Head Full of Mountains (31 page)

The tiny chest filled, emptied, and filled again—

Then he did the same to the other child.

Finally, picking up the largest creature, he flipped it over and slung it in one motion, like he’d done this before, behind his own head. The legs were cool as they gripped him, and the carapace against the back of his head was not hard. He opened his mouth to let the tube seek his throat. A blue aura erupted from the mite. The legs gripped his haloed head.

Retrieving the children, lungs pumped full with cool air, he leapt up.

He had vague intentions of retracing his steps, finding his sister and the cockpit—maybe even the pen if he searched hard enough—yet once he was floating, curled around the infants to keep them warm (while the symbiotes clicked and adjusted and hissed air into them), he found himself getting sleepy. In the formless black of the pylon, for an indeterminable amount of time, Crospinal faded in and out. Voices of the sailors were also fading. Were his passengers attempting to leave his body? Or were they feeling assured, finally, and merely quieting?

Blood from his groin drifted about him in perfect spheres. Though he could not see them as he dozed, the crimson globes were like worlds, planets, stars. Crospinal slowly passed between them and left behind a sparse trail.

Eventually, against his naked skin, the infants stopped moving. Their energies were spent. They knew nothing about what, if anything, they might be missing. Life to them had been a handful of hours—lungs just starting to work, now filled by an alien bladder, the discomfort and need of sustenance growing as they sailed without weight.

But Crospinal, for some reason, was no longer drifting.

He could not open his eyes.

After that, discomfort flared, and the thin wails of the infants grew louder, peaked, until they, too, were finally past. The three of them took slow, shallow breaths, the handful of hours thrown at them nearly spent. No questions had formed in the minds of the infants. There was silence.

He managed at some point, before or just after he had stopped drifting, to put one hand down, a massive effort, and lay it across a tiny body, holding it even closer. His skin, and the skin of the baby, was hot as real fire.

Then he slept again, or expired, and he thought for one last instant as he passed over a threshold into a place of light about the elementals that had watched over him as a child, his guardians, which he’d named Fox and Bear; it seemed as if he could see their red eyes again.

Calmness on the water. Overhead, constellations were visible, but wisps of clouds had begun to blow in. The shore was not far ahead, waiting. Creatures waited there, too. They waited for everyone, eventually, and took them, without regard. He did not fear death now. Lying, almost relaxed, mere dregs of life remained. The trembling returned to his limbs, one last time, and as he tried to quell it, he realized the boy next door was silent, and had been silent for ages.

He woke, exhausted, in the dark.

The fires of their skin had cooled.

A single sphere of light—one
star
—broken free from the others, resolved before his face. Were the shapes of land ahead the peaks of a coast? Dreams were memories, and memories were dreams. From the sailors that had travelled inside him, he knew about stars, and about a spine of green mountains at the end of the sea—

“Sir?”

One thing he had not known—and was surprised by—was that stars could talk.

Crospinal tried to respond but his lips and mouth were too parched. The creatures that waited for them all would not greet him, not just yet. One day, but not right now. Recalling the infants, and leaving his girlfriend behind in the hub, he understood how little time comprised a life, and how tenacious and wondrous and frustrating the interim between oblivions could be.

Lifting a hand, to hold it up to the night sky as he lay dying, and bid goodbye, he rapped the star with his knuckles.

“Shit,” it said. “Sorry sir. I’m new to this. So sorry. I didn’t anticipate your movement.”

It’s okay.
He wanted to smile.

“And sorry for the profanity, too. I’m sort of, well, new to this. And
very
distressed. It’s just that, well, I believe these are strange times. I’m getting no signals at all from network support.”

It’s going to be okay.

“You should be feeling a bit better, no?”

I am. My name’s Crospinal.

“I, uh, took the liberty of hydrating you, and the, the infants—the
orphans—
when I realized no doctors were coming. Stanched your rupture, too, though I have only rudimentary help, I’m afraid. And one of the little ones has died, sir, the female, with the cleft palate. Her stomach was perforated. I couldn’t do anything. We’re not even supposed to help them, but I tried anyhow. She was very young and damaged, and I don’t believe her batch, whatever their year was called, have the capacity to, well,
regenerate
. Not the damaged ones, anyhow. This situation is certainly not what I had been expecting.”

Words of reassurance swam around Crospinal’s head, though he could not express them.

“You were brought here by the strangest of humans. I’ve watched the footage. I’ve watched ten times!”

Now Crospinal managed to grin.

“I’m sorry, sir, if I’ve let you down. You had just two orphans with you? You were taking them somewhere? I don’t claim to understand. The child’s death was painless, I assure you.”

“Light,” Crospinal said, able to speak at last, and figuring out how to do so: ambients flared up the walls, then brightened, and brightened further, illuminating the area.

He was lying naked in a composite alcove.

Blinking, he got up onto his elbows.

The controller—concerned, unsure—stayed directly over the living child, who seemed pale, but peaceful, and suffused, like himself, with traces of life.

The other child was blue and cool.

So, this living child was a boy? Their bodies, in life and death, were identical. A very small food dispenser, which must have come up through the floor while they slept, gently rubbed the tiny lips of the boy with a milky pale pellet; the child responded.

Behind the dispenser, a water spigot craned its neck to watch.

And behind these devices, a porthole had opened in the wall, but he could see, even from here, that the view was opaque, uncertain.

“Are you ready, sir? The world has, well,
stopped.
On the other side of, uh,
fuck
, beyond these panels—”

Toluene was already seeping through. Polymers ran in darker rivulets, reconfiguring, recycling, as the controller hung there over the nursing baby.

“I’m ready,” Crospinal said, and as these words came from his mouth, he believed them.
Of course he was ready
. One hand on the warm infant by his hip—the boy, chest softly lifting Crospinal’s palm—and the fingers of his right hand around the small calf of the dead one, he cradled the bodies closer against his sides, and held them there so they lay full-length along his flanks.

The composite panel was almost fully dissolved now. Slanted columns of warm light fell across them, and breezes coming through brought scents that stirred his growing wonder.

Out there, the sounds of activity—

Creatures would have to wait.

Against his hip, the living child murmured, and gurgled, and swallowed.

The dead child, of course, was still.

Crospinal rose carefully and took a deep breath. He would name both, first thing, when he got outside.

Brent Hayward’s shorter fiction has appeared in several publications. He is the author of the novels
Filaria
and
The Fecund’s Melancholy Daughter
. Born in London, raised in Montreal, he currently lives in Toronto.

Head Full of Mountains
© 2014 by Brent Hayward
Cover artwork © 2014 by Erik Mohr
Cover design © 2014 by Samantha Beiko
Interior design © 2014 by Vince Haig

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Published by ChiZine Publications

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

EPub Edition JULY 2014 ISBN: 978-1-77148-182-3

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Edited by Brett Savory
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Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.