So that was the job then—to investigate the proxy’s death. There was a sense in which the death of a proxy was no different from the death of an Archlearner himself. A proxy, I’d heard, was someone who completely surrendered his own will in order to fully transform into the one with whom he had contracted. There was madness in that kind of work.
“Isn’t that a job for the Ministry of Law Enforcement? In any case, my mind’s already made up: I want out.”
“What’s that? You’ll do it then? Great … this kind of work … erfect for … omeone like you, after all.” Tagadzuto’s voice seemed to be breaking up. An elaborate stratagem. He was talking like that on purpose.
“Even for me, the circumstances make things a bit hard to swa … of course, the Maruba faction is suspic … at any rate, talk to Archlearner Meimeiru … okay? I’ll be in touch.”
Tagadzuto’s face collapsed, and in its place the face of a woman began to take shape. It was my former wife. In a seductive voice, she began whispering to me, releasing an aphrodisiac fragrance.
I suddenly felt lightheaded, but just as I was about to bury my face in hers, that terror that had seized me just before our spawning ceremony reawakened. Startled, I jumped back from the reverbigator and slammed the lidshell shut.
I had just come within inches of having my head engulfed by that thing; if I hadn’t pulled back, not a sliver of carapace would have been left undigested. Neurofungi fed on almost any organism; the only exceptions being those crawling packets of concentrated namas known as the namas-machina. That was why namas-machina were used for inspection and maintenance of the reverbigation network.
I crushed another pair of namas-machina and slurped them down. As my viscera grew warm and I started to feel that sense of exultation again, I grabbed a small bottle of aromatic oil from the boreshelf and jammed it between two plates on my chest. I had no intention of getting mixed up with any Zafutsubo, so I planned on staying scentless on the way to the Seat of Learning.
There was nothing for it. This would be my final dodgejob. Thus resolved, I set out from the grotto.
Chapter 2:
The Last Dodgejob
1
Crouching low with my hands on the walls, I walked up the slope of the narrow forkway. From time to time, my cranial plate would scrape against the ceiling.
I emerged into a boreway in Marov Clifftown and walked through the dimness toward the castellum’s outer shell. When a faintly glowing aromaseal appeared on the wall, I knew that I had passed into Gukutsu Clifftown. The muffled sounds of distant, joyful cries grew gradually louder, and an exit came into view that opened onto the loway of Mebohla Riptrench. The roar of the crowd was enough to shake my body. Even if I had wanted to go out into the riptrench, the way forward was blocked by a dense, unbroken stream of jubilant revelers, many carrying nectahol bottles in their hands. I backtracked a little ways, took a pitway up to the fifth level, and emerged onto the gougeway. Here there was only a smattering of sightseers, and I was able to look out across the long expanse of Mebohla Riptrench, formed by two high, sheer cliffsides that traced wide arcs around the castellum.
A huge, jumbled multitude was filing past on the loway beneath where I stood. Every tribe imaginable was included, all churning against one another like ingredients of a stew boiling in a pot. Their carapaces were creaking so loudly that I wondered if some might start popping open here and there at any moment. Most were drunk on nectahol, rubbing their carapaces and clacking their mandibles together playing festival music. They were embracing one another, hitting one another, and heedless of place or propriety, even spawning and defecating. Some were happily jabbing egg tubes into members of other tribes, while others just kept walking in spite of missing arms or heads. The lower-level suspension bridges that stretched out over the crowd were sagging from the weight of the people who had piled out onto them, and many arms and legs were hanging over the sides.
The time was skyrise sharp. The castellum had risen to its highest point in the verilucent layer; it was the time of arc when the Rimblaze was at its brightest. The humid air warmed, and my antennae contracted a little, sensing a miserable stuffiness on the way. Even the fragrance of grass and flowers that was usually so thick on the air had for this one arc been pushed aside by the brilliant, cloying crush of people.
