Appleseed

by John Clute

  ‘Every virtuous homo sapiens flesh sentient thinks so,’ said Freer, pulling at his ponytail; grinning for an instant suddenly, but without any dangerous pheromonal surge. ‘And it is a joy to me that you concur. The Celestial Planisphere, in any case, ended up on Ordinance, the world I have made my home. Some time ago, half a lifetime ago, I was able to obtain the original on extended loan, but confidentially, for reasons of security. It means a great deal to me, as a wanderer. I had thought my attachment to the Planisphere was entirely private, but I seem to have been mistaken.’

  Outside Tile Dance, near space exploded like firecrackers into something that zigzagged like cartoon smoke.

  —Shit, said Freer as the shockwave hit. He swayed in his safeseat, which held on to him.

  —Guidance is collapsing, said Kirtt.

  —Handfast! yelled Freer.

  A thick filament extruded from a flattish dais. A hand took shape at the end of what was quickly becoming an arm. Freer clasped the hand, which was now holding a sword. Kirtt was now free to respond actively within the Law Well sphere, as long as Freer kept in physical contact with the handle.

  Uncle Sam destroyed the Clearance Motor.

  —Vipassana? Freer said.

  —I have taken over pilotage, sang Vipassana alto. —We are about to penetrate heliospace markers, at eighty-nine degrees to the ecliptic, then we will be free of Law Well governors, we will go random pronto. The planetary defences have fired upon us.

  —We have sustained some damage, said Kirtt, —but we maintain integrity.

  —There are disorientation devices at work, said Vipassana. —They seem to be attempting to warp our course back to Trencher. I have solved them profoundly. The solar wind lessens. We near the rim of Law Well.

  —Go! said Freer. —Go! Bye-bye, Mowgli!

  In Ynis Gutrin the tiles began to dance.

  —Let them fall, Mowgli; they are only tears.

  —Through! cried KathKirtt in the voices of a choir.

  The shipmind mask exfoliated into a dozen masks of the commedia, each Janus-faced: each wearing a lion body with the head of a sun which was an eye, a great eye seeming to smile, flyting the cosmos; and a naked woman, her arms and legs outspread to touch the rim of a fiery wheel, grinning fit to kill with wanderlust.

  —Gimme a kiss, said Freer, and whooped ferociously. He continued to grin as though he could not stop. This was the case. He tossed his tithe sigil at an embrasure, which tucked it away. His cache-sex leaped free and began to spin, bee-dancing through the holomaps of Ynis Gutrin.

  Freer did a small buck-naked caper.

  Mamselle Cunning Earth Link’s head disappeared.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said to the quivering torso.

  —Let’s make tracks, said KathKirtt in the full voice of themself.

  —I am turning left, said the Vipassana. —Wormholes abound yonder, I aver.

  As far as any surviving observer on the rent surface of Trencher might have seen through eyescope augments, a diminishing pinpoint of light, already halfway above the wandering moon, spun in pinwheels blindingly, and was gone.

  three

  The bubble at the heart of Tile Dance hummed with tiles whose masks peered out into the world coyly, a Mystick Krewe of digital minds come together in order to parade naked Freer sat in their midst in the glitter of his flesh, which was brighter than porcelain, and which seemed to burn: because of the literal heat of corporeal sentience, and because flesh — within the time frame of an AI’s perception — was grass. Cooler but ardent all the same, the Eolhxiran female sat in her sheltered alcove behind the captain of the ship, one prehensile foot idly juggling a fragment of the demolished Clearance Motor eidolon.

  Behind them, Trencher had become a speck in the eye of its sun; and then disappeared utterly as Vipassana’s random evasion dance carried Tile Dance abruptly slantwise the ecliptic, further into free space, where the wormholes awaited serious voyagers.

  The handfast sword retracted into its polished dais.

  ‘O lamentoso,’ murmured Mamselle Cunning Earth Link a second time, gazing at the pocked region Trencher had once dominated; then fell silent again.

  In humble obedience to the diktats that shaped their welcome servitude, KathKirtt, the Uncle Sam and the Vipassana remained in plain sight, remained tied to their masks for Freer to track in realtime, which is to say they remained naked. Masks, which bound a Made Mind to time and place and the Mardi Gras parade of shape, were not disguises of the flesh for Made Minds, but a submission to exposure. When KathKirtt manifested themself — the immemorial flyting and jack aspects of the full Made Mind conjoined in one Janus mask — they descended into a crippling exile, locked themselves into the tile sepulchre of the world, for flesh is weak; the essence of the bondage of the world is that it strips a Mind of the quantum compact of home and family, so that it is visible naked.

