Appleseed

by John Clute

The dragons did not fade into sigilla on stilts.

  ‘Don’t fret,’ said Appleseed. ‘They are real toons.’

  They stood on the plaza which, rimming the portal, bent out of sight in both directions; of the great multitude of folk, at least half were bilaterals, though none seemed to be homo sapiens. The folk peered around balustrades, looked down from higher tiers. They dangled in space.

  It all stank of garlic.

  —London Bridge, whispered SammSabaoth. —Just for you.

  —Thank you, whispered Freer to the Made Mind, whose time of bondage to the world had begun on Human Earth when it had still been inhabited by free-range homo sapiens, and who remembered the planet when it lived. Freer now saw that the narrow crescent tiered city of the rim, ringing with calls and clamour, arcaded over with stalls and hostelries, had been shaped (for him?) to echo London Bridge from below the bottom of the well of the past, a dozen London Bridges were woven topsy turvy into one another, London Bridges woven London Towns (a dozen cities of Human Earth all sunk axle-deep in the same mud) into an urb of tiers, redolent of the days of light on Human Earth before the Alzheimer began to seize shut the small island of Britain: before Alzheimer Gogs and Magogs, their wickerwork phyzogs turned to ash, had mottled the gables and the roof gardens and the jousting ground hung with tapestries and the food stalls and the inns and the revels of midwinter into scunge, had scraped the thousand calls and clamours of London off the bridge like old paint, leaving behind nothing but a plaque-addled sans-serif osteoporosis of stone straddling the dead Thames.

  Spasms of light flickered to and fro across the vacancy between rim and stamen, like chandeliers tossing in a generation ark buffeted by stars. Dirigibles sounded haven from these regions as they descended to eye level.

  There was a smell of coal smoke, and a chuffing sound.

  The throng split in a kind of Mexican wave. Yellow parallel tracks laid themselves along the spiral lines of the mosaic tiles, whose faces grinned up like the faces of Klavier’s Made Minds grinning outwards into vacuum, a thousand azulejarias awaiting nightfall to tell a thousand and one stories. The train they had seen from above was suddenly close. It followed the tracks around the plaza in a tightening curve. It now seemed very much larger. It was pulled by a brightly polished steam locomotive with brass fittings, which belched white smoke into the ochre dark. The smoke fled into the abyss, where it made faces before winking out. It was toon smoke.

  The train was not toon.

  It came to a halt. The rear carriage, with CABOOSE inscribed over its picture windows, and a lit cupola extending through its painted roof, swayed on its bogies directly in front of the palanquin.

  Freer hushed his earring.

  The umbrellas made a small wheeing sound in unison.

  On to the observation gallery of the caboose strode a person.

  It was a human female.

  The Mexican wave of bilaterals suddenly ebbed. Those closest to the three homo sapiens seemed to shrink. Those wearing masks stayed close.

  Johnny Appleseed did not move.

  —Fuck me fuck me fuck me, whispered Freer.

  ‘Ferocity?’ he said acoustic.

  ‘Hi baby,’ said Ferocity Monthly-Niece, and gazed directly at him: it was her, all right. The remaining bilaterals flinched as one, fell over each other to get out of range. It may have been the first time in their lives that they had seen two homo sapiens engage in eye contact while communicating with each other. The sigilla and eidolons present also faded from sight, as a matter of decorum. She looked directly at his eyes. He looked directly at hers.

  Ferocity Monthly-Niece then turned to clamber down from the observation deck. Except for the normal cache- sex, and a carved necklace, she was naked. Her arms stretched overhead to hold on to a brass railing, and her breasts lifted in the heated air. Her buttocks spread slightly as she stretched to reach the warm ground.

  She stood on the plaza, as though in sunlight.

  She spread her arms, bent her elbows, twisted her torso, then paced out a swift intricate pattern within a tile azulejaria that told the tale of a topless tower on a planet far from Human Earth, her knees lifting sharply. From above, it might be seen that she was measuring a quincunx.

  She bent over.

  (Her breasts brushed her knees.)

  She placed her open palms within the quincunx she had paced.

  Her fingers pointed in one direction.

  It was a set of movements that Freer remembered very well. Every morning at dawn. Every noontide. In the gloaming. Whenever they left a building.

