Month: July 2023

Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

Christopher left the bottle and tumbler behind, in the empty dormitory. He walked the halls with purpose now.

The gray-walled back halls of Razor Mountain were a purgatory where Christopher could wander endlessly. He had been walking these hallways for centuries. God-Speaker had. There was hardly a difference between them anymore. But he couldn’t actually walk forever. Eventually, inevitably, he came to the place he knew he had to come to: the chamber of the voices.

He knew what he had to do, but he wondered if he was too far gone to do it. It was Christopher that was driving him, but there didn’t seem to be much Christopher left. God-Speaker wanted it too, in his own way, but he could never bring himself to do it—not on his own. He was a river that had run for so long, cut a canyon so deep, that he could never change course of his own volition.

In the chamber, he could not completely shut out the voices. The cloud of their strange memories surrounded him, at first just flashes, moments, then more and more until he was inside a kaleidoscope of images, smells, sounds and sensations from lives long past and places far away.

We must continue, they all said. They were a race of God-Speakers, a race that had come to the conclusion that death erased the value of living. A race for whom the transitory nature of life was anathema. Yet, they were here. In their quest for permanence, their race had died out, and even then, they refused to accept it. They cast themselves out, as living memories, to find new vessels for their endlessness. But this paltry rock played host to such primitive life. So primitive that it could scarcely even understand them, let alone play host to them. Only one had ever come close. Even though he could understand them, sometimes, and learn a bare few secrets of how they cheated death, even he was not a suitable vessel. They were trapped. They still clung to this purgatory, this faintest semblance of life, rather than face death.

They only made Christopher more determined. There was no dignity, scrabbling and clawing as you slid down the slope. It was a quiet fear, always at the edge of thought, poisoning every good thing with the sickness of impermanence. Everything was temporary. Hating impermanence made the world terrible.

Having seen enough of the kaleidoscope, Christopher pushed it back. He shut out those dead memories, and reached out with his mind. He took hold of their power one last time. He knew what to do, though he had never been brave enough to do it himself.

He felt a storm of emotions, of logical arguments arrayed like armies against one another. He could barely tell what came from Christopher and what came from God-Speaker. He didn’t want to do it. He had to do it. He had to wait, to be sure. No, now was the tipping point. Now was the only chance. He was afraid.

He recalled the words he used to train the oracles.

See the flow of time, the branching river. Reach out and stop yourself. Step out of the current. Hold on tight, and feel the universe move on without you.

It was surprisingly easy. He was untethered. His centuries of memory were small and simple in comparison to what unfolded around him: the endless strand of time, in the twinkling cascade of infinite moments. The universe unfolding in fractal complexity, perpetually giving birth to itself from nanosecond to nanosecond. The view was utterly overwhelming, and it made plain the lie that the minds in the chamber told themselves. There was no permanence in the face of the whole vast universe. Neither kings nor empires nor the lifetimes of planets and stars were of any consequence. They were so small as to be undetectable.

Christopher felt himself getting lost, and reached out for an anchor. He could go backward, but once he started, there was no stopping, not for long. He sought out the moment that mattered. Back a few years, then a few more, then a century, and time was flying past in a torrent.

It was like skimming a book. He saw only a few individual places and moments, moving in reverse. Effects spawning their causes. He was afraid he would miss it, but when he came to the pivotal moment, it was unmistakable. He grabbed at it, fighting against the pull that now owned him, that would eventually force him to keep going backward and backward and backward.

He dropped into the familiar world again. He found himself—but not himself.

Those ancient, arrogant, fearful minds in the chamber beneath the mountain could never find purchase in the human brain, but Christopher had no difficulty. This was his mind, even if it was inherited.

A hunched and dirty figure limped deeper and deeper into a dark cave. The space in the rock was little more than a narrow crack, and he was forced to crouch and crawl to get through. The voices were calling to him. They were faint, but they were like the voice of his stone god. He had nothing, no tribe, nobody to lead him or keep him safe. Nothing to trust in a world that was terrifying in every way.

There was no light here. He moved by feel alone. Christopher settled deeper into this mind, breathing this man’s breath, feeling the rough rock through his raw and stinging fingertips. Thinking his dull thoughts, despairing and afraid to admit the faint glimmer of hope that these voices engendered.

There was a gap, Christopher knew. A place where this crack intersected another. And that other crack opened into a deep and unknown space below. He was crawling. His fingers found the lip. He brought his knees to the edge and reached across the gap.

Yes, another ledge. Just a little more than an arm’s-length of empty air between.

He gripped the other side and slid forward. Carefully, carefully. The rough ceiling was low. He stretched his body across the gap.

