Head Full of Mountains (25 page)

When he moved his fingers into the black morass, touching the blood with his skin, he expected a reaction, exterior to him, a shock, but without mitts there was none. He wanted to weep, to say a tribute, thanks for surrendering life, or maybe an apology, but no words or strong emotions came and he was not sure if he should be grateful, or even if life, in any form, was a gift or a curse.

“Another console,” Clarissa hissed, as if she had heard a voice Crospinal had not, speaking into the comm of her helmet. “Another console . . .”

She had followed him, and Crospinal looked up at her now. She did not even seem to notice the body of the batch, though the toes of her fresh boots touched it. “Crospinal,” she said, “you have to get up now. They’ll regroup, call the paladin. They know where we are. They know where the sailors are. If a paladin makes it as far as the cockpit . . .”

Now Crospinal broke into something almost like a sob. The first sailor he had been, in the haptic, the one with shaky hands, moved fingers again through the thick blood of the dead batch. No, skin did not react like mitts. Capillaries didn’t hiss into action. “Paladins are ghosts,” he said. “They’re nothing.” But he knew what paladins could do. He had seen Clarissa collapse in the hall. The metal rat had tried to heal the others, who had been stricken. And his own heart had been broken by a paladin, never to be the same again. They were ghosts that could change the world, transform a life. End it.

But so could crew.

And him, too: the console, the batches had plummeted when he stepped across the threshold—

Voices whispered inside him, and flickered.

The arms of the dead batch, lambent with illumination, were bent in an impossible pose, elbows almost touching, straight out, behind the back. Ambient glow on the dead skin appeared to be dancing, or searching. Blood was very dark. Leaning forward, Crospinal twisted the left forearm of the corpse wrist up, cooling flesh firm in his grip, a stiffening brought on by death and by the once-strong muscles and tendons he could never imagine rolling under any neoprene or spandex sleeve. These batches were some form of fabulous animal, vessels, without reflection or question, unless fathers took them or crew, and filled them with their incomplete knowledge.

He ran his thumb over the ridges of the cold transponder so hard the fibres under the skin distended and bulged like veins.

When he stood, the depression made by his thumb remained on the dead limb. Of the nearest crew, he asked what had happened, and the crew member said simply, facing Crospinal: “I killed it.”

Craving evidence of humanity behind the visor, aghast, he saw only shadows. The statement of murder had not been confession, nor confrontation, but an offering, to be laid at Crospinal’s feet.

I killed it.

For you.

He heard himself ask:
How
?

The crew raised a forearm, mitt closed into a fist, sheathed in the fresh sleeve—Crospinal put his hands up, mostly to protect his face, but when the crew member did not move again, he touched the neoprene, the uniform, clenching until the boy’s mitt unfurled and capillaries hissed against his palm. A dark tube revealed, like piping, curving up and across the ridges of the boy’s metacarpals, integral.

The brink he had stood upon, looking out across the impossible expanse—across clouds, no walls in sight, toward the mountains—used to be here somewhere, but configurations of the walls had changed, the opening sealed now. Parts of the floor shifted under his feet as he sought the aperture, small patches of grille uniting, regurgitated to join other patches and establish a pattern. Ambients flared, directing: a station was forming here, maybe the new console.

Controllers darted past to witness the development, swivelling toward Crospinal with evident concern, no doubt, but not pausing to interfere or speak. The devices might even have been the same ones he had passed, clustered, commiserating, not so long ago.

An area of composite had formed so fresh the veneer of linking polymers fractured when Crospinal tore at it, fingers still bloody from touching the face of the dead batch. Walls were hardly denser than smoke or the light that brought the materials here. Building machines stood by, thwarted, a dumb audience as Crospinal peeled aside a scale of the wall the size of his head, cracking the carbon and the bonding agents, letting a different light spill through the hole—not ambient, but warm, softer, like a caress: he smelled freshness that seemed to offer a modicum of relief, and release, so he resumed pushing at the scale with the heels of both hands, back and forth, until toluene flowed to repair, to break into molecules and try again, resume the intent, but he persevered at his labour until he was able to tear the piece off, stunned and breathless to be staring out over the vast core of the world once again.

