
Better off sick, inside the bones of the fixed ladder
.

A row of bright lights, recessed into a poly ceiling, extending into the middle distance. All these halls and floors were immaculate and new. He imagined no one could possibly have visited them before, and that the locations might disappear altogether when they were no longer in sight. If he went back up—if he had the energy and capacity to ever climb back up—would the layout change?

No, the world was not made for him. That had been a lie. The world didn’t care if he lived or died.

Maybe a haptic was playing. He looked around. Loops of a landscape drifting by while he watched, until he bled to death, or fever claimed him

Crospinal nodded off. Sagging sideways against the ladder’s supporting ribs, one arm hooked over a rung, preventing the plummet. A leg, pendulous. In his sleep, Crospinal smiled. He couldn’t fight this nap, nor did he want to. Even in its grip he was astounded. His chest rapidly filled and emptied. His bones were hollow, air was fire, and he was able to fly. Inside his tricot, Crospinal’s heart hammered faster than any rat’s heart. His thumb—

A shout made him start; his eyes snapped open. Nearby, someone was afraid, and in pain.

The shout was not repeated.

Had it been real?

He moved his tongue against his palate, and it stuck, gummy. But he felt better. His sight, and the sensation of his hands and feet against the rungs, as he straightened himself, getting the kinks out, seemed sharp.

Straining to hear further sounds of distress, or other indications of a person nearby, only the engines’ whisper responded.

He went down a few more rungs, as quietly as he could, toward the next floor, while he was still alert, hearing the scuffle and grunts before he was able to duck his head, and see into the hall below. Despite the window of relative acuity, for a moment Crospinal just hung there, unsure what he was looking at: limbs and bodies, naked and sheathed in uniform, entwined together, a beast unlike any he had seen in haptics—

No
. People were
fighting
. Three of them. He’d come across some form of primal battle. There was a thud, groans, and the group abruptly broke apart. The closest, in the fresh uniform, faced away from Crospinal, trying to hold off two others—both long-haired and wearing nothing but a nylon breechcloth—brandishing a length of carbon tube. One of the skins clutched a wound, backing away, having been hit in the upper arm; the second tried to close once more but the tube swung, stomach level—
whoosh
—and had to leap back.

Their expressions were mostly unreadable.

The next swing connected against a bare shoulder but the rod was grabbed, forced down, and, as the uniformed fighter lost balance, clattered to the floor; three people, entwined, grunting again, collapsed together, where the scuffle intensified—

The third, in the uniform, was a girl. Crospinal saw her face, the straining features, and knew for sure. Not the girl from the train, though. Grimacing in the melee, tugging, trying to get free, she seemed somehow urgently familiar; this familiarity, for Crospinal, was another blow. She looked like him.

And in that instant, before he could identify any feature of this other face, or place the sensations it had triggered, or even take a breath, Crospinal understood a simple truth: watching someone being killed and doing nothing was equal in guilt to killing someone himself.

Below, among a nest of construction materials, was a tall cluster of carbon tubes, growing on the grille, near where the fixed ladder passed. Crospinal made his way down unnoticed, until he was standing on the lip of the platform on this burgeoning floor, holding his own length of tube in both bare hands. Sweat cooled on his forehead. He wiped his face with a spasmodic twitch of his shoulder, and when he swung, the tube cut through the air loudly and he lurched toward the fight. They all heard now, one by one turning to see his approach, and freezing. He imagined how he looked by the expressions of horror on their faces, including the girl’s.

One of the attackers scrambled upright.

The second pushed to his haunches

The girl watched from where she lay and did not move at all.

Crospinal stared into her blue eyes. “Luella?” he said.

Now the girl struggled to get up, favouring one side. Her left leg seemed stiff. “Who are you?”

Hearing her name had made Luella more wary than frightened. Crospinal was delirious and insistent. “Your brother.”

Glancing briefly at the other two—who were still backing away—Luella grabbed a tube of her own, snapping it off at the base, where it had rooted. She brandished it. “No closer.”

“But Luella, I wanted—”

“Where does that chute go?” Indicating the ladder with her chin.

Her face had changed over the years. Though he had seen his sister only in haptics and dreams, he suspected his memories of her might be of
other
memories
. Traces of the wonder glowing on her young expression had leaked away. Hardly enough vestiges remained for him to identify. He had wanted to gather in the wonder, but it was gone. He had wanted to embrace his sister, but could not move. Why did she seem so suspicious, so hostile?

Her hair was entirely depilated. Her snug uniform, fresh, in excellent shape, had intact boots and mitts and a narrow collar, made for a helmet smaller than the amber one he had often been asked to wear. A shield shimmered before her face. Their father would have been very proud. Luella’s limbs were straight and strong, and had always been that way. (The stiffness was from some injury acquired during the struggle, not congenital.)

Crospinal managed to look over his shoulder, to the long ribcage of the ladder, and to the darkness beyond. “That hatch? It goes down to the engines, I think.”

“What engines?”

“Or to the hub. You don’t recognize me?” He’d turned back to look at Luella again. “I’ve been altered by an elemental. They made me . . . taller. Maybe that’s why. I’m Crospinal. Your brother.”

But his fever was returning in waves that soon staggered him, hitting him fast, one after the other from behind, like being shoved repeatedly, with surprising malevolence. Crospinal stumbled, in a sweat from head to toe no uniform could wick. Whatever had given him insight and energy vanished. He needed to lie down. Blinking away a blurry caul, he realized his sister was farther away, and ebbing. Leaving? The other two, the attackers, were gone already. Had he hurt them? The fight seemed a long time ago. He put his hand to his face and felt bare flesh contact bare flesh, shocked by the heat generated.

“Luella,” Crospinal called out. “Father’s dead!”

Now she was somehow heading past him. She’d turned around to look over the precipice. “That’s useless,” she pronounced. “Unfinished shit.”

Trying to scrutinize the hall where he stood, swaying, unable to follow in any capacity.

“Batches’ll be back soon,” she said. “With others. And a paladin’s curse. Let’s get out of the open. What’s the matter with you?”

“Father’s
dead
.” He tried to reach for her but nothing was functioning properly, and she wasn’t even there anymore. “Cancer,” he said, but when he managed to focus on the girl’s face again, she was taking a step back, and all resemblance to Luella was gone. This girl was surely tinier than his sister would be. Small white teeth, eyes recessed, much darker skin.

“You’re sick,” she said. “Toxic. There’s a new spigot in there; you’d better drink up.” Pointing to an aperture just behind Crospinal, to his left. “You’re on your last legs. Know what a spigot is?”

“Sure,” he said. “But I thought . . . I thought you were my sister.”