by Matt Bell
Chapman
Time wrinkles, folds, stretches. Chapman stands in the pouring rain, lightning streaking from the sky, thunder shaking the earth. The three witches wait at the clearing’s edge, each much changed from how she appeared inside the song, their once civilized shapes regressed to fit this wild American frontier. Clutching the screaming head of the singer, one witch howls like an injured beast, another releases a huffing breath muffled as fog, all three pace the tree line, passing the screaming head back and forth as they stalk the rent edge of the homestead, seemingly unable to advance.
Chapman remembers how as a child he couldn’t cross the farthest row of a field of tilled corn without bodily struggle or pained screaming. Are the witches what Chapman might’ve been if he’d had no brother to civilize his ways? Pure wilderness, creatures whose power persists wherever man hasn’t yet come to dominate?
How much stronger might their allergy to settled lands be than half-domesticated Chapman’s? For a moment, the faun wonders if he’s safe on the cabin’s stoop, but then the singer’s song changes, then the homestead’s clearing begins to shift and fade and flicker.
As the song washes over him, Chapman sees the plot of land as it was when the family who built it inhabited it: hot summer sunshine, golden autumn hope, then a winter of despair and death and abandonment. He sees pasture grass growing tall, the corn in need of weeding, the fence falling in. Snow drifts in the past, thunder booms in Chapman’s present, a sunlit future appears, the house gone, its foundations long ago removed, the forest vanished and replaced with vast structures he can’t recognize, buildings made of materials unlike any he’s ever seen. The homestead plot flickers back to somewhen closer to his own year and he sees the witches ready to pounce, the one in the middle holding aloft the singer’s head, seeking to find the verse containing a time not far off, the year when the cabin collapses, when the fence rots away, when the corn is dispersed and devoured, when the swamp reclaims this plot into itself.
When the land is again wilderness, in the slim gap before it’s settled again.
The scene flickers; the right moment appears alongside fresh lightning, a bright finger of electricity bolting from the sky to strike the abandoned cabin, the air around Chapman exploding with static and heat as the house bursts into flames.
Chapman covers his head as the rotted wood blows apart, throwing burning boards across the plot. The three witches advance through the rain and the fire, the scene warping around them, past and present and future sliding across one another: he sees a vision of a young girl laughing as she chases a rust-colored rooster across the yard; a moment later a mass of metal screeches across a flat black road laid where the girl had been, the machine coming louder than anything Chapman’s ever heard; before the screech fades he sees the forest once again completely intact, as it was in the years before the homesteaders arrived here, or else how it’ll regrow many years from now, after their absence. Then the forest vanishes, the girl and the screaming metal and the black road vanish too, every world momentarily lost within a howl of blowing snow, a blast of frozen air.
The witches advance through every time Chapman sees at once, placing their steps in whatever moment suits them best, holding the crying head aloft, his song unsettling the way.
Chapman flees, fast as his legs will carry him. Stubborn branches slap his face, thorns tear his fur; his hooves slide on slick rocks, he slips and stumbles, tumbles into knee-deep muck, climbs out with soaked trousers, his satchel heavied with mud. Rain falls, lightning spikes the sky ahead of pealing thunder. Chapman tries to distance himself from the inhuman hollers of the witching women, plus the echoing song they carry, its dense drone pounding, reverberating off boulders and tree trunks, disorienting and confusing the landscape, the ground slippery mud or fresh-poured road or cracked dry clay or glassed ice.
No matter how fast Chapman runs, his pursuers do not flag, not even when the landscape ahead flickers. He leaps a fallen log whose trunk is several feet high and one of his hooves snags a broken branch; he somersaults into a spray of icy powder, he regains his feet to crash through a field of golden corn, snow melting from his beard in the autumn heat. His leathern bag bangs against his bruising body, his skin is cut and ripped and scraped from innumerable falls; in every landscape he crosses he sees how the song eventually becomes a blight, its sound withering plants, turning soil to dust, shattering icy surfaces, setting his muscles aching deeper than even a full night’s running should. Mostly but not always he remains a faun, running on a faun’s hooves, but at least once he looks down and thinks he sees himself changing too, his body a sudden nightmare of upset flesh and fur; mostly but not always he thinks the rushing witches chase him on the same naked feet he’d seen in the clearing, still human enough.
