Appleseed

by Matt Bell

  “How could you? Nathaniel and I have been apart for many years,” Chapman says, although he can’t feel that gap, which for him passed in an instant, an instant in which his last nursery of hoped-upon seeds somehow sprouted this thriving household.

  Grace’s expression smooths as she bounces Eliza on her hip, the child no longer crying, now just as curious about Chapman as he is about her. “We’re glad you’ve found each other again,” Grace says. “Nathaniel spoke of you often, in the months he spent with us each year.”

  And what did Nathaniel say? Chapman wonders. What could he possibly have said? Grace tells him of the humid summer she and Jasper struggled to stack the stone to make their chimney, her husband young and inexperienced and not as strong as he is now, her body then slim as a sapling, almost still a girl’s, years before giving birth to Eliza. The house grew in size every year, Grace says: at first they had only one room, built around the chimney, in which they ate and worked and slept; then the next year they raised another for their own bedroom, so their work and their rest might be parted; and then they built a room for the child they wanted. One season they dug the root cellar, another they built a crib, a child-sized bed, a child-sized chair; and always the land was in need of improvement, Jasper with ditches to dig, plow-breaking stumps and rocks to remove, the planting of new crops in new fields requiring new fences, everything needing more time and attention, the way a farm demands a family give its life to make the land prosper.

  “It’s taken us our entire marriage to make this land the home it is,” Grace says, “and there’s always more to do. We’re lucky Nathaniel’s been such a help to my husband.”

  Chapman considers his brother, conferring with Jasper at the kitchen table, the two men leaned in, laughing over tin cups of coffee, close as brothers—Chapman feels again the jealousy he felt on the day Nathaniel left him for the ditchdiggers. How he worries his brother will forever be searching for someone else, someone better, someone more human. Even now, when Chapman’s hidden his faunness away, his brother craves the company of others.

  Grace shuffles Eliza arm to arm, the sick toddler whining as she’s jostled. “You’ve listened enough, Chapman. Go sit with the others.”

  Chapman flushes. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Worth,” he says. “I didn’t intend any rudeness.”

  “After the snow falls, we’ll have whole months to fill with nothing but talk,” she says, soothing Chapman’s worries with an easy smile. “Go be with your brother and my husband. When you tire of their company, I’ll still be here.”

  Grace gives Chapman a light push—and how this touch lingers, when no one but Nathaniel has ever touched him—turning him toward the kitchen table, the free seat pulled back in welcome, the third tin cup he hadn’t noticed. She carries sickly Eliza toward the bedrooms, the girl watching Chapman from her mother’s shoulder. Her expression is serious, seeking despite her sickness, or else because of it: in her fever gaze Chapman worries Eliza might see what others do not, guessing at the beast hidden within the skin. But then she’s vanished into her bedroom and Chapman is neither outcast nor monster, only one more man sitting down at a table of friends, unremarkable in every way.

  The brothers move their few possessions into the Worth household, the Worths grateful to have Nathaniel’s help earlier than usual, to have Chapman there too throughout the busy weeks of the harvest and of preparing for the winter to come. Nathaniel and Chapman labor dawn to dusk beside Jasper, bringing in the crops, patching leaky joins between the house’s boards, pulling stubborn stumps from ground Jasper wants to plow the next year. The work isn’t harder than anything Nathaniel and Chapman did in the Territory, only more determined by the rhythms of the household, by the morning and evening meals, by Jasper’s insistence on reading scriptures aloud after the night’s meal and after Eliza has been put to bed, while the four adults sip last year’s cider from Grace’s delicate ceramic cups.

  Jasper reads, Jasper interprets, Jasper shows Chapman the words of the man whose ideas rule Jasper’s own. “According to Swedenborg,” he says, “the soul is the gift of life from God and the human body its natural clothing. You are shaped as God made you, there can be nothing wrong with the flesh you are given.”

