Sisyphean

by Dempow Torishima

  A certain hypothesis occurred to him, based on the words of Kubutsutsui, but it was too absurd to take seriously, and he shook it out of his mind. Had a couple of momonji come apart in midair during the Descent after all? Both of these men are returnees. All he could do was keep telling himself that.

  He tripped on the flesh-tube that lay in a writhing mass on the floor. He stripped off the sticky glueball and set it next to his universe globe, then coiled up the flesh-tube and put it away beneath his bed.

  “If any of Grandpa’s colleagues come by, I’ll bring them up here,” he said. Taking his lamp in hand, he put the shrine office behind him. Before the bedfluid erupted from the petaurista mound to form the Pillar, the ebisus would have to spend the whole night hauling the freshest-looking, most promising petauristas over to the disposal area. No one had asked him, but Hanishibe had made up his mind to assist them in the task as much as he was able.

  A whitish haze hung over the whole of the filthbed now, rising up dimly from the blackness in the illumination of torchlight that shone from the perimeter. Gas was being given off by petauristas as bedfluid melted away their bodies.

  As Hanishibe began climbing up the slope, his body could sense that the entire mound was slowly, almost imperceptibly rotating. The slope to his right collapsed, burying alive several ebisus who had been carrying a momonji. He started to turn to go and help them, but right away one of the buried ebisus stuck his torso up out of the jumble and signaled in arm language that they were all right.

  Relieved, Hanishibe signaled back, and that was when he sensed the presence of someone standing behind him. He turned around. Through the whitish mist, he could make out a dim figure. The face still resembled a liposculpt, but now it had taken on a solid shape, with features more defined than they had been before.

  “Narikabura!” Hanishibe cried. He started running toward him, but his foot slipped on a blood-smeared shell and he fell down on his back. “You … you must really bear a grudge for what I’ve done.”

  “Yeah. I’ve never forgiven you. Up until just now even, I was thinking about … about killing you.”

  The moment Hanishibe tried to sit up, the corpse he was sitting on began to slide, and he grabbed hold of an intestine that was near at hand. His fingers were sinking into a wall of flesh.

  “I’ve been in hiding,” said Narikabura, his face beginning to blur. “Together with the eschatologists. Because I’m sure even now that my dad was right.”

  “How can you blindly believe in things like eschatology and the Theory of Celestial Motion? What about the will of the gods?”

  “Since moving into the shrine, you seem to have learned how to hide your true feelings in front of them. Even you must realize what’s going on. Even you must suspect it. Food and drink offerings are being brought into the Deilith constantly. Divinity students are being forced to work their brains until they martyr.”

  Hanishibe felt his throat going dry as he waited for the next words.

  “They only intend to escape themselves.”

  “Who’s going to escape? And where in the world from?”

  Shadows wavered in the growing swells of fog.

  “I’m out of time already. But I’ll tell you one thing before I go. Those ebisus you’re on such friendly terms with? Why do you think it is their intelligence is so low? Because the same thing is happening to them that’s happening to the divinity students right now: their intellects are suppressed because almost all of their brains’ functionality is being used from outside.”

  “What in the world for?” A faint scent of grass brushed past his nose. “And how could you know something like that?”

  Narikabura drew nearer through the fog. He was walking on two legs. What was then revealed before Hanishibe was the baseform of a woman wrapped in an unbleached kimono and a pleated skirt. The fabric covering her chest and shoulders bore dark stains.

  “Right now, I am simultaneously here and in the village by the lake.” The features of his liposculpt face began to run, as if melting in the heat. Bubbles appeared in depressions that formed, resembling eye sockets, as his lips and the ridge of his nose came protruding forward. There was no mistaking it: what was forming was the face of the Shrine Chieftain’s wife.

  At that moment, someone called out Hanishibe’s name from below. Narikabura silently backed away. When Hanishibe twisted around to look behind and below, he saw the Shrine Chieftain standing there, holding up his lantern.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Helping the ebisus like always. My foot just slipped.” There was no lie in merely leaving out the details. “What brings you out here?”

