Appleseed

by John Clute

  Grandfather clauses could be broken, sliced into gamy slithers, like egg snacks.

  But that would be to lose Klavier Station, lose a prime source of data from down-Spiral, where the heat was terrible, too terrible yet for the Harpe.

  But this was too much to shit.

  Appleseed was wearing the body of a homo sapiens. The owner of Klavier Station had gone over to the exiles.

  It had gone meat puppet.

  It was wearing the skin of deportees.

  It had met Opsophagos, in the flesh, while inedible.

  The insult was so grave his skin softened for chewing.

  An eye opaqued over, became an opalescent plaque glitter — a fine dish to set before a king — but this was neither the time nor the place to have a love feast.

  Two of Opsophagos’s hands waved suckers; it was almost impossible to keep them from draining his flesh.

  Two held on to his cart, which rocked in its cradle in the command skiff.

  Another clutched a sphincter.

  Yet another clutched Appleseed’s Gift of Ceremony: a small porcelain tile on the face of which was an image of Klavier in repose.

  His eyes wanted to fixate.

  Through the triple visor readout above his heads, the great orange sullen sphere of Klavier Station loomed heavily above the perilously fragile skiff. The great teethed O of the docking portal above him remained open, and the wind that came from it, the hurricane of spoliated air, continued to vomit the skiff further into space.

  Opsophagos could almost smell it.

  It was air that had been breathed in and out of the lungs of inedibles.

  It smelled eaten.

  His dinner belly gnashed at the thought.

  The skiff floated into space, jettisoned in a bath of human air.

  It was obscene.

  The sphere above him was obscene.

  And it was a lie.

  What the alarms revealed only confirmed this.

  His eyes could see nothing but the single metal-orange shadowy impenetrable sphere of the lie, not one of his eyes could see the truth, I eat you eyes!

  They could not see the truth . . .

  Eat liars!

  But the instruments buried within the skiff did not lie, the robot sensors in orbit did not lie.

  Through his visored readouts, the vast deadly portal above him finally crushed shut, as though he were food it had spurned. All his guts knotted, he felt like prey.

  He felt alone.

  Never! Not!

  Slowly the command skiff inched its way into free space, unglued itself from the blank obscene shadow of the enemy worldlet, from the dissolving spume of wet digestive air, and his guts began to unclench.

  The instruments told the truth.

  Opsophagos’s breakfast teeth gnashed.

  As they had faced virtual starvation in the acid killing- field chambers of Klavier (eat all liars!), he allowed himself to forgive the teeth and their head (this once!) and let his brainless breakfast head sink its hollow jowls (starvation eat all liars!) into a trough of loyal wrigglies, which it wolfed down. He adjusted the twining of his tails within the cart, settled into command posture over the great lunch bucket, and — while it continued slowly to starve half to death awaiting its repast — set his idiot savant lunch head the task of sorting through the overwhelming waves of data that threatened to clog the safe chip devil-spawn computers.

  Bilateral stink!

  Stink of the inedible!

  An of Opsophagos’s mouths pursed at the memory of the stink.

  His tails seized up, knotted into a starvation kowtow.

  He thwacked the knot.

  The cart rocked with resumed shitting.

  The breakfast guts settled down, began to digest a feast of cuticle; skinned siblings shot into the lunch bucket; lips smacked involuntarily at the smell of membrane.

  But Opsophagos focused the skittish central gazes of his dinner head back to the central comm screens. The Insort Geront logo, a fiery three-bodied snake emblematic of the trinitarian God Quorum of Harpe, shone through them. His eyes slid slantwise.

  He bobbed his dinner head in a swift obeisance.

  The logo faded from the screens, but Opsophagos could feel the dormant gaze of the Six Eyes of the God Quorum from their dinner lair deep under Human Earth, a planet safely coated in saliva exudate.

  Waiting for a sibling to come home and feed them.

  Feed or food! Sure!

  ‘Mon semblable, mon frère,’ the owner of Klavier had said to Opsophagos, pleadingly, his hot bilateral eyes staring him down to stone, not an hour ago.

