Sisyphean

by Dempow Torishima

  When he exited onto the loop-lane, white lees were dancing lightly in the air. The whirligig was very heavy now. He had not even made it halfway back to the great stairway when one of the cart’s wheels broke. At a loss, Hanishibe looked up at the sky, wondering what he should do. It was blue overhead with not a cloud to be seen. Though it was still bright, the stars were out already. But it was as he was staring at that sight, thinking it rather odd, that each of those points of light began increasing rapidly in size.

  The whole sky was full of them by the time the reverberating peal of the alarm bell began to sound from the watchtower on the uppermost level.

  It was much too late in ringing. Hanishibe fretted as he looked around. Doom-proofed doors were going down in front of every entrance. The windows were already stopped with armored shutters. He pulled on the cart with the broken wheel, hoping to at least take shelter beneath the eaves of some roof, but it wouldn’t budge an inch. The whirligig wheezed with the sound of a stopped-up proboscis.

  Something bounced from the cobbleshell near his feet, and a little splash of blood radiated outward. Here and there, on the rooftops and the ground, bloody splashes were blossoming one after another like red handprints. At the moment, they were mostly insectoids known as carapaceans. Several of them were trying to get up, even with body segments half torn off.

  One level down, something that looked like a coelenterate slammed into a roof, stuck there, and began extending tentacles out in every direction from its hemhorraging body.

  Hanishibe turned about at the sound of a loud, wet noise, and flying chunks of meat stuck to his forehead and cheek. A petaurista shaped like a fava bean covered in black feathers had burst open, sending reddish brown organs flying. He wiped off the pieces of flesh and looked across the wide-open funnelspace of Cavumville.

  Petauristas were falling in staggering numbers, like a waterfall plunging into the moon’s hollow space.

  There were brain-shaped lumps covered in tumorous growths; scaleless, sluglike fish shaped like bugles; spiral sponges that sprouted eyeballs …

  —legless waterbears with elephant-skin that trailed multiple arms that ended in mouths; eel-like rays vibrating with innumerable sensory whiskers; hemichordates with comb-shaped antennae flowering out in every direction; discolored beetles under attack for some reason by the acorn worms they used as lures …

  —priapulids joined together in radial patterns; pig pupas; fur seals bristling with gaudily colored, star-shaped projections …

  —horned owls shaped like trilobites; tapeworms twisted into ghost-leg lattices; clouds of luxuriantly growing organs; streamlined water cicadas wriggling their parapodia …

  Although “petaurista” was the catch-all term for all of them, it was hard to think any of these creatures belonged to the same planet’s ecosystem.

  The majority of them were falling toward the center of the funnel.

  Though Hanishibe was frightened, he held up a hand to shield his eyes and looked up at the sky. The shadows of thinly scattered, lozenge-shaped momonji were beginning to appear. A sharp pain—it felt like a boulder had struck him in the back—assaulted Hanishibe, and he lost his balance. A crustacean resembling a rabbit rolled into view a few steps in front of him, coughing up green blood as it went into convulsions.

  Hanishibe wanted to run away that very instant, but he couldn’t abandon the whirligig.

  While he was hesitating, though, he felt something tickling the back of his neck. At some point, a many-legged mouse had gotten onto his shoulder, and its vibrating, stamenlike feelers were rubbing against his neck. He was shooing it off with his hand—carefully, for fear that it might be poisonous—when he heard a fierce sound like an explosion. Hanishibe’s entire body was enveloped in a huge spray of blood.

  The thick, fishy odor clung to him. His body was starting to feel hot.

  As the blood spray cleared, the corpse of the whirligig, burst open like the petals of a flower, came into view. The cart was split perfectly in half and drenched in frothing blood. The nearest wall was cracked in a spiderweb pattern, in the midst of which was buried an armored petaurista that resembled an infant child. Each time its body writhed it made a creaking sound, and finch-yellow fluid came pouring from its segmented body.