Machines or great devices did seem to churn on the horizon, but the shapes he had previously imagined to be mountains now appeared to be a mere bank of fog, a hazy roil. There was a source of light out there, impossibly far away, an amber glow behind the haze. Perhaps, with residues of the sailors inside him, he would know a mountain if he saw one now, though what they might resemble would remain elusive to him, becoming clear only upon the trigger of absolute recognition.

He remembered his flight, literally soaring down, sure it had happened, and that he could do it again. Outrage was powerful, trapped inside his skin with the others, trying to burst free.

Clouds drifted, even below him, mists of polymers over a distant floor. Another garden, which he had not seen before, bigger even than the one he’d ridden the elemental through, sprawled in the middle distance. Greyness, scattered across darker pinpoints that might be hundreds, or thousands, of dead crows—

From within the huge chamber, a single data orb approached, moving so fast toward him a contrail spiralled behind. Stopping abruptly right before the aperture, before Crospinal’s face, the orb hovered, either assessing the damage Crospinal had done to the wall or registering him. Crospinal’s chest worked hard inside the battered tricot, like bellows from his father’s ephemera. His processor whined. Was he being studied? He did not care.

Behind him, in the newly formed hall, a girl had began to cry. He did not turn. He could tell this was a girl by the tones, by the cadence of sobs.

With tentative fingertips, Crospinal reached out and touched the data orb, which did not back away: the surface was like his father’s oil over a revolving skin colder and smoother than he had expected, almost a faint burning on his skin.

He said, “That crew member had a . . .” Searching for words. “A
weapon
. Here.” Touching the inside of his own naked forearm, he was surprised, as the orb fell away, to realize it was Clarissa crying, and that she had been tugging at him, holding the hem of his tricot, as if to pull him back. He remembered now, Clarissa and Richardson, running after him as he fled the corpse, and the three fathers. “You all have that?” he asked her.

“Only sentries. Their sleeves—Crospinal, you know all this. You’ve done this before. Sentries are trained to fight.”

He pushed her hand away, and tugged free.

“We need you, Crospinal
. We need you here
. Sailors are ready. Where are you going?”

Pipes bigger around in diameter than the harrier lookout, ringed by thinner tubes—some moving like netting, or veins in an arm—rose in formation to make vast, widening cones, webbing far overhead. The ceiling here, he imagined, could only be the outside perimeter of the world. Beneath him, the wall was mapped with striations and darker interstices. Staring down, he felt his outrage and dismay dwindling. His fists clenched and unclenched. Had the fathers been ready to emerge? He could have opened the doors, helped them out, brought them to the cockpit to tether them there. He could have helped the crew but the idea was abhorrent.

“You need to help us,” whispered Clarissa, as if she had heard his thoughts. “We’ve been waiting. . . .”

He looked at the dried blood on his fingers.

You need to help us.

He was able to tear enough of the wall away to crawl through the opening. An expanse dropped toward the slow curve of the wall’s base; Crospinal could not see the bottom for the roiling polymers. There could be no more death. All the while he had been staggering around the pen, useless, a battle had been fought. Killing each other, for years, and waiting for him.

He stepped up, precarious on the rim of the opening, and felt the warm breezes against his skin. Several building machines, which he had not seen before, were at work, an arm’s length away, on the outside of the wall, relaying instructions of light. These, too, registering him, froze. He felt the crew members behind him, the two he had named, felt their expectations, their disappointment. If they followed, they would perish.

Letting go with one hand to reach down, Crospinal detached the flapping leg from his uniform and tugged if off altogether, which was excruciating; tendrils of the interface had pulled free from the muscles and nerves of his thigh. He removed the other leg more carefully, unhooking the clasps, one by one, and easing the connections from his leg before tossing it, too, over the brink, where it sailed away.

