Tag: science-fiction

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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