Variations on an Apple (2 page)

For a moment, nothing. Then the city was lit by the apple's light, as though it was a lantern of condensed evenings. Everything was painted over with the jitter-tint of unease, from the factories where cyborgs labored with their insect arms to the academies with their contests of wit and strength, from the flower-engraved gun mounts to the gardens where fruits breathed of kindly intoxications.

“It's not without its charm,” said Ilion, who had odd ideas about aesthetics. “Have you talked to your parents?”

“I didn't exactly have the time for lengthy consultations,” Paris said. “And besides, all their protestations don't mean anything if you're not agreeable.”

“Too bad you're too old to be flagellated,” Ilion said, but he was smirking, and for a moment a silhouette-flicker of scourges twined around his ankles.

Paris resisted the urge to roll his eyes.

Ilion cocked his head. “I can hear the war fleets drumming their way through the black reaches even now,” he said. “Will you love me when all that's left is a helter-skelter of molten girdings and lightless alloys? And the occasional effervescing vapor of toxic gas?”

“At that point I'll be dead too,” Paris said, unsympathetic.

“It's a bit late to get you to think this through,” Ilion said dryly. “Well, I suppose it was high time we enjoyed a challenge.”

With that, he tossed the apple up in the air, high, high, until it was a glimmer-mote of malicious amber. Paris's heart nearly stopped. Then it plummeted to land with a smack in Ilion's hand. He brought it up to his mouth and bit into it. Paris almost gagged at the sudden sweetness of the apple's stench, the overwhelming pall of juice that evaporated as soon as it was released from the apple's pale flesh.

“You're crazy,” Paris said.

“No crazier than you are,” Ilion retorted. “I'm merely reifying the situation.”

Ilion ate the entire apple, core and all, or perhaps, more likely, it had never had any core except a mist of recriminations. Paris was willing to bet that its seeds were everywhere, and always had been.

“Come here,” Ilion said, barely loud enough for Paris to hear him over the taut silence. His lips curved, asymmetrical; his eyes were shadowlit with desire.

Paris was not known for moderation or good sense, but he said, “I don't think this is the time—”

Ilion grasped his shoulders and dragged him closer. He was sometimes taller and sometimes shorter. Right now Paris couldn't tell, drunk as he was on the apple perfume on Ilion's breath. The kiss lasted a long time.
I am never going to surface
, he thought at one point, before giving himself over to the taste of candied massacres.

“There,” Ilion said, releasing Paris so suddenly he stumbled backwards and only just caught himself against a column crowned with translucent leaves. “I wanted to give you an appetizer of what we're about to go through.” There was the merest undercurrent of pity in his voice. “You could have made a pretty face the focus of all the troubles coming for us, I suppose, but the end result is the same.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” Paris said, lying. Shades stood around the two of them, a veil of suffocating possibilities. “I must take my leave of you. My parents are not going to be in a forgiving mood.”

“Since when have you ever cared about their opinion?”

“I'm sure they're going to be asking themselves the same thing,” Paris said, and left.

*   *   *

Paris didn't make it to the hall of halls before his sister intercepted him.

The passages of metal brightened with pattern-mazes of snaking circuitry, pulsing in on-off foreboding. “Paris,” Cassandra said in encrypted flashes. The effect was not unlike taking a scalpel through the retina. “Tell them the truth.”

There was no point in hiding anything from her if she knew this much already. “I'm going to,” Paris said, a little wearily. The unfortunate problem with Cassandra's binary existence was that, for all the things she saw, her version of reality never seemed entirely compatible with the one that everyone else experienced.

“Tell them it's about a woman,” Cassandra said. “She'll be the death of us, Paris.”

“I'm not going to endanger us for some new lover,” Paris said with the patience of long practice. “I have Ilion. Unless Ilion
is
the woman you mean.”

“Not Ilion,” Cassandra said. “The one who has your heart.”

He reached out and pressed his hand against the wall. The light had no heat, although he fancied the warmth of kinship passed between them anyway. “Sister-sweet,” he said, “there's love and there's love, and I would never betray us that way. I glimpsed what Aphrodite offered, and she was beautiful the way a stellar furnace is beautiful, but please think better of me than that.”

