Appleseed

by John Clute

  The winds whistled up the holes of time.

  It was the third gate.

  Tile Dance shifted again and again in the wind and the rain, spinning the KathKirtt and the SammSabaoth flytes into vortices of light as the gyre narrowed.

  They held to each other roaring.

  It was the fourth gate.

  Rain beat upon the meniscus of the screens.

  Wind shook the fins of the Wisdom Fish.

  ‘Turn!’ she cried.

  With each move in the dance of the two homo sapiens, Tile Dance passed further in, light-years further inward. As she sank, the double helix that was her bridal gown turned in time, wrapping her more and more intimately, light-years longer each turn that was turned, but unbroken.

  They were a thousand light-years further in.

  It was the seventh gate.

  The two homo sapiens thought they could hear the sea.

  When you put a sea conch to your ear.

  The gate opened, they thought they could hear the sea. It was light.

  Tile Dance shot upwards or downwards, through the surf that rimmed the waters of Ocean, toward the light. The Wisdom Fish leaped through apertures that opened for them alone, leaped pearly pink into the foam. The waters of Ocean sluiced down the flanks of the ship.

  And it was light.

  The inside of the world was light.

  The inhabitants of Tile Dance stared through the illuminated floor of Ynis Gutrin where the planet hung in the centre of space before them, the jack face of Klavier — all planets are jack — hanging apple-bright in the rain of Ocean, as bright as the Shield of Achilles. The inhabitants of Tile Dance - the topiary parthenogenete, the flesh sapients, the Made Minds, the cobwebs of partials like Doc Punch — gazed upon the deeply seamed faces, dense with mazes. Mountains became eyes which winked, mustachios became rivers. The surface of the planet could not be seen for faces, faces and words of wisdom carved into continents of piedmont and banners fluttering in a great wind that seemed to blow upwards from within, as though the jack faces within Klavier were not the hundred and twenty- one skins of a planet but the crown of a Tree. Faces larger than Klavier, whose eyes were mountain peaks, gazed unwaveringly outwards through the branches. There were thousands of faces, or a hundred and twenty-one faces, or seven, or one.

  It was one face.

  It was jack but more.

  It was mappemonde but more.

  The face was light.

  The man and the woman lay touching. They gazed through the floor at the jack face of the planet within.

  ‘Mercy bucket,’ said Mamselle.

  Freer took a finger from the hollow between her legs.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ said Ferocity. ‘Nothing to it.’

  The Predecessor Queen of Tile Dance formally addressed the krewe of Made Minds and the flesh sapients then.

  ‘Mercy buckets, children, we have come through,’ she crooned, gazing all the while through the floor of Ynis Gutrin at the luminous tapestry of home. ‘The story is ended, fare thee well, mercy buckets! Mercy buckets, children. Mercy buckets, fare thee well! Mercy buckets!’

  Tile Dance began to fall, faster than light, spinning, into the face, into the mouth of the planet or the Tree.

  There was a smell of roses.

  The planet within Klavier stank of roses.

  The great mouth of Eolhxir closed delicately around Tile Dance, which had become the mouthpiece of a trumpet woven from the roots of Klavier, the mouthpiece of a conch the god blows through to tell Ocean it is day.

  To tell Ocean it is time.

  From the guts of the planet of the Tree within, a great wind rustled the branches that mustachioed the mouth, a great wind rang through Tile Dance and through the conclave hollow horn: composed of Klavier, the cunt, the conch, the cornucopia, the megaphone, the whorl. The wind in its passage touched the stories of the krewe of Tile Dance and remembered them. It was the Note. It touched the stories of the trillions whom Klavier held holy, the stories of the eaten since time began, the stories of the eaten who remembered the face of the God who came down to eat. The wind did not ruffle a hair.

  Wash! said the Tree through Klavier to the world.

  Wasssshhhh.

  And the sound became light.

  The sound of the wind became the sound of the gorgon of the deep, for the gorgon of the deep is light.

  All the Johnny Appleseeds became music.

  The War Against God dates from this moment.

  acknowledgements

  No science fiction novel published at the end of a century of science fiction could stand alone, and Appleseed is full to the core with borrowings. Most are very general, some are explicit. I’ve taken the extraordinary phrase about a house made of weather from the great last paragraph of John Crowley’s Little, Big (1981). The description of the sound homo sapiens make, as a kind of barking, appears in the last sentence of Thomas M. Disch’s The Puppies of Terra (1966). The Horse of a Different Colour comes, of course, from Oz. In the description of the core country of Klavier, as seen through Harpe eyes, I have paraphrased the tiger imagery used by Jorge Luis Borges in ‘The Zahir’ (1949), where it adumbrates the nature of a name of God which, once perceived, fatally invades the mind and cannot be forgotten. From ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941) I have taken a famous parenthesis. The term ‘Human Earth’ is from Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) by Rudyard Kipling, and the reference to Mowgli’s tears comes from The Jungle Book (1894). Arthur C. Clarke provides a famous sentence from Rendezvous with Rama (1973), which I have multiplied. In his Long Sun sequence, Gene Wolfe was (I think) the first to call the interior of a generation starship a Whorl. And Roger Zelazny’s phrase ‘sang epithalamium’ has always haunted me. There are, I know, further explicit debts which have sunk too deep into memory to surface when I call.

  On the other hand, Bruce Sterling did not give me the Mardi Gras imagery, which I’d introduced at an early draft stage before I read his Distraction in late 1998; the krewe deployed in that excellent book may prophetically describe human social groupings in the next century; my krewe is more metaphysical, and they can fly.

  I would like to thank Paul Barnett, who had the original idea. I would like to thank my UK agent, Robert Kirby, who took a wee synopsis and blew upon it and saw it bloom; and my US agent, Donald Maass, who took a novel to the high tor and placed it there. I would like to thank Tim Holman of Little, Brown for the limb he must have grown to stand on in order to buy this book; and Colin Murray, for astute copyediting. I would like to thank David Hartwell and Moshe Feder of Tor. I would like to thank Judith Clute and Elizabeth Hand, and their countries.