Sisyphean

by Dempow Torishima

  When the momonji that led each column arrived at the movable fence that was in front of the holding pen, handlers stationed at strategic points placed their hands between the momonji’s three eyes and brought them to a halt. With a slight lag, the momonji following along behind stopped as well. A synchronized venting of exhaust gases came from the spaces between the ground and their bellies, sending wispy clouds of dust flying.

  The handlers, exhausted from their long journey, began to exchange parting courtesies. One after another, the dustmancers and feelancers departed, and the fatteners who stayed behind hurriedly set to work around the momonji.

  One fattener, lying on his back, got down under a momonji’s buttocks, twisted an arm into its cloacavity, and pulled out a long stripeworm he’d caught in his hand. Another fattener, grooming the creature’s white body hair with a flea comb, removed a large flea the size of his thumb and squashed it under his boot. These tasks had to be done before they could bring the momonji into the holding pen.

  Near the end of the line, a slender young girl with a fluff of walnut hair was scolding a momonji that had started moving forward on its own. She was not a fattener though, and her voice was too weak to be of much use. Her garb was that of a dustmancer—a boilersuit with antidust camouflage that appeared only as a solid gray and a shadecap hanging down on her back. In terms of stature though, she didn’t even come up to the top of the momonji’s thick body. The girl kept ordering the momonji to go back, but instead it simply latched on to the gigantic posterior waiting in front of it.

  “You suckin’ cartilage or something?” a voice called out. “A weak little squawk like that ain’t gonna do nothing.” A young fattener strode up, grabbed a handful of the momonji’s loose hide, and wrung it like a wet towel as he barked a command. Reluctantly, the momonji curled around and came loose from its fellow’s rear. “Take a break, kid. You ain’t looking so good.”

  With a vague smile on her pale, mole-dotted face, the girl walked away. She next approached a momonji near the middle of the procession.

  She stroked its soft back with a small hand that was covered in scars, though her veins were clear to see through her skin. She had lived side by side with these momonji for most of the past month since departing Afumi Fattening Lake.

  Momonji were hermaphroditic, and the juveforms born at the fattening lake had been no larger than watermelons. Their baggy, pale-peach skin had been completely hairless, and their backshell ossiforms, arrayed like armor plates, had been faintly visible through it. When spots of soft white hair had started to grow in here and there, the girl had found their pitiful, ragged appearance utterly adorable.

  Bobbing out on the lake, the juveforms would gradually swell to larger and larger size, eventually exceeding the young girl in height.

  On reaching the age of ten, momonji were entrusted to caravans, with whom they would journey across the Vastsea, either hauling cargo or as cargo themselves.

  Soon these momonji would be handed over to another caravan and make for points farther north.

  Following a stopover at some way station like Tochino Recuperation Block, momonji were led away to the more remote recuperation blocks in outlying areas. There some would be forced to produce gas and liquor until the day they died, while others would simply be disassembled on the spot. The latter were processed for a wide variety of uses—muscles and organs served as foodstuffs, intestinal fiber became guidelines, fat was made into candles and soap, pelts were used for clothes and bedding, and bones became building material and tableware; everything was used up. “The only thing we don’t use,” the saying went, “is the sound of their breathing.”

  The girl called out words of farewell to her traveling companions. Of course, the momonji could not reply. They had never had voices to begin with. The only sounds they could make were those useless, intermittent breaths, emanating from a mouth hidden under the forward part of the chest area.

  She heard somebody groan near the posterior of the momonji she had just been petting and looked over to see what had happened. The fattener who had been pulling stripeworms there had just had his head doused with a gush of lye-colored excrement, which was now dripping down his face. She fought back laughter as soilmongers came flocking to the man from out of nowhere and started to shovel the manure into a wheelbarrow. They would ferment and dry it, and then it would go on sale. Sometimes the caravan would load muck of that sort onto the backs of momonji as well and transport it to agricultural recuperation blocks.

