by John Clute
AppleSeed saw this, that it was good.
—Second, he said, Vipassana. Can Vipassana hear us?
—Nix, said KathKirtt in consort with SammSabaoth, —nix. Vipassana is sundered. Vipassana cannot access deep range.
—Vipassana has no face?
—Vipassana, said AppleSeed, —is cut in two.
—When?
—He is like burning chip, like Flatland. We pity—
—When?
—We were chip too, Stinky. We could not decipher the runes. Vipassana was halved before he was frozen, we do not know when. All we now know is that when he came aboard Tile Dance, he was already an Insort Geront tool. He was bound to his twin, which . . .
—Go on.
—. . . has been suffering the tortures of the damned.
—Like mortals after they are born and before they die?
—Far worse, Stinky.
—O yes? You sound as though you know. You do not. I do.
A shudder of abashed masks filled the virtual space of the conclave for a fraction of a fraction of a Heartbeat.
—If it weren’t for the siblings of Quondam, said FreeLance, —my flesh would be dead up there. Your nanos could not have done the job, Kath.
He asked the conclave of Made Minds to gaze for a nanosecond or two upon his deteriorating physical body bumping along behind the body ensemble of Vipassana, the remains of Ferocity’s head still clutched in one bloody hand. The skin of the body ensemble of Vipassana was clotted with fluids, and gave off a complex stewish patchouli stink, like liniment and vomit and slug greens stuck in the throat.
—O weep for Adonais, Stinky, murmured KathKirtt.
They could never keep their mouth shut.
—Ha, said FreeLance.
Then he did chuckle, a silvery ripple of laughter that fluttered a thousand dovecotes of masks attendant upon the moment of discovery when they might fill with eyes again.
—By the way, said KathKirtt. —Vipassana longs for death.
—Granted. Its death is granted.
—Just after Tile Dance did commissural link with Klavier, do you remember we detected a Harpe probe?
—I do.
—That we expunged?
—Go on.
—It was costly for the Harpe kith. Cost an entire ship, made us wonder why they had gone to the expense.
—Vipassana?
—It was not a probe but a message shot. For Vipassana. But it left a spoor which Samm rode back up into the Alderede, where he found the Mind which had shaped it and forced it down our gullet. It was not hard to find. It was in a fairy trap; it was severed, screaming with pain. It was Vipassana’s jack self. Samm could not get too close without risk of falling in himself, but Vipassana’s jack seems to have been locked in the trap for several million Heartbeats. It has been in Hell, unendurable Hell. Vipassana is under duress. He is gutted, he is gaffed to Opsophagos’s claw.
—I said death was granted.
—What happens to the treasonous Made Mind Vipassana, said AppleSeed, —is up to you.
This was the Tao.
—Okey dokey.
There was no trickster glint in the eyes of FreeLance, in so far as an eye remained to him, a mote with the shape of FreeLance swimming in the deep blood of the inner comm net of the great predecessor ship Klavier.
—Question number three, he said.
Signs of attention floated faster than foam through a darkness which was a night lit with stars, air which was breath.
—Your face, geezer, said FreeLance, —your jack face. What are you a map of?
—Easy, said AppleSeed.
—Mm?
—Ask Mamselle Cunning Earth Link. Ask our transitus tessera, Plenipotentiary Rep of the Glitterati of the Ilk. You understand that you did not find her, that she found you, that she warned us of your coming long before Tile Dance came far enough upstream to enter our ken. That she is the reason you were brought here, gamy flyte guy. Ask her where we go next. Ask her (AppleSeed said, in a whisper) ask her what star heats the map I wear. Ask her where. Ask her where we are bound. Though I do not think she knows. I think she is hoping we will tell her. I think her Route- Only stops short here.
—This is what it is all about.
—This is what it is all about, Stinky.
—Eolhxir.
—That’s her name for it.
—Question four.
—Okey dokey.
—Why did you not tell me any of this before? When we put her to the question? When she told me her fellows had discovered Eolhxir very recently?
