by John Clute
Something like a bed, or a hammock, floated in the middle of the long room. It had been woven from capillaries which ended in tufts which emitted musk. Tiny eyes winked from knots in tiles. Herms lined the walls; dozens of masks hung between the herms, facing outward, stiff and praetorian. A universal window gave access to the control chamber of Tile Dance, where a krewe of masks in the guise of KathKirtt and SammSabaoth had gathered round. Other windows glowed softly, seeming to await the coupling. The air within the room was as hot as skin, but there was a slight draught, which carried smells: capillary musk, garlic, cumin. The carriage swayed as the train crossed points at a junction somewhere in its circling descent, where it exchanged ritual teraflops with an ancient braid, thousands of winding kilometres inward from its childhood on the surface of the world. The braid was old enough to retain traces of the light.
‘I’ve been staying here since I awoke,’ whispered Ferocity Monthly-Niece.
Her body glowed with sweat.
Freer flexed his toes on the warm carpet, which depicted a human man and woman whose limbs were intricately shackled, each to the other, so that they were bound together wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle, giving them no choice but to lie upon each other as deeply as they could dream. The figures writhed within the carpet. Their nipples were black with heat. The sounds they made were very soft. The walls turned mirror-dark. Freer undid his cache-sex and tossed it over a herm, where Kath settled herself down after making a Cowardly Lion face. Ferocity dropped her cache- sex on to the carpet.
‘Shall we fuck slow?’
‘No,’ said Ferocity. ‘No. I don’t think I can.’
She leaped towards him.
He shifted sideways, slipped his hand between her legs, and they fell through the light gravity on to the floating bed, hardly noticing as it rose into the cupola, where windows real and universal gave them to the world. They burrowed into position, as was the normal habit of homo sapiens anywhere after the loss of Human Earth, lowering their heads to each other’s orifices, sniffing, touching tongues to the pomace of sweat and juices. It was as though they were checking passports. There were, after all, many thousand species in the galaxy. Some were mimics.
Some engaged in a mimicry of human sex in order to gain sibling access to a human partner, so they could feast after coupling. Some unfolded carnivorously, once they were alone, whether or not intercourse had taken place. After meeting some nonbilaterals of a hoarding nature, many homo sapiens had spent the rest of their lives in jelly.
But this was Freer’s flesh, it was Ferocity.
As was the case with so many thin-hipped women, the cleft dividing her buttocks was shallow. The surf of her cunt and asshole beached there openly, she was as reachable as foam. Her clitoris glowed like a buoy in salt waters, or a soapstone herm, or a keep in the wildwood, or the pommel of the Sword in the Stone; the folds of her inner flesh curled like foam around the outside of the inside. The mild caldera of her asshole flexed at the stroke of a slow single moistened finger. With his two hands, very gently, he parted her cleft until it flowered fully.
She exhaled.
With her two hands, very gently, she parted his deeper cleft, which was bristly with male homo sapiens hair.
They buried their cheeks in each other’s cheeks.
This was home for homo sapiens meat puppets.
The universal windows hovered. The real windows stayed put.
The human lovers turned to face one another.
He touched a nipple with his tongue. It was as rough as a map of mountains, like the inside outside of cunt: the topology of human fucking being a contour map which must be read. The task of love being to fuck from the inside out.
(Human fucking was catnip to many parthenogenetes.)
He touched the back of her neck, at the vulnerable ceding of naked skin to the fine hair.
Ferocity Monthly-Niece arched her hot body.
Freer touched his tongue to her navel.
She stretched to her full length.
They touched tongues, exchanging juices.
‘Rut,’ she whispered. ‘You now.’
He entered her, or she took him.
They read each other’s faces.
They moved toward climax.
The hundred and twenty-one cohorts re-assembled on the plaza watched the homo sapiens not eat each other.
