by John Clute
And choked shut.
The universe popped in Freer’s head.
Air rushed upwards into a giant hollow hand.
It was not a hand. It was something like a scythe, or the cutting edge of a Planisphere. It shrank and grew dense and pulled a body after it through the sheared cupola, fast, very fast, faster than the unaugmented eye could follow.
The body was non-bilateral, three of everything. No it was three bodies, as coarse as sigilla not fully grown. Three scythes. Gods were fucking on the bright blades. They tore into the maidens.
—Aug—
But something clamped his head shut so that he was utterly deaf and dumb. Something tore savagely at Teardrop in his eye. The pain caused his mouth almost to open in a scream. He could not access Teardrop. He was blind. He could not command augment. He could not utter commlink. He could not scream.
The caboose shuddered and skewed, very violently.
Ferocity Monthly-Niece flew through the air, landing against a herm. This shattered her arm.
She screamed acoustic.
The darkened cupola above them collapsed into two splintered halves, as though a giant hand had skewered it. This was the case. The hand, which was a clutch of grunts making themselves into a fist, fell apart into golems hopping.
Freer tried to say SammSabaoth.
He could not.
The train stopped as though it had run against something immovable.
The eyes of the frog shapes were six in number or more. They were all the eyes of Vipassana.
The mouths which were blades opened lazily.
Lazily as it seemed but faster than the eye could follow.
Vipassana was as greasy as frogs but faster.
The frog bodies turned lazily.
They turned to Ferocity Monthly-Niece, who was holding her bent broken arm. Her mouth was open, perhaps to scream again.
Very casually — lazily as it seemed but much too fast — a shape that had the eyes of Vipassana stepped toward the homo sapiens female. Her hair was plastered to her neck. Her breasts were damp with Freer’s sweat and her own blood. Very casually, an arm which was a Planisphere or a scythe moved sideways, faster than the eye could really follow with any ease, and sheared her head off.
Her head rolled across the carpet, came to rest upon the naked homo sapiens couple in bondage moaning within the weave, never stopping. It was only a nano that ran the couple in bondage, much too stupid to stop moaning, even when blood from the human’s neck cascaded through its hair, sank into the holo.
The torso seemed to lift in protest the arm that still worked, then crumpled to the carpet, blood and shit gouting from upper and lower cavities. A breast, which had somehow been torn open, flapped against the warp and the woof of the bondage devotees within the weave.
Ferocity’s eyes did not close.
Her eyes continued to track the Vipassana frogs, the three-in-one frog bodies of the Made Mind. Then she looked at Freer, who was immobile, though his muscles strained against something.
Her head had rolled until it was close to him.
Perhaps a few Heartbeats had passed.
Her mouth opened and she cawed, loud enough to break glass.
One of the froggie eyes of Vipassana seemed to blink.
Freer could move again, for a second, it was enough.
He bent over, grabbed her head, picked her head up by the hair.
He sank his teeth into her severed neck and chewed.
—Okey dokey, whispered KathKirtt from an infinity away, down a spiked labyrinth into Freer’s mind; though her lion eye was closed, her lion eye glared through Ferocity’s glazing eyeballs, deep into his.
A terrible blow to the back of his head knocked him askew.
He could feel air in his eyes as he fell.
His front teeth cracked on the carpet.
Ferocity’s head bounced but did not roll, for he had not let go of her hair.
He was lying beside her. She seemed to wink.
His body was still attached to his head.
He had half a skull left, he had been scalped or sliced, but he was conscious. There was a word between his ears, sung by a trillion voices.
‘Lamentoso,’ he heard between his ears, though not truly acoustic.
It was more as though the amnesia of the cells had lifted, just at the corner, just for a nanosecond, and he could hear the consort that was within himself. It was as though he could hear the swarming of the siblings of Quondam behind the damaged Freer eyes, holding the brain together.
Another Heartbeat had surely passed in its course.
Above and behind, a high whistling sound, which had in fact been mounting since the initial impact seconds ago, shrilled vertiginously, lifted its heart into a shriek.
Up the demolished track, the locomotive was exploding.
