Mind Webs - Apple

0:00Enjoy big savings with red hot deals at Vons and Albertsons! This week, Signature Select Drumsticks or Thighs, Bone and Value Packs are 99 cents per pound with membership where applicable. And Alpharos, Archesano Bread, 20 ounces select varieties are 299 with Digital Coupon. Plus, get a 3-pound bag of Mandarin for 399 with Digital Coupon. Enjoy fresh and delicious savings every day of the week. Hurry in! These deals won't last! Visit VonsorAlbertsons.com for more deals and ways to save! Hi, I'm Gus. I'm a dog in an expert in speed. So when it comes to fast internet, I know what I'm talking about. That's why I recommend Optimum Fiverr-powered internet. It has fast and reliable internet speeds, starting at only $30 a month with a 5-year price lock. So how can you fetch such an amazing deal by calling 8669 Optimum or visiting Optimum.com to switch? That's 8669 Optimum. Speaking of fetch, that's my cue! Terms apply, seeoptimum.com for details.

1:00Enjoy big savings with Red Hot deals at VonsorAlbertsons. This week, Signature Select Drumsticks or Thighs, Bone In Value Packs are 99 cents per pound with membership where applicable. And Alpharos, Archesano Bread, 20 ounces select varieties are 299 with Digital Coupon. Plus, get a 3-pound bag of Mandarin for 399 with Digital Coupon. Enjoy fresh and delicious savings every day of the week. Hurry in! These deals won't last! Visit VonsorAlbertsons.com for more deals and ways to save!

2:27Welcome to half-hour of Mindway. Short stories from the worlds of speculative fiction. This is Michael Hansen with a Mindweb story that comes from New Riding's and 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 a hollow from

3:31which 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 insipient 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. Through billing, standing three miles away, it had looked as if the apple itself were getting ready to snap up the rubble of houses over which it hovered, but when he looked up at the mass of the fruit, luminesolid and red and 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,

4:34hitched 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, bellines thought, looked like a mouth, the apple lying on a broad and smooth tongue of brown earth, surmounted on three sides by a gap tooth and mountain range that grinned obscingly at him. His climb had brought him out of the throat, a narrow gully of dry earth rippled with erosion scars like a tumbled cloth. Standing now at the root of the tongue, he looked furiously, scratched away a recalcitrant colony of itchers 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 clented back the 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

5:40pointed out to him. The dead earth and the weird giant fruits it spawned were 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, bellines 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. Staining 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 laddest with crooked muddy streets. Its weakhold on reality was accentuated by the bulk of the apple, looming above it,

6:43needing only a touch to roll down on it like a red moon crushing the miners and their houses into the earth. But nobody cared. Women stood gossiping at their doors while children vital to bought in the mud holes. There was an endless traffic of hand carts along the street carrying sorns, 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 apples 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,

7:45when 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 pavz end was well inside the cavity at yonder 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 are going voices, people to dark air with ghostly curses and prayers, underscored in occasion, lay blotted out altogether by the crickling splash 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

8:47fell 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 content side and buy item, laying them out in a meatrow on the ground. There's two blades, something like the billhooks used by the miners were differently weighted so that the flat almost square blade at the end of the fourth would handle could bite deeper and stay in longer. It's curved, how am I hanging onto flesh and carapace even when its wheeler 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 pulled 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

9:51as 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 need wrist movement sliced a horizontal gash in the main face. The flesh was brown, rotten, almost right out but another cut showed white. He cut again, suffering 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 hung again,

10:51higher up cutting the frither foothold. His gone-letted 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 steadying for only a few seconds before the rotten flesh collapsed under his touch and the cleated soles 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 a 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. Spiderman upwards his hands grasped his blade swung his feet bit and pestined him up the cliff. His mind was blank until after a long moment of doubt his blade cut air. His fingers grabbed the firm, newest laced edge and he hauled himself up onto the main upper terrace. As he stood panting on

11:53the 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 zigzagged up the main face. The lint's weighted loud comment cleaning his blade and scraping a 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 and the boss told him further up. They moved along the terrace until it peedered 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. He pulled at the tattered edge of the tunnel lining and shredded a piece of it in his fingers. Maybe four,

12:58it's dried 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. The lint's 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 him light clented on the walls. He remembered his father who had died in a tunnel very

14:03like 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 at wood leaves. Though the bow was long since empty of sap and the leaves were perisolzed 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 desecrated 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 rosted with a drying webstuff of the insects cocoon. Bellings 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,