The clifftowns towering above either side of this great multitude were completely overgrown with fungi and succulents the size of men, with leaves that came in every shape imaginable. There were radial tubes that moved around slightly; stretching, contracting multilayered whorls; belts that undulated like waves … They all shone with powerful lights that set the spores and the particles of pollen sparkling as they danced through the air. The nectarvectors were nowhere to be seen, and even the windows that could be seen among gaps in the leaflight were dark, with no sign of life.
Gukutsu Clifftown curved around the riptrench’s inner circumference, arcing rightward toward its terminus, where the Seat of Learning was located. My present course would take me there.
I walked along the gougeway, whose porous surface bore traces of its carving. When the light hit its curved surface just right, it would gleam with a rainbow sheen. Every once in a while, I would catch sight of a worm crawling on the wall.
On the loway at the bottom of the cliff, the people looked like a squirming mass of explosively reproducing gloambugs.
The festival music built to a crescendo, and a cheer rose up, so loud and long that throats went dry as they shouted. As the crowd churned with excitement, the stately form of a huge, reddish-brown seed was gradually coming into view from behind the curvature of Gukutsu Clifftown. The labyrinthine pattern of grooves covering its hard outer shell gave off scattered flashes of light as silverbugs, used for divination, ran back and forth through them. At the festival’s finale, just before the seed was plunged into the fertilization pool on the castellum’s lowest level, the trails of mucus left by their bellylegs would be decoded, and that would become the name of the baby castling.
Riding a wave of many bearers, the seed tilted dangerously to one side like a mudfish without its statolith. It wobbled unexpectedly to the left and the right, then rode up against the cliff face, crushing vegetation as it proceeded forward, and with the sight of it distracting me, I was late to realize what was heading my way. The timing couldn’t have been worse if I’d planned it. My spiracles squeezed shut.
From the direction opposite, a trio of rust-red, barrel-shaped figures with huge, imposing bodies—a trio of Zafutsubo—came striding toward me, swinging their shoulders left and right.
It’s all right, I told myself. It’s not like every Zafutsubo is in her spawning period.
I walked forward without hesitation. The Zafutsubo drew nearer. I kept walking. The distance closed between us. I moved out of their way toward the riptrench-facing edge of the gougeway and turned my body sideways. The first passed by in front of me … the second passed by as well … and the third twisted her upper body in my direction and stretched out two thick arms as she came at me. The red, hypertrophied antennae extending from her forehead made a soft hum as they quivered, and the abdomanus between her legs curled forward.
Oh dungheaps! Not again—!
With a glare at that fat, whitish spawning tube sliding up from the tip of her abdomanus, I kicked off the edge of the gougeway and leapt into open air—and in that instant the tiny bottle in my thorax came loose and went spinning through the air, sparkling as it scattered a splash of innumerable tiny drops. A great swell of surprised cries rose up from all around. Splashed with the scented oil, it “looked” like I had just appeared out of thin air right above the crowd. Maybe that was why festival-crazed revelers started leaping one after another from gougeways and suspension bridges all through the riptrench. As for me, I crashed into the crowd on the loway.
I could hear groans from those I had landed on, as well as a noise like mucus being
squeezed out of something.
I was still in one piece though. Other voices rose up in similar torment from here and there, and the crowd’s confusion worsened, bringing the festival march to a halt. Pushed back by walls of people, I fled the scene and, after running this way and that in confusion, escaped into a Gukutsu-side ripway and the forkways beyond.
My dorsal vessel was pounding furiously. My whole body throbbed with pain.
Crouching low, I was making my way forward through the forkways when I noticed a grass-green body floating in midair inside a branch that headed off to the right. The trap resembled a zephyr lily; a lone figure was tangled up in strands of mucus that hung vertically from the ceiling.
This was one of the Meiyuru tribe’s licensed traps, and as such its location was publicly disclosed. Yet still for some reason there was no shortage of idiots who kept getting themselves caught in it.
“Help me, help me,” he called out in a voice devoid of all strength.
He could see me, thanks to that aromatic oil I’d gotten all over myself. Still, helping him out of that trap would not only be an illegal act on my part, I might well end up getting caught in it myself. Ignoring the pitiful voice, I walked on by.
After advancing some distance, I came to a junction with another forkway, and there the way forward was blocked by a procession of brown figures who were passing by across my way.
The festival’s spread all the way down here, I started to think—but then noticed that nearly all of them were Guromura tribesmen. Possessed of wide fans on their tails, many of them worked in waste-mud removal.
From the middle of that line, a totally unexpected voice called out to me: “Hey … that wouldn’t be Radoh Monmondo I see over there?”
It was a drinking buddy of mine, the same one who’d found me my current grotto and remodeled it to make it livable. I owed him a lot.
“Well, if it isn’t Roto Guromura!”
“You’re breathing awfully hard, there … You okay being up and about? And what’s with that hideous decoroma? You’re scarin’ me! You got some kind of contagious mystery disease? I can see right through your bottom half!”
“I just ran into a little trouble.”
“As always; it’s never anything good if you’re mixed up in it.”
“Well what are you doing down here? Shoveling mud even during the festival?”
“Nah, I’m scraping potassium nitrate, actually. That’s what’s keeping us busy lately. Can’t hardly catch a break.”
“Whatever for? What with the marriage, potassium nitrate production should be suppressed; there’s no more chance of a suiseeding. Or are you prepping for some war you think’s on the way?”
“I don’t really know why, but down in the bottom-level powdercaves, the potassium nitrate volume keeps going up; no matter how much we shovel, it doesn’t go down.”
Were boreback snakefish and backside marshgrippers breeding explosively out in the Mudsea? Countless combtongues grew amid the rootleaves and cnidarians covering the castellum’s outer shell, catching mudborne creatures for nourishment. Those two species of mudfish contained substances essential to the production of potassium nitrate.
The workers in the line whom Roto was blocking were starting to complain.
“All right, all right—well, see you later, Radoh Monmondo. Don’t hit the namas too hard.”
The Guromura workers raised their tail-fans and disappeared one after another into the tunnel to the right. The line went on and on. I should’ve gotten them to let me through while they were stopped. From far off in the distance, I could still hear that whisper: Help me … help me …
That unpleasant sense of weightlessness we felt whenever the castellum changed directions was coming over me. It was the beginning of postrise.
Once again, I took a pitway up to the fifth floor of Gukutsu Clifftown and began walking down the gougeway toward its right-hard terminus.
Up ahead, the vertical, slightly convex wall blocking off the end of Mebohla Riptrench was … making me wonder what in the world had happened to it. From the middle levels down to the loway, the wall had collapsed, and an open space beyond could be seen peeking through the hole that had opened there.
Oh, that’s right! We’ve married Castellum Saruga; the outermost riptrenches of both are joined now. I could’ve sworn we’d taken cannon fire from the look of things.
The clifftowns’ points of connection hadn’t matched up well at all.
Must be a difference in size or a mistake in positioning, I thought.
The Seat of Learning’s drilding was a single, seven-level structure. Vegetation had been cleared from its surface, leaving its stone face exposed. I passed through the opening of a tall ripway lined with dustboxes and stood before the drilding’s vaulted gate.
With sudden concern for the state of my dress, I rubbed at my upper body, trying to spread out the drops of aromatic oil that were sprinkled over my carapace.
When I was ready, I stepped beneath the vaulted gate, glanced at a pair of golden statues protruding halfway out of the walls on either side, and faced the heavy, imposing door. I pushed against it, but it wouldn’t so much as budge, and there wasn’t any knob or latch for me to pull on either. As I stood there wondering what I was supposed to do now, the four long arms of the golden statue to my right began to move, and then the whole thing came loose and stepped out of the wall. Frightened, I whirled about, only to find a second statue standing there. Miguraso tribe gatekeepers.
From my mandibles, I gave off my identification scent, stated my business, and then the gatekeeper to my left grabbed me and wrapped his long arms around my thorax. The other took a sharp-edged scraper in his hand and, paying no mind to my panicked bewilderment, started scraping at my back and sides.
Scattered fragments of what looked like broken shells started falling to the ground around my feet, followed by a white, fan-shaped thing that plopped to the ground like a piece of dung.
I had been feeling awfully stiff, I was thinking as it hit me that the glowjars in my grotto must have been breeding while I was bedridden. Many kinds of life-forms were being studied inside the Seat of Learning, so there were restrictions on bringing in things that could reproduce. Once the gatekeepers had curtly explained this, they let go of me, slid their sharp fingertips into cracks beneath the heavy, imposing door and, with a single heave, lifted it up for me.
It was my first time to set foot inside the Seat of Learning. The corridor had a high ceiling painted with diatomaceous earth, and the floor was carpeted with white leaf-fat. Gelded fluoroflesh flies were stuck to the walls at ten-pace intervals, illuminating the corridor with their orange light all the way to the back.
Threading her way through a sparse smattering of passing students, a black figure came sliding toward me. She was a slender woman of about five heads’ height, and between her four smoothly moving legs was a bulging abdomanus that dangled all the way down to the floor. A Meiyuru tribeswoman. Yellow ivy patterns of decoroma rose up here and there from her black carapace, over which a fresh-smelling aromatic had been modestly applied.
The woman came up in front of me and silently stopped.
She had a narrow face, and her ruby eyes bulged out in a way that made me think of fish eggs. A long proboscis stretched from her mouth down to her thorax.
“You’re the replacement, correct?” Heaving that long abdomanus between her legs, she spoke to me with sounds caused by the friction of body joints.
“Replacement? I was told to come here by Tagadzuto at the Dodgejob Agency. I’m a dodgejobber—”
“Yes. Radoh Monmondo, correct?” In her tremulous voice, it sounded like she had said “Raroh.” “I’m Liaison Officer Noi Meiyuru. There’s no need to be so guarded.”
It wasn’t until she said that that I realized I’d been unconsciously putting space between us. The reason was clear
enough: I’d seen that Meiyuru trap in the forkway on the way here.
“Archlearner Meimeiru is currently meeting with an investigator from the Seat of Defense; there’s a hearing at the Ministry of Law Enforcement there. So first, let me show you to the postmortem room at the Ministry of Clinics, where his late proxy is. This way, please.”
Following along behind Noi Meiyuru, I walked down the lonely corridor.
We had just reached the postmortem room’s relief-carved door when I was shocked to hear a voice from the other side of its glossy shellite surface saying, “—just a stage prop, though, right? Nothing more to this guy than aromatics.”
We entered the room. A Hagu tribesman covered in long white hair was standing with a grass-green Urume tribesman next to an examination table in the back of the room. A Monmondo tribesman, garbed in aromatics, was lying facedown on a fringed examination table with wheeled legs. Using his hairy hands, the Hagu tribesman stripped a body segment’s worth of carapace off his back. A shriveled dorsal vessel appeared underneath.
Instantly, the Urume drew in his antennae.
“Ugh! What a stench! This guy reeks of namas-machina!” Brushing his antennae toward the back of his head with one upper hand, he added, “And right in the middle of the Circlingseed Festival too. Well, Coroner Sabo? Let’s hear it.”
“The scarring on the carapace resembles burn marks, but that has nothing to do with the cause of death. It could be he got burned by the Rimblaze on the continent.”
Burned by the Rimblaze? Surely he didn’t mean Archlearner Meimeiru’s proxy had been to the Hellblaze!
The coroner applied a crowbar to the joint of his cranial shellplate and, with a strong push, jammed it underneath and pried up the carapace. The Urume tribesman’s upper body bent backward as he backed away.
Sisyphean Page 17