by Matt Bell
More than enough for apple trees, but far from what Chapman wants.
Only later does he think he should have gathered some apples for Nathaniel, who might’ve enjoyed these literal fruits of their labors.
Perhaps, perhaps not.
Nathaniel, Chapman soon realizes, is unbelievably sick of apples.
Chapman walks daily now among men, a man himself. He hears all around him their loud voices, conversations, jokes, frustrations, buying and selling, bartering and bragging. New neighbors talk across the bounds of new fences, while cows low, goats bleat, pigs grunt. Children chase each other along packed dirt lanes, laughing shrilly in the moments before they are caught: How are there already children here, in this place where last Chapman came there was nothing but filthy white-faced men? As he travels east all the noises he hears are of the same sort, their slim variations repeating daily, hourly. The apple trees transplanted behind neat raw-board homes, the wheat and the corn, the sows and the steers—all of them are only human desires brought to life, everywhere made plentiful. Among this living want he feels a fear never felt before, not even near the Pennsylvania villages where the brothers wintered for so many years. Here, where his apple trees dot every plot he sees, there’s no denying his responsibility. He once promised that all the world might look like this before he was finished, all the world turned over and plowed under and tamed, made every inch safe and the same. He and others like him will want and want and want until there is nothing left; every man Chapman meets carries within his skin his own creature of endless appetite, forever widening its greedy gnashing mouth.
The brothers tarry only enough for Nathaniel to try in vain to extract some few pennies from each homestead graced with seed-grown apple trees, likely transplanted from one of Nathaniel’s nurseries. But Nathaniel’s claims are impossible to prove, and the supposedly good Christian men of the State rarely pay debts they cannot believe they owe. Again Nathaniel stands before a roughly set door making his ask, time and time again he is denied or sent away with a fraction of what his trees and labor are worth. “God has made us a gift of these trees,” one well-scrubbed settler piously tells Nathaniel, and by the time the brothers leave the valley by the old roads along the river—not the fastest way east, but the quickest escape from this sudden civilization—Nathaniel’s face is crimson with fury, he’s cursing and muttering, kicking at blameless rocks and complaining loudly enough to flush every nearby bird from cover.
Chapman commiserates, comforts, cajoles. For now he wants Nathaniel to stay the course, to keep returning to the frontier as long as he’s physically able, to plant as many trees as they can each season. But where the trees fruit—whether along a riverbank or in the yard of some settler’s farm—Chapman doesn’t care. Either way he’ll test his teeth against the skin of their apples, either way he swears he’ll eventually earn the Tree he’s again determined to seek, a Tree whose fruit he decides now might ease Nathaniel’s anger too.
Many miles east of the Zanesville bounds—once he can hear no voice but Nathaniel’s—Chapman relaxes, reclaiming his first shape, but as soon as he’s a faun again he fears he spies evidence of the witching women’s presence. He lopes cautiously through stretches of forest transformed by fire and rain and human hands, he smells seeping water falling slowly through untouched trees, he discovers clearings previously unseen, and wherever some wild spot remains he finds hidden signs: in certain copses wait the scorched marks of bonfires, surrounded by the scuff marks of unshod feet ecstatic in their dancing; he spies twine-bound branches weaved into sigils hung high in the trees; wind chimes made of bones tinkle over the faint tracks of a forest cat, muddy signs leading to denser, uncut groves where Chapman thinks a black panther’s rubbed itself raw against the sides of trees, ground sprayed with pungent yellow piss, the markings of a beast in heat, mad with an unseasonable lust.
Chapman makes himself a man again, then hurries back to Nathaniel’s side, urging his tired brother onward, translating his fear into urgency. “How far is it,” he asks, “how far to the place where we’ll stay the winter?”
Nathaniel stops, considers. “Two days until we reach Splitlip Creek,” he says, then claps his brother across his broad shoulder. “Don’t worry, Chapman. A sweet family lives there, the Worths, who gave me shelter in return for work on their farm, in return for the trees we planted the year you went missing. In two days’ time, we can rest against those trunks and talk again of better days.”
