by Matt Bell
“I’m no killer,” Chapman argues, “I’m no killer,” he says again, but it is only for men that he’s stayed his hand. What about all else that’s gone from the Territory, from the State, vanished at his hand, his brother’s, all the others like them? It wasn’t the witches who cut down thousands of trees, who displaced untold bird’s nests, who unearthed countless dens and burrows. It wasn’t the witches who plowed every inch of land they could, wasn’t the witches who bragged of planting horizon-busting orchards, who dreamed of apple trees bred double or triple their size, the great weight of ever-brighter, ever-sweeter globes of apples bending low every crooked branch.
Didn’t man have a right to till the ground, to plant his fields, to make a living for his family? Yes. But itinerant Chapman, made the legend Appleseed, who yearly converted more of the Territory into what humans wanted it to be than any other—surely he was no mere man.
Long-lived as a faun might be, this Appleseed might endeavor to take more than his share, might plow and plant and reap more than one life, all of it serving only his selfish desires, his useless story of the Tree that never was.
He’s thinking when he should be fighting. Now the grizzly roars, the wedge of its battered head leading the muscled hump of its shoulders as it wheels toward Chapman, who tries again to plead his ridiculous innocence: “I’m no killer,” he says, denying his complicity for the third time, refuting the witches’ vengeance even as he sets his hooves, ready to meet the bear’s attack with equal force. He drops his head, hammers his good horn against the bear’s temple hard enough to stagger it; he staggers too, stumbles a step before he recovers. He feints toward the bear to bait the panther, then leaps away from its pounce, letting the two beasts knock each other to the torn ground. On the other side of the nursery, the vulture screeches, hopping crooked with its broken wing, flickering back into its witching shape, the woman who is not a woman appearing in a series of stuttering images, some vulture, some dangerously neither bird nor woman, then a woman with the witch’s face, wearing the features of the bird: the sharp nose, the beaded eyes, her ears pinned to the sides of her head, her raptor’s tongue too small between her human teeth.
Broken arm flopping behind her, the half-woman, half-vulture witch screeches after Chapman, who’s running hard now, risking everything in the hope of reaching the nursery’s edge before he’s caught. As the witches took their animal forms, they’d dropped the singer facedown in the dirt at the tree line; now it’s Chapman who rescues him, lifting the singer by his topknot, holding the half-rotted head like a lantern as he spins toward the pursuing bird-witch. As he turns, he slides the fingers of his free hand into the singer’s neck, working the throat open, recoiling at the waxy stuckness of the dead flesh even as he widens the throat: the singer’s voice rises in volume, its terrible beauty magnified, its awful screeching louder than ever before.
Chapman has seen how the song finds the future in the flicker and brings it back: he’d seen the frozen world when the trapper was killed, the country of poured rock at the abandoned cabin all those years before. He remembers the visions the singer gave him decades ago, of the nymph in the dale, the niece they said the faun killed in a life Chapman can’t remember. She was the witches’ niece too, when they were sometimes fates and not just furies; she had been the one beautiful truth at the center of their world, the purest spirit of the woods, joined in marriage for only a single day to the singer whose head Chapman holds, who’d been the best of that world’s men.
When the faun who lived in the myth caused the nymph’s death, his greed broke the union of man and tree, the covenant between humans and the world. But this story didn’t have to be that story. Surely anything but that inevitability.
Surely there is a choice, even now, if only Chapman could see it to take it.
The song pummels the bird-witch with waves of sound, its battering aging her terribly: Chapman sees her again become simultaneous, her body appearing at every age she ever was, ages making no sense for a shapeshifter, a woman who is a beast, a beast who is a woman, a beast and a woman who are avatars of an idea, expressions of savage force. All magic is more fragile than anyone ever imagines, even what’s seemingly immortal. The bird-witch ages into who she should have become only many years from now, after the human conquest of the world has completed its diminishments: her skin sags, her joints crumple, her hair wisps and blows away, yellow teeth drop from snarling lips. Everything the witch was collapses at once to fertilize the earth of the nursery, the planted orchard-to-be already sprouting, buried Nathaniel and the decomposing bird-witch together feeding the accelerated fecundity of this patch of earth, its transformation sped by the song.
