by Matt Bell
They pass through more tightly twisting tunnels, then into a sprawling archive, the great room patrolled by drones opening and closing deep shelves.
“Seed repositories, being inspected for rot and ruin,” E says. “Everything we could save, everything we could gather. Millions of crop samples, two billion seeds in all, the result of thirteen thousand years of human agriculture. There’s more than one way to put back the world.”
But some of the archives have toppled, their bases cracked; E recounts unexpected seismic activity, water damage, breakdowns in the temperature regulation systems. “It was so hard,” she says, “when I was the only one awake.” Now the tunnel narrows, no wider than the boring machine that dug it, the dwarves chittering, circling the tram, trading seats for handholds, their bodies restless, their inane chatter incessant. E stops to click commands, then loses the grip of her story. Her speech trails off, doubles back, argues with itself in other voices C can’t understand, speaking languages he doesn’t understand: English and German, French and Russian, Mandarin and Pashto, Navajo and Mojave—the monolith languages, chosen to ward others from this Black Mountain, beneath which was never stored any present danger, only an endangered future.
C jerks his head, tries to find E in the dark. Above him floats her woman’s shape, following the tram but not tethered to it; then there’s the glowing suggestion of the wolf, panting beside him; then only a shapeless cloud, the cloud speaking in the same voice as the woman or else barking like the wolf. His vision blurs, the tram ride lulling him nearly to sleep before a sudden stop or steep turn jolts him awake. Countless hallways and corridors shoot off the tunnel, countless shafts lead between floors; other chambers are hidden behind enormous blast doors. As the tram rolls on, C sees many more dwarves working at various labors: digging with jackhammers and shovels, clearing rubble; welding new supports to replace bent girders, dragging lengths of tubing or wiring between gasping water pumps and sparking power conduits.
How much more biomass does E have stored beneath the Mountain? What have the dwarves cost her, how much have they taken from her stock? To keep the machinery running, she’d had to print new life; but every life she prints means it matters less and less if the machinery runs. “If we arrive at the promised future with nothing left of the past we’ve preserved,” she asks, in a sad voice C thinks isn’t quite hers, “then does it matter that we arrive? What good is the earth reset if nothing living survives?”
At the main habitat’s platform, the dwarves separate the sledge from the tram, then C from the sledge, transferring him to a waiting gurney, its metal frame groaning under his weight, the weight of the tree. The dwarves rush him through narrow hallways showing their age, bright paint stripping from yellowing concrete; heavy hatches separate corridors marked with a designation system C can’t comprehend. As they arrive at the habitat’s hospital ward, he remembers his first days in the crawler, his body sick from the Loom—days he spent curled shaking in the nest of rotten blankets in one of the trashed rooms. After he left that place, he’d pretended he wasn’t seeking Black Mountain to save himself—he’d told himself it would be enough to save the tree—but as the dwarves lift him from the gurney into a hospital bed, he knows he wants to live too.
His room is no less dilapidated than the rest of the facility, its walls flaking, the bed’s mattress collapsed with age. IV stands and various monitors are wheeled into the room, plus a pair of ultraviolet sunlamps ready to be activated after the dwarves depart. The dwarves work without instruction, poking needles through the flesh of C’s free arm, securing an ill-fitting oxygen mask over his face, the mask not made for what his mouth has become.
Now E materializes again, her body more solid, the wolf subsumed into the woman. “There’s something I need you to give me,” she says.
What, C rasps, his voice barely audible, his body starving and worn, desperately in need of rest and care.
E doesn’t immediately answer. Instead she waves over one of the dwarves, this one thinner and taller, or maybe only less hunched. In his hands, the dwarf carries a pair of rubber-handled shears, the rubber the same bright orange as the knife C used to prune his tree.
“Just a cutting,” E says, “so we can learn what you’ve become.”
C screams his protest, but his flattened lungs empty fast. Other dwarves rush the bed, piling atop him, pinning his bucking body to the sheets as the lean dwarf steps forward. When the dwarf places the shears against the base of one of C’s branches, C ceases his struggling, nearly sick with relief. He’d misunderstood, had thought she’d meant to cut him, to take some of his own flesh: a finger, a hoof, or a horn.
