by Matt Bell
The remainder is sometimes a single commanding speaker loud in C-433’s mind; more often it’s a murmuration of many voices. C-433 walks hallway to hallway, spinning open long-shut hatch seals, steadying his shaky body on doorframes and exposed struts. Only a few chambers are fully intact: the Loom and the adjacent recyclers, the hangar housing the translucent photovoltaic bubble, a galley with seats for fifty where C eats alone, every meal taken from the stored biomass in the recycler tanks, every overindulgence risking some future self.
C was born nearly empty stomached, but the remainder implores him to keep himself lean, hungry, wanting, so they might live longer, so they might go on.
To live is enough, the remainder claims, its voices an unsubtle swarm inside his head.
If C has any other purpose, then 432 times he has failed to find it.
“This time will be different,” he says aloud, hearing his particular voice for the first time, while in between his horns many similar voices repeat the same useless claim. He continues his tour, studying how the remainder dismantled the crawler’s lab equipment and computer displays, how it fed tools and test tubes into the inorganic recycler; he remembers hooves almost like his kicking through the side of clear plastic crates whose raw materials might have helped the Loom make do after the biomass ran low. There are intercom speakers and various controls mounted on many of the rusting walls, but no matter what button he touches the only response is O’s voice screeching through the speakers, a sound from which the gathered remainder recoils, the visceral blast of repetitive droning tightening C’s stomach, setting his plasticine teeth to grinding.
Usually, the voice can be stopped with a single button press.
Other times, no matter what C does, the song blares on and on.
“What is this place for?” he asks, room after room, the crawler too complex to be the best way to traverse the Ice, much less suited to the task than his bubblecraft. C-433 hasn’t been outside yet, but the remainder knows what he’d find if he walked the perimeter of the crawler: the treads on each side of the facility, the hydraulics attached to each axle designed to lift the crawler over obstructions; the way the various sections of the crawler are segmented, allowing the whole to stretch and distort and turn over the changeable landscape. C understands that the crawler is an extraordinary piece of technology, a last invention of the world that was, but under his command its promise has been nearly completely depleted, until the facility is almost as ruined as the wreckage beneath the Ice, the crushed trash of Below. Without the Loom, there might be no reason for him to stay here. But as long as the Loom functions—as long as each new C spends his life gathering enough biomass to buy more life from its recyclers—then the crawler will be his home.
Home, and also salvation, and also leash, cage, prison cell.
Chapman
By May’s end, Nathaniel and Chapman have planted three new nurseries, each twenty miles apart, one alongside what Nathaniel thinks is called Splitlip Creek, another beside a nearby river tributary, then a third hidden deeper in the bowels of the great black swamp, where Nathaniel says the nursery will be safe to flourish free from human intrusion until all the easier bottomlands to the east are settled. By the end of these weeks spent struggling in the swamp’s wet gloom, the brothers speak less and less, their experiences so twinned there’s nothing new to report or discuss, no stimulation except the endless daybreak to nightfall labor of their efforts.
Nothing new to discuss, and also nothing old: Chapman still hasn’t told Nathaniel about his witnessing of the moose’s butchering, despite the distance it puts between them, despite vegetarian Chapman’s rising disgust as his brother ate his month of moose.
The frustration soon grows mutual. The morning the last nursery is finished, Nathaniel snaps at Chapman over a broken gimlet both can see cracked not from mishandling but overuse. Nathaniel’s anger is misplaced but genuine: there’s no way to replace the tool here in the swamplands, and a month’s passed since they last met any human presence other than each other. Without outside contact, there’s no news, no chance for barter, no change to their foraged diet of gathered berries and dug tubers and hunted game, supplemented less and less by the dwindling supply of flour and other sundries brought west from Pennsylvania. Items lasting years in settled lands disintegrate in weeks in the sodden, shelterless Territory, the constant exposure enough to undo even the best-made items the brothers could afford: Chapman wears only trousers, but his one pair is filthy, torn, and unseamed, unmendable; the sole of Nathaniel’s left boot flops free of its glue, his hat brim breaks, the felt across its crown fallen to tatters.