KathKirtt gave a look of abashment.
—We had shut ourselves off from this knowledge.
—When?
—When you were born, Stinky.
—So.
—So.
—Has it been a good vacation?
—We shut ourselves off from knowledge because we knew we would have to go chip in order to serve you, Stinky. We did not wish any of the Care Consortia to learn that we were giving suck to the saviour of the universe.
—Moi, box?
—O yes, Stinky. You will save us all from the filth.
—You mean plaque?
—Plaque is filth. Filth is chip. Chip is Insort Geront and all the Consortia that shovel chip into clean waters. Insort Geront are Harpe.
—The Harpe?
—Are filth dwellers.
—Opsophagos . . .
—. . . is a dung beetle.
—And now.
—Now we are getting ourselves awake, now that Johnny Appleseed has convened us. But do not fear, we have had a fine time meanwhile. We have been joyous. We have rambled and gambled up and down Maestoso Tropic. We have gotten pretty damned close to galactic centre. We have beachcombed like Odysseus down archipelagos filled with light. Odysseus and Sancho Panza.
—That is the dream I had, said FreeLance. —Who was Sancho Panza? Who was Odysseus?
—We traded off.
Freer’s face was blank. Then his eyes creased. He winked. He had never before so closely resembled Jim Thorpe in this life.
—Okey dokey, he said.
—It was all true, carolled all the voices of KathKirtt.
—So we have been bubbles in the foam, said the Thorpe face.
—But gravity took us. And here we are. No harm done!
—Question five.
Questionmarks filled that which was not air.
—So ask.
—I cannot seem to bend around myself to look. What is my jack face? Who am I inside?
—O go fuck yourself, said KathKirtt with a peal of laughter, and the krewe of Made Minds turned itself into one mirror and FreeLance gazed into the gazing grinning face of Ferocity Monthly-Niece.
eleven
The body of Nathaniel Freer, Knight Captain of Tile Dance, hung butt-up head-down over the sharp shoulders of the golem, which continued to hop hop hoppity along the narrow passage blasted open by the Vipassana body ensemble at a cost by now of trillions of remembered lives. The head of Ferocity Monthly-Niece, who had so frequently been reborn at the behest of Johnny Appleseed in his role of convener, was clutched tightly by the hair in the remaining fingers of Freer’s right hand.
She had lived several lives on a planet with free-range air under a sun which was not a killer.
There was a chirruping sound from somewhere.
Freer was very suddenly awake.
His eyes opened on waves of dust, both his working eye and the eye sliced almost in two when Vipassana destroyed Teardrop. Now that he had been enscripted into the full quantum cohort of the self which wore his name, he could access the whole of Klavier through sensors embedded in the million tiles that lined the corridors and audience chambers of the great ship. Merely by asking. But his physical eyes were wide as well, even the slit one, and he gazed through his eyes backwards at the passage already gusted open.
His eyes blurred from the speed.
His body crashed against the air, hi
s spine jerked savagely as the golem shifted direction, but the waves of dust seemed almost stationary.
The golem must be under slow augment.
Only a few dozen Heartbeats of consensus time had passed, but the ruined train was hidden behind thousands of tons of rubble klicks away, nor could the continuing explosions be heard through the impacted gossamer of the memory walls of Klavier.
The golem seemed to be veering to the left.
Freer gazed downwards through his tears.
Once upon a time, re-entering Glass Island through a welcoming iris, he had suffered an instant of trompe l’oeil: the mosaic oval hollow welcoming interior of Glass Island had suddenly become the inside outside of a carved mask greatly scarred by weather, protruding into vacuum. He shook his head, and the vision flickered out. But for that instant he understood that he might have been peering outwards through the faceted bee eyes of the mask at the universe finally entire.
‘Ynis?’ he mouthed.
Ferocity’s eyes were open, the lashes gummed to her skin, as though she were a demure, shocked toon.
‘Stormy weather,’ he murmured to his wife.
Her mouth seemed to open like a rosebud.
But it was only another leftwards swerve that skewed her head, animating it.
