Sisyphean

by Dempow Torishima

  “A warning from Castellum Sosoga?”

  “Dungheaps! I can’t hear you!”

  “It’s close to a distance of one hundred mudmiles—”

  “They’ve extended their exoshell gunbarrels—”

  “What? What was that? What?”

  “What about Saruga’s Seat of Defense? What’re they doing at the Seat of Cooperative Measures?”

  “At any rate, station bombardiers in the defensive cloisters—”

  I could hardly believe my elbows. This castellum was sitting on the razor edge of getting into a war! Castellum Raondo had suddenly begun increasing its potassium nitrate stocks, despite now being married—had that been mistaken for an arms buildup in preparation for war?

  Overwhelmed by the situation, I stumbled forward and nearly fell. My rope had been yanked.

  “Where do you think you’re going? The Ministry of Reverbigation is this way,” scolded the liaison officer.

  With me being pulled along behind, we descended a staircase and came out in a long hallway. My handcuffs were removed in front of the first door we came to, and I was ushered into a large chamber that was apparently some kind of meeting room. From the center of the ceiling, there hung a huge, biconical garden lantern woven from fungal fiber, which illuminated an oval arrangement of desks. Currently, there was only a solitary Murai tribesman sitting in the seat farthest back from us. He was leaning on the desk with his elbows, and his eight slender forearms were positioned in a complicated, crisscrossed arrangement, each holding a blotterbug in its hand.

  “This is the chief of the Ministry of Reverbigation,” said Noi Meiyuru. She took one step back from my side, revealing another seat near the door, in which sat exactly the sort of rust-red, barrel-shaped figure that I didn’t want to meet. His antennae were tracing over paperwork on his desk.

  I shook my head in protest, but Noi, oblivious, introduced me to him.

  “Gashun Zafutsubo, this is Radoh Monmondo.”

  Gashun leaned forward with his wide torso and glared at me. His antennae extended and retracted repeatedly. There was a lot of strength in the hands with which he was gripping the edges of his desk; his claws were digging deep into the tabletop.

  “I see. So your injuries are all better now?”

  “Do you know each other?” asked Noi.

  “I don’t,” Gashun replied in a voice like a grinding millstone. “But among my tribe, he is … something of a celebrity.”

  The man at the inner seat was sliding a blotterbug across a leafsheet. In any case, he appeared to be a stenographer.

  “Thank you for your concern,” said Radoh.

  The stenographer moved one arm away from his desk, lowered another arm to it, and started writing again. Apparently, different speakers were assigned to different arms.

  “In any case,” Gashun said, “it appears that war is upon us …”

  The implication being “… and I have bigger fish to fry than you.” He was deflecting my attempt to speak with him.

  Gashun opened a flat box on his desk, caught a relay bug, and drew it out. He brought it close to his mouth and, after making a sort of kissing gesture, tossed it to the floor.

  “As you can see, I have quite a lot to do.”

  The relay bug turned its long, narrow head this way and that, then disappeared in the blink of an eye from where it had landed.

  “Radoh Monmondo believes this uproar about a war breaking out has something to do with an unresolved question the Ministry of Archaeological Contemplation is trying to answer.”

  I shot a panicked glance at Noi’s expression of studied indifference. No, I do not! That thought hadn’t even crossed my mind.

  Gashun leaned back in his chair; perhaps Noi’s words had calmed him down.

  “So this is about the reverbigation net? It’s true the confusion on that end has been going on for a while now. It’s under investigation at present; we’re doing all that we can.”

  “Is it possible that some contaminant has gotten into the reverbigation net somewhere?”

  “Contaminant? Is that what all this is about?” Gashun sat up straight. “I just told you that it’s under investigation. I can’t be talking about this to outsiders. Especially not when one is a dodgejobber.”

  “It’s all right,” Noi said calmly. “This man is the proxy of Archlearner Meimeiru of the Ministry of Archaeological Contemplation.”

