Appleseed

by Matt Bell

  Beetles, he guesses, choosing from among the words the remainder has to offer, unsure if that’s the right name for what he sees, these unlikely insects hatched from his body.

  C shuts down the bubble’s light beam, conserving energy. Darkness descends over the trench as he leans against his tree half, shivering at the tickle of the beetles’ tentative steps, crawling through the grooves of his black bark, crossing the purple-bladed grass to part the blue fur printed into his dark skin. As early as tomorrow he might arrive at Black Mountain, a place he knows only as an icon on a map, a symbol where C hopes to deliver this tree—the first new life he thinks this cold world has made—where he hopes this tree might be made to live separate from him, before it takes so much they both die.

  Chapman

  By midwinter, Chapman chafes at the captivity of the Worth household, its tight environs too much restraint on the faun trapped inside the man, who despairs at his shivering diminished self: as a faun, he knows, he wouldn’t quake against the cold, wouldn’t whine for more blankets, for warmer clothes than the ones Nathaniel bought him months ago. He misses the woods, misses the feel of pine straw beneath his bare hooves, misses all the wild smells the wind once brought him, all these sensations ejected from every human household. One midnight, under a full moon veiled by bright wisps of cloud, he can take no more. He leaves his boots beside the door, drapes his shirt over his boots, rolls his pant legs above his knees. Barefoot and bare-chested, he steps into the frigid night, his feet clinging to the icy slats of the porch, his skin threatening to freeze and tear.

  Chapman doesn’t hesitate. He takes his first steps on human feet, running across the Worths’ frozen yard, but before he reaches the edge of their fields he is already galloping on faunish hooves, cruising over crusted snow to jump atop their split rail fence, cracking the top rail as he leaps off it to enter the woods beyond, running over frozen logs and frigid boulders. Chilled air slides over the bark of his skin, and he laughs at the contact of hoof on solid earth, so much more satisfying than cramped shoe on sanded board. For a few hours, he thrills at his loping passage through the snowy woods, he dwells within the right feeling of his returned faun body, his inhuman footsteps never breaking the wild quiet of the cold night, the creaking of frozen trees in the stiff wind, the settling of ice, the whisper of no living thing speaking. Only once he’s exhausted does Chapman pause in the wintery dark, a faun closing his eyes to consider again the flickering blackness where this winter he’s had to hide so much of himself.

  How long can this blessed stillness last? He slowly opens his eyes but doesn’t yet move. He scans the dark woods, cocking his head one way and then the other. Nothing living moves, nothing living stirs, not at first; the wind strains the ice loudly wherever it’s frozen to a leafless branch, the woods speak with the voice of winter itself. But that’s not all. Chapman’s heartbeat rises, quickening as the song he cannot ever forget further penetrates his reverie—is what he hears coming his way a distant memory or a present nightmare rushing closer?

  Whatever Chapman hears is enough to set his skin ashiver, to set all his fur to standing. He panics. Turning back toward the Worth homestead, he immediately misjudges a leap over a frozen fallen log, the toe of one hoof catching on a broken branch, sending him tumbling painfully across rock-studded ice. Stretched out and panting, he listens again, he wills himself to locate the terrible dirge, if it’s there, the feared song that is elegy and threat, anger and future-making flicker—

  Maybe he hears the song. Maybe he doesn’t. But somewhere, somewhen, surely the head is still singing its complaint, caught crooked in a witch’s arm; somewhere, somewhen, or maybe here, maybe now, because now doubt vanishes, now Chapman is suddenly sure he hears the singer’s voice.

  He rises in a rush, his footing falters as haste overtakes care. Reaching the edge of the Worth homestead, he again bounds over the cracked rail, already changing mid-leap, giving up his faunness, so when he stumbles to the ground inside the fence line he falls this time on bare human feet, his unfurred skin burning at the earth’s frozen touch. He picks himself up fast as he can, then pauses shivering in the yard, his bare soles sticking to the icy ground.

  He hears nothing now, is no longer sure he ever did. A trick of the mind, he tells himself, an indulging of fearful imagination.