Mostly but not always. Once Chapman sees a black panther, larger than any he’s ever imagined, loping through the trees, its mouth spilling a pink tongue from between daggered yellow teeth; another time he leaps past what he’s sure is a grizzly bear huffing free from the trap of a dank, mossy cave, its hiding place nearly buried beneath rising swamp water; throughout the night’s pursuit, he sometimes hears a gigantic vulture soaring overhead, its gargantuan wingspan swooping over the high treetops, its grotesque bald head cawing to chill Chapman’s blood.
Whatever these witch-beasts are, they come hauntingly close but never catch him. A faun was made to run, and so Chapman runs: as the miles accumulate, the witches’ charges become less frequent, and after each such attempt their crashing, loping, soaring noises fade farther into the distance; as they fall back, the song fades too, its drone rising and falling then retreating altogether, after which the ground at last ceases its shifting beneath Chapman’s hooves.
Chapman is fast and strong, but by dawn’s twilight he’s exhausted. Eager to escape the swampy muck of the forest floor, he climbs a grassy hillock, gasping at the cleaner air above the canopy, placing hands on knees to propel his tired legs. As the rain trickles off, the thunder and lightning retreat, withdrawing their enervating energies as Chapman crouches to hide his profile. The still-risen moon emerges, a yellow lamp parting black clouds; the distant horizon glows with the first sign of the coming sun. Chapman doesn’t know if the coming day will save him, but he begins to hope he might escape. He searches for signs of fire back the way he came, hunting for where the lightning struck near the abandoned homestead, but he can’t see even the thinnest tendril of lingering smoke.
How far east has he come? He doesn’t know. In every direction, all he spies is a profound profusion of trees, miles and miles of barely inhabited landscape offering no sign or suggestion of giving way to the coming civilization Nathaniel promised will conquer this land.
Because Chapman is a faun, and because it’s in a faun’s nature to fall in and out of trouble, he thinks tonight he will not be caught. Whatever his pursuers claim he did in some past life, before he was Chapman, tonight he will not be punished. He turns toward the more inhabited lands of the east, the rising sunlight world of men where he might be safe, where he might reunite with Nathaniel. He can’t see himself from below, but if he could he’d see his unique shape silhouetted against the revealed moon, its yellow gaze turning him to strangest shadow: a creature slowly rising, his hands leaving the earth as his body unfolds, rearing out of his bestial crouch to throw back his horns. His mouth opens to let out a defiant cry, loosing a whinnying whoop of triumph—but then he hears the singer’s voice rise in response, the voice hoarse now but still making way for the commotion of the witches’ passage through the trees, shoving aside branches and thorns and briars by making visible a future in which no swamp exists.
The witches rush from the west, the singer’s voice preceding them; Chapman rises on his hooves to face the pursuing song, the flicker advancing before its sound like a wave, a wave of future possibility overcoming the hillock at the same moment a single rifle shot is fired from below, from the east, the direction where he’d hoped to find his brother. Chapman turns
toward the unexpected sound, the grieving drone washing over him from behind in the same instant a musket ball reaches his chest, its impact spinning the faun off his hooves.
Falling toward the ground but never hitting it, taking the would-be fatal bullet with him as he drops through the song’s strobing sound, Chapman cries out his beloved brother’s name, his voice rising even as his body strobes and fades into the passing flicker: Nathaniel, Nathaniel, NATHANIEL!
And Nathaniel is close by. Nathaniel, who used to promise not to hunt when Chapman was nearby so as not to mistake his brother for his quarry, who has for the past week been desperately seeking his brother, sorry to the bone for what he said, for how he acted the day they met the ditchdiggers, climbs fast through the horror of what he’s suddenly sure he’s done. Terrified by the injured voice he knows he heard calling his name, he searches the hillock in confusion, his smoking musket clenched in his trembling hands. From far off in the forest to the west, he swears he hears simultaneously the roar of a monstrous bear, the screech of a great cat, the sharp cry of a giant buzzard—but then those distant voices are drowned out by his own rasping breath, by the speeding grieving sobs already choking his throat.