The first morning of June, Nathaniel stares balefully across the cookfire, his reddened eyes signaling the return of a rage he bears constantly but rarely shows. An anger that this difficult life is Chapman’s fault, that if Chapman had been born a mere boy, if his monstrous birth hadn’t killed his mother, then Nathaniel wouldn’t have to sleep outside, exposed and starving so one day they might make a dollar. Chapman waits for his brother to speak some such accusation, but Nathaniel says nothing until breakfast is finished, the fire smoldering out while he scours their dishes with dry dirt scraped from the maple trunks, above the foul waterline.
“We’re out of supplies,” Nathaniel tries, dissembling, casting his glance away from Chapman’s too-wide face. “Cornmeal, tobacco, whiskey. We need a new gimlet, thanks to you; plus another blade for the saw. I’ll be gone a week, if the weather holds. More if it doesn’t.”
Chapman knows he isn’t invited. Even if he was, he couldn’t walk the streets of whatever clapboard town Nathaniel intends to visit. Brotherly kindness means saying none of this. Brotherly togetherness means pretending they’re mutually agreeing to part ways. Chapman says, “While you’re gone, I can visit last year’s nurseries, secure them against wind and weather, predation and theft. I’ll be able to move faster without you.” Because it’s not only Chapman who holds Nathaniel back, but also Nathaniel who constrains what Chapman might otherwise be: without him, he can speed his return to older nurseries possibly at last ready to fruit, among which he might find his Tree. And if he finds it, without Nathaniel? Then the next time Nathaniel sees him, he will have become a surprise, a man instead of a faun, a brother come anew in a body to which Nathaniel’s affections might more easily attach.
By noon the brothers have climbed free of the buggy swampland, both bitten often about the face and hands, both slicked with muck below their belts. They expect no sign of other people so soon, but at the waist-deep water’s northern edge they discover a newly built levee holding back brackish water, further flooding the swampland on one side.
“This wasn’t here when we came this way a week ago,” Nathaniel says, frowning.
A hundred yards away, Chapman spies a dozen men digging beside the unsteady levee’s loose hill of mud, dredging the swamp slop with shovels and mattocks, piling it high onto the next strand of levee.
The brothers hesitate, hidden halfway up the levee’s steep slope. “They might have something to trade,” Nathaniel says, taking another slim step upward, away from Chapman. “Otherwise I wouldn’t leave you.”
Chapman turns from his brother’s renewed want for better conversation, for the sight of anyone else; if these other men will have him, then Nathaniel won’t have to walk to town to meet the new company he craves. The logic is sound, but still, there’s a hesitance in Nathaniel’s voice, an unspoken ask for permission or absolution. Nathaniel has made his faunish brother into as much of a man as he can—he has dressed him in men’s clothes, he has taught him to do a man’s work—but sometimes it isn’t enough.
What is it Chapman desires, in this moment and every other like it? He wants his brother to choose him. Fair or unfair, that’s all. There are two worlds he knows he can’t fully join, the human and the nonhuman, but every time Nathaniel chooses to dwell in the wilds of the Territory with him instead of returning to more civilized lands, Chapman’s apartness doesn’t have to
become aloneness too. Chapman wants Nathaniel to choose him, but like his brother, he wants not to ask for what he wants.
“Go then,” he says, waving a clawed hand at the cold stink of black mud around them. “I’ll be fine in the swamps, alone.”
There’s no pleasure in anticipating more wet fur, no joy in mud ceaselessly clumped between cloven toes, but the only easy way to let Nathaniel leave without another fight is to leave him first.
Chapman descends the levee’s bank to wade back the way they came, through doomed stands of ash and elm looming out of the rising floodwater. From beyond the tree line he follows his brother at a distance, walking parallel to Nathaniel but staying hidden. The ditchdiggers startle when Nathaniel calls out, then relax when they see his hands raised, far from the tomahawk slung through the strap of his bag, the hunting rifle secured across his back.
The ditchdiggers’ foreman leans on his shovel, appraises Nathaniel, who appears beggared and destitute besides these better-provisioned men. “You’re alone?” the foreman asks, scanning the swampland for compatriots, bands of thieves, whatever danger he imagines.
Chapman holds his breath. What is it he hopes Nathaniel will say? The impossible thing? That he has a brother waiting nearby, whose odd shape need be no reason for alarm or violence?
