by John Clute
‘Johnny Appleseed?’ said Freer.
‘Sorry I could not greet you immediately,’ said the wisened flesh sentient to Freer, ‘but Opsophagos of the Harpe, who shares with all his species a guts aversion to sigilla, had done me the great honour of making a personal call. I in turn did him the great honour of allowing him inside Klavier. So I say. Normally Care Consortia ships or personnel are not allowed within the thousand walls of our home, because they are plaque carriers. They carry untruth.’
Appleseed’s face had become denser.
‘Opsophagos of the Harpe,’ Freer said gingerly, as to a teacher of uncertain temper, ‘is he Insort Geront?’
‘Sure thing, lad. Insort Geront speaks for the Care Consortia here in Maestoso Tropic,’ Appleseed said in the soft voice of an adult human flesh sentient whose authority is so great he never need attempt to be heard. ‘Opsophagos governs Maestoso Tropic from the Alderede, which has ftl capacity even though it is registered as an ark. With regard to Klavier, he claims he has a free hand, but no choice. He claims he is authorised to take any action he wishes, as long as it brings home the bacon. Bacon being defined as you, the lens, and the unholy Made Minds you are consorting with. He speaks filth.’
The krewe did not flutter.
‘They pretend to be caretakers of data,’ he said, very softly, ‘that which is the holiest of tasks for those who love the gods. But those for whom Opsophagos of the Harpe speaks are not caretakers. They do not cleanse. They do not sort. Plaque is untruth, so I say. Plaque untunes.’
He was almost whispering. This did not matter.
‘Plaque is the untuning of the universe.’
He closed his eyes.
When he opened them, he was a hayseed again.
He spat on the carpet.
‘I’ve flummoxed him for a day or so, I think, son. But not any more than that. So we must decide what to do, O most precious folk of Ynis Gutrin.’
‘Why do you call us that?’ said Freer.
‘Well,’ said Johnny Appleseed, ‘it seems only courteous to address you by the name of your ship. She is a great adventuress, as we know of old. You should be very honoured to be allowed to belong to her. Do you think there’s any chance she’ll awake soon?’
—KathKirtt? KathKirtt?
—Sorry, Stinky.
—An, KathKirtt, said Johnny Appleseed, switching effortlessly into Tile Dance comm net. What about it? When do you expect your mother to wake again?
—Perhaps, KathKirtt whispered, soon.
Over the last several seconds, mask after mask had been drifting into the aquarium-green glow of Glass Island. Dozens of aspects of KathKirtt, flyte and jack, floated now within the woven green luminescence, like wide-eyed tropical fish.
‘So what is this ship I own?’ said Freer.
‘I’d rephrase that, if I were you,’ said Johnny Appleseed, his voice creaking with mirth, perhaps. ‘Better to ask, who am I riding?’
‘Who am I riding?’ said Freer.
‘She’s an absolute Goddess,’ said Johnny Appleseed. ‘So I say! But enough small talk! We have a war to wage. Take a gander. You in particular, my dear SammSabaoth. This is your bailiwick. Nice to see you again. Though I thought you had wings.’
‘They were in the eye of the beholder,’ said SammSabaoth, their voices military. ‘May we speak together?’
‘Later, dear. First be a thorn in the flesh of the paynim, not?’
The SammSabaoth skull masks subsided stiffly.
Before them, at the heart of Glass Island, just above the helm complex, a vast rotund apple came into view, turning slowly in the dance of menus at the heart of the atriums of memory, its waxy carapace glittering. It seemed to be a normal 3D multiphase schematic holo of Klavier Station — but when Freer glanced sideways for an instant at Appleseed, who was now leaning against a herm, he could see, from the corner of his eye, sudden heart-wrenching hints of Klavier exulting, an almost subliminal re-enactment of the spindrift panoply of imperial welcome of an hour ago: great clustered foliate heads, who smiled like dolphins, pressing against the skin of ocean to gaze outwards into vacuum.
Freer blinked.
Klavier was a simple holo schematic again.
The vacuum was filled with ships.
When Freer focused on any one of the ships, it grew hugely in a bath of menus, which Teardrop duplicated, and whispered softly to him through the comm net.