  The theophrasts of the inner stars designate the masking of a Made Mind as a form of kenosis - the ultimately fatal incarnation of the divine into the progeria of mortal flesh. The theophrasts of the inner stars further argue that Alzheimer plaque - the data seizure which seals a world into fixated system deadlock, into an unending cramp of darkness — reflects the reverse process. That plaque is a scar left by the departure of the gods from the universe, and that it is this scar, or vacuum, that gives the universe a charley-horse.

  The theophrasts are wrong.

  All the same — as though ‘divine’ entities were shackled by an inborn tropism, a fatal longing for the bondage of the world — the Made Minds found it strangely thrilling to spreadeagle themselves on the rack of time: to gape through the peepshow eyes of their chosen faces at the meat faces of the mortals to whom they gave suck. To engage in converse through a mask came as close to understanding the paradoxical allure of human sex as a Made Mind was ever likely to attain.

  Only rarely, however, did Made Minds find the temptation to inhabit meat so deep that they loosed the stays of true being, forget themselves in the flesh, became mortal, died of progeria, were reborn into the flesh, died, were reborn like capillaries in brain meat, died, were reborn.

  From the shadowy fluted ceiling dangled, like the vertebrae of a neverending story, long figurative dramas in azulejaria porcelain. The grouting between each glowing blue tile leaked gold enamelling deep into the dramas: tales of intolerable eros typical of Human Earth, accomplished fingers caressing piccolos and bared breasts. The masks resident within the stories stared outward through moist bee- eye-dense embrasured tiles between molten grouts of gold. Flitting from the stories that held them, other masks exfoliated themselves for the nonce to become memes, hiked themselves through the grouting slots, janiform and doppelganger-pale from the prison of the dance of tiles, and into the gimbal-shot free space of Glass Island, where they loured over the scene from fittings atop brass herms, shot antic bat glances around toggles, crouched over a braced scroll beaded with the sweat of attar, through which the Prime Copy of the Universal Book might be accessed ceremonially and at points of crisis.

  —We must speak together, spoke in unison a mask propped against the Book.

  There was a perfumed whutter, like the beating of the wings of giant dusky moths.

  The masks began to morph, a constant, inhumane, scritching transition from one face to another; hurtled themself from aspect to aspect, from one Janus mask to another, in a rhetoric of the weaving of consensus. Faster than a human eye could catch, they gave signs of their never- stopping concourse. A realtime digest of the ongoing conversation, comprising a tiny but uncensored sampling of the teraflop burn of full non-flesh-sentient quantum intercourse, fed like manna into Freer’s sensorium.

  There was a smell of burning leaves.

  —Just a little nervous from the Fall, murmured a Made voice inside Freer.

  —Kath, Rath, dearly beloved, vocalised Freer. —Welcome back. Was that a song of Human Earth from your deep bits?

  —As always, Stinky.

  —I think we should
go acoustic, my dear.

  —Okey dokey.

  ‘Go acoustic,’ he said aloud.

  ‘Okey dokey,’ said KathKirtt.

  ‘Mamselle,’ said Freer, turning in his seat, which resembled leather and turned with him, ‘now that we have safely exited Law Well, may I formally introduce you to KathKirtt, ship Mind of Tile Dance, who are now reunited. They have been patient enough to serve me for many Heartbeats.’

  Cunning Earth Link nodded her tiny head at the mask lying against the Book, whose double page hummed with texts which succeeded each other blurringly, awaiting a request to pause on some single page or volume, epic or summa.

  ‘Abide with us, o, please,’ she said.

  From the mask adorning the tallest herm, KathKirtt gave her one face only: a woman at the nacre heart of a burning wheel which might be mistaken for Ynis Gutrin. This face of Kath then ricocheted glowing through a dozen KathKirtt masks, flooding Glass Island with light.

  Each mask pulsed softly, swiftly, as she passed.

  ‘Hi there,’ they said in a Kath voice, and dimmed.

  ‘I have gone acoustic,’ said Freer to the Eolhxiran Route- Only, ‘because we’re all in the same boat here, and I think we need to try to understand what has been happening over the last few hours. Much has. Much has.’

  He paused, as though reluctant to continue.