  Surely he’s safe with the Worths, as safe as Nathaniel hoped they would be.

  Surely this land is settled enough to keep wild things at bay.

  Disguised as a man, indoors upon planted lands, Chapman hopes he can live freely.

  But every moment he wears the man, he fears the faun is shrinking.

  Just after dawn, Jasper Worth leaves the house’s warm interior to feed his goats; minutes later, he’s back, pale and trembling. Jasper sits shaking while Grace makes him a cup of tea; he doesn’t speak until he’s swallowed its heat in one scorching gulp. “There’s some danger in the woods,” he says, returning his cup to the table, “unlike anything I have seen before.”

  In the night, he says, something broke the fence at the end of the yard, letting one of the goats escape through the shattered rail. Jasper followed the missing goat’s hoofprints to a hollow thrashed through the crusted snow, where the black-and-white goat sprawled—its belly split, its entrails spilled atop bloody snow.

  “A mountain lion?” asks Nathaniel, pulling on his boots. “A bear?”

  “Could be either,” Jasper says, swirling his tea, his eyes lowered to watch a clot of cream swim circles across its surface. “I should have been more careful, should’ve checked the tracks before I scuffed the ground with my boots. But whatever killed the goat didn’t eat it.” He shakes his head. “No, this is something else.”

  “What do you mean?” asks Grace. “What else could it be?” She bounces Eliza in her arms, the raven-haired child entangling her fingers in her mother’s braids.

  Nathaniel looks at Chapman, who can barely keep his eyes open, the man’s body tired from the faun’s night spent running; Chapman, whose fault it is the fence was broken, who in a single night called his pursuers to the Worths’ door: Which one of the three witch-beasts, Chapman wonders, was it that killed Jasper’s goat?

  “Jasper, I should’ve already been out there with you,” Nathaniel says, “helping you with the work.” He looks to his brother: Will Chapman reproach him for his drunkenness last night, the cider that kept him from waking as early as Jasper? But Chapman stays silent, relieved for his brother’s distraction, and for the ask that follows. “Chapman, can you mend the fence? Better one of us stays behind and makes sure no more goats go missing.”

  “Yes, brother,” says Chapman, watching Jasper and Nathaniel dress themselves in fur and hide, then donning his own stitched furs, slid over bare skin he still doesn’t think of as his. While the others are gone, he cuts a new rail from a stack of lumber, fitting it into the existing slots in the fence posts, hammering it home. He feeds the remaining goats, then checks the laying hens in the cramped chicken coop, delivering the day’s eggs to Grace in the kitchen, where the stove’s radiant heat sets his cold skin to pleasant tingling.

  Before this, he’d never known the monotony of chores, the not unpleasurable way what next is here answered only with now again.

  “Rest a minute, Chapman,” says Grace. “Your brother will be back soon.”

  He sits, accepting a second cup of tea, always grateful when Grace joins him. Eliza plays in the corner of the room, watching Chapman as she prances a wooden horse across the cold floorboards. He smiles cautiously at the girl’s attention, then starts when she rises, dragging her toy behind her to stand beside his chair, her thumb in her mouth, her horse clutched to her side.

  “You can pick her up,” says Grace. “She likes you.”

  Chapman lifts Eliza, hefts her surprising weight into his lap. Eliza digs her feet into his thighs, laughs as he bounces her as he’s seen Jasper do. He’s known no children, had no playmates of his own besides Nathaniel, who was parent first an
d brother second. House and farm and family—this was what Nathaniel always said he wanted. In the years Chapman was missing, Nathaniel found some approximation of that dream here, after coming brotherless to this place where now Jasper calls him brother, where Grace calls him friend, where Eliza calls him uncle.

  Chapman’s presence threatens to bring that good life to ruin. Somehow, he must try this winter to accept being a man. For his brother’s sake, for the sake of this sweet family. How much easier it would be if he found his Tree, he thinks, his old story shifting to accommodate his new life: changed by the flicker, he can pretend to be a human now, but after his excursion in the wintry night he admits pretend is all it is. His fur itches the inside of his skin; he feels his hooves wanting out of his shoes, wanting out of his feet. The flicker has let him live inside the Worth house, but it has not made him human.

