by John Clute
The Six Eyes of the God Quorum reddened.
Within moments the mouth of the pillar, a torrid caldera foaming with nutrients, reached the rear of Tile Dance, and engulfed it.
Tile Dance, very slowly, began to spin.
As it spun, it wove the halves together.
Klavier was joining together.
There was a flash on the schematics.
Then nothing but silver.
The inner world of Klavier had opaqued.
‘Closer!’
The pudding face spun like dough in a centrifuge.
‘Closer! Or I cut you forever!’
Opsophagos’s point of view plunged dizzyingly into close focus, but bounced off the silvery opaque shield guarding inner Klavier. His point of view hovered, mere metres (it seemed) from the surface. He could see veins and sutures. He could see bilaterals dancing and climbing, leaping off, floating back sideways to the cerebellum-rich fields and agorae of wall country.
It was impossible, however, for Opsophagos to gain any further visual access, so he could not see — though he could envisage - a flesh sentient in the shape of Johnny Appleseed floating smugly within the honeycomb abysses of inner Klavier, Johnny Appleseed gazing hotly upwards, it was easy to imagine, towards the surface of Klavier; it was as though the meat puppet coated in skin were staring directly through palimpsests and tears of branch and skin, through space and the englobing fleet of Insort Geront, through the black armoured rock skin of the Alderede, into the command chamber, where rain sizzled against the scales of its foe.
Opsophagos shut his eyes, blanking the schematic.
There was a burning sensation in his eyes.
The chamber was in darkness. A rain of spicy nutrients bathed Opsophagos and the sibling heirs of the sector he commanded.
‘It has come,’ said the God Quorum under Human Earth, through the stone mouths that proclaimed the visor theirs, and the Alderede theirs, and Maestoso Tropic their satrapy eternally enfeoffed.
The saliva spat from the God Quorum’s mouths charred the walls of the chamber.
A corpse segment slowly calved from a virgin sibling.
There was a great shriek!
Silence came soon, and a downpour of silent sibling grubs.
A dozen breakfast heads gummed solace.
‘Shh!’ humphed a lunch head.
‘We are ready to invest Klavier,’ said Opsophagos finally to the Three of Generals and the remaining siblings. ‘We are almost fully battle ready. We can spike a solo gorgon.’
But the heresiologue blinked in twos and threes its slanty idiot-savant eyes.
‘It is written,’ said the heresiologue, ‘that although the Predecessors calculated on a vigesimal base, they preferred to count in elevens. That is,’ it continued, raptly, ‘fours and sevens. The four Gods and the seven helpers.’
Rain fell in soft bullets into the echo.
‘It is written,’ said the heresiologue, ‘that Predecessor Made Minds,’ speaking aloud the obscenity as its partially decorticated brain was incapable of distinguishing the sayable from the unsayable, ‘once they smell a lens, awaken fully.’
Horror burned like homo sapiens pong.
Opsophagos sank teeth into himself, then lifted his gorged head.
Opsophagos spoke to his captive AI.
‘Can you reach your mate?’
The porcelain face in the iron mask seemed to pale to chitin at the thought of penetrating the opaque shield that guarded inner Klavier.
‘Answer!’
—They will know if I gain access.
‘Answer!’
—They will be alarmed.
‘Answer!’
Opsophagos had said it thrice.
The face in the iron mask sagged into an affirmative.
‘The message is: bring in the pilot. Send it!’
—The lens will come as well.
‘Follow the command!’
The porcelain turned puddingy, scummy with something resembling plaque, but within moments it would manage finally to force the message downwards — at the cost of a frigate, which burned out under the energy demand and the stress of transfer fibrillation — through the barrier into the hot cauldron where Klavier was beginning to join itself together after untold aeons.
The necklace around Freer’s neck would begin to sweat.
nine
Johnny Appleseed and his guest continued to fall softly downwards into the populous heartwood of Klavier. Whiskers of light, suddenly visible from these inner regions, touched the soles of Freer’s feet, and embraced Appleseed floating alongside him, jaws grinding softly as though he were chewing tobacco. The air sparkled beneath them. There was a smell of candycane. Beside them, vast and throbbing, seemingly almost close enough to touch, swelled the glistening translucent stalk or stamen whose puckering orifices had embraced Tile Dance and sucked her wastes and fed her and traded data carafes by the trillion. A faint odorous zephyr whispered in Freer’s hair.