The train continued to wind downwards, paced by the Moon of Tile Dance, its ancient hull wrapped in the wedding commwebs of Klavier, which could be defined as one hundred and twenty-one balls of nerves occupying one space.
The funnel narrowed.
The train made a screeing sound as the curve of the tier tightened. At one point it entered yet another tunnel.
As the two homo sapiens came to climax, Tile Dance, the lens at its heart wrapped thousandfold within its veil within the stamen, descended finally to a point where it filled the portal completely. Only metres separated it at any point from the hardened yew dermis of the portal wall. Tile Dance was now fully married to Klavier. Unguents flowed from various spigots and orifices to lubricate the union between the bulging stamen and the abyssal surrounding wall. The ship continued to descend within her bath of unguents, turning slowly so as to keep her face to Freer and Ferocity in their cupola.
The train continued to descend.
As the ship turned, her skin - radiant with news gathered by her archives in the course of voyages far distant indeed from Maestoso Tropic - continued to exchange data with the capillary-webs she had gathered around her, so that the trillion trillion trillion nerves of Klavier were fed. In return, the data-nodes within the capillaries continued to instruct her about the nature of Klavier, and the task ahead.
When the homo sapiens climaxed, they cried aloud acoustic.
‘Nathaniel,’ she cried.
‘Whee,’ he cried.
Then sobbed.
The sound of their coming was heard across the world.
The representatives of the assembled one hundred and twenty-one species demonstrated their acclaim as universal windows, arrayed diorama-like around the circumference of the plaza, revealed to them all the last seconds of the unique coupling of the homo sapiens couple.
No other species coupled (or joined in any other fashion) face to face, certainly not while both partners were conscious, and even then would normally copulate blindfold for safety (even if they were strangers). No other species for which sexual intercourse was pleasurable — there were many such — engaged in simultaneous coupling and procreation. Except for Predecessors, so it was said, no other species stank both before and after the act of joining.
Johnny Appleseed held his caduceus like a staff. He sighed with something like relief. It had been a very long time since homo sapiens (or Predecessors) had mated within a gorgon.
‘That’s the way it was,’ he said.
His voice fed through commlinks into the hundred and twenty-one tongues.
‘The shutters have been closed too long,’ he said.
His voice crackled against pearl cupolas cupped like ears over higher regions of the city in the upper darkness, where still more citizens of Klavier had gathered to listen in the flesh.
‘Are we all here?’
—Nix, murmured a few Made Minds. —Parthos Consort has not awoken. We have knocked. It no longer survives.
‘Fuck,’ said Johnny Appleseed. ‘Symbionts should not die.’
—We are lucky to live on, said a Made Mind.
‘Right,’ said Appleseed, and added, though what he was about to say was familiar, ‘Sacred is the new.’
—Sacred is the new, averred a consort of awakened Made Minds, speaking in unison with representatives of their cohorts.
Johnny Appleseed was now standing at a small toon podium, surrounded by universal windows that continued to give the cohorts full visual and acoustic on the homo sapiens lovers. They seemed to be whispering to one another, while at the same time they traced, ort each other’s moist skins, episodes of
the vigil of flesh mysterious as arcades at dusk in Paris (Human Earth, long ago), Where Harlequin with bated breath wooed Columbine. Appleseed gestured toward the lovers in the universal windows, and spoke to the cohorts of the brave and terrible solitude of homo sapiens, a people so deafened by the sound and smell of its own being-in-the- world that only the most fleeting and partial communications were ever possible between its members.
Homo sapiens were not consensual (he continued); each individual homo sapiens sensorium was solipsistic, each individual member of the species was contained in the narrow coffin of a solo world. At a primal level, no homo sapiens could genuinely believe in the existence of any other being, hence the destruction of all its sibling species on the planet of its birth. No other sophont could pass on any knowledge whatsoever to them — except along the parsimonious tightrope of words — of what might be happening in the bath between beings. Homo sapiens could not draw upon the lines of empathy, so heavily suckled in densely inhabited worlds that Great Yoni species — several of which inhabited Klavier — were necessary for proper drainage and flow. No homo sapiens could detect fault lines, regions of damage in the bath of being, where the need to mend drew sophonts as avidly as the nerve endings of the Made Minds of Klavier had been drawn by Tile Dance; no human being could understand a Great Yoni species, whose deepest urgency was to embrace and by embracing to heal.