Clarissa and Richardson watched him, incredulous. Clarissa leaned on Richardson’s shoulder. The run must have hurt her foot again, inflaming the wound. Neither were wearing helmets now, but Crospinal did not know when he had first noticed this.

“Leave,” he said. “Go back.”

Yet he knew they would follow. Turning carefully, he backed out, holding onto the rim of the hole, feeling for ridges or small crevasses in the wall with his bare toes, to begin the long descent.

“Before the first sailor stopped dreaming, there was only darkness. The empty world. Batches, dormant at the hub; paladins, watching over everything. Eons went by. But the world was passing through the tunnel, and when it came out the other side, paladins had changed. They didn’t want to watch anymore, or maintain. They wanted to control. They brought one batch awake. And by one, I mean an
entire
batch. Four score, in all. A full year. The batches were just babies. As they grew, they were used like hands to shape the world in ways the world was not meant to be shaped. The network had also changed in the tunnel. Machines, too. When a batch got sick or died, the paladins woke another. For there were thousands, dormant down there. And they tried to prevent sailors from waking.”

Crospinal sat cross-legged for the first time in his life. His hands were on his bare knees, rubbing them, the way he used to, but not out of pain, not to diffuse any pain. Skin now, on skin. “And sailors came awake?”

“One did.”

Clarissa sounded like his father when he had lectured or prayed, or was pumped with nutrients, head full of visions. Though she was nodding at his question, Crospinal knew that Clarissa repeated what she’d been told, in hopes that the words might become truer each time they were relayed, that they might explain or validate. She did not truly understand why Crospinal was the way he was, and why he did not do what she’d been expecting him to do. She was certainly at a loss as to why she was here, on this ledge. Inside her, the essence of a passenger was beginning to stretch.

“You’re not a batch anymore,” she said. “Neither am I. We’re
crew
now. We can’t go back to the hub. We don’t belong here.”

“I’m not crew,” he said. He showed his arms to her; the scars were inflamed. “You should return to the others.”

“We were
both
batches.” Clarissa persevered, getting desperate. “While sailors dreamed in their stats, the darkness was inside us. Inside
each of us
, Crospinal. But sailors have us now, we’re safe, and they brought us into the light. We can change things. You can, Crospinal. You’re a pilot.”

Looking at the other thin scars, running the inside length of each white thigh, accompaniment to those scrawling his arms (where the metal rat, presumably, had straightened his femurs), Crospinal could imagine augmentations to the bone: titanium rods, or hafnium plates and minute medical screws. He imagined his thigh muscles re-stretched and pinned into place, tendons taut and stapled to his patellas, woven through with cremasteric fibres. Modifications, if nothing else, set him apart from the others. So many aspects altered since he had left the pen. Some added, some taken away.

Climbing down this far—thirty metres or so below the lip of the hole he’d torn in the wall—was arduous work, and slow, but not exceptionally difficult or, he felt, perhaps wrongly or stupidly, dangerous. Indignation carried him. Desire to keep moving steeled his grip. The polymers, if he leapt or fell, were surely there to absorb him.

Both Clarissa and the boy, Richardson, had followed his passage, as he’d predicted, coming headfirst through the hole, as if bound to him. Maybe they believed they could bring Crospinal back to the cockpit, when an opportunity arose, either by force or by convincing him that building crew, assembling sailors, and killing batches were paramount tasks. Maybe they’d been told to follow him.

Or maybe their names took away any choice.

Though Crospinal listened to everything Clarissa said, and was moved by her words, appreciating her attempts to convince him, he wanted nothing to do with such a destiny. Origins and circumstances of life were no reason for hostility. There were no sides to take. He would not bring the sailor’s world back, not if it meant fighting batches and struggling to vanquish one another in the brewing hallways and chambers of this strange world.

