by Matt Bell
Other remnants of the Below begin to appear more frequently, in seams of debris thrust upward, all the previous world pulverized to gravel by pressure and weight and the slow friction of ice age time. Gravel of aluminum siding and steel girders and blacktop, gravel of roofing tiles and mailboxes and security gates. Gravel of countless vehicles, gravel of innumerable computers, gravel of televisions and radios and medical devices. Gravel of petroleum-based carpeting, gravel of throwaway flat-pack furniture. Gravel of marble countertops, of ceramic dishes, of stainless steel appliances. Gravel of fences and roadways, gravel of streetlights and traffic signals. Gravel of plastic chairs and plastic dishes and plastic children’s toys. Gravel of libraries of printed books, gravel of record collections, gravel of oil paintings and framed photographs. Gravel of bones, gravel of last humans, of last human children, last children’s pets. Gravel of bones too fine to be worth scavenging, too bright white to pick out against the sparkling glitter of the Ice.
Two weeks out from the crawler, this garbage-strewn but still slowly sloping shelf gives way again to more uneven ice, the flatness cut by breakages and crevasses, steep icefalls cascading for hundreds of meters. The sun shines daily, but even when every cloud recedes its energy is often palely diffuse, offering too little radiation to make travel worthwhile. There’s no option but to wait for the unseen blockage to disperse, C begging for a trickle of sunlight to recharge the craft. Even when the sun shines, he starts and stops, moving fitfully as the days of travel accumulate. It takes more sunlight to charge the batteries in motion than it does when stopped, and always the waning remainder warns against running the craft’s engines when the batteries are dimmest.
If C ruins the batteries, he’ll have to abandon the craft. If he abandons the craft, there’s no chance of reaching Black Mountain with these barkspots intact, their thorned branchlets surely more susceptible to frost and cold and darkness than furred C is; and then there is O to consider, the only companion he’s ever had, because if the craft dies then whatever O is dies too, wedded as he is now to the craft, unable to be separated by any knowledge C possesses. As C mulls his responsibilities, O’s song unmutes itself again, the drone setting the barkspot to new burning, C’s now ambient fever flaring as a new bud sprouts beneath the one leaf growing from his shoulder, as others break through in other places, the skin surrounding each bud swelling as new leaves break free of the bark.
C watches these leaves flutter in the recirculated air, each reaching toward the wan sunlight, its glare too weak today to thaw the slightest trickle of water from atop frozen ice. He sees how every leaf seems to dance to O’s song, and how when he mutes the song the leaves go limp again, crumpling in on themselves—and so what choice does C have but to let the song resume, no matter how much O’s drone hurts him to hear?
The bubble spins westward, O sings his song, the barkspots sprout more branchlets and buds as the glacier continues to drop, the Ice sloping toward some plain C cannot quite picture. With his imagination stunted by his vocabulary, he’d initially pictured his entire journey taking place across a landscape as frozen and featureless as the region nearest the crawler, one high flat plane reaching thousands of kilometers to Black Mountain, but surely there are other possibilities hinted at by words the remainder still knows, good words setting C’s heart skipping with anticipation: earth, he says, he says: dirt, ground, soil. There was dust in the crawler, but dust is not dirt. The remainder offers flickering memories of descents Below where some previous C found better evidence of the earth that was—dried clots of dead soil caught in the bark of mummified tree trunks, better than the root ball C-432 died for—but no C ever found any living earth.
To calm himself, C resumes his litany, all that lovely Latinate, all that lovely Greek, languages C cannot name, plus names for this frozen earth itself: should there be no humanity left in Black Mountain, whoever comes next will not call it earth, from the Old English eorthe, the Dutch aarde, the German erde. There will be no more English, no more Dutch, no more German. Never again. If one day some next intelligence emerges to name this planet—which will not by that intelligence be called a planet—the intelligence will name this ball of scraped rock and frozen water and magma something other than home.