  Liar!

  Appleseed had opted. It had donned poison flesh. Appleseed was a human male.

  Filth!

  Humans ate their enemies. That was decent enough. Sure! Enemies are intimate. A enemy defeated is a sibling gained. But humans ate blind — they ate the flesh of strangers, they ate those who served them.

  But they did not eat themselves!

  They were inedible.

  They never looked food in the face. In order that food not take part, they killed it first. In order to make sure food was dead, they heated it with fire, torturing to death any unannealed sibling that might be left within. In order to conceal the wounds they had inflicted on their food, they covered it with opaque sauces. So that others might witness the extent of their triumph over food they would not look in the face, they chopped it to bits, and displayed the bits in front of their teeth, so that fellow guests might witness! Only then did they sink their teeth into the stranger or the servant.

  For humans, eating was not eating unless they could gloat first over what they had done to the food.

  They were inedible.

  They were creatures who could not eat their joy.

  They turned their stick-insect desert eyes to you, the mayfly glare that made even Opsophagos of the Harpe, veteran of a thousand encounters with bilaterals, feel after each encounter as though he had been turned to stone, as though he might be next.

  He knew that true homo sapiens, unlike the obscene impostor Appleseed, deserved pity. The Alderede consumed homo sapiens oldsters like krill, so quickly did their substance burn into ash. They lived a day or so, they scalded you in their passing, then jitterbugged into death. The life of a homo sapiens flesh sentient was a blink, a throe. Only the eyes, in the centre of the bald bilateral head, ever stayed still: as though the sibling inside had suddenly seen something very terrible. It was the homo sapiens gaze, the death- descrying gaze of the sibling inside. It pinned Opsophagos to his skin, his lungs beat uselessly against the heat. That was when he knew he could not, in truth, feel pity.

  He hated them.

  Mon semblable, mon frère!

  The owner of Klavier Station was a homo sapiens?

  Liar!

  Ownership of Klavier Station had not changed for a Trillion Heartbeats. Since long before homo sapiens had exterminated its siblings on Human Earth (as attested by those archives which remained functional) before it could be properly harvested, Klavier Station had been under one ownership.

  It was intolerable. It was war.

  After Billions of Heartbeats of truce, Klavier had declared war on the Consortia of the triune Gods.

  Opsophagos’s eyes squelched shut. His skin was deadly soft. He had to prevent himself from making a sacrifice. His breakfast head continued to munch sibling fingerlings without a care, stacking the skins in the recycle cradle with mindless punctilio. But his lunch head showed some signs of understanding it had been reprieved. Its lips whistled:

  ‘Phew! Phew!’

  On to the central comm screen flashed a sigillum, obscenely crafted out of uneatable grass flesh.

  It gazed back at Opsophagos of the Harpe.

  ‘We wish you good speed, Commander Opsophagos,’ it spoke. The obscene, toothy, single mouth of the artefact, set in the middle of its naked bilateral face, lipsynched the lying words.

  This was too much.

 
‘Grass,’ Opsophagos said insultingly through his lunch mouth, ‘do not address this one!’

  The sigillum, shaped to simulate the owner of record of Klavier Station, froze.

  Its mouth did not open.

  Through the visor screens above him, Opsophagos’s lunch head caught sight of a movement.

  —Master, it signalled through their body join.

  Opsophagos directed his dinner gaze upwards.

  His guts seized again.

  Only a few kilometres distant, the docking port that had so reluctantly vomited the command skiff into space was now opening again.

  It was turning into a vast mouth.

  It was laughing.

  An enormous tongue shot from between its teeth.

  ‘WE WISH YOU GOOD SPEED, COMMANDER OPSOPHAGOS,’ thundered the tongue.

  Klavier had spoken.

  The skiff shook in the ‘wind’.

  ‘Clever effect, Mr Appleseed,’ said Opsophagus, addressing the world, all his eyes focusing insanely together for an instant before, with great courage, he became themself again.

  No eating!