But the tree is him too. When the shears cut through the base of one flowering branch, the pain is immediate, extraordinary, impossible to soothe. E doesn’t even try. She waits, floating, morphing shapes and densities until C wears himself out, the furred half of his face streaked with salty tears.
“I need you to understand,” she says, her color stuttering, green going gray, green going blue: a command is being sent. “C, I want you to remember that all this was something you chose.”
In the morning, a man enters C’s otherwise unoccupied room, propelling himself in a wheelchair to the side of the bed. The man’s hair is wet, his expression bemused, his legs amputated above the knees. A smell C knows well follows him: he’s fresh from the Loom, despite his obvious injury. C gulps repeatedly under his oxygen mask, his good eye rolls in its woody socket as he tries to take in as much of the man as he can. His head and shoulders are all that’s visible above the bedside rail, but it’s enough.
The man’s face is stained with yellow bruises, dark and tanned, because when he was scanned he was dark and tanned, bruised, sunburned.
Sunburned. A danger from another time.
C understands, even across the many years, the many bodies that have passed since he last saw this face. This man wears the face he wore long before the bark took it; he’s who C would be without horns, without blue fur threaded through his skin, without claws or hooves. His breathing accelerates as a fresh panic rises; his heart pumps bloody sap through the tree’s cracks, its bark healing slower than flesh. He feels the beetles fleeing his anxious fear, all of them burrowing into the bedsheets or else taking flight, buzzing loudly as they fail to escape the room.
“It’s okay,” the man says, reaching through the bedrail to touch C’s arm, his hand seeking C’s skin wherever it’s still skin. “No need to be afraid.” He laughs, a low rueful sound. “Here you are again. But why should I be surprised? We never could stay away from her.” He takes C’s hand, their hands identical in size and shape, one hairy knuckled, one blue furred and clawed. The man who is and isn’t C says, “She wanted to tell you our story herself, but I don’t think she remembers it all anymore. It’s been too long, she’s been awake too many years. I don’t know when she became the swarm, when she made those things serving her. I have some idea what both of those decisions have cost, might have stopped her from making them, if I could have. But how can I be angry with her now, when I’m here too, looking at you, looking at this?”
Releasing his grip, the man holds his hand out palm up, waiting patiently for one of the beetles on C’s trunk to fly to him. An expression C can’t name crosses the man’s face as one does, its bright body circling the man’s palm, then crossing onto the hand’s hairy back as the man turns it, adjusting to keep the beetle upright until it loses interest and flies away.
“I never thought I’d see a bee again,” he says, smiling, his eyes kind but sad. “I didn’t know I was still hoping I would.” After his smile fades, his hand finds C’s again. “When I finish, E will want you to make a decision,” he says. “Even though you’re me, I promise you whatever choice you make will be yours alone.”
Chapman
Chapman chooses. He considers going farther west, across Indiana and Illinois, across the greater plains, into other Territories not yet fully settled. Somewhere there awaits the Mississi
ppi, the great river he’s never seen but whose tributaries and watershed he’s spent his life working; beyond it he hears there are mountains far greater than the Alleghenies he knows so well. He has heard tales of creeping glaciers to the north, parched deserts to the south, and somewhere beyond them all, there is the verdant promise of California and the unfathomable depths of the Pacific, visions Chapman can hardly imagine. For now, almost everything west of him remains frontier, wild enough spaces where a faun might yet roam, unseen and free in this vast America.
Holding the singer’s head by its topknot of hair, Chapman surveys his last orchard, grown from seed in ten flickering years, years that took only a few moments of his own time: trees growing bitter fruits, spitter apples; each tree a miracle, part brother, part witch, utterly itself.
If he goes west, no matter what else happens, he will not live forever.
If he goes east, he’ll still die, but he might not have to die alone.