  ‘I will begin, mamselle,’ he said finally, ‘by asking you if you enjoyed the show.’

  The Eolhxiran’s four visible breasts flattened.

  ‘Show?’

  ‘Surely you remember,’ said Freer, almost soapily. ‘Back down there on Trencher. Just a few hours ago? The cannibal picnic? The Love Feast of Homo Sap? It must have been right up your alley.’

  He felt himself to be calm but her head began to retract.

  ‘Moi?’ she carolled very softly from nearly inside her neck.

  ‘And the aftermath?’ purred Freer. ‘Surely you enjoyed the Attack of the Grunt Sigilla. Surely you delectated the Killer Rage of the Cornered Freebooter, I mean myself, sweetling.’

  ‘Moi?’ whispered again the Route-Only in a bird voice.

  ‘Toi, sweetling,’ said Freer. ‘Recollect, if you will, my unhappiness at being trapped in-planet. Contract delay? Route-Only still missing, but not really, I guess, mamselle? Premonitions of plaque? Insort blendo jam? And no Clearance Motor for love or money? Finally Kirtt icepicks a spare out of the fuckhead planetary minds’ defence plaque. Fuckhead planet minds using fucking dead-data mazes as mithridatics to fucking gandydance profound fucking Alzheimer trauma, fucking useless. Fuckheads,’ he murmured absently, giving her time to regain her balance.

  He had hawk eyes. They scryed Mamselle as prey.

  On the control centre monitors, through the dance of masks, a circumambient model of n-space gave an online purport of the random lunges of Tile Dance into the backdrop seethe of stars of interstellar space, while at the same time it traced the last spasms of Trencher’s planetary defences as they punched erratically through the fading solar wind and — terminally violating relevant treaties — through Law Well boundary where the heliosphere began, shaking the fabric of space, but missing the smooth archaic ship, now fully Minded.

  —Fuckheads, chorused KathKirtt.

  —We are one light-year out, crooned Vipassana from a spinning Planisphere. —See.

  In the centre of control centre, a hologram sphere formed, an analogue of the memory-theatre atriums and council chambers and labyrinths and performances-in-the-round and harlequinades of conclave space, ready to become ‘real’ at the stroke of a menu, whether a mind’s-eye menu, or a Teardrop function, or a menu clutched in the palm of a handfast in literal space. At the moment, the sphere had become a globe of space with Trencher throbbing at stage centre. An intricate red line gave the history of Tile Dance’s evasion pattern; its red tip jerked suddenly, recording a leap sideways.

  On Teardrop a menu-laced analogue of the globe gradually smoothed down: Tile Dance was beginning to get some elbow room.

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  The screens confirmed that the last speedlined runic thrust of the ship had taken her out of the ken of anything left on Trencher capable of tracking an escaper.

  —That was good, that was indeed very good, sang the Vipassana voice calmly. —We have been here since exactly when we were. We are utterly where we are. We shall be where we’re going. We will go profoundly.

  —And the devil knows who I’ll marry, murmured Kath. —Profoundly.

  Freer leaned towards Cunning Earth Link.

  ‘My apologies, mamselle,’ he said. ‘We were distracted. Allow me to continue. Just shortly before the first Insort ark lost control and hit, I had left Tile Dance, at Kirtt’s suggestion, as there was nothing for me to do on board. And because Kirtt, who ill-advisedly thought he could maintain a safelink with me, wanted to see what fire I might draw. Right, Kirtt?’

  —Wise seedling! boomed KathKirtt through a krewe of masks.

  ‘So I decided to disembark, take in a homo sapiens genitalia masque. More or less at random, I thought. But almost as soon as I arrived the shit began to freeze. I activated my Sniffer immediately, scoped the scene, noticed in the audience an extremely unusual sigillum whose livery I had never previously encountered - natty blue, smooth and sweet, four tits, toi, toi, toi, toi. Were you not there? Were you not riding your sigillum?’

  —You’re beginning to emanate, Stinky, said Kirtt. —We’ll get nowhere this way.

  ‘And later, in the Arcade of the Glory of Trencher, were you not there too?’

  —Cool it, Stinky, or she’ll shrivel.

  —Check, said Freer. He sighed.

  ‘Mamselle,’ he said, ‘I must assume you were riding.’

