The splintered underside was swarming with white ricemites.
“They’re included in the bill as an appetizer, so dig in,” Master said, plucking up one ricemite, then another, and tossing them into his mouth.
The other man’s only reply was his shallow breathing.
“This isn’t the kind of rice you were lookin’ for, is it?” said Master.
“I meant the grain.”
“I see. Pearls from the sea; gems from the mountain, eh? If I could easily lay hands on pearls and amber, there’d be all kinds of things I’d like to eat too. Just recently, I’ve really had a hankering for lasagna.”
From the sound of that word, Umari imagined some kind of fruit. It was unfamiliar-sounding, and the barkeep seemed to have had the same reaction.
“Is that something maremen eat?”
“Something like that.”
“Excuse me,” the man said to Master. “But you wouldn’t happen to be a first-generation Incarnate, would you?”
“Incarnate? Oh, a crawlbacker, you mean. What gave you that idea?”
“Well, unlike these other scraplings, you’re quite easy to communicate with. Then there’s your face, and the fact that something about you just feels different.”
A murmur arose from the seats behind the man. Who was this guy? Some mareman, letting taboo words slip out in public? Umari was thinking he might be, when the man realized his faux pas and corrected himself: “I’m sorry; what I should have said was ‘these non-replayable intellects.’”
Which was an even worse term. The original meaning was long forgotten; now all that remained was the strong sense of contempt attached to the term.
“I think you’re the one who’s the crawlbacker,” Master said with a scornful laugh. “I met a guy who looked a lot like you once. His arms were stranger though … and longer.”
“Ah yes, that mutation was very common in the first generation. Oh, I forgot to tell you, but my name is Hanishibe—”
But the man suddenly stopped and inhaled deeply.
“What’s the matter?”
“I feel dizzy. My field of vision’s gone terribly wobbly; also, I’m not used to these intense sensations in my intestines. And on top of that, with this rarefied air and these overwhelming odors …”
Umari, still chewing on some horsebit meat that she still hadn’t managed to bite through, lowered her head over the bar counter a little and tried to sneak another glimpse of Hanishibe’s face. The fingers he was dabbing his eyes with came away, revealing a face with a glossy sheen.
“I’m no different from anyone else in the worlde,” said Master, “aside from being a feeble old man.”
“Is that so? Could I ask you some questions about yourself? What’s it like living in this ruined worlde as a non-replayable intellect that doesn’t even legally exist? I’ve always been curious about that.”
There was a rustle as several people stood up from their seats at the tables.
“You don’t legally exist either,” said Master. “And when you choose your words, it might be a good idea to keep in mind these folks who are perking up their ears right behind you.” Master jerked his chin back toward the middle of the room, but the other man, oblivious to the gesture’s intent, continued to speak.
“I’m still listed as replayable in my parish’s individual registry. Now it’s true that about ten years ago, this would have been a seriously illegal act, but the Divine Will First Party has received legal sanction, so this kind of thing is allowed within certain set parameters. There are all kinds of factions over there; it gets kind of complicated, you know.”
Several voices rose, saying, “He said he’s a crawlbacker!” Tables and chairs rattled.
Umari, frozen with tension, took a sideways glance and saw several rough-looking men standing behind the stranger. Soilmongers, most likely, judging by the earth-colored filth on their clothing.
“Those dirty traitors turned tail and ran when we were facing the Great Dust Plague!”
“Lousy ghosts!”
“Rotten mantis shrimps!”
“You suckered a whole lotta people with your ‘baptism’ and ‘Translation’ and all that other babble …”
“We’ve just barely survived out here on the Vastsea, and you think you can come in here and insult us with those forbidden words?”
A vicarious rage was shooting through the men, as though each of them had just lived through it all themselves.
“Oh no, I certainly never meant …” The crawlbacker twisted around and looked up at the roughnecks.
“I hear you ghosts like to call this place the ‘Scrapworld … ’”
“You dungdriver—!”
“What’d you bother crawling back here for!”
“Couldn’t find Nirvana in a mantis shrimp?”
“No, these fellas been gatherin’ up the young people.”
“They’re plannin’ to take ’em away again!”
“What’s that? Why? What do you plan on doin’ with ’em?”
“He wants to take ’em all away again!”
“You can’t have my apprentices!”
“Kidnapper!”
It was already too late to calm them. Kugu-shi and Romon got up from their seats some distance away.
“No, no, this is nothing more than good old-fashioned human resource canvassing; we exchange formal contracts.” Overwhelmed, perhaps, by the angry shouts, Hanishibe’s gaze danced back and forth as if following a fly as he explained himself to no one in particular. “And besides, I’m from a different department, so I had nothing to do with that—”
Suddenly, Master reached for Hanishibe’s face with his thick, cracked hand. The man shrunk back, trying to get away, but Master’s thumb and index finger caught the boil on his jaw in a pinch and wouldn’t let go. Hanishibe’s soft skin broke out in a greasy sweat, his eyes opened wide, and his jaw quivered sideways. Master’s thick fingers held on like a ring-clamp.
