Appleseed Read online

  appleseed

  cover

  also by john clute

  title page

  copyright page

  dedication

  epigraphs

  author’s note

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  acknowledgements

  Also by John Clute

  The Disinheriting Party

  Strokes

  The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (edited with Peter Nicholls)

  Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia

  Look at the Evidence

  The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (edited with John Grant)

  The Book of End Times

  appleseed

  john clute

  A TOM Doherty Associates Book

  New York

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  APPLESEED

  Copyright © 2001 by John Clute

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  First published in Great Britain by Orbit 2001

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 0-765-30378-7

  First U.S. Edition: January 2001

  Printed in the United States of America 0987654321

  For Dede

  (1944-2000)

  passed living

  ‘But here now I has broken His sword of power acrosst my knee, and flung’d his pieces in the face of His despite. Yea, agin His Commandermint onc’t more I will go back to watch on the aidges of His airthquake, for the sakes of Adam’s childer: though they-all fergit me in their Nowadays, and say to one anithers: “No Angel now cometh from Anywhar.”’

  And the Angel bussed me with his lips.

  And he were goned.

  But what he bussed me on the mouth hit were like a flower-bud of fire . . .

  Percy MacKaye, ‘The Stranger from Anywhar’

  ... he might dream that his old nurse was baking an apple on the fire in her own cozy room, and as he watched it simmer and sizzle she would look at him with a strange smile, a smile such as he had never seen on her face in his waking hours, and say, ‘But, of course, you know it isn’t really the apple. It’s the Note.’

  Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

  ‘Sir, I did not mean to stand! something made me stand. Sir, why do you delay? Here is only the great Achilles, whom you knew.’

  E. M. Forster, The Celestial Omnibus

  author’s note

  In this novel two unusual words in particular are used again and again in contexts which do not necessarily explain their original meaning. I thought a short definition of each might be useful:

  azulejaria

  The art of the Portuguese figurative tile panel. Examples are usually rectangular, are normally fixed to walls (both internal or external), and can comprise a hundred or more tiles. Portrayed on these panels are images (which are not restricted to individual tiles, but flow over from one to another) out of the tradition of European drama and the commedia dell’arte. Almost certainly the most complete study of azulejaria dramas is Daniel Tércio’s Dança e Azulejaria: No Teatro do Mundo (‘Dance and Azulejaria: The Theatre of the World’, Lisbon: Edições Inakpa, 1999); it is an indispensable book, both for its superb illustrations and for its text. Those, like me, incapable of understanding more than a few words of Portuguese will find an English summary at the end.

  mappemonde

  In medieval and later times, a map of the world, usually oval or circular, usually (but not always) originating in England. The mappemonde often placed Jerusalem at the centre of the world, and at first glance more complex examples could easily be understood to depict a densely detailed landscape, or an apple perhaps, or perhaps a face. The trompe l’oeil portraits of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-93), which bring together painted fruits and vegetables and fish and meat and other ingredients into the semblance of a face, resemble mappemondes.

  one

  There had always been something about a planet of cities that made Freer long for the sky. Nothing about Trencher, a hundred thousand klicks below, glowering like slag in the holograph cube at the heart of control centre, seemed likely to charm him out of the ill temper and claustrophobia he anticipated. Several centuries of local sector warfare had ground the planet’s surface to a mottled airless nub; the various waif species that now occupied Trencher kept below the surface, in great muggy warrens which had metastasised into a world city. The aboriginals, who had destroyed their world aeons past, were all dead. Only their story-nodes remained, fragmentary partials, digital echoes of long-dead flesh sapients pacing up and down the prison yards of AI pickle jars.

  There seemed little point in adding to his store of knowledge.

  —Blank me, he subvocalised into conclave space, turning away from the humming cube. The nano-rich Teardrop in his eye shivered at the thought of losing contact. But the circumambient screens blanked out obediently, as did the holographic projection of local space surrounding his command couch, and he sat nestled in silence within the suddenly darkened heart of his ship, which continued to fall towards the planet of buried cities. The blizzard of media noise, generated by the port AIs’ traffic control channels, shut off. Having obeyed orders, the Teardrop dried to an almost invisible thread.

  He had been in Trencher space for ten seconds.

  He sighed.

  But almost instantly a tractor beam locked on to Tile Dance, its high-priority codes overriding the Teardrop block, and Freer was no longer at peace.

  Through his data gloves he stroked a tile mask, which had responded to his slight distress. The tile made a blank purring sound — no AI was parking within its tiny brain — and returned to its place beside its companions, on the curved walls of control centre.

  —We are your personal Trencher engine, spoke an ensemble of beamed voices into his Teardrop, a parched choral murmur generated through the throats of a thousand long-dead sampled aboriginals circling within their jars like dead tigers in a fossil zoo.

  —Okey dokey, said Freer.

  —Please select a name of your choice.

  Freer did not much like idiot-savant engines with monikers.

  —‘Mowgli’, he sent.

  —Welcome to Trencher, chorused Mowgli.

  —Kirtt? said Freer formally, through Teardrop, which awakened to hear him; Mowgli listened in.