Without Nathaniel, Chapman will never plant again, because the planting has already served its truest purpose: not to make the brothers rich, but to keep them brothers. Now that this brotherhood is ended, he abandons his tools, then begins making his lonely way east, toward the only other fellowship he’s known. At the last moment he decides to bring the singer with him, the singer’s song the last of the true magic he’s seen. With the core of the song-grown apple still gagging the head, reducing its drone to a muted retching, the settled landscape Chapman crosses doesn’t flicker much, but nightly he hears in the singer’s leaking sound stuttering dreams of futures to come, poured roads cutting black paths across blighted treeless landscapes, then dryer lands, the ground everywhere cracked clay; he wakes to the loud shake of explosions breaking open the mountains, to the roar of machines stripping the surface of the earth, to white masts being fitted with white blades, somehow farms too, farming the wind.
Chapman’s passage is slow. He travels the starlit nights, trotting through wood and field with the singer’s hair clenched in his fist; he hides during the day, sleeping fitfully in shaded copses, his hands clenched over the apple-filled mouth. All the way across Ohio, he lies to himself, boasting to himself that he won’t ever again take the man’s shape, even if it might speed his passage, even if it might buy him a home: either he’ll make it safely back to Splitlip Creek or he won’t; either the Worths will accept him as he is, or else he’ll flee their home forever.
Soon it’s August again, the air buzzing with black flies, mosquitos, grasshoppers the length of his fingers, locusts the same color as his claws. Everywhere Chapman roams, Ohio’s planted lands burst with tall corn and wheat and barley tilting listlessly; the branches of apple and pear trees bend low with heavy fruit. Every crop is healthy and high; there are so many bountiful signs of the human world’s confident flourishing.
Ten miles from the Worth homestead, the singer renews his squirming in Chapman’s grip, moaning around the apple stuck in his craw. His song insists against his gag: Chapman pauses, then steps through its flicker into one possible future. He stands between two monstrous rows of apple trees, the black of their bark absolute, their fruit the biggest he’s ever seen, gold and red and bright green globes of fruit. At the center of the orchard, he watches a gleaming tower climb floor by floor into the sky, his imagination balking at the structure, surely taller than the castles in Eliza Worth’s stories.
“No,” he says, addressing the singer. “This cannot be what will be.”
But what can the singer say?
Nothing, with the apple stuck in his mouth; nothing ever, even if it were removed.
The singer does not speak. He sings.
The faint song changes, the ripple reverses, the flicker steadies: where the bright tower rose, the Worth house now stands.
Chapman hesitates. Here is the lamplit house, here is the orchard of apple trees that’s all that stands between him and the family he has learned to love, the family with whom Chapman doesn’t know if he belongs without his brother to grant him passage, without his human shape to ease his entry. He raises his hands, watches them morph, each transformation part of his unmade decision: he sees his pale hands as a man, then the darker hands of a faun, covered in graying fur; he passes one clawless hand across a hornless forehead even as the clawed other reaches for his whole horn. He stamps a hoof, he stomps a foot; he’s warm within his barked skin and furred flanks, he shivers in naked flesh.
The sun sets. As night falls, Chapman watches the Worths through their windows: Grace playing her fiddle, Jasper reading his holy books, young Eliza beautiful and lovely. After the family extinguishes their lamps, he stalks past the pigs and the goats, his cloven brothers and sisters, all the mute domestics. Never has he thought them kin; always he’s identified with men instead of beasts—as if a man cannot be made a product too, denied his agency; as if his sovereign flesh cannot be bought and broken and put to use.
In the orchard, Chapman crouches over his hooves—hooves sometimes feet—and he uses his hands—hands sometimes clawed—to dig a hole. The orchard is well established, over two decades old now: he has to tear up the grass, rip the sod, claw the rooted, wormy soil below, digging and digging while the leaking singer’s voice keeps his shape turning.
In the end it’s not so much hole, just deep enough for a head.
Chapman puts the singer in, the singer’s head made a seed, his mouth still choked with the apple core, trying desperately to sing as Chapman drops a first handful of earth across its forehead.