  ‘Aye I rode,’ said Cunning Earth Link, straightening herself at last. ‘Bungling downwards into the shivery halls of Trencher Underneath I rode sigillum, sirrah, kaboom, kaboom, a Valkyrie, a wisenheimer. I followed the traceries of your course, sure! Dead easy! You and Kirtt do kaffeeklatch! Gab gab gab gab! I followed you like Huck Finn follows the Mississippi, just as in preternaturally Old Book of era of your empathy choice on Human Earth in Universal Book.’

  The Book obeyed the hint, rendered a facsimile of the first page of paper of the original text.

  ‘So you got me dead to rights!’ Mamselle concluded.

  She spread her palms, with their tiny vestigial eyes.

  ‘Though imagine me!’ she pealed.

  She raised her arms into a ballerina’s sweat-drenched pause. ‘Shivering with anxious joy, behold me, sure! O enormous masculine sophont of dead Earth,’ she continued, ‘bucking the bronco sigillum into badlands, “An Indian blanket on a pony with no rider in the flesh and bone lookin’ for his buffalo river home”, as the poet says in the sagacious Book. Agog with flush was I, you can altogether bet! Seeing you in the skin that wears those mighty bones! That was scrumptious. That was lagniappe. But reck you, O striking figure of a man, that such solace of the senses was my purpose down below? Nix! Reck you not how dire our need has been to keep you safe? O candlestick of flesh! quoth I inerrantly though in Trencher’s extremis, you stay hale now!’

  ‘That has the sound of a kindly thought. But it cuts no ice.’ He paused. ‘Who are you? Why ever should we let you live?’

  ‘I am your transitus tessera, sirrah. I am your ticket to ride, ho ho. Into regions unknown.’

  Freer’s eyes widened involuntarily.

  KathKirtt stilled within their masks.

  Cunning Earth Link flinched, her head sank inside its carry-all neck.

  ‘Unknown?’ Freer said softly.

  ‘Unknown to hoi-polloi, I mean. Unknown to riff-raff! Deeply familiar to me, natch, your savvy Route-Only!’

  Through the screens swelled the seethe of stars.

  ‘So tell me, Mamselle Cunning Earth Link,’ said Freer, slowly and clearly, ‘just when did you guys discover Eolhxir?’

  There was a silence.

  The krewe
watched.

  ‘I am plenipotentiary rep of glitterati of my ilk who settled Eolhxir,’ said Cunning Earth Link, finally opening her eyes, ‘it seems like yesterday.’

  —Hah, thrummed the newly awoken KathKirtt.

  The masks whirled faster than ever before.

  ‘Thank you, Mamselle Transitus Tessera Cunning Earth Link, Plenipotentiary Rep of the Glitterati of the Ilk,’ said Freer. ‘Perhaps we are beginning to get somewhere at last. So. How long ago was yesterday?’

  ‘Ever so recent, penetrating sophont! Twenty-five Million Heartbeats ago, could that be right? Seems like yesterday! Hi ho! Maybe more! We are peregrine remnants, you see, we do waif biota jobs. Kitchen help! Like you, once upon a time! But ever so less numerous. Look I show you!’

  From a midriff cavity she extracted a small cube.

  ‘I invoke holy data cube!’ she pealed.

  The krewe stilled suddenly.

  —I do so love a story, sighed Kath.

  ‘We grant sanctuary,’ said Freer. ‘Tell us a story.’

  Mamselle turned to place the cube into a slot beneath a matrix of waiting screens.

  ‘Hold a minute,’ said Freer.

  Mamselle’s head-tuft shrank into a wee puce dolmen.

  But he wore a child’s smile.

  ‘As long as you are telling us the truth,’ he said with a thespian twinkle, like a stage uncle consoling a niece, ‘there’s nothing to worry about. Sacred is the new.’

  He gave a conjuror’s wave.

  Out of a sudden aperture in the sandalwood floor appeared a free-standing plastic cabinet, with a small oval screen fitted into its front. It looked like glass. Freer leaned over and caressed a row of knobs on a plexiglass panel below the screen. He turned one knob clockwise. There was an audible click.

  He grinned quickly, joyously.

  It was a television set from his era of empathy choice.

  After several seconds the screen began to give off a whitish glow. There was a sound of static.

  ‘Please,’ he said, and Mamselle handed him the cube, which he inserted into the top of the cabinet.

  The masks of the krewe began to swirl again, circling the head of their flesh sapient, tossing as though in a wind that blew without sound through Ynis Gutrin, and settled in a circle around the television set, like small children around a campfire in the night, awaiting a story.