With equal parts wonder and horror, Chapman turns the head on the bounding panther, its yellow eyes blazing, its remaining claws churning the earth with every song-staggered step; he aims it at the roaring grizzly, the sound ripping the bear’s hackles free in graying banners, fur lifting like sod from the rotted surface of the bear: one by one, the witches come apart, bodies once unbound by time becoming flesh dissolving, returning to the earth. During their dissolution, in the nursery something like ten years passes at once, the time lapse local, the singer’s voice powerful as ever, ready to generate possible futures, ready to choose one and make it true: More life, Chapman thinks, as the song rises, more life, he cries as trees just planted, trees that should need ten years to grow, grow now, their sprouts unfurling, each seedling rising jerkily: seedlings becoming saplings, saplings becoming trees unfolding atop Nathaniel’s grave, their roots eating his flesh and drinking his blood and ferrying some of who he was back up into the living world as the trees’ sudden branches bloom, as their blooms turn to fruit, as the apples ripen upon their stems.
After the flicker fades, Chapman walks the orchard, the singer’s head still dangling from his right hand. With his left, he picks an apple, sticks it between his sharp teeth, bites down.
What idiotic hope prompts that bite? What does he expect to find, at long last?
Something magical, something life-changing: the promised fruit of the Tree of Forgetting, a miracle grown from the end of the witches and from the body of his brother, planted here in the last nursery he’ll ever sow.
Instead the apple he chooses is as bitter as any other, unsuitable for anything but cider, its fruit half wood and hardly any sugar. But maybe now wood is enough. With his free hand, Chapman pries open the singer’s mouth, then shoves the oaky density of the bitten apple in past his half-rotted teeth, choking the singer on all its leathery skin, its tasteless flesh, its stony core. This is apple as stopper, as gag, not enough to keep the singer from singing but capable of dulling his song, making it a manageable trickle of revelation, its prophecy unspooling only at the normal human pace, its next future always due to arrive exactly one second after the present, fast enough.
John
A keening sounds. A moment later, Eury Mirov arrives at the top of the Tower’s needle, freshly installed in the recently docile body of E-4, her Ohio-based rung positioned safely behind the soldiers attempting to breach the penthouse. She stretches, loosening a stiff muscle found waiting for her in her new neck—unless the ache needing soothing is just a tickle of remainder, a leftover need of the old body expressing itself in the new. It doesn’t matter, she knows. This body or that body, all of them are hers, all their feelings and thoughts are her.
“Five minutes to go,” Eury says, immediately assuming command of the operation. “Let’s get this door open already.”
She paces while the soldiers continue prying at the blast doors, their mechanism permanently sealed when the security nexus exploded, a safeguard meant to keep Eury safely inside, not trap her outside. The commander of her local bodyguard affirms Eury’s orders, her voice slightly garbled by her helmet’s face shield; Eury waves off the apology that follows, for the miscalculation of attacking the nexus. Mistakes have been made, by her as much as anyone else. She knows the soldiers are trying their best, first with
the thundering battering ram, then with an unwieldly two-person laser saw. The impressive door resists their efforts, the laser throwing off heat and sparks but barely scratching its nearly impenetrable surface, this last line of defense in Eury’s fortress holding exactly as it was designed to do.
Still Eury impatiently stalks the small anteroom. It’s not her soldiers’ fault they can’t breach her office, these loyal men and women who’ve followed her for years, dressed again in their heavy matte black armor, never before needed on the Farm. Armor was for the war, armor was for the West. The Farm had been meant to be home; now once again it seemed the frontier.
“Do we at least have a visual?” she asks, interrupting a discussion of other tactics for breaching the penthouse, then the Pinatubo launch chamber: rappelling in from a helicopter could work, but it would be difficult to avoid wrecking the equipment inside; if their only goal was to take out the terrorists, an attack drone could deliver a rocket or a machine-gun burst, but heavy weaponry would again damage the control room, a disaster this close to launch.