Part Two
John
John labors three days in a superorchard, two in the stockyard processing room, one pitchforking ripped or soiled clothing and broken furniture into a truck-sized shredder, prepping the refuse for recycling; on his first assigned day of rest he forces his stiff, sore body out of bed before dawn, setting out on foot as soon as the sun rises. The northern road out of his neighborhood is bounded on one side by rows of supertrees, on the other by a field of brown-leafed drought-resistant corn, the plants pushing their stalks high over the heads of the Volunteers. Between the clatter of the passing trams, he enjoys the warm sunlight, the rare dew about to vanish from the grass and corn; nanoswarms buzz nearby, and if he closes his eyes, he can pretend they’re real bees. He listens for birdsong carried on the morning air, but all the Farm’s birds are city birds, squawking or silent: pigeons, seagulls, starlings, the occasional hawk, a lone barn owl he’s heard hooting in the late evenings. There’s wildlife here, but no one would mistake the Farm for a nature preserve.
Walking the narrow tramways, John continues studying the disguised industrial agricultural architecture, all the while wishing in vain for the return of the farms and rural landscapes he’d once known, plus the wilder smell of something no longer possible to find: the deep rot of fallen trees left undisturbed, the strangely patient life of moss and lichen and fungus, the way every thriving forest floor is a bed of decomposition and regeneration, death and life lying down together. But now there’s no pristine wilderness left even in the preserves once set aside—and John knows this Ohio River valley, settled and farmed since even before colonization, was never really set aside.
John doesn’t forgive those who came before, but he tells himself he also doesn’t flee his own complicity: there’s no crime in being born into a harmful story, but surely there’s sin in not trying to escape. The story of how we got here, the story we refused to abandon; if that was all the human world could be, then he wants a different world. A world of mud and rot, a world of green life blooming everywhere without human intervention; a world of migrating megafauna, of birds of prey hunting bountiful meadows and bright-sparkling river streams; a renewed story of hooves and horns, of broad wings and bright scales, with a smaller, gentler humanity living as part of the whole, not better or more important. Humanity as equal to, not greater than.
Earthtrust offers another possible future, built on a culture where the endangered many Volunteer to preserve the better lives of a privileged few, the last citizens. What Cal wants instead—what she’s convinced John to want—is a world where the powerful might be forced to save everyone else. No takebacks, Cal said before they parted ways. Either we all survive, or no one does. John believes this. He tells himself he does. But he believes it best when he’s near Cal telling him what to believe.
At noon, John enters the next neighborhood’s brightly lit cafeteria, an ornamental red barn full of Volunteers standing in line or seated at long plastic tables, many making cheerful conversation. He tries not to make an impression while he waits in line, every so often squeezing his right hand to send out pulsing pings from his pebble, impatiently hoping for some response. By the time he reaches the front, he’s surprisingly hungry, his long walk in the sun having awoken his appetite. John piles his plate high with food the Volunteers surrounding him have grown and raised and cooked: a slab of fried Farm ham, a side of roasted Farm potatoes, a generous slice of apple pie, its fruit picked fresh from the Farm’s superorchards.
It’s all so earnest that it’s possible to pretend everything John sees isn’t a heavily managed experience, that Earthtrust hasn’t predetermined every choice he’s allowed to make. A transition, Eury would say. One day we won’t need to manage this land or these people. One day the Volunteers will be ready to manage themselves again.
One day, but not any time soon, according to Eury.
Despite these nagging thoughts, the pork and potatoes are truly delicious, undoubtedly the best meal John’s eaten in months, a far cry from his dehydrated dinners and nutrient bars, the simple meal he shared with Cal in the barn above the bunker. But then, after eating most of the ham and potatoes, he takes a first bite of the apple pie.
He blanches as he chews, has to force himself to swallow.
