Head Full of Mountains (20 page)

This time, Crospinal could not resist touching him, fingers on the warm, dry skin. Were he and these men ever the same beast?

“We live in the pylon. They said no one could live there.” The man pointed with his chin. “And we don’t believe in nothing.”

“We saved your life, sailor boy,” said one in the back, who had not previously spoken, startling Crospinal. “But we can’t save you from the shit inside your own head.”

And the third added: “If you wasn’t so filled with preservatives, you’d make a fine meal. But none of us want to live forever.”

Laughter returned, unanimous, uproarious, the three mouths open, lenses glinting, dark drool spraying. Even the symbiotes twitched and clenched, attempting to stay perched on the bobbing heads.

Crospinal was clapped on the shoulder by a firm hand.

“Okay, asshole, go back where you came from now. Crawl on home.”

“I can’t.”

The hand remained, moving down, clenching Crospinal’s upper arm in a powerful grip.

“
Hey—”

They had turned suddenly, as one, toward the tunnels. Was there a sound? Crospinal squinted but saw nothing amiss, heard no approach. Lights around the openings flashed their code.

Frowning, Crospinal pulled free easily, as if he’d been forgotten already.

The men stood. They were about as skinny as he was. The one who’d spoken first smiled down upon Crospinal with his rotten smile. “Good luck, asshole,” he said, then he reached to tap the creature on his back—which puffed and tightened—and, with the distorted grin still on his face, launched himself backward, a flip out into the darkness, and vanished.

His associates followed, engulfed one by one like apparitions, or haptics collapsing. They might never have existed.

Crospinal sat for a long while on that platform, over the abyss, the stale breath of the world rising up around him. He hugged himself and he rocked. There was no other movement, no sounds, from any direction. He thought briefly, obliquely, as was his wont, about stepping off the brink, taking up where he had left off, but instead he got up and headed toward the closest tunnel opening, across a sloping array of strange, hard tiles, and entered the delicate ring of semaphored lights.

A malfunctioning icon crackled in the air before his face and was gone. No controller to greet him.

Ambients swelled with his passage. The narrow hall was choked with old deposits and polymers, drifting in clusters. Nothing of note, no clue as to what had frightened the men off, if indeed they had been frightened. Perhaps the men had merely finished lecturing him, and had wanted to leave on a dramatic note. Crospinal nearly smiled, then wondered if he’d lost his mind. Running fingertips along the texture of the wall, he walked, expecting dogs to appear, barking, excited to know of his return, but of course none did; this tunnel did not lead home

He came to a junction, where an assortment of what looked like concrete ephemera were scattered in a rough heap. He stopped, surprised by this incongruity. There were tiny metal tools; what looked like styrene toys, from a children’s haptic; a polymethyl fan blade, cracked in two. He crouched, tingling and, without touching anything, looked about.

In the low, domed ceiling, directly above a blackened mark on the floor, not far from the pile, was a sort of vent with hard edges, as if the frame had been cleared of any build up. He rose, moving cautiously. His bare foot felt granular residue, and warmth.
A fire . . . 

Inspecting the perimeter of the junction area, Crospinal eventually located two small, primitive devices—a cowering food dispenser, and a pharmacy—wedged into a recess with an opening just large enough for his hand to enter. He struggled to catch and remove the devices, which had begun protesting weakly, but they couldn’t resist for long. When he turned the food dispenser over, liquid spilled onto the floor. (Slowly absorbed, with a nasty stench.) The skin of the devices was scratched, marked with crude glyphs.

“Are you smart at all?” Crospinal whispered. “Can you understand me? Who did this to you? Is there a father nearby?”

More liquid dripped. He released the dispenser, and it scrambled quickly away, back into the recess.

Just off a short connecting hall, he found a soft pile of padding on the floor tiles—mostly insulation, torn from a metallic panel, like the ones the crew cabins had been built from, and the wheelroom back home. Carried here? Or was this all once a pen? Maybe the father had died of cancer. How many children, if any, had lived here? The idea of having a single doppelganger, once so clear, now seemed an almost absurd concept. His girlfriend could have been summoned away by anyone putting their hands into a console, though he tried to convince himself that she would not be as attracted to others as she had been to him, and was staying away for awful reasons he could neither fathom nor change. He was mildly surprised to find that this notion brought little comfort. Her reasons for liking him in the first place, for returning so often in the early days of their relationship when they had fallen in love, were most likely the same emotions that had made him climb the seven ladders to porthole of the harrier, day after day, and lie awake at night, unable to stop thinking of her.

