Sisyphean

by Dempow Torishima

  No, that’s what I thought.

  “—many theories emerged previously regarding castellum intelligence but their physical structure too different from ours no way to prove it there was one faction insisted it was brainwave activity waveforms closely resembled humans at the onset of madness and there were others who said they were not so different from patterns that can be extracted from waves in the Mudsea—”

  That would make sense, I thought, if the castellum were acting with some kind of goal in mind.

  “—in mind it would make sense consider the damage to the jewel-bits in the autopsy room’s reverbigator, and the reverbs of indeterminate origin—”

  Judging by records of those “reverbs of indeterminate origin,” it seemed certain that Archlearner Meimeiru had been contacted by the castellum as well.

  “—supposing the castellum had had some sort of contact with Pancestor by way of the reverbigation network suppose that it stole something from Pancestor—”

  It was clear that the castellum had somehow tampered with Archlearner Ryofin’s consciousness.

  “—interested in a small shadow—a mineral, apparently—inside Pancestor’s head, the Banon tribe detected it with their hypersonic soundtouch artificial perhaps but if Pancestor formed multiple individuals to take it back—”

  And then somewhere along the way …

  … I found myself here, gazing on a vaguely peach-colored mollusk enclosed within a brain’s mucous membrane sac. Or was it a memory that had been implanted later? The creature was simple in form—nothing but tentacles in front, with tiny projections covering the whole of its moist surface membrane. I extended several touchtongues from inside the sac and buried them in the mollusk’s moist, elastic membrane. Savoring its sweet flesh as I dissolved it with my secretions, I realized that its cellular structure was a perfect match for Pancestor’s, which still resided in my memory. A scorching flame, I realized, was being transmitted by the nerve fibers running throughout its tissues. I sank my touchtongues deep into its tissues and followed those fibers until I reached a mass of cells that had become tumorous. This tumor seemed to be controlling its entire body. Was it coincidence that it so strongly resembled those tumors being discovered in the brains of castle folk?

  I withdrew the touchtongues, then extended tentacles of nerves, which I wrapped around the lump. I could see differences in electrical potential in it that resembled brainwaves, and what was more, it was receiving an external transmission that appeared to be a signal. It would take time to analyze the whole thing, but I could tell that one part of it was indicating something using three-dimensional coordinates, and one of those points was glowing. I pulled one of the Ministry of Reverbigation’s 3-D perspective drawings out of my memory, and after making many tweaks to its angle and scale, laid it over those coordinates. The glowing point was located at an intersection of the reverbigation net and the castellum’s nerve tissue. There was something there.

  I heard a strange noise. Was it just my imagination?

  I could find out what was there by sending in namas-kara—but no. There was no need for that. There seemed to be some contradiction in my reasoning. For the time being, I needed to break off the investigation. Yet even so … No. There was no need for that.

  I was standing in front of the door to the Ministry of Archaeological Contemplation. I felt worn down to nothing and was even unsure whether I’d really been inside Archlearner Meimeiru or not. Something slid from my upper arm, and frantically, I caught it with my one lower arm. It was the wide-mouthed bottle. When I opened the lid, it was not a parasite that I found inside but many tiny, meaty sprouts.

  2

  I became suddenly uneasy and hurried back home, stumbling again and again as the tilted world pulled at me. The castellum’s inclination could shift again at any moment, and if it did, my little grotto might end up buried in potassium nitrate.

  I wandered through the forkway, and when I finally got back home, the little bugs came crowding around, saying “’elcome ’ome, ’elcome ’ome.” They raised up the fronts of their flat bodies and touched me with slender arms that were like frayed strings.

  Ro Namas-machina was sitting in the danglebed, still as death. She raised up her cephalothorax to look at me and began to rise.

  “No, you’re fine. Please stay there.”

  I sat down next to Ro. Her far-too-light body rocked back and forth.

  “It isn’t safe here. Come with me, and evacuate to Castellum Saruga. Castellum Raondo is going to sink.”