  There was no further need to stay in this place. But even so, there were always short lulls during Descents from Heaven. For the time being, Hanishibe sank back under the eaves. The petauristas that were pounding against the roof overhead broke apart into blood-smeared organs and meaty chunks and came falling down before his eyes in a steady rain. A piece of flesh with a shell attached had come to rest on his shoe. He kicked it away.

  At the point where the loop-lane to his right began to trace out a visible arc, someone’s house collapsed with a great rumble. A giant momonji had crashed right into it.

  On the far side of level four—and level six and level five—clouds of dust were rising up from houses that had caved in, one right after the other.

  No sooner did the fleshy chunks falling from the eaves seem to be letting up than the skeleton of the house made a noise and began to creak. It was getting harder for things to slide off the roof, and they were accumulating up there. Had that been a terrified voice from inside he’d just heard? He had the feeling that it was, though maybe it had been the dying cry of one of the petauristas piling up in the street. From smashed internal organs, from fur gone stiff with caked blood, and from cracked shells, innumerable tenants were now crawling out of the corpses. Was it Hanishibe’s imagination, or was their crawling advance heading in his direction?

  Presently, a ray of light began to shine through. The falling petauristas grew sparse, and for a moment the sky regained its former brightness. A midsized momonji was the last thing to fall, and then there were only the flurrying lees.

  It was now or never. Shrugging away his fear, Hanishibe started walking, stepping over the accumulated piles of newfallen corpses. He made his way along the street, accompanied by the merry crunch of exoshelletons breaking underfoot, nearly falling over when he slipped on bodily fluids, and stepping around the eruptions of tenants.

  Suddenly, something latched onto his legs and clung to them tightly. Atop its hairless body there was no head, and the severed edge of its neck was swollen and quivering, just like a piece of hemomochi. As he tried in vain to peel off its lukewarm appendage, some passersby came and helped him.

  “That just came out of nowhere …”

  “Did you hear the first bell … ?”

  “Got yourself a good red dousing, there, didn’t you …”

  “You better run on home; you’re like bait for all these tenants …”

  “Be careful.”

  Hanishibe thanked them gladly and set off running. He had now gotten used to running on this unstable surface. The road ahead, however, was blocked by a single gigantic momonji. A quartet of ebisus were effectively using their long forearms to push it backward as it twisted its thick trunk in resistance.

  Like a loaf of bonemeal bread, its body was of uniform thickness and covered in white down through which its rippling, pale-peach skin could just barely be seen. Whenever one half of its body reared upward, a double row of claw-legs could be glimpsed. Completely useless for locomotion, they were one more example of all the unnecessary body parts momonji had.

  One of the ebisus held a palm out in front of the momonji’s head, touching it right in the center of its three translucent eyeballs. Its eyeballs were uneven, as if they had been thrown at the creature haphazardly from somewhere far away and merely stuck where they had hit. For some reason, they invited pity. The ebisu’s arm quivered for an instant, and then blood oozed out from the gap between hand and fur. The momonji went limp and had clearly given up its ghost. A reddish-black oval staining its white fur was growing larger.

  The second floor of the house beside the creature had mostly collapse
d. Hanishibe could see petauristas that had gotten inside crawling on its walls. The people who lived there were sobbing with both hands on their faces. He could also hear angry shouts directed at the ebisus, telling them to get lost this instant.

  “Climb over,” a solitary ebisu called from the other side of the momonji. “Here, give me your hand. Careful now.”

  The hand that was extended from across the momonji was hard and cold, as if carved from bone. With his left hand, Hanishibe clenched a clump of fur as if getting ready to rip it out. Then, pulled along by his right hand, he climbed up the side of the momonji. It had a fearsome overabundance of fur, making it very easy for his foot to start sliding on its exoshelleton. He somehow managed to get to the top and then slid all the way down the other side of its body.

  “Go quickly! The next fall is coming in less than four and a half doki.”

  Hanishibe bowed and hurried on ahead, but when he reached the great staircase, his legs went weak.