Crospinal sniffed. Where the tiles curved up to become the wall, in a slow grade, he detected the scent of feces, as if a processor had broken down or leaked.

Pushing at the accumulation of padding and arcane trinkets with his foot exposed tiny scavengers, scurrying for shelter.
Like in a garden
, he thought, frowning. Were there nutrient tiles nearby?

And the walls were scarred with subtle pictures, etched into the polymer deposits with a substance the composite could not eradicate, though toluene stained the areas purple. Crospinal imagined some of these crude depictions might be images of people, but he could discern no real likeness when he inspected them closer.

Two dead rats—biological rats, flesh and blood—lay in a steel fusion box, side by side, black, half immersed in thick liquid. Their skin was loose, coming off, their yellow teeth exposed. Each corpse had a visible wound where life had drained out. Crospinal slowly lifted one of the bodies, held it aloft, inspecting the glazed eyes, the bared teeth, trying to assure himself that no essence could possibly linger after a heart stops.
Endtime
 . . . 

He bit down with his sharp teeth, filling his mouth with wet fur and the sweet, sickly fluid that burst from the flesh and made him gag. The small bones were harder to break than he had expected, but he persisted, tearing off a mouthful. His stomach protested and he only managed to cram the rat back into the box before vomiting onto the floor and over his own hands, spattering his ruined uniform.

Trying to stand, pulling at the tabs down the front of his tricot—because the ambient temperature had suddenly doubled—but his stomach clenched again, heaved and heaved, until it could heave no longer, and he was left dry-retching on all fours.

When he was finally able to straighten, feeling weak and slightly astonished by what he had attempted, a timid controller hovered before him, at eye level. The device had seen better days. “You okay?”

“Where were you?” Crospinal said, wiping at his mouth. The dead rats appeared to be laughing soundlessly at him from their box. The one he had tried to eat was half out of the liquid, escaping. His stomach flipped. There was no sustenance left inside him. “A real food dispenser, and real water. A full spigot. There’s just broken things here.”

“Are you all right?”

“Do I look all right?”

The controller hesitated before leading him toward an obscured wall unit, which, hissing open, crumbling the layer that had encrusted it into the structure, revealed a dormant food dispenser that appeared, when it woke, to be quite terrified.

“You have a customer,” said the controller. “Don’t worry. The coast’s clear.”

Rumbling, the dispenser, active now, extended its neck to peer about before quickly dropping a pellet into Crospinal’s mitt. Behind the dispenser, a spigot cowered, trying to remain hidden. Crospinal was about to take a water bulb, to drain it, gargle, feel the rush, the cure, but he paused, staring at the still warm food in his hand, sinuses filled with bland scents, recalling so many meals with his father, the lectures of proteins and sustenance, prayers of thankfulness for what they were about to receive, the generosity of this world.

Turning his hand on end, he let the pellet fall, uneaten, to the floor.

“Waste not, want not,” scolded the controller. “What’s wrong with you? Everybody’s nuts. All I ever wanted to do was run a nice station. Attract some crew. That’s all. Why’d you do that?”

“I guess I’m not hungry.” He watched the pellet slowly dissolving into the dirty tiles, back to whence it had come.
Flesh of the world to flesh of the world. . . . 

“Are you feeling better now that you’ve wasted resources?”

“Yes . . .”

When the pellet had vanished completely, Crospinal tugged again at the front tab of his uniform, then at the lateral tabs, deciding which way was best to remove a battered tricot—which way would be least painful—but his groin crawled in anticipation of the discomfort that pulling out a catheter brought. He had peeled his pale shoulder free and that was it. The broken collar refused to unlatch altogether; the comm jack and the monitor scope fizzled briefly.

“Uh,” said the controller, “there’s no means to dispose of suits in that condition here, so please stop trying to take it off. Jumpsuits are point-of-generation waste. They can’t be recycled here.”

