Sisyphean

by Dempow Torishima

  Soho-shii stared intently at his bonecup and gave her a knowing smile. Originally, Soho-shii had been a disciple of the same clan as her, but two years ago he had struck out on his own as a linelayer, changing his honorific from “-shi” to “-shii” to show he was no longer a child apprentice but a fully-fledged workman. Their last journey had had a lot of difficult passages on its itinerary though, so he had accompanied the caravan at Master’s request.

  “I’m trying to find Kanze—the caravan cook,” she said.

  “Ah, he just went in there.”

  Soho-shii pointed a finger, but drunk as he was, it was too unsteady to be much help.

  What was in that direction was a long row of houses stretching from east to west. It looked like a dam that might burst at any moment, unleashing the flood of disorderly residences piled up behind.

  Soho-shii drank up the last of his liquor and, tilting this time rightward, added with a belch: “The maternitorium.”

  That word focused her attention on the middle of the row, where a dark, three-story wooden mansion stood out conspicuously from the rest. A belvedere adorned its large, gabled roof, and fretwork ran along the handrails of its cloister. The roof and the handrails glowed in the afternoon sunlight. The whole structure had been excavated from a dustsink and reconstructed here.

  “He said he’d be heading out in half an hour,” Soho-shii said.

  Umari thanked him and started walking toward the maternitorium. Like wet, fallen leaves, earthcreepers lay scattered here and there on the ground. “Earthcreeper” was a catch-all term for drunks, beggars, and dead bodies seen lying on the ground. Most had once been Vastsea crossers.

  Beneath a cusped gable was a conspicuous red and gold double door, in front of which ten or so young children were drawing momonji on the ground with pointed bones. Noisily smacking on cartilage, their mouths were moist with spit.

  When they noticed Umari, they came crowding around her, crying out in wild voices. Umari stroked their oily, matted hair, and that alone made them break out in innocent laughter. Using the full weight of their bodies, several of them pushed the doors open for her, and the rest, pulling on Umari’s hand and pushing against her back, guided her into the building.

  The moment she crossed the threshold, she felt a tickling in the back of her nostrils. Smoke from the incense burner filled an open space that extended three floors upward and shone faintly in the light streaming in through the skylight.

  Directly across from the entrance, a great red staircase awaited. The wide passage leading to it was inlaid with brilliant floral patterns in mother-of-pearl, and a row of women stood at ease along either wall. All of them wore embroidered gowns, with beauty spots stuck on their white, painted faces. Umari’s throat made a noise as she fought back a cough.

  “Why, if it isn’t Umari!” one of the girls standing in front cried when she noticed her. One after another, the other mothers leaned toward her, forming a fan-shape as they tried to see her face.

  “Isn’t that Umari—”

  “I’m glad you’re safely back—”

  “Skinny as ever, aren’t you—”

  “You never change—”

  “Have you been ill?”

  “You were like that before, weren’t you?”

  “You are making them feed you right, aren’t you?”

  Small spots of lipstick were painted in the center of each one’s lips, and the brilliant red color took Umari back to her own days in the maternitorium, when she used to grind up shellbugs to help make lipstick.

  “Mothers, I’m sorry to have been out of touch so long.” A smile blossomed on her face as she looked around at all the mothers on her right and left. Her eyes came to rest on the swollen belly of a long-necked woman in the middle of the row to the left.

  “Your tenth, Lady Shushu-mater?”

  “Your voice is the same as ever; still sounds like you’re sucking on cartilage. It’s my eleventh. The babies just keep on coming. It’s wearing me out.” Laughing loudly, she exposed a set of teeth resembling a broken keyboard. “Well, what brings you here today? Don’t tell me you’ve come back here to become a mother?”

  Umari felt a jab of pain in her slender chest. So Dr. Shibata had never told them she couldn’t bear children.

  “I’ll get around to it one of these days,” she said.

  But the mothers were not to be brushed off so easily.