  All across the stairway, there were half-dead, half-living petauristas jostling against one another like scales from some gargantuan prehistoric fish. Step by step, he made his way upward between slimy piles of glistening, skinned wreckage, through overflows of bodily fluids and organs that came up to his knees, searching with the tips of his toes for steps he couldn’t see. Though it might mean picking up a tenant or two, he made up his mind to press ahead and just endure it. His muscles gradually began growing stiffer though, and he soon realized it was getting harder to move. Midway up, he stopped walking.

  It wasn’t just the exhaustion. From his knees downward, tenants the size of phalluses had stuck to his legs and were expanding into conical shapes. There were even some that had attached to their fellow tenants. As he was knocking them off with his hands, he heard a wet noise like two pieces of raw meat colliding.

  He looked up and saw a wrinkly meatrug come bouncing down toward him from about ten steps above. It hung for an instant in midair right before his eyes. In that instant, it blew outward, expanding with explosive speed into a meatnet that wrapped around Hanishibe’s entire body, holding him fast.

  Countless translucent needles awakened throughout the meatnet, making quivering movements like the blinking of eyes. The strength began to drain out of Hanishibe’s body.

  He resisted desperately, but it was in vain; his body was beginning to tilt. At last, he fell over onto the steps and slid down the stairs, sending petauristas flying as he went. When he slammed into cobbleshell, his back took the blow. The meatnet was crushed underneath and sent out a spray of strong, pungent ichor.

  The blue of the sky grew pointillated and then became spotted. Several steps above, a piece of viscera that appeared to be a digestive organ rebounded up into the air. Right next to his ear, something popped. They were starting to fall again.

  If this is my last day in the Hereandnow, he prayed, please don’t put me through this again in my Yet-to-come.

  That was when he spotted a figure on the landing of the great stairwell, and a sound reached him that was like people cheering. A memory of the Hereafter? There were fragmented voices blended with static—lunar surface … Sea of Tranquillity … in human history … one small step—the figure … the astronaut … came bearing a flag as proof that he was first to reach this lunar surface. As the Descent from Heaven grew fiercer, he walked step by careful step down the stairs, until he stood right next to Hanishibe. A voice emanated then from his closed facelid.

  “Looks like you’re paralyzed,” he said. It was his grandfather’s voice. The flagpole came near and peeled away the meatnet. Then, like a cold blade, the realization hit him that it wasn’t a flagpole at all; it was an axe.

  “You did well to make it this far during a Descent from Heaven.” The older man lifted up his grandson’s body as though it were as light as a feather and carried him in his arms, shielding him from the petauristas with his broad upper body. He stepped back onto the stairwell and started climbing up again.

  “I’m sorry, Grandpa.” Tears overflowed from the shame Hanishibe felt. “I let the whirligig die.”

  “It’s all right. He’s become one with the momonji and is falling toward us now. We’ll raise him again.”

  “He was a good whirligig. I was horrible to him. I let him die.”

  “Yeah … he was a good whirligig.”

  Hanishibe couldn’t peel his eyes away from the sights he glimpsed out in the open air from between his grandfather’s arms. Petauristas in vast numbers—probably more than he’d ever seen in his current life—were plunging downward, practically climbing over one another in a mad scramble to hit the bottom first. It had long since become impossible to pick out individuals among them. Afterimages melted together with real images, and without his realizing it, time itself had seemed to come to a standstill. At last, the strangest feeling came over him that everything around him was falling up toward the heavens.

  Hanishibe felt a flash of terror, as though he himself might be dragged into the plummeting horde as well, and lowered his gaze. The bottommost level, once a mortar-shaped basin, now rose up like a mound. Over and over, the central region would cave inward and then start swelling up again. This was because petauristas were still accumulating.

  Suddenly Hanishibe’s field of vision tilted, and the corpse-heaped cobbleshells came rushing up at him. Sure that he was going to hit them, his body went rigid, but with a painful gasp his grandfather managed to regain his posture.

