The belt was gone. And the next blow drove Sean to his knees. He groped around in the air and his hand fell on something, some spot where the air was thicker and colder. He drove his fist into it with all his strength.
There was a sound like a hundred windows shattering, and Sean covered his head again for the rain of shards that didn't come.
After a long while Sean realized it was gone, and nothing else was coming to hurt him. Morning light shone between the shops and temples. His stomach growled fiercely. It felt like he hadn't eaten in days. Sean reached for his money again before he remembered, then checked again, just to be sure.
It was gone. It was all gone. Passport, letter of authenticity from Jumpless, his money, his car keys, his picture of his cat—all gone. Sean felt his chest seize up again. What was he going to do without—without what? His car keys? Was he ever going to need those again? He only felt upset about the money. It had seemed to work for the bathhouse lady. Or had it? Maybe black-tentacled monsters were reserved for people with bad cash. Thinking about that, Sean felt his heart start racing, and he quickly turned his mind away. He needed to concentrate on one thing at a time. First, food. He looked up the street. Wisps of blue like detached pieces of sky floated towards him, undulating slowly. He stepped to the side to let them pass. He edged his way warily up the street, stepping over a small stream that very clearly flowed uphill down the center of the street and had not been there the night before. Ahead of him a blue half-curtain fluttered in the morning breeze. Sean turned and went the other direction.
* * * *
Sean found where the beggars gathered. They lined the street, holding out their bowls in silence, and everyone who passed dropped a single grain of rice inside. Sean didn't know how he could live on a few grains of rice, but he was so hungry he didn't care. He stood at the end of the line of beggars and held out his hands, trembling with anticipation. Nobody gave him anything.
* * * *
Sean traded his hair for a mask to hide his human features. It was a fierce mask, a fox with sharp teeth and eyes that lit up green from time to time—he hadn't yet figured out why or how. With it on he felt like a new man, a man who was crafty and capable—a man who could get things done. He spent the rest of the day searching for the gate. He found a high stone wall and tried to follow it, but always it seemed to recede before him, or else the twisted streets led him off, always just away from where he thought he was going. He tried to ask the way, but no one spoke English. He wasn't even sure they spoke Japanese. Every person he talked to answered in incomprehensible gibberish if they answered at all.
At the end of the day he stood on the street corner, close to tears. His kimono was stained with dirt and grease and something that looked like blue jell-o that Sean was afraid to touch. His stomach felt like it was turning in on itself. He was exhausted, starving, and in pain, but worst of all, he was lonely. He felt like if he could just talk to one person, everything would be alright. Even that bastard Haruki. He trudged up a hill past a group of people staring at a television in a shop window. Sean paused to see what the big deal was, but it was just some multicolored static.
At the top of the hill was a bench overlooking the city. Sean eyed it warily, and sure enough, very soon it folded itself up neatly and dug itself into the ground until only a hole and a pile of dirt remained. Sean decided he preferred to stand.
Night was falling. A deep pink the color of Haruki's hair stained the sky, and the clouds turned red and orange and gold. In the distance a long chain of mountains spread out from horizon to horizon. One of them moved in a stately march past the others. Sean rubbed his eyes and looked again. The mountain continued on, graceful, beautiful, utterly bizarre and utterly perfect. Sean breathed in, the scent of pine and smoke identifiable among the foreign scents on the air. He leaned down and plucked a blade of grass at his feet, put it in his mouth and chewed it. It tasted a lot better than grass at home. He ate quite a lot of it, then lay down on the ground and slept. He didn't sleep very well—he kept dreaming that bench-shaped monsters came out of the ground to sniff at his clothes and bald scalp. But he made it through the night.
* * * *
Sean stood in a bustling market with bright stalls lining both sides of the street and colored banners waving. He scanned the crowd for a head of pink, spiky hair, but he didn't really expect to see it, and he wasn't disappointed. In the nearest stall a man with a fish's head sold grimy keyboards that looked like something from the 1980s. In the stall beside that a small boy with his liquid silver hair dripping down his shoulders plied voice activated kinetic interfaces, like the kind that Sean had given up purchasing in order to afford this trip. Sean noticed that both stalls had an equal amount of customers lined up before them.