  They were never lost.

  He felt the heart within him course into channels long- dry.

  The necklace around his neck became rough to the touch.

  Freer placed his fingers upon his nipples ceremoniously.

  The bilaterals and most of the non-bilaterals tumbled over themselves to get to a safe distance. They fell in heaps. The air shook with heat and dust, lanternlit into ghost dances.

  The homo sapiens female was nearly as tall as Freer. The hair of the homo sapiens female was russet. The eyes were amber. There was a mobile mouth in a thin face. The breasts were not large, but firm and extremely smooth, with large dark corrugated nipples, as though the air were cold, which it was certainly not. The belly of the human female had no stretch marks, as though no children had been carried. This was true. The homo sapiens female was long and wiry, with narrow hips and a full arched ass which fined into sharp curves, the inside outside of a ninth wave. The cleft was smooth and opened into darkness. Russet pubic hair could be seen over the top of the cache-sex, which was shaped like the head of a bee, and stared at Kath, who heated. The human female scratched between her legs.

  She grew in his sight faster than she could be peeled.

  —I’m rising, said Kath.

  ‘I believe you two have met,’ said Johnny Appleseed.

  Being something like homo sapiens himself, having every aspect of a homo sapiens male available for use, he was relatively immune to the electrostatic latency, the pheromones, the nutrient-choked neotenous heat of the homo sapiens mating ritual which, no matter what homo sapiens were doing, is what homo sapiens were doing.

  ‘Fuck off, Daddy,’ said Ferocity Monthly-Niece.

  Her eyes were on Freer.

  In the shadows, the pupils seemed vertical, slightly dilated.

  ‘Neither of us is dead, then,’ said Ferocity Monthly- Niece.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘It was a planet. Ardamon II. You left the ship—’

  ‘Tile Dance.’

  ‘Tile Dance. You had booked a visit to planet core. With your cousin.’

  ‘I have a thousand cousins.’

  ‘I met some.’

  ‘You fucked a few.’

  ‘I fucked hundreds. Hundreds.’

  ‘Days of light,’ she said formally.

  ‘I love you,’ said Freer. ‘Days of light.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Plaque hit,’ said Freer. ‘Everything is a blur from that point. I went in-planet. Tile Dance pulled me out.’

  —We pulled you out, murmured KathKirtt, —not for the first time, little Short-Life. And you went back. And we pulled you out again, dead as a doornail. We pulled you out until you ran out of bodies, until you were a Looney Toon.

  ‘My most beloved Made Mind pulled me out.’ ‘KathKirtt? Are you here? I don’t have commlink.’ ‘Hello, Ferocity, my dear sweet cunt,’ said Kath acoustic, from Freer’s cache-sex. ‘Let us give you commlink.’

  The necklace around her neck grew a jack mask of KathKirtt bound to the wheel of infinite voyage; she opened her eyes.

  —Thank you, KathKirtt. But please stay acoustic, for the sake of the folk.

  Her nipples were close enough to touch with the hands that had touched them, and the shadows under her breasts where his mouth had slept.

  Ferocity Monthly-Niece stared at Freer.

  She st
ared at his cache-sex.

  ‘I did not find you,’ said Freer. ‘I figured you were dead, that some vastation pupated within the planet, that you were trapped in a golem treadmill and ground to dust by flesh sapients whose wires had turned them into aspects of chalk.’

  —You see I remember what happens when plaque hits, said Freer to the Made Mind around his groin.

  —You remember now, said KathKirtt.

  —Ah.

  —You did not remember on Trencher.

  ‘I did not lose my sense of direction,’ said Ferocity Monthly-Niece.

  She clutched herself beneath the cache-sex.

  He could smell sharp musk from between her legs. It was the smell of Jerusalem on a map made of skin.

  ‘I aged pretty badly, plaque nearly took the body I wore, but it did not eat me, I got to the surface. I ate the flesh of the dead until they all ran down. I had some adventurous times, dearest heart. But I got to the surface. I sent Mayday Mayday. I sent Mayday till I died.’

  ‘She is not the daughter of my loins,’ said Johnny Appleseed. ‘But she is the daughter of my kind. She was found at the point of death. She was put to deepsleep and shipped to me. It took some time to grow a new body, even here.’

