Variations on an Apple Read Free Page A

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.
    â€œDon’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.
    â€œDo you ever wonder what they’re up to, out there?” Paris said.
    â€œYou 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