Their mitts and boots had aided both as they descended by adhering to the composite; Crospinal had no such assistance. His uniforms had never performed that function anyhow. He climbed with his fingers hooked on cables and clawed tight into thin seams. They were bleeding now, a nail cracked, the palms of his hands blistered. His toes cramped from gripping meager features.

When he’d dropped to the shelf where they would rest, bare feet slapping hard, rebuilt knees articulating smoothly, he had to lean with the skin of his pale belly pressed up against the surface of the wall, the drop just centimetres away.

He spent a moment tugging at his girdle, trying to disengage the tendrils that bound what was left of his uniform to his body, but the connectors were still anchored firmly and he certainly could not have pulled his catheter free, not while remaining conscious.

Resting on this broader ledge now, Clarissa trembled. Inside, where she’d said nothing but darkness once spread—before thoughts, or a half-baked concept of awareness, before sailors passed through—Crospinal felt a strange calm. There were no weapons growing on Richardson’s or Clarissa’s sleeves. He had checked several times. He checked again now, as Clarissa waited for him to respond, or come around.

The corpse of the batch, like all biological matter, would take a long time to decompose. Most likely there were no worms, so far from a garden. No rats or crows, either. But decay would take even longer if the body was a crew member, lying dead, sealed inside a
jumpsuit
. If his father’s body hadn’t been blown away by the explosion, he would likely be mummified, preserved inside the sheath of Dacron and nylon for years to come.

Watching Richardson take a hit from his feedtube and swallow, Crospinal tugged with one hand at his own tightening collar, thumbing the broken attachment ridge, breaking a cable. Flakes of neoprene drifted away and dissolved on the faint breeze. His chestplate was loose, almost swinging free. There were only two bands of reinforcement connecting his collar to his girdle, through which unused conduits ran that could power a helmet, or the force that projected over one’s head, though both options were inert to him now.

How could he disengage his processor?

A better question would be:
why
. Without it, he would not be able to live, at least not for long.

Looking out, Crospinal saw only distance, the bleary horizon. Below him, polymers continued to gather. A storm was brewing.

Having made a pest of itself when they first stood together on this shelf, asking repeatedly—
sotto voce
—if they needed anything, darting about, that they were
welcome, so welcome
, and they were the first visitors in
ages
, the local controller returned, hoping for further requests after, no doubt, directing a clean-up operation of its small station.

But the few pellets Crospinal had tried (and spat out) were stale and tasteless, the water tepid, so thick with enhancements that sediments remained even after the cup dissolved into thin air. No consoles, ill-formed or full. Crospinal got on his hands and knees and looked everywhere, murmuring, coaxing, while Clarissa and Richardson watched him. No uniform dispensers.
A bare bones operation
, as his father would have said. Which suited Crospinal fine. He did not trust, nor particularly wish to further test, his own abstinence from the supplies that the world had to offer.

Clarissa pressed her back firmly against the surface of the wall. She hugged her knees to her chest. “Luella told us to wait.” She was crying again, quietly, breaths shuddering her body. “She told us you were coming.”

She crumpled her face into her mitts, the capillaries of which began lapping up her tears.

Richardson watched, silent as always, sucking on his siphon. He had not long worn the jumpsuit and was on his first. The catheter still burned as it spiralled farther and farther up his urethra, supplying him with supplements and directives and even the seeds of an ability to process and understand language. Words bubbled in the boy’s mouth, but Richardson was not yet ready to release them. He sucked at his siphon again. A battle ago, maybe two, crew members had trapped him as he rushed the cockpit. Held him down. Pushed his arms into a console and let the transponders connect him to passengers.

Before that, Richardson recalled nothing.

If he were able to release the words from his lips, they would say his name, firstly, and then they would say other names, which he conceived, lying here, as if whispered into his ear. He would name two crew, whose faces he could recall, and in whom he felt a kindred bond.