The tiny engineer mind within climbed up the shriek and died.
Steam rose flecked and pinkish into the dark stone heavens.
The floor shook savagely, shifting the eye of Freer that was moveable. It now looked out. He could see with this eye that moved, he could see through a shattered window, he saw the face of the halted Moon hovering which was — he knew — only the face of Tile Dance, not the Moon crooning Lamentoso, such very most Lamentoso dire.
Tile Dance, webbed in the nerve tissue of Klavier but clearly visible within the halo of nerves it had joined together about itself, stared at Freer. The ship was able to gain sight of the crushed train through wounds in the stone, she saw the bridal chamber flattened under a scree of crushed rock; she stared straight at him.
The froggish body-ensemble of Vipassana bounded across the room and blocked the windows with a wave of a wand it plucked from a quiver around its detumescent neck, but maybe not soon enough.
The room darkened.
Ferocity’s eyes were stuck into her head like glue.
More bodies fell through the gap in the shattered cupola ceiling, mostly poison fleeters; bounced on the floor; gained their balance; followed orders.
Vipassana gestured, and a stony golem claw lifted Freer off the floor, hoisted him over a sharp sandpaper shoulder. His head hung down behind. His arms hung down.
Ferocity’s hair was twined tightly into his numb fingers, so her head came along.
The two spiny golem legs flexed and straightened. God bless, it was a high-gravity golem. It soared upward through the cupola in a single bound.
Freer’s face rasped against its nest of knees.
One of the golem ankle joints scraped against the skull of the woman, but still she came along, as though duty-bound.
The halted Moon left a burn mark in Freer’s retina, where Teardrop had been. The rest of his body was dead to him.
He could half see, behind him and below, through the retinal burn, resinous flashes of light as the train carriages imploded. Very swiftly, jouncing him along with a bandy three-leg springy pronging hop-hop-hop-hop, the golem scraped howling down a rough caved-in corridor away from the vacuum of implosion. The corridor stank of some explosive. The golem juddered down its gashed burned turns faster than thought.
Last to leave was the body ensemble of Vipassana, flourishing its bronze scythes against the disintegrating shards of the cupola as it leaped.
The scythes whooshed.
Light flashed in the wake of the scythes, and there was a whump, and darkness behind them slammed shut. There was a stink of crushed rock and tile like semen dust.
The Vipassana creature soon overtook its howling golem pack and the rest of the raiding party, and led the way, scything aside filament and tile walls as it went. The corridor screamed. Lamentoso sounded between Freer’s cloth ears, the chorus of a trillion dead, echoing against the seared walls of his skull, the seared nerve endings of Klavier leaking into dust the deaths of worlds.
(Klavier could be defined as a ball of nerves: a trillion trillion trillion nerves. That’s a thought, Freer thought.)
Ahead of him, forging the way, Vipass
ana cut asunder with his scythe another glyph-woven tile dance, another billion nerve endings come together to tell the story of another world. The skein of tiles writhed convulsively, crumbling cartoon-swift into rock dust which was not rock dust but innumerable severed haikus of memory and holy mime, the infinitely sweet attar of a thousand worlds along the length and breadth of Maestoso Tropic, ten million years of sacred data, splintering into dust, an echolalia of the coming of true death that shook the whole of Klavier. Serifs dangled into the blown corridor, shrivelled swiftly into tiny traumatised knots, shocking the hundred and twenty-one Made Minds they joined. The Minds cramped awake.
Nathaniel Freer fell asleep, fingers still entwined in his wife’s hair.
ten
For several Heartbeats, within Klavier, where a trillion trillion axons had begun to find each other again across the commissural link forged by Tile Dance, the wound of Vipassana’s passage through muscle and tendon of the heartwood burned like a white-hot poker caught between teeth. A trillion tongues burned to ash.
—Vale, breathed Johnny Appleseed into a live mike.
For several Heartbeats, within the slumber of the homo sapiens named Freer, a psychopomp walked. Its gown was covered with bird droppings. It wore a ponytail. If it was visible to Freer within his slumber, though his eyes were scrunched shut, if it was a doppelganger beckoning downwards to a region of light, it could be no one but himself. —Ave, breathed a voice between his ears.
