Variations on an Apple Read Free

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.
    â€œShouldn’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.”
    â€œHector likes to say you can’t win a war on the defensive.”
    â€œHector 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.”
    â€œHe’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.”
    â€œFine,” 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