The perfect-looking apples he picked during his orchard shifts, heavy and round, with unblemished red skins: Why hadn’t he tasted one as some of the other workers had? Maybe he already knew what he’d feel between his teeth: a new fruit made to survive new seasons, a product pushed until it’s no longer what an apple is meant to be. This wasn’t what he’d intended, when he’d made the first-gen supertrees.
He’s never had an apple that wasn’t domesticated, that wasn’t a human product. But the apples in this pie are something else, something worse, a mockery of what an apple had become over its thousands of years of human interaction. A generation or two from now, no one might be left who remembers the taste of what John thinks of as a real apple.
He sets down his fork, the pleasurable spell of good food broken. His hand buzzes as he does so—he glances down to see the purple and blue lights blinking beneath his skin. Looking up, he finds Julie and Noor standing across the table, then stepping over its bench to sit down. Julie, the sides of her head freshly shaved, the remaining hair gathered into a black braid falling between her shoulder blades; another ex-Earthtrust soldier like Cal, another scarred veteran of the Secession, plus abbreviated campaigns in Europe and South America, in the oil wars fought across the already-devastated Alberta tar sands. Forty years old, she’s fought half her life, is fighting still. Noor’s the youngest member of their cell: bright and quiet, dressed in long sleeves as always, her slim hands resting calmly before her on the table, hands John has seen move quickly across a keyboard. She’s a far better programmer than he’ll ever be, her hacker’s mind possessed of an intelligence John can only envy, her skill a tool on which they all rely.
Julie picks up John’s fork, spears his last bit of pork. “The pigs are the only animals here I’m willing to eat. You’ve seen those freakish cows your ex is growing? I wouldn’t try one of those monsters if I was starving.”
John almost points out that some Volunteers likely had been starving not long ago. Instead he pushes his tray at Julie. “They’ll give you your own lunch, you know,” he says.
“Not hungry,” says Julie, talking around her mouthful. “Anyway, it’s time for a tour of one of those superorchards you’re always going on about.”
Back outside, Noor and Julie walk hand in hand, following John into a superorchard plot freed from the seasons by Earthtrust modifications, populated today only by the buzzing nanoswarms visiting branches full of blooms, flowers nature designed to attract now-extinct pollinators. Beneath the trees, John squeezes his fist: pebble vibr
ating, he reroutes a friendly bee, commands it to lead the nearby nanoswarms away. The buzzing recedes, leaving behind only the wind, only branches scraping against branch, leaves rustling leaves, a few birds chirping nearby.
“When did you get here?” John asks. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Noor says, “We came in three nights ago. Surrendered ourselves to the detention center in St. Louis, driving an old gas-guzzler I hotwired in Kansas City.” She cocks a thumb at Julie. “You should’ve seen how she was living when I found her. Camped out on the top floor of a half-scorched Holiday Inn, living on minibar vodkas and condensed milk, cold cans of expired beans.”
“A good place to watch the freeway,” says Julie, smirking, “so I’d be ready when Noor came.” Noor returning from Montana, her Jeep packed with pilfered solid state drives, server storage modules full of proprietary data left behind by shuttered mining companies, decommissioned power plants, supposed departments of natural resources and environmental quality. She couldn’t process all the data, but there were others who could, hacker cooperatives safe in the new Northwest, in Freed Scandinavia, and who knew where else. Atop the Holiday Inn, Noor spent a week decrypting internal memos and corporate research reports, looking for further proof of government collusion, purposeful failures to prevent what might’ve been preventable. What she found wasn’t news but it was more evidence. She’d searched the offices then set her bombs, turning inside out whatever Earthtrust salvage crews might come to save.
John tries to picture their last free days. The damaged Holiday Inn swaying unsteadily in the gales rolling across the plains. Noor working long hours, boiling water on a backpacker stove for instant coffee, her laptop powered by a portable solar panel flagging from an open window; Julie pacing the floor, her rifle in one hand and a lukewarm drink in the other, watching the empty freeway for Earthtrust convoys, Bundyist raiders. When Noor was finished, the two women hauled a satellite uplink to the roof, set a timer to start the upload as soon as they’d gone.