What Clarissa had implied, Crospinal was considering (as he had several times since leaving home). He wanted to raise his voice but did not. “I wasn’t born in the hub. Neither was my sister. We were pulled from the womb. I’ve seen the cryonic pit, next to my daybed. I saw it every day. And I’ve seen haptics of me, babies too small for any uniform.”

Yet other aspects of his life had been a lie, so why not his origin? Madness to consider. He would never let his childhood go. Without a foundation, even minimal, he would retain nothing, and be set adrift, once and for all, into the darkness his father had always tried to keep away.

“
Crospinal.
” She let her hands fall to the lap of her uniform. A plea, as if he was a kid in his year of growth. “We all came from down there. We can’t go back, or forget what we’ve learned.
We can’t go back
. We have to turn around.”

Her emotions, though, eventually subsided in waves of release. She turned her face toward him. “Paladins are down there.” Her blue eyes, moist, reflected desperation. “And not projections. Real ones, in their housings. If they find you, they’ll
kill you
. They would see crew in a second.”

Like shadows, or light on water, the other sailors flashed their lives across Crospinal’s vision, too fast for details, though the effect left him giddy. Could Richardson and Clarissa see their spirits, too? Were they swelling in each of them? He raised his hands to greet these instances, or keep them at bay.

Richardson just watched. Intelligence burned in his eyes. A roll of flesh rose between the back of his head and his uniform, flattening only when he looked away—at last—and down.

Crospinal was distracted by the voices inside him. He could no longer understand their language. Time seemed to stutter.

“The sailor that chose you,” Clarissa said, “was able—”

“My
father
.”

“Your
father
.” She struggled to persevere. “The passenger. He made two pilots. Luella, and you. Luella brought sailors together, took them from stats. She slung them, plugged them. She rescued us from darkness when we were sent to stop her. I remember looking into her eyes that first time. I remember blackness leaving me. Luella showed us how to call trains and cycles. Dispensers grew wherever she went. Objects fell from the walls. She knew everything, because she was also a pilot.”

Crospinal closed his eyes and saw faint, stuttering images, hazy landscapes and scenes that could not possibly exist.
Mountains
, he thought. He opened his eyes again. “If she was hurt, why didn’t a metal rat fix her?”

“A what?”

“An elemental. The smart machines. With red eyes.”

Clarissa blinked. Finally, she said: “They’re tempters, and detractors. They ask too many questions that can never be answered. When Luella was hurt, she went to sleep before elementals found her. But there are none left now, anyhow. They’ve been banished.”

He looked out over the expanse, where once he’d imagined mountains, but he knew now that mountains were part of the sailors’ dream. As if agreeing, those within him flittered.

“Why did you name me?” Clarissa whispered.

He turned to look her in the eye, met her gaze for a long while, his jaw working. He saw the struggle, inside. Reaching out—an action that surprised even himself—he touched Clarissa’s face with his bare hand and, as his fingertips broke through the faint shield created by her collar, felt the electrostatic charge, like a tingling, and the fine hairs of her cheek, the bone under her warm, soft skin. She drew in breath sharply. She was crying, trembling. A fallen teardrop began to roll, whisked quickly away.

“There’s nothing here,” she said. “Where are you taking us?”

His fingers were still touching her face. Like everyone else, she was tormented by a past she could not recall. “Did Luella ever kill anyone?” he said.

Her blue eyes averted. She would not look at him. She moved away from his touch. “Luella converted when she could. Or she ended a life, if she had to. Batches are not like us. Seventeen stats rose from the floor when Luella was here. And when the batches came, most died, but some were saved, and converted. Like me. Even sailors were attacked, in their thrones, some who’d just come awake. They were torn from their gates and left to bleed. Memories were lost. You’d kill batches, too.”

Out over the vista, clouds were clearing. He looked at the distant garden, visible now, and the hazy patterns of the floor. To walk to the horizon would take many days. “We all die soon enough. That’s one thing I know.”

“A batch lives for twenty years, until their year of transgression. Without a jumpsuit, without food, without thought. Attached to the hub. They are not like us.”