Mind Webs - Apple

My way.

Welcome to half-hour of Mindway.

Welcome to a half hour of mind-wave short stories from the worlds of speculative fiction.

This is Michael Hanson with a mind-wave story that comes from new writings in SF-8 edited by John

Carnell. This is Apple by John Baxter. The Apple was red, smooth, coldly perfect. One patch almost

obscured by the shadowed cast in the soft light was green, a blemish that served only to show up the

flawless purity of the remaining color. It lay on its side, letting lights spill into the

recesses of its hollow, from which the stock chatted inconclusively, terminating in a small leaf,

green-lay transparent. Low down near the ground, a crater had been gouged out exposing the white flesh.

The hollow was an irregular one, and already the air had turned most of the higher points to a

rusty brown. Much of the rest was creamy with incipient decay. A town lay just under this crater,

half its 300 houses, and morning sunlight the others obscured by the dark terminator of the

apples of ast shadow. Two buildings standing three miles away had looked as if the apple itself

were getting ready to snap up the rabble of houses over which it hovered, but when he looked up

at the mass of the fruit luminesolid and red in the strengthening light, its color accentuated

by the climbing sun, the sensation passed. It was as solid and immovable as the others.

Faced finally with the thing he had traveled 50 miles to find, he dropped the long case of tools

hitched up his leather apron and reflectively massaged away some of the aches that had plagued

him this last half day of hill climbing. The valley before him, the lean's thought looked like a

mouth, the apple lying on a broad and smooth tongue of brown earth surmounted on three sides by a

gap toothed mountain range that grinned obscenely at him. His climb had brought him out of the throat

and narrow gully of dry earth rippled with erosion scars like a tumbled cloth. Standing now at the

root of the tongue, he looked furiously as scratched away a recalcitrant colony of itches on his neck,

picked up once again the clanking bag of tools and moved reluctantly on.

Growing down the slope was work almost as hard as his earlier climb. The ground was metal hard,

bleached by the rain to a sterile and jagged mass, from which grains of mica and quartz glinted back

to yellow sunlight. All atomic grounds had the same look, driven like scraps of another world.

No man, and especially not one of his trade, had to have one pointed out to him. The dead earth,

in the weird giant fruits, it spawned where indication enough, just two of the jokes, war had played

on the human race, like the moths. Head down, his eyes on the fissured ground,

the bellings tramped the long road to the town, thinking only of sitting down, loosening his tight

apron and belt, discussing his fee with the town boss. Mild pleasures, but the only one most

mortgillers knew. Staying in the air, he could smell the rotting juice of the apple, sweet and

diseased, matching the billious glow of the sun. He ignored the stink and soon it faded from his

sensations. He placed the boss as soon as he saw him, then forgot his existence. He was young,

ugly, tough. His town was the same. A ragged puddle of Jim crack shacks ladders to crooked muddy

streets. Its weakhold on reality was accentuated by the bulk of the apple, looming above it,

maybe normally a touch to roll down on it like a red moon crushing the miners in their houses

into the earth. But nobody cared. Women stood gossiping at their doors while children vitaled

about in the mud-holes. There was an endless traffic of hand-cartes along the street carrying

sarm's labs of apple flesh to the presses or returning empty to pick up a fresh load.

As the two men, boss and morph-killer went by, the people bent their heads but said nothing.

Close to the mine, traffic was thicker and more hurried. The miners' movements more ant-like than ever.

The apple loomed over them, cutting off the light, and in the mire of mud and juice that

surrounded the entrance to the mine, the men moved like naked specters shiny with the apple's blood.

A path had been made across the mud with slabs of pressed-out apple flesh like porous brown wood.

The boss went first, the leans following. As they walked across the narrow track, men looked up

at them and stepped uncomplainingly off until they had passed. Billings watched the men's legs

sinking to the knees and the brown bog, but felt no sympathy for them. He had been used to such

things when he was a miner. Now that he was more, it was his right to have privileges, he had worked

for them. The pav's end was well inside the cavity at yawned like a vast and jagged pit above them.

By the light of the oil lamps wedged into the walls, Billings could see the galleryed mine.

Rising 300 feet above him, its face started with men.

There echoing voices, people to dark air with ghostly curses and prayers, underscored in

occasionally blotted out altogether by the quickly splashed of juice from the cuts they made.

An endless drizzle of the sticky sweet liquid fell to the floor of the mine,

making their leather clothing glossy and stiff. Crops of the juice prickled off their aprons and

fell into the swamp that surrounded them. The area was thick with a smell of decay.