  “No, I’m—”

  Eyes still locked on Gashun, Noi cut me off with a wave of her left arm.

  “Telling me there ‘may be a connection’ isn’t good enough,” Gashun said. “The Ministry of Archaeological Contemplation and the Ministry of Reverbigation have never had much to do with one another. You two are just trying to extract information from us. So please leave.”

  With nothing at all to show for it, we were thus expelled from the Ministry of Reverbigation. Things had gone as I’d imagined, Noi Meiyuru’s words and actions notwithstanding.

  “And what were you planning to do if he’d found out this is not related to the war?” I asked as we walked along the gougeway together.

  “That’s why I said it was your idea. At any rate, if war does come, they’ll have more on their minds than you. And what did you do to earn a grudge from the Zafutsubo?”

  I gave a brief explanation, and Noi laughed—just a hiss of air expelled from her spiracles.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “At any rate, spawning an Archlearner’s proxy is not allowed.”

  “I’m not a proxy. I’m just a dodgejobber.”

  Noi didn’t reply. Even if there was some contract I didn’t know about that stipulated I be treated as a proxy, that was still no guarantee that the Zafutsubo would observe the law.

  Two Urume tribesmen had been following us ever since we left the Seat of Defense. Of this I was certain; dismissing such things as “just my imagination” had given me no end of past regrets.

  Later, when we were nearing the Seat of Learning, I told Noi about them and darted into a narrow ripway that turned off to the right. If I stayed on course, I would come to Suifu’ushi Riptrench, but I made a left along the way and entered the high-ceilinged Sohsoh Ripditch. Just as I remembered, a row of bathhouses ran alongside it.

  I ran into the drilding of Semama Bathhouse, tossed a shellcoin onto the counter, and grabbed a bathtag marked “purify” from the tagbox. Ignoring the surprised clerk, I entered a small private compartment closed off only by a curtain and lay down in a bathtub made of nectarwax. I pulled on the rope hanging down from above, and gloambugs started pouring from the bugtap in the wall, getting deeper and deeper as they crawled around in the tub.

  This was a really nice place—they had fourteen different kinds of gloambug, running the gamut from beetles to worms. If I’d had more time, I would have liked to specify the mix and taken my time soaking in them.

  As the bugs squirmed over me, the tension in my body started to loosen up. The dirt, the grime, the aromatics, and infiltrating hypha were all broken down by saliva from countless tiny mouths that sucked at my carapace, licking it all away.

  Things seemed to be quiet outside. In any case, it looked like my nerves had gotten the better of me. I had just fallen into an idle daze when the curtain of my compartment fluttered slightly. Two figures could be seen through it dimly.

  I leapt out of the bathtub. A splash of bugs went flying through the air. I slipped past the legs of two Urume tribesmen, who shouted as they wiped off the bugs that had landed on them.

  I got out of the bathhouse and kept running full-tilt down the ripditch. Bugs that were caught in my joints got crushed between my segments—it hurt. Pollen also got stuck in my spiracles, making it hard to breathe.

  I was wiping at my thoracic carapace when I tripped on a bughole near the middle of the ripditch and fell to the ground. I rolled over o
nto my back, rubbing away the pollen. Everyone walking in this ripditch was Urume. I tensed up each time one came near my side. Among them were two who were holding crowbars for prying open bug carapaces. I’ve heard that the first thing you learn in the Seat of Defense is how to do a decarapacing. The pair were closing in on me. As they looked this way and that, waving about their fully extended antennae, they walked right beside me and passed on by.

  I returned to the gougeway in Gukutsu Clifftown and slipped back into the Seat of Defense’s drilding. Walking along the walls of its crowded hallways, I entered the block where the Ministry of Reverbigation was located. If I could take such a great risk with so little hesitation, did it mean I’d become a proxy already? If that were the case, would the authorities view me as lacking free will and therefore not charge me in the event that I got caught?