  “Listen, happiness is watching over your children as they grow—”

  “We need to cheer up the men—”

  “Come back! You’ll be able to wear makeup and have romance—”

  “Oh, no! No matter what you say, it’s momonji this girl’s head-over-heels for—”

  “I just don’t understand …”

  “Back when Umari ran out of here saying she was gonna be a fattener—”

  “I was shocked when I heard that …”

  Even now, Umari would have liked to become a fattener if she could. She hadn’t been able to get on with any fattener clans though; not even the Fatguard Clan run by Sagyoku-shii, whom she’d glimpsed just shortly before. Her current master had taken her on when she’d been at wit’s end. Which made two times she had been rescued by Master.

  Umari hadn’t been born in a maternitorium. From what she had heard, she’d been picked up by Master when he was on a caravan drive and afterward entrusted to the maternitorium here. That was what she’d been told one year ago, after Dr. Shibata had examined her and explained the condition of her uterus.

  “Ah, this needs washing.”

  Lady Rani-mater pulled loose Kugu-shi’s antidust camouflage, which she’d been carrying under one arm. Washing the clothing of Vastsea crossers was one of the jobs the maternitorium performed. They also urged Umari to take off the antidust camouflage she was wearing now, but Umari declined, explaining that she was here on an errand.

  “Which room is Mr. Kanze in?”

  “That obnoxious caravan cook? He’s ‘playing house’ with Lady Mebaru-mater in the Hagoromo Room. Make it quick, okay?”

  Waving to the mothers, Umari went up the big, red-carpeted staircase. The soles of her shoes sank comfortably into the momonji fur. At the landing, she reversed directions and climbed a second staircase, then headed off toward the Hagoromo Room. On the way up, Umari passed a drunken man who was coming down together with a mother she didn’t know. As they passed one another, the man misstepped badly and stumbled into Umari.

  “Sorry, Mother,” he apologized in a voice that didn’t seem to be working right.

  All of the women here were mothers, and the men were all sons born in some maternitorium or other. It was rare now for births to take place anywhere else.

  Umari heard him whisper in the ear of the mother beside him: “She don’t ever change, does she, that mother …”

  “Women don’t age,” the mother replied with a laugh.

  Running along the third-floor cloister was a loop of small bedchambers separated only by thin, sheer curtains. Inside each, naked men and women lay entangled with one another, moaning and gasping.

  Umari came to one room that had a card labeled “Hagoromo” hanging from the pillar. She pushed the curtain open with the back of her hand. Inside was a small man, half buried in the vast expanse of Lady Mebaru-mater, whose body was now bloated to the point that her arms and legs looked like mere accessories. The man was making vigorous movements, like the flailing of a drowning man.

  Umari had been on a caravan drive with Kanze only once, and that was about ten months ago. Still, there was no mistaking that over-groomed mustache and square-jawed face, even with his features strained with excitement.

  The cook looked up with a sweat-smeared face when he realized Umari was standing there. “Don’t tell me it’s the Dustclingers’ girl,” he said. He spat out the clan’s name like a grape seed, indicating bo
th the clan and its Master, although he didn’t stop playing house. A wallet dangling from his neck danced and jumped about.

  “I’m here with a message from Master. Please pay him three months’ worth.”

  The Dustclingers operated a financial service for its hired hands. Kanze had been entrusted with funds by the caravan to buy foodstuffs, but after blowing it all in a gambling den, he’d borrowed money from Master to pay for the provisions, then accompanied them on the drive, acting as though nothing had happened. Since that time, he’d been avoiding routes that the Dustclingers frequented.

  “Well, uh, as you can see, I’m a little, er …” The cook shook his head, sending beads of sweat flying. He rocked his pelvis even harder, sinking deeper and deeper into Lady Mebaru-mater.

  “I may still be green,” Umari countered, “but even I know how to chant butthole-i-vores.” The medibugs of which Umari spoke were more formally known as “colonoscopy worms.” “I can’t control ’em yet though.”