15:08he looked at the walls and saw his face reflected back from the depth so the transparent lining, a long gaunt, invasive face that might have been his or his father's or that of a ghost haunting the vast mountain of the ample, the spirit of a man lost in the empty halls of the center as bellings was lost, as they were all lost. Hi I'm Gus. I'm a dog in an expert in speed. So when it comes to fast internet, I know what I'm talking about. That's why I recommend optimum fiber-powered internet. It has fast and reliable internet speeds, starting at only $30 a month with a five-year price lock. So how can you fetch such an amazing deal by calling 8669 optimum or visiting optimum.com to switch? That's 8669 optimum. Speaking of fetch, that's my cue. Terms apply, seeoptimum.com for details. Show button here. Football season is finally back and prize picks is bringing out their best offer yet. New users who sign up will get $150 in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup.

16:13That's right, if you win your first $5 lineup, you'll get $150 in lineups. On prize picks, you simply pick two to six players, pick more or less on their staff projections, and submit your lineup. Then, sweat it out as you watch your picks play out live. It's the best way to get more locked in on game day. Make all the picks you want. This football season, all in the same app. Also, prize picks is going crazy with the deals to start the football season, giving users a new promo every day during stack September. And now, prize picks is available nationwide. So, what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff because everyone and everything is on prize picks. What you want? Download the app today and use Co-Ad large to get $150 in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. Prize picks, run your game. Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire. Try them all only at my dogs.

17:18The deeper he penetrated, the less he was afraid. The worst fear was of failing, but when there were no other men around him, the sphere disappeared. It belonged to ordinary people. The men 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 and which buildings 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. Millings could hear it in motion on all sides. Tides surge 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.

18:25He 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 and edge in the mustiness of the gallery, a suggestion of pure faction. 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 with light. Slicing fresh footholds every few feet he slithered forwards, the tunnel ended,

19:28and 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 IT 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

20:29surprised on his side. Pawsing only for a glance back, to make sure his rope remained fastened to the tunnel, infranced 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 which he was moving. It lay ten degrees off the horizontal, making the main seed chamber slope slightly upwards. The floor was slippery and being forced to fight uphill, was some disadvantage, but he depended a great deal on surprise. If he could catch the moth, 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 an infinitesimal but noticeable sound, a slight creek,

21:36as if he walked down 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 unslung 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 but a demand ran, lifted the bite through it and looked at him. He glimpsed for a terrible moment, the waving, feroord and teni, the brown eyes and mouth of a fearsome face wide eyes, sharp cornered high cheekbones and wide and scarlet mouth, female, young, the talons put the skin, and from the tunnel newborn, the magnificent insect

22:38erupted 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 smooth leaves, while in breasts, was there a specific reference to humankind. A downed, covered her body and 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, betrayed 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

23:42of 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 chingrous center. Air buffeted him as her wings gripped, but he was safe, sheltered from the slashered claws, for an instant allowing and the luxury of a turn and a new grip on his blade. Then she was under the seeds and rising to attack him. Cut, a pointed tip caught a clawed for arm bit, then 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.

24:44Spinning 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 holligdough 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 and her living chamber. Thenly, he took in the rest of the place, the walls of descended and rotting terraces to the floor, but quickly in juice that welled out of them in a dozen places, the flax of sack of her discarded

25:45cocoon on which he had landed. From his lads, it fell twenty feet to the floor, a lie among this, a lagmites 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, played by the pool, twenty 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 and 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.

26:48He 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 knives skidded across the floor. Billings turned his head to look at the moth, then bowed it, like a sacrifice. Her body, no longer glued to the ground, surged up triumphantly, her magnificent face looked down at him, where talons raised in an embrace. He saw the descending claw, cried out, and was stunned forever.

27:55They 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, Elaine, 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, that would one day rise to be another moth, inhabit another apple, just to she had risen from a moth killer's body herself, and others would rise after her. Though 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.

30:21That 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 By Leslie Hilsenaw. Mindweb's is a production of WHA Radio and Madison, a service of University of Wisconsin Extension. Hi, I'm Gus. I'm a dog at an expert in speed. So when it comes to fast internet, I know what I'm talking about. That's why I recommend optimum fiber-powered internet. It has fast and reliable

31:26internet speeds, starting at only $30 a month with a five-year price lock. So how can you fetch such an amazing deal by calling 8669 optimum or visiting optimum.com to switch? That's 8669 optimum. Speaking of fetch, that's my cue. Terms apply, seeoptimum.com for details.