  I stood before the door to the meeting room I’d visited before and peered inside through its small window.

  Five people, including Gashun Zafutsubo, were gathered at the oval ring of desks, looking up at the huge garden lantern hanging from the ceiling as they spoke to one another. The Murai tribesman was sitting in the same seat as before, swiftly moving his many limbs all at once, transcribing the conversation.

  I put my elbows up against the door.

  —That proxy was saying something about a contaminant, wasn’t he?

  —You should know it’s nothing so trifling as that.

  —Hey, you’re keeping awfully quiet lately. It isn’t like you.

  —Never mind about me; have you heard anything from the Ministry of Castellum Contemplation?

  This discussion, perhaps having hit a roadblock, went around in circles a few times, and soon no one had anything else to say. I heard nails tapping on a desk.

  A reverbigator sounded noisily. Gashun left the ring of desks and walked over to the wall.

  I caught snatches of an insolent, angry voice shouting from the other side, occasionally overlapping Gashun’s answers.

  —At this rate, we won’t be able to keep the bombardiers in step with each other!

  —I don’t care how many relay bugs you send; it’s no use if they only remember sentence fragments!

  —What’s going on? The reverbigator—

  The voice went on, doggedly criticizing the outages in the reverbigation network. Apparently, it was someone from the Ministry of Defensive Action.

  I walked away from the door and wandered around the Ministry of Reverbigation, looking for its aromaterial depository. In the midst of a long hallway two floors down, I finally found a door with the aromaseal I was looking for. I took a peek inside through the small window in the door. There was no sign of anyone present.

  I slipped inside. It was dark in there. Not a single torchburr was glowing, but bathed in the scent of the aromaterials, the colors of everything rose up dimly all around.

  First of all, I started looking for records detailing the history of reverbigator outages. On a bookshelf near the entrance, three rounds’ worth of materials were assembled, sorted according to arc. Each document bore the personal aromaseal of Reverbigator Replacement Technician Sohso Shutohroh. He connected his giant brain to the reverbigation network to manage it apparently.

  I found the records from two arcs prior to Pancestor’s disappearance, from which I learned that during that time, a slight increase in temperature had been detected in the autopsy room of the Seat of Learning. A note written there said “ordinary influx of gloambugs.” Had the parasites been digested then? Three arcs prior to that, a reverb of indeterminate origin had been placed to the autopsy room, and following an unusual spike in heat consumption, the standby signal from the jewel-bits had broken off. An inspector had been dispatched to the site immediately amid concerns of a neurofungus leak in the room, but that bullet had been dodged; it was only a matter of damaged jewel-bits. An investigation into the cause had carried over into the following arc, when it was concluded to have been the same thing causing frequent outages on the reverbigation network: neurofungus fibers crossed with the neural network of the castellum.

  Just to be safe, I checked records from some other dates and learned that malfunctions had been taking place even in the offices of Archlearners Meimeiru and Ryofin.

  I tensed up at a sound out in the hallway, but no one came inside. I moved on to my next target of investigation.

  On a shelf further inside the room, periodically updated charts of the castellum’s structure were rolled up in tube-shaped bundles covering one round each. These were stored between small partitions. I pulled the tube for the current round from its compartment and unrolled the latest chart on the floor. A complex, 3-D perspective drawing of the castellum spread out before me. I was surprised when I saw the biconical shape of the reverbigation net that reached into the castellum’s every district. It was exactly the same shape as the garden lantern hanging in the meeting room. Had that thing been a model reflecting the present state of the reverbigation network? I could tell at a glance that the reverbigation network connected the residential blocks and the military facilities on the chart.

  The uppermost portion of the reverbigation network appeared dimmer than the rest and was tangled up with a fibrous shadow suggesting creeper vine. Beneath it, a short row of symbols had been jotted down. When I took a look at a chart made ten rounds ago, that shadow was smaller than it was now. And twenty rounds ago, there was no shadow at all.