Hence the evolution of braid architectures out of predecessor arcology rhetorics, in order to protect humans from other species, and to protect other species from homo sapiens.
He spoke then of the almost acoustic barrier erected around the sensorium of any homo sapiens, a barrier which bristled and clawed and ponged and twirled its knives of noise, so that no download from beyond, no lachrymae rerum of the bath of being, could reach the homunculus inside — perhaps as an evolutionary response to the nearness of God to Human Earth. Encountering a homo sapiens while unprotected was like landing in Babel: the myth of Babel being unique to homo sapiens. Communications between homo sapiens were like encryptions punched through plaque (he said).
‘Therefore, even though they are murderers, even though they are so deafened by proximity to God that they kill other species at sight, we revere them.’
All species in the Spiral Clade revered homo sapiens for their involuntary sacrifice of the shared world all others bathed in, and for their deafness to God. All other species, therefore, trusted homo sapiens — whom the Alzheimer juices could not digest - to answer back when the time came. All other races free of plaque understood that homo sapiens, wounded though they were, and impossible to live with in harmony, constituted a chivalry: a chivalry whose guerdon of recruitment was that great wound all homo sapiens bore, as though their heads had been torn off, and harlequin masks substituted for real faces. For the very wound of homo sapiens - that which caused their deafness to a universe of light and to the song of lachrymae rerum and to the jacuzzi (said Johnny Appleseed, sniffing his armpits) of pleroma — was that which enabled them to talk back to the God.
‘Therefore we give them living space in our home.’
Finally, Johnny Appleseed spoke of how homo sapiens fucked, which he described as a sounding of Eden on the part of members of a species for whom Eden, which may be defined as the Garden of Uttered Names, was forever unattainable: because the barking of the human sensorium kept the Names from being heard. Fucking, therefore, was profoundly quixotic; because Eden could never be reached. For a homo sapiens, female or male, to fuck with eyes open — to experience on rare occasions a whisper of the Uttered Names, that only faded again, almost instantly, into desert silence — was the highest form of chivalry. In a universe of the utmost cruelty to mortal homo sapiens, flicking was an act of arete, and of great joy.
‘And so, with this act of joy, at this great juncture,’ said Johnny Appleseed, ‘we proclaim the beginning of the end of the reign of God.’
The caduceus in his hand became two extremely simple snakes, one single, one a braided triad; the snakes wound around one another, and became filled with light.
‘We have had enough to God,’ he said. ‘It has been a real fuck-up.’
The concourse of species swayed as one.
Johnny Appleseed turned his gaze to a universal window, where the two homo sapiens could be seen touching each other still, as though in this fashion they could remember what they had heard of Eden.
They had no other choice.
The hearts of the commensals assembled went out to them. Unison outpourings of feeling are possible — indeed mandatory when feelings run high — in the bath of being.
Johnny Appleseed, who did not flick, wept openly. Until the moment came to fuck again, he would remain a singleton, a simpleton, a safe house, though highly odorous.
He could sense that Tile Dance had, by now, finished knitting the commissure together, and that the gorgon of the deep was beginning to reboot. Klavier had swallowed her whole, right down her gullet, a diamond become an eye become Heartbeat. Those Made Minds of Klavier which had awoken guarded the lens. Those which still slumbered, chitinous with the remains of old age, had begun to stir.
Johnny Appleseed could feel them.
It was as though the plaza beneath their feet was bestirring itself, finally.
‘Shall we toddle?’ said Johnny Appleseed.