As they walk, Nathaniel fondly describes every detail of the Worth homestead, its fine and humble house, its well-built barn, its ever-expanding fields and pens, until a new idea lights his face.
“Splitlip Creek isn’t so civilized,” he says hopefully. “There are plenty of woods nearby, if you’d prefer to sleep outdoors. But perhaps now you could sleep beside me, amid the heat and the light and the good company.”
“Yes, brother,” says Chapman, nodding his hornless head, still unaccustomed to its lighter weight. “For you, I’ll try.”
A rare grin cracks across Nathaniel’s face; Chapman smiles back, his expression a queasier version of his brother’s open joy. An entire winter indoors, dressed in the skin and clothes of a man? His feet encased in uncomfortable shoes? It’s impossible to fathom.
But the wilderness has become dangerous to Chapman as never before; now like any other man he must hide in buildings of wood and brick and stone. Better to say nothing more of his fears, better to let Nathaniel think he remains a man out of brotherly affection. Let Nathaniel make-believe they could become a normal family, that they too might one day inhabit a house like the one toward which they’re headed, where they might be farmers, landowners, bachelor kings.
Surely a lie can last a winter. Surely by spring Chapman will know what he needs to do.
John
Eury leads John and Ghost down a staircase hidden behind her office’s false wall, into a tall vaulted room, a private museum housing rows of ventilated cubes of blast-proof glass, each set on a marble plinth. Beneath columns of late light falling through the high angular windows, Eury narrates the living displays: a Galápagos tortoise born over a century ago, its shell broken decades ago then inexpertly glued, its movements slow and deliberate, as if it’s trying to remain unnoticed by time. An eighty-year-old alligator, crawling through a mucky manufactured pond. A blue-and-yellow macaw, its feathers undimmed but its beak slowly softening; Eury says her handlers have to feed it by a dropper bottle. The bird, one hundred and seventeen years old, alive in a world where a wild macaw hasn’t been born in decades. They pass a pair of peak-backed tuataras, the male a century old, the female in her eighties, the two uselessly mating, the once supple leather shells of their eggs coming out hardened, the insides still. Last, last, last, Eury explains, each of these is the last of its kind. Finally: an Andean condor far from its native mountains, one huge wing injured, the other clipped, its talons scarring its perch, its hooked mouth gasping from a head bald and terrible, ringed by a high collar of white feathers.
After all these aged creatures come exhibits containing the taxidermied remains of other lasts Eury’s people couldn’t keep alive, rows of specimens made a diorama of the end of the world, each animal arranged on its own plinth: the last American panther, its coat glowing in the soft light; the last coyote and fox and bobcat, each gifted the same shining glare. The last grizzly bear, dead in its forties; the oldest rhino, preserved at forty-five; a wild horse who improbably made it to sixty. John’s heart pounds at the majesty of a posed elephant whose plaque declares it lived to be eighty-six years old, its last twenty years spent alone, Eury says, after its mate died, after its children died, after every last wild elephant in the world died. The terrible cruelty of an elephant, a creature so capable of grief, living past the rest of its kind.
Beside the elephant stands a taxidermied she-wolf, fangs bared, glass eyes glaring. John wonders: Is this Ghost’s original, beneath whose preserved corpse the living Ghost rests, cleaning herself, tongue ra
sping over one forepaw and then the other? Maybe, maybe not. It’s impossible for John to compare the vitality radiating off Ghost with the preserved, taxidermied other, its staring glass eyes and posed snarl.
His anger mounts: last, last, last. “Why are you showing me this?” he asks. “Why would you ever think I wanted to see this?” He stares at Eury, furious at her tall, slim frame, her black hair swept back, her green eyes dancing, her usual outfit, accented now by a black-and-white cloak she’d retrieved from her office, its sharp angles flaring at her hips, its reflective fabric blazing when Eury walks. What kind of monster are you? he doesn’t say. What kind of monster would acquire the last Galápagos tortoise, the last macaw, the last everything, and then keep them for herself?
