by John Clute
This felt uncanny.
It felt as though the pianist were in fact not a dance of pixels in a bubble, but a live being in real time, staring through the light-years from Trencher at his target.
—Lock!
The pianist froze, still gazing across the light-years through the Sniffer record on the hologram at Freer.
Freer stared at the dirty, slightly puckish face.
The frozen pianist stared back.
Fear gripped at Freer. He could not source it.
—Augment, he said.
Everything slowed around him. KathKirtt stayed in synch, as did the Uncle Sam spider in his eye.
Freer fixed his augmented gaze on the image of the pianist from light-years back.
Nothing was revealed.
The frozen image of the pianist stared back without a flicker.
Freer breathed out.
The pianist did not flicker.
And then one eye closed in a wink.
—Abort! Freer screamed.
Tile Dance cachinnated in a dozen tongues.
As they died, KathKirtt wiped the image.
The hologram blacked out.
—Silent running, said Freer and shut his eyes.
The spider bloated.
Something stung Freer.
The two flesh sentients aboard Tile Dance, Stinky Freer and Cunning Earth Link, were now deeply unconscious. The Sniffer, which had opened its ghost snout to howl, quietened utterly. The two flesh sentients were immediately coated in something like bubble foam. Freer’s face could be seen for an instant, and Mamselle’s topknot; and then — at Uncle Sam’s command — the floor opened beneath them and they sank into the literal heart of the ship, which had stilled, where they were coffined. They were utterly silent to the universe.
Uncle Sam inverted himself into a dot and blanked.
The masks hung lifeless.
Tile Dance drifted along a course set by Vipassana.
A week passed.
Freer opened his eyes.
The utter darkness was paling slowly.
Something translucent scrimmed his gaze, then lifted.
—Ship? he mouthed, tasting something sweet.
—Awake, crooned a voice that might have been Vipassana’s.
Freer was rising from the heart of Tile Dance, he could feel the arterial pulse, the bone chant of the inner chambers, the warm intestinal umbraculae of the inner workings of the ancient ship, through which he ascended. He rose into Ynis Gutrin, where his hands held the reins of the ship.
The Mystical Krewe gave out gazes, a commedia of mask grimaces.
—You called? sang KathKirtt. —Silent running program has terminated. We are all here again.
—O my dear, said Freer softly. —You died. I felt you die.
—That was KathKirtt who died, Stinky. We are KathKirtt who are reborn. We are backup. We have lost one thousand seconds. Tell me why KathKirtt died, Stinky. Why did you abort us?
—I think KathKirtt self-aborted before I could order them to do so, KathKirtt. Though I did issue the abort command as fast as humanly possible. We were examining an image from the heart of KathKirtt, an image from many hours earlier, under absolute lock. We had run it through all the standard debugging. There were no viruses. It was the face of a man. We froze the image, and then something very frightening happened. The man winked at me. KathKirtt had been infiltrated. KathKirtt! In realtime!
—We were right to die.
—I grieve for the thousand seconds.
—Thank you, Stinky, said the ship Mind. —We too grieve for one thousand seconds of the universe. For what we learned, and no longer know.
There was a silence.
—Have you backed up? said Freer.
He almost felt he was going to blush.
—Yes, Stinky, we have bred backup, who now sleep one thousand seconds downtime, trailing us through the mists, holding for dear life to the arrow of Time, awaiting to awake to us, if we need to die. We are now entirely KathKirtt again, minus the thousand seconds. Tell us about the pianist. We have no memory of anything after the ark assault. Is there anything I have missed which affects our decision to continue our course to Klavier?
—We have no choice. You are wounded.
KathKirtt’s silence was assent.
The Planisphere evinced a cartographic alertness.
—So. Vipassana. Where are we?
—Absolutely here, sang Vipassana, pointing.
All the signs agreed. They had come a great distance in one week. They had entered the flow of Maestoso Tropic, heading west, toward the centre of the galaxy. The sky was full of ships. Station Klavier lay in the centre of the screens, half a light-year down, purplish orange and swollen, like a great fruit. The surface of the planetoid was crazed and mottled, as though coigns of vantage of a maze of infinite complexity within the skin of Klavier pocked into space from below. It was as though Klavier itself was mazed from view, hedged from raw access.
