Appleseed

by John Clute

  Something tickled at Freer. He shivered.

  —KathKirtt, he said. —In the dream I have, you guys are whistling Dixie.

  A Medusa mask pursed its lips.

  —Like this?

  The mask whistled, acoustic, piercingly.

  —Yes, said Freer.

  ‘Time to go, Stinky,’ Johnny Appleseed said acoustic. ‘Happy to shepherd your breeding stock,’ said Freer, finally, to the glowing topiary parthogenete. ‘Visit any time.’ ‘I pray fulsome,’ she said formally.

  Freer turned to Appleseed.

  ‘Off-ship?’ he said.

  ‘Want to show you around, take you farther in. But we don’t have much time. Someone I need you to meet.’ ‘You’re the boss of Station Klavier, boss.’

  Johnny Appleseed seemed to be vibrating with something like glee.

  ‘Sure am, sonny. Let’s hop it.’

  They turned to leave the birthing chamber.

  ‘One more thing,’ said Freer. ‘Mamselle?’

  ‘Hoi!’ she pealed, fanning her belly, her claws snicketing in a placid way.

  ‘Your son shrub future king,’ said Freer. ‘You did not tell us what you have decided to call him.’

  ‘I placate, natch!’ cried the new mother. ‘But ’tis only an instant since that we, my son and I, agreed pretty tickedy- boo hot-damn upon a soubriquet of virtue, one taking into just account his august parent vicar.’

  She paused, her tiny head raised so high on its stalk that its tuft brushed the ceiling.

  ‘Arturus Quondam Captain Future!’ she belled.

  Quite horrendously, she began to giggle. Her eyes nictitated. Her claws rattled hotly, as though a gust of wind had welled up through some open distant mouth of Tile Dance from the further interior of the planet. (This was in fact the case. Her claws, for an instant, were white hot.) The portal in her belly opened. Arturus Quondam Captain Future stared at them from the carved heart of the topiary womb, which seemed to contain cross-naves and mirrors. His petals trembled.

  ‘Please call me Quondam,’ said the king-to-be.

  The portal began to ease shut.

  ‘Give me time,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘I have some growing to do.’

  The portal was closed.

  Light faded from the birthing chamber.

  The homo sapiens males slipped through the sweating egress gate, which closed behind them with a tch.

  ‘You going like that?’ said Johnny Appleseed in the corridor, leaning against a gold inlay herm whose codger face mirrored his.

  He gestured at Freer’s clothes.

  ‘Might be a bit sticky for you out in the world, son,’ he said. ‘We keep bipedal shafts and braids at close to homo sapiens body heat. It has proven to be the best compromise for our range of bipedals.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Freer.

  ‘And you won’t need that,’ said Appleseed, pointing at the Insort Geront tithe sigil.

  ‘Okey dokey.’

  Freer pulled his clothes off, tossed them into an enclosure which opened to capture them. Naked, he was only marginally less wiry than Appleseed, though a head taller, and not filthy. Due to the extremely high homeostatic body temperature humans endured or enjoyed, he smelled faintly of flesh, slightly baked. Homo sapiens meat puppets in good health smelled like Christmas. The freelance sigil still held his ponytail tight. A jack mask detached itself from a trompe l’oeil coil of tiles which depicted an uncountable number of pilgrims traversing an infinite stairwell, upwards and downwards; and wrapped itself around his groin. The mask’s whiskers flickered. It was Kath as lion couchant. She stared forward.

  —Mmmm, she said.

  A dozen tiny fingers stroked his balls.

  —Stop that, for the moment, murmured Freer.

  Appleseed looked back at them. His neck had age spots.

  ‘Come on, you lot,’ he said.

  Before they could move, a Vipassana Planisphere banked downwards from the mosaic ceiling, elongated itself into a necklace of cunning device with a Planisphere pendant, and affixed itself around Freer’s neck.

  —We are here, crooned the necklace.

  —So point the way, murmured Freer.

  —Mr Vipassana? said Johnny Appleseed within the comm net. —You tagging along?