Christopher was a passenger here. His influence was so small, so light. A flicker of thought here. A moment of distraction. A carefully placed hand slips on the moist rock.

Christopher can’t hold on. He is moving backwards, pulled by an unstoppable gravity. He is in God-Speaker, in the depths of Razor Mountain before it had a name. He is falling down the crack. Then he is outside the universe again, watching God-Speaker fall and fall and fall in a frozen, endless moment.

It’s strange seeing it from the outside. God-Speaker falls forever, and then he lands. It is so forceful that there is no pain. Just the quiet dignity of an ending, of death. It is a relief.

The long tail of the future cracks like a whip and rolls out in a different shape. The voices whisper in their chamber, deep within the mountain, but nobody ever hears their susurration. The earth moves slowly, and they sink deeper and deeper into its warm heart.

The mountain is still and sleepy. It is never riddled with tunnels like an anthill. No locked doors hiding secrets. It slumbers peacefully.

The world moves on, different, but not so different. People live and die.

Christopher sails on in the opposite direction, through a void far emptier than the deepest space. He is falling down time, toward the beginning of all things. He has done all he can do to change the course of history.

A tremendous sense of relief washes over him. He sails up the flow of the universe, backward through time, back to the pinprick of infinite light and heat at the beginning, and then beyond.

THE END

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Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

Christopher could feel God Speaker in his bones—the disappointment, irritation, and disgust with Christopher. Beneath that was the fear. It was beneath everything. Christopher was exhausted. He was trapped in an endless cycle. He was scared to let it continue, but equally scared to fight against it.

The voices beneath the mountain raged and jeered. They had no such concerns. If only they could be free, they would happily live until the universe grew cold and dark around them.

He left Cain’s residence with a mumbled goodbye, annoyed by the man’s unflappable calm as he turned off the lights and lay back down to sleep.

There were miles of hallways under the mountain. Even in the restricted areas, Christopher could walk for a lifetime and not find every twist and turn. He let his feet walk where they wanted and did his best to feel nothing.

Eventually, he had to raise his eyes from the floor, to a door that was blocking his path. Like most doors here, there was a square of black plastic embedded in the wall. His skeleton key card granted him access.

He had never been to this place as Christopher, but it was instantly familiar. Something about the smell of the place made it register as a school, even though that was really just a facade.

He walked down the hallway. There were several rooms with desks; screens and white-boards on their walls. The rooms were bare and dusty and felt abandoned. Further down was a cafeteria, two long tables looking lonely amongst the empty space. A gymnasium followed, then a janitorial closet, a private office and several smaller rooms. Last was was a pair of dormitories, long rooms with bunk beds. A door at the far end of each led to bathrooms and showers.

It was an entire compound, weirdly segregated from the rest of the city, hidden in the restricted area. The rooms were large enough to comfortably hold dozens, though Christopher knew they had rarely held more than ten people: children, specifically, ranging from five or six years old up to their early teens. Children who showed signs of a gift. They heard faint, confusing voices from somewhere down below.

God-Speaker had accompanied every one of them to a strange room, deep below the city, where they might hear those voices a little better. With the right training, some of them could learn to listen.

Their parents would be told that their children were gifted. Those children would have to enroll in a boarding school, where their gifts could be cultivated. In that school, they would learn that they were special: they were oracles.

Christopher turned and looked back down the hallway, to the distant door where he had entered. Memory washed over him. It felt new, but somehow he had always known it.

God-Speaker was unique. Across thousands of years, he had never met another person who could hear the voices as clearly as he could. He did not know if it was some unique confluence of genes or something in his upbringing and culture. Perhaps there was some incurable defect in his thoughts that he managed to carry with him from one body to the next. Whatever it was, it didn’t flourish in the generations that followed him. If anything, it had become harder and harder to find anyone who could hear more than a hint of the voices.

God-Speaker had learned many things from the voices, projecting his mind out into the world and entering into others. Yet, the three dimensions of normal space were not the only ones the voices understood. There were other ways to project a mind, although they were dangerous.

Even the voices did not fully understand time. The future was forever hidden from them. Perhaps there was no concrete future, only the infinitely regenerating moment that was the present. Perhaps there were innumerable futures, branching and shifting and impossible to navigate.

On the other hand, there was certainly a past, and it was only slightly more comprehensible. In the same way a mind could be projected across space, it could be projected into the past. God-Speaker could send his mind back, if he chose to do so. But what would he find there?

Could he change the past? What would happen to the future he had already experienced? The voices weren’t certain. Time might split like the branches of a tree, different futures continuing in parallel. Or it might shift, like the flow of a river. It might tangle in self-referential loops and knots. It might even be impossible to change, a scrupulous bookkeeper who had already done the necessary math to ensure that anything the traveler did was already accounted for, that any actions taken in the past would lead to the future that already existed.