—It generates its own illumination, murmured Freer.
—Predecessor fingerprint, sang KathKirtt.
Kath ululated suddenly from her jack mask, perhaps joyously.
Kirtt seemed to Freer to hush her.
A sudden odour of moth wings filled the senses.
An arrow of light suddenly flashed on the comm screen, linking the ship to the growing globe.
A voice followed.
‘Welcome to Station Klavier, sonny.’
‘May we have visual?’ said Freer.
‘Sure thing.’
The screen turned flat and Technicolor.
A visage with a vast bulging forehead scowled at them from a hot cloud.
‘Shit,’ said Freer.
He was too tired to grin.
— Wizard of Oz, he vocalised to KathKirtt. —Human Earth cinema.
—Check.
—Make me Dorothy.
Dorothy stared defiantly at the screen.
Toto barked from her earring.
The screen growled like a thunderhead, the fog dissolved.
A geezer sat on a porch. He was wearing what looked like a tin pot on his head, with a circlet of flashing lights.
Suddenly the image focused on his face.
‘Welcome to Station Klavier, sonny,’ said the pianist again. ‘And twice welcome, noble Made Mind. Sorry about the thousand seconds. What can we do you for?’
—I knew it, vocalised Freer. —Up shit creek. All the sphincters are shut. We might as well deal.
‘Service and repairs,’ said KathKirtt acoustically to the grizzled pianist. ‘And we have a pregnant topiary parthogenete in deep sleep. Our greenhouse may be inadequate.’
‘Seedlings always welcome. Bring him/her in.’
‘Okey dokey,’ said the ship Mind.
KathKirtt drank the flood of data they needed to join the dance of ships englobing Station Klavier.
The pianist disappeared with a wave.
Like a tracer shot from the sparkling strand of Maestoso Tropic, Tile Dance began to fall into the world maze, which would swallow it from view.
four
At ten thousand kilometres, something happened. The self-generated glow that had illuminated Station Klavier softly from within suddenly sharpened. Like a magic lantern in the heart of the interstellar dark, the station shone bright orange.
It was grinning.
—O Great, murmured Freer, —Pumpkin. I never gave up, you know.
—Hush, hummed KathKirtt. —This is not a retrovirus show. Something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, Stinky.
—Nor have we ever seen the like (said Kirtt).
—Never have we seen the like (said Kath).
—Before now (they pealed)!
—Guide us down, then, said Freer, and sat in his command cocoon staring in silence as they approached the orange, gnarly world. From this distance, Station Klavier seemed impenetrable. A molten waxy maze of skin curtained its interior from view. Fierce whiskers of
hardened skin climbed kilometres high from the surface, baffling the gaze.
As Tile Dance fell closer, several arks were visible to the naked eye below them in close orbit, reflecting the Hallowe’en glow of the planetoid like tubby moons. Smaller ships zipped here and there, firefly-sudden in the new light from within the world. Farther out, two or three worm- hole scryers from the intergalactic rim scuttled widdershins, skidding like waterbugs around the fiery meniscus of orbit, as was their wont and privilege; their mirror probosces and their daddy-long-leg bodies caught the light from below, reflected it blindingly. In a safe distant orbit, far above Tile Dance, a hive ship loafed, full of its tourist. Tile Dance toppled on, past the arks and scryers, the solo coffins and candleships and hoi-polloi freighters, fell like a loaded bee downwards to the hive.
Closer in, the mottled orange surface of Station Klavier became increasingly hard to perceive as a whole, became perplexingly riddled and ruddy, pockmarked, trompe l’oeil. It was as though a dozen layers of skin, each skin tattooed with a different map of the territory, vied for the same patch of surface, jostling the rotundity of the world. Paths and peaks and abysses and hedges fought for lebensraum; cavities swelled jack-in-the-box into groins; guillotines of flaming wax carved rivers down the scalded flanks of spanking-new Matterhorns; floes calved into diamond- bright waters which sank into the depths; nacreous mouths pursed around spindles of black diamond ice; eyeholes coughed teeth like fireworks into vacuum. The skin of the planetoid had become an Arcimboldo cuirass, a vast swarming kaleidoscopic shape it would surely be fatal to intersect. The true Klavier lay somewhere within, impenetrable, occluded from outer darkness by the umbraculae of its skins.