He reached under the sash of his kimono and pulled out a handful of grass, reached under his mask and put it in his mouth. Now that he wasn't ravenous it didn't taste so good, but it was the only food he had and all that he was likely to get for a good long while. He had nothing left to trade. Your clothes, a snide voice in his head said. That ridiculous mask you think protects you. Sean started as he realized that, if time flowed the same way here as it did at home, it was Monday morning. He was late for work.
A sharp tug on his sleeve made him look down. Near his knees, a group of grape-sized people sat squeezed together on a floating piece of cloth like a miniature flying carpet. They held, between them, a large gold coin. They pointed at his sash.
Sean reached under it and pulled out a handful of wilting grass blades. The carpet swept upwards, and the foremost man, who wore a tiny pair of high-tech interface goggles over his jet black hair, reached out for them. The rest of the people shoved the coin into Sean's hand, and then the whole group flew off behind a lumbering mound of fur from which a pair of red eyes shone. A few stray blades of grass fluttered to the ground.
Sean looked for the gate all that day. And the next, and the next, but eventually he gave up. He'd thought that maybe, just maybe, even if he couldn't get back to his St Louis, he could get back to the St Louis of this world. That wouldn't be so bad, would it? But as much as he walked and searched and asked directions from people, animals, and inanimate objects, he remained in the spirit quarter. He discovered a good trick, though—lots of people would pay money for that grass he'd eaten. Why they didn't just walk up the hill and pick it themselves for free, he couldn't imagine. But in fact, anything that Sean picked up off the ground and handed to the nearest passerby would most often get him at least a handful of coins, and sometimes some paper money, although the question of which had the larger value continued to elude him. It got him food, though, and he even found a family of ghostly badgers living above a scuba gear shop that gave him a pallet in the corner at night, near the solar heating panel, in return for some money and a single thread from his frayed kimono.
* * * *
Then Sean saw the bark-man again, and figured out how he'd disappeared, not once, but twice, without a trace: he had jumped. Sean watched him do it. Watched him reach into his chest and pull out a piece of twisted up wire, then vanish. Sean didn't wait until he could find him again; he bought himself a ball of copper wire, and he set to work, bending it, shaping it, coiling and uncoiling it in endless permutations, all the while focusing on the Jetless jump room, the one place he could make himself believe he could get to if he wanted it bad enough.
Of course it didn't work. He broke about a hundred strands of wire, tried standing right where he'd seen the tree-man disappear, even said “Abracadabra” under his breath; the wire remained, not a magical conduit, but a wire, and Sean remained a gaijin in a fox mask. Finally he threw the wire in a gutter.
But then he saw someone else do it, too. A woman in a white robe—he could see the far side of the street through her, the polished mirrors of a gleaming temple, and he might have believed she simply vanished like a ghost, but for the wire. It, like the mirrors, gleamed silver in the sunlight as she twisted it into a shape like a geometric fl
ower with concentric petals. Sean had to search for days before he found someone to sell some to him, and it cost him all the money he had.
Sean stood outside the shop where he bought it, trying to faithfully replicate the shape the woman had made. The wire was sharp—it cut his hands—and it resisted every turn he gave it, finding shapes of its own, the wrong shapes, and making Sean redo every twist twice, three times, or more. For days it looked like he'd wadded it up and slept on it instead of tried to form it into something. Then one afternoon he suddenly wasn't standing outside a sushi restaurant anymore, but high on his favorite hill, with the wind blowing and all the mountains on the horizon floating two thousand feet above the foothills. He dropped the wire and screamed.
Then he picked it up and looked at the shape he'd made. It wasn't exactly what he remembered. He straightened the wire, sort of, then reformed it to the same shape. Nothing happened. He walked back to the sushi place and started up again.
