My left under-arm went flying up into the air, and my upper body—except for the shell on my back—was split almost completely in two. The membranes between my body segments ruptured, and my stomach and intestines splattered bright colors all over the road. A puddle of pale, yellowish-green fluid was spilling out of me, getting larger by the moment, and I shuddered at the sight of the many small parasites squirming around in it.
I felt my dorsal vessel contract, twitching, inside my thoracic cavity, as the chambers of my heart made sad, lonely sounds as they struggled to draw in bodily fluids that were no longer there. It was a sound like someone sipping at an empty cup. Yet even that near to death’s door, I was thinking: Surely I deserved a little praise for the bundle of vital aromaterials I was still clutching in three of my hooknails.
There was little pedestrian traffic at that time of night. As foam oozed out of my mouth, as I trembled with chills like I’d never experienced before, as I was praying, “Just let me die quickly,” a shabby white thing came crawling out of a tiny crack in Bohni Clifftown.
It looked like a tangle of long, spindly stalks stretching out from beneath a misshapen bowl. At first, I thought it was a gloambug, but as it drew nearer I could see that it had the stature of a person. Her entire body was covered in cottony white mold, with suspicious-looking mushrooms growing sparsely here and there. Though she stood on two legs, her three pairs of arms were touching the ground on account of a head and thorax that were bent extremely far forward. She was an elderly beggar, one to whom I sometimes gave spare food.
I couldn’t quite tell what tribe she was from, though hers was a type often seen among the beggars. Regardless of whether I was wearing balm or not, the resigned gaze of this old woman never failed to follow me when I passed through this quarter of the loway. Unable to do anything else about her, I had started giving her alms as a sort of hush money. Each time I did so, the woman would get this look on her face as if she had seen a ghost and bend her long antennae backward.
The old woman’s abdomanus was like a tacked-on accessory; it swung to and fro as she gathered up my spilled viscera in six delicate, hypha-infiltrated hands and placed them back inside the container that was my split thorax. I raised a moan in protest when she started putting the parasites back in too.
“Even these, play important roles,” she admonished. “Throw ’em away, and you’re a dead man.” She spoke in a halting tone, as if it had been years since the last time she had opened her mouth. It was a weak, scratchy voice, but she sounded younger than she looked. I shut my mouth, not so much because I was persuaded as because I lacked even the strength to cry out again.
The old woman got my thorax back together again, and as she was nimbly weaving a temporary binding from stems of raho grass she plucked from the cliff, she told me, “I worked as a nurse in Castellum Giri until the time I was twelve. I’m used to treating wounded soldiers.”
Castellum Giri … wasn’t that the one that had sunk to the sea bottom after getting into a big three-way fight with Castellae Raondo and Sosoga? Had that been when she had migrated here? But even if that were the case, why hide herself in a place like this? With questions such as these swirling though my mind, I slipped out of consciousness.
When I next awakened, I was lying in a soft danglebed in a narrow white chamber.
My body was back to normal, and I didn’t feel any pain. Had it all been a dream? I was starting to think so when I tried to sit up and realized that my lower left arm was missing. Fearfully, I touched the thoracic plate that I remembered having cracked. A long, diagonal ridge of half-dried sealant ran across it.
So this was a clinic of some sort. And there wasn’t a clinic anywhere that wasn’t tied up with Maidun Reproducing Pharmaceuticals somehow. Seized by a chill of fear, I looked around for some means of escape and noticed a window in the wall behind me. Timidly, I descended from the danglebed and walked over to the wall. I reached up to touch the window, but the instant I stretched my body upward, a sharp pain hit me—it was like a spring had just snapped inside my thorax—and I collapsed to the floor then and there.
With the sound of the door opening, I heard a familiar voice call out.
“Well now, what’s this? Trying to skip out before the bill’s settled? I just had to sew up your arthrostitial membrane, patch your carapace back together, and transfuse just about all of the fluids you now have. Do you have any idea how much trouble that was?”
It was Saromi Urume, the head of Saromi Clinic.
