by Matt Bell
“You’re making a mistake,” E says, steadily closing the distance between them. “You’re making everything worse than it has to be.”
Let me go, C wants to say, but every word would cost him a step, every utterance a gesture. He plunges forward, the tree dragging behind the flesh.
He knows he won’t escape. But better to die on his feet, on his hooves, within his tree.
Better than on his back, waiting for the dwarves to carve him up.
The corridor is barely lit, the way ahead darker than the way behind. E’s green glow follows faster than C can move, but there isn’t enough of her to stop him, her swarm worn thin. He stomps on. The end of the corridor approaches, a closed hatch blocking the way forward. What lies beyond—another hallway like this one, corridors leading to more corridors?
“Stop,” E says, her glow passing him, her face turning to float before his, her swarm backpedaling without touching the ground. “John, stop this.”
But he’s not John, won’t follow orders like John would have.
“I don’t want to die,” C says, gasping out the words, unable to avoid the mistake. Each word a step lost, a diminishment of the possible moves left to him.
“You won’t die,” she says, her shape shattering. “You’ll live on, safe in your own swarm. Inside me are all the voices of man and woman and child, every Volunteer who trusted me to get them to the future. All those promises, thinning but not gone: Are we not there, in the future? In the swarm, I hear every voice simultaneously, we share everything equally.”
C doesn’t remember who E was but he recognizes what’s left of her will. He trudges onward, stubborn to the last. E’s swarm becomes hundreds of mites, beetles, and bees, here and there something naming itself a worm: they land on C’s face, his neck, his branches, go scurrying through his leaves. Her face is reduced to a glowing jawbone, a suggestion of lips parting, teeth and tongue visible, the rest of the skull vanished. “You are not your body,” she says. “When you’re out of your rung, you won’t be alone anymore. All of you, all the different selves you were, the lives you lived, they’ll be distinct voices, one bot for every you there ever was. Together we’ll be so many people, we can be all of humanity together.”
You are not your body, E says, but C doesn’t believe her. He isn’t only part creature, part tree; he’s flesh and blood, plastic and steel. Outside of this body, who would he be? A ghost who remembers being a man, a creature, a tree, a beetle or a bee? He tries to shake his head but it barely moves, his neck stiffened by a new wooden protrusion poking against his trachea, straining his speech.
“No,” he says, his good knee weakening, threatening to tumble him to the floor. “No,” his voice flattening into despair. The tree he tried to save, the tree he brought E? He believes it’s what she hoped for too, all these years. What she’s been waiting for. What everyone inside her has been waiting to see, new life. So why can’t she see what he sees? Why can’t she let it alone, let it live as it wants, planted in his flesh?
E says, “You can’t escape. Your flight ends the moment I will it. This vain attempt, is it for you or for the tree? C, the tree will survive better without you.”
He tries to speak but cannot: I am the ground the tree lives in, he wants to say. I am the only earth the tree knows, and I do not want to let it go.
But now he asks himself: What does the tree want?
Only the tree is him. He might as well ask: What do I want?
But he’s never truly known the answer to that question. Not in any of his many lives.
E’s swarm lifts off C’s body to re-form a mouth already clicking and whistling. The dwarves climb out of the grates in the floors, out of hatches into tunnels leading to nowhere C has ever seen. Within seconds they’re bounding on all fours, running on their knuckles to leap atop him. He struggles, but only with the half of him that’s flesh, resisting now with curled fist and flailing hoof. He punches at one dwarf, he kicks another, but it’s not enough. The dwarves pile on, their naked weight overwhelming his waning strength, dragging him down, the tree breaking against the concrete, the sludgy red blood-sap leaking, the blinding pain of bark flush with nerves breaking apart. In one of the dwarf’s gnarled hands, C sees a branch, strained and almost snapped—and on the branch, he sees something new, something he didn’t know was there: the first unripe fruit his tree has ever grown.
He moans, he bucks and squirms, he stops, gives in, gives up.
When C wakes from the dwarves’ surgery he is half machine, or more than half, his mind at home in the less than half of who he was that’s flesh: the remaining arm, the leg, the hoof, the ruined torso covered in bandages, threaded with tubes and wires; the bark of him removed and replaced with a printed shell stapled to the skull, his swelling brain pushing at its unaccommodating cages, one bone and one plastic, both prisons of apparently unending pain.
The tree is cut from his body, but not gone. All this time he’d misunderstood, had thought the tree had been something separate, something growing out of him, not a new part of him that’s also him.
Now C is the human-enough creature strapped to the bed, flesh riddled with machinery, dying, a body being prepped for the scanner.
Now he is the tree, floating in its new habitat, its bloody roots replanted in chemical soil, a bed of prepared dirt and biomass.