—Are we at now? Freer asked.
Teardrop confirmed realtime.
—Go back an hour.
The holo shivered, then settled.
A tiny but fully detailed image of Tile Dance zigzagged adroitly through an englobing mass of Insort Geront arks downwards into Klavier. Dozens of ships, arks and cruisers and fingerships tried uselessly to follow, spewing nets and lines of force at Tile Dance, missing magically.
—What’s going on, SammSabaoth?
—Predecessor time phase effect, murmured SammSabaoth. —A long-lost technology. Very simple. Dislocates us fractionally, thousands of times a Heartbeat, every which way. Just enough chaos to bollix ark battle minds. We would have known what was happening then, had we been whole.
The tiny image of Tile Dance continued to topple toward the great tectonic cheeks of the apple.
—Freeze, said Freer.
Time stopped.
The apple schematic burst into a molten palimpsest of exploding skins, just as Klavier had in reality an hour before, and froze. The schematic was now a mappemonde of infinite device, a thousand Matters intrinsicate within its devising. Tile Dance hovered motionless above a great pursed mouth. Caught in the fudge of normal space, the Insort Geront battlefleet gawked greyly out of range.
—Okey dokey.
Time started again.
Tile Dance began to fall again, but just before impact the mouth opened wide in a berserker grin, and the schematic split into a chart of the way through and down. The ship slid into the mouth and down aisles of planetary sinew into the heart of the Station, stopping halfway to the core, where it embedded itself into a central strut. If he halted time again (Freer knew) the strut would turn into yew, and there would be a smell of Christmas. Then the schematic smacked its lips shut, hiding Tile Dance from view.
The apple shrank.
The holo now showed the entire local region. There were hundreds of ships visible, most of them tagged as Insort Geront. As they watched, the battlefleet cumbrously began to re-establish its englobement pattern. Previously concealed by the bulk of Klavier, a tiny cigar-shaped artefact drifted into view. Teardrop tagged it as the Alderede. Spinning slowly, the cigar neared Klavier, increasing gradually in size. By the time it reached a distant orbital path
— which Teardrop tagged as self-maintaining, the Alderede’s mass being far too great to obey Klavier’s small gravity field
— it had grown to half the size of the Station itself.
—What is that thing? said Freer.
—It is a flagship, murmured SammSabaoth. —Notice the spin. Full generation starship specifications, First Wave era. We think the Alderede is large enough to contain an entire whorl. We estimate at least a hundred thousand residents.
—All military?
—Half military, half retiree computer-links, Stinky. A ship that size needs a lot of mind.
—Armament?
—Yes.
A Jolly Roger mask flapped its tooth grin.
—Are we at now yet?
—Just synching.
—When was the Alderede first detected?
—I will ask the Klavier minds, murmured SammSabaoth.
There was a pause.
—The Alderede has been tracking Klavier Station ever since it joined Maestoso Tropic, heading up-Spiral. Before you were born, Stinky.
—What’s that?
He pointed at a tiny pip which Klavier had just spat into darkness. The pip began to climb.
—Opsophagos’s command skiff. It will take some time to reach the Alderede.
> The bulk of the slowly orbiting flagship occluded the apple. The skiff climbed slowly into the shadow and could no longer be seen.
Freer snapped a finger.
The holo shrank into a point of light and winked out.
He turned to speak to Appleseed.
The herm stood alone. An empty mask perched on the head. The owner of Klavier Station was nowhere in sight. Except for Freer, Glass Island was deserted.
There was not a live mask in sight. Not even SammSabaoth.
A deserted dataglove swayed on its stem, as though in the wake of some massive object that had just now passed from sight.
—KathKirtt? shouted Freer. —Appleseed?
Silence.
The bee eyes of Glass Island continued to show him Tile Dance wreathed in mothering tendrils. Suckers showed their tiny rune-encrusted faces, then buried themselves below his line of vision, sank the probosces that rimmed them into the warm body of the ship.
Freer sighed, very deeply.
—Okey dokey, he murmured. —In for a penny, in for a pound.
There was a crick in his neck.
Suddenly he could hardly stand. He sank backwards, almost staggering. His chair cocoon extended agilely behind him, took him in its arms, lowered him to rest.