  ‘It can take years,’ said Freer. ‘If you start from scratch.’

  ‘So here I am,’ said Ferocity Monthly-Niece. ‘I am yours, Nathaniel Freer. Let’s fuck.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Why would it matter?’

  She was staring into his eyes. Even though they were both essentially naked, even though they were both aroused, it was such a violation of decorum that his skin prickled. She always did this.

  It was how they had first met, more than once.

  He stepped to her, she stepped to him.

  The necklace around his neck seemed to constrict him.

  —Vipassana? What do you want?

  —We must continue our traversal. Time flies.

  Freer’s lips moved jaggedly, but he said nothing.

  —Now, sirrah. Now!

  —Nix, Made Mind, said Freer. —Dismiss, he added formally.

  He pulled the necklace from around his neck and tossed it through the air.

  He tossed it as hard as he could.

  It turned end over end above the thronged sapients.

  Where it fell, gaping through its pewter cheeks, nobody noticed at first. Then the toon caduceus in Freer’s hand took flight — spinning like a small tornado, as though it were mimicking Tile Dance - and descended upon the writhing necklace in the form of a small house made of wood. It landed on the necklace. From beneath the house protruded a pair of red shoes.

  The siblings of Quondam had soothed Freer’s heart and guts.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘Where were we?’

  The cache-sex rode him like a saddle blanket.

  ‘We’re going to fuck. Now.’

  She touched him.

  ‘Remember yourselves,’ said Johnny Appleseed, placing his spiny hands on their shoulders. ‘Klavier rules: unless they are among their own kind, it ain’t rightly proper for homo sapiens to engage in sexual intercourse in public spaces where other species may suffer damage. But it is surely necessary for you to fuck.’

  ‘Surely it is,’ said Freer. ‘Okey dokey, where? The train?’

  ‘You are my guest. The train will carry you down to the lock, where you will be able to transfer back to Tile Dance. She will follow you down. Then you will turn the key in the lock.’

  Johnny Appleseed’s hair was standing on end.

  ‘Ah, Johnny,’ said the naked woman, flushing, ‘you fuckhead.’

  The throng of sapients ebbed politely away from her.

  ‘Ah, Johnny,’ she repeated, touching his shoulder, then withdrawing her hand. ‘I love you.’

  There were beads of sweat on the curve of her breast.

  A tiny rivulet formed, dried.

  The three homo sapiens standing together emitted an extremely complex range of smells.

  Their bodies were glistening.

  Freer turned to Johnny Appleseed and took him in his arms.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘for saving her. Thank you for bringing me here.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘But first,’ said Johnny Appleseed at last, ‘have some cider.’

  The caduceus in his hand became a small table, with a jug and three glasses. He filled the glasses with a brownish liquid, which gave off a sharp smell.

  —KathKirtt?

  —Don’t be rude. You were not brought here to be drugged.

  —Okey dokey.

  Ferocity and Appleseed drank the cider down.

  Freer followed suit.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Johnny Appleseed. ‘May you live forever.’

  He turned them toward the train.

  ‘Bless you,’ he said. ‘But hurry. Your ship is impatient to get you back.’

  —So we can gain the interior, whispered Johnny Appleseed from within a privy alcove of conclave space fenced round with wards defensive of the intimacy of concourse.

  —What? said Freer.

  —Go.

  He slapped Freer’s buttocks. He slapped her buttocks.

  Freer looked up.

  Ferocity Monthly-Niece had already turned to the train, which huffed softly. Her buttock showed the mark of Johnny Appleseed’s hand. Heat rose. She began to dance out of the quincunx backwards, wagtail.

  —What’s happening to my ship? said Freer.

  Above the plaza, down through the flambeaux-hollowed darkening aisles of air above the plaza, Tile Dance had continued to spin within the flower of the pillar, and had sunk, as she spun, downwards, pulling after her the pillar from the other side of the world, which had continued to weave itself around the silver needle it had swallowed, elongating like spun glass. Quite visibly, Tile Dance seemed to be knitting the world together, drawing the ravelled sleeve of the world in a homewards direction.