  So saying, Umari took out a small leather pouch, loosed the string around its mouth, and turned it upside down. Silvery-white blobs of dustwreck came spilling out, resembling melted pieces of candy. They formed a mound in the palm of her hand.

  The cook, whose hips continued to sway even as he stared at the falling bits of dustwreck, suddenly shouted, “Agh! Cramp!” and jumped off of Lady Mebaru-mater, gripping his left calf with both hands as if catching a fish that had been flopping about on land. “My calf!” he cried. “My calf!” As he bent backward, clear, unclouded seed dribbled down lazily from a vessel that now had no harbor.

  The cook leaned against the corner of the room, suppressing his voice between ragged breaths as he berated Umari:

  “… cramped so bad I couldn’t feel a thing!

  “… made me waste it!”

  He pulled a ticket from his wallet and grudgingly, repeatedly, added up the amount. With a miserly air, he at last handed over five coins. Umari told him it wasn’t enough.

  “You greedy hag!” the cook shouted as he held out one more coin. Lady Mebaru-mater’s flesh rolled with her laughter. Even after Umari had put the Hagoromo Room behind her, the cheerful laughter rolled on.

  2

  Umari waved to the children and told them goodbye, then began walking westward along a row of buildings of which the maternitorium was a part. In the central square was another herd of freshly arrived momonji. She could even see the rare amber-colored breed.

  Enthralled by the sight, she tripped over something. An earthcreeper. There sure seemed to be a lot of them today. There was even one who was stuck in a dustdrain ditch.

  After passing by the tanner’s and the materialmonger’s, she arrived at the Isuzu Inn. This barracks, patched together from various excavated materials, had no wall in front, leaving an interior bustling with travelers and merchants completely exposed to view. Chairs were aligned haphazardly, and not even one matched any other. It was said that they were all precious artifacts excavated from a certain chair museum in dustsunk land, but thanks to rough handling, they now looked like nothing more than junk. Even so, if you threw them out on the Vastsea, large morphwaves would likely propagate outward from where they landed.

  Umari heard the grating cries of chickens and glanced down the narrow gap between the Isuzu Inn and the neighboring building. There was a legless earthcreeper in there, clinging to the chicken-wire fence. He had his hand stuck into the coop through a hole he had made in the fence. He was stealing chicken feed.

  The chickens were flapping their wings furiously—but not just because of the earthcreeper.

  A tremor rumbled through the ground, and everything around Umari swayed wildly. As she crouched down low, the ground supporting the Isuzu Inn began tilting perilously right before her eyes. The earthcreeper went sliding, and the chickens seemed to float for just an instant before they crashed into the wall. Innumerable bonebells, hanging in a loop from the walls inside, rang noisily while a landslide of cups and dishes poured off the tabletops, slipping through the hands of customers who tried to stop them.

  The split face of a thick, scraped-up flotation module rose up to the tip of her nose.

  Leaking water began spreading out from the gas factory next door on the left. Momonji used in gas production floated in large water tanks, since their exoshelletons had been removed to allow their air sacs to expand to the uttermost limit. Water from those tanks had apparently spilled.

  Slowly, creakingly, the ground began to level back out. Ordinarily, flat ground could be taken for granted, but this had just been a stark reminder that they were in fact standing on nothing more than a raft afloat in the Vastsea.

  Umari stepped into the Isuzu Inn, where the faint ringing of bells still lingered.

  The restaurant area had a floor space of one hundred square meters, and the shaking just now had thrown it into utter chaos. Food and tableware had been flung all over the floor. She could hear tightly choked sighs and pained coughs. Many people were picking up their boneplates and utensils, putting handfuls of spilled food back on their plates, or calmly continuing their meals. Naturally, there was no putting back spilled drinks, so voices were being raised here and there as people reordered—voices with that flatness and hoarseness peculiar to the violated lungs and windpipes of Vastsea crossers.