“Whatever I did to you in some other life,” Chapman whispers, “I wish I hadn’t.”
The singer doesn’t respond to this apology, only continues to try to sing around the apple core. Chapman covers the head with dirt, packs down the soil. Afterward, his hooves are steadily hooves, his fur stops receding and reseeding; he can still hear the singer’s voice, but just barely—and then mercifully not at all. Still, he wonders what might grow from what he’s planted, here behind the Worth household, here at the center of the first nursery he and Nathaniel seeded in that last easy season many years ago, before their brotherhood was broken for the first time. Will the singer’s song change this place’s potential, as it changed the future of so many others?
“If I cannot gain entry to the Worths’ as I am now,” Chapman whispers, “then maybe someday I can find some other way.”
Above his head, an apple breaks its stem; he catches it easily in one gray-furred paw. He rolls the fruit over, considers its deep golden color, its skin only slightly speckled. Lifting it, he snuffs in its heady ripe scent but doesn’t yet bite the flesh. How many apples has he tasted already? Not as many as he’s planted, not as many as have grown from his labors, but many, many apples. Once he thought one would save him, as if he were the first man in the Garden, or else a boy safe in a story. Trees of Knowledge, Trees of Life and Death, Trees of Forgetting: even in the holiest stories men tell, trees are never allowed to be only trees, they must be temptation or salvation, they must serve as sustenance and instruction and redemption.
This time Chapman doesn’t even eat the apple; instead he digs into it with his thumbs, forcing his fingers past the skin. Scraping out the flesh from under clogged claws, he refuses any expectations of color, refuses the smells he knows, refuses every memory the apple offers. He wants nothing but to be here, to be present and then, afterward, to go on, to let the phenomenal present become the unregretted past. Sweet juice streams down his hands, mats sticky his fur; his skin itches, the ground collects golden fallen peels, chunks of moon flesh. Reaching the wooden part, he forgets its name; beyond it, he forgets not just the apple, but also himself, becoming nothing and no one—but when at last the spell breaks, Chapman looks up from the grave he’s dug, decorated with all the discards of an apple reduced past its parts, to find Eliza Worth standing between the orchard and the house, her mouth widening in horror, readying a terrified scream.
Haloed in moonlight, the faun rises slowly, standing almost a foot taller than he is as
a man. His gray fur rolls lush from his abdomen to his hooves, his denser winter coat already coming in; his skin is dark brown, tanned leather-bark, everywhere unblemished except for the scar over his breast where his brother’s musket ball pierced his chest. He shakes out his hair, swings his horns. As a faun, his craggy face is wider, his mouth is elongated into a snout, his eyes are gold instead of gray, but it is his face, Chapman’s face, the face Eliza’s known.
For the last time, this is the faun entire, the faun no longer pretending.
Eliza Worth is a creature of story too, made of the fairy tales she loves, the myths read and recited until they’re almost her own memories. Chapman is something like her uncle, and in the stories she loves it’s not uncommon for an uncle to transform, to appear in more than one shape, to wear multiple skins. But in reality the moment is too unexpected, the faun in the family orchard too uncanny an encounter for such a rational thought.
Instead of recognizing the Chapman she’s known, his kind features barely submerged beneath this creature’s face, Eliza releases her scream, startling the faun into involuntarily moaning a monstrous reply, the distressed cry of the dumb beast whose shape he most resembles.
Still screaming, Eliza turns, picking up the edge of her nightgown to run barefoot back toward the house. Chapman immediately hears new movement from inside: Jasper and Grace, waking up to the sound of their daughter’s terror. He cannot stay, not as the faun; he must flicker or flee. He tries to change back to the shape Eliza and her parents know best, ready to brush off what she’ll say she saw as imaginative fancy, as walking nightmare.
But now the flicker doesn’t come.
Groaning in distressed disbelief, Chapman grabs his horns, the one horn whole, the other broken where, as a lonely child, he’d tried to remove it, to become like any other boy, to be like his beloved brother.