  ‘We hope,’ said Opsophagos formally, out of his three mouths, ‘for a satisfactory conclusion to our conversation, within the time we have accorded you.’

  He turned his face away from the screens. He showed to the sigillum, rudely, a tangle of back hair and tails, which shivered damply.

  ‘Roger,’ came the voice of the sigillum.

  Behind Opsophagos, the worldlet closed its mouth again. By the time he turned his face back to the screens, the sigillum had already faded out.

  Grass!

  But the skiff was free. The orange blockading shadow of Klavier Station lifted from the readouts, giving way to interstellar dark. Several wormhole scryers buzzed the command skiff, their mirror facets glittering orange. The Alderede slid into view.

  As the skiff continued to climb, the dinner head and the lunch head of Opsophagos bent together over analysis visors, and scanned the Gift of Ceremony for lurkers, spy- eyes. It was clean. They then ran through the records of the last terrifying hour, now properly deciphered and cleaned up by the skiff computing team — one chip central processor plus a disk of homo sapiens oldsters, their scent glands decently removed, sleeping the sleep of the just, shunting data as they steamed full throttle towards the early homo sapiens death.

  There was no doubt at all.

  Eat!

  It was what he had feared for Ten Billion Heartbeats.

  Opsophagos watched the sequence several times. It was very brief. He watched the command skiff leave the Alderede, accept Klavier port control, disappear down a gaping entry large enough to funnel several arks into their docks. He skipped ahead: and from a point of view a million kilometres north, on the other side of Klavier from the mother ark, he watched Tile Dance impact local space with its deadly cargo, exactly according to the schedule conveyed to Insort by the source on board. Routine descent began. Klavier presented its usual face to the sleek old craft: an orange sphere of antique vintage, dimly illuminated, surrounded by clients. It was all routine.

  It was at this point, as Tile Dance neared Klavier, that war was declared.

  The skin of the worldlet exfoliated suddenly into a thousand island platelets, all the colours of the rainbow, and within seconds Klavier had puffed itself up to twice its previous size. The island flakes of world skin, each larger than a dozen arks, began to shift and writhe like snake- skin in moult, until each wore the aspect of a vast toothy janissary humanoid face. The faces shone and smiled and opened.

  It was a Predecessor welcome rite.

  Tile Dance was being greeted as though it carried members of an Imperium whose last emissaries had fled downwind Ten Trillion Heartbeats ago.

  Eat!

  Tile Dance glowed infernally, fell suddenly planetwards, disappeared from all his instruments, fell into the ancient heart of Klavier.

  A siren whinnied thrice. Opsophagos looked up from the readouts, almost resignedly. Almost nothing could be worse than the past hour.

  But worse followed.

  The command skiff had slipped free of Klavier, slid safely away from the innumerable faces.

  But they were beginning to shift.

  Swiftly, smoothly, moire, in unison, the janissary faces began to melt, melted in an instant, into a single face. Mouths slurred into weeping deltas which became one beard, ears clustered into two giant ears, mountains into a nose, vast folds of skin crumbled and crackled until the cheeks became the cheeks of a lion scarred with tattoos. Two huge bulging bilateral eyes opened, stared out foetally into vacuum. Kilometre-long braids of hair turned instantly into glittering diamantine snakes. A gaping hole grew jaws, through which shot a congested tongue, and steam. Tusks began to grow through the tongue, spined upwards through the palpitating ears. The great beard began to grow downwards, grew light-years downwards in an instant.

  Klavier had become a bilateral face.

  Do not trespass! it proclaimed.

  It was a gorgon of the deep.

  It began to rotate.

  The other side of Klavier was also a countenance. It was male. It was the face of Johnny Appleseed.

  Klavier continued to rotate.

  The petrifying gaze of the gorgon of threshold fixed upon the universe.

  The worldlet rotated.

  Johnny Appleseed came into view smiling.

  Opsophagos turned his eyes from the readout visors.

  His jaws opened, his hands made a noose.

  He sacrificed his breakfast head.

  The torso blew its guts out, fully expressing the anguish of Opsophagos.