For quite some time now, I’d been investigating the finances of certain patients for him, as well as collecting unpaid debts. As such, I knew his dark secrets. Here, at least, I wouldn’t be handed over to Maidun Reproducing Pharmaceuticals.
Had that beggar known that I worked for this clinic regularly?
Dr. Saromi narrowed the space between his two antennae. “And even after all that,” he continued, “you’re still very much alive. You shouldn’t be.”
2
I found myself lying in the small grotto’s danglebed and for a moment was bewildered. Here my written record had broken off. Scentences had tremendous power to bring scenes back to life, and getting lost in their fragrances was an easy thing to do.
Scentences were written with secretions that came from the anuses of blotterbugs. When you gripped one of their elastic, spindle-shaped bodies, the neurofungi living inside would react, stimulating the creature’s glands. When using such an instrument, concentration was a must; otherwise, you’d end up rattling on and on about things that were self-evident or slip off into a kind of automatic writing that would just be all over the place. With the pain as bad as it was, it didn’t look like I was going to be able to use one this arc.
It was ten arcs after I was hospitalized that Tagadzuto, my manager, came to visit me. I explained to him that I had slipped on the gougeway, but he wasn’t one to be fooled by a weak excuse like that.
I had taken this job without going through his dodgejob agency, and Maidun Reproducing Pharmaceuticals—one of its regular clients—was about to have its reputation dragged through the mud as a result.
Thanks to the aromaterials I had by this time handed over to the Ministry of Welfare Contemplation, ambiguities in the evidence that had led to the namas-machina’s classification as gloambugs had been brought up for discussion in the Seat of Learning’s Assembly, with open hearings being held. Not that this had overturned the status quo, of course.
Tagadzuto was not about to show his hand. As usual, the smile on his one-eyed face never faltered as he said, “You should be up and about before long, Radoh Monmondo.” When addressing a member of another tribe, it was only good manners to attach the tribe name to the given name, yet when Tagadzuto said it, it somehow sounded like a slur. “I’ve got a request from the Zafutsubo. They want us to find out who that thief was who slipped into Maidun Reproducing Pharmaceuticals. Dead or alive, it’s all the same to them.”
The dodgejob fee from the Ministry of Welfare Contemplation had all gone to Dr. Saromi in the form of charges for surgery and hospitalization fees, and as if that weren’t enough, I’d even ended up saddled with debt, thanks to a rather ironic prescription for namas-machina. On top of that, the Zafutsubo—a tribe with whom any face-to-face meeting meant taking my life in my hands—now had it in for me personally. That was why I was living hidden like this now, in a labyrinth of forkways too narrow for their large bodies to pass through.
It was high time to get out of this business already. This dodgejobbing work—shameful, dangerous, the job description changing with every request—just wasn’t the kind of work someone could do for very long.
Originally, a “dodgejobber” had been the name of an invisible beast from a well-known legend, and when we Monmondo first migrated here, it had soon become our nickname. The Monmondo, fleeting and indistinct in form, had been prized as workers in both homes and businesses at first, but
then, as more and more of us had started cauterizing our decoroma glands and taking on illegal, dirty types of work, “dodgejobber” had turned into a slur. Later, the artificial removal of secretion glands—an act that invited disorder within the castellum—had been outlawed, and many of us had migrated to other castellae amid a rising anti-Monmondo sentiment.
Then, in an age when these things had been all but forgotten, Tagadzuto’s father had founded the Dodgejob Agency—an all-purpose contract business. The word “dodgejob” had of course been used to suggest the kind of dirty work the Monmondo had done in the past. Naturally, the tribal affiliations of hired dodgejobbers no longer mattered, but even so, it was only natural that I was welcomed warmly, being a Monmondo tribesman with the bonus of dysfunctional secretion glands.
Another wave of pain hit me, but it only made me feel less like moving.
“If all you do is sleep all arc, you’ll end up ugly as a grimebug.” I remember my mother used to scold me like that all the time. Grimebugs were very common, sweet-tasting gloambugs we ate as candy, but to my childhood self, their hideous, wrinkly forms were like hand-sculpted fragments of nightmare.