  Umari stretched up to her full height for a look around the restaurant. One man had a tall mound of momonji claw-legs piled up on his tabletop and was starting to vacantly scrape out the drying muscle fibers for the trace amounts of stimulants they contained. Another was haggling over the price of some rare item he had dug up out of a dustsink, holding it up with an air of self-importance. Yet another was drowsing as he breathed in vapors from momonji stones (said to be good for respiratory ailments) in a large water pipe. Seated in the midst of them, her teammates from the Dustclingers were throwing their yuzu-sized bonebells down on the floor and cheering as they shattered. It looked like it was going to be difficult to get over to where they were sitting. She looked over at the counter seats that ran along the wall to her right, and there she spotted Master’s wide back.

  Following in the wake of a server carrying a trayload of food, she made her way through the crowd and stood behind the tall chair where Master was sitting.

  “Master?” she said. He didn’t move. He had one elbow on the countertop of the riddled bar and was gazing into a bonecup filled with milky-white liquid. Master was known to drift away like this on occasion.

  That was why Romon was so eager to declare Master a dotard. “If he collapses or something in the middle of a drive,” he was always saying, “we’ll be the ones who’ll be goners—”

  Umari called him again, and Master came back to himself, blearily accepting the ticket she handed him. The man to the left of him rose totteringly to his feet, handing a bonebell to the barkeep before pushing past Umari’s shoulder on his way out. The barkeep added the new bonebell to a wall that was covered in them. It was tradition that before departing on a journey you prayed for safety and left a bonebell here; whenever you made it back again, you threw it down and shattered it.

  “Order whatever you like,” said Master.

  Umari seated herself on the high stool that the other man had just vacated, but since she usually just partook in whatever her master and brethren chose, she didn’t know what to order or how to order it. Master, sensing her distress, ordered for her: “Bring her some pão rolls and horsebit meat, along with some simmerstrings.”

  Soon the barkeep, whose browless face was like a peeled boiled egg, placed a boneplate haphazardly piled with food in front of her and set her bonebell down beside it. Umari wrapped her palm around the bell, gave it a ring as she felt its hard, cold surface, and then put it away in her breast pocket. She never felt like breaking them, so she would just leave this one behind again at the time of her next departure.

  Using the familiar knife she carried
in her travels, she sliced off some horsebit meat and tore right into it. Juices rich in vegetable nutrients—juices peculiar to the flesh of momonji—came welling out with an aroma of chlorophyll. The meat was full of tough sinews that she couldn’t quite bite through; they literally began stopping up her mouth, making it difficult to breath. Even so, she was happy to hold her head high eating a meal of her very own.

  It was then that someone came up on Master’s right. He ordered a drink in a voice as clear as a mountain stream and rested a strange arm—one longer than an arm should be—on a chair. Still standing, he cast his gaze across the room. Did he have some sort of lung disease? He was taking shallow breaths quite frequently. Still, he didn’t look like a Vastsea crosser. His soft, faintly reddish skin was like that of a newborn, which only made the large red boil on the right side of his jaw stand out even more. His skin was drawn tight and shiny like the rind of a fruit.

  “Might you be looking for someone?” the barkeep whispered as he held out his bonecup.

  The man turned toward the barkeep, a good-natured, friendly-looking smile brimming on his face. Umari was surprised by the whiteness she glimpsed in the flash of his teeth.

  “You really shouldn’t look at people so curiously,” said the barkeep. “You just might end up with trouble you don’t need.”

  “Oh, ah, right.” The man sat down in a tall chair and was hidden from view behind Master’s hulking frame. “Do you have anything to eat here?”

  “Red meat, sweetfat, sausage, offal, claw-legs—we’ve got it all.”

  “No thanks, I’d actually like to have rice.”

  “In that case …” The barkeep indicated the countertop with the palm of his hand.

  “I’m sorry, ah, what do you mean?” the man asked in bewilderment.

  “You do it like this,” Master said, grabbing the front corner of the bar. He pried up a chip of wood.