  —Sir, responded Kirtt, in a flat-voiced travesty of its usual polyphonic whisper that echoed drably down the aisles and atriums of conclave space, where Minds and their flesh masters conferred; but fully enabled quantum Minds were forbidden within the Law Well of Trencher — a precaution typical of inhabited planets along the fringes of the rim, with plaque descending nearer every Heartbeat down the Spiral Clade — and before Tile Dance had been allowed through the heliospace boundary and into the solar wind where Law Well prevailed, Kirtt had reduced themself to chip mode, to a fraction of its normal capacity. It shrank out of the tiles through which normally it acted out the masque of interface between Made Mind and mortal meat sapients. It was a tin shadow of his quantum self, spoke in a single male voice.

  —Speak up, chip head, said Freer.

  —This is not my doing, said Kirtt in its querulous single voice.


  But there could be no argument with the prohibition - indeed, even farther up the Spiral, where it was believed that any stirring of quantum foam from which the universe was built tended to trigger plaque, the Made Minds were banned entry to many sectors; up past Human Earth, where the plaque desert ruled abandoned satrapies of the old ecumene, AIs of any sort were forbidden altogether.

  When found, they were disassembled raw.

  —Take over, please, said Freer, and told his data gloves to fold themselves away. They obeyed. He sat blind and silent again in control centre. The frieze of tiles that normally generated a low susurrus of gossip around his command couch remained silent, disabled by Kirtt’s truncation ; a clutch of free tiles floated through the air like ceramic bats, their intagliated mask visages stark still, for the dance had stalled in the absence of the Made Mind.

  No mottoes flickered through the air like shuttlecocks.

  But one square of tiles continued to depict Ferocity Monthly-Niece, her unblinking bee gaze, her open desire for Freer, whose face her gaze had fixed upon.

  He gazed at her frozen face, which he knew so well it was almost as though he was gazing into a mirror.

  —Take over, he repeated.

  —Okey dokey, uttered the stunned chip AI flatly within his head, through the comm net that webbed conclave space with a trillion junctions, a little slow on the uptake, and meshed with Mowgli.

  —Trencher welcomes law-abiding traders! sang Mowgli. —Please disengage from Maestoso Tropic.

  —Roger, said the AI and snapped the thread. Tile Dance was no longer linked to the regional wormhole array of the great Tropic she had followed into this local sector; the ship was now in the hands of Trencher.

  A billion faces of data streamed into Tile Dance and she began to slide downwards through mazes of orbiting resters and nesters, down past orbitals and mirrors and coffins from afar, and immense duufus arks and powersats, and local ramscoops, and even an exquisite-corpse commune spatchcocked out of wrecks and flotsam. Below, at the heart of Law Well, Trencher squatted like a senile poison hive, sucking the bugs down toward the thickening song of atmosphere.

  It had been millions of Heartbeats ago, half a short life- time, but Freer’s memory, which was eidetic for women, gave Ferocity back to him. He did not really need the masks.

  He allowed himself to slide into a light trance.

  So it was without his intervention that the taut ancient polished wolverine-sleek Tile Dance, which had been home for the half of his life he could remember properly, slid the last few thousand klicks downwards into Trencher, dived across terminator into the vast net of guarded portals that protected the vacuum of docking country from the stinking air, sank into the world, sank deep under the seared epidermis of Trencher, came to rest within the assigned grid.

  Above the ship the passages of entry into Trencher flexed shut. Great spasms of light flickered off walls a klick distant. Hundreds of ships were visible, each cradled into its loading dock. Robot drones swooped through the maze, their prehensile claws guiding wires and tubes and cargo shoots into place. Hollow transport braids of all three authorised hues wove from ship to ship, giving crews and passengers access to the interior webs of the world.

  —Your pheromones are rising, Stinky, whispered Kirtt inside its master’s head, sounding almost normal - clearly it had been knitting together backup circuits out of the shambles of chip mode.

  —I’m not watching, he said into the comm net. —I was thinking about Ferocity.

  A cloud of cartoon spermatozoa did the can-can inside Teardrop. Freer shrugged at the joke. Being human was nothing to him. He was used to the dense maritime stench of human air. He had spent decades with his own species.

  —Shut up, Kirtt, he murmured after a few seconds.

  Teardrop blanked obediently, but then knocked.

  —What is it?

  The request mandala of a local net of press toons glowed in his right eye; the net had sniffed a scoop, was requesting visual access.

  —Deal with this, Kirtt, he signed within his head.

  —I’m only partly here, Stinky, said the ship Mind in its single male voice. —I’m a wounded surgeon.

  —Just do it, Kirtt.

  He blinked again, and the mandala swallowed itself, and his eye was free, for the moment.

  —Isolate me, Kirtt.

  —Roger, Stinky.

  Silence wrapped around Freer again.