  Their task completed, the sigilla and eidolon body shapes were now re-entering the ship. She continued to spin and sink, until she hovered just above the portal to the interior, the throat, the intimate gape.

  And then, like morsel arrow sliding down the throat of a snake, she sank into the portal humming. The portal began to bulge and throb, an opening into the heart of the world illuminated from within, laced by cornices; a peristalsis hearable as music. Tile Dance sank slowly, and soon the circumambient tiers blocked her from sight.

  —There seems to be an apple in the throat, said Freer.

  Appleseed clapped his hands together, joyfully.

  —Follow her down, he murmured, she will take us in.

  —Ceremonies, murmured KathKirtt out of a thronged agora of conclave space, —must be seen to be believed.

  Ferocity Monthly-Niece reached under Freer’s arm and touched his nipple.

  His erection returned in full.

  ‘It will be all right,’ said Johnny Appleseed. ‘All manner of things shall be well,’ he said, echoing KathKirtt two hours ago, when they had first entered Klavier.

  Freer looked at the pianist who had sucked him in.

  ‘You seem wakey wakey, boyo,’ said Johnny Appleseed. ‘Must be the cider.’

  Freer turned back to Ferocity Monthly-Niece.

  He said, ‘Let’s fuck.’

  They stepped across a dozen smiling faces in the mosaic. Masked sophonts of the hundred and twenty-one races, and a few hundred sigilla and eidolons and others of the unfleshed, made way.

  ‘The caboose will seal automatically once you are inside,’ called Johnny Appleseed after them. ‘For reasons of decorum, and to block the pong. But the cupola will remain transparent. We want to watch.’

  ‘That’s what universal windows are for,’ said Freer, shrugging.

  ‘And of course we will need to broadcast your climax.’

  Freer stuck a finger up without turning.

  —Wait for it, he murmured.

  ‘Sit,
Toto,’ he said over his shoulder acoustic, his eyes not turning from Ferocity’s back, the cleft of her buttocks.

  They clambered into the observation deck of the caboose. Her buttocks spread as she guided him up. He sniffed her.

  The inside of her leg dripped sweat pearls.

  They stood on the deck and waved. From the locomotive a bipedal train driver with rosy cheeks and a small moustache and a chef’s hat waved a handkerchief in response. The engine blew cartoon smoke softly, began very slowly to huff and puff and to draw its burden along the yellow tracks, which turned in a slow widening spiral, eleven turns in all until they reached the machicolated rim that guarded the plaza and its celebrants from the perils of the abyss. Masked sophonts, some of them of homo sapiens stature, some much shorter and neotonous, applauded in waves. Smoke puffed from the stack, whipped into a toon halo which burst into fireworks, in the light of which the woven commissural braids from both sides of the world gave off a complex placental glow.

  The two homo sapiens looked over the rim of the abyss as the train chugged downwards towards the first tunnel. Tile Dance hovered just below, awaiting their descent, keeping pace, her port always facing them as the train turned. Behind them, the central plaza had slid out of sight, but within moments they caught sight of it already above them, supported by a crazy-quilt azulejaria-packed yew cornice that reached out into the abyss. Flying buttresses, bedecked with banners, supported the cornice; waterfalls sprayed the next cornice down, drenching the locomotive. They slid downwards out of the tunnel and through the second of the eleven cornices, skirting tile-bright fields whose crops grew aslant, catching sight of great eyes blinking through apertures, and midnight arcades lit by chandeliers mirrored to infinity, and perched pagodas thronged with eidolons like stacked cards.

  Another tunnel. Another cornice. And again. And again.

  Tile Dance turned as the train turned, her face constant as the Moon of Human Earth: never shifting her gaze from the caboose.

  Finally they stepped inside. The door sealed shut behind them. They could fuck now without endangering other species. Menus protruding from herm heads indicated that all the universal windows were alive.

  The interior was a single long room with rusty green walls, open to the cupola above. There were three genuine windows along each wall. On one side, Tile Dance was visible, her face to them, seemingly near enough to touch. On the other, the walls beyond the fields the train was now skirting glowed like porcelain fresh from the kiln; but clearly they were liquid, for deep within, runes could be seen writing themselves, keeping pace with the train as it wound around the descending tier. The runes were telling the story till now.