“Probably so. Like they say, history repeats itself.”
“Not like this.” The man in the white coat tossed an object, which at some point had transformed into a light bulb, into an ultimaterial bin, and stared firmly into the face of the worker. “Can’t you feel a presence there behind you?”
“I’m not the type to believe in ghosts.”
“After you came out of your coma, you had your share of freakouts, though. ‘It’s the man I saw in my dreams,’ you said.”
“And that’s been taken care of through cerebro-physiological means. Now I just have dreams about everybody floating in the darkness.”
“Exactly. That’s because Hanishibe is still drifting through interstellar space alone in that spaceship even as we speak. By continuing to speak, he’s protecting us. The coordinates are—”
“I’m sorry, but it’s time for me to go. Work is work, even in a world like this one. I’m off to the canvasser now, so I’ll see you later.”
The man in the suit crossed over the manifestation boundary as he departed, and disappeared. Dazedly, the worker moved away from that place. He knew that the scene he had just witnessed could not exist according to the law of causality. In other words, this was not the past.
“Hey, are you listening?”
Double-translation, interstellar spaceships—as he was strolling along unable to collect his thoughts, he bumped into an invisible wall. There were limits to the scale of the space that a magatama could contain. The other side of the wall was covered in fog through which another town could be dimly seen.
“Even you must’ve sought after answers any number of times. Why are we employed by directors? When did we sign such contracts? What are we getting in compensation? Oh, we remember these things dimly. That we signed a contract, that we received a baptism. But why aren’t these things consistent even in our own memories? What were these directors and humans originally?”
Those who are forever damned … those who long to return … those who trick us into servitude.
“Why are there magatama even inside the canvassers? Does it mean that those disgusting things—I don’t even know whether they’re alive or machines—are our original forms? Why? Why? Look—you must be able to see it!”
The worker looked across the parish town, and simultaneously he was looking down at it with a bird’s-eye view. Dimly, he could make out the ghost of the
“Whenever a fundamental question occurs to you, the lice appear and devour your thoughts.”
The worker strained his eyes at the rows of houses and streets on the other side of the fog. Transforming his arms into Code, he pried open the invisible wall and stretched out his hand toward the mist-enshrouded town.
“So we forget the inconsistencies right away. The same questions occur to us, and we forget them again. This cycle has been repeating for generations. When the nymphs hatch from the lice egg cases—”
Those weren’t louse nymphs. They were bits of Code as well, implanted by the directors in the roots of their hairs to prevent the lice egg cases from hatching—in other words, to prevent the activation of the snowpetal bugs, which were a self-defense mechanism of the magatama.
“—they cover your head like an umbrella and suck out every last bit of your soul. Even if you’re disassembled afterward, there won’t be a magatama inside.”
That was because the snowpetal bugs would form temporary whisper-leaves and bequeath all of the magatama’s data to the canvassers’
“If that happens, you’ll be left a CP-type, suffering from hyperfrequent hemo—.”
Regardless of business conditions, many things would be needed to preserve and reunify the inner world of the cherubim: magatama to serve as its seeds, its slate-blue development medium, cogitosomes to expand it, and corpuscyte to protect the cogitosomes. Even if this were to lead to a repeat of the world’s end …
“W-what are you doin—?”
The worker was staring at the roads and the buildings of the two towns as they began to connect one to another, and at the same time, he was staring at the corners of the disassembler’s mouth as the director’s hands tore them apart; it opened wider and wider until the sides of the disassembler’s face had split in half.
The worker grabbed hold of the magatama stored inside the disassembler’s skull, then pulled his arm back out. The disassembler collapsed like a puppet whose strings had suddenly snapped.
On the second floor of a certain hospital in the midst of the expanded city, however, the disassembler, who had been lying comatose, opened his eyes, turned toward the worker—who was watching over him through the window from above —and nodded.
As he hallucinated the ghost of a planet. Of a
Chapter 3:
The Rite Came Off Without a Hitch
The workers who had been ordered to perform were standing in a line with nothing to do on a wharf near the outer edge of the ceremonial grounds.
The worker from the synthorgan company as well was standing on the cargo platform of the moored groundship, observing with a complicated expression the Festival that was also known as General Assembly. On the coagulating land whose reaffirmation had been completed, a great multitude of directors from all manner of businesses had gathered together and were crowded around a sacred palanquin. It was walnut-shaped, and about the size of an island. No canvassers came to attack. Already, many years had passed since the last sighting of them. With a presentiment that all things were coming to an end, the worker felt relieved and at the same time afraid, fearful of a future that he could not see.