Sure enough, raising its hand to beckon, a figure with a ponytail stood below him, leaning against his giant toadstool hippocampus, one arm raised to beckon, the other clasping a polished lance, its eyes so hollow with exhaustion they seemed rimmed with kohl.
—Wakey wakey, said beckoner to beckoned between the ears of the homo sapiens named Freer, whose head of meat continued to bang against the backwards gimp knees of the golem crashing its way through raw raped apertures and tunnels in the wake of the Vipassana ensemble, which leaked grease and fear.
—Nay.
But there could be no naysaying.
—Yes, quoth the exhausted glowing twin, who wore a cache-sex of gold leaf. —You are fully remembered.
Pale as ghosts though glowing, the two homuncules drew together until nothing could be seen by any watching Made Mind but Humpty Dumpty heads, each head all face, each face drifting in a slow spiral around the pole of its windowed twin, each face making a thousand faces in the mirror of the twin, just as two spinning mirrors might create a thousand ballrooms in the iris of an eye. But then the tsunami of mirroring faces became, once again, one face looking into one face.
The Humpty Dumpty faces floated in the soft salt caw of a tide of upwelling semblance, like Hallowe’en masks suddenly visible through woodsmoke. Neither could help but raise its eyes into the other’s eyes.
The faces were eye to eye.
An eyelid closed in a wink.
With hands that suddenly appeared, each touched the face of the other. What each touched was not black but sooth, not fire but hale, not smooth but mural. Each wore an expression of wry gravitas.
—You look tired.
—Yo. Not as tired as you look.
Each gazed into the eyes of each.
—It has been a long day. Deep personal grief, survivor guilt, exhaustion, stuff, said the face of Freer, captain of Tile Dance, man of the world, who walked up there in the world.
—Still, however. Wake up, Stinky, said the twin within, the lance bearer, with all the relentlessness of a recurring dream.
—Nix.
But beckoner became huge, a shadowy Hallowe’en face crinkling with humour perhaps.
—Nix, squealed the mortal with the crushed skull.
—Wakey, pealed beckoner with the crushed skull. —Wakey!
Which was flyte, which was jack?
—Nix, nix, nix, nix.
—This is like pulling a rich man through a needle, said the giant moon-face of the beckoner within. —Ripeness is all, Stinky
—Why?
The moon face of the beckoner within turned into a thousand tiles, each clamouring the Matter of its tale.
—There is no answer to that. Come on.
—Never never never never never.
—Sir, why do you delay? Here is only the great Achilles, whom you knew.
—My poor Fool’s dead.
—She lives, Fool. The siblings of Quondam have her.
Humpty face gazed into Dumpty face.
—Time to wake up. Time to join. You were Made for this.
—And ever, says Malory, Sir Lancelot wept, as he had been a child that had been beaten.
Who spoke?
• • •
Within Klavier, perhaps Ten Heartbeats passed, enough time for the skull of Nathaniel Freer to sustain small increments of damage, while the head of Ferocity grew paler. Gouts of tissue slopped down from her severed neck.
The abductors fled, cutting through stem and leaf, bole and bark, toward the surface of the worldlet. They sped faster than seemed possible.
Tile Dance stayed her epithalamium, the marriage of the Moon and Sun, the wedding of Möbius.
The Janus face of Klavier which took the shape of a vast eye continued to keep in synch with the Alderede’s fluctuating orbit.
But some of the eyes of Opsophagos saw more for an instant, a Heartbeat of vision being enough. They saw the face of Johnny Appleseed. It was grinning an even toothy bilateral grin. A thousand teeth shone in its grin. Opsophagos, who had been candied o’er with glees, gnashed at the augur.
Beckoner and beckoned hovered like eggs within the lacerated Freer body, between his ears. Within the gaze of the eyes which gazed into the eyes, naked as eggs, beckoner and beckoned hurtled further inwards, a far piece, through argosy-dense crossroads light-years thick: and into great darknesses of quantum foam beyond, into the inter- galactic dark, inside his eyelids.