He stepped from the podium, which became a surrey with a fringe on top from the bottom of the well of the past of Human Earth. He climbed into the surrey, which was pulled by a Horse of a Different Colour.
He led the way down the yellow brick road.
The cohorts followed in their twos and threes, sevens and elevens. There was no jostling. The various species, of every form and hue, followed in accordance with the flow of the bath of being: they were particoloured, or furry, or akimbo from the rear but not faces on, or leggy, or eggshell with veins twisted into an amorous imitatio of the chymical marriage of Tile Dance, or carapaced, or elfin, or as rotund as pomegranates (a milliard tiny commensals mounding together to ooze Great Yoni gift juices), or tweezered, or quadruple, or silken, or parthogenete, or brindled, chambered, puffy, zodiacal, moss-piglet, pool-bound, sapless, grailed, tidal.
It had been a long haul.
It was time to open the gate.
Appleseed stretched his thin arms. He made his way at the head of the cohorts around and around the plaza until he came to the edge, and gazed over the rim at the transparent walls of the conjoined braids turning slowly, screwing themselves further into the funnel, which they filled. Within the stamens Tile Dance had joined together, molten and tabby, thousands of bilaterals and nonbilaterals rode braids, silhouetted against inner partitions like dancers, riding braids downwards.
A dirigible came to rest by Appleseed, ready to take him.
Far out of sight below the rim of the plaza, tight as a glove between the porcelain walls of the tiered shaft and the unguent-coated bulge of Tile Dance, the train slid along greased rails downwards to the transfer point, where ship and pilot would join together for the next stage.
Eat yourself Opsophagos, thought Johnny Appleseed to himself alone. He turned to the universal windows belling like sails throughout the plaza, in order to make his farewell to the cohorts.
His hand froze.
There was a convulsion within conclave space; a message struggled through. He stiffened suddenly. His face aged.
Now that they had finished fucking, the bed they lay in sank back within the carriage, which was candlelit.
Above them the windows of the cupola glittered.
‘Here,’ murmured Ferocity Monthly-Niece. The room darkened once again, for they were entering yet another tight purgatorial tunnel, the ninth. ‘Have some cider.’
She rubbed her breasts against his face.
A spigot extended from the head of a herm with the words APPLE CIDER engraved floridly on the tap.
‘More cider?’ said Freer.
‘For what ails you,’ said Ferocity.
—Ah, cou
gh, said Kath from the cache-sex hanging from a Janus head.
—Yes, my dear?
—On the mountain peak, called ‘Going-To-The-Sun’ . . . murmured Kath.
—More Appleseed in Faerie? said Freer.
The train left the tunnel.
The cupola brightened above them into a kaleidoscope. It was the narrowest cornice yet. The fields were so steep they could be viewed like murals.
—Go ahead, said Ferocity through her new comm facility.
‘Sacred is the new,’ murmured Freer, giving formal permission.
Through a great face in the rock, the train entered another tunnel, the final one; the locomotive said choo- choo merrily. The room darkened down to candles again.
‘Sacred is the new, said Ferocity.
The Made Mind, known as KathKirtt after committing kenosis, who had undertaken many billions of Heartbeats earlier the task of serving as seneschal, started again:
On the mountain peak, called ‘Going-To-The-Sun’,
I saw grey Johnny Appleseed at prayer
Just as the sunset made the old earth fair.
Then darkness came; in an instant, like great smoke,
The sun fell down as though its great hoops broke
And rich dark apples, that poured from the dim flame
Where the sun set, came rolling toward the peak,
A storm of fruit, a mighty cider-reek,
The perfume of the orchards of the world,
From apple-shadows.
‘So?’ said Freer. His eyes were half shut. He could taste the curve of her breast.
‘Appleseed may well be immortal,’ said KathKirtt, ‘because the cider in his blood is telomerase. So he experiences no amnesia of the cell, no nogo lurkers. You, on the other hand—’