  The Planisphere necklace grew an impassive moon face. The detailwork of the universe it normally callipered softened into the Buddha fat of a slow, liquorish smile, oddly — it struck Freer at that instant, inside the planet and about to go deeper — post-coital: as though he had just been swallowed.

  He was a bug in a web of Made Minds.

  —It is the task assigned this one, crooned Vipassana.

  —Oh, yes?

  —Yes.

  —Have we met? said Johnny Appleseed.

  —We are here, crooned the necklace.

  —Ah . . .

  The mask smiled imperturbably at the geezer.

  —Let’s hop it, you said, murmured Freer.

  —Right. Just chatting with your new friend.

  But Freer could smell him.

  ‘All set?’ said Johnny Appleseed acoustic, for the walls to hear and store and pass along and make a picture of, perhaps to hang. ‘Shall we make tracks?’

  They slipped down a corridor. The necklace hung warm around Freer’s neck, mewing it; the cache-sex cupped his genitals with its lion’s breath. The walls were glossy black, though lamps softened the darkness into coigns and cavities, some of them real. Manikins in elaborate dress sat gazing out, some glancing up flagrante delicto. Commedia dell’arte masks — Harlequin, Tiazinha, Miles Gloriosus, Columbine — flickered in the gloom. Some apertures held universal windows which opened on to other regions of Tile Dance; through them, Freer and Appleseed cast highwayman shadows up and down the wilderness of corridors. Deep within its incandescent maze, the engine brother felt, as always, a draught of dark from the passage of its humans through the interstices of the ship.

  —Now, sang Freer softly.

  The exit hatch sighed open, allowing egress through ancient hardened skin into whatever there might be.

  He looked out and around.

  There was no access tunnel.

  The hatch opened into air, which blew into his face.

  —Tile Dance has penetrated the envelope of air, crooned Vipassana around his neck. —We are within the meniscus. We have reached atmosphere.

  —Okey dokey.

  —We are 10.22 kilometres below the surface matrix, said the necklace. —We are halfway down. We have air. We may float upon the air exactly.

  —Right, right.

  Twenty metres to one side, the prow of Tile Dance had been enveloped by the docking orifice, which had extended itself outwards, like a carnivorous plant about to swallow prey, from a seamed and pocked darkness, flickering with indecipherable lights. The abyssal shaft-wall might be a hundred metres away, or a thousand. Tile Dance glinted like an engorged silver penis in the orifice of Klavier. The docking orifice itself gave off enough illumination from embrasures and windows (through which Freer thought he saw the faces of bilaterals of varying hues staring up) that, in flashes, its shape became half-seen to the mind’s eye: a pyramid, orotund and mazed.

  There was a quick smell of cedar.

  Hints of ridges and peaks and canyons, intricate pulses of light, could be sensed; a further gust of hot air brought vinelike ardours, a faint reek of mire and blood, milk and myrrh and holly.

  There were no railings.

  His toes clutched the rim of the exit hatch, which extended like a plank. Between his feet was nothing but the abyss itself, open to the heart of the planet.

  Harsh hot air gusted upwards.

  —We are 10.22 kilometres from core country, murmured the Vipassana necklace. —Halfway. A long walk, Stinky.

  —What?

  —Unless we take a balloon.

  ‘What does he mean, walk?’ Freer said, turning to Appleseed in the hatchway beside him.

  ‘Nothing to it,’ said Appleseed,
and stepped into the ten-kilometre-deep well of air.

  His curly Ainu hair blew in the wind. He was floating downwards.

  Below him were the depths of Klavier.

  ‘Come on in,’ he said, and beckoned. ‘The air is warm.’

  Freer stared into the windy void with a surmise. In his bones he could feel engine brother beating the drum of ship time, slowly, calmly, tolling the Heartbeats of Tile Dance; the ship was safe in its own hands, in the hands of the Made Minds, the goblins, the goddess.

  The surmise was this:

  This feels like home.

  His lips moved soundlessly.