He hears the scuttling of beetle legs against a glass jar, knows their legs are his legs; he feels a rush of recycled air moving through his mossy blades of purple grass, replanted all around the tree’s severed trunk.
The next morning, he watches E’s green glow circle the tree, her shape nearly incorporeal, all her swarm summoned to substantiate a hand with which to pick a single fruit, ripened overnight upon the tree C once was, still is.
C knows when E leaves the chamber where the dwarves have planted the tree; he waits for her to float into the operating theater, her form reduced to a hand holding something almost an apple. In its chamber, the tree grieves its missing fruit; in doing so it learns absence, a letting go, an end to the joy of how when the apple was connected to its branch it was both tree and not tree, a future connected to the present by the slimmest of stems. Now the fruit is set apart: the apple darkest red, its glowing skin soft velvet; its stem thorned, the thorns spiraled into tight horns; its stem leafed, E bearing two of C’s leaves back to him.
In the recovery room, E puts the apple in C’s only hand, closing his furred fingers around the fuzzy fruit, his claws gently denting the apple’s skin.
E’s shape shimmers, the hand evaporating as the body and face solidify. Floating beside his bed, amid the hums and beeps of his life support machines, she says, “Let me tell you a story.” Her buzzing weight shifts nearer, a shape almost a woman’s, her voice tickling his one remaining ear. “In the Garden,” she says, “there were many trees, but only one Tree. And on this Tree there grew an apple just like this one. There was an apple in the Garden, and there was a creature, a creature like you. The creature had been forbidden to eat the apple, but by whom, for what reason? Perhaps the price of eating the apple was the creature’s death; perhaps it was the doom of his world. But maybe none of those prohibitions lasted. Maybe one day the creature found himself past the end of the story into which he’d been born. Maybe all the gods who made the rules, all who’d watched and judged the creature, maybe all those gods were gone. Maybe now the creature was free to eat whatever it wanted. And so the creature—the creature who is also a man—makes a choice. Afterward, no matter what happens, surely the world doesn’t end. The world lives, even if the creature, last of his kind, even if by making his choice he comes to die.”
E takes the fruit from C’s weakening hand before it falls to the floor. “You choose,” she says, lifting the fruit to his mouth. “Choose,” she says, forcing it against his lips, its rough hairs tickling what’s left of his bristly beard.
C chooses. He squeezes his empty fist weakly, just enough to send John’s recovered virus surging out of hi
s rung and into the air to infect E’s swarm, the program entering her bots through a backdoor designed centuries ago, a security flaw never patched in any new design. This is the sure end of human intelligence, an ending delayed only until the bots that make up E’s last body fade and fail: never again will she be able to transfer her consciousness to another swarm, another body. When the virus finishes its undetected upload, her face flashes then temporarily goes dark; after her glow returns, she smiles her wolfish smile, that once famous grin made momentarily uncertain. Nervously, she offers the apple ever more persistently against C’s mouth, pressing its fur against his teeth.
“Choose,” E insists—but C already has—“Choose,” she thunders—and in the end, C eats the apple—
Or else he doesn’t.
Either way, at the center of the apple, he worries he’s the worm.
Epilogue
See the great Tree, kept sequestered beneath the Mountain only until the weather above shifts and the great snows slow, until the ground beyond the gate can be properly prepared, its crust broken and tilled, irrigated and fed nutrients collected long ago. All this costs precious time, but the Tree might live a thousand years, it might live five thousand years or ten—surely the Tree will live as long as it’s needed. After its final planting, it ages onward unmolested and untended, freed at last to become whatever it will, in soil nourished by rainwater and snowmelt, its thorned boughs lifting its leaves toward the brightening sun; decade by decade it grows into a massive tower of crooked black branches budding ever more feathery blossoms, producing ever more bountiful harvests of glowing red-furred fruit softly illuminating the many seedlings and saplings soon growing among the columnar monoliths and the sharp black obelisks, all those old warnings slowly being undone by the Tree’s creeping suckers, by its bloody roots digging down, breaking bedrock, churning dead clay into future soil. Bright beetles buzz by on the fragrant breezes above the Tree’s flowers, building waxy hives and papery nests in the hollows of its trunks; later generations give up their wings, preferring to crawl through the spreading purple-grass prairie or to dig beneath the Tree’s roots, spawning new species to evolve into every empty niche. Every passing year the sky above turns a bluer shade of blue, and on the brightest summer days the melting mountain snowpack sends clean cold water coursing down the slopes to carve new spillways and new pools, to replenish dried-up lakes and ancient aquifers.