Pushed along by the directors, the palanquin moved forward little by little, the ground beneath it crushed and turned up by its underside. Of those caught underneath and crushed there was no end; for workers, this was less a festival than an execution.
The shrine was ensconced in its appointed place, where it tilted just slightly before coming to a rest. Then the directors, bodies radiating visible light, began moving in ranks two or three deep around its circumference as the upper hemisphere of the shrine, rotating in the opposite direction, began to rise. At last it came to rest, floating in midair.
From the underside of this upper portion, long tubes known as fiddleheads extended downward, and the directors crowded around them. As the fibers of their clothing unraveled and dissolved, they were sucked into the tubes like snails going back into their shells. First one and then another; one by one, they disappeared from sight.
Suddenly, the bodies of those awaiting their turn began for some reason to undulate. All attention was drawn to a cluster of seven directors in their midst who were standing perfectly still.
They awakened in the worker an ineffable sense of otherness. The other directors surrounding them began to draw back.
It appeared as if those seven had leaned back to back against one another, when radiating outward from their feet there appeared cracks in the ground, exposing a greenish, translucent hill-like thing. For some reason, their fourteen legs were attached to its surface. Still crowned with the seven directors, the hill began to heave upward, rapidly expanding and growing in volume. It had apparently been buried at a considerable depth. In no time, the upheaval had become a giant figure with the seven directors stuck to its face, dragging itself up out of the ground with a terrible rumbling.
Its cyclopean body was ten times the size of a director, an
d a jumble of iron building materials could be seen inside its pale green form. It also contained a pattern of dark spots that in the right lighting would be revealed as the floating skulls of subordinapes.
The worker looked on in utter shock and surprise. He had never seen a Crossing Guard this close up before. It appeared vastly more massive than before. Mowing down the director-humans with its clusters of arms, the Crossing Guard swung from left to right a face where traces yet remained of the seven directors, and pressed that face up against the fiddleheads.
As the Crossing Guard invaded the shrine’s interior by way of those tubes, steel towers, train cars, and the like came falling out of its body. They cracked the ground, and splashes of jellymire formed huge waves that began to engulf the entire area.
Many directors came running forward to try to pull the Crossing Guard’s huge body out of the fiddleheads, but they were swallowed up instantly and their organs squelched. Numerous whirlpools appeared all over the Crossing Guard’s body, and with a deafening roar it moved into the crowd of directors, who all cried out in baleful screams. There were also earnest protests from those who had voices to utter them.
INGuRoBaReMo, SoReBaDeSaGiMiDda, WaddaGoHome, DoToRe, WaddaGoHome—
As the worker looked on, the upper hemisphere of the shrine that the Crossing Guard had hijacked lost no time in withdrawing its fiddleheads and slowly began to rise higher. The directors lost themselves completely, and as they ran about in confusion looking for an escape, the space around the shrine grew distorted. In the space of an instant all fell dark as the light was sucked from the air in a radial pattern.
By the time a dim illumination had returned, the upper hemisphere of the shrine had vanished.
The many directors were lying on their backs, bobbing up and down with the waves of mud spreading out in concentric rings from the remaining lower hemisphere, and the survivors began to hurry as they tried to evacuate to the wharf where their attending workers awaited them.
This time, however, four long legs—wrapped about with thick, stringlike tissues through which not a gap was showing—emerged from the lower half of the shrine. They rose up vertically, started to twitch as they strained to their highest possible altitude, and that was when all of them bent at their center joints. Like sickles swinging downward, they stabbed into the face of the land.
Now these four legs had become support structures lifting up a gnarled, bony body from out of the shrine’s lower half. All of the onlookers were staring up in fascination as its body bent farther backward. A thin steam was rising from its surface.
The scheduled one, the true settler: a Planetary Child—
said one of the terrified workers that had gathered together.
—come down to turn the screw of Earth’s axis.
Beneath the four legs, the outer shell of the shrine rotated and began sinking into the ground. The Planetary Child crouched down to peer into the dark, ever-deepening shaft, and jabbed the tips of its four legs down into those inner walls. It raised and lowered its joints as though they were loaded with springs and then started to fall forward.
Amid intermittent rumblings in the earth, a few weak shadows that the directors could hardly be said to have cast came near the wharf. Among them was the president, his shriveled upper body bare and exposed. A cloudy pool of blood was visible inside his stomach. Utterly exhausted, he returned to the wharf. Then, as he was placing one leg on the groundship to steady himself, the body tissue of his face congealed into an oval shape that reflected an inverted image of the worker.