Soon Sean could jump to the hill consistently, or to the badgers’ house, although they didn't like it at all, and refused him lodging for two nights because of it; or even, if the wind was blowing the right direction, to the inside of a temple to a fierce demon. That last one, Sean tried to avoid. He wasn't quite sure how the jumps worked; it was something to do with bending wire, but also something to do with mood and intention and weather and probably whether or not the atoms of his hair were properly aligned, for all he knew. Still, he kept practising, because he knew if he could jump one kilometer, he could jump farther. Maybe all the way back to St Louis.
And one day he did.
He'd been standing on the hill again, watching to see what the mountains would do, absently coiling wire, when suddenly he was at Jetless travel agency, the St Louis Arch gleaming in the sunlight of the poster above the front desk. A young man in a silver suit, clipboard in hand, stood gaping at him beside a little old lady in a grass skirt. When the man pulled a gun Sean bent the wire, by pure habit and adrenaline, in a frantic loop and found himself back where he started, heart pounding like twenty hearts in his chest.
Sean knew right away he'd jumped to the wrong St Louis. The Arch had been bright blue, and he was pretty sure the little old lady had sported a tiny pair of horns poking through her scarf-covered perm. He'd never considered that there might be more than two St Louis's, his own and maybe one on this world, if he could ever reach it. The thought that there might be hundreds, thousands, exploded inside his mind like a bomb, leaving shrapnel everywhere. But when the smoke cleared, Sean was still standing on the hill, looking out over the golden afternoon sun shining on the spirit quarter of the only Tokyo he knew. He was on the brink of something amazing. He felt it deep inside like he'd never felt anything else before.
* * * *
Sean stood on the jump ramp he had built—on his hill, which he had never bought but which no one ever told him not to work on—the entire spirit quarter of Tokyo spread out before him. Its arches and temples gleamed in the morning light. Its alleys hung deep in shadow. Beside him a kid with yellow feathers covering his entire body looked doubtfully at the apparatus.
"You sure this'll work?” he asked in Tokyo standard.
"Positive,” said Sean. “I've done it a hundred times. All you have to do is run down the ramp and through the arch. I'll take care of the rest."
The kid walked down to where the ramp ended and looked over. Sean smiled to himself. Six feet below the ramp was a wide ledge. There was no chance of falling; the ramp and the overlook were for dramatic effect. People needed to feel they were taking a risk, or the jump was anticlimactic.
"Okay, Mr Anamurti, it's time. We've a narrow window to Shar-shar-balleae, and if we miss it the next one's not for three weeks.” In Shar-shar-balleae, feathers were considered a sign of sexual prowess. Minoru Anamurti would enjoy his trip.
Minoru walked over and joined Sean at the top of the ramp. Sean took his wire and formed the appropriate symbol, a square sprouting concentric loops and radiating meridian lines. He smiled at his work. Sean Randall, more often known simply as Fox, was the best jump master in Tokyo. All his customers went away satisfied.
Copyright © 2007 Jennifer Linnaea
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THE TRACE OF HIM—Christopher Priest
* * * *
* * * *
Chris began writing soon after leaving school and has been a full-time freelance writer since 1968. He has published eleven novels, three short-story collections and a number of other books, including critical works, biographies, novelizations and children's non-fiction. His most recent novel The Separation won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the BSFA Award. In 1996 he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Prestige (filmed in 2006). His latest projects are a book about the making of The Prestige, and a collection of short stories. Another collection, a revised version of The Dream Archipelago (to include ‘The Trace of Him’ and another previously uncollected story) is in preparation. More info on christopher-priest.co.uk
* * * *
The study was lodged high beneath the eaves of the house, and it was imbued with traces of him. It had not changed much in the twenty years since she was last there—it was more untidy, a mess of papers and books, standing on, lying beside, heaped below the two tables and a desk. It was almost impossible to walk across the floor without stepping on his work. The room was otherwise much as she remembered it. The window was still uncurtained, the walls unseeable behind the crowded bookcases. His narrow divan bed stood in one corner, now bare of everything except the mattress, although she had never forgotten the tangle of blankets she had left behind when she was here before.