A cheer went up from the crowd. Hanishibe bent over backward and landed on the floor. Following along, Master had also come out of his chair. Everyone laughed and jeered.
“What in the worlde are you doi—?” That was as far as Hanishibe got before the boil burst in a spray of blood.
His wordless scream rang through the restaurant, silencing the commotion instantly.
A piece of metal resembling a wing bolt was sticking out of the wound, which now resembled a vinegar-peach that someone had taken a bite of.
Master pursed his lips, and his throat began to quiver. He was generating a high-pitched ordinary-wave carrier tone.
All by itself, the metal piece began to revolve, corkscrewing its way out, plucking a spiral body resembling a turban snail from his lower jawbone. At last, it dropped to the ground. Down on the food-strewn floor, the turban shell collapsed and began changing form repeatedly, as if it were being kneaded by invisible fingers. Even eide that lived within the body became confused when they couldn’t find a partner to fuse with.
Master pulled out a leather bag and switched to a different kind of carrier tone. Several legs stretched out of the metal body, and it began walking like a spider. It crawled up Master’s leg and disappeared into his bag.
The deathly silent restaurant began to resume something of its former clamor.
Whether cheered by the crawlbacker’s suffering or fearful of picking a fight with a dustmancer, those who had been raining down epithets moments before now filed out of the restaurant. There was no shortage of people who hated or feared dustmancers. Even those who hired them out of necessity remained suspicious of skills such as dustvein-reading and dustchanting and almost never approached them unless it was for work.
“Have yourself some goldeneye momonji wine, Guv’nor,” the barkeep said, pouring a bonecup of Master’s favorite. The distinctive scent of iodine
came wafting through the air.
“You have my gratitude,” Hanishibe said, standing as he took a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and pressed it up against his wound. “To think I had something like that nesting inside my body!” He didn’t sound very articulate now; it was like the strength had gone out of his jaw.
“What you had there was a marrowsticker. They don’t usually dig into places like that. The inconsistency between that brand-new body of yours and its adult form is probably what attracted it.” Master wet his lips with wine and narrowed his eyes. “Just like your words attracted those hooligans.”
“I’ll be more prudent going forward,” Hanishibe said, steadying his breath. “Actually, it was dustmancers I came here looking for. Did you know there’s a shrine about two kilometers from here?”
“Yeah, it’s in a dustsink, about fifty meters underground. What? You planning on going there to pray?”
“That’s right,” he said with a carefree smile. “I really am. I’m a sailor. I’m shipping out on a rather long journey, so I’d like to say my prayers in advance. Could I get you to guide me there?”
“I don’t know; I thought there was still a seal on you people. You can only go in as far as the inner shrine’s divine gate, right?”
“Incarnates such as myself lack the genes for growing kosmetic boxes in their brains. Therefore, the seal shouldn’t work on me. If you can just get me as far as the divine gate, that will be enough.”
“If you’ll meet me in front of the West Gate three days from now, at five in the morning, dressed out in caravan gear, I can take you.” Master, who had been staring at Hanishibe, turned back toward the counter. “But you won’t come.”
“Now what makes you say that? I’ll come. I guarantee it.”
Disturbed voices rose up from among the table seats. Hanishibe turned toward the sound, and that was when Umari saw several metal shafts sticking out of the back of his head, resembling vaginal speculae. In addition, there was a fat metal leg sticking out from the left side of his nose and a vivid sound like something being sharpened. Hanishibe’s chest and back also began to produce asymmetric bulges.
“No, no, I’ll be there,” he said. The metal leg vibrated and split into upper and lower halves, which then spread apart, splitting Hanishibe’s face open vertically. Blood gushed forth in torrents and spurts, and bubbles overflowed and came dripping down. “That’s the West Gate,” the cloven lips said indistinctly. “Correct?”
Unearthly metal projections ripped through his skin one after another. Each one was shaped like a tool that could have only been designed to treat some strange, imaginary malady. Chunks of flesh were being sheared off from his face; his sleeves, and his pant legs, were torn to pieces.
An order echoed through the restaurant: “Somebody go get a feedmonger!”
Chapter 3:
Along This Shore
The ivory beach stretched gently out all the way to a promontory resembling the snout of a crocodile. Rising up from the tip of that promontory was the white tower of a lighthouse.
Out on the sea, waves lapped over one another again and again as they rolled in toward the beach where Hisauchi and Hamuro were standing. There was something unnatural about their repetition. The motion of the waves had become vastly more simple than it had been in the past.
A gentle sea breeze came blowing in against them. A fresh, delicate aroma tickled Hisauchi’s nostrils, but still something seemed to be missing—although as a child he had disliked the ocean’s raw, even violent, odor of living things. Prior to the Great Dust Plague, there had been Kosmetics, and you could use Concealer to turn off at will any stenches exceeding a certain threshold value, but here in this
“What’s changed?” somebody asked him. “Things are just the same as they’ve always been, aren’t they?” She repeated the words as if trying to convince herself. “Things are just the same as always.”
