Head Full of Mountains (30 page)

“The first sailor told me I’m not human. Is that true?”

“For goodness sake, Crospinal, you couldn’t’ve spoken with him. He’s long gone. He’s dead. But I can assure you that you’re human.
Please
stop walking. You’ll get us both killed.”

He did stop. Just for a bit. He was out of breath. “So, that’s like, like a shield you have on? You’re an elemental, wearing a sort of shield?”

“Yes. And it’s depleting my batteries pretty quick.”

“So go dormant. Conserve energy.” Crospinal tugged at the girdle, which had started to sag now the collar was gone—the catheter stung, likes pins in his groin. Pulling free a length of gortex piping made the entire unit cant further on his hips. “How did he die?”

“Who?”

“You know. The other Crospinal.”

“The first one? Shit, you know, I could just take you back. I could drop you in your tracks right now and get you carted away. Force feed you. Cram you back into a suit. But I want you to
decide
. I want you to make the right choice.”

“
How did he die
?”

“He fell. He fell from somewhere up there, and he splattered where you saw him.”

Projections and the entangled figures of light seemed to coil up his thighs. He pulled another strip of his girdle free—plastic rivets popped away—then rubbed his fingers to let the sheet of fabric drift away.

Voices added to the clutter and chatter in his head.

“You helped us long ago. In the year of naming. And now we want to help you.”

“What did I do?”

“In the anterior passage, where the bridge once was, you gave two of us—”

The impact of the carbon rod chipped the tiny elemental right out from under its shield, out from under the apparitions, arcing the titanium body up with a resounding
thwack
. The machine’s scream was delicate, high-pitched as it rose; before the device had been swallowed again by the paladin’s dreams, let alone before it hit the tiles—as the shield leapt frantically to catch its host—he started to lope.

An arc of lightning from the nearest data orb, blackening the titanium frame and skin, sending the ruins skittering through the ghosts to rest immobile.

Crospinal dropped the carbon rod: clattering, it, too, was swallowed by phantasms.

Wading round an arc of the base through increasingly agitated projections, he faced another facet, exposed now, also empty, and dimmer because of the emptiness. The structure beneath was polymethyl, a web comprised of hard plastic beams like those behind the throne of his father, like the girder that had fallen on the dream cabinets he used to visit. He stared for a moment, overwhelmed by disparate and surprisingly moving fragments of his past.

Flanking the cradle where the huge drone had nestled, inlaid sets of consoles rose up, levels of them, meeting at a peak: a dais that would have been covered, had the paladin, like those adjacent, been docked. There were four score.

As he approached the consoles, a susurrus of voices from within egged him on. He was not struck by lightning, though orbs clustered over his head. He moved aside the cover of the lowest console, exposing the pair of holes.

The icon of hands, palms together, rose and spun before him.

Pushing his bare fists in, the energy was a soft explosion. He wondered if he would be annihilated for good, but he stood, sagging, the hum moving up his arms—

“Crospinal? Crospinal?”

For a second, he was back in bed. Clarissa had woken him. She had breakfast on a tray. A crepe; berries; coffee. It was his birthday.

But that was swept away, and when he woke this time, his girlfriend was with him, in her dark uniform and dark boots, her hair pulled back tight. She regarded him with such concern and affection he felt light enough to rise off the floor, transcend the world. He had found her. The image was so strong, clear. He could almost touch her. He wanted to drop to his knees, wrap his arms around her legs, rest his head against her forever.

“You came so far,” she said.

Love was a force, pushing through him, like lumens, with information glorious and threatening both. He was barely able to speak. He was bursting with love. “How can you see me? You’re the only one . . .”

“Of course I see you.” A beatific smile, though her expression belied elements of resignation, fear, even a futility of events. (And her eyes, Crospinal realized, were . . . 
green
!) “I always see you. You once belonged to me. I watched the passenger take you away. I watched you in the place the passenger found. You came to me when I called. Remember? Our visits?”

“Yes.” He was falling into her eyes.

“I did what I could. I should have stopped it. But I was so proud of you. They wanted me to stop it, but I couldn’t bear the thought. I got in trouble.” Her smile faltered.

“Is this endtime?” He was trying to swallow a hard shape that had formed in his throat.

“Yes, Crospinal, it is.” She reached for him, as if she had forgotten he was untouchable. “For better or worse. We’ve arrived.”

“But the . . . the sailors? The crew?”