God-Speaker had experimented. Not with himself; that was too risky. He experimented by proxy. The oracles weren’t strong enough or skilled enough to project into someone else’s mind, across space, but they could project backward in time. They could find a perfectly compatible host: an earlier version of themselves. Still, time was a powerful current. Once they cast out into the past, it continued to pull them further and further back. They might visit their previous selves long enough to pass on a quick message, a few words of warning from their future, but they couldn’t stay. The riptides of time would tear them loose and pull them under. Their minds would be lost somewhere beyond the knowledge of God-Speaker and the voices.

The abilities of the oracles didn’t last. Some never learned, and others were capable only for a few years. The very best he found when they were young, and they might retain their usefulness for a decade.

Cain said the cabinet had used the oracles. They had sent back warnings. Of course they had. God-Speaker had received those vague messages. Someone would try to kill him, and without intervention they would succeed. None of the messages had told him who was responsible. They hadn’t known. The children had made their vague prophecies. He had begun his investigations. In the end, it had been for nothing.

God-Speaker understood this in cold, clinical terms. Christopher had to suppress the urge to vomit. He knew what would happen to those children whose minds had left their bodies, never to return. He knew that the families, who had been told their children were in a special training program, would be informed that they died in an unforeseeable accident. Their parents would feel what his parents had felt. Their siblings would feel what he felt. They would never know that these children had been sacrificed, or why. It hadn’t even saved him from a blade beneath the ribs.

Christopher remembered how he felt after being tortured, when he had finally stood up to Sergeant Meadows. He had known then, without a doubt, that he was going to die, and he had not been afraid. It felt like the ultimate liberation, the true face of freedom. That feeling had faded in the days that followed. It felt like so long ago, now. But the echoes of that revelation still reverberated deep inside him.

He was still going to die. He could no longer claim that he wasn’t afraid, but he knew that in this moment the fear wasn’t strong enough to bind him.

Deep in the darkest recesses of his mind, he could feel something coming, like the first faint light on the horizon at dawn. God-Speaker was waking up. Cain was right. Things would be different in the morning.

If he was going to do something as himself, as Christopher, now was his last chance.

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Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

Christopher blinked. The sun had fallen behind the mountains while he was lost in thought. The sky was filled with stars, and he couldn’t look at them without feeling an unbearable ache in his chest. He rose unsteadily and took the crystal tumbler inside to refill it.

There were many amazing things about Sky-Watcher. She had shocked him into loving her, long after he thought he had lost the capacity for it. She had constantly surprised him. Nothing had surprised him more than her acceptance of her own death. He knew she must have felt some fear. What lay beyond death was unknown, even to God-Speaker, even to the voices beneath the mountain. She accepted that fear too. She was content to let it happen.

Christopher poured slowly, the thin stream of amber liquid cascading over the ice, slowly filling the glass. Despite the numbness imparted by the alcohol, he felt hyper-sensitized. The colors and shapes of the world were sharper and brighter than they had ever been before.

He thought about his parents. They had put so much of their lives and energy into protecting him, keeping him safe, and this was how it all ended. They could never know the truth. They would always think Christopher had died on that plane. They weren’t far off the mark.

He pressed his palm against the rich wood paneling on the wall behind the shelf of decanters. All of the decor was for nothing. Although it gave the impression of an ordinary building on the surface of the world, Christopher could feel the stone behind the decorative shell. He could feel the weight of the mountain, suffocating him.

Why was this place here? Why all these tunnels and machines? Why all these people, scurrying around like ants, following collective instincts that no individual understood. The mountain had one purpose, and everything else flowed from that. It was made to keep God-Speaker alive, so why did it feel like a vast tomb?

He took the tumbler in one hand and a decanter in the other and began to walk with the over-careful gait of the intoxicated. He stepped through the double doors at the entrance to the apartment and began the long descent down the gently curving, wide-stepped stairs. He followed the back hallways, now so etched in his mind that they required no thought to navigate. Though it was night and the lights in the main caverns would be dimmed, the lights in these hallways were still bright. He arrived at a door, and like all doors under Razor Mountain, he could open it. He set down the decanter for a moment and fumbled for a key card. Soon, he would have a new chip implanted under his skin. For now, the card was necessary.

He entered an apartment somewhat like his own, though on a significantly smaller scale. It was dark inside, so he flicked on the lights that illuminated the entry, then a dining room, then a hallway. He had never been here before, but he found his way.

When he reached the bedroom, he did not turn on the lights, but he opened the door, and some of the light from the hallway filtered in. He slid a chair across the carpet, next to the nightstand, facing the bed. He set the tumbler on the nightstand and poured himself another drink.