One time, I found a dead grimebug lying in the corner of the oven in our house. Maybe someone had tossed it in to get rid of it. Even after the passage of several arcs, though, it had still been lying there, neither burnt nor decayed. As time went by, I stopped thinking about it. A few more rounds went by, and then one night when I was sound asleep, I was awakened by a strange sensation on my stomach. Still half asleep, I batted something away with my hand. I seemed to remember hearing the dry sound of something crawling across the floor.
The next morning when I went to clean the oven, the grimebug wasn’t there. My mother laughed when I told her about it and said there had never been any such thing there to begin with.
These things are all golden in my memory now. It’s been a lot of rounds since I last saw my mother, and having defied the natural law of the Monmondo tribe, it’s unlikely I’ll ever be able to return to Castellum Gakugu.
I sat up slowly and lowered my feet to the floor. Moving even a little made my joints go stiff with fear. It felt like my whole body had turned into fragile, wafer-thin porcelain.
I stood and nearly hit my head on the glowjar-encrusted ceiling. A mortar and pestle I took from the boreshelf in the wall, then set them down on a small round table. Next, I bent over carefully and pulled up a floorboard near my feet.
Inside was a cage containing a mass of jostling, flat-bodied namas-machina, who all raised up their cephalothoraces in unison. When I undid the latch and opened the barred lid, their eight threadlike legs undulated like cracking whips as they scrambled for escape. Knocking them back down with my one lower hand, I grabbed hold of a particularly vigorous individual, pulled it out, shut the barred lid, and replaced the floorboard. The creature’s pale yellow carapace was soft and damp. Its dark organs could be seen through it dimly.
“Stop this right now,” the namas-machina said in a voice incongruously deep for its small body. “It’s still not too late to turn back. You’ve not yet committed an unpardonable—”
It continued speaking, all eight limbs wriggling in protest, as I jammed it down on the spike that rose up from the bottom of the mortar. Its face twisted into an idiotic-looking grimace, and it let out a rather forced-sounding groan—Gweh! Using the pestle, I crushed its ovoid body in the space of a breath, then started grinding it up, carapace and all.
Only male namas-machina bugs were prescribed as medicine. They were capable of speech, true, but like it said in the textbooks, they were merely miming sounds; it wasn’t as if they understood anything they were saying. The pale yellow ichor, the dark thin organs, and the finely crushed shell all mixed together like gravel, and when it reached the perfect sticky consistency, I tossed in the yellow flesh of a peeled headpeach. As the medicine reacted with the fruit juice, it began to take on a reddish tint. I sheared off bits of a dried dewliver root and sprinkled the shavings over the top.
Leaning in close to the bowl, I tore into it with my maxillary and labial palpi, making slurping noises as I sucked in its contents. With the gustatory hairs on my tongue, I savored a perfect blend of bitterness and acidity and enjoyed the texture of crushed carapace shards against my gastric teeth.
A numbness that was like a chill spread out through my whole body, and the pain grew indistinct. The tips of my toes curled backward, and it felt like everything inside my body had turned into smoke and was dispersing. You don’t get that effect unless it’s just been crushed. I expanded to fill the entire grotto and was drifting around and around in eddying circles, but then there came a rude, rattling noise that brought me back to reality—that sucked me back into myself.
I was standing frozen in front of the round table. Both my hands were still on the mortar. The reverbigator shell, standing out like a knot protruding from the wall to the left of the doorway, was vibrating. Reverbigator shells were made from the shells of bivalves called magnanimussels.
Unconsciously, my mandibles started to chatter. I walked over and opened the spiky, hemispherical lidshell.