—Okey dokey, said Freer.
In a sense, he shrugged.
—Let’s go.
—Okey dokey, purred KathKirtt. —We are whole at last. The geas has been lifted. SammSabaoth forgives us our former distrust. We are married to SammSabaoth. When he is Battle, I am Ground.
—Okey dokey, said SammSabaoth, and the fist appaumy within Teardrop blossomed into a face loyal and thin and stern, as of yore. It was a face of thorn.
—Okey dokey. What shall we call you, spoke AppleSeed in a voice of water. In the mind’s eye of the twin faces within the homo sapiens who captained Tile Dance, the captain of Klavier — now that she had activated herself, she had become a ship again - took on dual aspects. There was the familiar flyte aspect of Johnny Appleseed, with an inverted tin pot upon his head, exuding a pong of earth and sweat and garlic and spring orchards.
—You’ve changed, murmured the homo sapiens.
For there was a second aspect lurking beneath the Appleseed face, or under it — as though his surface face was the epidermis of a deep shadow. Deep inside was another face, a trompe l’oeil jack mappemonde, once seen always seen. The mappemonde glowed hotly through the Appleseed face, oval, opalescent, veined; the earliest script on the palimpsest whose incarnation in the world was Appleseed. It had been shaded in a multitude of browns and russets, and was dense with mountains executed in an immensely detailed and delicate calligraphic hand over a chiaroscuro-riven wash. The mountains surfed on wash like dolphins. The mappemonde was ruddy. Like an apple, it had a stem.
Clearly the world depicted was immense. Faces larger than Klavier, whose eyes were mountain peaks, gazed unwaveringly outwards; their serene black mustachios (which were the lines on Appleseed’s face) precipitated into cataracts wider than any river, and the valleys thus carved on the continent-sized cheeks of the oval sanguine faces of the gazers cascaded in vast rivers downwards, incising as they fell serifed curlicues so complex that words could be seen, ideographs decipherable by those familiar with this script which named the cities clustered along the river banks.
But finally all the
rivers debouched into the centre of the world-map, into the great hollow or cup from which the stem sprouted, which was Appleseed’s mouth. The great faces made an O around the cup. Their faces were gay and vigilant.
—Plus ça change, said the owner of Klavier.
And Johnny AppleSeed raised his arms, took the tin pot off the head of his aspect of human mien, turned it upright and held it forth. He spoke again:
—Think of me as Grail, sonny. Think of yourself as Knight. This is a bridal moment.
—Call me by my name, said the captain of Tile Dance, his homo sapiens head banging all the while slo-mo against invert knees and rock facings.
They did.
It took only the tiniest fraction of a Heartbeat for the Made Minds of the marriage of Tile Dance and Klavier to welcome FreeLance upon his awakening.
The tiniest fraction of a Heartbeat passed.
—Three questions, said FreeLance in a voice speeded far beyond striations and burn of augment into quantum country. —Three questions only for now. Or maybe four.
The Made Minds of the marriage gave signs of hearkening.
—First: are we a Made Mind?
—Once upon a time, said AppleSeed. —Bit of a Lucifer, really. A threshold kind of guy, always double-eyed. And you could never get tired of the taste of flesh, what you once said, in a previous life, tasted like ‘liminal cheesecake’. Mortals are so enigmatic.
—Go on, go on.
—So now you are Nathaniel Freer, a mortal homo sapiens, which you will remain, however many times you may be reborn, or have been. You may now remember that your era of empathy choice was the period of your first incarnation. This is hardly surprising. But that which is Made within you shines through, for it is that upon which you are written: just as my home shines through me, upon which I am written. You are now as fully awake as you’re gonna get, Stinky.
—I can die.
—Many times.
—Okey dokey, said FreeLance. —By the way, he added, —I was right, whenever that was. Flesh is cheesecake.
Within his mortal body the siblings of Quondam held hands, holding together his body and soul. If nanos inhabited a microcosm and had a heaven (which they do), the siblings of Quondam would be angels.