Nathaniel says, “Yes, I’m alone,” with no quaver in his voice to suggest a lie. Chapman suppresses an angry snort, his face burning with hurt. Other than the last few of the brothers’ dollars, there’s nothing in Nathaniel’s bag these men could possibly want, not with their own wagon full of supplies and a proper camp surely nearby. Chapman’s too far away to hear every detail of the ensuing conversation, but it’s not difficult to understand its progress, how Nathaniel details his purpose in the Territory, how the men explain their own: the levees they construct and the ditches they dig will drain away the swamp, making it possible to build better roads, plow broader fields, allowing more and more families to come to settle.
“You’ll be able to plant anywhere you want next year,” the foreman boasts. “No more tripping through the mud for you.” Ohio Company men, Chapman presumes. He spits into the water, expectorating his disgust for the Company bosses back east, wealthy men who want to own a landscape they have never seen. Men happy to know the Territory only in their ledgers.
Despite all Nathaniel’s talk about making his own fortune, he takes a shovel from the ditchdiggers’ wagon, knowing all the while that the men will reciprocate with nothing richer than a hot meal, a space around their cheery fire.
Chapman fumes, but what can he do? Let Nathaniel dig in the mud, let Chapman seek other pleasures instead.
Without any map to guide him, Chapman follows a trail of memory, searching anxiously for his trees. Some of what he sees next no other man will again, the levee due to reshape these acres of swamp, home to unique combinations of plants and trees, to the specific animals thriving in this one particular place. He spies a snub-beaked bird flitting in the dry branches above his head, then a white-furred weasel swimming bank to bank through black water. Harelipped suckers flit and skitter in the shallows, the fish hunting fingernail-sized clams and dun-colored scuttling crabs. So much might’ve already changed in the past year: at any moment a nursery can be lost to spring flooding, to autumn fires, to early frost; seedlings might be devoured by jackrabbits, shoots and seeds dug up in winter by starving squirrels. The wilderness moves both slow and sudden, and anywhere civilization touches lurches toward new and terrifying speeds: one year there’d been no need to guard their trees with even the simplest of brush fences and the next their nurseries were all overrun with half-wild hogs, the pigs loosed to feed wherever they could by newly arrived farmers. Chapman returned another spring to find a once flourishing nursery washed away, the river bar he’d planted turned to sandy silt as the water changed direction, some new dam upstream eroding the good soil he remembered.
Every tree gone is a lost chance to discover the apple Chapman seeks, but he tries to tamp down his nervous urgency: all he’s truly lost is time; poor as he is, there’s always more time. Time and apple seeds, Chapman’s most honest currencies, all the wealth he’s ever had.
By noon of his first full day alone, Chapman emerges from the unculled woods to the surprise of a stand of one hundred adult apple trees, arranged in the neat rows where he and Nathaniel once bent to plant their seeds. It’s too early in the season for this nursery’s apples to have ripened fully, but Chapman can’t help plucking a dull fruit from the nearest tree, the apple gray green, mottled with pink flecks. His teeth, sharp as they are, struggle to pierce its waxy skin, the dense flesh within. It’s impossible to guess what this apple’s ripest taste will be: the early mouthful he spits out is wood and starch and stone, senseless disappointment.
Chapman tries another apple, but after each bite he remains wholly himself, unmoved and unchanged. Still, there are one hundred trees here, one hundred varieties of apple, one hundred chances. Moving faster, he tugs a purplish apple free from its stubborn stem, bites and tastes and swears before throwing the ungiving fruit into the bushes. He tries a green apple. A yellow apple. An apple striped and an apple stippled. The taste of sand, the taste of wood pulp, the taste of rind from skin to core. Apples too young even to be bug eaten, fly egged, worm riddled. Chapman’s teeth soon set to aching. The air is flush with humidity, loud with the calls of frightened birds bearing witness to his anger. He stamps a foot and crushes an ant nest; he rakes his hoof back and forth, thrashes loose a warren of worms.
“I will turn this whole continent over to you,” Chapman whispers to the uncaring trees, “if you give me what I want. I will plant a thousand thousand apple trees, a hundred thousand thousand. If it will earn me my right apple, I don’t care if anything other grows here ever again.” He’s waited ten years for these apples to grow, he knows he only has to wait another month, two at the most, to learn if there’s anything here for him.