Now come days of bad weather, pale mornings of slow battery-draining progress, afternoons of heavy clouds lying low, icy rain streaking the bubble’s surface. Visibility dropping, the bubble’s clarity obscured, C relies on the craft’s sensor arrays to pilot blind. When the bubble runs low on power, he pauses, passes time restlessly stomping his stiffening left leg and its bark around the constrained space of craft. He repeats his litanies, the flora and fauna of Greater Ohio, while every day the tree colonizes more skin, the creeping bark relentlessly increasing its territory despite his trimming its progress. When the barkspot first appeared, it was possible to believe he might still choose to cut it free with a minor surgery. Now that belief is rendered moot: the barkspot has become true wood, making a trunk of his left side, its innumerable thorned branchlets grown into scrawny branches bearing buds and leaves.
The bubble makes its slow way westward, navigating undulating dunes of packed snow, the craft rising and falling over hour-long slopes, dodging crystalline twisters come to shatter against its sides. C trims the wood as much as he can, he plays O’s voice at deafening levels, the drone arresting the bark with one song, setting its branchlets and buds to frenzied growth with another. And then one cloud-obscured afternoon the bubble climbs what C believes is only another snow dune, but as the bubble crests the dune an alarm cuts through O’s howling drone.
The command console pops into view, its gauges lit up with flashing red warnings. C looks out the glass, then back at the gauges, then out the glass again, his experience insufficient for his imagination to comprehend the improbable sight before him, an unexpected danger that does not disappear no matter how hard he stares: below the bubble’s perch atop this drifting dune, there waits a five kilometer sheer plummet into a layer of clouds, a drop C sees no way to safely descend, at least not anywhere near where his path touches the Ice’s edge, the end of the only world he thinks he’s ever known.
Chapman
The brothers begin their journey east several days out from Licking Valley, several more from Zanesville. An hour after breaking camp, they stop to reapportion their loads, discarding whatever might slow their passage, then better distributing Chapman’s weathered possessions and Nathaniel’s newer gear between the two of them. Despite his wound, Chapman is as strong as ever, while Nathaniel’s heavied, aged body soon wheezes against their haste. In the next days, they’ll cross plenty of land not yet carved with roads or separated into plots by split rail fences and rock walls, but everywhere between are pockets of inhabitation newly established since Chapman last saw this country: a dirt-pathed village, stove smoke swirling out of every brick chimney; homesteads bounded by piles of rubble dug from lands soon to be planted fields.
“We have to hurry,” he says, reliving again the long night’s chase, as recent for him as the wound burning in his chest. “We have to go east by the most direct route, fast as we can.”
“Brother,” Nathaniel says, squatting to rest beneath tall ferns shading the narrow track, his back stooped beneath his load. “Tell me again what happened. Make me understand this time.” Chapman had tried to explain in the lean-to beneath the hillock, but Nathaniel had taken his tale as injured confusion, the aftershocks of the trauma of his makeshift surgery. But if there is some truth to Chapman’s tale, then Nathaniel is willing to try again to hear it.
“The sin my pursuers showed me, brother, the crime wasn’t mine. Surely not. Surely I’m only myself, not responsible for every past faun.” Chapman shakes his head, then nervously whinnies, remembering the flicker-myth he saw in the beheaded singer’s accusing song. “I’ll tell you everything,” he says, “but first we must leave all this behind.”
Nathaniel lets it go. “There’s a farm a few weeks’ travel from he
re where I planned to work through the winter,” he says, then holds up a hand against Chapman’s incoming protest. “It’s not weeks of forest, brother. We’ll be out of these woods in another day, two at most, then we can walk the rest of the way on better roads. But you’ll be exposed the whole way.”
Chapman’s never slept beneath any roof, he’s never been able to bear to walk a field even during the fallow months of winter, and he suspects his pursuers follow the same rules that govern him: until the singer’s song transformed the abandoned homestead, the witches hadn’t been able to step forward. He thinks now that if the brothers can reach planted lands, then he might be safe enough there, as long as he’s also a man. The discovery is shocking, attractive, tempting, infuriating; as the brothers walk, he experiments, tries to force one body and then the other: claws appear and disappear, his facial features shift and rearrange themselves, the width of his faunish face grows narrower, sharper, more like his brother’s. Never have they looked as much alike as they do now, although at first Chapman’s skin remains darker than Nathaniel’s. He picks up a hoof and puts down a foot, his leg is covered in goosefleshed bare skin one step and thick brown hair the next.