He raised his palms to be tickled.
The zephyr, which was almost mindless, guided them then into a spiral, so that they circled under the thrusting outreach of the great stamen as they descended. The bole of the stamen dwindled into the distance abaft their course, where it extruded itself from a far wall klicks away, a wall which might be a mountain or (properly understood) one of the keelrock pillars of the world. The veins of the shaft bulged above them as they continued to fall; from below, its mossy undergirth, where arteries throbbed visibly, seemed to hold populations, entities large enough to be seen. Freer thought he could pick out finned flesh sophonts of many shapes and colours, some surfing up arteries carrying milk-pure streams of nutrients to the ship; others sliding downshaft through bewhiskered trailings of foam within the swollen delicate translucent walls.
He looked down.
Beneath the soles of his feet, as though he were peering downwards at an azulejaria frieze of intense and astonishing complexity, he could see a ring of structures — arcades, ramshackle towers, a crazy quilt of colourcoded walkways, plazas - clinging in tiers around the rim of a great funnel- shaped portal punched through the floor of this region of the world.
They seemed to be falling straight into the abyss.
Beams from lantern galleons forging upwards to them silently through the dark air, and from torchlights fixed to the city rim, caught the falling flesh sophonts, illuminated the glutinous pale fertile skin now far above them, and caught Tile Dance like a fly at the far end of the tongue.
A krewe of tiny figures strove on the decks of the galleons. Fierce piccolo shouts echoed off the sail-shaped globes of the lanterns below them and nearing. A minuscule, perfectly crafted galleon drifted between Freer and Appleseed. The krewe on board halted its work, doffed plumage.
The vast lubberly beings of flesh applauded, but softly, so as not to make waves in the air; but the galleon rocked, all the same, in the wake of their falling.
—Every Mind has its Matter, whispered KathKirtt.
—No Matter no craft, responded Freer.
—No craft no memory.
—No memory? Never Mind.
The city beneath them, ever nearing, seemed woven of rock and green tapestry, riddled with rust and red, a thousand colours hanging by threads; spindrift blurs of falling water cascaded over friezed porticos; tiled passageways thinned into suspension spans arching over Hundertwasser tenements lit by tethered galleons. Hundreds of small bilateral figures, gaily bedight, waved what might be hands from thatched roofs knitted into the tapestry; tiny floating platforms hurled upwards like kites, their undersides elaborated with runes, as though they bore messages from some Emperor; spiral ladders thrust in every direction, upsidedown or otherwise, as though gravity were no concern.
—Gravity is no concern, whispered KathKirtt, floating like a kiss across Freer’s sensorium.
Singleton craft dodged through the spindrift waters from interior caverns, rune-mottled shadows racing over the crescent agoras that cu
rved out of sight around the reddish abyss. Brightly coloured dirigibles cast more precise and slower shadows, before floating out of sight behind a pentangle of vaster zeppelins, which came into view from the lower depths, the fiery inner furnaces of Klavier.
Breezes wafted them ever downwards and closer.
‘Beddy-bye for Klavier folk,’ said Johnny Appleseed, smelling strongly. ‘Let them sleep well. Let them sleep the sleep of the children. They may wake dead. Or,’ he continued in his still small voice, ‘maybe not.’
He spat. He had been chewing tobacco.
A transparent eidolon paddled towards them out of the shadow of a bulb-shaped galleon larger than the flesh sophonts, though much smaller than the looming zeppelins, and swallowed the gob, chittering.
The gob dissolved within it like honey.
Klavier was self-sufficient.
‘So?’ said Freer. ‘Why the dirge?’
Appleseed gazed at Freer falling through the dark tumbleweed air.