“Without the nexus, we can’t access your office cameras, but we’re flying a surveillance drone around,” the commander says, knocking on the touchscreen embedded in her gauntlet cuff. “Should be in range any second now.”
A matter of time then. The launch can be disrupted but it cannot be stopped. In four minutes, the many Towers will open their needles, releasing their nanoswarms; once airborne, the swarm from the Ohio VAC will deliver its instructions to the global hive mind.
Stupid, treacherous John. But as long as the swarms work, he’s done his part. And Eury is sure they will, because everything John has ever invented has worked. Everything Eury has is part John’s, everything except the Loom. So much of the rest of Earthtrust is built on his ideas and his inventions, even the nanobots about to repair the world. Why can’t he accept that all this is what she thought he wanted, what she wanted to make with him, for him?
“Director,” the commander says. “Come look at this.” As she offers Eury her wrist-mounted screen, an explosion at the Tower’s base shakes the high antechamber. The screen jostles as the commander adjusts her footing, but Eury grabs her wrist, pulls the half-glimpsed image close: John stands at the launch controls, working furiously, while his terrorist girlfriend scans the penthouse windows, her eyes tracking the drone’s horizontal hover. Eury watches as the woman staggers, then catches a falling third figure in her arms, as a second explosion rocks the needle: another Eury Mirov, saved from the aftershock.
“Fucking hell,” Eury says, already peeling the long black glove from her right wrist. She squeezes her thumb against her bare palm until the usual row of lights winks on beneath the skin at the back of her hand, all the indicators white except the blue-blinking fourth, no longer the last in line, as it should be.
So now there are five, she thinks. Now there are five of me.
Now there is John, half turned from the console, frozen in place, looking over his shoulder at the newest E, held in the arms of his other woman. John as indecisive as ever, as unwilling to choose. Eury’s raw fury never lasts; already it’s going cold, calculated. When had this happened? Sometime within the last dozen distracting hours. There were no safeguards on the Loom, no alarms or alerts sent when it was activated. Why should there be, when no one could enter the room but her? She knew she shouldn’t have shown John the Loom but couldn’t help herself; somehow he had hacked and spoofed her pebble, copying her passcodes to gain entry, then discovered the code name she’d given her blueprint. He’d understood what else the Loom could do, then used it against her. If he knows this much, then he might also understand the last step of her plan, the part she hadn’t told him: it isn’t only the animals and the plants the Loom will reprint, repopulate. If worse comes to worst, Eury will blueprint the human race before it goes extinct; then, when it is safe, she will put everyone back. Starting with herself.
It’s okay, she thinks. John, I have chosen for you before. I can choose for you again.
Eury squeezes her hand again. There’s never a long delay between bodies, but nothing is instantaneous. A snatch of keening drone, followed by the flickering, a slight blinking pause of barely a second, before she comes loose from her flesh, and then every single time the same awe: I am the only person who’s ever experienced this. The soul, freed from the body, free to inhabit another—isn’t that immortality enough?
Humankind had dreamed of this since the beginning, in paintings in the caves, in the first stirrings of myth and religion. Now Eury has made the dream real. Sometimes she wishes she could stay in the flicker forever, living on as a mind safely wanting nothing, only floating, floating—but then always there’s the next body, calling her back to the world.
“She’s fine, John,” Cal says, trying not to sneer at John’s concern for the Eury clone, nearly fallen to the floor in the aftershock of the second bomb blast. “Get back to work.”
“Nothing left to do. It’s over. I did it.” His face is closed, his expression unreadable. “Ninety seconds to go.”
“We did it,” Cal says, triumphant, relieved. She stands E back on her feet, then steps away to rejoin John at the console, wanting to be at his side for the launch. But as she slides by E, she sees—what exactly?
E blinking a bit too fast, maybe her breathing momentarily changing pace. Nothing, really. Just a little bit of shock, Cal thinks—and then she doesn’t think much of anything ever again: Eury smiles cruelly as she grabs the pistol off the console’s ledge, her expression hardening as she quickly aims the weapon and pulls the trigger, shooting Cal at nearly point-blank range.