  He almost starved before the command skiff got back to the Alderede. He exited his thoroughly befouled cart. A trembling consort of siblings greeted him in the hatchway hive. He took a youngling for breakfast head. There was a gnashing and twining of tails!

  He clambered into the coils of home.

  Kilometres below, the great hollow of the whorl within Alderede spun calmly on behalf of its retirees, giving them a small sun (the Eye of Insort Geront) and stars (golf courses bedecked with firefly nebulas), while they lived.

  Opsophagos consulted the crippled captive AI in its iron mask. They agreed that the Johnny Appleseed face of Klavier was artefactual, a play of light visible only from the command skiff. But the other face was no decal, no trick played on the instruments of the Harpe. The other face was the face of the planet.

  Klavier was an engine of war from the previous Age.

  It had just turned itself on.

  Opsophagos sat within the cold steamy air of his black cockpit. His skin was still soft. He gazed through visors at the universe. The gorgon stared back, unblinking. As the Alderede paced its slow orbit, the face of the planet stayed full.

  There was no surcease from the heat of the stare.

  His skin began to blister.

  He shut the visors down, and sat in the rain. Microscopic siblings swam down the raindrops from nutrient valves in the black roof, so Opsophagos did not starve.

  The mask of his captive AI was wet with dying siblings.

  The comlinks opened their slit eyes.

  Opsophagos spoke to the assembled commanders of the Insort fleet. He spoke at length through the bristling comm links. He spoke of the arrival of Tile Dance bearing a plague lens, several AIs which had gone rogue, and a human who purported to be the owner of the ship, as if a flea could own its dog, and whose earlier life could not be traced, but about whom (Opsophagos’s source insisted) everything revolved. He spoke of Klavier Station, which showed signs of having awoken from aeons of amnesia. Eventually there was accord. The assembled commanders responded as one.

  Scribes took down the chant verbatim.

  Soon the golem hatcheries were rife with song.

  Skins splintered. Squads were born by the hour.

  Soon the fleet would teem with grunts.

  The skin of Opsophagos hardened for war.

  seven
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br />   Ynis Gutrin glowed around the awakening captain of Tile Dance. Slowly the captain opened its eyes, and became Freer again, awake and nuzzled in the embrace of his chair. The eyes of Ynis Gutrin bent upon him. Silhouetted against the mosaic glow, beckoner or beckoned slowly became transparent, sharply outlined, like the figure of a knight incised upon the inner curve of a great crystal goblet, visible only to the burning eyes of the one within, he who had undertaken the vigil of flesh.

  The knight continued to fade into the illimitable vastness of the thousand-eyed gaze of Ynis Gutrin. Freer gazed upon beckoner or beckoned until he was entirely alone, a meat puppet in a chair that succoured his needs. Around him, the green nipples of Klavier passed nutrients into the ship. Within the ship, under the gaze of the thousand inward monitors, they became capillaries and gave nurture. Beneath the chair, a floor became visible.

  —Freer? Freer? chorused Kirtt within his bones.

  —I hear you, box, said Freer.

  —We lost you for a second, Stinky.

  —Hope you enjoyed the break.

  —Mamselle has managed to eat her runts, Stinky. But it was a close call. A few Heartbeats more, and they’d have gained sentience, entered the empathy bath.

  —Coming, murmured Freer, —coming.

  —Ten thousand Eolhxirans, daily growing.

  —Okey dokey.

  He beckoned at an iris inlaid into the fragrant sandalwood panelling at his feet, and the floor opened beneath him. Glass Island closed its shades. He sank downwards, into a resinous hatchway. A Planisphere mask detached itself from an illuminated wall hanging, long one of Freer’s favourite examples of outsider art, ‘The Kenosis of Pecos Bill’, by a craftsman dead for millennia. It showed the moment when the great visitor to Human Earth, learning that he may no longer roam the world and the starways in the guise of Immortal Coyote, becomes a jaunty meat puppet. The hero is just opening his mouth to tell his first tall tale.