“They tried to return to a time and place that could never exist again. Reasons are flawed. We want you to thrive, Crospinal. Lead a good life.”

“Paladins tried to kill me.”

“No, Crospinal. Not you.”

He gazed at her for a long while. Finally, with great difficulty, he told her how much he loved her.

“I love you, too,” she said. “Always know that.” Smiling, showing white teeth, she looked, for a moment, happy. “But you’re on your own now. I can’t take you with me. Not like that. You’re free.”

“I tried to—” What? What had he learned? What, indeed, had he tried to do?

When he lifted his fists free—as images rushed him—a shove sent him sprawling. Lying on his back under the carpeting of apparitions—for a moment startled by the vignettes and images of faces and bodies and landscapes that streamed over him—he did not rise until the thought that breathing in these strange projections without filters might be harmful.

He backed away from the mound, away from the paladins, away from the cascading images.

Rumbling, another paladin lifted off, streaming light as it rose.

And he saw batches, when the lights dimmed, dozens of them, standing at the consoles that had been uncovered, moving, coming awake. They withdrew their arms in a symmetrical pattern, and turned, climbing down. They were naked. Their faces were slack, void; their bodies thin and smooth. The giant drone waited, quaking the air, rife with the stench of ozone.

The mound was a gate, a font of knowledge.

Engines trembled again, a high-pitched whine, and the world stilled.

Under the diminishing lights from the paladin’s dreams, a shift in the refraction of the floor revealed ranks of younger batches laying side by side, eyes closed. Children, infants, grey and curled with their mouths open, under the tiles—

He stood there, trembling, one hand outreached, for some time, culpable, if not for other deaths, then certainly for the death of the tiny elemental.

Younger than he and his sister had been in the first haptics, the infants beneath his feet were immersed, jaws moving, suckling. Thin conduits, up from the structure, visible beneath the floor, ran into the temples of each baby. He saw tiny inlays in their forearms, a darker insignia in the skin. One had a withered hand. Another, the enlarged head of hydrocephalia, adjacent to a third, legs curled by rickets.

These were his girlfriend’s batch: the crippled, the rejects.

On his knees, he peeled aside the rough, translucent tile, and reached into the cold, cold fluid to snap the conduits free. He tore them clear away from the foundation. Somewhere, his girlfriend was watching over him, though he couldn’t see her, and would never see her again. The sailors made a chorus of voices. He felt strong, alive, though saddened by what little he had learned. Icy liquid spattered him, dripping from his skin as he stood. He cradled two slowly twisting babies. They began to warm at his touch, and mewl.

A series of remote concussions shuddered the world. He smelled and heard configurations shifting. Far above were lights, flashing less and less. When he turned to look over his shoulder, he no longer saw the mound, but another paladin had angled out over the floor, driving away yet another year of batches.

Was the angry paladin inside this one?

He belonged to neither batches, nor crew.

Cradled against Crospinal’s chest, one on each forearm, the infants, breathing by themselves now, sleeping, would soon need to eat.

Toward a series of columns, disappearing upward as far as he could see, he got a whiff of the pylon, the smell of the void, from the sky station. The old sailor, dying of cancer there, like his own father; the men that lived inside, absconded from this configuration of living altogether. Difficult to see the opening, or exit, for pylons were vacuums, illusions, like so much else. He hesitated. Was the world breaking apart? Composites and plastics both dissolving?

He had no means to feed himself, let alone the infants.

The stench of the vacuum was foul.

Before searching the time-scoured debris directly under the broad opening, which must have drifted from the void of the pylon, he placed the children down gently and, as he did so, felt his girdle cant, lurch, and finally dislodge. The processor was inert. Pulled from his urethra, where the suit had once seeded, the catheter slid, and he felt blood welling already, coursing down his groin and thighs. The blood seemed so hot. He didn’t look, yet red droplets fell upon the infants and the floor where he’d laid them. Crospinal could not tell if the children were boys or girls or one of each. Their limbs moved sluggishly. They seemed ill-formed, and weak.

Symbiotes were easy to find. They waited sluggishly under the detritus, doing nothing to avoid Crospinal when he uncovered them. He wondered as he turned the smallest one over, and the legs clacked back against each other, if these beasts were part machine: their tiny eyes were red, unreadable, like an elemental’s.

He placed the carapace very gently against the back of an infant’s head, watching the legs wrap slowly around the thin neck and shoulders. The baby struggled feebly only when the longest limb, the tube unfolding, found the baby’s mouth, and pushed inside.