As expected, a sticky, ash-white blob was welling out from a circular frame in the wall behind the lidshell and was beginning to form itself into a head—the mantislike shape peculiar to the Urume tribe. The reverbigator’s jewel-bits were pressing hard enough against its mouth to cause indentations, and the face was making low moaning noises. For a tribe numerous enough to account for sixty percent of the castellum’s population, the Urume varied little in appearance; it was difficult for people from other tribes to tell them apart. This face, however, had only one eye, so I knew right away that it was Tagadzuto. Judging by the look of that moist, slightly swollen eye, he’d been sucking a great deal of nectahol.
Tagadzuto’s grass-colored face, looking at me through a reverbigation shell in some distant bar somewhere, had been recreated in front of me, its image transmitted across the net of neurofungi infiltrating every corner of the castellum.
By nature, neurofungus is predatory; it can sense whatever its prey was searching for and take on that shape to lure it in. Jewel-bits packed with namas were used in reverbigator shells to keep the stuff from crawling out when not in use—although caution was still necessary when handling it.
I pulled down the lever attached to the circular frame, releasing the jewel-bits, then took one step backward.
Released from the bindings, Tagadzuto’s mandibles began to open and close stickily.
“Well, well! It’s certainly a blessed arc, isn’t it?” The reproduction of his vocal cords was only middling quality; he sounded a bit different from the real thing. “So you’re pretty much recovered? I heard the news from Dr. Saromi. You never think to count your blessings until you’re laid up in bed and can’t move, eh?” Hollow words of appreciation for my work volatilized into the air. “Any progress on that request from the Zafutsubo tribe?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Well, there’s no hurry on that. Actually—”
He had called me right in the middle of the Circlingseed Festival. This had to be something major. Even so, I let fly with the words I had prepared.
“Actually, I think I’m gonna give up dodgejobbing.”
“What’s that? Can’t hear you with all the cheering outside. I hate to do this to you in the middle of the Circlingseed Festival, but I need you to head over to the Seat of Learning right now and meet with Archlearner Meimeiru at the Ministry of Archaeological Contemplation. He’s got a job for you. Come see me afterward.”
I’d heard that name somewhere …
“Oh yeah, the one who’s been speaking out against Arch-learner Maruba’s Speciation Hypothesis.”
I was stewing inside. Was this retaliation for taking that Welfare Contemplation job without permission?
“That’s right. Even I’ve been throwing in a little cash for
Archlearner Meimeiru’s research. It’s a sad state of affairs, but we can’t turn a blind eye to the rot that’s been spewing out of the Ministry of Welfare Contemplation … humans originating from bugs and whatnot.”
To be honest, the thought of being related to the tiny gloambugs that lived off our feces didn’t exactly put me in a good mood either. That said, there were many ambiguously defined tribes among the wide variety of races, and some of them—for reasons of business or politics—were considered gloambugs. Many people would no doubt be inconvenienced if the Speciation Hypothesis were to go mainstream.
“That public hearing at Sohlo Lecture Hall was sure something else, wasn’t it? Oh, but you didn’t go, did you?” Rather excitedly, Tagadzuto began to tell me all about it. The proxy of Archlearner Maruba had been in attendance from the Ministry of Welfare Contemplation, and brandishing his precious Speciation Hypothesis, he had pompously declared namas-machina to be an anthropoid species and claimed that any and all use of them as food was illegal. It was a rather unrealistic assertion.
“After all, he’s saying that lower gloambugs—even the sickos that externally fertilize eggs—are related to humans.”
Was Tagadzuto stifling a laugh? His maxillary palpi were quivering as he spoke.
Enraged listeners had objected, naming off obvious differences between humans and gloambugs—the gloambugs having a larval stage, their compound eyes, and so on. To which the Archlearner’s proxy had thrown up a smokescreen of terminology unfamiliar to Tagadzuto’s elbows—words like “direct development” and “neoteny.”
“Now compare that to the magnificent specimens the Ministry of Archaeological Contemplation has brought back from the Hellblaze—”
“So what happened next?” I said.
Tagadzuto let out a groan, as if tormented by a throbbing in his old wound. His mandibles clamped and unclamped repeatedly before he spoke at last. “Archlearner Meimeiru’s proxy apparently died while soaking in a bugbath.”
Sisyphean Page 16