Of course it was Hamuro speaking; even Hisauchi could tell that much. And yet she was set so firmly to
“For example,” he said, “don’t you get the feeling there are more and more vacant houses?” Even his own voice sounded formal and distant. “I mean, somebody must have been living in that house two doors down from us.”
“I’m pretty sure that one’s always been vacant. Still, sometimes extremists in the Divine Will First Party and whatnot do have their individual registries erased because of political problems, so …”
Hamuro looked over to the right, where waves were crashing in against the shore. A man there was walking toward the sea. Buffeted by waves, he gradually disappeared into the depths. A deathseeker, most likely. Deathseekers, it was said, gave themselves over to the tepid pain of suffocation to aimlessly wander the endless seafloor.
Staring at the rippling waves where the man’s head had dipped below the water, Hisauchi continued: “I’m having more episodes of déjà vu every day, and every once in a while these disgusting piles of offal come bubbling up out of the roads.”
“You’re teasing me again. That’s just an urban legend, isn’t it?”
“I’ve told you, I’ve seen them when they manifest, repeatedly. There are people at work who’ve seen them too.”
“But that just can’t happen. It isn’t reported on the news either.”
Give it up already, Hisauchi thought. He too, it seemed, was causing Hamuro loss.
Hamuro sighed listlessly and crouched down in front of a large boulder. It was about the size of a couch, with large cracks in the shape of a crucifix. Playfully, she smoothed the sand with her hands, scooped it up, and at last sank her fingertips deep into the earth to start digging. As she worked, the outline of something began to become apparent. She was just about to grab hold of it with both hands when she uttered a sharp cry.
Hisauchi leaned forward, straining his eyes. Buried in the sand was something like a chunk of meat, pulsating there slightly. A grossly enlarged heart—that was what it looked like. Thick blood vessels stretched out from its underside and disappeared into the sand.
They swept aside the sand with fallen sticks, revealing a jostling cluster of bodily organs, oozing with bubbly ichor.
Hamuro drew away from them, then froze just as she was about to sit down on the boulder.
Rounded projections covering its surface had begun to move all at once, scurrying into the boulder’s cracks like a swarm of sea slaters. She glimpsed them for only a moment, but they had all been shaped like fava beans and were about the size of fists.
“This … is what you saw?” she moaned. “Why isn’t the Concealer workin—?” A flash of self-deprecation shot across Hamuro’s face. “But … we don’t have Kosmetics anymore …”
“I still see illusions too sometimes. On the surface, I’m still the same as I was before I was Translated and have inherited the intimacy level of my Kosmetics.”
Hisauchi put a hand on Hamuro’s back and guided her away from the boulder. From behind, there came a faint sound of footsteps approaching in the sand.
Monks wrapped in yellow-brown robes filed past the couple, walking across the wet sand as they headed for the fishing harbor.
“Followers of Ājīvika.”
“Yep,” said Hamuro, turning to look back at the cliff face behind her.
The mouth of a cave opened at the base of it, and the face of the surrounding rock was adorned with elaborate carvings. A subterranean Ājīvikaist temple. The religion, revived from
ancient India, promulgated a doctrine of predetermined fate. It had its home base here in Parish 153, and word had it that conversions were on the upswing.
“Hey,” Hamuro said, brushing aside a few stray hairs. “When was the first time you really noticed the Kosmetics?”
“Let’s see, that’d be after I’d had the cranial nerve replacement, so I think I would’ve been about eight. The kosmetic box in my brain would go off occasionally even before that though, so I don’t really remember all that well.”
“Oh, that’s right; you were sick. For me, it was when I was four years old, when I went to the dentist to have braces put on. I ran my tongue across my teeth and felt the cold, jagged metal. I got really scared because the braces felt like these gigantic, foreign objects. But then I looked in the mirror, and it was so strange: my teeth were white and glossy, and I cut my tongue from running it over the braces too much. They sent an ambulance automatically.”
There was no sign of any change in her features.
“You’re right, actually. I can feel something happening.” Hamuro sighed deeply. “Maybe we’ve been losing things for much, much longer.”
“Yeah. When reality got a kosmetic makeover … when we traded Kosmetics for our new reality … ‘When you’re freed from the bonds of flesh, all things will be possible’—wasn’t that the sort of line they used to promote Translation with?”
“They were doing it everywhere,” said Hamuro, one corner of her mouth turning up. “After all, I got baptized in a church.”
Hisauchi wondered: had she had what they’d commonly called a “last-minute” baptism?
Hamuro continued: “I was reborn through repentance. But not only did everything not become possible, legal issues got thornier and thornier, and there were more and more restrictions, and when it comes to children—” Hamuro suddenly choked up.
Great deliberations had been going on in the Council for the past three hundred years, yet even now they couldn’t come up with so much as a legal definition for a “child.”
Sensing a strange presence, Hisauchi cast his gaze out to sea.
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