  “Are you all right, Grandpa?”

  “Yeah.” His grandfather swayed again perilously the moment after he answered. “It’s really coming down now. We’d better hurry.”

  The door of their house was buried to half its height in petauristas. With his thick arms, Hanishibe’s grandfather beat on the wall in what was apparently a signal. The first-floor armored door opened, and gray smoke billowed out. Then—as if materializing from its particles—a petaurista appeared. In shock, Hanishibe thought for a moment that one had even managed to get into his house. But when tenants came crawling up the wall, the petaurista began to precision-skewer them with her sharp legs.

  “Grandma!” Hanishibe cried in a voice shrill with joy. “We’re home.”

  Hanishibe was passed from his grandfather to his grandmother, who laid him down on the floor of a room where bitter smoke hung in the air. Due perhaps to the smoke’s effect, the tenants began detaching from his body.

  Hanishibe’s grandfather slowly climbed into the house through the window, falling over in the process, and immediately his grandmother shut the armored door and window and extinguished the smoke pot. Leaving curling eddies in the drifting haze, his grandmother crawled along the floor, spearing one by one every last invading petaurista and tenant that she found crawling up the wall or across the ceiling.

  2

  Hanishibe awoke with an uneasy feeling, as though his stomach were turned inside out. There was a sticky sound as he got up, and the fat inside the sofa quivered.

  “Grandpa! What time is it?” Surrounded by darkness, he had thought at first that it was already late at night. Relief spread through him when he realized it was just because the windows were covered with armored shutters. The noise of the Descent had let up.

  “It’s still the hour of the rooster,” his grandfather replied. “What are you all in a tizzy about?”

  “I’m supposed to meet somebody.”

  There was a scritching sound from the glowplates of a torchburr on the wall, and then the room brightened to a vague dimness. His grandfather was still standing. His grandmother, as always, was sitting on the floor in front of her rectangular board. He couldn’t even tell if she were awake or asleep. A blood-splattered dishcloth was lying at her feet.

  Hanishibe looked down at himself. The blood that had splashed all over him had been wiped away, and his clothes had been changed.

  “No one’ll blame you for breaking a date
on the day of a Descent from Heaven. None of the levels are done cleaning up yet. It’s dangerous to go walking around outside.”

  “Well, that’s true, I guess.”

  “Where were you planning to meet up?”

  “A hemomochi shop,” Hanishibe said, stumbling over his words just slightly. “There’s this girl named Yatsuo.”

  “Let’s go together,” said his grandfather, already headed toward the entryway before he even spoke.

  The people who lived on the uppermost level were shoving the corpses of petauristas from their rooftops into the streets. By rule, this was done in a level-by-level order. As one went down to the lower levels, the danger of an avalanche increased.

  Nearly all petauristas died instantly upon impact, and even the rare survivors never lasted the week. It was thought that they could not adapt to the lunar environment, though there were a few kinds, such as momonji, that were exceptions to this rule.

  Hanishibe and his grandfather passed by children of all shapes and sizes who were sticking tenants on their arms to make bugmen of themselves.

  He felt his chest tighten up when he saw his grandfather limping. He wondered if the pain was really bad and if that was why his silences were stretching out so terribly long.

  At the place where the hemomochi shop was supposed to have been—a mountain of wreckage littered with bonebrick and hemomochi—a trio of ebisus wielding straw shimenawa from the shrine were trying to hold down a bizarre, man-shaped giant wearing clothing made of muscle fiber. Those were known as doomgods; once every few years, one would fall into Cavumville along with the petauristas.

  The doomgod was pinned down on top of the wreckage by shimenawa wrapped around its arms and sides. It writhed powerfully as a whirlpool formed in its tongue-shaped, translucent head, unleashing an agonized growl of VuVuRuRuVuVu.

  “Doesn’t look like she’s here,” Hanishibe said a few minutes later. In spite of a growing sense of solitude, he felt relieved.