Billings dropped his tool case unlaced the opening and took out the contents item by item,

laying them out in a meat-row on the ground. There's two blades, something like the billhooks used

by the miners. We differently waited so that the flat almost square blade at the end of the

four foot-handle could bite deeper and stay in longer. It's curved, howl and hanging onto

flesh and carapace, even when its wielder was unable to strike again. After this, there were leather

gauntlets and grieves, barbed pitons, a fat coil of rope and spiked boots. It had been some months

since Billings had used the boots and grieves, but they had stayed supple inside the bag.

He called the mine laced and carefully and picked up the rest of his equipment.

The boss told him the entrance was at the top. Billings looked up. There was less activity in the

darkness and he knew why. Word had spread that he was a killer. He could feel them watching him hoping,

as he had hoped when he was a miner, to see some slip of fault in his skill. He visualized how it

must look to the men hanging in their harness up against the top faces in the dark. Their bodies

tacky would juice hands welded to their knives by a congealing glaze of the stuff.

In their eyes, used to darkness in yellow light, he would seem a dim and distorted figure

hardly more than an upturned face against the brown of the muddy floor. He moved quickly and

without warning the boss so that the man jumped visibly when Billings took his knife from his

quiver and with one neat wrist movement sliced to horizontal gash in the main face. The flesh was brown,

rotten, almost dried out, but another cut showed white. He cut again,

severing the overhangs of the firm foothold was exposed from above and shelled beneath by the

larger mass of rotted flesh. His right leg came up in the foot wedge deep into the notch while his

arms, long again, higher up, cutting the further foothold. His gone-ledged left hand,

grabbing at the rough and crumbling surface of the main face, steadying his body for the movements

of his blade. The climb was dangerous, depending on a continued ascent for safety.

His hand would steady him for only a few seconds before the rotten flesh collapsed under his touch

and a cleated soul of his boots would hold in a cut for only a moment before sliding out.

There was no time for him to see where he was going nor concern himself with the face above him.

He had estimated where the ledge was that he must arrive at and also the best route to approach it.

Now, he had to depend on his inborn skill. Spidering upwards his hands, grasped his blade swung,

his weak bit and pestined him up to cliff. His mind was blank until, after a long moment of doubt,

his blade cut air. His fingers grabbed the firm, new sliced edge and he hauled himself up onto the

main upper terrace. As he stood panting on the edge, he heard the miners around and above him

muttering, sensed their admiration and was content. The boss took another minute to reach

the terrace along the roped gallery that zig-zagged up the main face. The lens waited without

comment cleaning his blade and scraping accumulated pulp from between the spikes of his boots.

When the boss arrived, he recognized resentment in the man's dead face, but said nothing.

The boss told him, further up. They moved along the terrace until it petered out in a dark hollow

so small that they had a stoop. A miner brought down a lamp and the boss took it, holding the light

up. In the glow, bellings saw the beginning of a tunnel. The ragged edges of transparent,

slightly green material it lined it and smiled the dry and musty scent he had expected.

He said it's an old one, three days maybe, and he pulled at the tattered edge of the tunnel

lining and shredded a piece of it in his fingers. Maybe four, it's right out a lot.

How far in will I wouldn't know? The boss held the lamp further towards the tunnel, letting

fingers of light probe the darkness. There was nothing to be seen, but the smooth,

sighted circular hole plunging into the heart. The boss wondered how long it would take.

Bellings hefted his knives, sanded his back, and took the lamp.

As long as it takes, he said shortly, and walked down into the darkness.

The boss looked after him for a moment and turned to stare at the sound of miners hanging in their

harness across the face of the crater. Their burning eyes were brighter than the lamps by which they

worked. He moved quickly down the gallery without saying anything. Inside the tunnel, it was warm

and dark. Bellings trimmed the lamp and moved slowly forward, listening. Air moved softly around

in light, clented on the walls. He remembered his father who had died in a tunnel very like this.

The town where he was born was an apple town. The fruit was an ancient wrinkled mountain still

anchored to the earth by a thin bow tuffed it with leaves, though the bow was long since empty of

sap and the leaves were perils and rustled like sails and the stirring winds of autumn.

But the flesh inside was still firm, and men were not afraid to cut long galleries through the

desiccated exterior where the flesh was useless. Cells like dust filled rooms repeated in endless

transparency to reach the sweet white heart. They had found his father in one of those galleries a

long excavation that intersected the tunnel of a moth. A body was watered up into the galleries

end. A bone was mass of flesh frosted with a drying webstuff of the insects cocoon.