Cain sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes.

“Why did you work so hard to bring me back?” Christopher asked.

Cain blinked against the light. He took a tissue from the box on the nightstand and blew his nose. He showed no surprise to find himself in this situation.

Christopher waited, wondering if he would have to ask the question again.

“At first, I didn’t,” Cain said, at last. “I had no idea what to do. Like everyone else, I muddled through.”

He rubbed his eyes.

“Time passed, and I saw how the cabinet ran things. Endless squabbling and petty disagreements. I hated it. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do something. I wanted justice for Moira. I wanted everything back the way it used to be.

“I knew this place wouldn’t implode catastrophically. You built it to last. But it would fall into a long, slow decline. Eventually, cracks would form. Then, someday, something would fail and that would set off something else. It would all come tumbling down in a matter of weeks or days or hours. Maybe not soon. Maybe not for generations. But eventually. I didn’t want to be responsible for the first cracks that brought the whole thing down.”

“Why would it be bad for it to all fall apart?” Christopher asked.

“For one thing, if it happened on our watch, we’d be responsible. We’re the ones in charge. Or at least we were,” he said, nodding toward Christopher. “This place is my home. Despite everything that has happened, I’m happy here. I’m happy doing this job. I think this place really is important. We are a backstop against disaster for all of human civilization.”

“I thought you were worried it could all fall apart,” Christopher countered.

“Without you,” Cain replied. “It would all fall apart without you. The whole thing only works because there’s a single, strong vision. Empires fall because they lack consistency. A chain of successive humans running the show eventually fails, and it only takes one bad link to break the chain. The good king grows old and dies, and a bad king takes his place.

“But not here. Here, the good king lives forever. That’s why Razor Mountain has lasted.”

“You’ve never been in the outside world,” Christopher said. “Why do you think it’s better in here?”

“I’ve seen quite a bit of the outside world, even if only through screens and reports,” Cain said.

“It’s no utopia.”

Christopher sat next to the bed, lost in swirling, half-drunken thoughts. Cain rose, unabashed in his tee-shirt and boxers, walked to the bathroom and filled a glass from the tap. He returned to sit on the bed.

“You know, I think I might be the perfect vessel for God-Speaker,” Christopher said. “All he thinks about is staving off death. He does whatever he can to avoid every risk. It just so happens I’ve been doing the same things my whole life. Obviously with less expectation of long-term success.”

“Why is that?” Cain asked. Christopher got the sense that he was playing a part, acting as therapist for the stupid, inebriated king. Christopher shrugged off the feeling. Who else could he talk to?

“When I was young, my brother drowned,” Christopher said. He wondered when he had last spoken about it.

“After that, I was my parents’ only child. They didn’t let me bike to a friend’s house. They didn’t leave me with a babysitter. They never let me do anything remotely dangerous. Not that I was much inclined to. They never talked about it, but it was obvious that they were afraid they’d lose me too. I couldn’t very well blame them for it. I felt like I was obligated to outlive them, so they wouldn’t have to feel that pain again.”

Cain nodded. “And now?”

“They’re still alive,” Christopher said. “And as far as they know, I’m not.”

“That must be difficult.”

“A dozen times a day, I remember it. It feels a little bit like being stabbed in the chest.”

Cain was silent, calm and apparently content to just sit with Christopher. Christopher sipped from his tumbler.

“Doesn’t it worry you that your good king is so desperate to live forever?”

“Not really. Everyone is afraid of death. It keeps you going. It keeps the city running. It doesn’t really matter why you do it. It just matters that you keep doing it.”

“What about me? How is that fair for me?”

“It’s not. None of it is. Not for you, or me, or anyone else under the mountain. Reed wasn’t wrong about everything. It was only his conclusions that were wrong.”

“What if I just give up? What if I quit?”

Cain shrugged. “You could. I can’t stop you. Like I said, none of this works unless you’re running it.”

“You don’t care?”

“Don’t be shitty,” he said, suddenly irritable. “You know how much I care. I’ve dedicated my life to you and this city. I’ve done everything I can possibly do, and now I’m dead tired. It’s on you.”

Christopher sighed. “It’s on me.”

“You told me yourself that this transition, this change from Christopher to God-Speaker might be rough. I can’t even imagine. But I know this city pretty well, and even though I can only guess how old this place is and how old you are, I have some faint idea of how much work it must have been to build it and keep it secret. I don’t think you’d spend so many lifetimes doing that, just to throw it all away.”

He put his hand on top of Christopher’s hand and gave it a strangely patronizing squeeze.

“You’re just scared about what’s going to happen. And you’re drunk. Go get some sleep. Let the change happen. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

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