  “But you, have work to do. It isn’t, finished, is it?”

  “The investigation’s been canceled.”

  “But it isn’t, finished, is it?”

  She was right. We were about to sink to the bottom of the Mudsea, and everything was still so unclear. No, wait—if we used these gloambugs …

  “The little bugs might be able to dive into the reverbigation net and pin down what’s causing all this. It’s probably the thing the castellum stole from Pancestor—” When I had spoken that much, a forceful voice rang out in the back of my mind: The investigation is canceled! That’s right; it was canceled. And I realized then that the execution of my plan had been in trouble from the start. Ro had been cast out by Maidun Reproducing Pharmaceuticals, even though she still possessed the ability to lay eggs. Most likely there had been a drop in the namas content of her eggs.

  “If these little ones go into the reverbigation net,” I said, “they won’t come out unharmed.” I wasn’t thinking of them as simple gloambugs anymore. They were Ro’s children. “No, they are still lower gloambugs,” flashed the thoughts of the Archlearner.

  “But I laid them for you,” Ro said flatly.

  “Da-da, Da-da, Da-da.”

  The little bugs that had been listening to us started buzzing with excitement: “I wanna go! I wanna go!”

  “You don’t understand. It’s dangerous.” How many months of her life had she whittled off by laying them? “I can’t let you go.”

  I picked up one of the little ones as if to console him and said, “The investigation’s been canceled.” At that moment, I could feel thoughts of the Archlearner competing against one another inside me. He was unable to suppress his own intellectual impulses. However—

  A child came entreating me: “Da-da, I wan’ a name. I wan’ my own name.”

  “Your name is Shoru.”

  The name came to me instantly. It was one of the names I had picked out for the children I’d once expected to have myself. The other children shouted out his name over and over.

  My lower arm grabbed a pair of tweezers from the boreshelf and picked up one of the meaty sprouts from the wide-mouthed bottle on the table.

  “You all are not allowed to do this kind of thing. Don’t even try it,” I said. I wriggled my fingers between the joint of Shoru’s still-soft cephalothoracic shell and used the tweezers to plant one of the meaty sprouts in his slightly peach-colored brain, all the while murmuring, “This is wrong. I can’t do this …”

  “Ahh, lucky! Lucky!” the children were all saying enviously.

  I opened the reverbigator’s lidshell and pushed Shoru into the head that welled up inside. Gradually, he was sucked in through its face.

  Half the arc went by, but Shoru didn’t come back, so I finally sent in a second one, whom I named Jafutsu. Ultimately, though, the result was the same. Perhaps they’d been digested by the neurofungi.

  When the third one, Donei, finally returned next morning, he was almost completely dissolved. “I sorry, Da-da … I cou’n’t fine it … I sorry …” With those repeated whisperings, he breathed his last.

  Postrise came and with it the return of the fourth child, Sagusa. He was trembling violently when he came back. I set him on the danglebed, and Sagusa peeled back his labial palpi and opened his mouth wide. The corners of his mouth audibly tore as a rounded thin
g like polished jasper began to rise into view. He spat up a curved crystalline object, shaped like a gigantic water droplet. There was no great difference between its size and that of Sagusa. White fibers trailed from its tip.

  After stroking the back of the limp Sagusa once, I held the damp crystal up to a glowjar with two hands and looked at the light shining through it. Emerald illumination suffused it faintly.

  What in the world was this thing? Something seemed to be carved into its surface, but there wasn’t anything sealed inside. Why had the castellum stolen something like—

  Suddenly the children turned toward the door and started growling all at once.

  With a loud, violent shock, part of the door exploded inward, and with the next resounding blow, the rest of the door collapsed.

  An axe-wielding Urume tribesman came inside, and then right behind him, another. As he raised his axe, I planted a kick that knocked him to the ground and ran out of the grotto holding on to the crystal tightly. I fled through the forkways, getting potassium nitrate all over myself in the process.