Billings blanked back the image and drew a deep breath. The tunnel was empty around him,

and for a few dozen yards in each direction he could see it stretching emptyly into the shadows.

Lifting the lamp, he looked at the walls and saw his face reflected back from the depths of the

transparent lining. A long, gaunt, impassive face that might have been his, or his father's,

or that of a ghost haunting the vast mountain of the apple, the spirit of a man lost in the empty

halls of the center, as Billings was lost, as they were all lost. The deeper he penetrated,

the less he was afraid. The worst fear was of failing, but when there were no other men around him,

the fear disappeared. It belonged to ordinary people. The man who hunted moths were different.

They had an understanding with the universe, a heightened sensitivity to the world,

off which other men merely scavenged. The thick white messy bulk of the apple was a place with

its own rules in which Billings was comfortable at home. He recognized the risks, but they were

risks of the apple and of nature not of men. He faced death, but it was nature's death, not man's.

Thick and white, the apple bulked around him. Billings could hear it in motion on all sides.

Tides surged through its oceanic cells. Membranes quivered with emotion as palpable as that of a heart.

Above, below, on all sides, he sensed the white flesh, sleeping in darkness. Perfect, sweet, waiting.

He moved in the apple like a god, feeling other gods. His father, and his father's father,

waiting in the shadows for him resting just beyond the green tunnel wall.

Layers of civilization began to slough from him like shed skins and half-dreaming. He listened for

the expected voice. His foot slipped momentarily before the cleats caught again and he realized the

tunnel was shelving slightly. At the same time, his nose caught a different scent, an edge in the

mustiness of the gallery, a suggestion of pure affection. He unsung his knife. The tunnel was

reaching its end, dipping down to intersect the vulnerable heart. His feet slipped more off

and then he had to cut steps in the forehead, holding from sliding forward. The lamp showed him

no ending to the tunnel, but an area ahead of him that he could not penetrate would light.

Slicing fresh footholds every few feet he slithered forwards, the tunnel ended, and he looked down

into a deep chamber whose walls, glossy and transparent, reflecting his own elongated image

tapered some 20 feet below end to a point in which the globular brown shape of a seed was wedged.

He had reached the center. From now on, the real business of his task began,

sitting on the lip of the tunnel, his legs dangling over the I.G. methodically checked his

equipment, then he looked down. The walls were mirror-smooth, and he could tell from their sheen

that they remained slippery even though the seed chamber had been pierced. Wedging a piton into

the tunnel wall, he threaded his rope through its eye, tossed the rest of the roll out into space

and climbed down. There was no movement or sound, so he could assume his presence was still

undiscovered. At one behind the seed, he found the unguarded doorway to the inner chamber.

He knew he could have surprised on his side, pausing only for a glance back to make sure his

rope remained fastened to the tunnel entrance he dropped quickly into the main seed space.

Seeds, unlike tightly cocooned beetles above him, their smooth backs turned out,

their unseen claws clutching the central axis of the apple that gave Billings his only indication

of the direction in which he was moving. It laid ten degrees off the horizontal, making the main

seed chamber sloped slightly upwards. The floor was slippery and being forced to fight uphill,

with some disadvantage, but he depended a great deal on surprise. If he could catch the

morph-sleeping or perhaps somnolent, beginning a cocoon, it was their breathing time now and most

of them were sleepy and slow. Then his job would be easy. He moved forward, keeping the brown

kernels on his right watching the part of the chamber he could see under the rows of seeds for

any movement. Each step made in an infinitesimal but noticeable sound, a slight tweak,

as if he walked on transparent leather. The chamber was quiet as quiet as if it were at the center

of the earth. Billings reached the upper end of the space on slung his knife and half turned.

A face looked back at him from the chamber. In the far wall, a spotable pass of the

had appeared in the transparency. The skin was unbroken but a window had been cleared as a new tunnel

reached the center core. It widened quickly. A low held head, watered the membrane, lifted the

bite through it, and looked at him. He glimpsed for a terrible moment, the waving,

furred and tenny. The brow, highs and mouth of a fearsome face, wide eyes, sharp-cornered

high cheekbones, a wide and scarlet mouth, female. Young, the talons put the skin, and from the

tunnel, newborn, the magnificent insect erupted into the silent space. Backed against the wall,

Billings watched the moth, waiting for its move. The insect was patient, perhaps tired.

