Sisyphean
Page 14
Chapter 4:
Divine Crossing
1
By the end of the day on which the riot occurred, Hanishibe had departed the shrine forever.
He went back to his old, empty home, and when he came in the door, a great number of craftworks—embodiments of nostalgia for the Hereafter—were waiting there to greet him. One by one, he took each of them in hand and wiped away the dust.
It was while he was touching those rows of molars inscribed with divine letters that Yatsuo’s last words came back to him.
You … are the only one … who can stop you. You alone.
Hanishibe shut his eyes, drawing a deep furrow in his brow as tears spilled from the corners of his eyes.
The public’s criticism of Hanishibe, who had been court enforcer, was severe. Though he took on contracts for odd jobs at many different workshops, he sometimes had days when he couldn’t put a single meal on the table.
Whenever his hands were even briefly idle, he would rub and massage the rigid body of his grandfather, giving him stimulation and telling him continually about the things that had come to pass already and those things that would come to pass later.
Once when he was at the peak of exhaustion, Hanishibe was speaking to him while half asleep—and found himself inputting the coordinates of habitable planets in a launch device and firing off about forty chrysalises.
As he floated along the corridor of an ark of woven reeds, Hanishibe imagined what would come later. He could envision the chrysalises landing, turning into momonji, and crawling all around the planet investigating its environment. Then within the birthingsacs inside them, the variegated bodies of colonists fitted to that environment would be formed around the magatama that were their cores. The revivified colonists could then breed the momonji—which were themselves made of ultimaterial—and wrap themselves in their furs, build homes with their bones, light fires with their oils and fat, and fill their stomachs with their meat. If things went well, they would be able to build a civilization again. Naturally, the eternal pilot Hanishibe would never know what became of the colonists afterward.
All alone, Hanishibe completed each task in silence and then went back to his home by the lakeshore where his family was waiting. His dear family, constructed by way of a thorough psychological disassembly, was ever attuned to his present spiritual condition. Also present were the casual, friendly residents living nearby. There was such peace there.
As he was living out such days, possession-seats fashioned by the bronze bell continued to receive soulsplinters of him through his magatama. Hanishibe would live out his prescribed life span, then go down to a death that was little different from falling asleep. Then the possession-seat would awaken him, and he would become the next Hanishibe. Weaving in this manner a life without end, his voyage to untouched stellar systems continued, and he continued dispatching momonji pupae to worlds where the habitability ratio was high—
And then one day, Hanishibe awakened from his nap and realized that he was in neither the shipboard cabin nor the house by the lake, and he was overcome by a horrifying sensation of loss that left his whole body trembling.
His grandfather had not awakened, but in continuing to speak to him, it had become clear to Hanishibe what he should do, as if he had been given the exact advice he needed.
Hanishibe went to see Komorizu and told him everything.
Creaking noises began to be heard constantly all through Cavumville. From time to time, the petraderm would shake powerfully, causing plaster on houses to come loose, bonebrick to crumble, and loop-lanes to buckle. The membranes in the windows never stopped shuddering. The Shrine Chieftain was seen often out on the Deilith, waving around his pole with its streamers. Divinity students were martyring out one after another. Komorizu had been no exception.
After Komorizu’s death, Hanishibe became unable to find any of the commonplace items he used every day, and sobbing, he wandered all around his house looking for them. He couldn’t find a single thing. If Moitori hadn’t come to visit him several days later, he might have never stopped looking.
Moitori, granting a request his son had made while he yet lived, at last welcomed Hanishibe into the Department of Aquatic Resources. Though he had his doubts about a man who had once been court enforcer, Moitori had already secured nearly double the number of momonji that had survived thus far. That number would likely increase even further with the next Descent from Heaven.
Hanishibe went to see Professor Shitadami of the taxonomy department and asked him for his help.Together, they created an ultralow-temperature, near-vacuum environment in a Department of Aquatic Resources laboratory. Momonji were locked inside and experiments repeated time and again. Most of the momonji, however, died without displaying any transformations beyond an increase in body fur. Professor Shitadami endeavored to convince his taxonomy department’s undergrads and graduates alike to join in the experiments, but only a handful of these responded.
Houses and streets in the direction of the Serpent collapsed from the tenth level all the way down to the fourth. There was little time left.
One by one, the number of Professor Shitadami’s students at the Department of Aquatic Resources began to increase. An idea proposed by Monozane the Truncated Dodecahedron, who had been brought in aquarium and all, led to the breakthrough: momonji were illuminated with polarized light, and their skin was observed hardening just slightly. Once they determined the best way to proceed, the experimentation gradually accelerated.
Staring dazedly through eyelids nearly sealed shut by drowsiness, Hanishibe was looking at a creature resembling an albino armormole.
Its gigantic form, shaped like a roll of bone-mochi coupée pão, was covered in a succession of bone-colored armor plates.
