Sisyphean

by Dempow Torishima

  I asked him where I could find Noi Meiyuru, and he said she was probably in the liaison office just inside. Before I had proceeded even a few steps down the corridor, I spotted a door whose aromaseal said “Liaison Office.”

  The instant I opened the door, a rich, sweet aroma hit my antennae. In the dimness of the room, I saw two figures that seemed to be blending into one another. Suddenly, the strength went out of my legs, and my knees felt ready to collapse. I grabbed onto the doorframe.

  Something hot was beginning to coil around me. My field of view was becoming distorted, and in the middle of it, I realized that one of the two figures was Noi Meiyuru … that she was holding an Urume woman from behind … that her black arms and forelegs were wrapped around the woman’s grass-green body … and that a long proboscis was sticking out from the back of the inverted triangle of her head—

  Noi Meiyuru pulled her proboscis out and turned her head toward me. The golden aroma she emitted sparkled in the air like a scene straight out of heaven. She was the goddess I had lived my life in yearning to meet—there was no other way to describe her. Starlight dripped from the tip of the goddess’s proboscis. It was I who should be showered in that glory. Certainty of that coalesced inside me until I could restrain myself no longer.

  I shoved the Urume woman over and sat down in front of my goddess, turning my back toward her. A supple pair of beautiful black legs wrapped around my body, holding me gently, firmly, passionately still. I let out a low moan. I could feel my cranial plate being opened. My back arched suddenly, making my ventral carapace spasm. At last, I felt something hard against the back of my head, nudging its way inside—there was a sound like a flute being played off-key.

  Then … it was being … pulled … out …

  I heard someone coughing painfully. The legs holding me pulled away, and a strong sense of unease hit me, as if ropes on a suspension bridge were snapping one after another. When I stood up and turned around, two arms violently struck me, shoved me, shoved me again, pushed me out, and then slammed the door shut in my face.

  I stood frozen in front of the liaison office, my entire body flushed, feeling like I had just been put on hold. Why had she stopped? And then at some point, my knees began to tremble. The instant I noticed it, I was suddenly gripped by a terror that came welling up from inside. What in the world had just happened? I couldn’t believe that had been real. To think that a guy like me—who had fled from a perfectly proper spawning ceremony—would willingly offer himself up as food! Maybe it had been a daydream—a side effect of the painkillers—something! Maybe I had only just arrived here. That’s what it was! I’d only just gotten here!

  I stamped my feet down on the floor to stop the quaking. Then, just as I was raising a hand to knock on the liaison office door, it silently opened in front of me.

  With a backhanded motion, Noi Meiyuru shut the door behind herself as she emerged from that room. I backed a few steps away from her, and my pulse started racing.

  “Sorry to have kept you waiting,” she said softly with her abdomanus. I could read absolutely nothing from her serene expression. Noi’s entire body was becoming a dark, indistinct blur. No, that wasn’t right; it only seemed that way because my antennae had been retracting unconsciously.

  “So? What brings you here?”

  Stumbling over my words all the while, I told her my errand, and without the slightest hesitation Noi promised to take care of the job I’d requested. She told me she would need a little time to finish.

  “I’ll just wait outside,” I said.

  I wanted to get away from that place right now. As I turned to go, Noi called out to me from behind.

  “You’d do well to lay off that stuff,” she said.

  When I emerged from the front gate and started walking, I heard the gate guard on the left murmur behind me, “Isn’t that thing a little loose?”

  “Maybe he hasn’t noticed,” the gate guard on the right whispered back. “Let’s tell him.”

  When I reached back to feel the back of my head, sure enough, the artificial plate had come loose. Using both upper hands, I snapped it back into place and crossed the nearby suspension bridge into Nazumo Clifftown. A number of idle carapace polishers were loitering on the gougeway. They called out to me, but I walked on by and ducked through the tiny doorway of a cavebar. A flag raised outside had ethyl alcohol mixed into its aromaseal.