Cassandra said nothing.

“Cassandra.”

“Well,” she said, “I suppose it is not as if she, too, didn't have her choices.”

“I have no idea what you mean by that.
Please
, Cassandra.”

The lights unsnaked, and he was left alone in the hall. Telling the rest of his family came easily, compared to that. Dutifully, he reported Cassandra's misgivings as well, but no one else knew what she was getting at, either.

*   *   *

They saw the ships coming from a long way off.

Every evening Paris looked through Ilion's unoccluded eyes at the fleets setting out for the fortress. “I am the fruit of fruits now,” Ilion had said the other day, their lips smiling, “and they've come to pluck me.”

Paris had been lying in Ilion's arms. “You sound so
pleased
,” he muttered.

“Shouldn't I be?” Ilion said reasonably. “I have my pride too. Let them shatter themselves against my walls. Or, more prosaically, against high-velocity kinetic projectiles.”

“Hector likes to say you can't win a war on the defensive.”

“Hector is as loyal to me in his way as you are in yours,” Ilion said, pleased as a cat. “He'll be happy to fight when I require it.”

“He's more ship than human, these days. I hear him
singing
when he's out there. The hot sweep of flight. One of these days he won't come back.”

Ilion prodded him uncomfortably close to his groin. “Now you're being unfair,” they said. “He comes home each time, punctually as you please.”

“Fine,” Paris said. “Fine.” There was nothing to argue: Hector did, in fact, come back punctually every time.

Time passed like vapor, or foam, or yearning dust. And the ships: during that time the ships gathered in great fleets. Some of them were the same color as the night, silhouettes as predatory as silence. Some of them were gaudy-bright, phoenix-bronzed. Some burned as they flew. Ships that had once been moons, digested and regurgitated into their present form by choral nanites. Ships that named each gun after a different genocide. Ships crewed by the dead, their expertise distilled into decision trees of astonishing agility.

All of them were coming for Ilion.

Discord.
War of wars.

*   *   *

A few ways the war transpired:

In one version of the story, Ilion took on the garments of nine-tailed fox spirits, robing itself in their keen eyes and their curling riddles. Vast armies, with sun chariots and fire arrows and star spears, rode across forever shores of smoke and scratchless glass, never reaching their goal; rode in random walks across maps that changed each time they took a reckoning. Their generals conferred among themselves. Chief among them was a woman old in battle but young in the ways of cities. Her counsel, to the others' dismay, was to withdraw instead of wandering across the mire of their own impatience. After many days of argument they finally agreed. All that time Ilion whispered into her visions, wearing the face of her own ambitions.

In the meantime, Ilion of the many shapes, Ilion of the nine-veiled walls, was overtaken by a procession of numerate factions. Every plant in the spinward gardens hung with fruit whose flesh had the texture of cooked eyes. The Nines went about in fox-masks, and a civil war ensued between those who poured libations to prime numbers upon silicate altars and those who poured libations to composite numbers. Paris parted ways with his family in the early days, withdrawing behind the fortress's occlusions to design improved defenses. He studied Zhuge Liang and Vauban and Mardi bin Ali al-Tarsusi, he steeped his dreams in the properties of degenerate matter, and for all his care he was caught half-drowsing in Ilion's arms when at last bird-cloaked insurgents caused the fortress to fold in on itself like crushed paper.

The generals waited, and waited, and waited, and at last their chief sacrificed her face to the sky and sea and liminal shore. Concealed by a helmet from which three eyes stared lidlessly, she went before her lieutenants and told them the time had come to sack the city-fortress. Even now Ilion's fame had not waned. Songs of its treasures, of its metal heart and petal beauty, were still chanted in the sky courts and hell chasms and the surfeit of night roads.

By the time they arrived, they were much diminished in number, but great in glory. Ilion itself welcomed its new rulers. “We are the same,” it said to the chief, and smiled at her with her own face. She realized then how she had been tricked, but it was too late. Her generals were only too content to become part of the prize they had sought so long.

This victory was not without its price. Ilion's people took up the obeisances and rituals of their new masters, and even the numerate factions fell into disarray.