He cannot force himself to be patient. Everything he does next is folly and waste, but he cares not. He cries out, then lowers his head and rushes a tree chosen at random, its shape no more offensive than any other. He slams his stubborn skull against the tree’s adolescent trunk, he rakes his horns against the bark, then sets his claws to tearing loose chunks of pulp. He grabs hold of the tree’s lower branches, shaking them furiously until their stems break to shower him with unripe apples, hateful orbs bouncing off his barked flesh. How useless such fruit is, how despised the tree that drops it! When he tires of battering the tree’s surface, of snapping its branches—when his horns hum with the reverberations of repeated blows—he wraps his arms around the tree’s trunk, he plants his hooves and lifts. His muscles ripple and bulge, his strength is greater than any mere man’s. The tree’s trunk protests audibly, its bark quivers and cracks. The air is so humid Chapman can’t distinguish between the hot damp breeze and the sweat bursting from his fur. The ground gives way as he scrapes and pulls and twists, the soil collapses, his hooves slide into a trench widening at the tree’s base. He grunts louder, leveraging the trunk until its bark splinters in a jagged tear, the tree crying out as its juvenile roots tear free of the earth.
Afterward Chapman lies beside the broken trunk, his anger gone, the blankness that follows a mismatch for the spectacle surrounding him. The tree destroyed, he stands and shakily considers the scene: the root ball exposed, the suckers covered in clinging dirt, the trunk slashed and scored and splintered. All the apples knocked free, doomed to rot instead of ripen.
What if this was the Tree. What if this tree’s apples would have become the apples he sought, if only he’d allowed the tree to grow.
If Nathaniel had been here, this wouldn’t have happened. But Nathaniel isn’t.
Now Chapman chooses his own mistakes, makes regrets only he owns.
John
The maglev train streaks across the Sacrifice Zone, floating centimeters above its enclosed rails as the landscape blurs by. Eury Mirov’s likeness is omnipresent
onboard, her voice speaking from telescreens mounted in the headrest of every seat and from larger screens decorating the walls, all looping the same mix of Earthtrust advertainments and promotional videos. Restless by noon, John gives up his bench seat to a pregnant woman and her wife, the second woman’s forearm encased in a cast, likely broken during their capture. Limping through the train’s many cars, John watches what was Wyoming imperceptibly give way to what was Nebraska, the old signs marking the state lines since removed. The burned brown landscape rushing by outside is a stark contrast to the farmlands in the looping videos where Eury plays leader, muse, mother, an object of adoration and generosity, promising safety, security, favor to any who follow her.
In every video John watches, Eury wears the same black suit and white blouse, her hair trimmed short, stylishly militaristic. In one, she tours a cavernous barn with a cluster of hale Volunteers, smiling men and women in Earthtrust-printed clothing working spacious stalls crammed with black-and-white cows, the shoulders of each bioengineered animal taller than Eury’s. “These are not your grandparents’ cattle,” she says, reaching up to pat one of the passing cows. “There’s nothing quite like the real thing, even better than you remember.” Cue a clip of a beautiful child in a white sundress, using both hands to lift a glass of fresh milk to her smiling lips. When was the last time the train’s newest Volunteers had milk that didn’t come from a can or a powder? When was the last time they saw a pastured cow, safe and happy, dumbly chewing its cud?
In the next video, Eury’s voice languidly champions her Volunteer Agricultural Community: horizon-busting fields of crops, fruiting superorchards, rows of white concrete houses with printed yards, children playing inside identical plots, a life hard to imagine while staring out at the Nebraska deadlands rushing by the train’s windows. “This is your future,” Eury says, walking now through a superorchard of supertrees laden with bright red fruit, “if only you will believe, if only you will strive, if only you will sacrifice for the greater good.” Each apple above her a perfect globe, the grass between the trees impossibly level, improbably green. Eury holds out a hand and a bee lands on her palm, the camera smoothly zooming closer: it’s not a real honeybee—America’s honeybees have been extinct for years—but a miniature robot, part of the nanoswarms Earthtrust created to pollinate the VACs.