  He slides his book across the table at Chapman, who takes it but doesn’t open it. He can’t read, has never learned. He considers Jasper’s words, weighs them against the faunish body he’s hiding. As a child unlike any other, Chapman had wondered what it was he was called, but when years later he learned the word faun from a book of tales Nathaniel bought and read to him, he found it answered few of his questions, for the place the book claimed fauns were from wasn’t like the place Chapman had been born, the wild country in which he’d lived his life. Was that all books contained? Knowledge but not answers? Then perhaps Chapman didn’t need books.

  Watching Nathaniel refill his cup with cloudy cider—refilling his cup too often, Chapman thinks, watching his brother’s slackening face, his drooping eyelids—he asks, “But can the soul come back? Can the body die and the soul go on?”

  Jasper frowns, retrieves the unopened book from Chapman’s hands. “The Church teaches us there is Heaven, where the sunlight of God’s love shines upon you, and there is Hell, the absence of such light. In between the recently dead travel a realm of spirits, where a man grapples with the events of his life until he dares admit his true nature. Only after his every deed has been confessed and heard and judged does he pass into Heaven or else descend into Hell.”

  Chapman cares not for this talk of Heaven and Hell: What does it have to do with one such as he, so bound to the earth? He tells Jasper good night, then drains his cup; he takes sleepy Nathaniel’s and drains that too. His tongue thick with cider, Chapman says, “Come, brother. Let us lay out our bedrolls, let us get you to your rest.”

  Nathaniel’s voice slurs, his movements unsteady. Chapman cares for his brother now as his brother once cared for him, pulling a wool blanket over Nathaniel, his brother already snoring before he’s fully settled on the cabin floor.

  The next afternoon, Jasper and Nathaniel set out to slaughter a goat Chapman can’t bear to watch die. Begging off, he picks apples while watching Eliza for Grace, who takes his place in the goat pen. Eliza toddles beneath the trees as Chapman works; she laughs brightly when she topples over after chasing a chipmunk, then cooingly greets the worms she meets in the grass. Chapman picks apple after apple, the trees flush, glad to be growing in this good place, tended by this sweet family. As he works, Chapman tastes one apple from each tree. In the first he tastes no story more complicated than how sunshine turns water to sugar, how time and light and care are transformed into flavor and desire, nutrients and calories. In one apple there’s flesh soft as melted butter; in this one, flesh dense as unbroken oak. In no apple does Chapman find even a hint of the Tree of Forgetting, the long-sought answer to his unusual life, without which he knows his secret self will always hold him apart from this sweet family, from the gentle love Nathaniel has found among them.

  John

  At one end of the otherwise empty forty-eighth floor—a cavernous space waiting to be occupied by more fabricated labs—Eury pauses in front of an unmarked doorway, lifting her palm to the pebble reader bonded invisibly with the concrete wall until a light blinks green below the wall’s surface. A moment later, a concealed door splits and slides open: inside waits a stainless steel platform a dozen meters across, a radial trapdoor closed atop its mounded floor, the platform surrounded by a series of multijointed extruder arms, obvious prototypes tipped with revolving plates of printer heads and cutting blades, plus needlers and staplers, paddles for shaping and folding, all controlled by an ordinary laptop on a rolling cart, the cart’s wheels tangled in a messy nest of yellow network cables. A piecemeal machine, a fancy piece of kitwork assembled out of repurposed tech. Old dumb technology, not connected wirelessly to the rest of the Tower.

  Whatever you wanted to do with this machine, you had to do it here.

&nb
sp; “I call it the Loom,” Eury says. “The heart of the Orpheus project.”

  “Cloning,” John replies, still standing in the doorway. “It’s a fancy name for cloning.”

  “Not exactly.” Eury boots up the laptop, then begins moving around the room, turning on the other machines. “Cloning mammals usually requires living mothers to grow the cloned embryos, to nurse and nurture the offspring. It’s extraordinarily time-consuming, it bears a variety of risks, but the inputs aren’t difficult to produce in a functioning ecosystem: food, water, shelter, space. But our ecosystems are so battered. Conditions are going to get worse, and there’s only so much Pinatubo can do to protect us. Already we have to modify our livestock to make them thrive here on the Farm, and it’s a highly controlled environment.”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” says John. “What happens here? How is this different?”