She stayed near the new tunnel, looking globules of juice from her fur, watching him,

preening. Her body was out of a young moth about the size of a human girl,

though slimmer than most. Only in the smoothly swallowing breasts was there a specific reference

to humankind. A down that covered her body in a honey-colored mist, shadowed but did not hide

the smooth play of muscle under the flexible skin of the legs and torso. But around the head and

shoulders, a quick shading off of the fur and the appearance of tight shell across the skull and neck,

the trade, her insect nature. On first glance, there were a few other signs, but then she stretched

back her arms in a quick gesture, and the magnificent beige wings expanded from between her arms

and body. Their patterns of brown and black scrolling like hieroglyphs across his vision.

Billings blanked. In that moment, clawed feet gripped the chamber wall,

wings twitched in instant, and she sprang. A right hand cut to stop her advance,

then Billings scrambled for the seeds hanging like a garland of gunshot down the chamber center.

Air buffeted him as her wings gripped, but he was safe, sheltered from the slash of her claws,

for an instant allowing and luxury of a turn and a new grip on his blade. Then she was under the

seeds and rising to attack him. Cut, the pointed tip caught a clawed for arm bit and slipped.

The shrill twittering of her voice filled the air, then her other arm lashed out and he felt a

blaze of agony in his side. Cut again, back down on the arm buried in him, blood, green blood,

another lateral slice and wing membrane parted, another, but she was still coming. Her wings

delicate, but not vital, taking the blows while her body remained shielded behind them.

Spinning down the chamber from her blow, Billings sensed the hollowness of the wall behind him.

He looked down through the membrane into emptiness, a suggestion of mist, but nothing else.

A further chamber hoved out beside the others, probably her living place.

Before he had raised his knife, she was on his back, but he swung down with one last desperate

movement and felt the rotted chamber wall rip like paper. He fell down into a warm, steamy space

that smelled rotten and corrupt. Billings twisted as he fell and sensed the disappearance of her

weight from his back, and he landed with a sickening suddenness on something soft and thick.

He grabbed at it, slithered, hung on. He was on a ledge of crumbling flesh high

in her living chamber. Thenly, he took in the rest of the place, the walls had descended in rotting

terraces to the floor, but quickly in juice that welled out of them in a dozen places,

the flaccid sack of her discarded cocoon on which he had landed. From his ledge it fell 20 feet

to the floor, to lie among this, to lag mites of brown flesh and balances of dusty greens.

The escaping juice dribbled down to the bottom of the space where a pool of it almost covered

a sea brought from one of the other chambers. The juice had partly fermented and the place was hot,

steamy, thick, with a smell of decaying matter spiced by the tang of alcohol. Billings felt dizzy,

and sick. His side was beginning to hurt and he felt blood on his hands.

She, flayed by the pool, 20 feet below him, her wings sprawled across the juice wet surface

of the poolside. Their delicate transparency glued to the smooth, tacky surface.

She was struggling to rise, her hands fluttering across the floor in front of her.

The room was misty, and Billings was wounded. He made a mistake.

Unslinging his second knife, the first was lost in the main chamber. He grabbed a handful

of the soft cocoon and slid over the edge. The moment he did so, he sensed his error.

The cocoon was rotten, eaten to shreds by the humid air, under his weighted rift like the caved

cloth. He fell, tumbled, scrambled down, enveloped in its clinging folds. His grasping hands tore

at the stuff, bringing down fresh curtains of it around him. Then he landed with an impact that

emptied his lungs, his knife skidded across the floor. Billings turned his head to look at the

moth and bowed it like a sacrifice. Her body, no longer glued to the ground, surged up triumphantly,

her magnificent face looked down at him, her talons raised in an embrace. He saw the descending

claw, cried out, and was stunned forever.

They never found his body, as they had found out of his father, but it was there for them to find

if they had cared to look deep in the apple he lay, cocooned in her web, his face looking

out at her dried carapace. Long dead in the cold currents of autumn that even deep in the

core she had felt and responded to. She left behind a final sign for him to ponder. Deep in his body,

the larvae lay, that would one day rise to be another moth, inhabit another apple,

just as she had risen from a moth killer's body herself, and others would rise after her.

No dead, Billings sensed the last great possession of his life and was content.

Staring into the silent chambers of his tomb, he waited for resurrection.

The larvae lay, that would one day rise to be another moth killer's body.

The larvae lay, that would one day rise to be another moth killer's body.

The larvae lay, that would one day rise to be another moth killer's body.

That was Apple, a story by John Baxter, which appears in new writings in SF-8, a collection

edited by John Carnell. This is Michael Hanson speaking, a technical production from Mindweb's

Biolessly Hills Moth. Mindweb's is a production of WHA Radio and Madison, a service of

University of Wisconsin Extension.