  A stand-up bar stretched all the way to the back of the long, narrow interior. Standing on tiptoes, I looked across the room to make certain no Zafutsubo were present and then, just in case the need arose, took a spot near the entrance so I could slip out at any time. I put a shellcoin engraved with the name of Yuma Urume down on the counter. After death, everyone was processed into shellcoins to be passed around among the living—even that woman who’d just now become fodder for Noi. Even so, would there be any place for an invisible guy like me to go after death?

  The Urume barkeep turned the inverted triangle of his head toward me.

  “Give me a flamecaller ale,” I said

  Brewed from the nectar of flamecaller grass blossoms, it had the highest alcohol content of any nectahol. The barkeep set out a cupshell and picked up the shellcoin.

  “You look a little chilled, mister. I can put in some spicegrains if you like.”

  I nodded assent. The barkeep shook a slender, tube-shaped container above the cupshell, and when about ten of the blue-black grains had fallen inside, he whistled out a signal. Over by the inner wall, a Tsuamo tribesman rose to his feet. Letting out a belch, he walked over to us with obvious reluctance. His carapace was carved with decorative images of flamecaller grass, amid which my own sickly countenance was reflected in the brightly polished surface. The Tsuamo brought his mouth close to my cupshell and began vomiting at irregular intervals. Teardrops pooled in the gaps of his eye sockets as sticky, nectar-colored liquid gradually filled my cupshell. Midway through, he coughed, spraying some of it into the air. Its strong, liquory odor made my eyes water. “I’ll have one too,” said a customer standing farther inside, and the Tsuamo toddled away in his direction.

  The barkeep stirred the liquid with the long leg of a wingbug, then softly pushed the cupshell in front of me.

  I gulped downed the flamecaller ale. I swallowed again and again. By the time I finally regained my composure, my throat must have been charred black.

  That had been a dangerous spot.

  What had just happened in the liaison office had been no daydream brought on by the side effects of namas-machina. The Meiyuru tribe secreted an enchanting scent that put their prey into a state of ecstasy while their bodily fluids were being sucked out.

  You’d do well to lay off that stuff …

  Had that odor been to blame for Noi having stopped just as her proboscis was going in? Had the stench of namas-machina really soaked into my insides that deeply?

  “Ugh! What a stench! This guy reeks of namas-machina!”That’s what the detective from the Ministry of Law Enforcement had said yesterarc.

  The proxy had been a namas-machina addict as well. What if some unknown parasite had been driven out by the namas content that had built up in his system?

  But now that I’d gone and remembered the stuff, my body was starting to crave namas-machina. The minute I got back to my grotto—no wait, that old lady’s eggs were still stuck all over the ceiling, weren’t they? I didn’t feel like going back to that.

  How I was supposed to get rid of them? I was feeling a little down over that when suddenly a namas-machina came falling down from the ceiling. My drooping shoulders shot to attention, but no, it was smaller than a namas-machina, and the color was completely different. A seed-shaped gloambug with a translucent yellow-green carapace: a honeydew bug. It aimed its rear end at my cupshell and raised it up as if flirting. “No thanks,” I told it. Abdomen still aloft, the gloambug crawled backward in the direction
of the next customer over from me. “Thanks,” he said. A drop of honeydew swelled from the tip of the gloambug’s pointed anus and dripped into his cupshell.

  I realized then that the customer raising that cupshell to his mouth was none other than my childhood friend Rei Urume. Feeling suddenly nostalgic, I was just about to speak to him when an irate voice from behind interrupted my thoughts:

  “Huh? What did you say? No, no; that’s not right at all!”

  I didn’t need to turn around to tell it was somebody talking on the reverbigator. Recovering from the distraction, I started to call out to Rei and then realized that I’d never seen that man before in my life. And anyway, I was born in Castellum Gakugu; there was no way any boyhood friend of mine would be here.

  “No, no, no—what? I can’t hear you. At all. Hello? Hey!”

  The man’s voice was getting even louder behind me.

