Razor Mountain

Chapter 34

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.