  For weeks, Jasper keeps his rifle loaded beside the cabin door, ready to take aim at whatever creature preyed on his goat. Now the winter world grows quiet, the sounds of the forest reduced to the cracking of ice, the howl of freezing wind, the cries of the surviving goats as they squeeze together for warmth. Despite the forbidding cold, the Worth household is well provisioned, stocked with salted meat, jarred vegetables, tins of flour and sugar bought before the weather made travel impossible. Always there is sharp, pungent cider fermented from the orchard, and more than one evening is spent with Jasper and the two brothers lifting mug after mug, cheering one another in good company. Chapman enjoys the sound of others reading aloud, and so many hours are passed sitting on the floor beside young Eliza, with Jasper reading from his few volumes, his Swedenborgian tracts or a prized book of tales. Often the stories in this latter book are purest nonsense—a girl attending a ball in a pumpkin, dressed in a gown knitted from rags—but occasionally one rings truer. Chapman trembles to hear of a wolf prowling a forested path of needles, wanting only to devour a girl draped in red. The wolf, Jasper says, ate the girl’s grandmother first, then dressed itself in her clothes, her housecoat and bonnet—

  “And her skin,” says Chapman, the trance of the story making him forget himself.

  “What? No, no, of course not,” says Jasper, repulsed.

  Chapman scoffs, sipping from his cup of cider. So this wasn’t a true story after all. Because how else would an animal pass as human, except by wearing human skin?

  For the rest of the winter, the brothers help Jasper inside the house and out, assisting in minor feats of carpentry, or else digging more frozen rocks out of next year’s fields, their shovels bending against the cold earth. The work is difficult, the rewards and the dangers often distant, but in the moment there’s true pleasure in shaping the land. When the brothers first planted their nurseries, the people who would one day benefit were abstractions, hoped-for buyers of apple trees; here on the Worth farm, Chapman finds the beneficiaries of those efforts manifested, Jasper and Grace and Eliza set to enjoy their apples for the years to come.

  The work eases Chapman into the more settled life of a man, but then it’s spring again, and when the world wakes, Chapman’s wanderlust does too. “Brother,” he says, having waited until he and Nathaniel are alone beside the fire, stuffing their pipes with the last of Jasper’s tobacco. “Our apple trees await us.”

  Nathaniel taps his pipe against the hearth. “What if we didn’t go this year?” he asks. “Jasper would keep us on, we could earn our place here.”

  Chapman waves a hand over the human shape he’s worn nonstop since the broken fence, the body irritating his spirit as surely as his shirt scratches his skin. He says, “I want to be myself again.”

  “Brother,” Nathaniel begins, then trails off. He stares into the fire, his pipe’s scent filling the room.

  Chapman waits for his brother to speak, studies what isn’t being said when he doesn’t. Nathaniel doesn’t want Chapman to be a faun again. He’s older, slower, fuller of paunch, poor as ever. He’s shown Chapman that the Worth household is a good place, maybe the best place he can hope to secure. A life among these Christian people who treat him kindly, who accept him as he is: rough handed and rough mannered, given increasingly to drink.

  Chapman could leave his brother here to go on alone, into the Territory. It would be safer for Nathaniel, given what chases Chapman. Likely it would be better for his brother in every way. Certainly a year at the Worth homestead would be kinder than another six months in the woods, scrounging a never-arriving living from the inhospitable wilderness, sleeping nightly on bitterly hard ground.

  All Chapman has to do is say, Stay.

  Brother, you stay—he could say those words—he knows he won’t.

  If Nathaniel stays and Chapman goes, then Chapman will be alone forever—and whatever else he wants to be, he no longer wants to be alone.

  “I can’t stay,” he pleads, rising to his human feet. “And wherever I go I want you with me, at my side.”

  It’s the most selfish thing he’s ever said, the worst burden ever placed on his brother.