  I downed the remaining nectahol in a single gulp and put the bar behind me.

  I found Noi Meiyuru in front of the Seat of Learning speaking with the gate guards.

  The memory of myself worshipping her like a goddess embarrassed me no end, even though the bewitching scent of her secretions had been to blame.

  Noi’s antennae went up when she became aware of my presence. Was it the fumes of flamecaller ale that sent them recoiling backward even farther?

  The gate guards opened the door for me, and I passed underneath it. I heard them whispering to each other about going out for drinks tonight.

  Walking alongside me, Noi, who had had a worker inspect the gloambug drainage pipes, told me the results. As I had suspected, dark sticky blotches of red mucus had been discovered in the pipe connecting the autopsy room and the bathroom.

  When we entered the autopsy room, the examination tables that had earlier been flush with one another were now separated and lined up along the wall, exposing a hole in the center of the room for the draining off of gloambugs. Around it there rose up piles of dark red scum that gave off a sweet aroma. Gloambug legs, no doubt ripped off in the act of escaping, were sticking out of these piles in every direction.

  I told Noi about being attacked in my grotto and of the possibility that both the proxy and myself had nearly been parasitized by an unknown life-form. Noi’s elegant, flowing black antennae bent doubtfully.

  “So you think this life-form came up through the gloambug drainage pipe and gobbled up the mummy? But that—”

  She seemed to be shying away from calling it “Pancestor,” probably because her position required neutrality when it came to the Speciation Hypothesis.

  “Yeah, it wouldn’t be easy. Something that big would take a long time to eat, and there would probably be leftovers. But look at it another way: what if that life-form went out through the drainage pipe?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If this thing is a parasite, it’s a kind that’s never been identified in Castellum Raondo before. That mucus reminds me of the stains in the autopsy room yesterarc. And the fact that it appeared at the same time Pancestor vanished …”

  Noi remained silent, waiting for me to continue.

  “… means it’s possible to think it was Pancestor himself that turned into the parasite. Going by its original size, it could have divided into dozens of them.”

  “It was dead; there was no mistaking that,” said Noi, abdomanus pulling back slightly. “It was a dried-out corpse.”

  “‘You’ll end up ugly as a grimebug,’” I said.

  I had quoted my mother’s words with nostalgia, but Noi simply emitted a dubious body odor.

  “You never heard that growing up?” I said. “In Castellum Gakugu, they say that to children who want to sleep all the time. You smelled the odor of that scum. It’s blood sugar. A grimebug—even if you throw it into the Hellblaze—can replace the moisture in its body with blood sugar and enter a dormant, nonmetabolic state. It can stay that way practically forever.” When I had spoken thus far, I realized something I couldn’t explain: the mucus’s color … why was it red?

  “Even if we allow that it resuscitated,” said Noi, “how can one body divide into multiple parasites? It did have an endoskeleton and internal organs, after all.”

  “What do you think those ochre-colored fragments were that were left behind?”

  I told her what I’d heard from the patrol guard about Pancestor’s carapace.

  “That man! Why didn’t he tell me such an important—?”

  “He was assigned there the arc before yesterarc. He probably thought it had been covered in carapace from the beginning. Pancestor was changing by hardening its skin. Like a gloambug pupa becoming a chrysalis.” Suddenly, the muscles around my mouth tensed up. Something in my consciousness was struggling. “Inside its chrysalis, a gloambug temporarily dissolves all of its internal muscles and organs. Maybe this thing reformed itself into multiple individuals in the same way.”

  “If those shards came from a chrysalis, don’t you think there would have been more left behind?”

  “There were strange marks left on the fragments though, weren’t there? They may have eaten the shell for its nutrients.”

  “Even if such a thing is possible, it could have escaped any number of times before being brought here.”

  “Then it must not have done this to escape. It tried to parasitize me. And probably the Archlearner’s proxy as well.”

  “Why in the world would it do such a thing?”