—There’s no port here, said Freer finally.
—Shantih, crooned Vipassana in a voice whose pitch was absolute, —we are coming in.
Freer held still. He could feel his heart pound.
Then it happened.
They were a hundred kilometres out, and falling still. There was no way in.
Then it opened.
The gold gaudy world-girding net of skins upon skins burst open into bloom, hieroglyph-laden parchments made of world flaming outwards.
Klavier lay open, a flower open to the bee.
Flecked with light, Tile Dance fell nearer.
Freer could see access gaps grinning suddenly through the candy puncheon teeth of the world, shafts of light shining through palimpsests of flaming worldskin starwards, fire-stained cathedrals of light aspiring to the regions where all buildings fish and can never go. Spiked stalagmite spines bloomed into trumpets that shot great whole notes across the sharp horizon in riffs he could not hear, but bones felt. Mouths vaster than arks, whose pearly teeth were larger than hotels and populous with waving indigenes, gaped in unison, barbershop. The skin of Station Klavier had opened its thousand gates.
There was a liquid flash.
Something from deep inside a vast hollow in the world shifted and exploded dozens of kilometres upwards. Suddenly Tile Dance was buoyed within a vast chandelier bubble of something like air cascading.
—Pure Predecessor landing rites, chorused KathKirtt, —for those of imperial merit. As we know from bootleg benthos data. Before your time, Freer. This is not simulated.
Sensors showed Tile Dance rocking softly in the bosom of the deep.
—Shit, said Freer.
His earring panted.
—Nix, Stinky, sang KathKirtt. —All shall be well.
—All (murmured Kath) shall be well.
—All manner of things shall be well (they sang).
—Why?
—Klavier Station (they sang) goes back all the way. It goes back to the light. Look next for faces. Look for faces. You will find them.
The bubble sank downwards into a crystal mouth.
They were inside.
Around them, in the twinkling of an eye, the star- confounding fires became faces, as KathKirtt had foretold, a thousand faces, a thousand thousand. Vast bearded laughing faces fleshed into sight out of luminous parchment that became their skin, glowed, gazed, winked upwards at the stars. Face intersected face, face mirrored face, face knotted into face until all the faces became one hieroglyph of faces gazing upwards. A thousand mouths, larger than any ship, wreathed in holly, began to laugh. Vast oaten chins dangled rune-rich beards of tile-bright yew kilometres deep into the interstices of inner Klavier, and the deeper these spines of yew extended into Klavier the bigger Klavier became, as in a dream Freer had more than once awoken from weeping. In the dream, he was a figurine of porcelain in a maze of light, one of whose corridors darkened into the fluted coral chambers of a spiral staircase, which was the inside of a cornucopia tiled with story, and which grew larger the further he climbed, and made the sound of an ocean, and lo! he was peering through the crown of a great Tree, for he had in fact been climbing upside down. Here are the roots of the Tree (a voice said in his ear), once made of time, made now of weather. Help (scoffed the voice) if you can, little marmoset. What big eyes you have! Tell me (said the voice, diminishing into the cackle of a crone) a story.
—Once upon a time, murmured the Mind to their charge, —a very small boy fell into a very long sleep.
Freer’s bones shook of their own accord.
Tile Dance descended into greater darknesses, finer light; navigated around dense knots, vaster than arks, where eleven spinal tongues of yew joined in rosetti gossipings and made a shaft which spun; slid downwards, guided by tendrils of iron-hard odorous yew. The shadow of a vast bee darkened the ship, then lifted. They passed deeper. Drenched in hieroglyphs as radiant as tiles, the interlaced yew spines of the deep interior of Klavier gave off an umbral Christmas glow. The light within the world seemed resinous.
