Free Head Full of Mountains by Brent Hayward Page A

see what had prodded him, and spoken, but to no avail on any count. “
Let me out!”
    “Take a deep breath,” the voice advised.
    From behind the canister.
    Crospinal did what the voice said. He did feel marginally better, though his compliance irritated him.
    “You need to rest.”
    From where it had been hidden, at the foot of the gleaming canister holding firm to his deadened legs, emerged a sleek, grey . . . rat. Sitting back on its haunches, peering at Crospinal with red eyes. Not much bigger than his open hand, when he’d been able to open them, but the eyes—
    No. Not a rat
.
    “Get me out of this thing,” he said. “Did you open my uniform? I’m gonna die of some infection. Could you seal it, please? And get me out of here.”
    The elemental returned his stare but did not respond or assist.
    “This is shit. Clearly there’s something wrong with you. Get this thing off my legs. I can’t feel them.” Crospinal was wondering why he had thought of the elemental as a rat in the first place: the limbs were clearly fine rods of titanium, the fingers lengths of another delicate beta alloy whose name he could not recall (though the haptics about metals and plastics and composites had been nightly for over a year), and the voice came from a small comm.
    Thumbs had been designed, in an opposable manner. The face was remotely rat-like, with those red eyes and a muzzle-shaped protuberance—no doubt to accommodate the artificial neurons, which would have to be squeezed pretty tight into an elemental this small—but any similarity to a living beast ended there. For his confusion, Crospinal blamed grogginess, but was beginning to suspect that processes and patterns of his own thoughts were changing, and for the worst, now father was gone. This was clearly an elemental, with an independent personality. More sophisticated, perhaps, than Fox or Bear.
    “Can’t you talk anymore? You seem advanced but you’re not doing what I ask. What happened to my legs? And close my uniform.”
    Now the metal rat read him. Crospinal felt the pressure sweeping inside his body, nowhere near as intrusive or as blunt as those he had endured in the pen, when his caretakers checked him out, but enough to take serious and rile him. “Hey,” he said. “You should ask first. It’s just rude. What are you looking for?” Trying to sit up, to prop himself, but his arms had grown tired altogether of obeying his errant will and remained inert at his side.
    “If you keep moving,” said the elemental, “you’ll need to be sedated. You’ll tear something. I don’t want to restrain you.”
    “You already have.” Indeed, when Crospinal attempted to wrench his body free one more time, not much of anything moved, except for the surges of pain, like steel filings blooming in his guts. “Can’t you just let me out?” He suspected he might cry soon, though he really did not want to. “I can’t feel my legs.”
    “Because your legs,” said the metal rat, “are broken.”
    “
What?
”
    “But the bones are knitting nicely. So stop fighting.”
    Crospinal had stopped. “My legs are broken?”
    “Both femurs snapped by a large fragment, flash-hardened, spinning laterally. Two fractures on the left, one on the right. The second fracture was compound. The bone severed your femoral artery. There were other injuries—punctured intestine, mild concussion—but your fractures were the most grave.”
    “What are you saying?”
    “You don’t understand me when I talk?”
    “Of course I do.”
    “Then what? Don’t get excited. You seemed—I thought you couldn’t understand, that’s all. That’s what you said. An inner lock closed. Whatever was blocking it must have shifted or moved on. I extricated you from the wreckage and dragged you clear. Lucky to be alive, as they say. Only a few minor procedures left. Soon you’ll be right as rain.”
    Rain?
He frowned.
With the power to revive, to give life . . . 
“What does rain