By the time the brothers reach the road to Zanesville, Chapman’s glamour must be ready. The next day, he practices holding the shape, a minor act of will keeping his fur hidden inside his skin, his hooves inside his feet; he shivers through the cool evening and the colder night, the bark of his faun skin gone the way of his claws, his horns. In the morning, Nathaniel borrows his brother’s cleanest shirt, whose fabric scratches and itches Chapman’s torso; without hooves or boots, his feet soon begin to ache, then to bleed, his pace slowing. He complains as Nathaniel passes him on the trail, as the wound on his chest seeps blood, pinkening the makeshift bandages. Despite the pain, he knows this time as a man is almost the boon he’d hoped the Tree would grant him, only not nearly good enough: instead of his body truly becoming human, he feels merely turned inside out, his horns and hooves and claws not gone but only hidden away, his faunness a broken beast whose many wild parts can’t help but scratch and claw at him, eager to escape this imprisoning skin of a man.
“Turn back already,” Nathaniel says, watching Chapman bleed. It unnerves him to see his brother’s human face, his human shape; having gotten used to brothering a monster, he can’t yet square his affections with the man the faun contains. Chapman transforms himself again, but instead of a smooth progression of enveloping fur and emerging horns, his true shape returns this time in stuttering bursts, minor flickers: he’s a man and then both a man and a faun and then only a faun, a faun relieved by the returned solidity of his barkskin and the surefootedness of his hooves, by the wildness he was born into, the animal he’d for so long fervently wished to shed and forget.
The State that was the Territory is no longer the land Chapman remembers. As Nathaniel promised, they reach the dirt road to Licking Valley in two days’ time, after which Chapman forces himself into his human shape—every time the change comes faster, easier—and then waits shivering as Nathaniel flags down wagon riders willing to barter. A passing tinker sells Nathaniel a pair of shoes fitting Chapman well enough, plus two gray shirts, a pair of trousers, a slim supply of dried fruit and hardtack.
“That’s all the money I have, brother,” apologizes Nathaniel, “but when we get to Zanesville, I’ll collect on our nurseries there.”
The road into town is wider than any Chapman has previously seen, its ruts deep enough to trap wagon wheels in their tracks, forcing others to detour into the mud. The brothers pass whole acres of clear-cut forest turned into arable farmland, the homesteads closer to the Pennsylvania border devoid of any stumps indicating their fields were ever anything but flat black soil, land perfect for the rich harvests this good year promises.
Nathaniel’s expression sours fast, his frustration at the proximity of others obvious. “Once,” he says, “we were nearly the only men here. Now look.”
Chapman follows the sweep of his brother’s hand, sees only the world his brother told him would come. For the first time in his life, there’s a human voice always within earshot, every hour, dawn to dusk. Forests made farmlands, trees made houses and churches and general stores. Rocks dug from the earth and stacked into walls, branches cut into rails separating homesteads into discernible plots and parcels. Cattle and pigs and goats roam open pastures once dense swamplands, every river and stream and creek diverted to irrigate the many new farms. A windmill turns one millstone, another is powered by a waterwheel beside a creek bed; everywhere human ingenuity puts the land to work, everywhere human will makes the land productive. Corn in perfectly painterly rows, roaming sheep attended by herding dogs, an apple or pear orchard beside many of the new homesteads, thirty trees all any farmer needs to make his claim. How many of these apple trees did Nathaniel and Chapman plant? Not all but many. Nathaniel will try to collect as they pass by, but the economics of the squatter planter have not and will not make him rich.
In the evening the brothers make their bare camp along the wagon road, laying out their bedrolls, cooking their meal in a hastily dug firepit. With fences abutting both sides of the road, there’s less common space than ever before, with what once belonged to everyone now claimed by only a few. A creek runs nearby, but the easiest access to its trickling water lies within a settler’s fence so that Nathaniel must climb the house’s stoop to stand with his hat in his hand, begging permission to fill his waterskins. Chapman worries at his brother’s barely contained rage, at how what was once his or anyone’s is now only this one settler’s, at how this man came west already possessing the resources Nathaniel lacked, enough money to buy the right to try his hand at settling any acreage he desired.