The intimacy of the room was a shock to her. For so long his study had been a memory, a hidden joyful secret, but now it had become tragic, bereft of him. She could detect the scent of his clothes, his books, his leather document case, the old frayed carpet. His presence could be felt in every darkened corner, in the two squares of bright sunlight on the floor, in the dust on the bookshelves and on the volumes that stood there in untidy leaning lines, in the sticky ochre grime on the window panes, the yellowed papers, the dried careless spills of ink.
She gulped in the air he had breathed, paralysed by sudden grief. It was incomprehensibly more intense than the shock she had felt on receiving the news of his illness, his imminent death. She knew she was rocking to and fro, her back muscles rigid beneath the stiff fabric of her black dress. She was dazed by the loss of him.
Trying to break out of the grief she went to his oaken lectern, where he had always stood to write, his tall shape leaning in an idiosyncratic way as his right hand scraped the pen across the sheets of his writing pad. There was a famous portrait of him in that stance—it had been painted before she met him, but it captured the essence of him so well that she had later bought a small reproduction of it.
Where his left hand habitually rested on the side, the invariable black-papered cheroot smouldering between his curled knuckles, was a darker patch, a stain of old perspiration on the polish. She ran her fingertips across the wooden surface, recalling a particular half-hour of that precious day, when he had turned his back on her while he stood at this lectern, absorbed suddenly by a thought.
That memory of him had haunted her as she set out on her desperate quest to reach him before he died. The family had delayed too long in telling her of the illness, perhaps by choice—a second message she received en route, while waiting on an island, had broken the final news to her. She had travelled across a huge segment of the Dream Archipelago with the unchanging mental image of his long back, his inclined head, his intent eyes, the quiet sound of his pen and the tobacco smoke curling around his hair.
Downstairs the mourners were gathering, awaiting the summons to the church.
She had arrived later than most of the others, after four anxious days of hurriedly arranged travel to this island of Piqay. It was so long since she had made the journey across the Archipelago. She had forgot
ten how many ports of call there were on the way, how many lengthy delays could be caused by other passengers, by the loading and unloading of cargo. At first the islands charmed her again with their variety of colours, terrains and moods. Their names had memories for her from her last journey, all those years ago: Lillen-cay, Ia, Junno, Olldus Precipitus, but they were reminders of breathless anticipation on the voyage out or of quiet thoughts on the journey home, not actual recollections of events or experiences ashore.
The remembered charm soon faded. After the first day on the ship the islands simply seemed to be in her way. The boat sailed slowly across the calm straits between islands. Sometimes she stood at the rail, watching the arrowing wake spreading out from the sides of the vessel, but it soon came to be an illusion of movement. Whenever she looked up from the white churning wake, whichever island they happened to be passing still seemed to be in exactly the same relative position as before, across the narrows. Only the seabirds moved, soaring and diving around the superstructure, and at the stern, but even they went nowhere that the ship did not.
At the port on Junno she left the ship, trying to see if there was a quicker passage available. After an hour of frustrated enquiries in the harbour offices she returned to the ship on which she had arrived, where the protracted unloading of timber was still going on. The next day, on Muriseay, she managed to find a flight with a private aero club: it was only a short hop by air but it saved visits to the ports of three intervening islands. Afterwards, most of the time she saved had slipped away, while she was forced to wait for the next ferry.
At last she arrived on Piqay, but according to the schedule of funeral arrangements that arrived with the news of his death, there was only an hour to spare. To her surprise, the family had arranged for a car to meet her at the quay. A man in a dark suit stood by the harbour entrance, holding a large white card with her name written in capitals. As the driver steered the car swiftly away from Piqay Port and headed into the shallow hills surrounding the town and its estuary, she felt the commonplace anxieties of travel slipping away, to be replaced at last by the complex of emotions that had been kept at a distance while she fretted on ships.
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #214 Page 11