“There must be a dispenser nearby.” But Crospinal had given up on the half-baked idea of taking his uniform off.

“There used to be, when a complement lived here. None left in these parts at all. They were destroyed. I’ve never even
seen
one before, because I got transferred here. No amenities any more, I’m afraid.”

Crospinal shrugged. “Maybe they’re hiding?”

“We have no reason to hide from each other. You know the boots of that jumpsuit are breached? There are holes in the fabric, the helmet interface is bent and shorted, and the processor’s exhausted. That suit’s doing you more harm than good. You should probably get yourself to an active station, dispose of everything correctly, and don a fresh one. Do you still have the helmet?”

“You know what? How about if I ask you questions? I got a lot of questions. You’re supposed to be helping me.”

“What sort of questions?”

“About the bays, for one.”

“What about the bays?”

“Elementals work out there. Machines, as big as me. Smart ones. And little smart machines, too, like the rats that fix people up. And standing ones, who don’t say very much.”

“What’s your point? You haven’t asked a question yet.”

“What motivates them? Do they work for us?”

“Who’s us?”

“Humans.”

“Crew, you mean? Look, I’ve never even been to a bay. Those sorts of machines don’t frequent these halls. There’s not many of them left anywhere, as far as I understand. I think the answer you’re looking for is
chaos
. Chaos controls them. Same as you.”

“I asked one to open a cabin door. I knew that shouldn’t be possible, but the door opened, and the machine went through. There was a . . . conspiracy, to hurt me. But I’ve never even—”

Rudely interrupting, the controller darted closer: “You should know,” it said, “that the child is watching you.”

Crospinal went cold. “
What child?”

“The one who lives here.”

“
Another boy
?”

“He likes to watch people.” The controller was oblivious to Crospinal’s cataplexy. “He likes your suit, but he seldom comes out—”

However, from behind a scale in the wall, unclean, wearing nothing but a shawl made of two insulating sheets, bound by rusted cable ties, a young child did indeed emerge.

“Ah,” said the controller, backing off.

This was not the other boy, not the one who might have reflected Crospinal, but a much younger child, perhaps in the year of cognitive leaps, or of independent thinking, with large, green eyes and long, lank hair. If the controller had not brought up gender, Crospinal would have thought the child a girl. He had not seen green eyes before and they were disconcerting. The boy stared for a long while, but then a quick smile revealed rotten teeth, just like those of the men who’d saved Crospinal from floating in the pylon. Holding out tiny arms—marked with the clear, intricate underlay—the boy came forward.

“Hello,” said Crospinal, nervous. “I, uh, I don’t really like contact. I don’t hug.”

Yet the child continued, until he was embracing Crospinal’s legs and holding on tight. When Crospinal finally touched the child in return (because he did not know what else to do, though he wanted to push the kid away), the crude plastic clothes rustled, and he felt beneath them prominent bones, larger than the rat’s, but which he could break just as easily, nonetheless, if he tried. There was nothing to this boy. Over the kid’s large head, which was pressed against his thigh, he mouthed to the controller:
Who is this
?

“He, uh, doesn’t talk. Can’t talk. No capacity for it. Not like the others. He doesn’t have a formed larynx. He doesn’t hear so good, either.”

Crospinal patted the boy on the head; the hair was matted and dry. “Why are they afraid?”

“Why is who afraid?”

“The men who live in the pylon, or whatever they called it. The three men out there. And the sustenance dispensers. They’re afraid.”

Truthfully, Crospinal was fed up with the vagaries and duplicities of devices, machines, and people alike. He was prepared for denial and lies.
No one lives in the pylon. What men? What are you saying?
But the controller merely said, “They feed this boy. They bring him treats. He put ideas into them.”

“How could that be, if he can’t talk?”

The child had stopped hugging Crospinal and seemed bored now. Tottering, looking down, he hopped a few steps, stopped, and extended his arms, like a crow’s wings, trying to balance on one foot. Glancing at Crospinal, the boy bent to retrieve a tiny styrene cap from the detritus piled near the wall. He put the cap in his mouth. Spit it out again. Resumed his hopping around, hands extended.