  “There must have been some kind of trigger …”

  I wracked my brains for an answer, but it was starting to feel like I was just saying whatever came to mind, and I found myself at a loss for words. Unable to bear Noi’s incisive, questioning gaze, I looked away from her, and that was when my eyes fell on the reverbigator shell.

  “You told me the reverbigator had just recently been inspected and had parts replaced, didn’t you? When was that?”

  “Three arcs before the disappearance. The jewel-bits had worn out over many rounds, and a technician from the Ministry of Reverbigation came over. Because the remains were being kept here, I went with him as a guide and observed everything that happened.”

  “I see. It sounds like there was nothing suspicious, but something still bothers me.”

  I walked up to the wall and opened the lidshell. The formless fluid inside sucked at a thought that was always with me and began forming itself into a face. I shifted my gaze to the circular, seashell frame and saw a faint trace of dark red mucus stuck there. Yesterarc, I’d been standing far away and hadn’t been able to see inside very well. Or maybe it had gotten stuck there afterward.

  “You see this?”

  “Y-yes … ah, the reaction you had when you saw me at lunch earlier, that was merely a temporary effect induced by scent, so … I really should have put a lockbug on the door.”

  I looked back at the neurofungus and frantically shut the lidshell. What the neurofungus had unearthed from my thoughts was not the face of my former wife, but that of Noi. My temperature skyrocketed with embarrassment.

  “That’s not what I mean; there are traces of something that looks like that mucus on the reverbigation shell. The parasites attempted to dive inside.”

  “Couldn’t they have just made a mistake while trying to get outside?”

  “The reverbigation net extends all the way to the castellum’s central nerve area.”

  “Surely you don’t mean they’re trying to parasitize and control the castellum—they would just end up as fodder for the neurofungi. The only things that can move through it are namas-machina.”

  “The only things we know of.”

  I thought of that customer speaking loudly on the cavebar’s reverbigator just now … of Tagadzuto seemingly pretending his reverbigator was going out on him—either of those malfunctions could have been caused by invasive parasites.

  “T
he Ministry of Reverbigation is under the Seat of Defense’s jurisdiction, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “There’s some kind of problem at the Ministry of Reverbigation right now. And somehow, it’s mixed up in this case.”

  2

  I set out for the Seat of Defense with Noi, and together we walked on and on along the gougeway. We did not converse; it was an awkward trip—it felt like we were eloping or on our way to commit double suicide. The Seat of Defense was situated symmetrically opposite the Seat of Learning with the spinal girder right in the middle. Gazing out over Mebohla Riptrench, we looped around Gukutsu Clifftown toward the left-end terminus next to the oilfactory organs and finally arrived at the Seat of Defense.

  Plants were growing wild and untended on the cliff face, so that I couldn’t tell where the Seat of Defense facilities started or ended. The only hint was that compared to the areas where residences were clustered, I could hardly spot any windows here. I had been held in detention plenty of times on the bottommost level, where the Ministry of Executive Action was located, but this was my first time to visit a mid-level’s front entrance. Spear-wielding gate guards were standing one on either side.

  I noticed something move from the corner of my eye. I looked up and saw a swarm of unfamiliar gloambugs crossing the underside of a suspension bridge to Nazumo Clifftown. Both their bodies and their six limbs were long and slender, and their white carapaces looked oily.

  “Relay bugs, it would seem,” Noi told me. Was that a sign that the reverbigation net was finally about to go down?

  An Urume liaison officer whom I’d contacted earlier appeared, carrying a rope wrapped around one arm. Explaining that it was required by regulation, he snapped a set of handcuffs that were attached to the rope on my wrists. This was because I had an arrest record. I followed along behind the two liaison officers as they walked side by side, as if I were a suspect being taken in.

  In the corridor, strategists and tacticians were coming and going in silence. On the walls, countless relay bugs were rapidly skittering about. I heard an order barked from somewhere, and a large group came running down the hall, dodging out of our way as they moved on by. I could hear snatches of strained voices and the din of reverbigators spilling out from the rooms that we passed.