‘Stinky,’ he said, pot calling kettle black, ‘you forget the war. Klavier has roused itself loudly enough to wake the dead. The Opsophagos Harpe know the lens is here. He knows we possess a Route-Only to the motherlode planet, where thousands of lenses await recovery from deep storage. Insort Geront must attack before the lenses awake. The Harpe are a phage species and have been triggered. They are a phage of light. The long wait of Opsophagos is over. How happy they must be. It is the moment for which he has been waiting all their life.’
‘Why have you awoken?’
‘I was never asleep, boyo. But it has been a long watch.’
Light flashed far above them.
They gazed upwards through a nebula of lanterns into the dark heavens, where Tile Dance glowed dangerously at the end of the great docking stamen, a spear caught in sunlight, polychromatic for an instant, then pale.
—Freer, said KathKirtt, soft and choral, within his head.
—What’s up?
—Look and see.
Teardrop pointed his gaze. He saw, far beyond Tile Dance, an enormous tube snaking downwards from what had been the wall on the other side of the world, but which now, having turned upright into a corrugated night sky rifled with speedlines of cloud and storm, had become heaven. The tip of the tube swelled and opened like a mouth as it swooped, and it became obvious that it was the orifice of a second, sister stamen.
It was toothy and tendrilled.
—Augment, shouted Freer.
Nothing happened.
—No need, Stinky, chorused KathKirtt. —Unless you insist on overriding us.
‘Klavier is a twinned world,’ said Johnny Appleseed acoustic.
—The twin has smelled the lens and awoken, Kathkirtt said in a rustling voice.
‘Klavier is awaking. Not since . . .’
Appleseed did not complete the sentence. He gaped upwards. His face was lachrymose.
He resumed.
—The Predecessors were epithalamial, he said comm. —Anything an excuse for a marriage. Soon the lens will be wrapped in the nerve endings of the hundred and twenty- one Made Minds of Klavier militant. Those Minds who can be awoken, and who are awaking now, will protect the lens, encase the lens in praetorian foam. Those who are still asleep or more profoundly disabled will be awoken, with care, with its mediation.
The stamen from the heavens swooped at great speed across the abyssal schism that had sundered Klavier, and the palpating orifice gaped then closed around the rear of Tile Dance, swallowed half her length. She was now linked, mouth-to-mouth, to Klavier Yes and Klavier Aye.
She had become a copula.
—This is okey dokey, chorused KathKirtt.
—We remain unimpeded, said SammSabaoth in voices that were hoarse but solid.
—Explain.
‘Explain,’ he said acoustic to Johnny Appleseed, whom he could smell beside him, drifting in the gold-flecked dark, like a raven planing through updraught in the direction of prey.
—We have been asked to integrate the Made Mind network of Klavier, in order to defend ourselves, said KathKirtt. —We are the missing link.
‘And you, also, you are being asked to steer,’ said Johnny Appleseed.
Freer turned his head away, his ponytail floating in the breath of Klavier in the dark.
—Do you accede, KathKirtt?
—We do.
—Why Tile Dance? Why us?
—Ah, Stinky, that is a long story, sang KathKirtt, speaking behind Freer’s ears and within him.
‘What do you mean, steer?’ said Freer acoustic to Appleseed.
‘Ah, Stinky, that is a long story,’ said Johnny Appleseed, emitting a small elderly raven’s cackle. ‘But tell me this. Do you miss the centre? Do you want to follow Maestoso Tropic westward again? I miss the suns.’
—We are doing missing link, sang KathKirtt. —We are doing commissure.
The cache-sex around Freer’s loins bristled into a lion grin.
—We are integrating defences, said SammSabaoth. —We are initiating marriage.
—Now, chorused KathKirtt and SammSabaoth barbershop.
—Look, said Johnny Appleseed, grinning.
Above them, Tile Dance had begun to turn, very slowly, like a corkscrew.
—Watch, said a thousand voices.