“You think I’m showing you the end of the world,” Eury says. “But this is the beginning of the next one.” She returns to the condor, gesturing at the bird’s ancient face. “She was doomed in the world. Fifty years ago, she was doomed and no one did anything. But we’re going to make a world where condors can live again. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. Maybe I’ll be there, maybe you. Either way, a condor exactly like this one will be, because we’ll have sequenced its genome, blueprinted its body, copied its mind. The last shall be first, John. She’ll live again, her species starting over from a specimen exactly like her. With the appropriate modifications, of course, to make sure she can survive in the environment where we release her.” Eury unfolds her hand against the condor’s glass cage. “John, in the new world, I will make you another condor.”
“It won’t be a real condor, Eury. It’ll be just another thing you own.”
Eury doesn’t turn from the condor, but John can see her judging his reflection, his expression mirrored by the cage’s surface. “You’re disappointing me. I thought you wanted to save these creatures.”
“Yes. Not create pale imitations, more bad fakes.”
Now Eury pushes away from the cage, frustratedly tapping the glass to capture the condor’s violent attention one last time. “What are your nanobees but useful fakeries? If we didn’t have them to pollinate the supertrees, the trees wouldn’t fruit. Your fakeries are keeping people alive.” She gestures at the room, all the dead and dying lasts, her expression going placid as she turns. “You’re not convinced. Let me show you what else we’ve done since you left. After all, Pinatubo is only phase one. Orpheus is phase two, and it’s the key to everything.”
“The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice,” Eury explains, leading John deeper into the maze of glass cages and taxidermied mammals. “The two young lovers marry, but on the night of their wedding, Eurydice is killed. A snakebite, according to most of the stories, from a venomous viper, accidentally stepped on while she danced, although in other tellings her foot finds the viper while she’s fleeing a lecherous shepherd. In some of those versions this would-be rapist is a beekeeper. The inventor of beekeeping, in fact. Didn’t you invent some bees, John?”
John starts to object—to which accusation, exactly?—but Eury stops him. “A joke, John. Stop looking guilty. Eurydice dies; it doesn’t really matter how. Grief-stricken Orpheus wanders ancient Greece singing the most terrible dirge, begging the gods’ favor until they consent to let him enter the underworld. He descends into hell, where the gods make him another deal: they’ll allow Eurydice to follow Orpheus back into life, if only he can make it out of the underworld without looking back.”
Keep your eyes on the future, Eury says: that’s the story’s moral. “You remember what happens next: Orpheus flinches, looks back from the threshold of his victory. Doomed Eurydice returns to the underworld, dead forever. Orpheus goes insane all over again, his grief song driving the gods mad, until finally they have no choice but to have him ripped limb from limb. In some versions, a pack of wild dogs kills Orpheus. In others, it’s a mob of women, witches drunk on wild powers.” She smirks. “I’ll bet you can guess which version I like best.”
“Eury, what does this have to do with anything?”
She kneels to scratch Ghost’s ears, waiting until the wolf pulls away before continuing. “Maybe nothing. But there’s more to Orpheus than this myth. What do you know about the transmigration of souls?”
John’s never been interested in religion, doesn’t believe in past lives or ghosts. He shrugs. “Reincarnation? Something like that?”
“Close enough. The ancient Orphic mystery cults believed the soul was a prisoner of the flesh, aspiring to freedom. But after death, the freed soul couldn’t bear to be parted from the earth, so it inevitably began life again in a new body.” Eury stands, clicks her tongue at Ghost to follow; she clicks her tongue, John supposes, at him too. She’s already explained that below the needle is the Tower’s research layer, a labyrinth of glass-walled labs, some filled with rows of planters for germinating seeds, each containing a slightly different genetic variant of corn, soybean, or wheat, apple tree or pear tree; labs where the Farm’s livestock are being continually refined one gene at a time, banks of centrifuges spinning up blood and cultures for analysis. The work has advanced in the years he’s been away, but it’s all the same kind of research he left behind. What Eury’s talking about now is something else.