He gestured.
Obediently, Glass Island closed its shutters, closed Freer into his home. It had been his home since . . . since before he could remember.
So?
He sat alone within the warm cocoon.
—Mirror mirror on the wall, he vocalised.
An array of mirrors, lion faces of glory cartouched along their top rims, descended from the fluted mahogany ceiling and grouped themselves around him in a semicircle.
—Are you there, KathKirtt? he whispered.
Silence still.
In the nearest mirror, he saw that his face was drawn, his eyes bloodshot. He looked like a small child, he looked ancient. He looked as though he had been beaten.
He burst into tears.
‘This,’ he murmured acoustic, after a moment, his voice rough with tears, ‘has been one fuck of a long day. Excuse the language, Ynis Gutrin.’
The chair wiped his face.
Around him, he could feel the slow arterial pulse of Tile Dance, like surf bestowing him upon a far bourne.
‘All the way to Klavier. A far piece,’ he murmured.
As though on cue, a copy of the Universal Book extended itself towards him, silently. It was open to the works of Vachel Lindsay.
‘Don’t nag me,’ said Freer. ‘I am more weary than death.’ The cover of the Book nuzzled his hand.
So he read anyway, even though his eyes blurred:
Self-scourged, like a monk, with a throne for wages,
Stripped, like the iron-souled Hindu sages,
Draped like a statue, in strings like a scarecrow,
His helmet-hat an old tin pan,
But worn in the love of the heart of man,
More sane than the helm of Tamerlane!
Hairy Ainu, wild man of Borneo, Robinson Crusoe
— Johnny Appleseed!
‘Thank you, Book. You can shut now.’
The Book sank into a niche, where it rested.
Tiny Tamerlanes danced on Freer’s eyelids.
His eyes were shutting. He could not stay awake, he could not sleep. He was falling into the dream of old, which seemed clearer than ever before; perhaps because he had not quite yet fallen into slumber. If there was a psychopomp visible, a doppelganger beckoning downwards — surely some grave-eyed figure would soon raise its hand to beckon — it could be no one but himself. And sure enough, there before him, raising a hand to beckon, a figure stood below him, with eyes so hollow with exhaustion they seemed rimmed with kohl. Beckoning through a film of capillary-thick eyelids, he beckoned himself beckoning downwards until, as one, they were free of the mortal coil, free of Ynis Gutrin, free of Klavier’s golden skins, toppling upwards and downwards through the infinitely rich pomegranate of space, along the great trade tropics plummeting like sight lines, star route meeting star route, tracing downwards and upwards and westwards the webbed trapezoid of worldbearing stars that homo sapiens had touched, beachcombing like Odysseus down archipelagos filled with light.
Beckoner and beckoned, naked as eggs, hurtled still further, a far piece, in great silence, through argosy-dense crossroads light-years thick where Tropics met, and further still, into great darkness beyond the Tropics, into the inter- galactic dark, inside his eyelids. A sphere lay before the two who were himself alone; one of them saw a light-devouring black hole, one of them saw a hole that burned. As they landed on the hole that was a world, beckoner and beckoned readily discovered that the surface they had touched was not black but sooth, not fire but hale, not smooth but walled, not hollow but dense with palimpsests, not eyeless but thick with murals. It was the maze of old, the maze of grief and joy, turn which way you might. Beckoner and beckoned saw that they had become two porcelain figurines, mannish, girlish, tightly embraced, looking both forward and back. They had eyes in the back of their heads. They were a still point in a world-maze whose walls turned back and forth, up and down. They did not move, nor could they have shifted an inch had indeed they attempted to move their polished feet; for it was the maze whose task it was to move. Entering the beckoner and the beckoned with gates that opened or shut, and corridors which shut or opened again, turning cartwheels around the still centre of the beckoner and the beckoned, it was the maze that guided them.
But he was not asleep.