Very very slowly at first, the corkscrewing Tile Dance had begun to wind the great braided, almost infinitely complex, tubes around one another into a slowly tightening double helix which trailed behind her within the arch of the empyrean. The tubes turned like molten glass, elongating all the while, joining the two sides of the world together. Spindrifts of capillary tubing, finer than silk to Freer’s unaugmented eyes, drifted towards the spinning corkscrew from the corners of the world above the abyss, adhered to the turning ship, lord of the dance. Very soon, the kaleidoscope of the double spiral above and around Tile Dance grew joins and ganglions, a hubbub of catenaries jostling together into an enveloping cocoon of many colours, and it became difficult to see whether she were turning clockwise or widdershins.
As the two braids joining the two halves of the world continued to turn, they wound themselves together about a central axis, as though obeying a coriolis mandate. The hollow they created bore some resemblance to a conch seen from above, or a cornucopia, or a trumpet, the inside outside of the Tower of Babel in one voice. From above — clearly visible to any ensemble of tiles doing recording- angel stints for any Made Mind needing access — Tile Dance could be seen, where the fluted cornices of the hollow conjoined most intimately, turning like a dolphin in the deep.
—Secure, said SammSabaoth. —Secure hatches.
There was a snapping shut of darkness, a closing of something like eyes or shutters somewhere near the surface of the world.
—Time to batten down, said KathKirtt, —because—
Their voices screeched outwards in all directions and halted. There was a ping and silence, the air of the world popping in the ear. Freer opened his mouth as though to gasp for breath. There was a coughing sound all around; his head felt hollow.
The necklace around Freer’s neck began to sweat.
—We have interference, said SammSabaoth, after a second. —Time-shift multiphasic detune, he seemed to be muttering through the congestion and the static, —encrypt slamdunk ho ho ho ho fooly-racky-sacky toothcomb thank- ye-marm satchels ho! Got it! he declaimed finally in clear. Freer was breathing again.
Unnoticed by the flesh sapients as they continued to float downward through dewy lantern-shot darkness, Freer’s necklace had turned to suet.
—What happened? asked Freer.
—Harpe intrusion, said SammSabaoth.
—An eye spy?
—We think so, Captain.
—Minded?
—Tiny. Chip. Harpe fingerprint. A plaque cookie. We purged it.
Below them pulsed the skins of dirigibles, the faces painted there shifting from tears to laughter and back.
—And very costly, SammSabaoth added. —They must
have burned out a ship to drill this far down. We estimate at a cost of up to two thousand wetware knots. Poor souls. We did not know they still had the technology.
—So what did the eye spy?
—We think, added SammSabaoth, —that it may have been transmitting—
—To whom? Freer shouted.
—We are thinking about that, said KathKirtt and SammSabaoth en masse.
Teardrop spun like a top with Freer’s eyes, then calmed.
—We must keep a move on, said Appleseed into the comm net. —The cohorts are assembling.
So they continued to fall further into the world.
There was a shrill carolling sound from below.
A rainbow-coloured gondola with ochre railings flickered into sight around a zeppelin from somewhere over the central abyss. Its tile floor was bedecked with leaves, painted with smiling faces staring upwards through an elaborate geometry of struts and sheets to which small sails adhered, billowing in the wind; a chevron of long-necked birds flew above the vessel, clutching in their beaks a netting of thin ropes that held the gondola tight against the downward movement of the air.
—Swans, murmured Freer.
—Gansas, said Johnny Appleseed.
—Whatever.
—Tiles, murmured Freer.
—Tiles, said Johnny Appleseed.
—Reminds me of Tile Dance. Reminds me of home.
—It should, said Johnny Appleseed. —That’s an old ship you got there, sonny.
The multiple smile of the tile gondola broadened, and through porcelain mouths could be heard a chuckling ensemble of formal welcome.
The gansas honked.
A frantic toon watch with eyes like saucers launched itself into view from a ganglion of capillaries spinning upward like lemmings towards Tile Dance, waving its burly hour hand.
‘Piss off,’ said Johnny Appleseed.
Far above them, Tile Dance disgorged several teams of sigilla, most of which began to gather and bind in tidy sheaves the mating capillaries; one team somersaulted froglike out of sight, seemingly out of control. But no alarms rang in conclave space.
The air would hold them in its bosom.