The gate leading underground is left gaping, its black maw leading into a past from which a final few machines emerge, tilling ever wider spirals of desert ahead of the coming monsoon rains. As late as a century after the Tree is planted before the Mountain, two pale green ghosts sometimes still move among its offspring, at last wanting nothing from them. One ghost is horned and hooved, planting his steps while the other floats, her bare feet trailing beneath the hem of her gossamer dress, pretend fabric wavering in the real wind; this green-glowing faun and brightly lit nymph are two minds sharing the same swarm, pausing often to listen to the droning keening that leaks from the monoliths, a voice once believed to be able to sing many futures into being, including this new hope the ghosts begrudgingly accept was never meant for them.
Finally every digging machine runs down, every monolith crumbles, dismantled by the Tree and its offspring. When the last monolith goes, the song stops. In the quiet that follows the ghosts fade and flicker out too, their voices vanishing one bot at a time, until there’s only the sweet wind breathing through the leaves of the many young trees, only the buzzings of the abundance of beetles they support and the rustling of new species of grasses in their shade; and sometime after that last hour of the ghosts there follows the unwitnessed clamor and glory of the Tree’s apples thumping to the ground one after another, more furred apples than ever before rolling through purple-blooded grass, each bright-gleaming fruit full of seeds, each seed flush with potential, carrying within it all the many trees and not trees coming next, enough living variety to one day spawn a newly sprawling splendor, a beginning born of a forgetting, not an orchard of human want but a forest set free, a forest endlessly desiring to plant itself a world.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my editor, Katherine Nintzel, whose keen talent improved this novel in innumerable ways; to Eliza Rosenberry, Molly Gendell, Nancy Tan, Angela Boutin, Ploy Siripant, and everyone else I’ve had the pleasure of working with at Custom House; and to my agent, Kirby Kim, whose constant championing of my work has made so much possible.
Thank you to all my friends who aided my writing here, with special thanks to Anne Valente, Joseph Scapellato, and Gregory Howard, for their sustaining long-distance conversations; to Amber Sparks, for being my first reader and for her invaluable encouragement; to Travis Franks, for his counsel, especially on issues of settler colonialism; to Mark Doten, for celebrating with me in the hours after I finished writing the first draft of this book and for all his wisdom over the past decade; and to Ron Broglio and Jeffrey Cohen, for so much, including our regular Wednesday afternoons at Tops, where so many invaluable conversations were had.
Thank you to the Vermont Studio Center, where I wrote much of this novel’s last act in what will likely be the most intense week of writing I’ll ever experience. Thank you to all my students and colleagues at Arizona State University, especially those in my two novel writing classes; Ed Finn and Joey Escrich at the Center for Science and the Imagination; and Leah Newsom, who co-taught a crucial class on climate fiction and eco-fabulism with me. Thank you to Bradford Morrow at Conjunctions and Kaj Tanaka at Gulf Coast, for generously publishing excerpts from Appleseed while it was still in progress.
Thank you most of all to my wife, Jessica, for her unequaled love and support, and for her great affection for nature, expressed in her photography, her volunteering and advocacy work, and her continuing education as a naturalist and a birder. I’m so lucky to be a witness to her care for our wild places and for everything that inhabits them, and to spend countless hours alongside her exploring and enjoying the natural world we both love.
Appleseed, like all novels, owes innumerable debts to the books and writings of others. For instance, one moment in Chapman’s final chapter is a retelling of Jack Gilbert’s poem “Hunger”; earlier, a settler Chapman meets gives a speech adapted from a passage in R. Douglas Hurt’s The Ohio Frontier. The author John quotes but can’t quite remember is Wendell Berry, whose The Unsettling of America was a major influence; similarly, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine provided the framework I needed for designing that timeline’s political upheaval. The obstacles C-433 faces in his final approach to Black Mountain were inspired by the Sandia National Laboratories report titled “Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant,” authored by Kathleen M. Trauth, Stephen C. Hora, and Robert V. Guzowski. Finally, thanks to Michael Pollan, whose recounting of the legend of Johnny Appleseed in his The Botany of Desire provided the imaginative spark that set me down the path of this novel.
About the Author
MATT BELL is the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods as well as the short-story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a nonfiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. A native of Michigan, Bell teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
appleseed. Copyright © 2021 by Matthew Bell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this
text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Frontispiece © starostov/stock.adobe.com
Cover design by Ploy Siripant
Cover illustrations © ivan-96/Getty Images (apple); © bauhaus1000/Getty Images (tree); © arbalet/Shutterstock (globe); © Artistdesign29/Shutterstock (circuit board); © Studio Photo MH/Shutterstock (bee)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bell, Matt, 1980- author.
Title: Appleseed : a novel / Matt Bell.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Custom House, [2021]
Identifiers: LCCN 2020050897 (print) | LCCN 2020050898 (ebook) | ISBN 9780063040144 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780063040151 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780063090385 | ISBN 9780063040168 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3602.E64548 A86 2021 (print) | LCC PS3602.E64548 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050897
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050898
Digital Edition JULY 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-304016-8
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-304014-4
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