  When I reached the dunes of Mebohla Riptrench, I found myself surrounded by over a dozen pursuers—Urume and Guromura, mostly. They approached with awkward footsteps, narrowing the distance between us. All of their lower arms were dangling limply like those of dead men, and their bodies seemed slow to react to me. If I went for it now, I realized, I could probably get free of them.

  With that thought in mind, I was just about to make a run for it when my lower arms were grabbed from behind and I was dragged down onto the slope. Two more of them grabbed hold of me, and just when it seemed like the crystal I was carrying against my thorax would be torn away with the arm that held it, I saw a glint of golden carapace against the black slope.

  With their long arms and legs bent in a compact stance, a pair of Miguraso tribesmen came sliding down the incline. The slope collapsed under their weight, causing several of my pursuers to lose their footing. The Miguraso stretched out their four long, thick arms and pushed down the men I was struggling with. That was when Noi Meiyuru came skidding down as well, abdomanus raised, tracing out an arc in the sand. She jammed her proboscis between each pursuer’s body segments in turn, anaesthetizing them.

  It was as if we had suddenly fallen into a world without sound. The quiet itself was disquieting.

  “Has the shelling from the enemy castellum stopped?” I said.

  “Only temporarily. I just hope this means the Seat of Defense has managed to make contact with them. There’s enough potassium nitrate in here that even they won’t be unharmed if it blows.”

  “I see.”

  “You didn’t go along with Archlearner Meimeiru’s decision, did you?”

  “I thought I told you, I’m not his proxy.” Though it was still uncertain exactly who I was.

  “The archlearners carried out of the Seat of Learning were exhibiting many behaviors we’ve never observed before and seem to be in a stupor.”

  “The castellum is probably interfering in their conscious minds. Where is Archlearner Meimeiru now?”

  “Waiting for you.” Noi straightened and pointed over my shoulder.

  I turned around. Several dunes over was an enormous mass of skinned meat, large enough to be a house. It had twin black doors, and a diffuse curtain of steam was rising from it.

  Behind this fleshy mass, there swelled a translucent body that was like the stem of a mushroom. Many ropes were fastened to what looked like vestigial limbs, their ends held by a multitude of workers. The withered body was attached to the giant head.

  I stood before Archlearner Meimeiru, and his black doors, his giant mandibles, swung open.

  Chapter 5:

  Upstream to the Headwaters

  1

  The pale peach sac of a mucous membrane appeared before me like a bubble inflating before my eyes. No sooner did its moist surface press up against my forehead than I felt pressure on the back of my cranium as my head was pinched from either side. Overcome with terror, I squirmed to get free, but it only squeezed even harder. I screamed as loudly as my voice would go.

  Radoh Monmondo. Unexpectedly, those words came back to me. Oh, right … that’s my name.

  I peered into the membrane-sac’s interior.

  In the midst of the clear liquid contained therein, there floated an emerald crystal in the shape of a warped egg. It hung from tendrils of nerve cells dangling from the uppermost point of the sac’s interior.

  Slowly, I exhaled from every spiracle in my body, calming myself.

  I was jammed in between the crystal and the archlearner’s brain. I couldn’t believe this: I had become a conducting ciruitbreaker, a pawn to be sacrificed in the event of some abnormality. That was what he was using me for.

  Just as I was wringing out my last iota of strength in an attempt to get loose, I realized that I was tossing and turning in my danglebed. Right above me, I could see my ceiling, colonized by glowjars.

  I’d just been having a long dream, it seemed. Cheers from the Circlingseed Festival came to me as though through a seashell.

  The castle folk were tirelessly walking around and around in the riptrench overhead. I felt a swell of excitement at the commotion but was seriously injured right now and unable to move. Besides, if an outsider like me were to join in, I’d just end up disrupting the sense of harmony. A rather forlorn sensation, as though it were this grotto alone that was sinking to the bottom of the Mudsea, began to take hold of me, when suddenly the danglebed where I lay ripped open, and up and down switched directions.