“The land belongs to the Ohio Company,” Nathaniel reminds Chapman, once returned from the creek, “but the trees? The trees are ours.”
Once a squatter, always a squatter, Chapman thinks. Nathaniel’s been planting apple trees in Ohio for decades, but he’s no closer to his own homestead, the kingdom he promised Chapman he’d own.
Not yet even to Zanesville, already the brothers are tired of other people, weary of their bland planted lands. Despite summer’s end, more and more settlers clog the road, driving more wagons than Chapman can count, their progress slowed only by the road’s inability to fit so many wheels and hooves and boots. Every road turns to deep rutted mud, causing more stoppages, then more detours to be made around the stoppages, the industrious would-be settlers hacking back saplings and young brush before resuming their passage.
Nathaniel needs no such assistance, scowls at those who do. “It’s not necessary to destroy the world,” Nathaniel says, speaking to no one, loud enough so anyone might hear, “just to make your way through it.” He repeats himself until Chapman absently agrees, all his attention trained on his glamour, every distraction increasing the difficulty of his task.
Another day wanes. Chapman has no choice except to bed down in his human shape, with his bedroll beside Nathaniel’s, their blankets laid out under the stars, their camp ringed by the tents and wagons of other travelers, too many settlers gathered around too many fires for the crowded stretches of free land. Some make their beds in the middle of the road, planning to be awake by dawn, hoping no one coming west decides to travel by the light of the full moon. They could be killed in their sleep by trampling hooves or rolling wheels, but probably they’ll be kept safe by the light of campfires up and down the road, fires burning low in the wee hours, leaving smoke hanging over the valley, tonight’s wind insufficient to push it over the hills. Gas lamps gutter, bored men walk the camp sharing whiskey until they’re fighting in the dirt, and amid all this nocturnal activity there’s Nathaniel, too furious to sleep, and there’s Chapman, not sleeping either, too afraid he might dream of hooves and horns until he sprouts them both.
After Nathaniel’s frustrations finally turn to angry dreams, after all the other settlers have fallen beneath the spells of darkness and tale and c
ider and whiskey, restless Chapman leaves camp to explore the nearby homesteads, his human chest aching where the bullet clattered against his ribs. Beside one cabin he finds a homely arrangement of trees, inexpertly transplanted but likely some of theirs, each tree unique, not grafted from some already established stock. It’s possible someone might see him, but inside the orchard he relaxes his glamour, allows his anxious attention its rest. He hoofs slowly among the trees, scratching absently at his itching wound as he studies the character of every apple, the hope he wishes to suss out from its shape.
His Tree of Forgetting, if he ever finds it—will it be more beautiful than other trees, will it be taller or stouter, will its crown loom above its brothers and sisters? Chapman knows not everything good is beautiful, despite the dumbly persistent superstitions of simple men. Perhaps the fruit he wants will be horrid to see, or else unassuming, dull to the eyes and duller to taste. Whatever its shape, however warped or rotted, he chooses to continue to believe it will work the magic he desires, will set him free. From the death of his mother. From taking from Nathaniel the life he would have had. From the crime he saw in the song, attached to his shape if not his person. More than anything, he wants to be freed from this shape itself, sometimes hated, sometimes beloved, always defining him and constraining him, these contradictions unchanged by the false, impermanent trick he brought back from the flicker, the sleight by which he hides himself inside himself.
He wanders the orchard, putting his rough hands to the trees’ gnarled trunks, running his fingers down their varied barks, each tree its own being, half wild despite being planted only to satisfy human wants. He picks an apple, bites into its flesh with his sharp teeth. He lets its juices run from his broad lips, into the bramble of his beard. Only an apple, he curses unfairly, as if the apple need be anything else. He picks one from each tree, he takes one bite of each before tossing the rejects to the ground. The stories these apples tell Chapman are of simple things, the simplest things always the greatest: weeks of sunshine, much-needed rain, good soil tugged by good roots, the hasty visits of pollinators, the way the wind whistles through the boughs, rustling changing leaves and shaking ripe apples from softening stems.