  The girl moved over to a long-haired momonji waiting one head back in line. A little to the upper right of its three quartzlike eyes, its long hair curled in a spiral pattern, like a whirlpool in a surging sea. This was its whorl, or more precisely its jewel-eye, whose position differed on every momonji. During the course of their journey, she had gotten terribly attached to this one.

  The girl touched its whorl and wrapped its hair around her fingers. After enjoying the sensation for a moment, she started combing it with her fingers while moving sideways, along with the natural flow of the fur. At last, she spread both arms wide and buried herself in the shaggy, sun-warmed pelt that covered its body.

  Comforted by the elasticity and warmth of its thick skin, she breathed in a deep draught of its musky beast-smell, when suddenly, a husky voice from behind brought her back to reality.

  “What did I tell you, Umari?”

  She jumped away from the momonji and spun around.

  Staring down at Umari was a powerfully built old man with a face that looked like something carved from a rocky mountainside. His fearsome eyes were like webbed cracks made by a blow from an iron staff. The lingering scent of fuzzy down steadily volatilized from her cheeks and chest.

  “Master!” Umari cried, remembering only belatedly to bow her head.

  Just as old carvings always seemed to be missing a piece or two, Umari’s master was missing his left arm. The sleeve of his garment was tied off like a sausage around his upper arm. It had been torn off in his youth, he had said, by one of the Canvassers that haunted the Vastsea. Nothing but white stubble was growing on his square, bony jaw, and not a single hair was left on the top of his head; still, he stood ramrod-straight and certainly didn’t look like someone over seventy.

  The average life expectancy was short for those who spent their days traversing the Vastsea. Dr. Shibata at the clinic was probably the only one in the whole recuperation block who was older than Umari’s dear master. Both had a certain air about them, like blessed, immortal hermits. She wondered: was that why they were rumored to have lived through the Great Dust Plague three hundred years ago?

  “Don’t let yourself get attached to them,” said Master. “You’ll only end up hurting yourself. The work of a dustmancer is finished the moment the momonji are all inside the recuperation block. You’ve finished making your courtesy calls, I presume?”

  Umari gave an audible gasp and fumbled for a reply. Her master sucked in a single breath of air that made his thick chest swell and then let fly: “Then what are you doing staring off into space?! Get on it now! Start with the captain. When you’re finished, come to the Isuzu Inn. And tell the other brethren to come there too.”

  “Yes, sir. Master.”

  “And after that—”

  Frantically, Umari had started to run, but Master’s words made her wobblingly freeze in mid-stride.

  “—it seems that Kanze—that caravan cook—is in town right now. Can I ask you to take care of him as well?”

  Umari ran northward along the column of momonji, looking for Team Leader Higan-shii. When she came to the momonji at the head of the line, she found it waiting quietly in front of a gate in a fence running east to west through the entire recuperation block. The temporary holding area that spread out past that fence was divided into numerous sections based on the momonji’s destination and intended use, and momonji were being shoved into each of them. Some
were also being driven along the road to the auction grounds at the northernmost end of the recuperation block.

  She saw no sign of Team Leader Higan-shii. A row of three rusting cargo trailers were lined up near a movable section of fence that served as an entrance. Sitting on top of the nearest trailer—whose front end had been severely warped and twisted—were five members of the Dustclingers—the clan to which Umari also belonged. This was their first time in what felt like ages that they were back on their clan’s home turf, and the strength seemed to have drained out of all their shoulders.

  On the far right end sat Renji. The tan girl’s thick black hair was tied up in the back, and her tan lips were pursed. A polyhedrical object rested in the palm of her thumbless right hand, and moment by moment, the number of its corners was changing in accordance with her whispers. She was dustchanting to kill a little time. Umari would have probably needed days to produce just one of those eide.

  “Ahh, I just can’t do it!” Renji said. “They won’t come out right like Junrin-shi’s.” Renji glared at the polyhedron as she spoke. She was hoarse from an excess of dustchanting. Junrin-shi was a dustmancer whose name was known even among the Dustclingers, but some years ago she had gone missing during a caravan drive.