  For a moment, I could have sworn I’d been flung into the very heart of a natural disaster.

  I was lying flat against the blinding white earth of the Hellblaze as my body was buffeted by the ferocious gale of a violent storm. Pounded by the wind’s unceasing blows, it seemed certain they would scoop me right up off the ground, yet thanks to the numerous rootlimbs I had extended deep into the earth, I was able to hang on just barely. A strange sensation in my inner organs added to the sense of urgency. There was a pump-shaped organ in the middle of my chest pounding out a rhythmical—if irregular—beat.

  I hardly move from this place much anymore, I was surprised to hear myself thinking. Maybe because I’m so old now.

  My field of view had always been narrow, and it was now blurred to the point where all I could see was just the bit of ground before my eyes. Even so, I could make out my own shape—indistinct though it was through the clouds of dust and sand—as well as that of a rugged boulder that both resembled a human and looked nothing like one. Perhaps it was one of my comrades?

  Through my rootlimbs, I expelled the last of the moisture and the water fleas mixed with it, uprooted myself, and with undulations of my gastropod moved to another spot and deployed my rootlimbs once more.

  Through repetition of this simple procedure, the distance I covered continued to grow. Surrounded by hard shellite blackened by the scorching rimlight, my weakened body, my weakened cells, were becoming active again. At the same time, the many layers of shellite I had accrued were vanishing as if through volatilization, and even my rootlimbs had become withered. With ease, the winds pushed and shoved me around, until at last I started to roll. I couldn’t stop the contraction of my body. At the end, I became a flat seed that could fit in the palm of one’s hand. As the winds blew me up into the air countless times, I began to cross that continent of scorching sands.

  At times when the force of the wind would weaken, the seed I had become would fall and stick into the sandy ground.

  Beyond the gale-blasted clouds of dust, I saw a faint, wavering shadow. It emerged from a curtain of roiling, grainy particulate to become a boulder as black as jet. It came edging its way toward me, bearing down on me from above. I was afraid I was going to be crushed, but the next instant I found myself being sucked inside and deposited within a seedsac. Inside, I stuck to a mucou
s membrane, on which I gradually dissolved into nothing. I became the boulder itself.

  In this dazzlingly bright, blazing-hot world where night never fell, the generations of these boulder life-forms passed one after another. Over time, the external shells that had protected me from the searing light disappeared, leaving only thick carapaces. These were not sufficient to protect my internal organs from the burning rimlight, so I had no choice but to endure brief lives of only a few tortured rounds.

  Beneath my umbrella-shaped cranial plate, drops of water oozed one after another from the tip of my long tongue. The droplets instantly leapt upward and clung to the underside of my cranial plate, where at last they broke apart into fine particles blown out from gaps in the segments of my body.

  After the passage of several generations, my carapace had thinned somewhat, and after several generations more, its area had shrunken to the point that only scattered blotches remained, like lakes left behind by a dried-up sea. When black cortex lay exposed all over my body, many clusters of insulating, heat-resistant fat nodules began to swell out, and I turned into a four-legged creature that looked just like a succulent plant.

  Panting with thirst, heavy clusters swaying, I walked backwards, wandering from place to place, until I suddenly stopped and gouged a hole into the ground. Into this hole I stuck my proboscis, and joyfully, ecstatically released all of the moisture that was stored up inside my fatty clusters. As I did so, my consciousness grew dim and distant from a sudden, lethal dehydration.

  Not long afterward, my clusters of fatty growths atrophied and a crazed tightrope-walk between life and death began.

  I finally understood now. I was traveling backward through the long and perilous history of variegation leading up to my acquisition of a body-type suited to the harsh environment of the Hellblaze.

  Spurred on now by some unknown instinct, I was beating death by breeding faster than the Rimblaze—its place ever fixed in the heavens—could kill my bodies.