  From somewhere on the other side of the hole in the world, a great narrow beam focused suddenly and raptly on Tile Dance, which glowed blindingly for the instant before darkness fell as the beam swung sidewards, illuminating the shaft wall for an instant. It seemed impossibly far, like a country glimpsed through the window of a plane, a window through which fields and ziggurats and colonnades full of tiny figures could be seen, but only fleetingly. The vision disappeared. In the glow of Tile Dance, the master of Klavier was visible floating gently downwards, his narrow back and spiny buttocks catching the light. He was as flecked and golden as mistletoe in the vast resinous singing dark.

  Then, slowly, his body turned at right angles to Freer.

  ‘This way,’ Johnny Appleseed said, looking back up at his charge, beckoning. ‘This is the way.’

  Darkness swallowed the flesh puppet floating downwards on the air, except for the glint of an urgent unblinding tiny eye. An hour had already passed since they had entered Klavier. Something was about to happen.

  Freer shrugged, and obeyed.

  He stepped out on to the air, his heart lifting.

  Inches from the ancient polished hull of Tile Dance, gravity lessened abruptly. He was floating in hot air, and as he slid down an updraught towards Johnny Appleseed, his body too began to turn sideways to his line of descent, which slowed. By the time he reached the stringy welcoming arms of the beckoner, he was swimming at right angles to his previous line. Tile Dance, which had been above him, now floated beside him, its nose caught in the great blossom of orifice.

  Freer gazed downwards, into the red-veined, ornamented darkness of the world.

  The shaft was no longer a shaft. Beside became above. Tile Dance was above him. Below his feet was country. Above him was sky, with doors. Barely visible through stygian aisles of rushing air, the country below them — a few hundred metres down, more likely a few thousand, he could not guess yet — displayed flickeringly through the darkness a tapestry of inns and atriums, quiltwork fields, pines bedecked with crazed pagodas, spiral staircases reaching towards them, roads of yellow brick (it seemed). From somewhere beneath their feet came a sound of cymbals and tambourines. The air shook; the two bilaterals swayed delicately in a column of updraught, their legs of even length dangling gently down.

  It was like a dream of falling.

  A great drum, too deep for ears, though it was acoustic, sounded through their bones.

  It sounded only once.

  It seemed to say: You are awake but falling.

  Below them, the lights of the world switched on.

  eight

  Opsophagos of the Harpe sealed himself shut into his drenched chamber. He retained within the grip of his eyes a slurry of siblings hungry for war, a hoary Three of Generals, and a solo seven-eyed bowelless heresiologue, begging for wrigglies.

  The eye of Klavier continued to track the Alderede unblinkingly.

  The skin of Opsophagos was hard.

  The heresiologue stewed in its solitude, eyes swivelling. It tried a homily.

  ‘It is written,’ it mused aloud, ‘that the God eats only a single word, but that word is pleroma.’

  Opsophagos tossed a slurry of finned wrigglies at the heresiologue, which it ingested greedily. But without a bowel to its name, it was always hungry.

  ‘To eat is to know,’ it murmured in thanks, unctuously. Opsophagos’s lunch head nodded absently.

  A stew of nutrients rained from the ceiling into the clangorous dark, rained upon the gruff and hoary Three and the twelve siblings and the heresiologue whose tongues were out. In order that his mood might be quickly digested, Opsophagos tore off his newish breakfast head, screaming in pain as the toughened skin ripped at the root, spat it into the gaping dinner mouth of the eldest Three.

  So soon! thought Opsophagos to the flapping head. Vale!

  ‘Swallow!’ bellowed Opsophagos.

  The eldest General gagged at the influx of raw data, but swallowed.

  ‘More!’ he said, bravely.

  The lunch head’s tender limbs contracted in fear.

  ‘It is enough,’ said Opsophagos.

  The siblings gulped down the skinned youngling.

  The heresiologue lapped excreta and moaned, for it saw Appleseed in all its eyes, down all the aisles of tomorrow, and a burning lance. It saw the bronze approbation of Klavier, the clanging shields, the terrible swift teeth of the galaxy alight.

  ‘We foretell great hunger,’ said the heresiologue in unison.