  The Shrine Chieftain looked around, and in a gloomy voice he told him, “I can’t find my wife.”

  Just before dawn, the search for the Shrine Chieftain’s wife was called off for the time being. Hanishibe headed for the disposal area, thoughts churning at a state of affairs that was difficult to believe. As he stared at the momonji lined up on the straw mats, there appeared a taxonomist who had been a friend of his grandfather’s. Hanishibe explained the situation to him and asked him to come up to his private room in the shrine office.

  There the taxonomist pried his grandfather’s facelid partway open with a scraper used for disassemblies, stuck a syringe into the reliefs of a face softer than his exoderm, and injected a resurrectant. Nothing happened. The taxonomist moved on to various other approaches, forcing him to breathe in awakeners and sticking acupuncture needles into his pressure points to stimulate the nerves.

  “Well, sometimes the effects don’t take right away,” the taxonomist said in a consoling voice, then headed back over to the disposal area.

  Hanishibe was sitting in his chair, doing nothing in particular. On a sudden impulse, he opened his desk drawer, pulled out a bundle of manuscript pages, and laid them out on the floor. On every page, dreams of that village by the lake, dreams he had heard from the ebisus, were recorded in densely packed, reddish-black letters.

  Hanishibe didn’t need to reread them all in order to realize what he had been pretending not to see. He put his hands to the floor and hung his head. The veins in his temples were beating furiously.

  “Blackness,” a muffled voice suddenly said.

  “Grandpa?” Hanishibe rose to his feet like a drunkard.

  “Am I still … in space? No … this world … is awfully heavy …”

  Hanishibe waited to hear what he would say next.

  He noticed a pale, wisteria-hued glow coming from the shelf where his decorations were kept. The gluelike mass was giving off light. The tiny stars on the universe globe next to it were set twinkling as they reflected it.

  When he opened the window and craned his neck upward, the sky was tinged with the same color and was beginning to grow brighter.

  4

  Three days later, Hanishibe was awaiting the Shrine Chieftain’s arrival in a fourth-floor living room. He had decided to tell him the truth.

  As the door began to open, he heard a voice saying, “Thank goodness! Thank goodness you’re safe!” The Shrine Chieftain came into the room with his arm around the shoulders of a young woman. She had no arms below her elbows, which were wrapped in bandages.

  “Hanishibe was with you until dawn looking for me, wasn’t he?” the girl said, staring straight into Hanishibe’s eyes. Her voice was that of the Shrine Chieftain’s wife; her face that of Matamade the washwoman. “I am truly grateful,” she said and gently touched with her bandage-wrapped elbow a clenched fist that Hanishibe couldn’t keep from trembling.

  “Hanishibe, what’s the matter?” the Shrine Chieftain asked concernedly. “You look so distressed … Perhaps I’ve made you overdo too often lately. You should relax for a while.”

  “What about her?” he said.

  “‘Her’?” asked the Shrine Chieftain. With a frightened expression, Matamade�
�the Shrine Chieftain’s wife—drew near to her husband. “Oh, you must mean this possession-seat that she’s been wearing lately. What with the sudden uproar this time, the receptaflesh from the bronze bell couldn’t get here in time. It’s all right though. Her arms, of course, and even her face will go back to normal, so don’t you worry. Although my wife does seem to prefer being thinner, as she is at present.”

  “What are you talking about, sir?”

  “Oh. So is that what was going on?” The Shrine Chieftain’s expression clouded over. “I’ve spoken carelessly. It seems that I’ve done something inexcusable to you. If this has upset you, we can decide on a different ebisu.”

  Hanishibe couldn’t understand the words being said to him.

  “This may sound like I’m trying to make excuses, but we had her tested for personhood, just in case. We proceeded only after confirming she is not a person, not even by legal definition.”

  Hanishibe punched the Shrine Chieftain in the face as hard as he could. The sensation was like hitting a boneless mass of flesh. The Shrine Chieftain fell back on his buttocks, and Hanashibe kept hitting him until Matamade interposed herself, waving the rounded nubs of her elbows.

  For a long moment, no one moved.

  “Even whirligigs are fundamentally no different,” the Shrine Chieftain said, the palm of his hand pressed against his cheek.

  Hanishibe staggered back away from him until he felt the wall against his back. Were his ears ringing, or were there angry voices outside?

  “We’ve always treated the ebisus well,” said the Shrine Chieftain.

  “No doubt to protect your life in that city by the lake.”

  “Good heavens! Don’t tell me you’ve recollected? But if you have, you should understand. Here, through the power of some unknowable outside presence, deteriorated copies of magatama-bearing momonji—of countless alien life-forms as well—are replicated continuously. That’s why our daily life began its endless, meaningless repetition and in time began to pollute one of the Divine Implements—the Magatama. That contamination led us to isolate the Divine Implements, and in their place create the Hereafter—a specially designated preservation area we’ve made by availing ourselves of unused regions in the brains of ebisus.”

  “For your own families to live in?”

  “As the Divine Will First Party carries out its unending duties, the right to good health and welfare is also granted us by law. But since only a single bronze bell has been handed down to us, we cannot make possession-seats receive spirit at will. Rather than doing everything in the manifestation zone, you get better reception by going through the raw sensory organs, and it’s also in keeping with the Divine Will First Party’s philosophy.”

  Hanishibe was feeling as though the Shrine Chieftain were a fundamentally different life-form. “You’re doing the same thing to your Divinity students. They may not know it, but they’re burning off years of their lives to assist your families in escaping. Destruction is coming, just like Kubutsutsui argued. Isn’t it?”

  “Hanishibe, no!” cried the Shrine Chieftain’s wife. “My husband is trying to save everyone in this city!”

  “So how many more are you saying can board the Deilith?”

  “The boarding of the volunteers has been complete from the very start. They’re in the Divine Implement, the Magatama. All of them.”

  “That’s different from the people living in Cavumville right now! How could you do this?”

  Hanishibe’s knees were starting to tremble. Even though things had come to this, he was still clinging fervently to the hope that the Shrine Chieftain might say it wasn’t so.

  “Even you would do the same,” said the Shrine Chieftain.

  “How dare you. Please don’t make assumptions about what I would do.”

  “At any rate, it looks like you didn’t recollect after all, though guesswork alone has gotten you pretty far.” The Shrine Chieftain leaned against the wall as he got back to his feet. “You may have been revivified from a momonji, but you’re still me after all.”

  At that, Hanishibe felt as though the air had been crushed out of his lungs. “Well then,” he said at last, glaring at the Shrine Chieftain’s wife, “does that mean you’re Yatsuo?”

  “Of course not,” the Shrine Chieftain replied. “Yatsuo was my prior wife, whom I outlived. That’s a tale of long, long ago—of Earth in the days of the Great Dust Plague. But she—”

  The Shrine Chieftain was taking his wife’s shoulders to draw her near when a lone, dismayed-looking purifier suddenly burst into the room. Eschatologists, he reported, were gathering outside in large numbers, violently demanding admission to the Deilith. The Shrine Chieftain asked him who had stirred them up, and the purifier mumbled an answer too low to understand. The Shrine Chieftain asked again less politely, and the purifier, glancing at the Shrine Chieftain’s wife, answered in a voice that came out as a whisper.

  “Your wife.”

  The Shrine Chieftain opened a window, and they looked down below. Amid the thick, drifting haze, a multitude of bizarre figures stood in disorderly array, forming a line that was bobbing on a soup of digested petauristas. Bound for the Deilith, they had crowded onto the array of barges that formed the approach to the shrine. Those who had surged up onto the Deilith were shouting angrily toward the main shrine and the shrine office. A figure holding a bonestaff aloft at the head of the group was none other than the Shrine Chieftain’s wife.

  “We planned to escape this crumbling world with only our families!” she cried.

  Over and over, she fanned the flames of the furor around her, shouting out secrets that only the Shrine Chieftain’s wife could possibly know.

  Without a word, the Shrine Chieftain went out of the room. His footfalls could be heard as he descended the staircase. His frightened children ran in from the next room over and clung to their mother.

  “It’s all right, dears, it’s all right. Daddy is sure to save us. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Hanishibe realized in a sudden flash of insight exactly what the Shrine Chieftain was about to do. He leaned far outside the window and shouted as loudly as he could, “Don’t! Get away from here right now! Narikabura, stop it!”

  Not a soul paid heed to his voice.

  Rises began to appear in the layer of corpses piled up around the Deilith, growing higher and higher as if swelling from sudden fermentation, until four large hills had formed. Giving off a faint smoke, the dead bodies covering these mounds stuck one to another as they slid downward, and out from their centers there crawled misshapen human figures, each one as tall as the shrine office’s third story. The entirety of their long, twisted bodies were covered—or bound perhaps—with clothing that bulged with ridges of muscle fiber. From their collars jutted tongue-shaped, transparent heads from which bubbles of air were popping in such numbers that the creatures appeared to be boiling.

  “Gods—”

  “Doomgods!”

  “Doomgods …”

  “Four of them!”

  “We’ll be cursed!”

  With a roar of voices, the multitude fell back. People were pushed off the ledges of both the Deilith and the shrine road and began to smoulder as they were buried in half-digested remains.

  Hanishibe, following after the Shrine Chieftain, descended as far as the basement but found that the iron door that continued to the inner part of the Deilith had been closed. Reversing directions, he climbed back up the stairs and went out through the front door of the shrine office.

  Before the main shrine, the doomgods were crawling on all fours so that their bodies overshadowed everyone. They were raising and lowering their ridge-enveloped thoraxes. Inspired to awe by those magnificent forms, all remained rooted to the spots where they stood. The people would shrink back each time the doomgods’ long arms and legs buckled, making their midsections twist and turn
.

  One of the doomgods suddenly lowered its faceless head down to eye level, then slowly waved it left and right. That alone was enough to make many of them lose control of their bladders and sink to the ground on the spot.

  Underneath the shifting, glossy sheen of its smooth surface layer, strange-looking organs pulsated amid entangling nets of blood vessels and nerves. The surface of its face sank inward from the center, rotating like a whirlpool, and a shrill, piercing voice rang out. Fountains of blood erupted from the noses and ears of the dozen or so people in front of it. They were instantly thrown backward.

  On the other side of that doomgod’s inclined torso, the figure of a woman came into view, being lifted high up into the air. Three fat fingers gripped her head tightly. Hanishibe cried out when he saw that face. In the blink of an eye, the Shrine Chieftain’s wife’s—Narikabura’s—head was twisted off. It fell to the ground, where it was kicked back and forth among the legs of people running around in a panic as they tried to escape.

  The barges of the shrine road swayed back and forth in a winding fashion, and the crowds of people surging across were gradually being thrown off into the filthbed.

  Most of the people, driven away in every direction by the doomgods, were fearfully coalescing around the Divine Gate that rose high above the forward end of the Deilith.

  The double door at the front of the main shrine creaked open. Standing in the doorway was the Shrine Chieftain, garbed in the raiment of a Shinto priest and holding in his hand a long pole from whose tip hung white streamers of purification.

  “Make way—”

  “Make way—”

  “Make way—”

  —backed by the voices of purifiers in the main shrine who sang out their admonitions in a round, the Shrine Chieftain stepped forward uttering the lines of an incantation and waved the staff at the doomgods.

  One step at a time, the doomgods retreated. The people all breathed out sighs of relief. The Shrine Chieftain continued to wave the pole about. One by one, the doomgods returned to the filthbed from whence they had come.