  As I was checking out a number of other document shelves, I learned that those symbols corresponded to numbers assigned to the minutes of Reverbigator Damage Response meetings. That fiberlike shadow was apparently an irregularity in the growth of castellum nerve tissue. Caught between the necessity of a major construction project and the danger of harming the castellum’s autonomic functions, it seemed they had been unable to decide what to do.

  I put back the charts and the meeting minutes, left the depository, and after traversing many corridors in which the commotion was growing only louder, slipped back outside, whereupon I was stricken suddenly by a great exhaustion and felt a cold ache in my stomach. The gustatory hairs covering my tongue stirred.

  Contrary to all expectation, I had uncovered no trace of any parasite disrupting the reverbigation network. What now bothered me more, however, was that abnormal growth of castellum nerve tissue and those reverbigator calls of unknown origin.

  I’d always heard that castellae had no more intelligence than an ordinary gloambug. That was supposed to be settled science, but if it were to be overturned—

  I was still struggling with these thoughts when I arrived back at my grotto, but right away I pulled up the floorboard.

  My dorsal vessel contracted tightly.

  I sank to the floor on the spot. My namas-machina were gone! Not even one was left in the cage. Somehow, I must have forgotten to close the latch.

  I was hurting all over now; it felt like every last nerve in my body had been laid bare. I no longer had any idea what was causing it. It hurt so bad, I thought I was going to burst open at any moment. While I was putting on aromatics and getting ready to go out again, the strength drained out of me, and wobbling, I lay down in my danglebed.

  Just as before, eggs were still dangling from the ceiling. No, something was different now. Overall, their surfaces were stretched tighter than before. The wrinkles had vanished, and a ripe green color was beginning to tint the adhesive parts stuck to the ceiling. I sat up and felt one. There was an elasticity to the shell, and I could feel the pulsations of something inside. It was the same as when touching any egg.

  Don’t tell me those namas-machina went and violated them when they got loose! But these eggs were so baggy and shriveled! Had a lifetime spent in a closed environment made those gloambugs completely undiscriminating? They’d fertilized as many as they could and then run for it!

  It was then that I realized the truth that had been right in front of
me all along, and I shuddered.

  That old woman was a namas-machina female.

  I’d heard that the females were forced to spawn under the auspices of Reproducing Pharma workers, and I’d heard that they kicked them out the moment the quality of their eggs began to drop.

  Many miserable, forlorn namas-machina females—who looked like nothing if not people—were said to be milling around in the margins of the riptrenches. Still, almost no one, myself included, took note of their presence, nor did we ever doubt our actions as we went on consuming namas-machina.

  Just then, a sudden tremor rocked the grotto. Like the hands of some giant, it shook me to and fro and threw me out of my danglebed. Dishes and other necessities of arclife came spilling off the shelves and the tabletop. The lid in the floor opened and shut like a flapping wing. The war, it appeared, had begun. Three eggs fell from the ceiling and burst open. The castellum had never shaken like this before. Maybe we’d taken a hit.

  The shaking quieted, but the floor was still listing. Whitish embryos writhed amid pools of sticky fluid and shards of broken eggshell. Black eyes stared at me from behind white, cloudy membranes. Fleeing their stares, I backed out of the grotto.

  I will never put anything like that in my mouth again, I swore. But resolution alone wasn’t enough to quell my craving for them. I hurried into the forkway as another powerful tremor rocked the castellum. At the very least, I needed something that could serve as a substitute. My job for the Seat of Learning was slipping farther and farther from my mind.

  I came out into the riptrench and stopped in at a second-rate bar facing the loway. It was a tiny place, just a narrow cellar with a few tall tables where customers could drink standing up. Shards of broken cupshell were scattered about the floor, and the smell of stale alcohol hung on the air. There was no sign of any other customer.