  He follows Eury around the room’s perimeter, running his hand over the steel tanks ringing the walls. The insulated metal is cool to the touch, the contents clearly refrigerated. Nothing in the room is marked, all of it too provisional and new for warnings or explanatory labels.

  Once Eury logs in to the laptop, the patchwork Loom begins to hum, its extruders waking up, a low chug of liquid volubly circulating in the tanks. “The Loom is the first part of Orpheus,” she explains. “It’s a 3-D printer, partly, but that’s selling it a bit short, since no other additive manufacturing process can do what Orpheus can. It’ll be easier to show you than to explain, but before that you should know that buried beneath this Tower is a series of reservoir tanks holding a highly refined and stable form of liquefied recycled biomass, the Loom’s most crucial input.”

  She says it like its nothing: liquefied recycled biomass. John stares, at first unwilling to comprehend what she’s telling him. “Where does the biomass come from?” he asks, but he knows part of the answer already: the flying drones in Yellowstone, the dozers scraping the ground in Montana, the work crews pulling timber out of the western suburbs.

  “When we built the Farm,” Eury says, her fingers flashing across the keyboard, “we had to clear the land. Instead of piling the dead livestock and rotted crops into landfills, we harvested them, shipping what we could to be sorted and recycled at a facility outside Vegas, a first-of-its-kind refinery capable of separating polluted dirt and broken concrete from decaying plant matter, stinking animal carcasses. Everything organic gets broken down into one material, from which others might be made.”

  At first the process had required heavy chemicals, immense amounts of power and heat, coughing smokestacks ringed by white holding tanks, all the ugly industry John knew they needed to leave behind. “One last extractive industry,” Eury says, waving away his concerns. “Scraping the surface of the earth before it blows away, so later we can reseed the planet.”

  All necessary technologies move quickly. Already the refineries were obsolete, replaced by a novel acidic compound invented in Earthtrust’s labs, capable of dissolving skin and bone, keratin, cellulose, lignin, rubber, cotton, anything biological in origin. Once emulsified with an antibiotic preservative, the resulting sludge could be stored indefinitely, forced through pipelines into storage tanks, even frozen into longer-lasting bricks.

  “None of this was enough for the scale of Orpheus,” Eury says, continuing to prep the Loom, occasionally looking up from the laptop to be sure each next piece of machinery has successfully turned on. “And it’s insanely labor intensive and time sensitive. Even scouting with drones, focusing on the most easily available sources—abandoned industrial-scale agriculture, for instance—it was never going to work long term. That’s where the Farm came in.”

  “Wait. What does the Farm have to do with this?” He tries to connect the supertree orchards with their tasteless apples and the stinking stockyards of almost mutant cattle to the sterile hum of this room, but fails. “What are you really doing, Eury?”

  “John, did you think people were going to live in cooperative agricultural communities run by megacorporations forever? I keep telling you: Earthtrust is a transitional company. To bridge the present we have and the future we want requires using the tools available. We live in a capitalist country; I built a capitalist tool. But I don’t care about the money, only what it can do.”

  “You’ve made an awful lot of it, though.” This unavoidable petulance, always a source of self-loathing, and never more so than now—how much does John hate how small his objections always feel before the grandeur of Eury’s ambition?

  Eury doesn’t look up from the laptop, but John knows she’s rolling her eyes, if not outright scowling. “And I’ve poured every cent back into Earthtrust. Give me a break. I’m administering half of the United States from a research facility in Ohio. Not to mention our efforts abroad. This is all a means to an end. Democracy wasn’t up to the task of facing the future. Too slow, too dispersed, too many safeguards. Do you have any idea how difficult it would have been to do any of this through national elections or ballot referendums? Starting late last century, corporate greed weakened democracy’s safeguards; now, in the places where the safeguards are weakest, we’re free to act. Now we exploit the gaps left in our democracy to save our people.”

  This was the world as it had always been to people like Eury, the visionaries of the next human age, the next human race: the future the promised land, the present a necessary sacrifice, the past irrelevant, embarrassing, dispensable, taboo.

  A necessary evil, Eury would say, if John pressed.