  This was its role, for which it was contemned as something obscene: it remained at the edge of starvation, in order to foresee the bare world.

  ‘Blind hunger,’ said the heresiologue.

  There was a sudden din of apprehension from the siblings and the Three, as though the door of a furnace had suddenly banged open.

  ‘Whew,’ gurgled the lunch head of Opsophagos. Its eyes were fixed upon the triplex visor screen in the centre of the command chamber.

  ‘Open!’ commanded Opsophagos, his remaining mouths uttering the command in unison, and the screen came to life.

  The heresiologue’s silver eyes turned to the screen and glittered in the dark; the siblings turned reluctantly to the screen and chewed on the burning sight; the Three of Generals harumphed and clattered their scales but watched Klavier on the screen as it armed itself, the gorgon gaze growing fiercer and more molten with each revolution, the beard of Klavier sucking space for light-years down, fuelling for war.

  Eat! thought Opsophagos, engorged.

  He wheeled his command cart to the captive AI in its iron mask on its bloody herm. The mask glowed red with heat, keeping the AI in stifling bondage. Streams of rusty nutrient splashed against the mask, and sizzled. The mask was cooking wrigglies, rendering them inedible. Through the bars and the steam, the captive AI - tied to the iron, tied to time, its mouth open in a perpetual scream — gazed upon the sight of Klavier re-arming.

  A small acoustic sound escaped through the painted wrought-iron grin of the mask.

  Opsophagos rattled the cage.

  ‘Locate the pilot,’ he voiced acoustic.

  ‘How?’ barked the eldest Three, who had spent a lifetime tracking Klavier up and down Maestoso Tropic, without his instruments once penetrating the flail of ice that guarded the obscene quantum conclave spaces of Klavier.

  The siblings echoed him, thumping their tails till mist coated the walls.

  Opsophagos did not deign to answer. He tore open the gates of iron that bound the captive. Within the imprisoning bars of the shell that bound the Made Mind could be seen an inner facemask of flayed hide. Its mouth was open extremely wide. Something flickered light-years deep within the darkness within.

  ‘Alas, Jehovah,’ said the pudding face, ‘I obey.’

  It spoke in the singular voice.

  Through the anguished gape of its mouth, under the realtime gaze of the Six Eyes of the God Quorum, a schematic blossomed. The eleven abyssal shafts of Klavier became visible, each coded a different colour; the multiplex spinal columns of the great Station could be traced spiking out from the immense hot inner knot of core country, which showed on the schematic as a tiger composed of many tigers, dizzyingly crisscrossed with tigers, striped with tigers, seas and Himalayas. The shafts all conjoined at the heart of the tigers like a ratking of many colours. Nothing could be seen within the tiger hide
s.

  What was hidden under the trillion hides?

  As they spread upwards and outwards from the beds of tigers — beds each shaft emerged from hollowly, each shaft a whorl tattooed with satrapies — the shafts brachiated bewilderingly, proliferated into gorgets and channels and leaves of armoured skin: became the arcimboldo face of the gorgon gazing unwaveringly through vacuum at the Alderede. Each shaft was like the inner whorl of a generation starship; each exfoliated into Yggdrasil.

  One of the shafts was larger than the others, immense and palimpsested with icons of populousness. On the schematic — which immensely simplified the topology of Klavier into a sea of tiger skins — this shaft in its immensely complex spiral course through Klavier, seemed to halve what could be perceived of the planetoid into two fissured pomegranate slices. But it was Möbius: each half became the other half, in the end.

  ‘Closer,’ commanded Opsophagos.

  The schematic blossomed, focused downwards through the cities of the skin, shot down the largest shaft of all until, deep inside Klavier, Tile Dance could be seen, a silver needle hovering over what might be a docking orifice, but the ship had sunk too deep, far deeper into the skin than docking country. But it was an orifice all the same, though cloaked in tiger skins flapping so nothing could be made out. It was volcano-hot.

  Along the countries pasted to the walls of the great shaft, the lights of the world turned on. From the other side of the world (which was, after everything was told that could be told, the same side of the world) a second elongated pillar began to extrude itself.