“You bitch,” Eury says, standing over Cal’s already crumpled body, watching her gurgle blood through a hole low in her throat. Cal’s chest is heaving, her eyes wide, one hand scratching at her gushing wound while the other digs inside her backpack, its contents half spilled beside her; already her strength is failing, her movements slowing. “You killed my dogs,” Eury accuses, hot tears forming in the corners of her eyes at the remembered sight of Cal raising her rifle to shoot the second Ghost, a scene Eury had streamed from the first Ghost’s retinal display moments before flickering into E-4. “You killed my dogs and all I could do was watch.”
She can print another Ghost but it won’t be the same, she’ll have to start over, training the new wolf again from scratch. If I live through this, she thinks, it’s time to invent better backups.
John squeezes his eyes shut at the gunshot, his hands paused above the keyboard; behind his thumb, an unwatched orange light flares then goes out forever. “Eury,” he says, his voice choked. He raises his hands in surrender, his eyes flicking between Cal, fallen at Eury’s feet, one hand awkwardly buried inside her pack, and Cal’s pistol, held in Eury’s right hand. “I didn’t know—” How had she inhabited E-5? He’d missed something crucial and it had cost Cal her life: E wasn’t a clone but a vessel. He waits for his anger and grief to rise, but for now he only feels numb; he fights to keep his voice as even as he can. “You didn’t have to kill Cal, Eury. Not now, not anymore.” Less than a minute to go. He has only to delay her.
“She wouldn’t have done the same to me if she could?” Eury steps over Cal, raising the handgun again. “You can’t stop the launch, John. You and your friends have made everything worse, for nothing. Haven’t you learned anything? Every remaining resource is precious, every bit of biomass we can gather is necessary for us to survive.” She gestures to the windows, the black smoke rising from the flaming Farm. “That’s the future burning. Suffering today, absence tomorrow. All because of you.”
John follows her gaze in time to watch the Earthtrust drone make another pass. He says, “There was no grand plan, Eury, no conspiracy. These are ordinary people, rising up. Wanting a say in their own destiny.”
Eury shakes her head. “They’re not ready, John. Always a necessary few lead, by election or by force. I am leading now, doing what cannot wait for a vote.”
“Okay, Eury. Ok
ay.” It doesn’t matter who’s right, not anymore. The choice is made.
Eury’s expression clouds. He’s too calm, too accommodating. “What did you do? John, what have you done?” She casts the gun aside, rushes forward to the command console. He stumbles when she pushes him out of the way, then moves to Cal’s side, slumping to the ground to take her in his arms. Behind him, Eury desperately tries to see the changes John’s made to her code, but before she can even touch the keyboard the launch commences.
In these last moments, John remembers the bees he raised on his farm, plus all the other real bees he’s known: a species extinct, but maybe not forever. He pulls Cal’s body against his own, wishing there’d been time to save her; as her arm slides free of her backpack, he hears a sharp ticking, the clicking sound steady at first, then speeding faster. He freezes: in Cal’s opening fist, John sees the bomb with which she’d planned to kill Eury Mirov, or at least destroy this launch chamber: a perfect globe the size of an apple, a bloodied clump of illegally printed plastic explosive, its detonator shoved through its meat.
The bomb’s short countdown completes as the first bright nanoswarms rise from the Tower’s needle, and also from the VAC outside Berlin, where the winters were once thought over forever, and from the Tower erected in the Burgundy region of France, where there is now only one variety of grape, grown only on Earthtrust’s farms. Swarms rise in Doukkala, in Overberg, in West Bengal and Sichuan, in Singapore-controlled Kedah, in the Mekong and Chao Phraya Deltas, in Beauce and eastern Ireland and Andalusia, in Ukraine and Brazil, in Argentina and in what remains of Patagonia: all over the world, Eury Mirov’s Towers simultaneously send forth the same nanoswarms.
Goodbye to blue skies forever, goodbye to that particular phenomenal beauty no one now living will ever see again, because in less than three days the sky everywhere will be bright white on even the clearest days.