In another version of the war, Ilion descended upon an immense artificial world of ocean, concealing itself in its depths like a belated pearl-irritant. Braids of kelp became her hair, and during the festivals of war preparation, she decorated herself with the whorled dances of transparent eels and algal blooms.

Fleets upon fleets came to orbit the world of ocean, intending to boil away the waters layer by layer. Instead, they were subsumed by the sea reverie. Spherical dreadnoughts condensed into whale shapes. Flights of missiles became voracious finned schools, themselves consumed by carriers that sprouted anemone banners. It was not long before the invaders had joined Ilion's ecology of untided longings.

Ilion's children learned the undulant languages, applied themselves to the study of fluid dynamics, and wrote disparaging treatises that, misconstrued in realities slightly aslant their own, birthed legends of sunken civilizations.

In yet another, Ilion, like a great maw, began digesting the beings sentient and non-sentient who dwelt within it. As it did so, it encrusted itself with minerals and mirrors, an armor of prolix crystallography. The voices of its victims thundered through the space-time membrane, threnody absolute. Every guidestar that knew Ilion's name was unmoored from the firmament and crushed into singularity specks. Of Ilion itself, nothing remained but a vast jeweled simulacrum of apple-plague.

We could go on in this manner, but these examples suffice to demonstrate Ilion's inability to escape the apple's nature.

*   *   *

It was the tenth year of the siege (the hundredth, the billionth). Paris leaned back in Ilion's arms and listened to the shield beat and the spear chant, the unsound of missiles and catapulted projectiles hurtling through the black depths. “I can't imagine what it would be like to sleep in a time of peace anymore,” he remarked.

“Don't be ridiculous,” Ilion said. “You're adaptable.” He shifted his leg, and the gown he wore slipped sideways to reveal a tanned expanse of thigh. Ilion's clothing was a matter of opinion. Every time Paris thought he had eased all of it off, he found another coy fold of tunic, or tassels covering an ankle. There was no such thing as a completely naked city. You could dig and you could dig, you could walk the walls under the night's unkind eyes; nevertheless, farther down you'd always find some furrowed bone, some scratched potsherd, some hexadecimal couplet stamped on plastic.

“Do you ever wonder what they're up to, out there?” Paris said.

“You mean besides throwing glorified space rocks at us?”

Paris snorted. “They must live and love and die, the same as we do,” he said, moved by an unaccustomed swell of sentimentality. “They must have children of circuitry or flesh or cunning brass. And some of them must be as sick of this whole conflict as we are.”

Ilion tapped impatiently on the couch. The walls shivered black, then red-gold-pale with the burstlights of the bombardment, the light of local stars glinting off the barding of massed ships. “Yes,” Ilion said, “they're so sick of it that they're going home.”

“They must want
something
concrete out of all this.”

“Glory,” Ilion said. “Vengeance, spite, security, the sheer unadulterated expression of aggression. None of these, I will note, is
concrete
.”

“You could vomit up that damn apple. I wish—” Paris bit his tongue.

Ilion refrained from an entirely redundant
I told you so
. This was, at least, an improvement over the first nine years.

“I am going to fall asleep here,” Paris said. “And I'm going to dream of enjoying silence, and waters unblemished by ships, and eating nothing to do with fruit—no sauces, no preserves, no fresh chilled slices,
nothing
—for the rest of my life.”

Ilion threaded his fingers through Paris's hair, untangling a lock. It almost didn't hurt. “Sleep, then,” he said in a voice sweet as water. “It won't be much longer.”

Paris meant to ask what he meant by that, but his eyelids drooped, and sleep descended upon him. Whether he had the dreams he had wished for, he never remembered.

*   *   *

Late in the last year, some but not all of the enemy fleets withdrew. Hector and the defense fleets were on high alert for weeks afterward, patrolling Ilium behind the cover of its flanged force-screens. Paris edited out his need for sleep, as much as he longed for the escape, and oversaw the city's artillery defenses.
Far-archer
, Ilion's guns said of him, mostly with affection, where he could hear them. (They called him other things behind his back, in the way of soldiers and commanders everywhere.)