As the maze entered into beckoner and beckoned, so did a solemn passage of murals that slid past their faceted eyes, a diorama vivid as the paint of childhood, puffing small puffs of smoke like a steam fair carousel. Each mural was a tapestry, woven out of threads undirtied by the unseen hands of the weavers. The threads moved asmoke. They were the tapestry of memory. As beckoner and beckoned watched, a mural depicting the myriad walls of Klavier, which opened into faces seasoned with joy, entered them like smoke. Then Mamselle’s harum-scarum obbligato. Then masks fluttering in a great wind. Freer falling into deepsleep in the coffin heart of Ynis Gutrin. Braids weaving like soiled threads through dying Trencher. Mamselle beginning to awake, surrounded by newborns, in her birthing pot. SammSabaoth, a Thorn, allegiant, on a field gules. An iron-willed Hindu sage who stank. A sigillum which turned into dust and shavings. A row of Number One Sons and sigilla and eidolons, decks deeper in the ship nursery, each awaiting its brief taste of being. A full cornice further into the Tile Dance heartwood, four tiny dense ovoid-shaped coffins, steaming white with frost, pips in an apple.
—I carry lenses in my sack, said a mural depicting Johnny Appleseed on the mountain-peak called ‘Going-to-the-Sun’.
—On Trencher it was music, said beckoner or beckoned.
—Much the same thing, don’t you think? said Johnny Appleseed.
Then Tile Dance, scarred by arks, breasts bare. A krewe of masks whistling Dixie, gouache and gumbo, cakewalking. Mamselle eating her runts. A Planisphere engraved with a thousand faces of Vipassana, which were only one face, behind bars: savage streaks of blood following gravity down. A three-headed figure whose hairy torso boasted lots of intertwined tails leaking shit into a lunch bucket. The seizing of Trencher. A throne room. A stone. A sword. Eleven lords a-leaping. A mural completely blank, though as it closed around beckoner or beckoned it became exactly a million tiles, which became a single lens, which told the whole story.
The walls of the maze which saved the world continued to circle faster and faster, passing through beckoner and beckoned, guiding them on by coming up to them, toppling and turning in a genuflection of arrival. A side corridor then darkened (this had happened before) and they found that they were ascending a spiral staircase, which in fact descended beneath their feet. The staircase pulled them onwards (or slid beneath their feet), until they fell upwards through a snowglobe porthole into a rosy cornucopia ever larger the deeper they entered, and th
ey could hear the sea, and lo!
He was wide awake.
He was peering at the crown of a great Tree, for he had in fact been climbing upside down. Here are the roots of the Tree (a familiar voice said in both his ears), once made of time, made now of weather. Here is the church, and here are the people.
—Old apple tree (sang a carnival Krewe), we’ll wassail thee, And hoping thou wilt bear; The Lord does know where we shall be Merry another year.
—Help (said Johnny Appleseed in a voice of scorn) if you can, small beast of night. Here is the cave, and here are the threads. What big eyes you have! Wakey wakey!
—Tell us (said other voices, shushing softly like a surf of blood within Tile Dance) a story.
—Once upon a time, murmured beckoner to beckoned, —a very small boy fell into a very long sleep.
—Okey dokey, sang KathKirtt far below.
They were entirely awake. Beckoner and beckoned beseemed themselves that they had been washed.
—What is it, KathKirtt?
—We are below decks, with Mr Appleseed. Please come to the birthing chamber. We have good news. Mamselle has given birth, and is eating her runts.
six
As soon as the command skiff began to slide free of Klavier on a raft of contaminated air, a thousand alarms sounded.
Opsophagos of the Harpe, a full-quorum top sibling male of the dominant arm of his species, fought guts-devouring panic. He quelled the alarms with a spasm of hands.
Nothing they could tell him was worse than the face of Appleseed. All they could tell him was what he knew already: that war had been declared.
The face had already told him that.
He was used to homo sapiens, in their place, used to the parched bilateral animal heat that made even Insort pensioners almost impossible to deal with in the flesh, as though they could eat the world by looking at it. Only partially shielded by his cart of office, he had often come so close to human beings, in the course of duty, that he could literally smell their arousal, feel the heat of their unwashed, unwashable skin. But he had never before been forced into flesh access with the owner of Klavier, who — when the Station drifted up-Spiral into Consort space every century or so — came armoured with the strictest of grandfather privacy clauses, and who in any case preferred to communicate through Made Mind channels.