Despite inventing the nanobees, he isn’t an expert in other kinds of biomimicry, artificial intelligence, genetic modification, three-dimensional printing. The bees were cunning enough, sharing intelligence and communication across swarms, capable of lifting the microloads necessary to spread pollen, but their programs are relatively simple, the results nothing like the habits of real bees. The nanobees mimic only what’s needed by humans: when the last colonies collapsed, John’s nanoswarms saved the fields and orchards real bees had once pollinated, saved them well enough it was possible to forget the bees were gone.
How difficult it is to notice the presence of an absence, the sound of no bees buzzing.
How quickly you adjust to whatever diminishments the world allows.
Eury shows John to the far end of the atrium, where a table displaying a series of perfectly square patches of gray fur waits. He looks to Eury for permission, then runs a finger along the edge of one of the squares, seeking the line where the fur meets the skin, where the skin meets the air; the edge is too regular, too smooth, missing any sign of a blade where the animal was skinned, the fur squared. He lays two furs side by side, then runs his hands through the hair, across the skin. Each must be exactly identical to Ghost’s fur, to the fur of the Yellowstone wolf that was Ghost but not Ghost, maybe the fur of the dead wolf taxidermied in Eury’s zoo of lasts.
Eury doesn’t object when he opens a specimen cabinet beneath the table to discover other parts reproduced in bulk: a deep drawer full of jars, two dozen pairs of green eyes floating in formaldehyde; another drawer of tongues, rough muscles drowned in yellow liquid; then one of forepaws, of rear paws, of tails, all never having been attached to any animal; and in the bottom-most drawer wait six glass jars with six floating brains, each exactly the same size and weight.
A pack of wolves, Eury jests, printed in parts, never assembled.
“Your nanobees,” she says, “are incredibly impressive, but they’re not bees, are they? You’ve been obsessed with what is real, what is pristine, untouched. I don’t feel the same way, only because I don’t believe anything is pristine anymore, if pristine means unchanged by humans. Pinatubo will give us time to make a sustainable future, to ensure human resilience. But it won’t be fast enough for the large mammals, for the raptors or the big reptiles or so many other creatures, mostly already gone. Nearly everything else might go too.” She sighs. “I know that’s hubris, that I’m seeing the world from a human perspective. Not everything, then—there’ll always be something alive somewhere—but even if we save humanity, what remains won’t be the world we remember.”
John closes the drawers, then returns to the tabletop squares of fur, digs his fingers deep into the soft gray hair. “If the world is only humanity,” he says, “is it even worth saving?”
> “That’s exactly the question, John.”
He looks up from the fur square he’s holding to find Eury’s triumphant expression waiting for him.
“Exactly it. But it’ll still have to be humanity who gets saved first. The iguanas aren’t going to fix the planet. If the chimps and the gorillas weren’t already gone—and if they’d had another billion years to evolve—maybe they could have. Maybe somewhere deep in the ocean there’s a super-octopus capable of abstract thought. But the only way to sell the future to the human world is to sell a human future. Once that’s secure, then we put everything else back. That’s why we invented Orpheus.”
“In your story,” John says, his eyes lowered to the square of fur in his hands, “you’re the Eurydice who stays up on the surface, alive in the light, while it’s every other creature who descends into hell. Then, once you’re ready, you’ll lead them all back out again, by some miracle of science you’ve dreamed up.”
“Yes, John, exactly,” Eury says, excited now. “Most people are already living in the underworld, in the dry lands, from which there is no escape without our help. We can walk out together, but only through an act of bravery and will. If we look back too soon, if we flinch or linger on what’s behind us, then we lose everything. John, whatever happens, I do not plan to look back. Not now, not ever. I will bring humanity out of the dark. Later, once I’ve made the world right for us, I’ll save everything else too.” She picks up a jar holding a pair of wolf’s eyes, shakes it teasingly in front of his gaze. “You know how I saw you in Yellowstone,” she says. “That wolf wasn’t Ghost, but close enough. A slightly different personality, a slightly different purpose embedded in the same body. Ghost’s sister, perhaps.”