  Nathaniel sits and smokes and watches the flames, fists balled, legs shaking nervously. “I will not lose you again, brother,” he says at last, his eyes on the fire. “Where you go, I go.”

  “West then,” Chapman says, his smile a mismatch for his heart’s thudding fright. “West to wilder lands, where this year at last we make our fortune.” Where this year we must at last plant my Tree, he thinks. Now or never, for if the Tree will take ten years to bear fruit, then he cannot stand to delay another day.

  Their path decided, the brothers part for the rest of the night. Any day now, they’ll leave the Worth homestead together, Nathaniel promising as always to return as soon as his work is done. They’ll again gather seeds to plant all across this beautiful, invincible land, this surely inexhaustible green world from which they and all their kind have asked so much.

  John

  All plots move humanward. Before Eury leaves the Farm, a herd of thirty bison appear in the meadow beneath the Tower, happily grazing the circular plain: all juvenile males, printed from the blueprint of the last bison John saw dying in the Lamar Valley dust. That night, up late in his lab, John thinks about how happy he was to see them, then how infuriating he found this instinctual joy. Always the mind and heart are eager to be tricked by forgeries of the wild, falling in love with trees planted in pots, animals kept in cages. He’d created the nanobees because he loved real bees but real bees were gone; the supertrees he’d designed the nanobees to pollinate couldn’t live anywhere but the VACs, existing only to serve human desire, each one a human wish planted in chemically enriched dirt, fulfilling Eury’s want for all the biomass a tree might make.

  And the bison, printed from the biomass Earthtrust had collected? What were they? Only the present recycled, then wasted: an animal brought back from extinction, a token conservation in the present whose cost was a waste of what they’d need to reach the future, if Pinatubo and Orpheus worked.

  All plots move humanward, all human plots move toward the human. If Pinatubo launches, then what it means to live on Earth will change forever; but if the human world someday ends, it won’t be the end of the world. Even if everything goes as wrong as it can, it likely won’t even be the end of humanity, only one particular way of living. But however much the human world has been diminished, humanity’s diminished the nonhuman more. In the West, John had tried to connect himself to what remained, to erase the gap between himself and all the othered others. He remembers the faraway red rock canyon, the painted giants, horned and antlered; the parklands and the dying bison and everything he did in the Sacrifice Zone to give the world back, all the bombs he set to remove the heavy damage of the human mark, all the nights he spent sleeping under the stars in the years after he left Earthtrust, many with Cal but just as many alone with what remained of the world. But it’s impossible to fully summon these fleeting memories from the forty-eighth floor of the Tower, as humancentric a monument as any he’s ever imagined.

  All human plots m
ove humanward, he thinks, but what about the plot of the world? To what ends does it move, toward what triumph, what tragedy, what redemption? What does the world want, what is the world still capable of becoming? Where is the will of the world made most visible? Is it an angry force, felt in its earthquakes and hurricanes, in the endless wildfires, in the hot gales kicking up dead dust? How else is the agency of the world made manifest? In the slow shaping strength of a glacier, a behemoth of ice pushing mountains before its weight? Or in the profusion of life, the splendor of bounty and beauty that so many peoples have been convinced must be proof of some god, some higher purpose to existence? Are evolution and its abundances the expression of the world’s will, or only the artifacts of its indifference?

  As always, these questions remain outside John’s knowing, which is not to say they don’t matter, that their answers do not matter terribly to him—but what can he do now except continue along the path he’s committed himself to, a human-focused plot if ever there was one? He squeezes his fist, blinks through menus to unlock the rest of the hidden subroutines. Bringing his hacked nanobees inside the Tower had been a risk, but he needs only a few: two dozen line his gums, deactivated and undetectable beneath his tongue, tucked against the molars. A moment later, he opens his mouth to release the activated bees, their false buzzing nothing like that of real bees, whose extinction broke John more than the death of his parents, more than the loss of his family’s home. He remembers when colony collapse came for his farm: cleaning the last dead hives, prying loose tiny body after tiny body, looking for any living queen, any viable larvae; abandoning the beekeeper’s suit halfway through his search, the protection unnecessary against the nothing there.