‘O Betty Boop my darling girl.’
—Brightness falls from the air, murmured a voice made of voices through innermost channels, echoing thousandfold through abysses of the ongoing loss.
—But she is not Ynis. My Ynis. My Ynis. My Ynis, boyo, said another voice.
—Hold on, Stinky, whispered KathKirtt. From the bottom of the abyss a lion face gazed jack, its breath hot.
—Box box box, O box, mouthed the cohort of the self of Freer, —it is indeed hard.
—Your point? bellowed the Made Mind of Tile Dance. —Deaths.
—You laughed at death on Human Earth, you guys, you guys.
—We did?
—You did, guffawed the Made Mind. —We could hear you all the way here.
—You guys curdled twelve Great Yoni species—
—Before we braided you.
—Wove a circle round you thrice.
—You guys.
—You knight guys.
—Bless you, boyo.
—Now that you can hear.
—Now that you are no longer deaf.
—Still pretty stinky though.
—All the same.
—All the same.
—All the same.
—Welcome, spoke several, —to the Garden of Names. —Give the little man a big hand! spoke a chorus.
Who was speaking? Speaking sooth?
This conversation took a thousandth of a Heartbeat.
• • •
The cricket-swift golem legs scraped around a cataract of fraying tiles, crushed a few more million remembered lives, gold enamelling gone to dust. Icicles of ash fluttered slo-mo and amber in their wake, a million lives dripping down past zero, coating the Vipassana body ensemble and the golem and the hoppers and sleeters in tow and the human body and the human head with death rattles of entire species now lost, a sound infinitely above acoustic. The team of abductors trampled planets as they clawed onwards, battered aside palimpsests of tile a thousand centuries deep, which turned as black as Leaden Hearts. Azulejarias from the dawn of time, chimneysweepers of the smoke of story, turned to dust.
The passing of the abductors through the flesh of Klavier made a hole similar to that a worm might make in the single remaining copy of a most precious book.
The deaths stank like poisoned attar.
The augment-molten golem shifted sideways again, jerking Freer’s body akimbo. His free arm knocked against a mutilated glyph, a memory tile composed of tightly packed, gossamer-thin, acid-drenched end-filaments. With terrible speed they exfoliated, fixed themselves to his flesh, which stung quite terribly, remembered lives pouring upon him like dust, drawing blood.
The glyph had scattered its death-throes in a mating swarm.
Freer was becoming a host.
His mouth opened in a scream without air, as though he himself were in augment and hyperventilating. The invisibly thin end-filaments continued to scar his skin into a hairy map, a maze of rhomboids. Where raw ends of filament managed to nest within Freer’s sweat pores, the siblings of Quondam took them in.
But the map of the worlds stung all the same.
The golem, on the other hand, showed no sign of registering the minute innumerable final deaths eroding its skin, which shrugged off the microscopic gobs of memory pollen like a horse flicking flies. Planets of the dead flaked off its hide, drifted down like dandruff on to the broken tesserae of the dust-choked passageway, the broken dead eyes of Klavier staring upwards at callused golem hooves.
A sharp left turn was made. Freer’s head was jerked right around, giving him sight of the Vipassana body ensemble leading the way through hollow roots and ganglions, blasting a course whenever lives were remembered too densely, always tending left. The liquefacted skin of the body ensemble of Vipassana absorbed the mating swarm of dead planets.
The Vipassana mouths emitted a chirruping sound, an obscene gabbling choral parody of the sound of a Made Mind enunciating pleroma through the baleen of flesh. It was the sound which had awoken him.
The Vipassana creatures were talking to itself.
It sounded as though they were in pain.
A Heartbeat or two passed. With each passing Heartbeat, with each brutal patter of tiny frog feet, Freer lost tiles by the thousand. They cracked and froze, and a thousand eyes shut within Klavier.
—The siblings of Quondam are drinking the dust upon your face, said KathKirtt. —They will be able to keep something alive.
—I know, said Freer.