  Following a clinical examination, Renji had been pronounced sterile at the age of ten, and after being kicked out of the maternitorium at Isurugi Recuperation Block, she had joined the Dustclingers out of admiration for Junrin-shi. Even so, she was not yet ready to receive the title of “-shi.” And while it was true that less than a year had passed since Umari’s joining the clan, she doubted she could ever learn to chant dust as skillfully as Renji did, even if she trained for decades.

  “Look, I’m telling you, there’s no point in eking by with these runs between recuperation blocks.” Sitting next to Renji, Romon dangled his booted feet off the edge of the trailer, gesticulating passionately as he made his points. “All across the worlde, the number of recuperation blocks keeps falling. How much longer do you think this kind of work can go on? We need to be thinking about what comes next.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.” Next to him, Homaru gave a noncommittal reply.

  “So what are you saying?” sturdy-framed Kugu-shi said listlessly from Homaru’s side. “That we should become sailors and go trade with maremen or something? We’d just end up swallowed by coffin eels.”

  Kugu-shi had stripped off the coverall he used for caravan work and was now wearing short sleeves and knee-length breeches. Leaning back on his thick, muscular arms, he gazed up at the tangled wisps of cloud in the sky. His calf was swollen so badly it looked ready to burst and had big stitch marks snaking all the way around it; to Umari, the sight was difficult to take in. How many times does this make it that Kugu-shi’s saved my life? I’ve got to train—every minute I can spare—so I won’t just be cuffs and fetters on everyone. Yet even as the thought ran through her mind, she knew she was so far behind in so many ways … Feeling miserable and pathetic, she let out a sigh.

  Sitting on the left end as if in meditation was Geiei-shi, the eldest of the group, with his ruined eyes and his close-cropped hair. He turned toward Umari, showing a face tattooed with antidust camouflage.

  Suddenly, Romon said in a louder voice, “No, you’re oversimplifying; I didn’t mean it like that. What I’m trying to say is—”

  “Who in the worlde has filled your head with that tripe?” said Kugu-shi. “You haven’t been yourself lately.”

  “Nobody’s filling my head with anything. It’s Master and all of you who aren’t thinking things through enough!”

  “What did you just say?”

  Homaru, caught between the arguing pair, had drawn up his sloped shoulders in obvious discomfort. Noticing Umari standing in Geiei-shi’s line of nonsight, he called out to her, “What do you want, Convalescent?”

  Umari hadn’t actually been sick, but she got called that a lot, being as her color was seldom very good.

  The arguing stopped, and all faces turned toward Umari.

  Romon stuck his head out; it was covered with deep scars from old cuts. Glaring at Umari, he said, “The old fossil send you?”

  Ever since she had joined the clan, she had been ostracized by Romon. Probably in part because Umari’s carelessness was to blame for a few of those scars. Judging by his behavior and his many scars, it was easy to think him the same age as Renji and Homaru, who were both in their mid-twenties. In fact, though, he wasn’t much older than Umari. Not that Umari knew her own age with any precision. She had thought of herself as seventeen at the time she realized she didn’t know.

  “‘Old fossil?’ I’ll tell Master you said that,” warned Renji.

  “I ain’t afraid of that senile fossil. He works the living hell outta me! Well? What is it?”

  “Master says finish your courtesy rounds and then meet up at Isuzu Inn.”

  “All right, folks,” said Kugu-shi. “In that case, it’s dinnertime.” He jumped down off the trailer, and the other clan-brethren followed with languid cheers, kicking up dust as they landed.

  Slack-jawed, Umari looked up at Kugu-shi’s nearly two-meter height. His fat nose reminded her somehow of a bull’s.

  “What?” he said in his deep bass voice, draping his worksuit over Umari’s head. Taking care of laundry was her job. “We finished up ages ago.”

  “Um,” Umari said, peeking out from beneath Kugu-shi’s sweat-ripe coverall. “Where’s Team Leader Higan-shii?”