The worker nodded and said, “Shall we go back to the workshop, sir?”
A thought flitted through his mind of their remaining store of liquor. Would just that much be enough?
That was the end for him. Disassembled into more than a hundred different parts, that which had been the worker was suspended in midair. It was the president’s judgment call. From among these parts, the lungs, the liver, the thigh bones and all manner of defective parts were levied into the president’s body.
Finally, the magatama was removed from his pineal gland, and the remaining fragments of the worker came pouring down like rain on the jellymire.
Even now, with the land handed over to the Planetary Child, the president was still waiting, and the next worker continued to do his work. Though the canvassers had been wiped from the plains of coaguland, a reconstituted
If a planet is a suitable cradle, exiles will surely be sent there to reaffirm it. Subordinapes will continue to be made from the magatama. And the date from which the tale is set forth will matter little.
Fragment:
Jewel
What
Dictating syntax from the jewel he extracted,
Chapter 1:
The Hereandnow
1
Gentle ripples rolled across the classroom window, transforming the view into something like a reflection on a watery surface. Countless homes, clinging like shellbugs to petraderm walls outside, appeared to sway back and forth. Sound waves created the illusion as they beat against the translucent peritoneum stretched across the window frame. Nor was it only the classroom window; an inaudible roar echoing up from the depths was sending vibrations through every window worthy of the name in that funnel-shaped city.
“… the complex endoskeletal structure exists apart from the exoshelleton, and at first glance appears to be entirely without purpose. In fact, I can’t see any use for it myself, and yet …”
Suspended in front of a sallow skinboard that accounted for the entire front wall of the classroom, Professor Shitadami lectured on without a pause, his head one-third the size of his entire body.
He pulled and manipulated the gutlines that hung down from the sliptrack overhead and began sliding from the left side of the skinboard to the right, moving along a spinal column that extended from one side of the ceiling to the other. From either side of his overhanging chin there protruded a hard antenna that quickly and nimbly trailed scratches across the skinboard.
Long welts swelled up along the scratches, presently embossing the skinboard with a skeletal diagram of a momonji—a creature particularly simple in form and mysterious in its ways, even among the countless body plans and innumerable behavioral traits of its fellow petauristas. But for Hanishibe, sitting two rows from the back, everything in the tall, vertical space of the classroom was a blur, pushed from his mind by the vibrations of the silk-white city streets.
Why do I feel so uneasy? Hanishibe mouthed, not quite giving voice to the words. Descents from Heaven happened all the time. His sweaty fingers crawled along the spine of his rib-bound textbook, and he took comfort in the familiar peaks and valleys of its vertebrae.
“… if you know this part? Yes, Mr. Karikomo?”
“The roundbones are used as wheels or cogs. But even so, Professor, I have to think that from our standpoint, momonji are put together just a little too conveniently.”
“That�
��s an important point, but it’s also a question that takes us into the realm of metaphysics. If you wish to pursue it, I’d suggest you transfer to the department of theology. Now, next is Mr. …”—Professor Shitadami turned toward the students and gazed across the classroom—“Hanishibe. What is this called, and what function do you think it serves?”
Hanishibe hadn’t heard a thing the professor had said, but when twenty-three classmates turned around to look at him all at once, he realized that he had been called upon. A dazzling beam of sunlight was being reflected into his eyes off the hairless, hard, and finely cracked cranium of Yatsuo, who was sitting with perfect posture in a seat in front of him and off to the side.
There were four rows and six columns of seats, and about half of the faces occupying them were far removed from the human baseform. In the case of Monozane the Truncated Dodecahedron, who was bubbling away contentedly in an aquarium on a front-row desk, Hanishibe couldn’t even tell what part corresponded to a face.
Grandpa’s really amazing, Hanishibe thought, impressed anew by the outstanding work his grandfather did. Although humans came in all shapes and sizes, he could see right away that they were people and took measures to resurrect them.
Hanishibe was fearful that even if he did manage to become a taxonomist, he might misjudge someone and make a mistake he could never atone for. He had long had a feeling that it wouldn’t be terribly unusual if people were found among the raw materials used in the mesenchyme-wrapped bones of the chair he was sitting in or among the ingredients of the broth that today’s rhinoceros meat had been served in at lunchtime. His fear of making such errors was supposed to be why he was studying in this taxonomy department to begin with, but for some time now, Hanishibe had been afflicted by a sense of unease that he couldn’t put clearly into words and had become unable to focus on his studies.
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