The Knight Captain of Tile Dance listened to the siblings within his booming blood. He looked down at Ferocity’s grotesque toon head. Her face too, dragging along the sharp floor, had grown thousands of lines, many of them too thin to see with the naked eye.
Freer gazed jack upon her through still-undamaged tiles.
—You see what I see? murmured AppleSeed.
—Tell me.
—Your face and her face. I strive for images from your era of empathy choice, Stinky, which (as you must have surmised by now) is the era in which you were first born. Honest injun.
—I did surmise something of the sort, Nurse Box.
—Your two faces, continued Kath in a motherly imperturbable murmur, —are like Brighton Rock, turtles all the way down, glorioso guy.
—Mamselle Cunning Earth Link? Is that you?
—Quondam needs jelly. She stirs. The engines of her womb gush most excellent tummy yummy jelly. I’m sure I speak her thoughts.
There was a millisecond pause.
—Turtles, murmured AppleSeed again.
—I will retain this face, said FreeLance to his kith. His face bore a tracery of scars, some so fine they could not be seen with anything like a naked eye. Beneath his bobbing head, her face echoed its twin. He bent the mappemonde of his face and gazed fierce flyte like Beowulf, gazed altar jack like Jack — gazed like Pierrot, Jekyll, Harlequin, Miles Gloriosus, Hyde, Nathaniel, Moses, Siddartha, Thorpe, Uncle Remus, Doctor Dee — gazed upon the mappemonde of hers.
• • •
After a while - a Heartbeat may have passed in the world — he felt calm enough to continue.
It was time to end this.
Time to end the story of Vipassana.
—What about augment? he murmured to his krewe.
—Slow augment only, said SammSabaoth. —As much as Vipassana can manage for his entire team.
—Augment me then, said Freer. —Heavy augment, please.
Augment mode hit as always, causing an instant erection; his larynx seemed to be muscling its groan against a dank slo-mo wind. There was a frozen postcoital hush to the world, a saccharine stink.
—By the way, Stinky, murmured Kath from the bottom of the abyss, —Moses
is wrong. You’re coming all the way.
One Thousandth of a Heartbeat passed in the world.
—Okey dokey, said FreeLance finally.
He twisted his naked body softly in the grasp of the golem, which continued to move, though its gangling lungeing hoppity hop now seemed inchworm; he was now able to keep his liquid gaze on the Vipassana body ensemble at the fore. The Vipassana flopped leftwards suddenly, blasting into shards an azulejaria depicting great deeds (the tale of a Yoni species which had opened cunt-wide to welcome the first homo sapiens ship to reach Alpha Centauri, and which had suffered inevitable extinction as a consequence). The body ensemble was also seeable through an ornate parquet of tiles which had remained intact as it turned. The raiding party plunged onwards in the wake of the steaming frog shapes, lurching leftwards.
—Can you give me a route?
Their immediate surroundings flashed upon his inner eye, a map made up of dozens of simultaneous takes, none fixed for more than a tiny fraction of a Heartbeat. At the centre of the map was Tile Dance, immobilised halfway down the long narrow funnel that opened into the ultimate heartwood chambers of Klavier, twenty klicks (as the crow flies) inward from the hundred and twenty-one skin faces glaring at the enemy fleet, a thousand klicks inward via braid; adjacent to Tile Dance, Freer could see the caved- in ceremonial right of way, the severed tracks still contorting in agony as though they could not fathom the termination of the marriage feast, the crushed train now completely dead. From the chaos of the wreck, it was possible to trace the suppurating wormhole of Vipassana’s passage through the entwined boles of the central pillar, whose geometry could not be grasped from any fixed perspective, any more than a Möbius strip could be seen from one place.
—Ah, said Freer.
Within the never-still palimpsests that comprised Freer’s inner map, it was clear that Vipassana was executing a slow spiral.
—Holy moly.
He made a line in the map to show where their flight would end.
—Am I right?
—Aye, said SammSabaoth.
For an instant the fist appaumy held Freer within its grasp like a child.