  “You’re still keeping to your usual snail’s pace?” Homaru said, laughing with phony surprise and a flash of silver light. After losing his baby teeth as a child, permanent ones had never grown in, so silver false teeth had been implanted in both his upper and lower jaw. There were a lot of people like that. “By this time, he’s probably leading the next caravan out already.”

  “For someone who takes no rest at all, the man really does hold together pretty well,” said Romon.

  “Aw, what’s with the poor sad face, Umari?” said Renji. “If all you ever do is hang around momonji, it stands to reason your sweetums’ll get away.”

  Riding the coattail of Renji’s comment, the other clan-brethren started teasing her. It was the usual routine. Renji always accused Umari of liking whoever she herself had fallen for; it was a way she tried to keep her own feelings hidden. In any case, there were no other women outside the maternitorium.

  “I’m going on ahead,” Kugu-shi said as he turned away. “Finish up your courtesy rounds or there won’t be any left when you get back.”

  Left all alone, Umari set off on foot, threading her way between rows of momonji as she searched for the hands who had accompanied them on the drive.

  The fatteners called out to her in kind voices, but no one else did. After all, Umari was still just an unskilled greenhorn who couldn’t even do a dustchant very well. Normally, there would have been a ritual exchange of coordinates earlier for communication purposes, but not only had no one given their coordinates to Umari, she had not even been able to get coordinates for herself. That was why she had to go around thanking and bidding each one farewell in person; to do otherwise would have been disrespectful.

  She noticed a pair of feelancers who had been with the caravan. They were standing on the west side of Caravan Square talking to one another. She ran up and bowed, but they brushed her off without so much as a glance.

  It hit her then that she didn’t even know Master’s coordinates. It wasn’t as if she needed them, but at the thought of that, she grew all the more miserable.

  “Got no house, got no shack, got no shirt to hide my back …

  “Got no meat, got no bread, got no job to keep me fed …

  “But momonji I got …

  “Mo-mo-mo-monji I got …

  “… and with them I get by.

  “… and with them I get by.

  “…
and with them I get by …”

  She could hear the drunken voices singing from somewhere. She turned around and saw what looked like a crew of gutdiggers in front of a food stall, clad in protective coveralls. One by one, and occasionally together, they were lifting their voices in song.

  On the western side of the square was a wide, open-air market, with the eaves of assorted stalls aligned to form many long aisles. These included momonji stalls that sold lightly broiled meats, bonemeal soba, stewed organs, fried stripeworms on sticks, hemomochi, and more. Even with the sun still high, it was crowded.

  At a kebab stall, Umari spotted Soho-shii, standing a head taller than the other diners around him. His slender body was leaning over toward the left. Inside the oven, a spindle-shaped chunk of meat—a whole armload’s worth—was grilling on a rotating oven plate. Every once in a while, a drop of grease would fall and pop.

  Soho-shii held a bonecup and a large skewer of grilled meat in his hands as he conversed with a handsome-looking man—a beastbutcher, judging by the blood-spattered apron.

  “No, it’s not that I was trying to raise my skills,” Soho-shii was saying, his mouselike, high-cheekboned face stretching as he tore a piece of meat off with his teeth. “It’s just that all the young dustmancers are being headhunted by that crawlbacker lot. It’s leaving the clans short-handed.”

  “Huh. What do crawlbackers want with a bunch of dustmancers?”

  “No idea. I have heard some pretty crazy rumors though. Wild tales of giant eidos bombs and the like—Oh look here! If it isn’t Umari! What’s the matter? Your courtesy rounds ending in miserable defeat again?”

  Soho-shii raised the bonecup to his lips. A powerful smell of ammonia wafted on the air. The beastbutcher turned to Umari with a stunning smile. Behind him, the upper body of a terribly fat woman could be seen wobbling back and forth like a pendulum. That was Sagyoku-shii, leader of the Fatguard Clan. The beastbutcher continued smiling at Umari.

  Unsure how to respond, she averted her gaze and started speaking quickly, trying not to look flustered. “You drink that stuff a lot, don’t you, clan-brother?”