Something struck the back of his knee, and he came back to himself as he dropped to a kneeling position. Right beside him was the diminutive Professor Shitadami, sitting in a chair and holding a dermasheet out toward him. Hanishibe took it from him, and as his eyes followed the masterfully written script, a smile began to spread across his face. Every department had met their targets. They had succeeded in turning a momonji into a pupa.
With everyone looking on, two pairs of wing-type ossiforms pushed up one segment of its armor, and then one of its backshell ossiforms, in a layer of fat, slid open, laying bare the wet gleam of its birthingsac membrane.
Once the production of pupae began, the grounds of the Department of Aquatic Resources grew steadily more cramped, and even the homes of those involved were taken over. In the marketplace, momonji and the midsized petauristas that served as their fodder grew quickly scarce, until at last, all that could be had were the dried ones and the ones boiled in sweetened soy sauce.
2
The disturbances continued. The Descents from Heaven that had once occurred at a rate of one every three months had not taken place now for five months and counting. The trembling in the window membranes only grew stronger, and the funnelroar was reaching the point where it was clearly audible. It reminded Hanishibe somehow of a herald’s voice, crying out to clear his master’s way.
The Shrine Chieftain’s lack of appearances even at Descentmaking ceremonies encouraged unease among the multitudes, and even if someone had wanted to negotiate with him, the four doomgods had reappeared at the Deilith a month ago and were still sitting there listlessly so that no one could approach the shrine.
Hanishibe was fine-tuning the environment of the experimentation chamber when he overheard some student talking. One of the doomgods was melting, they said. He went out onto the loop-lane and found Moitori and the others gathered there looking downward at the Deilith. Hanishibe was taken with a strange sense of déjà vu and ran his gaze back and forth across the filthbed surrounding it.
“What are you looking at? It’s over there.” Moitori pointed at the main shrine.
A thing like a blob of fat
was going in through the doorway. At its side there stood a figure garbed in priestly raiment.
From that point onward, the doomgods were three.
The following week, Hanishibe went all the way down to the bottommost level for the first time in months. This was because he had noticed that the houseboats dotting the filthbed had not changed their positions in quite a long time. Most likely, this was what had caused his déjà vu.
When he drew near the Deilith, the doomgods in front of the main shrine grew restless, so he couldn’t get on from the shrine road. He had a feeling that the filthbed surrounding him contained more of the dregs of Descents from Heaven than usual. The houseboats moored nearby were all uninhabited. The main shrine as well had its door ajar and showed no sign of life.
With fat fingertips, a doomgod was kneading something resembling an internal organ, but losing interest perhaps, it threw it away over its shoulder. It rose on its haunches just slightly, leaned forward, and thrust its hand through the door of the main shrine. Taking hold of a single, elongated arm, it dragged a limp human form outside. The body’s head lolled about and nodded forward in Hanishibe’s direction. A bowl-shaped depression was visible from which a chunk of him had been cut out. The doomgod started twisting the limbs off the dead body.
Another doomgod dragged another dead ebisu from the main shrine. It tore open the corpse’s stomach with its bare fingers, and when it had finished pulling out the intestines, it put one end to its throat and gradually sucked it into its body. The head of the ebisu had of course been severed.
Hanishibe shuddered violently. Looking across the filthbed, he realized that most of those scattered dregs he had noticed were pieces of ebisu corpses.
Cavumville was facing an increasingly severe food shortage. Even the replenishing of whirligigs had been hit with delays.
In front of the Department of Aquatic Resources, residents had been gathering for days on end making high-handed demands that the momonji market be reopened. After experiencing numerous skirmishes, the crowd, overcome by raging passions, attacked both the Deparment of Fisheries and the homes of those who worked there.
The three momonji that were in the experimentation chamber at the time were disassembled on the spot, but then the blood-smeared attackers were themselves attacked as they headed home carrying slabs of meat. However, the pupae being stored in the warehouse and in private homes could not even be scratched by the likes of hammers and axes.
In the midst of this riot, not even one of the attackers noticed the gargantuan crack that had appeared in the heavens.
Hanishibe was gazing at the sky from the window of his room when it happened. The crack grew, zigzagging across the sky like a lightning bolt, and the air pressure began to drop precipitously. All through the city of Cavumville, dust and tiles began to be swept up into the air.
Hanishibe remembered the very first cnidarianlike baby he had taken from the birthingsac of a momonji in this land. The touch and the weight of that moist mucous membrane came back to him with vivid clarity. The long years before this hollow had come to overflow with its supervariegated humanity came and went in the twinkling of an eye. Perhaps this diversity of mutations had been the result of trying to adapt to a world that could not possibly exist.