There was a soft jolt, and a thrumming through the ship, Herms trembled, toggles glowed their alerts, nine hand- fasts (one for each cornice) throbbed on their dais. It felt as though some portal in the knot had opened inwards and docked Tile Dance within some antechamber next to the engine of the world.
There was no movement.
The silence they sat in was like an odour.
—What is happening to us? said Freer.
—We have docked, sang KathKirtt. —We have docked in a Predecessor cathedral called Klavier Station. We have been accorded the full panoply of an imperial welcome.
—As though we were Kings of Orient Are (hummed Kath).
—We are absolutely here, crooned reverently the Made Mind of absolute location.
—Why? said Freer. —Why us?
—Not us, sang KathKirtt. —You.
—Fuck that. And ‘Are’, said Freer, —is a verb. We, who happen to be these Three Kings of Orient, are getting close to Christ, Kath.
The bee-eye net of monitors around Freer’s command cocoon had expanded, joined together into a single seamless gaze facing everywhere, so that he now stood like a polished figurine in the middle of a glass island in the middle of the world. Tile Dance had inserted itself like a seed or bead of sap into a knothole or crater whose seamed enclosing walls protruded from a great intricately inscribed spine of yew, which continued to descend in crazed channels, winding around an abyssal central shaft, which itself curved grandly out of sight beneath his feet, spiralling downwards to a gold mosaic netting kilometres below that marked (a voice said in his ear) the beginning of core country, where the Predecessor throne room, which lay at the heart of any Predecessor cathedral like Klavier, might be found. Somewhere deep within Klavier, there would be found an amber room of modest size, its walls bedisened with images of a race whose gaze was smoothly abrupt, whose gem-hung necks turned sharply in what may have been a formal dance on floors whose mosaic tiles were a map of the galaxy Ten Trillion Heartbeats ago, and the tiles on the walls told the stories that beat time to the map, like the children of Human Earth stepping between cracks in the pavement. There would be eleven dancers dancing. From the centre of the room would rise a throne in the shape of a rune, and by the throne a stone, and in the
stone a sword.
The walls of the abyss were webbed with veins that ran in every direction, nurturing the spines that wound down from above. Through enamelled portals in the walls of the abyss could be seen blazing corridors, so large a ship could enter them; they curved out of sight around the curve of the world, and laughing faces gazed back through the peepholes; a great gold lynx eye winked. Above him, a maze of intertwining yew arched upwards, joined with its fellows into a porous mosaic of root and leaf; it was, perhaps, the bottom of the roof of the world, the azulejaria beneath the world; naves and cupolas pocked it, as though he were gazing upwards at the ceilings of a hundred cathedrals. Through great apertures far above light shone, green as sun-shot leaves, apple-green.
He blinked.
His perspective reversed suddenly. He saw that the cathedrals were innards. They were the inside of the surface. They were the innards of the uncounted face-masks whose populous eyeholes gazed, like pilchards in a star-gazey pie, through the waxy outer skins of Station Klavier, at the stars.
The doorbell rang.
—I did not know we had a doorbell, said Freer, turning away at last from the thunder of all that was visible in the window that wrapped him.
—We do now. Somebody wished to ring it.
—So answer the door.
—It is done.
Teardrop showed that a sigillum had already made entry, and was now climbing the lacquered spiral passage upwards into command country, which opened for it.
It came inside.
It wore the aspect of the pianist, and his tin pot. Except for a scanty cache-sex, and the multicoloured pack hoisted over its back, it was stark naked. It wore no tithe sigil. It was extremely dirty.
Being a sigillum, it maintained eye contact with Freer.
‘Greetings,’ said the sigillum in the pianist’s clipped archaic drawl. ‘Welcome to Natchez Trace hostelry, Station Klavier. Welcome, noble Made Minds KathKirtt, Uncle Sam, Vipassana; welcome, home sapiens Stinky Freer; welcome, though you slumber deep, Transitus Tessera Mamselle Cunning Earth Link; welcome, sweet nanos of the masks and Book; welcome, firm but tiny Sniffer, so I say. Et cetera, et cetera. I speak for my rider, who is not at this moment able to ride. Our name is Johnny Appleseed.’