  “The Volunteer Agricultural Communities feed the world,” Eury continues, still typing, her back to John, blocking the laptop screen. “But the ultimate goal is for the world to feed itself, once we’ve halted the rising temperatures and the climbing sea levels, once we’ve rebuilt the soil, once we agree upon a model for sustainable human agriculture as part of a thriving global ecosystem. It might take fifty years or a hundred. They might be ugly years. To bridge the gap, the VACs will grow as much as we can as fast as we can, not only for food but to stash as much biomass as possible. John, I don’t care what a superorchard apple tastes like. Flavor is easy to chemically correct. The only marker I’m chasing is density of available organic compounds. I care only how tall the trees can grow.”

  John listens, his face darkening. He studies the activating Loom, sees the hoses leading from the storage tanks to the extruders begin to stiffen, thick liquid biomass chugging through them, pumped nearly fifty stories up from the underground tanks. “What are you doing, Eury? Why are we here?”

  “Just wait,” she says, pressing one more button before stepping away from the laptop.

  Now the extruders rise, now the stage’s radial hatch opens to reveal an oblong pool of bluish liquid, a milky sludge sloshing as the first extruder tip dips below its surface. A repetitive keening fills the room as the other extruders lower themselves, moving in time with the oddly melodic but grating loop of noise. John’s heart pounds. The sound reminds him of something, but he can’t concentrate enough to make himself remember, not with the extruders sliding along a series of interlocking circular tracks, performing a dance of hydraulics ready to deliver bioinks and fast-setting polymers. As the song-sound grows unbearable, Ghost moans, its head buried beneath its paws; John wants to comfort the wolf but not as much as he wants to watch the Loom’s movements.

  It takes only a moment more to understand what Eury’s ordered: a full-grown she-wolf, another Ghost, another tame sibling to Eury’s spy in Yellowstone.

  Layer by layer, working from the inside out, a wolf is made, birthed already fully grown: the slow manufacture of bright white bones, the delicate threading of nerves and blood vessels. A mass of intestines appears, a stomach, a gall bladder, the kidneys and liver, each part assembled in its right place, as determined by billions of years of evolution. Bio-staplers zip shut the internal organs, secure the blood and the bones beneath printed muscles, leave the muscles twitching against the enwrapping skin. The wolf is pink and hairless and
without life, no breath yet as a scalpel-wielding arm cuts the mouth free of the skin stretched over the skull, the cut exposing teeth clenched in a stilled snarl, then shapes the ears, the nostrils, the eyelids, under which the wolf’s eyes might or might not be modified as the Yellowstone wolf’s must’ve been. The keening rises steadily, its screech screaming through John’s skull, its bass pounding at his breastbone, intensifying as the extruder needles pound millions of hairs into pink skin, finally leaving behind a perfect copy, floating lifeless in the Loom’s viscous milk.

  No creature was meant to be made this way; until Earthtrust, no creature ever was.

  Now the noise gets louder. More piercing. Wrenchingly terrible. A flood of electricity jolts the tub of milky fluid; when the song stops, it’s replaced by the sound of two wolves barking, by Eury clapping as Ghost rises to meet the twin bounding wetly from the Loom’s tub, a wolf exactly as alive as John, as Eury, as any creature ever born.

  John crouches beside Eury to join her in petting Ghost and its sister: here are the perfect muscles beneath the skin; the happy panting breath moving into Ghost’s lungs, out of its sister’s. The squares of fur he saw earlier are nothing like the same fur here, he thinks: to dismantle the living into pieces is to unmake reality, but maybe to reunite the parts into a whole is to heal a break in the world, closing the gap left when the last wild wolf died. Surely a world with wolves is better than one without them, no matter how the wolves came to be.

  “We’ve all lost so much, but we don’t forget everything.” Eury scratches both wolves behind their ears, each wolf exactly as happy as the other. She says, “We all have some vanished part of the world we miss more than any other. The wolves were mine. Maybe the bees were yours. You and I are not so old, not so young. But the worst environmental devastation happened in our lifetimes, not to mention the political breakdown. This is why we have to act now, while there’s still a generation who remembers what the world should be.”