He thought of the four hundred passengers sleeping inside the momonji pupae. It had been impossible from the start to provide enough momonji for the entire population to cross over. Perhaps those who had not been selected by the vote were feeling relieved about it now. Hanishibe had the feeling that they probably were.
Beyond the cracks overspreading the whole sky, an inky blackness could be seen that seemed to inflate as it grew ever larger.
The rooftop, the ceiling, and the walls were all blown away in the space of a single breath, and the world went dim. Hanishibe clung to the body of his grandfather. It was as if every Descent from Heaven that had ever occurred—and every petaurista—were caught up in a vortex, and all going back to Heaven at once.
At the center of the whirlwind, the Deilith was rising, even as the main shrine, the shrine office, and the Divine Gate were falling away.
He thought of Narikabura, now a ghost lurking in that village by the lake.
Rows of houses peeled away in succession, and bruise-colored petraderm was exposed. The town that had been built up over untold generations was going down to utter destruction.
Hanishibe and his grandfather had already been swallowed up in the raging currents borne of that Stygian void. Rings of petraderm spun away into the distance. Amid a blackness spangled densely with dull bonebricks and human forms, he could make out the shapes of many silk-white pupae, each one as sturdy as armor.
It was getting hard to breathe. He felt like his insides were on the verge of turning inside out. As Hanishibe clung to his grandfather, mucus came oozing out from his eyeballs and from between the scales that covered his entire body. It formed a thick protective membrane around him. Even so, that was merely a simple reaction to the environment and could only prolong his life a short while.
Hanishibe’s sense of sight slipped away into the distant past. Before an ark of woven reeds there suddenly appeared a green and blue planet. Its volume was only about three times that of the ark. Even so, it had an atmosphere, and there was no word save planet he could use to describe it. At the end of an undeclared war with its gravity, the ark, badly damaged, made an “unplanned landing” on that world. Although Hanishibe had managed to escape using the Deilith, it too crashed soon afterward into another planetoid with a powerful gravitational field, crash-landing inside a hollow in its interior. Finally, the entire planetoid had been covered in a celestial sphere, which had begun to glow with an ashy whiteness—
Amid the darkness, a part of the sky glowed brilliantly with the color of forget-me-nots. It was a giant, slowly revolving shard of the celestial sphere. As thick clouds rolled across its surface, the angle it made with the horizon grew more extreme. It was so vast that there was no way to guess how far away it was. Fragments of sky flitted by his field of view, revealing multilayered cross sections that fluttered past like the pages of a book. Then the curved surface of the heavenly realm rose into view, covered in a swollen, translucent membrane that gave off a faint light, squirming with untold multitudes of life-forms. There were shelled things that crept on the ground, wild things that ran in herds, soft things that lurked in shadows, vigorously copulating momonji piled atop one another, and doomgods who, like cattle drivers, were hurrying all these petauristas along, but at last all of them vanished from Hanishibe’s field of view.
The sky had been shattered into fragments of all sizes and shapes, resembling the islands that were drawn on the map of the Hereafter. The blue light given off by these shards of sky illuminated the indistinct shape of the bruise-colored moon, with its funnel-shaped mouth. Behind it, some sort of gargantuan shadow—a vertically oblong spheroid—was growing larger and—no, not larger—closer! It crossed the limb of the moon, growing ever more voluminous: a strangely shaped mass of stone suggesting a fossilized egg with complex patterns of cracks.
Long, vertical projections resembling dried sausages stuck out in four directions from the moon’s outer shell, trembling and scattering innumerable flakes as they opened up, their outer surfaces peeling off, their lower bases near the filthbed being used as fulcra to move them. From their tips extended clumsy projections like palms with no fingers.
The upper and lower halves of the now-unoccluded mass of stone began to rotate in opposite directions around its center and at last came apart into two pieces. The hollow moon, waving around its four projections like an infant, slowly moved into the space between the two hemispheres. Night fell across many of the sky-shards illuminating this spectacle, and then the stone that had enveloped the moon began to lose thickness, until at last the border between itself and the surrounding space simply melted away.
Hanishibe couldn�
�t stop shaking from the cold. Tightly, he gripped the magatama hanging from his neck.
Unexpectedly, the fearless arms of his grandfather moved. Grabbing both of Hanishibe’s shoulders, he turned him around so that he was facing forward. Then like interlaced fingers coming apart, his grandfather’s entire body opened up from its center and enveloped Hanishibe’s freezing body.
He could hear his grandfather’s voice murmuring, I can hold out … until you get to sleep.
Hanishibe nodded.
Or maybe it was Yatsuo who nodded.
Or his grandmother.
Or me.
Or us.
Fragment:
Genesis
It seemed as if the geometric civilization would continue flooding into him, but then of its own accord it began degenerating into Chaos, and the danger that it posed increased all the more. One by one, the surrounding corporatians pulled out their distribution tubes and ceased from trading fluids with him. Even
Chapter 1: