Dozens of gloambugs were squirming around inside his cranial shellplate.
“His brain’s been completely consumed,” the Hagu coroner said. “People with loose body segments should know better than to get in a bugbath of all things!”
“It happens though,” said the Urume. “Every round, there’ll be one or two who end up like thi— Hm?” The Urume turned around toward us. “And who are you supposed to be?” Judging by his pompous stance, he was most likely an investigator from the Ministry of Law Enforcement.
“Archlearner Meimeiru asked him to come investigate the death,” Noi Meiyuru answered in my place.
“Another paper stage prop? And what’s with that awful decoro— No, wait; I know that freaky-looking face of yours … You’ve been thrown in my detention center how many times? I get it, you’re on a dodgejob for Tagadzuto’s agency. What’s a crook like you up to around here?”
In spite of what he was saying about me, I didn’t get angry at all. The dodgejobs that came my way usually were illegal investigations; they just tended to get overlooked thanks to an understanding we had with the Ministry of Law Enforcement.
“So you’re planning to investigate this case independently of us? You are, aren’t you? Why is that?”
But since I didn’t yet know the details of the job myself, there was no way for me to answer.
“I don’t know what to do with this paranoid bunch at the Seat of Learning. Do what you’ve gotta do, but there’s nothing suspicious about this case. It’s a cut-and-dried gloambug seepage. Now hurry up and get out of here.”
After we were run out of the postmortem room, we went up to the second floor, where the Ministry of Archaeological Contemplation was located, and headed toward the bathroom where the proxy had died.
“Pretty fancy place, having baths in here,” I murmured as we walked.
“It’s because we can’t have samples and excavated artifacts getting contaminated. Our laboratories are even equipped with bugstreams for sanitation. Of course, the gloambugs used are all sterile, so there isn’t any breeding.”
The bathroom was a small chamber inlaid with hardshell tiles that gleamed a pearly white. Most of the floor was taken up by the long, narrow bathtub. In the tub, there was not a single gloambug to be seen. It had probably been drained after the investigation was completed. Noi explained that the used bugs were collected in gloambug disposal bins located in the ripway, where they were picked up by bugsweeps who in turn sold them to repro-pharma employees for use as fodder.
“Seen enough? Next, I’ve been asked to show you to the autopsy room.”
“So the body we just saw was the Archlearner’s proxy, right?” It’s good manners to look at someone’s face when you talk to them, but my eyes had somehow drifted down to her abdomanus. “Why the autopsy room? How is that different from the postmortem room?”
“The equipment’s the same, but the affiliation is different. Follow me, and you’ll understand soon enough.”
We left the bathroom, and the autopsy room was the very next room over.
Noi Meiyuru opened a door inlaid with a round viewing portal and showed me in. The room inside was extremely dry, and there was a faintly sweet odor on the air. Noi told me that the smell had started several arcs ago, but the cause was still unknown. In terms of decor, there was no great difference between this and the postmortem room we had just visited, although this one was a little more spacious: a windowless cube with reverbigator shell, boreshelves for instruments, and numerous autopsy tables. The arrangement of the tables was rather odd though. They were pushed up flush with one another in four columns and two rows. Like a dim shadow, there was a faint black stain in the middle of this composite surface, and ochre-hued fragments of something were scattered around it here and there.
“It must’ve been one huge giant who slept here,” I said, cracking a joke without forethought.
“That’s correct,” said Noi. “Twice as tall as a Zafutsubo.” Could the Meiyuru tribe crack jokes too? I found that surprising, but there was no change in Noi Meiyuru’s body odor. “You’ll get a detailed explanation from the Archlearner later. Up until yesterarc the mummified remains of an unknown life-form were lying on these tables—one dug up from a barrow on the continent.” Noi tapped her fingers on one of the autopsy tables. The sound they made was cold.
“An unknown life-form?” This had taken a turn for the weird. “It didn’t just disappear all of a sudden, did it?”
Without so much as a twitch of her antennae, Noi stared at me with her red eyeballs. While it wasn’t exactly the job Tagadzuto had promised, finding that thing was apparently the reason I had been summoned here. This was the Seat of Learning though. With the brains they had here, they should have been able to think up any number of reasons why this had happened. There was something about all this I was finding a little hard to swallow.
“Naturally, the lockbug showed no signs of tampering.”
“You think maybe the reverbigator broke, and it got eaten up by neurofungi?” I picked up one of the shards lying on the autopsy tables. “Though it’s bad manners to scatter one’s meal around like this.”
Occasionally, stories of neurofungi eating babies or someone’s head did make their way to my elbows.
“These fragments do confuse the matter, unfortunately. Most likely, they aren’t from the mummy. In appearance, it was quite different from we humans.”
I picked up a fragment and took a close look at its edge. There was a delicate wave pattern there. Rubbing at it with my hooknail, I said, “Does that shadowy-looking stain over there have nothing to do with this giant either?”
“Like I said, it was excavated in the Hellblaze. It was completely desiccated.”
Did that mean these fragments and that stain were traces of someone who’d made a giant disappear?
“Also, it couldn’t have been neurofungi. The reverbigator shell had just been inspected and had had parts replaced; it was as good as new. After the corpse disappeared, we checked with the Ministry of Reverbigation just to be sure and confirmed that there had been nothing in particular out of the ordinary.”
“Did you get the Banon tribe to—”
“We had them soundsight every nook and cranny in here.”
I was just about to ask about security patrols when she headed me off at the pass. “The security detail confirmed looking through the viewport twice last night and saw the remains inside both times. That gives us a window of about three swings in which it could have happened. All I can think is that we’re dealing with some unknown presence.”
As I could only think of the most typical questions to ask, it was getting harder and harder to understand why I’d been chosen for this job. The Dodgejob Agency even had a guy who was a former investigator. The face of shrewd Tagadzuto rose up in my mind. What if I had been called here not to investigate, but to be investigated? Was I—a dodgejobber with an invisible body—a suspect?
At just that moment, the lidshell started rattling on the wall-mounted reverbigator. Noi walked over to it and opened the lidshell. Viewed from a distance, it looked like a dark hole had opened up in the wall.
“The investigator just left,” a hollow-sounding voice said from the hole. “Bring Radoh Monmondo over to me now.”
2
On the seventh floor of the Seat of Learning, double doors of black shellite were arrayed up and down the hallway known as Archlearner Row, resembling giant sets of mandibles.
About ten paces ahead of us, one pair of doors swung open. I could hear raised voices from inside, but I couldn’t tell whether they were excited, angry, enraged, or panicked.
“Why won’t you let us investigate—”
“It’s performing its marital duties without defect—”
“True, but the potassium nitrate level really is going up; the castellum’s eating nothing but snakefish and mar
shgrippers.This must have something to do with a sort of eating disorder, or maybe there’s abnormal development of the nerve fibers—”
“If you look at history, nothing like this has ever happened in the fifteen-hundred-round record of our migrations across the eight castellae—”
“Which is precisely why—”
“It’s only a temporary issue—”
“Reinvestigate—”
“That won’t be necessary—”
“Archlearner Ryofin!”
Three men and women were shoved out into the hallway, and the doors closed behind them. There they stood in front of those doors unmoving, with furious expressions on their faces. Archlearner Ryofin … of the Ministry of Castellum Contemplation, if I remembered correctly. He was in charge of running the Circlingseed Festival.
Noi and I walked past them as though we hadn’t seen anything and stopped in front of the third door down the hallway.
A vertical slit appeared between black, rounded doors marked with the Ministry of Archaeological Contemplation’s aromaseal, and then they swung open, trailing strands of mucus to the left and right. Urged on by Noi, I went inside, swiping away the mucus strings. She remained in the hallway as the doors closed again. It felt kind of like being thrown into a detention cell.
A raw, fishy smell hung thick in the air, and the room was hazy with mist. It was a space of irregular shape and little depth, covered in rippling meatpleats suggesting some sort of coelenterate. Two giant lunming bugs clung to the walls on either side, and both had their oddly elongated, polelike arms raised almost to the ceiling. They were rigid and motionless, as if in death. The wall in front of me was pierced by a large, ugly hole that looked as if it had been gouged there, and beside it, a man was tilting a barrel he held in his four arms, pouring in sticky nectar.
“Archlearner Meimeiru, I presume?” But in spite of my greeting, the man with the barrel didn’t reply; he simply shouldered a second barrel and again began pouring nectar into the gaping hole.
“I am Archlearner Meimeiru Shutohroh of the Ministry of Archaeological Contemplation.”
I turned around at the sound of a muffled voice behind me, but all I saw there was a reverbigator pointed toward me like a shellfish stuck to a meatpleat.
“This reverbigator shell was created to be my voicebox. It’s made so I can speak with the lidshell closed.”
The voice could be taken for either male or female.
“Where are you, Archlearner Meimeiru? I’ve come here to see you, but—”
“You’re seeing me already. Because you’re inside my cranial plates.”
At that, I was gripped by a feeling of extreme unease. He didn’t seem to be speaking in metaphor. Were these meatpleats the folds of the Archlearner’s brain tissue? I had heard rumors about the Shutohroh tribe but had never dreamed they were this hypertrophic.
“I believe you’ve heard the short version from my liaison officer already, but I’d like you to know the details as well. This is the truth of the Speciation Hypothesis. This is what will define both the present and future human race.”
Maybe the Maidun Reproducing Pharmaceuticals incident, too, had in fact started out as an interdepartmental battle. The idea of humans descending from gloambugs sounded ridiculous to me too, but I couldn’t imagine what other creature might be substituted for them.
“Braving extremely harsh conditions, the Ministry of Archaeological Contemplation had already conducted as many as fourteen research expeditions to the continent of Iva, located on the Hellblaze side of the planet. There, evidence was discovered of more than four hundred anthropoid life-forms completely unlike gloambugs.”
I looked around, unsure which direction I should face when speaking. In the center of the ceiling was a cluster of several black, hemispherical shapes resembling the round windows seen on submuddies; long fibers that reminded me of plant roots were hanging down from their fringes.
“Sounds like you could draw up a whole new phylogenic tree,” I said, giving him a neutral reply as I wondered whether those things might be eyes or antennae. If they were, did that mean he could use them only to peer inside his own head?
“Indeed we could,” said Archlearner Meimeiru. “On the other hand, the roots of that tree remained missing. In order to investigate that mystery, we organized a research team made up of seventeen individuals and sent them on what became the fifteenth research expedition. That’s when they discovered the mummified body of a heretofore unknown life-form, which has given us a clue toward unraveling the mystery of humanity’s origin.”
Unbidden, a question came to mind: what were the remains of so many life-forms even doing in the Hellblaze? Hadn’t the same hemisphere been exposed to the light of the Rimblaze since the world first formed? Wasn’t it established science that living creatures could only survive in the Mudsea?
“I have named this creature ‘Pancestor.’ That’s enough for the introduction; now I will have you see the reality.”
“See it? I thought you called me up here because it disappeared from the autopsy room.”
But no reply was forthcoming. I saw the man from before leaving the room with his empty barrels, and then the many long legs of those lunming bugs that had been waiting on the walls to my right and left started moving—so swiftly that each was like the afterimage of another—and clamped onto every part of my body, holding me still in a firm grip.
Huh? What? As I cried out in incomprehension, the rippling walls of meatpleat closed in and pressed up hard against me. A lukewarm, foamy liquid began oozing from each point of contact.
No matter how I struggled, it was useless to resist. My body was being pulled into the meatpleats … It was like I was being dissolved, and after I’d lowered the sails of the landship, and sunk its anchor down into the Sandsea, I opened the entryway door and headed outside.
Instantly, my field of view went solid white. The heat and the gale-force winds were unbelievable. No one could stand against it; everyone was crouched down low on the scorched, sandy soil. If I bent my arms at a certain angle, the acoustic pores in my elbows would moan with flutelike sounds. Two of us had been blown away by powerful gusts.
Light shone down from the celestial sphere like a rain of burning needles. We had lived most of our lives in the indirect lighting brought to us by riptrench vegetation, but this was lethally direct rimlight.
Moreover, night did not exist in this hemisphere. Our antennae dried out, and we couldn’t focus our visual or olfactory senses. The cooling, protective cloths we wore over our heads were reduced to rags in no time, and our carapaces grew hot as cooking grills, boiling our internal bodily fluids.
Slowly, my eyes adjusted. It was an empty world, without a single plant growing anywhere, and so vast that I could get no sense of distances. Still, there was no mistaking it: these were the same coordinates at which the previous survey team had made visual confirmation of a bizarre corpse but had been forced by a sandstorm to give up on investigating it.
Something was shimmering off in the distance. It was on a slightly elevated hill. The region that extended from midway up to its peak was dark and clearly made of a material different from that of the sand. I nodded to the team, and they nodded back. At long last, we had found the corpse.
Battling the wind, we approached the hill, but as we drew near I could feel a sense of disappointment spreading through the survey team. The thing buried in the sand that made up the upper part of the hill was a simple, flattened ovoid shape, composed of arrayed body segments; it looked far too much like a gloambug.
What became clear as we got closer, though, was that it was big—so big that a castellum seed could have probably fit inside. Its carapace was singed black, as if it had been grilled over a high temperature flame and had peeled back here and there in a pockmark pattern. We spent half an arc removing a portion of its carapace, and inside we discovered
a hollow space encompassed by a complex skeletal structure. It put me in mind of something man-made, like a submuddy.
I took a step inside, passing beneath an array of bones that reminded me of thick ceiling beams. I continued on to the center of the hollow and realized there that this place was a barrow—for sealed within a baglike membrane was a dessicated giant.
It had one pair of arms and one pair of legs. Its smooth, almost featureless body was completely unsegmented and didn’t connect at any point to the shriveled, wrinkly membrane that covered it. At first, I took it for some sort of mollusk, but thanks to the ultrasonic soundsight of our Banon team members, we soon learned that internal bones ran throughout its trunk and four limbs. Furthermore, we detected in its head the shadow of a small, artificial object that appeared to be mineral in nature.
We stayed there for a space of ten arcs, investigating the barrow and transporting the giant’s mummified body, but three of our number, unable to endure the harsh environment, perished, and most of the rest were weakened. A Meiyuru teammate injected the particularly critical cases with a venom that induced a state of suspended animation. We launched the catamaran-style landship that was awaiting our return, transferred to a submuddy at the survey base on the coast, and then, rocked by the waves of the Mudsea, I found myself suspended within the cerebral plate of the Archlearner.
I was lowered to the floor by the long arms of the lunming bugs. The back of my head was pounding fit to burst.
“Even now, many members of that team are in the hospital undergoing resurrection treatment. My personal proxy synchronized with me once before being hospitalized. He had a smooth recovery and returned to work, but then, as you know, he died in a bugbath just before Pancestor’s autopsy was to begin. And shortly thereafter, Pancestor himself disappeared.”
I exited the Seat of Learning, holding my pounding head with my upper-left hand, and turned into a ripway that formed one side of it. The ripway rose to about three stories’ height, narrowing gradually toward the top.
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