  He was able therefore to spend the next few thousand Heartbeats playing chess with data mice while Kirtt fed the press toons a few terabytes of bumpf, handled docking formalities through Mowgli, arranged for supplies and fuel. The crippled ship Mind also liaised with the firm — a journey- cake cartel emceed by speckled sophont non-bilaterals from Betelgeuse — that held the goods for transfer to Tile Dance, initiated authorisation procedures with the Trencher planetary minds, formally requested permission to download the Route-Only contracted to guide them to Eolhxir. Stretched to its limit by these procedures, which ebbed and flowed like surf, Kirtt failed to register certain nuances in the data perfume. Freer was given no idea, therefore, that he was causing a stir.

  He did not yet know that he was the most important person in the planet.

  During these early hectic moments, Number One Son goofed off on its own, cartwheeling down the translucent egress spiral toward a homo sapiens braid which had just linked up for the benefit of the visiting ship. Number One Son looked like any other sigillum doing business for the flesh sapient it mimed. Visible through the ceiling of the egress hatch above its clumsy bumping torso, Tile Dance rested within the docking cocoon, an elongated pregnant wasp swathed in braids, caught in amber, succoured by nipples bearing nutrients from the innards of the world. Shafts of light from the surface of the planet far above danced down mirrored passages into the vast docking chamber, flickered through the ceiling, caught Number One Son’s stiff bare buttocks bumping out of sight into the hollow oval that opened into the braid; the snorkels and prostheses and nipples that cobwebbed the ship flickered and darkened as beams echoed to and fro, as though half alive.

  In naked space, on the far side of a thousand ceilings of rock, several thousand klicks up in the nesting orbit it had occupied for millions of Heartbeats, an Insort Geront ark of the Harpe Kith continued to slide around the planet, doing its job. Greedily, it drank up sacred data from Trencher; sometimes the flow of information near exceeded its computing capacity, and whole ranks of oldster homo sapiens overheated, often fatally - like any Insort Geront ark, it was loaded to the gunwales with distributed chip nets, human brainchips sunk in senior-citizen deepsleep, millions of obsoleted flesh sapients enjoying the culmination of their mortal span.

  But flesh is grass, isn’t it? Opsophagos themself of the Harpe had said once to a homo sapiens philosopher, whom he had awoken to converse with, through glass. Opsophagos knew the doctrines of Human Earth. Knowing the ways of humans was a large part of his job. Flesh is grass, he told the fuming, odorous human locked behind its barrier. Flesh is mowed!

  A timorous sibling tched softly within striking distance of the breakfast head of the Harpe in command of the great ark in orbit around Trencher with its stuffing of deep- sleeps snoring through their brainchip tasks. The sibling masticated with tiny nibbles the real-paper printouts in its glutinous ticklers, which it extended, perhaps hoping to donate an extensor limb. The commanding officer — a grown sibling of Opsophagos — took the printout in the mouth of its slack-eyed famished breakfast head, read the co-ordinates displayed, pulled down a three-horned screen and punched out the designated location. Chip-sluggish, the screen cleared, in time to reveal Number One Son wobble bare-assed into the homo sapiens braid. Controlling their aversion to sigilla, the commanding officer began to jubilate.

  They almost ate himself alive with joy.

  Meanwhile, Kirtt uploaded into Mowgli a chip carafe of data perfume gained during Tile Dance’s sweep upwards along the trade Tropics from the warmth of stars farth
er in towards galactic centre; in exchange, Mowgli uploaded a case of carafes containing all the latest news. Fastidious but leaden in his chip state, Kirtt washed each carafe with care, filtering out great streaks of rust — the random garbage and spoilage typical of planetary perfume this close to the rim, plus a few trillion snoops coated in sheep’s clothing - but chip snoops were easy to detect, easy to banish. Kirtt also swatted a whining haze of spam mosquitoes.

  The rust stank even to its partially disabled senses.

  —Sacred is the new, Kirtt said to its chip self. All the same, it added to itself.

  —Check! Freer subvocalised to the data mice, which manifested as molten flows of miniatured tiles, tile pixels.

  Kirtt overheard, but did not interfere with the privacy of its homo sapiens.

  Once cleansed of rust and crap, snoops and spam, poison pens and charity mandalas, the carafes of sacred data began to flow into the Tile Dance library, where they would abide within chips until the moment they could be translated into the quantum foam level, where the library heart lay, dormant now. There were trillions of news items from nearby sectors of the Spiral Clade, including a batch of instability readings on several hundred local ‘empires’, and a slough of mandatory Virtual Reality warnings, often a first sign of plaque. There were enough obits to populate a world. One entire carafe held nothing but science and technology infodumps, all newish, all therefore bogus. A scattering of toon infomercials had escaped Kirtt’s half- crippled net; most of them touted useless R&R programs for devices too new (in truth) to be worth Recovering or Recuperating. Kirtt noted a growing pattern of Law Well violations and extensions, more rifts and stitches in the webbing of the increasingly fragile comity of the Upper Clade; but a certain fraying of interstellar comity was inevitable (so any search engine would confirm) at a time of constricted commerce. Trade indeed was bad. There was a scent of fear in the air. Jobs were almost non-existent (it was good luck that Tile Dance had a commission). The thinned Made Mind also decoded, with some difficulty, an array of eavesdropper scoops, one of which unpacked the command structure of an entire Black Mass of rogue Harpe.